Tell me this is a book on informality without telling me this is a book on informality
Spector, R.A. (2017) Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia. Cornell University Press.
Doing academic research on informality is not a straightforward task. Add a gender dimension to it, the Central Asian context, and frame it within a very particular locality such as bazaars and - voilà! Now the study is narrowed down to the point where finding relevant literature is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yet, I was lucky and managed to stumble upon a hidden gem: Regine Spector's Order at the Bazaar, a one-of-a-kind book on bazaars in Central Asia. And here’s why: rather than analysing the region's socioeconomic and political transformations from a macro perspective, Spector employs a "bottom-up" approach to discover how people on the ground perceive the changes and construct their own new reality after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This “bottom-up” narrative becomes the leitmotif of the entire book: order emerges from below despite the surrounding chaos. Even the author’s conceptualisation of order is the result of such grassroots effort. The five facets of "order" as outlined by Spector are cleanliness, rights (i.e., lawfulness), regulation, discipline (and respect), and peace (p. 16). These understandings are scrutinized throughout the manuscript and capture diversity of voices constructing orders at bazaars.
By rethinking post-Soviet bazaars through cultural, neo-liberal and monopolistic perspectives, Spector points at the drawbacks of each and illustrates that it is the "dwellers" of bazaars who manage to organize within and despite the weak institutional setting of Kyrgyzstan. She does so by using an ethnographic approach to studying the "islands of order" (using the author’s term for bazaars) and relying on years of careful fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek. She collects data using participant observation, library work, and interviews with bazaar traders, activists, journalists, and NGO workers. Even though Spector centres her analysis around the concept of "order," I could not help but feel that she was in fact using the concept of "informality," without explicitly operationalizing it. Narratives of informality understood by me as gaps between top-down initiatives and local practices were omnipresent. Nevertheless, even without using informality as a conceptual framework, the author manged to situate bazaars in a broader context of the weak state and offer a ‘bottom-up understanding of “situated knowledge”’ thanks to a combination of methods and approaches employed (p. 13).
In portraying the bazaar participants as active agents who exercise power to achieve order, Spector critically engages and contributes to the theory of institutions. Despite claiming to offer a new perspective on institutions created by people on the ground, the book (deliberately or not) disregards views about institutions from the economic and political economy literature. In this sense, her contention that order emerges from society to meet its needs resonates well with the influential work of political economist Elinor Ostrom who stated that solutions to common problems may arise from a bottom-up process (Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom, 2009). In addition, Spector unfortunately does not cite the literature on small-scale trade in Central Asia that emerged and was published after she conducted the majority of her research from 2005 to 2007 (e.g., Alff, 2015; Karrar, 2017). Having examined alternative disciplines, theories, and publications more closely, Spector could have made her book better grounded in theory, accessible to a wider audience, and thus enhanced the validity of her arguments.
The monograph is divided into seven main chapters that uncover various understandings of “order” in Central Asia’s largest wholesale bazaar Dordoi and Bishkek’s centrally located Osh Bazaar. As emphasized earlier, the author does not impose her own understanding of order. Instead, she collects the everyday meanings of order from traders who associate it with concepts of “cleanliness, rights, lawfulness, regulation, discipline, respect, and peace” (p. 16). In my view, this approach aligns well with the overall design of the study where the focus is shifted towards everyday construction of the meaning from below.
Although people in both bazaars managed to establish order through self-organization, Spector shows that in Dordoi it happened following Soviet understandings and practices of “ordering” through centralised trade-union whereas, in Osh Bazaar, order emerged through the pre-Soviet historical institution of local elders. In her nuanced account of the emergence of order at Dordoi bazaar, Spector also highlights the role of its founding owner, Askar Salymbekov and his diplomatic skills in establishing this order. However, this conclusion is based on analysing Salymbekov’s public speeches, media interviews of others about him and other secondary sources. Given that Salymbekov is a political figure in addition to being Dordoi’s owner and has corresponding powers, the positive praising statements of himself or about him should not be taken at face value. Although Spector herself notices the difference in discourses about Askar Salymbekov between people within and outside bazaar, her accounts of Salymbekov’s role in establishing order at Dordoi do not account for the obvious ambiguity.
In contrast, the Osh Bazaar with more than 70 owners experienced a more chaotic process of privatization and hence underwent a more disintegrated route towards order. By illuminating how the Osh Bazaar transformed, Spector masterly conveys the complexity of clashed interests between the different bazaar actors and the municipal authorities and illustrates the bazaar as an ambivalent space of both modernity and tradition. While local authorities wanted to modernize the Osh Bazaar, the owners wanted to collect as much rent as possible and thus let the traders flood and overcrowd the bazaar. As a result, traders adapted traditional rural pre-Soviet institution of elders called baibiche for females and aksakal for males to sustain order and solve numerous conflicts. Spector also applies a gender perspective to highlight an increasing role of women in establishing order at the Osh Bazaar.
Although the book argues that markets can flourish without strict state regulation and order can be achieved through informal means, it could go even further and explore complex patterns of informal governance by superseding clear divides into formal and informal and thus contribute to the emergent multidisciplinary dynamic theory of informality that conceptualizes informal governance through the instruments of co-optation, control and camouflage in the context of Mexico, Russia and Tanzania (Baez-Camargo & Ledeneva, 2017, p. 52). This conceptual framework, in my view, suits the findings of Spector in that co-optation meaning the ability to form a network, control referring to discipline, and camouflage relating to the network protection all echoes with what Spector documents: self-organization, order and sustainability of traders’ activity in bazaars respectively. Thus, had the author engaged with interdisciplinary literature and done a more rigorous comparative work, she would have contributed to the theory building more explicitly.
Finally, in addition to the detailed narrative of bottom-up order-building in Kyrgyzstani bazaars based on qualitative data, Spector complements her manuscript with some statistical data on the development of bazaars in Central Asia and thus backs up her arguments about the growths and transformation that bazaars underwent after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
An intriguing book, this might be regarded as a foundation work on which other scholars interested in the topic of bazaars in Central Asia can build. In addition to providing food for thought, it encourages the exploration of new avenues for research, such as illuminating the many voices that can be heard at the Central Asian bazaars across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion.
References
Alff, H. (2015) Profiteers or moral entrepreneurs? Bazaars, traders and development discourses in Almaty, Kazakhstan [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/article/45206> [Accessed 26 November 2020].
Baez-Camargo, C. & Ledeneva, A. (2017) Where Does Informality Stop and Corruption Begin? Informal Governance and the Public/Private Crossover in Mexico, Russia and Tanzania. The Slavonic and East European Review, 95 (1), pp.49–75. Available from: <http://dx.doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.95.1.0049> [Accessed 24 March 2021].
Karrar, H.H. (2017) Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi and Kara-Suu Bazaars: Mobility, Globalization and Survival in Two Central Asian Markets. Globalizations, 14 (4), pp.643–657. Available from: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2016.1201323> [Accessed 3 February 2022].
Ledeneva, A. (2018) Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 1: Towards Understanding of Social and Cultural Complexity. UCL Press.