タンザニア都市古着商人の商慣行の変容にみられる平等性と自立性

抄録

This paper analyzes how the unique business practices of small-scale traders dealing in second-hand clothes have changed under the recent socio-economic transformation in Tanzania. The business practices described here involve a kind of credit transaction called mali kauli, which is conducted by middlemen and micro-scale retailers.

This transaction conferred many economic benefits to both kinds of merchants when I conducted research in 2001-02. However, middlemen and retailers were finding it difficult to sustain this type of transaction in 2003-05, when I conducted further research, because of dramatic socio-economic structural changes taking place in Tanzania. When their business reached this critical situation, the problems faced by both middlemen and retailers was not how they should respond to situational change by individual action or by collective action but how they should reconstruct their personal economic relations by using the logic of reciprocity. In conclusion, I argue that the business practices have changed through the manipulation of the power relationship between middleman and retailers, who are trying to be self-dependent and social at the same time.