Chinese markets" of Russia: the role in post-sustainable transformation (a casestudy of Irkutsk)

The article discusses the role of the phenomenon of "ethnic markets" in the post-soviet transformation of a Siberian city. The authors state the poor knowledge of this phenomenon in Russia and in other post-socialist countries. In the authors' opinion, one of the most important reasons for it is the lack of a sufficient source base for historical analysis of "ethnic markets". Therefore, this analysis is based on a wide range of different sources, including media texts, official documents, materials of socio-anthropological field research in Irkutsk. The first part of the article is devoted to the dynamics of the "Chinese markets" development in the post-soviet period. The authors show the development of the open-air markets, labeled "ethnic" (particularly, "Chinese"), as a mechanism of institutionalization of new daily-life practices. The authors investigate the development of the two largest "Chinese markets" in Irkutsk - "Shanghai" and "China Town" during the 1990s-2010s. It is alleged that by the 2000s "Chinese markets" became resistant knots of the social interactions network. These objects retained their role in urban everyday life in spite of the restrictive actions of the authorities. The focus of the second part of the article is on the analysis of the "Chinese markets" role in urban everyday life and of the meanings of the ethnic labeling of these objects. Since its inception, the "Chinese market" has been described in everyday language and in the media as an ethnically marked locality. However, in the early 2010s townspeople of Irkutsk described such markets like "Chinese" regardless of the presence of Chinese merchants there. This suggests that such markets have come to localize not only ethnicity, but also migrant origin in the urban space. It is argued that the "Chinese markets" of Irkutsk, emerged as a mechanism of survival and response to extreme situation, turned into a stable institution of the post-soviet city's life. Thus, ethnic labeling of markets actually ceased to denote ethnicity in the urban space. The "Chinese market" is increasingly becoming a marker of specific urban locales, of ways of organizing space and of a certain repertoire of practices. The authors conclude that "ethnic markets" (including the "Chinese" markets) have become an important marker and element of the post-Soviet transit. Their dynamism and flexibility have brought "fluidity of modernity", in which only the changes of space, visuality and practices are constant, into the Soviet city's space.

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