The Fredrik Barth Honorary Lecture 2015 ‘Revisiting Entrepreneurs: Afghan trans-regional trading networks across Eurasia and beyond’

The project formally started on the 1st October, but it also has a kind of launch today when Magnus Marsden delivered The Fredrik Barth Honorary Lecture 2015 ‘Revisiting Entrepreneurs: Afghan trans-regional trading networks across Eurasia and beyond’, at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

You can read more about the event HERE.

And here is a short extract with the scene-setting and some key ethnographic questions discussed in Magnus’ talk:

“ In March 2014 I met with Karim in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa. Karim is a Dari or Farsi-speaking Afghan in his early forties who was born in Kabul but has lived in Ukraine since 1995. Having raised some capital in Kiev selling women’s underwear provided to him on a credit basis by a Hindu businessmen of Afghan nationality, Karim moved to Odessa in 2000. Back then, traders in Odessa were benefitting from the city’s status as a node for the distribution of imported Chinese made commodities across Ukraine and also Russia. Karim built a business in the import and sale of Chinese-made leather goods in Odessa’s 7km container market (shown in the picture). Today, Karim lives in Odessa with several members of his family who have come to Ukraine from Afghanistan (including his wife, younger brother, maternal cousins, and these men’s families). Karim imports leather bags, wallets, and purses by the container load to Odessa from China, selling these on a wholesale basis across the country. He also imports smaller quantities of leather goods from Italy and India. The bar in Odessa in which we met that evening was close to being empty, a sign of the difficult economic climate in Ukraine, caused by the ongoing conflict with Russia. The gryvn’s depreciation had devastating effects on traders such as Karim: he would be unable to import the same quantity of goods to Ukraine that he had in previous years. The market for leather goods is dependent on sales in the period leading up to the festivals of New Year and Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and International Women’s Day: ‘nowadays in Ukraine’, he told me, ‘there is no day of women, no day of men and no day of love – there is nothing’. Karim told me that he had a further $325,000 worth of goods stored in a warehouse in China. He was waiting to transport these by shipping containers to Ukraine. Yet Karim still had goods languishing in his Odessa warehouse. He had also been unable to pay his Chinese supplier for an earlier round of goods that he had taken on credit because of the sharp decline in sales. Karim showed me on his mobile phone a scanned copy of a bill that his Chinese suppliers had recently sent to him. Despite all of the precariousness that came with being a commodity trader in Odessa, Karim told me that he was not interested in moving elsewhere. When I inquired about the health of his mother and sister in Germany, he replied:

‘they are all well, they have their health, but not much else besides. Life in Germany is really the life of a refugee (zindagi-i muhajir). They go between home and work, that is it. Even there a father is not a father. The only good thing they have are hospitals  and schools. In Ukraine, at least, we have a life - a free life (zindagi-i azod)’. How did an Afghan become a trader in Chinese-made bags and purses in Ukraine? Why does Karim claim to prefer to live in Odessa than move to elsewhere? On what grounds does Karim distinguish between ‘the free life’ (zindagi-I ozod) that he claims to lead in Ukraine and the ‘life of exile’ (zindagi-I muhajir) that he says his relatives must contend with in Germany?”