“Traders and Non-Russian Aliens” a Hundred Years Later: An Introduction

Abstract

This article introduces a thematic cluster on the anthropology of the market in indigenous Siberia. It approaches market as a system of social interrelations and suggests an optics for ethnography of these relations that takes units of exchange, rather than categories of “population” (ethnos, “people”) as its subject. The key argument of this article is that market relations are socially embedded in other forms of exchange, such as redistribution and gift, and thus exist in close links with the notions of state subjecthood and biopolitics.