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Markets and Fields: An Ethnography of Cotton Production and Exchange in a Turkish Village

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Koray Çalışkan
Koray Çalışkan*
Affiliation:
Boğaziçi University, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Bebek, İstanbul, [email protected].
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Abstract

How do farmers explain their engagement with commodity production and the market? This article describes the universe of cotton production and exchange in a Turkish village. Building on the scholarship concerning the anthropology of markets, I offer an account of the power relations concerning exchange in the countryside whereby a cluster of agents interact in multiple ways. Describing the microcosm of cotton production and exchange as it is perceived by farmers in the largest cotton-producing village of the Söke Plain in western Turkey, the essay documents how farmers mobilize resources, interact with agricultural workers, find credit, and finally sell their product. Farmers see the market and their fields as interconnected geographies of struggle between various actors. In contrast to the cotton field where they perceive themselves as active and formative agents in the rural political economic universe, cotton growers understand the market as a location of encounter dominated by traders and controlled by various mercantile tools that weaken their agency. The market is neither only a place where the price is set, nor merely a location of commodity exchange. It is a power field where farmers encounter the “production” of price as relatively passive agents of trade.

Keywords

Turkeyagriculturemarketscottonexchange relationsfarmerstradersagricultural workersprices
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 37 , Fall 2007 , pp. 115 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2007

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