Games of Civility: Ordinary Ethics in Aleppo’s Bazaar

The Unbearable Lightness of Trust: Trade, conviviality, and the life-world of Indian export agents in Yiwu, China

“…In these critical studies, mistrust is not defined naively by the absence of trust, but has been conceptualized either as a legitimate political tool of the subaltern (Krishnamurthy 2015; see also Elyachar 2005; cf Hardin 2004) or as a disposition embedded in culturally specific understandings of the inherent opacity, or incoherence and autonomy, of the self (Robbins 2008; Carey 2017; see also Corsín Jiménez 2011). While the ethnography I discussed does not warrant the attribution of either ethical value or ontological status to mistrust in itself, it does suggest that trust is not (always, necessarily) immanent in the qualities of social relations, but in certain circumstances it might be elicited by the management and deployment of mistrust (see also Geschiere 2013; Marsden 2016; Anderson 2019a). I am not suggesting here that the life-world of Indian export agents and traders in Yiwu—and also of those in India or the Gulf—is a Hobbesian dystopia or an instance of amoral familism or even an expression of unbridled self-interested instrumentality.…”

“…In these trade environments, the formal regulatory frameworks which underwrite fairness and trust in modern markets are believed to be either underdeveloped or altogether absent (see Geertz 1979; Hart 1988; Cook 2005). Instead, the circulation of information and knowledge about trade, the setting of prices, the extension of credit—and all the practices which enable the exchange of goods and commodities—take place within wider social networks in which reciprocal trust is embedded in ties of kinship, friendship, patronage, ethnicity, religious allegiances, and more (see, for example, Keshavarzian 2007; Anderson 2019a; Rabo 2005; for India, see Bayly 1983; Ray 1988 and 2011; Yang 1999; Harriss 2003; Birla 2008). These social networks might be narrowly local in orientation—as in Clifford Geertz's classic studies (1968; 1979) of markets in Indonesia and Morocco—or expansive, cosmopolitan, and transnational in shape and orientation, as revealed in scholarship on historical or contemporary cross-regional land and sea trade (see, for example, Gupta 1967; Meillassoux 1971; Dale 2002; Markovits 2000a, Sood 2016; Marsden 2016; MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000; Humphrey 2018).…”

Bazaar aesthetics: On excess and economic rationality

“…Throughout the article, I use the term ‘bazaar’ and ‘marketplace’ interchangeably to emphasize that Delhi’s electronic market place is a particular type of commercial place, where together with face-to-face trade, a feature of the daily marketplace (Braudel, 1977), there is information asymmetry, a lack of formal ‘market devices’, and bargaining exists as a model of price setting, all of which fit into the anthropological definition of bazaar-level commerce (Anderson, 2019; Geertz, 1978).…”