Dr. Soon Yong Ang, Stirling Business School 

Drawing on the sociology of secrecy and empirical data from a unique market mechanism in Malaysia—the whispering market—we examine how subaltern resistance is enacted and sustained by creating an alternative market against the ethnically dominating and exploitative calculative system of appropriation known as panggu. Our findings reveal that while marginalised Malay fishermen use secrecy to resist the dominating calculative logic of panggu that Chinese merchants exploit, these merchants counter the subaltern resistance with their own secrecy tactics, including gossip and informal cartelisation. This dialectic between resistance and counter-resistance ultimately reduces the whispering market to a ceremonial façade, diminishing its emancipatory potential for the Malay subaltern.

By empirically analysing these complex power dynamics, this paper provides a nuanced perspective on the interplay between secrecy, power, calculative practices, and subaltern resistance. Furthermore, it illustrates how the sociology of secrecy offers a valuable theoretical lens for understanding subaltern resistance toward accounting-based control within non-capitalist modes of production in the Global South.

Image: “Fish” by Vincent-Lin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.