ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the valences of life and death for those on the margins of contemporary Kyrgyzstan’s social order, namely chronically homeless individuals, many of whom struggle with substance addiction. I consider attachments to normative and emergent idioms of kinship in a context of capitalist transformation where access to care, socio-economic opportunity, welfare and even survival are often tied to relational affinities. In the face of political, economic and social exclusion, how do marginalised populations obtain social services and care? I follow a young woman who struggles to receive treatment at the hospital and a man who becomes an adoptive son to the doctor of his substance addiction program, in order to explore the surprising malleability of seemingly entrenched social formations in a region that is typically glossed as a site of strong patriarchal families, clan identity and rigid ethnic categories. Their stories reveal the simultaneous ambivalence and promise offered by intimate attachments to reshape the terms of belonging in post-socialist Central Asia.
