This article focuses on Russian traders operating in China, particularly in Yiwu, the major commercial hub for the 'small commodity' trade, and explores the idea of the 'Russian merchant' prevalent in Russia today. Rather than examining the new commercial culture from the perspective of global neoliberalism, it deals with Russia's pre-Soviet merchant estate (soslovie) and its present-day political-ideological evocations. While there is no direct cultural-professional continuity between pre-Soviet and post-Soviet merchants, some similarities have come to the fore and have been encouraged by the state and the Church. This is due to the promotion of a particular moral economy wherein the 'Russian merchant' figures as a positive category. Using a case study of a Russian trader in Yiwu, the article illustrates the new ways in which mistrust as well as 'traditional' merchant attributes such as patriotism and patriarchal authority, have been harnessed to create a successful Russian transnational business.
The contributors to this Special Issue are concerned by the nature of transregional Asian interactions taking place in the field of commerce. They explore this concern through an examination of the experiences, activities, and histories of commodity traders whose life trajectories criss-cross Asia. The articles share a common geographic point of reference: Yiwuan officially designated 'international trade city' located in China's eastern Zhejiang province. The introduction to the Special Issue analytically locates the individual papers in relationship to a longstanding body of work in anthropology and history on port cities and trading nodes. In so doing it suggests the importance of considering multiple historical processes to understanding Yiwu and its position in China and the world today, as well as, more generally, for the anthropology of 'globalization from below'.
This article looks at 'educational' migration instigated by the Danish programme of agricultural apprenticeships, which since the late 1990s has brought many young Ukrainians to rural Denmark. It discusses discrepancies between the logic of achievement implied by the programme's ideology on the one hand, and Ukrainian apprentices' aspirations to social mobility on the other hand. In this way, the article questions the concept of 'community of practice' that has been used to describe the formation of a social persona sharing the values of this community. Using ethnographic case studies of former apprentices, I argue that while apprenticeships often fail to produce a shared social and professional identity within a community of practice, there are many ways in which the experiences afforded by Danish apprenticeships lead to (sometimes unforeseen) achievements.
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.
Situated in Ukraine, post-Soviet Odesa has experienced emigration of its ethnic minorities (Jews, Greeks, Germans), seeing them replaced by Slav newcomers, transnational migrants, traders, and refugees. This migration pattern provides an opportunity to reflect critically on scholarly ideas of 'new diaspora', understood as vibrant cultural mixing. Drawing on Appadurai's notion of 'translocality' and focusing on Soviet generations of Odesans, I argue that some urban residents see themselves as having been transformed into a new diasporic community in their own city. This is due to a particular post-Soviet combination of factors: they have been confronted by demands of the nation-state, their social circle has emigrated, and new engagements have been 'blocked' by a form of tolerance marked by indifference.
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