Keshavarzian 229Notes
1.e author would like to thank Narges Erami, Michael Gasper, Setrag Th
Manoukian, Karuna Mantena and Seteney Shami for their helpful and gen-
erous comments on earlier drafts of this essay and conversations about the
themes discussed in it.
2.s essay is based on field research in Iran during several research visits, Thi
primarily May–August 1999 and August 2000–August 2001.
3.e tripartite notion of place—locale, sense of place, and location—used Th
in this paper is borrowed from John A. Agnew, Place and Politics: The
Geographical Mediation of State and Society (Boston: Allen and Unwin,
1987). For a comprehensive review of the concept of place, see Thomas F.
Gieryn, “A Space for Place in Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 26
(2000): 463–496.
4.e literature on Iranian bazaars acknowledges the spatial attributes of Th
Iranian bazaars. Most definitions of the bazaar begin with the built envi-
ronment (e.g., Michael Bonine, Encyclopædia Iranica, s.v. “Bāzār,” 20).
Geographers have paid attention to the bazaar’s location and relationship
to the hinterland in terms of measurable and quantifiable indicators of eco-
nomic activity and exchange. Using economic factors, such as land values,
functional roles, and logistical factors, geographers have used central place
theory to explain the bazaar’s distribution of stores, position in the com-
mercial hierarchy and regional economic geography. See Michael Edward
Bonine, “Yazd and Its Hinterland: A Central Place System of Dominance in
the Central Iranian Plateau,” Marburger Geographische Schriften 83 (1980);
Paul Ward English, City and Village in Iran: Settlement and Economy in
the Kirman Basin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); Martin
Seger, Teheran: Eine Stadtgeographische Studie (New York: Springer-Verlag
Wien, 1978). Similarly, researchers who have discussed bazaars’ economic
organization as a reflection of information scarcity and asymmetry view
spatial cohesion as a response to these problems. See Clifford Geertz,
“Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou,” in Meaning and Order in Moroccan
Society, edited by Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz and Lawrence Rosen
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Frank Fanselow,
“The Bazaar Economy or How Bizarre is the Bazaar Really?” Man 25 (June
1990): 250–265. In short, these approaches have interpreted space as both
descriptively and analytically important.