ABSTRACT
The introduction sets the scene for this book, which follows the evolution of capitalism through three decades since the late Soviet era from the vantage point of Kyrgyz traders, middlemen and entrepreneurs who are earning and living in-between Russia, China and their ‘fatherland’. ‘Translocality’ is outlined as a concept that takes acts of place-making and a multiple situatedness as seriously as it does various mobilities that transgress state borders and other relevant boundaries of geography, economy or social belonging. More specifically, it is argued that the notions of ‘translocal livelihoods’ and ‘translocal value chains’ serve well to capture the ways in which the strive for profit among Kyrgyzstan’s ‘first capitalists’ becomes entangled with non-material matters of ethnicity, generation and gender. The methodological segment reflects on various aspects of long-term, translocal fieldwork in Guangzhou, Novosibirsk and across Kyrgyzstan between 2013 and 2018, particularly in regard to how an always different mutual positioning between research participants and researcher impacted data-gathering and the insights concluded for each locale.
