Bazaar

Abstract: There have been a number of points at which anthropology and economics have come to confront one another over the last several decades-development theory; preindustrial history; colonial domination. Here I want to discuss another where the interchange between the two disciplines may grow even more intimate; one where they may come actually to contribute to each other rather than, as has often been the case, skimming off the other's more generalized ideas and misapplying them. This is the study of peasant market systems, or what I will call bazaar economies. There has been by now a long tradition of peasant market studies in anthropology. Much of it has been merely descriptiveinductivism gone berserk. That part which has had analytical interests has tended to

Abstract: Prolegomena Part I. The Roman Empire and the Comparative Study of Pre-Industrial Society: 1. Beyond the ancient economy? Trade in the Roman empire and the problem of comparative history 2. An agrarian empire between market and tribute - situating interregional trade in the Roman empire Part II. Imperial Bazaar: 3. A rough trading world - opaque, volatile and discontinuously connected markets 4. A thin line - portorium, protection and predation 5. Community - cult, courts, credit and collaboration in the bazaar Epilegomena: taking stock - the world of goods.

Abstract: Gods in the Bazaar is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as “calendar art” or “bazaar art,” the color-saturated, mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets. In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features. Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies—of art, commerce, religion, and desire—within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India’s postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.