Trust and Gender in a Transnational Market: The Public Culture of Laleli, Istanbul
The operation of market exchange usually relies on a combination of written rules and regulations and some unwritten but shared cultural codes. Yet in an age when the mobility of people, goods, and money is rapid and far-reaching, many markets might lack either one or both of those bases of operation. This essay discusses the organization of such a marketplace, one formed at the nexus of cross-border movements of goods and people. In the Laleli district of Istanbul, entrepreneurs from different countries and of both genders mobilize eclectic idioms of trust and sex in order to carry out economic exchange in a weakly regulated economic environment. In the process, they form gendered social relationships ranging from friendship to sexual intimacy.
Over the last fifteen years, a transnational trade network has emerged that is centered in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and spans the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia. The agents of the chelnochny biznes (shuttle trade), as unregistered and unregulated cross-border trade is called in Russian, are small-scale traders who travel abroad regularly to purchase moderate quantities of consumer goods, such as garments and leatherwear. Turkey, especially Istanbul, is an important node of the shuttle trade. The Laleli district, on the historic peninsula of Istanbul, has become the primary marketplace where predominantly female shuttle traders (chelnoki) from the FSU meet Turkish small-scale entrepreneurs who have set up shop there to cater to the traders’ demands.1
Laleli is a locus of transnational movements of people in the shuttle trade network. At the same time, it is a marketplace characterized by weak legal regulation. This informality has led both Turkish suppliers and chelnoki to attempt to turn strangers into regular trade partners. In the process, they construct an urban space through their everyday encounters in streets, shops, and restaurants. Following Sharon Zukin (1995), I call this urban space a public culture, which includes the entrepreneurs’ savvy with operating beyond the gaze of the state, gendered skills in the informal economy, a makeshift notion of trust, and stereotypes and narratives of masculinity and femininity.2 Suppliers and the chelnoki employ elements of this public culture in order to conduct business. In this essay, I focus especially on how idioms of trust and sex are strategically manipulated by both male suppliers and female chelnoki to achieve economic ends. The idiom of trust, which draws on both Russian and Turkish informal small-business practices, enables buyers and sellers to carry out repeated trade with one another by sharing risks. Likewise, the idiom of sex and intimacy mediates market exchange between entrepreneurs of the opposite sex in several ways. Sexual intimacy may ground trusting relationships that facilitate regular, repeated exchange between male and female traders. Conversely, sexual stereotypes and codes are also manipulated for economic gain. In both instances, idioms of trust and intimacy differ from the social and ethnic relations economic sociologists have identified as facilitating transactions in uncertain economic environments.3 Indeed, buying and selling on trust might provide fragile insurance against economic ups and downs in the shuttle trade network. Likewise, business relations embedded in sexual or romantic intimacy might just as easily result in betrayals as initiate trusting partnerships between men and women. Nonetheless, these idioms are integral to the unfolding of the shuttle trade in Laleli.
The language of exchange nurtured in the public culture of Laleli does not fully describe the shuttle trade, however. At times when the threat of state control over unregulated trade is coupled with relatively large-scale and potentially more profitable activities, certain aspects of the shuttle trade have been informally or even illegally organized by stronger actors. In what follows, I describe the features of shuttle trade and the formation of the public culture in Laleli at the nexus of transnational flows of people. This sets the stage for a discussion of the notions of trust and gendered practices among small-scale entrepreneurs in Laleli and a concluding analysis of the large-scale organization of the shuttle trade.
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Notes
This essay draws on the field study I conducted in 1996–97 in Istanbul, Trabzon, and Moscow as well as back in Istanbul in the summers of 2001 and 2002. The research was funded by a grant from the MEAwards. I would like to thank Kelly Brewer, Caitrin Lynch, the editors of Public Culture, and especially Beth Povinelli and James Rizzo for very helpful comments on previous versions of this essay.
- I use the term Turkish to denote citizens of Turkey rather than people of Turkish ethnicity. The Laleli marketplace is ethnically very diverse, as will be shown.
- My description of public culture differs from the way the editors of Public Culture have used the term (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988). My emphasis is on everyday urban practices rather than on art forms, cultural products, and services. Yet like Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, I also emphasize the translocal character of public culture.
- Economic sociologists have critiqued the hypothetical market of neoclassical economics (where agents are indifferent to extended social contacts) by emphasizing that real-life markets suffer from malfeasance and asymmetrical access to information. Some of the ways economic agents overcome these problems include getting to know their trading partners and operating within social networks of one sort or another (Granovetter 1985; Portes 1994).