Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores women's cross-border trading practices in post-Soviet Russia, focusing on krutit'sya (circulate) as a complex logistical practice. Merging feminist studies with the anthropology of infrastructure, I emphasise embodied dimensions of social reproduction in times of crisis.

Paper long abstract:

The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a wave of cross-border trading mobility, primarily among women seeking a living by transporting goods across international borders. This presentation explores the embodied practices of these women traders, highlighting the emic concept of krutit'sya (to move, circulate) as a masterful logistical practice. Krutit’sya, I show, encompasses the complex combination of factors that women shuttle traders take into account when deciding where to go, what to buy, when to invest, and how to keep the business running and the family afloat through both formal and informal channels. Studying practices of krutit'sya allows to, on the one hand, theorize the body as a location of human experience and political subjectivity, and, on the other hand, as an infrastructuring agent. Drawing on AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) concept of "people as infrastructures," I examine how these women navigate opportunities, risks and physical strains to sustain their livelihoods while also contributing to the broader reproduction of life in the crisis-ridden post-Soviet societies of the 1990s. Taking seriously the task of krutit'sya as an embodied practice, I shift Simone's framework from a broad notion of "people" to emphasize the role of bodies as the most intimate of spatial scales and a geo to study the complex effects of globalization and geopolitical shifts. Based on biographical interviews and market ethnographies, I integrate feminist studies with the anthropology of infrastructure to advance a body-as-infrastructure framework, shedding light on the gendered and embodied dimensions of trade in a predatory post-socialist environment.