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Abstract

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