ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 takes up various start-up businesses to illustrate the heightened relevance of middle-class consumption, servicification and ethnic notions of ‘Kyrgyzness’ in Kyrgyzstan’s present-day economy. The chapter examines a Bishkek-based fashion brand, modelled as a local alternative for Turkish and ‘Western’ imports, which targets younger, urban and affluent women, and specifically appeals to their consumer conscience by ways of patriotic slogans such as ‘be loyal, buy local’. The same clientele is targeted by a domestic services-agency offering personnel for private childcare and housekeeping, which however also presents an ‘ethnic dilemma’, because these are tasks traditionally assigned to younger Kyrgyz women and watched over by their in-laws. Finally, I look into a national business association, which alongside Kyrgyzstan’s entry into the EAEU has evolved as a way to forge a more collaborative and resilient local ‘business community’ through knowledge transfer, networking and a non-commercial sociality. While this more generally attests to a new kind of ‘servicification’ in Kyrgyzstan, it also documents an attempt to increase private-sector leverage to lobby the government into a more proactive, constructive approach towards Kyrgyzstani ‘national producers’.
