Marketing Hope tells the story of how people in the majority Buryat town of Aginskoe, located in a Siberian district east of Lake Baikal, engaged in the immensely popular multi-level marketing (MLM) and pyramid schemes of the 2010s. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in 2014–15, Schiffauer examines how developments in the national and local economies fueled residents’ interest in Amway and similar firms whose activities were legal yet in many ways paralleled the exploitative techniques used by illegal pyramid schemes. In the late 1990s, the Aga district had been declared a special economic zone and functioned as a tax haven, drawing significant resources into its communities for a time. When that status ended in 2008, resources dried up and the search for new means of money-making made this area particularly rich ground for the MLM and pyramid enterprises that were expanding throughout Russia. Schiffauer engaged with both enthusiastic MLM networkers and skeptical relatives to illuminate why so many people there had placed their faith in these ventures—ventures that, she argues, ultimately contributed to their impoverishment. By way of framing the larger goal of the book, she suggests that a close examination of these schemes can help us “better understand how capitalist ideology gains support at the periphery and how capitalist values penetrate social structures” (4). In other words, Schiffauer takes a zoomed-in, ethnographically-precise approach, yet she also seeks to make this case speak to broader questions concerning how capitalism is taken up and legitimated in postsocialist settings and beyond.

At the core of the book is Schiffauer's consideration of how MLM and pyramid schemes worked through local relations of kinship and intimacy in Aginskoe. Reviewing the principles of informal economies and blat as they functioned in the USSR, Schiffauer contends that the role of close social relationships in people's survival strategies had shifted but were no less important in the context of postsocialist capitalism. Indeed, “the logic of the market is not opposed to mutuality, but, on the contrary, requires mutuality in order to deal with the problems and challenges generated by the wider economic system” (45). Individuals who became distributors for companies such as Amway drew on their immediate social networks to sell their wares and recruit new sellers, from whom they earned a percentage of subsequent sales in turn. Ideologies of mutual support encouraged people to be receptive to these propositions; in fact, purchases often seemed driven less by interest in the commodities themselves than in the pre-existing relationships of intimacy and reciprocity on which they turned. Along the way, Schiffauer provides enough background on socialist economies and postsocialist financial crises to make the events intelligible to readers less familiar with this history, but the book is not really centered on postsocialism as a rubric, and the author avoids drawing any rigid distinctions of “before” and “after” the collapse of the USSR, emphasizing continuities in Buryat social life and the relations of kinship upon which people drew through changing economic circumstances. She also brings frequent attention to global histories of MLM and to trends in neoliberal capitalism at large. Theories of gift and commodity, Foucauldian notions of subjectification, and Lauren Berlant's notion of “cruel optimism” all make as-needed appearances.

On the whole, the book speaks to rather classical anthropological theorizations of value and to the anthropology of postsocialist transitions, but its primary interest seems to lie in neither of those schools of work but rather in the highly specific dynamics of MLM, as well as in the broad ways these speak to global capitalist dynamics. Student audiences without pre-existing interest in any of these areas may struggle to engage with the book, though it is accessibly written and admirably researched. It culminates in an important take-away: the final chapter focuses on the ways in which Siberian MLM and pyramid schemes overlap with the neoliberal gig economy at large, with its emphases on flexibility and independent entrepreneurship and its tendency to further practitioners’ financial insecurity and ultimate exploitation. In both scenarios, “rather than seeing themselves as oppressed workers, people prefer to imagine themselves as competitive protagonists of capitalist growth” (159), becoming complicit in their own impoverishment. In the postsocialist context, desires to reject “socialist mentalities” provide specific ideological justification for embracing new financial ventures, but for Schiffauer, these ventures are just one example of a more global problem. The claim that neoliberal gig employment and postsocialist multi-level marketing are two manifestations of the same phenomenon is the most provocative and illuminating contribution of the book.