Emotion Work, Shame, and Post-Soviet Women Entrepreneurs: Negotiating Ideals of Gender and Labor in a Global Economy
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1070289x.2011.654104
ISSN1547-3384
Autores Tópico(s)Emotional Labor in Professions
ResumoAbstract Drawing on ethnographic research among Russian women traders or "shuttle traders" (chelnoki), I examine discourses on shame as a type of emotion work and consider links to ideal gender roles among Russian women entrepreneurs. In a post-Soviet era increasingly shaped by transnational mobility, as well as by a persistent legacy of Soviet sensibilities, a focus on emotion among women traders provides an ideal lens for considering what travels between eras marked by distinct ideologies, between nation-states, and between public and domestic spaces. A discourse of shame links Soviet sensibilities of proper labor and contemporary gender sensibilities that continue to elevate men as breadwinners; thus, a focus on shame enables us to see the contradictory ways in which women are positioned in local and global economies in the 2000s. This case shows how Russian women's insertion into the global economy beginning in the early 1990s has required emotion work that is similar to that required in other locations where global capitalism has brought about reconfigurations of work lives and required people to renegotiate gender roles, expressions of power, and the meaning of labor in their lives. Keywords: emotionRussiacapitalismgender Acknowledgments I am grateful to Masha Khomenko and Liudmila Prokoshina, who generously introduced me to the world of shuttle traders. I also thank the faculty in the anthropology reading group at the University of British Columbia (UBC), participants in a seminar sponsored by the UBC Inter-faculty Initiative on Migration Studies in 2008, and attendees at the "Narratives of Socialism" workshop organized by the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in 2009. Julie Cruikshank and Michael Hathaway especially who provided key comments on earlier versions of this essay, and I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting pertinent ways of sharpening my argument. Finally, as always, Milind Kandlikar's lucid readings at various stages were critical in bringing this article into fruition. Notes 1. Pseudonyms are used throughout the text. Russian words are indicated in italics, and Turkish words are italicized and underlined. 2. I refer to small-scale entrepreneurs and women "shuttle traders," or traders (chelnoki), interchangeably. There is a discrete literature focused on small-scale women traders, many of whom sell their wares in open-air market stalls, but all of whom deal in relatively small amounts of wares, frequently acting as supplier, stocker, bookkeeper, and salesperson in their businesses. Scholarship on such traders does not use a uniform set of terminology, however. For instance, Gates (1991 Gates, Hill. 1991. "Narrow Hearts" and Petty Capitalism: Small Business Women in Chengdu, China". In Marxist Approaches in Economic Anthropology, Edited by: Littlefield, Alice and Gates, Hill. 13–36. Lanham: University Press of America. [Google Scholar]) describes the "petty capitalist" women entrepreneurs in Taiwan, Clark (2000 Clark, Gracia. 2000. Mothering, work, and gender in urban Asante ideology and practice. American Anthropologist, 101(4): 717–729. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) writes about Asante women in Ghana as "market women," and Babb (2001 Babb, Florence. 2001. After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua, Austin: University of Texas Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) describes small-scale trader women as working in the "informal economy." Quiñones (1997 Quiñones, María I. 1997. Looking smart: Consumption, cultural history, and identity among barbadian "suitcase traders.". Research in Economic Anthropology, 18: 167–182. [Google Scholar]) writes about Barbadian "suitcase traders" and "higglers," a term Carla Freeman (2002 Freeman, Carla. 2002. "Mobility, Rootedness, and the Carribean Higgler: Production, Consumption, and Transnational Livelihoods". In Work and Migration: Life and Livelihoods in a Globalizing World, Edited by: Ninna Nyberg Sørenson and Karen Fog Olwig. 61–81. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) also uses in her discussion of Barbadian women moving apparel between New York and home communities. Peraldi (2005 Peraldi, Michel. 2005. Algerian routes: Emancipation, deterritorialisation and transnationalism through suitcase trade. Anthropology and History, 16(1): 47–61. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) writes that male Algerian suitcase traders, who travel to a wide range of destinations, including Istanbul, are referred to as "trabendistes" in Algeria. Konstantinov (1996 Konstantinov, Yulian. 1996. Patterns of reinterpretation: Trader-tourism in the Balkans (Bulgaria) as a picaresque metaphorical enactment of post-totalitarianism. American Ethnologist, 23(4): 762–782. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) writes of "trader-tourism" to refer to those small-scale traders moving goods between Istanbul and Bulgaria. Humphrey (2002 Hann, Chris, Humphrey, Caroline and Verdery, Katherine. 2002. "Introduction: Postsocialism as a Topic of Anthropological Investigation". In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia, Edited by: Hann, Chris. 1–11. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 88) notes that in China, Mongolian shuttle traders are known as gahaichin, or "pig keeper," a pejorative term referencing pastoralists of the steppes but also huge bales of goods that traders transport; she also indicates that at one point Russian traders in China were known as "vacuum cleaners" because they were thought to buy everything within sight. 3. I am borrowing this terminology from Roger Rouse (1992 Rouse, Roger. 1992. "Making Sense of Settlement: Class Transformation, Cultural Struggle, and Transnationalism among Mexican Migrants in the United States". In Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, Edited by: Nina Glick Schiller, Basch, Linda and Blanc-Szanton, Cristina. 25–52. New York: New York Academy of Science. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 [Google Scholar]), who uses the idea of "transnational circuits" to describe the way in which Mexican migrants and negotiated ideals around masculinity, class, and citizenship circulate between southern California and northern Mexico. 4. Here and elsewhere I borrow from Nancy Ries' formulation "newly capitalist" (2002: 283) to avoid a static, binary portrayal of socialist and post-socialist Russia and to suggest the distinct experience of recent capitalist processes in Russia. This is also inspired by Ong's important discussion of multiple capitalisms (1999). 5. I define former socialist or "emergent capitalist" regions of the world (e.g., Vietnam, China, and the former Soviet Union) as places where under socialism labor was valued as something that produced an end product of use to the broader society. As Dunn writes about a Polish factory undergoing privatization, the employees viewed the firm as "… more than an engine to make profit or even to make products. It was the heart of a social community… . Under socialism it was the vehicle through which the state carried out its moral obligation to care for its citizens" (2004: 46). I also use the terms "post-socialist" and "post-Soviet" to refer to a similar set of social relations, although I see "post-Soviet" as a subset of "post-socialist" (or "postsocialist"). Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery point out that patterns that may appear "socialist" are not really; they are "… direct responses to the new market initiatives, produced by them, rather than remnants of an older mentality … . people's responses … may appear as holdovers precisely because they employ a language and symbols adapted from previous orders" (1999 Burawoy, M. and Verdery, K. 1999. "Introduction". In Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in a Postsocialist World, Edited by: Burawoy, M. and Verdery, K. 1–18. NewYork: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. [Google Scholar]: 2). Chris Hann has noted that for now the term post socialism has utility because it describes a common experience "… of Marxist-Leninist socialism, the reproduction of a common layer of socialist institutions, [and] ideology and moral purpose over two generations or more" (Hann et al. 2002 Hann, Chris, Humphrey, Caroline and Verdery, Katherine. 2002. "Introduction: Postsocialism as a Topic of Anthropological Investigation". In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia, Edited by: Hann, Chris. 1–11. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 11). Others argue that the term "post-socialist" has utility as long as it is used to define specific contexts and practices (Humphrey and Mandel 2002 Humphrey, Caroline and Mandel, Ruth. 2002. "The Market in Everyday Life: Ethnographies of Postsocialism". In Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-socialism, Edited by: Mandel, Ruth and Humphrey, Caroline. 1–18. Oxford: Berg. [Google Scholar]: 3). In this essay I use this term to underscore the ways in which a Soviet past influenced and continues to influence specific ways of understanding gender and labor. 6. For a key review article on "people on the move," see Kearney (1995 Kearney, Michael. 1995. The local and the global: The anthropology of globalization and transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 547–565. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). See Kopnina (2005 Kopnina, Helen. 2005. East to West Migration: Russian Migrants to Western Europe, Aldershot, , England: Ashgate Publishers. [Google Scholar]) and Darieva (2005 Darieva, Tsypylma. 2005. "Recruiting for the Nation: Post-Soviet Transnational Migrants in Germany and Kazakhstan". In Rebuilding Identities: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia, Edited by: Kasten, Erich. 153–172. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. [Google Scholar]) for examples of recent ethnographic research focusing on transnational migration out of the former Soviet Union, and Solari (2006 Solari, Cinzia. 2006. Transnational policies and settlement practices: Post-Soviet immigrant churches in Rome. American Behavioral Scientist, 49(11): 1528–1553. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Keough (2003 Keough, Leyla. 2003. Driven women: Reconceptualizing the traffic in women in the margins of Europe through the case of the Gagauz mobile domestics in Istanbul. Anthropology of East Europe Review, 21: 73–80. [Google Scholar]), and Patico (2010 Patico, Jennifer. 2010. Kinship and crisis: Embedded economic pressures and gender ideals in postsocialist international matchmaking. Slavic Review, 69(1): 16–39. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), for work examining the intersection of gender and migration in the region. 7. The larger project of which this study is a part examines the links between women from the former Soviet Union employed in Istanbul, Turkey, in three distinct spheres—small-scale trade, domestic work, and entertainment—and their transnational families. This research was conducted over about thirteen months as follows: preliminary research in a small city south of Moscow (October 2000 and May 2001) and in Istanbul (June 2001); and additional research in Istanbul (June–July 2002; June 2003; July 2004; June 2005; February–June 2007). 8. The fifty women I interviewed (fifteen traders, fifteen domestic workers, and twenty exotic dancers) are in many ways distinct. Frequently, they self-identify as Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldovan, or Gagauz, but just as often they refer to themselves as "Soviet" (sovetskie). They range in age from nineteen to fifty-five, and they are employed in very different spheres requiring distinct skills. However, these women are integrally connected through the transformation of political economies in the former Soviet Union, the lingua franca of Russian, and most significantly, through their experience negotiating new ideologies around meaningful labor, often beginning with small-scale trade. 9. Like several other scholars, Humphrey resists the tendency to assume that Russia and other countries in the region are in "transition" to a Western-defined form of capitalism. She calls for ethnography to focus on the "nontheorized and most various frameworks and values through which people understand the world … they both inform economic action and create reactions to that action" (2002: 71). 10. In the Ukraine in the mid-1990s, official estimates are that the shuttle trade comprised 20 percent of the shadow economy, which in turn was considered equivalent to as much as 50 percent of Ukraine's formal economy (Ivanova and Buslayeva 1999, cited in Williams and Baláž 2002 Williams, Allan M. and Baláž, Vladimir. 2002. International petty trading: Changing practices in Trans-Carpathian Ukraine. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(2): 323–342. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 327). 11. The subject of travel within Soviet Republics, as well as beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, and its role in shaping Soviet perceptions of mobility, identity, and social stature is a fascinating topic. See Gorsuch and Koenker (2006 Gorsuch, Anne and Diane, E. Koenker. 2006. Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). A select group of people was able to take part in the tightly regulated travel beyond the Soviet Union, but travel within the Soviet Union was widespread and frequently features in nostalgic accounts of a wide range of people. Travel between socialist bloc countries ranged from student work brigades to conference attendance to organized tours, and movement from the "socialist diaspora" into the Soviet Union, especially for the purpose of education, was extensive (e.g., see Matusevich 2007 Matusevich, Maxim. 2007. Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters, Trenton: Africa World Press. [Google Scholar]). 12. The women I spoke to initially traveled to nearby Poland, Romania, or Hungary, carrying with them household items, socialist era lapel pins, or koniak intended for sale. The capital generated would in turn finance the purchase of clothing for resale back home. For a discussion of the early era of shuttle trade practices in Turkey, see Hann and Béller-Hann (1998 Hann, Chris M. and Béller-Hann, Ildiko. 1998. "Markets, Morality, and Modernity in North-East Turkey". In Border Identities, Nation and State at International Frontiers, Edited by: Wilson, T. M. and Donnan, H. 237–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); for a recent film on women traders in Central Asia, see "Ballad of the Trader," producer and director Lacaze Gaëlle, 59 min, 2005. 13. By 2012, according to other estimates, 12 percent of urban Russian households were involved in cross-border trade or labor migration (Badishtova 2002 Badishtova, Irina Mikhailovna. 2002. Specific Features of Migrant Worker Households in Russia. Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniya, 28(9): 83–90. [Google Scholar]: 83). 14. There is a wide range of roles occupied by post-Soviet women engaged in small-scale entrepreneurship. In this essay I am primarily concerned with high-end traders who travel weekly to Turkey to supply their boutiques or wholesale outlets in Russia and traders who travel to urban centers like Moscow and buy in small amounts to resell at the local markets in Russia. On classifications of traders in Russia, see Humphrey (2002 Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 85–90). 15. As Hohnen describes for Lithuania (2003 Hohnen, Pernille. 2003. A Market Out of Place? Remaking Economic, Social, and Symbolic Boundaries in Post-Communist Lithuania, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 20), in the early 1990s in Russia men and women entered into trade at open-air markets with gender-specific expertise—men sold shoes, tools, and sometimes vehicles, and women concentrated on selling food and clothing. 16. Turkey was one of the few countries in the region with a garment industry that was responsive to post-Soviet consumer tastes and budget, and it also maintained relatively open borders for post-Soviet citizens, allowing them to enter Turkey on one- or two-month tourist visas (see Yukseker 2007 Yukseker, Deniz. 2007. Shuttling goods, weaving consumer tastes: Informal trade between Turkey and Russia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31(1): 60–72. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Bloch 2003 Bloch, Alexia. 2003. Victims of trafficking or entrepreneurial women? Narratives of post-Soviet entertainers in Turkey. Journal of Canadian Woman Studies, 22(3/4): 152–158. [Google Scholar]). Turkey's relatively permeable border policy beginning in the 1990s is linked to Turkey's status as one of the signatories of the Black Sea Economic Co-operation agreement; Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine are also signatories of this agreement (see Gökdere 1993, cited in Aktar and Ögelman 1994 Aktar, Cingiz and Ögelman, Nedim. 1994. Recent developments in East-West migration: Turkey and the petty traders. International Migration, 32(2): 343–354. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 348). In 2005 citizens of most countries in the region could obtain one-month tourist visas upon arrival at Turkish borders, while by 2009 citizens of a number of countries in the region—Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Romania—could obtain a two-month tourist visa at the border. 17. In addition to several popular newspapers published in Russia (e.g., Moskovskii Komsomolets, SpeedInfo), from 2004 to 2008 kiosks sold the Istanbul-based Russian-language bimonthly newspaper TurPressPanorama. 18. Because this wholesale garment district attracts a wide range of transnational traders, including from the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, it is also common to see businesses, like tour agencies, appealing to clients in signs written in languages other than Russian. However, Russian-speaking customers are by far the most predominant in the neighbourhood, and Russian language clearly acts as a lingua franca between most buyers and shop assistants on the one hand, and wholesalers, restauranteurs, and taxi drivers on the other. 19. In fact, frequently these assessments were ahistorical and localized, homogenizing the diverse reality for especially urban Turkish women and assuming all of them to be confined by gender structures framing the lives of many working-class Islamist women's lives (see White 1999a White, Jenny B. 1999a. "The Paradox of the New Islamic Woman in Turkey". In Gender, Religion and Change in the Middle East: Two Hundred Years of History, Edited by: Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Flaskerud, Ingvild. 123–135. New York: Berg Press. [Google Scholar]: 128). 20. For more on the history of this concept in Soviet society, see Grant (1995 Grant, Bruce. 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]) or Anderson (2000 Anderson, David G. 2000. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 21. In Istanbul, traders spend their time as part of a growing contact zone that positions them as "Russian" (Rus), regardless of where they have come from in the former Soviet Union; they are widely viewed as representing an alternate form of modernity, distinct from the albeit various paths of modernity and concomitant gender ideals prevailing in Turkey (see Abu-Lughod 1997 Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1997. "Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions". In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Edited by: Abu-Lughod. 3–33. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]; Kandiyoti 1997 Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1997. "Gendering the Modern: On Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity". In Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, Edited by: Bozdogan, Sibel and Kasaba, Resat. 111–132. Seattle: University of Washington Press. [Google Scholar]; and White 1999a White, Jenny B. 1999a. "The Paradox of the New Islamic Woman in Turkey". In Gender, Religion and Change in the Middle East: Two Hundred Years of History, Edited by: Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Flaskerud, Ingvild. 123–135. New York: Berg Press. [Google Scholar]: 123–135). 22. This woman emphasized that when she herself had to fill out paperwork, she never wrote affirmatively that her mother had a criminal record. 23. There are wide differences between how private entrepreneurship was viewed across Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) and the former Soviet Union prior to 1989. Hungary was the first country to introduce market reforms in the late socialist period; by the late 1970s select consumer goods were permitted for sale in the private sector, including in open-air markets (see Williams and Baláž 2002 Williams, Allan M. and Baláž, Vladimir. 2002. International petty trading: Changing practices in Trans-Carpathian Ukraine. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(2): 323–342. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 325). Polish and Czechoslovak shoppers were attracted to these markets and a thriving cross-border trade developed; by 1995 an estimated 500,000 people were crossing annually as small-scale traders out of Poland (see Okolski 1998, cited in Williams and Baláž 2002 Williams, Allan M. and Baláž, Vladimir. 2002. International petty trading: Changing practices in Trans-Carpathian Ukraine. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(2): 323–342. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 327). Given the tightly controlled borders of the Soviet Union, with passport controls in place even for travel to the ECE until the early 1990s, small-scale trade and informal markets were slower to develop than in the ECE (see Krassinets and Tiuriukanova 2001 Krassinets, Eugene and Tiuriukanova, Elena. 2001. Potentials of labour out-migration from Russia: Two surveys. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 92(1): 5–17. 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With the onset of Perestroika in the late 1980s, fleeting trade was allowed to operate throughout Eastern Europe with fewer restrictions and as it expanded, vendors often spilled over from the vacant lots and historic town centers into city streets (Sik and Wallace 1999 Sik, E. and Wallace, C. 1999. The development of open-air markets in East-Central Europe. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 23(4): 697–714. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In Russia in the early 1990s these market areas, as well as other public spaces, were rapidly "privatized" as local governments sold off government property to the highest bidder, a process noted in the formation of market spaces across the former Soviet Union (Hohnen 2003 Hohnen, Pernille. 2003. A Market Out of Place? Remaking Economic, Social, and Symbolic Boundaries in Post-Communist Lithuania, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 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For instance, Jennifer Patico writes of St. Petersburg teachers' discourses about "morally upright persons," as linked to the social usefulness of a given profession (2008: 140). Others have examined how private trade in late socialism was viewed as implicitly revealing the failure of the state provisioning system and reflecting bourgeois tendencies to desire consumer goods and accumulate capital (Dunn 2004 Dunn, Elizabeth. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]; Kaneff 2002 Kaneff, Deema. 2002. "The Shame and Pride of Market Activity". In Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-Socialism, Edited by: Mandel, Ruth and Humphrey, Caroline. 33–52. Oxford: Berg. [Google Scholar]; Verdery 1996 Verdery, Catherine. 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 27. Bruno argues that women's "need to provide material and emotional support" for their families is linked to their success as entrepreneurs and originates in the Brezhnev era when difficulties in obtaining basic goods "turned women into able managers and specialists of market operations" (1997: 62). 28. This period of "late socialism" and a "backlash" against Soviet policies officially promoting gender equality has been the subject of a vibrant feminist scholarship for nearly twenty years. For instance, in the late 1980s the LOTOS group (the League for Emancipation from Social Stereotypes), from which the Moscow Center for Gender Studies grew, analyzed four major forces in Russia (socialism, perestroika, democracy, and the emergence of market forms of exchange) from the perspective of gender equality and identified perestroika as a "period of postsocialist patriarchal renaissance" (The League for Emancipation for Social Stereotypes, cited in Posadskaia 1994 Posadskaia, Anastasia. 1994. Women in Russia: A New Era in Russian Feminism, London and New York: Verso. [Google Scholar]: 4). 29. This wide range of professional backgrounds among traders is consistent with Badishtova's findings (2002 Badishtova, Irina Mikhailovna. 2002. Specific Features of Migrant Worker Households in Russia. Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniya, 28(9): 83–90. [Google Scholar]: 84). Her survey on temporary labor migration (including shuttle trade) among households in five major Russian cities found that adult household members' professional backgrounds included teachers, lawyers, medical personnel, accountants, engineers, drivers, and academic researchers. 30. Contrary to Badishtova's findings, where fewer than 10 percent of Russian households involved in labor migration had children under eighteen, the women in my sample were typically at a point in their life cycles where they had school-age children. Of the fifteen traders interviewed, only two had grown children; eleven consultants had children aged from eight to fourteen, and two had no children. In fact, clothing and educating children were the primary reasons cited for becoming involved in trade. 31. In 2000 Olga had begun making weekly buying trips to Istanbul to fill out her inventory, including with chic silk blouses for US$45 and knit sweaters for more than US$100. In an economy in which average monthly incomes were US$300–400 per month in 2001, these clothes were within the reach of a small economic elite. 32. This phrase is borrowed from Anne Marie Leshkowich's work (2006 Leshkowich, Ann Marie. 2006. Woman, Buddhist, entrepreneur: Gender, moral values, and class anxiety in late socialist Vietnam. Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 1(1-2): 277–313. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) on textile traders in post-socialist Vietnam. 33. 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The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Post-Soviet Russian Far East, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Google Scholar]; Bloch 2005 Bloch, Alexia. 2005. Longing for the Kollektiv: Gender, Power, and Residential Schools in Central Siberia. Cultural Anthropology, 20(4): 534–569. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Grant 1995 Grant, Bruce. 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]). Through these mechanisms, state discourses on undesirable behaviours, and conversely on what it meant to be an upstanding citizen, indelibly shaped moral frameworks, thus illustrating Foucault's much-cited point that "discourses … [are] … practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (1972 Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon. [Google Scholar]: 49). 35. In his fascinating ethnography of transborder identities in Georgia along the border with Turkey, Mathijs Pelkmans describes a long history of border negotiation and border crossing, including the paradoxical post-Soviet slowing down of flows and cross-border connections for some and the increased opportunities for others (2006 Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]: 179).
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