Department of social anthropology seminar with Madeleine Reeves

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Madeleine Reeves from University of Manchester. She will present the following paper:

Moskvachylyk: Spaces of favour and indifference in Moscow’s temporary housing market


Abstract
Drawing on research in 2009-10 amongst Kyrgyz migrant workers and the officials with whom they establish relations, this paper explores the economies of favour that emerge in the search for temporary accommodation in Moscow. Like other temporary residents in the city, migrant workers from Kyrgyzstan depend upon on a range of formal and informal brokers to provide living space and to secure the documents needed to become legally legible to the state. In this economy of letting and sub-letting living space and producing and loaning of documents, “help” (jardam) plays a crucial role. The paper explores the dynamics of interaction between landlords, intermediaries, tenants, sub-letters and police officers with a view to thinking theoretically about “favours” and their limits in the contemporary Moscow housing market. For whilst jardam is crucial to keeping roof and remaining legally legible to the state, the ambiguity of residential arrangements can make the offering and denial of help the focus of considerable moral commentary. For the “big tenants” who I focus on in this chapter, the challenge is often to limit the space of favour with their kin-tenants, whilst avoiding accusations of moskvachylyk—a recent Kyrgyz neologism that mocks the sly instrumentality of those who have spent too long in Moscow. I argue that the moral commentary around help and indifference provides a useful way for situating economies of favour in ethnographic terms.

Bionote
Madeleine Reeves is a University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her interests lie in the anthropology of the state, space, and everyday il/legalities. Her current research focuses on the experiences of ‘flexible legality’ for Kyrgyzstani migrant workers in Moscow. She is the editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia: Contested Trajectories (Routledge 2012) and the forthcoming volume, Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics (Indiana). A monograph based on her doctoral research into the workings of new international borders in Central Asia is forthcoming with Cornell as Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia.


All interested are welcome!