Business
In a bazaar, people from very different backgrounds size up goods, words and ways of dealing together, as one judgment. What something is worth cannot be separated from what the seller's talk and conduct are taken to mean.
Where prices and quality are uncertain, buyers and sellers find out what they need to know by judging the people they deal with, not by consulting posted prices. The search for market information becomes a careful reading of social ties, set against how the whole town and its surrounding countryside work.
Ideas usually used for politics, such as brokers, patron–client ties and dependency, also explain how markets work. Traders form lasting attachments and depend on go-betweens, so buying and selling is shaped by the same bonds that shape power.