Hierarchies of Trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: the Case of an Uzbek Merchant Family From Tajikistan 

Container Bazaars in Crunch. Photos past they author.

One of the many impacts of SARS-CoV-2 is the necessity to invent ever more than flexible livelihood strategies and swift adaptation to digital working processes. Thus far, I have developed a dissertation projection in which I aimed to trace and compare subjective geopolitical imaginaries of pocket-size cross-border traders at 2 of the biggest retail hubs in the postal service-Soviet infinite, the Vii Kilometer Market (Sed'moi) in Odessa, and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek. Given the ongoing state of crises, my research focus is likely to modify, and focus on what is the almost inevitable challenge in the lives of my informants: how to cope with the pandemic crunch?

Ethnographic research strategies frequently need to exist reconsidered and adapted to unpredictable circumstances. In a similar vein the focus group of my project – market traders at the two gigantic mail service-Soviet container markets in Odessa, Ukraine, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – are prone to constantly changing weather that limit and facilitate the profitability of their businesses. Yet, the current global wellness and economic crisis is posing unprecedented challenges to each of our respective scope of activity.

For the traders i of the existential features of everyday economies have been interrupted: the circulation of goods, people, and upper-case letter. For me, every bit an anthropologist without fieldwork, the foundations of professional practice are at pale. Whether we like it or not, it'due south time to develop new methods to stay 'on the books', and, somewhen, consider non-confront-to-face up strategies for ethnographic research.

Contextual background

Post-Soviet markets are particular in various ways, east.k. they only emerged when privatized factories close down in the 1990s, workers put down their tools for the last time and many, specially women, resorted to bazaar trade every bit the terminal bachelor ways of subsistence. The markets in Odessa and Bishkek are located in borderland countries of the former Soviet Union, and hence integrate unlike ideological and socioeconomic zones. With governments aquiver between larger geopolitical and economic powers (mainly Russian federation, Cathay and the European Spousal relationship), market place traders are discipline to and profiteers of constantly changing regulations on merchandise and mobility regimes. Large calibration expansionist politics such as the Chinese Silk Road Initiative (SERB), the Eurasian Economic Marriage (EAEU), and the European Marriage (Eu), as well as international political, economic, and wellness crises directly bear upon on the livelihood strategies of post-Soviet marketplace merchants. Officially imposed ideological spaces, nonetheless, don't necessarily comply with the everyday practices of traders who produce their own spaces through the movement of goods, people, and ideas. The merchants' livelihoods depend on trans-edge price differentials in appurtenances and labor, and transnational commercial and social networks. Physio-spatial, cloth and epistemic permeability alongside official, unofficial and digital infrastructures are therefore of fundamental importance for the generation of trading profits. Hence, the merchants' subjective geographies are intrinsically tied to questions of accessibility, profitability, and safety. Yet, based on previous ethnographic research I argue that spatial imaginaries are also shaped past personal associations with foretime, desired, or imagined spaces and places.

The specific socioeconomic features of post-Soviet bazaars already produced an inspiring body of literature (see for instances, Humphrey, 2002; Kovács, 2015; Leshkowich, 2014; Mandel and Humphrey, 2002; Nasritdinov, 2006; Sik and Wallace, 1999). Many take highlighted the diversity of social and ethnic groups at these markets (Billé, Delaplace, and Humphrey 2012; Karrar 2017b; Marsden 2016a; Nasritdinov and O'Connor 2009), the extra-legal dimension of market exchange (Fehlings 2018; Morris 2012; Polese 2016; Sasunkevich 2015), and the part of kin, clan, or commercial networks (Fehlings 2020; Ibañez Tirado 2018; Marsden 2016b). In that location has been relatively little research, still, on how merchants at postal service-socialist markets locate themselves within their changing geopolitical, and socioeconomic surround. More specifically I am interested in the ways in which the everyday production of space and identify among market traders confirms, contests, or transcends top-down demarcations of spatial cohesion such equally the nation-country, economic Unions or other physically, ideologically or economically divisional territories.

I debate that an ethnographic report of subjective views on space and identify, also as the ways in which these views are enacted in daily life at the marketplace, can offer a particularly productive magnifying glass of post-Cold War geopolitical and economical processes.

Methodologically, I wanted to tackle this question by applying a multi-sited approach, visiting various places alongside the larger supply and retail networks (e.g. markets and product sites in Turkey, China, and Russia). Traveling with the traders to the purchasing destinations I hoped to elicit e.thou. memories of previous trips and reflections on how they have changed over time. Participant observation at the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek and biographical narrative interviews should complete the triangulation of information collection.

The Space and Fourth dimension of Crisis

Since the beginning of the global pandemic in Feb 2020 and the subsequent restrictions on cantankerous-border mobility, I have been trying to suit my project to the new challenges posed to both, my potential interlocutors and my own ethnographic fieldwork. Inevitably, a part of this work will engage with the nearly recent dramatic changes of what we, against all odds, considered to exist a status quo. As a consequence, I will take the current condition as a matter of fact and focus on a term that has experienced surprisingly niggling attending in anthropology (Roitman 2014) – I am referring to 'crisis' every bit a vernacular concept.

The notion of 'crisis', though, has been a vital descriptor for the condition of trade, already in my earlier marketplace-based ethnographic research[1]. Talking about crisis can past no means be reduced to experiences of hardship and disharmonize. Crisis is a foundational condition for the market business (after all markets in post-Soviet countries were born from the collapse of their surrounding socioeconomic and political environment) and traders accept a complex understanding of its personal and economical assets and drawbacks.

In previous fieldwork, I encountered traders that identified the crisis as a living condition since the demise of the Soviet Union, or others who complained that a raging 'global crisis' (mirovoy krizis) forces them to constantly invent new business organization strategies. Crisis does not simply unfold in place, but it is too salient in its temporal dimension. Talking to traders in unlike post-Soviet countries, I realized how biographical narrations are often organized alongside periods of plight and times of prosperity (even if they would normally coincide to some extend).

The time when mail-Soviet bazaars allowed for accessible and assisting engagement in market trading accept ended already before pandemic. Economic crises (due east.g. 1998, 2008, 2014, 2020), political and social instability (revolutions in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, 2010, and ongoing since October 2020, and in Ukraine in 2004-5 and 2014), and border conflicts (Kyrgyz-Tajik-Uzbek border, Kazakh-Kyrgyz border, inner Ukrainian separation of the Donetsk People's Republic) are just some examples of larger processes that create a hazard for market traders. The sudden standstill of international mobility in the face of SARS-CoV-2, thus, accelerates a refuse, that had already been looming (encounter also Alff, 2016; Eggart, 2019a; Karrar, 2017b). But 'Do Bazaars Dye?', as the anthropologist Hassan Karrar (2017a) provocatively asked in a study of the condition of merchandise at Dordoi. Information technology remains an open up and urging question of how traders can cope with the present economic conditions and whether the flexibility they acquired during by crises will come in handy to develop new strategies for the current situation.
It is possible as boutique trade is hardy to crises, and has shown remarkable persistence over time. Both, Dordoi and Sed'moi market are nodes, where global forces materialize in everyday activities of men and women with different ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds. They are places where the accelerated mobility of people, goods, and ideas symbolize a fashion or linguistic communication of globalization that takes place on the ground, or 'from beneath' (Mathews, Ribeiro, and Vega 2012; Rudaz 2020). If nosotros want to empathize the challenge that the pandemic poses to market place traders whose livelihoods depend on the cross-border mobility of goods and people, nosotros need to enquire how the current crisis is perceived to be dissimilar or similar to previous ones.

Methodological challenges

Given the institutional restrictions on contiguous enquiry (that may last for an unpredictable period of time), I volition not exist able to travel to my field sites in the foreseeable time to come or to bear  classic ethnography and participant ascertainment on the ground. Therefore, I am thinking near switching to an online-based style of data collection. Finding participants would and so rely on a strategy that I already practical during previous fieldwork in Russia. There, I advertised my project in an open Facebook group (for supply and demand for all possible kinds of appurtenances and data). The resonance to this phone call was striking and I was not even able to personally meet all the people that offered their participation. Both markets in Odessa and Bishkek have their own social media sites, which I could use for a similar telephone call. This technique would naturally limit the telescopic of insights and the possibility to develop closer relationships with key informants. It would pose a serial of ethical and practical questions (e.k. if the participants should be paid because of the remote type of interaction, and how a closer collaboration with local actors could look without meeting in person). And it would require to conceptualize the epistemological implications of digital ethnography.

From what I know, however, many traders at the market have reacted to the digital turn much swifter than I and already turned into professional person online providers. Maybe the traders' easiness in using digital communication will enable us to develop a more collaborative framework for the collection and exchange of information, information, skills, and knowledge.

Written on 13 October, 2020

I am  Claudia Eggart, a PhD researcher in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where I work under the supervision of Madeleine Reeves. I accept a background in Literature, Slavonic Studies, (BA, University of Vienna), Sociology (MA, Gratis University Berlin) and Social Anthropology (MA, Primal European University, Budapest). In previous work, I studied the emotional aspects of professional reorientation among female shuttle traders in the early on 1990s in Russian federation. Afterward that, I engaged in the study of mail-Soviet mobilities, comparing different types of mobilities and livelihood strategies among traders and labor migrants in Kyrgyzstan. For my current PhD project, I accept come a long way to conceptualize a study that combines my interest in the making, unmaking, and remaking of biographies of mail-Soviet market traders, social and geographical mobilities, and spatial imaginaries.

Contact: claudia.eggart[at]postgrad.manchester.ac.united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland

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Footnote

[one] I conducted ethnographic inquiry with active and one-time market traders in Russian federation (2018), Hungary (2019), and Kyrgyzstan (2019), see Eggart (2019b, 2019a).

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Source: https://boasblogs.org/fieldworkmeetscrisis/mapping-the-post-soviet-market-in-crisis/