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Abstract:

Increasing marketization has been a double-edged transformation in Kazakhstan’s single-industry towns. Whereas it has created opportunities for a some (entrepreneurial) inhabitants, many residents of single-industry towns have been struggling in the face of privatization and de-industrialization accompanying marketization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In spite of all odds, some of these towns have recently been regenerating. One of them is the former mining town Tekeli in Kazakhstan’s Southeast. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue in this presentation that ingrained everyday practices of giving – particularly home-grown food – have played a significant role in (post)industrial communities’ ability to endure and recover. Unlike other common types of transactions in Central Asia such as those related to the "economy of favors”, I suggest, (food) giving practices are not driven by utilitarian calculations and an obligation to return. Rather, it is the enjoyment arising from making a valued and abundant good available to a broader circle of people that motivates these practices. In Tekeli, sharing home-grown food helps the urban residents carve out niches of enjoyable sociality in the context of rapid marketization that is perceived by many as being characterized by insecurity, precarity and moral degradation.