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Abstract
Since the 1990s, the development of informal trade in trans-frontier places bordering Mongolia has offered opportunities for Mongolian people to develop new trade links with China, Kazakhstan, and Russia. These ‘businessmen of the transition’ or informal ‘suitcase traders’ go abroad along roads opened to and through Russia and China. My article analyses the ‘circulatory roads’ opened by suitcase traders. I take two examples of this activity: Mongolian Kazakh traders who go to Russia and Mongolian traders who go to China. The trans-frontier places reveal the particular ways of being and skills of drivers, retailers and wholesalers.
Notes
1See Hann, Post Socialism.
2The French expression ‘businessmen of the transition’ (businessmen de la transition) is used by Anne de Tinguy, La grande migration, 112.
3The suitcase trade is characterized by small scale and informal traders who use small suitcases to transport the goods they buy in small quantities. This kind of trade is well known by social scientists.
4Davaa, ‘Tömör zamyn aûlgüj bajdal’, Ünen 106 (2007/05/31): 5.
5 Erlianhot City Inner Mongolia News (2005/04/15).
6In Mongolian, Èrèèn means ‘bicolor’ and Zamyn üüd, the ‘Door of the road’.
7Michel de Certeau distinguishes ‘space’ (in French: place) and ‘place’ (in French: lieu); the first are transformed into the second by ‘walking figures’ (figures cheminatoires); de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire, 139–191.
8Kazakhs constitute 5% of the population living in Mongolia. In 1990, the Kazakh diaspora numbered between 100,000 and 150,000 persons. They mostly belong to the Najman, Kèrèj and Uaq clans.
9I spent four months in western Mongolia. From Bajan-ölgij, the center of the province, I made investigations in several villages, especially in Cèngèl in the west, close to the Russian border. I was given special permission by the Russian embassy to visit the Russian province of Gorno-Altajskii for three days and to cross the border in Cagaan-nuur (Mongolia) and Tašanta (Russia). We left at 05.00 and arrived at 07.30 in Tašanta, but Russian customs allowed me to go only at the end of the afternoon. During the preparation and the three days of travel, I evaluated the social organization and labor structure involved in the activities of small Kazakh merchants supplying goods between Russia, Mongolia and China. I began to understand the process of building networks among populations of the Altai Mountains across the political borders. This research, ‘A comparative study of the alimentation of Kazakhs and Mongols’, was supported by the Fyssen Foundation (Paris).
10The Naran Tuul open market lays on the southeast of Ulaanbaatar in the middle of a yurt district. This fieldwork was supported by the EHESS in the context of the ‘Research Group on Chinese Frontiers’ (CECMC, Paris, EHESS), under E. Allès direction, where I have worked for several years.
11de Certeau, op.cit., 147.
12Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 162. Indeed, for Tim Ingold, cognition is ‘social activity that is situated in the nexus of ongoing relations between persons and the world, and that plays its part in their mutual constitution’. Furthermore, for Ingold (ibid., 162), according to Bourdieu's ‘theory of practice’ (1972), ‘the habitus is no-expressed in practice, it rather subsists in it’(Ingold, op.cit.).
13Csordas, ‘Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology’, 5.
14It involves in a consideration pivotal to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology that the ‘body is given in movement’, and that ‘bodily movement carries its own immanent intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 128–129). Indeed, it is because of this intentionality that the subject's action is, at one and the same time, for Tim Ingold, a ‘movement of perception’ (op.cit., 170).
15Ingold, 162.
16Tarrius, ‘Nouvelles formes migratoires’, 118.
17For information on the settlement process see, among other sources, Humphrey and Sneath, Culture and Environment in Inner Asia.
18Shombodon, ‘The Division of Labour’, 212.
19World Bank, Quarterly Report: January 2008. Since 2000 Mongolia has experienced a gold rush. Many nomadic shepherds began to search gold, while urban residents migrate to the gold mines and countryside. These city-to-countryside movements of people differ from the nomadic trajectories.
20As opposed to Russians' attitude, for the Kazakhstan Kazakhs, hospitality is a matter of ethnic identity while for the Mongolian Kazakhs, it is a traditional obligation sanctioned by a symbolical punishment feared by nomadic countrymen as well as settled townspeople.
21For more details on access to alcohol and drunkenness of traders in Mongolia, see my documentary Ballad of the Trader; http://www.neotheque.com/lib/html/gaelle_lacaze/g_lacaze.html.
22It's not easy to get data about alcohol consumption, drunkenness and intemperance in the field among the Kazakhs, partly because of Islam, introduced in eastern Central Asia during the eighteenth century. But, on the other hand, Islamic influence is, in fact, superficially adopted in Kazakhstan societies. For Kazakh men from 20 to 50 years old, alcohol consumption is identical to Mongolian people, in the same age period.
23For more details, see Lacaze ‘Convivialité, consommation d'alcool et catégorie de personne’, 30–47.
24In 1990, the population of Kazakhstan approached 10 million, but only 40% were ethnic Kazakhs. Almost 150 minorities were present in Kazakhstan. In fact, many Russians immigrated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as Germans, Koreans, and others. Those immigrants were mostly technical experts, engineers, intellectuals or political refugees. After 1991, the Kazakhstaneese President N. Nazarbaev called back the Kazakhs expatriated abroad in order to make the ethnic Kazakh population dominant in the country: those ethnic refugees came from Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, China, Russia or Mongolia. They are called Oralmana.
25Tarrius, ‘Nouvelles formes migratoires’, 118.
26The Kazakhization politics of Kazakhstan was promoted after 1991 in the context of profound social and economic crises. The Kazakhstan government wanted to expatriate Germans and Russians while encouraging foreign Kazakhs' immigration. By 2002, Kazakhs made up 60% of Kazakhstan's population. More than 65,000 persons migrated from Mongolia to Kazakhstan between 1991 and 1995. Current census estimates that Mongolian Kazakhs (Oralmana) number 90,000 persons. Five-year plans supported migrations, but few of the Kazakhs who migrated from Mongolia work as specialists and executives. The Kazakhstan government located many of them in the eastern regions of the country in order to colonize former regions occupied by non-Kazakh minorities, including Germans. Many Mongolian Kazakhs live in several villages close to Alaköl and the Altai mountains (e.g., Tèlman), in Taldykurgan and Učaral.
27Only 10% of the Oralmana, 10,000 of them Mongolian Kazakhs, asked for Kazakhstan citizenship. Most of them are married to Kazakhstan Kazakhs. Oralmana receive several years of financial support to live in Kazakhstan, yet this initial help has not encouraged Mongolian Oralmana to seek Kazakhstan citizenship. Most of migrants from Mongolia develop mobile activities while using their network in Mongolia, for example as a meat merchant. Indeed, they found a way of being partly integrated into Kazakhstan Kazakh society.
28Around 30,000 people, one-third of the Oralmana, returned to Mongolia after a few years spent in Kazakhstan. When asked their reasons for coming back to Mongolia, the ‘returned Oralmana’ evoke headaches, being unwell or strange feelings. They remember how they were feeling alone in Kazakhstan. Their feelings refer to linguistic isolation, economic precariousness, and the lack of indigenous social networks. Moreover, the Kazakhs of Mongolia are socially and psychologically unsuited for their lives in Kazakhstan. They were intellectuals, executives or qualified workers, who occupied important functions or worked in management in Mongolia. Before entering Kazakhstan, most of them had already emigrated from Baân-ölgij and were living in central Mongolia in the Hèntèj or the Sèlèngè provinces, or in cities like Nalajh or Ulaanbaatar. Few migrants were shepherds. They had to sell all their goods and even livestock, which were not allowed to cross the borders, before leaving Mongolia.
29For example, the meat price in Kazakhstan does not allow people to prepare dishes according to their pastoral traditions, e.g. with meat attached to the bones. Thus, the Kazakh traditional dish, the « five rings » (kz. bès barmaq) was adapted to the Kazakhstan conditions: meat is taken off the bones and pieces of meat laid on quarters of pasta. Mongolian migrants are not familiar with these practices. Indeed, in Mongolia, the distribution of meat-on-bone defines the consumer relative to his gender, his age and his status in relationship with the Ego « standing treat ». Kazakh migrants from Mongolia do not have any socio-cultural model allowing them to respectfully invite Kazakh guests because of the loss of the knowledge about the rules of meat distribution in Kazakhstan.
30For more details see Lacaze, ‘D'os et de chair’, 130–155.
31For example, Mongolian Kazakhs send meat to Kazakhstan and import flower, oil, vegetables or industrial products (vodka). Indeed, circulatory roads are opened between western Mongolia and eastern Kazakhstan throughout the Gorno-Altajskii Republic of the Russian Federation.
32The distance between Erlian and Zamyn üüd is 4 km from one frontier-point to the other one, while the distance between the cities is approximately 20 km from one centre to the other.
33 Law on Free Zone of Mongolia.
34Bilik, ‘Culture, the Environment and Development in Inner Mongolia’, 138–139.
35Colmon, ‘Zamyn üüd dèh’, 5.
36Ministry of Industry and Trade, Government of Mongolia, Notification of the Tender Results.
37Bolormaa, ‘Čölööt büs’, 6.
38A few restaurants and hotels in this small town are in front of the railway, all around the station. But, in August 2007, only a few hotels in Zamyn üüd had piped water.
39Bolormaa, op.cit.
40The Tèèvèr company, in English ‘Transport’, organizes the frontier passage by microbuses, and receives 8% of the profits of the whole legal and official traffic, totaling around 2,000 USD per month. They also built a park for merchandise and trucks near the Zamyn üüd railway station. Colmon, op.cit.
41Signe Gutersen, a Danish social anthropologist, is working on a PhD about the traders of Naran Tuul. She underlines the organization of the Naran Tuul market in Ulaanbaatar. She explains the najmaačid's infinite quest for the newest, best and cheaper shoes. She illustrates how the najmaačid's social status involves them in a cycle of exchanges, where they have to give more and more. Najmaačid contract many debts while, on the other hand, they are supposed to control their goods and to master the process for increasing them (piles of shoes). They are characterized by their generosity because for their network they are supposed to be rich. In fact, they are perpetually in debt. In the ‘quest for goods’ which characterizes the najmaačin's activities, the prestige comes from the unique, rare and exceptional shoes they discover in Erlian markets. They are like ‘good sustainers’ in wide exchange networks. The rapid turnover of the products carried along the railway corresponds to the najmaačid's role and status in exchanges movement: they act in transnational networks along circulatory roads. The circulation of goods and money between najmaačin and čanžuud is in terms of accumulation and distribution. The najmaačin seems on the side of individuals while the čanžuud live in a more collective world (Pers.Com., International Workshop of Young Mongolists).
42Nei Menggu zizhi qu ditu ce 
[Atlas of Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region], Annexe 1,
43de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien, 147.
44Nei Menggu zizhi qu ditu ce [Atlas of Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region], Annexe 2.
45Bilik ‘Culture, the Environment and Development in Inner Mongolia’, 135.
46For more details on this topic, see Lacaze ‘Mongolian Representations of the Body’, 43–67.
47Dèmbèrèl, ‘Hün hudaldaalah gèmt hèrgijn èsrèg’, 6. Mongolia is the 114th poorest country of the world according to the UNDP scale. In Mongolia, unemployment explains the high poverty level, which is worse for women than for men (3.6% of women are unemployed, 3% of men). Many women run away from a bad family situation, from their husband's alcoholism, or from domestic violence. The poverty is localized in western and eastern townships of Ulaanbaatar, where the unemployment rate reaches 40% among 16–24 year olds. Tümèn, ‘Âduurald èmègtèjčüüd ilüü örtdög’, 8.
48Pine, ‘Retreat to the household?’, 96.
49Ibid., 98.
50Ibid.
51Annexe 3.
52Van Gennep, Les rites de passage.
53In 1934, in his article ‘Notion de technique du corps’, Marcel Mauss remembers how the army strongly and deeply conforms the bodies they wear with uniforms. In Surveiller et punir, Michel Foucault extends the analysis to disciplinarian surroundings and structures. Desmond Morris, for his part, in La clé des gestes, visually illustrates the ‘taming’ or ‘training’ of the body in sport as well as in the army. Indeed, a peculiar rhythm emerges from disciplinarian conformation of the bodies. In the frontier place, this temporary conformation needs to be incorporated by anyone crossing by in order to serve one's own interest.
54de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien, 174.
