Calculation in the pirate bazaars

Recent debates in economic sociology have focused on the question of long-term calculation specific to capitalism. With a renewed interest in Max Weber’s work, particularly his seminal essay, The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, scholars such as Arjun Appadurai and Jens Beckert have analysed calculative devices intrinsic to long-term accounting. Appadurai highlights the charismatic figure of the financial player who speculates on uncertainty, the same realm of uncertainty that in Beckert’s work becomes intelligible through the creation of market fictions. In this paper, I instead explore calculation as it unfolds in bazaars selling contraband and pirated electronic goods. Based on an ethnographic account of Delhi’s Lajpat Rai market, Palika Bazaar, and Nehru Place, I argue that calculation in the pirate bazaars is of a short-term nature and oriented to an embedded economic rationality that is closely entangled with the longue durée of everyday life. Rather than future-oriented fictions, small-scale traders employ moral stories and piracy-related discourses to meet day-to-day survival needs

For a Sociology of India - III: Three years into the pandemic: What changed in Delhi’s electronic bazaars

The initial impressions from Delhi’s Lajpat Rai Market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place have been that they integrated into the digital economy as suppliers and service providers to e-commerce platforms during COVID times. The increasing use of digital payments to boost online sales, including social media marketing on Facebook and YouTube, has also brought many of them inside a banking system. As a result, physical bazaars are now less about informal face-to-face commerce and operate more as repair hubs and ancillaries to a platform economy

“Names doing rounds”: On brands in the bazaar economy

This article draws on fieldwork form Delhi’s garment and electronics bazaars to articulate an alternative perspective on the role of brands in the global bazaar economy. Knockoffs and counterfeit brands have mostly been viewed as problematic manifestations of counterfeiting and piracy, or framed in terms of authenticity or marginal practices of imitation. In this article, we suggest that bazaar brands also function as central to a growing popular innovation system able to provide material goods as well as immaterial experiences to the world’s poorer consumers in ways that stay in close contacts with the mediated fluctuations of popular affects. Bazaar brands develop a unique relationship with consumers based on an ability to seize the moment rather than the creation of enduring loyalties. We suggest that bazaar brands can be understood as central to an emerging postcapitalist consumer economy that has been substantially empowered by the spread of digital technologies

Embodied Commons: Knowledge and Sharing in Delhi's Electronic Bazaars

The notion of the ‘sharing economy’ has recently received significant academic and non-academic attention. What the different debates have in common is an emphasis on how technologically mediated knowledge and specific social motivations enable practices of sharing. This article discusses knowledge and sharing in popular marketplaces. Based on an ethnography of Delhi’s electronic bazaars, Lajpat Rai market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place, this article suggests ways to think about knowledge that are embodied and practice-based: What is such embodied knowledge? How is it created and shared? The article argues that bazaars combine sociality established through face-to-face bargaining with informal trade arrangements to enable co-creation and collaboration around technological products. The resulting knowledge is tacit in nature and is mimetically transmitted between bodies. As a result, the bazaars feature a kind of sharing that is distinct from what is understood by most accounts of the sharing economy

A Note on Bazaar Consumer Collectives

This commentary forwards the bazaar consumer collective as a distinct way to view popular consumer sociality. Instead of just building social relations through a particular commodity or brand, bazaar consumer affinities emerge by “grabbing” the moment of potentiality. This commentary argues that what defines bazaar consumerism is about getting onto a trend very quickly through ad hoc and informal production networks. Unlike in previous analysis of popular consumer cultures, bazaar consumerism is no more about aspiring toward upper-class consumption; it is about encapsulating whatever is trending in their environment. A loose bazaar consumer collective gets formed by the possibilities of wearing garments that are thoroughly capturing the moment, not about wearing a specific brand. By this logic, bazaar consumerism is an act of mimesis of decentering corporate discourse at one level and introducing copies as new symbols at the other end

Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy

The term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit