Humanities & Social Sciences 4 (2016 9) 795-814 ~ ~ ~ УДК 304.727 Ethnic Markets in post-Soviet Transitional Space: Their Role in Society and the Research Area Victor I. Diatlov* Irkutsk State University 1 Karl Marx Str., Irkutsk, 664003, Russia Received 12.12.2015, received in revised form 21.01.2016, accepted 02.04.2016 Open-air markets have become an essential element of the post-socialist transitional space. <...> They appear over a vast area from China to Poland and Germany. <...> Coupled with the huge scale and meaningful “shuttle trading”, they formed a new phenomenon in the economic, social, political and cultural life. <...> Markets have become a mechanism of economic survival for the vast number of people who have lost their former status and sources of income; they created the launching pad for the formation of small and medium-sized businesses. <...> As the fi rst and fi nal points of shuttle trading system, markets have integrated into the global system of relationships, not only trade ones, but socio-cultural as well. <...> Open-air markets have become an important area of economic activity for the cross-border migrant workers, facilitating their economic and cultural integration. <...> In conjunction with their huge role in promoting Chinese and Turkish goods into the emerging markets, the markets have been treated in urban communities as “ethnic” markets, namely Chinese, Kyrgyz and Caucasian. <...> As such, they quickly outgrew usual marketplaces and turned into sophisticated and self-developing social organisms, clumps of social connections, networks, confl ict places, power and control mechanisms. <...> In many Russian cities the largest ethnic and migrant clusters formed around these markets. <...> They became “a meeting place” and a place of daily mass contacts, cooperation and confl icts; representatives of different languages, cultures and traditions. <...> Markets have gained tremendous symbolic importance, commonly representing a lot of new forms of life, economic and cultural practices, ways of social contacts and relationships. <...> Political turmoil and social upheavals overshadowed this problem in the minds of people and in the views of researchers. <...> The purpose of this text is to classify and organize what we know (and what we presumably do not know) about the open-air “ethnic markets” in the post-Soviet era. <...> All rights reserved <...>