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| 1 |
ID:
171130
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| Summary/Abstract |
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.
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| 2 |
ID:
101297
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Within the context of Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, this article deals with an identity boundary between the so-called 'urban' Kyrgyz and Russians on the one side, and the so-called 'rural' or 'newly arriving' Kyrgyz, on the other. In the first section I discuss the ways in which this boundary is constructed among Bishkek male youth, both rhetorically as well as with regard to actual practices of social inclusion and exclusion. Starting from these insights on what 'makes' an urban identity, I try to approach the question of why this boundary might be drawn as it is. Linking a theory on 'group size' with migration data for Kyrgyzstan and the concept of 'opportunity structure', I try to examine the allocation and accessibility of opportunities such as jobs, marriage and living space - all of which can be considered to affect the current divide between ethnic Kyrgyz in Bishkek.
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