Urbanities,
Vol. 4
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No 2
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November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
26
As it has been demonstrated by De La Pradelle (2006), markets offer a vantage point
for challenging a common understanding of cultural values in an economic system. In the
market, social relationships and economic transactions are combined in the daily interactions
among people (Black 2005), whereby they exchange goods, ideas and values. The market is,
thus, the perfect context in which to observe resistance to more rationalised use of public
space. Social scientists who study the urban gentrification of cities often share this viewpoint
(Herzfeld 2009, Zukin 2010). The socio-economic significance of markets in urban settings
derives also from their ties to food production and food distribution networks. Studying a
geographically located place in relation to the local territory and to the global food systems
allows us to investigate the interactions between cultural values and material and economic
situations (Bestor 2004).
Geertz (1979) showed how the market is structured according to general principles of
social organization. Consequently, it is easy to understand his definition of the bazaar as ‘a
distinctive system of social relationships centring on the production and consumption of
goods and services (that is, a particular kind of economy)’ (Geertz
1979: 124). More recently,
De La Pradelle’s (2006) monograph about a Provençal market challenged the radical
opposition of modern societies, where the rationality of the market prevails, to ‘traditional
societies, where the exchange of goods is always ‘embedded’ in the social relations of persons
and groups (kinship, status hierarchy, domination and so on)’ (De La Pradelle 2006: 2). This
perspective followed the objection raised by Bird-David (1997: 471), against ‘reproducing the
master-division into wholly capitalist or wholly non-capitalist economy kinds’. These themes
have recently originated debate in economics, as much as in the social sciences. The global
recession which started in 2008 has fuelled a reconsideration of the long-established claim in
economics, which reassured that ‘everyone is rational and markets work perfectly’ (Krugman
2009). As Harvey and Wachsmuth have noted ‘[a]t times of crises the irrationality of
capitalism becomes plain to see’ ( Harvey et al. 2012: 264).
As much as we cannot divorce economy from cultural and social processes, it is not
possible to dissociate knowledge from bodily perception (Serres 2008). Herzfeld (2001: 252)
argues that ‘the study of sensory symbolism forcefully reveals the hierarchies and stereotypes
through which certain social groups are invested with moral and political authority and other
groups disempowered and condemned.’ This constitutes a fertile terrain of investigation in the
social sciences (Chau 2008, Classen 1997, Geurts 2002). Attaching importance to the senses
deprives the intellectual dimension of social life of its supremacy (Brant 2008, Chau 2008). In
the case of La Pescheria, competence is acquired through the verbal interactions between
seller and buyer, but it is also related to the ‘social sensorium’ (Chau 2008: 489). Stoller
(1989) uses the expression ‘tasteful ethnography’ to emphasise that dealing with food means
‘not only [to] investigate kinship, exchange, and symbolism, but also describe with literary
vividness the smells, tastes, and textures of the land, the people, and the food.’(Stoller 1989:
29).
Nonetheless, places need to be investigated taking into account the sensory interaction
between people and their environment. Place is indeed deeply interconnected with sensory
perception and, in the market, it is essential to learn how to move in a ‘sensorially rich social
