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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.

AbstractThe diversification of US suburbs in terms of race, ethnicity and immigration has created invaluable opportunities for scholars to study technologies of translocality‐in‐the‐making. Translocal landscapes are described as spaces of 'here' studded with 'parts of elsewhere' (Allen and Cochrane, )—but which pieces of the landscape count as meaningfully 'of elsewhere', how do those parts get there, and what range of meanings can they signify? This article is based on qualitative, in‐depth interviews and explores these questions in the context of an Arab Muslim ethnic enclave and retail district in an inner‐ring suburb of Detroit. The findings indicate that 'parts of elsewhere' are more internally pluralized, multifunctional, multidirectional and aesthetically diverse than commonly recognized. The implications of these findings challenge scholars to develop more robust frameworks to explain how translocal geographies are produced, why they matter, and how they can be recognized.

The Baloch are one of the best documented ethnic communities in the modern Islamic world. But the information comes from non-Baloch, who saw them as a tribal population, with their own history and culture, separate from the people around them. This conventional approach masks the continuities in their history, from their raiding of urban populations over a thousand years ago to their current national opposition movements in Iran and Pakistan and their recent association with international terrorism. But if studied in a larger context, both historical and geographical, the available information illustrates the continuities, through qualitative changes, from the earliest available sources down to the present. Enlarging the context in this way has an additional advantage: it enhances our understanding of other world-historical processes that are currently playing out under globalization. An important variable in this history is locality, the cultural evaluation of location, and translocality, the way locality changes as the social context becomes more complex—variables that have received little attention from either historians or ethnographers. Locality is determined mainly by investment and the social interests resulting from investment. Where there was sufficient soil and water to support investment in irrigation engineering and agricultural development, small communities settled and grew into cities. As the cities grew, they developed trade networks, which further increased their investment potential. The Baloch, like other 'tribal' peoples in the arid zone of the northern hemisphere, formed from people who did not find a place in this urban social dynamic. They are people without investment, who remained historically independent of the cities, but were always there to replenish the cities demographically in times of economic growth, and to take in their economic refugees in times of decline. This history of demographic interdependence, between the cities which could increase their productivity by means of investment and the tribal people who could not, generated a culturally distinctive sense of locality throughout the arid zone, which was different from the temperate and subtropical zones to the north and south. More recently, as translocality has accelerated with the increasing social complexity of globalization, the people without investment have been forced into political and economic dependence on the cities, but the new city-based nation-state governments responsible for them have so far largely continued to leave them without investment. In the new political framework of the information age the tribes rebel. Similar developments are evident among tribal populations in other parts of the modern Islamic world, and make interesting comparison with similar populations elsewhere.

This article reports on the current state of collective migrant organizing for two Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Strained relations between migrant organizations and village authorities combine with small active memberships to limit the level and type of fund-raising in support of village development and governance. These findings highlight the difficulties that communities face to maintain effective translocal institutions over time, particularly as first-generation migrants "retire" and a lack of new arrivals hinders organizational renewal.

This volume discusses globalising processes from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. It focuses on the a ~global southa (TM), notably the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Densely researched case studies examine a variety of approaches for their potential to understand connecting processes on different scales. The studies seek to overcome the main traps of the a ~globalisationa (TM) paradigm, such as its occidental bias, its notion of linear expansion, its simplifying dichotomy between a ~locala (TM) and a ~globala (TM), and an often-found lack of historical depth.

Abstract Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development policies, nationalist citizenship regimes, and discourses, and arbitrary state power. Arguably, the consequent insecurity and uncertainty have profound implications for the social and economic life of migrant labourers. Although these conditions engender dangers and risks, they also hold possibilities for crafting translocal livelihoods and social relations. In this introduction, we investigate the diverse trajectories of labour migration in Southeast Asia through a critical discussion on the concept of 'precarity' that underscores the resilience of labour migrants despite the precarious conditions of their lives. The special issue suggests that, while precarious labour has long been part of regimes of control and exploitation in the region, precarity today is shaped by the blurry boundaries between the legal and the illegal, between local and global lives, and between different worlds of belonging.

AbstractTranslocal music worlds are often defined as networks of local music worlds. However, their networked character and more especially their network structure is generally assumed rather than concretely mapped and explored. Formal social network analysis (SNA) is beginning to attract interest in music sociology but it has not previously been used to explore a translocal music world. In this paper, drawing upon a survey of the participation of 474 enthusiasts in 148 live music events, spread across 6 localities, we use SNA to explore a significant "slice" of the network structure of the U.K.'s translocal underground heavy metal world. Translocality is generated in a number of ways, we suggest, but one way, the way we focus upon, involves audiences traveling between localities to attend gigs and festivals. Our analysis of this network uncovers a core‐periphery structure which, we further find, maps onto locality. Not all live events enjoy equal standing in our music world and some localities are better placed to capture more prestigious events, encouraging inward travel. The identification of such structures, and the inequality they point to, is, we believe, one of several benefits of using SNA to analyze translocal music worlds.

"This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality. The chapters scrutinize the capacity of translocality to describe, in new ways, the multiple mobilities, exchange practices and globalizing processes that link places, people and institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus with others in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Illuminating translocality as a productive concept for studying cross‐regional connectivities and networks, this volume is an important contribution to a lively field of academic discourse. Following new directions in Area Studies, the chapters aim to overcome 'territorial containers' such as the nation‐state or local community, and instead emphasize the significance of processes of translation and negotiation for understanding how meaningful localities emerge beyond conventional boundaries.
Structured by the four themes 'crossing boundaries', 'travelling ideas', 'social and economic movements' and 'pious endeavours', this volume proposes three conceptual approaches to translocality: firstly, to trace how it is embodied, narrated, virtualized or institutionalized within or in reference to physical or imagined localities; secondly, to understand locality as a relational concept rather than a geographically bounded unit; and thirdly, to consider cross‐border traders, travelling students, business people and refugees as examples of non-elite mobilities that provide alternative ways to think about what 'global' means today.
Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas will be of interest to students and scholars of the anthropology, history and sociology of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as for those interested in new approaches to Area Studies."