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An Anthropological Study of the Shift from Ritual, Embedded Economy to Shapeless, Disembedded Economy

Rouhollah Nosrati

Pertanika Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science, Volume 26, Issue T, February 2018

Keywords: Bazaar, disembedded economy, economic anthropology, economic action, embeddedness, ritual economy

Published on: 18 May 2018

Folkways and Rituals as one of the central aspects of culture in every society have entertained the minds of anthropologists and sociologists. Researchers have analysed rituals in religious and mythological frameworks, but the current article has taken a different approach toward the phenomenon by articulating it within the important sphere of economy, hence ritual economy. The analytical framework of the current research is based on the formulation of two embedded and disembedded economies as scaled on the ideal type economy. The specification of ideal type market in the present study is a combination of Karl Polanyi's theoretical approach toward the embeddedness of economic activities within the pre-modern economy and its disembededess toward the modern one, with a glance at Weber's ideal type of traditional and modern economies. The findings of the study show that the economic action of bazaaris has transformed from the ritual, embedded economy toward a disembedded one. The inherent changes could be analysed to have resulted from the conventional order, action orientations, conventional forms of interaction, and the logic behind action in bazaar. The findings indicate that modern economy is imposing its logic onto non-modern economies.

ISSN 1511-3701

e-ISSN 2231-8542

Article ID

JSSH-T0789-2018

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