AKÇAKOCA PEASANT MARKET
AS A PUBLIC SPACE AND MARKET WOMEN

PhD Dissertation
by
Hanife Aliefendioglu
Anthropology Department
Hacettepe University
Turkey.
provided by OPENAIR-MARKET NET

SUMMARY

(Full text available from author in Turkish only)
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The question that the research will try to answer is to reveal the dynamics of Akçakoca Peasant Market by the causes that attract the women who are mostly unpaid family workers to the market and the elements that make marketing lasting, to discuss the interactivity of production and reproduction in agricultural production areas and to understand what kind of a public sphere market place is.

In this study, the dynamics of market is studied with the dimension of the relationships of the marketer women among themselves, with the clients, the local government and the town. Gender based division of labour, the distinction between private and public spheres, the relationship of production and re-production, and, small scale production have been determined as basic concepts. Accordingly, the private sphere is home and its close enviroment, the public sphere is the exterior of home. In the study, the debate concerning the advantages and disadvantages brought by modernisation to the rural women in relation with both private and public spheres is deepened in the particularity of marketing and marketer women.

Peasant Market in the district of Akçakoca (Bolu) in Western Black Sea Region has been selected as the field of this research. In the research, theories and debates in anthropologic and feminist literature have been made use of, and, participant observation, questionnaire and indebt interviews have been used as data collection techniques. During the fieldwork, 93 marketer women have been interviewed.

Marketer women expose a heterogenous structure with regard to income, family situation, age group and income level. All the marketer women are either married or widows. They join the market when their children reach a certain age with the approval of their spouses or their elders of families. Most of them has learned marketing from an elder relative or acquintances. To the traditional solidarity among relatives and acquintances existing in the market place, a new solidarity they form with the the friends whom they have met in the market place is added.

The persons and relationships that are unreachable in villages become reachable for the marketer women in Peasant Market. Marketing is an activity that calls for the awareness of the power and importance of the women in private and public spheres. Although it has been started for economic profit, marketing gains importance by the social benefit dimension in the course of time.

In the peasant market, as there exists a competition directing towards augmenting the product and the profit, there also exists a solidarity created by forming small groups. The marketer women use traditional methods both at the stage of production for market and or selling. With this aspect, marketing preserves its existence being an authentic space in the modern economy only within a new harmony with modernism.

The Akçakoca Peasant Market is a public sphere being formed and reproduced by women. The elements of this public sphere are, to be at the interior, to receive acceptance, solidarity, resisting competition, forming small groups, making accumulation, conforming to the rules or developing new rules. Common experiences that are developed about marketing are transferred to new marketer women. By this aspect the Peasant Market as a public sphere gains continuity both spatially and on the liasons side.

The Peasant Market may gradually cease to exist because of young women unwanting to continue with marketing. On the other hand, the inclination that is developing in big cities towards the consumption of healthy food may increase the demand for agricultural products in the Peasant Market. On that condition, it may be possible that young women may continue marketing that they found traditional with a new cause. Also on that condition, the possibility that this new form of marketing which is no more a small-scale income yielding activity is not pursued by peasant women but by their husbands may arise.

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