’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent

Marketplace exchange is implicitly both economic and social. Participants in marketplace encounters assemble into multidimensional categories of familiarity and difference, both through the material culture object for sale and through the interaction between vendors and clients within their transact...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lauren B. Wagner
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Linköping University Electronic Press 2015-12-01
Series:Valuation Studies
Online Access:https://valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view/778
_version_ 1818362437271814144
author Lauren B. Wagner
author_facet Lauren B. Wagner
author_sort Lauren B. Wagner
collection DOAJ
description Marketplace exchange is implicitly both economic and social. Participants in marketplace encounters assemble into multidimensional categories of familiarity and difference, both through the material culture object for sale and through the interaction between vendors and clients within their transactions. This paper brings attention to the latter through microanalysis of one example from a corpus of recorded marketplace interactions of Moroccan diasporic visitors from Europe with marketplace vendors. This example illustrates a repeatedly observed bargaining strategy: to explicitly or implicitly claim the category of ‘a son/daughter of this country’ (weld/bint el-bled) as an argument to lower prices. While vendors did not straightforwardly refute this category of ‘descendant’, they often did respond by introducing other–sometimes seemingly contradictory–categorical differentiations they found relevant to finding a price. This article explores how vendors and diasporic customers negotiate these categories, and how categorization become significant for the emergent value of the goods under negotiation. Through turn-by-turn analysis, I demonstrate how interlocutors engage with ideas of ‘Moroccanness’ beyond ethnonational discourses of belonging, in that ‘doing being Moroccan’ while bargaining becomes a negotiation of being ‘Moroccan’ geographically, socially and economically, as resident in or out of Morocco.
first_indexed 2024-12-13T21:32:34Z
format Article
id doaj.art-bc46ee33bd5a422db79319dfe52a9a32
institution Directory Open Access Journal
issn 2001-5992
language English
last_indexed 2024-12-13T21:32:34Z
publishDate 2015-12-01
publisher Linköping University Electronic Press
record_format Article
series Valuation Studies
spelling doaj.art-bc46ee33bd5a422db79319dfe52a9a322022-12-21T23:30:46ZengLinköping University Electronic PressValuation Studies2001-59922015-12-013210.3384/VS.2001-5992.1532119’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of DescentLauren B. Wagner0 Department of Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University, The Netherlands Marketplace exchange is implicitly both economic and social. Participants in marketplace encounters assemble into multidimensional categories of familiarity and difference, both through the material culture object for sale and through the interaction between vendors and clients within their transactions. This paper brings attention to the latter through microanalysis of one example from a corpus of recorded marketplace interactions of Moroccan diasporic visitors from Europe with marketplace vendors. This example illustrates a repeatedly observed bargaining strategy: to explicitly or implicitly claim the category of ‘a son/daughter of this country’ (weld/bint el-bled) as an argument to lower prices. While vendors did not straightforwardly refute this category of ‘descendant’, they often did respond by introducing other–sometimes seemingly contradictory–categorical differentiations they found relevant to finding a price. This article explores how vendors and diasporic customers negotiate these categories, and how categorization become significant for the emergent value of the goods under negotiation. Through turn-by-turn analysis, I demonstrate how interlocutors engage with ideas of ‘Moroccanness’ beyond ethnonational discourses of belonging, in that ‘doing being Moroccan’ while bargaining becomes a negotiation of being ‘Moroccan’ geographically, socially and economically, as resident in or out of Morocco.https://valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view/778
spellingShingle Lauren B. Wagner
’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent
Valuation Studies
title ’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent
title_full ’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent
title_fullStr ’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent
title_full_unstemmed ’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent
title_short ’Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent
title_sort tourist price and diasporic visitors negotiating the value of descent
url https://valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view/778
work_keys_str_mv AT laurenbwagner touristpriceanddiasporicvisitorsnegotiatingthevalueofdescent