On Trade in Europe: Anthropologists Speak

Abstract

This article is an introduction to the issue’s special theme on “Humans Buying and Selling: Anthropology of Trade (People, Goods, Structures, Relationships)”, featuring contributions by Svetlana Sidneva, Alexander Novik, Armando Maxia, Oxana Fais-Leutskaia, Julia Butschatskaja, and Irina Kucherova. The authors discuss the current state of trade as economic activity in a number of European regions, examining the local specificities of trade operations and their functioning, the symbolism of goods, the preservation of archaic traditional elements of “old ways of trade”, the human relationships of participants in these “games of exchange”, and other aspects of trade as a cultural phenomenon. Due to the fact that trade, especially in the context of modern developed societies, is infrequently considered as an object of anthropological research, while available studies in the vein of economic anthropology
are mostly concerned with realities of the “Global South” or societies with “mixed economy”, these contributions are based on actual fieldwork material and represent an attempt at ethnographic reconstruction and anthropological analysis of trade through particular cases of European regions, such as Greece, Kosovo, Sardinia, Sicily, Germany, and Iceland. The contributors employ novel approaches to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of this theme in the context of contemporary culture.