The Retail Revolution and a Changing Consumer Culture: Spotlight on South Asia

This issue of Perspectives explores why and how landscapes of production, trade, regulation, and consumption are transformed in contemporary South Asia. It does so by exploring a specific relationship or tension: that of bazaar economies and standardised economies. Conventionally, bazaars or bazaar economies of South Asia and elsewhere are associated with trust, personalised exchange, authenticity, and exoticism. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described bazaar economies as traditional and lacking in organisation.