Coping with Uncertainty

Petty trade helped vast numbers of people to survive the crisis faced by post-Soviet Russia. The book analyses how this survival technique was carried out in practice. On the basis of his fieldwork research, the author shows how people coped with rapid social change and places their activities within a context of government policies, migration flows and entrepreneurial strategies. «This is an original work based on extensive fieldwork research. Wielecki skillfully intertwined «ethnographic meat» with «the bones of theory», which has resulted in a «flesh-and-blood» anthropology.» Michał Buchowski «This is an immensely insightful exploration of petty trade in post-Soviet Russia. The author laces his genuine ethnographic work in a coherent account of the concepts of uncertainty, embeddedness, and informal economy.» Violetta Zentai

Author Biography

Kamil Maria Wielecki is an anthropologist and social philosopher at the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has done ethnographic fieldwork research in Moldova, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. His areas of interest include postsocialist studies, political economy of capitalism, globalization, and economic anthropology.