Working Paper Series on Informal Markets and Trade
The Working Paper Series is produced by the Project on Informal Markets and Trade with the support of a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation’s funding initiative “Between Europe and the Orient — A Focus on Research and Higher Education in/on Central Asia and the Caucasus.” ISSN: ISSN: 2510-2826
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8
This paper gives an account of the unmaking of Soviet workers at the Vernissage in Armenia. I argue that the unmaking of Soviet workers, first, is the irrelevance of Soviet workers as workers once they lost their jobs after the collapse of the Soviet Union and came to the Vernissage to trade. During the Soviet period, private trade was forbidden, and the Soviet government persecuted people who dared to engage in it. Consequently, many people grew up thinking of trade as a criminal activity that was non-productive and parasitic, as opposed to productive work that facilitated the modernization of the USSR. After the dissolution of the USSR, when trade was liberalized and many former Soviet workers were pushed into trade as they lost their jobs, it still retained its quality of not being “real” work, to borrow Roberman’s (2013) wording. Even 25 years after the dissolution of the USSR, former Soviet workers at the Vernissage still want to be identified with their former Soviet occupations and not with trade. However, now engaged in trade, former Soviet workers came up with a “new” way of establishing identity and hierarchy—through production. I describe this “new” way as “the identification game”; employing it, I demonstrate how former Soviet workers at the Vernissage identify and represent themselves as masters, whose work is productive and intellectual. In doing so, they single out resellers, people who resell the work of other masters, by implying that their work is parasitic and selfish. However, this “identification game” is reified only by the older generation of traders, former Soviet workers. The younger generation of traders at the Vernissage, which does not have any experience of being Soviet workers, is disengaged from it, thus undermining the Soviet view of trade as not “real” work and making it irrelevant in the postsocialist era. Thus, I contend that the unmaking of Soviet workers consists in, first, their irrelevance as workers in a postsocialist period, and second, the irrelevance of their ideas about trade as not “real” work. Furthermore, to support my depiction of a master who engages in “the identification game” and a younger-generation trader who is disengaged from it, I give two ethnographic portraits of traders at the Vernissage. I assert that the disengagement of a younger generation of traders at the Vernissage signals a change in the perception of trade as “real” work and runs parallel to the unmaking of Soviet workers.
10
The merchant language of the Georgian Jews deserves scholarly attention for several reasons. The political and social developments of the last fifty years have caused the extinction of this very interesting form of communication, as most Georgian Jews have emigrated to Israel. In a natural interaction, the type of language described in this article can be found very rarely, if at all. Records of this communication have been preserved in various contexts and received different levels of scholarly attention. Our interest concerns the linguistic aspects as well as the classification.
In the following paper we argue that the specific merchant language of Georgian Jews belongs to the pragmatic phenomenon of “very indirect language.” The use of mostly Hebrew lexemes in Georgian conversation leads to an unfounded assumption that the speakers are equally competent in Hebrew and Georgian. It is reported that a high level of linguistic competence in Hebrew does not guarantee understanding of the Jewish merchant language. In the Georgian context, the decisive factors are membership in the professional interest group of merchants and residential membership in the Jewish community. These factors seem to be equivalent, because Jewish members of other professional groups (and those from outside the particular urban residential area) have difficulties in following the language that are similar to those of the Georgian majority. We describe the pragmatic structure of interactions conducted with the help of the merchant language and take into account the purpose of the language’s use or the intention of the speakers. Relevant linguistic examples are analysed and their sociocultural contexts explained.