PAPER PROPOSAL

Studying the Market Anthropologically

There are few words that are as prominent in the current public discourse as
the word market. One look at any current respectable news publication (i.e. one
that writes news properly) will be enough to confirm the enormous explanatory
leeway that the market is accorded. The market that elusive, incomprehensible,
sometimes paradoxical entityexplains equally elusive, incomprehensible and
paradoxical facts. It explains inequality as its insufficient and incomplete application
or as an insuccesful adaptation to it, hardship as an effect of investor panic or of a
crisis in the banking sector, homelessness as the effect of a house market bubble,
hunger and misery as the effect of a slackening in demand because of a slowing
economy (in the context of an unpredictable business cycle of economic up and
downturnsbut dont we worry: the economists are working on explaining
it...stochastically). The market also lulls us with the promise of balance, equality and
justice in the long run. Now the investors have panicked, so home prices have fallen
(incidentally leaving thousands of people homeless because they cant meet their
mortgage balance and an equal number of houses emptyfor an economic crisis is
no hurricane to destroy buildings), but in the long run those pusillanimous investors
will see that homes have become underpriced and move into the market to take
advantage in the good, old utilitarian fashion, home prices will go up and the
invisible hand of social disengagement will re-establish (as a secondary effect) the
well-being of all. Never mind what a certain economist said of the long run in a
period when it seemed a long run indeed1 and never mind that in the case above the
invisible hand merely vows to repair the havoc wreaked by the invisible foot 2 of the
same social disengagement.

My somewhat poignant exposition above makes it clear that what the market
does not explain is at least as important as what it claims to explain. My research
concerns are directly linked to this circumstance.

The very narrow inclusion of human beings in most market talk is obvious from
the exposition above. Insofar as human beings are included in such accounts of the
market they are considered only in the highly specific position of buyer or seller, and
as if that positional restriction were not enough, their actions are supposed to be
inspired by a rigid, highly formalized framework of market rationality 3. I shall not enter
1
John Keynes, arguing during the Great Depression against economists who opposed
active intervention on the grounds that what was happening was an imbalance in the
market that would redress itself in the long run, had famously said: In the long run we
are all dead
2
The term probably originates from Garrett Hardin, although it has appeared
spontaneously in many other contexts.
3
I leave aside here most economists recognition of the fact that the perfect market in
which these formal circumstances are valid is only an idealized expression. If one refuses
to move from the awareness of that fact to historicizing and reworking ones views in
accordance to that awareness one detracts nothing from the specific blind-spots of the
economistic theoretical system and can easily slide into transforming that ideal
here into a detailed discussion of this point (the interested reader is referred to the
voluminous and vociferous literature of the formalist-substantivist debate in economic
anthropology).

What I do want to discuss is: are we only referring to generic buyers and
sellers when we are talking about the market? To make my question more specific:
what exactly are we talking about when we make a statement about, for example,
the construction market, the steel market or the honey market 4? What do such
expressions refer to?

Certainly they do not refer to a homogenous space where the given

commodity is exchanged, or to certain buyers and sellers that are in exclusivity
buyers and sellers. They also refer to the production of that commodity, and to the
people, places, artifacts and circumstances that are employed in various fashion in
its production and exchange, and to the effects of all these practices on the integral
experience of the various people implicated, on material life and its qualitative
apperception and on other (i.e. non-market) practices, and to the power fields that
practices encompassed by the steel market create and to the agencies that (shape
and) are shaped within these power fields.

However, this reference, though surely in existence, is also a silent one.

Knowledges articulating these aspects of the X market abound, yet they are
demeaned, scattered and lack a theoretical field in which they can be articulated as
something more than accidentsin the dominant (i.e. most vocal) economistic
paradigm these knowledges can have no explanatory claim: they can never
constitute true events, often they are considered to be outside the market. The
stage of economistic discourse is occupied by the formal rationalized subjectivities of
the buyer and the seller (demand and supply) and the only representable event is the
stochastic movement of their quantitative manifestations (random changes in value
demanded, supplied and exchanged). With such an event form, no wonder that in the
economistic framework human experience (and most importantly human suffering)
counts for so little.

Thinking in Gupta and Fergusons5 terms, the economistic framework, despite

its claims to universality, is (obviously) a localized knowledge, and there are few
fields in which reaping knowledges situated elsewhere and shifting ones
epistemological and political location accordingly may prove more fruitful. Forging the
link between the economistic representations (and objects) and other local
expression into a normative one. The latter is typical of economic literature.
4
There are many other object types that are described by using the word market, i.e.
the market, the Turkish market, the vegetable market in Aksaray, the stock
market. It is very important, in my opinion, not to conflate these typologies (as it has so
often been done) and to study these generalities separately, although in connection to
one another. The question above is valid for all these typologies, however in my research
I will pursue it only for a formulation of the type the steel market.
5
Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James. 1997. Discipline and Practice: The Field as Site,
Method, and Location in Anthropology. In Anthropological Locations, Gupta, A. & Ferguson,
J (Eds). Berkeley: University of California Press.
knowledges and objects would amount to re-anthropologizing the economy, re-
claiming it as a field of open-ended, human activity and dynamic, contesting
agencies. The beginnings of such a project go back to Marxs critique of political
economy in The Capital and elsewhere.

The market (and more specific formulations such as the X market) makes for
a troublesome anthropological object. The reasons for that can be understood in the
light of Gupta and Fergusons analysis 6 of the dominant position that the field in the
sense of a location bounded in space has in anthropology. Conversely, the dynamic
artifacts, people and subjective separations and unities constituting the market
require a different understanding of boundedness and locality. Gupta and Ferguson
give the example of the media as a troublesome anthropological object in that it
travels to you [the anthropologist] rather than you [the anthropologist] having to
travel to them 7 thus violating anthropological canon. In this respect the market offers
very similar challenges: it is designed to travel to you. Arjun Appadurai is one of a
couple of social scientists that have attempted to address this difficulty and to
develop ways to study the mobile and spatially over-extended phenomena such as
the market. Recent interest in the economy and the market has appeared in the
anthropology of science and technology (AST) which has produced a great number
of insightful studies, approaches and theoretical tools such as the agent-network,
framing, performativity etc.

This being said, the issue of markets in the form in which they are objects of
our economic statistics (i.e. the steel market etc.) has not been specifically tackled
in that literature. The importance of this omission has imposed itself on me quite
forcefully when I have attempted an ethnographic analysis of the Turkish honey
market and have run against substantial methodological and theoretical difficulties
despite my acquaintance with much of the material mentioned above (and my decent
background in economy, finance, marketing, management etc). The stress on the
honey market as a unified whole when represented by the government, the statistical
bureau, certification offices and other regulatory organizations clashed with the way
in which the other market actors suspicion, careful control of the flow of information
and fiercely pursued seclusion of their action domains created a number of tenuously
connected subjective, epistemological8 and practical spheres. Still, these tenuous
connections summed up to produce a recognizable unity (the production, distribution,
exchange and consumption of honey) without which the separate existence of each
sphere would have been meaningless and to which no sphere (including the
regulatory authorities) could lay claim. This baffling interplay between unity and
separateness had overpowered me methodologically and theoretically, and it may
well puzzle many other researchers. The aim of this paper will be to reflect upon the

6
ibid
7
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1992. Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the
Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23.
8
In the full sense of the term! Each sphere produced its clearly recognizable and
mutually irreducible body of knowledge
way in which the X market can be studied and theorized under an anthropological
approach drawing upon (and referring to) my experience of studying the honey
market in Turkey and in discussion with the relevant literature. Gupta and
Fergusons understanding of locality and situated knowledge as well as their analysis
of the fieldwork paradigm may contribute a great deal to disclosing and tackling the
theoretical difficulties involved.

TENTATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun (ed). 1986. The Social life of things : commodities in cultural
perspective. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University
Press
Callon, Michael and Koray alkan. Forthcoming. Economization: New
Directions in the Social Studies of the Market
Callon, Michel. 1998. Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets
in Economics. In Laws of the Market, 1-57. Michel Callon (Ed). Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers.
Cochoy, Frank. 2007. A Sociology of Market-Things: on Tending the Garden
of Choices in Mass Retailing. In Market Devices. Callon, M., Millo, Y., &
Muniesa, F. (ed.)
alkan, Koray. 2007. Price as a Market Device. In Market Devices Callon,
M., Millo Y., Muniesa F. (ed), 241-260. Madlen, MA: Blackwell Pub.
Lpinay, Vincent-Antonin. 2007. Parasitic formulae: the case of capital
guarantee products. The Sociological Review, 55 (2): 261-283
MacKenzie, Donald. 2006. An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models
shape Markets. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Mitchell, Timothy. 1998. Fixing the Economy. Cultural Studies 12(1): 82-101.
Wim M.J. van Binsbergen & Peter L. Geschiere (eds). 2005.
Commodification : things, agency, and identities : (The social life of things
revisited). Munster: Lit
Zelizer, Viviana. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Pay
Checks, Poor Relief and Other Currencies. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.