ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the informal provision of healthcare in a hospital located in rural Kazakhstan. One-third of the village is home to Kazakh repatriates known as Oralmandar—recent immigrants predominantly from China and Uzbekistan. These migrants are mobile in the sense that they occupy positions in dynamic translocal networks bridging countries both with regards to origin and destination. We contrast the collective experiences associated with this mode of mobility to the collective experiences characteristic for large parts of Kazakhstan’s Soviet population. Partly because of their often ambiguous status concerning legal recognition as Oralmandar, many repatriates face a range of concomitant problems, including economic exclusion as well as limits to their rights to social benefits and, not least, their right to the provision of (free) healthcare services. Here, we focus on new practices surrounding the informal provision of healthcare services that emerged in response to the new mobility of the ‘paperless’ Oralmandar and their often precarious situation. In this setting, informal practices complement the formal provision of healthcare. We also demonstrate how the situation has changed, whereby informal practices related to healthcare provision have come under pressure following recently implemented initiatives to reform and digitise Kazakhstan’s healthcare system. However, the informal provision of healthcare persists at present.
