29 The Global Marketplace: Why Global Perspectives Matter across the Disciplines

When you hear “marketplace,” what comes to mind? Do you think about currency? Buying, selling? Products? What a concept evokes depends on how our experiences have prepared us to think about it. If “marketplace” evokes money and commerce, that’s an economics perspective. But here we’ll consider marketplaces in another sense: as places of exchange. Not of products and currency, but of experiences, ways of life, perspectives, and beliefs.

As an ethnomusicologist, I’m fascinated by the diverse ways people create meaningful cultural communities. So when I look at marketplaces, I consider how a market is embedded in its community. Sometimes literally: where it is, or its layout. But if we shift our view a little, sit down for a coffee and watch people pass by, this literal “location” becomes a cultural one. Beyond its spatial coordinates, a market also exists within cultural contexts, the things that give the market meaning for those who use it. The market gains meaning through people’s use, and so, markets are networks of people. As people, we live within shared cultural flows of ideas that inform how we organize our lives, and shape the lives we can imagine for ourselves. Markets are cultural spaces in which this imagining happens.

I have been to many marketplaces around the world: chain groceries in Tucson, farmers’ markets in Atlantic Canada, corner stores in Liverpool, fish markets in Thailand. For me, though, “marketplace” as a multisensory cultural entity is epitomized by the street markets of East Jerusalem. Shuk Mahane Yehuda in East Jerusalem^[1] and the Arab Souk in the walled Old City are markets where you can purchase ingredients, electronics, clothing, and more. The narrow streets are paved with glowing Jerusalem stone worn smooth and slick by centuries of foot traffic. Shop awnings overhang the entire thoroughfare, leaving parts of the market in a perpetual twilight. Along wider streets, there’s the sonic density of vendors’ percussive shouts and the clatter of carts over uneven stone, the low susurration of price negotiations, a tumult of sound that dissipates when you step into a narrow passageway. In the cocoon of quiet, a fragrance draws you to a spice stall filled with gleaming piles of paprika, cinnamon, and za’atar. The nutty smell of pistachios beckons from a nearby bakery, whose centerpiece is a miniature Al-Aqsa Mosque, made entirely from honey-saturated baklava.

But this is no “Arabian Nights” fantasy. This is a place where the negotiation of price and the quotidian search for groceries overlays a larger negotiation of space, and a search for cultural belonging and ownership. East Jerusalem is a contested space, enfolded in local and international geopolitics that ricochet through histories that are never just collections of dates and events, but are the interpretation of those moments as culturally significant, fraught and freighted with many meanings.

Beyond selling baklava, the baklava mosque is also a statement of presence and perspective. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam, understood as the endpoint of the Prophet Muhammed’s transformative Night Journey. Al-Aqsa surmounts another significant site: the platform that originally supported the biblical First and Second Jewish Temples. Whether you call this site Har HaBayit, Haram esh-Sharif, the Temple Mount, or the Al-Aqsa Compound depends on your relationship to the history of this place, which is influenced by Jewish and Islamic religious teachings, British colonial history, the fact and aftermath of a world war, genocides, nationalisms, political ideologies, and more.

The bakery, in the heart of Shuk Mahane Yehuda, is a 10 minute walk from the Arab Souk and the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Compound. I finished my baklava while arriving at the Western Wall, a retaining wall of the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Compound, and Judaism’s most sacred site. I also walked past Christianity’s holiest site, but that’s another story.

Meaning isn’t singular or fixed, because what something means depends on our relationship to it. So how do we make meaning of history as living, situated within a dynamic space of multiple global and local narratives? Cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai suggests we identify and map how people, media, technology, financial capital, and ideas flow across the globe, focusing on the places where these flows intermingle. It’s places like the markets where meanings multiply and become concentrated, where dominant meanings emerge.

Ultimately, what “matters” emerges from the concentration of shared meaning, conveyed through ideas and narratives. These allow us to understand ourselves and our histories, and when shared, they hold immense power. The focusing of different kinds of power on a particular issue, area, or idea confers meaning to that thing. Meaning, like power, accrues, and it can be directed. We’re subject to these global flows of power, but we can also influence their direction. The narratives I learned while living in Jerusalem differ from what I learned of the city while in the United States.

We build global perspectives by cultivating multifaceted, nuanced perspectives and becoming aware of the flows of power and narratives. Understanding others is prefaced by understanding ourselves, as individuals within cultures. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that “Man is…suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”: these “webs” are culture, structures we participate in and through which we make meaning for ourselves as societal participants (5). We humans collectively build and rebuild our cultures to achieve particular purposes, learning and practicing cultural ideas and values in our fashion, sports, cuisine, gender roles, faith, and more. The cultural things we share give us a sense of belonging, and help us recognize and navigate differences between ourselves and others. Even cultural things shared by people worldwide are filtered through local intersections of place, identity and belief.

In East Jerusalem’s markets, I recognized the meaning of cultural flows of power by moving temporarily out of my own subject positions and experiences. We can never entirely escape our cultural entanglements, but recognizing how and when we should, having the curiosity to try, and being humble in the face of our own limits are essential skills to carry with you.

Works Cited

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays. Basic Books, 1973.

United Nations. “The Status of Jerusalem; Prepared for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.” New York, United Nations, 1997. https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Status-of-Jerusalem-Engish-199708.pdf

About the author

name: Kathryn Alexander

I am an associate professor of practice in the W.A. Franke Honors College. I grew up in San Diego, studied abroad in Israel, lived in Canada, spent a year in Minnesota, and moved to Arizona in 2017. The qualities that guide my approach to life, teaching, and scholarship are grit, resilience, curiosity, and community. Cultivating curiosity about the world around me has led to the knowledge that what I do matters, and it matters that I do that work with competent intention and respectful humility. As an ethnomusicologist, I am compelled by the ways people use music to make meaning in their lives and communities, and this professional way of being stems from the ways I choose to engage with my world.