Sentido y valor de los mercados costeros de lugar en Chile

This article analyses the structural dynamics of social life at five local coastal markets (LCMs) on the Chilean coast (Calbuco, Puerto Montt, Valdivia, Valparaiso and Tongoy). In a semantic narrative framework, we use ethnographic methodology to demonstrate the opacity of local markets—particularly LCMs—in terms of economic and community life. Opacity is a social condition. However, the background reveals profound significance that bears witness to and partially portrays the complexity of markets as places of business, livelihood, life projects and social mobility, where individuality is necessarily intertwined with the community. Our conclusions show that these LCMs go beyond the orthodox definitions that reduce the economy (and the markets themselves) to cost-benefit-motivated interactions between individual agents. Instead, markets go against the grain of this instrumental reductionism and offer remarkable potential for re-thinking, imagining, constructing and co-constructing areas (coastal areas in our analysis) based on collective experience.