ancient cities

64 Bazaar
conventional assumptions about the novelty of
globalization. The most historically renowned
bazaars have, in fact, been touched by major trade
routes for centuries and have always grown under
the influence of a translocal scenario. Hence, the
latest globalizing trends may have simply added
new artefacts, messages, people, and a new speed
of movement but not qualitatively generated a new
phenomenon altogether. Looking upon the bazaar
in the contemporary world as a space of convergence
thus raises central issues regarding globalization
and the cultural logics of late modernity.
The Bazaar as a Metaphor for
the Contemporary World
Already in the 1970s Clifford Geertz noted how,
from being a purely descriptive term, the bazaar
had also turned into an analytic concept. Recently,
within the social sciences (and within public discourse
too), another turn has taken place whereby
the bazaar has been translated into a metaphor for
addressing a variety of phenomena belonging to
the contemporary world. A perspective informed
by orientalistic and exoticizing notions as well as
by postmodern theoretical insights, the bazaar has
become a symbol for the disorderly, hybrid, fragmented,
multifaceted, and commercialized organization
of social life in late modernity.
One connotation of such metaphorical usage
presents the bazaar as a term and a notion useful for
addressing the late modern city. Intended as an
arena of multiplicity, trade, and movement, the
bazaar has been used for epitomizing the borderzone,
undefined, and at times dangerous and illegal
character of the urban world. As the ultimate space
of Otherness, the bazaar sums up, in such approaches,
the notions of a universe made up of unstable roles
(of part-time work, semi-illegal occupations, etc.)
that runs parallel to the open official market.
On a more abstract level the bazaar has also
recently been used to address the spaces of digitalized,
virtual reality. In his analysis of the developments
of the open source software model, Eric
Raymond, inspired by poststructuralist thinkers such
as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, opts for the
bazaar as the key metaphor for addressing the new,
open, nonlinear, flexible models of software developments
able to host differing agendas and approaches.
Stretching Raymond’s approach farther, Benoît
Demil and Xavier Lecocq have chosen the same
metaphor for describing new models of (bazaar)
governance inspired by the open licenses model. It is
with no surprise that the bazaar is also one of the
most used terms in commercial and noncommercial
web spaces (such as Internet shops and data banks).
The metaphorical presence of the “bazaar” in
the discourse surrounding digital networks and
virtual spaces once again reminds us of the evocative
potential of such a notion. It also highlights its
associations to notions of anarchic freedom, deterritorialization,
and individualism expressed in a
number of works (coming mainly form the field of
cultural studies) devoted to issues of identity and
subjectivity in late modernity. In tune with the
postmodern interest for the deterritorialized subject,
the bazaar represents here a creative enterprise.
A liminal zone of subject creation, it provides
the individual with an interstitial (and hence
uncontrolled) space for the negotiation of identity.
Given these latter metaphorical dimensions, the
bazaar, as a term and a notion, could be approached
alongside that chain of terms (hybridity, nomadism,
etc.) that, since postcolonial times, have gone
through an inversion of connotation. Once terms
of discrimination and oppression, such words and
notions have become positive symbols of renewal.
Adopted by several scholars, public administrators,
artists, and commentators, these terms express
(and perhaps help celebrate) the openness and fluidity
of the contemporary (Western but not exclusively)
world. It may be worth adding that, in fact,
the bazaar is a much deployed metaphor and inspiration
for many public events and festivals devoted
to promote integration and intercultural dialogue
in contemporary Europe.
Hence, from being a place of decay (as in E. M.
Forster’s novel Passage to India), the bazaar, in
contemporary industrialized societies, has become
synonymous with encounter and dialogue across
borders and with openness, individuality, and
freedom. Informed by orientalistic fantasies identifying
it with an exotic, prototypical space of
Otherness, the bazaar stands, in the contemporary
West in particular, as one of the charming
epitomes of cultural diversity. And, from being a
counterexample of the organized and rational
Western markets, it has today become an often
uncritically approached hymn to creativity.
Parallel to such celebratory tones, in fact, in many
regions of the world today, the bazaar (as a
proper physical space) has become a security