BEYOND INFORMALITY: CULTURAL MEANINGS, MORAL ECONOMY, AND GENDER AUTONOMY IN THE POPULAR TRADE OF BOGOTÁ AND OTAVALO

Abstract

This article analyzes informal trade in two urban contexts of the Global South: Bogotá (Colombia) and Otavalo (Ecuador). From the perspective of economic anthropology opposed to the traditional economicist bias, we argue that the informal economy does not constitute a simple anomaly or a precarious survival strategy. Through an ethnographic methodology based on life stories and thick vignettes, it is demonstrated that this trade operates as a moral and symbolic system where notions of dignity, belonging, and sovereignty over time are contested. Crucially, fieldwork with female traders reveals that popular commerce is a vehicle for emancipation and subjectivation against subordinating formal structures: "freedom of work and life" and the rejection of managerial authority ("having no bosses") emerge as the cultural rationality that organizes and drives these economies from below.