Bazaar

Originally referring to a vaguely defined “oriental” market, the bazaar, as an institution and a space, has for many centuries exercised its attraction upon observers from all over the world. A sensorially and semiotically overloaded space and a point of encounter of various influences, actors, artefacts, and symbols, the bazaar is commonly presented in most travel guides, novels, and reportages (and often in scholarly work too) as the epitome of Middle Eastern (and Asian) societies; as the arena where visitors can capture the most picturesque and “authentic” impressions of the “culture” of such areas. An originally localized space and notion, the bazaar has therefore become a constitutive part of translocal fantasies as well as an example of Western exoticizing and orientalistic representations of the world.

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.