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493 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 10 (1987)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0493 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Any examination of social life is necessarily partial. We selectively and systematically omit in order to sharpen and differentiate. To focus on a special topic is both to eliminate and to enhance. The one begets the other. For many years discussions of economic activity have been silent on informality in order to enhance formality. Michel Foucault has reminded us that silences are strong tools in the construction of reality.' In recent years some scholars have begun to challenge that silence. In challenging silences the aim is to interrupt the smooth passage of 'regimes of truth,' to disrupt those forms of knowledge which have assumed a self-evident quality, and to engender a state of uncertainty in those responsible for servicing the network of power-knowledge relations.2 Until the 1970s the silence on informal economic activity was part of the historical development of formal, rational, industrial economies, whether these were capitalist or socialist. In the early 1970s in the United States and Europe, scholars began to rediscover a long-ignored phenomenon. Goods and services did not have to be produced and consumed in officially recognized and registered enterprises. Instead they could be made, traded, swapped, and bartered among members of informal networks. Anthropologists of nonindustrial society were not surprised at this realization. They had recognized such activity as a universal form of exchange,3 but some now began applying this insight to aspects of industrial society.4 Others documented informal income opportunities in global capitalism.5 Yet others were exposing the second or parallel economies of socialist planned economies.6 However, it was the identification of informal economic exchange as a means of survival among the urban poor of American cities that was to serve as a major corrective to our perception of the hegemony of modern industrial and commercial rationalism. The paper by Ferman and Ferman in 1973 set the scene and was supplemented with the ethnographies by Stack, Lowenthal, and Dow7 and in Europe by the comparable works of Henry, Mars, Gershuny, and Pahl.8 In 1978 1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Penguin, 1978). 2. Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 135. 3. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972). 4. John Davis, Gifts and the UK Economy, Man, 7:408-29(1972); idem, Forms and Norms: The Economy of Social Relations, ibid., 8:159-76 (1973). 5. Keith Hart, Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana, Journal of Modern African Studies, 11:61-89 (1973). 6. D. K. Simes, The Soviet Parallel Market, Survey, 21:42-52 (1975); A. Katzenelinboigen, Coloured Markets in the Soviet Union, Soviet Studies, 29:62-85 (1977). 7. Patricia R. Ferman and Louis A. Ferman, The Structural Underpinning of the Irregular Economy, Poverty and Human Resources Abstracts, 8:3-17 (1973); Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Martin Lowenthal, The Social Economy in Urban Working Class Communities, in The Social Economy of Cities, ed. G. Gappert and H. Ross (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1975); Leslie M. Dow, High Weeds in Detroit, Urban Anthropology, 6:111-28 (1977). 8. Stuart Henry, The Hidden Economy (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978); Stuart Henry and Gerald Mars, Crime at Work: The Social Construction of Amateur Property Theft, Sociology, 10

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