Module 5: The Market as Concept and Activity

Neuchâtel, December 5/6, 2008

Organizer: Prof. Ellen Hertz, UniNe

After several great and not-so-great transformations, the world offered up to economic anthropology at the beginning of the 21st century is one in which the reassuring dichotomy presented by Karl Polanyi in 1944 no longer does the trick. Yes, a certain progression from a concrete and limited notion of "market" (the marketplace of African or Asian hub towns) to an abstracted and autonomous "market sphere" no doubt occured over a series of centuries, a progression that explains the fact that journalists, politicians, scholars and lay-people can use the term "the market" in the singular form. But "real" markets have always been more than concrete, and the market abstraction has always required more than belief (or credit) to keep it afloat.

This module examines the ways to observe, analyze and theorize the concrete-abstract continuum as it applies to markets, both as it manifests itself in the various field situations that anthropologists encounter today and as it shapes the theoretical literature in economic anthropology, sociology of markets and marketing sciences. We will also examine the various ways in which a very general discourse of markets overflows into other social spheres, colliding and colluding with other social logics. The accent will be on an examination of recent ethnographies of markets and capitalism to see how different authors go about untangling these logics in the field and in their writing.