Publication details
Simmel and Slovak Village Shops
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2006 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | From the viewpoint of the villagers, the past shops were historically interlinked with otherness and outside, embodied either by the Jewish shop and innkeepers or by the socialist state. Drawing on broader ethnographic research concerning retail and shopping , this paper will explore how shops conceived of and conceptualised today, when there is no stranger (Simmel 1971) there, and the shops are owned and operated mostly by the villagers themselves. Overall the wider theoretical concern of the paper is to demonstrate that the more simplistic dualism that asserts modern commerce as somehow intrinsically opposed to spirituality and the construction of village community (Simmel 1978, 1991) needs to be reconsidered. In this paper I shall argue that there are many ways in which the shops and the activity of shopping do not oppose but actually complement and contribute to the project through which the village attempts to construct itself as a viable and in many ways holistic community. Rather the shops and its products are seen as forms that can be appropriated and manipulated and provide the substance for this larger task. |