SHUTTLE TRADING IN KAZAKHSTAN: ORAL HISTORIES OF WOMEN TRADERS AND THEIR CHILDREN

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