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Paper abstract:

This paper is a contribution to the body of knowledge about shuttle traders in post-Soviet spaces. It is established that shuttle traders are predominantly women and that they have contributed significantly to new nation-states GDP. However, there is still little body of discussion of Kazakh shuttle traders, especially those who emerged from small Kazakh towns for whom traveling to Kazakh large markets was as much of a hustle as crossing the borders with Russia, Eastern Europe, China or Turkey. Moreover, little is known about the ways shuttle trading affected the private lives and immediate families of Kazakh shuttle traders.

This paper aims to fill in this gap by exploring the experiences of shuttle traders from a small town in the South-West of Kazakhstan, who had traveled extremely long distances, crossed borders and worked transnationally. To shed light on what shuttle trading meant to shuttle traders and their families, the paper aims to include the reflection of both shuttle traders and their children on what their families did.

Ethnographic fieldwork done for this paper were divided into two stages. The first stage included participant observation in the market in the town with 4 shuttle traders who still work at the bazaar and their life history interviews. The second stage involved 4 online focus groups with adults who have grown up with such mothers, where preliminary findings from the first stage were used as incentive for group discussions.

I chose to focus on the transnational family dynamics enabled due to women’s long distance travels to illustrate how women’s mobility and extended absence brought changes to their homes. I argue that the gendered nature of familyhood normalized the extreme conditions of traveling experienced by women and abrupt detachment from home was the source of intense internal emotional conflicts for these women. Focus group discussions with children show that women’s absence flipped gender roles in the house and the old ways of kinship practice were disrupted. However, children’s reflection on childhood memories show that trade provided women with tools to reclaim their connection to their children. Children and women’s own sentiments towards women’s trading are still seeing changes.