Good political ethnography provides thick description of how individuals experience politics at the ground level, while also suggesting something about political patterns more generally. Regine Spector’s Order at the Bazaar, a comparative study of two of Bishkek’s main markets, achieves both of these goals, painting a vivid portrait of life in these bazaars and suggesting how these political lives undermine many of the dominant narratives about Central Asian politics.

Spector begins with a contradiction: International rankings and various political indicators suggest that Kyrgyzstan has low levels of rule of law and ineffectual governance structures, yet, locally, several large bazaars have thrived over the past decades of alleged political chaos, becoming regional trading hubs.

At the center of the book is a contrast between the political and social order maintained in two very different bazaars. The Dordoi bazaar is located on the outskirts of Bishkek. It has a sole owner, who works with a group of trade union leaders, a hybrid of former Soviet Union officials and local elders, to organize sellers, help resolve disputes, limit corruption, and provide security for the bazaar. In contrast with this, the Osh bazaar, located in the center of town, has a more complex political position with 78 separate owners, whose on-again, off-again negotiations with state officials gradually led to the modernization of the bazaar through a series of infrastructural improvements.

Osh bazaar, using Katherine Verdery’s formulation, is a “fuzzy property,” with less clear ownership structures. Here, much of the credit for maintaining order goes to aksakals, elders who build on a somewhat invented tradition of village-style leadership, reviving an idealized past. These figures paint a picture of a state that may appear weaker than it was during the Soviet period but, in many ways, is simply more malleable. Governance becomes a series of negotiations, and the line between state and nonstate actors blurs. This presents the growth of the bazaar not as a neoliberal success story of local entrepreneurs, nor a postcolonial vision of the violent march of capitalism, but something more in between. Spector states: “To presuppose the inevitable legitimacy of trade based on logics of profit and efficiency alone is to be complicit in the construction and naturalization of a flawed conceptualization of markets as socially and morally disembodied” (p. 45). Instead, she spends much of the book describing the ways in which the market is socially and morally embodied.

While Spector says that she wants to refocus “our attention away from the national to a more local level” (p. 165), she is selling her text short somewhat. In fact, what will be of interest for most readers concerned with post-Soviet politics is the way in which the local level actually reframes the history of national-level changes. For example, the chapter that focuses on the owner of Dordoi bazaar provides a history of how the owner managed to expand the market during the political tumult of the past 25 years. The author points to his strategically ambiguous approach, where he moved from government loyalist to the opposition, seamlessly over time, as the reason for his success. The somewhat unexpected contribution that this chapter makes is a retelling of Kyrgyzstan’s last two decades of political history from the ground up, through the moves and strategies of this one individual and his family. The result is a fascinating complication of narratives about “state-capture” by oligarchs and political patronage showing how, for the individuals within the system, there is a need to constantly move between economic and political strategies in order to maintain influence.

Politically speaking, one of the most interesting, implicit questions that the book asks concerns what political order is. As Spector’s informants point out, order in the bazaar is not measured from the top down with typical rule-of-law indicators used by groups like the World Trade Organization, but for most traders, order is about equity in economic exchanges, predictability, fairness, and transparency. Political actors in the bazaar do not directly involve state institutions to do things like resolve disputes, but still, this order should “derive from education and professional intuitions of the state” (p. 70). This recalls Eugene Weber’s and Norbert Elias’s work on the creation of citizens’ education and a “reorganization of human relationships” (p. 71), which, in the Kyrgyz case, is particularly active and fraught during the postcommunist period. For traders, it is the corruption of state officials, the inability of the new capitalist system to provide social protections, and the failure of the state more generally to instill orderly habits among the people that is the real cause of any disorder.

Order is thus “shaped and inscribed by their past experiences and current environment, and serves as the foundation for action as people seek to create meaningful lives in otherwise chaotic and corrupt states” (p. 189). As such, order is not about quantitative economic indicators, but the ways that people understand equity, fairness and civility. More than a certain standard of living or political arrangement, it concerns how individuals feel about their own lives and interactions with others. This raises some complicated methodological questions that Spector confronts by using a variety of tools. She relies primarily on interviews and participant observation in the two key bazaars studied, but also an analysis of historical newspaper accounts of the bazaar.

In a brief chapter at the end, Spector does point to several comparative cases across the post-Soviet world and beyond, where bazaars continue to thrive, but this was one place where the reader may wish that she had gone further. Indeed, she often refers to these markets as “islands of order” (p. 174), but one wonders whether they could also be seen as interconnected archipelagoes. Recent work, by Magnus Marsden (Trading Worlds, 2016), for example, focuses not on the bazaars as physical sites but on Afghan traders who move across Central Asia, visiting these markets. A future project that looks at how goods and individuals move between these sites of stability, and how this shapes post-Soviet order on the local level, would help us understand order both locally and at a transnational level.

Similarly, more historical literature on bazaars by anthropologists like Clifford Geertz (e.g., “The Bazaar Economy,” American Economic Review, 68(2), 1978), along with some more recent studies (e.g., Noah Coburn, Bazaar Politics, 2011), link local social order to the economics and politics of the bazaar. This, too, would suggest that the order of the bazaar might point to other political patterns in the wider political and social arenas of Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia. For example, Spector points to the fact that the key bazaars in Central Asia are primarily in Uzbekistan, dominated by Tajiks. As ethnically Kyrgyz merchants and businessmen have taken over much of this trade going through Kyrgyzstan, and as links to China become increasingly important, how will this reshape politics and ethnicity in Central Asia? Likewise, Spector points to the Tunisian fruit seller who, fed up with bribes and local corruption, set himself on fire, triggering the movement that would become the Arab Spring. What political changes might the smaller successes of Central Asia’s traders eventually bring? The author provides an entry point for asking these questions from below, while avoiding the language of international development and other political studies insisting that order flows from above, fundamentally misunderstanding much of the political economy of developing societies.

The greatest strength of Order in the Bazaar is Spector’s commitment to such a view, and, taken as a whole, her political ethnographic approach to the bazaar provides a fascinating look at order in post-Soviet Central Asia. It also opens the door for other questions about the role of the bazaar in political and social formations more broadly and forces us to ask more sophisticated questions about what creates order.