graduate student
Olomouc, Czech Republic
The author of this study attempts to apply the "material turn" approach – M. Delanda's Assemblage Theory – to study the Chinese presence in the agricultural sphere in Siberia within the framework of the concept of the informal economy. The paper will demonstrate how, as a consequence of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, the collapsed agricultural networks and abandoned infrastructure have been excluded from formal processes, production chains, and networks and have found their second birth in the field of the informal economy. According to mechanisms of market self-organization, former collective farms and, at present, "Chinese" farms have become unique places of assembly of people, objects, and technologies – acting actors embedded in transnational, trans-local, and local networks.
Informal economy, Assemblage theory, sociomaterial networks, agriculture, Chinese presence, Siberia
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