ancient cities

62 Bazaar
Hats on display at a bazaar outside of Topkapi, Turkey
Source: Jill Buyan.
Among scholars, the bazaar has captured the
attention of individuals from different disciplinary
environments. In earlier scholarship it was
approached primarily in terms of economic behavior,
hence becoming a field of encounter primarily
between economists, historians, and anthropologists.
Later on, however, it was identified as a key
arena for understanding societal issues at large. In
scholarly work, thus, the bazaar has two main
connotations. On the one hand, it signifies a particular
space and place of exchange (that some
authors have proposed as the ideal precursor of the
fairs, the world exhibition, and the contemporary
department stores); on the other hand, it refers to
an economic system (originally denoting the peasant
markets) opposed to the competitive “Western”
markets. In the past few decades the bazaar has
also become a popular metaphor for addressing
various aspects of late modern societies. Carrying
along its original orientalistic connotations, the
bazaar is today a recurrent term and notion (in
scholarly as well as public discourse) for addressing
the contemporary hybrid, multifaceted, globally
interconnected, and digitalized world.
After a brief introduction presenting the origins of
the term, this entry will outline a number of passages
and notions that have characterized research on the
bazaar. Divided in three sections focusing first on the
bazaar as an economic system,
second as a space of convergence,
and finally as a metaphor, the
entry does not, however, aim at
offering a thorough chronological
account of the history of scientific
research in this field. Rather, it
suggests some critical insights into
the main visions, interpretations,
and turns that have characterized
its presence within the social and
humanistic sciences.
The Term
A term of Persian origins connoting
a market or a marketplace, the
term bazaar has, across the centuries,
spread to different parts of the
world. Eastward it has been
adopted in south and southeast
Asia (in India, in particular, it
came to connote also a single shop or stall). Westward,
it has reached Arabic, Turkish, and European languages
alike. Whereas some of these languages have
adopted it literally, in many European countries the
term bazaar has become synonymous with the “oriental
marketplace” at large and been used to indicate
chaotic, disorderly, and irrational places of exchange,
where an array of objects and ideas could be found.
Generically, however, the bazaar is also often used to
address marketplaces (often open aired and indigenous)
in most areas of the world.
The Bazaar as an Economic System
In the past 50 years, two main approaches have
dominated the work of scholars interested in the
study of the bazaar as an economic system.
Whereas older accounts presented the bazaar
almost as the precursor or prototype of the modern
capitalist competitive market, more recent ones
have addressed it as an arena so deeply entrenched
in its own sociocultural context as to appear totally
outside of modern economic analysis. Among the
most influential scholars representing the latter
(and more recent) approach to the bazaar is
anthropologist Richard G. Fox. In his work on a
market town in North India, Fox presented the
bazaar as a place of the irrational. Describing it as