Abstract
Moving through the Burrabazar district along Kolkata’s Strand the immediate buzz of hustling and trade obscures the crumbling warehouses that line the thoroughfare. According to a popular saying, ‘Everything is available in Burrabazar’. This ethos of ready supply, at least for those who are prepared to haggle (and almost everyone is), comes with an infrastructural and informational layer. ‘Everyone wants to buy cheap and sell dear’, writes Clifford Geertz in a classic article on the bazaar economy from the 1970s. ‘In the bazaar information is poor, scarce, maldistributed, inefficiently communicated, and intensely valued’. What are the material conduits that support this game of information procurement and coveting and what are the historical and political conditions that have allowed it to flourish?
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour. No. 2, Kolkata |
| Editors | Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter |
| Place of Publication | U.K. |
| Publisher | Low Latencies |
| Pages | 7-14 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781785420511 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781785420504 |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Open Access - Access Right Statement
This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0Keywords
- India
- computer software
- infrastructure
- labor
- logistics