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This article seeks to extend the scope of existing literature on migration in Kyrgyzstan by revealing the material and moral assessment of labour migration and remittances amongst the people of Sopu Korgon, a village in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Remittances perform important social roles in sustaining social relations, making absent migrants ‘present’, gaining and/or retaining social status, passing through rites of passage and fostering the emergence of a new wealthy elite. Drawing on ethnographic research, the author examines the ambivalent opinions that surround the issue of migration and explores the idioms through which family absence is justified. The author argues that in addition to the important social functions of remittances, migrants' transfers in Sopu Korgon also help immediate family members to remain in the village and sustain their lives there. This in turn suggests that migrants' money ‘slows up time’ for other family members, delaying their own need to migrate.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank a number of anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on the earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Dr Madeleine Reeves for her strong, warm encouragement and guidance. I owe an enormous gratitude to all of my informants in Sopu Korgon for their openness, trust and hospitality. I wish to thank Burul Usmanalieva for her initial help. Prof. Dr Heinzpeter Znoj at the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Switzerland has also been a kind and supportive supervisor during my MA studies.
Notes
The SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis, a Moscow-based non-profit organization which monitors hate crimes, reports a minimum of 525 victims of racist xenophobic violence in 2008, including 97 deaths. According to SOVA's data for 2008, the main victims of nationalist violence were people from Central Asia (49 dead, 108 injured) and the Caucasus (23 dead, 72 injured). Read the full article at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,,QUERYRESPONSE,RUS,,4b7cee862d,0.html [Accessed 1 October 2009].
For more on the history of migration in Kyrgyzstan, see Schmidt and Sagynbekova (2008).
‘Kyrgyz labor migrants restore their positions’, Azattyk. Available from: http://www.azattyk.kg/content/Kyrgyzstan_migration_economic/2240442.html [Accessed 6 December 2010].
Aiyl ökmötü is the government administration body. It was established by the Kyrgyz government in 1996 as a body of the local self-governance unit. Depending on the size of a village, aiyl ökmötü can contain from one to 12 villages.
See the example of customary law – the court of elders – given by Beyer (2010).
For a comparison, see Reeves (forthcoming). In her paper on the role of migrant remittances on life-cycle rituals in southern Kyrgyzstan, Reeves cites her informants using the word for ‘in town’ (Kyrg. shaarda). As opposed to the notion of talaada in my research, being shaarda does not necessarily imply something negative. It means that a person is not in cities and towns of Kyrgyzstan but in Moscow.
For the sake of protecting informants' privacy, all the names in the article have been changed.
Upon graduation from high school, children get a passport, an important identification document allowing them to travel abroad. It is also the age when children get engaged into labour and are no longer considered ‘children’ but young people.