No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Caucasian Biznes, Local Trade, and Entrepreneurship
Abstract
This chapter discusses why local bazaar traders do not formalize their businesses according to official and Western standards. It describes the broader local economic field in the Caucasus and explains different aspects of Caucasian biznes (бизнec), providing an overview of activities subsumed under that rubric and suggesting parameters that help classify economic activities and forms of small entrepreneurshipentrepreneurship. These parameters include (a) the location where business is done (ranging from public pavements to bazaars, shopping malls, and private spaces); (b) personal background (e.g., age, gender, education, personal skills, and ethnic and religious affiliation); (c) social networksnetworks along which business is organized (which may originate in the criminal sphere, in local networks conceptualized as friendshipfriendship, brotherhoodbrotherhood, ethnic community and kinshipkinship, or in the interaction within business activities); (d) the mobilitymobility of traders, (e) the goods that are traded, and, finally, (f) the amounts of goods and capital, means of transportation, and the frequency of the activity. Ideology is another parameter that must be considered, embracing ideas, beliefs, and values. Ideology, parameter (g), is an integral part of the sociocultural setting, and, among other things, provides the framework within which economic activity is assessed. The author suggests considering three overlapping value systems, which together constitute a set of ideas. These value systems respectively relate to (1) value systemlocal society, culture, and cosmology, (2) Soviet ideologyideology, and (3) the neoliberal market economy. Which of these value systems is taken as the point of reference depends on the context, situation, and the actors involved. By giving detailed descriptions of all these parameters and their combinations, the author depicts the variety of the local businesses’ environment, or ecology. She defines the place of long-distance and bazaar tradebazaar trade within the local social hierarchy and socioeconomic context, which, again, results from a specific entanglement of the aforementioned parameters. She visualizes this entanglement by adapting Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt’s Naturgemälde,Naturgemälde to reflect on the organic causalities between different factors composing an environment. These causalities create specific niches, which constitute the ecosystems of specific kinds of trade. Forms of trade and entrepreneurship linked to these niches can be viewed as sophisticated adaptations, which do not work in other niches or contexts. Normative definitions of entrepreneurshipentrepreneurship thus do not capture local realities, especially those of bazaar traders. This is also why these traders do not formalize and/or meet the expectations linked to the Western definition of entrepreneurship associated with innovation and the discovery and exploitation of opportunities, described as “one of the primary drivers of industrial dynamism, economic development, and growth” (Carlsson et al. in Small Business Economics 41:913–930, 2013). This chapter thus reviews a variety of themes related to the economic activity of the traders studied and of the Caucasus in general. Above all, it describes the position of bazaar and long-distance traderslong-distance traders within a broader local economic system.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This chapter draws attention to the trends of decline recently taking place at the traditional marketplaces of Eastern Europe. An ethnographically rich account relates patterns of socio-material and spatial re-ordering of people, practices and relationships at the open-air markets of Sofia (Bulgaria) to a neoliberal restructuring of the public marketplace institution. The chapter follows how a new policy of public tenders championed by the city administration instituted a regime of continuous commodification of the marketplace space. Several resulting “patterns of decline” are identified, such as the departure of the traditional small-scale food growers. Further, it is argued that to understand how patterns of decline set in at Eastern European marketplaces, one needs to consider how citizens are constrained to specific economic niches, social milieus and regions of space in the city. To this end, Venkov theorises processes of “socio-spatial sorting” and explores what concrete forms the sorting of people, places and practices could take in Sofia and its marketplaces.
This article looks at Georgians' perception of Chinese businesspeople in Tbilisi. Although Chinese communities can be found almost everywhere across the globe-including in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the Americas, South and East Asia, etc.-the Chinese presence in the Caucasus is a relatively new phenomenon. My analysis of case studies in Georgia, where the Urumqui-based Hualing Group is perhaps most powerful Chinese investor, challenges the assumption that differences between groups predominately create conflict and mistrust. It also challenges the hypothesis that trade and business networks is built on cooperation of ethnic and religious ties and communities. Instead, it gives examples of how common economic interests and shared social practices create a mutual understanding, and how this understanding is explained and experienced by Georgians.
In the following paper we argue that the specific merchant language of Georgian Jews belongs to the pragmatic phenomenon of “very indirect language.” The use of mostly Hebrew lexemes in Georgian conversation leads to an unfounded assumption that the speakers are equally competent in Hebrew and Georgian. It is reported that a high level of linguistic competence in Hebrew does not guarantee understanding of the Jewish merchant language. In the Georgian context, the decisive factors are membership in the professional interest group of merchants and residential membership in the Jewish community. These factors seem to be equivalent, because Jewish members of other professional groups (and those from outside the particular urban residential area) have difficulties in following the language that are similar to those of the Georgian majority. We describe the pragmatic structure of interactions conducted with the help of the merchant language and take into account the purpose of the language’s use or the intention of the speakers. Relevant linguistic examples are analysed and their sociocultural contexts explained.
Nowadays Georgia is a comfortable transit passage for Asian oil and gas to the European market. “Transcaucasian” pipelines have increased political sympathies towards the country and continue to contribute to its economic growth. The modern vision of Georgia as a transit hub, however, emerged in ancient times and though the intensity of transit ebbed and flowed, the idea of the Georgian corridor has persisted. The paper traces the the dynamics of the silk roads from ancient to modern time indicating the changes along the way and underlining the current geopolitical importance Georgia holds both for the collective West as well as the rising China.
The book is devoted to post-Soviet «ethnic markets» as the most important phenomenon of the post-socialist transition. The recent situation in «ethnic market» studies is analyzed along with some theoretical approaches in this field. The research is based on case studies carried out in Russia, China, Germany, and Czech Republic. Authors demonstrate the impact of «ethnic markets» on the urban space and urban communities and analyze the impact of Russian migration policy on the dynamics of formation and functioning of the «ethnic markets». A number of texts are devoted to a retrospective analysis of ethnic entrepreneurship in late imperial Russia.
Along with other globalizing forces such as migration and proselytism, religious markets have played a key role in the transformation of religious practices in Armenia. This article focuses on the intersection of mobility and markets through mobile fairs, which are temporarily organized at shrines on pilgrimage days. Market vendors tend to travel from shrine to shrine across Armenia throughout the year, each following his or her own trajectory. In this article I examine how such markets are organized, how and by whom they are run and controlled, how small-scale mono-confessional markets become part of transnational globalization processes, and how the marketplace is embedded in the pilgrimage ritual, changing and modernizing its traditional meanings and structure.
This article analyses the trajectories of two transnational networks present in the Chinese city of Yiwu: Afghan merchants who trade goods in and out Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan; and Uzbek traders (citizens of either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan) who commercialize their merchandise in and out Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Our aim is to capture an ethnographically grounded understanding of informal markets and economies by analysing the notion of trade ‘outside the law’, including the contested yet widely used category of the ‘smuggler’. By paying attention to the fluidity of trading practices ‘outside the law’, we also address the uses and limitations of metaphors widely used in scholarly analysis of informal markets: notably those of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ forms of globalization, and the transposition of formal-legal and informal-illegal exchanges onto the notions of economic ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’.
For many ordinary people responding to ongoing post-Soviet precarity, domestic and transnational trade has become a common choice of livelihood. This article is about the small and medium sized traders who deal in cheap Chinese commodities in the Caucasus-particularly in Georgia and Armenia. It introduces the notion of 'trade formations' to account for the multiple ways in which cross-cultural trade and microfinance practices, as well as stereotypes about national and regional groups and trading minorities, highlight the role of trust, reputation and everyday diplomacy in long-distance commercial networks. While current trade networks are rooted in the cultures of trade practised under the Soviets, dispositions of pragmatic cosmopolitanism and defensive nationalism often determine who may or may not respond to post-Soviet precarity by turning to transnational trade, embracing political and religious diversity, and overlooking hostilities, past and present.
Under the label of the BRI (Belt Road Initiative), bilateral agreements have been signed between the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the Georgian government. Both governments promote cooperation. This article, however, explores face-to-face encounters between Georgian and Chinese individuals in this context. It discusses how the BRI is implemented and perceived in Georgia and thus provides grassroots materials for comparative analysis. It argues that while Chinese are met with prejudice, everyday encounters between locals and Chinese are shaped by pragmatic considerations and the long-term goals of the different actors involved. These actors, according to their goals, use a set of strategies when it comes to establishing social relationships.
This article explores the joking relations that constitute conviviality in one of the largest marginal bazaars in Moscow. The marketplace is known as a hub for migrant workers and traders, and is often stigmatized in the media. It remains one of the largest commercial nodes in the bazaar network that stretches across and beyond much of ex-Soviet Eurasia. Scholars of conviviality have often claimed that convivial living represents more than hilarity and laughter; exactly how laughter actually happens and what sets of relations and interactions make it possible have been largely left out of the discussion. I will explore how a certain joking repertoire both connects Russian customers with migrant sellers and traders from Central Asia, Vietnam, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and animates relations between sellers themselves. I argue that these relations are characterized by volatility , which incorporates play and improvisation within different registers of uncertainty, conflict, enjoyment, proximity, and—ultimately—virtuality.
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.
Anders Åslund foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union in his book Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform (1989). He depicted the success of Russia's market transformation in How Russia Became a Market Economy (1995). After Russia's financial crisis of 1998, Åslund insisted that Russia had no choice but to adjust to the world market (Building Capitalism, 2001), though most observers declared the market economic experiment a failure. Why did Russia not choose Chinese gradual reforms? Why are the former Soviet countries growing much faster than the Central European economies? How did the oligarchs arise? Who is in charge now? These are just some of the questions answered in How Capitalism Was Built, covering twenty-one former communist countries from 1989 to 2006. Anybody who wants to understand the confusing dramas unfolding in the region and to obtain an early insight into the future will find this book useful and intellectually stimulating.
In the three decades since the Soviet Union, bazaars have enabled self‐employment for large segments of the population in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In this article, we analyse data collected through 1200 structured interviews with bazaar traders in 2016 and 2017 in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where we inquired about money, organization and support. These data allow us to draw empirically grounded conclusions about the daily operations of independent bazaar traders in the three countries. The data reveal two trends, which we describe in this article. First, the more globalized the individual businesses – evidenced by knowledge and usage of foreign currency and long‐distance trade networks – the more profitable the individual businesses. But simultaneously, in the three countries, bazaar trading has a low potential for growth. Although the cost of entry into the bazaar is low, the data show that the possibility of transformative growth – expansion in scale, innovation in efficiency or production, or increase in earning relative to investment – is also low, which reveals limitations on what bazaar trading can add to national economies despite its popularity as a vocation.
This article aims to understand how local communities affected by protracted conflicts could maintain a capacity for agonistic interactions in their everyday encounters on the margins of the hegemonic control of conflict-inducing narratives. The article analyses the Sadakhlo bazaar on the border between Georgia and Armenia as a possible example of such interactions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was the setting for daily encounters of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, whose ethnonational identity narratives have been polarised and heavily securitised due to the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict. The authors suggest that the bazaar in this case appeared as a concrete space of embodied practices of thin recognition of the otherwise antagonised other where the antagonism was not contested but suspended. The article conceptualises the bazaar as a local site of situated agonistic peace by undertaking a critical assessment of theoretical calls concerning the ‘ontological security dilemma’ and ‘transformative power’ of mundane experiences.
Bertolt Brecht’s extraordinary historical novel presents an aspiring scholar’s efforts to write an idealized life of Julius Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandons his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. Was Caesar an opportunist, a permanently bankrupt businessman who became too big for the banks to allow him to fail – as his former banker claims? Did he stumble into power while trying to make money, as suggested by the diary of his former slave? Across these different versions of Caesar’s career in the political and economic life of Rome, Brecht wryly contrasts the narratives of imperial progress with the reality of grasping self-interest, in a sly allegory that points to the Weimar Republic and perhaps even to our own times.
Brecht reminds his readers of the need for constant vigilance and critical suspicion towards the great figures of the past. In an echo of his dramatic theories, the audience is confronted with its own task of active interpretation rather than passive acceptance -- we have to work out our own views about Mr Julius Caesar.
This edition is translated by Charles Osborne and features an introduction and editorial notes by Anthony Phelan and Tom Kuhn.
This book researches the question of what the Russian Mafia is, and challenges widely held views of its nature. It charts the emergence of the Russian Mafia in the context of the transition to the market, the privatization of protection, and pervasive corruption. The ability of the Russian State to define property rights and protect contracts is compared with the services offered by fragments of the state apparatus, private security firms, ethnic crime groups, the Cossacks and the Russian Mafia. Past criminal traditions, rituals, and norms have been resuscitated by the modern Russian Mafia to forge a powerful new identity and compete in a crowded market for protection. The book draws on and reports from undercover police operations, in-depth interviews conducted over several years with the victims of the Mafia, criminals, and officials, and documents from the Gulag archives. It also provides a comparative study, making references to other mafia in other countries (the Japanese Yakuza, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, American–Italian Mafia and the Hong Kong Triads). The book has an introduction and conclusion and between these is arranged in three parts: I. The Transition to the Market and Protection in Russia (three chapters); II. Private protection in Perm (two chapters investigating the emergence and operation of the mafia in the city of Perm); and III. The Russian Mafia (three chapters).
In 1992, there was an explosion of 'stock fever' in Shanghai. 'From the moment I set foot in Shanghai until my last day there, people from all walks of life wanted to talk to me about the market', Ellen Hertz writes. Her 1998 study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and it probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West. A trained anthropologist, she explains the way in which investors and officials construct a 'moral storyline' to make sense of this great structural innovation, identifying a struggle between three groups of actors - the big investors, the little investors, and the state - to control the market.
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.
Since 2013, there have been multiple fires in bazaars in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Most of these fires have occurred in Barakholka, the largest bazaar in Central Asia, known for wholesaling in apparel, shoes and low-quality household and office supplies. Ownership of Barakholka is opaque. Using recurrent Barakholka fires as my point of departure, this article contributes to scholarship by describing how the clearing of old bazaars is followed by new property developments and the imposition of new rent regimes. In doing so, I argue that fire – a form of ruination that not only destroys property but also severs networks and people's relationship to a place – is illustrative of how the bazaar, as a new institution within an emerging post-Soviet market economy, was moulded by private interests, and repeated, often ruinous assertions of control over property. I also argue that this process was embedded in a larger political economy that sought to ‘civilize’ the earlier marketplaces. This article is based on ethnographic interviews and repeated visits to the Barakhola between 2016 and 2018, and media accounts of the fires.
Among the many ‘businesspeople’ whom the promise of commercial success has drawn to southern China in recent years one can find a small number of Kyrgyz middlemen. Working mostly with Russian-speaking clients, their job is to organize buying trips, coordinate with local manufacturers, translate, and oversee cargo shipments. Based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2013, this article examines in detail the careers, work routines and business model adopted by Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou. I argue that in contrast to the early bazaar or shuttle traders, who have been operating across Eurasia since the 1990s, these Kyrgyz middlemen constitute a next kind of economic actor within more diversified, service-oriented and formalized value chains across post-Socialist Eurasia (referred to here as Business 2.0). One of these middlemen’s most salient contributions is to translate between the informal and formal domains of national economies as well as within cross-border economic transactions.
This article approaches ‘informal’ modes of organization among Uyghur bazaar traders in Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan in a complex context of increasing state regulatory measures and strong social networks. It captures this organization as a ‘formal side of informality’. The practices comprising it are deemed ‘informal’ from a state-centred perspective, as they are not regulated by the state law or bureaucracy, but they still display a non-state formalization in the sense of being codified, regular and predictable to the traders. The article explores areas and examples of such ‘informal’ formality in the bazaar trade that are built around notions of morality, piousness, pride and shame. It pays special attention to oral contracts, purchase on credit, go-betweens and the status of profit. The article draws on participant observation and interviews in Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan as well as on descriptions of trade morals and trade customs in ethnographic and folkloristic publications by local Uyghur scholars in Xinjiang.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in China and Georgia, this article traces the origins and describes current practices of post-Soviet tourist trading in Yabaolu Market in Beijing. While traders from across the Caucasus visit Yabaolu, my focus is on Georgian traders who today perceive themselves as biznesmeny. Focusing on a typical trade visit, the article explores the role of ethnic and kinship ties in the organization of this trade. It questions the notion of ethnic entrepreneurship and the idea that ethnic cooperation itself may serve a basis of trust and underpin traders’ activities. Instead, the article illustrates how enduring transnational linkages are built on other forms of reliability and reputation. These are framed in the lexicon of friendship, as well as kinship and pseudo-kinship vocabulary, and facilitate commercial transactions between traders of different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds in an environment where state regulation and legal law enforcement are almost absent.
Trading in Astana’s Central Bazaar rests on mutually beneficial people-to-people contacts, or personal networks. Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, personal networks are pivotal in whether one succeeds in an informal market economy. I argue that networks cannot be disassociated from trader motivation, which serves as a measure of how these networks evolve over time. I describe how those traders who were driven primarily by lifting themselves out of economic precarity tended to build strong social networks; these strong social networks sometimes evolved into ‘unconditional’ social networks, by which I mean a trader supporting others even though doing so has no commercial benefit. At the other extreme were traders driven by ambition and goal attainment. I argue that such traders are less likely to establish and maintain social networks. Between these two extremes is a middle ground, where traders alternate between strong and weak social networks.
