Abstract
“When Salary Is Not Enough . . .“: Private Households in Central Asia outlines household economic strategies during the insecurity of the post-Soviet period. Editors Eckhard Dittrich and Heiko Schrader present the results of a multi-year project by a team of researchers from Germany, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The project utilized data from surveys and interviews conducted in urban and rural areas of northern Kazakhstan, southern Kazakhstan, and northern Kyrgyzstan. In each setting, the team conducted 150 surveys (100 in urban settings and 50 in rural settings) and 40 interviews (25 urban and 15 rural).
As the primary research focus is outlining the strategies of households, the majority of the book presents detailed descriptive findings about aspects of household income-generating activities and consumption. Each of the chapters is authored by a combination of various research team members. The book begins with a review of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, which forms the authors’ framework for investigating household economies. The authors are intentional in linking the factors of a household resources basis from the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach to Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, which justifies their focus on households’ natural capital, physical capital, social capital, human capital, and financial capital. The introductory chapter is followed by two chapters of general economic and political information about Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Survey methodology and findings are presented in the following six chapters in three different forms. First, overall findings for the entire sample of 451 households are presented, followed by a chapter for each location that focuses on rural and urban differences. Presentation of the survey data ends with a chapter covering differences between North Kazakhstan, South Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The six chapters are packed with detailed descriptive data on various aspects of household economies, including information on informal and formal income-generating strategies, reliance on family networks, savings strategies, and consumption habits. Unfortunately there is not a standard presentation of the data across cases, as the chapters are authored by various combinations of team members, making comparisons across cases in areas of individual interest difficult.
The following four chapters contain a presentation of the general methodology for the interviews along with chapters presenting the findings of each case. Unlike the survey findings, there is not a general summary of interview findings from all cases nor a summary of differences between the cases. Interview findings mostly support the descriptive survey findings and provide interesting anecdotal information about the trends outlined in the survey analyses. One key difference is that survey findings indicate thata majority of households (64 percent [p. 60]) report not being part of a kin-based resource-sharing network. In contrast, interviews highlight the multiple ways that families support each other, ways that definitely form a resource-exchange network. As with the chapters describing the survey results, the interview findings were written by various combinations of research team members, and the findings are not presented in a standard way, with varying levels of quality.
If a reader would like to quickly understand the ways in which households survived the economic insecurity of the post-Soviet period, I would recommend going directly to Chapter Five. It provides a succinct, yet detailed synthesis of data described in the previous chapters. Chapter Five outlines a typology of six varieties of household economic strategies based on the survey and interview findings. The team divides the sample into “poorer, middle, better off” households and differentiates strategies for each category in rural and urban settings. To support their typology, the authors present vignettes of three households that represent each of the six categories. As this chapter was written by a single set of research team members, the key areas of variation are consistently described across types, allowing for a clearer understanding of the differences between cases.
The final chapter provides a general conclusion. It brings back into the conversation the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach framework and nominal references to types of capital presented in the first chapter of the book. The title of the chapter refers to a bold claim that the kinship-based resource-sharing networks used by families to survive the post-Soviet transition form a new “variety” of capitalism. The claim is tentatively argued, with reference to the need for more study (p.437). As discussed above, the majority of respondents in the survey (N=451) identified being in a closed nuclear household that did not exchange anything with other households, while many of the interviews (N=151) described the large role that family networks played in household economic strategies.
The large volume of detailed descriptive information about multiple aspects of household economies in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan lends itself to being most useful as a reference for specialists of the former Soviet region. There is very little theoretical grounding or application that would make it more interesting to a general audience. Only Chapter Five, the succinct summary of six types of households, would be of interest to a general audience. Overall the text is cumbersome to read, and the non-standard coverage of findings across cases is frustrating to navigate. It should be mentioned that the research team and editorial staff have generously offered an open-access version in Russian.