ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an insight into the everyday machinations of work at Arizona against the background of national and global developmental policies aimed at the market. Traditionally, and presently also outside of Arizona, the trader at a Bosnian market either sells the products of family labour, as do the peasant and the farmer, or sells mass-produced commodities. In post-war Bosnia, the transition from a centrally planned economy to a neo-liberal, global market economy is pursued with a vengeance. For the traders, Arizona is a negotiation of customary, normative claims to subsistence against neo liberal claims to profit. Casting Arizona as a model of free market entrepreneurship, the state and the Office of the High Representative (OHR) burden the meagre earnings made there with high taxes and rent and thus infringe on the very possibility of subsistence. The Italproject scheme occupies the sphere that Karl Polanyi observes within the liberal economy and terms the non-market.
