This article explores the processes influencing the retail prices set by fresh produce vendors in an open-air marketplace. I demonstrate that frameworks used by other anthropologists to understand the formation of retail prices cannot explain how vendors in Challapata, Bolivia, determine their selling prices. Using Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, I argue that in order to understand how vendors formulate their prices we have to look beyond the commodity being sold and explore the relations underlying their exchange. I suggest that the household maintenance of vendors and customers is linked through commodity transactions and that the resulting interdependence shapes the formation of retail prices in Challapata.
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