Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, residents of Chalma, a village in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, were faced with many new challenges. Economic crisis and the elimination of welfare supports forced an entire generation to become labour migrants in Russia. Those ‘left behind’ – grandparents and children – were sustained by migrants’ remittances and charitable activities, but at a cost. As villagers at home and in the Chalma diaspora built upon existing kinship structures to create new practices of charity and mutual aid on the lines of Islamic teaching, both migrants and the left behind suffered from the ‘dark side of kinship’ that the crisis revealed. Migration is destructive of both the nuclear family and wider village life, but it provides an opportunity for lineages to be mobilized for collective social action that is both local and translocal. In the research on which this book, the author interviewed many persons in both Chalma and its Moscow-based diaspora. Their experiences of creative response to adversity are at the heart of this text: those responses created a ‘moral economy of migration’ that became territorialized as kinship was de-territorialized.