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Cars, the Customs Service, and Sumptuary Rule in Neoliberal Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2008

Brenda Chalfin
Brenda Chalfin
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Extract

This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and allocation imposed by Ghana's Customs Service, and the resulting public critique, in an effort to capture the shifting contours of state authority in the context of an electoral and economic transition spurred by neoliberal reform.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 424 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

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