The Traditional Role and Perspective of the Bazaar

ENGLISH ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the specification of bazaars and the bazaar economy. Bazaar [bāzār] is a Persian word for marketplace, also used in Turkish- çarşi [čarši]. Like the Arabic term souk وسق [súq], bazaar is both the concrete trading place, where many people meet and interact but like the English word market or the French le marché is also understood as a more abstract notion of buying and selling in the sense of demand and supply and it involves small shopping stalls, modern shopping and business avenues and shopping malls as well. Bazaar can refer to a single shopping unit or a street in the frame of the marketplace or outside its boundaries or to the whole business complex. The marketplace has symbolic and social importance indicative of its urban centrality. The souk is seen as one of the quintessential oriental spaces. Clifford Geertz and his own studies of Moroccan and Indonesian rural markets inspired many economic anthropologists to examine the structure of marketplaces in the developing world as products of informational scarcity. The bazaar economy was defined in Clifford Geertz' extremly influential anthropological study on the bazaar economy in Sefrou (1978), a quite small town in Morocco with about 600 shops. Geertz was the first to emphasise the important difference..