At farmers’ markets, we expect to see fruit bursting with juicy sweetness and vegetables greener than a golf course. For Michèle de La Pradelle these expectations are mostly the result of a show performed by merchants and sustained by our propensity to see what we want to see there. Hailed upon its release in France, the award-winning Market Day in Provence lays bare the mechanisms of the contemporary outdoor market by providing a definitive account of the centuries-old institution at Carpentras, a city near Avignon in the south of France famous for its quintessential public street market.
The renewal and celebration of the outdoor market culture in recent years, argues de La Pradelle, artfully masks a fierce commitment to modern-day free-market economics. Responding to consumer desire for an experience that recalls a time before impersonal supermarket chains and mass-produced products, buyers and sellers alike create an atmosphere built on various fictions. Vendors at the market at Carpentras, for example, oblige patrons by acting like lifelong acquaintances of those whom they’ve only just met as they dispense free samples and lively, witty banter. Likewise, going to the market to look for “freshness” becomes a way for the consumer to signify the product’s relation to nature—a denial of the workaday reality of growing melons under plastic sheets, then machine-sorting, crating, and transporting them.
Offering captivating descriptions of goods and the friendly and occasionally piquant exchanges between buyers and sellers, Market Day in Provence will be devoured by any reader with an interest in areas as diverse as food, ethnography, globalization, modernity, and French culture.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
--William Grimes"New York Times" (02/03/2006)"
In this vivid and highly perceptive ethnographical study, which was first published in French as Les "Vendredis de Carpentras" in 1996, the late Michele de La Pradelle analyses the traditional "marche forain, " a traveling stallholder market, using Carpentras, one of France s oldest and most celebrated markets, as a model. . . . While de la Pradelle s observations uncover illusions of the street market, one suspects that she too has fallen under its spell. In her Carpentras, the sun always shines, the locals are unremittingly friendly, and the latent religious and racial tensions that have characterized this city in recent years are only hinted at. Yet the brilliance of "Market Day in Provence" lies precisely in the fact that, however much Michele de La Pradelle demystifies the object of her study, she remains loyal to its magic. Her evocative descriptions of this colourful theatre of fantasy will delight anyone who has ever wondered why the lettuces look crispier, the tomatoes redder and the oranges more juicy at the market.
--Sarah Howard"Times Literary Supplement" (09/01/2006)"
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