Frobenius-Institut

This chapter gives insights into the development of small-scale long-distance trade between post-Soviet countries, the Caucasus, and China. It starts with a description of the activity of the so-called chelnoki (челноки) (suitcase-traders, or trade tourists), who pioneered the market economy and international trade in Eurasia in the early 1990s. The chelnoki and their situation are then compared with the new generation of traders, who are referred to as biznesmeny (бизнесмены‚ biznesmeni). The term biznesmen encompasses a whole spectrum of entrepreneurs, including some very poor and some very rich , who started to do business in the post-Soviet sphere. The chhapter’s focus is on bazaar traders dealing in Chinese merchandise, some of whom travel to Beijing regularly. After having portrayed the evolution of bazaar trade since the 1990s, the author turns to the current situation and describes a business trip of contemporary bazaar traders to Yabaolu Market in Beijing in China. The case study describes the Chinese marketplace and reflects the perspectives of four individuals, three Georgians and a Russian, three men and one woman. Three of them started their businesses in the 1990s, one of whom belongs to the younger generation. Analyzing the data, the author comes to several conclusions that concern the practices, motivations, and networks of Georgian traders: (a) traders’ motivations are linked to family and kinship obligations, and profits are usually put into housing; but (b) these traders usually base their business on contacts other than those linked to kin networks. These other relationships develop while doing business—on the one hand between other travellers and fellow post-Soviet traders within and outside the own ethnic group, on the other, between post-Soviet and Chinese businesspeople. These relationships, even though they are conceptualized in local terminologies, have a very specific content and context. Long-distance trade creates a reality, a “culture” of its own, which encompasses complex social contexts, relations and interactions, codes of conduct, and moral judgments—and an ideology that partially contradicts local sociocultural paradigms and formal institutional frameworks.KeywordsHistory of shuttle tradeSuitcase traders Chelnoki Businesmeny Yabaolu MarketKinshipBrotherhoodFriendship

In this article, I argue that the word ‘resource’ can be used to denote what is considered to be of high value in a given society. These values may relate either to society as a whole or to its parts. In the former case, resources often acquire the characteristics of the sacred as identified by Émile Durkheim and others. It is here argued that the Durkheimian approach captures the symbolic dimension of the collective sacred but ignores the social effects of people’s attempts to obtain access to the highest value. To understand how concrete social forms evolve, one may rather turn to the writings of Arthur Maurice Hocart. His approach draws our attention to values (of ‘life’) and the social processes deriving from people’s engagement with the sacred. To illustrate this approach, an ethnographic example from Odisha, India is provided.

A difusão da língua portuguesa em Angola, iniciada com a chegada dos portugueses no século XV, está estreitamente ligada ao comércio atlântico de escravos. Os principais impulsos dessa difusão partiram das cidades, feitorias e presídios portuguesas junto à costa e no hinterland. No entanto, atribuir as raízes históricas da actual lusofonia em Angola única e exclusivamente aos portugueses e ao seu domínio colonial, seria incorrer num erro grosseiro e num simplismo inadmissível. Desde o século XVII que um grupo de africanos que adoptou elementos da cultura portuguesa – para além do vestuário, principalmente a língua falada e escrita – teve uma participação decisiva neste processo, não só no hinterland costeiro, mas a partir do início do século XIX também no interior profundo do continente, longe de qualquer influência directa dos portugueses. No interior do continente, este processo terminou após a conferência de Berlim e a criação do Estado Livre do Congo. Nos territórios ocidentais da Angola actual, o processo complexo, protagonizado por portugueses, luso-africanos e alguns africanos, criou no entanto as bases em que assenta a lusofonia posterior.

Wörter und Wandel. Ethnographische Zugänge über die Sprache. By Hans Fischer. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. 2000. Pp. 313, bib., 3 maps, tables. 78.00 DM

C.-H. Perrot (ed.) avec le concours de Gilbert Gonnin et de Ferdinand Nahimana, Sources orales de l'histoire de l'Afrique. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989, 228 pp., 165 francs, ISBN 2 222 04244 5. - Volume 61 Issue 4