Volatile Conviviality: Joking relations in Moscow's marginal marketplace

Abstract

This article explores the joking relations that constitute conviviality in one of the largest marginal bazaars in Moscow. The marketplace is known as a hub for migrant workers and traders, and is often stigmatized in the media. It remains one of the largest commercial nodes in the bazaar network that stretches across and beyond much of ex-Soviet Eurasia. Scholars of conviviality have often claimed that convivial living represents more than hilarity and laughter; exactly how laughter actually happens and what sets of relations and interactions make it possible have been largely left out of the discussion. I will explore how a certain joking repertoire both connects Russian customers with migrant sellers and traders from Central Asia, Vietnam, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and animates relations between sellers themselves. I argue that these relations are characterized byvolatility, which incorporates play and improvisation within different registers of uncertainty, conflict, enjoyment, proximity, and—ultimately—virtuality.

On the double social life of failure

“…My informants tended to speak of them less as places of exception than as nodes of safety in a hostile external environment: as places of respite and protection from the Moscow winter and the Moscow cops; of warm, sometimes volatile sociality and connection; of petty conflicts and stress (Reeves 2016;cf. Jitlina, Kangas, Pasucci & Tereshkina 2020;Nikolotov 2019). All of them stressed the importance of the koiko-mesto to being able to survive, and hopefully send a few thousand roubles home, in a city where it was 'expensive even to breathe' .…”