Controlling Bazaar, Fighting Precarity, and Producing the Nation

This article focuses on production cycles of traditional embroidery making (yaka) in Turkmenistan. In Turkmenistan, yaka is a key element in the national dress for women's everyday wear and since the process of the embroidery making is often handmade, the distribution of yaka and the networks of producing and dealing this essential apparel offer a rich ethnographic context. The article focuses on the study of resellers and dealers who control the market flow and the precarious labor of those women who produce this highly valued handmade product in villages and households and then resell them at the major bazaar hubs in the central cities. At each stage, there is a quality, price and “tradition” control—whether the product adheres to the constructed but widely shared idea of the “national dress.” These relations are also imbued with logics of the gendered economy of respect for work and mutual help given the precarious circumstances of each individual yaka-maker. Yaka-making is seen by many women as a way out of financial crises, but it becomes a cycle of precarity based on the trends, demands, and forms of the formal dress requirement in the state institutions to which female clients have to adhere to when choosing the product. What influences the market flows in trends, supply, and everyday profit? How do women regulate the market from within despite the growing precarity? Studying these internal power relations will help us reveal how cultural and social control stems from the precisely political and male domination and how the rules of the game in that field are guided by completely different gendered and labor principles on the ground.