Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Market Day in Provence

Market Day in Provence

de la Pradelle, Michèle

Paperback

Series: Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries

AnthropologyFranceGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0226141853
ISBN13: 9780226141855
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Oct 7 2015
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
At farmers' markets, we expect to see fruit bursting with juicy sweetness and vegetables greener than a golf course. For Michèle de La Pradelle these expectations are mostly the result of a show performed by merchants and sustained by our propensity to see what we want to see there. Hailed upon its release in France, the award-winning Market Day in Provence lays bare the mechanisms of the contemporary outdoor market by providing a definitive account of the centuries-old institution at Carpentras, a city near Avignon in the south of France famous for its quintessential public street market.

The renewal and celebration of the outdoor market culture in recent years, argues de La Pradelle, artfully masks a fierce commitment to modern-day free-market economics. Responding to consumer desire for an experience that recalls a time before impersonal supermarket chains and mass-produced products, buyers and sellers alike create an atmosphere built on various fictions. Vendors at the market at Carpentras, for example, oblige patrons by acting like lifelong acquaintances of those whom they've only just met as they dispense free samples and lively, witty banter. Likewise, going to the market to look for freshness becomes a way for the consumer to signify the product's relation to nature-a denial of the workaday reality of growing melons under plastic sheets, then machine-sorting, crating, and transporting them.

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