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Dealing with Institutional Frameworks
Abstract
Bazaars, petty trade, street vendingvending, and the forms of economic activity I have portrayed so far are usually classified as belonging to the so-called informal sphere, because, in the Caucasus as elsewhere, they are often not regulated or only partly regulated by statestate institutions.
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Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic and technological changes in Russia have created a wide range of new possibilities and constraints in the pursuit of different ways of life.
Each contribution is drawn from meticulous first-hand field research, and the authors engage with theoretical questions such as whether and how the concept of lifestyle can be extended beyond its conventionally urban, Euro-American context and employed in a markedly different setting. Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North builds on the contributors’ clear commitment to diversifying the field and providing a novel and intimate insight into this vast and dynamic region.
This book provides inspiring reading for students and teachers of Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies and for anyone interested in Russia and its regions. By providing ethnographic case studies, it is also a useful basis for teaching anthropological methods and concepts, both at graduate and undergraduate level. Rigorous and innovative, it marks an important contribution to the study of Siberia and the Russian North.
This introductory article revisits cross-border shadow exchanges in a comparative perspective and reflects on their theoretical implications. It explores the diversities and complexities of shadow operations and critically examines the concept of informality that is commonly used to describe such non-state-sanctioned practices. It further underlines the key role played by checkpoint politics in border governance. Border checkpoints serve both as a state institution in regulating border crossings as well as a political site where material and power exchanges among state and non-state actors are negotiated. Such negotiation of selective passage through state-controlled gateways is often predicated upon the skilful manipulation of time and space by experienced traders and brokers.
This article explores the links between informal moneylending and aspects of sociality and morality. It documents the moral reasoning and strategizing of two female moneylenders who operate in the radically destabilized context of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. By analyzing these women’s lending practices and the way they talk about their experiences, we document the constitutive intertwinement of morality, sociality, and formality in the workings of credit and debt, and demonstrate how questionable behavior is transformed into moral practice. This in turn highlights important features of the post-Soviet capitalist frontier. © 2018 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved.
Formal launch of our new book including discussion with the three editors and Q&A.
Considering that debt has become a pervasive feature of contemporary life in Mongolia, this article calls for a nuanced examination of the diversity of current debt relations as evinced through its multiple moral interpretations and social effects. Through case studies of moneylenders in contemporary Dornod Province, I discuss (1) how local actors perceive multiple moralities and types of debt (e.g. formal and informal/kinship); (2) how moneylenders comprise an occupational role as ‘translators’ between these different registers; and thus (3) how they allow local debtor actors to navigate their debt load by moving money between the varying registers. By mobilizing local forms of social value, moneylenders create financial value that supports and enables bank debt. As a result, the moralities and logics of finance have increasingly pervaded aspects of local social relations in the collateralization of social standing and the designation of interest payment as a form of community assistance.
Indebtedness as a global phenomenon has attracted much attention both in public discourses and in academia in recent years. In Hungary, however, up to date social scientists have not paid considerable interest to studying debt. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural northern Hungary, in this article I explore the financial portfolios of the poor in two settlements and their debt relations. I attempt to show how different forms of debt (formal and informal) are used, perceived, and valued; what kinds of different meanings are attached to them; and how they interrelate to each other. I will show the magisterial juggling of the poor with income scarcity, and the wizardry with which they make a living on twenty-two thousand forint (60 2 a day” global poverty benchmark. I will attempt to shed light on the role of informal moneylending in this puzzling story. I will explore how the cash-poor invent new ways (by appropriating and adjusting established ones; among others, subprime lending) to generate regular income. Whilst comparing the practices of formal and informal financial institutions towards the poor, I argue that informal/’illegal’ lenders fill the gap, the economic niche, left empty by formal/legal financial companies, to “bank the unbanked”. Through this process, however, old dependency structures are reconfigured, new patronclient ties are formed and community wealth is redistributed-to further impair the poorest of the poor. © 2015 Hungarian Sociological Association. All rights reserved.
Legal pluralism and the experience of the state in the Caucasus are at the centre of this edited volume. This is a region affected by a multitude of legal orders and the book describes social action and governance in the light of this, and considers how conceptions of order are enforced, used, followed and staged in social networks and legal practice. Principally, how is the state perceived and how does it perform in both the North and South Caucasus? From elections in Dagestan and Armenia to uses of traditional law in Ingushetia and Georgia, from repression of journalism in Azerbaijan to the narrations of anti-corruption campaigns in Georgia - the text reflects the multifarious uses and performances of law and order. The collection includes approaches from different scholarly traditions and their respective theoretical background and therefore forms a unique product of multinational encounters. The volume will be a valuable resource for legal and political anthropologists, ethnohistorians and researchers and academics working in the areas of post-socialism and post-colonialism.
The contemporary model of microfinance has its roots in a small local experiment in Bangladesh in the early 1970s undertaken by Dr Muhammad Yunus, the US-educated Bangladeshi economist and future 2006 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient. Yunus’s idea of supporting tiny informal microenterprises and self- employment as the solution to widespread poverty rapidly caught on, and by the 1990s the concept of microfinance was the international development community’s highest-profile and most generously funded poverty reduction policy. Neoclassical economic theorists and neoliberal policy-makers both fully concurred with the microfinance model’s celebration of self-help and the individual entrepreneur, and its implicit antipathy to any form of state intervention. The immense feel-good appeal of microfinance is essentially based on the widespread assumption that simply ‘reaching the poor’ with a tiny microcredit will automatically establish a sustainable economic and social development trajectory, a trajectory animated by the poor themselves acting as micro-entrepreneurs getting involving in tiny income- generating activities. We reject this view, however. We argue that while the microfinance model may well generate some narrow positive short run outcomes for a few lucky individuals, these positive outcomes are very limited in number and anyway swamped by much wider longer run downsides and opportunity costs at the community and national level. Our view is that microfinance actually constitutes a powerful institutional and political barrier to sustainable economic and social development, and so also to poverty reduction. Finally, we suggest that continued support for microfinance in international development policy circles cannot be divorced from its supreme serviceability to the neoliberal/globalisation agenda.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the reasons behind a decade long contestations between the Georgian government and the petty traders over the access to the public space for commercial use.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper relies on the repeated ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tbilisi in 2012 and 2013. The ethnographic interviews with legally operating traders and illegal street vendors are supplemented by the in-depth interviews with the representatives of the city government and secondary literature on Georgia’s post-revolutionary transformation.
Findings
– Bridging the critical literature on the politics of the public space with Polanyi’s theory on commodification of fictitious commodities as a precondition of establishment of a market economy, the author argues that for the Georgian government control of the public space was necessary to pursue neoliberal marketisation policies. These policies required removal of the petty traders from public spaces because the state needed to restrict access to public space and limit its commercial usage to delineate public and private property and allow commodification of the urban land and property. As the commodification intensified and the rent prices started growing and fluctuating, the access to the public space became even more valuable for the petty traders. Therefore, the traders developed subversive tactics undermining the division between public and private space and property.
Originality/value
– The paper demonstrates the importance of enforcing the public-private divide in the process of establishing a market economy in transitional settings. Moreover, it illustrates little discussed social costs of establishing such a divide.
This paper looks at the microcredit model made famous by Dr. Muhammad Yunus and explains the key reasons why it has failed as a poverty reduction and local development instrument. It also briefly analyses some of the reactions to this failure by the microcredit industry and why many microcredit supporters nevertheless still stand behind the model in spite of its failure.
This article examines anti-corruption activities in Georgia after the Rose Revolution of November 2003 under the administration of Mikheil Saakashvili. It aims to analyse the existence of different assessments on the country's success in fighting corruption and applies an interpretive framework to study these assessments as “narratives” that reveal the diverging or converging interests of anti-corruption actors in sustaining a common narrative on the country's reforms. The article examines how the two main anti-corruption actors – the Georgian government and international organisations – frame their activities into two different representations of success and seek a mutual validation on them. It aims to identify the factors underlying a (non)-convergence of these actors into a common representation or an “official transcript” of their activities. The case study of the adoption of a national anti-corruption strategy in Georgia in 2005 reveals the difficulty of these two actors to validate their representations and to sustain a coherent image. Certain inherent contradictions in the relations between donor organisations and transition or developing countries, in particular in the juxtaposition of the two notions of a “transfer of external knowledge” and “local ownership/political will”, are viewed as the main factors behind this problem of validation.
The historical study of borderlands has been unduly restricted by an emphasis on the legal, political, and geographical aspects of borders and by a state-centered approach. Too often, the question has been how states have dealt with their borderlands rather than how borderlands have dealt with their states—culturally, economically, and politically. This article outlines a comparative approach to the social dynamics (struggles, adaptations, and cross-border alliances) in regions bisected by borders, and it argues that borderland studies provide an indispensable corrective to historical narratives that accept the territoriality to which all modern states lay claim.
In this paper I present an analysis of a mobile entrepreneur and his transnational economic activities in post-Soviet space. I argue that the space of informal economic activities of mobile entrepreneurs are structured by trust-networks in the sense Tilly (2005) uses it. In this context the concept of tirikchilik (an Uzbek term for ‘muddling through’ or survival) which defines the space of informal economic activities is important to decipher. Tirikchilik unifies various economic activities which vary from trade, service delivery, middleman services, administration and any kind of activity that generates some cash.
We use an RCT to analyze the impacts of microcredit. The study population consists of loan applicants who were marginally rejected by an MFI in Bosnia. A random subset of these were offered a loan. We provide evidence of higher self-employment, increases in inventory, a reduction in the incidence of wage work and an increase in the labor supply of 16-19 year olds in the household's business. We also present some evidence of increases in profits and a reduction in consumption and savings. There is no evidence that the program increased overall household income.
The highland region of the republic of Georgia, one of the former Soviet Socialist Republics, has long been legendary for its beauty. It is often assumed that the state has only made partial inroads into this region, and is mostly perceived as alien. Taking a fresh look at the Georgian highlands allows the author to consider perennial questions of citizenship, belonging, and mobility in a context that has otherwise been known only for its folkloric dimensions. Scrutinizing forms of identification with the state at its margins, as well as local encounters with the erratic Soviet and post-Soviet state, the author argues that citizenship is both a sought-after means of entitlement and a way of guarding against the state. This book not only challenges theories in the study of citizenship but also the axioms of integration in Western social sciences in general.
Cross-border trade is central to the socio-economic structure of the former Soviet republics and their integration in the world economy. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, bazaars have functioned as nodes that enable multi-directional, cross-border trade. While there have been studies on the bazaar trade in the Soviet successor states, few have used quantitative methods. Drawing from 600 structured interviews with traders in Dordoi (Bishkek) and Lilo (Tbilisi), the data from Dordoi highlight the relationship between informality and entrepreneurship, unlike Lilo, where there are clearer markers of formality, but where bazaar trade also seems to be less profitable. The data from the 600 interviews illustrate that Dordoi functions as a globalized trading hub, its transnational linkages forged by the bazaar traders and the buyers themselves. By contrast, trade in Lilo is more localized. Hence, ‘globalization from below’ presents itself differently across the post-Soviet space.
The Grammar of Trust and Distrust under State Socialism after Stalin. Introduction
The introduction to the special issue defines trust/distrust from an interdisciplinary perspective, treating these emotions as analytical categories and outlining their potential for historical analysis. Inspired by the emotional and sensory turns, the guest editor examines the shift from Stalinist violence towards a politics of trust and empathy. This new politics saw these feelings as powerful emotional forces and moral resources that not only made it possible to renegotiate a social contract between the state, society and the individual, but also enabled the stabilisation of the Eastern bloc as a whole in the post-Stalin era. Differentiating between regimes and communities of trust/distrust, the author sheds light on the grammar of trust and distrust under state socialism, which impacted the shared sense of stability and inner hybridity of the socialist personality. By connecting trust and distrust with the key analytical categories of gender and generation, morality and power, consumption and materiality, and self and subjectivity, this special issue is a contribution to a history of trust and distrust that provides further reflection on the unceasing debate about what socialism was and what the lived experience of socialism continues to be in post-communist space.
The chapter is based on field research carried out in the Zugdidi region (West Georgia). It discusses how cross-border relationships build communicative channels between border settlements. The borderline between Georgia and the break-away republic of Abkhazia appeared after an armed conflict in 1993, and has physically separated a territory settled by people who are ethno-culturally homogenous. Border settlements on both sides maintain close contacts by the use of formal and informal channels. The main domains of cross-border contact and movements are trade-vending relations, healthcare, smuggling and kin relations. The chapter argues that the multiple forms of relationships create a possibility of overcoming the conflict in spite of increasing pressures from competing citizen regimes.
When revolutions happen, they change the rules of everyday life--both the codified rules concerning the social and legal classifications of citizens and the unwritten rules about how individuals present themselves to others. This occurred in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which laid the foundations of the Soviet state, and again in 1991, when that state collapsed. Tear Off the Masks! is about the remaking of identities in these times of upheaval. Sheila Fitzpatrick here brings together in a single volume years of distinguished work on how individuals literally constructed their autobiographies, defended them under challenge, attempted to edit the "file-selves" created by bureaucratic identity documentation, and denounced others for "masking" their true social identities. Marxist class-identity labels--"worker," "peasant," "intelligentsia," "bourgeois"--were of crucial importance to the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by "de-Sovietizing" themselves. Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources, Tear Off the Masks! offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.
This work has taken an inordinately long time to complete; so many people have helped me along the way, and it is impossible to thank them all. The original version of this book was presented as a thesis to the University of Oxford, for which I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. First and foremost, my thanks go to my supervisor, Dr Godfrey Lienhardt, without whose encouragement the thesis could not have been written. In Georgia the late Professor Vera Bardavelidze and Academician Giorgi Chitaia, Heads of the Departments of Ethnography in the University and Academy of Sciences Institute, helped me in every way. The Dean of the Faculty of History, the late Professor Shota Meskhia, and the specialist in Georgian kinship and marriage studies, Dr Ilia Tchqonia, are owed my thanks. Countless are the other scholars who taught and helped me in Georgia. I must especially, however, mention Professor Sergo Jorbenadze, pro-Rector of Tbilisi University, who helped me invaluably, not least in obtaining permission to do the fieldwork.
The highland region of the republic of Georgia, one of the former Soviet Socialist Republics, has long been legendary for its beauty. It is often assumed that the state has only made partial inroads into this region, and is mostly perceived as alien. Taking a fresh look at the Georgian highlands allows the author to consider perennial questions of citizenship, belonging, and mobility in a context that has otherwise been known only for its folkloric dimensions. Scrutinizing forms of identification with the state at its margins, as well as local encounters with the erratic Soviet and post-Soviet state, the author argues that citizenship is both a sought-after means of entitlement and a way of guarding against the state. This book not only challenges theories in the study of citizenship but also the axioms of integration in Western social sciences in general.
Democracy is established as a generally uncontested ideal, while regimes inspired by this form of government fall under constant criticism. Hence, the steady erosion of confidence in representatives that has become one of the major political issues of our time. Amidst these challenges, the paradox remains that while citizens are less likely to make the trip to the ballot box, the world is far from entering a phase of general political apathy. Demonstrations and activism abound in the streets, in cities across the globe and on the internet. Pierre Rosanvallon analyses the mechanisms used to register a citizen's expression of confidence or distrust, and then focuses on the role that distrust plays in democracy from both a historical and theoretical perspective. This radical shift in perspective uncovers a series of practices - surveillance, prevention, and judgement - through which society corrects and exerts pressure. © Éditions du Seuil, Paris and Cambridge University Press 2008.
Purpose
– In contrast to the dominant accounts in post-Soviet studies that see public and private as two spheres existing in parallel, the purpose of this paper is to argue that in Armenia the public-private dichotomy can be better understood as a spectrum of different kinds of interactions between the state and private actors/social groups representing different sets of socio-cultural values, which are mirrored in Yerevan’s city planning and housing.
Design/methodology/approach
– The data derives from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Yerevan. To analyse the data set the author used methods common in social and cultural anthropology. The theoretical background derives from urban anthropology (Liu), theories on housing (Carsten and Hugh-Jones), the anthropology of values (Dumont), and the anthropology of states (Herzfeld) linked to the debate on modernity.
Findings
– The author demonstrates that basic cultural concepts, norms, expectations, rules, beliefs, and values currently take effect on both sides (public and private/state and people), and that personal networks in Armenia are no longer used to trick an alien state, but also used by the state elites to gain advantage. The degree of intimacy of social relations thereby structures urban space and behaviour.
Originality/value
– The paper looks at the public-private dichotomy in post-Soviet states from a new perspective, which is inspired by the anthropology of (socio-cultural) values, and argues that cultural intimacy (Herzfeld) is – simultaneously – a unifying and a separating fact in the relationship of states and people.
In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions them uneasily: in order to fulfill social requirements in one register, they acquire intensified obligations in another. Moneylending and money borrowing, owing much to the legacies of “credit apartheid,” involve an uneven mix. Embeddedness and community connection enable flexibility, juggling, and temporary escape from repayment obligations on the one hand, but systems of repayment and ever-newer technologies enable creditors to pursue debtors with inexorable swiftness on the other. Given that credit postapartheid has an increasingly formal, uniform, and financialized character, the second of these—which makes debtors get “deeper into a hole”—is becoming a predominant way of experiencing and representing the situation. The phrase, with its suggestion of entrapment, captures an important aspect of the deeply ambivalent feelings that borrowers experience in the face of debt.
List of cartoons List of figures and tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Blat: the unknown phenomenon 2. Understanding blat 3. The Soviet order: a view from within 4. The use of personal networks 5.Blat as a form of exchange: between gift and commodity 6. Networking in the post-Soviet period Appendix Bibliography Index.
Traditional law continues to be relevant for the Svans (Georgians), who usually live in the highlands of the Caucasus, but who have also migrated to various parts of Georgia. To grasp its practice we draw on approaches in which its use is discussed as a strategy for '(re)asserting collective
identities' (Benda-Beckmann) in order to enforce specific goals. But our research also shows another dimension of traditional law: more than in actual conflict resolutions, traditional law is found in narratives, that is in memories of how conflicts were resolved earlier and should be solved
today. These stories, however, of how and when traditional law should be applied rarely correspond to lived reality. Drawing on Brubaker and Cooper, we argue that beside a rather instrumental motivated use of traditional law in asserting collective identities, its contemporary practice can
only be fully understood if we also acknowledge its non-instrumental practice.
Drawing on long-term field engagement with microcredit programs in rural northern Tamil Nadu (South India), in this article I examine how this specific form of debt is used, experienced, signified, and interrelated to other forms of debt. I attempt to define debt from an economic and anthropological perspective and to highlight the diversity of values surrounding debt. Debt has a material value and actively contributes to producing social worth, setting debtors and creditors within local systems of social hierarchy, producing or eroding trust, and inserting people into local networks of wealth distribution, extending dependency and patronage ties. Far from being static, the social significance and regulation of debt are continually discussed and negotiated through practices of juggling sources of indebtedness. Yet owing to its multiple forms, debt is not only a powerful force for the reproduction of power relations but also a potential vehicle for the reconfiguration of forms of dependence. Analyzing practices and processes is essential for undestanding the reasons for this ambivalence and how it plays out in specific historical
contexts for situated subjects.
Since the 2003 revolution that brought to power President Mikheil Saakashvili, the post-Soviet Republic of Georgia has implemented a major programme of police reforms, including the mass dismissal of corrupt officers, the restructuring of police agencies, and significant changes in recruitment, training, and compensation. The reforms have eliminated many forms of corruption and have transformed what was a criminalised and dysfunctional police force into the most disciplined and service-oriented law enforcement agency in the post-Soviet region. The paper describes the scope and nature of these police reforms, analyses their effectiveness, and explains their origins. The Saakashvili government implemented police reforms as part of a broader agenda of reversing the decay of the Georgian state in the post-Soviet period and reasserting its control of the national territory and its effective independence from Georgia's neighbour, Russia. Police reforms in Georgia were also the product of a revolutionary moment in which the new government could take extraordinary measures to reshape the police. In part because the Georgian government remains domestically and internationally embattled, the reformed police have become closely associated with the Saakashvili presidency. Georgia therefore suggests that we need to rethink the different ways that democracy and state building contribute to successful police reforms.
Peebles, in a recent review of the anthropology of debt and credit, found an ‘astonishing consistency’ in the moral valuation of credit which is everywhere given a positive evaluation relative to debt. But why is this? Does it apply to creditors as well? What are the theoretical implications of these questions for economic anthropology?
The article explores some of the assumptions behind the current valence of the notion of trust and in particular its entanglement in discourses of social robustness, the management and reporting of (corporate) knowledge, and its underlying culture and systems of responsibility. It unfolds by contrasting classic and contemporary anthropological work on cultures of suspicion, culpability and spiritual ambiguity with the new vocabulary of capitalist corporate ethics. Finally, the argument examines the work that relationships do when moving in and out of the occult, and contrasts it with the kind of temporal work that capitalism demands from relationships to remain diaphanous. If public trust functions as the political epistemology of neoliberal society, an anthropological theory of trust ought perhaps to reaffirm instead our trust in anthropological theory and comparison.