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The book is about the economic practices of traders and businesspeople from the Caucasus and China who work in local bazaars in Tbilisi and Beijing. It describes their activities, their motivations, their socio-cultural backgrounds, their work environments, and their interactions with one another. Contributing to a broader debate on the nature and role of informal economic practices in the post-Soviet periphery and processes of “globalization from below”, the book aims at providing a thick description of the embeddedness of bazaar traders’ economic behaviors and strategies in local and global political, economic, and cultural contexts, markets and supply chains.
This book assembles original ethnographic research into urban spaces and lifestyles in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia. Taken together, the case studies address cities as gateways to ‘new worlds’, both local and global, discuss ambitions of states at taming urban landscapes, and illustrate current trends of economic, religious and other li
This book analyses how Calon Gypsies in Brazil have responded to global financial transformations and shifted their economic practices from itinerant trade to moneylending. It also explores their role as ethnic credit providers, offering rare insight into the financial lives of poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians. More broadly, this volume examines how ethnic difference is created in a context where fixed and collective structures supporting ethnic identity are missing. It is important reading for economic anthropologists, cultural economists and all those interested in processes of financialisation from a local perspective, as well as those fascinated by informal economies, how exchange and debt relate to social and political marginality, and how financial credit becomes 'domesticated' by communities.
Internet and Gender in Kazakhstan offers an empirically rich and theoretically compelling analysis of how the Internet is influencing societal attitudes towards women’s roles and agency in Kazakhstan. Equipped with intimate perspectives from the wider public in five different regions of Kazakhstan, the book conceptualises, theorises, and analyses the relationship between the Internet and gender-related attitudes in Kazakhstan through a decolonial feminist lens. The author argues that digital communication technologies’ effect on societal attitudes towards gender roles and norms in Kazakhstan is conditional on Internet and social media penetration rates, state-led digital censorship, and the ways in which local activists and conservative bloggers use their online presence. The book will be of interest to policy makers and researchers in the field of media studies, gender studies – in particular women’s rights, LGBTQ+, feminist activism, and gender-based violence – and Central Asian studies.
This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality. The chapters scrutinize the capacity of translocality to describe, in new ways, the multiple mobilities, exchange practices and globalizing processes that link places, people and institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus with others in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Illuminating translocality as a productive concept for studying cross‐regional connectivities and networks, this volume is an important contribution to a lively field of academic discourse. Following new directions in Area Studies, the...
What does it mean to study culture – and what does culture finally mean? Whether we compare cultures or delve deeply into the dynamics of a single social order, anthropology’s task is to confront the interplay of the human condition and the cultural form. Tracing the genealogy of our touchstone method, ethnography, and investigating its relation to alternative disciplines that try to get at the heart of the human experience – philology, history, and social relations – this volume considers whether contemporary anthropology might, at last, be able to define culture, after more than a century of investigation.
This volume examines significant social transformations engendered by the ongoing Syrian conflict in the lives of Syrian Armenians. The authors draw on documentary material and fieldwork carried out in 2013-2019 among Syrian Armenians in Armenian and Lebanese urban settings. The stories of Syrian Armenians reveal how contemporary events are seen to have direct links to the past and to reproduce memories associated with the Armenian genocide; the contemporary involvement of Turkey in the Syrian war, for example, is seen on the ground as an attempt to control the Armenian presence in Syria. Today, the Syrian Armenian identity encapsulates the complex intersection of memory, transnational links...
Translocality, Entrepreneurship and Middle Class Across Eurasia is a comprehensive, multi-sited ethnography about the unfolding of capitalism across Eurasia and the advent of a new middle class since the late Soviet era. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book follows three generations of ethnic Kyrgyz in three distinct eras and sites: The early bazaar traders of Novosibirsk (Russia), the post-2000 middlemen operating in Guangzhou (China) and the ‘new entrepreneurs’ who have emerged at home in Kyrgyzstan around 2015. The book advocates translocality as an innovative concept to better understand the dialectic of mobility and emplacement in contemporary livelihoods and value chains that tra...
Migration from Central Asia analyzes migration from Turkestan to Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the United States and the identity formation of these people living in different countries. It also deals with younger generations and their views about homeland, sense of belonging, and identity. Using oral history methods, the book focuses on migrants from Turkestan in the 1930s. The book includes in-depth interviews as well as short surveys with those who migrated and their children. Focusing on what families experienced during migration, how they made their living, how they lived in these different countries, and how they preserved their language, traditions, and culture, the author presents an overall picture of these migrants and how and why language and traditions, which are central cultural elements, have been preserved. The analysis in this book contextualizes the change in the structure of migration and identity formation and the emergence of the notion of Turkestanian migrants. It will be of interest to academics studying Turkish World Studies, Central Asian Studies, and migration studies as well as identity and cultural studies, ethnic studies, and nationalism.