Flip-Flop

A Journey Through Globalisation's Backroads

Caroline Knowles

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783711512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

*Shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography 2015* This book follows the global trail of one of the world's most unremarkable and ubiquitous objects - flip-flops. Through this unique lens, Caroline Knowles takes a ground level view of the lives and places of globalisation's back roads, providing new insights that challenge contemporary accounts of globalisation. Rather than orderly product chains, the book shows that globalisation along the flip-flop trail is a tangle of unstable, shifting, ad hoc and contingent connections. This book displays both the instabilities of the 'chains' and the complexities, personal topographies and skills with which people navigate these global uncertainties. Flip-Flop provides new ways of thinking about globalisation from the vantage point of the shifting landscape crossed by a seemingly ordinary and everyday commodity.

1

Navigating the Territories of the Trail

Flip-flops – even shoes – rarely feature as a central character in a book. But unlikely characters provoke new stories. Travelling stories. So fundamental to mobility are shoes that only a minority would venture out without them. In shoes distinctions between object and human are blurred, saturated as they are with bits of skin, DNA and remnants of the ground across which we travel. Flip-flops reveal the world in which we live. Uncounted billions touch more feet (lives) than any other shoe. No other shoe has been to more places on more feet. In them people tackle the epic and mundane journeys of their lives: flip-flops are worn to the bathroom, to the beach, to work, to school, to market, to a new country. They tread all manner of journeys, social scenes and landscapes.

Although designer flip-flops are expensive,¹ flip-flops’ popularity lies in their cheapness. They retail for as little as US 40 cents. Thus they have social reach: millionaires and paupers wear them. In the twenty-first century, a billion people walk barefoot.² Flip-flops are the first step into the world of shoes. Flip-flops are demographically sensitive: when world population rises so do flip-flop sales. Flip-flops are a shoe with critical mass and mass appeal across social spectrums and continents. They are travelling objects with untapped potential in revealing mobile social worlds of the twenty-first century.

Flip-flops can be made from any materials but today they are made from plastic, connecting them with the mid twentieth century. American mass manufacture of them dates back to 1930s Hawaiian plantations, where they became a substitute for rubber boots – in short supply – copying the design of ninth-century Japanese sandals made in rush and bamboo and brought to the plantations by nineteenth-century Japanese migrants. Flip-flops were popular in the US navy with sailors travelling to Pacific theatres of war, and the period after the Second World War was crucial to their widespread popularity. In the 1950s they appeared in Californian beach and surfer culture and then made their way down the coast to Mexico and into South America, inspiring the term ‘slipper foot’ applied to the poor.³ They have different names in different places: ‘thongs’, ‘zoris’, ‘slaps’, ‘flaps’, ‘beach walkers’ and ‘go-aheads’, because it is impossible to walk backwards in them.

Materials are as important as the objects from which they are made and plastic is a thoroughly modernist twentieth-century material: its most common form, polyethylene used in plastic bags, is a thermoplastic polymer created at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bakelite – a thermosetting plastic that dates from 1909 – was used to fabricate the first telephones and early radios in addition to an array of early twentieth-century household objects. DuPont filed a patent for synthetic rubber in 1931, the first synthetic fibres in 1934 and for ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) in 1956.⁴ Flip-flops are now made in different kinds of plastic, the material of everyday life the world over. Today the world in which we live is literally fabricated in an array of plastics. Plastic is made into spectacle frames, interior car trim, baby seats, electrical wire coating, packaging, buckets, bowls, biro casing, telephones, speakers, computers, telephones, shoes, insoles, light fittings and more: it is injected into fabrics made into clothes. If there is a dominant material in which the contemporary world is made, it is plastic. The objects composing the dominant material fabric of our lives are thus neither precious nor unique but plastic and disposable.

Material and Social Fabrics

Social and material fabrics, social and material worlds, are intimately connected.⁵ This book shows this in revealing the mobile fabrics of everyday life. Fabric is used in two (overlapping) ways to refer to materials – in this case plastic – and to social textures – the weave of everyday life. It unpicks both of these fabrics at the same time in order to dramatise how plastic and social lives are connected. Objects, rather than materials, have shaped cultural anthropology’s⁶ exploration of the ways in which lives and objects are entwined, inaugurating new lines of enquiry. In these frameworks circulations of objects and the quiet lives they reveal have become important areas of research.⁷ Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Miller and especially Igor Kopytoff have inspired this book. Kopytoff⁸ suggests that asking critical questions about the provenance and use of a car in Africa reveals how social worlds work. While he neither applies nor elaborates his example, the car prompts important questions: How was it acquired? Where did the money to buy it come from? What were the relationships between buyer and seller? How was it used? Who drove it? And how was it disposed of? The idea that objects have biographies – life stories – and that exploring them exposes social texture inspired this book. It executes Kopytoff’s project while developing a distinctive approach differing from that of Kopytoff and other material anthropologists like Miller and Appadurai by following the entire trail created by the object and unfolding its human and environmental textures along the way.

While Kopytoff reanimated the archaeological methods of Pitt Rivers so that objects (traces) access lost social forms, Miller⁹ locates people through their domestic objects, demonstrating both the intimacies of people–object connections and the analytic potential of objects in probing lives. I aspire neither to material cultural analysis nor to the delicious elaboration of lives that comes from juxtaposing people with the aesthetics of the object assemblages with which they cohabit. Instead I use a particular object to explore the vitality and motility of the lives and landscapes connected, in various ways, to its making, transportation, use and disposal. A plastic object is this story’s central character and its key investigative tool; it is used to excavate the everyday lives and landscapes it regards as equally significant. Biography and geography, rather than cultures, are the social textures this book explores and which distinguish it from others.

The emphasis on making raises the profile of the material substance of objects and this too distinguishes this book from much material and cultural anthropology. This partly results from the importance placed on fabrication – the making and unmaking of the object – rather than on its end-shape. But it results too from an understanding that materials are more than inert matter moulded into objects. Drawing (selectively) on the idea of ‘vibrant matter’,¹⁰ I suggest that plastic vibrates with the vitality of the social lives with which it is enmeshed. I hope to show that plastic is animated; that it has flesh and bones and it dances along the road. Activated in the lives it entwines, plastic is mobile and vital. Even landfill sites, full of seemingly disused objects, emit active streams of methane gas as one form of matter becomes another. Plastic’s flesh and humanity – its journeys, its circuits, its ways of dwelling in the world – are animated in this book. Flip-flops’ material properties, as well as their usefulness and ubiquity make them a worthy protagonist in my book.

I will show how plastic flip-flops make social class, migration, landscape and the multiple translocal social relationships of export, transport and expanding markets. Different types of migratory movement, in particular, come into focus along the trail. As plastic flip-flops create these kinds of social textures so they also make and expose the topographies of their co-production and distribution. Plastic flip-flops make and reveal cities, exurbs, suburbs, borders and zones, the places where people live and travel through on the routine journeys of everyday life. I pay particular attention to these broadly urban forms and to the local and translocal connections composing them. Thus plastic flip-flops are shown to be an ideal object for thinking about the production of topographies and the routes connecting them. Plastic flip-flops are a travelling object, which both makes and reveals translocal worlds: and following the object sequentially through the territories and lives it traverses configures the flip-flop trail.

Trails

Despite the efforts of Kopytoff, and of scholars of material culture that make trails comprehensible, they are not particularly popular in anthropology. They are still less comprehensible in sociology, a discipline whose empirical focus is still conceived in nation-state terms despite the (theoretical) turn to translocality.¹¹ Trails appeal to a certain kind of vagrant sociologist¹² like myself on account of their methodological challenges and travel requirements. The best examples of trails are interdisciplinary. Deborah Barndt’s Tangled Routes¹³ follows a tomato trail from Mexico to fast food restaurants in Canada, pursuing important questions about environment, global food chains and the lives of the women cashiers and pickers who make them work. James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s The Oil Road¹⁴ traces the political cartographies of oil, and the landscapes to which it lays waste, from the Caspian Sea to the City of London.

Trails are increasingly appearing in popular literature in a ‘know where your stuff comes from’ approach centred on everyday items like tea,¹⁵ fish¹⁶ and underpants.¹⁷ These trails are driven by an imperative to expose a (simplified) global North (consumption)–global South (production) axis and focus on global social justice: these trails show that wages, labour conditions and terms of trade are clearly not ‘fair’. The (unstated) intellectual roots of this literature lie in dependency and development theory, and in critiques of uneven terms of trade and the distribution of global wealth and competitive advantage, establishing distinctively uneven playing fields. Driven by moral tale telling rather than by serious investigation of the substance of lives and of the landscapes through which they are lived, this literature focuses on work, not lives in the round nor on the local, national and transnational circumstances in which they are cast. Confined to being workers, the heroes of these tales can only be poor and exploited victims. And while they are certainly poor and exploited they are also much more – active agents, making intelligent decisions about their lives, in particular circumstances.

Adding to the contribution of trail anthropology, the concept of the trail also comes from other routes in the literature exploring ‘commodity chains’. These describe articulations of resources – raw materials, manufacturing processes and the logistics of distribution – which imply solid and thoroughly investigated global geographies composed in the connections commodities (not objects) themselves articulate.¹⁸ Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami’s Nike chain,¹⁹ following trainers through all stages of production, is a good example. This presents a complex account of global production geographies: a political economy of production, emphasising manufacture and the transport systems of distribution. Still more sophisticated analyses²⁰ link households, enterprises and states within the territories of global production. But commodity chains are problematic in a number of ways. They are place-blind. Only the narrow scenes of production and their broader political economies are judged relevant, thus their geographies are limited. As in moral tale telling, commodity chain analysis treats people as abstract labour whose life-stories are told in the machinations and sequencing of global production. The opportunity to acknowledge and explore complex and multiply layered lives, and the landscapes through which they are lived, is lost in this abstraction. The priority of commodity chain analysis is the technical operations and economic consequences of the chain, and, in drawing these connections, people are inevitably caricatured and truncated.

I share the concern with production and distribution: with the ways in which things move from place to place. But I am also concerned with the landscapes and lives involved in production, distribution and consumption. Production is explored not for its technical and economic operations alone but for the ways in which such operations are articulated in making people’s lives and the territories and spaces in which they live. My narrative seeks out trails in the plural, rather than a single chain. Trails are more than a chain; they are animated by the topographies they cross, by the feet, flesh and lives, living in particular, local, connected worlds.

This story navigates the flip-flop trail, allowing the logics of the trail to shape the book’s terrain and scales of engagement. Its scales of spatial analysis are sometimes global, sometimes national or sub-national and sometimes hyper-local: its narrative is organised by different intensities and magnifications, from the microscope to the telescope, in an effort to weave a micro–macro patchwork. It loiters in villages and inside houses, exposing connections between spaces and scales, always illuminating the tension between social textures and lived experience. One of the drawbacks of covering so much ground is that it can work against detailed engagement. Pausing and working more deeply in some places along the trail mitigates this to some degree. Allowing the trail to expose territories, lives and the connections between them turns my narrative into a chronicle of uncertain journeys, into a travel story across unimagined micro landscapes as the object itself unfolds. My concern lies with the globally networked uncertainties which wash through specific located neighbourhoods: more of this later.

Mobilities

Trails embed the movement which both constitutes them and which provides a method for their investigation. The reframing of the social in mobile terms belongs to a shift in thinking which admits the intertwining of human and physical worlds networked in dynamic open structures across a globalised civil society.²¹ It is not just that social and material forms are restlessly on the move: they are themselves generated through movement and thus form its social substance.²² In attending to the social textures of mobility it becomes apparent that the ‘mobilities thinking’ of many contemporary social t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. Navigating the Territories of the Trail
• 2. Oil – Maps Beneath the Sand
• 3. Choreographies of Petrochemistry
• 4. Plastic City
• 5. Plastic Village
• 6. Making Flip-flops
• 7. Logistics, Borderlands and Uncertain Landings
• 8. Markets
• 9. Urban Navigation in Flip-flops
• 10. Rubbish
• 11. Globalisation Revisited
• Notes
• Maps
• Index