Le savoir des marchands : comment prendre en compte les valeurs en jeu dans l'économie ? Sirohi district, Rajasthan, Inde. I

Abstract : In this chapter, I argue that traditional business community in the Sirohi District of Rajasthan was the only community there to consider the local economic process in terms that approximate to Western Economic thought. Despite the fact that rural economy produced almost no surplus and used money only on a few occasions, it can not be said that it was simply a subsistance economy. It could be defined rather as a fully monetarised system but one where the use of money remained largely nominal because most transactions between economic agents took either the form of redistribution or the form of credit and debt relations. The local business community aplied a "rational" conception of economics based on the pursuit of long term equivalence between the production and the consumption of the different communities in the District. They could do so, firstly because they were the only ones to use the simple tools of monetary accountancy; and secondly because they had sociological knowledge of the behaviour of other communities. These two forms of knowledge enabled them to adjust the economic process to communities which did not themselves act according to a model of "rational" economic behaviour. (Résumé d'auteur)