Taking the case of Qazaq Pastoralists in Western Mongolia, this book looks at the universal human requirement to balance individual flexibility and strategies designed to make a living with the social expectations that impose particular rules of conduct but also enable mutual trust and cooperation to emerge. Pastoralists in Western Mongolia have experienced dramatic changes in recent decades, including the dismantling of the socialist economy, a series of natural disasters, and an emigration of roughly half of the local Qazaq minority to the newly independent state of Qazaqstan. Four aspects illustrate the chances and challenges that people face. First is the emergence of the market as the dominant mode of production and exchange, a thorny way full of uncertainties. Second is the individual household and its adaptation to the new economic system, creating new opportunities as well as precarities, and resulting in rapid social stratification. Thirdly, patterns of pastoral land allocation highlight problems of collective action and institutional fragmentation in the wake of a retreating state apparatus. Finally, social networks of mutual support and cooperation constitute a key component of pastoral livelihood but are under great pressure due to short time horizons and a lack of trust. The first longitudinal analysis of the Qazaqs in Mongolia in English and a contribution to anthropological theories on human adaptability and decision-making, economic and social inequalities, institutional change and the difficulty of deriving at cooperative solutions, this book will be a standard work and of interest to academics in the field of Central Asian Studies, Anthropology, Human Geography and Development Studies.

Telling the story of the author's time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region. It looks at the position of the Kazakh over time in relation to Tsarist Russian, Soviet, Chinese and Mongolian rule and influence. These are stories of migration across generations, bride kidnappings and marriage, domestic violence and alcoholism, adoption and family, and how people have coped in the face of political and economic crisis, poverty and loss, and, perhaps most enduringly, how love and family persist through all of this.

Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification and conflict at the level of particular actors in relation to the behaviour of large aggregates of people and to systemic conditions.

Translocality, Entrepreneurship and Middle Class Across Eurasia is a comprehensive, multi-sited ethnography about the unfolding of capitalism across Eurasia and the advent of a new middle class since the late Soviet era. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book follows three generations of ethnic Kyrgyz in three distinct eras and sites: The early bazaar traders of Novosibirsk (Russia), the post-2000 middlemen operating in Guangzhou (China) and the ‘new entrepreneurs’ who have emerged at home in Kyrgyzstan around 2015. The book advocates translocality as an innovative concept to better understand the dialectic of mobility and emplacement in contemporary livelihoods and value chains that transgress not only political borders, but also less tangible socio-cultural boundaries. Through this lens, the chapters forcefully demonstrate how ways of business-making align or conflict with notions of ethnic belonging, diaspora, sociability or gender, in and in-between various locations. Proposing the imaginary of commercial journeys, the book documents the aspirations, adjustments and struggles of an emergent middle class, whose neoliberal subjectivity is inspired by a flexible entrepreneurial spirit of ‘Kyrgyzness’, and who navigate in a market environment that recently has been shifting towards more actor diversification, service orientation and rule-based formalization. This book will be of interest particularly to scholars in the fields of (economic) anthropology, post-socialist studies, migration, mobility and area studies with a focus on Central Asia and Eurasia.

In Qazaqlïq, or Ambitious Brigandage, and the Formation of the Qazaqs Joo-Yup Lee examines the formation of new group identities, with a focus on the Qazaqs, in post-Mongol Central Eurasia within the context of qazaqlïq, or the qazaq way of life, a custom of political vagabondage widespread among the Turko-Mongolian peoples of Central Asia and the Qipchaq Steppe during the post-Mongol period. Utilizing a broad range of original sources, the book suggests that the Qazaqs, as well as the Shibanid Uzbeks and Ukrainian Cossacks, came into existence as a result of the qazaq, or “ambitious brigand,” activities of their founders, providing a new paradigm for understanding state formation and identity in post-Mongol Central Eurasia.