The fate of humanity in indonesia amid disruptive market modernization

Market as one of the social institutions where economic transaction process takes place has undergone a significant transformation nowadays in the form of modernization from traditional market to modern market. This modernization process, which includes the revitalization of market’s physical appearance as well as the change in transaction system, has drastically changed the economic structure and the shopping culture within a community. Some changes including the introduction of selfservice system and various discount strategies are offered not just as a way to attract more people to modern markets but also to increase the comfortability and efficiency in transaction. This phenomenon is based on what Max Weber identifies as the result of community’s dependency towards bureaucratic system that emphasizes aspects such as efficiency, calculability, predictability, and the substitution of human workforce with non-human technology. This means that any institution, including market, are no longer following the will of human as its actor alone, but also following some logical and autonomous rules that is set from the beginning. As the result, as Karl Polanyi found in his study of economic anthropology, economic activity in the market is slowly isolated from other cultural aspects of human life so that it is fully controlled by rational-mechanical principles without regards to the more emotional considerations of society. The most obvious example comes from the price equilibrium principle and the existence of money which now have the ability to control or even determine our actions and choices in the market. Inspired by these two ideas, it seems that in addition to the impacts mentioned above, the existence of market modernization also indicates the emergence of dehumanization phenomenon that slowly turns humans into mechanistic and individualistic units. This article as a whole will identify the characteristics of traditional and modern markets by focusing on their socio-cultural aspects, to then, through the ideas of Weber and Polanyi, examine the possibility of reduction in the anthropological dimension of market due to the modernization process as well as the changes in the mode of relation between individuals in other sectors of life outside the economic activities.