TRANSPORT AMPHORAS AND MARKET PRACTICES 257
political spheres of behavior. Within the area of the transaction itself, price cre-
ation mechanisms and the processes of exchange also interact with dynamic
institutions.
Self-Interested Rationalities and Choices
The wants or needs of the buyers and sellers as well as the nature of the
goods themselves all modify the free operation of market forces. The model
just described leaves open the possibility of a wide range of motives and ratio-
nalities shaping supply, demand, and the process of transactions. While other
models exclude both non-maximizing motives and limited range of choice
from the market sphere, this approach – shared by many others in the fields
of economic anthropology and sociology – opens the possibility for a broader
spectrum of behavior to be considered. Even within a model of profit max-
imization, motivations can vary between actors. Prasch ( 1995 ), for example,
distinguishes between the wants market (unmet demand will stay the same
or decrease) and the needs market (unmet demand will intensify over time).
A needs trader, for example, cannot simply withdraw from a market and wait
for better conditions without increasing his/her own level of demand (hence
limiting the level of choice); a wants trader’s level of demand will stay the same
or decrease over time, so there is full choice as to remaining in or withdrawing
from a transaction or even from the market altogether (on rationality, see also
North 1990 : 17–26).
Such modifications to rational principles even within theoretical marketsystems echo the various systems of rationality employed by peasant commu-
nities as their household economies exist within broader market economies
(Deere and de Janvry 1979 ; Fafchamps 1992 ; Mayer and Glave 1999 ; Fafchamps
and Hill 2005 ; and in historical perspective, Kanta Ray 1988 ; Haynes 1999 ;
Lanaro 2003 ). For example, subsistence production among Sudanese peas-
ants, using unpaid family labor and proceeding regardless of market prices
or potential profits that could be gained from crop sales, coexists – rationally
and necessarily – with participation in the off-farm labor market, cash-crop
production, and even purchases on the food market (Bernal 1994 ). The house-
hold’s seeming autonomy, perhaps even self-sufficiency, in terms of subsistence
crop production is in fact heavily influenced by the coexistence of labor and
commodity markets as well as the economic policies of the state. A similar
coexistence of non-market agricultural production for the household and pro-
duction for market sales figures prominently in studies of the rise of markets
in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, which happens also to provide
an example where, as in antiquity, the stated ideology of autarky existed in a
dynamic relationship with the development of markets (Rothenberg 1981 ;
Hobbs Pruitt 1984 ; Atack and Bateman 1984 ; Ford 1985 ; likewise Jones 1993 on