A Dance of Wares: Bargaining in Esfahan's Grand Bazaar — Epoche B2
Buying a single inlaid box in the Grand Bazaar of Esfahan took me forty minutes, two glasses of tea, and a conversation I had been dreading for a week. You enter the bazaar through the Qeysarieh gate at the northern end of Naqsh-e Jahan Square — the great rectangle laid out for Shah Abbas from 1598, and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, under its other name Meidan Emam, in 1979 — and the temperature drops by several degrees as the vaulted brick roof closes over your head. The passage runs for kilometres, branching as it goes: carpets in one corridor, block-printed cloth in another, and somewhere further in the coppersmiths, whose hammering you hear long before you find them. Persians have a phrase for this city — Esfahān nesf-e jahān , "Esfahan is half the world" — and after twenty minutes in the bazaar the boast begins to seem reasonable. The coolness is worth a sentence, because it is the first thing that tells you the building was designed rather than accumulated. Thick brick has a large thermal mass: it absorbs heat slowly and releases it slowly, so the temperature inside tracks the average of the day and night rather than the afternoon peak, and the vault admits no direct sun onto the floor. What I had dreaded, though, was not the walk. It was the bargaining. In the shops I grew up with the price on the label is a fact, and questioning it would be faintly aggressive. Here nothing so simple is on offer, and I had convinced myself that this meant confrontation. It took one afternoon to understand that I had the shape of it entirely wrong — and, as I only worked out afterwards, to understand what each stage of it was for. The first move: an asking price is a description The opening belongs to the seller, and the first thing to get right is what his number is doing. In a small shop selling khatam boxes, the owner turned one over in his hands, showed me the underside, and named a figure. Khatam is the marquetry work Esfahan is known for: rods of wood, brass wire and camel bone, each drawn to a triangular section about a millimetre across, are bound six at a time into hexagonal bundles, glued under pressure, and then sliced crossways into wafer-thin sheets that are laid over the object. Six is not a choice. The rods are equilateral in section, each corner is $60^\circ$, and a ring of them closes around a point only if the corners sum to a full turn: $6 \times 60^\circ = 360^\circ$. That is also where the scale of the pattern comes from — six triangles a millimetre on a side make a star roughly two millimetres across, which is why the visible motif is as small as it is. Hans Wulff documented the process workshop by workshop in The Traditional Crafts of Persia . The seller's figure, I understood later, was not a demand. It was a description: this much work, this many hours, this quality of inlay. He had put a value on the object and invited me to respond. Understanding this changes what the number is for — it is the first piece of evidence in an argument, not a barrier. Why a counter-offer is not an insult My response was the counter-offer, and this was where my instincts were least useful. Naming a lower number felt like telling a craftsman his work was not worth much. In fact the silence I nearly chose would have been the insult; a buyer who says nothing is a buyer who has not really looked. Clifford Geertz explained why in a short paper on the bazaar economy of Sefrou in Morocco, and his claim is precise enough to be worth stating properly. In a bazaar, he argued, the scarce commodity is not goods but reliable information about them — what a thing is made of, what it is worth, who else sells it, what they would charge. Information of this kind is poor, unevenly distributed, expensive to obtain, and therefore intensely valued. Two institutions grow up in response. The first is what Geertz called clientelization: buyers and sellers form repeated partnerships, so that each knows whom he is dealing with. The second is intensive bargaining. The word "intensive" is doing real work there, and it is the distinction that made sense of my afternoon. A shopper can search in two directions. Extensive search means comparing many sellers: visiting eight shops and noting eight prices. Intensive search means going deep with one seller: asking what the dark pieces are, why the lid costs more than the body, what a poor example looks like. Geertz's argument is that where information is bad, extensive search returns very little — eight numbers attached to eight boxes you cannot tell apart are eight numbers, not eight comparisons — whereas intensive search returns a great deal, because it tells you what the numbers mean. So the bazaar concentrates effort in the second direction. My too-low offer was not an affront; it was a probe, and when he told me cheerfully that it was too low he was answering it. That was the point at which the afternoon actually began. What the settlement number actually is What followed took forty minutes and two glasses of tea, poured from a flask and drunk over a lump of sugar held between the teeth. He explained which pieces of the pattern were natural camel bone and which had been dyed dark, and why the lid took longer than the body. Here I should correct the way I first described this: the contrast in khatam is not between bone and camel bone but between bone left pale, bone or wood stained dark, and the brass wire that gives the metallic lines. I said, honestly, what I could spend. He came down; I came up; he came down again and then stopped, and I could tell from his face that we had arrived. I used to say that the number we settled on was not the midpoint of a formula. That was the wrong lesson, and the right one is more interesting. Consider the two quantities that actually determine the outcome. Call $V_b$ the most I would pay before walking away, and $V_s$ the least he would accept — which is not his cost but the value of his best alternative, namely what he expe