Abstract:
Tourist traders emerged in the early 1990s as a predominantly female response to the collapse of
state systems, job cutbacks, shortages in commodities - the chaos that enveloped newly emerging
nation-states. There is still no reliable evaluation of Kazakhstani traders and their contribution to
the national economy. Yet, shuttle trading has and continues to impact the socio-emotional state
of families and traders. Through ethnographic fieldwork in the market of a small town Merken,
this thesis aims to pay homage to women, who relentlessly peddled for the sake of their families,
and to provide a personal description of trading biographies and relations showing the complexity
and embodied nature of this broad informal economy. First of all, ‘bazaars’ are extremely flexible
phenomena that could occur at any point in time and space, ignoring the geographically defined
premises of the markets. Shuttle traders could create a bazaar anywhere and carried the power of
creating multiple sources of income for others. Gender expectations and the negative connotation
of the bazaar created negative and conflicting pressure for women traders: women faced severe
work conditions at the same time that the significance of their labor was diminished. Trading also
swapped traditional gender roles in families because women were earning the household income
and gone for long periods of time; this created a sense of yearning for a mother in children.
However, trading provided women with tools to reclaim their connection to their children, too,
such as being able to provide for their well-being and education. Focus groups show that children,
too, have intense and changing emotional responses to their mothers’ trading career and are still
in the process of giving a more defined shape to their relationships with their mothers. Traders
themselves shared similar sentiments, which is currently helping them undo clusters of traumatic
and painful experiences of the past