The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing

TLDR

Anthropology and economics have historically intersected on topics such as development theory, preindustrial history, and colonial domination, yet peasant market studies in anthropology remain largely descriptive with limited analytical depth. This paper investigates how anthropology and economics can collaborate more deeply by studying peasant market systems—bazaar economies—rather than merely borrowing each other’s generalized ideas.

Abstract

There have been a number of points at which anthropology and economics have come to confront one another over the last several decades-development theory; preindustrial history; colonial domination. Here I want to discuss another where the interchange between the two disciplines may grow even more intimate; one where they may come actually to contribute to each other rather than, as has often been the case, skimming off the other's more generalized ideas and misapplying them. This is the study of peasant market systems, or what I will call bazaar economies. There has been by now a long tradition of peasant market studies in anthropology. Much of it has been merely descriptiveinductivism gone berserk. That part which has had analytical interests has tended to