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From Chelnoki (Shuttle Traders) to Biznesmeny
Abstract
This chapter gives insights into the development of small-scale long-distance trade between post-Soviet countries, the Caucasus, and China. It starts with a description of the activity of the so-called chelnoki (челноки) (suitcase-traders, or trade tourists), who pioneered the market economy and international trade in Eurasia in the early 1990s. The chelnoki and their situation are then compared with the new generation of traders, who are referred to as biznesmeny (бизнесмены‚ biznesmeni). The term biznesmen encompasses a whole spectrum of entrepreneurs, including some very poor and some very rich , who started to do business in the post-Soviet sphere. The chhapter’s focus is on bazaar traders dealing in Chinese merchandise, some of whom travel to Beijing regularly. After having portrayed the evolution of bazaar trade since the 1990s, the author turns to the current situation and describes a business trip of contemporary bazaar traders to Yabaolu Market in Beijing in China. The case study describes the Chinese marketplace and reflects the perspectives of four individuals, three Georgians and a Russian, three men and one woman. Three of them started their businesses in the 1990s, one of whom belongs to the younger generation. Analyzing the data, the author comes to several conclusions that concern the practices, motivations, and networks of Georgian traders: (a) traders’ motivations are linked to family and kinship obligations, and profits are usually put into housing; but (b) these traders usually base their business on contacts other than those linked to kin networks. These other relationships develop while doing business—on the one hand between other travellers and fellow post-Soviet traders within and outside the own ethnic group, on the other, between post-Soviet and Chinese businesspeople. These relationships, even though they are conceptualized in local terminologies, have a very specific content and context. Long-distance trade creates a reality, a “culture” of its own, which encompasses complex social contexts, relations and interactions, codes of conduct, and moral judgments—and an ideology that partially contradicts local sociocultural paradigms and formal institutional frameworks.KeywordsHistory of shuttle tradeSuitcase traders
Chelnoki
Businesmeny
Yabaolu MarketKinshipBrotherhoodFriendship
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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 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.
In economic anthropology, flea markets are considered as an informal sphere of economic activity and as places of informal exchange (Brown 2017; Brown and MacKie 2017). This paper also tries to explore flea markets as spaces of informal trade and informal interaction in the case of Armenia. The questions I explore in this article relate to the social and cultural practices and so-called informal relationships in Barakholka flea markets and public spaces in an urban setting in post-Soviet Armenia. Broadly speaking, space and its commercialization is a frequently studied field in urban and economic anthropology (Lefebvre 2009; Prigge 2008). In this working paper, I (1) illustrate how flea markets, as commercialized public spaces, relate to political processes and the emergence of informal trading as a sign of collapsing governing political systems, and (2) how social, economic and cultural processes are reflected in fleamarket activities.
http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/43115
This article explores the forms of cosmopolitanism that form an important element of the identities and activities of long-distance Muslim merchants involved in the global trade in Chinese commodities. It focuses on two nodes that are central for this type of trade: Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province. Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the commercial and social ties that exist between Muslim traders from Afghanistan and those who identify with the country’s dispersed Hindu ethno-religious minority. It argues that the ability to manage heterogeneous social and religious relationships is of critical significance to the activities and identities of these commodity traders.
The concept of “informality” was introduced by anthropologist Keith Hart in the 1970s to point to the economic significance of unregistered labour practices in Ghana. It constitutes an attempt to create a dialogue between anthropology’s local perspective and the state-centered theoretical framework of established social science and economics models derived primarily from the study and common sense of modern, Western society. The concept of “informality” can only be so successful because it accepts the basic premises and implicit ideology of the state-centered discourse it enters into. The concept tacitly acknowledges the analytically subordination of practices not bureaucratically registered. Stressing the importance of practices outside state registration and bureaucratic organisation in a wider interdisciplinary discourse remains valuable and much needed. Therefore the concept of “informality” rightfully continues to receive much attention. Yet, when it’s ideological baggage and analytical limitations are not recognized and reflected the concept becomes a contributing force in the ongoing naturalization of state power hegemony, global bureaucratization and the de-legitimization of non-state, non-bureaucratic modes of organization.
http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/5782/
How does a group of Uyghur traders from a village in Atush (Xinjiang, China) end up with a stock of unsellable rubber sandals in Kadamjay (Batken, Kyrgyzstan), and why don’t they compete according to market principles? This article explores the social investments of the traders and their families, and reveals their behaviour to be rational, both economically and socially. It illuminates the business and daily life of Uyghur traders in southern Kyrgyzstan, an environment that is increasingly challenging and uncertain. The examination of exchange relations between their households explains why the traders cooperate as they do and also why they do not cooperate more. Economic rationales and social obligations prove to be mutually embedded. This insight expands and deepens a nascent analytical approach that recognizes social motivation for economic activities in Central Asia alongside undeniable economic incentives. This approach has much to gain from being more explicitly reconnected to classical anthropological theories of gift giving.
This article begins by asking how African traders learn to adjust to the foreign world of Guangzhou, China, and suggests that African logistics agents and middlemen serve as cultural brokers for these traders. After defining “cultural broker” and discussing why these brokers are not usually Chinese, it explores this role as played by ten logistics agents/middlemen from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As logistics agents, these people help their customers in practically adjusting to Chinese life, and as middlemen they serve to grease the wheels of commerce between African customers and Chinese suppliers. This is despite their own ambivalent views of China as a place to live. They play an essential role in enabling harmonious relations between Africans and Chinese in Guangzhou, even though they see themselves not as cultural brokers but simply as businessmen. © 2015, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. All rights reserved.
State borders can be seen as both physical and symbolic barriers, prohibiting any uncontrolled transition between neighbouring countries. They function as sites for implementing state's power (see Pickering/Weber 2006). At the same time requirements of national boundaries collide with requirements of people living in the bordering areas (see Horsman/Marshall 1994), and the very fact of the existence of borders inevitably provokes various types of economic activity on adjacent territories such as small-scale trade, tourist services etc. These economic activities, in turn, make people from the bordering states communicate with each other both literally, in their everyday interaction, and symbolically, in constructing images and perceptions. People separated by the state borders usually see each other as totally different: they speak different languages, have different traditions and practices, and collision of these differences influences habitual ways of living and thinking in various aspects. Mutual attitudes on the border are shaped by many factors, and state policy and propaganda can play a rather serious role (see Wilson/Donnan 1998). © 2012 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH. All rights reserved.
Limits to human action and interaction are detectable everywhere in a state (and not only). The state does not necessarily have a direct role in setting them, but they exist nonetheless. A local trader, from a village or another city, wishing to sell some products in another place must face a number of obstacles: finding the right place, entering a new zone, facing new competitors, finding new connections, affording travel costs etc. Likewise, somebody wishing to move from one city to another, temporarily or definitively, has to face a number of issues such as finding a place to sleep, earning the necessary amount of money, finding and trusting the right people. Even somebody simply wishing to visit a relative has to face issues like finding the way to the other town, affording the ticket and in general moving away from a comfortable environment to enter the unknown. © 2012 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH. All rights reserved.
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.
In the wider scientific debate, post-Soviet Central Asia has been primarily known for the question in what ways this region currently experiences a ‘New Great Game’ of geostrategy and resource-competition. In contrast to that, ethnographic research on the various cross-border mobilities, networks and identifications of non-elite actors from countries such as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan has set off only recently. Proposing a conceptual approach based on ‘translocality’ and ‘livelihood’, this article presents in-depth case studies which explore how Central Asians engage in ‘business-making’, ‘evolve’ their Muslim piety, transgress rural-urban boundaries and experience ethnic marginalization in between ‘home’ and cities in Russia, China or Egypt. We show how mobility is institutionalized, i.e. how within these ‘translocal livelihoods’ geographic relocations do not only combine with social mobility, but that assessments on personal well-being and the orientation on cultural norms also draw on somebody’s particular position within social hierarchies of gender and generation.
Shopkeepers have social networks composed of ties to many others: family, friends, customers, suppliers, employees, and moneylenders. We examine how ties to family and friends affect three aspects of entrepreneurship for Asian and white shop owners in four English cities: business foundings, business success, and business turnover. Social ties are important for all three processes in both groups. An implication of our research is that the comparative study of immigrant and native groups shifts the focus from group differences to group similarities. Studies examining only immigrants may find apparently distinctive characteristics, but, in fact, many traits are common to all small-business owners, given the turbulent environment they face.
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.
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.
This article discusses a vast, new and semi-legal marketplace of shipping containers on the outskirts of Odessa, Ukraine. It is suggested that such markets, which have sprung up at several places in post-socialist space where routes intersect, have certain features in common with mediaeval trade fairs. However, today's markets have their own specificities in relation to state and legal regimes, migration, and the cities to which they are semi-attached. The article analyzes the Seventh Kilometer Market (Sed'moi) near Odessa as a particular socio-mythical space. It affords it own kind of protection and opportunities to traders, but these structures may be unstable in a changing economic climate.
We examine various approaches to explaining ethnic enterprise, using a framework based on three dimensions: an ethnic group's access to opportunities, the characteristics of a group, and emergent strategies. A common theme pervades research on ethnic business: Ethnic groups adapt to the resources made available by their environments, which vary substantially across societies and over time. Four issues emerge as requiring greater attention: the reciprocal relation between ethnicity and entrepreneurship, more careful use of ethnic labels and categories in research, a need for more multigroup, comparative research, and more process-oriented research designs.
People caught in circumstances of social upheaval differ in the ways in which they adjust to instability and change. Occasionally individuals at less privileged socioeconomic levels engage in socially devalued practices such as the small-scale trading enterprises that have been degraded ideologically during 45 years of communist rule in Bulgaria. In this article we explore the ways in which people adjust to change by examining ethnographically the practice of trader tourism in Bulgaria. We argue that such an examination supports a rethinking of the concept of boundaries, if boundaries are fluid sets of constraints that individuals negotiate when reacting to monumental stress. Specifically, we consider the reactions of population groups within Bulgaria to the post-1989 economic crisis. We also suggest that members of each group react in group-specific strategies of temporary inclusion, permanent inclusion, and exclusion, [economic anthropology, survival strategies, markets and trader tourism, capitalism con. communism, Roma/Indo-Roma/Gypsies, Eastern Europe/Balkan/Bulgaria, transition/boundaries]
The article evaluates economic interactions between people in the adjacent border cities of Blagoveshensk (Russia) and Heihe (China). The article reveals the conflict between the development of translocality around the border of the two countries and recent Russian policy to strengthen the position of the nation-state.
Trader-tourism is a massive survival strategy practiced in East European countries, in this case Bulgaria. “Trader-tourists” import Turkish goods that are sold at Bulgarian open-air markets. Profit is made by circumventing customs control through the bribing of officials—a loophole facilitated by widespread corruption and engendered “from above” by the more powerful transitional actors. The picaresque role that former state employees have adopted as present-day tradertourists accentuates a deficit of legitimacy and absence of normative institutional support. Trader-tourists attempt to overcome this deficit of authority through imaginative treatment (poetization) of entrepreneurial materials in order to attain a reinterpreted form of the previous stability, normativeness, and order. [economic anthropology, trader-tourism, Bulgaria, Balkans, transition]
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.
Over the past two decades, China has become a new and attractive destination for migrants from all over the world, including Africa. The city of Guangzhou, with its long history of international trade, has attracted tens of thousands of Africans, primarily to do business. Here we focus on Baohan Street, an area frequented by African traders. © 2017 by Th e Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
This paper presents a case study of urban boosterism in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – three resource-rich states around the Caspian Sea. Boosterist projects are typically justified through the injunction of, “build it and they will come.” This cliché is a staple of how urban planners and elites seek to justify development schemes that lack an obvious demand. And while the logic underpinning urban boosterism hinges on a high degree of openness and freedom of movement – both for capital and people – it is a tactic increasingly being used in closed and otherwise illiberal states. Understanding the effects of this development is an important task as a growing number of urban planners in nondemocratic but resource-rich countries seek to develop spectacular new urban landscapes and position their cities as “world class” hubs for international mega-events – even if these are smaller, second-tier events. Exploring event-oriented urban development in Astana, Ashgabat, and Baku, we show how boosterist narratives are being re-deployed in closed contexts to promote the image of a benevolent and “magical state,” as well as solidifying authoritarian political configurations and a selective engagement with market capitalism.
This article focuses on a recent development in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, described by its urban population as a ruralization process. I explore what it means to call something or someone ‘rural’ or ‘urban’, and I compare the social category of ‘rural people’ with the social category of the (old) urban intelligentsia. This includes an analysis and reconsideration of the traditional ‘nature–culture dichotomy’ and its meaning for the architecture and urban planning of Yerevan. It also interrogates the classification of people into newcomers from the countryside, urban dwellers, new elites, and young men called rabiz.
Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have moved to Russia and Eastern Europe. However, until now, very little research has been done about the initial migrants in the nineteenth century, the presence of the Chinese in Europe and Russia in the twentieth century before the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes or about the great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia which occurred after 1989. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in Russia and Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. Particularly important is the movement of entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, who took advantage of unmet demand, inadequate retail networks and largely unregulated markets to become suppliers of cheap consumer goods to low-income Eastern Europeans. In some villages, Chinese merchants now occupy a position not unlike that of Jewish shopkeepers before the Second World War. Although their interactions with local society are numerous, the degree of social integration and acceptance is often low. At the same time, they maintain close economic, social, and political ties to China. Empirical in focus, and full of rich ethnographic data, Pál Nyíri has produced a book that will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, international migration, diaspora and transnationalism.
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.
'We will figure it out' is a common expression among Russian shuttle traders, which refers to their ability to effectively respond to the new state restrictions regarding the crossing of the border and customary rules. I obtained an insight into how it works in practice during the 'participant observation' part of my fieldwork. I crossed the Finnish-Russian border for the first time in 2006. This year has been viewed as a most significant turning point for the further 'squeezing' of this segment of the economy, since the devastating, sharp devaluation of the rouble in 1998 (see Stammler-Gossmann 2006; Gostev/Kuskov 2006; Nedobitkov 2006). The maximum allowed customs-free import of goods to Russia per person (for one's own need) was fixed in 2006 at 35 kg per month, instead of the previous 50 kg per week. The value of goods that was to be considered tax free was set at 65,000 roubles, approximately 2,200 dollars. © 2012 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH. All rights reserved.
Drawing on recent ethnographic research, this article explores key aspects of contemporary discourses on the bazaar trade-development nexus in Kazakhstan. Wholesale traders at the Bolashak Bazaar in Almaty, part of the Barakholka bazaar agglomeration and one of the country's largest markets, have forged particular practices and visions of entrepreneurial development over the last two decades. These have been impacted by state-imposed modernisation agendas and their underlying goals. Using an actorcentred approach, I show how trade entrepreneurs' identities and social representation are challenged by statist developmentalism. However, I argue that traders also embrace a grassroots understanding of what socio-economic development should be like and thereby question the outcomes of seemingly utopian, state-led modernisation efforts on the ground. Through this focus it becomes apparent that the knowledge, aspirations and representations of actors in terms of social change constantly intersect, overlap and condition each other.
Harsha Ram begins responding to his colleagues by addressing Harriet Murav’s concerns with the Rabelaisian carnival experience and hence temporary nature of the supra’s power discourse, using it to reiterate his point about the facile binarism of repression and resistance. Ram comments on his colleagues’ interpretations of the multivalence of the supra (the mode of acculturation and civilizing; the imposition of form and hence a set of rules onto the innately disruptive experience of inebriation; “unruly” material practice, etc.). He agrees that his literary-centered history of the supra should be supplemented with the spatial history and ethnography of the Georgian feast, mapping its transitions from the Safavid-inspired gardens and taverns of old Tiflis to the aristocratic, military and vice-regal milieus of imperial Russia, to the familial and professional networks of the Soviet era. While embracing similar suggestions, Ram rejects a view that the supra evolved from nativism to nationalism, with the latter understood as a political anti-imperial project.
The last half of Ram’s response deals with the main disagreement between his commentators and him, pertaining to Partha Chatterjee’s methodological model adapted by Ram. Some of his critics suggest that the rootedness of Chatterjee’s argument in the specifics of British India and Hindu nationalism makes his model impertinent to the very material Georgian case, whereas Gyan Prakash claims that Chatterjee falls into the trap of identifying with nationalism’s metaphysical oppositions instead of exposing their historicity as by-products of a colonial rule that is as modern and hybrid as any other imperial formation. Ram rejects these criticisms of both Chatterjee’s and his own attempts to overcome the binarism of nation and empire and explains how his approach parallels Chatterjee’s. He does this by reconstituting the nativizing Georgian elite discourse that elevated the supra to the status of a national tradition, while also pointing to the feast’s culturally heterogeneous constitutive elements that cannot readily be inscribed into the narrative of the nation. Finally, Ram calls for a renewed methodological synergy between literary history and literary theory on the one hand, and history and the social sciences on the other.
Резюме:
Харша Рам начинает своей ответ коллегам с замечания Хэрриет Мурав, сравнившей супру с раблезианским карнавальным – и потому временным – перевертыванием властных отношений. Он отталкивается от этого замечания, чтобы еще раз разъяснить свою мысль об искусственности оппозиции репрессии и сопротивления. Рам с энтузиазмом отзывается на размышления коллег по поводу мультивалентности супры, понимаемой ими и как способ аккультурации и цивилизации; и как привнесение формы и, соответственно, правил в стихийный разрушительный процесс опьянения; и как “неуправляемую” материальную практику и проч. Рам соглашается с тем, что его литературоцентричная история супры должна быть дополнена пространственной историей и этнографией грузинского пира, очерчивающей его перемещение из сафавидских садов и таверн старого Тифлиса в аристократические, военные и правительственные пространства имперской России, а затем − в семейные и профессиональные сети советского времени. Принимая подобные предложения, Рам отвергает трактовку, согласно которой супра развивалась из нативистского института в антиимперский национально-политический институт.
Во второй части своего эссе Рам разбирает главное расхождение между ним и его комментаторами, относящееся к методологической модели Парты Чаттерджи, воспринятой Рамом. В частности, некоторые участники форума считают, что модель Чаттерджи укоренена в специфике Британской Индии и индуистского национализма и потому не объясняет сугубо материальный грузинский феномен супры. Гаян Пракаш добавляет, что Чаттерджи идентифицируется с имплицитно заложенной в идеологии национализма метафизической дихотомией, недооценивая его исторические корни в колониальном контексте и модерную гибридность, присущую всем имперским формациям. Рам не согласен с подобной критикой, доказывая, что Чаттерджи осознает специфику имперской ситуации и стремится преодолеть бинарность нации и империи. Рам мыслит параллельно с Чаттерджи, одновременно реконструируя нативизирующий дискурс грузинской элиты, возводящий супру в статус национальной традиции, и указывая на культурную гетерогенность составных элементов супры, не вписывающихся в национальный нарратив. В заключение Рам призывает к обновленной методологической синергии истории и теории литературы, с одной стороны, и истории и социальных наук – с другой.
According to IMF and OSCE reports, informal economic transactions in Russia and other states of the former Communist Bloc have cushioned the shocks of economic and political transition of the 1990s by quickly satisfying the consumer demand and providing unofficial jobs to the population faced with transition recession. As these analyses extensively emphasise the advantages of informal entrepreneurship and its positive contribution to stimulating economic growth, this article explores the phenomenon of shuttle trade – a system/form of informal trade outside state control that does not comply with state regulations – as an issue of concern for criminologists. This article investigates the convergence of shuttle trade and criminal activities and the relationship of shuttle trade to the formal regulatory environment. It offers insights into selected criminal activities at Cherkizovsky market in Moscow before its shutdown in 2009 and an evaluation of the policymaking decisions the shutdown triggered.
When Mikhail Gorbachev initiated economic reforms in the mid-1980s, many people in the USSR found international peddling more profitable than anything else they could do. At first, tens of thousands of Soviet citizens poured into ‘socialist’ Poland, Hungary, or China, but by the mid-1990s the trade expanded to include thirty million people and a wide range of countries and became the backbone of Russian consumer trade. Even though scholarly works have begun to acknowledge the unique role of this shuttle business in the post-Soviet Russian economy, this study analyzes the role of gender in the business based on extensive oral history fieldwork. The research demonstrates that even though the shuttle business gave women new opportunities for financial advancement, their prolonged absence from home and the specificity of this semi-legal trade also brought high rates of divorce and rising health problems for these women as well as lack of parental control for their children. These women-traders facilitated the transition to a free market economy in Russia but their shared experiences demonstrated the gap between the rhetoric of free market economy and the actual market practices of the 1990s.
This article attempts an assessment of entrepreneurial contributions to the solution of some of the objectives of central economic development planning—contributions which are ignored by planners for reasons that are described in this social anthropological study of one aspect of economic development in Ghana.The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Managers of the Smuts’ Memorial Fund for providing much of his financial backing during field‐work; also to the Ling Roth fund, the Anthony Wilkin fund, the Bartle Frere Fund, the Mary Euphrasia Mosley fund, the West African Research Unit, and the Warmington fund. He held a Department of Education and Science studentship during the years 1965–68.The author also wishes to thank Jack Goody, Esther Goody, Enid Schild‐Krout and Jeremy Eades for discussing a preliminary draft of this paper; and Marion Pearsall for comments on later versions; Richard Cornes and Mike Faber have also been most helpful. Responsibility for the final draft is entirely his own.