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Abstract

This research examines how farming practices and strategies change within the context of ambiguous institutional settings, market volatility and climate change. Qazaqstan’s land rights landscape is characterized by significant discrepancies between legal frameworks and actual practices, particularly affecting agricultural access and ownership. Therefore, the research focuses on identifying how farmers in the rural Zhetysu region of Qazaqstan identify opportunities and addresses challenges in the face of uncertainty and high transaction costs. Situated within the anthropology of economic institutions and entrepreneurship, the paper is based on empirical material from 4-6 months of fieldwork, and provides a fresh perspective on daily and long-term decision-making by farmers in the region. This ethnographic approach allows for capturing how farmers interpret institutional rules in practice and how everyday economic decisions are shaped by both formal regulations and informal social relations within rural communities. Based on the lived experiences of farmers, the analysis presents the state of the art on property rights, gender and labour relations, access to capital and technology, as well as market and climate risks.

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This paper studies how small and medium-sized meat and dairy processors in the Jetisu region of south-eastern Kazakhstan create relative stability under conditions of institutional volatility. Drawing on social and economic anthropology, it asks how producers sustain processing and small trade when regulations are unevenly enforced, market opportunities shift, infrastructure remains fragile and access to formal support is inconsistent. Rather than treating institutions as fixed rules imposed from above, the paper shows how they are interpreted, negotiated and reworked in everyday practice. The analysis is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, participant observation and conversations with processors, traders and local officials. It shows that business decisions are formed not only by prices or formal regulation, but also by trust, debt, kinship ties and moral obligations. In this context, formal compliance rarely operates as a self-sufficient system. For example, documentation such as SES certification often works less as a mechanism of full product traceability than as a practical requirement for entering bazaar trade.

The paper argues that capacities for stabilization are unequally structured by scale. Medium sized processors regularly depend on outsourced supply from small-mid size farmers while building private infrastructures that stabilize production, trade, including milk and meat collection systems, trusted supplier networks and informal lending arrangements. Smaller processors, many of whom are also farmers, absorb a disproportionate share of seasonal, climatic and biological risk, commonly prioritizing herd expansion over investment in processing capacity. The paper thus demonstrates that under conditions of institutional volatility, relative stability depends not simply on formal rules, but on how actors mobilize informal institutions, social networks and private organizational arrangements to reduce uncertainty.

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This research examines how traders of food and other comestible goods in southeastern Kazakhstan navigate uncertainty in everyday exchange. It argues that under conditions of institutional volatility, personal trust is not a remnant of “traditional” commerce but a practical social resource through which trade is made possible and sustained. Where formal guarantees are weak, uneven, or difficult to enforce, exchange depends on repeated relations, trusted intermediaries, and shared expectations built through long-term interaction.

The paper builds on earlier research conducted in Kazakhstan during the COVID-19 period, when border closures and mobility restrictions disrupted bazaar trade and intensified dependence on older contacts and trusted brokers. That research showed that digital communication did not replace bazaar relations so much as reconfigure them: parts of trade were displaced into social media platforms and remote coordination, while uncertainty around quality, delivery, and accountability became even more pronounced.

Drawing on new fieldwork on the circulation of food and other comestible goods, I extend this question to a domain in which risk has a particular texture. In food trade, uncertainty is shaped not only by distance, delayed payment, or weak enforcement, but also by perishability, freshness, timing, storage, and the difficulty of verifying quality before goods arrive. In such contexts, transaction costs are especially high: traders must identify reliable partners, assess quality at a distance, negotiate credit, manage delays, and redistribute the risk of spoilage or loss. Bringing economic anthropology into conversation with work on transaction costs, embeddedness, informal institutions, and market uncertainty , I suggest that personal trust functions here as a practical mechanism of coordination. It lowers search and verification costs, makes deferred payment possible, and helps actors sustain exchange where formal guarantees are limited or unreliable. Trust, in this sense, is not external to market exchange; it is one of the social conditions through which exchange becomes workable in volatile institutional environments.

Keywords: food trade; personal trust; transaction costs; institutional volatility; informal exchange; bazaar networks; borderlands; Kazakhstan

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Abstract

Discussions of the gastronomy sector in Kazakhstan frequently frame labor shortages, especially in kitchen positions, as a primary constraint on business operations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in food establishments in southeastern Kazakhstan, this paper challenges this assumption by showing that the issue is not a simple absence of workers, but a reconfiguration of labor under conditions of economic and institutional volatility.

Gastronomy businesses operate within shifting regulatory demands, rising input costs, unstable supply chains, and uneven enforcement of standards. In this context, sustaining everyday operations depends on continuous adjustments in the organization of kitchen labor. 

The paper argues that what is described as a “labor shortage” is better understood as a mismatch between working conditions, expectations, and available forms of labor. Crucially, the sector relies on gendered, low-visibility labor, often performed by middle-aged women. Rather than resolving structural constraints, this labor functions as a stabilizing mechanism that enables businesses to maintain everyday operations and keep food accessible. By foregrounding these hidden forms of work, the paper reframes labor shortage as a narrative that obscures the social organization of labor underpinning the affordability of everyday food.