Games of Civility: Ordinary Ethics in Aleppo’s Bazaar

ABSTRACT

Bazaars are often seen as a type of market where there is little scope to engage in moral behaviour. Yet salesmen in Aleppo’s bazaar before the current conflict were not amoral actors who related to their customers in narrowly instrumental ways. Drawing on the perspective of ordinary ethics, this article argues that their salesmanship was infused with ethical dimensions. Aspects of their salesmanship such as flirtation and forceful bargaining were seen as morally questionable in some quarters of the bazaar. But I argue for a perspective of ordinary ethics in which the ethical is both dissolved into and an emergent aspect of a dialogic process in which aspects of the person – desires, intentions, stances – are constituted and recognised. Whatever positions they took on the ‘morality’ of bargaining, most traders regarded a refusal to enter into any kind of dialogic construction of the sale as a failure of civility.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• ordinary ethics
• civility
• bazaar
• Aleppo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Similar lingos drawing for example on scraps of Hebrew were known among traders other parts of the bazaar, including the gold and jewellery and informal money exchange businesses. Many said that these private codes had fallen into disuse and were just a ‘game for children’. But in Suq Tfaddaliyya, vendors did use improvised codes to communicate.

2. Numbers were communicated privately by dividing by five, fifty or five hundred, and adding a camouflage noun. At first I tried to elicit lists of vocabulary and grammar. But the vendors stressed that it required an improvisational ‘cleverness’ (shatara); it was not a system of meaning, but a ‘way of operating’ (De Certeau 1984) whose usefulness was precisely to evade orders of legibility.

3. It was common for suq traders to refer to the Prophet Muhammad as an ideal merchant, exemplifying the virtues of being ‘honest and trustworthy’ (sadiq wa amin).