Trader‐tourism is a massive survival strategy practiced in East European countries, in this case Bulgaria. “Trader‐tourists” import Turkish goods that are sold at Bulgarian open‐air markets. Profit is made by circumventing customs control through the bribing of officials—a loophole facilitated by widespread corruption and engendered “from above” by the more powerful transitional actors. The picaresque role that former state employees have adopted as present‐day tradertourists accentuates a deficit of legitimacy and absence of normative institutional support. Trader‐tourists attempt to overcome this deficit of authority through imaginative treatment (poetization) of entrepreneurial materials in order to attain a reinterpreted form of the previous stability, normativeness, and order. [economic anthropology, trader‐tourism, Bulgaria, Balkans, transition]

People caught in circumstances of social upheaval differ in the ways in which they adjust to instability and change. Occasionally individuals at less privileged socioeconomic levels engage in socially devalued practices such as the small‐scale trading enterprises that have been degraded ideologically during 45 years of communist rule in Bulgaria. In this article we explore the ways in which people adjust to change by examining ethnographically the practice of trader tourism in Bulgaria. We argue that such an examination supports a rethinking of the concept of boundaries, if boundaries are fluid sets of constraints that individuals negotiate when reacting to monumental stress. Specifically, we consider the reactions of population groups within Bulgaria to the post‐1989 economic crisis. We also suggest that members of each group react in group‐specific strategies of temporary inclusion, permanent inclusion, and exclusion, [economic anthropology, survival strategies, markets and trader tourism, capitalism con. communism, Roma/Indo‐Roma/Gypsies, Eastern Europe/Balkan/Bulgaria, transition/boundaries]

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