Making the Market Work
Based on the analysis of the manner in which the notion of « the market » is being used, the article aims to document the way in which anthropologists have constructed the notions of socialism and post-socialism. It shows that the analysed studies have recourse to a vision of the market which remains largely essentialist, a-historical and insensible to the power relations which take part in the social construction of this form of exchange. The article argues that it is only by taking into account the current agents and power relations that we can go beyond the question of the social order which seems to haunt these analyses, and thus begin to develop a true study of the change taking place in the post-socialist period.