Les vendredis de Carpentras

Reviewed by: Les vendredis de Carpentras: Faire son marché, en Provence ou ailleurs Laurier Turgeon Les vendredis de Carpentras: Faire son marché, en Provence ou ailleurs (Friday in Carpentras: Going to Market, in Provence or Elsewhere). By Michèle de La Pradelle. (Paris: Fayard, 1996. Pp. vi+374 , preface, notes.) Michèle de La Pradelle's book is part of the rapidly emerging set of studies in the anthropology of trade and consumption of material goods in contemporary societies. The author asserts that the market, and commercial trade generally, establishes specific types of social relations. She challenges the rather widespread notion that social relations have ceased to exist in modern, not to mention postmodern, economies. A social bond is always established even if trade is taking place on an impersonal, anonymous basis. Far from disappearing, social relations take on new forms and appear in other modes. For de La Pradelle, trade serves as a link between partners who implicitly agree, for the duration of a transaction, to put their respective social identities on hold and to see each other as equals. To test her hypothesis, she chose to study three very different markets-the "station market," the truffle market, and the itinerant market-all found in Carpentras, a small [End Page 494] Provençal town not far from Avignon. While all these markets are based on the principle of the equality of partners, both trade and, by extension, social relations work differently in each. The "station market" is the region's main wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Located at the edge of town, this market is governed by the cold rationality of supply and demand. An atmosphere of extreme tension and quasireligious silence reigns here, where so very much is at stake. The truffle market is almost its exact opposite. Set up in the center of town, it brings together a small number of initiates who are more impassioned by this luxury item than by the price. Buyers and sellers form an intimate, fraternal, and almost secret world governed by a sense of solidarity rather than competition. A festive atmosphere reigns, and chatter fills the air. Between these two extremes lies the itinerant market, the author's particular favorite. She argues that this marketplace provides the setting for a theatre of equality that is performed with the complicity of each and every player. Here power struggles give way to seduction, the meeting of experts is transformed into a collective ceremony, and confrontation becomes entertainment. Wheeling and dealing take place among the citizens, and each person is simultaneously both actor and spectator. The market appears to be informed by the logic of play, more than economics. Everything is a game or a pretext for one. Potential customers wander about in a carefree manner, perusing the stalls and stopping to chat. Here we find an atmosphere of leisure rather than work. The market is an open and free space where making a purchase is more of a pleasure than an obligation. The itinerant does everything possible to seduce the client: clowning, heckling, putting on the airs of a nomad, and giving the impression of being disorganized in order not to be seen as the typical tradesperson. As the author puts it so well: "The potential buyer comes to feel even more open to making a purchase given that the merchant has used every trick in the book, from mistreatment to indifference, to show that this customer is not really needed at all" (p. 157). The third section enters the imagination of the customer in order to understand what attracted this person to the market. It was not the low prices, nor the quality of the products. Itinerants charge the same prices as shop owners and stock up at the same wholesale markets as department store managers. However, the customer shopping at the itinerant market is convinced that he or she has gotten a good deal and purchased products to be found nowhere else. Everything depends on how products are displayed and described, the author tells us. The itinerant makes one believe in the freshness of the products, their local origins, and their "natural" flavor by displaying them in bulk, without packaging, in

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