Ethnology, vol. 45 (1). Winter 2006. 1 Culture and Economy: The Milk Market in Northern Ecuador. 1 Emilia Ferraro. In this article I present the ethnography of the milk market in a quichua area of the Northern Andes of Ecuador where the commercialization of milk has traditionally been in the hands of non indigenous people. Due to the historical and economic changing conditions, in recent years this market has shifted in the hands of indigenous peoples, who use their kin relations to take it over from mestizos intermediaries. The aim of the paper is to show ethnographically that the historical changes in the economy of the area have been paralleled by changes in the socio-culture of the villages, in continuation with local ways of conceiving of the “economy” and of what makes a “fair” transaction and relationship. Unlike the majority of the regional literature on the Andes, I maintain that there does not exist a sharp division between market and traditional exchanges; rather, “market” exchanges are understood and given in the language of traditional “reciprocity”. In this way, I want to contribute to the ongoing debate in anthropology and development scholarship on concepts and functioning of markets, but also to the growing awareness among scholars from different disciplines that “much Western thinking about the economy is problematic and heavily ideological and so merits careful scrutiny”. Key words: Ecuador, Northern Andes, market, reciprocity, ethnic economy, indigenous people, mestizos, structural adjustment policies. Since the 1980, there has been a flourishing literature, within anthropology, on markets and market systems considered either as empirical entities ( e.g. Plattner 1985) or as conceptual categories and discourses (e.g. Dilley 1992; Carrier 1997, 2002; Carrier and Miller 1998). This long anthropological interest is even more relevant in the present historical moment, when ‘”globalization” –variably defined (1) - opens up opportunities for “new” markets in many parts of the world (cf. Colloredo-Mansfield 2002). Certainly, the topic of market is still very relevant in Latin America, where the 1990s have witnessed the domination of the neoliberal philosophy and its emphasis on the importance that “the free” market has for the development of national economies. All the more so in Ecuador, the focus of this article, where from the year 2000 the national currency has been officially substituted by the US dollar, a 1 This article has been written thanks to the generosity of the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research that awarded the author the Richard Carley Hunt writing fellowship for 2004-2005, Gr. 7183.