Koray Çalişkan - Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity

Preface

W E LIVE IN THE AGE of the market without knowing how and whether it works. Market Threads addresses this puzzle at a time when new crises in world markets cannot be managed with old ideas. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two hegemonic approaches govern our consideration of markets. The neoclassical hegemony insists that the market is a mechanism that draws on universal economic rationality The free market reforms of the last quarter-century were inspired by this observation. On the other hand, the institutionalist hegemony argues that the market is embedded in society and calls for the study of the conditions making markets possible. This book argues that neither can fully grasp how markets work on the ground.

Since the 1980s, an increasing number of market studies has challenged the terms of the neoclassical and institutionalist debate, giving birth to a novel theoretical and empirical approach. By drawing on new directions of research on the market, Market Threads explores a simple question: What is a global market? Drawing on the production and trading of cotton, a global commodity that connects the three major economic activities in the worldindustry, services, and agricultureI examine how the world cotton market is produced and maintained on the ground. This book presents a detailed analysis of the arrangements, institutions, calculative devices, power relations, and forces on which the production and circulation of cotton depend. It starts by examining the mechanisms that make it possible to produce global, regional, and local spot, options, and futures prices. It then traces the circulation of cotton, exploring how it crosses various borders. Lastly, it examines how cotton is grown, studying the struggles of humans and nonhumans to control it in the countryside.

Market Threads deviates from the understanding of markets prevailing in both political economy and economic sociology. Markets do not just emerge as a relationship among self-interested buyers and sellers, governed by appropriate economic institutions. Nor are they to be understood as networks embedded in wider social structures. They are relations of power maintained every day by constant interventions; the production of mercantile tools such as prosthetic, associate, and rehearsal prices; and the waging of various forms of struggle among market actors. This book shows that researchers and policy-makers must focus on the specific practices of price realization and market-making and maintenance in order to understand the conditions of the vast majority of the global population whose survival is pegged to the working of world markets. Drawing on methods from the social study of science and technology, as well as new studies of markets developed in political science, sociology, economics, and economic sociology and anthropology, the book presents an analysis of how a multitude of market agents with different capacities to shape each others possible fields of action negotiate, accept, reject, resist, and reproduce a global market that connects social positions to power.

Acknowledgments

As I CARRIED OUT THE RESEARCH and writing of the present book, I relied on the energy, inspiration, support, and friendship of many, without whose help the story I tell here would be shorter and incomplete. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Research Center in Turkey (ARIT), and the Population Council Meawards Dissertation Grant funded most of the research. I am grateful to these three institutions. ARIT and Boazii University (Scientific Research Grant BAP 07C302) also extended their support by funding various visits to the fieldwork sites in 2003 and between 2006 and 2009, allowing me fill in some of the gaps that appeared only as I began to envision this book.

Many people assisted me during the fieldwork and welcomed me into their lives. In Turkey, without the help of the following persons, I might still be carrying out the research: Cennet Uyanik, Durmu Nizam, Fatma Nizam, Hasan Gk, Hayri zmeri, Hulusi zbaatak, Hseyin Oymaz, Kerim Uyanik, Metin Budak, Murat Nizam, Nkhet Sirman, Pinar Nacak, Beyza Balpazari, Turcan Uyanik, and Veli Yava. In Egypt, I received help from Abdel Aziz Mohammed Eesheey, Abdelmawla Ismail, Abubakr Ghoneim, Albert Gierend, Galal Al-Rifai, Hamdy Zidane, Hanaa Baddar, Madhet Al-Alfi, Mahmoud Abdel Aal, Mohammed Bishara, Moushira Elgeziri, Nawal Omran, Nicholas Hopkins, Rabie Wahba, Reem Saad, Sherene Hamdy, and Wagdy Hendy. Without the company and support of Laura Bier and Nawga Hassan Ali, neither my research nor the time I spent in Egypt would have been enjoyable. I am most indebted to the children, women, and men of the villages of Pamukky, Izbet Sabri, and Kafr Gaffar, all of whom invited me to share their lives. I learned from their wisdom. I am especially grateful to the late Ahmet Uyanik of Pamukky, whose friendship, support, and encouragement helped me become a better researcher. Without Mahmoud and Mohammeds help, I would not have been able to find my way around the Egyptian villages. In the United States, I am indebted to the following persons for helping me better appreciate the intricate details of cotton markets: Brijest Sampat, Dan Watts, Gerard Estur, Gerardo Garcia, Loukas Louktodis, Marco Varini, Mustafa Kocaba, Pierre Viscolo, and Woodson Dunavant. William Griffin trained me in spot, , and options cotton markets. Without Bills help, it would have been very difficult to comprehend the complex world of trading.