The Central Asian World (Routledge Worlds) [1 ed.] 9780367898908, 9781032492179, 9781003021803, 036789890X

Citation preview

“Discover the ‘Central Asian World’ through the lenses of leading anthropologists. Drawing from empirical data and giving voice to local communities, the authors help us to explore the complex lives and experiences of contemporary Central Asians. These original contributions were possible due to the generosity and hospitality of Central Asians who welcomed ‘outsiders’ into their homes and generously shared their food, time, and knowledge with them. If a decade ago, Central Asians had served foreign anthropologists as research assistants, translators and/​or informants, today, they have become established and emergent scholars contributing to the international discourse on the region.” Elmira Köchümkulova, Co-​ordinator of the Cultural Heritage and Humanities Unit, University of Central Asia “This collection of deeply informed essays puts the ‘Central’ back into ‘Central Asia’ –​ a region too long treated as a cultural and intellectual backwater but in historical and ethnological reality an arena of socio-​cultural ferment and reciprocal permeation on a global scale. The authors transform the charge of marginality into an object of critical reflection across an impressive array of disciplines, topics, and venues.” Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University, USA “Central Asia has long been unaccountably marginalized in disciplinary and political worldings. This superb collection of essays triumphantly demonstrates the huge importance of this vast region for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary world. Offering a comprehensive, polyphonic introduction to the area’s diverse and fluid pasts and presents, the volume advances cutting-​ edge anthropological approaches in explorations of how more-​than-​human reverberations of previous regimes affect and shape material culture, ecologies, cosmologies, kinship, economies and state encounters. With contributors from both within and beyond Central Asia, this looks set to be a foundational work for the region and social sciences alike.” Catherine Alexander, Professor of Social Anthropology, Durham University, UK

TH E C E N TR A L ASIAN WO RL D

This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ at the intersection of post-​Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds. Encompassing chapters on life between Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, this volume situates the social, political, economic, ecological and ritual diversity of Central Asia in historical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonising and queering approaches to Central Asia. The volume’s discussion of More-​than-​Human Worlds, Everyday Economies, Material Culture, Migration and Statehood engages core analytical concerns such as globalisation, inequality and postcolonialism. Far more than a survey of a ‘world region’, the volume illuminates how people in Central Asia make a life at the intersection of diverse cross-​cutting currents and flows of knowledge. In so doing, it stakes out the contribution of an anthropology of and from Central Asia to broader debates within contemporary anthropology. This is an essential reference for anthropologists as well as for scholars from other disciplines with a focus on Central Asia. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix is a social anthropologist focusing on water and energy issues. She is the author of Iconic Places in Central Asia: The Moral Geography of Pastures, Dams and Holy Sites (2017) and is co-​editor with Beatrice Penati of Environmental Humanities in Central Asia (Routledge, 2023). She is setting up a transdisciplinary team at the University of Bern to foster environmental justice around marine renewable energy technologies. Madeleine Reeves is Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. Her interests lie in the anthropology of space, power, mobility and reproduction. She is the author of Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (2014) and the co-​editor, most recently, of The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty with Rebecca Bryant (2021). She is currently leading a new research project on infertility and the emergence of new reproductive markets in Central Asia.

T HE ROU T L E DGE WO RLDS THE ANDEAN WORLD Edited by Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen Fine-​Dare THE SYRIAC WORLD Edited by Daniel King

THE TOKUGAWA WORLD Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-​min Tao THE INUIT WORLD Edited by Pamela Stern

THE FAIRY TALE WORLD Edited by Andrew Teverson

THE ARTHURIAN WORLD Edited by Miriam Edlich-​Muth, Renée Ward and Victoria Coldham-​Fussell

THE MELANESIAN WORLD Edited by Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason

THE MONGOL WORLD Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope

THE MING WORLD Edited by Kenneth M. Swope

THE SÁMI WORLD Edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva and Sigga-​Marja Magga

THE GOTHIC WORLD Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend THE IBERIAN WORLD Edited by Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim, and Antonio Feros THE MAYA WORLD Edited by Scott Hutson and Traci Ardren THE WORLD OF THE OXUS CIVILIZATION Edited by Bertille Lyonnet and Nadezhda Dubova THE GRAECO-​BACTRIAN AND INDO-​GREEK WORLD Edited by Rachel Mairs THE UMAYYAD WORLD Edited by Andrew Marsham THE ASANTE WORLD Edited by Edmund Abaka and Kwame Osei Kwarteng THE SAFAVID WORLD Edited by Rudi Matthee THE BIBLICAL WORLD, SECOND EDITION Edited by Katharine J. Dell

THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD Edited by Xinru Liu, with the assistance of Pia Brancaccio THE WORLD OF THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH Edited By Robert H. Stockman THE QUAKER WORLD Edited by C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon Grant THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE WORLD Edited by Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce THE ANGKORIAN WORLD Edited by Mitch Hendrickson, Miriam T Stark and Damien Evans THE SIBERIAN WORLD Edited by John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson and Vladimir Davydov THE CENTRAL ASIAN WORLD Edited by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves THE EPIC WORLD Edited by Pamela Lothspeich

www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Wor​lds/​book-​ser​ies/​WOR​LDS

THE CENTRAL ASIAN WORLD

Edited by

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves

Designed cover image: Copyright Cholpon Alamanova 2020. Naryn Syr Darya panorama First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Feaux de la Croix, Jeanne, editor, author. | Reeves, Madeleine, editor, author. Title: The Central Asian world / edited by Jeanne Feaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves. Description: New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005022 (print) | LCCN 2023005023 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367898908 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032492179 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003021803 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology–Asia, Central. | Asia, Central–Civilization. | Asia, Central–History. | Asia, Central–Politics and government. | Asia, Central–Social conditions. | Asia, Central–Economic conditions. | Asia, Central–Ethnic relations. | Asia, Central–Social life and customs. | Asia, Central–Religious life and customs. Classification: LCC DK851 (ebook) | LCC DK851 .C465 2023 (print) | DDC 958 23/eng/20230–dc08 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005022 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​89890-​8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​49217-​9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​02180-​3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003021803 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

xii xvi xvii xxiv

List of Figures  List of Tables  List of Contributors  Acknowledgements  1 Introduction: centring the anthropology of Central Asia  Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves

1

PART I: REVERBERATING LEGACIES  17 2 Ethnogenesis through the lens of Soviet ethnography: academic research in the service of nation-building and socialist modernity  Sergey Abashin Translated by Matthew Naumann

21

3 Lasting legacies in Central Asia’s agro-pastoralist livelihoods  Jeanine Dağyeli

39

4 Aftershocks of perestroika: Tajikistan’s flattened modernity  Isaac McKean Scarborough

55

5 Struggling to interpret Islam in Central Asia: religion, politics, and anthropology  Julie McBrien

68

6 Decolonizing ‘the field’ in the anthropology of Central Asia: ‘being there’ and ‘being here’  Alima Bissenova

82

vii

—​​​​ C o n t e n t s —​​​

7 Utterly Other: queering Central Asia, decolonising sexualities  Mohira Suyarkulova

96

PART II: SOLIDARITY AND STRUGGLE  113 8 Qara Shangyraq: searching for a Qazaq home between two worlds  Zhaina Meirkhan 9 The Dvor and urban communities: socio-​spatial rhythms in Bishkek and other cities of Central Asia  Philipp Schröder 10 Fighting back: the older working-​class women’s resistance against market forces in Kyrgyzstan  Elmira Satybaldieva 11 Local political organization in Afghanistan  Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili 12 Daughters as Ojiza: marriage, security and care strategies for daughters among Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan  Aksana Ismailbekova 13 New churches and the religious freedom agenda in Kyrgyzstan  Noor O’Neill Borbieva

115

130

144 159

173 188

PART III: CARE AND INTERDEPENDENCE  205 14 Theorizing Central Asian neighbourhoods as social interdependence, state encounter, and narrative  Morgan Y. Liu

209

15 Life and death in the margins: care and ambivalence in southern Kyrgyzstan  Grace H. Zhou

222

16 Bargaining over care and control: money transfers and ICT-​based communication in transnational families between Tajikistan and Russia  Juliette Cleuziou 17 Outsourcing domestic care: gendered labour mobility and ambiguities of Turkmen migrant work in Istanbul  Marhabo Saparova

viii

237

253

—​​​​ C o n t e n t s —​​​​

PART IV: NAVIGATING THE STATE  267 18 Ethnicising infrastructure: roads, railways and differential mobility in northwest China  Agnieszka Joniak-​Lüthi

269

19 Language choices, future imaginaries, and the lived hierarchy of languages in post-​industrial Tajikistan  Elena Borisova

284

20 Sonic statecrafting: the politics of popular music in Uzbekistan  Kerstin Klenke 21 Before the law: policy, practice and the search for the ‘Prepared Migrant Worker’ in the transnational migration bureaucracy  Malika Bahovadinova 22 Reeducation time: the banality of violent paternalism in Xinjiang  Darren Byler

302

318

334

PART V: PERSONS, HEALING, AND MORE-​T HAN-​H UMAN WORLDS  349 23 The art of interpreting visionary dreams  Maria Louw

351

24 Early childhood health care in rural Kyrgyzstan  Baktygul Shabdan

365

25 Drunkenness and authority between animal and human worlds: on the partridge hunt in Tajikistan  Brinton Ahlin

379

26 Healing with spirits: human and more-​than-​human healing agency in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan  Danuta Penkala-​Gawęcka

392

PART VI: ETHICAL REPERTOIRES  407 27 Legal pluralism in Central Asia: the customization of state and religious law in Kyrgyzstan  Judith Beyer

ix

409

—​​​​ C o n t e n t s —​​​

28 Hospitality in Central Asia  Magnus Marsden

422

29 Mobile livelihoods of Kyrgyz Tablighi Jamaat: living between two worlds  Emil Nasritdinov

434

30 The value of a dead miner: industrial accidents, compensation and fairness in Kazakhstan  Eeva Kesküla

446

PART VII: EVERYDAY MORAL ECONOMIES  463 31 Who owns the (good) land? Cotton farming, land ownership and salinised soils in southern Central Asia  Tommaso Trevisani 32 Changing pastoral livelihoods  Carole Ferret

465 482

33 Small-​scale gold mining communities in Kyrgyzstan: torn between extraction projects  Gulzat Botoeva

499

34 The Central Asian bazaar since 1991  Hasan H. Karrar

514

35 Halal as a site of dilemma and negotiation  Aisalkyn Botoeva

528

PART VIII: MOBILITY AND MIGRATION  545 36 The money of home: remittances and the remaking of an Afghan transnational family  Said Reza Kazemi

547

37 Gendered worlds and cosmopolitan lives: Muslim female traders in Yiwu and Dushanbe  Diana Ibañez-​Tirado

560

38 Informality and Uzbek migrant networks in Russia and Turkey  Sherzod Eraliev and Rustamjon Urinboyev

577

39 Diasporas of empire: Ismaili networks and Pamiri migration  Till Mostowlansky

591

x

—​​​​ C o n t e n t s —​​​​

PART IX: MATERIAL CULTURE, PERFORMANCE AND SKILL  605 40 Uzbek cinema as a lens on early Soviet state-​and nation-​building  Cloé Drieu

607

41 In the blood and through the spirit: learning Central Asian textile skills  622 Stephanie Bunn 42 The differentiated authenticities of Rishton pottery in Uzbekistan  Haruka Kikuta

642

43 Clans as heritage communities in Kyrgyzstan  Svetlana Jacquesson

658

44 Uyghur subnational histories as meta-​heritage  Ildikó Bellér-​Hann

672

45 The Uyghur twelve muqam and the performance of traditional literature  685 Nathan Light

PART X: SACRED WORLDS  701 46 Using experience differently: religion, security, and anthropology in Central Asia  David W. Montgomery

703

47 Sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan as a phenomenon of power  Gulnara Aitpaeva

717

48 Uyghur Islam, embodied listening, and new publics  Rachel Harris

732

49 Mosque lives  Yanti M. Hölzchen

747

Polyphonic afterword: anthropology for Central Asian Worlds 

761 771

Index 

xi

FIGURES

2.1 The ethnographer T. Zhdanko (second from right) with kolkhoz workers in Karakalpakistan, 1953–​54  2.2 The ethnographers Kh. Esbergenov (third from right), T. Zhdanko (standing in the middle), A. Utemisov (first from left) with informants in Karakalpakistan, 1969  3.1 Soviet map from 1926 depicting areas suitable for cotton growing with irrigation (green), proposed for irrigation (dark pink) and without present plans for irrigation (light pink). The map was composed by a commission from the Academy of Sciences headed by V.I. Yuferev (available in colour at www.prlib.ru/​item/​417​526)  3.2 Qarakul market in Bukhara  8.1 ‘Basbau’, the ornate belt hung above the door of Qazaq yurts, used here as a decoration for a bench  8.2 The multicultural surroundings of the ‘Atameken’ Complex  15.1 A client at the Community, a centre in Osh run by a local non-​profit that provides shelter and services to vulnerable groups of women  16.1 ‘Two countries in one sim-​card. Profitable calls in Russia and Tajikistan’ Megafon commercial for cheap transnational tariffs, Tajikistan, 2021  16.2 T-​Cell commercial for the smartphone application ‘Chi gap’ (‘what are you saying?’), showing a young man in Russia (identifiable from Moscow’s Red Square behind him) and his wife in Tajikistan (identifiable via Dushanbe’s Rudaki statue) talking on the phone for a cheap tariff. The gender division of mobility is often represented in phone companies or online banking commercials, Tajikistan, 2021  16.3 ‘With online Eskhata the distance is closed.’ Commercial of Eskhata bank reflecting the importance of money transfers sent by Tajikistanis in Russia to their relatives at home, Tajikistan, 2021  18.1 Screenshot of the China Road and Bridge Corporation website  18.2 A roadblock under construction on the Naryn–​Kucha road  18.3 Map of Xinjiang  xii

23 25

43 47 124 125 224 240

241 247 270 270 273

—​​​​ F i g u r e s —​​​​

9.1 The House of Culture in Mehnat  1 19.2 Regular morning school assembly (lineika)  19.3 Distributing lessons for the following term among young teachers of Russian. The poster on the wall praises the beauty of the Russian language as a treasure to be preserved  20.1 The Turkiston Palace, one of the biggest concert halls in Tashkent and seat of O’zbeknavo and later O’zbekkonsert at its rear side. The caption on the monument reads: ‘Uzbekistan’s future is a great state’  20.2 At the folk fair for Independence Day in Alisher Navoiy National Park. The banners on stage read: ‘Congratulations on your holiday, dear fellow citizens!’ and ‘The homeland is singular –​the homeland is unique’  20.3 Promoting ‘Students’ clothing culture at Uzbekistan’s State Conservatory’  21.1 Migrant workers depicted as tools laying bricks: ‘In order to safeguard your health and life, be attentive, and follow safety procedures!’  21.2 Saying goodbye to ‘tools’ at the airport  23.1 Dreams may be a lens to explore the intangible hopes, fears and regrets that accompany a life  24.1 No.1 Kelechek Family Medical Practitioners Group, one of the hospital buildings in Kochkor  24.2 Kleinman’s diagram: popular, professional and folk sectors (1978, p. 86)  24.3 Four sources of treatment in Kochkor  25.1 Chukar partridge in captivity on the hunt  26.1 Rakhilyam’s healing séance  26.2 Rakhilyam with her patient during the healing session  30.1 The grave of a young miner after the funeral  30.2 Two coal processing plant workers standing in front of their home in Shakhtinsk  30.3 The 2008 Abai mine explosion memorial in the steppe  31.1 Abandoned farmland in the Maktaaral District. (September 2017)  31.2 Cotton plants on salinised soil  31.3 Cotton farmer and his grandchild, Maktaaral District. (September 2017)  32.1 Preparation for the transhumance. Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012  32.2 A flock of fat-​tailed sheep coming back to the village in the evening, Kaz./​South/​Tolebi, April 2008  32.3 A few rare dark fat-​tailed sheep among a flock of white Arkharo-​ Merinos arriving in the summer pastures, Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012  33.1 Meeting in the Kichine-​Too village  33.2 General meeting in Asyl-​Tash  34.1 The large bazaars in Central Asia tend to be container bazaars where shipping containers are repurposed as outlets. Here a buyer purchases from the wholesale section of Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar  xiii

288 289 294

305

307 311 327 328 352 366 370 370 380 397 401 447 454 455 467 470 476 485 489 491 506 506 516

—​​​​ F i g u r e s —​​​

34.2 On the outskirts of the bazaar, one tends to see pushcarts, as well as goods being sold from stalls, as here at the Barakholka market, in Almaty  34.3 In Central Asia’s large bazaars, multiple currencies are freely traded. In this image, taken in Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar, exchange rates are prominently displayed  35.1 A scene from a halal bakery in Osh  35.2 Chubak aji Jalilov tasting one of the products at a halal expo in Kyrgyzstan  35.3 A poster advertising Muslim women’s apparel. Pictures illustrate both modern Muslim outlooks as well as Kyrgyz traditional outfits with a modern flare  36.1 Hakimi’s family  37.1 Billboard of a cargo company shipping goods from Yiwu to Tajikistan, Yiwu, 2018  37.2 USSR halal restaurant in Yiwu  37.3 Retail vendor of art and prints in Yiwu’s Night Market  37.4 One of the numerous shops selling Muslim clothes in Yiwu’s area known by foreigners as ‘Maedah’  38.1 Pulat and his co-​villagers waiting for Chechen protection racketeers  38.2 Everyday life in Kumkapi  40.1 Shaykhantaur medresseh, transformed into a film studio  41.1 Felt toys for tourists  41.2 Felts for sale in Ashkhabad bazaar  41.3 Munara imitating her grandmother Sabira palming yak hair rope  41.4 Tajik Kyrgyz bedding pile  41.5 Kygyz shyrdak  41.6 Uzbek embroidered felt with positive and negative imagery  41.7 Kurak  41.8 Guard outside the Emir’s palace, Bukhara, wearing ikat  41.9 Fabric merchant, Samarkand 1912–​16, with a framed page from the Koran hanging at the top of his stall  42.1 A master looks at his productions from the 1970s (2003)  42.2 Master Komilov’s works with national ash glaze from the 1990s (2003)  42.3 Zafar’s works (2003)  42.4 Diagrammatic representation of the social aspects of pottery technique  42.5 Diagrammatic representation of the axes of authenticity in Zafar’s pottery dolls  42.6 Diagrammatic representation of the axes of authenticity in Asadbek’s pottery  42.7 Sample of Asadbek’s work from 2018  43.1 The covers of genealogy books reassert 1) the old age of genealogies (as old as petroglyphs); 2) the role of elders –​ak sakal –​in their preservation and transmission; 3) relatedness through sharing a

xiv

517 522 531 535 536 548 564 565 567 570 584 586 611 624 626 627 629 631 632 633 635 637 646 647 651 652 652 653 655

—​​​​ F i g u r e s —​​​​

43.2 46.1 46.2 7.1 4 47.2 48.1 48.2 48.3 49.1 49.2

common putative ancestor or the same root (as in a tree); 4) pride in the land inhabited and bequeathed by the ancestors  663 Various ways of representing ancestries as genealogical charts: while in the first genealogy books (upper left) genealogical charts were like illustrations, subsequently they became more ‘data-​bound’  665 A typical taxi stand outside a market, with drivers hoping to catch fares from shoppers, Kyrgyzstan, 2012  705 An intracity taxi driver with “Allah” and “Muhammad” ornaments hanging on the windshield, Kyrgyzstan, 2006  707 Praying at the Mausoleum of Shadykan-​Ata, Naryn region, 2014  718 Talmazar-​Buva mazar, Batken province, 2012  722 Propaganda image from a 2014 ‘peasant art’ competition, depicting the dangers of mediated listening, Xinhuanet, 2014  734 Bekhtiyar, an Uyghur businessman from Karakol, Kyrgyzstan in 2016, holding a family photo taken before they adopted a pious lifestyle  736 Women at a Qur’an class in the Pokrovka neighbourhood of Bishkek, 2016  738 This printout announces the date and time of circumcisions organised at the mosque and offered to villagers by mobile doctors (name of village and doctor’s mobile numbers pixelated; photo by the author).  748 Posters in the prayer hall of Kyzyl-Too mosque. In the centre, the poster entitled ‘The sequences of ritual prayer (namaz)’ displays 17 separate images of a man wearing a Muslim-style cap (doppi), a longsleeved white shirt and black trousers moving through the standardised routine of ritual prayer. The poster to the right lists the ‘Al-Fatiha’, the first surah of the Qur’an; the poster to the left is entitled ‘Zikir and duba prayers after namaz’ – that is, prayers of supplication (Arab.: duʿāʾ). The posters to the right and left each spell out the texts both in Arab script and Cyrillic transliteration (photo by the author).  749

xv

TABLES

0.1 Mining accidents in Karaganda area, 1961–​2009  3 33.1 Sequence of events around Solton-​Sary and Kum-​Bel mining sites in August 2019 

xvi

450 502

CONTRIBUTORS

Sergey Abashin is Professor of Anthropology at the European University at St Petersburg, Russia. He is the author of Nationalisms in Central Asia: In search of Identity (Aletheia, 2007) and Soviet Kishlak: Between Colonialism and Modernization (Moscow, NLO 2015). In his current research, he is exploring migration processes in Russia and Central Asia. Brinton Ahlin is Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, and Harper-​Schmidt Fellow in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows. He is a cultural anthropologist specialising in the ethnography and history of Islam in Tajikistan during and after the Soviet Union. Gulnara Aitpaeva is Director of the Aigine Cultural Research Center in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of sacred sites, Kyrgyz literature and folklore. She is the co-​editor of 1916: Depoliticizing and Humanizing Our Knowledge on the Uprising in Central Asia (Bishkek, 2020), The National Manual for Safeguarding Sacred Sites and Ritual Practices’(Bishkek, 2020) and Literature and Society in Central Asia, in Cahiers D’Asie Centrale (Paris and Bishkek, 2015). Malika Bahovadinova is a political anthropologist working on migration, bureaucracy and development. Her research has covered labor migration, development aid, gendered labour practices and migration law. She is investigating these themes to explore the changing content and normative ideas of citizenship in Eurasia. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities in the University of Amsterdam. Ildikó Bellér-​Hann is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen where she teaches Turkish and Central Asian Studies. She is the author of Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–​1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur (Brill, 2008), and co-​author (with Chris Hann) of The Great Dispossession: Uyghurs Between Civilizations (LIT Verlag, 2020). Judith Beyer is Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz. She specialises in legal and political anthropology and has conducted long-​ term ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar. In Central Asia, her research xvii

—​​​​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​​​

focuses on legal pluralism, (neo-​)traditionalisation, activism, the state and practices of social ordering. She is the author of The Force of Custom. Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan and co-​editor of Practices of Traditionalization in Central Asia (with Peter Finke) and Performing Politics. Ethnographies of the state in Central Asia (with Madeleine Reeves and Johan Rasanayagam). Alima Bissenova is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Nazarbayev University. She specialises in urban anthropology, anthropology of Islam, postcolonial studies and intellectual history. She has published her work in English and Russian in the journals Religion, State, and Society, Europe-​Asia Studies, Ab Imperio, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie and Sotsiologiya Vlasti. Noor O’Neill Borbieva is Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her research, on gender, religious change, and the development sector in the former Soviet Union, has been published in numerous journals, including Slavic Review, Central Asian Survey and Anthropological Quarterly. Her book, Visions of Development in Central Asia: Revitalizing the Culture Concept, was published by Lexington Books in 2019. Elena Borisova is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, specialising in migration, (im)mobility, and citizenship in Eurasia. She received her doctorate from the University of Manchester in 2021. Her research explores the imaginative and moral aspects of migration in Tajikistan, and covers the questions of morality, personhood, modernity, the good life, kinship, care and gender. Aisalkyn Botoeva is a researcher who is fascinated by questions in economic sociology and economic anthropology. Among other things, in her past and ongoing research, she has examined how people adopt varying strategies and economic repertoires of action in the face of uncertainty and shortage of resources. She has published her individual and collaborative works in Politics & Society, Theory & Society, Families, Relationships and Societies, Post-​Soviet Affairs and Central Asian Survey, as well as other journals. Aisalkyn lives in Alexandria, Virginia and currently works at the international NGO, Search for Common Ground. Gulzat Botoeva is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Swansea. Her research focuses on illegal economies in Central Asia working at the intersection of economic sociology and criminology. Her doctoral research examined illegal hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan, focusing on issues of legitimation of illegality and the use of alternative monies in a cashless society. Her current research on mining disputes furthers her analysis of the effects of neoliberal policies on rural communities in Kyrgyzstan. Stephanie Bunn is an anthropologist of textiles at the University of St Andrews, conducting research into Central Asian textiles and basketry. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the first ever British Museum exhibition of Kyrgyz felt textiles. She is author of Nomadic Felt (British Museum Press), editor of Anthropology and Beauty (Routledge) and co-​editor of The Material Culture of Basketry (Bloomsbury). She currently collaborates with several scholars and basket-​makers on Forces in

xviii

—​​​​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​​​​

Translation, www.forc​esin​tran​slat​ion.org researching the relationship between basket-​work and mathematics. Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-​Tech Penal Colony. His current research is focused on state power, policing and carceral theory, infrastructure development and global China. Juliette Cleuziou is an Assistant Professor at the anthropology department at University Lumière-​Lyon 2 (France). Her doctoral research explored marriage and ‘de-​marriage’ in Tajikistan. More recently, she has been conducting a research project on funerals and death among Central Asian migrants in Russia. Her main research topics are kinship, gender relations, and ritual economy in Tajikistan, as well as transnational families and community building in migratory contexts. Jeanine Daǧyeli is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Vienna and research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the history and anthropology of labour in Central Asia, human-​environment relations, disease and death, and cultural heritage. Cloé Drieu is Research Fellow at CNRS in the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asia Studies. She specialises in the history of Central Asia during the interwar period, which she has studied through the lens of Uzbek cinema. Her book on the subject, Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919–​1937 (2019) was first published in French (2013). Since 2019, she has been coordinating a comparative project on ‘Mass Violence on the Shatterzones: Caucasus and Central Asia beyond the Great War (1912–​1924)’. Sherzod Eraliev is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sociology of Law Department of Lund University and a Visiting Professor at Tashkent State University of Economics. His research interests include labour migration, state and society relations, and international affairs in Eurasia. Carole Ferret is a French ethnologist, researcher at the CNRS (Laboratory of Social Anthropology, Paris). She has carried out extensive fieldwork since 1994 among the Turkic peoples of Siberia and Central Asia, especially Yakuts-​Sakha and Kazakhs. Her main research topics are the anthropology of action, technology, nomadic pastoralism, nature, and children. Rachel Harris is Professor of Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on expressive culture, religion and state policies in China’s Muslim borderlands. She led the Leverhulme Research Project ‘Sounding Islam in China’ (2014–​17) and is now working with Turan University in Kazakhstan on a British Academy Sustainable Development Project to revitalise Uyghur cultural heritage in the diaspora. Her latest monograph, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (2020), is published by Indiana University Press.

xix

—​​​​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​​​

Yanti M. Hölzchen is an anthropologist who has worked in north-​eastern Kyrgyzstan on mosques, Islamic funds, imams and the Tablighi Jamaat, as well as in Ethiopia, focusing on burial and pilgrimage practices in interreligious settings. Since May 2022, Yanti is employed at the College of Fellows of the University of Tübingen, Germany. Diana Ibañez-​Tirado is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. Based on her fieldwork in southern Tajikistan, Diana has published numerous articles that discuss the anthropology of time, the senses, and family life. More recently, Diana has conducted research with Russian-​ and Persian-​speaking traders who work and live across Eurasia, drawing on fieldwork in China, Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan and Turkey. Aksana Ismailbekova is a research fellow at Leibniz-​ Zentrum-​ Moderner Orient (ZMO). Ismailbekova completed her dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. A monograph based on her doctoral research was published as Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan by Indiana University Press in 2017. Svetlana Jacquesson is a senior research fellow at the Department of Asian Studies (Palacký University). In her current research, Jacquesson explores the politics of knowledge production on and in Central Asia, focusing on popular ways of re-​emplotting history to support old and new identity claims and on the politics of knowledge production on or in Central Asia. She is the author of Pastoréalismes (2010), co-​editor of Local History as an Identity Discipline (2012) and editor of History Making in Central and Northern Eurasia (2016). Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is also the managing editor of the platinum Open Access journal Roadsides. Agnieszka focuses in her research on Xinjiang and the Sino-​ Central Asian border regions. Hasan Karrar is an Associate Professor in a multidisciplinary humanities and social sciences department in at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. His research and writing cover contemporary China, Central Asia, and the Karakoram region of north Pakistan. Said Reza Kazemi is a visiting researcher in the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg and holds a PhD in anthropology (2021) from the same university. His doctoral research examined transnational family relationships from Afghanistan in the context of displacement and war. He previously worked as a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Herat and Kabul. Eeva Kesküla is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tallinn University. She has conducted fieldwork in mining communities in Estonia and Kazakhstan and published articles on labour, health and safety, and working-​class lives in the post-​ Soviet space. She is currently studying location-​independent workers and the impact of CO2-​reduction policies on Estonian miners. Haruka Kikuta is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Hokkai Gakuen University in Japan. She has been engaged in cultural anthropological studies in Uzbekistan since 2002, where her first research explored Islamic patron saints for artisans. Her xx

—​​​​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​​​​

current research examines the social influence of labor migrants from Uzbekistan on changing family relationships. Kerstin Klenke specialises in the anthropology of music with a focus on Central Asia and the Caucasus. She is author of The Sound State of Uzbekistan. Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era (Routledge); her current research project is Abkhazia –​ War, Music, Memory. She is head of the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Nathan Light is Docent in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang (LIT Verlag, 2008), and has published widely on history, language, ritual, economy and kinship in Central Asia. Morgan Liu is Chair of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University, with a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows and served 2019–​22 in the Presidency of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. Maria Louw is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University and leader of the cross-​disciplinary Center for the study of Ethics and Community. She has conducted extensive research in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Her interests include religion, secularism and atheism; morality and ethics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology. Magnus Marsden is a Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. His books include Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Northern Pakistan, Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier and Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia. Julie McBrien is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality. Her research focuses on religion, secularism, gender, development, and nationalism. She is the author of From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Zhaina Meirkhan is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Michigan. Her research examines Qazaqs’ relationships with imperial Russia and Qing China, legacies of state violence, ethno-​national identity, the politics of belonging, oral literature, oral history, migrations in comparative contexts, human experience of exile, imperial formation, and the politics of expulsion. David W. Montgomery is Research Professor in the Department of Government and Politics and the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, and director of program development for CEDAR –​Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion. His books include Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding; Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan, Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World and Everyday Life in the Balkans.

xxi

—​​​​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​​​

Till Mostowlansky is Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He is the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and co-​editor of Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022). Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is Professor of International Affairs and Founding Director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores bottom-​up governance arrangements across diverse spheres including governance, security and development. Her books include Toward a Political Economy of the Commons: New Rules for Sustainability (with Meina Cai, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Raufhon Salahodjaev), Land, the State, and War: Property Rights and Political Order in Afghanistan (with Ilia Murtazashvili), and Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan. Emil Nasridtinov is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Urbanism and International Development at the American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan. He is also a director of SILK –​Social Innovations Lab Kyrgyzstan. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Melbourne. His main research and teaching expertise areas are migration, religion and urbanism. His main long-​ term ethnographic field engagement in researching religion is with Tablighi Jamaat. In addition, he has conducted research and written on state policy towards religion, Islamic education and madrassas, Islamic civil society, vulnerability and resilience to radicalisation, migration and Islam, and Islam and peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan. Danuta Penkala-​Gawęcka is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where she received PhD and Dr. habil. degrees. She specialises in medical anthropology and Central Asian studies (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). Her publications have focused on medical pluralism, spiritual healing and people’s health-​seeking strategies. Marhabo Saparova is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northeastern University, in the US. Her research interests are in migration, gender, and urban studies with a focus on care and domestic work, informality, and migrant governmentality in Turkey and Central Asia. Elmira Satybaldieva is a Senior Research Fellow at the Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent. Her main area of research interest is on grassroots activism in Central Asia. She is the co-​author of Rentier Capitalism and its Discontents: Power, Morality and Resistance in Central Asia. Isaac McKean Scarborough is Assistant Professor in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Institute for History, Leiden University. He is interested in post-​war social and economic development in Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia, especially in terms of continuities across historical boundaries, such as the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Philipp Schröder is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Nazarbeyev University, Astana. He focuses on identity, urban spaces, youth and gender, as well as on translocal mobilities and entrepreneurialism. He is the author of Bishkek Boys: Neighbourhood Youth and Urban Change in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital. xxii

—​​​​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​​​​

Baktygul Shabdan is a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Goethe University Frankfurt. She is the co-​editor (with Deepak Kumar Ojha) of Dynamics of Speaking and Doing Religion (TUP, 2022). Her research focuses on the anthropology of childhood and personhood, the anthropology of Islam, Sufism, digital religion, medical anthropology, Kyrgyzstan and India. Mohira Suyarkulova is an Associate Professor at the American University of Central Asia (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). Her research focuses on nationalism, statehood, gender and sexuality, and environmental politics in Central Asia. She has co-​authored the Book on Happiness for Young (and not so) LGBT (but not only) People (in Russian) together with Nina Bagdasarova and Georgy Mamedov (2021), based on ethnographic studies of psychological well-​being of LGBTQ+​communities in Kyrgyzstan. Tommaso Trevisani (DPhil in Social Anthropology, Free University of Berlin) teaches Societies and Cultures of Central Asia as an Associate Professor at the University of Naples L’Orientale. He has conducted research in Uzbekistan and in Kazakhstan on topics including: agrarian change, class and industrial work, marriage and family, post-​socialist state-​ and nation-​building. Rustamjon Urinboyev is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Law of Lund University. Rustamjon is an interdisciplinary socio-​legal scholar, studying migration, corruption, governance and penal institutions in the context of Russia, Central Asia and Turkey. Grace H. Zhou is a Post-​Doctoral Researcher at Maynooth University. Her research focuses on transnational intimacies, practices of care, and the mobility of colonial forms across Central Asia. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and was previously a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University.

xxiii

newgenprepdf

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Any book of this size depends on the work of many hands. As editors, we gratefully acknowledge the willingness of our author colleagues to contribute to this project. This book collaboration took shape during a particularly fraught and anxious time in the parts of the world we live and work: we would like to thank all our contributing authors for their dedication, cordiality and dogged attention to detail, through many rounds of review and revision. We are grateful to the enthusiasm and support of our commissioning editor at Routledge, Meagan Simpson, and to the calm efficiency of Eleanor Catchpole-​Simmons, our production editor. Jeanne Brady, at Cove Publishing Support Services, has been a wonderful copy-​editor to work with in the final stages of this project. Cholpon Alamanova has graciously allowed us to use her stunning artwork on the cover of this book. We thank the Universities of Manchester, Oxford and Tübingen for making it possible to dedicate several years to this book. This project accompanied us over the last five years through a pandemic, maternity leave, a transatlantic move, changes of job, illness, and unemployment. We would like to express our deepest thanks to our families, our support networks, and to one another for keeping going when the task at hand seemed altogether too unwieldy and the time available to work on it, too short.

xxiv

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION Centring the anthropology of Central Asia Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves

This book celebrates the anthropology of Central Asia as a flourishing and consolidating field. It began with conversations between the co-​editors about a paradox that seemed to intensify during the 2010s. On the one hand, as social anthropologists teaching and researching this vast region, we were part of a vibrant and rapidly growing subfield of Central Asian anthropology. It was an arena of rich internal debates, proliferating avenues of research, and probing analyses of the inequities of knowledge production on the region and their legacies.1 On the other hand –​and even as the scholarly subfield was burgeoning –​we found Central Asian ethnography remained marginal within the wider anthropological canon. Not only did Central Asia not seem to have any of the gatekeeper concepts (and perhaps also the gatekeeper senior scholars) that are associated with the anthropology of other world regions. It also had little in the way of visibility in general and comparative anthropology texts, introductory readings lists, or surveys of the field. To our students, Central Asia often came across –​if it figured at all –​as what Louw (2007: 18) calls an ‘anthropological no-​man’s land’, where debates and arguments had to be gleaned from a still rather limited number of published monographs, or from PhD work that was difficult to access and often written for an entirely different audience. Equally importantly, there were few introductory resources that gave a sense of how one might theorise from this region –​from the experiences of this particular postsocialist postcolony in all its historical specificity and complexity. Indeed, the only introductory anthropology text that explicitly included Central Asia, Dale Eickelman’s The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, had much more to say about the former region than the latter. The most recent, fourth, edition (2001) was already two decades old as we worked on this project. Seminal as it was when it appeared, Eickelman’s text simply didn’t reflect the vibrancy of the scholarly field as we encountered it in seminars, workshops and conferences. Nor did it capture the urgency of calls to address historical biases and blindspots in the production of anthropological and historical knowledge about the region (Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva 2021).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-1

1

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​

To be sure, there were and are plenty of books about Central Asia aimed at a general and student audience. But these have mostly either been descriptive country surveys, or analyses of high politics focused on what David Lewis (2008) pithilly calls the ‘temptations of tyranny’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union (see, e.g. Cummings 2013, Rashid 2017, Roy 2016). There were few accessible texts that gave a sense of the complexity and vibrancy of social life beyond the tropes of Central Asia as a place, in the subtitle of one recent book, of ‘revolution, murder and intrigue’ (Shishkin 2013). The dominance of top-​ down approaches and grand abstractions have real consequences for the way Central Asia comes to figure in the public imagination –​ and the shelves of bookshops. For one thing, Central Asia often comes to seem over-​ determined by the machinations of outside interests: the region’s leaders mere pawns in a new ‘New Great Game’ between Russia, China and the West (Cooley 2012). For another, an excessive focus on political elites and their capacity to mobilise society can result in a rather thin and reductive account of the social. Political scientists, for instance, have devoted considerable attention to ‘clan politics’ and its role in driving what Collins (2006: 16) called ‘negative political trajectories’ in Central Asia. But much less attention has been given to how, and in what circumstances, lineage affiliation or ‘clan’ membership comes to serve as a salient register of identification or political affiliation (though see, notably the work of anthropologists Beyer 2011, Gullette 2010, Ismailbekova 2017). This lack of attention to emic registers of analysis and interpretation means that researchers often bypass the question of how people make sense of, navigate, or co-​ constitute particular political configurations, whether those of revolutionary protest in Kyrgyzstan, the securitisation of social life in Xinjiang, the closure of an Islamic public sphere in Tajikistan, or the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Turkmenistan. In a compelling recent critique of such blind spots, Asel Doolotkeldieva (2022) has shown how an over-​emphasis on ‘elite-​led protest’ and popular manipulation, particularly by US-​trained political scientists (e.g., Radnitz 2010) has occluded sustained attention to protesters’ political agency –​or the substance of their political demands (see also Satybaldieva 2018). More generally, the discursive dominance of top-​ down frames of analysis leads to the evacuation of attention from issues that matter most to people in the region, such as the burden of housing debt (see Sanghera and Satybaldieva 2021 and Elmira Satybaldieva, this volume), the preservation of cultural heritage (see Svetlana Jacquesson, this volume), the passing-​on of craft skill (see chapters by Haruka Kikuta and Stephanie Bunn, this volume) or the making of a good life, (see Montgomery 2013 and Borisova 2021, as well as the chapters contributed by Yanti Hölzchen, Danuta Penkala-​Gawęcka and Maria Louw in this volume). Talking to friends and colleagues, we sensed that we weren’t alone in our frustration at the lack of accessible entry points to an ethnographically grounded analysis of social, political, economic and cultural life in Central Asia. In part, this is the result of largely uninterrogated colonial and Cold War legacies in the institutional organisation of anthropology departments in the global North, still often wedded to a ‘Three Worlds’ division of academic labour (Pletsch 1981, Ben-​Ari 2009). In teaching, hiring, and institutional organisation, Central Asia tends to be treated as an appendix of other, more visible elsewheres, whether defined in terms of geography (the Middle 2

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​

East, South Asia, Eastern Europe), religion (the ‘Muslim-​majority world’), or historical experience (‘the post-​Soviet states’). Such divisions create arbitrary silos of knowledge production about a region that straddles these boundaries. The five post-​Soviet states of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are often treated as part of a ‘postsocialist’ world and thus grouped together for institutional and teaching purposes with Russia and Eastern Europe. Afghanistan, meanwhile, is typically studied as part of South Asia or the Middle East, and Xinjiang is typically subsumed into East rather than Central Asia. While such global divisions of scholarly labour might be helpful for exploring certain themes and commonalities, such as the legacies of Soviet socialism, it also occludes the analysis of processes and relationships that link, say, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, or Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Such bounding also has the effect of privileging the perspective, language and scholarship of former imperial metropoles. If prospective anthropologists of Kazakhstan, for instance, are trained in the Russian language rather than Kazakh, or scholars of Xinjiang are trained in Mandarin rather than Uyghur, they are more likely to be exposed to some perspectives, ideas and scholarly literature in their training than others (Picket 2017). They are more likely to privilege research topics that foreground the perspective of those who speak the (former) colonial language. And they are more likely to hear certain narratives from their interlocutors. The fact that many people in Central Asia are bi-​or tri-​lingual doesn’t mean they express the same ideas when they are speaking one or other language, a point poignantly illustrated in the case of Osh Uzbeks by linguistic anthropologist, Emily Canning (2016). Context matters –​and so does the listener’s own social position. Two further consequences follow from the institutional marginalisation of Central Asia in anthropological teaching and research. The first is the discursive erasure of internal heterogeneity. If Central Asia as a world region is marginal to anthropological knowledge production, then its significant ecological, political, linguistic, cultural and religious diversity is more likely to be reduced to flattening generalisation. This is reflected in the pejorative simplifications that saturate public discourse (‘the Stans’, ‘Russia’s back yard’) as well as the metaphors through which foreign policy decisions are interpreted (as a ‘new Great Game’, or a ‘Giant Chessboard’). These simplifications simultaneously deny agency to Central Asian publics and treat huge regional variations in social and political organisation as simple variations on a theme of post-​Soviet statehood. The second consequence is that it can be hard for our students to distinguish the metaphorical ‘wood for the trees’. If the only texts available to our anthropology undergraduates are specialist monographs exploring a specific social practice, place, or social group, it can be difficult for them to make the connections between disparate materials, to reflect on the linkages between broad political transformation and everyday lifeworlds. It can also be difficult to appreciate the ways that, say, practices and expressions of what it is to be a Central Asian Muslim might differ between town and village, young and old, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, men and women (Montgomery 2017, Peshkova 2014, Privratsky 2001). It was as researcher-​ teachers engaged in conversations about the stakes, consequences and inequities of knowledge production about the region that we first mooted the idea of compiling this book: one that, we hoped, would convey something of the vibrancy and diversity of Central Asian anthropology as it existed in the early 2020s. We hoped to offer this curated collection to fellow anthropologists, to 3

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​

area specialists from other disciplines, and to a wider public interested in deepening their understanding of this region’s social complexity. This approach and these imagined audiences informed our editorial choices throughout the process of commissioning, editing and compiling chapters. We explicitly sought to produce a volume that represented and amplified a diversity of scholarly voices, including those of early career and more senior scholars. We wanted to recognise the range of scholarly traditions that characterise the anthropology of contemporary Central Asia and the varied sites in which that knowledge is being produced. In doing so, we have taken inspiration from colleagues who have critically explored the way that an imagined ‘we’ gets invoked across a global landscape of anthropology. As Chua and Mathur note in a recent introduction, ‘although anthropology’s long-​standing “romance with alterity” has been subject to extensive critical scrutiny, the same cannot be said for presumptions of affinity between anthropologists, which … are equally instrumental in shaping ethnographic knowledge’ (Chua and Mathur 2018: 1, citing Ntarangwi 2010: xii; see also Bošković 2008). We wanted in particular to give prominence to a generation of scholars trained in, or currently teaching in Central Asia, whose critiques of a ‘field’ that is also home have been some of the most incisive and important for Area Studies in recent years (see especially the critical collections edited by Kudaibergenova 2019, Marat 2021 and Doolotkeldieva 2022). While not all of our contributors would identify as anthropologists, each has conducted sustained, immersive fieldwork, using this research to generate theoretical insight. In commissioning ­chapters –​and each of the contributions here is published in English for the first time –​we have encouraged our authors to provide ethnographically driven introductions to a range of contemporary debates, rather than dry, encyclopaedic overviews or textbook-​style surveys. We encouraged a narrative style that would draw in a wide, non-​specialist audience to a particular domain of enquiry, giving them a ‘deep dive’ into some of the themes that animate contemporary research through the practice of ethnography. The result, we hope, is a take on ‘the Central Asian World’ as a locus of empirical and theoretical enquiry that reflects the plurality and vibrancy of these scholarly approaches. Readers will see that some places and some themes have generated significantly more anthropological research than others. We could have filled an entire book with contributions based on ethnography from Kyrgyzstan, while there remains a serious dearth of anthropological scholarship on contemporary Turkmenistan. This is in part a reflection of the different degrees to which sociocultural anthropology, as a theoretical practice of comparative enquiry on the human condition, has been institutionalised in Central Asian universities. But it is also a reflection of the greater openness to foreign research in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan than neighbouring states, making these comparatively more accessible to ethnographic fieldwork. Uzbekistan remained largely off-​limits to foreign anthropologists for much of the last 15 years, though there are encouraging signs of change, including the reopening in 2020 of a department of anthropology and ethnology at the National University of Uzbekistan.2 In other parts of the region, the research landscape remains bleak. Many of the scholars who conducted ground-​ breaking research on Xinjiang in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s find themselves blacklisted from return. Research in Tajikistan has become increasingly restrictive in a context of consolidating authoritarianism and repression of critical voices –​particularly for Tajik scholars themselves. 4

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​

In Afghanistan, the return of the Taliban to power in 2021 forced many Afghan scholars to flee (including one of the contributors to this volume), while few universities abroad would now allow scholars to conduct sustained anthropological research in Afghanistan. If this is intentionally a polyphonic collection, then, it is also a reflection of the politically constricted times in which it was produced: times in which the conditions of possibility for long-​term ethnographic research have varied dramatically and where the competing demands upon writing time fall differently and unequally among scholars with and without secure academic positions. Our hope is that, by dipping into chapters across its span, the reader can get a sense of Central Asia, not just in context (Montgomery 2022), but as context for reflection on how, where and when anthropological theory is produced and recognised within a wider scholarly community (cf. Herzfeld 1987 for the case of Greece). Below, we map out some of the contours of this evolving field before introducing our take on what the ‘Central Asian World’ might offer for anthropology.

AN ASYMMETRICAL FIELD Anthropological knowledge is not produced in a vacuum. It depends on a whole ecosystem of mentorship, training, funding, research access, serendipity and luck. It depends on scholars being deemed by those mentors to have acceptable, researchable, interesting, or ‘relevant’ topics of study that warrant funding and publication. It depends on gatekeepers and facilitators; it may rely on interpreters and transcribers, reviewers and editors. During the 70-​year existence of the Soviet Union, that ecosystem of ethnographic knowledge production about Central Asia was centred on Moscow and St Petersburg. Within this centripetal system, it was Russian-​speaking scholars from the Soviet centre who generated most authoritative accounts of social life in Central Asia for a Russian-​reading public, even as they often relied on those whom Roche (2014) felicitously calls ‘faithful assistants’: local anthropologists, conversant in the regional vernaculars, who acted as gatekeepers, facilitators and knowledge-​providers for visiting ‘expeditions’ (ekspeditsii) of faculty and students. As Sergey Abashin explores in his contribution to this volume, this was an asymmetrical field, even as it allowed a certain degree of social-​academic mobility to individual Central Asian scholars. In a rare analysis of this field of knowledge production from the periphery, Roche (2014) has explored how Tajik anthropologist Muhiddin Faizullaev’s meticulous documentation of Tajik social life was sidelined within a Moscow-​ centric hierarchy of knowledge production. Faizullaev’s work was also ‘filtered’ through the theoretical preoccupations of the anthropologists with whom he collaborated in the 1970s and 1980s: these preoccupations centred on ethnos theory and the study of religious and cultural ‘holdovers’ (perezhitki) (e.g., Bromlei 1973, Polyakov 1992) (Roche 2014: 5). The stakes of mis-​alignment with political priorities were considerable. Noted ethnographer Saul Abramzon, who spent most of his adult life in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, for instance, found that his 1971 monograph on the ethnogenesis of the Kyrgyz People (Abramzon 1971) was subject to harsh and sustained criticism in the pages of Sovetskaia Kirgiziia for stressing the enduring salience of tribal identities in Soviet Kirgiziia, after decades of ostensible ‘modernisation’ (Horolets 2018: 189; Tchoroev 2002). 5

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​

This ecosystem and the funding system that sustained it began to fracture and eventually collapse after the end of the Soviet Union. In the ‘wild’ 1990s, detailed ethnographic studies of what were now foreign states were no longer considered a priority for the Russian Academy of Sciences. Many of the scholars trained within these institutes either abandoned academia, switched geographical focus, or came to concentrate on questions deemed ‘urgent’, such as the rise of inter-​ethnic conflict in regions previous celebrated for their social harmony (Reeves 2014).3 In 2005, the division of Central Asia and Kazakhstan within the Institute for Anthropology and Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences was downgraded to a research group within the Centre for Asian and Pacific Research. Well-​funded research expeditions to Central Asia, which had often involved numerous staff and students travelling en masse, came to a grinding halt. Nor was this just a question of shifting economic priorities. On the one hand, Central Asian scholars found themselves sometimes being treated as research assistants rather than as peers by researchers with foreign credentials and funding (de Boulay 2019). In a political economy of knowledge production, in which donors from the global North could call the shots, local scholars could find themselves exploited and censored, prohibited from ownership of data they themselves had gathered (Kim 2019). On the other hand, local anthropologists in Central Asia were often treated by political leaders as de facto scholars ‘of and for’ the nation (see also Amsler 2007 for the case of sociology). Political and institutional prominence was given to a rather essentialised reading of national culture as a means of demonstrating who ‘we’ are and where ‘we’ have come from (Gullette 2010, Horolets 2018). University departments for the study of sociocultural anthropology (etnologiia) often explicitly foregrounded the study of the titular ethnic group in that particular republic. Opportunities for scholars to collaborate across borders were restricted by the dramatic hike in regional travel costs, new border regimes and the shifting priorities of newly nationalising regimes. Renewed political pressures also meant that Central Asian anthropologists, particularly in the restrictive academic environments of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, often avoided topics that could in any way be perceived as politically sensitive –​which largely excluded any research that did not celebrate the enduring spiritual culture of the titular nation (Abashin 2009). In Tajikistan, scholarly ethnography was recruited to the task of exploring a distinct Aryan heritage to the Tajik nation. One Tajik ethnologist, who during perestroika researched an authoritative monograph on land use and agricultural traditions in Uzbekistan’s Tajik-​majority Sokh Valley (Dzhakhonov 1989), became a vocal advocate of Aryanism a as a national ideology for Tajikistan, supposedly as a counter-​ weight to the nationalisms of Central Asia’s Turkic populations. In Uzbekistan, by the early 2000s ethnology had become, in Marlene Laruelle’s words, ‘one of the reigning sciences of Nationhood’, tasked with demonstrating ‘indisputable foundations for the preeminence of the Uzbek people over other national groups in their titular state’ (Laruelle 2010: 104). In this period, the ecosystem of anthropological knowledge production shifted in significant measure to the global ‘West’. Anthropologists trained outside the Soviet Union had been undertaking fieldwork-​based doctoral research on Central Asia since the mid-​1980s. However, many of these ground-​breaking studies remained accessible only as doctoral dissertations (Schoeberlein-​Engel 1994, Tett 1996, Kuehnast 6

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​

1997, Keshavjee 1998, Werner 1998), or were not published until many years later (Liu 2012, Zanca 2010). It was not until the early and mid-​2000s that there emerged a small but steady trickle of published anthropological monographs in European languages, typically drawing on field research conducted the previous decade (Louw 2007, Pétric 2002, Privratsky 2001). Valuable conversations emerged around the revival of Islam, the role of ethnicity in daily life, and what might be glossed as everyday economic strategies after the end of socialism (Kandiyoti and Mandel 1998). There were publishing initiatives too, with dedicated book series on ‘Culture and Society after Socialism’ and the ‘Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia’, both of which located Central Asia within a comparative ‘Eurasian’ or ‘Postsocialist’ field. Anthropologists often described the experience of addressing a wider scholarly audience as a challenge of specificity. Writing in 2007 in the introduction to her seminal book on Bukharan Muslims, Danish anthropologist, Maria Louw, described the sense of engaging in ‘a kind of analytical bricolage … wavering between the fear of making points that seem banal to other anthropologists on the one hand, and the temptation to draw sweeping conclusions based on limited material, on the other’ (Louw 2007: 16). The landscape of publishing on the region has changed significantly in the decade-​ and-​ a-​ half since Louw wrote these words. If in the early 2000s the number of anthropological monographs in English on Central Asia could be counted on the fingers of two hands, there are now enough to fill a small bookcase. The kinds of theoretical and substantive debates in which anthropologists are engaged has expanded to include linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of infrastructure, the anthropology of secularism, the intersections of kinship and politics, and the anthropology of climate breakdown (see, indicatively Dubuisson 2017, Mostowlansky 2017, Billaud 2015, Ismailbekova 2017 and Wheeler 2021). There are more scholars engaged in these conversations, and from a wider range of countries. Anthropology has also had an outsized impact on the wider ‘Area Studies’ community, with anthropological publications widely referenced also by geographers, historians, sociologists and political scientists. Anthropologists have been key figureheads in creating scholarly associations, and building institutional ties and training opportunities within the region and abroad. Openness to interdisciplinarity is perhaps frequently the hallmark of ‘small’ regional expertise and ‘new’ scholarly domains –​the anthropology of Central Asia most certainly is such a case in point. But for all these grounds for optimism, this is still a radically asymmetrical field. Scholars from Central Asia often need to travel ‘West’, geographically and epistemically, in order to be read or recognised in a wider scholarly community. The dominance of English in anthropological publishing reinforces hierarchies of knowledge production, distribution and valuation that privilege those whose scholarly training has been in that language. This dominance in turn leads to valuable research findings being inaccessible to the majority of scholars or practitioners based in the region, or worse, to a kind of ‘data drain’, in which the primary results of fieldwork in the form of interview transcripts, survey results, or ethnographic observations are stored in libraries and personal archives outside the country that furnished the research. The coloniality of knowledge production also goes well beyond language of training and publication. As Madina Tlostanova (2015: 49) has argued in her seminal 7

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​

article, ‘Can the Post-​Soviet Think?’, access to the spaces of Western academia is often contingent on abstaining from criticism of the West’s ‘monopoly of knowledge production and distribution’. In this way, scholarly priorities or epistemic framings that are discordant with those of the West are ‘erased or negatively coded even in the works of local scholars themselves who are forced to buy their way into the academic sphere through conforming to Western mainstream research’ (ibid.: 52; see also Marat 2021). Many of our contributors have experienced such forms of epistemic disciplining, including being steered towards comparative projects with more internationally legible regions, or being discouraged from conducting research ‘at home’. One contributor to this volume was warned that they would have problems competing in the North American academic job market if they didn’t include a China comparison for a project originally focused on Kyrgyzstan. Others have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, to foreground the figure of the (typically female) ‘suffering subject’ as a way of rendering their work legible to funding agencies in the anglophone global North (de Boulay 2019). As Iranian-​born anthropologist, Sadaf Jadvani, has noted of her experience in German academia, projects which ‘depict an oppressed, exotic other … tend to be well-​received by lecturers and students. But these projects play into deeply problematic expectations of colonial narrative’ (Javdani 2019: n.p.). Perhaps most importantly, research relationships have often been unequally structured by a global hierarchy of research sponsorship in which most funders, donors and Principal Investigators are located in the global North. While there have been many instances of generative international collaboration, this asymmetry can also invisibilise forms of academic extractivism by reframing them as ‘training’ or ‘mentorship’ (Kim 2019). Erica Marat, reflecting on the field of Central Asian Area Studies 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, has noted how, during the 2000s ‘Western and Russian scholars began holding joint forums more often, yet, still without the representation of Central Asian voices. Speaking “about us, but not for us” was a common experience (Marat 2021: 479, quoting Sultanalieva 2019). When scholars spoke to Central Asian colleagues, it was rarely to co-​produce knowledge together, but rather to extract notes from the field and assistance with local contacts.” Epistemic injustices are reinforced by very real inequities of time, money and international mobility. The very training that enables scholars to participate in an ostensibly ‘global’ but resolutely anglocentric anthropological conversation can then leave scholars marginalised from academic debates (or even excluded from academic careers) in their country of origin, facing a kind of double estrangement (Suyarkulova 2019). Most anthropologists employed at universities in Central Asia do not get the kind of sabbatical leave that would allow for sustained periods of ethnographic fieldwork. Teaching loads, academic pay, visa regimes and the cost of transnational travel can make participation in scholarly conferences in the global North de facto impossible. And then there are the more subtle forms of exhaustion, physical and intellectual, that exist when ‘the field is also home’, as Kudaibergenova (2019) puts it in the introduction to a brilliant collection of essays on the coloniality of knowledge production on Central Asia. Many scholars from Central Asia are also activists, for whom writing about (say) forms of gendered shaming around dress and behaviour (Nozimova 2022), the rise of nationalist populisms (Baialieva and Kutmanaliev 2021, 8

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​

Doolotkeldieva 2021), heterogeneous expectations and lived experience of ‘development’ (Arzieva 2022) are not mere theoretical problems or intellectual puzzles, but urgent and existential questions of political and intellectual praxis. As Suyarkulova (2019) notes, for many Central Asian feminists, the field is not just ‘home’ and a source of livelihood. It is also a ‘battlefield’ in which the very possibility to carry on conducting critical intellectual work is at stake. These are themes that we return to in the collective Afterword to this volume: a small attempt to give these critiques the prominence they deserve.

IS THERE A CENTRAL ASIA WORLD? This book is part of an anthropology series featuring ‘world’ as the key idea connecting overviews on regions such as Melanesia and the Andes. We were initially wary of reifying a singular life-​world, and would have much preferred signalling plurality with ‘Central Asian Worlds’ as our title. As the riotously diverse chapters here attest, certainly making a case for THE Central Asian World as a single, uniform entity would be absurd. Nevertheless, in a territorially and digitally contiguous space, these plural existences are all more or less connected, and thus do indeed form an uneven, brittle whole of sorts. This connectivity is self-​evident in the case of the massive impact of migration (see Juliette Cleuziou’s contribution to this volume), but these patterns also fuse in other ways at their ‘outer’ edges with social and spatial elsewheres, such as fashions in Egyptian Quran recitation (Rachel Harris), or U.S. notions of good formal governance (Jennifer Murtazashvili). We therefore take ‘THE’ Central Asian World as a challenging heuristic for identifying patterns and variations. Every single chapter of this book documents interconnection, be it the involvement of Indian companies in Kazakhstan’s mines (Eeva Kesküla), or WHO posters in rural Kyrgyzstani clinics (Baktygul Shabdan). Rather than attempting a full ethnographic survey of a ‘world region’, the volume thus seeks to ask how people in Central Asia make their lives at the intersection of diverse cross-​cutting flows of knowledge and practice. We believe there is a second good argument for holding on to Central Asia conceptually, which might be glossed as a kind of strategic essentialism. This move focuses anthropological attention on a world region that has tended to be treated as the margin of other Worlds. Central Asia, as mentioned above, often features as the western edge of China, the northern edge of the Islamic World, the southern edge of the Socialist World, or some kind of other languishing or hotly contested no-​person’s land between Great Powers. In this book, we chose a definition of Central Asia that encourages a view of commonalities, overlaps, borrowing and ‘open edges’. What to ‘count’ as Central Asia is a long-​standing question, always linked to the purposes of the definition, as recognised by Transregional and other reformulations of regional studies. Past collective names for the current nation-​states we cover have included ‘Mahwarana’ (in the Arabic), ‘Turkestan’, ‘Middle Asia’ (R: Srednaya Aziya) and ‘Inner Asia’, as well as quite other scopings and denominations, for example by Chinese and Persian-​language scholars (see Gorshenina 2014 for a detailed survey) . Holding in view ‘Central Asia’ as a site of interaction and debate at the intersection of Eurasian worlds advantageously highlights particular legacies in the intellectual 9

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​

division of labour (see in particular the contributions by Sergey Abashin and Alima Bissenova, this volume). But our editorial decision also holds significant costs. Our scope occludes other enduring connections, for example with enduring links of livelihoods and the arts with Mongolian and Siberian pastoralists, the contiguity with Azeri epics and traditions, or practices in adjacent areas of the Muslim world, in particular Iran and Pakistan (though see the contribution by Till Mostowlansky to this volume). Our chapters empirically attest both to strong interrelations in the region of our grasp, while also clearly showing how social life continually challenges the intellectual (and often policy) project of regional boundary-​making. We therefore invite readers to continue critiquing the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ even as we recognise it to be a productive heuristic.

PATHWAYS THROUGH THE BOOK Putting an order to 50 analytical glimpses on the Central Asian World has been both an exhilarating and, at times, an excruciating task. We were intrigued by two facts: first, that our authors’ collective did not turn to the more exoticising anthropological concepts such as ‘purity and pollution’, ‘taboo’, or ‘the evil eye’ in crafting their analyses. We were also struck by the fact that in contrast to other regional handbooks, we did not see strong sections on the most classic anthropological topics emerge, such as ‘kinship’, ‘ritual’, or ‘rites of passage’. We followed this collective lead in forging relatively abstract, unconventional book sections such as ‘Solidarity and Struggle’. There were other reasons for resisting conventional mapping: for one, ‘economy’ and ‘religion’ are such stong themes in the anthropology of Central Asia that they sprawl well beyond any single section. We found many chapters cross-​fertilised theories, e.g., gender and migration studies (chapter by Diana Ibañez-​Tirado), queer studies and postcolonial theory (Mohira Suyarkulova), the anthropology of Islam and knowledge (Julie McBrien). We therefore designed the book sections to highlight diversity and tensions in Central Asian worlding, such as tensions inherent in ‘care and interdependence’. We also sought to foreground themes like ‘navigating the state’ as urgent concerns that interest an audience far beyond anthropology. The upshot of this design process are ten thematic sections, each holding four to seven chapters representing a wide regional scope in covering essential topics ‘aslant’, such as kinship, politics and migration. We have prefaced each section with a brief overview to draw out its theoretical contribution, cross-​cutting arguments between chapters and potential for further thematic research. For reasons of space, we regretfully refrained from referencing the large bodies of work feeding our discussion of, e.g., statehood in the region: please see individual chapters instead. This volume opens with ‘Reverberating Legacies’, an analytical overture introducing anthropological scholarship on Central Asia. Our contributors span analyses of Soviet ethnography, recent histories of pastoralism and agriculture, Islam and late Soviet life, decolonising and queering lenses of enquiry. In the following section on ‘Solidarity and Struggle’, the authors make a strong case for attending to the action, imagination and skill of non-​elite actors who fight, for example, for affordable housing (Elmira Satybaldieva), or full citizenship for Kazakhs migrating from Xinjiang (Zhaina Meirkhan). This set of chapters highlights the normative registers through which calls for justice are articulated, from the use of verbal arts to kinship 10

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​

structures. Countering uni-​dimensional accounts of ‘patriarchy’ or ‘gerontocracy’ in Central Asia, the chapters featured in ‘Care and Interdependence’ explore relational complexities and experimental forms in domestic and quasi-​domestic settings such as mahallah neighbourhoods (Morgan Liu). At the same time, they demonstrate how hierarchical patterns of care and interdependence are gendered, raced and reproduced as ‘natural’. For the anthropology of Central Asia, it has never been an option to analytically ‘ignore’ state structures and actors. Consequently these feature on every page of this book. In the section on ‘Navigating the State’, we feature contributions that put the experience of statehood centre-​stage, be it as a representation, as repression, or as promoting and controlling cultural forms like estrada music in Uzbekistan (Kerstin Klenke). ‘Persons, Healing and More-​than-​Human Worlds’ illuminates the classic anthropological topic of personhood through the angle of healing, spirit-​encounters and –​intriguingly –​the sport of partridge hunting in Tajikistan (Brinton Ahlin). The authors here take experiences with other-​than-​human beings seriously, and reveal surprising parallels in the fluctuating relations tapped by mothers to cure their offspring (Baktygul Shabdan), and students making sense of mind-​ blowing dreams (Maria Louw). How to live well: this is the key question animating the chapters of ‘Ethical Repertoires’. While Central Asians frequently describe a situation of moral decline and vacuum, the ethnographies here tell other stories: of committed Muslims struggling to be responsible car-​salesmen (Emil Nasritdinov), of astute differentiations made in judging Afghan hospitality (Magnus Marsden), of fighting for the ‘right’ compensation after mining accidents (Eeva Kesküla). While the catastrophic Soviet unravellings of the 1990s preoccupied many of the early English-​language anthropology studies in the area, the circulation of things still remains a strong focus in Central Asia. The spark of fascination with an economic ‘otherwise’ is far from exhausted, and eloquently showcased in ‘Everyday Moral Economies’ by studies on updated bazaar economies (Hasan Karrar), artisanal gold-​ mining (Gulzat Botoeva), or the link between land ownership and cycles of land degradation (Tommaso Trevisani). Famous as Central Asia is for particular histories of movement such as ‘Silk Roads’ and ‘Nomadism’, we explore contemporary forms in ‘Mobility and Migration’. In this section, authors examine ideational and real-​ time travel, including the powerful effect of Russian and international agencies’ converging imagination of ‘the’ migrant as a problematic ‘other’ (Malika Bahovadinova), or the unequal inclusion of Pamiris in ‘pluralistic’ Ismaili networks (Till Mostowlansky). A gratifyingly thick section on ‘Material Culture, Arts and Performance’ attests to at least some of the myriad forms of cultural production, from early cinematography in Soviet Uzbekistan (Cloé Drieu) to Uyghur muqam music (Nathan Light). Despite persistent attempts to devalue or control art forms like tent-​making or pottery, this section shows how tenaciously skills and art forms have been safeguarded and adapted (Haruka Kikuta). Since religious policies are also examined elsewhere in the volume (see chapters by Emil Nasritdinov, Aisalkyn Botoeva), the concluding section on ‘Sacred Worlds’ highlights the moments when Central Asians seek out numinous, collective experiences. While some form of Islam is the operating framework for many Central Asians to do so, ethnographic work emphasises that this is not the only one (Pelkmans 11

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​

2017). Many long-​standing practices such as the maintenance and pilgrimage to holy sites (Gulnara Aitpaeva), but also the mushrooming of mosque sponsorship (Yanti Hölzchen) are both ubiquitous and hotly contested. The maelstrom of global and regional crises at the turn of the 2020s gave very little opportunity for collegial discussions in person. We therefore created a polyphonic afterword, for which our authors’ collective generously shared their thoughts. This text brings together quite different assessments of the strengths and weaknesses in how anthropologists have engaged in Central Asian worlding, as well as inspiring suggestions for reformulating the anthropology of Central Asia. We see a whole swathe of Central Asian life that urgently calls for the kind of interconnected analyses which not only allow us to understand, but also to interact with the world in life-​affirming ways. How, for instance, would an explicit ethnography of ageing in the Ferghana Valley read? What would we learn from an institutional ethnography of Turkmenistan’s gas industry? Where will anthropological analyses of literary and scientific practices in the region emerge? Who will produce comparative analyses capable of holding in view, for example, both environmental and other forms of violence? When will we learn how to simultaneously hold both the longue durée of human life and the urgency of political events in Central Asia in view? As we go to press, we feel both humbled and thrilled by the sweep of both good ‘new reads’, for example on environmental anthropology (Wheeler 2021) and autoethnography (Taalaibekova 2022), as well as the energetic and demanding new initiatives for reforming anthropological debate and publishing modes, particularly from the region itself (Nasritdinov 2022).

NOTES 1 For the purposes of this book, we include ethnology, social and cultural anthropology. We do not cover biological or other subfields of anthropology in this volume. 2 The department’s website notes quite frankly that between 2010 and 2020 ‘attention to ethnological sciences decreased and reached the point of extinction’ (https://​nuu.uz/​en/​ antrop​olog​iya-​va-​etn​olog​iya-​kafedr​asi/​, accessed 4 November 2022). 3 In 1990, for instance, the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography within the Russian Academy of Sciences launched a series on ‘applied and urgent ethnology’ (Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abashin, S. 2009. “Mustakillik i pamiat’ ob impersom proshlom: prokhodia po zalam tashkentskogo Museia pamiati zhertv repressii. Neprikosnovennyi zapas 4 (66): 37–​54. Abramzon, S. 1990 [1971]. Kirgizy i ikh etnogeneticheskie i istoriko-​ kul’turnye sviazy. Frunze: Bilim. Amsler, S. 2007. The Politics of Knowledge in Central Asia: Science Between Marx and the Market. Abingdon: Routledge. Arzieva, A. 2022. Tensions, Disorientation, and Search for Moral Grounds: Development Driven Order and Conflicting Value Systems in Kyrgyzstan. PhD dissertation. Geneva Graduate Institute. 12

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​ Baialieva, G. and Kutmanaliev, J. 2021. “Social Media Mobilization and the Rise of Populism in Kyrgyzstan.” In A. Haug (ed.), Retreating Rights: Examining the Pressure on Human Rights in Kyrgyzstan. London: Foreign Policy Centre, 52–​60. Ben-​Ari, E. 2009. “Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Politics of Professionalisation.” In J. van Bremen and A. Shimizu (eds), Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania. Hong Kong: Curzon, 382–​409. Beyer, J. 2011. “Settling Descent. Place-​making and Genealogy in Talas, Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Survey 30 (3–​4): 455–​468. Billaud, J. 2015. Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bošković, A. 2008. Other People’s Anthropologies. Ethnographic Practice on the Margins. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Bromley, Iu. 1973. Etnos i etnografiia. Moscow: Nauka. Canning, E. 2016. Lives on the Line: Making and Breaking Ethnolinguistic Boundaries in Southern Kyrgyzstan. PhD dissertation, Brandeis University. Chua, L. and N. Mathur. 2018. Who are “we”? Imagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Collins, K. 2006. The Logic of Clan Politics in Central Asia: The Impact on Regime Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooley, A. 2012. Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Cummings, S. 2013. Understanding Central Asia: Politics and Contested Transformations. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. De Boulay, S. 2019. “The Moral Education of a Young Woman in Kazakhstan.’ OpenDemocracy, 20 December. www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​odr/​moral-​educat​ion-​young-​woman-​kaz​ akhs​tan/​ Doolotkeldieva, A., 2021. “Populism à la Kyrgyz: Sadyr Japarov, Nationalism, and Anti-​Elite Sentiment in Kyrgyzstan.” Illiberalism Studies Working Paper Number 4, February. www. illib​eral​ism.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2021/​02/​ILL-​pap​ers-​no-​4-​Febru​ary-​2021.pdf Doolotkeldieva, A., 2022. “Towards Radical Equality and Emancipatory Approaches to the Study of People’s Struggles.” Introduction to Special Issue of Central Asian Affairs, 9 (4): np. Dubuisson, E. 2017. Living Language in Kazakhstan: The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dzhakhonov, U. 1989. Zemledeliia Tadzhiki dolini Sokha v kontse XIX–​ nachale XX v. Dushanbe: Donish. Eickelman, D. 2001. The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach. Fourth Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gorshenina, S. 2014. L’invention de l’Asie centrale: histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie. Paris: Librairie Droz. Gullette, D. 2010. The Genealogical Construction of the Kyrgyz Republic: Kinship, State and “Tribalism”. Folkstone: Global Oriental. Herzfeld, M. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horolets, A. 2018. “Ethnology and Sociocultural Anthropology in Kyrgyzstan.” Ethnologia Polona 38 (2018): 187–​204. Ismailbekova, A. 2017. Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press. Javdani, S. 2019. “As an Iranian Academic, I’m fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression.” The Guardian, 22 August. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​educat​ion/​2019/​aug/​ 22/​as-​an-​iran​ian-​acade​mic-​im-​fed-​up-​of-​being-​asked-​to-​focus-​on-​pove​rty-​and-​opp​ress​ion

13

— ​​​​ J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —​​​ Kandiyoti, D. and R. Mandel, eds. 1998. Market Reforms, Social Dislocation and Survival in Post-​Soviet Central Asia. Special Issue of Central Asian Survey 17 (4): 533–​718. Kassymbekova, B. and A. Chokobaeva. 2021. “On Writing Soviet History of Central Asia: Frameworks, Challenges, Prospects.” Central Asian Survey 40 (4): 483–​503. Keshavjee, S. 1998. Medicines and Transitions: The Political Economy of Health and Social Change in Post-​Soviet Badakhshan, Tajikistan. PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Kim, E. 2019. “When the ‘Field’ is Your Institution: On Academic Extortion and Complaining as Activism.” OpenDemocracy, 7 October. https://​www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​odr/​when-​ the-​field-​is-​your-​inst​itut​ion-​on-​acade​mic-​extort​ion-​and-​comp​lain​ing-​as-​activ​ism/​ Kudaibergenova, D. 2019. “When the Field is Also Your Home: Introducing Feminist Subjectivities in Central Asia.” OpenDemocracy, 7 October. https://​www.opende​mocr​acy. net/​en/​odr/​when-​your-​field-​also-​your-​home-​intr​oduc​ing-​femin​ist-​sub​ject​ivit​ies-​cent​ral-​asia/​ Kuehnast, K. 1997. Let the Stone Lie Where it has Fallen: Dilemmas of Gender and Generation in Post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota. Laruelle, M. 2010. “National Narrative, Ethnology and Academia in Post-​Soviet Uzbekistan.” Journal of Eurasian Studies 2010 (1): 102–​110. Lewis, D. 2008. The Temptations of Tyranny in Central Asia. London: Hurst Liu, M. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Louw, M. 2007. Everyday Islam in Post-​Soviet Central Asia. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Marat, E. 2021. “Introduction: 30 Years of Central Asian Studies –​The Best is Yet to Come.” Central Asian Survey 40 (4): 477–​482. Montgomery, D, ed. 2013. Negotiating Well-​Being in Central Asia. Special Issue of Central Asian Survey 32 . Montgomery, D. 2017. Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Montgomery, D., ed. 2022. Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mostowlansky, T. 2017. Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity Along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nasritdinov, E. and S. du Boulay 2022. “Autoethnographies of Spiritual Practices in Central Asia: Introduction.” Ketmen 1: 1–​8. Nozimova, S. 2022. “Imagined Women: Bearing, Rearing and Wearing the Tajik Nation.” Central Asian Affairs 9 (2022): 324–​350. Ntarangwi, M. 2010. Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Pelkmans, M. 2017. Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Peshkova, S. 2014. Women, Islam and Identity: Public Life in Private Spaces in Uzbekistan. Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press. Pétric, B.-​M. 2002. Pouvoir, don et réseaux en Ouzbékistan post-​Soviétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Picket, J. 2017. “Categorically Misleading, Dialectically Misconceived: Language Textbooks and Pedagogic Participation in Central Asian Nation-​Building Projects.” Central Asian Survey 36 (4): 555–​574. Pletsch, C. 1981. “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labour, circa 1950–​ 1975.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (4): 565–​590. Poliakov, S. 1992. Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Privratsky, B. 2001. Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond: Curzon Press. 14

—​​​​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​​​​ Radnitz, S. 2012. Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-​Led Protests in Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rashid, A. 2017. The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism. With a New Introduction. New York: New York Review of Books. Reeves, M. 2014. “Antropologiia Srednei Azii cherez desiat’ let posle ‘sostoiania polia’: Stakan napolovinu polon ili napolovinu pust?’ Antropologicheskii Forum 20 (1): 60–​79. Roche, S. 2014. “The Faithful Assistant. Muhiddin Faizulloev’s Life and Work in the Light of Soviet Ethnography.” FMSH Working Paper Series, no. 85, November. Roy, O. 2016. La Nouvelle Asie centrale ou la Fabrication des nations. Paris: Editions Seuil. Sanghera, B. and E. Satybaldieva. 2021. Rentier Capitalism and its Discontents: Power, Morality and Resistance in Central Asia. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan Satybaldieva, E. 2018. “A Mob for Hire? Unpacking Older Women’s Political Activism in Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Survey 37 (2): 247–​264. Schoeberlein-​Engel, J. 1994. Identity in Central Asia: Construction and Contention in the Conceptions of ‘Özbek’, ‘Tâjik’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Samarqandi’ and Other Groups. PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Shishkin, P. 2013. Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Sultanalieva, S. 2019. “How Does it Feel to Be Studied? A Central Asian Perspective.” OpenDemocracy, 7 October. www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​odr/​how-​does-​it-​feel-​be-​stud​ied-​ cent​ral-​asian-​pers​pect​ive/​ Suyarkulova, M. 2019. “A View from the Margins: Alienation and Accounability in Central Asian Studies.” OpenDemocracy, 10 October. www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​odr/​view-​marg​ ins-​ali​enat​ion-​and-​acc​ount​abil​ity-​cent​ral-​asian-​stud​ies/​ Taalaibekova, G. 2022. “Autoethnography: On the Question of Whose Interests the Native Anthropologist Represents.” Ketmen 1: 76–​92. Tchoroev, T. 2002. “Historiography of Post-​ Soviet Kyrgyzstan.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2): 351–​374. Tett, G. 1996. Ambiguous Alliances: Marriage and Identity in a Muslim Village in Soviet Tajikitsan. University of Cambridge. Tlostanova, M. 2015. “Can the Post-​Soviet Think? On Coloniality of Knowledge, External Imperial and Double Colonial Difference.” Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics 1(2): 38–​58. Werner, C. 1998. Household Networks, Ritual Exchange and Economic Change in Rural Kazakhstan. PhD dissertation, Indiana University. Wheeler, W. 2021. Environment and Post-​Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Basin: Sea Changes. London: UCL Press. Zanca, R. 2010. Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village: Cotton Farming After Communism. Belmomnt, CA: Cengage Learning.

15

PART I

REVERBERATING LEGACIES

Apparently more so than other world regions, Central Asia is frequently cast as a region tethered firmly to its past. In our Introduction, we examined the benefits and costs of interpreting Central Asia as bearing the long ‘shadow’ of Soviet development and practices. On the other hand, Central Asia is also celebrated for the glorious artistic legacies of flourishing city, court and ‘nomadic’ societies. We look at interpretations and struggles around this material culture, heritage and history-​making more closely in the last section of the book. We view the following section as an analytical ‘overture’, introducing key themes and schools of thought in the scholarship of Central Asia. Each contributor showcases an approach, spanning analyses of Soviet ethnography, pastoralism and agriculture, Islam and late Soviet life, decolonising and queering lenses of enquiry. As discussed in the volume’s Introduction and afterword, the knowledge produced by Soviet ethnographers is often neglected by contemporary anthropologists. We strongly believe this body of work, as scarce as it has now sometimes become in libraries, deserves both recognition and critical discussion. So to open the book, Sergey Abashin introduces the work of leading Soviet scholar Tatyana Zhdanko, and her engagement with the dominant institutional focus on ‘ethnogenesis’. Zhdanko collected a huge range of ethnographic material, especially among Karakalpaks between the 1940s and late 1980s. She helped to shape the Soviet scientific program of explaining the formation of ‘ethnos’ and its relation to the desired project of nation-​building. Like many social scientists of the time, she was preoccupied with ‘survivals’ from the past such as Khorezmian architecture, and how to deal with them in pushing forward socialist transformation. Through Zhdanko’s scholarly biography, Sergey Abashin demonstrates the history of unequal relations between ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ Soviet institutions of knowledge production, as well as an increasingly autonomous body of ethnographic work from Central Asia itself. In the following chapter, Alima Bissenova critically comments on the norms of anglophone anthropology that came to dominate scholarship on Central Asia from the 1990s. Comparing these with Tsarist-​era Russian ethnography, she asks crucial questions about access and relations in what anthropologists call ‘the field’. Alima Bissenova examines the work of Aleksei Levshin and Chokan Valikhanov, two nineteenth-​century orientalists writing on people we now call ‘Kazakhs’ and ‘Kyrgyz’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-2

17

—​​​​ R e v e r b e r a t i n g l e g a c i e s —​​​

The author points particularly to the price of institutional and personal ‘distance’ from the field, and the persistence of representational tropes around ‘discovering’ ‘inaccessible’ and ‘unknown’ peoples in the anthropology of Central Asia. The next two chapters bring together ‘the steppe’ and ‘the sown’, a classic framework of viewing history in the region that we find at play both in vernacular and scholarly interpretations. In her study of rural economies in the Bukharan oasis, Jeanine Dağyeli unpacks the idea of static and radically distinct nomadic and farming ways of life. She traces the entanglement of livelihoods based on cotton and sheep with each other, as well as with global commodity markets over the last two centuries. Jeanine Dağyeli discusses both colonial and Soviet efforts to modernise, for example by introducing new breeds and specialist professions. Taking care not to idealise pre-​colonial livelihoods, the author argues that these policies catalysed large-​ scale environmental degradation and increased poverty through deskilling, overgrazing and over-​stretching water resources to support cotton monocultures. Carole Ferret’s discussion of pastoralism in the steppes and mountains of Kazakhstan also comments on the intense pressures on rural Central Asia. She describes the ‘double death’ of pastoral livelihoods, first through collectivisation in the 1930s, and then with privatisation in the 1990s. Carole Ferret takes a detailed look at the evolution of animal husbandry that weathered and adapted to these cataclysms, such as techniques to fatten livestock. Through her analyses of principles and adaptations in transhumance, she takes issue both with idealised notions of ‘nomadic’ movement, and with the idea of predominantly ‘sympathetic’ animal-​human relations. If economic themes have been a dominant strain in studies on the region, so have studies of religion, in particular –​of Islam. Similarly to economic concerns, the anthropology of religion here bears the traces of public anxieties, both among Soviet and post-​Soviet elites and governments. Though the sponsorship of many studies on Islam may be motivated by such anxieties, as Julie McBrien shows, many anthropologists have worked to overcome the fixation with Islam as a ‘security concern’. In drawing a vastly more differentiated picture of Muslim religious practices in the region, the author argues that ethnographies have come to modify Talal Asad’s famous notion of Islam as a discursive tradition. Could Muslims emerging from the restrictions of the Soviet period be said to engage in ‘instituted practices’, as Asad would ask, if they themselves feel a heightened sense of inadequacy in this regard? Studies of Islam in Central Asia have therefore instead opted to conceptualise Islam as ‘Muslimness’ and emphasise this both as a form of belonging, and of ideological debate. Through her close reading of recent ethnographic work, Julie McBrien argues that this emphasis does not contradict Asad’s definition, but rather poses important questions that could expand and modify the conceptualisation of Islam. Examining Perestroika as an earthquake with repeated aftershocks in Tajikistan, Isaac Scarborough uses this trope to undo the prevalent notion of a finished Soviet modernising project. As he argues for the case of Tajikistan, there was certainly no clean ‘cut’ between late Soviet reforms, economic collapse and the social degradation and civil war of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic observation, memoirs, interviews and archival materials from the capital Dushanbe, Scarborough shows how local experiences of time and causality were both ‘flattened’ and ‘stretched’. People may feel that ‘restructuring’ in fact never ended, and sense ‘aftershocks’ in the way violent events and warlords resurface in politics. Scarborough also describes how the 18

—​​​​ R e v e r b e r a t i n g l e g a c i e s —​​​​

practical reverberations of late Soviet ‘restructuring’ affect property rights and become relevant, for example, when trying to reclaim a family dacha. As in the previous chapters of this section, re-​cognising basic assumptions made about the region is at the heart of Mohira Suyarkulova’s manifesto for queering Central Asian Studies. She suggests that Central Asia itself can be understood as ‘neither here nor there’ between post-​Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds, a ‘queer time-​space’ in itself. And yet, with very few exceptions, Central Asians themselves are portrayed as ‘straight’. The author uses Utterly Other (Sovsem Drugie), a recent collection of feminist and queer science fiction stories written in Bishkek, to explore the possibilities of queering the region. This means making the familiar strange, not only in relation to gender, but also for instance in relation to the politics of ethnicity, contemporary communism and globalisation. She calls for a new regional studies that does not adhere to the binary logic of importing theory and exporting data. Instead, Mohira Suyarkulova proposes a regional studies grounded in an ethic of creatively imagining better ways of living together, a form of regional studies that draws out Central Asia as a place generating complexities and hybridities of its own, in many directions.

19

CHAPTER TWO

ETHNOGENESIS THROUGH THE LENS OF SOVIET ETHNOGRAPHY Academic research in the service of nation-​building and socialist modernity Sergey Abashin Translated by Matthew Naumann INTRODUCTION The history of the ethnographic study of Central Asia in the Soviet period is characterised by contradiction. During this period, a huge array of data was collected, accumulated and processed; many books and articles were published, constituting a huge body of knowledge about the region; and research schools and institutions were created in Central Asia itself. During the same period, however, academia was characterised by centralised management and relative isolation from the outside world, and an extremely ideologised conceptual language of description and analysis took hold. Soviet ethnography–​including the ethnography of Central Asia –​had its own internal dynamics, of course, and was marked by differing points of view on a wide range of issues. Nevertheless, there were traditions of strict political control over research and one interpretative framework was imposed as dominant. This inconsistency persisted beyond the end of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent states in Central Asia, where ethnography inherited many of the institutional and conceptual features of the Soviet academy. However, at the same time, ethnographers began to rethink and reformat these features, taking into account new political realities and new ties with global academia. The main aim of this chapter is to bring together two often-​conflicting perspectives on the history of Soviet ethnographic research on Central Asia. Some researchers consider Soviet ethnography to be a form of colonial knowledge or dogmatic Marxist engineering, which created a pattern of pushing Central Asia to conform with the task set by external management and reforms (Hirsch 2005; Slezkine 1994). Others see anticolonial motives in the Russian (including the Soviet) production of ethnographic knowledge, highlighting the contradictory –​and sometimes even oppositional –​relationships that existed between ethnographers and the State (Tolz 2011). In this chapter I seek to move beyond these rather polarised accounts. I show how relationships between ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ institutions of knowledge production were characterised by elements of inequality and subordination, even as they DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-3

21

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

provided new opportunities for local researchers to discuss and pursue their own personal interests. This interaction included informal relationships between ‘masters and natives’, personal exchanges of skills and administrative support, and the creation of informal disciplinary and area studies coalitions with their own corporate interests (Gorshenina et al. 2019: 29–​84). This enabled Soviet ethnographic knowledge produced in Moscow and Leningrad to engage in constant dialogue with the inhabitants of, and experts from, the Soviet periphery, taking into account their interpretations and interests. I develop this analysis through a close study of the biography of one particular scholar whose career epitomised these contradictions: Tatyana Zhdanko. Zhdanko was a leading Soviet ethnographer, who studied ethnology in the 1920s and went on to work in various academic institutions from the 1930s to the 1990s. In particular, she worked at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where she headed the Department of Central Asia and Kazakhstan for several decades. Zhdanko wrote a number of significant works on the ethnography of the Karakalpaks, and also participated in the writing and editing of synthesised works on Central Asia as a whole. I explore how the work of Zhdanko and the Soviet ethnographers who followed her example related to various political processes and academic concepts in an environment where the activity of academics –​specifically, the collection and classification of new materials and the search for theoretical explanations –​was determined by political and ideological frameworks on the one hand, and personal preference and local context on the other. In particular, I show how the theories of ethnogenesis and ethnos were interlinked with nation-​building in Soviet Central Asia, as well as how assumptions about ‘survivals’ (perezhitki) and traditionalism were invoked to explain both socialist transformation and the resulting difficulties and conflicts. I will also briefly describe the institutional and personal networks that were created during the process of producing ethnographic knowledge about the region in Soviet times. I show how the hierarchy and asymmetry of these networks was complemented by a policy of affirmative action, and the growth of ethnographic autonomy within Central Asia itself.

SOVIET ETHNOGRAPHY IN CENTRAL ASIA Tatyana Zhdanko was born in 1909 in Elisavetgrad, now the city of Kropyvnytskyi in modern Ukraine, into the family of a tsarist general. In the mid-​1920s, she moved to Moscow and entered the Faculty of Ethnology at Moscow State University. There she studied with specialists who had pre-​Soviet ethnographic experience, alongside fellow practitioners who were to go on to be leading figures of Soviet science, such as Sergei Tolstov and Sergei Tokarev. Between 1930 and 1936, Zhdanko worked at the Samarkand Museum in Uzbekistan, where she was part of a team who collected and catalogued Uzbek national artefacts. She then returned to Moscow to work at the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, where she was instructed to prepare the Karakalpak display area. With the outbreak of war in 1941, Zhdanko again found herself evacuated to Uzbekistan, where she lived for two years. She then returned to Moscow to work at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in its Moscow branch, 22

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

which was headed by Tolstov. At the Academy, she participated in an expedition to Khorezm, and defended her Candidate of Science and Doctor of Science dissertations. For more than 30 years, from 1953 until almost the collapse of the USSR, she was the head of the Department of Central Asia and Kazakhstan and specialised in the study of the Karakalpaks (see Figure 2.1). Zhdanko died in 2007, having survived the entire Soviet era and lived to witness post-​Soviet transformations in the country and in academia. For much of this period Zhdanko held leading positions, defining policy on the Central Asian branch of Soviet ethnography and serving as an important mediator between central and regional institutions. The Khorezm expedition occupied a special place in the power structure of these institutions (Arzhantseva 2016; Arzhantseva 2015). Zhdanko began her work in 1937 in the lower reaches of the Amu Darya, on the territory of the former Khiva Khanate, which had become part of Uzbekistan. The project was headed by Sergei Tolstov, who saw the region as one of the key centres of linguistic and ethnic processes in Eurasia. After the end of the Second World War, Tolstov, now director of the Institute of Ethnography, turned the expedition into a huge research enterprise, with dozens of academics and support staff, significant technical equipment and funding, and a high volume of publications. Large-​scale archaeological excavations were launched, and several ethnographic detachments were created. The Khorezm expedition was not just one of several projects of Soviet ethnography: from the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, it was its main project. The expedition was allocated huge resources,

Figure 2.1  The ethnographer T. Zhdanko (second from right) with kolkhoz workers in Karakalpakistan, 1953–​54. (Source: private collection, printed with the kind permission of O. Rototaeva). 23

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

and became an effective rite of passage for a significant proportion of Moscow and Central Asian academics, who received hands-​on research experience and gained experience of working with colleagues from different cultural backgrounds and of establishing informal scientific networks. For many years, Zhdanko was the head of the Karakalpak brigade of the Khorezm expedition (Zhdanko 1981). The brigade usually consisted of no more than ten people, students and researchers from Moscow and Karakalpakstan itself. Every year, the members of the expedition rotated, and new local researchers were included. The brigade’s work included touring all the districts and main settlements in the autonomous republic, holding conversations with local residents (especially elderly people), after which the brigade would stop in certain settlements for longer-​term stationary work. Zhanko recalls how the work of ‘my Karakalpak brigade’ was known in the villages of the Republic: they called it the ‘Kyzlar detachment’ [girls’ brigade], as in 1945 … female students were working with me. Though, there was a man –​our first Karakalpak graduate student, R. Kosbergenov, who later became a Doctor of Historical Sciences. That’s how we started. Then over many years of work we travelled all over Karakalpakstan several times. Both my candidate and habilitation dissertations were based on these field materials. And not just mine, but those of many other brigade members, including Karakalpak ethnographers. (Zhdanko and Tishkov 1994: 126) In addition to the collection of ethnographic materials themselves, interaction with the environment that produced them was also important. The brigade cooperated closely with Karakalpakstan’s administrative bodies, but it was arguably the informal ties established with local institutions that were more important. An example can be found in the biography of Sabyr Kamalov, who worked with Zhdanko in the Khorezm expedition for several years, both as a student and a ‘faithful assistant’ (Roche 2014). The Khorezm expedition became a springboard for Kamalov’s academic and administrative career: by 1961, he had already become president of the Karakalpak branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, which he left as an academician after 35 years. Another example is Igor Savitsky, who through his acquaintance with Zhdanko ended up on the Khorezm expedition as an artist, settled in Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpak Republic, and became the director of the local Museum of Arts, which contained a large collection of applied Karakalpak art and an unprecedented collection of Soviet avant-​garde art (Kasimova 2019). Official and unofficial contacts and connections were of a hierarchical nature, with some acting as teachers and managers, and others as students and assistants. However, this hierarchy did not set subordinate status in stone, but rather created a path for social mobility. Zhdanko, as her pupil Kamalov recalls, ‘set a whole group of leading scientists from the republic on the path of science’ in the future, including himself, Rzambet Kosbergenov, Khozhakhmet Esbergenov and Tatlymurat Atamuratov. These men initially helped her with the research, and then under her tutorship went on to complete their dissertations and take up senior positions in academia (Kamalov 1989: 13). These relationships also created horizontal networks in which a variety of 24

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

Figure 2.2  The ethnographers Kh. Esbergenov (third from right), T. Zhdanko (standing in the middle), A. Utemisov (first from left) with informants in Karakalpakistan, 1969. Source: private collection, printed with the kind permission of O. Rototaeva.

mutual exchanges took place: teachers and students co-​wrote scientific papers, and provided each other with expert and administrative support. In these networks, not only professional, but also friendly and even family ties were formed (see Figure 2.2). Lada, the daughter of Sergei Tolstov, the ‘chief Soviet ethnographer’, for instance, married Karakalpak philologist Doszhan Nasyrov. These hierarchies and networks changed over time. The peak of activity of researchers from Moscow and Leningrad in the study of Central Asia occurred between the 1930s and the 1950s, when academics from the centre often travelled to the Soviet periphery, living and working there for long periods, and in practice monopolising the production of academic literature about the region. However, from the 1960s onwards, the production of scientific literature gradually began to shift to the local republics, from the former teachers to the former pupils. This period saw the creation of a hierarchical structure of ethnographic institutions, developed in accordance with the national-​administrative pyramid. In this structure, Karakalpakstan was an ‘autonomous territory of a national minority’ within Uzbekistan, and Uzbekistan in turn was part of the overall institutions of the Soviet Union. At the top of the pyramid was the Ethnography Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, established in 1933 and located in Moscow and Leningrad, which underwent several reorganisations and served as the main centre of expertise. 25

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

Until the collapse of the USSR, the Institute of Ethnography set the official and dominant interpretative framework. Failure to adhere to these standards could result in accusations of heretical deviation. Many researchers from the field were still trained in Moscow and Leningrad, and academics from the Soviet centre often took on the functions of reviewers and examiners (opponenty) of doctoral dissertations. However, as decentralisation progressed, local academic institutions gradually emerged and expanded their scope of activity. This process was enabled by a policy of affirmative action aimed at increasing the representation of residents of the Soviet periphery in various state institutions (Martin 2001). One such institution was the Institute of History and Archaeology, created in 1943 together with the formally independent Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR. Later, after a separate archaeology faculty was created, it became simply the Institute of History. At the bottom of the academic pyramid was the Karakalpak branch of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, formed in 1959, with its Institute of History, Language and Literature, from which the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography later emerged. Despite being guided by the conceptual trends set by the central Institute of Ethnography, local ethnographic departments and academics working in the Uzbek Academy and its Karakalpak branch were not directly financially or organisationally subordinate to it. This provided them with their own platform for formulating their vision of local history, for training their own personnel, and for publishing academic books and journals themselves, sometimes in their national languages. The relationships within this hierarchy were thus not completely one-​sidedly hegemonic. The growing autonomy of local academic institutions meant that the main discussions shifted from Moscow to the Central Asian capitals. Local academics, as I will show later, carefully supplemented and refined the concepts that were proposed to them by their Moscow and Leningrad colleagues to reflect their own interests, seeking their consent to form their own historical and ethnographic narrative. In this hierarchy, relations were not two-​sided, but three-​sided. Karakalpakstan –​ which in the 1920s and 1930s was part of the Russian SFSR, before being transferred to Uzbekistan –​later retained special relations with Institute of Ethnography, despite the fact that it was formally subordinate to Tashkent. In particular, the Khorezm expedition remained the channel through which a significant number of local Karakalpak ethnographers continued ongoing, direct collaboration with Moscow and Leningrad specialists; many of them also studied and defended their dissertations in Soviet capitals. Metropolitan institutions were viewed in the Karakalpak scientific community not only as an external power, but also as an important source of legitimisation, and as a mediator and protector in complex and hierarchical internal relations between Tashkent and Nukus. The behind-​the-​scenes role of persons who were in effect patrons (in the roles of scientific leaders, official examiners and reviewers, and co-​authors) as well as close personal relationships by default gave members of the national minority in Uzbekistan more confidence and prevented potential pressure from Tashkent on the Karakalpak scientific community in regard to administrative or conceptual issues. As Zhdanko’s pupil Kamalov wrote diplomatically, since 1948, when she began working on her expedition, Zhdanko ‘has been and remains my teacher, and was a true friend and mentor for many of our comrades, doctors … candidates of historical science … And now she monitors our work and helps us to overcome difficulties, for which we are sincerely grateful’ (Kamalov 1989: 13). 26

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

ETHNOGENESIS AND NATION BUILDING IN CENTRAL ASIA In the nineteenth century, Karakalpaks lived in the territory of Khorezm, close to the Aral Sea, at the very edge of the Khivan Khanate. Following the Russian conquest of the Karakalpaks’ homelands, the Amu Darya Distict was created as part of the Turkestan General Governorate, which acted as a buffer territory with a form of autonomous status. After the Russian Empire disappeared, the Soviet regime redesigned the administrative regions of Central Asia based on the idea of ethnic divisions. Officials and experts divided the population into a number of peoples, some of which –​the largest –​became ‘titular’ in the union republics, while others were ‘titular’ in the autonomous republics and regions. A third group –​the smallest –​ received the status of national minorities without their own sovereign territory. In 1924, during the national-​territorial delimitation of Central Asia, the Karakalpak Autonomous Region was created out of the former Amu Darya District and a number of lands from the former khanate. The Autonomous Region was designated part of the Kazakh Autonomous Republic, at that time part of the Russian Federation, and had the status of a separate union republic within the USSR (Haugen 2003: 172–​ 179). In the early 1930s, the region was given the status of a separate autonomous republic, with its capital in Nukus. A final significant transformation took place in 1936, when the Karakalpak Autonomous Republic was transferred to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, where it remained. The fact that a relatively small ethnic group –​about 140,000 people at the time of the 1926 census –​were granted their own autonomous republic was the result of the colonial history of conquest and the Soviet policy of national emancipation and unification of local elites. However, the emergence of this separate administrative unit set the scene for further nation-​building, which included the creation of its own governing bodies, the strengthening of its identity and language, and the development of the institutional framework for consolidating nationhood in the form of museums, and academic institutes. This in turn meant an official national narrative about the origin and history of the Karakalpaks and their cultural features was required in order to legitimise this Soviet nation-​building. Reconstructing history and cultural ties was challenging because of the small size of the population, lack of information, the region’s poverty, and the tortuous changes to its administrative affiliation. In this context, ethnography –​particularly the study of ethnic history, or ethnogenesis, of the local population –​came to assume a critical role. Ethnographic research and the search for a conceptual language were thus inscribed in Soviet national policy, and were needed to substantiate the cultural, linguistic, territorial and other parameters of those peoples who were declared socialist nations. Although there had already been academic works about the Karakalpaks (Ivanov 1940), the general picture of the ethnogenesis of the Karakalpaks and other peoples of Central Asia was first articulated by Tolstov at a special academic session in Tashkent in 1942 (Tolstov 1947: 303; Alymov 2007). He declared the Iranian-​ speaking Massageteans who lived in the Aral region 2,500 years ago to be the ancestors of the Turkic-​speaking Karakalpaks. Methodologically, his interpretation drew on the concepts of academician and orientalist, Nikolai Marr, popular in the 1930s. According to Marr, languages and peoples arise not from the transformation of an initial ethnic community through migration in one direction or another, but 27

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

as a result of the mixing of autochthonous peoples with outsiders and neighbouring groups, and the creation of new hybrid communities from them. These mixings were tied, according to the Marxist doctrine already in place, to leaps in socioeconomic development (Slezkine 1996; Gerasimov et al. 2017). This theory created a complex genealogy, and made it possible to link the current inhabitants of the region both to the current territories and to the ancient peoples who lived there, thereby avoiding unfavourable associations as newcomers and conquerors. This idea had the effect of symbolically consolidating the territories assigned in the course of the demarcation of the modern ethnic groups. Zhdanko built her version of the ethnogenesis of the Karakalpaks on the same conceptual foundations, outlining them in the landmark publication, Essays on the Historical Ethnography of the Karakalpaks, published in 1950 (Zhdanko 1950). She criticised the alternative view that the Karakalpaks were a people who had come to the Aral Sea region and were descended from the ‘black hats’ (chernye klobuki) people, known from Russian written sources, who at one time had lived in the Dnieper region on the current border between Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Zhdanko suggested that the origins of the Karakalpaks could be found in many different tribes and peoples, starting with individual groups of ancient Iranian-​speaking Sakas and then Oghuz Turks, Kipchak Turks, Mongols, Nogais and even the late Persians, who had ended up in the region as slaves and were assimilated into the Karakalpaks. All these multilingual groups were linked by Zhdanko to the current clan division, with the various clans having, in her opinion, different origins. Taking into account the history of migration, Zhdanko came to the conclusion that the core of the Karakalpaks was constituted by groups that had long lived in the Aral Sea region. Although a large number of Karakalpaks resettled from the lower reaches of the Syr Darya to the lower Amu Darya in the nineteenth century, this recent migration did not undermine their local origin. Thus, the Karakalpaks were described by Zhdanko as an autochthonous people of Central Asia, Khorezm and the Aral Sea region, who had every right to claim the historical and cultural heritage of the various peoples who had lived there since ancient times. Zhdanko made this argument in a monograph, which included a detailed listing of all available sources on the Karakalpaks and the history of research on them, as well as numerous maps and diagrams, giving the analysis the necessary appearance of solidity and completeness. Stalin’s devastating criticism of Marr’s concepts in 1950 legitimised the revision of the earlier orthodox Marxism in Soviet ideology and brought back into academic language the concepts of ancient genealogy and cultural continuity that essentialists attributed to ethnic communities (Slezkine 1996). Marr’s ideas of mixing and hybridity continued in ethnographic descriptions, but without reference to Marr himself. In a new work in 1953, Zhdanko, referring to Stalin’s criticism, nevertheless repeated her previous description of ‘large, brightly shining and sometimes tragic events of the historical past and the rich cultural heritage of the industrious, talented and freedom-​loving Karakalpak people’ (Zhdanko 1952: 566). All of Zhdanko’s theses were repeated in the work, Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, which appeared in the series of books ‘Peoples of the World’ edited by Tolstov in the early 1960s. Zhdanko was the co-​editor of this work and co-​author of the introductory chapter (Tolstov and Zhdanko 1962). Tolstov and Zhdanko used Marr’s ideas of autochthony and mixed origin (although without reference to Marr), 28

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

to assign all the peoples of Central Asia different ‘strata in ethnogenesis’; they also wrote of ‘the fusion of different ethnic elements’. They repeated the assertion that the ‘modern nationalities’ of the region appeared in the ninth–​twelfth centuries, and that by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this process was complete, meaning that all the ‘main nationalities’ were already formed in the sixteenth–​nineteenth centuries. ‘Ethnic communities’ already existed, although their ‘national development’ was restrained. Their ‘national consolidation’ began to accelerate with the accession to Russia and the development of commodity-​money capitalist relations. National consolidation finally took shape in the Soviet era, when the creation of national republics made it possible to complete the formation of nations and to initiate the process of ‘coming together [sblizhenie] of the socialist nations’. This interpretation of the ethnogenesis of the peoples of Central Asia resolved two problems. On the one hand, it indicated the rights of the modern peoples present in the region to form their national republics, bearing in mind their historical connection with ancient peoples. On the other, it prevented possible disputes between the union republics and the autonomous republics over the legacy of the past, emphasising in return the close interaction and mutual influence of local cultures. ‘Not one of them [the peoples of Central Asia] goes back directly to any of the ethnic groups of antiquity’: this unflinching conclusion was important for Soviet ethnographers as a means of restraining competing nationalist claims (Tolstov and Zhdanko 1962: 92). In the mid-​1960s, the Institute of Ethnography saw a change in leadership, when the medievalist Yulian Bromley replaced the archaeologist Tolstov as the chief ethnographer. At the same time, the dominant theory of ethnogenesis in Soviet ethnography changed. The new director suggested returning to the term ‘ethnos’, which Marr and Tolstov had rejected (Anderson et al. 2019). Ethnos, according to the new theory, is a semblance of ‘organisms’ that arose in ancient times and then went through various stages in their formation (Hirsch 2005: 314–​316). The theory of ethnos moved even further from Marr’s concepts, with the creation of a language for searching for ancient ancestors and the ancient roots of modern peoples, which Tolstov had resisted. The idea became popular in the context of growing competition between different national narratives for cultural heritage and historical priority. However, the old ‘Marrist’ language did not die, but was skilfully incorporated into the new theory. In 1972, Zhdanko published an article on ‘The Particularities of Ethnic Communities in Central Asia and Kazakhstan’. The article appeared to be an attempt to formally combine these two different concepts (Zhdanko 1974). The text marks a shift in analytical language, using the terms ‘ethnos’ and ‘ethnic community’. However, Zhdanko’s general framework –​developed at the end of the 1940s –​had not changed significantly. In this article, the issue was how, in the era of modern nations, the old tribal and ethnic identities are preserved, and how to place them in the narrative of the sequential development of an ‘ethnic community’. Zhdanko adopted a narrative that distinguished between primary and secondary nationalities and tribes, in which these secondary groups already lose their signs of independence and become autonomous entities within larger peoples. After repeating her reasoning for the preservation of ‘tribal relics’ [plemennykh perezhitkov], Zhdanko nevertheless specifically emphasised (already in the spirit of the theory of ethnos) that ‘these were fully formed ethno-​social organisms, with certain ethnic territories, with their 29

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

own languages, ethnonyms and peculiarities of everyday life, material and spiritual culture and ethnic identity; this differentiated them in the eyes of other nationalities and in their own eyes from other Turkic-​speaking peoples’ (Zhdanko 1974: 26). In the same vein, Zhdanko wrote Contemporary Ethnic Processes in the USSR, a monograph which received the highest state prize (Zhdanko 1975). In the chapter ‘Ethnic Communities and Ethnic Processes in Pre-​Revolutionary Russia’, Zhdanko’s analysis of the incompleteness of ethnic consolidation and the complex composition of ethnic communities was extended to all the peoples of the USSR. The text was also written within the framework of the theory of ethnos, but drew from this theory those theses that fitted Marr’s previous interpretation of ethnogenesis. The bringing together of the two different views was also reflected in several amendments to the ethnic history of the Karakalpaks. In 1971, the book Karakalpaki was published, co-​authored by Zhdanko and two of the Karakalpak Republic’s most senior and famous scholars, her student Sabyr Kamalov and the philologist Marat Nurmukhammedov. The latter had also studied and worked in Moscow, working as secretary for ideology of the Communist Party in Karakalpakstan and later becoming vice-​president of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. This text, now sanctified by the names of local scholars, repeated the version of ethnogenesis formulated by Tolstov and Zhdanko. But the text included new assertions: for example, that the Huns who once lived near the Aral Sea already included groups that spoke Turkic (proto-​Turkic) languages (Nurmukhammedov et al. 1971: 11). This reflected a new concern to highlight the longevity of the Turkic ethnic genealogy in Central Asia, instead of stressing continuity with their Iranian-​ speaking ancestors. This thesis reflected a general shift that had taken place since the 1970s in ethnogenesis studies of Central Asia, from the search for cultural and ethnic hybridity to the reconstruction of pure ethnic forms. Such a shift helped emerging local nationalist movements to better define their claims to the symbolic resources of regional history. Despite methodological incompatibility, both points of view entered the late Soviet and then the post-​Soviet national narratives, not only of the Karakalpaks, but also other Central Asian nations too. Notwithstanding these new ideas, the main logic in describing the Karakalpak ethnogenesis still remained the idea of mixing and the commonality of the primarily Turkic peoples of Central Asia. After the collapse of the USSR, Academician Kamalov continued to reproduce the main postulates of Zhdanko’s research. Speaking of the growing interest ‘among our people of their own history’ following Uzbekistan’s independence and about the existence of ‘superficial and far-​fetched statements that “the ancestral homeland of the Karakalpaks is in foreign territories”’, Zhdanko’s student wrote: it is not surprising and it is natural that the Karakalpak, Uzbek, Kazakh and Turkmen peoples, who have inherited the shores of the Aral and formed as nationalities on its coast, have a common historical destiny. No inconceivably difficult situation, even the current Aral crisis, is capable of breaking their brotherly, centuries-​old friendship. (Kamalov 1997: 121) Zhdanko’s ethnographic works and concepts about the origin of the Karakalpaks as a people with their own territory and culture but sharing kinship and cultural 30

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

affinity with Uzbeks and other neighbours remained an integral part of the image of the Karakalpak nation even after the collapse of the Soviet regime. This formula was the most successful, as it enabled the only autonomous district in the region to fit into the narrative of nation-​building in independent Uzbekistan.

‘SURVIVALS’ OF THE PAST AND THE SOVIET TRANSFORMATION OF CENTRAL ASIA In addition to ethnogenesis, another issue that the Soviet ethnographers tackled was the problem of what the culture of the modern Central Asian peoples should look like. The cultures of the peoples of the USSR, as set out in Soviet ideology, were national in form and socialist in content. While questions of form were resolved in discussions about ethnogenesis, the issue of the extent to which Central Asian societies had successfully transformed in a socialist direction was a separate area of study and analysis. Socialism, or the Soviet version of modernity, envisaged a set of standard features –​such as industrial economics, secularism, the nuclear family, and the emancipation of women –​the presence of which was supposed to indicate change. In Central Asia however, researchers had to contend with a large number of deviations from this model, and needed to formulate explanations for this. This was addressed through the concept of ‘survivals’ [perezhitki], popular already in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. According to this concept, all these deviations are atavistic features and do not play any significant role in the life of Central Asian society. The concept made it possible, on the one hand, to quite legitimately record social and cultural realities in the present, while also creating a subject for ideological negotiations about what should be considered a ‘harmful’ or ‘useful’ relics, or where traditionalism ends and modernity begins (DeWeese 2011; Аlymov 2013a). Resolving these issues created certain challenges, in order to avoid an impression of archaisation and backwardness, or, conversely, an exaggerated level of progress. One of the first articles in which Zhdanko touched on this topic was ‘Life of the Karakalpak collective farm aul’, published in 1949 (Zhdanko 1949). The text was written as a conventional community study. The theme was the ‘socialist reorganization of culture’, and the location for the ethnographic fieldwork was chosen with the cooperation of local communist and administrative authorities, who saw this as an important opportunity to demonstrate their successes to Moscow academics. In this article, based on surveys and oral histories, Zhdanko recreated a picture of the life of the aul in the early twentieth century. This was followed by the history of collectivisation, and a section on the ‘socialist present’ that described the Akhunbabaev collective farm in great detail, including its economy, local leadership, and work brigades. The text sets out successes and achievements, describing new villages, a school, a club, a medical centre, and modern housing. Zhdanko writes: ‘The panel displaying the indicators of the work brigades and teams is always at the centre of attention for the collective farmers … The best performers at the collective farm appear against a red background, under images of an aeroplane, a car and a horse … Here, along with remarks about good production workers, 31

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

is seen the notorious tasbaka –​a tortoise that depicts truants and disruptors of the plan riding on it, and satirical rhymes under the caricature. (Zhdanko 1949: 46) Although the description is mainly of cases of Soviet transformation, Zhdanko also mentions that the brigades correspond to clan divisions; that until recently local residents sought out treatments from healers and shamans, and that Muslim holy places continue to be popular and old customs of marriage are practised, in particular clan exogamy. However, these vestiges, according to the researcher, do not spoil the overall picture, which indicates ‘the victory of the Leninist-​Stalinist nationality policy’. In 1958, Zhdanko published a long article entitled ‘The life of migrant collective farmers on the newly reclaimed ancient irrigated lands of Karakalpakia’ (Zhdanko 1958). This article appeared just nine years after the article about the Karakalpak aul, but during this time important changes had taken place: Stalin had died, and a period of political and academic thaw had begun. This affected the emphases in the text. The article was based on research undertaken during the Khorezm expedition in 1950, 1952 and 1953 on the collective farm settlements that were constructed after a canal was built on the site of previously barren steppes and deserts. Zhdanko particularly emphasised that this development was of great importance for the development of the socialist economy and the socialist way of life, and that the changes here were particularly intense. The article describes in detail the collective farm economy and the social structure of the newly settled villages. She noted, in particular, the multi-​ethnic composition of the population –​with Turkmens, Kazakhs and Karakalpaks present in addition to the predominant Uzbeks –​and stressed that ‘nowhere are conditions so favourable for the development of new socialist relations between different nationalities, as in the environment of these resettlement collective farms, among innovators and explorers united by the challenges of the joint struggle to revive the desert’ (Zhdanko 1958: 729). Having listed the achievements and changes, as she had done so in the 1949 article, Zhdanko moved on to the perezhitki. However, in this case, she did not limit herself to listing them. In a long section on housing, she emphasised that local houses had inherited the traditions of ‘national’ construction: they were spacious, provided protection from wind and heat, matched the tastes of the population, and used the ‘best traditions of ancient and medieval architecture’. Criticizing the ‘shortcomings’ in the construction of new, standard houses, which, in her opinion, ‘do not correspond to local conditions and needs’, ‘rational architectural techniques and traditions developed by the local population are ignored in the project’, Zhdanko wrote about the desirability of ‘further development of the collective farm dwellings … along the path of most rational use of the positive features of Khorezmi architecture, which can be easily combined with improved construction techniques and the cultural appearance of a collective farm house designed by the state’ (Zhdanko 1958: 751). This was a new, already quite positive, interpretation of the role of perezhitki in modern Central Asian society, and this understanding of them –​which, along with ‘harmful customs’ and ‘obsolete’ elements included ‘genuine national traditional folk traits’ and ‘progressive traditions’ –​began to gain popularity among Karakalpak 32

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

ethnographers and students of Zhdanko and was reflected in the ethnographic literature that they produced (Esbergenov and Atamuratov 1975: 6; Zhdanko and Kamalov 1980: 202). The new thesis now made it possible, by drawing on the authority of the Moscow ethnographer, to challenge the authority of the metropolis to single-​handedly determine which cultural practices and artifacts should be excluded from the national heritage as ‘obsolete’. The Karakalpak elite now had a mechanism, recognized by Zhdanko and other authorities outside the republic, to uphold certain local customs, bestowing on them the status of ‘genuinely of the nation’, allowing local intellectuals more scope in defining their own image of the Karakalpak nation. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Central Asian officials and academics were rewriting the perezhitki into national characteristics, still with some support from Moscow. At the same time, at the very centre, including among Soviet ethnographers, scepticism was growing regarding the progressiveness of socialist transformation. In the 1960s, Zhdanko’s fellow practitioner and colleague Gleb Snesarev saw in the perezhitki a whole layer of social archaicism, and tried to explain their persistence by the insufficiently intensive social development in the region (Alymov 2013b). Their younger contemporary, Sergei Poliakov, in his book published on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, declared Central Asian societies ‘traditionalist’, and socialism just a superficial superstructure that did not change the ‘Asian’ essence of local communities (Poliakov 1992). Zhdanko herself did not speak so categorically. In her work ‘Family Life of the Peoples of the USSR’, she still pointed to the transformation of Central Asian society, but nevertheless listed a huge collection of ‘survivals’ of the ‘patriarchal-​feudal way of life’: the large size and complex structure of families; the high proportion of undivided families; the significant influence of relatives, in particular on marriage; high numbers of children; the strength of family ties; exogamy; low marriage age; the low proportion of mixed marriages; the existence of bride price (‘the shameful custom of kalym’); irrational spending; ‘petty mercantilism, philistine understanding of family prestige, honour and dignity’; ‘a perverted idea of prestige’; bride kidnapping; self-​ immolation, and authoritarian relations in the family. The list ended with a small number of traditions that had gained the status of national traits with a positive character: family stability, family and children as the main value, nurturing love of hard work and respect for elders, caring for the elderly and children, mutual assistance, collective work and rest: ‘wonderful traditions’. The 1980s saw Moscow and Leningrad ethnographers facing a crisis of the idea of Soviet modernity. Criticism of the problems and failures of Soviet transformations became popular: with evidence of corruption, for example, in the criminal investigation of the ‘cotton case’ in Uzbekistan (Cucciolla 2017) beginning to be interpreted as evidence of continuing backwardness, and even the inability of Central Asia to accomplish socialist transformation. This reflected not only the general decrepitude of Soviet institutions, but also the loss of the metropolis’s leverage over the periphery. The role of ethnographers from the Centre in Central Asian discussions declined, specialists from the region became less likely to study in Moscow and Leningrad, regular expeditions were curtailed, and local researchers increasingly planned their work independently. However, Zhdanko saw this crisis more as a ‘tragedy’ linked, for example, with the Aral Sea environmental crisis. In a 1994 interview she said: 33

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

I am deeply affected by this disaster; I perceive it as a tragedy of my beloved land and people. Indeed, over my many years of expeditionary work, close ties with the inhabitants of the republic and with my students, I have developed a bond with Karakalpakstan. My main scientific works, written in the best years of my life and creative research, are dedicated to it. Many of my friends live there, families of dear people close to me, and my former graduate students with whom I conducted field work. Working together, we sought to penetrate deeper into the history, life, traditions, art of the Karakalpak people. Young people grew up before my eyes: they prepared and defended dissertations, published their books, started many families. Of course, I am experiencing the calamity that befell them, the death of the beautiful Aral Sea, all the hardships that befell their families and the entire people because of this terrible ecological catastrophe. (Zhdanko and Tishkov 1994: 133)

CONCLUSION After several years of institutional conflict, mutual accusations and repressions, the Soviet ethnographic community finally found itself in a steady state in 1943, which coincided with a meeting on the ethnogenesis of the peoples of Central Asia that had taken place a year earlier in Tashkent. The last joint meeting of Soviet ethnographers –​ which was held in Moscow in 1988, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR –​was devoted to the same topic of the ethnogenesis of the peoples of Central Asia. Tatyana Zhdanko attended both meetings, the first as a young scholar who had been evacuated during the war, and the second as a distinguished and elderly researcher who had retired from field practice and theoretical debate. Coming full circle, Soviet ethnography returned to the same issues and the same region around which it had debated and conducted research for half a century. The early discussion –​about the periphery but conducted mainly by academics from the metropoles –​demonstrated external control over models that described Central Asia: Moscow and Leningrad ethnographers proposed schemes that were supposed to take into account the interests of national and socialist construction, while at the same time avoiding conflict over national identity, the history of the region and its culture. The last meeting in 1988, at a residential facility for academics near Moscow, which brought together dozens of researchers from the Soviet Asian republics, showed the changed role of the Centre. The national schools of ethnography and history that had been established and strengthened in Central Asia defended their own academic agendas before the collapse of the USSR; they further diverged from each other and the Centre in cognizance of their individual interests and competition for local cultural heritage. Academics from Moscow and Leningrad attempted to reconcile the sides and renew the conceptual language, recalling again the ideas of mixing and hybridisation of cultures. Orientalists Boris Litvinsky and Vadim Masson –​who themselves had lived for a long time in Central Asia and moved to Moscow and Leningrad, where they took up positions as leading experts on the region –​urged the meeting’s participants to accept that one should speak ‘about a long process of creation of … ethnic entities, stretched out over many centuries’; that ‘the uncertainty of ethnic identity’ was the main feature of local culture; that ‘the process of transformation … of ancient ethno-​social formations … was by no 34

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​

means simple and straightforward’; that ‘the general line of creation of cultures lies through interaction and mutual enrichment of cultures as the antithesis of isolation’, and that ‘primitive stereotyped evolutionism, in which all phenomena, including the development of an ethnos, are built in a calm ascending order, in no way reflects historical realities’ (Litvinsky 1990: 37, 38; Masson 1990: 44, 51). Zhdanko recalled the 1942 meeting, where Tolstov tried to apply Marr’s language in a description of the ethnic history of Central Asia, and spoke about the development of the concept of ‘economic and cultural types’ as an alternative to the division into ethnic groups (Zhdanko 1990). The attempt to return to the foundations of the early Soviet concept that Marr and his students and supporters once defended, without mentioning Marr himself, did not meet with enthusiasm, however. Representatives of the union republics continued to build the genealogies of their peoples separately, looking for new evidence of their deep antiquity, continuous existence and wide territorial distribution. On the side of each national school now stood its own autonomous institutional academic milieu, in the form of academies of sciences, humanities institutes and universities. Scientists from the Soviet periphery now created their own national narratives, following the logic of nation-​building in their republics and regions, skilfully using the methodologies that had been proffered to them from Moscow and Leningrad. The concept of ethnogenesis, developed by Marr and his followers, facilitated the formulation of claims to territory and ancient ancestors, the ethnos theory of Bromley made it possible to deepen the genesis of peoples in the past, while the theory of perezhiktki informed the language of the uniqueness of national traditional cultures. Having received all these ways of explaining and legitimising from the metropolis, local ethnographers began to creatively appropriate and develop them on their own terms, and also continued the practice of accumulating and systematising data in accordance with these paradigms. The biography of Tatyana Zhdanko, her research and her theoretical preferences, testify to the trajectory of Soviet Central Asian ethnography, from an imperial emancipatory patronage that supported nation-​ building and controlled development towards socialist modernity, to the role of a respected teacher recounting the bygone past of Central Asian ethnography in her final publications. There were many specific cases of this kind of trajectory; each, of course, had its own individual fate and characteristics. But it appears possible to name a few common features. This half-​ century of Soviet ethnography constituted an era of selfless collection and preservation of unique data, much of which was forgotten during post-​Soviet reforms. The half-​century brought about a close connection between research and the political demands of the authorities, teaching academics to take into account regime change, speak in ‘hints’, and clothe their personal interests in the expected ideological form. This was a time of the creation of complex scientific networks, formal and informal, through which field and historiographic data were exchanged, often-​unequal theoretical requirements and fashions disseminated, and statuses and authority endowed. This was the era in which the scientific institutions, the academic language and the directions of study that were inherited by the newly independent states of Central Asia appeared and grew stronger.

35

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​

REFERENCES Alymov, S., 2007. “Na puti k “Drevney istorii narodov SSSR: maloizvestnye stranitsy nauchnoy biografii S.P. Tolstova [Ancient history of the peoples of the USSR: little-​known pages of the academic biography of S.P. Tolstov]”. Etnografichskoe obozrenie, 125–​144. Аlymov, S., 2013a. “The Concept of the ‘Survival’ and Soviet Social Science in the 1950s and 1960s”. Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 9, 157–​183. Аlymov, S., 2013b. “G.P. Snesarev i polevoye izucheniye ‘religiozno-​bytovykh perezhitkov’ [G. P. Snesarev and Field Research on ‘Religious and Everyday Relics’]”. Etnograficheskoye obozreniye, 6, 69–​88. Anderson, D.G., Arzyutov, D., Alymov S. (eds.), 2019. Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. Arzhantseva, I., 2015. “The Khorezmian Expedition: Imperial Archaeology and Faustian Bargains in Soviet Central Asia”. Public Archaeology, 14(1), 5–​26. Arzhantseva, I., 2016. “Khorezm. Istoriya otkrytiy i issledovaniy [Khorezm: History of Discovery and Research]”. Etnograficheskiy al’bom. Ul’yanovsk: Artishok. Bustanov, A.K., 2015. Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis Cucciolla, R.M., 2017. “Legitimation Through Self-​Victimization. The ‘Uzbek Cotton Affair’ and its Repression Narrative (1989–​1991)”. Cahiers du Monde russe, 58(4), 639–​668. DeWeese, D., 2011. “Survival Strategies: Reflections on the Notion of Religious ‘Survivals’ ” in Soviet Ethnographic Studies of Muslim Religious Life in Central Asia. Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia. F. Muhlfried, S. Sokolovskiy (eds.). Berlin: LIT Verlag, 35–​58. Esbergenov, Kh., Atamuratov, T., 1975. Traditsii i ikh preobrazovaniye v gorodskom bytu karakalpakov. [Traditions and their transformation in the urban life of the Karakalpaks]. Nukus: “Karakalpakstan” Gerasimov, I., Glebov, S., Mogil’ner, M., 2017. “Gibridnost’: Marrizm i voprosy yazyka imperskoy situatsii. [Hybridity: Marrism and Issues of the Language of the Imperial Situation]”. Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 144 (2), 174–​206. Gorshenina, S., Bornet, Ph., Fuchs, M.E., Rapin C. (eds.), 2019. “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past. Berlin: De Gruyter, Serie: Welten Süd-​ und Zentralasiens/​Worlds of South and Inner Asia /​Mondes de l’Asie du Sud et de l’Asie Centrale, 29–​84. Haugen, A., 2003. The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hirsch, F., 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Ivanov, P.P., 1940. “Kara-​kalpaki [Karakalpaks]”. Sovetskaya etnografiya, IV, 23–​54 Kasimova, Z., 2019. “The Improbable Museum: Igor Savitsky’s Art Museum in Nukus as an Artifact of Postwar Soviet Reality”. Ab Imperio, 3, 119–​143. Kamalov, S.K., 1989. O zhizni i nauchnoy deyatel’nosti Tat’yany Aleksandrovny Zhdanko. Etnicheskaya istoriya i traditsionnaya kul’tura narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana. [About the life and scientific activity of Tatyana Aleksandrovna Zhdanko. Ethnic history and traditional culture of the peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]. Nukus: “Karakalpakstan”. Kamalov, S., 1997. “K voprosu o formirovanii karakalpakskogo naroda. [On the Question of the Creation of the Karakalpak People]”. Bulletin of the Karakalpak branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, No. 4 (150), 113–​122. Litvinskiy, B.A., 1990. “Etnogenez i etnicheskaya istoriya narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana v drevnosti i srednevekov’ye (teoreticheskiy aspekt). Problemy etnogeneza i etnicheskoy istorii narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana. [Ethnogenesis and Ethnic History of the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Theoretical Aspect). In 36

— ​​​​ E t h n o g e n e s i s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f S o v i e t e t h n o g r a p h y —​​​​ Problemy etnogeneza i etnicheskoy istorii narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana [Problems of ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]. Issue 1. Obshchiye problemy. Moscow, 21–​41. Martin., T., 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Masson, V.M., 1990. “Kul’turogenez i etnogenez v Sredney Azii i Kazakhstane. Problemy etnogeneza i etnicheskoy istorii narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana. [Cultural Genesis and Ethnogenesis in Central Asia and Kazakhstan]”. In Problems of ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Issue 1. Obshchiye problemy. Moscow, 42–​53. Nurmukhammedov, M.K., Kamalov, S.K., Zhdanko, T.A., 1971. Karakalpaki [Karakalpaks]. Tashkent: FAN. Poliakov, S., 1992. Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Roche, S., 2014. “The Faithful Assistant. Muhiddin Faizulloev’s Life and Work in the Light of Soviet Ethnography”. Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme. Working Paper 85. Slezkine, Y., 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Slezkine, Y., 1996. “N.Ta. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics”. Slavic Review, 55 (4), 826–​862. Tolstov, S.P., 1947. “Osnovnyye problemy etnogeneza narodov Sredney Azii [The Main Problems in the Ethnogenesis of the Peoples of Central Asia]”. Sovetskaya etnografiya, VI–​ VII, Moskva, Leningrad, 303–​305. Tolstov, S., Zhdanko, T., 1962. “Osnovnyye etapy etnicheskoy istorii narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana [The Main Stages of Ethnic History of the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]” . In S. Tolstov, T. Zhdanko, S. Abramzon, N. Kislyakov (eds.), Narody Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana [Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]. Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences, 38–​114 Tolz, V., 2011. Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Zhdanko, T.A., 1949. “Byt karakalpakskogo kolkhoznogo aula [The Life of a Soviet Kolkhoz aul]”. Sovetskaya etnografiya, 2, 35–​58. Zhdanko, T.A., 1950. Ocherki istoricheskoy etnografii karakalpakov. [Essays on the Historical Ethnography of the Karakalpaks]. Moscow, Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences. Zhdanko, T.A., 1952. “Karakalpaki Khorezmskogo oazisa [The Karakalpaks of Khorezm Oasis]”. In Trudy Khorezmskoy arkheologo-​etnograficheskoy ekspeditsii [Works of the Khorezm Archaeological-​Ethnographic Expedition]. Vol. 1. Moscow, 461–​566. Zhdanko, T.A., 1958. “Byt kolkhoznikov-​ pereselentsev na vnov’ osvoyennykh zemlyakh drevnego orosheniya Kara-​kalpakii [The Life of Migrant Collective Farmers on the Newly Reclaimed Ancient Irrigated Lands of Karakalpakstan]. In Proceedings of the Khorezm archaeological and ethnographic expedition. Volume II. Moscow, 705–​760. Zhdanko, T.A., 1974. “Spetsifika etnicheskikh obshchnostey v Sredney Azii i Kazakhstane (XIX –​nachalo XX v.) [The Peculiarities of Ethnic Communities in Central Asia and Kazakhstan (19th and Early 20th Centuries)]”. Rasy i narody, 4th Edition, Moscow, 10–​26. Zhdanko, T.A., 1975. “Etnicheskiye obshchnosti i etnicheskiye protsessy v dorevolyutsionnoy Rossii” [Ethnic Communities and Ethnic Processes in Pre-​revolutionary Russia]” in Yu. Bromley (ed.) Sovremennyye etnicheskiye protsessy v SSSR Contemporary ethnic processes in the USSR. Moscow: Nauka, 33–​84. Zhdanko, T.A., 1981. “Etnograficheskiye issledovaniya Khorezmskoy ekspeditsii (narody, problemy, trudy) [The Ethnographic Research of the Khorezm Expedition (Peoples, Issues, 37

—​​​​ S e r g e y A b a s h i n —​​​ Labour)”. In Kul’tura i iskusstvo drevnego Khorezma [Culture and art of ancient Khorezm]. Moscow: Nauka, 21–​40. Zhdanko, T.A., 1990. “Etnicheskaya istoriya i istoriko-​kul’turnyye svyazi narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana v trudakh etnografov [Ethnic History and Historical and Cultural Ties of the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan in the Works of Ethnographers]”. Problemy etnogeneza i etnicheskoy istorii narodov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana [Problems of Ethnogenesis and Ethnic History of the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]. Issue 1. Obshchiye problemy. Moscow, 105–​117. Zhdanko, T.A., Kamalov, C.A. 1980, Etnografiya karakalpakov XIX –​nachala XX veka (materialy i issledovaniya) [Ethnography of the Karakalpaks in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Materials and Research]. Tashkent. Zhdanko, T., Tishkov V., 1994. “T.A. Zhdanko beseduyet V.A. Tishkov [V.A. Tishkov Speaks with T.A. Zhdanko”. Etnograficheskoye obozreniye, 1, 118–​133.

38

CHAPTER THREE

LASTING LEGACIES IN CENTRAL ASIA’S AGRO-​PASTORALIST LIVELIHOODS Jeanine Dağyeli INTRODUCTION In the past, the lives and livelihoods of many sedentary and semi-​sedentary people in Central Asia were shaped by the notions of belonging to and working in an oasis community, more than today. This community existed on various scales. Mutual solidarities and obligations were associated with its multiple substructural units. For example, these included settlements, city quarters (mahalla), or riverine-​sharing a distributary irrigation channel. Oases permitted a sedentary mode of life amidst a steppe environment and attracted craftspeople and traders. Pastoralist, nomadic, or semi-​nomadic groups lived in between or on the fringes of agricultural lands. The rural-​urban interface flourished under the constant flow of people, animals, water, goods, ideas and other objects. Far from being merely hinterland subjects, the rural populations of the oasis played a substantial role in providing food security, as a labour force, in maintaining the infrastructure of the oasis (most importantly, the waterways) and in producing two commodities that still leave a trail through the social, economic and ecological fabric of Central Asia today: cotton and sheep. Oases are fragile ecologies. Dependent on irrigation from suitable water bodies, drainage and transportation infrastructure for their sustenance, they were to a certain degree self-​sustaining while also being interconnected with other nodes in a wider network of trade, pastoral routes, waterways, pilgrimage, transport and provisioning, that ultimately linked them to global markets via Russia, British India, or the Ottoman Empire.1 Through the example of the oasis of Bukhara, this chapter asks how the beginnings of the capitalist cotton and sheep economies in Central Asia altered how people lived with the oasis in ways that were formative for its later Soviet and post-​ Soviet manifestations. It questions the conventional anthropocentric approach that discusses these longue-​durée developments primarily as outcomes of state and elite investment, whether colonial or local, by putting non-​human agency back into its place. What were the ramifications, intentional or not, of changes in the oasis for those who inhabited it? And how can a plant (cotton) and an animal (sheep) have a history in the region that dates back millennia, and yet be a symbol of political, economic and environmental change?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-4

39

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

The pre-​socialist Bukharan oasis was an agro-​pastoral transition zone, characterised by a multiple resource economy where most people employed diversified income strategies (see Franz 2005). Most sedentary people planted both food and cash crops, raised a few animals, cultivated fruit trees, and occasionally engaged in craft or menial labour. Pastoralists also sowed low-​maintenance crops such as sorghum, and offered transport or other services. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and up to the time of the national delimitation process beginning in 1924,2 Bukhara together with its oasis belonged to the Emirate of Bukhara, a vassal state of the Russian Empire and its successor, the short-​lived Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. Over the last two decades, cotton has become a favourite academic object for examining the crafting of the modern capitalist world and its global commodity chains, communication infrastructures and labour exploitation (e.g., Çalışkan 2010; Beckert 2014). Despite its popularity, many particularities of cotton cultivation and marketing remain surprisingly vague, as Beatrice Penati remarked several years ago (2013b, pp.65–​66). Cotton had been one of Central Asia’s stock commodities for centuries before demand, especially from Russia, increased dramatically between the mid-​eighteenth and mid-​nineteenth centuries (Levi 2007, p.226), pre-​dating the cotton fever of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Paolo Sartori (2016, p.198) has attributed developments such as the Central Asian cotton economy to regional political and economic decisions rather than colonial incentives. While it is certainly true that infrastructural improvements in the Ferghana Valley that had been commissioned by the Khans of Kokand paid off in terms of agricultural surpluses, including in cotton, this argument misses a critical point. To assume that the Central Asian cotton economy of the colonial era was an organic outcome of pre-​conquest measures, rather than a colonial intervention, ignores the unprecedented anthropogenic intervention into seed varieties, as well as the momentous change in work and economic routines. This is what I explore here. As for the trade in animals and animal products, the change is even more profound. While Central Asia had previously been a core supplier of horses for the Chinese, Indian and Russian markets (Levi 2007, p.218), by the turn of the twentieth century sheep had outranked horses in importance. Mutton and hides were traded as far as Western Europe. While the topic in principle calls for following these translocal commodities on their global journey, I deliberately concentrate in this chapter on the communities at the beginning of the commodity chain: those whose lives, livelihoods and situated knowledge were profoundly altered when nineteenth-​century capitalist modes of production entered Central Asia. The ways in which human and non-​human actors thrived, interacted and occasionally failed in the specific ecological habitat of the oasis, and how they make sense of their being in the world, call for a holistic approach that integrates the complex entanglements of what are conventionally classified as either ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. Following Latour (1993), I will use the term ‘Natures-​Cultures’ to overcome conventional dichotomies and highlight their hybrid character, while at the same time stressing that there is neither one, generic, nature nor one culture. I am interested how humans and non-​humans lived with the oasis, not merely in it. This chapter examines the cotton and sheep Natures-​Cultures in the pre-​Soviet Bukharan oasis on the basis of documentary and narrative archival sources, oral history, and ethnographic fieldwork in southern Uzbekistan. 40

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

OF SHEEP AND COTTON: FIBRES, CHANGE AND CONTINUITY Large flocks of sheep and fields of cotton are two familiar sights when travelling through the landscape of southern Uzbekistan today. Both sheep breeding and cotton cultivation have a long history in this part of Central Asia, and have found their way into today’s emblematic national iconography. However, sheep and cotton are equally emblematic of the long-​term colonial legacies for Bukharan livelihoods and work routines, rural poverty, landlessness and –​in the case of cotton –​conscript labour. To address the question of how sheep and cotton became symbols of profound economic and environmental change, we need to realise that sheep are not just sheep, and that there is cotton –​and cotton.

Cotton The word ‘cotton’ as we use it today is an umbrella term for four out of several dozen different species of the genus Gossypium that have been domesticated independently and are of economic relevance, namely the Mesoamerican Gossypium hirsutum, the South American Gossypium barbadense, the African Gossypium herbaceum and the Asian Gossypium arboretum (cf. Smith and Cothren 1999; Beckert 2014, p.6). It is still not known exactly when cotton as an annual plant was introduced to Central Asia, but it was possibly around the sixth or fifth century BC (see Ibrohimov 2000–​ 2005, p.53, Obertreis 2017, p.28, fn 59). Cotton, mostly the local Gossypium herbaceum varieties (i.e., of the species that originates in Africa), was cultivated in pre-​Socialist Bukhara together with other crops by individual growers, partly for domestic consumption and partly for the market.4 This mixed cultivation did not allow for a large market surplus, but served as an insurance against crop failures, a common risk-​averse peasant strategy described in detail in different regions of the world. Remembering his childhood, the renowned author and intellectual Sadriddin Aini, who came from a modest farming family in the Bukharan oasis, listed his family’s agricultural mix as of 1889: relying only on household and some community labour,5 his father planted one tanob6 each with cotton and sorghum, and Aini himself, who was an 11-​year-​old child at that time, planted a spare plot in their apricot orchard with pumpkin. That particular year, the sorghum and the pumpkins yielded a bumper harvest, but the cotton failed entirely due to a dry spring (Aini 1998, pp.163–​164, 177–​178). Aini’s father, himself a part-​ time cotton weaver, had planted the cotton specifically for the market to pay for his son to attend the madrasa in Bukhara. While his efforts were in vain, the overall agricultural mix proved beneficial. By not risking everything by planting only the profitable cotton, Aini and his siblings were able to survive economic hardship after the cholera epidemic to which their parents succumbed; they lived on a modest diet of sorghum, dried fruit from their orchard and occasionally some additional products from the market. Aini was even able to repay the funeral debts of his parents, cover household demands, and buy a ewe and a lamb the following spring by selling most of the sorghum and pumpkins. His orphaned household slipped into scarcity but did not become destitute (Aini 1998, pp.178–​179). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, capitalist pressure on agricultural and uncultivated space in Central Asia increased. Some Central Asian cotton 41

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

had ended up on the Russian market, but its market share had remained modest. By 1857, it accounted for only 6.5 per cent of Russia’s industrial needs. As the global demand for cotton rose, spurred by industrialisation, and prices spiking because of the American Civil War, Russian industrialists and bureaucrats pressurised the government to increase the cotton supply from the Caucasus and, in the wake of the conquest of Central Asia, from the newly acquired territories (see Penati 2013a; Beckert 2014, pp.344–​347). While cotton exports from the emirate to Russia had amounted to 410,000 pud in 1880/​1881(ca. 6,700 tons), it had risen to 2,624,000 pud (almost 43,000 tons) by 1915 (Remez 1922, pp. 49, 68). The rapid increase in cultivation was not only due to Russian efforts to extend cotton cultivation areas in Central Asia, but was also enabled by the gradual integration of Central Asia cotton markets into global markets (mostly through Russia), as well as by pre-​conquest improvements in infrastructure, globally increasing demand and a rise in prices for raw cotton (cf. Alimov 1970, p.8; Levi 2007). Although the pressure was less direct in Bukhara than in the General-​Governorate of Russian Turkestan (which was under direct colonial rule), the financial promises of cotton production did not fail to have an effect on Bukhara’s ruling elite. When, after experiences elsewhere, the industrious Russian merchant and chairman of the Turkestan Trades Company, N. Kudrin, approached the emir with the intent of growing cotton on both banks of the Amu River in the autumn of 1887, the emir agreed and ordered him to be given as much land as he needed from the Russian concessions at Charjuy (today Türkmenabat in Turkmenistan). Kudrin had also informed the emir about new methods for cotton cultivation earlier that year (Akhbār-​i dākhiliya 1887, p.2, see also Becker 2004, p.143; Peterson 2019, pp.135–​136). The latter, however, was apparently not entirely convinced; by 1909 his ‘retrograde revenue taxes’ were blamed for the perseverance of local cotton varieties that hampered ‘the rational development of agriculture’ (Von der Mühlen 1909, pp.137, 139). The increase in the amount of cotton that was produced and the change from mixed cultivation to monoculture were not the only transformations. What changed the lives of smallholders and agricultural workers at least as much was Russian capitalists and agronomists’ instigation of a profound replacement of the local Gossypium herbaceum varieties in Central Asia with American cotton of the Gossypium hirsutum species, known for its long fibres and soft quality. While its introduction into Central Asia is still glossed over in scholarship as a mere ‘improvement’ (e.g., Thompstone 1995, p.233), Annette Meakin was a keen contemporary observer who noted that: Next to the arrival of the Russians themselves no event has brought so many changes into the life of the Sarts[7] as the introduction of American cotton; whether it will prove a blessing or a curse remains to be seen. (Meakin 1903, p.31) The new varieties achieved high prices at commodity exchanges, but brought profound ruptures to the fine-​tuned irrigation arrangements and the work routine in agriculture. The so-​called ‘Old World’ cotton species Gossypium herbaceum and Gossypium arboreum are relatively salt tolerant, can grow on marginal soils and are able to contend with low moisture and hot winds. Compared to the New World cotton species 42

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

Gossypium hirsutum, known as American upland or American cotton, the Old World species have shorter fibres and produce lower yields (Brite and Marston 2013, p.41).8 American upland cotton requires more water, which quickly sparked complaints in Central Asia that its cultivation would lead to water shortages and the withering of gardens elsewhere (Gasprinskii 1890, pp.1–​2). As an incentive, the Russian administration offered tax breaks to the farmers, kept the prices for the American variety artificially high and advertised rewards for large harvests. Additionally, the taxation on land for cotton cultivation was adjusted to the lower rate of grain fields in 1891, thus stimulating cotton cultivation (Peterson 2019, pp.136–​137). By 1890, cotton grown in Russian Turkestani fields was almost exclusively of the American species (Gasprinskii 1890, p.1–​2). A Russian-​Turkestani newspaper lists the varieties of cotton seed circulating in the Ferghana Valley in 1902, but the names malla chigit (lit. light cotton seed), qora chigit (black cotton seed), ko’k chigit (blue-​green cotton seed) among others, do not signify whether these are local Gossypium herbaceum or Gossypium hirsutum seeds. The names of another set of seeds mentioned, including ‘Chimkent seed’ (first grown in 1901), ‘Extra Prolific’ and ‘Peterkins’ clearly show that they are Gossypium hirsutum varieties (Turkestanskie vedomosti 1902, p.52). Local varieties were still grown up to 1928 in Bukhara and Khiva, although to a lesser extent (Abdullaev et al. 2012, p.6) (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1  Soviet map from 1926 depicting areas suitable for cotton growing with irrigation (green), proposed for irrigation (dark pink) and without present plans for irrigation (light pink). The map was composed by a commission from the Academy of Sciences headed by V.I. Yuferev (available in colour at www.prlib.ru/​item/​417​526). 43

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

Two of the arguments against the indigenous Central Asian Gossypium herbaceum varieties were that their quality was inferior because of their short, comparatively coarse fibres, and that cultivation was labour-​ intensive: Russian post-​ conquest investigations concluded that cotton cultivation with indigenous techniques, equipment and species demanded 25 days of animal labour, 120 days of adult labour and 30 days of child labour per desĭatina (a Russian square measure equalling roughly 1.1 ha) (Whitman 1956, p.191). This labour calculation misses one important point, however, which some careful contemporary observers noticed: the substantial change in labour routines and the timing of labour in cotton fields caused by the specificities of the different species. The cotton bolls (capsules containing the cotton fibre and seeds) of Gossypium herbaceum and Gossypium arboreum varieties do not burst, but must be cracked open, which requires additional work steps. The pods of Gossypium hirsutum by contrast do break and the cotton fibres ooze out, creating the familiar scene of green fields speckled with white, fluffy cotton wool. Consequently, Gossypium hirsutum is more vulnerable to rains in autumn as well as to sparrows and mice that use the cotton to build their nests (see Meakin 1903, p.31, fn 1). The harvest usually starts in mid-​September and continues into November if weather conditions allow, and it requires the mobilisation of many hands at once. Since Soviet times, Central Asia has been infamous for child and conscript labour in the cotton fields, though there have been some improvements in recent years (see, e.g., International Crisis Group Report N° 93 1993, Bhat 2013; International Labour Organization 2018). What exactly changed then with the introduction of Gossypium hirsutum? In 1914, the German anthropologist Richard Karutz commented (both insightfully and condescendingly) that the local cotton needed around 100 days to ripen, with the upper bolls ripening first but remaining closed, which allowed people to stretch the harvest over half a year. As he describes, … [A]‌lso because the people, very slow workers, suspend the harvest to do other things. Since the fruit does not decay on the shrub, they may take their time with impunity, additionally inveigled to do so by the competition of wholesale buyers. (Karutz 1914, p.58).9 The discontinuity and work pace that aroused Karutz’s disapproval were not signs of ‘laziness and levity’ as he suspected, but instead a deeply rational behaviour which calculated the available work force at a given time, market prices and household needs. It provided some protection against price deterioration and was an expression of a work ethic that was oriented rather towards meeting household needs at a particular time than towards profit for its own sake (cf. Atabaki 2013). Karutz, in the quote above, captured this attitude well (even if he disapproved of it), when he noted that one incentive for leaving the bolls on the shrub was the competition between wholesale buyers who would offer better prices if not all of the cotton from the yearly harvest flooded the market at the same time. Even cotton that was not ripe by the time that frost set in and killed the plants could be processed. It was torrefied, artificially dried, and sold at a cheaper price. This too was not possible with Gossypium hirsutum. The propensity of Bukharan farmers to cling to Gossypium herbaceum had yet another reason. Unlike their fellow farmers in the cotton-​growing 44

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

areas of Russian Turkestan, Bukharan farmers remained under the Bukharan tax system, which required them to keep their crop on the stalk until it was assessed for taxation by an official. Local Gossypium herbaceum varieties that kept their cotton encapsulated allowed the farmer to wait for the assessors while Gossypium hirsutum would have easily been ruined if not picked promptly (Becker 2004, p.143). The cultivation of Gossypium hirsutum, by contrast, needs many hands around planting and harvest time. The labour force needed for cultivating, harvesting and processing Gossypium hirsutum came largely from a growing mass of displaced farmers who hired themselves out as sharecroppers or seasonal hands between September and February (Kisch 1946, p.107). Cotton brokers, financed by loans from Russian banks such as the Russo-​Asiatic Bank, the Azov-​Don Commercial Bank and others at interest rates of around 12 per cent, gave an advance against the harvest to farmers at interest rates of 35, 45 or almost 100 per cent (Maktub az Bukhārā 1912, p. 2; Kisch 1946, p.107; Becker 2004, pp.146–​147). Farmers, unable to repay the loans if the harvest did not meet expectations, consequently lost their land with all investments and animals to their creditor, the bank, a merchant, or a moneylender. This dynamic probably contributed significantly to the increase in rural poverty during the early twentieth century, but more in-​depth, micro-​perspective research would be required to make this argument. The hunger for cotton in the Russian (and global) markets incited more and more Central Asians to grow cotton rather than wheat or rice, as cotton was even more profitable than rice (Meakin 1903, p.32). The consequence was an increasing dearth of food grain and horse fodder, which even the Russian colonialists began to feel. They set their hopes, however, on the completion of the Orenburg-​Tashkent railway, which would allow them to import Siberian wheat and thus to ‘liberate’ Central Asian lands for cotton monoculture. When droughts hit Central Asia in 1889 (the one that dried up Aini’s cotton field) and 1893, the disastrous combination of cotton over-​cultivation, poor transport infrastructure and grain speculation led to famine in Russian Turkestan (cf. Dağyeli 2020, p.86). Bukhara was spared the direst consequences because the emir had chosen a different path: as the contemporary observer, Meakin noted, he had forced ‘his subjects to grow a certain amount of corn on their private lands, and thus the danger of famine in that province is warded off’ (Meakin 1903, p.33). Nevertheless, the emir had to purchase additional wheat from Russia and the Caucasus during the drought of 1893 (Dağyeli 2020, p.87).

Sheep The second commodity that Central Asia was famous for in global markets was sheep. The seemingly separate commodities of sheep whose hides, wool and meat were marketed, and cotton were in fact tied to each other in several ways. The ecological zones used for cotton growing and pastoralism in the Bukharan oasis were distinct yet interlaced. Within the oasis, many plots can be turned into potential fields through bush clearance and irrigation, while dry, unused plots support typical steppe vegetation.10 The close proximity of agricultural fields and grazing areas was a potential source of conflict between farmers and shepherds if usage agreements were violated or circumvented (see Zanca 2000, pp.4–​5 for an example from the recent past). 45

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

First, however, we should look more closely at the animal itself. Domestic sheep in Central Asia usually belong to fat-​tailed species. The most famous among the local breeds are the Hisar breed, a large-​bodied sheep raised mainly for meat and fat from its tail, and the Qarakul, renowned for its wool. The latter were called ‘Arab’ locally, after the Central Asian Arabs who traditionally bred them.11 Although all sheep breeds raised in Central Asia are tolerant of temperature extremes, water scarcity and a certain degree of salinity, there are differences concerning their tolerances. The Qarakul is unusual in being able to thrive on the marginal lands and saline waters that would not sustain other sheep breeds. Qarakul are famous for their beautifully patterned sheepskins but they were a multi-​use sheep breed to their Central Asian Arab, Turkmen and other owners, highly adapted to their ecological niche. Allegedly one of the oldest domesticated sheep breeds, the Qarakul’s grazing habits are less damaging to the vegetation than others, while their hoof action reworks nutrients into the soil (Ibragimov et al. 2007). Three types of pastoralism existed within and around the oasis of Bukhara (see Holzwarth 2004, pp.93–​94): ‘stationary’ or enclosed pastoralism (Rowton 1974),12 long-​distance meridional or horizontal nomadic pastoralism, and vertical pastoralism, taking advantage of the climatic zonation of mountainous regions. Enclosed pastoralism was practised mostly by the Central Asian Arabs and later Turkmen on the marginal lands of the Bukharan oasis. The herders moved their herds throughout the year in the same ecological zone within a network of artesian wells. The herds consisted mainly of Qarakul or Arab sheep, named after the core region of Qarakul rearing, the town of the same name south of the Bukharan oasis (today Qorako’l). This was also a highly coveted winter pasture for different animals and pastoral groups. Meridional and horizontal transhumance was mostly in the hands of different Kazakh and Uzbek groups and, in contrast to the Arabs and their herds who lived within the oasis, took place outside of the oasis proper (cf. Barfield 1981, pp.9–​12). The animals included different fat-​tailed breeds such as Hisar, Jaidara and Kazakh sheep and others, that have the ability to cover hundreds of kilometres during seasonal migrations and were well suited for horizontal and vertical transhumance. Their wool and hides were coarser than those of the Qarakul sheep. Their owners raised them for meat, tallow, dairy products and wool but, in contrast with the Qarakul sheep, their market value consisted primarily in their meat, tallow and milk products, rather than their hides. Furthermore, virtually every household with sufficient means in the oasis raised some animals; if their number exceeded the sustainability level of pastures close to home, they were given to hired herders during the day or even for the entire summer (cf. Karmyševa 1969, p.117). A fashion for Qarakul sheepskins that appropriated the insignia of court dress for mostly European and American elites came in waves after the mid-​nineteenth century.13 This destabilised this fine-​tuned niche specialisation of different sheep breeds making use of different ecological zones within and around the Bukharan oasis (Holzwarth 2004, pp.91–​92). The Qarakul market expanded almost in parallel with and as explosively as the better-​known cotton market. Often, the cotton and Qarakul businesses went through the hands of the same person. The above-​mentioned merchant Kudrin, for example, was not only one of the representatives of trading offices dealing in cotton, but also engaged in the Qarakul trade. Even the Bukharan Emir Abd-​al Ahad was ‘deeply involved in both the cotton and the karakul trades, and 46

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

he was a major stockholder in the new railroad’; his economic activities eventually turned him into the third-​largest trader in Qarakul hides and the owner of three ginning mills (Becker 2004, pp.149, 157). By the 1910s, Bukharan Qarakul fleeces accounted for 40 per cent of Bukhara’s exports, just below raw cotton, which had seen a similar exponential growth rate (Holzwarth 2004, p.92). Qaraqul exports rose to 1,800,000 pieces in 1914 and –​together with cotton –​accounted for over 80 per cent of Bukhara’s exports to Russia (Alimov 1970, p.9) (see Figure 3.2). Credits for Qarakul breeders were almost exclusively in the hands of the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade (Becker 2004, p.147). One side-​effect of this fashion was that people started to crossbreed the original black, longtail Qarakul with white long-​ haired Afghan sheep to produce more lambskins for the market, with the effect that the original breed was largely extinct even by 1912 (Young 1914). To satisfy the demand, large stretches of those pastures that had been reserved for the less salt-​tolerant Hisar and other meat and dairy sheep were given over to Qarakul rearing, as for example the O’rta Cho’l steppe to the south-​east of Bukhara. By 1880, the O’rta Cho’l was completely taken over by Qarakul breeders and pasturage zones were constantly expanded into Russian-​controlled territories around Samarkand and into the mountainous areas of East Bukhara. This process resulted in the complete reversal of traditional meat market supply routes (Holzwarth 2004,

Figure 3.2  Qarakul market in Bukhara. Photo by C.C. Young, probably 1912 or 1913 (available at http://​libra​rybl​ogs.is.ed.ac.uk/​towar​dsdo​lly/​2013/​05/​31/​from-​bukh​ara-​ to-​texas-​dr-​cc-​young-​and-​his-​kara​kul-​sheep/​). 47

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

pp.94–​95). When the railroad connected southern Siberian cities including Orenburg (in 1877) and Central Asian cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand (in 1888) to the Russian rail network, Kazakh sheep-​breeders increasingly started to market their animals in Russia rather than Bukhara. At the same time, the loss of pastures for meat sheep caused by both the reallocation of higher-​grade pastures to Qarakul breeding and the increased land consumption for cotton led to a shortage of meat on the internal Bukharan market. Attracted by rising meat prices in Bukhara, Afghan breeders also redirected their commodities away from Kabul and towards Bukhara. Prohibitions and other sanctions by the Afghan emir notwithstanding, the contraband trade in sheep flourished; in response, in 1900, the Afghan emir gave orders to fire live bullets at smugglers (ibid., p.96).

NATURES-​C ULTURES IN THE OASIS AND THEIR REVERBERATIONS The life-​vein of the Bukharan oasis was the River Zarafshan, an allochthonous river. These rivers originate in areas with high precipitation, in this case from springs in the glaciers of the Turkestan and Zarafshan ranges, and feed arid areas along their courses with water quantities untypical for these regions. As in other river systems, riverine soils in Central Asia were fertile due to the silt carried with the annual floods. Natures-​Cultures in the Bukharan oasis were built around the organisation of water infrastructure. The grid of irrigation channels, with its large canals that branch out into ever smaller lateral ones throughout the oasis and into irrigation ditches of individual households, is mirrored in the historical organisation of communities around the canals. Pastoral movements were also predetermined by the availability of water, either from artesian wells or other water bodies along the routes. However, the water grid was much more than just a conduit for water. It carried notions of ownership and community, and was in a way one among several ecological actors in its own right. Predictions concerning the availability of water during the growing season were precarious and contingent upon the careful observation of the environment. The Bukharan oasis was a relational world. Water allocation, crop rotation and animal passage were not individual decisions, but had to be negotiated within one’s water community. While water allocation from canals to villages and individual plots was regulated through community-​based water overseers –​the mirob –​maintenance works at the canals were done by collective work along one feeder channel. Each household was responsible for the upkeep of its own ditches, while all those who drew water from certain sections of the larger feeder channels were collectively responsible. These regulations, theoretically well balanced, only refer to the ideal state of affairs, however. The mirob system was prone to fraudulence, overseers were accused of accepting benefits and a person of power could get away with using too much water to the detriment of others. On the other hand, the office of mirob could involve physical risk, during the dry summer months and leading up to the harvest when tensions among farmers over water allocation rose. Planting crops with a high market value that demanded larger quantities of water, such as cotton or rice, often had to be negotiated within and among villages, and petitions were filed in case the agreements were violated (TsGAU, f. 126-​I, d. 989; Ṣadr-​i Ziyā 2003, pp.146–​148). 48

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

The oasis with its natural, rural and urban entangled zones of economic, cultural and religious activities engendered its own conceptualisations of what it means to be in the world, and, more precisely, in the oasis habitat. Cotton and sheep, both established species in this world, hold a very different status within the Natures-​ Cultures entanglements of Bukhara, but also Central Asia more generally. Sheep meant wealth –​they were a symbol of plenty, bestowed with paradisiac origins and closely related to the sacred; some of their body parts are employed in apotropaic or visionary rituals (cf. Dağyeli 2011, pp.95, 97–​100). Although people with means tended to breed ever-​larger herds, this did not follow a capitalist logic but was an aim in itself (cf. Schweitzer 1993, p.322). Cotton, by contrast, has left hardly any traces in the supernatural imagination.14 The only memories it engendered, both pleasant and unpleasant, were related to work in the fields. It could be argued that sheep are valued as providers of meat and dairy products, and foodstuffs were valued above other things. Sheep are sacrificed in religious rituals, represent wealth and can be exchanged. It is the sheep sacrificed during the major Islamic holiday of Eid al-​ Adha that, according to popular belief, will carry the deceased across the fires of hell into paradise. On the other hand, (cotton) cloth is also an important item of ritual exchange, the plants’ stalks serve as fodder and the seeds are processed into oil. There is thus more than an appreciation of values of different goods at work in the difference made between sheep and cotton. This apparent hierarchisation of the environment would certainly merit a deeper investigation.

CONCLUSION What are the trails of these ‘longue durée’ narratives of cotton and sheep in contemporary Uzbekistan? If humans are, to cite a catchy phrase of Tim Ingold’s (1996, p.164) a ‘creature of the past abroad in the present’, it is important to examine these echoes of past work, belongings and Natures-​Cultures to understand contemporary communities in a more holistic way. If the past is indeed a ‘constituent of the real world’ (Küchler 1996, p.183), it is equally important to recognise what kinds of knowledge have been lost. The long road from individual, mostly subsistence-​oriented agro-​pastoralists to colonial-​era labourers (in fact often in debt bondage), to kolkhoz workers complying or not with different Soviet planning schemes, and finally to contemporary farming structures was not smooth.15 Ruptures in work routines, supply chains, responsibilities and access to resources may have rendered knowledge redundant quickly and removed it from the repertoire of what was actively passed on and inscribed into the bodies of younger generations (Evers and Wall 2006). As elsewhere in the colonised world, Bukharan farmers, pastoralists and craftspeople experienced knowledge loss and de-​skilling, as the processing of raw commodities was taken out of their hands and transferred to European Russia, while industrially produced cheap goods such as cotton cloth flooded Central Asian markets, making local craftsmanship and manufacturing unsustainable. Under different conditions, this uneven distribution of labour continued during Soviet times while agricultural and pastoral knowledge was channelled into specialised institutes dealing with questions of seed and breed improvement, fertiliser and pesticide development, fodder quality, and so on. Although many Soviet-​era agro-​pastoral implementations are viewed positively in retrospect by rural communities, from the 49

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

perspective of local knowledge development, this move to technocratic, specialised solutions proved problematic. It shifted the previously horizontally (if never fully evenly) available rural knowledge repertoire to a vertical knowledge structure with specialised experts at the top and formal training, ideally in Tashkent or preferably Moscow, to achieve this status. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the breakdown of the rural structure in Uzbekistan, as elsewhere, again resulted in knowledge loss, because agrotechnical institutions became dysfunctional and specialists who were no longer paid found other jobs. This was one of several reasons why agro-​pastoralist structures, founded on the ruins of the formally abolished kolkhozes, often fared poorly (see Zanca 2000; Evers and Well 2006; Herbers 2006; Trevisani 2007a, b, c).

NOTES 1 Of most importance for the global market were cotton, silk, qaraqul hides, and sheep for the meat market. Sheep from Central Asia were brought over long distances (Holzwarth 2004). The goods were distributed via large markets along the trade routes, among the most important being Irbit, Nizhni Novgorod and Moscow (see Ismatov 1965; Holzwarth 2004). 2 A plethora of articles have been written about the Soviet national delimitation in Central Asia, but many are rather superficial and sometimes even incorrect. Sengupta (2000) promises insights into the implications of the border drawing for Bukhara but falls short of any thorough analysis and presents only known, sovietological narratives. Sabol (1995) provides a good overview. For an extensive account of the delimitation from a Tajikistan-​ centred perspective, see Bergne (2007) and Battis (2015), for an Uzbekistan-​centred perspective see Chapter 8 of Khalid (2015), and for linguistic and ethnic implications for the territory of today’s Uzbekistan, Baldauf (1991, pp.86–​92). Fedtke (2007) shows in detail how the personal motives and histories of the pre-​socialist era played into putatively ‘objective’ decision making and Hirsch (2000) contextualises the Central Asian experience with other examples from within the Soviet Union. 3 In the late 1850s, cotton from the United States still accounted for 92 per cent of Russia’s overall cotton imports, however, with Central Asia supplying only 6.5 per cent as of 1857 (Obertreis 2017, p.61). 4 Beckert (2014, p.15) points out that this was the global pattern of cotton growing before the eighteenth century, when cotton monoculture gradually emerged. 5 The feeling of belonging to a village, city quarter or other small-​ scale community necessitated some forms of mutual solidarities and obligations. Among these were collective labour during labour-​intensive tasks, support with tools or draught animals, etc. 6 Roughly a quarter of a hectare. 7 The term ‘Sart’, by now obsolete, was a widely used etic denomination for the sedentary population of Central Asia during the colonial period. For colonial administrators, the much-​debated term was used in lieu of an ethnic category, though those who were referred to as Sarts could be Turkic or Persian speakers (see Baldauf 1991, pp. 79–​82). 8 There were also differences in degree of quality between Central Asian varieties. Kazak (1937, p.30) lists East Turkestani cotton varieties (it is not clear whether of the Gossypium herbaceum or Gossypium arboreum species) in order of descending quality –​Kurla, Turfan, Kashghar and Kucha –​but says that they are all better than cotton seeds of West Turkestani provenience. 9 Translation from the German original by the author of this chapter. 10 This is not to say that the turnover of virgin steppe soils (as in the Khrushchev era) can be redone easily. The vegetation coverage of land that has been used for agriculture and then 50

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​ abandoned is different from virgin steppe vegetation, as David Moon kindly explained to me on a visit to former Virgin Land Campaign fields in Kazakhstan in 2019. 11 See Barfield (1981, pp.3–​17) on the Central Asian Arabs and the decline of their importance in Bukhara after the Russian conquest. See Sukhareva (1966, pp.149–​152) on the Arabs living within Bukhara city. 12 Both Holzwarth (2004) and Rowton (1974) in fact speak of nomadism rather than pastoralism. I chose the term ‘pastoralism’ because it is more inclusive of the different versions of animal rearing and herding practised by different groups in and around the Bukharan oasis. See Karmysheva (1969) for livestock farming among sedentary or semi-​nomadic populations of southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. 13 This railway played a vital role in connecting the General-​Governate of Turkestan with the ports on the Caspian Sea via the border crossing on the Amu Darya. Since the tracks ran partly through Bukharan territory, the emir needed to consent, but did so only under the caveat that the ‘holy city of Bukhara’ was not directly connected. 14 This is not a question of animal versus plant. Other agricultural plants such as wheat occupy a secure place in the socio-​cosmic field. 15 For obvious reasons of word constraint, the post-​Soviet developments cannot be detailed here. For more discussion, see Zanca (2000); Herbers (2006); Trevisani (2007a, b, c).

REFERENCES Abdullaev, A., A. Abdullaev, I. Salakhutdinov, S. Rizaeva, Z. Kuryazov, D. Ernazarova and I. Abdurakhmonov. 2012. Cotton Germplasm Collection of Uzbekistan. The Asian and Australian Journal of Plant Science and Biotechnology 7 (2): 1–​15. Alimov, I.A. 1970. Agrarnye preobrazovanniĭa v narodnykh sovetskikh respublikakh Khorezma i Bukharu (1920–​1924 gg.). Tashkent: Uzbekistan. Aini, S. 1998. The Sands of Oxus. Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini. Translated and introduced by John R. Perry & Rachel Lehr. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publ. Atabaki, T. 2013. From Amaleh (Labor) to Kargar (Worker): Recruitment, Work Discipline and Making of the Working Class in the Persian/​Iranian Oil Industry. International Labor and Working-​Class History 84, pp. 159–​175. Baldauf, I. 1991. Some Thoughts on the Making of the Uzbek Nation. Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 32(1): 79–​95. Barfield, T.J. 1981. The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan. Pastoral Nomadism in Transition. Austin: University of Texas Press. Battis, M. 2015. Soviet Orientalism and Nationalism in Central Asia: Aleksandr Semenov’s Vision of Tajik National Identity. Iranian Studies 48(5): 729–​745. Becker, S. 2004. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–​ 1924. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Beckert, S. 2014. Empire of Cotton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Bergne, P. 2007. The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic. London: Tauris. Bhat, B.A. 2013. Forced Labor of Children in Uzbekistan’s Cotton Industry. International Journal on World Peace 30(4): 61–​85. Brite, E.B. and Marston, J.M. 2013. Environmental Change, Agricultural Innovation, and the Spread of Cotton Agriculture in the Old World. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32: 39–​53. Çalışkan, K. 2010. Market Threads. How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Dağyeli, J.E. 2011. Gott liebt das Handwerk. Moral, Identität und religiöse Legitimierung in der mittelasiatischen Handwerks-​risāla. Wiesbaden: Reichert. 51

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​ Dağyeli, J. 2020. The Fight Against Heaven-​Sent Insects: Dealing with Locust Plagues in the Emirate of Bukhara. Environment & History 26: 79–​104. Evers, H.-​ D. and Wall, C. 2006. Knowledge Loss: Managing Local Knowledge in Rural Uzbekistan. ZEF Working Paper Series 15. Available at: https://​www.econs​tor.eu/​bitstr​eam/​ 10419/​88301/​1/​578445​62X.pdf. [Accessed 19 July 2020]. Fedtke, G. 2007. How Bukharans Turned into Uzbeks and Tajiks: Soviet Nationalities Policy in the Light of a Personal Rivalry, pp.19–​50 in P. Sartori and T. Trevisani (eds.) Patterns of Transformation In and Around Uzbekistan, 1st ed. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis. Franz, K. 2005. Resources and Organizational Power: Some Thoughts on Nomadism in History, pp.55–​77 in S. Leder and B. Streck (eds.) Shifts and Drifts in Nomad-​Sedentary Relations, 1st ed. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Herbers, H. 2006. Landreform und Existenzsicherung in Tadschikistan: Die Handlungsmacht der Akteure im Kontext der postsowjetischen Transformation. Erlangen: Selbstverlag der Fränkischen Geographischen Gesellschaft. Hirsch, F. 2000. Toward an Empire of Nations: Border Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities. The Russian Review 59(2): 201–​226. Holzwarth, W. 2004. Mittelasiatische Schafte und russische Eisenbahnen: Raumgreifende eurasische Lammfell-​und Fleischmärkte im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, pp. 88–​ 97 in J. Gertel and S. Calkins (eds.), Nomaden in unserer Welt: die Vorreiter der Globalisierung. Von Mobilität und Handel, Herrschaft und Widerstand, 1st ed. Bielefeld: Transcript. Ibragimov, Y., Svitojus, A., Yusupov, S. and Baltrenaite, L. 2007. Management, Use and Conservation of Karakul Sheep in Traditional Livestock Farming Systems in Uzbekistan, pp. 103–​109 in K.-​A. Tempelman and Cardellino, R.A. (eds.) People and Animals. Traditional Livestock Keepers: Guardians of Domestic Animal Diversity, 1st ed. Rome: FAO Publ. Ibrohimov, P. 2000–​2005. G’o’za, pp. 52–​55 in O’zbekiston Milliy Ensyklopediasi. 1st ed. Tashkent: O’zbekiston milliy ensyklopediasi Davlat ilmiy nashriyoti. Ingold, T. 1996. Introduction, pp. 163–​166 in T. Ingold (ed.), Key Debates in Anthropology, 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge. International Crisis Group Report 93. 2005. The Curse of Cotton: Central Asia’s Destructive Monoculture. Available at https://​www.cris​isgr​oup.org/​eur​ope-​cent​ral-​asia/​cent​ral-​asia/​taj​ ikis​tan/​curse-​cot​ton-​cent​ral-​asias-​dest​ruct​ive-​mono​cult​ure [Accessed 19 July 2020]. International Labour Organization. 2018. Major Progress on Forced Labour and Child Labour in Uzbekistan Cotton Fields. Available at https://​www.ilo.org/​glo​bal/​about-​the-​ilo/​ newsr​oom/​news/​WCMS​_​650​697/​lang-​-​en/​index.htm [Accessed 19 July 2020]. Ismatov, E. 1965. XIX asrda Rossiyaning sharq mamlakatlari bilan savdo aloqasiga doir, pp. 52–​58 in R.Kh. Aminova, M.A. Akhunova, B.V. Lunin and L.M. Landa (eds.) Iz istorii Sredneĭ Azii (dorevolĭucionnyĭ period). Sbornik stateĭ. 1st ed. Tashkent: Nauka. Karmyševa, B. 1969. Arten der Viehhaltung in den Südbezirken von Usbekistan und Tadshikistan, pp. 112–​126 in L. Földes (ed.) Viehwirtschaft und Hirtenkultur, 1st ed. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Karutz, R. 1914. Von Lübeck nach Kokand. Ein Reisebericht. Lübeck: no publ. Kazak, F. 1937. Ostturkistan zwischen den Grossmächten. Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftskunde Ostturkistans. Berlin: Ost-​Europa Verlag. Khalid, A. 2015. Making Uzbekistan. Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Kisch, E.E. 1946. Asien gründlich verändert. Vienna: Globus Verlag. Küchler, S. 1996. Against the Motion (2), pp. 182–​184 in T. Ingold (ed.) Key Debates in Anthropology, 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

52

— ​​​​ L e g a c i e s i n C e n t r a l A s i a ’ s a g r o - p a s t o r a l i s t l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​ Levi, S.C. 2007. The Ferghana Valley at the Crossroads of World History: The Rise of Khoqand, 1709–​1822. Journal of Global History 2(2): 213–​232. Obertreis, J. 2017. Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–​1991. Göttingen: V&R. Penati, B. 2013a. The Cotton Boom and the Land Tax in Russian Turkestan (1880s –​1915). Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14(4): 741–​774. Penati, B. 2013b. Marginal Rural Landscapes in Colonial Turkestan: A View from the Margins, pp. 65–​109 in P. Sartori (ed.) Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia (19th–​early 20th centuries), 1st ed. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Peterson, M.K. 2019. Pipe Dreams. Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Remez, I.A. 1922. Vnešnaia torgovlia Buxary do mirovoi voiny. Tashkent: TsSU Turkrespubliki. Available at https://​elib.rgo.ru/​safe-​view/​123456​789/​60488/​1/​MTgyMDA4MDdfUmVtZ XosIEkuIEEuIFZuZXNobnlheWEgdG9yZ292bHlh​IEJ1​aGFy​eSBk​byBt​aXJv​di5w​ZGY=​ [Accessed 19 July 2020]. Rowton, M. 1974. Enclosed Nomadism. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17(1): 1–​30. Sabol, S. 1995. The Creation of Soviet Central Asia: The 1924 National Delimitation. Central Asian Survey 14(2): 225–​241. Ṣadr-​i Ziyā, M. 2003. The Personal Diary of a Bukharan Intellectual: The Diary of Muḥammad Sharīf-​i Ṣadr-​i Ziyā E. Allworth and M. Shukurov (eds.). Leiden: Brill. Sartori, P. 2016. Ijtihād in Bukhara: Central Asian Jadidism and Local Genealogies of Cultural Change. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59: 193–​236. Schweitzer P.P. 1993. Jäger, Tierseelen und Umweltschützer, pp. 317–​335 in A.G. and E. Mader, (eds.) Metamorphosen der Natur. Sozialanthropologische Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Weltbild und natürlicher Umwelt, 1st ed. Wien: Böhlau. Sengupta, A. 2000. Imperatives of National Territorial Delimitation and the Fate of Bukhara 1917 –​1924. Central Asian Survey 19(3–​4): 394–​415. Smith, C.W. and J.T. Cothren. 1999. Cotton: Origin, History, Technology and Production. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Sukhareva, O. 1966. Bukhara XIX –​nachalo XX v. Moscow: Nauka. Thompstone, S. 1995. Russian Imperialism and the Commercialization of the Central Asian Cotton Trade. Textile History 26(2): 233–​257. Trevisani, T. 2007a. The Emerging Actor of Decollectivization in Uzbekistan: Private Farming between Newly Defined Political Constraints and Opportunities, pp. 138–​ 162 in D. Kandiyoti (ed.) The Cotton Sector in Central Asia. Economic Policy and Development Challenges, 1st ed. London: SOAS. Trevisani, T. 2007b. After the Kolkhoz: Rural Elites in Competition. Central Asian Survey 26(1): 85–​104. Trevisani, T. 2007c. Kolkhozes, Sovkhozes, and Shirkats of Yangibazar (1960–​2002): Note on an Archival Investigation into Four Decades of Agricultural Development in a District of Khorezm (Uzbekistan). Cahiers d‘Asie centrale 15/​16: 352–​361. Von der Mühlen, R. 1909. Cotton Growing in Russian Central Asia and the Caucasus, pp. 135–​142 in The Sixth International Congress of Delegated Representatives of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Association. Milan: n.p. Whitman, J. 1956. Turkestan Cotton in Imperial Russia. The American Slavic and East European Review 15(2): 190–​205. Young, C.C. 1914. Origin of Karakul Sheep. Journal of Heredity 4(170): 445–​447. Zanca, R. 2000. Kolkhozes into Shirkats: A Local Label for Managed Pastoralism in Uzbekistan. The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

53

—​​​​ J e a n i n e D a ğ y e l i —​​​​

Newspapers Akhbār-​i dākhiliya. 1887. Tarjumān 35 (23 November), p. 2. Gasprinskii, I. 1890. Pamuk zirācati. Tarjumān N° 2 (8 January), pp. 1–​2. Maktub az Bukhārā. 1912. Bukhārā-​yi Sharīf N° 95 (1 July), pp. 2–​3. Turkestanskie vedomosti. 1902. N° 9 (13 February), p. 52.

Archival document TsGAU, f. 126-​I, d. 1989. Petition to prohibit rice cultivation because of water scarcity.

54

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTERSHOCKS OF PERESTROIKA Tajikistan’s flattened modernity Isaac McKean Scarborough Over the years, I have driven through Tajikistan’s Hisor Valley numerous times: into the valley itself on occasion, and through the valley on the way south to Qurghonteppa or Kulob.1 In September 2008, during one of my first trips along the road that runs southwest out of Dushanbe towards the ancient Fortress of Hisor, one of the valley’s main attractions, the car in which I was sitting passed between an unremarkable hill and an empty field. The other passengers in the car fell silent, and one began to relate how, in January 1989, a giant wave of mud had swallowed an entire village on this spot. The field with its scrabbly evergreens and wide empty swathes of grass, I was told, was the edge of a giant mass grave (bratskaia mogila): early one morning that January, an earthquake had thrown the wet earth of the hill, mixed with the underground water hidden beneath it, into the air and down upon the sleeping villagers of Sharora. Hundreds died almost immediately.2 Tajikistan is a seismic land: earthquakes are a frequent and little remarked-​upon occurrence. Events such as the Sharora tragedy, thankfully, are much rarer, and their memory and aftershocks remain alive for decades. Today, Sharora has been rebuilt, but the tragedy remains alive in the person of Sharora, the village’s lone survivor, who rode out the wave as a six-​day-​old infant strapped to her traditional Tajik cradle (gavora) and was renamed in honour of her lost home. In recent years, Sharora has often been interviewed on the anniversary of the tragedy, the aftershocks of the earthquake visible in her strained smile and the repeated questions asked of her (Navruzsho 2016). The year that Sharora’s village was engulfed, however, was ultimately more politically than geologically seismic. Long known within the USSR as a political and economic backwater and little renowned for dynamism, Tajikistan would experience 1989 as a time of upheaval. In February, the first post-​war political demonstration was held in Dushanbe, and by that summer independent political parties were being formed while Tajik was declared the state language (Scarborough 2016). This would mark the start to three years of political foment, massive demonstrations, rioting, violence, and finally social collapse, all subsumed under the heading of ‘perestroika’, the Communist Party First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s name for his programme of economic and political reform. Initially conceived and implemented by Gorbachev and his advisors in Moscow, perestroika had begun slowly in 1985; by 1991, it would have led to the collapse of the entire USSR (Scarborough 2018). In Tajikistan, perestroika was the greatest earthquake experienced for decades, and its aftershocks in DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-5

55

—​​​​ I s a a c M c K e a n S c a r b o r o u g h —​​​

coming decades would be amongst the most palpable, subsuming those of many smaller rumbles. This chapter moves forward from the years of perestroika itself, tracking how the debates, conflicts, and struggles to which it gave rise would come to shape the republic and its population for decades. With Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms roughly divided between an economic reorganization towards the market and a political shift towards pluralism and semi-​democracy, this chapter considers both the political environment engendered by the period’s changes and the economic outcomes of liberalization. Drawing on works from across the USSR that have emphasized the stretching of time around and across the historical divide of 1991 (Yurchak 2005; Ibanez-​Tirado 2015; Alexievich 2016), as well as the consistencies across this arbitrary line (Humphrey 1995; Bahovadinova and Scarborough 2018), the chapter works with the running metaphor of perestroika as an earthquake. This earthquake, it argues, had two related but independent effects. First, the impact ‘flattened’ time around and after the collapse of the Soviet economy and society, creating a sense of experienced time in which events from many years flowed together in a wave of transformation. This ‘vivid present of daily interaction’ (Munn 1992, 99) in times of extreme or ongoing change, as anthropologists have observed in the former USSR (Alexander 2009) and elsewhere (i.e., Geertz 1966), can lead, as it appears to have done in Tajikistan, to breakdowns in the linkage between a sense of objectively existing historical events and the time in which they occur. As Caroline Humphrey (1995, 46) observed in Buryatia in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR ‘workers [were] not in possession of the master narrative of which they [were] the objects’: there was little obvious link between their lives and formal political events and histories meant to link these events together. In Tajikistan, however, the late Soviet earthquake of perestroika also demonstrates the enduring relevance of these same political events and chronologies. While experience of time was flattened, it was also stretched forward, creating aftershocks into the present. This has extended the reach of historical events, such as the collapse of the USSR and the partial restructuring of the 1990s, into the extended now. The aftershocks are still there, occasionally shuddering towards Dushanbe from the southwest.

POLITICS: SAFARALI KENJAEV’S CIVIL WAR In 1989, the road leading west out of Dushanbe brought the rumblings of earthquakes and tales of woe; in October 1992, it would bring the rumble of armoured personnel carriers (APCs) and woe itself to the Tajik capital. On the morning of 24 October 1992, Safarali Kenjaev, former Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Tajikistan and staunch defender of the Soviet order, who had been pushed out of power in May of that year, entered Dushanbe along the long road that wound its way outwards from the former headquarters of the Tajik Communist Party’s Central Committee. Kenjaev had spent the past six months preparing for his revanche and roared into Dushanbe at the head of a mobilized cavalcade of 500 men and a handful of APCs (see Kenjaev 1995, 134–​142; Nasreddinov 1995, 196; Kamolov 2008; Epkenhans 2016, 322–​324; Malikfariduni 2019, 97). He had been spoiling for a fight. His removal from power in early May 1992 had marked the end of a two-​month-​ long confrontation between the established government of the newly independent 56

—​​​​ A f t e r s h o c k s o f p e r e s t r o i k a : T a j i k i s t a n ’ s f l a t t e n e d m o d e r n i t y —​​​​

Republic of Tajikistan and a disparate group of opposition parties, dissatisfied with the economic collapse in the Republic and their lack of political power. In May, the extended stand-​off between opposition supporters camped on Shahidon Square in front of the Central Committee, and government supporters on Ozody Square half a kilometre south in front of the Supreme Soviet, ended with the opposition’s victory. When passive animosity turned to active confrontation, the opposition proved more decisive, sending its supporters to occupy key buildings, storm security services, and by 10 May, force the government of President Rahmon Nabiev to remove Kenjaev and form a ‘Government of National Reconciliation’ that included many opposition leaders (Scarborough 2018, 248–​252). Removed from power, Kenjaev sought support in Tashkent and Tajikistan’s northern province of Leninabad before settling in the mountains north of Hisor to train a militia (Mitchell 2014, 82). These were the men he led into Dushanbe in late October. The October 1992 incursion into Dushanbe was thus itself an aftershock of a political struggle that had begun earlier during perestroika and which would continue to rumble forward in time for many years. Under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, the years of ‘perestroika’ had proven a period of unexpected and generally unwanted change for the leaders of the Communist Part of Tajikistan (CPT), who found their previous unassailable hold on power slowly chipped away. Moscow pushed for Dushanbe to allow and register opposition movements, promote Tajik as a state language, and, paradoxically, criticize the Party itself. By February 1990, the pedestal on which the CPT stood was sufficiently shaky to allow for two challenges to its rule: explosive riots and opposition-​challenged elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR. While the riots almost managed to overthrow the republic’s leadership, Moscow intervened politically and militarily to re-​establish a semblance of order (Scarborough 2018, 150–​176). The late February 1990 elections would actually prove more pernicious in the long run, bringing to Dushanbe a vocal, if small, group of populist politicians with a mandate to publicly criticize the CPT First Secretary, Kahhor Mahkamov, and the republican government. A relatively unknown transport prosecutor before February 1990, Kenjaev was amongst this wave. Seeing a political opening, he quickly shed his sympathies for populist opposition movements, such as Rastokhez (taj: ‘rebirth’), which had taken an early lead in the republic, and positioned himself as a proponent of law and order, criticizing Mahkamov from the right.3 As the USSR disintegrated in the autumn of 1991, he helped to organize Mahkamov’s removal from power and the election of Rahmon Nabiev, a largely ineffective older politician, as President of the Republic of Tajikistan. Shortly thereafter, he became Chairman of the Tajik Supreme Soviet, a position he managed to hold onto for all of six months.4 Not to be held back, Kenjaev’s ambitions had returned him to Dushanbe in October 1992 as a nascent warlord. While expecting to meet resistance from opposition militias, Kenjaev and his followers hoped the element of surprise and assistance from southern fighters based in Kulob who were equally opposed to the new government in the capital would turn the tide in their favour. ‘Move out but don’t let the secret out’ (sar ravad va ham sir naravad) they told themselves as they started out from Hisor (Kenjaev 1995, 136), moving towards Dushanbe without waiting for assurances about reinforcements. In the capital, however, Kenjaev initially met neither backup nor open opposition –​only silence. Allowed to take up positions 57

—​​​​ I s a a c M c K e a n S c a r b o r o u g h —​​​

in central Dushanbe by the forewarned Government of National Reconciliation, Kenjaev and his men were then subject to an encircling and well-​organized assault by opposition militias. Forced into retreat to Hisor, Kenjaev’s attack on Dushanbe was quickly overshadowed by the actions of the Kulob-​ based ‘People’s Front’ (rus.: Narodnyi front /​taj.: Fronti milii), led by Sangak Safarov, the career criminal and militia leader who had been supposed to reinforce Kenjaev in Dushanbe. By early December 1992, Safarov had managed to cut an alliance with Tajikistan’s northern Leninabod region, install his own candidate, Emomali Rahmon, as the country’s new Supreme Soviet Chairman, and lead his People’s Front into Dushanbe in a little-​opposed show of force (Nasredinnov, 1995, 214–​216; Nourzhanov 2005, 117; Nourzhanov and Bleuer 2013, 327–​328; Epkenhans, 2016, 324–​326). Kenjaev was politically sidelined, finding work as a local prosecutor in the northern city of Qayroqqum before being re-​elected as a member of the Supreme Soviet in 1995. On 30 March 1999, he was assassinated on a busy Dushanbe street when his car was attacked by unknown assailants wielding automatic rifles; he, his driver, and his bodyguard all died (Epkenhans 2016, 342–​348). As a political figure, Safarali Kenjaev represented the political aftershocks moving forward from perestroika into the Tajik Civil War. His political struggles with the opposition in spring 1992 helped to initiate the war; his own militia and assault on Dushanbe were part and parcel of the war; his death in 1999 was widely interpreted as an ongoing ripple of violence related to the officially complete war. Although the government of Tajikistan under Emomali Rahmon signed a peace agreement with the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) in June 1997, violence was far from over: disorder, assaults, explosions, and day-​to-​day violence continued for at least a decade thereafter (United Nations Security Council 1997). Aftershocks of violence and trauma were on display for years, from the former militia members given places in university and bringing automatic rifles and grenades to exams, to the distant rumble of gunfire and the sense of threat that settled over Dushanbe after nightfall.5 On some levels, the war never ended, with open conflict erupting between state military units and former opposition fighters in the Rasht Valley in 2008–​10 (Marat 2016, 541–​542) and Khorog in 2012 (Mukhibbi 2019). The state also fought a slow campaign against former supporters of the UTO, now largely folded into the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT). This culminated in September 2015, when IRPT members were accused en masse of supporting a failed coup attempt nominally organized by Major-​ General Abduhalim Nazarzoda, the deputy minister of defence, who may (or may not) have been a member of IRPT, but who had fought against Kenjaev and Safarov on the side of the opposition in 1992 (Radio Ozody 2015; 2017). Those members of IRPT who remained in Tajikistan were summarily jailed for decades; Nazarzoda himself died in a firefight with government forces. Today, the war and the unresolved conflict of the final Soviet years between newfound social and political freedoms and government control rumble along, having moved to OSCE meetings in Warsaw, where refugee IRPT leaders and Tajik government bureaucrats refuse to speak with and instead physically confront one another, as well as to media discourses (RFE/​ RL 2018). In November 2017, 25 years after his assault on Dushanbe, Kenjaev reappeared as a final shadow of an aftershock: the Tajik Ministry of Internal Affairs aired a TV segment accusing Nazarzoda, the IRPT, and Iran of organizing Kenjaev’s murder (Asia-​Plus 2017). 58

—​​​​ A f t e r s h o c k s o f p e r e s t r o i k a : T a j i k i s t a n ’ s f l a t t e n e d m o d e r n i t y —​​​​

ECONOMICS: A DACHA IN HISOR The Hisor Valley, like much of Tajikistan, is riddled with fast-​moving streams pouring down from the snow-​capped peaks that surround the valley’s northern ridge. Filled with melting snowpack and glacial run-​off in the spring, these streams frequently overflow their banks, spreading a fine silt of fertile soil across the valley. Wild raspberries flourish, as do strawberries; once introduced, fruit trees also grow rapidly. When dachas (summer home plots) were being distributed to Soviet workers in the 1970s and 1980s, plots along these burbling streams were prime territory: easily accessible from either Dushanbe to the east or Qurghonteppa to the south, they made for pleasantly shaded gardens in which to hide from Tajikistan’s summer heat. In late summer 2016, I wandered along one such stream as it burbled forward over a cluster of boulders, making its speedy way towards the city of Hisor, where it would join with the Hanaka River. Across the stream there was a stand of trees providing shade; behind me, a row of small fenced plots. The corner plot nearest to me was an overgrown thicket of raspberry bushes and shrubbery. There were the vaguest hints of a house’s small foundation and some building materials left scattered about, but little more to indicate habitation. A rough fence was wrapped around the plot. Before 1992, though, this had been a dacha, where a young family had grown vegetables, spent summer weekends, and paddled about happily in the stream. That, however, had been before the earthquake of perestroika and the many aftershocks it left over the ensuing 25 years. Stopped once by a militia checkpoint on the way back to Dushanbe from their dacha during the first months of Tajikistan’s civil war, the family had subsequently not returned. Taking the road west out of Dushanbe into the Hisor Valley made little sense during the war; the dacha and the strawberries there were simply not worth the risk. Later, the plot of land was forgotten with the passage of time and the movement of lives: children grew up and travelled abroad; horizons moved beyond the nearby valley. In the summer of 2016, however, the family remembered the dacha, and began to ask what had happened to their piece of land, a plot that had once been theirs by right through the father’s place of employment. A trip was organized to the dacha location, leading to the walk along the stream and a conversation with a former guard in the area, who explained that the ‘garden cooperative’ (sadovoe tovarishchestvo), the formal organization of which the dacha plot had been a part, had been ‘privatized’ in the early 2000s, with the plots being distributed to new owners. This was followed by a ride into Hisor city to check the land’s new registration status in the city’s administrative office (hukumat). Here it turned out that the family’s plot had been given to one of the city’s prosecutors (prokurator), who had removed the remains of the house that had been left on the property and done little else. An attempt had been made to find the former owners during the cooperative’s restructuring, the city administrators said, but unable to find them, they had treated the plot as abandoned. With previous Soviet rights to the land fading with the years, those nearby had seemingly seen and grasped the opportunity to claim the view on that burbling brook for themselves.6 Property rights were a complicated matter in the USSR. Apartments could be owned (although the majority were formally rented from the state and various institutions), as could private homes. The land under either –​and in fact the land under everything 59

—​​​​ I s a a c M c K e a n S c a r b o r o u g h —​​​

in the USSR –​remained the ‘exclusive property’ of the state, as codified by the Soviet Constitution. Individuals, institutions, and even collective farms received the right to use various tracts of land, but the final ownership was never in doubt. Thus land could not be bought and sold, and there was no market for land rights: if an individual had the right to use a plot of land, but had never built a house on it, he could not sell the usage to another individual. Instead, he would need to build a garage and sell the garage to someone, who could then apply for land use rights for the same plot, which was no longer being used (on Soviet ownership rights, see Morton 1984; Schneider 1989). During perestroika, however, questions began to be raised about property in general: as private businesses (initially called ‘cooperatives’) were legalized, they also gained the right to own extensive capital goods –​the very means of production that Soviet ideology dictated should also be owned by the state. Eventually, debates about the marketization of the Soviet economy began to touch on land as well. In Moscow, land was considered another potential source of profit, and in order to activate this economic lever, the ‘renting’ of land (along with other capital goods) was legalized in November 1989. Now, land could be rented out by its formal owner, the state, or by those who had use rights to it: state farms, collective farms, or even homeowners. This ‘de facto meant that land as a form of property was allowed on the market’, (Verkhogliad 2014, 165) an ambiguous position that was further muddied by the passage in February 1990 of a new Statuary Framework of the USSR and Soviet Republics ‘On Land’, which no longer specified the state’s ‘exclusive’ right to land ownership. While saying nothing about final ownership, this Statutory Framework allowed for lifelong and even inheritable usage rights; a new Constitution passed in March 1990 also removed the word ‘exclusive’ from its discussion of the state’s ownership over land. Faced with this ambiguity, Soviet citizens and local governments took different approaches. In Russia, the state embraced the privatization of land, passing a series of resolutions in November 1990 fully legalizing the land market.7 In Tajikistan, where land and property had also begun to be rented and traded in various ways in 1989, the republican government was less enthusiastic. Taking up debate on a new Land Code for the Tajik SSR in August 1990, the Tajik Supreme Soviet ultimately decided to return to the Soviet norm: land could be given by the state to individuals or organizations for ‘permanent or life-​long use or control’, but neither land nor its use rights could be sold; it remained the ‘property of the republic’.8 In December 1991, an attempt was made to reopen the debate and consider distributing land to collective farmers, but this was quashed and the Soviet standard again reaffirmed by Tajikistan’s Supreme Soviet on 25 December, the very day the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, an irony apparently unremarked upon in Dushanbe.9 In the following years, the government of independent Tajikistan would continue to assert its control over the republic’s land. While affirming to Western organizations, such as the OSCE, its interest in ‘land reform’, efforts to privatize collective farms and plots and legalize the land market were at best inconclusive. The Constitution of the Republic of Tajikistan, passed in 1994, reiterated the state’s ‘exclusive property’ over land, and the 1990s ‘privatization’ of collective farms largely involved the breakup of larger farms into smaller ‘farmer’s collectives’ (dekhanskie khoziastva), where the land was still in practice rented from the state.10 Theoretically, farmers could now choose 60

—​​​​ A f t e r s h o c k s o f p e r e s t r o i k a : T a j i k i s t a n ’ s f l a t t e n e d m o d e r n i t y —​​​​

what to sow on their rented land –​but in practice, their indebtedness to the collectives and credit brokers and vulnerable position meant that their produce remained largely unchanged and still focused on the export crop of cotton (Scarborough 2014, 6–​7). In many cases, moreover, the ambiguity of the new system allowed those with local authority to remain entrenched. As Davlatsho Gulmahmadov, then the Chairman of Tajikistan’s State Committee for Land Use, admitted in 2004, ‘As soon as the process [of breakup] began, certain quite influential and educated people saw an opportunity to gain personal benefit, and, taking control of wide swaths of farming land, started to rent small plots to farmers … some of them had been, and remain, local state administrators (glavy khukumatov)’ (Nissen 2004, 8). More recently, USAID and other Western donors have pushed the Tajik government to allow for a secondary market in land use rights, which would mean giving farmers an asset (their right to a plot of land) that could be used as collateral against which to receive credit from a bank, but examples of land rights being bought, sold, or leveraged are rare (Asia-​ Plus 2013). There seems, moreover, strong disincentive for change on the part of state actors: when land can only be used, and use rights only transferred, with state permission, this creates a clear advantage for local bureaucrats, giving them access to a valuable and rare resource.11 In the beautiful mountainous valley of Hisor and throughout Tajikistan, after all, arable land is but a tiny percentage of the total –​at best, less than 5 per cent of the country’s territory (Tajstat 2011, 519). Today, land in Tajikistan remains in a sort of stasis between Marxist ideology (according to which land cannot be a commodity) and market dictate (according to which land is a central element of property rights and credit); the contradictions of perestroika remain unresolved (also see Aliev 2013). As Gulmahmadov (2009, 9) remarked in a later dissertation, ‘It is doubtless that private property of land has lost its initial meaning. The countries of the world more and more understand that the important thing for national economies is clear regulation and guarantees for the legal conditions of land use … the future lies with commercially organized agriculture independent of forms of land rights.’12 Having been promoted to the position of Governor of Tajikistan’s southern Khatlon Province, Gulmahmadov’s muddled convolutions represented more than just his own confusion: this instead reflected the republic’s broader attempt to occupy the middle ground between private ownership and state control. As Katherine Verdery (1998, 104) has written, after the collapse of the communist order of ownership, which had emphasized collective property and collective benefit, there reigned instead a ‘lack of routinized rules and crystallized practices around private property’ –​a field of ‘fuzziness’ that allowed for the proliferation of ambiguities and often unequal competition for resources. While property rights may always be in practice a mix of legal application and illegal obfuscation (von Benda-​Beckmann et al. 2009), the shuddering collapse of the Soviet property order that began during perestroika appears likely to have further cracked the lines of distinction. In Tajikistan, this provided the legal and social basis for dachas to be ‘privatized’ through redistribution to and by local bureaucrats; it equally reflects the practices and results of privatization of all property in Tajikistan since the collapse of the USSR. The final years of perestroika saw the first steps towards the privatization of Tajikistan’s economic assets: ministries were spun off into ‘concerns’ (kontserny), while factories, hotels, cars, and other valuable capital goods were sold (or given) 61

—​​​​ I s a a c M c K e a n S c a r b o r o u g h —​​​

to a new class of businessmen who quickly became very wealthy. This process was formally halted during the civil war of the 1990s, but essentially continued unseen; as the government has exerted increasing control over the country after the end of the war, however, it has often worked to reverse or repeat privatization to its own benefit. Thus the well-​known spa ‘Shaambary’ in the Hisor valley was privatized in 2006, but nationalized in 2015; in 2016, it was again up for sale (Aziia-​Plius 2016a). More famously, the Tajik Aluminium Company (TALCO), the largest factory remaining in Tajikistan from the Soviet era, was never formally privatized, but has undergone a complicated series of commercial arrangements with foreign companies while remaining under the control of the central Tajik government (Heathershaw 2011, 157–​161). The earthquake of perestroika essentially set off shockwaves into the future, pushing off decisions about the proper balance between public and private ownership. Today, the modern state of Tajikistan appears to still be looking for a middle ground of ‘commercially organized but state directed’ activity: as during perestroika, the government is once again providing lists of factories and enterprises to be privatized –​or, as with land, to be ‘temporarily privatized’ with permanent use rights divided from ownership.13

CONCLUSION: CONFLICT STRETCHED AND REVERBERATING At the top of the hill just west of the corner of Rudaki and Ismoil Somoni avenues in Dushanbe, a hill that leads down to the Dushanbinka River and further west to Hisor, the government of Tajikistan has built a large ceremonial complex. The country’s national museum, a fantastically large and impressively asymmetrical building, lies at one corner of a large park; at another rises one of the world’s tallest flagpoles and largest flags, while along the centre are rows of statues of Tajikistan’s (almost exclusively pre-​Soviet) national heroes. A ‘national theatre’ is in the process of being built on the northeast corner, the point closest to the square in front of the former Central Committee Building to which Kenjaev had arrived at the head of his colonnade in October 1992. When Kenjaev passed, however, there was little to remark upon at the top of this hill, except for the ‘Putovsky Bazaar’, a long-​standing Soviet produce market. Officially the ‘Abundance Bazaar’ (Bozori barakat), the market had largely been referred to by the name of the avenue on which it stood, as it continued to be called for years after the fall of the USSR and the changing of the avenue’s name to Ismoil Somoni. Even today, when referring to the turn west to Dushanbe’s microregions and further to Hisor, residents of the capital will say ‘the turn onto Putovsky’ (povorot na putovsky), belying the passage of years, place names, and the state’s evident attempt to assert its vision of history on the very site.14 For states, time is the reflection of change in structures of power and its trappings. Nations undergo reform, collapse, and are replaced by new ones; wars start, warlords invade cities, and peace treaties are signed; dachas are lost and reappropriated and street names and bazaars are changed and replaced with museums. Perestroika began in 1985 and ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Human experience, however, has a tendency to diverge from the idea of history and time as clearly bounded change; times of change are in fact the most likely to cause breakage between life and the ‘master narratives’ of political history. Instead, earthquake-​like events such as 62

—​​​​ A f t e r s h o c k s o f p e r e s t r o i k a : T a j i k i s t a n ’ s f l a t t e n e d m o d e r n i t y —​​​​

the collapse of the Soviet Union flatten experience: in Dushanbe, it is not unusual to hear that the USSR finally disintegrated in 1997, if perhaps not later.15 Events clearly documented to have occurred in 1992 or 1993, such as the intervention of foreign powers in the Tajik civil war, are said to have occurred in 1990 or even earlier.16 The civil war itself is infrequently referred to as a war, rather as a series of ‘events’ (rus.: sobytiia /​taj.: voqeaho) that move forward and backwards across dates and periods, encompassing parts of the Soviet era and years long after 1997. Professional economists sigh in frustration as they wait for the ‘real market’ to arrive in Tajikistan after decades of reform,17 an economic perestroika that has never ended, just as the political reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and democratization remain in some central ways unresolved. Human society is organized through and bound by shared experience and memory, and although the sense of recent time understood by Tajikistan’s citizens violates strict dates and divisions of change, this is for all intents and purposes irrelevant. For Tajikistan, perestroika and the ‘events’ it engendered continue to rumble and shake insofar as this is experienced by its citizens, and the aftershocks remain evident all around. While the fault for perestroika’s destructive power is often charged against divergent sources –​Moscow’s imbalanced development policies (Shakuri 2011), Mahkamov’s political machinations (Nasreddinov 1995), or simply Gorbachev’s reforms (Sultanov 2014) –​there is little disagreement in Dushanbe that conflict began specifically in that era. In many ways, moreover, the period of change known as perestroika, which started struggles between political openness and government control and between commercial markets and state regulation, is very much ongoing in Tajikistan. Privatization is an open process, with at best mixed results. Political liberalization has been tried, and rejected, and market liberalization occupies a middle ground that seems difficult to understand even for many of its architects. Nor is this a unique position: like Tajikistan, many post-​Soviet countries have undergone, or are undergoing, similar decades-​long processes of reorganization. The ongoing conflict in Donbass, for example, is in part an unfinished political and economic struggle over the place of Soviet-​era industry and mining in a post-​Soviet consumer-​driven economy; the wave of protests that brought Nikol Pashinian to the presidency of Armenia in 2018 can be seen as the latest struggle between the capital and politicians from the perestroika-​era hotspot of Nagorno-​Karabakh, who until then had held a stranglehold on power in Yerevan; in Kyrgyzstan, waves of protests, revolutions and ethnic violence have echoed the conflicts of perestroika. Even in Russia, the giant oil and gas corporation Gazprom was initially privatized in the 1990s before being renationalized after 2000, an early step in the Russian security services’ move to position themselves as the forces of stability in the ‘conflict between the private economy and a strong state’ (Butrin 2018). This same conflict has motivated much of the last 30 years of history in Tajikistan, whether in the state’s scepticism over private land ownership or its ongoing focus on the ‘events’ of the 1990s. In his recollections about the preparation for his assault on Dushanbe from Hisor in October 1992, Kenjaev (1995, 75) cites a couplet that he attributes to the medieval Samanid poet Rudaki: ‘Although the dagger adorns the hand, do not raise it to kill /​In the face of God evil is not forgotten.’18 Flattening time even further, Kenjaev links his own struggles against those he sees as unjustly killing innocents to earlier Samanid Emirs struggling to establish a strong state. Those 63

—​​​​ I s a a c M c K e a n S c a r b o r o u g h —​​​

whom he opposed in the civil war, however, would have simply turned his words against him, pushing forward the need for political and economic liberties. Today, the conflicts of perestroika remain alive in the experiences of those who lived through them, while their aftershocks continue to rumble beneath the surface, occasionally shaking the ground beneath the country’s economic and political foundations.

NOTES 1 Toponyms have changed frequently and controversially in Tajikistan since 1991. For the purposes of consistency, this chapter employs the modern Tajik-​language spelling and pronunciation of most cities. Officially, the city of Qurghonteppa was renamed Bokhtar in 2018; in practice, however, most residents of Tajikistan have continued to refer to it as Qurghonteppa. 2 Personal conversation, Sharora, Tajikistan, September 2008. The geological basis for the mud wave that subsumed Sharora and partially damaged the villages of Okuli Poyon and Okuli Bolo remains unclear: competing accounts suggest a ‘vertical’ earthquake shock broke the outer layer of the hill and threw upwards a mix of mud and water (Okunev 2019) –​or, alternatively, that underground natural gas reserves were set off by the earthquake and exploded, throwing up a volcano-​like plume of mud and water (Novgorodtsev 1990). 3 On Kenjaev’s association with Rastokhez, see Helsinki Watch 1991, 49; on Rastokhez more broadly, see Scarborough 2016; on Kenjaev as a defender of law and order, see Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Tadzhikistan (hereafter TsGART), f. 297, op. 40, d. 1261, l. 1; Kenjaev 1996, 6–​12. 4 Kenjaev was elected on 2 December 1991. TsGART f. 297, op. 40, d. 1270, l. 1. 5 Conversations with Dushanbe residents, 2008–​19. 6 Personal observations and conversations, Hisor Valley and Hisor City, August 2016. 7 ‘Zakon Rossiskoi sovetskoi federativnoi sotsialisticheskoi respubliki “O krest’ianskom (fermerskom) khoziastve”  ’, 22 November 1990, and ‘Zakon Rossiskoi sovetskoi federativnoi sotsialisticheskoi respubliki “O zemel’noi reforme” ’, 23 November 1990, Vedomosti S”ezda narodnykh deputatov RSFSR i Verkhovnogo Soveta RSFSR 26 (1990): 417–​433; 434–​437. 8 See ‘Proekt –​Zemel’nyi kodeks Tadzhikskii SSR’, TsGART f. 297, op. 49, d. 1218, ll. 118-​ 183; also Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 9654, op. 10, d. 59, l. 92. 9 TsGART f. 297, op. 40, d. 1280, ll. 356–​357. 10 See Section 1, Article 13 of the Constitution of the Republic of Tajikistan; online: http://​ prok​urat​ura.tj/​ru/​legi​slat​ion/​the-​const​itut​ion-​of-​the-​repub​lic-​of-​taj​ikis​tan.html. 11 The Law of the Republic of Tajikistan ‘On Land Reform’ (initially passed on 5 March 1992 and last updated on 3 March 2006) in fact states that ‘in the first stage local state administrative agencies are provided with the right to manage land ... in the second stage local state administrative agencies and the state agency for land use of the Republic of Tajikistan enact, in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Tajikistan, distribution of land to individuals and legal entities for use.’ 12 The Russian organization ‘Dissernet’ has accused Gulmahmadov of plagiarising large sections of his dissertation (see www.disser​net.org/​expert​ise/​gulmah​mado​vdk2​009.htm), but the section cited here appears to be original to the dissertation in question. 13 In 1991, the Republican government of Tajikistan put together a list of 551 ‘objects’ that they planned to privatize (TsGART f. 297, op. 40, d. 1286, l. 68) as well as a ‘Programme of de-​nationalization and privatization’ (TsGART f. 297, op. 40, d. 1247, l. 95). In 2003, it 64

—​​​​ A f t e r s h o c k s o f p e r e s t r o i k a : T a j i k i s t a n ’ s f l a t t e n e d m o d e r n i t y —​​​​ passed a ‘Strategic Plan of privatization of medium and large enterprises’, which included a list of 459 enterprises to be privatized; by 2016, it reported that 424 had been sold, but continued to look for buyers for others (Aziia-​Plius 2016c). As for TALCO, it was initially included in a list of enterprises that could not be privatized, but in 2016 it was suggested that it could be ‘temporarily privatized’ (Aziia-​Plius 2016b). 14 Personal observations, Dushanbe, 2008–​19. 15 Personal conversations, Dushanbe, 2012; 2016; also see Ibañez-​Tirado 2015, 196. 16 Personal conversation, Dushanbe, June 2016. 17 Discussion at the conference ‘The Rebirth of the Silk Road’ (‘Vozrozhdenie shelkovogo puti’), Tajik National University, Dushanbe, 20–​21 September 2016. 18 While Kenjaev attributes this couplet to the Persian-​speaking Samanid poet Abu ‘Abdollah Ja’far ibn Mohammad Rudaki (880–​941 CE), it is not evident that it actually was written by Rudaki. Kenjaev may have written it himself, or it may have been apocryphally ascribed to the former; the central point, however, is Kenjaev’s attempt to link himself to Samanid Emirs of an earlier era (see Tabatabai 2010; personal correspondence with Dr Tabatabai, 13 February 2020).

REFERENCES Alexander, Catherine (2009). “Privatization: Jokes, Scandal, and Absurdity in a Time of Rapid Change.” In Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age, edited by Karen Sykes (London: Palgrave Macmillan): 43–​65. Alexievich, Svetlana (2016). Second-​Hand Time (New York: Fitzcarraldo). Aliev, Abdurakhim Rakhmonovich (2013). “Zemel’naia reforma kak osnova realizatsii otnosheniia sobstvennosti v agrarnom sektore ekonomiki respubliki Tadzhikistan.” Vestnik TGUPBP 53 (1): 142–​147. Asia-​Plus (2013). “US Government successfully completes land reform project.” Asia-​Plus, 24 January. Asia-​Plus (2017). “Po TV pokazali, kak byl ubit Safarali Kendzhaev.” Asia-​Plus, 9 November. Aziia-​Plius (2016a). “Osobennosti natsional’noi privatizatsii: kak ‘zhivut’ nekogda chastnye predpriiatiia.” Asia-​Plus, 2 July. Aziia-​ Plius (2016b). “Talbakov: vremmenaia privatizatsiia gosudarstvennykh ob’’ektov protivorechit Konstitutsii.” Asia-​Plus, 2 June. Aziia-​Plius (2016c). “V Tadzhikistane budut rasprodovat’ infrastrukturnye ob’’ekty.” Asia-​ Plus, 14 June. Bahovadinova, Malika and Isaac Scarborough (2018). “Capitalism Fulfills the Final Five-​Year Plan: How Soviet-​Era Migration Programs Came to Fruition in Post-​Soviet Eurasia.” In Eurasia on the Move: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Dynamic Migration Region, edited by Marlene Laruelle and Caress Schenk (Washington: CAP): 1–​11. Butrin, Dmitrii (2018). “Otlozhennyi endshpil’.” Kommersant, 27 October. Epkenhans, Tim (2016). The Origins of the Civil War in Tajikistan: Nationalism, Islamism, and Violent Conflict in Post-​Soviet Space (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). Geertz, Clifford (1966). Person, Time and Conduct in Bali: an Essay in Cultural Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Gulmakhmadov, Davlatsho Kurbonalievich (2009). Upravlenie zemel’nymi resursami trudoizbytochnogo regiona v usloviiakh agrarnoi reformy: na materialakh sel’skogo khoziastva Respubliki Tadzhikistan (Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata ekonomicheskikh nauk, Dushanbe). Heathershaw, John (2011). “Tajikistan amidst globalization: state failure or state transformation?” Central Asian Survey 30 (1): 147–​168.

65

—​​​​ I s a a c M c K e a n S c a r b o r o u g h —​​​ Helsinki Watch (1991). Conflict in the Soviet Union –​Tadzhikistan (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch). Humphrey, Caroline (1995). “The Politics of Privatization in Provincial Russia: Popular Opinions amid the Dilemmas of the Early 1990s.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 18 (1): 40–​61. Ibanez-​Tirado, Diana (2015). “How can I be post-​Soviet if I was never Soviet? Rethinking categories of time and social change –​a perspective from Kulob, southern Tajikistan.” Central Asian Survey 34 (2): 190–​203. Kamolov, Saidanvar (2008). Protivostoianie (Dushanbe); online: www.kamo​lov.tj/​index.php/​ ru/​proizv​eden​iya/​25-​prot​ivos​toya​nie. Kenjaev, Safarali (1995). Tabadduloti Tojikiston. Kitoby seyum (Tashkent: Uzbekiston). Kenjaev, Safarali (1996). Perevorot v Tadzhikistane (Dushanbe: Dushanbinskii poligrafkombinat). Malikfariduni, Ravshanzod (2019). Grazhdanskoe protivostoianie i mirotvorcheskii protsess v respublike Tadzhikistan v 90-​e gody XX v. (Dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata istoricheskikh nauk, Tadzhikskii natsional’nyi universitet). Marat, Erica (2016). “Post-​ violence regime survival and expansion in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan,” Central Asian Survey 35 (4): 531–​548. Mitchell, Jennifer (2014). Civilian victimisation in the Tajik civil war: how the popular front won the war and ruined the nation (PhD dissertation, King’s College London). Morton, Henry W. (1984). “Housing in the Soviet Union.” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 35 (3): 69–​80. Mukhibbi, Khasan (2019). “Otvetit’ za Khorog.” Fergana.ru, 24 July; online: https://​ferg​ana. age​ncy/​artic​les/​109​275/​. Munn, D. N. (1992) “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: Critical Essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 93–​123. Nasreddinov, Hikmatullo (1995). Tarkish (Dushanbe: Afsona). Navruzsho, Zarangez (2016). “Sharora 27 let posle tragedii.” Radio Ozody, 6 February; online: https://​rus.ozodi.org/​a/​27535​737.html. Nissen, Søren W. (2004). “Ustraniaia prepiatstviia na puti zemel’noi reformy.” Zhurnal OBSE, July. Nourzhanov, Kirill (2005). “Saviours of the nation or robber barons? Warlord Politics in Tajikistan.” Central Asian Survey 24 (2): 109–​130. Nourzhanov, Kirill and Christian Bleuer (2013). Tajikistan: A Political and Social History (Canberra: ANU E Press). Novgorodtsev, N. (1990). “Gissarskaia katastrofa,” Vokrug sveta 11 (2602), 11 November. Okunev, Dmitrii (2019). “ ‘Dumali, upal meteorit’: poslednaia katastrofa SSSR.” Gazeta.ru, 23 January; online: www.gaz​eta.ru/​scie​nce/​2019/​01/​23_​a_​1​2139​363.shtml. Radio Ozody (2015). “Bezhavshii general. Kem byl Khodzhi Khalim?” Radio Ozody, September 7; online: https://​rus.ozodi.org/​a/​27231​015.html. Radio Ozody (2017). “ ‘Miatezh’ generala Nazarzoda. Dva goda spustia.” Radio Ozody, 4 September; online: https://​rus.ozodi.org/​a/​28715​222.html. RFE/​RL (2018). “Tajik Officials, Activists Scuffle at OSCE Meeting in Warsaw,” Radio Free Europe /​Radio Liberty, 12 September; online www.rferl.org/​a/​tajik-​offici​als-​activi​sts-​scuf​ fle-​at-​osce-​meet​ing-​in-​war​saw/​29486​243.html. Scarborough, Isaac (2014). Child, Student, and Adult Participation in Tajikistan’s Cotton Harvest: 2013 Annual Assessment (Dushanbe: IOM). Scarborough, Isaac (2016). “From February to February and From Ru ba Ru to Rastokhez: Political Mobilisation in Late Soviet Tajikistan (1989–​1990).” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 26.

66

—​​​​ A f t e r s h o c k s o f p e r e s t r o i k a : T a j i k i s t a n ’ s f l a t t e n e d m o d e r n i t y —​​​​ Scarborough, Isaac (2018). The Extremes it Takes to Survive: Tajikistan and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985–​1992 (PhD dissertation, London School of Economics, London). Schneider, Richard C. Jr (1989). “Developments in Soviet Property Law.” Fordham International Law Journal 13 (4): 446–​480. Shakuri, Muhammadjoni (2011). Panturkizm va sarnavishti tar’’ikhi Tojikiston (Dushanbe: Adib). Sultanov, Shakur (2014). Demontazh SSSR (Khujand: Khuroson). Tabatabai, Sassan (2010). Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and his Poetry (Leiden: Leiden University Press). Tajstat (2011). Tadzhikistan: 20 let gosudarstvennoi nezavisimosti. Statisticheskii sbornik (Dushanbe). United Nations Security Council (1997). Report of the Secretary General on the Situation in Tajikistan, S/​1997/​686, 4 September. Verdery, Katherine (1998). “Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization.” In Transforming Post-​Communist Political Economies, edited by Joan M. Nelson, Charles Tilly, and Lee Walker (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press): 102–​117. Verkhogliad, Dar’ia Aleksandrovna (2014). Sobstevennost’ na zemliu i zemel’no-​pravovye otnosheniia v sovetskoi i postsovetskoi Rossii (1917 –​nachalo 2000-​ x gg.): istoriko-​ pravovoi analiz zakonodatel’nogo razvitiia (Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata iuridicheskikh nauk, Kubanskii gosudarstvennyi agrarnyi universitet). von Benda-​Beckmann, Franz, Keebet von Benda-​Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber (2009). “The Properties of Property.” In Changing Properties of Property, edited by Franz von Benda-​Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-​Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber (New York: Bergahn Books): 1–​39. Yurchak, Alexei (2005). Everything was Forever, Until it Was no More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

67

CHAPTER FIVE

STRUGGLING TO INTERPRET ISLAM IN CENTRAL ASIA Religion, politics, and anthropology Julie McBrien INTRODUCTION Studies of Islam in post-​ Soviet Central Asia had long been predetermined and foreshortened by the influence of Soviet-​ era scholarly frames and contemporary political and security concerns (e.g. Benningsen and Lemercier-​Quelquejay 1979; Benningsen and Broxup 1983; Poliakov 1991; Naumkin 2005; Olcott 2007).1 These works were either fixated on Islam as a source of violence and instability in the region, relied on overly dichotomist frames for the interpretation of Islam, or were mired in theoretical traditions which limited investigations. Over the last 10–​15 years however, a body of scholarship, primarily in anthropology, has emerged that has broken with these concerns and examined, instead, the multiple ways that Muslims in Central Asia understand and live Islam. This new anthropological work builds fruitfully upon and places itself in dialogue with discussions in the broader anthropology of Islam (e.g., Bowen 1993; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Deeb 2006; Ahmad 2017). Within this body of work, Talal Asad’s 1986 essay ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ is a foundational text. In it, Asad argues for the need to define an analytical field of investigation when undertaking the study of Islam. His proposition is to understand Islam as discursive tradition, in which Muslims attempt to carry out correct practice in reference to an established set of texts which have a long-​standing history. Intriguingly, the frameworks that have recently emerged for interpreting Islam in the former socialist region may stand at odds with Asad’s central assertation in his seminal text. In a 2019 panel of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, Morgan Liu and Usmon Boron argued that the conceptual frames developed for Islam in Central Asia tend to describe Islam and Muslimness in terms that reference belonging (Privratsky 2001; McBrien 2017), culture (Khalid 2007), or ideology (Pelkmans 2017). In Asad’s work, however, Islam is defined as a discursive tradition, an articulation which may not fit with understandings that foreground culture or belonging. This tension deserves treatment for, if it holds true, it suggests either a reworking of Asad’s quintessential theory or an adjustment to the ways in which Islam in Central Asia is treated (Liu 2017; 2020; Fadil 2019a; 2019b). Liu (2020) has argued for the latter, positing that a more serious engagement with Asad’s work may open up new avenues for research on Islam in the region. Against this, I assert that a close reading 68

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-6

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

of both Asad’s text and the work on Islam and Central Asia, does not reveal a contradiction, but rather a compatibility and an extension of his thought (see also Fadil 2019b). Moreover, the anthropology of Islam in Central Asia is a thriving field. The more pressing question is, I stress, what this body of work can contribute to wider disciplinary discussions.

ASAD AND ‘THE IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLAM’ Asad’s aim in his 1986 article is clear –​to establish Islam as an analytical category. His conceptualization was made against the three dominant frames for interpreting Islam within anthropology at the time, as he outlines, namely Islam as 1) impossible to define as an isolable object (e.g., Abdul Hamid El-​Zein) 2) anything Muslims say is Islamic (e.g., Michael Gilsenan) 3) ‘a distinctive historical totality which organizes various aspects of social life’ (e.g., Ernest Gellner) (1986: 2). Asad discusses the insufficiencies of these conceptualizations for reaching his goal. He moves through El-​Zein’s quickly for an endeavour which concludes by stating that ‘Islam’ as an analytical category dissolves’ (1977:252) is surely inadequate to the task. The second causes problems, Asad argues, when Muslims begin to contest the ideas and practices of others as ‘not really Islam at all’ (ibid.). Rather than adjudicating between them, the anthropologist ends by allowing all. The third, at its base, fails to fruitfully deal with the diversity of belief and practices of Muslims, as well as an underlying, rather unproductive and faulty assumption, concerning the correlation of different ‘types’ of Islam with ‘types’ of social structure. Against these ideas, Asad proposes an object which holds tradition as its centre (1986:20), though not tradition defined as something set apart from modernity. For Asad, tradition is the discourses oriented to teaching correct practice, which ‘precisely because [they are] established, ha[ve] a history’ and hence, a tradition (ibid.). Traditions, moreover, are not homogenous; variation in, and debate over, proper practice does not signal a lack of tradition but rather difference in ‘Islamic reasonings that different social and historical conditions can or cannot sustain’ (ibid.: 23). By marking out a tradition as that which ‘relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith’ (ibid.: 20), Asad is able to avoid the trap of Islam becoming anything (Gilsenan). He is likewise able to account for a diversity of opinions and practices (Gellner), as well as the contestation between Muslims over what Islam truly is (Gilsenan), without dissolving the object (El-​ Zein) or essentializing it (Gellner). Asad’s definition has become a loadstone in the anthropology of Islam (e.g., Bowen 1993; Mahmood 2005; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006). In Central Asia, however, few anthropologists have engaged with it directly, Rasanayagam’s monograph (2011) being a notable exception. Recently, some have questioned whether the understandings of Islam in Central Asia produced by scholars of the region are compatible with Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition (Fadil 2019a; Liu 2020). Islam in Central Asia, in contrast, they argue, has been characterized as ideology, culture, or belonging and as such, is either misguided or irreconcilable with Asad’s seminal work. This begs the question of exactly how Islam in post-​Soviet Central Asia has been conceptualized by anthropologists. 69

—​​​​ J u l i e M c B r i e n —​​​

THEORIZING ISLAM IN CENTRAL ASIA When anthropological research on Islam in post-​Soviet Central Asia began in the 1990s and early 2000s, the field was dominated by literature preoccupied by a set of strong Soviet-​era frames. During the mid-​to-​late Soviet period, Soviet researchers were often concerned with understanding Islam in order to uncover how and why it persisted despite social and economic interventions, and anti-​religious campaigns (Poliakov 1991). They interpreted Islam in dichotomist frames with textual, pure, and official understandings and practices of the religion on one side and traditional, popular, and unregulated on the other (Sukhareva 1960, Saidbaev 1984, Basilov 1992). Outside of the USSR, Islam was usually analysed by Sovietologists in Europe and America through similar dualistic frameworks, in addition to seeing it as a possible source of political instability (Bennigsen and Lemercier-​Quelquejay 1979, Bennigsen and Broxup 1983, Fierman 1991). These tropes persisted in the post-​Soviet period. Islam continued to be viewed by academics –​but also journalists, policy makers, and aid workers –​from both in and outside Central Asia, in the same bifurcated terms (Ro’i 2000) and/​or primarily as a threat or in reference to its perceived potential for violence (Rashid 2002; Naumkin 2005; Olcott 2007). The anthropology of post-​Soviet Islam in Central Asia is a fairly new field and the English-​language monographs that describe it are not only few in number, but rather recently published. Each of the works is concerned with a slightly different set of questions, but all, in one form or the other, do two things –​reckon with the existing literature, including the bifurcated conceptualization of Islam and the fixation on violence, and reflect on the Central Asian’s own understanding of themselves as Muslims. Muslimness (Kazak: musïlmanshïlïq, Uzbek: musulmonchilik, Kyrgyz: musulmanchylyk) is the ubiquitous Turkic Central Asian term used by Kazaks, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks alike to refer to, reflect upon, and discuss their own state or quality as Muslims.2 It is muslimness rather than Islam that seems to concern most Central Asians and the two are used as (near) synonyms in the region. Muslimness likewise appears as one of the most central terms in anthropological research on Islam in the region. It is in Muslim Turkistan (2001) that the term first enters contemporary studies of the region. In this book, author Bruce Privratsky argues that when discussing religion, most Kazaks speak of muslimness or the ‘clean path’ (taza jol) rather than Islam.3 Muslimness, for Privratsky’s interlocutors, is practised in the veneration of saints and holy places, marked by the keeping of life-​ cycle events and rituals related to the home, and consigned primarily to women and the elderly. Muslimness, in his work, describes the way in which his interlocutors understood both themselves and their religious lives. Examining Islam in Uzbekistan, Maria Louw too prioritizes the concept of muslimness, summarizing her book as a description of Bukharans’ negotiation of Muslimness in their struggles for agency, meaning, and belonging in uncertain times. Nevertheless, Louw does not explicitly reflect on the origin or nature of the term. She does discuss what has been an enduring debate in the study of Islam –​the relationship between what is variously referred to as either ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ tradition (Gellner 1981), or Orthodox/​scripturalist traditions and customary/​folk/​traditional ones, frames which parallel the discussions of Islam in the Soviet Union. In these studies, scholars debate which ideas and practices fall within Islam and which do not, 70

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

which are part of religion and which are anathema, superstition, or culture. But it is not only in scholarly debates about Islam that this boundary-drawing between what counts as Islam and what does not has occurred. It has been a perennial discussion among everyday Muslims and can be seen in, for example, disagreements between reformist movements and those they criticize. Reflecting on both these debates, Louw demurs, taking no stance. Instead, she articulates her decision to focus on the ways in which her interlocutors ‘live, experience, and use’ their ideas and beliefs (2007:19). Taking Islam to be that which one’s interlocutors say it is, is a fairly conventional position among anthropologists, but one that Asad criticized (1986). Louw’s, but also Privratsky’s and Johan Rasanayagam’s (2011), move to do so however, is not only informed by the anthropological tradition of understanding things from the perspective of one’s interlocutors’, but, as Louw explains, is also informed by the particular position of Islam in Central Asia during the Soviet period, and the impact this had on Muslims of the region and their own reflections on their qualifications as Muslims. As Louw describes […] the Uzbek Muslims that I worked among were themselves acutely aware that they lacked religious knowledge, that history somehow had made them forget what it meant to be Muslim –​intellectually, morally and practically. It has been a major concern of mine to take this perceived ignorance seriously as a very important aspect of what it means to be Muslim in post-​Soviet Uzbekistan […]. (Louw 2007:19) Louw’s interlocutors wrestle with what it means to (seemingly) lack the kind of deep knowledge of Islam/​being Muslim they suppose is commonplace to Muslims around the world. While they, just like the Kazaks in Privratsky’s study, are unquestionably Muslim, the lack of knowledge is a source of discomfort and dregs up uncertainty about their own qualifications. The acknowledgement of and anxiety about a lack of religious knowledge on the part of Uzbeks that Louw worked with would be echoed in future work on Islam in the region, becoming a hallmark of many descriptions of Central Asians’ own reflections of their position as Muslims (e.g., Kehl-​Bodrogi 2008; Hilgers 2009; McBrien 2012). There seemed to be a connection between this notion of muslimness, and what happened to Islam and Muslims, during the Soviet period. It indexed both the persistence and loss of religion. Muslimness, however, was also connected to communal belonging, which was articulated not only in reference to religion, but also nation, as Louw, Privratsky, and many after them would note. While not an anthropologist, Adeeb Khalid, a historian, describes a similar connection: In a way, there is nothing new about this: historically, ‘customary’ Islam, which ties community, custom, and tradition to Islam, has been the dominant way in which Muslims have understood Islam. In the modern world, this form of Islam has been challenged by numerous reformist movements and assaulted by secularizing states. In Central Asia, it survived in the interstices of Soviet society, but it did not remain unchanged. Today, customary Islam is wedded to modern national identities and exists in a political realm that is still de-​Islamized. (Khalid 2007:122) 71

—​​​​ J u l i e M c B r i e n —​​​

Here Khalid indexes both Muslims’ keeping of Islamic practices during the Soviet period, the inclination of these practices to be assessed by some Muslims as improper or not truly Islamic, and the tie to belonging in the form of ethno-​national identity, that Louw and Privratsky noted. Khalid makes much more explicit the way that community within Islam became tied to the idea of belonging to the modern nation-​state during the Soviet period, arguing for the role of Soviet-​era programs, politics, and socioeconomic processes in facilitating this union, as well as its position in fostering what is, when contrasted to other Muslim majority countries, a ‘political realm that is still de-​Islamized’ and in which the ‘public presence of Islam is highly muted’ throughout Central Asia (Louw 2007:122). Taken together, Privratsky’s, Louw’s, and Khalid’s work lay out the elements that later would become the most central components of discussions of Islam in Central Asia, namely: the abiding importance to many Muslims of being Muslim, believing in God, and keeping a set of rituals related to the home, ancestors, saints and the life cycle; an anxiety among many Muslims about the loss of true knowledge and practice of Islam over the course of the Soviet period; debates about what really counts as Islam, and the entangling of Islamic and ethno-​national belonging. Muslimness becomes a key term in much work on Islam in the region, precisely because it points to all four of these elements and, for the anthropologists involved, stays the closest to the terms and ideas used by Central Asian Muslims themselves. Not all anthropologists researching Islam in the region use the term ‘Muslimness’, yet all those who conducted at least a portion of their fieldwork in two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, wrestle with what impact the Soviet past had on religion in the region, the question that is perhaps at the heart of the notion Muslimness. For most, Muslimness formed the backdrop to other investigations like those examining questions of memory (e.g., Privratsky 2001; Louw 2007), morality (Stephan 2010b; Rasanayagam 2011), religious knowledge and education (Stephan 2010b; Schwab 2012; Peshkova 2014; Montgomery 2016), saints, holy places, and shrine veneration (Privratsky 2001; Kehl-​Bodrogi 2006b, 2008; Aitpaeva et al. 2007; Louw 2007; Rasanayagam 2011; Féaux de la Croix 2016), transnational religious connections (Bissenova 2005; Ismailbekova and Nasritdinov 2012; Nasritdinov 2012; Toktogulova 2014), or development, modernity, and the state (Beyer 2016; Bissenova 2016; Mostowlansky 2017; McBrien 2017; Nasritdinov and Esenamanova 2017). For others, religion and politics were more central to their research and here the Soviet atheist project loomed larger and formed a focal point for central arguments and theoretical interventions (Khalid 2007; Hilgers 2009; McBrien 2017; Pelkmans 2017). It is especially the latter works that foreground the impact of the Soviet anti-​ religious and other modernizing campaigns on Islam, and bring the case of Soviet atheism to bear on wider academic discussions, resulting in the notions of belonging, culture, or ideology that Liu and Boron highlighted in their critique. Each of these terms, however, covers a different field of investigation and attempts to discuss different phenomena. While they all wrestle with secularism, the politics of religion, and understandings and practices of Muslimness in Central Asia, they are asking different questions. Importantly, they do not aim to conceptualize Islam in Central Asia. Pelkmans’ discussion of ideology (2017), for example, can hardly be characterized as a description of Central Asian Islam. Rather the term is for him 72

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

a way to analyse the relationship between ideas and power, and the affective role of ‘pulsation’ therein, which can be found in religious and non-​religious movement alike. So, while he discusses ideology in reference to Islam, specifically the Tablighi Jamaat, he likewise does so in regard to Pentecostalism, Soviet atheism and spiritual healing. Belonging was a central term in my work on Islam in Central Asia. Ironically, it was a term I developed not to describe what Islam was during the Soviet period (or is, during the post-​Soviet one), but rather what the category of acceptable public religion came to be as a result of the Soviet political project of secularism.4 In this way, my notion of belonging is a contribution to discussions of secularism, not religion. I started from Asad’s work on secularism in which he demonstrated how, in Western Europe, religion as individual, internalized belief, is the notion that the state monitors, defends, and delineates in its political project of secularism (2003). It is allowable religion because it does not undermine the authority of the state and it is from this definition of religion that the state gets, in part, its power. The modern state emerged in tandem with this definition, shaping it as it was shaped by it. Building on this, I argued that in its project, the Soviet State, like its European and North American counterparts, inadvertently and unintentionally created and allowed a particular mode of publicly allowable religion (McBrien 2017). However, I argued, the only understanding of religion that could be publicly articulated from within the logics of a modern Soviet state was that of religion as a part of ethno-​national belonging (cf. Khalid 2007). This contrasts with the essential definition of religion in Europe and North America, but is a historically contingent outcome of what was a similar modern project of secularism.5 For both Asad and me, these conceptualizations of religion were neither an analytical definition of religion to be deployed by anthropologists in their work, nor were they offered as complete understandings of religion for the particular people, time, and place researched. In short, in my case, it was not a depiction of Central Asian Islam writ large. Rather, in both instances, they were descriptions of dominant notion of publicly admissible religion allowed by a modern state in its political project of secularism; the ideas and practices of religion by religious actors exceeded the limited definition of the state. As a case in point, in Asad’s work, there were Christians to be found who asserted an essential notion of belonging to their definition (Asad 2003:139), while in my research with men and women who came to full maturity during the Soviet Period, there were Muslims who professed internal faith as vital to true Muslimness (McBrien 2017:94). Belonging was a heuristic used to attune the reader to the category of acceptable religion under Soviet secularism, a category that, I assert, applied whether the religion under question was Islam or Orthodox Christianity. Research on the intertwining of religion and nation all throughout the former Soviet Union bears this out (McBrien and Naumescu 2022). The works on Islam reviewed here do not stand in tension with Asad’s notion of Islam as discursive tradition, because they do not aim to dissect whether Islam in Central Asia is or was definable as the analytical object Asad proposed. They also do not offer alternatives to his articulation. Finally, they do not set out nor claim to characterize Islam writ large in the region. Those texts which employ notions like belonging or ideology aim to accomplish something else. The former seeks to 73

—​​​​ J u l i e M c B r i e n —​​​

understand the qualities of publicly allowable religion in the context of Soviet secularism, while the latter asks questions about the relationship of ideas and power and the function of affect therein. It is true that many of the early texts on Islam in Central Asia were more concerned with questions of religion and politics (Hilgers 2006, 2009; Kehl-​Bodrogi 2006a, 2006b, 2008; McBrien 2006, 2017; Rasanayagam 2011; Stephan 2006, 2010), rather than about religion itself. This was a common trend in initial research on the former Soviet Union, regardless of topic or region, as researchers sought to grapple with macro-​scale changes and their various impact on people’s lives. However, there is no need to reinvigorate the field by reaching back to Asad, as Liu argues. The larger corpus of work on Islam in Central Asia already provides fine-​grain analyses of various aspects of the religious lives, commitments, doubts, and struggles of the Muslims in the region. It is a lively field and the authors contributing to it take the religious lives of their interlocutors seriously and place questions of religion central in their foci. Moreover, Islam already appears in these investigations as an object for investigation, very much in the way Asad described it. It is worthwhile, however, to examine an at times unarticulated anxiety in the literature. What many Muslims of Central Asia, and the anthropologists who worked with them, were struggling with is the nature of Islam during the Soviet period. Perhaps a better formulation of the question posed by Liu and Boron is whether, when looking at the Soviet period, we can identify Islam as analytical object in the way that Asad defined it.

THE CENTRALITY OF PRACTICE IN ASAD’S ISLAM AS A DISCURSIVE TRADITION It is the term ‘discursive tradition’ that has resonated the most from Asad’s influential piece. What is often forgotten or insufficiently emphasized, however, is the way Asad understands tradition and the role of practice therein. ‘What is a tradition?’ Asad asks. ‘A tradition,’ he explains, ‘consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice […] (Asad 1986:20). Touching on proper practice, Asad is careful to deal with an oft-​repeated distinction by anthropologists of Islam, that between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘orthopraxy’, whereby Muslims are seen as primarily concerned with the latter rather than the former. Asad asserts the spuriousness of this distinction, arguing that it ‘ignores the centrality of the notion of “the correct model” to which an instituted practice –​ including ritual –​ought to conform’ (ibid.:21). In sum, there can be no orthopraxy without orthodoxy. Thus, in Asad’s arguments about Islam as discursive tradition, we find, at its core, a notion of correct practice, and the teaching thereof. This bears out in another place, namely in his conceptualization of the category of ‘Muslim’. Many of the works theorizing Islam in Central Asia point to the centrality of belonging in its conceptualization. Muslimness is not only at the heart of the academic work on Islam in the region, but a concept which comes from Central Asians themselves. Asad is, at first glance, silent about belonging. While Islam as an analytical category is the object of his inquiry, the notion ‘Muslim’ is not explicitly interrogated or defined. Yet his idea of an anthropology of Islam rests upon it, for they are the practitioners who are learning, teaching, debating, and contesting correct 74

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

practice (in reference to tradition). This may be the closest Asad comes to defining a Muslim. In his understanding of Islam, it is proper practice, in reference to tradition, that seems to make the Muslim: ‘For the anthropologist of Islam the proper theoretical beginning is therefore an instituted practice (set in a particular context and having a particular history) into which Muslims are inducted as Muslims’ (ibid.). In refusing to define Islam as that which has been called such by an anthropologist’s Muslims interlocutors, the starting point for Asad becomes the instituted practice itself and the one who keeps it: the Muslim. It would seem therefore that this is the crux of the problem for thinking through Asad’s notion in reference to the anthropology of Islam in Central Asia, at least in the Soviet period. If we accept Asad’s definition, then we must examine whether or not Muslims in Soviet Central Asia learnt, kept, and taught instituted practice. We must ask then if the notion of Muslimness contains more than just being born into a community, for if it does not, one might argue that there is no Islam to analyse in this case. Asad is careful to point out that it cannot be anything which a Muslim does that can be considered as a part of Islam as an analytical category (ibid.: 20). Rather only those things that are a part of understanding, teaching, learning, and performing correct practice, with reference to an Islamic tradition, qualify. This is where we arrive at the thorniest issue –​how do we deal with the centrality of correct performance of practice in Asad’s definition, considering the inability of Muslims in Central Asia in the Soviet period, to keep many of the practices understood as central to so many Muslims across time and place?

BEING A SOVIET CENTRAL ASIAN MUSLIM Anthropologists researching Islam in Central Asia in the early post-​Soviet years, were faced with a lacuna in the historical literature. Scholarship had nearly exclusively focused on the early Soviet period but the years most prescient for the anthropologists –​ the mid-​to-​late Soviet era –​had yet to be researched. Anthropologists had only the rather ideologically ladened texts produced by both sides of the divide during the Cold War to guide them. Much of the anthropological work on Islam in Central Asia therefore leaned heavily on the life-​stories of interlocutors to understand the impact Soviet secularism had on religious life. This was comparable to the situation faced by anthropologists working on different religions in other former Soviet republics, which led some to do substantial historical research (e.g., Rogers 2009; Luehrmann 2011). The oral histories that the anthropologists collected showed that despite the tremendous impact the violent attacks had on Islam during the early anti-​religious campaign, Muslims were able to practise Islam during the mid-​to-​late Soviet period. Notably, this practice was not only or even primarily a mode of resistance. Being Muslim and being Soviet were not incommensurable; some Muslims even sought ways to make Islam and the Soviet project compatible (Abashin 2014; Tasar 2017). Muslimness had become crucially about belonging.6 However, it also necessitated a belief in God, the keeping of life-​cycle events like circumcision, marriage, and burial, all done according to the traditions they had been taught by kin and which were essentially defined as Muslim, as a part of Islamic tradition (Privratsky 2001; Hilgers 2009). For some, this also included shrine visitation or other rituals intended 75

—​​​​ J u l i e M c B r i e n —​​​

to invoke God’s protection, fortune, or guidance and home-​based rituals (Aitpaeva et al. 2007; Kehl-​Bodrogi 2008; Abashin 2014) and religious practice late in life. In the spaces possible, Muslims creatively attempted to understand, live by, and teach Islam; moreover, God and the saints continued to speak to Muslims in the Soviet Union, despite secularism (Kehl-​Bodrogi 2006b, 2008; Grant 2011). Not everything was possible; much religious knowledge, including that of correct practice, was lost, and there were many Islamic practices that were difficult if not impossible for Muslims to keep, to varying degrees, over the long Soviet period. Importantly, both the meanings and practices of Muslimness also transformed in interaction with the social and material processes of the Soviet Union over its long history. But there was a limited space and possibility for practising religion, as the subsequent historical work on the mid-​to-​late Soviet period has borne out (e.g., Khalid 2007; Dudoignon 2011; Tasar 2017). While many of these practices might indeed be contested by other Muslims as ‘not really about Islam at all’ (Asad 1986:2), they were not only marked as part of Muslimness and Islamic tradition by many Central Asians towards the end of the twentieth century, but they have been included as part of an Islamic tradition by Muslims across time and space (cf. Khalid 2007). Returning to Asad, the question is whether, within his definition of Islam as a discursive tradition, religious life in Soviet Central Asia was enough to qualify as ‘Islam’? Discourse, and specifically discursive tradition, have been the terms most widely used to sum up his articulation of Islam as an object of investigation. But, as argued, a close reading of his work reveals the importance of instituted practice in his definition. I have already argued that during the Soviet period, there was room, however limited, for practice that Muslims of Central Asia linked to Islam and proper Muslimness. These were things they learned from their kin and their neighbours, in some cases from those locally known as knowledgeable of Islam (moldo, otincha) and in the carrying-​out of the rituals, there was a sense of proper performance. Moreover, though there was an explicit recognition of a lack of Islamic knowledge, there was an idea of Islam, of being part of it, and of one’s duty to keep certain practices. Let me again return to Asad’s definition: For the anthropologist of Islam the proper theoretical beginning is therefore an instituted practice (set in a particular context and having a particular history) into which Muslims are inducted as Muslims […] And I refer here primarily not to the programmatic discourses of ‘modernist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ Islamic movements, but to the established practices of unlettered Muslims. A practice is Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam and is so taught to Muslims –​whether by an ‘alim, a khatib, a Sufi shaykh, or an untutored parent. (Asad 1986:21; emphasis added) It is here that Asad’s definition becomes expansive enough to capture the practice of Islam by many Central Asians during the Soviet and early post-​Soviet period. While for many there were few religious scholars from whom they could learn about Islam, there was most certainly kin, friends, classmates, colleagues, and neighbours who did instruct proper performance and who taught many to believe in God. And while this may have not been prayer or fasting for most (though it was for some), it 76

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

was nonetheless a practice of Islam in the limited space allowed. Belonging was an important aspect of proper Muslimness, especially given the impact of Soviet secularism, however this was not to the exclusion of, in opposition to, or divorced from, practice or belief.

CONCLUSION Religious life in contemporary Central Asia is flourishing and so is the research being conducted about it. The field has broken from the frames and foci which constrained investigations in the early post-​Soviet years and has built fruitfully upon the rich anthropological research on Islam carried out in other regions of the world, including that of Talal Asad, and his understanding of Islam as a discursive tradition. Asad’s definition of Islam as an analytical object proves a fruitful lens for facilitating the study of Islam in Central Asia, just as it has for other regions around the world. Asad neither dissolves the object of investigation altogether nor fixes the tradition to any specific set of social or historical conditions within which it arises. His understanding remains expansive and flexible enough to encompass the kind of practice, contestation, and transformation of the Islamic tradition that has always characterized it, including among ‘unlettered Muslims’ (Asad 1986:21) like those of Central Asia in the late Soviet and early post-​Soviet period who wrestled with the effects of the Soviet atheist campaigns on their idea and practice of Muslimness. The works reviewed here are, generally, based on research conducted in the first two decades after the collapse of the USSR, when many researchers grappled with the politics of religion in a new political environment. While these questions remain important, much research now investigates religion in and of itself, and seeks to understand its intersection with other areas of life. New works have emerged on transnational religious connections between Central Asia and the Gulf or the Middle East (Bissenova 2005; Stephan-​Emmrich 2018a, 2018b), religious education and authority (Bigozhin 2019; Doolotkeldieva 2020), Islamic mediascapes and the intersection of religion and art (Kudaibergenova 2019; Schwab 2019), halal economies (Botoeva 2020), and the continued politics of religion through the region (Bissenova 2016; Nasritdinov and Esenamanova 2017; Gatling 2019; Toktogulova 2020). There are many new fields to explore and many older ones that warrant revisiting. One of these stems, for example, from recent criticism of work on Islam in the region which points to an overly homogenous portrayal of Islam and argues that the understanding and practice of Islam and national identity have been more varied than that described (Artman 2018). This may spur new explorations into the varied ways Uzbeks, Tajiks, or Kazakhs, for example, live, understand, and contest their national identity, their interpretation and practice of Islam, and the ways they do and do not fit together. The exploration of religion’s intersection with gender, especially in reference to marriage and the burgeoning feminist movement across the region, is likewise an area that warrants further investigation. Finally, inquiries which investigate the ways in which religion is, or is not, bound with recent nationalist movements or the impact that more than a decade of sustained labour migration has had on religious practice and understanding, and vice versa, are both ripe for enquiry. It is also time to turn our gaze around and ask what insight research among Muslims in Central Asia has for the rest of anthropology. Unlike in the research conducted in 77

—​​​​ J u l i e M c B r i e n —​​​

many other Muslim majority regions of the world, anthropologists researching in Central Asia have been less inclined to reduce Muslims to primarily religious actors, a problem some have argued has plagued the study of Muslim-​majority societies elsewhere (Schielke 2010). They have also included a wide breadth of practices of Islam, including movements away from and an ambiguous stance towards it, in their research, and not just the piety movements that some have argued overly dominate the anthropology of Islam (Mittermaier 2010; Osella and Soares 2020). Investigations into the importance of belonging in Central Asian ideas of Muslimness have already served to widen notions of what might be included in an idea of Islamic tradition (Fadil 2019b). Contributions like these will continue. The anthropology of Islam in Central Asia is a vibrant field with much to offer the broader subdiscipline, including the way in which we think of Islam as a field of anthropological investigation.

NOTES 1 See also, see Rasanayagam 2006; Montgomery 2014, and Liu 2017. 2 Though I point to a Turkic term and list only three of the ethno-​national communities in Central Asia, the argument is broadly true for most across the region including among Tajiks and Turkmen, for example. 3 Privratsky explains that taza jol (clean path) is a ‘Kazak rendition of the Quranic definition of Islam as the “straight path” ’ (Privatsky 2001:74). 4 This phrasing and conceptualization–​a political project of secularism –​is Asad’s, from his work on secularism (2003). 5 While in both the Soviet and Euro-​American cases, the state had a dominant mode of religion which it publicly endorsed, there were also regular breaches of this that could be ignored when in the state’s interests. For example, despite the official separation of church and state throughout Europe and North America, most nation-​states have tacit, unacknowledged religions which form essential parts of their ‘national culture’ (e.g., Protestant Christianity in the United States, Catholicism in Spain, or Protestantism in the Netherlands). 6 Importantly, this occurred not only because of the logics and mechanism of Soviet secularism, but also because of precepts in Islam itself (Khalid 2007; McBrien 2017).

REFERENCES Abashin, S. (2014). A Prayer for Rain: Practicing Being Soviet and Muslim. Journal of Islamic Studies 25 (2), 178–​200. Ahmad, I. (2017). Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to the marketplace. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Aitpaeva, G., Egemberidieva, A. and Toktogulova, M., eds. (2007). Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas. Bishkek: Aigine Research Center. Artman, V. M. (2018). Nation, Religion, and Theology: What Do We Mean When We Say “Being Kyrgyz Means Being Muslim?”. Central Asian Affairs 5(3), 191–​212. Asad, T. (1986). The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Basilov, V.N. (1992). Shamanstvo u narodov Srednei Azii i Kazakstana. Moscow: Nauka. Bennigsen, A. and Broxup, M. (1983). The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State. London: Croom Helm. 78

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​ Bennigsen, A., and Lemercier-​Quelquejay. (1979). Official Islam in the Soviet Union. Religion in Communist Lands 7(3): 148–​59. Beyer, J. (2016). The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bigozhin, U. (2019). “Where is Our Honor?” Sports, Masculinity, and Authority in Kazakhstani Islamic Media. Central Asian Affairs 6(2–​3), 189–​205. Bissenova, A. (2005). Central Asian Encounters in the Middle East: Nationalism, Islam and postcoloniality in al-​Azhar. Religion, State and Society 33(3), 253–​263. Bissenova, A. (2016). Building a Muslim Nation. In M. Laurelle, ed. Kazakhstan in the Making: Legitimacy, Symbols, and Social Changes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 211–​228. Botoeva, A. (2020). Measuring the Unmeasurable? Production & Certification of Halal Goods and Services. Sociology of Islam 8(3–​4), 364–​386. Bowen, J.R. (1993). Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deeb, L. (2006). An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Doolotkeldieva, A. (2020). Madrasa-​based Religious Learning: Between Secular State and Competing Fellowships in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Affairs 7(3), 211–​235. Dudoignon, S.A. (2011). From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from De-​ Stalinization to Independence (1955-​ 91). Central Asian Survey 30(1), 53–​80. El-​Zein, A.H. (1977). Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam, Annual Review of Anthropology 6(2), 27–​54. Fadil, N. (2019a). Redefining Islam in Central Asia. Current Anthropology 6(2), 279–​280. Fadil, N. (2019b). The Anthropology of Islam in Europe: A Double Epistemological Impasse. Annual Review of Anthropology 48, 117–​132. Féaux de la Croix, J. (2016). Iconic Places in Central Asia: The Moral Geography of Dams, Pastures and Holy Sites. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Fierman, W., ed. (1991). Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation. Boulder, CO: Westview. Gatling, B. (2019). Islam and Cultural Heritage on Tajik Television. Central Asian Affairs 6(2–​ 3), 113–​132. Gellner, E. (1981). Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, B. (2011). Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(3), 654–​681. Hilgers, I. (2006). The Regulation and Control of Religious Pluralism in Uzbekistan. In C. Hann et al., eds. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-​Central Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag, 75–​98. Hilgers, I. (2009). Why do Uzbeks Have to be Muslims: Exploring Religiosity in the Ferghana Valley. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Ismailbekova, A., & Nasritdinov, E. (2012). Transnational Religious Networks in Central Asia: Structure, Travel, and Culture of Kyrgyz Tablighi Jama’at. Transnational Social Review 2(2), 177–​195. Kehl-​Bodrogi. K. (2006a). Islam Contested: Nation, Religion and Tradition in Post-​Soviet Turkmenistan. In C. Hann et al., eds. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-​Central Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag, 125–​146. Kehl-​Bodrogi. K. (2006b). Who Owns the Shrine? Competing Meanings and Authorities at a Pilgrimage Site in Khorezm. Central Asia Survey 25(3), 235–​250.

79

—​​​​ J u l i e M c B r i e n —​​​ Kehl-​Bodrogi, K. (2008). Religion is Not So Strong Here: Muslim Religious Life in Khorezm after Socialism. Münster: Lit Verlag. Khalid, A. (1998). The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Khalid, A. (2007). Islam After Communism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kudaibergenova, D.T. (2019). Religion, Power, and Contemporary Art in Central Asia: Visualizing and Performing Islam. Central Asian Affairs 6(2–​3), 224–​252. Liu, M. (2017). Central Asia Islam Outside a Soviet Box. News of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, 57(3), 3–​5. Liu, M. (2020). Review of: From Belonging to Belief: Modern secularisms and the construction of religion in Kyrgyzstan by Julie McBrien. Journal of Religion 100(1), 149–​150. Louw, M.E. (2007). Everyday Islam in Post-​Soviet Central Asia. Routledge. Luehrmann, S. (2011). Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McBrien, J. (2006). Extreme Conversations: Secularism, Religious Pluralism, and the Rhetoric of Islamic Extremism in Southern Kyrgyzstan. In C. Hann et al., eds. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-​Central Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag, pp. 47–​73. McBrien, J. (2012). Watching Clone: Brazilian Soap Operas and Muslimness in Kyrgyzstan. Material Religion 8(3), 374–​396. McBrien, J. (2017). From Belonging to Belief: Modern secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. McBrien, J. and Naumescu, V. (2022). The ‘Post’ in Perspective: Revisiting the Postsocialist Religious Question in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. In: J. Buzalka and A. Pasieka, eds., Anthropology of Transformation: From Europe to Asia and Back. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Mittermaier, A. (2010). Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley:University of California Press. Montgomery, D.W. (2014). Towards a Theory of the Rough Ground: Merging the Policy and Ethnographic Frames of Religion in the Kyrgyz Republic. Religion, State & Society 42(1), 23–​45. Montgomery, D.W. (2016). Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mostowlansky, T. (2017). Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity Along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nasritdinov, E. (2012). Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers. Ab Imperio 2, 145–​167. Nasritdinov, E., and Esenamanova, N. (2017). The War of Billboards: Hijab, Secularism, and Public Space in Bishkek. Central Asian Affairs 4(2), 217–​42. Naumkin, V.V. (2005). Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Olcott, M.B. (2007). Roots of Radical Islam in Central Asia. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Osella, F. and Soares, B. (2020). Religiosity and its Others: Lived Islam in West Africa and South India. Social Anthropology 28(2), 466–​481. Pelkmans, M. (2017). Fragile Conviction:Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Peshkova, S. (2014). Women, Islam, and identity: Public Life in Private Spaces in Uzbekistan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. 80

— ​​​​ S t r u g g l i n g t o i n t e r p r e t I s l a m i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​ Privratsky, B. (2001). Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond: Curzon. Poliakov, S. (1991). Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia. London: M. E. Sharpe. Rasanayagam, J. (2006). Introduction. Central Asian Survey 25(3), 219–​34. Rasanayagam, J. (2011). Islam in Post-​ Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rashid, A. (2002). Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rogers, D. (2009). The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ro’I, Y. (2000). Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev. New York: Columbia University Press. Saidbaev, T.C. (1984). Islam I obshestvo. Moscow: Nauka. Schielke, S. (2010). Second Thoughts About the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life. ZMO Working Papers, 2. Berlin: Zentrum Moderner Orient Schwab, W. (2012). Traditions and Texts: How Two Young Women Learned to Interpret the Qur’an and Hadiths in Kazakhstan. Contemporary Islam 6(2), 173–​197. Schwab, W. (2019). Introduction to the Islamic Mediascape in Central Asia. Central Asian Affairs 6(2–​3), 89–​94. Stephan, M. (2006) “Moral education, Islam and being Muslim in Tajikistan.” In C. Hann et al., eds. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-​ Central Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag, 49–​52. Stephan, M. (2010). Das Bedürfnis nach Ausgewogenheit: Moralerziehung, Islam und Muslimsein in Tadschikistan zwischen Säkularisierung und religiöser Rückbesinnung. Würzburg: Ergon. Stephan-​Emmrich, M. (2018a). Playing Cosmopolitan: Muslim Self-​fashioning, Migration, and (Be-​) Longing in the Tajik Dubai Business Sector. In M. Laurelle, ed. Being Muslim in Central Asia. Leiden:Brill, 187–​207. Stephan-​Emmrich, M. (2018b). iPhones, Emotions, Mediations: Tracing Translocality in the Pious Endeavours of Tajik Migrants in the United Arab Emirates. In M. Stephan-​Emmrich and P. Schröder, eds., Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas: Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 291–​317. Sukhareva, O.A. 1960. Islam v Uzbekistane. Tashkent: Izdatelstvo Akedemii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR. Toktogulova, M. (2014). The Localisation of the Transnational Tablighi Jama’at in Kyrgyzstan: Structures, Concepts, Practices and Metaphors. Crossroads Asia Working Paper Series 17. Toktogulova, M. (2020). Islam in the Context of Nation-Building in Kyrgyzstan: Reproduced Practices and Contested Discourses. The Muslim World 110(1), 51–​63. Tasar, E. (2017). Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 1943–​ 1991. New York: Oxford University Press.

81

CHAPTER SIX

DECOLONIZING ‘THE FIELD’ IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CENTRAL ASIA ‘Being there’ and ‘being here’ Alima Bissenova INTRODUCTION It has long been established that anthropology’s label as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ was well-​deserved, because of its intimate connection to the colonial apparatus and colonial thinking of the time. Anthropology first developed as a near-​colonial discipline to help those European people and powers who ventured beyond their lands to make sense of the outside world and understand ‘others’ who had come into contact with Europeans and were subsequently conquered and subjugated (Asad 1973). The colonial situation created opportunities and formed an epistemic frame in which European intellectuals could act as ‘neutral’ subjects creating knowledge about the cultures of colonized peoples. Many well-​known anthropologists found their fields in the countries and places that were colonies of their own countries. The colonial administration and pre-​existing colonial networks often mediated their access to these ‘fields’. The colonial apparatus that supported careers of studying ‘other people’ was famously described by Edward Said in the Introduction to Orientalism: Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand … The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part. (Said 1979:7; original emphasis) In the quote from Edward Said above, we could replace the word ‘Orient’, with any number of other locations in which this ‘flexible positional superiority’ of the Western observer is manifest. The rest of the world was made accessible to the curious scholars as a ‘field of study’, either directly through the colonial administration during the colonial era, or indirectly as a result of postcolonial and neocolonial economic, political, and, inevitably, academic inequalities. In this chapter, I consider how the rest of the world (and Central Asia specifically) turned into a ‘field’ for ethnographic inquiry and how the divided existence between the field and the place of work might have affected the perception and 82

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-7

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

longevity of one’s anthropology. Drawing on an analysis of the works of the Russian orientalist, Aleksei Levshin (1798–​1879), and his Kazakh critic, Chokan Valikhanov (1835–​1865), I analyze historical practices of ‘entry into the field’, ‘being in the field’, and publication of the results, i.e., ‘descriptions and stories of the field’, in the West and Russia before the so-​called ‘reflexive’ and ‘postcolonial turns’. I examine what Clifford Geertz terms the ‘gap between engaging others where they are and representing them where they are not’, and discuss how this gap manifested itself in the history of anthropology in the West, in the history of ethnography in Russia, and how it continues to inflect the anthropology of Central Asia today. In pre-​revolutionary Russia, for all its unique path of ‘internal colonization’ and contiguous land empire, ethnography was, perhaps, even more than elsewhere, a ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ because knowledge about the culture of ‘Asiatics’ was collected and produced most often by colonial officials themselves. On the one hand, their place in the colonial apparatus or the army gave them access to the field and the opportunity to communicate with natives. On the other hand, their approach perpetuated a particular power perspective on the natives and clouded the ‘scientific view’. Indeed, we should probably give Levshin credit for first constructing or –​as we say after Benedict Anderson –​‘imagining’ a single Kazakh (‘Kirgiz-​Kaisak’ in his words) nation, which at the time was not united politically or even ethnically. After Levshin, a holistic ‘comprehensive’ description of the Asiatic peoples as a single subject, including geography, nature, religion, physical anthropological features, lifestyle, and what we would call today ‘material culture’ –​food, clothes, jewelry, arts, and crafts –​became an almost invariable formulaic ethnographic genre in Russia. Such ‘encyclopedic’ description would continue in the Soviet and even in the post-​Soviet times, as evidenced by recently published collections named Tajiks, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, etc., from the series entitled Peoples and Cultures of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. My point is that –​as Said pointed out and as the case of Levshin illustrates –​how scholars’ gain access to their respective fields is not an innocent question. Even as we might dismiss Levshin as a colonial apologist, the assumptions that one can make a career through knowledge of ‘far-​flung places’ that one then represents to an audience ‘at home’ continues to shape the way that anthropology is studied and taught. When teaching anthropology first in an American and later in a Kazakhstani institution, I noticed this difference in the imagination of the world, which turns out to be connected to the different degrees of the ‘accessibility’ and ‘openness’ of the world to the students coming from different contexts. While most of the American students in my anthropology classes in the US were ready to consume interesting ethnographies –​ documentaries and articles –​from any part of the world, my Kazakhstani students initially would not ‘get’ ethnographies from places like Polynesia or Central Africa –​ even famous documentaries like ‘Ongka’s Big Moka’ and famously popular ethnographies like Evans-​Prichard’s analysis of Zande witchcraft (1976 [1937]). In my anthropology class in Kazakhstan, I had the best students from all over the country who had curious minds and were open to the world beyond Kazakhstan. Still, they would also lean rationally and pragmatically toward the knowledge that would have a practical application to their careers. From this perspective, a trip to or a job in Polynesia and Central Africa would not be feasible for them. Thus, I can say that my students’ situation of getting knowledge and their prospects of applying it differs 83

—​​​​ A l i m a B i s s e n o v a —​​​

from the situation of American students whose interest in any part of the world could be nurtured and supported by various institutions connected with the State Department, international NGOs based in the US, or American business structures. I don’t assume that there is guaranteed employment for American students of anthropology, and I do not have only anthropology majors in mind. But until the recent trend of deglobalization (of which the push for decolonization is just one dimension), many academic, business, and government structures in the West have been premised upon the expertise of area specialists whose knowledge of ‘the field’ is grounded in assumptions of spatial and epistemic difference and distance.

BEING THERE AND BEING HERE Clifford Geertz, the initiator of the interpretative and reflexive turn in the American anthropology, in his book Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), conceptualized the division in the lives of anthropologists between the place of their field and the place of the rest of their life/​work as a gap between ‘Being There’ and ‘Being Here’. On the one hand, the authority of an anthropologist, their epistemological and moral confidence, comes from their ‘Being There’ in the field. This is the kind of authority, echoing Malinowski, that asserts: ‘I was not only there, I was one of them, I speak with their voice’ (Geertz 1988:22). Along these lines, travel to the field becomes a personal, almost romantic quest for ‘self-​transformation’ (Geertz 1988:22). However, as Geertz also points out in this book, eventually, in the course of one’s academic life, ‘Being There’ in the field turns into a ‘postcard experience’, while ‘Being Here’ in one’s own ‘native’ university environment is ‘what gets your anthropology published, reviewed, cited, taught’ (Geertz 1988:130). Geertz dedicates his book to four classics of the British, American, and French anthropology, with the third chapter of the book devoted to ‘Oxford don’ Sir Edward Evans-​Pritchard, who wrote the most famous works to date on witchcraft among the Zande, and structural concepts of time associated with seasonal pastoralism and seasonal agriculture among Nuer. Evans-​Pritchard could be considered a part of the British colonial machine, as he briefly served for Anglo-​Egyptian colonial administration of Sudan. At the same time, his involvement with the colonial administration and the use of African ‘connections’ during the Second World War does not necessarily detract from his merits as an ethnographer of Zande and Nuer, as well as a theoretician of ‘primitive’ religions and structural (cyclical) concepts of time. For many generations of British and American students studying anthropology at university, Evans-​Pritchard represented Africa. It would not even occur to these students to question Evans-​Pritchard’s authority in representing African peoples correctly. As Geertz writes in his book, even if a reader later found that the situation with Zande or Nuer is not how Evans-​Pritchard described it, finding fault with Evans-​Pritchard’s writings would be the last thing they would do: One can look at Azande again, but if the complex theory of passion, knowledge, and causation that Evans-​Pritchard said he discovered there is not found, we are more likely to doubt our own powers than we are to doubt his –​or perhaps simply to conclude that the Zande are no longer themselves. (Geertz 1988:5) 84

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

Perhaps, the reason why we don’t want to put Evans-​Pritchard into the ‘colonial shoes’ of his time is because of his theoretical and subjective position as an ethnographer. Evans-​Pritchard sees the job of an ethnographer as a translator. Through his own experience, he translates the witchcraft magic of Zande into European conceptual language. In particular, he emphasizes the religious function of witchcraft in explaining unfortunate events in our life –​the role that more ‘advanced’ religions, including Judeo-​Christian ones, also perform. His fieldwork experience with Zande serves as an additional proof that Zande’s worldview can have a basis in their everyday life. In his writings, Evans-​Pritchard admits that he might also have been witness to witchcraft when he saw the bright travelling light at night which Zande said was the cause of the death of the two men that night. He writes: This event fully explained the light I had seen. I never discovered its real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate, but the coincidence of the direction along which the light moved and the subsequent death accorded well with Zande ideas. (Evans-​Pritchard 1976 [1937]:11). Then as now, it is considered an essential trait of anthropology to see the world from one’s informants’ perspective and translate this experience into the ‘native language’ of the ethnographer –​in the case of Evans-​Pritchard, that meant the English language and the language of anthropology. The main goal of Geertz in the Works and Lives, the Anthropologist as Author was to show that even the founders of the discipline in the West, who at their time held the positivistic view of the possibility of knowing and understanding ‘other people’, and ‘other cultures’ through the application of the proper ethnographic method and proper documentation, were first and foremost writers with different styles, writing more in a literary than an academic and scientific genre (Geertz 1988:11). Indeed, the ethnography of Zande by Evans-​Pritchard reads at least partly as a detective and partly as a horror story. Why do misfortunes befall particular people? Why did this boy stumble upon a stump of wood on a well-​trodden path and why on this particular occasion did the sore on his toe begin to fester? (Geertz 1988). Evans-​Pritchard grasped himself and explained to his readers that Zande understand the physical and physiological causes of things as well as Europeans do, but that they also believe in additional causes that make certain events ‘coincide in time and space’; it is this constellation of the natural and social causes (the evil intention and the use of witchcraft to fulfill it) that lead to unfortunate consequences. While Evans-​ Pritchard fulfilled his role as a translator of experiences and worldviews, he still believed that Zande could not theorize about their doctrines of witchcraft, which, in other words means, that they themselves could not have explained their experience to others (Europeans). So, naturally, it is he, Evans-​ Pritchard, who comes and does it for them, that is, saves them from their inability to represent themselves in theoretical-​analytical frame: ‘I hope I am not expected to point out that Zande cannot analyze his doctrines as I have done for him’, he states plainly (Evans-​Pritchard 1976 [1937]:23). Thus, for all of the credit that we give him as a translator we cannot not point out that he claims that only he can represent them. Evans-​Pritchard, and not only he but most of the founding fathers 85

—​​​​ A l i m a B i s s e n o v a —​​​

and mothers, indeed believed that ‘natives’ lack the ability of abstract thinking and theorization and thus cannot speak for themselves in these terms.

FIELD AS ‘SERVICE’ AND FIELD AS ‘DISCOVERY’ After the age of exploration and the age of discovery and long before the disciplinary formation of anthropology in Britain, ethnology in Germany, and ethnography in Russia as separate disciplines, the authors who came into contact with ‘exotic’ people unknown to Europeans considered themselves to be making discoveries the same way that they would discover new places and new species. Ethnographic discoveries, in this epistemic model, were mere extensions of geographic ones. Paradigmatic here is one of the founders of the Russian Geographic Society, Russian scientist and official, Aleksei Levshin (1798–​1879), who arrived in Orenburg at the age of 22 in 1820 and left two years later in 1824. In 1820, his article titled ‘A Date with the Khan of the Small Kirgiz Horde’, written in the genre of travelogue, was published in the journal Bulletin of Europe. The article described the design and the decoration of the Kazakh yurt and the Kazakh customs of hospitality. In 1824, another article, ‘The story of the ancient Tatar city of Saraichik’ was published in the Northern Archive, and in 1825 a third article, ‘On the enlightenment of the Kirgiz-​Kaisaks’ was published in the same journal. After translating and publishing these articles in French, Levshin was elected a member of the French Geographical Society in 1827 and the Société Asiatique 1828. His book, The Descriptions of the Kirgiz-​Kaisak hordes and steppes, which also included all of these pieces (Levshin 1996[1832]), was published ten years later in 1832 and became Levshin’s most notable work, making him for a long time the so-​called ‘Herodotus of the Kirgiz people’, one of the most famous Orientalist scholars and a senior official in the Russian administration. Striking in Levshin’s preface to his book is the emphasis on novelty (the unknown-​ ness of the Kazakhs to the ‘enlightened world’), his innovative approach, and the reliability of his sources. In a style that finds echoes in the conventions that anthropology graduate students follow in the introductions to their dissertations, Levshin was keen to demonstrate the novelty of his subject and his contribution to the field: If the subject of this work were better known to the enlightened world, then the work I now present to the judgement of readers would not have been published … But the circumstances under which I collected information about Kirgiz-​ Kaisaks were so favorable, the sources from which I borrowed my data were so reliable and the Kirgiz hordes are so little known that I consider it my duty to publish what I learned about the former and current state of these hordes. (Levshin 1996 [1832]:12; author’s translation) Further in the same preface to the first edition of the book, Levshin presents what might be called a ‘description of the methodology’. He names archives in which he collected materials: the Archive of the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Archive of the Orenburg Border Commission. Reading the preface, we also understand that he talks about his work and service at the Orenburg Governorate as we would talk today about ‘fieldwork’. 86

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

I drew my initial notions about these people from the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during 1819–​1820. In the following two years, which I spent in Orenburg and in the trans-​Ural steppes being sent there by the Highest Will, by the same Ministry, I added to these more details, verifications, and all kinds of data. (Levshin 1996 [1832]:12; author’s translation) Levshin’s work was highly appreciated at the time by both the authorities and the ‘enlightened world’ in Russia and the West. In 1831, in anticipation of the release of the book, two extracts of the manuscript were published in issues of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the leading literary journal of the time, with a note from the publisher about how ‘rarely do we have books based on such fundamental research’ (cited in Erofeeva 1996:570). After the release of the book, Orenburg military governor Pavel Sukhtelen (1788–​1833) also published a complimentary review of it, noting that it systematizes a lot of information about the country almost unknown to the European world and praising Levshin for his role as ‘the first historian of this illiterate and homeless people’ (pervyi istorik naroda bezgramotnogo i bespriiutnogo) (cited in Erofeeva 1996:564; author’s translation). While Levshin’s archival work and systematizing of information available in the Orenburg Border Commission has been recognized by historians of his time and modern historians (Erofeeva 1996, Sartori and Shablei 2019), some of Levshin’s fieldwork has raised questions about its veracity. The first specialist who categorically disagreed with some of Levshin’s data and conclusions ‘from the field’ was his contemporary, Kazakh orientalist and ethnographer Chokan Valikhanov (1835–​1865), who published remarks on the third (ethnographic) part of Levshin’s work. Curiously, Valikhanov, who also wrote about syncretism of Islam and ‘traces of shamanism’ among Kazakhs, was very critical of Levshin’s work precisely for his assessment of the ‘degree of Islamization’ of Kazakhs. ‘It is difficult to decide who the Kirgiz are: Mohammedans, Manicheans or pagans?’ writes Levshin and continues, ‘fasting and ablution –​very prudent decrees by Mohammed –​the Kirgiz do not observe, they find it difficult to pray five times a day, they do not have mosques and do not elect mullahs from among themselves’ (Levshin 1996 [1832]:313–​314). Criticizing Levshin’s assessment, Valikhanov notes that Levshin most likely did not see enough Kazakhs and did not fully understand the situation to draw such conclusions from what he saw. He writes: Levshin was too carried away describing the ignorance of the people he observed, saying that witchcraft, deceit, and magic are part of the religion of the Kirgiz-​ Kaisaks; they are not a part of religion but only superstition, which people of all faiths have. (Valikhanov 1985:199) From Levshin’s descriptions, we know that he had access to documents of the Orenburg military governorate and archives of the Orenburg Border Commission. Still, we do not know how often and under which circumstances he went to the steppe to observe the Kazakhs, nor how far he traveled. Levshin mentions in the book that it was dangerous to travel far into the steppe without military support: ‘A European who would 87

—​​​​ A l i m a B i s s e n o v a —​​​

take it into his head to wander through their hordes without armed cover will inevitably become captives’ (Levshin 1996:326). In the ethnographic part of the work, Levshin tells us about two occasions when he conversed with Kazakhs he met on the way. One was when he asked Kazakhs about their religion, and another was his argument with a Kazakh bai (a wealthy livestock owner), but neither the names nor the location of interlocutors are indicated. Only the khan of the Little Horde Sergazy is mentioned by name, to whose headquarters (not far from Orenburg) Levshin traveled several times. Thus, we can assume that based on some observations in the basin of Ural, Levshin draws far-​reaching conclusions regarding all the Kazakhs living in the territory from Altai mountains (in the east) to Volga (in the west) and from the Ural river (in the north) to Syrdarya river (in the south). This inevitably leads to overgeneralization, which was pointed out by Valikhanov at the time, and which is particularly striking to a contemporary reader. When reading Levshin’s work, my students particularly find objectionable and extremely Eurocentric his description of Kazakh women: ‘As to Kirgiz pretty women they do not strike Europeans and … do not satisfy our notion about beauty’ (Levshin 1996 [1832]:301) As my students rightfully ask: ‘How many Kazakh beauties could he see and did he have the same access to women as he had to men?’ Levshin was also one of the first in the cohort of Russian ethnographers to designate laziness as a distinctive feature of Kazakhs: ‘Seeing at least one healthy Kirgiz lying in a state of complete inactivity near a tursuk [leather bag] filled with kumis, one cannot help but recall the Homerian Cyclopes, who did not plow, did not plant, and did not sow, but lived at the expense of the gods’ (Levshin 1996 [1832]:322). Particularly telling, from the point of view of misunderstanding the actions and motivations of the ‘other’, is a story about his communication with the owner of 8,000 horses: a case of irrational, from his point of view, wealth-​hoarding, which did not bring any benefits to the owner. Levshin includes the story to illustrate the vanity of the Kazakhs, advising the owner to sell and convert at least part of the herd into money. To this the owner of the horses replied: ‘What do I need money for? Nobody sees money, but everyone sees the horses’ (ibid.:327). Here we see how Levshin is oblivious to the ‘other’s’ rationality and system of values. Besides the conspicuous visibility and the beauty of the horses that mattered to Kazakhs, there is also a rational grain (hidden from Levshin) in the bai’s argument. Firstly, horses are a social form of wealth, which, unlike money, should be shared since one person or even a whole family cannot manage 8,000 horses. Secondly, why would a person migrating over a long distance through the steppes and deserts (and to feed 8,000 horses, one would need a large territory for migration) require money, which at the time was silver? Money could be helpful in Orenburg but not in the steppe where the bai lives and travels. If the bai is engaged in horse breeding on such a scale, any immobile wealth that does not have a useful function (or use-​value in Marxian fashion) will be an extra burden. ‘We must remember’, writes Irina Erofeeva, ‘that Levshin had relatively little contact with the Kazakh people, and therefore did not have any serious basis for broad generalizations and categorical statements’ (Erofeeva 1996:585). Nonetheless, just as Evans-​Pritchard, in the middle of the twentieth century, became the ‘representative of Zande’ for the whole world, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Levshin ‘represented’ the Kazakhs to the ‘enlightened world’. Levshin’s academic career in 88

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

the field of Orientalism can be loosely (leaving aside some nuances) compared with the occupation of today’s talented anthropologists and historians from the (mainly) Western academia, who in their youth travel to distant countries to work in archives and do field research. Then on the basis of this fieldwork, they prepare a publication that becomes a rite of passage for their further academic career, which they continue while mostly being in their own ‘native’ university environment.

‘FIELD’ AS TRAVEL AND AN EXPEDITION In his Introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, first published in 1922, the founding father of modern anthropology, Malinowski, who made ethnography into the foundational method of the discipline, writes that such a method is ‘scientific’ in nature and thus should be separated from ‘unscientific’ and ‘undisciplined’ observations and descriptions used by ‘amateurs’ –​travelers, missionaries and colonial administrators: ‘the scientific field-​work is far above even the best amateur productions’ (Malinowski 2016 [1922]:13). Malinowski’s prescriptions for how ethnographic research should be conducted pose a problem for two types of researchers: travelers and native intellectuals. Malinowski’s argument against travelers is more related to their theoretical and methodological unpreparedness for immersion and the supposed spontaneity and superficiality of the impressions they get while traveling. As for the natives, Malinowski (just as Evans-​Pritchard after him) believed that they had not reached the level of abstract thinking and theorizing about their society that Europeans had. Thus, from the point of view of Malinowski’s ‘scientific ethnography’, Chokan Valikhanov would be problematic twice –​first as a native, who is not an impartial observer and theoretical thinker, and second as a traveler, who, serving as a Russian officer, could not stay ‘in the field’ longer than he was ordered. I think we can assume that during his lifetime, Valikhanov might have been irritated by or even jealous of Levshin’s career as a supposed ‘Herodotus of Kazakhs’. At least in Valikhanov’s remarks on the third part of the Descriptions of the Kirgiz-​ Kaisak hordes and steppes, one can hear irritation about Levshin’s hasty conclusions based on fleeting impressions about Kazakhs (Valikhanov 1985:198–​200). Unlike Levshin, Valikhanov could not write ‘encyclopedically’ about Kazakhs. Kazakhs were different for him from different places with different dispositions –​he was culturally close to some and distant from others. In the ‘Diary of a trip to Issyk-​Kul’, Valikhanov perhaps even unconsciously divides Kazakhs into ‘our Kirgiz’ and ‘the Kirgiz of the Great Horde’. Considering that a significant part of the diary is also devoted to the dikokamennye kirgizy (i.e., modern-​day Kyrgyz), it is not always clear how and in what way they differ from the Kirgiz of the Great Horde (Valikhanov 2017 [1985]:45–​102). At the same time, since Valikhanov does not write an ‘encyclopedia’ of people but keeps a diary of the trip with everything that occurred on a particular day documented, we never have ‘methodological’ questions like: ‘Where and when did he see this? How does he know this? Who told him?’ Valikhanov’s descriptions are specific and well-​documented –​where, when and what he saw or heard. In most of his descriptions of his trips, one can feel his presence, his emotional and intellectual involvement, as well as a young man’s euphoria from the anticipation of adventure. He anticipates what he will see on the way, and relishes all the details 89

—​​​​ A l i m a B i s s e n o v a —​​​

and impressions. Here, for example, how impatiently he awaits a stop on the Ayagoz River, where the mazar (mausoleum) of Kozy-​Korpesh and Bayan-​Sulu, glorified in the Kazakh love epics, is located: Ten miles before the 4th [Cossack] station, stands the famous grave of Kozy-​ Korpech in Kirgiz poems. We studied the poem well and therefore wanted to inspect their grave … we wanted to get up there in the morning and drink tea on the grave: how pleasant it is to drink tea on the road, especially on the ruins of ancient tombs. To think about the past and care about the present … . (Valikhanov 2017 [1985]:49) As we see from this passage, Valikhanov is not just ‘any traveler’, but a traveler thoroughly prepared for ethnographic observation. He knows what places, artifacts, and people he is interested in. Inevitably, subjectivity and identity play a considerable role in the reliability and quality of the ethnographic knowledge that Valikhanov produces. It is his identity that predetermines a sensitive look ‘from the inside’: knowledge of the area, its languages and history. We can argue for a long time on the topic of what cultural forces produce us as subjects and how our identity is connected with our knowledge about culture. Much has been written in Kazakh and Russian about Valikhanov as ‘the first Kazakh historian and ethnographer’. Presenting Valikhanov as ‘the first’ (meaning the first Russian-​speaking) ethnographer is a Soviet framing, which further developed in the post-​Soviet period. Of course, he is not ‘the first’, if we consider other native and non-​European traditions of writing about history and culture. Valikhanov’s identity can be divided into three main components: firstly, the identity of a Chingizid, a descendant of the ‘last’ Kazakh Khan (for Valikhanov himself, as many of his friends noted and as can be seen from his writings, this identity is the most important one, and it dominates any ethnic identity he might have); secondly, the identity of a Russian officer, a graduate of the cadet corps, and, thirdly, the actual identity of an intellectual and a writer. During the life of Valikhanov, the aristocracy of the ‘white bone’ still had authority among the people and the Russian provincial colonial administration. Officials for the management of the Kazakh steppe were often appointed from the (rather numerous) number of Chingizids. Valikhanov often used his ‘Sultan’ origin to win over his Kazakhs, Kirgiz, and other Central Asian interlocutors. ‘Diary of a trip to Issyk-​Kul’, which took place in the spring and summer of 1856, is a diary of a military campaign with an army detachment that left from Semipalatinsk, crossed over the Ayagoz, Lepse, Ili, Merke rivers, and the Santash pass to arrive at Issyk-​Kul [Valikhanov 2017 [1985]:45–​102]. The military detachment consists of a subdivision of the regular Russian army, Cossacks, Kazakh guides, and camel drivers, also on wagons and sometimes on camels; the detachment carries artillery [ibid.: 71]. Valikhanov was 21 years old on this trip and, being the son of the agha-​sultan of the Kokchetau district, a student of the cadet corps, and a favorite of Orientalist teachers, who practiced ‘local languages’ with him, he never encountered the colonial situation from the ‘other’ side. Needless to say, traveling with a military detachment in the recently conquered lands is not the best situation for ‘ethnographic research’. Both Kazakh and Kyrgyz auls (villages), hearing about the approach of the Russian army, 90

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

rushed to get out of the way [ibid.: 53]. Detailed description of nature and landscape, rivers and tributaries, flora and fauna of the ‘new’ land occupies the majority of his diary. On the one hand, this is the usual routine of a traveler of that time –​writing about the geography of the new land first and the people, second. But, on the other hand, even in this description of nature, Valikhanov optimally uses his, as they would say today, ‘multicultural’ background. Latin names of plants are intertwined with Russian, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Even in the description of the flora, one can feel the attitude of a person who understands the concerns of the nomadic economy: From the upper reaches of the Karkara, the terrain is flat, the pasture [for animals] is plentiful, and in general the vegetation here is the richest: tall grass –​as the Kirgiz say, reaching to the rider’s stirrups –​various broad-​leaved plants grew densely both in the meadows and along the slopes and peaks of the mountains. Particularly remarkable were the plants: mint (English) and a kind of reeds with leaves, like on a jugar (sugar cane). The Kirgiz call this plant aq-​qurgashen, while dikokamennye call it deer-​ear (maral-​qulaq). It was believed that the juice of this plant is poisonous and causes swelling. The cattle do not eat it until August when it turns yellow and loses its juice. [Valikhanov 2017 [1985]:68] Valikhanov puts more emphasis on nature in this diary because the detachment with which he travels scares away the locals, and there are not many opportunities for ‘intercultural’ communication with other humans. Tired of such an unfriendly attitude and still not understanding the reasons for this, Valikhanov decides to change clothes and try on a ‘different’ identity: We drove on: villages were constantly coming across on the road, but a creature could not be seen; everyone rushed into the yurts shouting: ‘Urus! Urus!’ (‘Russians! Russians!’) In order to avert suspicion and lure the curiosity of the fair sex, I suggested that our Kirgiz people sing a Kirgiz song and dressed myself as Kirgiz dandy. This trick, indeed, was a complete success: all the women fell out of the yurts, and one of them even started a funeral song, addressing us as faithful [Muslims]. [Ibid.:78] Valikhanov would use this ‘trick’ of dressing up into a culturally appropriate dress many more times during his short career as an ethnographer and a spy. On the one hand, it seems that this is just a trick and a game –​the instrumental use by a ‘native’ ethnographer of his ‘native’ identity to get closer to the informants and obtain reliable information. But, on the other hand, such ‘dressing up’ can also be regarded as a ‘change of identity’, which leads to ‘growing into the field’ and has consequences for further interactions and mutual understanding. After the change of dress, Valikhanov and the Kazakhs traveling with him are recognized as ‘faithful’ Muslim brethren to whom the laws of hospitality should be applied. But it is not just one-​way ‘warming up’. Valikhanov also feels gratitude for the hospitality of the Kyrgyz people: We started talking with the Kirgiz surrounding us. When they learned that I was a Kirgiz sultan and a descendant of khans, they warmed up and the elderly 91

—​​​​ A l i m a B i s s e n o v a —​​​

ayachis (women) looked with empathy at my thin body and ruddy face and drew reasonable conclusions that I, poor thing, probably miss my mother, and were very sorry that a boy like me, in such a far country without comfort: who can cuddle me, who can clean my clothes from annoying alien-​eating insects? Their last naive words made me laugh. ‘What a kind and simple people!’ I thought. One old woman brought me kumys in a cup. In her eyes and words there was so much kindness and compassion that I immediately drained the cup just to make her happy. [Ibid.: 79] This almost lyrical moment from the notes of 1856 fits into what today would be called ‘building trust in the field’ and an intersubjective approach to the production of ethnographic knowledge. In the course of reading the diary, one can see how Valikhanov’s attitude to what happens in the region is changing and how he takes the side of the ‘Kyrgyz’ (both Kazakh of the Greater Horde and modern-​day Kyrgyz) as his own ‘inner other’. He does not yet translate ‘strange customs’ for a European audience, as Evans-​Pritchard does, but he explains for himself the behavior of the locals, which at first seemed to him so ‘strange’ and ‘stupid’. By the end of the journey, he begins to understand why, based on the experience of previous ‘contacts’ with the Russian army, the locals are running away from his military detachment.

ETHNOGRAPHIC GENRES: SCIENCE OR ART It is instructive to compare Valikhanov and Levshin not only in terms of their subjectivity and different attitudes towards the ‘Kazakh field’ (as something distant in the case of Levshin or, on the contrary, close in the case of Valikhanov), but also in terms of their styles. Valikhanov’s style has fewer claims to ‘scientific’ production. His most famous and widely read works today are ‘Description of the way to Kashgar and back to the Alatau district’ and ‘Diary of a trip to Issyk-​Kul’, both in the genre of travelogue. They were not intended as ethnographic or popular essays and were first published after his death. ‘Description of the road to Kashgar’ of 1859 was originally written as a report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the results of his trip where he was disguised (‘dressed up’) as the merchant, Alimbay, and the ‘Diary of a trip to Issyk-​Kul’ of 1856 first published in 1985 is just a diary that he kept during a military campaign. The ‘Description of the road to Kashgar’ is the most valuable in that it gives an idea of the material side of the caravan routes that survived until the end of the nineteenth century: the goods carried by merchants, the seasonal routine of such travels, the customs of that time, as well as the fragile infrastructure of the so-​called ‘Silk Road’ and the translocal ties that it supported. The first collected works of Valikhanov were published almost 40 years after his death under the editorship of the famous orientalist and archaeologist Nikolai Veselovsky in 1904 in the Notes of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (Department of Ethnography) (Valikhanov 2017 [1904]: 436). According to the descriptions of his contemporaries, Valikhanov was talented but not disciplined and did not prepare his notes for publication. As Grigory Potanin, a friend and colleague of Valikhanov, writes: ‘Chokan was a big lazybones. He had the patience to write down a fairy tale or a legend, but he could not put his papers in order’ (Valikhanov 92

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

2017 [1904]: 37). Nevertheless, Valikhanov’s descriptions were prepared for publication thanks to his friends, relatives, as well as both pre-​revolutionary and Soviet academic structures (the Russian Geographical Society fully funded the first edition of Valikhanov’s works and the Institute of History named after Valikhanov of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR published the complete collection of his works in five volumes in 1985, alongside original drawings and notes). His observations have been of great interest both to orientalists of the early twentieth century as well as to modern historians and anthropologists precisely because of their documentary nature and concreteness, as well as the presence in them of the voice of Valikhanov himself and the voice of his informants. It turns out, then, that while Levshin was more successful, more ‘scientific’, and productive during his lifetime, it was Valikhanov, who managed to publish almost nothing during his lifetime except his two articles in the ‘Proceedings of the Russian Geographical Society’, who turned out to be more successful and influential after his death, judging by the number of reprints of his works, translations into other languages (English and French), as well as the number of citations from him in the works of modern ethnographers, historians, and anthropologists. Levshin, after the publication of 1832, was reprinted only twice –​and both times in post-​ Soviet Kazakhstan. In 1996, 164 years after the first edition, the academic edition of ‘Descriptions of the Kirghiz-​Cossack, or Kirghiz-​Kaisak hordes and steppes’ was published, edited, and with a preface by academician Manash Kozybaev and with an afterword by Irina Erofeeva, and in 2006 an edition of excerpts from this edition of 1996 was republished in the series ‘Library of Kazakh Ethnography’.

CONCLUSION In concluding, I want to make a disclaimer that this chapter is not trying to apply twenty-​first century standards to nineteenth-​century Russian and twentieth-​century British ethnography, but rather to invite us to think about what the field is for an anthropologist from a decolonial perspective. The anthropological ‘field’ assumed a radical change of environment: paradigmatically, the ‘white man’ traveled to a distant exotic area, living among the natives, and as a result understood more than others (both natives and his compatriots) about the host society, about his own society (in comparison), and sometimes about humanity as a whole. The ‘white man’ could be a Pole in the process of naturalization in the UK, like Bronisław Malinowski, or a white woman, like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; later he could be either an immigrant from Asia, like Gananath Obeyesekere or a descendant of emigrants, like Leyla Abu-​Lughod. But the distance between, on the one hand, academic life and the career of anthropologists and, on the other hand, the ‘field’ remained and remains regardless of the identity of the anthropologist in question. It continues to inflect contemporary knowledge production too. Undergraduate students in the US are invited to ‘discover’ Central Asia on year-​abroad programmes, while doctoral dissertations and ethnographic monographs on the region often stress the novelty and originality of their representation of a region that was ‘inaccessible’ to Western researchers a generation ago. Such practices of epistemic distancing were first problematized in postcolonial studies. Among the Orientalists who studied the Orient while being ‘outside it’, Said 93

—​​​​ A l i m a B i s s e n o v a —​​​

also named anthropologists [Said 1979]. Although it would seem that anthropologists produce knowledge by being ‘present’ in the field, it turns out that despite the fact of a temporary presence in the field (‘Being There’), there remains a gap between the field as the ‘periphery of life’ and the academy as the ‘center of life’, and this gap can concern both Western and native anthropologists, who, despite their race and ethnicity, may be far from the ‘field’ and live in a different social and epistemic world. This is exactly what Kirin Narayan writes about in her article ‘How Native is a “Native” Anthropologist?’, proposing to abandon ‘nativism’ in terms of the concept of ‘native’ anthropologist, which implies some kind of authenticity and complete match between the anthropologist’s identity with the identity of the field, as well as to abandon the concepts of insider and outsider, and to describe the relationship of an anthropologist with the field, and use the idea of long-​term strong ties with the field and rooted-​ness in it (Narayan 1993). What is a more significant development in the deglobalizing and decolonizing world, I suggest, is not the emergence of the ‘native anthropologist’ (after all, such anthropologists existed since at least the nineteenth century) but competition over the authority to ‘represent the field’, particularly as in the contemporary world, the practice of ‘the field’ as something remote, exotic, unusual is becoming more and more marginal. ‘Life in the field’ is becoming more and more important than ‘going to the field’ and ethnography is increasingly shifting towards the more literary and journalistic genres that could better represent this ‘life in the field’. In Central Asian studies, this shift of the representational authority to the field can be seen by the proliferation of the popular blogs such as Central Asian Analytical Networks in Russian (the most popular post on which with a local Kazakh historian collected more 100,000 views), the blog Voices on Central Asia in English, and the Russian-​language podcast Hordes and Empires (Ordy i Imperii). If previously it seemed that it did not matter what those who ‘stayed in the field’ thought about anthropologists who come and go to the field once in a while, it is no longer the case. Could there be another Evans-​Pritchard representing African people after Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart? Who can better represent the customs, culture, and local and national trends than a person living there, rooted in the field? Who is better able to translate culture into another language? The answer seems obvious. Thanks to the postcolonial and recent decolonial turn, ‘those in the field’ have more and more media, intellectual, and institutional resources to speak for themselves.

REFERENCES Asad, Talal (ed). 1995 [1973]. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Lanham, MD: Humanities Press. Erofeeva, I.V. 1996. “Levshin i ego trud ‘Opisanie Kirgiz-​Kazach’ikh, ili Kirgiz-​Kaisatskikh, ord i stepei.’” Afterword to Opisanie Kirgiz-​Kazach’ikh, ili Kirgiz-​Kaisatskikh, ord i stepei. Almaty: Sanat, 533–​595. Evans–​ Prichard, E.E. 1976 [1937]. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. New York: Oxford University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levshin, Aleksei. 1996 [1832]. Opisanie Kirgiz-​Kazach’ikh, ili Kirgiz-​Kaisatskikh, ord i stepei. Almaty: Sanat. 94

— ​​​​ ‘ T h e f i e l d ’ i n t h e a n t h r o p o l o g y o f C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​ Malinowski, Bronislaw. 2016 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Oxford: Benediction Classics Narayan, Kirin. 1993. How Native is a Native Anthropologist? American Anthropologist. 95 (3): 671–​686. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sartori, Paolo and Pavel Shablei. 2019. Experimenty imperii: adat, shariat i proizvodstvo znaniya v Kazahskoi stepi. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie Valikhanov, Chokan. 2017 [1985]. Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, tom 1. Almaty: Glavnaia redaktsiia Kazakhskoi entsiklopedii. Valihanov, Chokan. 2017 [1904]. Strana shesti gorodov. Dnevnik puteshestviia na Issyk-​Kul’. Мoscow: Izdatel’stvo Eksmo.

95

CHAPTER SEVEN

UTTERLY OTHER Queering Central Asia, decolonising sexualities Mohira Suyarkulova INTRODUCTION How could one translate the word ‘queer’ into (Kyrgyzstani) Russian? In early December 2016, I gave a public lecture addressing this very question as part of the Evening School run by the School of Theory and Activism Bishkek (STAB).1 The question was important for STAB, an organisation founded by a collective of contemporary art curators and artists working at the intersection of theory, politics and art. In 2014, the organisation released the Manifesto of Queer Communism. In my talk, I reflected on two alternative translations into Russian of an iconic text for queer history that was first distributed by ACT UP activists at the New York Gay Pride Day Parade in 1990: the Queer Nation Manifesto. The two translations appeared independently of one another a few weeks before the lecture. The first translation of the manifesto from the original English into Russian was my own, for the queer feminist zine ‘Weird Sisters’ (Suyarkulova 2016). The second was by another Kyrgyzstani activist, Gulnara Kurmanova (2016), for a Russian LGBT group. The most interesting aspect of these two competing translations was the approach to the keyword in the title of the manifesto –​‘queer’, or ‘kvir’ in Russian. The publishers of the other translation of the text (Kurmanova’s) had previously publicly criticised the word, calling it inappropriate for the post-​Soviet context. They claimed that its original transgressiveness and radical emancipatory potential are lost in translation, and argued that it is divisive, harmful and contributes to de-​politicising the LGBT+​ movement, even wishing the term ‘kvir’ would ‘die’ (Sozaev 2010; 2015a; ). Yet Sozaev still felt compelled to commission the translation of the manifesto for their webpage. In Kurmanova’s translation, the dangerous word, ‘queer’, was translated into Russian as ‘pidar’, a homophobic slur used to insult gay men in Russian. My translation used ‘kvir’ and other translations (‘izvrashchenets’ –​pervert, and other terms depending on the context) to maintain the authors’ intent to make the term gender neutral/​inclusive, but also keeping with the idea of the fluidity and instability of identity. Both translations were created as part of an ongoing debate concerning the usefulness of queer theory in the post-​Soviet context. It is notable that these discussions were not taking place within gender studies departments at universities or among established scholars of sexuality studies, but rather on the pages of self-​published feminist zines and the LGBT initiative’s website. The reason is simple: there are no 96

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-8

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

such established centres of academic knowledge production in Central Asia. Gender and sexuality studies in the region are thus not clearly established at institutions of higher education or research. Discussions about gender and sexuality are more of a cottage industry existing on the margins of development agencies’ surveys, the reports of international organisations, feminist and LGBTQ+​activist discussions and contemporary art practices. A significant aspect of the controversy over translating and adopting the term kvir in activist circles was the critique from a post-​colonial/​decolonial point of view, which argued that theories and concepts articulated in foreign contexts are inappropriate and not useful for Central Asian societies. The use of the word was deemed elitist and presumptuous by some. Its semantic opacity, critics have pointed out, was at times used as a shield against potential homophobic attacks on events and institutions. More recently, there have been heated debates in both activist and academic spheres of Central Asian studies regarding the coloniality of knowledge production in and on the region. As a result of these discussions, calls have been made for the intellectual decolonisation of area studies, including Central Asian studies (ODR series, 2019). A recent volume edited by Emily Channell-​Justice titled Decolonising Queer Experiences: LGBT+​Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia seeks to ‘highlight the globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+​that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities’ (2020, p.1). In this chapter, I explore not only the possibility of decolonising queer activism, queer studies and queer theory for the sake of its productive application in Central Asia; I also consider the utility of queering Central Asian studies itself. I do this in reference to the collection of feminist and queer science fiction short stories Utterly Other (Sovsem Drugie), which was published in Bishkek in 2018 by STAB-​Press (Shatalova and Mamedov 2018). Working at the intersection of activism, art and academia, the authors of the stories imagine a new world by both decolonising queerness and queering Central Asia.

QUEERING CENTRAL ASIA Central Asia is usually portrayed as at once a very queer region, which defies simple definitions and narratives, and yet a very ‘straight’ one. The queering of Central Asia can potentially be conceptualised in three ways. Firstly, we can consider the region as a ‘queer time-​space’ –​at the intersection of post-​Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds, ‘neither here nor there’, forever ‘lost’ and ‘forgotten’ and, in the words of Nick Megoran and John Heathershaw, often represented as ‘Oriental, obscure and dangerous’ (Megoran and Heathershaw 2011). Secondly, we could pursue an alternative historiography, sociology and ethnography of ‘queers in Central Asia’. An emerging body of literature is documenting queer lives and experiences in the region (Bagdasarova 2018; Suyarkulova 2019, 2020; Wilkinson and Kirey 2010). Finally, we could launch an ontological challenge of the figure of ‘Central Asia’ as the object of study of Central Asian studies. Like many other words in English, ‘queer’ can be used as different parts of speech –​ a noun, an adjective and a verb. Queer theory uses the word as a verb. To queer things means literally to ‘spoil’ or ‘to ruin’ something; to destroy neat categories; to complicate simple answers; to make the familiar strange. Queer theory has outgrown its 97

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​

origins in the studies of gender and sexuality, and now informs critical examinations of issues as diverse as race and diaspora, globalisation, migration, nationalism, environmentalism, affects and embodiment. To queer Central Asia(ness) and Central Asian studies would also imply challenging ‘normative knowledges, identities, behaviours, and spaces, thereby unsettling power relations and taken-​for-​granted assumptions’ (Hunt and Holmes 2015, p.156). The aim is to counter hegemonic ideas about gender and sexuality, but also about identity more broadly, including nationalism, statehood, regionalism and internationalism. The few existing academic studies on gender and sexuality in the region tend to cast Central Asian gendered sexualities as national in character (Mole 2019; Harris 2004; Temkina 2008). Central Asian sexual subjectivities are analysed in relation to the conflict between modernity and tradition, global narratives and nation-​building efforts of the states in the region: these studies are mostly conducted within the framework of nation-​states. Such ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) further works to reinforce the apparent ‘naturalness’ of national boundaries, while also serving as invisible boundaries of analysis. The colonial heritage of area studies research often meant that non-​ normative gender and (‘excessive’, ‘exuberant’, or ‘uncontrolled’) sexuality were often discussed only as attributes of ‘primitive cultures’, while western bodies, mores and behaviours were considered and constructed as the normative default (Stoler 1995). In reaction, postcolonial societies have often articulated their own notions of authenticity, national identity and pride on the backs of women and gender-​variant and non-​conforming individuals. This often involves violently enforcing written and unwritten norms of propriety and modesty; homophobic, transphobic and racist laws; and ideals of masculinity and femininity, imposed by colonial regimes (Northrop 2004). For instance, the introduction of ‘anti-​sodomy’ laws in Central Asia in the early Soviet period was framed as part of the struggle to overcome ‘backward’ cultural practices, along with the local tradition of dancing boys (bacha bozi –​Tajik), arranged and forced marriages, bride abduction, bride price (kalym) and women’s seclusion and veiling (Healey 2008). Today, a ‘New Cold War’ narrative depicts the West as a haven for ‘homosexualism’, and the East as the last fortress of ‘heterosexualism’, ignoring the complex reality whereby ‘national stances are usually contradictory and always already globalised’ (Essig and Kondakov 2019, p.91). Compounding this postcolonial condition of gendered and sexualised national subjectivities is the history of institutionalising area studies during the Cold War. The nationalist basis of these academic disciplinary formations has participated in producing sexual subjects as nationalist subjects or as cultural-​nationalist subjects. Within this configuration, Central Asian sexual subjects are often produced as traditional in contrast to feminist and queer subjects, who are projected as Western. Indeed, most of the queer identities we recognise emerged during the era of modernity encompassing the rise of capitalism and the nation-​state in the context of imperialism. These identities (or in Foucauldian terms, ‘subject positions’) were forged in the context of specific institutions linked to state power (Foucault 1978/​1990). It is no wonder that these identities are often seen as externally imposed and, therefore, inauthentic outside of the Global North. This ‘import-​export’ logic of modernity, especially in the context of gender and sexuality in Central Asia, could be challenged through the application of critical regional studies. Since the 1970s, critical regional studies has set out to investigate 98

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

‘the materiality of capitalist space’ (Connery 1996) through the concept of ‘queer regions’ (Gopinath 2008). Regionality can become a useful concept for queer studies, introducing an alternative mapping of sexual geographies that can link disparate transnational locations and allow new models of sexual subjectivity to come into focus (Gopinath 2008, p.343). The ‘Asia as Method’ approach advocated by Kuan-​Hsing Chen (2010) calls on Asian scholars to prioritise comparative studies between Asian societies in order to find Asian solutions to Asian problems. This logic is then further extended to suggesting ‘Queer Asia as Method’, making a case for a non-​Eurocentric perspective that would utilise the analysis of queerness outside the West as the ‘method’, rather than a mere ‘object’ of study (Chiang and Wong 2016, p.4). The critical promise of queer regionalism may therefore overcome the divide between area/​ethnic studies and theory, which perpetuates the ‘myth of (Western-​derived) theoretical frameworks as general and universal and of local (non-​Western) cultures as merely local and particular’ (Martin et al. 2008, p.15).Queer Central Asian studies could go beyond the nationalist origins of area studies to emphasise the transnational nature of Central Asia itself.

DECOLONISING QUEER STUDIES, QUEER THEORY AND QUEER ACTIVISM Reflecting on the making of queer/​decolonial politics, Po-​Han Lee writes: ‘If queerness is always located in the combatant position against heteronormativity and patriarchy, then decoloniality stands in a similar place in relation to colonialism and capitalism’ (Lee 2019, p.231). Queer theory, studies and activism also all share an opposition to ‘identity politics’, resisting not only the regimes of oppression based on binary oppositions (‘male/​female’, ‘straight/​gay’, ‘normal/​abnormal’), but the binaries themselves. Thus, when it comes to decolonising queerness (as well as queer activism/​ studies/​theory), the facile dichotomy between self/​other, inside/​outside, or native/​foreign appears deeply unsatisfying. Dipesh Chakrabarty made a call to ‘provincialize Europe’ (2000), which for our purposes involves pointing out the historical and cultural embeddedness of US and European forms of queerness. Provincialising queer theory and calling for a decolonial politics of knowledge production is not simply an empirical, but also a methodological and theory-​building task. It requires more than lip service to intellectual decolonisation and the ritualistic citing of a handful of names of scholars, most of whom are themselves embedded in institutions located in the Global North. Such symbolic engagement with decolonial thought is meaningless unless we also question the underlying political economies that are behind the institutions of knowledge production. Can one engage in intellectual decolonisation, if one is not actively involved in an anti-​colonial struggle seeking to overcome the continuing injustice of colonialism? If we are not working towards demanding payment of reparations and the return of native land, if we are not discussing the systems and logics of education and research in the neoliberal capitalist world, then talk of decoloniality is empty. Many scholars have criticised the logic of export-​import that presumes that the countries of the Global North are the privileged sites of progressive social movements, 99

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​

while other parts of the world are assumed to be traditional, especially in regard to sexuality (e.g., Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Essig and Kondakov 2019). Is there a way to make queer life in the complex modernities of the non-​Western world and the Global South itself the centre of transnational imaginaries? Atanasoski and Vora (2018) have suggested that postsocialism, which they view as a queer temporality and a global condition (not just a temporal or spatial marker), may be used as an analytic to examine ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present and as a method for making sense of the ‘current practices, imaginaries and actions that insist on political change’ (Atanasoski and Vora 2018, p.139). They argue that Whereas tethering postsocialism to the post-​89 narrative homogenizes what is recognizable as socialism, by queering the temporality of socialism we are able to focus on the inheritances of plural socialisms as an ethos of care for multiple understandings of what is ‘common’, as well as the international movement and body of theory and discipline of state formation and governance. (2018, p.140). The School of Theory and Activism Bishkek (STAB), in its many projects over the short span of its existence, also sought to make sense of the multiplicity, nuances and contradictory nature of socialist legacies in Central Asia. As queer communists, they turned to the progressive promises of communism, sometimes discovering utopias in the past through projects like ‘Concepts of the Soviet in Central Asia’ and ‘Bishkek the Utopian’ (Mamedov and Shatalova 2015, 2016), even sometimes writing alternative queer histories of the region (The Kollontai Commune project). The examination of the past inevitably led to attempts to radically imagine a future. One of STAB’s first publications was an almanac entitled ‘To Regain the Future’ (Mamedov and Shatalova 2014), containing the Queer Communist Manifesto by STAB founders and artistic directors Oksana Shatalova and Georgy Mamedov. The manifesto begins with these words: To return [to] the conceivable horizon and image of the future, to overcome the postsoviet paralysis of imagination, we realise that our goal is not communism, our goal is queer communism. We understand queer not only as the blurring of standards of sex, gender and sexuality, but on the whole –​as a challenge to the traditional identity politics in their essentialist turn –​as a denial of gender, ethnic, racial and national boundaries. Queer and communism are mutually dependent and inevitable concepts –​the names of the process which overcomes alienation. (Mamedov and Shatalova 2014, p.10) The manifesto goes on to argue that ‘to be queer is to be communist’ and, likewise, ‘to be communist is to be queer’. The concluding section of the document asserts that ‘the future is built of the bricks of the present’ –​the practices and experiences that are radically opposed to the logics of the dominant normativities. The authors proclaim that

100

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

Radical equality, radical reimagining of the forms of affinity and intimacy among people, the infinite diversity of bodily beings is the horizon worthy of the daring, radical and uncompromising movement of the queers, which cannot be replaced by the illusions of bourgeois cosiness of private property and commodity diversity of the free market. (2014, p.12).

UTTERLY OTHER: A COLLECTION OF FEMINIST AND QUEER SCIENCE FICTION The publication produced by STAB in 2018 completed the logic of radical imagination of the future: it was a collection of feminist and queer science fiction stories authored by activists from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and the United States, written or translated especially for the book. In the editors’ outro ‘Activism as Science Fiction, Science Fiction as Activism’, Shatalova and Mamedov write that ‘activist science fiction is a tautology: any activism upon a closer inspection is fantastical, and science fiction is closely related to activism’, because both deal with the future: ‘activism, just like science fiction, forewarns, predicts and demands changes’ (2018, p.319). The title of the book is a response to the famous Soviet science fiction writers, the Stugatsky brothers, who imagined that the people of the future would not be very different from the ‘best people of today’ represented by their friends: Soviet intellectuals, ‘the physicists and the lyricists’. The books by the Stugatsky brothers imagine interstellar travel and other fantastical transformations in technology and society, yet they seem incapable of imagining a world without patriarchy and a gender binary. As Mamedov and Shatalova write: We conceived of this book ‘Utterly Other’ as an attempt to imagine new socialities, new forms of relationships –​the forms that exist outside of the patriarchal and capitalist matrix. … We have undertaken a complex endeavour –​to imagine a world without exclusion. (2018, p.324) The short stories and artistic projects included in the book attempt to sketch out a future world that is changing as a result of the struggle against patriarchy and other forms of oppression. These future worlds are not utopian in that they are not perfect: they have their own, new problems and contradictions. The authors of the stories engage with the themes of activist separatism (uncompromising divorce from the oppressive societies and worlds); revolutionary changes in reproductive technologies; bodily transformations; the rights of non-​human subjects; a revision of the concept of the norm; immortality. Four main aspects of these stories are common to science fiction in general (Haagland and Sarwal 2010) and can be analysed through the lens of postcolonial, feminist and queer theory: (1) their relationship to history; (2) the centrality of the Other to the narrative; (3) the critique of heterosexist colonial ‘master-​narratives’ of space exploration, colonisation and conquest (Grewell 2001); and (4) a/​the contemplation of the human condition and emphasis on social and ethical issues. All of these aspects are also themes of central significance for scholarship 101

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​

on Central Asia. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyse the short stories from Utterly Other using the metaphor of a palimpsest, offering a queer, ‘palimpsestuous reading’, as suggested by Sarah Dillon (2005). This analysis suggests a reading of the stories in the collection as a mode of critique and a model for queering Central Asia. A palimpsest is a manuscript or other surface on which the original writing (or other signs of previous creativity) has been erased, and new text, images, or structures are superimposed. Yet the original writing remains stubbornly visible over time, through the process of oxidation, thus creating a present bearing the traces of the past and pointing to the possibility of future inscriptions (Dillon 2005). The metaphor of the palimpsest has been utilised by literary scholars (especially those writing postcolonial, feminist and queer criticism), by psychoanalysts as a metaphor for memory and the impossibility of forgetting, and by archaeologists and historians. All of these insights are also highly relevant to this analysis, in that they offer not only a lens for reading the stories in Utterly Other, but suggest the possibility of palimpsestous readings of Central Asia itself. Sarah Dillon (2005) makes a distinction between the traditional ‘palimpsest reading’ and what she calls ‘palimpsestuous reading’. In the first, the priority is the recovery of the original effaced text, ‘the making visible of what was previously unseen’: in Michel Foucault’s terms, an archaeology (Foucault 1980). The second is a genealogy, in which the task ‘is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation … to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us’ (Foucault 1972, p.162). While postcolonial and feminist criticism often engage in palimpsest readings of texts, seeking to discover the hidden histories of oppressed groups, Dillon writes that ‘such a project risks … ignoring or disregarding the overlying texts of these narratives, as well as complex relationality of the different texts which constitute their fabric’ (2005, p.256), which she argues can be avoided by moving to a queer ‘palimpsestuous’ reading (2005, p.257). Such readings would not aim to uncover the ‘hidden’ suppressed narratives, but would rather see in the structure of the palimpsest the entwined, twisted and interlocking narratives of the present, that always already contains within it the past and the promise of the future. Similarly, when I call for a decolonising scholarship on sexuality and queering of Central Asian studies, our objective is not simply to ‘uncover’ the untold and hidden stories while dismissing the overlaying text as ‘foreign’ and ‘inauthentic’, but rather to appreciate the palimpsestous nature of the region, with its contradictions and complexities as part and parcel of both its present and future. In science fiction, the present is often defamiliarised while the future is made familiar. A common criticism of science fiction narratives is that in these imaginaries, the future becomes mere stage dressing as the past is obsessively revisited and reconsidered in order to justify the present. Frederic Jameson famously stated that the science fiction industry’s ‘deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate our incapacity to imagine the future’ (1982, p.153). Science fiction writers, according to this critique, tend less to imagine the future than to ‘defamiliarise and restructure our experience of our own present’ (Jameson 1982, p.151). Postcolonial, feminist and queer science fiction writers, on the other hand, draw explicit and critical attention to the ways in which imperialist heterosexist history is constructed and maintained. The story by the LGBTQ activist from Kazakhstan, Anatoliy Chermousov, presents such an attempt at a palimpsestuous reading and re-​writing of the history of 102

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

Central Asia. His story, An incomplete collection of writings by Ernazik Natalievich Pecheikin, is itself a palimpsestuous narrative of the life of an ‘demiurge-​historian’ of Central Asia, set in the late 21st century. In the ‘introduction from the editor’, we read: To our great regret, Professor Pecheikin’s book “The Golden Central Asian triangle: a new history” has been lost. This collection is a compendium of damaged files from the professor’s neurophysiological data storage device, which after his death was formatted due to the reasons clear to THEM, but not to US! The shreds of precious data were sorted and compiled by the professor’s spouses –​A.E. Nikonova, P.P. Azizov and Toto, and still contain nuggets of personal information. (Chernousov, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.258) From the collection of disparate shreds of text (parts of which are corrupted and illegible), hyperlinks, audio files and advertising, we learn of the life and work of Ernazik Natalievich Pecheikin (bearing a Kazakh first name, followed by a matronymic, instead of the traditional patronymic, and a Russian last name). He is a young person embarking on independent life away from his five parents and pursuing a vocation as a ‘demiurge-​historian’, a profession that is explained to the reader through the protagonist’s own words: Since antiquity history was a story told by a historian who selected a needed set of facts from the past to confirm the correctness of his vision of the past the correct version of the past was dictated by the ideological demands of the present and was called upon to legitimate the existing order of things each new present had to have a past that confirmed it demiurge-​history utilises the same mechanism but not for a passive confirmation of the present by the past but for the active transformation of the present by the past history history has to be re-​ written and has to be re-​written in such a way that the new present is better than the old present. (Chernousov, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.277; original formatting and punctuation) Pecheikin also reflects on the role of science fiction in his notes, pointing out that very few science fiction stories in which the character time travel[s]‌ to the past in order to change the present and future have a happy end as a rule the authors try to prove that nothing in the past should be changed or things will turn out worse –​they won’t! (Chernousov, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.270; original formatting and punctuation) In the text of the story, we also can read some remaining traces of the alternative history of Central Asia that Pecheikin was working on before his untimely and tragic death. There are sections of chapters from his ‘The Golden Central Asian Triangle’ 103

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​

opus magna, historical documents, oral histories, audio recordings of Cossack and Kazakh songs, ‘demiurge-​historical’ maps of Central Asia following its ‘international-​ territorial delimitation’ in 1924–​1936, resulting in the creation of the Turkestan SSR, Orenburg SSR and Zhetisui SSR (1936–​1991). At the same time, we can follow his life through his personal diary entries, through which we can glean the radically different gender and sexual order (partnerings involving multiple people of all and any genders, lovebots, children both conceived and born ‘traditionally’ and with the help of new reproductive technologies), space exploration (P.P., one of Pecheikin’s partners, studies ‘floromorphs’ from other galaxies) and the social contract (a type of a communist economy guaranteeing everyone free housing and educational opportunities). However, this society obviously has its own contradictions, which we can discern in Pecheikin’s complicated relationship with his parents, as well as opposition to his work from the mysterious ‘THEM’: What do THEY want?! why are THEY dissatisfied?! i have thought everything through everything up to the tiniest details and relationships has been checked out there are not bad consequences only the positive results fewer casualties more happiness i have observed the code i followed all the rules no nationalism no capitalism no problems with all those languages no homophobia no transphobia no misogyny what do THEY want?! my work does not harm anyone it benefits everyone we must liberate ourselves must live consciously i am not just a peg i am a demiurge-​historian this is not pride this is a feeling of relatedness responsibility my responsibility extends to the entire world i work will help everyone i have thought it all through the golden triangle is better i get it now THEY do not want THEY are afraid for themselves THEY want to stay in power preserve THEMSELVES! THEY are not needed in the golden triangle THEY will die out as relics THEY are scared of this that is what is the deal! that is why THEY are not happy! this is unchangeable! impossible! THEY must go THEY will not be needed people will themselves themselves. (Chernousov, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.285; original formatting and punctuation) Chernousov’s story is especially relevant for queering of Central Asia, as it imagines not only an alternative queer communist future, but its central character’s life work is dedicated to the imagining of alternative pasts. This is not only a tongue-​in-​cheek commentary on the ‘uses and abuses’ of history by contemporary Central Asian governments, but rather an exercise that seeks to read the region palimpsestously, where not even the past is a static, unchanging given. In science fiction, the figure of the Other (usually appearing in the image of an alien from/​in outer space) and the human encounter with this Other is central to storytelling. This has of course been noted and critiqued by postcolonial, feminist and queer thinkers. Traditionally, the Other performs the function of consolidating difference and solidifying the norm, and is therefore used to justify the exploitation and annihilation of non-​normative groups. Almost all stories in Utterly Other (as suggested even by its title) critically engage with this issue one way or another. A common theme in many stories is the idea of ‘two worlds’. In some instances, as in Syinat Sultanalieva’s Element 174 and Mia Mingus’s Hollow 104

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

(which I translated from English into Russian especially for Utterly Other), these two worlds are literally located in different galaxies and on different planets. In other stories, the two worlds coexist on the same planet as segregated communities (Oksana Shatalova’s The Other Dimension), or as different states of being (such as cyberspace where humanity has to migrate before the planet falls apart, and the world of the dead in Zhanar Sekerbaeva’s Chimeras of the Z City). In these stories, the subalterns (who are usually represented in science fiction as monstrous and dangerous) are builders of a better world, and the way they are treated by the ‘normals’ is part of the testimony to the injustices of the past and the justification for needing a different future. Science fiction narratives often conflate the figures of the alien and the internal and external Others (Pearson 1999, p.6). The danger of the Other when they have the ability to appear as an ordinary person, is echoed in many of the tropes about the aliens that disguise themselves as humans, often through mind-​control or body invasion. Lee Edelman wrote that queerness is often envisioned as always already written on the body while, at the same time, queers are feared in part because of their ability to ‘pass’ (1994, pp.151–​156). This ‘invisibility’ of the queer people is not a mere absence of knowledge, but is a result of social construction of ignorance, whereby silence and omission function as speech acts enabling the erasure of queerness (Sedgwick 1990). The subaltern’s, women’s and queer people’s history and cultural production remain invisible and unrecognised, even when that invisibility comes at the cost of a wilful act of blindness (Pearson 1999, p.9). Pearson notes that ‘cultural constructions of visibility operate like magic: they make certain things disappear, or appear only in very particular contexts’ (1999, p.9). Oksana Shatalova describes exactly this phenomenon, referred to as ‘the effect of heavenly blindness’, in her story The Other Dimension. In a world divided into the patriarchal ‘Heaven’ and the queer feminist communist ‘Hell’, the inhabitants of each world become invisible to one another. This is at first achieved through the technology of Augmented Reality (AR) that erases all the ‘improper’ information from the vision of the person wearing special contact lenses, but eventually the dwellers of the opposing worlds develop a mutual blindness that does not require technological support, as it becomes part of their neurological circuits. Thus, in this story, told from the point of view of a young girl called Zabota (Care) growing up in Heaven, the queers (referred to as the ‘she-​fags’ and ‘monsters’) are invisible to the ‘normals’ (‘tru’ and ‘bro’), and become ‘like microbes –​invisible, but dangerous creatures’ (Shatalova, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.82): Some heavenly scholars hypothesized that the enemy figure is erased from the field of vision as a result of detection of its disparate formal attributes that the viewer identifies as ‘banned’, such as a pink triangle –​a required marking for wearing in some countries. Others argued that the blindness is triggered by disparate attributes but their critical whole –​perverts’ appearances and habitus are obviously different from those of worthy people. When this entirety of attributes is detected the brain deletes the object from the field of vision as ‘forbidden for viewing’ (the function previously performed by the Augmented Reality contact lenses is now accomplished by the brain itself). The scientific debates soon abated though, since it was recognized that blindness to sickness is a sign of health, and 105

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​

as such does not need an explanation, but should rather become an example for emulation. (Shatalova, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.81). Contact with the Other thus becomes impossible unless one is expelled or defects from Heaven or Hell into the other domain. The ‘effect of heavenly blindness’ can only be overcome by emotional connection and familiarity between people marked by ‘heavenly’ or ‘hellish’ AR-​markers. The two major types of encounters with aliens/​the Other depicted in science fiction are inward (dealing with alien visitors or invaders of the Earth) and outward (depicting the experiences of humans in space) (Grewell 2001, p.27). The outward encounter narratives fall into three categories: the explorative, the domesticative and the combative (Grewal and Kaplan 2001, p.28). As noted by Kingsley Amis in The New Maps of Hell, science fiction has a chronic ‘problem of colonialism’, with its tendency to externalise otherness and place it in ‘galaxies far far away’. This is accomplished through the use of colonial narratives of space exploration with the aim of settler colonialism and resource exploitation of the ‘new worlds’, which sanction and justify violence against ‘others’ (Amis 1961). Maria Vilkovisky and Ruthia Jenrbekova, Kazakhstani performance artists and the founders of the Creolex Zentre, an imaginary art institute, contributed to the collection with a fanfic of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, titled ‘La Junta de Valladolid-​ 2: Solaris crew respond to the questions of the United Nations Commission’ (SHALAZINE magazine #42). The title of the story is a direct reference to the colonial history of dehumanising the Other, referring to the theological debates in Valladolid in the mid-​sixteenth century. These debates sought to circumvent an earlier papal edict that proclaimed America’s indigenous people as fully human, in order to justify the Conquista and the enslavement of Native Americans. This dehumanisation takes place even when this Other is completely incomprehensible to the human mind. In ‘La Junta de Valladolid-​2’, the issue is not whether the Ocean on the Solaris shares ‘humanity’ with the Earthlings. Rather it opens up the question of human dealings with non-​human subjects. The special investigation commission initiated by the Non-​ human Rights Watch advocacy network of ecosmo-​activists questions the crew of the Solaris and finds them morally wanting, citing the analysis of the Yakut-​Iranian writer Aynykh Rentad (an anagram of Hannah Arendt in Russian). Rentad’s work is titled ‘The Banality of Cosmos’, which draws direct comparisons between the actions of the Solaris crew and the famous crimes against humanity of the Holocaust (Vilkoviskaya and Jenrbekova 2018 in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.289). In the first story of the collection, ‘Element 174’, the author Syinat Sultanalieva, a feminist and LGBTQ+​activist from Kyrgyzstan, also tells a story of space exploration and colonisation. In this story, the ‘undesirables’ of the Earth (represented by queer feminists) are exiled to the planet Umai, which they domesticate not by terraforming the alien environment, but rather by Umai-​ forming themselves and becoming cyborgs. The former defectors from Earth form a federation with the neighbouring planets –​Gaia and Atabei (all three are the names of the Earth-​goddesses in ancient Turkic, Greek and Native American mythologies, respectively) –​and the creatures that inhabit them. The safety of the new world is threatened, however, by the arrival of an ambassador from Earth, Jenry. She is a contradictory character who describes 106

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

herself as ‘a shameless lesbian’, who, upon discovering that the mission to Umai would involve physical travel, made a macho resolution to ‘seduce as many beauties that this planet was famous for as possible’ (Sultanalieva, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.7). Her real mission on Umai, however, is to get intelligence on the recently discovered ‘Element 174’, while pretending to seek reconciliation with the Umaians. Jenry is a homage to the character of Genly Ai in the famous novel by Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Genly Ai, the narrator, is also an envoy of the Ekumen confederation on the planet Winter (Gethen), where there is no gender and the social order is therefore radically different from that of his home planet Terra, with a mission to persuade the Gethenians to join the Ekumen. Both missions –​that of Jenry on Umai and Genly Ai on Winter –​face the challenge of the fundamental misunderstanding of the culture of the host planet by the representatives of the Earth. Both stories discuss the ambiguous loyalties and anxieties rooted in the conflicting impulses of exploration and xenophobia, conquest and exchange, attraction and repulsion/​fear. At the same time, Sultanalieva offers us an alternative, non-​Eurocentric queer communist world that has left the patriarchal past behind. Zhanar Sekerbaeva, a poet, sportswoman-​powerlifter and queer feminist activist from Kazakhstan, offers a more radical and distinctly anti-​colonial alternative to the narratives of space exploration, colonisation and conquest in her story titled ‘Chimeras of Z-​City’. Here, instead of leaving the Earth which has become uninhabitable, people decide to continue existing only as ethereal bites of information in a virtual ‘cloud’. She describes the last days of the Earthlings before the compulsory migration of all humans to cyberspace, following the directive of the World Government that established the ‘desomatic democracy’, the event preceded by the long struggle of cyberfeminists and environmental activists. Of course, the move from the usual mode of existence into cyberspace is opposed by many, especially cis-​men: ‘people were clinging to the idea of keeping their bodies, as if those bodies were not already sites of constant transformations, movement, perpetual production of cells’ (Sekerbaeva, in Shatalova and Mamedov 2018, p.204). The protestors demanded the resettlement of humanity on other planets, but the rest of the Solar System was inhabited by creatures called ‘prothoses’, with whom it was impossible to establish communication. Thus, instead of colonisation and conquest, the global government chooses ‘desomatisation’, the upload of human beings into cyberspace. The last ‘chimera’ (a person who has not undertaken the transition into cyberspace) on Earth, Vasumitra, volunteers to make sure that the remaining humans safely make it to the other side. On the final day before the great exodus, she succeeds in locating the long-​lost grave of her mother, goes to a cemetery and has a joyful pyjama party with the spirit of her mother and her ghostly neighbours. The ending of the story further complicates our understanding of the fuzzy boundary between the world of the living and the dead: the apocalypse is only the beginning of the new life.

CONCLUSION As queer activists, scholars and theorists, we can potentially engage in two modes of challenging Western-​centric scholarship and the import-​export logic of modernity. The first approach can be termed ‘recuperative’. This approach seeks to uncover 107

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​

indigenous queer histories and identities, describing current practices as different to the dominant narratives and discourses established in the queer canon of the Global North. This approach in effect accepts the association of modernity with the West. The second approach offers a post-​colonial critique of both modernity and tradition, denouncing the search for authenticity, critiquing both nativism and tokenism, and embracing hybridity and complex liminal ‘borderland’ identities. Queer regionalism –​an approach which combines queer theory and area studies –​promotes a critical scholarship of Central Asia which understands the region not merely as the recipient of influences from the Global North, but as itself generating complex modernities and transnational flows in a global context shaped by political economic asymmetries. There are multiple ways of knowing, and imagination is one of them. Far from being strange curiosities, the stories written by Central Asian scholar-​activists for Utterly Other should be used to inspire, reframe and critique conventional readings of the region and its inhabitants’ gendered and sexual subjectivities (along with subjectivities such as ethnic, national, etc.). In its stubborn refusal to fit any simple definition and normativity, the ‘queerness/​kvirnost’ of Central Asia is not a cause for lamentation for the authors of Utterly Other, but rather something to be embraced and celebrated: something that is to be discovered in a palimpsestous reading of the region and to inspire the struggle for a radical creative imagining of better collective living. All of the authors in Utterly Other attempt a feminist and queer communist resolution to the contradictions of the human condition, emphasising the social and ethical issues at stake. Following the maxim formulated by STAB –​‘Queer communism is an ethic’ –​the authors in Utterly Other all challenge the sexist, heteronormative and imperialist paradigms and offer alternatives, in an ethical framework of justice, equality and responsibility. A queer palimpsestuous re-​reading and re-​writing of the past, present and future would benefit not only queer activists in the region, but scholars of Central Asia too.

NOTE 1 STAB, which existed in Bishkek from 2012 to 2018, was a Central Asian artistic and research initiative which viewed ‘art as an instrument of social criticism, a territory of solidarity, and a practice of radical imagination’ (Mamedov and Shatalova 2017, no pagination). STAB worked on a seasonal basis, running a public programme in the spring and an educational programme in the autumn. Each spring, STAB held its Spring Creative Report, a large thematic public programme whose theme in 2017 was ‘Queer Futurology’. In the autumn, STAB organised Evening Schools for Central Asian artists, activists and researchers, which combined a theoretical reflection with artistic imagination. The 2017 programme, entitled ‘When the Subaltern Speak’, was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. STAB’s work was funded by international foundations such as the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and the Open Society Foundation. Asel Akmatova, Oksana Shatalova and Georgy Mamedov are Central Asian curators, researchers and authors, who together worked on many projects before founding the STAB (School of Theory and Activism). Akmatova is a native of Kyrgyzstan, while Mamedov and Shatalova come from Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, respectively.

108

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​

REFERENCES Amis, K. 1961. New Maps of Hell –​A Survey of Science Fiction. London: Victor Gollancz. Atanasoski, N. and Vora, K. 2018. Postsocialist politics and the end of revolution. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 24 (2): 139–​154. Bagdasarova, N. 2018. Securing an LGBT identity in Kyrgyzstan. Case studies from Bishkek and Osh. International Quarterly for Asian Studies 49 (1–​2): 17–​40. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chen, K.-​H. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialisation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Chiang, H. and Wong, A.K. 2016. Queering the transnational turn: Regionalism and queer Asias. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 23 (11): 1643–​1656. Connery, C. The oceanic feeling and the regional imaginary, pp. 284–​311 in Wilson, R. and Dissanayaki, W., (eds.). Global/​Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dillon, S. 2005. Re-​inscribing De Quincey’s palimpsest: The significance of the palimpsest in contemporary literary and cultural studies, Textual Practice 19(3): 243–​263. Available at https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​095023​6050​0196​227 Edelman, L. 1994. Tearooms and sympathy; or, the epistemology of the water closet, pp. 148–​172 in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, New York and London: Routledge. Essig, L. and Kondakov, A. 2019. A Cold War for the twenty-​first century. Homosexualism versus heterosexualism, pp.79–​102 in Mole, R. (ed.). Soviet and Post-​Soviet Sexualities. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated from the French by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. 1978/​ 1990. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–​79, (ed. Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon. Gopinath, G. 2008. Queer regions: Locating lesbians in Soucharam, pp. 341–​354 in Haggarty, G.E. and McGarry, M. (eds.) A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. Available at https://​doi.org/​ 10.1002/​978047​0690​864.ch18 Grewal, I. and Kaplan, C. 2001. Global identities: Theorising transnational studies of sexuality. GLQ 7 (4): 663–​679. Grewell, G. 2001. Colonizing the universe: Science fiction then, now and in the (imagined) future. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 55 (2): 25–​47. Haagland, E. and Sarwal, R. (eds.) 2010. Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co, Inc, Publishers. Harris, C. 2004. Control and Subversion: Gender Relations in Tajikistan. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Healey, D. 2001/​2008. Gomoseksual’noe vlecheniie v revoliutsionnoi Rossii: regulirovaniie seksual’no-​gendernogo dissidentstva [Homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia: The regulation of gender and sexual dissent], Moscow: Ladomir Scientific Publishing Center. Hunt, S. and Holmes, C. 2015. Everyday decolonisation: Living a decolonising queer politics. Journal of Lesbian Studies 19 (2): 154–​172. Available at https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​10894​ 160.2015.970​975

109

—​​​​ M o h i r a S u y a r k u l o v a —​​​ Jameson, F. 1982. Progress versus Utopia. or, can we imagine the future? Science Fiction Studies 27 (9): 147–​158. Available at www.dep​auw.edu/​sfs/​bac​kiss​ues/​27/​jame​son.html Kurmanova, G. 2016. Manifest natsii pidarov. [Queer Nation Manifesto]. Deistvie, 2 December 2016 Available at http://​cen​ter-​act​ion.org/​2016/​02/​12/​manif​est-​nat​sii-​pida​rov-​ queer-​nat​ion/​. Lee, P-​H. 2019. Queer Asia’s body without organs: On the making of queer/​decolonial politics. pp. 219–​241 in Luther, J.D. and J. Ung Loh, eds. ‘Queer’ Asia: Decolonising and Reimagining Sexuality and Gender, London: Zed Books. Le Guin, U. 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books. Mamedov, G. and Bagdasarova, N. 2021. Tema, a ne ‘LGBT’? Vremiia i prostranstvo seksual’no-​gendernogo dissidentstva v postsovetskom Kyrgyzstane [Tema, or “LGBT”? Time and space of sexual and gender dissent in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan]. Cahiers du Monde Russe 62(2–​3): 283–​306. DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.4000/​mon​deru​sse.12453 Mamedov, G. and Shatalova, O. (eds.) 2014. STAB almanac No 1. Vernut’ Budushchee [To Regain the Future]. Bishkek: STAB-​Press. Mamedov, G. and Shatalova, O. 2015. Bishkek utopicheskii [Bishkek the Utopian]. Bishkek: STAB-​Press. Mamedov, G. and Shatalova, O. (eds.) 2016. STAB almanac No 2. Poniatia o sovetskom v Tsentral’noi Azii [Concepts of the Soviet in Central Asia]. Bishkek: STAB-​Press. Mamedov, G. and Shatalova, O. 2017. Against Simple Answers: The Queer Communist Theory of Evald Ilyenkov and Alexander Suvorov. 17 August. Available at: https://​art​seve​rywh​ere. ca/​2017/​08/​17/​agai​nst-​sim​ple-​answ​ers/​ Martin, F., Jackson, P. A., McLelland, M. and Yue, A., eds. 2008. AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Megoran, N. and Heathershaw, J. 2011. Contesting danger: a new agenda for policy and scholarship on Central Asia. International Affairs 87 (3): 589–​612. Mole, R. (ed.) 2019. Soviet and Post-​Soviet Sexualities. London: Routledge. Northrop, D. 2004. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Open Democracy Russia 2019. Series of articles, available at www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​odr/​ when-​your-​field-​also-​your-​home-​intr​oduc​ing-​femin​ist-​sub​ject​ivit​ies-​cent​ral-​asia/​ Pearson, W. 1999. Alien cryptographies: The view from queer. Science Fiction Studies 26 (1): 1–​22. Sedgwick, E.K. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Shatalova, O. and Mamedov, G. (eds.) 2018. Sovsem drugie. Sbornik feministskoi i kvir-​fantastiki [Utterly Other: a collection of feminist and queer science fiction]. Bishkek: STAB-​Press. Sozaev, V. (ed.) 2010. Vozmozhen li “kvir” po-​russki? LGBTK issledovaniia. Mezhdistsiplinarnii sbornik. [Is Russian ‘queer’ possible? LGBTQ studies. An interdisciplinary collection of texts] St Petersburg: Coming Out/​Vykhod. Sozaev, V. 2015a. Kvir dolzhen umeret [‘Queer’ must die]. OutLoud Magazine, 1 May. Available at http://​out​loud​mag.eu/​eve​nts/​item/​kvir-​dolz​hen-​ume​ret. Sozaev, V. 2015b. “Skromnoie obaianiie kvir, ili kvir kak illiuziia. [Modest charm of the queer, or queer as an illusion]. Makeout, 23 November. Available at https://​make​out.by/​2015/​11/​ 23/​skrom​noe-​obaya​nie-​kvir-​ili-​kvir-​kak-​illyuz​iya.html Stoler, A.L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Sultanalieva, S. 2020. Escaping the dichotomies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’: Chronotopes of queerness in Kyrgyzstan, pp. 55–​72 in Channell-​Justice, E. (ed.) Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+​ Narratives in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

110

—​​​​ Q u e e r i n g C e n t r a l A s i a , d e c o l o n i s i n g s e x u a l i t i e s —​​​​ Suyarkulova, M. 2016. ACT UP, Manifest kvir-​ naroda [Queer Nation Manifesto]. Weird Sisters 5: 49–​69. Bishkek: STAB-​Press. Suyarkulova, M. 2020. ‘Nobody is going to want her like this’: Disability, sexuality, and un/​ happiness in Kyrgyzstan. Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, special issue: Resisting Ableism, Queering Disability, 6 (2): no pagination. Available at https://​kohl​ jour​nal.press/​nob​ody-​going-​want-​her Suyarkulova, M. 2019. Translating ‘queer’ into (Kyrgyzstani) Russian?, pp. 42–​56 in Cottet, C. and Picq, M. (eds.), Sexuality and Translation in World Politics, open access book on E-​International Relations internet portal available at: www.e-​ir.info/​publ​icat​ion/​sexual​ity-​ and-​tran​slat​ion-​in-​world-​polit​ics/​ Temkina, A. 2008. Seksual’naiia zhizn’ zhenshchini: mezhdu podchineniiem i svobodoi [Sexual Life of a Woman: Between Submission and Freedom]. St Petersburg: European University of St Petersburg. Wilkinson, C. and Kirey, A. 2010. What’s in a name? The personal and political meanings of ‘LGBT’ for non-​heterosexual and transgender youth in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey 29 (4): 485–​499. DOI: 10.1080/​02634937.2010.533970 Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. 2003. Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay on historical epistemology. The International Migration Review 37 (3): 576–​610.

111

PART II

SOLIDARITY AND STRUGGLE

The chapters in this part of the book explore questions of solidarity and struggle across scales: from the intimate negotiations of autonomy within Uzbek family networks to demands for accountability from government institutions in Afghanistan. Several important findings emerge across these diverse empirical settings. One is the need to attend ethnographically to the action, imagination and skill of non-​elite actors in articulating their demands towards powerful outsiders. As Elmira Satybaldieva notes in her chapter on older women activists in Kyrgyzstan’s anti-​debt movement, scholars have tended to ignore the agency of non-​elite actors. The contributions in this section show that non-​elite actors are neither mere ‘weapons of the wealthy’, nor simply unreflective followers of tradition. They point to the spaces of agency and negotiation that exist within a variety of ‘traditional’ domains, including those of male-​dominated kin groups or village networks. They highlight the normative registers through which calls for justice are articulated; they reveal the importance of verbal arts in making demands register with a variety of local, national and international publics. More generally, the chapters in this section point to the fluidity and adaptability of customary practice itself, including in places often assumed to be ‘unchanging’ or ‘ungoverned’. Drawing on extensive research in rural Afghanistan, for instance, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili demonstrates how attempts to bypass effective customary procedures for dispute resolution in the name of ‘good governance’ and ‘state-​building’ can risk amplifying nepotism, corruption and cronyism. A second important theme to emerge from the chapters concerns the gendered dimensions of negotiating agency, sociality and (political) visibility. In her detailed ethnography of Osh Uzbek kinship practice, Aksana Ismailbekova explores the mobilising role of mothers (and their brothers) in protecting a daughter in her husband’s house. Intriguingly, these older women exert a form of control-​through-​proximity over the future son-​in-​law. Contradicting the image of older Kyrgyz women as singular bearers of ‘tradition’, Elmira Satybaldieva illustrates the formative training they experienced in the thoroughly ‘modern’ institutions of Komsomol and Soviet labour unions. She points to the value attached to forms of learned communicative skill, from oratory and letter-​writing to political organising, which enable a variety of non-​elite women to make their political demands heard and seen. Philipp Schröder illuminates the historical importance of territorially based sociality, including street fighting between urban neighbourhoods, for transforming boys to men in late Soviet Bishkek. DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-9

113

—​​​​ S o l i d a r i t y a n d s t r u g g l e —​​​

As we saw in the general introduction, Central Asia often appears a region over-​ determined by its geographic and social complexity: a place of ‘arbitrary’ borders and deep-​seated inter-​ethnic or ‘tribal’ hostilities. These chapters corroborate the variable salience of ethnicity and other registers of collective identity in concrete social settings. They point to ways that concerns to protect one’s community can be amplified in situations of protracted insecurity or perceived threat. So Zhaina Meirkhan shows how ethnic Qazaq returnees from Xinjiang narrate a dual homeland through improvisational poetic debate, even as they confront the reality of de facto exclusion from full recognition as compatriots. Noor Borbieva explores why newly established Protestant churches, which can provide a source of protection and community to members, can nonetheless be perceived as threatening to village-​based solidarity networks. Following a period if intercommunal violence, Ismailbekova’s chapter illustrates how Osh Uzbeks seek to ensure that girls are married young and to ‘one’s own’ as a form of social and spatial protection. But this section also demonstrates that once-​salient forms of identification and belonging can dissipate in the face of new political and economic realities. So Philipp Schröder shows how place-​based forms of urban identity centred on the courtyard that were salient a generation ago, dissipate in the face of rural-​urban migration and the increasing shift to online socialising among urban youth. Finally, the chapters in this section point consistently to questions of justice, inequality and in/​exclusion as important and generative themes for scholarly research. There is much work still to be done in this direction. Anthropologists of Central Asia have only recently begun to attend to the debilitating consequences of inter-​ generational debt; to the transformations in access to land and housing over the last three decades; to the lived experience of insecurity and dispossession, and to ways that geopolitical realignments and anthropogenic climate change can affect the most intimate domains of life, generating new solidarities and demands for justice. These chapters provide a generative entry point into this emergent research agenda.

114

CHAPTER EIGHT

QARA SHANGYRAQ Searching for a Qazaq home between two worlds Zhaina Meirkhan INTRODUCTION The question of ethno-​national belonging in the context of Qazaqs across Central Asia has emerged strongly in recent years for two reasons.1 First, following the independence of Qazaqstan from the Soviet Union, the region has seen a rise in ethnic nationalism. Ethno-​national culture and traditions are widely promoted as the key to sustaining solidarity within the state. Second, since the 1990s, Qazaqstan has promoted the idea that all Qazaqs should return to their ‘homeland’ and initiated a state-​level repatriation program (Diener 2008). This program has fostered the expectation among Qazaqs in China’s Xinjiang that they are part of the qara shangyraq, the one ‘native home’ of all Qazaqs. For these people, anything related to the ‘homeland’ is considered precious: in Xinjiang, affection and hopes for the future are expressed in clothing with KZ logos, as well as consuming food products or wearing jewellery from Qazaqstan. In a podcast, 40-​year-​old Muhtar, a mathematician and assistant university professor, described the feeling of passion for ‘homeland’ he experienced when he stepped on the ground of his atameken (fatherland/​homeland) for the first time. In an interview on a YouTube offering ‘Find Your Batyr (Heros)’ Muhtar comments: ‘I knelt down to kiss the ground of my “homeland” and smelt the fragrance of its wormwoods’ (Muhtar 2019). He had left his studies in Xinjiang in 2002 due to financial difficulties and came to Qazaqstan to continue at university. In Xinjiang, Muhtar’s early memories and imagination about atameken (homeland) had often been fuelled by long conversations with his father’s guests from Qazaqstan. Small things from Qazaqstan became the valued possessions of his childhood. In our interview, he told me: ‘I had a full collection of candy wrappers and a piece of newspaper usually used for wrapping up the porcelain wares exported from Qazaqstan to Xinjiang, and I always hid them in my books.’ Muhtar still remembers what was written on that piece of newspaper. Although he was already in college by then, he always knew that he would end up in Qazaqstan, because he understood it to be the ‘qara shangyraq’ for all Qazaqs. However, for many Qazaq migrants to Qazaqstan, the dream of full acceptance and an unquestioned home does not necessarily come true. In the face of different forms of exclusion both in China and Qazaqstan, how do Xinjiang Qazaqs build and understand a sense of their own place in the world? In this chapter, based on DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-10

115

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​

ethnographic research between 2019 and 2020, I discuss how one migrant community of Xinjiang Qazaqs uses memories of Xinjiang and oral traditions such as aitys to establish a dual sense of homeland(s): on the one hand, the ‘tughanjer’ (the place they were born) and on the other, the ‘atameken’ or ‘historical fatherland’ as the indispensable golden pillars of belonging to this qara shangyraq. In order to explore the Xinjiang Qazaqs’ place in the world, I will first explore the meaning of the qara shangyraq in the context of a Qazaq family and broader society and its correlations with the idea of ‘homeland’. I then discuss the reality that Qazaq migrants face in becoming part of ‘homeland’, and the role of oral tradition in shaping their belonging to the community.

THE MEANING OF QARA SHANGYRAQ AND ‘HOMELAND’ The notion of qara shangyraq refers primarily to the idea that the youngest son will inherit the homestead and responsibilities for parents, while older married siblings regard this son’s family as the legacy of their deceased parents. In this patriarchal tradition, the youngest son’s family is respected as continuing the father’s lineage, the natal family and the core of all other kinship relations. As a cultural metaphor, qara shangyraq combines many related concepts such as the ‘greatness’ and ‘sacredness’ of this core family, the essential nature and ancient identity of Qazaqs and the inclusivity and protection of such a social group. The specific idea of qara shangyraq has been directly linked to the collective projection of the nation-​state in both migrants’ imaginaries as well as official rhetoric. This reflects the insight that the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘the state/​the nation’ are interwoven in Central Asian cultures (Mostowlansky 2013). That connection is echoed in the narrative theme of ‘Otan otbasynan bastalady’ (A state or a nation starts from a hearth, a family), in Qazaqstan, as this one qara shangyraq is constituted of a myriad of families. This establishes the legitimacy for Qazaqs from Xinjiang as part of this one shared ‘native home’. However, despite the great promises and state-​managed adaptation programmes, they feel they are unintentionally or intentionally singled out as oralmandar (‘returnees’, a term that has become largely derogatory rather than descriptive), or as ‘foreign Qazaqs’ and excluded from mainstream Qazaqstani society (Dukeyev 2017; Diener 2005). Both China and Qazaqstan have played a key role in shaping the sense of belonging and exclusion for recent Qazaq migrants. A ‘revival’ of ethnic culture is the mechanism through which China legitimises its status as the host country of minority diasporas. At the same time, ‘heritage’ is also a tool that China utilises to hegemonise its sovereignty and coopt the rest of the country in solidarity (see Light, this volume). For example, while oral traditions such as aitys are celebrated by the Chinese government as the ‘cultural folklore’ of the Qazaq ethnic minority, these practices are also less likely to be considered ‘modern’ or legitimate, compared to the ‘modern’ and dominant Han culture. In Xinjiang, indigenous traditions are also increasingly treated with suspicion and repressed, particularly if they are seen to have any connection to Islamic worlds or to ethnic nationalism (Salimjan 2020; Meirkhan and Nikopoulos forthcoming). In turn, the exclusion that Qazaqs experience in China gives more momentum to claim their belonging to the ‘historical homeland’ in neighbouring 116

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​

Qazaqstan. A sense of belonging to a certain social world is, after all, integral and indispensable for everyday life (Colhoun 2003 in Halse 2018).

IDEALS OF BELONGING AND EXPERIENCES OF EXCLUSION IN QAZAQSTAN Using the concept of qara shangyraq metaphorically in its rhetoric, the Qazaqstani state has established a resettlement programme to ‘return’ its diaspora communities ‘home’ (cf. Dukeyev 2017; Diener 2005). For Qazaqs, the main reasons for responding to this call centred around the future of their families and cultural identity, the appeal of a vast land with a smaller population and the expectation of better living conditions. They were also eager to acquire a political identity with ethnic Qazaq cultural rootedness, rather than living under the dominant Han-​Chinese mentality of viewing Qazaqs’, like other ethnic ‘minorities’, as a ‘backward’ group that needs to be ‘modernised’ (Shanatibieke 2016).2 A second compelling reason for migration to Qazaqstan, and for ethnic identity becoming an urgent question in recent years, is the growing and long-​lasting crackdown targeted against indigenous Muslims in Xinjiang. This campaign is sponsored by the Chinese state and involves so-​called ‘re-​ education programmes’ in which large numbers of people are indefinitely detained (Smith Finley 2019; see also Roberts 2018; Zenz 2018; Byler 2021a, 2021b, this volume). These recent events have greatly accelerated the pace of outmigration, as the majority of those leaving are now trying to survive, and to thrive culturally, even if their past life in China was comparatively prosperous. Qazaqs from Xinjiang initially imagined a very promising future in the ethno-​ nationalist rhetoric of the Qazaqstani state’s desire to assemble all Qazaqs in this ‘one shared nation’. Despite the immigration of over a million migrants from all over the world, they still account for only 5 per cent of the Qazaqstani population.3 The scale of ‘ethnic return’ migration to Qazaqstan has also created public debate on whether to build an ethnic nation or a civic one (Dukeyev 2017; Diener 2005). Despite the official welcome since 1990s, the Qazaqstani state authorities also seem to fear increased migration from Xinjiang, and the impact of an increased ‘Qazaqification’ that potentially threatens the civic-​nation building paradigm in a multi-​ethnic environment (Kuşçu 2013). Though Qazaqstan made great promises to its projected ‘diaspora’ community across Eurasia, there are serious barriers to legal and cultural integration for Qazaqs. For many, it is not certain whether this can truly be their new ‘homeland’, or whether this context may even become another layer of uncertainty and a sense of non-​belonging for the ‘returning Qazaqs’ (Dubuisson and Genina 2011; Werner et al. 2017; Meirkhan and Nikopoulos forthcoming). Research on ethnic repatriation in Qazaqstan reveals complex dynamics of ethnic returnees’ integration and adaptation, showing how difficulties in mutual adaptation have led to their marginalisation. As a result, a transnational group identity has emerged among Qazaq migrants. My fieldwork in the Almaty and Taldyqorghan areas of Qazaqstan included participant observation, archival research and the collection of aitys poems in the summer of 2019. Interviews with migrants, including my relatives and acquaintances in the community, revealed their primary concerns and how they reflect on their past, present and future. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I also convened a ‘townspeople gathering’ with a group of women, from which I draw on substantially in this 117

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​

chapter. Bayan, an old acquaintance from Xinjiang, mentioned that these women had recently moved from Xinjiang a year or two before. Bayan assured me that they felt lonely, and the discussion would be a good opportunity for them to make some connections and keep up friendships with Xinjiang Qazaqs. Sharing a transnational identity as their ‘idealized community’ is one of the ways in which people can position a sense of belonging (Bloch 2013). Qazaq migrants experience social and cultural alienation from mainstream society, as well as certain political exclusions by the authorities of Qazaqstan. An example of such exclusion is language policies which recognise Russian as the lingua franca in the larger cities such as Almaty and Nur-​Sultan. Marginalisation left the oralmandar unable to benefit from the quota system (a share of financial aid for a person or a group can receive from the government of Qazaqstan) or privatisation, and made it difficult for them find employment in governmental organisations, even forcing them to rethink whether to apply for citizenship in Qazaqstan (Diener 2005). Media reports, the label of ‘oralman’ (‘returnee’), migration policies, the law and the settlement planning have all become tools of ‘othering’ by mainstream society (Diener 2005). Such practices have become the major obstacles for recent migrants to obtain jobs, whether in government organisations or in the service sector. Qazaq migrants, dealing with social and political exclusion, struggle to legitimise their belonging in this ‘qara shangyraq’, this ‘one shared nation’ of Qazaqstan. They try to nurture a sense of belonging by first building bonds among themselves.

THE PERFORMANCE OF AITYS AS A VEHICLE OF DISTINCTION AND COHESION AS ‘ONE SHARED NATION’ It was a hot Almaty summer afternoon when Jazen and I spoke with other recent migrants at our ‘townspeople gathering’ at a Chinese restaurant. All the members of the group were female and mostly middle-​aged. They included Jazen, a former journalist and radio announcer in Xinjiang, who migrated with her whole family in 2019 and now gives psychological consultations; Lina, a university teacher who moved with one of her children while her husband and another child remain in Xinjiang. Saya, a former businesswoman, now a homemaking mother of two; an artist Bayan; and Merey, a 29-​year-​old Ph.D. graduate, who now lives in Europe, also attended virtually from Beijing. We entered a room luxuriously decorated with Han Chinese-​style flying dragons, with lit clouds floating lazily on one wall and Chinese oil paintings hung on the other. Typical Chinese background music lingered in the room, drawing us all the way back to the familiar feeling of being at a ‘home’ that we could now only picture in our memories. That familiar feeling also came from the cameras located on the ceiling of the restaurant, as they are found in every corner of Xinjiang to monitor people’s ‘harmful activities’. When I asked Saya about her motivations for moving to Qazaqstan, she explained that she was prompted by hearing a rumour about the only surviving bilingual Qazaq-Chinese bilingual school in Urumqi being shut down, and about the pending impossibility for ethnic locals to study abroad. Lina meanwhile had arrived a year ago: her father had died in Qazaqstan, and this was her ‘excuse’ to escape from Xinjiang. She had been separated from her son and her husband ever 118

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​

since. The group saw aitys as an important feature of Qazaq tradition, maintaining Qazaq identity and the cohesion of Qazaq society.

Using aitys performance to foster solidarity and friction As mentioned above, official language policies, which recognise Russian as the lingua franca in larger cities such as Almaty and Nur-​Sultan are major obstacles for recent migrants to obtain jobs, whether in the state or private sector. As Lina complained: ‘Why would we always have to “wear someone else’s clothes” [i.e., speak other languages] even in our home?’ The contemporary aqyn (poet/​performer) Ainur Tursynbaeva comments on the language issue in her aitys, stating that she has ‘three dresses –​one for home [Qazaq language], one for work or other social venues [Russian] and the last [English] for international occasions’. Thus, recent migrants use other forms of narratives to assert their place and their connection to their ‘homeland’. Migrants not only rely on the use of genealogies (see Jacquesson, this volume) to relate to a ‘native home’; but they also use other cultural traditions such as the aitys oral form of poetry to cope with the social and political exclusion and to legitimise their belonging in this ‘one shared qara shangyraq’ (one shared nation). Recreating traditions and attending aitys is one way to construct and reconstruct perceptions of being Qazaq and invoking the idea of ‘homeland’ and ‘home’ (Post 2007; Dubuisson 2017; Salimjan 2017). As an oral and epic literature form, aitys is a competitive oral duelling performance centred on improvised oral poetry spoken or sung to the audience and accompanied by the dombra, a two-​stringed instrument. Two aqyns compete with one another to improvise verses on topical themes in a duel of wits that alternates between humorous ripostes and poignant philosophical reflections. During the competition, the performers sit opposite one another, improvising a dialogic debate on topics chosen by the host or the audience. Aitys performances organised across Qazaqstan have titles like ‘Torteuy tugel bolsa’ (‘If we have all four united’),’ or ‘Bereke byrlygyngde elim’ (‘My people, prosperity lies in your unity’).4 The winner is judged based on originality, resourcefulness, wisdom, wit, musical skills and rhythm. The most meaningful and witty expressions often become popular sayings in the broader cultural environment. Broadcasts and videos of nationwide and international aitys performances online played a role in catalysing migration to Qazaqstan, even before the current crackdowns in Xinjiang. When I asked about the role of aitys in her life, Jazen shared stories about some fellow migrants who moved to Qazaqstan after watching one aitys competition between the famous poets Ainur Tursynbaeva (from Qazaqstan) and Hairat Kul-​Mukhamet (a migrant aqyn from Xinjiang). ‘You could see how powerful that is’, Jazen articulated. This oral tradition is practised on a variety of occasions, ranging from local festivities to nationwide events, where performers often use the competition to legitimise their status as a citizen-​leader, to challenge or even transgress the authorities by raising important social issues, and to question the state authority’s operating systems (Salimjan 2017). To some degree, being an aqyn means being empowered to challenge the ruling authorities, and an aqyn’s words empower the audience to express their thoughts and opinions about the authorities. Erving Goffman highlights 119

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​

the ‘co-​participation’ and inter-​reliance between two parties (addresser and addressee) in communication and interaction, where the ‘message’ is formed together (Goffman 1981). This process is visible in a recent performance by Zhandarbek Bulgakov5 and Didar Hamiev6 at one recent aitys performance held in Qaraghandy to celebrate the anniversary of a Qazaq author repressed in the early Soviet period. Didar Hamiev: …Zhukeynge (Zhursen Yerman) jolaialmai zhur edyngghoi, bylmeimyn bugyn kymnen qairat aldyng; alghanyng qyzyedyghoi jalaiirdyng, senjainda osyndai jaigha qandym; senushyn keremet kun bolghan au, Tokayevty patchagyp sailatar kun; Qatysyp ketkenynge qaraghanda, qatysybop ketkenau qainatangnyng … Zhursen has neglected you long ago, tell me where you got the courage [to come here]. Your wife is the daughter of jalaiyr, I’ve heard from others. It must be a wonderful day for you, when Tokayev became the president, Seeing you here at aitys, it must be your ‘father-​in-​law’s’ [Tokayev’s] influence … Zhandarbek Bulgakov: Au, Didarzhan qanzhartylyn zhalayng etty, zhapyryp ketpecede zhanip ötty; Küeiubala boldyngdep Tokayevqa, menyng qaiinzhurtymdy sanap ötty; “ ‘Kempyrdyngde sheshecy bar degendi’, qainatam ol qyzmetke zhangna jetty; Shyndyqtty byraq bary bylyp otir, qalyqtty kym aldanghysh bala deptty; örde eky pilot otyrghanmen, bir adam basqaryptur samaliotty;… Au, Didar is taking out his sword, it didn’t axe everyone, yet some get hurt. called as the son-​in-​law of Tokayev’s,you have counted all my ‘in laws’. ‘An old lady also has a mother’ is an old saying, my father-​in-​law has just gotten this office job. Everyone knows the truth, and who told you that people are naïve as children. There are altogether two pilots on board, only one of them is a real captain … Linguistic anthropologists Joel Sherzer and Anthony K. Webster emphasise the importance of social and cultural contexts of language in verbal art (Sherzer and Webster 2018). In the excerpt above, the cultural context is the tribal-​kinship system of Qazaq society. Didar voices suspicion about the reasons for Zhandarbek’s five-​year absence from aitys performances. He assumes Zhandarbek’s return must be related to his ‘father-​in-​law’ (Tokayev, the second and current president of Qazaqstan who is from the jalaiyr tribe, which is also Zhandarbek’s wife’s tribe). Using such kinship ties as social and economic capital is quite a conspicuous phenomenon, allowing citizens to navigate inside the government system for benefits such as a promotion or job opportunity. So, in the first section, the aqyns are humorously revealing the reality of relations and interactions between interested parties. In the second part, Zhandarbek teases Didar by claiming that he is the qainy (brother-​in-​law) of the

120

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​

‘real captain’ (the first president), and that he is in fact the only one who holds the reins of power. Aitys as a cultural carrier (Meirkhan 2012) also plays a political role even in extreme Soviet repression, and in political circumstances in modern China, and has endured as a lived tradition (Dubuisson 2010; Salimjan 2017; Meirkhan and Nikopoulos forthcoming) –​a form of poetry and a cultural capital uniting people across time and space. Aitys as a poetic performance and an art of improvisation is a vehicle through which people share their stories, their memories of history, their current lives and their imagined futures. In Xinjiang, before the 1950s, aitys competitions were primarily local, taking place at weddings and other festivals and ceremonies. In the second half of the twentieth century, aitys was officially moved to the political stage of China’s nationalising project. Under the state’s administration, aqyns were assigned the role of ‘people’s singer’ in promoting socialist values and denouncing class enemies (Salimjan 2017). In Qazaqstan, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, alongside the institutional anchoring of the Qazaq language as the state language, reviving Qazaq traditions became part of the journey of nation-​building. Aitys was branded as ‘the face of the nation’ and was foregrounded in revitalising and (re)traditionalising movements in Qazaqstan (Dubuisson 2010). Television broadcasts of traditions and ceremonies such as aitys have also impacted the nature of rituals. The popularity of aitys rose to unprecedented levels under the patronage of political and cultural institutions such as the Nur Otan Party7 or corporative organisers and leaders aiming for dialogue with authorities in the public sphere (Dubuisson 2010, 2014). To intensify the nation-​building process and sustain the unity of the state of Qazaqstan, a series of programmes such as Ruqani Zhanghyru (cultural revival) were introduced by leaders including the first president, Nur-​Sultan Nazarbayev. Cultural groups responded by organising and reviving various events and activities, with financial support from the state or sponsorship from specific patrons such as mayors. This task is now in the hands of poets and the head organiser, Zhursen Yerman. In an interview in 2019, Yerman told me that ‘aitys is considered an “innate quality” “carved” in particular persons; aitys is the altyn besyk [a golden cradle] of producing aqyns and it would not be appreciated at this level if it were not for Qazaqs.’ Echoing these sentiments, many Qazaqs from Xinjiang believe that they should preserve the traditions they have possessed since ‘ancient’ times. During our meal at the Chinese restaurant, Saya asserted ‘It is not created by someone; aitys is engraved in Qazaqs’ blood and soul.’ In her view, aitys has a strong role in creating a particular sense of community. Aqyns’ poems are attractive to people because they praise a shared history, recognising historical figures and events of their ‘homeland’ in the past. This awakens a sense of belonging and regional or genealogical solidarity among listeners. During our meal, we also watched and discussed recordings of aitys poems created by Ularbek Minatkhan (from the Altay region of Xinjiang) and Zhansaya Musyna (from Aral in Qazaqstan) in Qaraghandy in 2017. These performances included the following couplets: Ularbek: Korgesyn shalqar eldyng shattanghanyn, Borkymdy aspangha attyp attandadym. 121

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​

Seeing the great people’s great joy, I threw my hat to the sky to celebrate. … Ili, Altay, Tarbaghatay, ‘salem’ aitty Barkol, Bughdanyng, qoinyndaghy el. The people in Ili, Altay, Tarbaghatay, Barkol and old Bughda sent their greetings to you all. … Qarsal el, kolderynge kelyp qondy, Saghyntghan qarabauyr qasqaldaghyng. Please, welcome your own ‘coot’, who arrived at your beautiful lake. Ularbek began his performance with sincere greetings from Ili, Altay and Tarbaghatay regions of northern Xinjiang, that originally belonged to the Qazaq steppe (Millward 2021 [2009]; Noda 2016), and which he invoked as part of the ‘homelands’ of Qazaqs today. Because of this historical origin, when addressing the audience in Qazaqstan, he mostly used ‘we’ and ‘our’ to indicate that all Qazaqs are part of this qara shangyraq. He compares himself to a qarabauyr qazqaldaq, a coot, symbolising the ‘owner’ of a lake used here figuratively as the membership as a citizen and patriot of a country. This is a very common metaphor that aqyns frequently apply in aitys, originating in a song named Qarabauyr Qazqaldaq by aqyn Esenghali Abdijapparuly Rawshanov in 1987.8 Ularbek went on to pay tribute to the bravery of Qazaq ancestors in protecting the ‘historical motherland’ from fierce enemies, and the first president Nazarbayev’s foresight and vision in acknowledging ‘our ancestors’ in leading his people to their own independent country. The song further eulogises the people’s heroes and heroines, and their sacrificing during the Jeltoqsan Incident (the December Incident) in 1986 in Qazaqstan (Michaels 1986). Genealogy also plays a vital role in generating Qazaq identity and belonging (Yessenova 2005), as it does for many groups across Central Asia (Light 2018). In Qazaq culture, knowing one’s jety ata (seven fathers) and shejire (genealogy) suggests the level of family education and refinement (Jacquesson, this volume). As an old saying goes, ‘the one who doesn’t know his/​her seven great fathers is uncultured.’ In this sense, the audience also helps to shape a sense of shared values and a social bond. The genealogical connection is a capital that Qazaqs from Xinjiang use to relate themselves to the Qazaq community. In this view, all Qazaqs are regarded as kinfolk through different sides of families, as Didar pointed out above, thus comprising ‘this one qara shangyraq’. Aqyns are regarded as a ‘golden bridge’, not only between leaders and the general population who enhance the solidarity of el (the people) across the country, but also to attract Qazaqs in other parts of the world through genealogical ties. Many think that their ancestors are now lying under the ground of the ‘homeland’. For aqyns, it is claimed to be a necessity and an honour to be in the ‘homeland’. Hairat arrived in Qazaqstan 17 years ago. He has won many prizes across Central Asia and is one of the few former aqyns from Xinjiang to be awarded the title of ‘The Poet of the People’ and ‘The Artist of Contemporary China’. In an interview, he told

122

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​

me that ‘aitys is the brand of the Qazaq qalyqy/​people; it is only for Qazaqs, no one else would appreciate it more than Qazaqs.’ He declared that aitys fostered his love for, and fired his passion to move to, Qazaqstan. In his understanding, it is the skill and craft of an aqyn to wrap up the issues of real life into beautiful and poignant verses so that the ideas are easily conveyed. Hairat defines aitys as a ‘brand’of Qazaq culture that frames Qazaq identity. At our ‘townspeople gathering’, Jazen described aitys as the altyn arqau: the patterned belt used to maintain the shape of the kiyz ui/​kigiz ui (Qazaq yurts), figuratively meaning ‘a golden pillar’.9 This pillar is thought to underpin the cultural values and social norms of Qazaq society, articulating its role in assembling people. In the past, Jazen continued, aitys worked especially well for regular meetings called ‘Kultobede kunde jiyn’.10 These meetings, held for those ‘at the top of Kultobe’ –​that is, the important figures, biis, sultans and elites regarded as ‘the cream of society’ –​were intended to discuss the ‘future of the people’ and how to resist outside enemies. According to Jazen, in her experience of attending aitys events in Xinjiang as a journalist, the audience would not turn up until the aitys actually began, to avoid the prelude of Chinese Communist Party’s agendas. ‘When aitys begins, you will see the people flooding from valleys to aitys.’ Jazen quoted an unknown author in Xinjiang, saying that ‘it is so hard to gather people unless you force them against their will’, adding her own interpretation, ‘or even by using violence, by torturing people like currently in Xinjiang.11 But the most effective way [to gather people] is aitys.’ Jazen’s comments at the Chinese restaurant drew everyone into a reverie. As one Qazaq literary scholar pointed out in an interviews with Jazen, the proper venue to hold aitys would be jaylau (the prairies, the steppes, grasslands); performances should be accompanied by a cultural exhibition of the Qazaq way of life which was based in rural auls (kin-​based settlements), which fostered the aqyns’ output and reproduction of aitys. Saya remembered aitys events on the jaylau were a jolly and memorable experience during her childhood. With tears in her eyes, she paused for a second to control her feelings, then explained: It was the first time that I saw so many kiyz/​kigyz ui [Qazaq yurts]! You know some people haven’t seen kiyz/​kigyz ui yet and sadly they don’t know about the inside ornaments either [see Figure 8.1]. They never rode horses, they couldn’t tell the difference between tuye [two-​humped camels] and nar [dromedaries]; girls don’t know about wedding dresses and boys know nothing about traditional sports, etc. Aitys offers an arena and opportunity to expose these forms of culture to people at the jaylau. It is a way of educating the youngsters in the culture and values of Qazaq traditions and lifeways in the past. For the Xinjiang Qazaqs, such romanticised cultural values are based on and bounded by the view that Qazaq culture is rooted and uniquely embedded in a nomadic lifestyle. Aul life is invoked in their imagination and collective memories. Being immersed in aul life is supposed to help one become a tektty adam, a respectful person who knows their own genealogical trajectory, considered an essential milestone in becoming an ideal citizen serving ‘one shared nation’. 123

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​

Figure 8.1 ‘Basbau’, the ornate belt hung above the door of Qazaq yurts, used here as a decoration for a bench. (photo by author, 2019).

UNSETTLING: REMEMBERING A ‘HOME’ IN XINJIANG WHILE EXPERIENCING A NEW ‘HOMELAND’ The reiteration of certain attitudes, values, behaviour and social practices build up the connection or specific tie to a certain sociocultural space and community (Halse 2018, following Yuval-​Davis 2011). Through sociocultural practices like aitys associated with narratives by Qazaqstani authorities, a particular Qazaq identity, including particular language forms and traditions, are rehearsed and reproduced. These have, with partial success, established a bond between Qazaqs from Xinjiang and the Qazaq community and an ‘ethno-​national homeland’. This process feeds into the idealised anticipation the Xinjiang Qazaqs have developed of the ‘homeland’, prior to any personal experience. In this regard, as the social etiquette and moral standards showcased in mahalla in Uzbek society (Liu, this volume), Xinjiang Qazaqs have connected historical memories of aul life with their expectation of a modern, civic and multicultural context of Qazaqstan, embellished with national elements. The migrants imagined that the facets of traditions and culture they would pursue in their new ‘homeland’ would match what they knew in Xinjiang, because they view Qazaqstan as the one and only qara shangyraq. A sovereign ethnic homeland is considered to be the rightful and final destination for all Qazaqs. Many Qazaqs migrating from China believe that what they have lost in relinquishing their tughanjer (the place they were born) will be regained in the atameken (fatherland) of Qazaqstan. New migrants are heavily invested in this rhetoric; it is an ideal that continues to feed the non-​stop stream of migration from Xinjiang to Qazaqstan. 124

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​

However, Hairat, an aqyn from Xinjiang, proposed a more complex and painful picture. He explained to me the history of several generations of aqyns in Xinjiang and the situation for aitys in today’s Qazaqstan. He recognises himself as an apprentice in the second wave of aqyns in Xinjiang. To Hairat, it is a necessity and an honor to be in the ‘homeland’. He shared one of his theories: ‘Qazaqs in Xinjiang have tughanjer [the birthplace], but they don’t have atameken [fatherland] and otan [fatherland/​ native land]; for those who moved to Qazaqstan, now they don’t have tughanjer but they have atameken and otan.’ Hairat thought that he belongs to the second category. It seems that Qazaqs from Xinjiang are somehow not entitled to have a complete life, always lacking a part of what is considered an ‘essential’ qara shangyraq. While I was introducing the ‘townspeople gathering’ focus group at the Chinese restaurant in Almaty, some of my participants joked with each other that they were not knowledgeable enough to talk about topics I wanted to discuss, like cultural traditions. Jazen then jumped in, saying ‘There is no Qazaq who is unknowledgeable.’ In its repatriation programme, the rhetoric of the Qazaqstani state tends to naturalise the links between language, ethnicity and nation. This strategy can be a very effective way for authorities to argue for, or enhance, the cohesiveness of people in the country. Yet, as I have discussed, there are considerable obstacles facing migrants’ integration into a de facto multicultural Qazaqstani environment, as pictured in the Atameken

Figure 8.2  The multicultural surroundings of the ‘Atameken’ Complex. (photo by author, 2019). 125

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​

photo (see Figure 8.2). As a result, they find themselves becoming lost and caught in continual struggles as they try to claim belonging. Qazaq migrants from Xinjiang often experience new feelings of isolation and exclusion, as well as a sense of ‘inferiority’ in the social system, because they do not speak Russian, which is considered ‘the basic social etiquette’ in Qazaqstani society, and thus makes them appear ‘less civilised’. Ultimately, in my research I found that among Qazaqs migrating to Qazaqstan from Xinjiang, although they claim that they belong to the Qazaqstan community, the reality is an everyday struggle. They must deal with a sense of alienation in this new ‘homeland’, which is not in fact monolithically Qazaq, but rather another multicultural and multilingual nation. At the same time, too much emphasis and celebration of the culture of one group as ‘higher culture’ or ‘higher class’, and the belittling of others as ‘lower culture’ or ‘lower class’, feeds into exclusion of other communities and associated cultures (Gal 2005). In different ways, the worth of non-​ Qazaq communities is questioned in this framework, which thus works against the state’s parallel aspiration to build a civic nation. As is typical of migrant groups everywhere, a strong sense of nostalgia for their ‘home’ back in Xinjiang quickly developed. The migrants build and romanticise strong ideas around idealistic notions of ‘homeland’ rooted in monolithic Qazaq culture. Qazaqs from Xinjiang pursue more specific forms of connection, by emphasising genealogical links, and celebrating shared cultural traditions such as aitys as a form that grounds a claim to continuity and legitimises their belonging to the ‘homeland’. Participating in and reflecting on aitys poetry as a shared public cultural tradition becomes a means for many poets and audiences alike to express their ideas, struggles and hopes. They project the romanticisation of their own tughanjer –​Xinjiang –​ onto the future imagination of their historical atameken –​Qazaqstan. To cope with their exclusion from the atameken of Qazaqstan and the nostalgia for their ‘other’ home, Xinjiang, recent migrants divide their sense of belonging in time and space, between their memories of Xinjiang and realising their dreams for Qazaqstan. As Saya reminisced during our conversation, ‘I’ve been in many places in Qazaqstan, but nowhere is like our tughanjer [the birthplace], three Aimakhs [the three northern Xinjiang regions of Altay, Tarbaghatay region and Ili Qazaq prefecture].’ While Saya distinguishes these places, for Qazaq migrants, the geography itself seems recast as an earlier period: the regions of Ili, Altay and Tarbaghatay of Xinjiang are thus embraced as part of the ‘homeland’. Ultimately, every person, family and community must negotiate what it means to be attached to different times and places according to their experiences (Rees et al. 2021). However, what people are reaching for –​in common language and traditions, in co-​constructed narratives of authentic, nomadic Qazaq cultural life indigenous to the Qazaq steppe back in time –​is the simple idea that every ethnic Qazaq is entitled to be part of this Qazaq community. In effect, the idea of such a shared and protected ‘homeland’ –​the ‘big family’, the qara shangyraq –​only partially works to include native Qazaqs and the large number of Qazaqs migrating from other places, while also potentially excluding non-​Qazaq citizens here.

126

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​

NOTES 1 Qazaqs today are mainly distributed across China’s Xinjiang territory and Qazaqstan, with smaller populations in other countries such as Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. 2 www.thea ​ t lan​ t ic.com/​ t ec​ h nol​ o gy/​ a rch​ i ve/​ 2 009/​ 0 7/​ o n-​ u igh​ u rs-​ h an-​ a nd-​ g ene​ r al-​ r ac​ ial-​attitu​des-​in-​china/​21137/​www.bbc.com/​zhong​wen/​simp/​foc​us_​o​n_​ch​ina/​2014/​04/​ 140421_​focus_​o​n_​ch​ina_​xinj​iang​_​urg​hur_​han 3 https://​24.kz/​kz/​zha-​aly-​tar/​o-​am/​item/​361​638-​t-​uelsiz​dik-​al-​aly-​ansha-​andasy​myz-​elge-​ ora​ldy 4 This title refers to the saying ‘Torteuy tugel bolsa tobedegy keledy, altauy ala bolasa auyzdaghy ketedy’: ‘If we have all four united, we can get what we want above our ceilings, if there are six with various minds, we will lose what is in our mouths.’ This saying articulates the importance of unity, completeness and solidarity. 5 Zhandarbek Bulgakov, an aqyn from Qazaqstan, the winner of the Daryn Laureate. 6 Didar Hamiev, an aqyn from Qazaqstan. He has been awarded one of the two Aitys Aqtanggery honours given to outstanding aqyns in Qazaqstan. 7 Nur Otan Party, translated as ‘Bright Fatherland’, is pro-​presidential and the largest ruling party in Qazaqstan. 8 The song is about the author resembles the heroes and heroines died in the Incident as the qarabauyr qazqaldaq [those who had been killed]. 9 Qazaq yurts, called kiyzui mostly in Qazaqstan, and kigizui among Qazaqs in Xinjiang. 10 ‘Kultobenyng basynda kunde jiyn’ is very famous account of an eighteenth-​century event. Kultobe is located in in the Ordabasy region, near the Ahmed Yasavi shrine in today’s Turkistan region. In the depths of the Ordabasy Mountains in 1726, the Qazaq Horde was built, the heads of the best of the three Qazaq Juz came together to discuss the mobilisation of the population in the struggle against the Dzungar invasion. These meetings are counted as among the most important events in the history of the Qazaq people, which raised the spirit of the people, ignited national pride, gave courage and strength, and is said to have decided the fate of the future as a united people. From that time on, it was considered a sacred place. The saying ‘Gather at the head of Kultobe every day’ dates back to that time (see also at https://​old.qaza​qtv.com/​o/​kz/​tele​joba​lar/​item/​1578-​k-​lt-​beni-​basy​nda-​k-​nde-​ zhiyn-​nem​ese-​z-​t-​uke-​khan-​ordas​yna-​ajnal-​an-​k-​lt-​be) 11 On crackdown and violence in contemporary Xinjiang, see also Smith Finley 2019; Roberts 2018; Zenz 2018; Byler 2021a, 2021b and this volume.

REFERENCES Bloch, A. 2013. ‘Citizenship, Belonging, and Moldovan Migrants in Post-​Soviet Russia’, Ethnos 79 (4): 445–​472. Byler, D. 2021a. In the camps: China’s high-​tech penal colony. New York: Columbia University Global Reports. Byler, D. 2021b. Terror capitalism: Uyghur dispossession and masculinity in a Chinese city. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Diener, A. C. 2005. ‘Kazakhstan’s Kin State Diaspora: Settlement Planning and The Oralman Dilemma’, Europe-​Asia Studies 57 (2): 327–​48. Diener, A. C. 2008. ‘The Settlement of the Returning Kazakh Diaspora: Practicality, Choice, and the Nationalization of Social Space’, pp. 265–​304 in Buckley, C., Ruble, B. and Hoffmann, E.T. (eds.) Migration, homeland, and belonging in Eurasia. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Dubuisson, E. M. 2010. ‘Confrontation in and Through the Nation in Kazakh Aitys Poetry’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (1): 101–​15. 127

—​​​​ Z h a i n a M e i r k h a n —​​​​ Dubuisson, E. M. 2014. ‘Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons’, pp.55–​77 in Reeves, M., Rasanayagam, J. and Beyer, J. (eds.) Ethnographies of the state in Central Asia: Performing politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dubuisson, E. M. 2017. Living language in Qazaqstan: The dialogic emergence of an ancestral worldview. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dubuisson, E. M. and Genina, A. 2011. ‘Claiming an Ancestral Homeland: Kazakh Pilgrimage and Migration in Inner Asia’, Central Asian Survey 30 (3–​4): 469–​85. Dukeyev, B. 2017. ‘Ethnic Return Migration in Qazaqstan: Shifting State Dynamics, Changing Media Discourses’, Central Asia Working Papers, 1–​11. Gal, S. 2005. ‘Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/​Private’, in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 27. Goffman, E. 1981 Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Halse, C. 2018. ‘Theories and Theorising of Belonging’, pp. 1–​28 in Halse, C. (ed), Interrogating belonging for young people in schools, London: Palgrave. Kuşçu, I. 2013. ‘Ethnic Return Migration and Public Debate: The Case of Kazakhstan’, International Migration 52 (2):178–​97. Light, N. 2018. ‘Kyrgyz Genealogies and Lineages: Histories, Everyday Life and Patriarchal Institutions in Northwestern Kyrgyzstan’, Genealogy 2 (4): 53. Meirkhan, Z. 2012 ‘A Study on Qazaq Aqyn Aitys –​from Cultural and Cognitive Perspectives’, MA Thesis, Urumqi: Xinjiang University. Meirkhan, Z. and Nikopoulos, J. forthcoming. ‘Shuttling between Identities: Xinjiang Aqyns’ “Double-​Faced” Dilemma –​Aitys Poetry in Qazaqstan and Xinjiang’, Angime (Literary journal, Nazarbayev University). Michaels, P. 1986. ‘Ninety Winds of Change: The Alma-​Ata Riots and the Mobilization of Kazakh Ethnic Identity’, Michigan Discussions in Anthropology (12): 39–​50. Millward, J. 2021 [2009]. Eurasian Crossroads: The History of Xinjiang. New York: Columbia University Press. Mostowlansky, T. 2013. ‘ “The State Starts from the Family”: Peace and Harmony in Tajikistan’s Eastern Pamirs’, Central Asian Survey 32 (4): 462–​74. Muhtar. 2019. ‘Find Your Batyr (Heros)’, YouTube www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​P3ZY​PjXT​ QgU&feat​ure=​youtu.be Noda, J. 2016. The Kazakh Khanates between the Russian and Qing Empires: Central Eurasian international relations during the eighteenth centuries. Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishing. Post, J. C. 2007 ‘ “I Take My Dombra and Sing to Remember My Homeland”: Identity, Landscape and Music in Kazakh Communities of Western Mongolia’, Ethnomusicology Forum 16 (1): 45–​69. Rees, K., Williams, N. W. and Diener. A. 2021. ‘Territorial Belonging and Homeland Disjuncture: Uneven Territorialisations in Kazakhstan’, Europe-​Asia Studies 73 (4):713–​39. Roberts, S. R. 2018. ‘The Biopolitics of China’s “War on Terror” and the Exclusion of the Uyghurs’, Critical Asian Studies, 50 (2): 238–​58. Salimjan, G. 2017. ‘Debating Gender and Kazakhness: Memory and Voice in Poetic Duel Aytis Between China and Kazakhstan’, Central Asian Survey 36 (2): 263–​80. Salimjan, G. 2020. ‘Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh Life Cycle Songs in Xinjiang’, pp. 115–​140 in Breed, A., Dubuisson, E. M. and Igmen, A. (eds.) Creating culture in post-​socialist Central Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shanatibieke, M. 2016. ‘The Road to Modernisation’. Inner Asia 18 (1): 135–​51. Sherzer, J. and Webster, A. K. 2018. Speech play, verbal art and linguistic anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith-​Finely, J. 2019. ‘Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-​Terrorism Evolved into State Terror?’ Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 1–​26. 128

—​​​​ Q a r a S h a n g y r a q : s e a r c h i n g f o r a Q a z a q h o m e —​​​​ Werner, C. A., Emmelhainz, C. and Barcus. H. 2017 ‘Privileged Exclusion in Post-​ Soviet Kazakhstan: Ethnic Return Migration, Citizenship, and the Politics of (Not) Belonging’, Europe-​Asia Studies 69 (10): 1557–​83. Yessenova, S. 2005 ‘ “Routes and Roots” of Kazakh Identity: Urban Migration in Postsocialist Kazakhstan’, Russian Review 64 (4): 661–​79. Zenz, A. 2018 ‘“Thoroughly Reforming Them towards a Healthy Heart Attitude”: China’s Political Re-​Education Campaign in Xinjiang’, Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 102–​28.

129

CHAPTER NINE

THE DVOR AND URBAN COMMUNITIES Socio-​spatial rhythms in Bishkek and other cities of Central Asia Philipp Schröder INTRODUCTION: THE PRISM OF IUG-​2 AND BISHKEK IN THE MID-​2 000S Iug-​2 is a Soviet-​era ‘microregion’ in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek. Built during the 1970s and 1980s, this neighbourhood consists of 22 concrete-​panelled apartment buildings and is home to about 3,000 residents. In between these 9-​storey blocks, there are courtyards (dvory1) with trees, benches and playgrounds. Through the decades, the recreational appeal of the courtyards in Iug-​2 has faded: most swings are now rusty and squeaky, the wooden seating surface of many benches is broken, and in ever more parts of the neighbourhood, dirt and mud patches have come to dominate over what used to be green spaces. Overall, the state of the courtyards aligns with the worn-​out aura emanating from the grey and never renovated socialist facades all around. I have a history with Iug-​2. It dates back to 2007, the year when I began my first ethnographic fieldwork there. But the brief account I just provided of the physical appearance of Iug-​2 was as accurate back then as it was in early 2020, when I last strolled through the neighbourhood. This is already a first indication of what to consider when following the proposition made by Reeves, for the case of road-​ construction projects in southern Kyrgyzstan, that infrastructural forms are ‘contingent co-​constitutions’ (2017, 713) of the material and the social. Applied to place-​making in a former Soviet municipal housing project, one can still observe the general simultaneity of the human and non-​human forces. But in detail, it is essential to remark that in environments such as Iug-​2, the outer material, represented by the arrangement and condition of apartment blocks and courtyards, might remain a (stagnant) constant, while the social, represented by quotidian practices of exchange and identification, might be subject to rather rapid change. To illustrate the latter, let us take the mid-​ 2000s and Iug-​2 as a prism for looking into the past and future of courtyard and community life. This suggestion draws on Humphrey’s insight that the Soviet material structures of the dormitory (obshchezhitie) and the courtyard (dvor) are no simple reiterations of what official ideology envisaged, but ‘The built construction seems capable … of acting as if like a prism: gathering meanings and scattering them again, yet not randomly. As a prism has a given number of faces, the light it scatters has direction’ (Humphrey 2005, 55). 130

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-11

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​

When remaining with this image, the light that is gathered and scattered through the prism of ‘Iug-​2 in the mid-​2000s’ would be the notion of urban community. As Clarke (2014, 54) reminds us, the resilience of community as a scientific and emic concept, despite its apparent elusiveness, rests on three aspects: it is a critical resource to address, represent and examine social change; it allows for easy movement between and to articulate relevant binaries, such as vernacular-​ governmental, emotional-​ pragmatic, or nostalgic-​futuristic; and, by always implying ‘the other’, community enables critical distancing from the unwanted, such as a calculating market, corrupted state, or unattractive social group. The following sections thus reflect on institutions, meanings, belongings and place-​making between the late Soviet era and today, always beginning from Iug-​2 and returning to it, while also expanding to Bishkek at large and other cityscapes across Central Asia. Exploring various influences that urban communities have encountered since the 1990s, from neoliberal reforms in municipal governance to demographic shifts based on rural in-​migration, I document the waning relevance of single neighbourhoods and courtyards as spatial entities where residents socialize, exchange support within, or identify with, in Iug-​2 and elsewhere. Continuing on this, I point to more recent, interest-​based practices for community-​ making in digital, commercial or activist spaces across Central Asia during a less narrowly territorialized present.

NEIGHBOURHOOD MALE SOCIALIZATION In the mid-​2000s, and despite it being far from picturesque, ‘our courtyard’ (nash dvor) meant a lot for Batyr, Tilek and other young males who resided in Iug-​22. The area in front of their apartment blocks, about 5,000 square meters, was the geographic epicentre and crucial socio-​symbolic resource for their daily lives (Schröder 2017a). These young men had become friends there while playing outside and attending kindergartens and schools close by. They had established a reliable basis for mutual respect and support while collectively fighting the ‘boys’ (patsany) from adjoining Bishkek neighbourhoods, and while being there for one another during the ‘difficult minutes’ of life. They turned to Iug-​2, or rather Shanghai as the quarter was informally known among ‘real Bishkek youth’, to formulate claims of rightful belonging and in order to justify the exclusion of recent rural migrants to the city. Also, for lack of money to spend on pastime in Bishkek’s cafés or clubs, the courtyard had always been the foremost hang-​out spot for Batyr, Tilek and their peers in the evenings and nights, during summer and winter (see also Nasritdinov and Schröder 2016). When measuring Iug-​2 and its courtyards for indications of community, we need to see that these young males represented a particular and diminishing user group. In the mid-​2000s, they were all around 20 years of age and unmarried. This meant that they still lived in their parents’ apartments, but were not burdened anymore by similarly arduous household chores as boys or girls younger than them. Also, they were not yet occupied with the after-​ work obligations that usually emerged from married and parental life. Such elder neighbourhood brothers (bratany) were considered to already be ‘off the streets’. This meant that they would pass through the courtyards on their way home, receive a respectful hand-​shake from 131

—​​​​ P h i l i p p S c h r ö d e r —​​​​

Batyr and co., and then quietly spend the rest of the evening inside their apartments instead of on a bench in the courtyard. But when these elder generations of Batyr’s bratany were still out and about, particularly during the so-​called ‘wild 1990s’ (likhie 90e), youth street culture was depicted as more vibrant, violent and relevant for shaping a young man’s reputation than I could observe in the mid-​2000s. The focal point for all these essentials of male youth socialization was neighbourhood territoriality, which encompassed the courtyards as the most intimate unit worth protecting against alien intruders. For the late 1980s, at least 50 such ‘youth territories’ with informal names inspired by architectural design or local histories could be identified across Frunze (Bishkek’s name during the Soviet era; Nasritdinov and Schröder 2016, 10–​11). For young men, their courtyards and neighbourhoods also marked the sites where they enrolled and passed through the ‘school of the street’. In his pioneering study on this phenomenon in 1990s Tbilisi (Georgia), Koehler refers to the school of the street as a ‘space de passage for boys becoming men, boys leaving the protected and protective territory of family and school in order to enter an unknown, uncanny space of autonomous rules, authorities, rituals and procedures’ (1999, 42). In Bishkek, the school of the street as an informal institution of male socialization and liminal interstices between family and society, had almost faded out by the mid-​2000s. Its basic structure and ‘curriculum’ were still in place, which included an age-​hierarchy distinguishing younger and older neighbourhood brothers (bratishki, bratany), a stress on physical exercise and martial arts training, and the promotion of social exchanges along the lines of showing respect (towards bratany) and taking responsibility (for bratishki). But in Iug-​2 and other quarters of Kyrgyzstan’s capital, ever fewer young neighbourhood brothers could be recruited for the school of the street. In the mid-​2000s, building up a localized reputation from exposing oneself to this kind of ‘social upbringing’ (vospitanie), which was time-​ consuming and demanded submissive behaviour, promised only negligible rewards beyond one’s own courtyard. Unlike in the previous decades, the opportunities to transform neighbourhood social capital into profit or power were minor: the school of the street was not as tightly related anymore to organized crime or racketeering, to the Soviet ‘second economy’, or its immediate capitalist aftermath of ‘violent entrepreneurialism’ (Volkov 2002; Schröder 2010). With the bratany ‘off the streets’ and the bratishki uninvested in the ‘school of the street’, Batyr and his peers represented the last generation of ‘real Shanghaians’. The courtyards of Iug-​2 were theirs to appropriate and hang around in from the early evening until late into the night. But in the same way as all other long-​term residents, Batyr’s generation was keenly aware that the courtyards’ potential as a space for community-​making and urban male social integration would not last much longer than the mid-​2000s.

INSTITUTIONS AND ORDER Looking beyond male youth, residents of Iug-​2 who were in their 50s and older during the mid-​2000s conveyed a distinctively different air of nostalgia. Having experienced their formative and ‘prime years’ (luchshie gody) during the Soviet era, 132

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​

they remembered a cohesive neighbourhood community marked by the rhythms and state-​endorsed rituals of this era. Compared to those days, when all the neighbours would bring out their tables to the courtyard, sharing food and jointly celebrating the essential red holidays in the calendar, what Iug-​2 had become after the 1990s was characterized by such elderly, ‘indigenous residents’ (korennye zhiteli) as a largely impersonal and self-​serving mass of strangers (see also Nasritdinov et al. 2015). For a neighbourhood in Astana around 2008–​09, Laszczkowski observed a quite different, rather animated and inter-​generational dvor-​life than I could for Iug-​2. In the courtyards of his field-​site, called 5 Oktyabrskaya, residents not only greeted each other ‘heartily’ before chatting, but also ‘the women exchanged home-​made pickles and vegetables from their suburban garden patches, and the men helped each other repair their cars’ (Laszczkowski 2015, 145–​46). In other respects, 5 Oktyabrskaya presented a similar material environment as Iug-​2, that is, a Soviet-​era arrangement of multi-​storey apartment blocks dating from the 1970s. Both these neighbourhoods had been caught up in neoliberal processes that reformed the previous ‘Soviet social modernity’, when heating systems and other elements of urban infrastructure had still factored into a more holistic assembly of ‘collective life’ that connected ‘households to urban utilities and utilities to national circuits of resource flow in a system that was driven by a substantive rationality of need fulfilment’ (Collier 2011, 8). The post-​Soviet privatization of the housing market, the commoditization of utility resources (heat, gas, water, etc.), as well as the de facto retreat of municipalities from administering complexes such as Iug-​2 or 5 Oktyabrskaya, effectively fragmented this configuration. It made the actual implementation of maintenance work in shared neighbourhood spaces a matter of the residents’ informal solidarity, ad hoc ingenuity and individual financial capabilities. In Iug-​2, the work of cleaning, repairing, painting, or planting was already outsourced as a paid-​for service in the later 1990s (see Martínez 2018, 228). This regularly led to conflicts between neighbours and the representatives of the lowest level of self-​government, which in the case of Iug-​2 was represented by two elderly Russian women residing in a tiny office inside one neighbourhood building. In the mid-​ 2000s, they used to complain agitatedly about their always tedious efforts to go from door to door and collect the small amounts necessary to pay the courtyard cleaner (dvornik). Another constant annoyance were the dysfunctional elevators, which had remained in service since the 1970s. Although repair charges were supposed to be shared among the residents of the apartment block, most households living below the third floor rejected this demand, arguing that they would not use the elevator. In return, residents of lower floors employed the same argument whenever they were called for contributions to patch up a leaking roof. Unlike in the Soviet past or in other parts of Central Asia’s present, since the 1990s, Iug-​2 has lacked basic social institutions through which even small-​scale community matters could be resolved. The former all-​Union Soviet subbotnik, a collective labour effort of ambivalently voluntary and compulsory nature that had gathered citizens on specific Saturdays (subbota) to perform unpaid work in order to ‘beautify’ (ukrasit) their neighbourhoods, was erratically announced in Iug-​2, but factually was a remnant of the past. There was also no mobilization of residents to mutually get involved in neighbourhood issues along the lines of an informal institution such as 133

—​​​​ P h i l i p p S c h r ö d e r —​​​​

hashar. As Liu notes in his ethnography on mahalla (neighbourhood) communities of ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan’s city of Osh: ‘Hashar refers to neighborly assistance or monetarily uncompensated communal labor, which typically involves house construction, tree planting, or the maintenance of street waterworks’ (Liu 2012, 130). Beyond the pragmatic, practicing hashar can be taken to index a community’s moral status and an expression of its members’ sense of belonging. Emergent from its conventional hospitality, constant co-​presencing and strict social surveillance, Liu depicts the mahalla as the primary source for the formation of a pious and virtuous personhood –​and eventually a way for Osh Uzbeks of dwelling in the world and even treating ‘the state like a mahalla writ large’ (Liu 2012, 147). In Iug-​2 of the mid-​2000s, while there was a notion of proper order and conduct, this was not similarly encompassing, penetrating and consequential as that of a mahalla. Long-​term inhabitants of Iug-​2 shared an understanding that the condition of a courtyard would reflect upon the reputation of its resident households. Quite straightforwardly, however, this referenced to an order of the physical environment, such as that garbage should be put in the small cardboard boxes placed next to the benches; or that cars should be parked ‘accurately’ in the side-​streets and were not meant to block others. In regards to social etiquette, the expectation was to greet neighbours, but not necessarily to copiously chat with them. Visits among neighbours in their homes were rare, as were acts of extensive mutual solidarity, both financially or as labour efforts. Male and female youth could socialize together in the courtyards during the day without fearing gossip that questioned a girl’s chastity and her family’s propriety. In the evenings, it was acceptable that young men, such as Batyr and his friends, would consume some beers and play cards while hanging out in the courtyards. For those rare occasions when male youth decided to go beyond these conventions, to smoke or consume vodka, Iug-​2 offered nearby evasive spaces, where one could easily slip out of view. Most prominent among them was the school’s basketball playground, which was located right in the middle of the neighbourhood, and so still in closest proximity to the courtyards and apartment blocks. This adds to the observation that the boundary to what was considered a ‘personal matter’ (lichnoe delo), and thus something into which neighbours should not get involved in or spread word about, was drawn considerably tighter in Iug-​2 than in a mahalla.

DEMOGRAPHY AND THE RURAL IN THE CITY What Iug-​2 had in common with many urban neighbourhoods across Central Asia was a changing demography. Laszczkowski (2015, 145) remarks that since the 1990s ‘up to three-​quarters of long-​standing inhabitants left 5 Oktyabrskaya and were replaced by various kinds of newcomers.’ For Iug-​2 in 2008, my estimates were that 50–​60 per cent of its approximately 3,000 residents still belonged to the group of ‘urbanites’, that is, long-​term residents of mostly Kyrgyz or Russian ethnicity (Schröder 2017a, 13–​15). The remaining 40 per cent were almost exclusively ethnic Kyrgyz, who had recently migrated to the capital from a rural area of the country. These internal migration dynamics were even more pronounced at the city-​level. The last Soviet census of 1989 concluded a total population of 620,000 for Frunze, and a ratio among the predominant ethnic groups of 56 per cent Russians and 23 per 134

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​

cent Kyrgyz. Until 2007, the total population of the capital, now called Bishkek, had increased to 814,000 inhabitants, now among them 25 per cent Russians and 62 per cent Kyrgyz (Schröder 2010, 458). Similar numbers were noted for Astana, which in 1989 (then called Tselinograd) had a total population of 277,365, among which 17.5 per cent identified as ethnic Kazakhs. Twenty years later, not only had the total population increased to 639,311, but also the ratio of ethnic Kazakhs had risen to 63.4 per cent. (Danzer et al. 2013, 3) In their comprehensive assessment of domestic mobility in Kyrgyzstan, Fryer and colleagues (2014, 183–​84) distinguish three ‘waves’ of massive re-​locations towards the Republic’s capital between the late Soviet era and the mid-​2000s. In the first wave, occurring between 1989 and 1991, the squatting of land in the city’s outer districts was conceived of primarily as a form of social protest opposed to the late Communist regime’s unjust land allocation. As part of the ‘economic wave’, 1992–​ 2005, primarily residents of the impoverished rural periphery in Kyrgyzstan’s northern part arrived in Bishkek, hoping that their income opportunities would improve in the urban domain. After 2005 and the regime change from (the northern Kyrgyz) President Akaev to (the southern Kyrgyz) President Bakiev, the third wave consisted mostly of citizens from the southern regions of the country who moved to the capital (see also Alymbaeva 2013, 136–​43). Demographic shifts at such rapid pace and of such magnitude, as far as population increase, ethnic belonging and regional origin are concerned, certainly have the ability to get to the core of established urban routines and social fabrics. In an earlier publication, Liu (2007) approaches Osh as telling a ‘tale of two cities’. For its residents, the city’s Soviet sector of rectilinear streets and apartment blocks inspired associations with modern urban life, European civilization, ethnic pluralism and Socialist-​era Russian domination. In contrast, the historic mahalla-​sector of narrow and winding streets, populated by ethnic Uzbeks, represented notions of Central Asian traditionalism, Islamic mores, patriarchy and close(d) communities. Such a contrast could hardly be detected for Frunze, which through most of its twentieth-​century history had rather unambiguously been a Russian-​Soviet city: its urban planning was oriented on a chessboard layout since the late Tsarist administration; its demographic majority was of ‘European origin’ (e.g., ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Germans); and its lingua franca was Russian, which in time also many urban Kyrgyz employed as their family language (see Korth 2005). A bifurcated imaginary, comparable to that of Osh, emerged in Bishkek only with the massive in-​migration from the countryside after Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991. Examining urban narratives across the border in Kazakhstan, Yessenova (2003, 148) quotes a resident of Almaty: ‘The city is the “heart” of the nation, inspiring to follow [its dynamics.] But the village is its “soul”. … One cannot live without the other.’ In the mid-​2000s, such an idealization resonated well also with long-​term Frunze/​ Bishkek residents. But in their eyes, with the sudden and sizeable appearance of Kyrgyz rurality in the city, two opposed modi operandi of quotidian existence were now unnecessarily colliding in one location. For many urbanites, the stereotypical villager was a pleasantly naïve, humorous and authentic contemporary only as long as he remained in his habitat and mutual contact was sporadic. But when taking up permanent residency in Kyrgyzstan’s primary metropolis, so in the urban narrative, 135

—​​​​ P h i l i p p S c h r ö d e r —​​​​

that very same personae manifested as an obstinate, irascible and intolerant ethno-​ nationalist (Schröder 2010). Not only in Bishkek but across urban Central Asian, the arrival of these antipodes to a cosmopolitan, Russian-​speaking arena of civilizational sophistication was anxiously anticipated as a ‘ruralization’ of cities (Alexander and Buchli 2007; Flynn and Kosmarskaya 2012; Kosmarskaya 2014; Kosmarski 2011). Aside from the Russian terms ‘rurals’ (selskie) or kolkhozniki (‘kolkhoz workers’), locally still stronger defamations were employed, such as myrk in Kyrgyzstan (Schröder 2017a, 185–​203), or mambet in Kazakhstan (Laszczkowski 2016, 58–​60; Bissenova 2017, 7). In Bishkek’s cityscape, the rural most vividly materialized in the so-​ called novostroiki (‘new settlements’). Residing on mostly squatted land, which in official development plans was not designated for residential use, the struggle of novostroiki residents to claim urban citizenship (access to health care, education, social benefits), to legalize private property, and to connect to basic urban infrastructure (transportation, electricity, sewage) is well documented (Hatcher 2017, 2015; Hatcher and Thieme 2015; Isabaeva 2014, 2013; Alymbaeva 2006). In which ways novostroiki have evolved into communities beyond the matters of material connectivity and social, political or property rights has been less researched. A recent study by Cramer (2018) points to yntymak (kyrg.) as a polymorphous notion among novostroiki settlers (sometimes now second-​or third-​ generation residents there) that encompasses a counter-​narrative to urban apathy highlighting a village-​like conviviality, a cultural repertoire to mobilize communal support, and a political instrument to direct collective action against (what is perceived as) adversarial attempts of city-​governance. In the sense that yntymak is, as Reeves observes, an ‘enactment of social obligations marked by gender and generation’ (2014, 207), it appears as a potential praxis for place-​making among ethnic Kyrgyz in Bishkek’s new settlements; one that corresponds with Liu’s characterization of the long-​established Uzbek mahallas in Osh as a particular way of ‘dwelling in the world’ (see Liu, this volume).

GENTRIFICATION AND (HARMLESS) NEWCOMERS ‘This is the sell-​out of our neighbourhood. Now these rurals already come here, to our parts of the city’ –​a friend of Batyr made this comment to me back in 2008, while we sat in his courtyard watching a Kyrgyz family move beds, wardrobes and boxes into an Iug-​2 apartment block. His unwelcoming remark addressed two aspects. First, that incoming Kyrgyz migrants would not (anymore) exclusively inhabit the peripheral novostroiki, but also relocate to areas closer to the city centre. And second, that Kyrgyzstan’s emphatic post-​Soviet embrace of capitalist market reforms had led to new divisions into lower and higher income strata. In Bishkek, as elsewhere across urban Central Asia to a similar or lesser degree, the privatization of the housing market initiated a process of gentrification (Alexander and Buchli 2007, 25–​27). In quarters such as Iug-​2, this was rather unnoticeable from the outside, that is, the façades of the residential buildings stayed grey and the staircases or courtyards decayed. Instead, material change occurred behind closed doors, where households replaced Soviet-​era flooring, wallpaper, or other items of 136

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​

home decoration –​sooner or later, expensively or cheaply –​according to their purchasing power. The most significant distinction in affluence thus emerged from whether a family had been assigned an apartment during the Soviet era and ‘simply privatized’ it for as little as several hundred US dollars during the early 1990s; or whether a family had the means to purchase living space at the real-​estate prices of the mid-​2000s, which for Iug-​2 ranged between $25,000 for a one-​room apartment and $85,000 for a three-​room apartment. This observation clarifies that income-​based urban divisions have not neatly fallen into the urban rich vs. the rural poor in the city. It makes apparent that there are in-​betweens beyond a binary opposition, such as formerly privileged urbanites who now rather belong to the category of the post-​Soviet ‘dispossessed’ (Nazpary 2002), or representatives of a newly emerged middle-​class of rural provenance. Aside from the financial dimension, fragmentation in Iug-​2 since the 2000s had become about identification. While the established residents nostalgically cultivated their sense of belonging, those who had recently moved here saw the location as hardly more than a conveniently located and central neighbourhood of Kyrgyzstan’s capital, where otherwise they knew no one and whose local history they were unaware of. In contrast to the established residents, whose social ties tended to redundantly coalesce in this one place, for those new to Iug-​2 there were usually more meaningful places in other parts of Bishkek. For example, this was the case for many rural university students, whose first stop in Bishkek were either relatives or friends of their parents, a dormitory, or a rented apartment. While studying and making new friends, they sometimes relocated ten times or more within the city (see also Schröder 2013). Their priorities were to secure affordable accommodation and to cohabit independently, and happily with their peers. And as long as they would not have to fear for their personal integrity, it was at best secondary to these students which quarter and what social fabric they would temporarily settle into next. For most rural students and other incoming new residents to Iug-​2 or similar Bishkek neighbourhoods, the courtyards did not represent a parochial space situated in between the private home and the wider cityscape (e.g., public parks or restaurants). In their ways of partitioning space into ‘hierarchies of intimacy’ (Liu 2012, 138), the courtyards did not feature as an arena for communal exchange, but were reduced to generic spaces of transience from and to their apartments. In consequence, old and new residents basically lived a parallel existence, which led to neither meaningful integration nor open conflict between them, aside from each side half-​quietly voicing their annoyance with the ‘rude urbanites’ or the ‘ignorant rurals’, respectively. Outside of their neighbourhoods, long-​term Bishkek urbanites strategized to avoid unpleasant encounters with young, male groups of rurals. They bypassed novostroiki, they did not attend mass gatherings in the city centre, and they did not frequent certain areas of parks during evenings or weekends. Yet the very same spatio-​temporal rhythms, aiming to escape harassment, theft and other violent altercations in the urban public, could be found among recent arrivals to Bishkek (Schröder 2016). For the most part, the aspiration of migrants with a village background was to smoothly blend into the urban flows of Kyrgyzstan’s capital and avoid the stigma of ‘backwardness’ (otstalost’). In fact, this meant (no more than) to acquire the sensory 137

—​​​​ P h i l i p p S c h r ö d e r —​​​​

identifiers of proper jargon, dress and etiquette, which would then lead others during encounters to tacitly acknowledge that someone was ‘urban enough’. Beyond that, non-​native Bishkekians were usually content with being categorized as ‘newcomers’ (priezzhie), a status that attested to their post-​rural socialization and confirmed them as benign co-​practitioners within the urban domain (and not trespassing ‘ruralizers’ of the city). From there on, and not only in Bishkek, city newcomers quite self-​confidently rejected becoming ‘just like’ urbanites, by referring to them, for example, as spoiled, arrogant, or ‘people of the past’ (Laszczkowski 2016, 68).

ALTERNATIVE SPACES FOR COMMUNITY-​M AKING After the mid-​2000s, neither long-​term Bishkekians nor urban newcomers focused their socializing efforts, and exchanges of support and identity work on the level of neighbourhoods, but rather on one spanning the entire city (and beyond). While this had never been different for the newcomers to the city, the established residents of Iug-​2 and Bishkek equated the replacement of their old neighbours with the lamentable passing of their localized communities. Looking forward, already the next generation of young males in Iug-​2 following after Batyr and his peers had adjusted to that situation. Unable to connect to their new neighbours, due to the asserted impossibility of finding a ‘common language’ with them, culturally and in parts literally (the use of Kyrgyz vs. Russian language), they shifted their attention. Spatially, now urbanites from all over Bishkek, who generally shared their ‘city mindset’ (gorodskoi mentalitet), were considered eligible for befriending. Along with the scaling-​up of identification and the subsequently multiplied potential for integration (among all urbanites and not exclusively among Iug-​ 2ians), a shift of emphasis could be observed after the 2000s, from a predominance of place-​based community-​making to one that was driven by common interests. One of Batyr’s younger neighbourhood brothers (bratishki), for example, had made friends with another Bishkekian because they shared the dream of becoming famous rap artists. The two young men wrote lyrics together, pooled money to record their tracks in a small studio, performed in local clubs or festivals, and even in front of Batyr in Iug-​2. Before the millennium, their friendship would have been ‘simply unimaginable’, in their words, because this other Bishkekian originated from the quarter right next to Iug-​2, which had been considered its fiercest enemy during the 1990s inter-​neighbourhood battles. In Bishkek, the mid-​2000s were a time of accessing the internet at specific clubs or cafés, less from a home-​computer, and certainly not via a smartphone. But when compared to some years before, playing computer games online or exchanging messages via social networking platforms had become a widely available and affordable pastime activity for Bishkek youth (see Ibold 2010). In particular, odnoklassniki, a social networking service operational since 2006, and the multiplayer video shooter game Counter-​Strike had evolved as potent sources for integrating beyond the narrower territorial confinements of one courtyard or one quarter (Schröder 2017a, 208–​10; Kirmse 2013, 129). Among the bratishki of Batyr in Iug-​2, quite a few got in touch with other Bishkek boys while chatting online during a game of

138

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​

Counter-​Strike, and later transferred these digital acquaintances into offline, face-​to-​ face encounters. If for young residents in Iug-​2 it was new pastime opportunities such as music-​ making or online-​gaming, which marked the nascent significance of interest-​based communities, for Bishkek at large and other cities across Central Asia, we can identify further alternative spaces to courtyards and residential neighbourhoods for engaging in urban sociability. Simkin and Schmidt (2019) discuss Bishkek cafés as recently emerged ‘third places’, next to the home (first place) and work (second place). These cafés address local middle-​class desires of attaching to a global-​urban coffee culture, but they also present their customers with a space for individual pursuit (reading or working), informal socialization, self-​presentation and business encounters. For combining a multipurpose functionality with a pleasant atmosphere, such cafés thus escape a clear demarcation between the domain of private homes and the professional workplace. Another recent appearance in former Soviet cityscapes have been large-​scale shopping malls. Taking the example of the ‘Mega mall’ in Aktobe (Kazakhstan), Jäger (2016) documents it as a space where the retail shops of global brands are strategically combined with ‘adjacent attractions’, such as a cinema, food court, children’s park, or ice-​skating rink. Aside from the alluring condensation of commerce and entertainment, the Mega has emerged as a ‘hot spot’ for local youth, because it is easily accessible regardless of season and offers a stage with enough anonymity to hang out with friends or cautiously experiment with self-​fashioning and harmless dating beyond traditional conventions. In the words of Laszczkowski (2011, 99), who had earlier identified a Mega mall in Astana as an emergent site for new forms of urban sociality between ‘worldliness’ and local politics, being there ‘is a socially situated practice of [mimetic] self-​making and self-​ alignment with certain people and values and against others’. Social activism that focuses on changes in the urban domain, or utilizes it as the arena to publicly advocate or contest particular viewpoints, might be considered as a further alternative space with potential for community-​making. Aside from expressing grievances and formulating societal demands, there have been efforts also in cities across Central Asia that aspire to re-​animate place-​based communities and localized urban identities. Bissenova (2017, 19–​23) discusses the initiative ‘Almaty –​creative city’, whose agenda was to retain (Soviet) urban cosmopolitanism, as opposed to Kazakh ethnic nationalism, via art-​ploshchadki (art-​squares), panel discussions, music and theatre performances. In Bishkek, the experience of the group ‘Urban Initiatives’, which unsuccessfully aspired to revive a neighbourhood sculpture park called Sloniki (‘little elephants’), made apparent that the sustainability of such projects is critically jeopardized in the case when a well-​intentioned activist concept does not resonate sufficiently with the local residents’ present life-​world (Nasritdinov and Schröder 2017, 123). Aside from examining a dis-​/​connect between activists and target-​groups, the question remains, also for future research in Central Asia, whether it might not be the participants engaging in the committee work, event management and project implementation of such social movements, who eventually constitute new forms of urban community themselves (see Pink 2008).

139

—​​​​ P h i l i p p S c h r ö d e r —​​​​

CONCLUSION: THE PRISM OF URBAN SOCIABILITIES IN BISHKEK AND BEYOND This contribution followed ways in which communities in Bishkek and other parts of urban Central Asia are in flux. Employing the analogy of a prism, I documented the waning relevance of narrowly defined territories through time, here from the late Soviet era until today. For these three decades, I identified demographic change and rural in-​migration, the informalization of urban governance, and an advancing income stratification as particular influences that gave shape to the prism of community-​making. In the case of Iug-​2, one line of scattering was directed at a geographic scaling-​up: this went from the courtyard, as a parochial space for male socialization and neighbourhood sociability until the end of the 1990s, to the entire city of Bishkek, where later the more inclusive categories of ‘urbanites’, ‘newcomers’ and ‘rurals’ befriended, encountered, or avoided each other. Understood as fleeting or persistent relations that ‘provide pleasure, satisfaction and meaning’ (Glick Schiller and Schmidt 2016, 11), the observation that present-​ day urban sociabilities across Central Asia seem inspired more than before by individual selection from a broadened spectrum of potential common interests can count as another such line of scattering. Computer-​gaming and other online exchange, the spread of ‘third places’ such as cafés or shopping malls, or the events organized by social activist collectives have thus crucially redirected the focus of community-​ making from courtyards and neighbourhoods to commercial, digital and more public spaces. Against this trend, it is noteworthy that those urban communities which apparently have ‘preserved’ a place-​based mutuality and custom-​based institutions for collective action also represent minorities, ethnic and/​or economic ones (see Joniak-​Lüthi, this volume). For example, this appears to be the case for ethnic Russians as found in Laszczkowski’s Astana neighborhood 5 Oktyabrskaya, or for marginalized rural migrants as in Bishkek’s novostroiki. This observation is further substantiated by the research of Ismailbekova (2018), who identifies the mahalla as a ‘securityscape’ into which ethnic Uzbeks retreated in response to the 2010 conflict in Osh and other parts of southern Kyrgyzstan, for example, by opening up stores there in order to avoid the Kyrgyz-​dominated public bazaars. Let us return for a final time to Bakyt, Tilek and their peers from Iug-​2, with whom I have remained in touch since 2007 as part of my multi-​temporal fieldwork (Schröder 2017b). Their quotidian lives have been equally affected by this prismatic scattering of scaling-​up and congregating in non-​neighbourhood spaces. Once they became husbands and fathers, they moved with their families to other neighbourhoods all across Bishkek, where ever since they have not appropriated and hung out in the courtyards, but pragmatically self-​identified as ‘urbanites from another quarter’. And for their routine get-​togethers as ‘ancient neighbourhood friends’ (drevnie druzia s raiona), they do not select Iug-​2 anymore, but commercial-​public venues that are less charged with localized collective memories, such as a soccer field that can be rented by the hour, or an old, established Bishkek basement beer pub.

140

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​

NOTES 1 If not otherwise indicated local terms in italics are from Russian language. Kyrgyz language terms are indicated as kyrg. 2 All names are pseudonyms.

REFERENCES Alexander, Catherine, and Victor Buchli. 2007. “Introduction.” In Urban Life in Post-​Soviet Asia, edited by Catherine Alexander, Victor Buchli, and Caroline Humphrey, 1–​ 39. London: UCL. Alymbaeva, Aida. 2006. “Ethnic Identity Issues: North and South (In the Case of Bishkek’s Peri-​Urbans Kelechek and Kök-​Jar).” Politics and Society Journal under Kyrgyz National University Bishkek Kyrgyzstan, no. 3–​4: 79–​102. —​—​—​. 2013. “Internal Migration in Kyrgyzstan: A Geographical and Sociological Study of Rural Migration.” In Migration and Social Upheaval as the Face of Globalization in Central Asia, edited by Marlène Laruelle, 117–​47. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Bissenova, Alima. 2017. “The Fortress and the Frontier: Mobility, Culture, and Class in Almaty and Astana.” Europe-​Asia Studies 69 (4): 642–​667. Clarke, John. 2014. “Community.” In A Companion to Urban Anthropology, edited by Donald Macon Nonini, 46–​64. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Collier, Stephen J. 2011. Post-​ Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton University Press. Cramer, Bert. 2018. “Kyrgyzstan’s Informal Settlements: Yntymak and the Emergence of Politics in Place.” Central Asian Survey 37 (1): 119–​36. Danzer, Alexander, Barbara Dietz, and Ksenia Gatskova. 2013. “Kazakhstan Migration and Remittances Survey: Migration, Welfare and the Labor Market in an Emerging Economy.” Regensburg: Institute for East and Southeast European Studies. Flynn, Moya, and Natalya Kosmarskaya. 2012. “Exploring ‘North’ and ‘South’ in Post-​Soviet Bishkek: Discourses and Perceptions of Rural-​Urban Migration.” Nationalities Papers 40 (3): 453–​71. Fryer, Paul, Emil Nasritdinov, and Elmira Satybaldieva. 2014. “Moving Toward the Brink? Migration in the Kyrgyz Republic.” Central Asian Affairs 1 (2): 171–​98. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Garbi Schmidt. 2016. “Envisioning Place: Urban Sociabilities within Time, Space and Multiscalar Power.” Identities 23 (1): 1–​16. Hatcher, Craig. 2015. “Illegal Geographies of the State: The Legalisation of a ‘Squatter’ Settlement in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.” International Journal of Law in the Built Environment 7 (1): 39–​54. —​—​—​. 2017. “Making Property in Kyrgyzstan: Bishkek’s Urban Periphery as Redistributive Space.” Central Asian Affairs 4 (2): 173–​96. Hatcher, Craig, and Susan Thieme. 2015. “Institutional Transition: Internal Migration, the Propiska, and Post-​ Socialist Urban Change in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.” Urban Studies May, 1–​17. Humphrey, Caroline. 2005. “Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 39–​58. Ibold, Hans. 2010. “Disjuncture 2.0: Youth, Internet Use and Cultural Identity in Bishkek.” Central Asian Survey 29 (4): 521–​35. Isabaeva, Eliza. 2013. “Migration into the ‘Illegality’ and Coping with Difficulties in a Sqatter Settlement in Bishkek.” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 138 (2): 139–​54. —​—​—​. 2014. “From Denizens to Citizens in Bishkek: Informal Squatter-​Settlement Residents in Urban Kyrgyzstan.” The Journal of Social Policy Studies 12 (2): 249–​60. 141

—​​​​ P h i l i p p S c h r ö d e r —​​​​ Ismailbekova, Aksana. 2018. “Secure and Insecure Spaces for Uzbek Businesspeople in Southern Kyrgyzstan.” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 49 (1–​2): 41–​60. Jäger, Philipp Frank. 2016. “Where the Whole City Meets: Youth, Gender and Consumerism in the Social Space of the MEGA Shopping Mall in Aktobe, Western Kazakhstan.” Central Asian Survey 35 (2): 178–​94. Kirmse, Stefan. 2013. Youth and Globalization in Central Asia: Everyday Life between Religion, Media, and International Donors. Eigene Und Fremde Welten 28. Frankfurt/​ M. and New York: Campus. Koehler, Jan. 1999. “The School of the Street: Organising Diversity and Training Polytaxis in a (Post-​) Soviet Periphery.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 17 (2): 41–​55. Korth, Britta. 2005. Language Attitudes towards Kyrgyz and Russian Discourse, Education and Policy in Post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Bern: Peter Lang. Kosmarskaya, Natalya. 2014. “Russians in Post-​Soviet Central Asia: More ‘Cold’ than the Others? Exploring (Ethnic) Identity under Different Sociopolitical Settings.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35 (1): 9–​26. Kosmarski, Artem. 2011. “Grandeur and Decay of the ‘Soviet Byzantium’. Spaces, Peoples and Memories of Tashkent, Uzbekistan.” In Urban Spaces after Socialism. Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities, edited by T. Darieva, W. Kaschuba, and M. Krebs, 33–​56. Frankfurt: Campus. Laszczkowski, Mateusz. 2011. “Superplace: Global Connections and Local Politics at the Mega Mall, Astana.” Etnofoor 23 (1): 85–​104. —​—​—​. 2015. “Scraps, Neighbors, and Committees: Material Things, Place-​Making, and the State in an Astana Apartment Block.” City & Society 27 (2): 136–​59. —​—​—​. 2016. “City of the Future”: Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana. Integration and Conflict Studies, 14. New York: Berghahn Books. Liu, Morgan. 2007. “A Central Asian Tale of Two Cities: Locating Lives and Aspirations in a Post-​Soviet Cityscape.” In Everyday Life in Central Asia. Past and Present, edited by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, 66–​83. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. —​—​—​. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Central Eurasia in Context. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Martínez, Francisco. 2018. Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia: An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces. London: UCL Press. Nasritdinov, Emil, and Philipp Schröder. 2016. “From Frunze to Bishkek: Soviet Territorial Youth Formations and Their Decline in the 1990s and 2000s.” Central Asian Affairs 3 (1): 1–​28. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. “Re/​ Claiming Bishkek: Contestation and Activism in the City of Two Revolutions.” Central Asian Affairs 4 (2): 97–​128. Nasritdinov, Emil, Yelena Gareyeva, and Tatiana Efremenko. 2015. “How Small Kitchens Become Even Smaller: Social Life of Soviet Microdistricts.” In Unbounded: On the Interior and Interiority, edited by Dolly Daou, DJ Huppatz, and Dinh Quoc Phuong, 129–​48. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Nazpary, Joma. 2002. Post-​ Soviet Chaos. Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto Press. Pink, Sarah. 2008. “Re-​Thinking Contemporary Activism: From Community to Emplaced Sociality.” Ethnos 73 (2): 163–​88. Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. “Politics, Cosmopolitics, and Preventive Development at the Kyrgyzstan-​ Uzbekistan Border.” In Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities, Discontents, edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Andrew Irving, 201–​17. Oxford: Berghahn Books. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. “Infrastructural Hope: Anticipating ‘Independent Roads’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan.” Ethnos 82 (4): 711–​37. 142

—​​​​ T h e D v o r a n d u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s —​​​​ Schröder, Philipp. 2010. “‘Urbanizing’ Bishkek: Interrelations of Boundaries, Migration, Group Size and Opportunity Structure.” Central Asian Survey 29 (4): 453–​67. —​—​—​. 2013. “Ainuras Amerikanische Karriere. Räumliche Und Soziale Mobilität Einer Jungen Kirgisin.” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 138 (2): 235–​58. —​ —​ —​ . 2016. “Avoidance and Appropriation in Bishkek: Dealing with Time, Space and Urbanity in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital.” Central Asian Survey 35 (2): 218–​36. —​—​—​. 2017a. Bishkek Boys: Neighbourhood Youth and Urban Change in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. —​ —​ —​ . 2017b. “From Shanghai to Iug-​ 2 … and What Now? Traces of (Re-​ )Claiming Bishkekfrom Multitemporal Fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Affairs 4 (2): 129–​45. Simkin, Paulina, and Matthias Schmidt. 2019. “A Cup of Coffee in Bishkek: Insights into the Emerging Coffee Culture in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital.” Central Asian Survey 38 (4): 446–​59. Volkov, Vadim. 2002. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yessenova, Saulesh B. 2003. “The Politics and Poetics of the Nation Urban Narratives of Kazakh Identity.” Montreal: McGill University.s

143

CHAPTER TEN

FIGHTING BACK The older working-​class women’s resistance against market forces in Kyrgyzstan Elmira Satybaldieva INTRODUCTION Struck by the omission of class in literature on Central Asia, Stone asks, ‘Where are the publications on the Central Asian working class as a working class, those people who form the absolute and overwhelming majority of the citizens of the region?’ (2012, p. 179). Searching for a class-​based analysis of Central Asian women and failing to unearth it in key Central Asian journals and the works of ‘Marianne Kamp, Colette Harris, Yvonne Corcoran-​Nantes, and Mary Buckley’, he notes that the Central Asian working class in the post-​Soviet region has not gained adequate scholarly attention (Stone, 2012, p. 179). The omission of class as a meaningful unit of analysis is still apparent and problematic in the academic literature on Central Asia, especially considering that three decades of neoliberalisation have produced obscene levels of economic inequality. Echoing concerns about the analytical exclusion of class, this chapter places the experiences of class inequality at the heart of working-​class women’s engagement in politics. I argue that the commodification of land, labour, money and welfare services in Kyrgyzstan produced social suffering, to which working-​class women sought redress through social movements and political action. Polanyi (1944) argues that society inevitably reacts against unfettered market forces to preserve the necessary social fabric and its norms. But Polanyi was vague about the origins and dynamics of ‘protective countermovements’ (Polanyi, 1944, p. 119). Although in Kyrgyzstan neoliberal intervention threatened many social groups, including the middle classes, it is predominantly older working-​class women who emerged to lead resistance against indebtedness, land and housing evictions and the commodification of welfare services. They notably mobilised without the support of the international donor community, the mass media, or Bishkek-​based feminist campaigns. To analyse these women’ s resistance requires an understanding of the nature of class inequality and experiences. Drawing on the Bourdieusian conceptualisation of class, this chapter explains the emergence of social movements and older women’s political agency. The relational definition of class views inequality as a structurally interdependent process, which involves competitive struggles over resources and recognition (Bourdieu, 1991). This relational understanding of class criticises 144

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-12

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

neoliberal and statistical accounts of poverty and social stratification that individualise class experience and effects. Social actors’ forms and volume of capital shape their class power and their ability to strategise and compete against others in social fields. Class power has four key dimensions: economic (material wealth and income, including property), cultural (knowledge and skills), social (networks) and symbolic (legitimate authority). Neoliberalism negatively affected working-​class women’s position in social fields through lower pay, the loss of welfare support, economic dispossession, weaker work-​ based solidarities, the loss of social prestige and symbolic status previously associated with their employment and professions, and difficulties in re-​skilling to meet new market demands. In addition, the commodification process excluded working-​ class women’s access to essential goods and services such as housing, childcare and healthcare, and indebted them through predatory and usurious loans. Their everyday experiences of insecurity, exploitation and injustice created by neoliberalism-​ in-​ practice produced affective strains (such as anger and shame) and cognitive strains (moral shock) (Crossley, 2002; Whyte and Wiegratz, 2016). These emotions involved evaluative judgements about concerns that affected their well-​being, and moved and motivated them to bring about change by countering market forces (Sayer, 2011). Without adequate attention to class, the political activism of such women in Kyrgyzstan becomes either invisible or distorted. For example, mainstream frames of analysis (Radnitz, 2010; McGlinchey, 2011) often attributed ‘non-​elite’ practices to patronage and subversive clientelism, which provide a spectator’s view of action in which the political agency of working-​class citizens is explained in instrumental and passive terms. Third-​person accounts of politics tend to belittle the agency of non-​elite actors, reducing the latter to either weapons of the wealthy and elites, or unreflexive followers of traditions and customs. They ignore what ordinary people feel, worry about, struggle with and aspire to. People are often stripped of their agential powers to evaluate things and relations, and their desire to transform social surroundings according to the things that matter to them (Sayer, 2011). In my study, the older working-​class women activists stood out from other political actors in their normative response to market forces. They saw the closure of kindergartens, maternal mortality, evictions and indebtedness as unjust, inhumane, outrageous and obscene, and engaged in social struggles to improve people’s well-​being. This chapter is based on three case studies that discuss how older working-​class women responded to the commodification of welfare, housing and credit money. The case studies were based on in-​depth interviews with women activists, a focus group discussion with anti-​debt movement leaders, and ethnographic material collected in 2008, 2013 and 2016. In the study, the women activists were aged between 55–​67,1 and were retired school/​kindergarten teachers, retired/​former health workers, former textile factory workers, and indebted petty traders. Due to limited space, this chapter does not detail the complexity of women-​led mobilisations to neoliberal commodification, but rather highlights key aspects.

THE NEOLIBERAL ASSAULT ON WOMEN In a desperate need for capital, Kyrgyzstan implemented extensive neoliberal reforms to attract foreign capital that resulted in the neoliberal commodification 145

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​

of land, labour, money and welfare services (Myant and Drahokoupil, 2011; Appel and Orenstein, 2018). The extension of market forces to these goods and services politicised the older working-​class women, and provided the basis of resistance and social movements. The land and housing resistance was rooted in the neoliberal privatisation of land, agriculture and housing. Neoliberalism transferred scarce and valuable public assets to private elites. For instance, in my study, the mobilisation for land was partly triggered by new owners of Soviet-​era dormitories evicting former female factory workers and rural migrants. The privatisation of agriculture and rural land also dispossessed working-​class women, making them asset poor. A 2015 study found that among rural women aged between 15–​49 years old, 43.7 per cent of them did not own a house, and less than 5 per cent had sole ownership of houses (ADB, 2019). Most assets, including 80 per cent of land, 90 per cent of passenger vehicles, 93 per cent of agricultural transport and 61 per cent of commercial real estate were registered in a man’s name (ADB, 2019). The withdrawal of state provision of free housing, and the adoption of mortgage-​based policies exacerbated housing inequality. Political activism for the protection of welfare services was a response to the commodification of education and healthcare. Key social services saw significant cuts in state spending, which not only reduced public sector pay but made education and healthcare increasingly commodified, enabling those who could pay to acquire better services and those without means being deprived and harmed. In 2008, private expenditure accounted for 53.8 per cent of total health expenditure (Ibraimova et al., 2011). Commodified reproductive care led Kyrgyzstan to the highest maternal mortality rate in the post-​Soviet space, with 90 per cent of deaths found to be preventable (Ford, 2015). According to the Ministry of Education, as a result of rampant privatisation in the 1990s, the country lost almost 80 per cent of all preschool institutions (Toma, 2018). Out of almost 1,700 kindergartens, only 400 remained by the year 2000. On average, only 23 per cent of young children attended kindergartens. But in rural areas, attendance was 16 per cent due to limited funding available in rural municipalities (UNICEF, 2019). The resistance to indebtedness was a response to the neoliberal commodification of labour and money. By the end of the Soviet period, Kyrgyzstan’s light industry sector employed over 100,000 people, while fewer than 10,000 people worked in this sector by 1995 (Spector and Botoeva, 2017). The privatisation of state enterprises significantly reduced pay and working conditions. For instance, in my study, many women leaders used to work at an Osh textile factory, which was the second largest in Central Asia, employing over 13,500 workers. The closure of Soviet-​era industrial monoliths forced the majority of women either into unemployment or informal employment at home and abroad. Moreover, many teachers and health workers resorted to petty trading or migrant labour due to meagre state salaries. Women comprise 31 per cent of migrant labour in Russia (Rocheva and Varshaver, 2018). In 1988, the Soviet Union had the highest female labour force participation rate of any industrialised society (with 90 per cent of working-​age women engaged in full-​time work or study), but by 2017, Kyrgyzstan’s female participation rate fell to 48.2 per cent, compared to 75.7 per cent for men (Zellerer and Vyortkin, 2004; ADB, 2019). The female labour participation was predominately in the informal sector, because 146

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

out of the total number of employees in Kyrgyzstan, 75 per cent were self-​employed, while only 25 per cent were in the formal sector (ADB, 2019). To cope with the costs arising from the commodification of society, international financial and state institutions promoted loans to impoverished working-​class women as a way of becoming ‘entrepreneurs’ and improving their lives. Since the mid-​1990s, international financial institutions targeted women for microcredit loans as a form of self-​help.2 This reflected a global neoliberal strategy of debt-​based growth, which recast marginalised groups as a high-​yielding investment opportunity. Under the guise of women’s empowerment, international finance saw women in the Global South ‘as less risky investment choices because of innate gendered characteristic, such as the responsibility to nurture and work harder’ (Soederberg, 2014, p. 202). Janda and Turbat’s (2013) study of over 90 microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Central Asia shows that female borrowers improved the financial performance and profits of MFIs because they had a higher repayment rate than men. By 2015, 62 per cent of borrowers were rural women, who were charged an average of 34 per cent interest rate (Sultakeev et al., 2018), but some MFIs charged interest rates as high as 180 per cent (Sabi, 2015), making Kyrgyzstan’s real interest rates one of the highest in the world. Rather than turning them into entrepreneurs, microcredit lending burdened women with usurious debts (Bateman, 2010; Karim, 2011; Fedirici, 2014). The available evidence indicates very little take-​up of small and medium-​sized enterprises by women in Kyrgyzstan (ADB, 2019). A UNDP national survey in 2016 found that only 4 per cent of female respondents were engaged in entrepreneurship (ADB, 2019). But the cumulative experiences of commodification did not merely erode the working-​class women’s security, they caused immense social suffering and loss of pride, dignity and purpose. The women felt they had been dispossessed of things that mattered to them as a result of having inadequate housing and land, de-​skilling by ‘sitting in the bazaar’, and losing status and respect associated with work and professions. Moreover, in my study, many women, who took out loans, reported that lenders used shame and other aggressive debt-​collection methods to increase the rate of repayment, making the women feel ‘enslaved’.

THREE CASE STUDIES This section examines how older working-​class women countered the effects of neoliberalisation in villages and cities. Many of the women activists were former public sector workers who had strong feelings about protecting the provision of public goods to the most vulnerable members of society. These older women were born and educated in the Soviet era as agents of change in Central Asian societies, and were particularly averse to market norms that reduced things to market value. They felt frustrated, angry and upset by the unravelling of ‘everything they had worked for’ and the infliction of the violence of the market on children and families.

Resisting the privatisation of welfare In the remote mountainous village of Kara-​Korgon, Altynai, a retired kindergarten teacher, prevented the closure of its oldest kindergarten by convincing the regional 147

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​

authorities that she could provide care for 75 children without much state assistance. She had worked at the kindergarten since its opening in 1963, and served as its head for the past 20 years. Having dedicated a lifetime of service to this kindergarten, she could not bear its closure and abandonment of the children’s needs. She saved the kindergarten by becoming resourceful in the provision of kindergarten meals. Altynai and her staff grew vegetables and kept livestock on the kindergarten premises to feed the children. In addition, Altynai asked parents to set up a kindergarten fund for renovation needs, and to contribute fees to top-​up staff salaries. Reluctant to commercialise the kindergarten, she capped the monthly contribution fee to 100 soms (US$2.50) per child, as she explained: I’m worried that poor families won’t be able to afford it. With higher fees we’ll have only children of traders here. But 80 per cent of the children in the village are cared for by grandparents. And everybody wants their children to be educated and to have a better life. Altynai was aware that household finances could significantly affect young children’s attendance. Her decision to avoid the commercialisation of childcare was driven by her egalitarian concerns. In Kyrgyzstan, 50 per cent of children from the richest households attended kindergartens compared to 11.7 per cent of children from the poorest households (UNICEF, 2019). In places where the local council department (ayil okmotu) sold off kindergarten facilities, some women converted private houses and property into kindergartens. For instance, Inavar, a retired schoolteacher, was inspired to do something about ‘the numerous unattended children’ in her village, when she met a female school director, who had converted a disused mosque into a kindergarten in a neighbouring district. In turning her house into a kindergarten, Inavar believed that it was a temporary measure, as she explained: Our ayil okmotu promised to build a kindergarten in the next five years. If we wait for them to build a kindergarten, we’ll leave many children lagging behind in education. I’m giving my house for kindergarten until the ayil okmotu will build a new one for us. We expect the president, deputies and ayil okmotu to solve our problems. Inavar stressed that she did not want to relieve the ayil okmotu of its responsibility to provide welfare services. As Reeves (2017) notes, provision of primary and secondary education is a paradigmatic state service. Inavar’s decision to open a temporary kindergarten was driven by her desire that the state should provide the public good to give children an equal start in life. Thus Inavar persuaded the local state to cover some of the running costs related to the kindergarten, such as electricity and staff salaries: ‘I went to talk with Bakyt [the ayil okmotu head] and listed the kind of support I needed. He said that the ayil okmotu could pay our electricity bills and staff salary and contribute with manpower to build toilets for boys and girls.’ In my study, older women like Inavar felt it was important to engage the state, so that it was held morally responsible for basic welfare and communal provisions. 148

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

Altynai, Inavar and other retired professional women endured self-​exploitation and great personal sacrifices to ensure care and education for small children. Inavar (and her two instructors) worked without pay in the first year. The local state was able to pay their salaries in the following years, but only 1,500 soms (US$21) a month. Inavar did not complain about her small salary, because her motivation was moral rather than financial (see also Reeves, 2017). She was more concerned about the limited capacity of her kindergarten to accommodate a maximum of 50 young children, and kept putting pressure on the ayil okmotu to build a proper kindergarten. She was a dedicated teacher, who believed in the transformative role of intellectuals in post-​Soviet societies (see Niyozov and Shamatov, 2006). In the third case, Doolatkan, a retired nurse, re-​opened a medical clinic in a remote mountainous location. During the Soviet period it had been an all-​purpose medical centre, consisting of surgeons, doctors and dentists. After its closure in 1996, the local health workers left, and the building was unused and dilapidated. As elsewhere in the country, the number of health workers had declined significantly since the early 1990s, and a shortage of physicians in rural areas had reached a critical level (ADB, 2019). Doolatkan observed that after the closure of the medical centre, many local women died during childbirth in the villages, because they were unable to travel to the regional hospital, as she explained: ‘It takes time and money to get to Gulcho [district centre] to give birth. Roads aren’t good and lack of transportation is also another problem.’ Doolatkan felt the need to respond to this tragic situation, and in 2004, she decided to restore the decaying medical centre into a maternity clinic. Doolatkan’s ayil okmotu refused to help. International foundations also did not support her. Undeterred, Doolotkan organised a charity marathon, and she raised funds to pay for the purchase of new beds, a new boiler and some medical supplies. She also mobilised local women to make new bedding and mattresses. The maternity clinic was staffed by Doolotkan and three other nurses, working without pay and with limitied medical provisions. She felt embarrassed that painkillers and anti-​ inflammatory potions were prepared from herbs collected in the mountains. She and her colleagues persevered with the clinic, hoping that the ayil okmotu would eventually be shamed into supporting it. For Altynai, Inavar and Doolatkan, childcare and healthcare were essential public goods, and their commodification violated their ‘true’ nature (Polanyi, 1944). They construed and evaluated the provisions of education and medicine in terms of care-​ giving, social needs and well-​being, rather than as commodities for sale. Their actions should not be read as ‘self-​help’, which reinforces the neoliberal approach to social care, but as social struggles to protect society from commodification, ensure social equalities, and preserve the welfare state. They saw the state as the only legitimate provider of such public goods.

Land and housing resistance Not only did the neoliberal transition to a market economy change the ownership and control of key assets from the state to the private sector, it also allocated more rights to owners to charge high rent, evict tenants and repossess property (Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2021; Auyezkhanuly et al., 2019; Sharipova, 2015; Kaganova et al., 2008). In the early 2000s, over 640 families living in dormitories in Osh city 149

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​

received eviction orders from new owners. During the Soviet period, various public organisations managed these dormitories, housing residents until the state issued them with permanent accommodation. The dormitories were transferred to the new owners without payment, on the condition that the residents could remain. But soon after their privatisation in 1997, the new owners used the dormitories as collateral for bank loans, and demanded rent from the residents to pay off interest charges. When the residents protested, the owners unlawfully evicted numerous families. Among those who were evicted were former textile employees, who had been allocated rooms in the dormitories in the 1970s, and had been living there with their families. After receiving an eviction order, Tamara, a retired textile factory worker, mobilised other dormitory residents to contest the eviction. Two years of legal challenges ended in district and regional court judgments in favour of the new owners. After the final court verdict, Tamara mobilised 83 families to occupy a disused public building: I worked for the factory for more than 20 years and didn’t get housing. By the end of 2003, I was evicted from my dorm room with my three daughters. Many Kyrgyz who worked for the factory were left with nothing. In 2004, we broke into an abandoned building and occupied rooms there. We then started picketing in front of the mayor’s office, demanding housing. We went there every day. The failure to find justice through legal and judicial mechanisms radicalised Tamara’s campaign. She was seen as the leader during the court proceedings, because she was the most vocal at articulating residents’ grievances and challenging the new owners. She organised numerous protests, sit-​ins and land-​grabs to force state officials to recognise and provide accommodation for the evicted families. Their demands for housing went unanswered, because the judges upheld the private property laws, and the state ceased building public housing. In 2010, only 2.7 per cent of apartments were built using state funds (Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2021). Moreover the state could not allocate land for housing, because after land privatisation, Osh city had only 69 hectares of vacant land, which constituted 0.47 per cent of its territory (Kaganova et al., 2008). The protesters’ search for vacant land uncovered the extent to which land was concentrated in the hands of the few, as Tamara explained: Everything belongs to the rich! They’re the ones who took all the land. I was shocked to find out that the rich even privatised public park land, you know, where Salkyn Tor is, along the Ak Bura river … But they have to share resources with the poor. The women were angry that the neoliberal regime of property rights not only dispossessed them of their accommodation at the dormitories, but had allowed wealthy elites to acquire former public lands. The older women activists began to occupy public lands, such as parks, summer camps and farmlands, to expose the city’s housing inequality and demand redistribution of resources. Their concern for social justice shaped their strategy to occupy land (see also Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2012). Land was not a market commodity, but an essential resource for human 150

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

flourishing and socialising, as Tamara explained, ‘But we’re people too. We also have needs and rights. My kids have no roof over their heads. I can’t even invite people over for tea.’ Over the years, the older women’s campaign for social housing evolved to include the demands of city’s rural migrants,3 who were ‘forced to rent rooms God knows where’ as Tamara remarked. The struggle for social housing lasted a decade, and involved complex negotiations with various political elites (for further information, see Satybaldieva, 2018). The Osh’s land and housing movement gained concessions during the 2005 and 2010 political crises, which provided protesters with opportunities to exploit intra-​elite rivalry for power. In 2011, the older women leaders finally succeeded in obtaining state land outside Osh city for about 45,000 propertyless people in Osh.

Resistance against the financial industry In 2002, the Kyrgyzstani government deregulated the financial system by allowing banks and MFIs to set their own interest, penalty and commission rates (Sultakeev et al., 2018; Fries and Taci, 2002). In addition, the Kyrgyzstani financial industry secured broad rights to seize borrowers’ property after a 60-​day delay in payment without a court order (Kudryavsteva, 2016). Banks and MFIs were keen to take advantage of people’s situation, and use their extrajudicial powers to seize properties. A women’s anti-​ debt movement emerged to challenge the financial industry’s myth of women’s empowerment through microcredit enterprise. The industry was criticised for creating women’s debt bondage, especially in rural areas. Initially between 2008–​10, female borrowers responded in spontaneous, visceral and localised ways to looming evictions and repossessions. For instance, in Atbashy, a group of female borrowers burnt down an MFI branch to destroy its files and documents on borrowers. In Jalal Abad, a group of women attacked bailiffs to prevent evictions. In Osh, a large group of female borrowers mobilised to take legal actions against banks and MFIs, who refused to recognise the June 2010 conflict as a force majeure that affected women’s trade and ability to make payments. By 2012, the older women activists realised that legislative change was necessary to protect borrowers’ rights. They travelled to Bishkek, and held a series of protests in front of the presidential building and Bishkek’s Gorkii Park, as Gulnaz, a Bishkek-​ based leader of the anti-​debt movement, recounted: So in 2012 many indebted women gathered in Gorkii Park to protest. But no one was paying attention or helping us. We then threatened to burn ourselves and brought gasoline canisters. After the threat three Parliamentarians came out and said, ‘Let’s set up a committee and try to negotiate with the banks.’ The movement activists gained access to powerful institutions after the threat of violence. For the first time, the Parliamentary Committee on Economic and Fiscal Policy was formed in 2013 to investigate banking practices that required the activists to collect evidence of financial malpractice and fraud throughout the country. This facilitated the mobilisation of struggling borrowers into a nationwide movement, 151

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​

which was named the Committee for Protection of the Borrowers’ Rights in Kyrgyzstan (Komitet po Zashite Prav Zaemshchikov v Kyrgyzstane). The anti-​debt movement gained momentum after an increase in home repossessions. The movement leaders demanded the Parliamentary Committee to initiate banking and microfinance legislation that would ban repossessions, as Ainagul, a regional leader of the anti-​debt movement, explained: Within this movement we focused on fighting the seizure of properties, preventing evictions and court orders for evictions. People were losing homes simply because they couldn’t pay [the] US$1000 loan. The contracts are written to protect the interests of the banks, there’s nothing that protects us. Many women were shocked that lenders had no moral qualms about making women and children homeless just because of a couple of months of missed payments. The women’ s demands invoked the state as a market regulator to prevent the financial industry abusing and exploiting people. As a result of its recommendations, the then President Atambaev signed into law an amendment restricting usurious activity in the Kyrgyz Republic in 2013. The law capped interest rates on loans (to 35 per cent per annum),4 on penalties and fees (to a maximum of 20 per cent of the loan), and required court orders for taking possession of the collateral. Unsatisfied with the scope of the amendments, the anti-​debt movement continued with its protests. In May 2016 the movement mobilised about 700 people, mostly rural women, to protest in front of the US Embassy, demanding a debt amnesty from the banks and MFIs that the USAID and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation had set up and financed. The new wave of protests led to the creation of a new institution, an Interdepartmental Committee on Borrowers’ Appeals (Mezhvedomstvennaia Komissiia po Rassmotreniiu Obrashenii Zaemshchikov),5 which assists borrowers experiencing problems with repayment of loans and cases of fraud. The anti-​ debt movement members have observer status on the Committee. Currently, the movement is pressurising political and financial elites to pass a personal bankruptcy (insolvency) law. For the past three years, the National Bank, under supervision of the World Bank, has been meeting with international experts on personal bankruptcy to assess possible models of the law: the struggle continues (for further discussion, see Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2021).

DISCUSSION OF OLDER WOMEN’S POLITICAL AGENCY Although the older working-​class women were structurally disadvantaged, they were able to generate political power. Their power to act was achieved through public speaking and motherhood authority, which reflected their high cultural and symbolic capital. Emotive and cognitive affects informed and motivated their political action.

The power to speak up The older women leaders in the study were educated beyond school level, and were assigned active political roles during the Soviet period. Many women identified their past activism in youth organisations (komsomol), trade unions (profsoyuzy) 152

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

and councils (zhensovety) as valuable leadership experience. The older women were able to transform their accumulated cultural capital into political capital by speaking up in public spaces at an ‘inaugural moment’ (Bénit-​Gbaffou and Katsaura, 2014). For instance, during the 2017 presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan, several anti-​debt movement leaders appeared at the Akipress media centre to denounce the candidacy of Omurbek Babanov, who owned one of the largest commercial banks in the country. During the elections, Babanov promised to issue bank loans at 7 per cent interest rates. The movement leaders questioned his pledge, exposed his bank’s malpractices, and explained that the bank had refused to lower interest rates to its existing borrowers, who were struggling to make repayments. In many instances the older women were prompted to speak on behalf of the ‘voiceless subjects’ at courts, state offices and banks. Speaking up for impoverished migrant groups, young children, pregnant women and evicted families, they came to symbolise and channel the poor people’s anger, as Roza, a housing activist and a former history teacher, explained: I’m most angry when I see injustice towards single mothers with children. If I see that they’ve nothing to eat, I can be invincible. I’ll talk to anyone and will refuse no for an answer … I’ve earned not one but two higher education degrees. I can fight politicians, if I see that they’re wrong. If necessary, I can get on TV and expose them. I’m not afraid of them! The older women saw themselves as ‘defenders of poor people’s rights’, and when they spoke, they were fierce, assertive and direct. Their ability to speak truth to power gave them political legitimacy among poor groups. But the middle classes, political elites and the media pathologised their way of speaking as unfeminine, vulgar, irrational and unrestrained, trying to de-​authorise and de-​legitimise their voice. Older women activists complained of being labelled as ‘shameless’ or ‘OBONchu’,6 when they emotively spoke about injustices, as Tamara remarked, ‘They demonised us as OBON [bizdi OBONchu dep zhaman atty kylyshty].’ Their capacity for public speaking involved challenging, shaming and negotiating with political elites at key political and opportunistic moments. Their oratory skills became a highly sought-​after resource during election campaigns, when political elites needed to swiftly mobilise grassroots support. On such occasions, older female leaders had to devise strategies that both asserted their own power and avoided being used by elites for their goals (Satybaldieva, 2018). Local state officials were particularly aware of the older women leaders’ power to speak up, and were wary of becoming a target of their fury.

The embodied power of motherhood In the context of eroded state support, the older working-​ class women derived authority from motherhood, a form of nationalism and neo-​patriarchy that grants women authority and recognition in old age, especially if they have produced male progeny, and have ensured a reproduction of patriarchal structures. Kandiyoti (1988) refers to this phenomenon as a ‘bargain with patriarchy’. But this symbolic capital comes with limitations. Such ‘motherhood authority’ is typically restricted 153

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​

to the domestic sphere, and does not permit public criticism of male authority. In my research, the older women like Altynai, Inavar and Doolatkan were successful at using their symbolic capital, because their claims did not relate to scarce assets, and they did not aggressively berate state officials. Their strategy was not feasible for women activists demanding a fairer distribution of housing and land, and a less usurious credit system. The older women activists were ambivalent about using motherhood status to achieve their goals. They sought to both accommodate and circumvent traditional patriarchal structures. They claimed that the patriarchal bargain had broken down, as Jarkyn, one of the housing movement leaders, observed, ‘Our men are unable to govern us and they’re forcing us mothers to send our children to other countries.’ But at the same time, they evoked the patriarchal norm of protecting mothers, especially when contesting evictions, as Gulnaz noted, ‘Kyrgyz people never put mothers with kids on the streets before.’ The patriarchal and ethno-​nationalist norms were both defended and criticised. The authority of motherhood is ambiguous in the public sphere. This was vividly demonstrated at a rally against violence towards women on 10 March 2020. The rally was held two days after a group of Bishkek-​based feminist activists was attacked by young men wearing masks and kalpaks (traditional male hats). Several older women attended the rally, largely comprised of urban middle-​class people, and asked for the opportunity to speak. One of the older women was dressed in traditional Kyrgyz clothing, crowned with ak-​elechek,7 symbolising a Kyrgyz ene (older mothers). She started to address the crowd, and had barely uttered a few words in defence of traditional values, when they became hostile. She was jeered at, and shouted down with cries of ‘Shame on you! [Uyat! Uyat! Uyat!]’ (Kloop, 2020). The urban educated middle classes that had earlier chanted for tolerance and respect towards women were now shaming and silencing the older speaker. Ejected from the rally, she accused the Bishkek-​based feminist activists of being inauthentic and detached from the suffering and everyday experiences of working-​ class women. The urban middle-​class members and feminist activists failed to recognise that impoverished working-​class women face considerable difficulties in operating outside of patriarchy, and have no choice but to bargain with it. For many older women activists, their age, ethnicity and their motherhood provided some protection from state violence. Their aged motherly bodies stormed into buildings, blocked roads, and shielded them from physical violence. Policemen were reluctant to batter, push, or drag older women’s bodies, fearing a public backlash. Moreover, the activists placed their own unarmed aged bodies in the frontline of protests to attract public attention, and signal injustice and urgency. In this respect, they weaponised their bodily ‘weaknesses’ in their political struggles.

The power of feelings The first-​person evaluative accounts of older women activists express moral concerns and emotions about things of importance. Their feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, restlessness and despair were about events and practices that affected their well-​being. Consider how Gulnaz evaluated the way banks repossessed homes: 154

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

Before foreign banks came here, the Kyrgyz people weren’t indebted. We certainly weren’t made homeless. We didn’t even have the word bomzh [homeless person] in our vocabulary. When I see them going through trash bins, it strikes me right where it hurts … We didn’t have such levels of stress and anxiety before. I can’t even eat because all I think about is that we’re going to lose our home … Many commit suicide because they can’t take the pain. These banks and MFIs are literally killing people. How’s this different from genocide? Gulnaz felt that repossessions were a disproportionate and inhumane response to loan default, and against Kyrgyz norms. Her cognitive and affective strains were the effects of ‘a negative mismatch between agents’ habitual expectations, assumptions and ways of being-​in-​the-​world’ and the new habitat (Crossley, 2002; Satybaldieva, 2017). Gulnaz’s feelings about the destructive impact of markets on people’s lives involved evaluations about the flow of experience and the scale of harm on people’s well-​being. Her emotions were indispensable evaluative judgements about things that matter to people, things that go beyond cultural discourses, and inevitably shape political action (Sayer, 2011). Furthermore, older women activists attributed their early protests to powerful indignation and righteous anger. In many instances, the women activists acted because they felt the urge to stop harm, which they described as ‘making our blood boil’ or ‘eating us up’. Mizen (2015) observes that emotions form the basis for action as ‘shoving power’ or the ‘force of ought’, and are capable of animating people’s actions above and beyond their normative obligations. The older women activists’ spontaneity in initial protests reflected the urge to act, rather than rational calculation or following conventional norms. Finally, emotions do not simply spur action, but sustain social movements. For instance, the anti-​debt movement leaders noted that a significant part of their activism was about tackling people’s sense of shame, which was systematically caused by bank and MFI workers, as Gulnaz explains: Kyrgyz people are particularly sensitive to being shamed. We need dignity more than we need money. A few years ago, people wouldn’t admit they were in debt. They felt so ashamed! For some, the sense of shame was so great that they committed suicide. But now, people are beginning to slowly wake up. We explain that their indebtedness was largely not their fault. If feelings of indignation and anger moved older women to action, the desire to unburden borrowers from the crushing sense of shame motivated older working-​ class women to be committed to the anti-​debt movement. Their emotions had causal, objective and normative qualities, in that they were causal mechanisms of political action, and barometers of the world around them.

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed the politics of older working-​class women, who resisted the neoliberal commodification of care, housing, land and credit money. Despite their marginalised social position, the older working-​class women acted to preserve public 155

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​

goods, and resist indebtedness and dispossession. They struggled to make the state provide welfare services and regulate markets in favour of ordinary people. The older women activists were resourceful, resilient and evaluative beings, who cared about their own and others’ well-​being. They formed alliances with working-​class men, who they believed were struggling to live up to the male breadwinner role because of neoliberal restructuring of the economy. In supporting working-​class men, the women were caught up in ethno-​nationalist and patriarchal norms, which had ambivalent effects on their political agency. Drawing on Polanyi, Bourdieu and Sayer, this chapter has argued that class inequality and class experiences were central to older women’s activism. The Bourdieusian conceptualisation of class explains how power constrained and enabled older working-​class women’s politics. Although the women had the power to speak up in public spaces and possessed the embodied power of motherhood, their political legitimacy was contested by political elites and the middle classes. The older women’s emotive responses to class experiences mobilised their political action. Their emotive responses not only spurred political action but also sustained social movements over time. The politics of older working-​class women has significant implications for wider Kyrgyzstani politics. Their movements are likely to form alliances with social forces that are critical of liberal market values. This can widen social divisions along class lines. It remains to be seen if a broad-​based alliance is possible to fight for both redistribution and recognition in ways that allows for human flourishing for all.

NOTES 1 At what age does old age begin? The precise year cannot be universally defined. In Kyrgyzstan, where the average life expectancy is 71 years, the beginning of old age comes earlier than in developed countries. The pension age for women begins at 58. In this study, women are defined as older because many were retired, and were given the social respect of older women. 2 The two leading MFIs in the country, Kompanion and FINCA, had very high rates of female borrowers, 85 per cent and 67 per cent respectively (Yale School of Management, 2011). 3 By 2012, more than 100,000 rural residents had migrated to Osh, and they faced problems of accommodation, employment, city registration (propiska) and discrimination by urban middle-​class residents. 4 The Law on Limitation of Usurious Activity (2013) calculated the maximum interest rate based on the nominal interest rate determined by the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic plus 15 per cent. The law has been criticised for being poorly implemented and enforced in relation to pawnshops, especially outside of the capital in southern and rural areas of the country. 5 The committee includes representatives of the oblast leadership, district administrations, regional departments of the National Bank and law enforcement agencies. It is a consultative body which arranges meetings with representatives of financial and credit organisations and develop proposals on the settlement of relations between lenders and borrowers. 6 OBON (Otryad Bab Osobogo Naznacheniia, Women’s Unit for Special Purposes) is a derogatory term, which defines older women as hired paid protesters. 7 Ak-​elechek is a traditional multi-​ layered female turban worn by married women. The number of turban layers and its model varies depending on age and social status. 156

—​​​​ T h e o l d e r w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n ’ s r e s i s t a n c e —​​​​

REFERENCES Appel, H. and Orenstein, M. (2018). From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Asian Development Bank. (2019). Kyrgyz Republic: Country Gender Assessment. Manila: Asian Development Bank. Available from: https://​dx.doi.org/​10.22617/​TCS190​593-​2 Auyezkhanuly, A., Manap, A., Akpanov, A., and Karshalova, A. (2019). ‘The Study of the Residential Real Estate Market in the Republic of Kazakhstan’, Journal of Real Estate Literature 27(1), 117–​133. DOI: 10.1080/​10835547.2019.12090495. Bateman, M. (2010). Why doesn’t microfinance work? the destructive rise of local neoliberalism. London: Zed Books. Bénit-​Gbaffou, C and Katsaura, O. (2014). ‘Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu’s ‘Political Capital’ in Post-​ Apartheid Johannesburg’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5), 1807–​1832. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press Crossley, N. (2002). ‘Global Anti-​Corporate Struggle: A Preliminary Analysis’, British Journal of Sociology 35(4), 667–​691. Fedirici, S. (2014). ‘From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 113 (2), 231–​244. Ford, L. (2015). ‘Kyrgyzstan strives to make inroads on poor maternal health record’, The Guardian, 28 May. Available from: www.theg​uard​ian.com/​glo​bal-​deve​lopm​ent/​2015/​may/​ 28/​mater​nal-​mortal​ity-​kyr​gyzs​tan-​poor-​rec​ord Fries, S and Taci, A. (2002). Banking reform and development in transition economies. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Working Paper 71. Available from: http://​www. ebrd.com/​downlo​ads/​resea​rch/​econom​ics/​workin​gpap​ers/​wp0​071.pdf Ibraimova, A., Akkazieva, B., Ibraimov, A., Manzhieva, E., and Rechel, B. (2011). ‘Kyrgyzstan: health system review’, Health Systems in Transition 13 (3), 1–​152. Janda, K and Turba, B. (2013). ‘Determinants of the financial performance of microfinance institutions in Central Asia’, Post-​Communist Economies 25 (4), 558–​569. Kaganova, O., Akmatov, A., and Undeland, C. (2008). ‘Introducing more transparent and efficient land management in post-socialist cities: Lessons from Kyrgyzstan’, International Journal of Strategic Property Management 12 (3), 161–​181. DOI:10.3846/​ 1648-​715X.2008.12.161-​181. Kandiyoti, D. (1988). ‘Bargaining With Patriarchy’, Gender & Society 2 (3), 274–​290. Karim, L. (2011). Microfinance and its Discontents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kloop. (2020). ‘Bishkek: Na mitinge protiv nasiliia potrebovali otstavku nachalnika Sverdlovskogo ROVD i rassledovanie ataki na zhenskii marsh (Bishkek: At a rally against violence resignation of the head of the Sverdlovsk ROVD and an investigation of the attack on the women’s march was demanded)’, Kloop, 10 March. Available from: https://​kloop.kg/​ blog/​2020/​03/​10/​live-​mit​ing-​pro​tiv-​nasil​iya-​v-​bishk​eke/​ Kuznetsova, E. (2016). ‘Poniat and prostit: Amerikanskaia mechta kyrgyzstanskogo zaemshchika (To understand and to forgive: An American dream of the Kyrgyzstani borrower)’, Akchabar, 26 May. Available from: www.akcha​bar.kg/​ru/​arti​cle/​loans/​pon​yat-​i-​ pros​tit-​amerik​ansk​aya-​mec​hta-​kyrg​yzst​ansk​ogo-​zae​msh/​ McGlinchey, E. (2011). Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mizen, P. (2015). ‘The Madness that is the World: Young Activists’ Emotional Reasoning and their Participation in a Local Occupy Movement’, The Sociological Review 63, 167–​182. Myant, M and Drahokoupil, J. (2011). Transition Economies: Political Economy in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell. 157

—​​​​ E l m i r a S a t y b a l d i e v a —​​​ Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: Economic and Political Origins of Our Time. New York: Rinehart. Radnitz, S. (2010). Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-​led Protests in Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reeves, M. (2017). ‘The Ashar-​State: Communal Commitment and State Elicitation in Rural Kyrgyzstan’ in Heathershaw, J. & Schatz, E. (eds), Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 216–​231. Rocheva, A and Varshaver, E. (2018). ‘Gender Dimension of Migration from Central Asia to the Russian Federation’, Asia-​Pacific Population Journal 32 (2), 87–​135 Sabi, M. (2015). ‘Supply of Islamic Microfinance in Central Asia: The Case Study of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan’, International Journal of Islamic Finance 7(2), 9–​27. Sanghera, B and Satybaldieva, E. (2012). ‘Ethics of Property, Illegal Settlements and the Right to Subsistence’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 32 (1/​2), 96–​114. Sanghera, B and Satybaldieva, E. (2021) Renter Capitalism and Its Discontents: Power, Morality and Social Resistance in Central Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Satybaldieva, E. (2018). ‘A Mob for Hire? Unpacking Older Women’s Political Activism in Kyrgyzstan’, Central Asia Survey 37 (2), 247–​264. Satybaldieva, E. (2017). ‘Working Class Subjectivities and Neoliberalisation in Kyrgyzstan: Developing Alternative Moral Selves’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 31(1), 31–​47. DOI:10.1007/​s10767-​016-​9251-​5 Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shamatov, D. and Niyozov, S. (2006). ‘Trading or Teaching: Dilemmas of Everyday Life Economy in Central Asia’, Inner Asia 8 (2), 229–​262. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.1163/​ 146​4817​0679​3646​675 Sharipova, D. (2015). ‘Who Gets What, When and How? Housing and Informal Institutions in the Soviet Union and Post-​Soviet Kazakhstan’, Central Asian Affairs 2, 140–​167. Soederberg, S. (2014). Debtfare States and The Poverty Industry. London: Routledge. Spector, R and Botoeva, A. (2017). ‘New Shop Owners in Old Buildings: Spatial Politics of the Apparel Industry in Kyrgyzstan’, Post-​Soviet Affairs 33 (3), 235–​253. DOI:10.1080/​ 1060586X.2016.1251024 Stone, L. (2012). ‘Central Asian Studies’, Journal of Third World Studies 29 (1), 175–​202. Sultakeev, K., Karymshakov, K., and Sulaimanova, B. (2018). ‘The Impact of Microfinance on Entrepreneurship in Kyrgyzstan’, Acta Oeconomica Pragensia 26 (2), 24–​40. Toma, A. (2018). ‘Doshkolnoe obravovanie v Kyrgyzstane. Chem ono vazhno, i pochemu ego ne hvataet na vseh (Preschool education in Kyrgyzstan. Why it is important, and why it is not enough for everyone)’, Kloop, 1 June. Available from: https://​kloop.kg/​blog/​2018/​ 06/​01/​dos​hkol​noe-​obra​zova​nie-​v-​kyrg​yzst​ane-​chem-​ono-​vaz​hno-​i-​poch​emu-​ego-​ne-​hvat​ aet-​na-​vseh/​ UNICEF. (2019). Lack of Access to Early Learning is yet Another Issue Affecting the Wellbeing of Children in Kyrgyzstan. Available from: www.uni​cef.org/​kyr​gyzs​tan/​early-​childh​ood-​ deve​lopm​ent-​and-​learn​ing Whyte, D. and Wiegratz, J. (2016). Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud. London: Routledge. Yale School of Management. (2011). Kyrgyz MFI Comparison in 2010. Available from https://​vol11.cases.som.yale.edu/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​cases/​kompan​ion_​fina​ncia​l_​gr​oup/​Pict​ ure%2043.png Zeller, E and Vyortkin, D. (2004). ‘Women’s Grassroots Struggles for Empowerment in the Republic of Kazakhstan’, Social Politics 11 (3), 439–​464.

158

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LOCAL POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN AFGHANISTAN Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili Despite predictions of its demise, traditional or customary authority in Afghanistan remained resilient after 2001 (Favre 2006, 2005). Although initially many people argued that such authority had broken down or had collapsed during the war (Rubin 2002), throughout fieldwork across more than thirty Afghan villages and interviews with government officials between 2005 and 2012, I found a much more nuanced situation. Unfortunately, the idea that such local authority had collapsed influenced policymakers in the days after the US began its state-​building efforts in Afghanistan and was the dominant paradigm that underpinned the international intervention in that country. The most important consequence of this is that policymakers believed they had to design political institutions from scratch because there was nothing left at the local level. For example, during a meeting I witnessed with international donors, Afghan government officials argued that “no local government had existed in Afghanistan for more than two hundred years” (it is not clear what happened 200 years ago that brought such a rupture!). This led a drive to create new informal governing councils through aid programs (Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development 2008), as well as an effort to resurrect Afghanistan’s highly centralized state structure. Although there is no formal government at the village level, the most dynamic governance in Afghanistan happens in communities. Local governance is mediated by informal rules. This is because state law on formal political organization at the subnational level remains inchoate and also because there is a long history and tradition of informal governance that operates at the village level. This chapter highlights the governance gaps that exist between formal organization of the state at the subnational level in Afghanistan and contrasts them to the informal political organizations that exist at the local level in rural areas. As we will see, there is an extraordinary gap between formal and informal rule. This chapter argues that the gap between the highly centralized rules of the formal state and the highly decentralized rules of informal political organizations at the local level are the primary obstacle for governance, stability, and development in that country. Despite the growing gap between these two spheres, few policymakers have been willing to bridge these gaps. This is because both international and domestic actors DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-13

159

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​

have incentives to promote a highly centralized system of governance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the prolonged insurgency in the country: one of the primary drivers of the continued insurgency in Afghanistan lies in the inability of local government officials to respond to demands of those they are supposed to serve. Their inability to respond is key to understanding the continued insurgency.

THE FORMAL GOVERNANCE ARCHITECTURE IN AFGHANISTAN Before exploring dynamics of informal governance, we must understand the incentives embedded in the formal structures, as local political organizations exist in this interplay between formal and informal structures. For centuries, there has been a difficult relationship between the central government and communities at the subnational level in Afghanistan. Throughout its history, authorities in Kabul aspired to a highly centralized form of government that gave no voice to those at the subnational level. A centralized system was always attractive to them because they sought to consolidate control over what they viewed to be an unruly or restive countryside (Shahrani 1986). This process reached its first peak during the violent reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (r. 1880–​1901), known as the “iron amir” for his willingness to use horrific violence to achieve his aims, who saw customary leaders at the local level as a threat to his authority in Kabul (ʻAbd al-​Raḥmān Khān 1900). Consequently, he used violent campaigns to eliminate these local leaders and gain the quiescence of citizens. Simultaneously, he sought to increase the capacity of the central state by reforming the bureaucratic structure, giving almost all power and authority to those in Kabul. He eliminated the system of informal indirect rule, which had dominated the country since the founding of the Afghan state in 1747 (T. Barfield 2012). Most leaders since Abdur Rahman viewed relations between communities and the state in all-​or-​nothing terms. In his autobiography, the iron emir wrote: I had to put in order all those hundreds of petty chiefs, plunderers, robbers, and cut-​throats who were the cause of everlasting trouble in Afghanistan. This necessitated breaking down the feudal and tribal system, and substituting one grand community under one law and under one rule. (ʻAbd al-​Raḥmān Khān 1900, 175) In early 2004, a constitutional Loya Jirga came together and ratified a new constitution. This new constitution was based largely on the old 1964 model. The country’s highly centralized system of governance embodied in the country’s new 2004 constitution, which was ratified through an Afghan constitutional convention (Loya Jirga) with support of the United States and the international community, did not disrupt nor punctuate the country’s bad governance equilibria. The centralized political system, described below, created a very difficult situation for effective governance to emerge at the subnational level. Rather than inspire political change and transformation, the new constitution represented deep continuities with the dysfunctional aspects of the country’s past governance structures because it was based on previous constitutional models. The highly centralized system of governance crowded out local voices and insured that informal governance structures 160

—​​​​ L o c a l p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n i n A f g h a n i s t a n —​​​​

at the local level—​or any local voices for that matter that remained so resilient during the war—​had almost no role in formal government decision-​making. This widened  the  gap between de facto and de jure forms of authority, further undermining the ability of the state to function effectively. The 2004 constitution retains Afghanistan’s highly centralized political structure. The Bonn Process, which established an interim authority in the country in the days after September 11, 2001, revived the 1964 constitution as the interim constitution. Along with the constitution, it also revived thousands of administrative regulations that served as the legal foundation for the new state. The decision to revive the old constitution was very important because it signaled the end of any possible reform to the subnational governance structure. Although the 1964 constitution was the most democratic in the history of the country, establishing a constitutional monarchy, it was still an authoritarian constitution. From the perspective of subnational governance and local political institutions, this constitution reflected the highly centralized governance structure that dominated the government for centuries. The 2004 constitution was based on the principle of centralism, just as had its predecessors. This meant that subnational authorities were not autonomous or even local bodies, but instead were subnational representatives of national institutions. District and provincial governors were simply representatives of the central government serving in the regions. This meant that citizens at the local level have no role electing or selecting their provincial or district governors. They would continue to be appointed by Kabul and accountable to the center, just as they had during the communist period and during the monarchy. The new political order did create democratic institutions, but they were weak vis-​à-​vis a very strong executive. The new constitution created a weak parliament that had very little power standing to check a very powerful president. The president appoints one-​third of the upper house in parliament. This was a continuation of what was found in the 1964 constitution. Under the new constitutional order, the president, a national parliament, provincial councils, district councils, and mayors were to be elected. Elections for district councils and mayors never held. Provincial councils were never given any authority. After 2001, citizens felt the consequences of unchecked executive power even more acutely at the subnational level. The 2004 constitution gave the president the power to appoint all provincial-​and district-​level governors. This meant that these officials at the subnational level were accountable to the center and not to citizens. Although the constitution did create elected provincial councils, these councils had no formal authority. They had no oversight over provincial governors who continued to be appointed by Kabul. So, individuals were asked to participate in elections, but elections did not translate into the selection of policymakers who had a voice in important matters at the subnational level. For example, citizens elected members of their provincial councils, but these council members had no role in any local policymaking such as oversight of governors, development of budgets, or anything else of substance. For this reason, Afghanistan has not had formal local government since 2001—​nor at any point in the country’s history. It has only had subnational authorities that represent executive authority at the local level. Citizens had no way of having any role in the policymaking process. There were no ways for policies to reflect views of citizens at the subnational level. 161

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​

Rather than ushering in a new era of democracy and individual freedom, the post-​ 2001 era in Afghanistan thus represented a shift back to the past. Instead of seeing change in the kinds of institutions that could aggregate or reflect their interests, citizens were given the same old institutional arrangements they had seen in the past, with all important appointment decisions made in Kabul. These centralized institutional arrangements were never effective before the war. They were even more ineffective during a period characterized by growing insecurity. This highly centralized structure, with no opportunity for citizen oversight, led to massive corruption and was an important force driving the anti-​government insurgency. Without opportunities to oversee officials at the subnational level and hold them accountable for their actions, officials were able to act with impunity at the local level. According to this new constitutional framework, all subnational officials—​ including provincial governors, district governors, and mayors—​answered to Kabul. Principles of centralism dictate that all policy issues are decided at the central government level and given to officials at the subnational authority to implement. There were some debates about whether or not to implement centralism during the first constitutional Loya Jirga in 2003–​04, but those who advocated it were ignored by the interim government of Hamid Karzai and the United States, who played a major role in shaping and supporting the new government. The Karzai government, which had just come to power and had to deal with consolidating Karzai’s authority vis-​à-​ vis a group of armed commanders and warlords, preferred a centralized system. Both he and the international community feared that decentralization might give greater voice and power to warlords and their armed groups (Dobbins 2014). According to their vision, it was the job of the state-​building effort to help them consolidate power in Kabul. They believed that warlords and other autonomous powers at the subnational level served as an immediate threat to their ability to exert control over the countryside. In 2007, the Karzai administration established the Independent Director for Local Governance (IDLG). The purpose of this organization was to consolidate subnational governance and ensure integration among line ministries working at the subnational level. It was also tasked to improve the professionalization of officials at the subnational level. Prior to the establishment of IDLG, these functions were managed by a department within the Ministry of Interior, which was responsible for overseeing subnational governance. Most of the staff of IDLG simply moved from the Ministry of Interior to this new agency. It is important to note that many of the appointment processes IDLG inherited from the Ministry of Interior were holdovers from old processes imported from the Soviet Union as a consequence of the extensive influence the Soviets had in Afghanistan for many years. The socialist influence on Afghan governance pre-​dated the 1979 Soviet invasion in 1979. Beginning in the 1950s, Soviet authorities brought in advisors that helped shape the contours of the Afghan system of governance (Robinson and Dixon 2013). These advisors reinforced centralism and forms of central planning, many of which remain intact today. In fact, it is a great irony that the international donor community, who have always been in a rush to exit Afghanistan, resurrected many of these Soviet-​era formal political institutions at the subnational level with their massive assistance programs (J. B. Murtazashvili 2019). Rather than reform the institutional structure that was in place, the decision of western donors to 162

—​​​​ L o c a l p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n i n A f g h a n i s t a n —​​​​

keep old institutional structures in place led many citizens to quickly lose trust in the state. This led to a vicious cycle of state collapse from which Afghanistan has yet to recover (J. B. Murtazashvili 2016). For example, after people began returning to their communities after 2001 and peace began to break out, citizens had high expectations that they would be treated differently by their state. Although they now were able to elect their president and parliament, they were still unable to elect any officials at the subnational level. They had no voice over who would be their mayors, district governors, or provincial governors. They had no input into public budgets or into major policy issues that affected their lives at the local level. Elections at the national level did not translate into meaningful change for citizens in the way they experience the state at the local level. This led to massive disillusionment. The most prominent formal local organizations at the subnational level in Afghanistan are provincial governors. These officials are appointed by the president through IDLG. There are 34 provinces in Afghanistan. These officials are responsible for overseeing line ministries at the provincial level. Most governors have been very weak and often do not come from the provinces they serve. Although there have been exceptions, such as Mohammad Atta in Balkh and Gul Agha Sherzai, who served as governor of Nangarhar, very few governors had strong sources of authority in the provinces where they served. This is because many of them were not from the provinces where they were assigned to work. The relative weakness of these governors made it easier for the central government to control and monitor their work. It made it much harder for citizens to have any say over what they did. The 2004 constitution called for the creation of provincial councils. There have been four rounds of provincial council elections held in Afghanistan (2005, 2009, 2014, and 2019). Elections have been marked by high levels of corruption. The October 2019 elections were so corrupt that it took nearly six months for the Independent Elections Committee to tally the votes. Although winners were declared, the winners had very little legitimacy because the elections are widely perceived as corrupt. Consequently, despite being democratically elected, these councils have very little trust in the eyes of the people (Asia Foundation 2018). Even more challenging than the corrupt elections, the most significant challenge with provincial councils lies in the fact that these bodies have a very weak mandate. They have no formal authority over provincial governors and administration who are all appointed by Kabul. There was a 2006 law on provincial councils that laid out their authority, but this law did not give them formal oversight over provincial governors. They cannot set a positive agenda for the province nor can they veto any rules established by the central government or the provincial governor. All important policy issues are made in Kabul. According to the constitution, it is up to these provincial councils to simply execute the will of the center. Unlike many democratically elected councils at the subnational level that exist in other countries, these councils have no law-​making ability. Donors gave them some role in overseeing international development projects and tried to give them a voice in local development planning. But governors are not obligated to listen to any advice given by officials at the subnational level. Creation of elected provincial councils did not help aggregate local preferences, or ensure local voices were heard in government or at the policy table. Instead, in focus group discussions designed by the author, citizens said that the provincial councils 163

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​

exist as a primary vehicle of patronage. This patronage was both a source of deep pride for some people, as well as deep dissatisfaction and resentment for those who did not have access to a provincial council member. Ultimately, they created new privileges and access to aid and government resources (J. B. Murtazashvili 2012). Just as is the case for the lower house of the Afghan parliament (the Wolesi Jirga), representatives to the provincial councils are selected on a provincial-​wide (or at-​ large) basis. Voters select members using the Single Non-​transferable Voting System (SNTV) and select one council member when they vote. There is one council in each of the country’s 34 provinces. Councils have between 9 to 29 members, depending on the population of the provinces (larger provinces have more seats allocated to them). Because provincial council members are selected through at-​large processes at the provincial level, there are no sub-​provincial constituencies in Afghanistan. Instead, all the provincial councilors represent the entire province. When an issue arises that requires resolution, citizens have no single councilor to whom she or he can turn. Instead, she or he can choose from among the those selected at-​large from the province. In practice, this means that citizens choose to work with members of the provincial councils who come from their ethnic group or with whom they have some personal connection. Consequently, this exacerbates ethnic tensions and communalism. In this way, this democratically elected body does not help people overcome divisions, but instead reinforces them. The creation of these at-​large provincial council elections also weakens accountability linkages between citizens and the state. Each province consists of several districts (some provinces have more than 30 districts). Districts are the third tier of government in Afghanistan. Like provincial governors, district governors are also appointed by the president through IDLG. In some cases, provincial governors may play a role in selecting district governors. The entire process of selecting governors at all levels is unclear. Like the provinces, each district should have an elected district council. Despite this constitutional requirement, these district council elections have never occurred. After 20 years of massive international assistance, districts have not been fully delimited. The government also has lacked the resources and security to hold district elections. Doing so would require standing up many election committees in each district and encouraging large numbers of district-​level candidates. Just as is the case with the provincial councils, it is not clear what authority district councils would have, if they were to be elected. However, one important role district councils potentially play is in changing the constitution through the constitutional Loya Jirga. According to the constitution, changes to the country’s constitutional framework can only be made if they are approved by a constitutional Loya Jirga, which should include members from district councils. But over the past twenty years, Afghanistan has been in a constitutional conundrum as advocates for constitutional change have been unable to promote change or convene a constitutional Loya Jirga, because district council elections have not been held. They were supposed to be held in October 2019 but were once again postponed due to security and resource concerns. District governors have very weak de facto authority, especially if we contrast them to more powerful provincial governors. Despite this, they are arguably the most powerful political forces in Afghanistan because their behavior determines the legitimacy of the state. As the lowest level of government in the country, they are the face

164

—​​​​ L o c a l p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n i n A f g h a n i s t a n —​​​​

of the government because they are the person most citizens turn to when they need help. The behavior of these district leaders plays an enormous role in shaping individual attitudes towards the government. If a district governor is very corrupt and demands large payments from citizens, they will simply turn away from him or her. Almost a decade ago, IDLG sought to professionalize the appointment of district governors and have them go through a civil service exam and training process. Using the civil service process to vet and train district governors underscores the central government’s view that these are not individuals who wield executive authority, but instead are civil servants who work and execute policies on behalf of the central government. Public opinion data shows that citizens have more trust in district governors than officials at the provincial and national level (Asia Foundation 2018). Some governors have more legitimacy than others. For example, in my own work I found that when subnational officials, and district governors in particular, were from the districts they were serving as governor, citizens tended to view them as more legitimate and effective (J. B. Murtazashvili 2014, 339). I conducted interviews in a district administration building in Herat Province. The building was gleaming and well-​kept, but completely empty during the middle of the day. In that district, villagers complained of deep corruption among district officials. By contrast in a district in Bamiyan province, I found a run-​down administrative building that was teeming with people during the middle of the day. In this district, residents spoke in glowing terms about their district official. They valued his ability to solve problems and remedy local disputes. That is why there were long lines outside of his office. In Afghanistan, crowded and seemingly confused administrative buildings seemed to be correlated with stronger government performance and higher levels of accountability. Orderly and quiet offices were correlated with corruption, as it was useless for citizens to spend time petitioning a local administration whose primary interest was predatory. The civil service process meant that many governors simply rotate from one district to the next, serving for very short periods of time in any district. These short-​ time horizons give them enormous incentives to engage in corruption and other forms of predatory behavior. As noted above, when governors are from regions where they serve, citizens are more likely to trust them because local norms serve as a constraint on their behavior. But there are no formal rules that require these officials to be accountable to citizens. According to the constitution, district and provincial governors are only accountable to the central government that appoints them. This creates enormous challenges in insecure districts, where the security of appointed governors depends on the willingness of citizens to keep them safe and protect them. In these more perilous conditions, governors are de facto more dependent on citizens, because they depend on them for information about things like the whereabouts of insurgent groups. Consequently, these informal relationships become much more important to establishing trust between the governors and citizens than do the formal rules. If these officials wish to survive, they must develop trust with citizens at the local level. This means that officials will allow citizens to have a greater seat at the table—​albeit through informal channels (because there are no formal channels for citizens to express their voice on policy or other issues). This seems counterintuitive, but it is the consequence of Afghanistan’s heavily centralized political system.

165

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​

BUILDING STATES ON ASTROTURF The post-​ 2001 political order in Afghanistan failed to create formal government authority at the village level. But given the high levels of corruption in state institutions, this may not be an entirely bad thing. As noted in the previous section, the 2004 constitution calls for elected village councils, but elections for these bodies have yet to be held. The role of these councils has never been clear. Although there are supposed to be elected village councils, there are no executive bodies at the local level. In other words, the constitution calls for elected councils but makes no mention of elected or appointed village leaders. Instead of creating elected village councils, the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, with more than $2 billion in support from the World Bank, created Community Development Councils (CDCs) through a program called the National Solidarity Program (NSP). In the days after the fall of the Taliban government, some in the government alongside the donor community assumed that there were no informal bodies left at the village level. For this reason, the government with World Bank support, should move and create new bodies to channel aid into communities. The World Bank contracted with mostly international NGOs to create more than 30,000 CDCs at the local level, giving each up to $60,000 in block grants. Some factions within the Afghan government wanted to make the CDCs the formal village councils, while others argued that this was unconstitutional because these councils were created by foreigners and not selected through standard electoral processes. The councils were sustained by large amounts of donor funds and were more viable when the country was more peaceful. As insecurity grew in the country beginning in the late 2000s, donor aid for these councils disappeared and many of them vanished. Although there is no formal government at the village area, the most dynamic governance in Afghanistan occurs in this space. This is because the rule of state law in this area remains inchoate and because there is a long history of informal governance at the village level. The next section on informal local governance discusses this vibrancy at the local level.

INFORMAL LOCAL GOVERNANCE IN AFGHANISTAN Despite decades of turmoil, conflict, and a dysfunctional and highly centralized government system, informal village governance throughout most of rural Afghanistan remains effective (J. B. Murtazashvili 2021). These informal village governing bodies are a type of customary organization. I describe them as customary rather than traditional. As Olivier Roy notes, tradition refers to something frozen in time and reviving traditional authority represents a desire to go back to a yesterday frozen in time (Roy 1990). Rather than be seen through the prism of tradition, village organizations in rural Afghanistan are customary. Just as customary law changes and evolves over time (Abotsi 2020; Joireman and Meitzner Yoder 2016; Beyer 2016), so too do the rules governing village organizations in rural Afghanistan (T. J. Barfield 2003). In rural Afghanistan, there are three main local informal governing organizations that play a foundational role in community life: village representatives (maliks),1 religious authorities (mullahs), and village councils (shuras). These organizations have different names in different parts of the country. For example, Pashtun communities 166

—​​​​ L o c a l p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n i n A f g h a n i s t a n —​​​​

use the term jirga instead of shura. Some communities eschew the terms shura or jirga altogether and speak of majlis or jalasa (meeting) when describing their village councils. Instead of malik, some communities in different regions use the terms arbab, khan, namayenda, wakil, or some other title.2 The important thing is that these organizations typically operate by the same rules in communities. Local informal governance is effective in rural Afghanistan not just because villages possess diverse governing organizations, but because they share an understanding of the rules that govern these organizations. Regardless of region, shuras should be governed by norms of deliberation and a sense of accountability to citizens. Maliks should be accountable to citizens and are typically described by citizens as “a bridge between the people and the government.” These maliks are no feudal lords but instead serve as firsts among equals—​leaders primus inter pares. They are representatives of village interests rather than hereditary village rulers. Norms governing maliks, for example are fairly consistent across the villages of Afghanistan (J. B. Murtazashvili 2016, 66). For example, although women do not generally participate in public convenings of shuras, citizens expect the right of every household to participate in deliberations (J. B. Murtazashvili 2016, Chapter 3). Shuras or jirgas are the most important local political organizations in rural Afghanistan, although they are completely informal. Village life usually is centered around these councils. According to public opinion data and household surveys, they exist in almost every village in Afghanistan. These shuras do not have fixed membership. There are not elections to be part of a shura. Instead, they convene when issues arise. Participation in the body depends on the nature of the issue being discussed. In some situations, it will involve the entire village. In other circumstances, convening of a shura will involve just a few families. In such case, the shura process will only involve the relevant disputants to an issue along with respected leaders as well as religious leaders. In principle, representatives of each household are eligible to participate in these convenings when they involve entire communities. In practice, it is typically men that represent households in public, but every household affected has a right to attend these hearings. In that sense they are more egalitarian. A community would hold a village-​wide shura when they deliberate an large aid project or other infrastructure project coming to their community. Shuras (usually represented by maliks and affected households) of two communities might meet when there is a dispute over a joint resource, such as an irrigation canal. Mullahs are village religious leaders, but the term “leader” here may be misleading. In Afghan Islamic tradition, village mullahs often do not have very high social status. A mullah is simply an individual claiming the ability to decipher and apply Islamic Law in a community, but for complicated legal issues an Islamic leader of a much higher status can be called upon. Mullahs are the individuals in a community who are involved with life-​cycle rituals. In terms of governance, they are involved in issues such as resolving inheritance or property disputes. In Afghanistan, there is a deep blurring of lines between customary law (adat/​ ’urf/​Pashtunwali) and Islamic legal traditions. This does not generate substantial tension because interpretation of Islam in Afghanistan is tightly fused with custom. In some communities, there is deep fusion between the two, so that mullahs may often apply customary law when they believe they are applying Qur’anic law. Similarly, many Pashtun communities believe that their form of customary law, Pashtunwali, is 167

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​

distinct from practices and traditions of other ethnic groups inside of Afghanistan, when in fact these groups often share quite a lot in common. Their differences are much less significant than the facets they have in common. Mullahs exist in communities to apply law; they are not responsible for creating it. Although Islam as a religion is highly decentralized, there remains a hierarchy among religious leaders in Afghanistan with judges (qazi) and scholars (mawlawi) having higher status to innovate with religious law than their village-​level counterparts. Their job is to apply basic principles of law to daily life. In his ethnographic work on religious leaders in Afghanistan during the anti-​Soviet insurgency, Roy referred to the mullahs of rural Afghanistan as “traditionalist, and not fundamentalists” (Roy 1990, 4). Throughout much of Afghani history, political leaders sought to diminish the role of mullahs in political life because both the monarchy and the subsequence communist leaders believed that these religious leaders could accumulate legitimacy to challenge their rule. The communists ruthlessly assassinated mullahs around the country. Mosques play a central place in community life. Villages will often measure their size by the number of mosques they possess. Mosques are central meeting places and a place where people go to meet mullahs and resolve issues (cf. Hölzchen, this volume, for comparison). Often village meetings will take place in mosques. For this reason, citizens in a community will often contribute money to construct mosques as they are a place that is vital for all men in the community to meet to sort out issues as they arise. Despite their lower status in society, mullahs are foundational to the political architecture in villages, because they represent the interests of people in communities, rather than some higher level of authority. Although mullahs may be associated with certain political factions and may even wander from community to community, they are not part of a broader religious hierarchy. Even if they represent a certain religious school (Jafari, Hanafi, etc.) they do not answer to a specific religious leader. The flipside to this is that villages can easily select new mullahs to replace those who they believe do not serve their interests. Similarly, individuals can often engage in “venue shopping” when they have a dispute that requires resolution. When faced with a dispute, villagers can go to a mullah who they believe will be most disposed to solving a dispute in their favor. This can lead to enormous tension when disputants face a challenge of which mullah they should turn to. If a community has more than one mullah, and two mullahs have equal standing to resolve a conflict, it can be difficult for disputants to decide which is the mullah of recourse. Maliks are the third pillar of informal local governance in rural Afghanistan. They are also the most difficult for outside audiences to understand because they do not nicely correspond to political institutions in many other countries. Maliks are customary village leader who represent community interests to the outside world. Although the power and history of these leaders is based in custom, these people do not come to power because they are leaders of tribes or clans. They do not attain this position automatically through kinship status, or through a strict lineage process. In some cases, the position of a malik is hereditary, passed on from a father to his son. But this is not always the case, nor is it the case in most instances. In Afghanistan, there is no such thing as a tribal leader or a clan leader. Instead, maliks generally 168

—​​​​ L o c a l p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n i n A f g h a n i s t a n —​​​​

become informal leaders of communities through their leadership talents and political prowess. They typically do not enter government service. Although the formal state institutions in Afghanistan remain incredibly weak, local governance in rural Afghanistan is sustained by the confluence of these three informal political organizations at the village level, that come together to underpin an “informal constitution of village governance” in rural Afghanistan (J. B. Murtazashvili 2016, Chapter 3). Most villages in rural Afghanistan possess village councils (shuras/​ jirgas), religious arbiters (mullahs), and village leaders (maliks). Each of these local political organizations has the authority to act inside of their own domain of power. Power is separated among them and they have domain over unique action arenas (Ostrom 2005).

THE FORMAL, INFORMAL GAP The greatest challenge to development and stability in Afghanistan is the enormous gap between the formal and informal governing arrangements, especially in rural areas. As the previous sections have illustrated, Afghanistan has incredibly robust informal governing arrangements that are highly decentralized. Most of this activity does not scale upwards. These informal local political organizations stand alongside the highly centralized formal political institutions of the state, which are very ineffective and offer very few opportunities for citizen participation. Scholars of development and governance have long pointed out that it is the gap between de jure and de facto institutional arrangements that drive instability and conflict (North 1990; Ostrom 1990; 1996). Over the past 20 years, the state-​building effort in Afghanistan has done very little to bridge the gap between formal institutions of the state and the informal constitution. The formal institutional arrangements do not allow for citizens at the local level to have much voice into national policies or debates. There are few ways for people in communities to bring proposals to the government at the local level. Efforts to build the Afghan state were not successful. The US military intervention at the height of the counterinsurgency campaign in the 2000s also shared this vision. General Stanley McChrystal famously said that the purpose of the state-​building effort and his counterinsurgency campaign was to bring “government in a box” to communities throughout Afghanistan. In post-​2001 Afghanistan, individuals and communities have been frozen out of participation with state institutions. There are no elections for local leaders. Not only is the organization of government very centralized in terms of representation, it is also characterized by a very strong centralized bureaucracy where all important decisions about investments and public finance are made in Kabul and very far away from communities. The system of public finance in Afghanistan has deep Soviet legacies that began as far back as the 1950s, when the Soviets begin implementing five-​year plans in that country (Robinson and Dixon 2013). The heavily centralized system also contributed to massive amounts of corruption, because there were few vehicles available for citizen oversight or any forms of accountability. Rather than building a strong democratic government with opportunities for citizen participation, the international donor community resurrected authoritarian structures from the past. 169

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​

This gap between effective local institutions and national institutions that remained out of touch with the needs of citizens has been a primary driver of the Taliban insurgency (Felbab-​Brown 2017). The lack of government accountability that was enabled by massive donor investments, which accounted for 43 percent of GDP in 2020 and 100 percent of GDP in 2010, bred unparalleled levels of corruption.3 Building accountability when aid as a percentage of GDP was 43 percent in 2020, is a monumental task. Much of this corruption was done legally, by skilled Afghans who were able to “game” the US government contracting system and make off with millions of dollars in assistance intended to help people (J. Murtazashvili 2015). Neither President Hamid Karzai nor his successor, President Ashraf Ghani, ever sought to reform the governance system in Afghanistan and devolve it into a more decentralized system that would reflect the strengths embodied by the informal constitution of village governance. Like most politicians, they preferred more power. They wanted to concentrate power in their own hands to eliminate rivals and capture rents. Afghan leaders were not alone in this endeavor: they were empowered by foreign donors who supported the state. Those foreign states that contributed to the Afghan state-​building effort also preferred a centralized system to a more decentralized system, as a unified system promised unity of command. A more diffuse system would make it harder for outsiders to control this new government and account for the use of resources. In sum, it was in the interest of both parties to retain this almost authoritarian system of government because it gave an illusion of control.

NOTES 1 This is a term used across Afghanistan’s many languages and is common across Central Asia and Afghanistan. Derived from an Arabic term (lit. “owner”). All terms in this section are used across Afghanistan’s main languages: Persian, Pashto, and Uzbek. Many of them have Persian or Arabic roots. 2 I use these generic titles (shura, mullah, malik) to describe all these organizations even though they have unique titles in different regions. 3 Source: World Bank Country Overview (www.worldb​ank.org/​en/​coun​try/​afgh​anis​tan/​ overv​iew)

REFERENCES ʻAbd al-​Raḥmān Khān. 1900. The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan … J. Murray. Abotsi, E. Kofi. 2020. “Customary Law and the Rule of Law: Evolving Tensions and Re-​ Engineering.” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 37: 135. Asia Foundation. 2018. “A Survey of the Afghan People: Afghanistan in 2018.” Washington, DC: Asia Foundation. https://​asi​afou​ndat​ion.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2018/​12/​2018​_​Afg​ han-​Survey​_​ful​lRep​ort-​12.4.18.pdf. Barfield, Thomas. 2012. “Centralization/​Decentralization in the Dynamics of Afghan History.” Cliodynamics 3 (1). https://​escho​lars​hip.org/​uc/​item/​1ks0g​7dr. Barfield, Thomas J. 2003. “Afghan Customary Law and Its Relationship to Formal Judicial Institutions.” Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace. Beyer, Judith. 2016. The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 170

—​​​​ L o c a l p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n i n A f g h a n i s t a n —​​​​ Clunan, Anne, and Harold Trinkunas. 2010. Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. First edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies. Dobbins, James. 2014. “Remarks on Afghanistan to the Asia Society.” US Department of State. www.state.gov/​p/​sca/​rls/​rmks/​2014/​229​015.htm. Favre, Raphy. 2005. “Interface between State and Society: Discussion on Key Social Features Affecting Governance, Reconciliation, and Reconstruction.” Unpublished manuscript. —​ —​ —​ . 2006. “Local Shura, Security and Development in Afghanistan.” Unpublished Manuscript. Felbab-​Brown, Vanda. 2017. “How Predatory Crime and Corruption in Afghanistan Underpin the Taliban Insurgency.” Brookings (blog). April 18, 2017. www.brooki​ngs.edu/​blog/​order-​ from-​chaos/​2017/​04/​18/​how-​predat​ory-​crime-​and-​cor​rupt​ion-​in-​afgh​anis​tan-​under​pin-​ the-​tali​ban-​ins​urge​ncy/​. Joireman, Sandra F., and Laura S. Meitzner Yoder. 2016. “A Long Time Gone: Post-​Conflict Rural Property Restitution under Customary Law.” Development and Change 47 (3): 563–​ 85. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​dech.12236. Krasner, Stephen D., and Jeremy M. Weinstein. 2014. “Improving Governance from the Outside In.” Annual Review of Political Science 17 (1): 123–​45. Lynch, Marc. 2016. “Failed States and Ungoverned Spaces.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 668 (1): 24–​35. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00027​ 1621​6666​028. Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. 2008. “National Solidarity Programme (NSP).” Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. http://​nsp​afgh​anis​tan.org/​media/​downlo​ads/​ NSP_​Broc​hure​_​Apr​il_​2​008.pdf. Murtazashvili, Jennifer. 2012. “Survey on Political Institutions, Elections, and Democracy in Afghanistan.” Washington, DC: Democracy International and United States Agency for International Development. —​ —​ —​ . 2015. “Gaming the State: Consequences of Contracting out State Building in Afghanistan.” Central Asian Survey 34 (1): 78–​92. —​—​—​. 2016. “Afghanistan: A Vicious Cycle of State Failure.” Governance 29 (2): 163–​66. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​gove.12195. Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick. 2014. “Informal Federalism: Self-​ Governance and Power Sharing in Afghanistan.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 44 (2): 324–​43. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1093/​publ​ius/​pju​004. —​—​—​. 2016. Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan. New York: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​. 2019. “Pathologies of Centralized State-​Building.” PRISM 8 (2): 14. —​—​—​. 2021. “The Endurance and Evolution of Afghan Customary Governance.” Current History 120 (825): 140–​45. https://​doi.org/​10.1525/​curh.2021.120.825.140. North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press. —​ —​ —​ . 1996. “Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy, and Development.” World Development 24 (6): 1073–​87. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​0305-​750X(96)00023-​X. —​—​—​. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Risse, Thomas, ed. 2011. Governance Without a State?: Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood. New York: Columbia University Press. Risse, Thomas, Tanja A. Börzel, and Anke Draude. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Governance and Limited Statehood. Oxford University Press. Robinson, Paul, and Jay Dixon. 2013. Aiding Afghanistan: A History of Soviet Assistance to a Developing Country. New York: Columbia University Press. 171

—​​​​ J e n n i f e r B r i c k M u r t a z a s h v i l i —​​​ Roy, Olivier. 1990. Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Barnett R. 2002. The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. Second edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shahrani, M. Nazif. 1986. “State Building and Social Fragmentation in Afghanistan: A Historical Perspective.” In The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, edited by Ali Banauazizi and Myron Weiner, 23–​74. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

172

CHAPTER TWELVE

DAUGHTERS AS OJIZA Marriage, security and care strategies for daughters among Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan Aksana Ismailbekova INTRODUCTION This chapter illustrates the dynamics of the Uzbek marriage system and new forms of care, material and moral support for young married women in southern Kyrgyzstan. My ethnographic research shows tremendous concern among parents to ensure daughters’ livelihoods and to help them cope with the insecurity arising in their lives in both peaceful and conflict-​ridden times. The main forms of solidarity extend to all aspects of caring for their daughters and their respective family members. These observations contrast with the existing regional and Western literatures on Central Asian Muslim societies, which have emphasized the predominance of patriarchy (Vasil’yeva and Karmysheva, 1969; Suhareva, 1978; Monogarova and Muhiddinov, 1992) and patrilineality (Hardenberg, 2009, Jacquesson, 2013; Ismailbekova, 2017), but have under-​studied the significance of other types of kin-​based relationships. This chapter will show the importance of some of these in Central Asia, focusing in particular on care strategies for daughters and matrilocal ideas. The lack of information concerning these other types of relations is linked to the fact that women’s voices are often ‘muted’ and cannot be heard even by other women (Ardener, 2005). Usually, women in Kyrgyzstan –​regardless of ethnicity –​articulate themselves in the ‘dominant’ idioms of kinship. Like men, they tend to emphasize patrilineality and genealogy. Their own practical kin relationships are not brought into explicit consideration and are not verbalized. My recent research, however, has revealed other relations within local kinship systems such as the importance of the mother and her relatives for the maintenance and advancement of a household, the importance of a mother’s brother and his support role, and the importance of having extensive knowledge of kin on the mother’s side. How do Uzbeks care for their daughters and maintain caring relationships with them after marriage? This care is connected to the local idea of treating daughters as vulnerable (Uzb., ojiza) and the ideal of providing for a daughter’s ‘security’ in marriage. There are several factors that can influence the helping relationships established between parents and their daughters, as well as the perceived safety of the daughter: 1) knowledge of potential future marriage partners, 2) investment in relationships on the maternal side, 3) preference for marriages at a short distance. As parents deal with the different life-​stages of daughters, they also engage in a creative DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-14

173

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​

process of invoking a range of alternatives to preserve the ideals of a daughter’s security. This chapter is based on long-​term research among ethnic Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan from urban and rural contexts between 2011 and 2017. The most focused research occurred from November 2018 to February 2019, when a questionnaire-​ based survey on kinship networks was conducted, combining qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. My research was both sociological and ethnographic in nature, so my methods began with random sampling and ended with in-​depth ethnographic research to elicit individual voices and biographies. I also collected 40 genealogies from families of diverse status in terms of wealth, education, age and gender. Let me give a brief introduction to the socio-​political background and debates in the anthropology of altruism and kinship cooperation before discussing the Uzbeks’ marriage system. Afterwards, I will consider the local meanings of Uzbek marriage patterns (in connection with the caring relationships between daughters and parents) in times of conflict.

SOCIO-​P OLITICAL BACKGROUND Ethnic Kyrgyz comprise 72 per cent of the population in Kyrgyzstan. The largest minority are the Uzbeks, comprising 14.6 per cent of the population, concentrated mainly in southern Kyrgyzstan. More specifically, they are mainly located in and around the city of Osh and Jalal-​Abad oblasts in the Fergana Valley. In these areas of southern Kyrgyzstan, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks reside in roughly equal proportions. For example, in 2020 the population of Osh city (total 312,530) was almost equally divided between Uzbeks (42.84 per cent) and Kyrgyz (50.96 per cent), with the remaining 6.2 per cent represented by other ethnic groups (National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic, 2020). The resident ethnic groups have a long history of peaceful coexistence in Osh and across the Fergana Valley, marked by inter-​ethnic marriages, friendships, and socio-​economic exchange. Historically, the two ethnic groups have lived side by side, in constant contact with each other through a state and business ‘symbiosis’ (Liu, 2012; Megoran, 2012). More specifically, since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991, the Uzbeks have occupied a niche position in the middle of the economy –​typically trading in the bazaar, working as shopkeepers, café owners and drivers –​whereas the Kyrgyz have occupied key occupations in state employment (Reeves, 2010; Liu, 2012, Megoran, 2012; Ismailbekova, 2019). Nevertheless, since the late Soviet period, ethnic tensions have been present. These tensions are partly related to Soviet nation-​building projects1 and partly to the new state’s efforts to establish its independence (Megoran, 2017). For example, the Osh conflict in summer 2010 was the worst violence the region had seen in years. This conflict drastically changed and destroyed the previous symbiosis, and thus also threatened the Uzbek business sector (Atakhanov and Asankanov, 2020). The violence between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz erupted in the city on 10 June 2010 in the form of intercommunal clashes as a result of political crisis in the country. Ethno-​nationalism intensified in the country after the summer’s deadly clashes, and a decade later a common discourse promoting the view that ‘Kyrgyzstan is the land 174

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​

of Kyrgyz and the rest, i.e. the ethnic minorities, are guests’ (Abashin, 2011: 2) remains strong. Aspects such as nationalization, ethnic strife, and migration in part created or reproduced a sense of ethnic minority status. In this regard, the Uzbeks of Kyrgyzstan often came to feel the need to protect a newly ethnicized identity and heritage. Specifically gendered practices became an instrument of maintaining this, a pattern that is not so evident across the border in Uzbekistan itself. The Uzbeks as a minority group have deepened their ‘ethnic’ identity to the detriment of their women, who are deprived of the choice of a partner to marry, especially during conflicts. The existing literature on warfare shows that women’s rights always suffer massively, especially in civil war-​like situations (Björkdahl and Selimovic, 2017). It is within this context that the discussion among Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan about altruism, cooperation, matrilocal care and the security of daughters has become more audible.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF KINSHIP ON ALTRUISM AND HUMAN COOPERATION There are fundamental arguments in anthropology concerning the roles of kinship and what motivates people to be involved in kinship relations. All perspectives on kinship agree that humans are able and willing to cooperate and support each other. They differ markedly, however, in how they explain cooperation. Functionalist perspectives about the prevalence of mutual support among kinsmen were raised long ago by Fortes (1969). Assuming the group-​specific universality of amity, Fortes argued that altruism is a constant in human life, and that people help a wide range of relatives according to individual need. He argues that the human universe is divided into two spheres. One sphere includes family and kin, while the second sphere encompasses strangers. Amity functions within the framework of kinship networks, tribes and communities, supporting the right to claim for mutual support and cooperation. In contrast, strangers fall outside the realm of (obligatory) altruism; they may be considered suitable for marriage, but they are equally likely targets for serious fighting. Other arguments have focused more directly on the interests of the persons concerned, and their efforts to provide for their own children. From such perspectives, help given to another relative may be a matter of strategy rather than altruism. For example, Becker (1991) does not agree with functional and evolutionary perspectives, but explains changes in family patterns in terms of economic models. As Becker argues, many human behaviors are rational and partially self-​interested, even when they are generous. Becker thinks that one might be generous to one’s own children; in such a case, a parent cares about the welfare of his or her children alongside his or her own welfare. Goody (1976) argues that kinship is not detached from exchange, property relations, or inheritance patterns. His main concern is to demonstrate the important linkages between domestic relations and property institutions associated with the different productive capacities of horticulture and agriculture. The case of Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan demonstrates a point also made by Goody: children often inherit before their parents’ death in the form of landed property and dowry –​both forms being intended to secure the children’s material well-​being. 175

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​

Another body of scholarship stresses the cultural meanings of kinship over its functional dimensions. Schneider (1984) challenges the relationship between biological and social kinship, and argues instead that it is important to investigate what people say about their relationships and how they imagine and value both social and biological relations. Schneider rethinks kinship in terms of local understandings, discourses and practices of relatedness (Carsten, 2000: 2–​3). From this perspective, altruism among kin is motivated by culturally learned moral values and symbolic constructs (shared substance, shared food, sentiment and nurturance). Sahlins (2012) has reviewed the anthropological literature from this perspective and demonstrates abundant evidence that human kinship relations are neither dependent on, nor reducible to, those of biology. He argues that kinship involves a ‘mutuality of being’; kin are ‘related’ in that their experiences are transpersonal rather than individual and that they all contribute to their common existence as ‘kin’. ‘Unconditional amity’, which implies cooperation, being supportive, and ‘mutual relationships of being’ is the main principle of kinship (Sahlins 2012: 53). Though the above analyses all agree that human beings have incentives to cooperate and support each other, they disagree strongly on the nature of these incentives. Nevertheless, the above-​mentioned perspectives are rarely engaged in direct debate. The question remains for any given community, like Uzbeks, whether people provide generous support towards their children for reasons of rational self-​interest, or shared cultural values. Furthermore, such general perspectives on kinship rarely engage directly with the more specific body of scholarship on care. This is so despite ethnographic evidence that many societies view ‘kinship as the most authentic domain of care provision’ (Read and Thelen, 2007: 10). In the anthropological study of care, gender and generation have been considered primary vectors of interest. With respect to patriarchal societies, the role and status of daughters have been particularly scrutinized. In general, it seems that care relations are expected to follow patriarchal principles, with concern for a daughter centered on her marriageability, while long-​term concerns for security are afforded only to sons. Daughters have been seen to place financial and emotional burdens on their families (Evans, 2008; Jefferey and Jefferey, 1996; Seymour, 1999). This has been well documented in the Chinese context in connection to values of filiality, before the one-​child policy (Fong, 2002). More recent ethnographic research reveals changes in these trends (Fong, 2002). In India, decisions about daughters’ education were long linked to its likely effect on their ‘marriageability’ (Mukhopadhyay and Seymour, 1994). Among Uzbeks in twenty-​ first century Kyrgyzstan, intense economic and affective investment in daughters after marriage is common, even in the context of enduring patriarchy. Part of this specificity may be related to the fact that my Uzbek informants acknowledge so-​called ‘bilateral descent’, which an equal balance between mother’s and father’s sides. Though the society is patriarchal, relations and descent are traced from both sides: this contrasts with the Kyrgyz case that demonstrates strong patrilinearity. In the patrilineal descent system of Kyrgyz informants, local ideas of kinship imply that ‘daughters are treated as guests/​outsiders who will leave the family home and no longer belong to their parents’ family after marriage’ (cf. Ismailbekova, 2017: 56).

176

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​

An element of the Uzbek bilateral marriage pattern could be linked to the historical profession of a sedentary, closely related kin group of more or less equal wealth and status, living in an area to protect property and to maintain professional qualifications as traders, craftworkers, or cooks.

THE UZBEK MARRIAGE SYSTEM Unlike Kyrgyz or Kazaks (cf. Ismailbekova, 2017; Hudson, 1964), my 40 Uzbek informants do not have deep genealogical ties with common ancestors and they trace their descent from the mother and father’s side equally; this means that relatives from both sides are equally important. However, because ancestral genealogies are not traced, affiliations with larger kin groupings are rare. Cousin marriages are preferred, and it is not unusual for Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan to have the same grandparents on both sides. Sometimes, genealogies are even more collapsed when they claim that their grandparents were the siblings of intermarrying children (Uzb., jeen). Such a marriage is unlikely, but it is a short cut to explaining the common grandparents and vague knowledge of great-​grandparents. In the absence of explicit attempts to learn or record genealogies, effective genealogical depth amounts to the oldest known ancestor of the oldest living person. People are knowledgeable of their cousins, however, as these are important for marriage strategies. One could characterize the kinship system thus as weakly patrilineal with a strong matrilateral link prevailing among my Uzbek informants in southern Kyrgyzstan, and endogamous tendencies through first cross-​and parallel-​cousins. Marriage is expected to be within the ethnic group, which is subdivided in terms of class (wealth and professional status) rather than lineages. Yet, the marriage ideal has not been unchanging. At the very least, Soviet policies popularized inter-​ethnic marriages to a certain extent (Edgar, 2007), and the dynamics of recent ethnic conflict in Osh have also reshaped marriage preferences (Ismailbekova, 2019). At one level, the Uzbek marriage system of 40 individuals that I interviewed resembles the pattern described by Lévi-​Strauss (1963). Their marriages are based on exchange of women and mutual obligations among affinal groups. The core of kinship of my informants is based on the establishment of close affinal ties. Accordingly, a lot of time and energy is invested in the search for spouses, as marriage presents the opportunity to create new kinship ties. The choice of marriage partners within kin relations or close geographic proximity has parallels to Tajiks or Uzbeks outside of Kyrgyzstan (Kikuta, 2016; Cleuziou, 2017), as well as to some other Muslim societies elsewhere (Tillion, 1983).

‘A GOOD GIRL DOES NOT GO OUT OF THE MAHALLA’: ARRANGED MARRIAGE My informants tend to marry off their children in their late teens and early twenties: girls by the age of 20 and boys by the age of 22, as otherwise they fear that the young people would be tempted to start choosing partners independently, disregarding their parents’ advice and denying their parents’ final approval. As a consequence, a young man’s parents will look to find possible partners for their 177

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​

son following careful investigation of the young woman’s character (hard-​working, educated) and family status. If the prospective bride’s status is accepted by the prospective groom’s family, the young people will have the opportunity to meet privately at home for an hour to talk and decide whether they like each other. If either of the young people express disinterest, the parents repeat the process until they find a likely partner. Arranged marriage is strong and widespread; children are not allowed to find partners by themselves –​should they find a potential partner through means other than their parents’ matching, they can marry only with their parents’ approval, and that means that each side has carefully considered the status of the other side. The ideal marriage is made between relatives (Uzb., öz jak). Within the kin group, my informants prefer to establish affinal relationships between a younger sister and elder sister; in this case, the children of two sisters marry. Another possible match is the marriage of the grandchildren of two brothers. A young woman should not marry someone from far away, so the ‘best’ girl comes from or stays as a bride in her own neighbourhood (Uzb., mahalla). If it is not possible to find a partner from among their relatives or neighbourhood, families will start searching for a match from outsiders (Uzb., zhat jak) living within a short distance. This means that marrying outside of a kin group and village is possible, but only if the potential marriage partner is not located far away. In this instance, it is important that the marriage keeps the bride physically close to her kin group. According to my informants, daughters are at the heart of Uzbek kinship formation, and they connect two different households and make them a kinship unit for the future. Usually it is the daughters who balance obligations, reciprocity and exchange between two households. Due to recent mass labour migration, this marriage pattern is changing: many young men now emigrate to Russia and parents know this and desire to keep their daughters nearby after marriage. The young men migrate in search of a ‘stable normal life’ (Schielke, 2020): in the Uzbek case, the ‘stable normal life’ is desired after marriage. They go through an unstable and insecure migration process (Cleuziou, Eraliev and Urinboyev, in this volume) –​while leaving their wives with their in-​laws or parents. The groom’s family may manipulate these known preferences and desires. According to one informant: If the marriage is made within the ‘pool’ of cousin marriages, the groom marries first and then moves to Russia and takes his wife with him. But before the marriage the groom and his family usually do not openly express that they intend to go to Russia; otherwise the parents may refuse to give up their daughters. Alternatively, the husband travels to Russia immediately after the marriage and leaves a young woman with the husband’s parents for a long time. There have been cases where husbands found other women in Russia while they had young wives in Kyrgyzstan. (Shavkat Atakhanov, 18 November 2018, Osh) For Uzbeks who are parents of girls, the desirability of keeping their daughter close after marriage is connected also with the desire to help her evade her husband’s parents’ control and with the fear of losing their son-​in-​law’s tartib (loyal discipline, commitment) over a long distance. They are not convinced easily that the economic benefits of migration are the most important aspects of their daughter’s 178

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​

security. Sometimes parents tend to send their daughters abroad with the young husband, so that they take care of their husbands and keep the marriage alive. Mukadas (pseudonym, 30 years old) says it was emotionally difficult when her husband found another wife in Russia, and her parents paid for Mukadas’ trip to Russia, asking her to be closer to her husband, but her husband turned out to be a despot who beat her and brought other women to their apartment in Russia. In the end, she decided to divorce, despite her parents’ attempt to save the marriage, because as she explained, she had gone through ‘humiliation and shame’ (December 2018, Osh). In such circumstances, local Uzbeks extend their marriage preferences beyond the ‘pool of marriageable cousins’; the new matches may be less related, but they are physically close and this means that daughters remain close to their natal families. It is instructive to note that the possibility of taking care of daughters is considered more important than maintaining cousin marriages. But the cousin marriage is not always the key factor for a successful marriage: Marhoba (pseudonym) told me that her mother agreed to marry her off to a son of Marhoba’s mother’s younger sister. Marhoba described their marriage as disgusting, because it was impossible to live with a ‘brother’ with whom she had grown up as ‘siblings’ since childhood. Marhoba says that she also had a miscarriage in early pregnancy, which was fortunate for her, otherwise she would have had to stay with the man. After her divorce she fled to Russia, leaving her mother and siblings behind. Marhoba’s mother and her aunt have not spoken with each other since Marhoba’s divorce (November 2018, Osh). Sometimes the ideal pattern is still realized. During my research, I found a few cases in which two sisters had been married to two brothers. One of the women, Dilnoza, explained My sister met her husband when she came to me for a few days and they liked each other. It is convenient for me when my sister is next to me and helps me with the household chores. When we go to the doctor, we take turns looking after the children. I have integrated my sister into this family by showing her everything in the household. (November, 2018, Osh) In another case, a man had married two sisters sequentially: when the first daughter died, the second daughter was already divorced. The husband of the deceased daughter, the widower, then married the divorced daughter in order to make sure that the children of the deceased daughter were not motherless. It was seen as a preferable outcome for the children to be taken care of by their mother’s sister. This form of marriage –​the sororate –​in which a woman marries the husband of her deceased (or barren) sister is widespread among Kyrgyz and elsewhere in the world too. If a girl gets married in a physically close area outside the kinship network, there is a strong possibility that her parents would choose to give a second daughter to a partner in the same village in which their first daughter resides. This allows the two sisters to take care of each other and be close to one another. Uzbek families married their daughters to households that were located very close to home. There were several occasions when girls married their next-​door neighbours in order to stay within 179

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​

their neighbourhood, and others married their daughters to men who lived just down the street. According to Gulnora (pseudonym): When we were children, we used to play with my husband. He was working in Russia for many years, and when he came to Osh, his mother came as a sovchu (Uzb., messenger with marriage proposal). My mother also suggested this variation as ‘ideal’ because of the closeness and support she can get from her. I agreed, even though I did not find him a good-​looking man. (December 2018, Osh) The marriages can become so tight and hegemonic that they lead to feelings of revulsion about incest. This also traps women, since women can hardly afford to fight with their brothers and fathers, or affinal women who are sisters, especially when remarriage rates are so high. If a girl’s parents are divorced, the chance of finding potential suitors for her is lower because divorce lowers a family’s status. Another low-​status category is that of a family whose father cannot feed the family, or drinks alcohol. Finally, if a young man drinks or consumes narcotics, the girl’s parents can choose not to give their daughter in marriage to him. But even these characteristics can be neglected in practice. Farida, a local teacher who raised three children on her own, had a different experience, as her two daughters were able successfully to marry despite the fact that she is divorced, and her eldest son was arrested by the Kyrgyz security service for liking ISIS terrorists on YouTube. Farida (pseudonym) claims that ‘for years it was emotionally difficult for me to constantly worry that my daughters might not marry successfully in the future because of my own and son’s status’ (November, 2018, Osh). But in life things turned out differently for her, thanks to the mutual respect and love of daughters and their husbands.

THE MOTHER’S BROTHER (UZB., TOGA) Ideally, the main source of support for a woman’s children should come from her brother (i.e., mother’s brother). The toga is the closest elder male kinsman and has the same responsibilities for his sister’s children as for his own. After the death of parents, usually a mother’s brother remains responsible for their sisters and their sisters’ children. Among ethnic Kyrgyz families it is the opposite, and the egos (the father’s brothers) are responsible for their brother’s children (Ismailbekova, 2017). My informants told me: Uzbeks have a saying that boys have a strong belly (beli bekem), meaning that they are free and allowed to work and earn money. In contrast, a girl is dependent on her husband and his family. The only source of emotional and material support comes from her mother’s relatives –​sisters (Uzb., khola), the mother’s brother, and maternal grandparents. (30 November 2018, Osh) It is important to briefly mention here that young women live with their husbands and are usually financially dependent on them. The husband’s parents usually provide 180

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​

the house/​or room for a young couple. Although it is the husband who is supposed to cover the most important basic needs of his growing family, many young women told me that their husbands’ earnings are not sufficient even for basic needs. The husband’s side (his own parents and relatives) does not provide any further support to the struggling couple, but waits for support to be provided by the woman’s family. They know that there is enormous support for daughters from the mother’s side. Knowledge of the mother’s relatives is therefore extensive; daughters are motivated to maintain especially close contact with their mother’s brothers and mother’s sisters and their children. Furthermore, many young women try to establish close contact with their maternal grandparents’ children and grandchildren. In order to make this connection close, parents encourage cousin marriages. Some married women are allowed by their husbands to work, others not, even if they are educated, and in this way they remain dependent –​but not only on their husbands. Usually married women are sent to their parent’s house every 15 days for one or two days, together with their children. In migration contexts, if a husband goes to Russia, his young wife remains at home and continues to visit her parents’ house. Whenever a married woman returns from her parental home, she is expected to bring lots of things: food for her in-​laws, clothes for herself and for her children. In addition, married women are sent to their parental house for treatment if they or the children are ill. Thus, all basic needs of a married woman have to be provided by her parents, not by her husband or parents-​in-​law. Parents always support their married daughters, within the limits of their possibilities. When a married woman gives birth, her parents are responsible for providing for all her basic needs –​for herself, for the children and for her husband as well. By contrast, it is not common for a son-​in-​law to visit his wife’s parents’ house. The wife’s parents invest a lot of energy and money into helping their daughter, not only at the beginning of married life, but also thereafter. Daughters are described as vulnerable and impotent (ojiza). The term means blind, weak, powerless and helpless; so described, a young woman belongs to the same category as an ‘invalid’. She is dependent on her parents while under 18 years of age; over 18 years of age, she is under her husband’s jurisdiction. The voice of a young married woman is usually not heard by her husband’s family. Thus, young married women are treated as being unable to do anything and they have to beg for support. Married women are believed to suffer greatly from this deprivation of emotional and financial support. Because it is thought that only a woman’s own relatives can provide adequate support, the ‘solution’ for a married woman is to seek out, expand and deepen relations within her own family and relatives. So there are various ways in which families look to support, protect and care for their daughters to address and balance that fundamental ‘vulnerability’. However, I would argue that treating women as ‘ojiza’ is ambiguous: on the one hand, it implies weakness, vulnerability, impotence; on the other hand, it is a strategy of individuals in patriarchy, through which women can exert a degree of agency in using this attribution to call for support. Ojiza is a functional concept that has both sides: ‘care’/​‘protection’ and ‘discipline’/​‘control’. Daughter marriages can be arranged by parents, and in return women are given care from the maternal side. Daughters are not only objects, as it may seem, but they have their own agency, which they can exercise within the overarching ‘ojiza’ framework, mobilizing meaningful 181

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​

power/​support within kin networks and they put the idea to use whenever necessary. They can enjoy the ‘ojiza’ status in patriarchy, that is, as young married women moving into the husband’s home, fulfilling a young bride’s (Uzb., kelin) duties, sometimes strictly adhering to new family rules and expectations. Some young women strategize with this vulnerable status. For example, the 19-​year-​old Aziza (pseudonym) pretended to be sick and came back to her parents for treatment, but in reality she just wanted a break from her duties as a young wife and wanted to enjoy the freedom at her parents’ house (interview conducted in the village of Alimtepe, 2018). Aziza’s case shows her agency and (some) free spaces of enactment within the dominant and ongoing patriarchal community. Comparable ethnographies from very different regions also show how women exert power in society, despite a highly patriarchical ideology being dominant (Adapon, 2008; Abu-​Lughod, 1990). Not all women are fortunate, and marriages are vulnerable, for example, to border politics between neighbouring states. Some women who came from Uzbekistan, for example, found that the connection with their mother’s relatives was weakened and that they were unable to maintain contact with them during the periodic closures of the border with Uzbekistan since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time of writing, the border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan is open, and families have started to re-​establish social contact.

DOWRY AND SUPPORT FOR SONS-​I N-​L AW There is an Uzbek proverb which highlights that a girl’s dowry preparation should start as early as possible: when a baby girl is brought to her cradle, the mother starts collecting her dowry in a chest. The parents must prepare an extensive dowry. For example, preparation of the dowry starts by slowly obtaining basic needs starting with the dowry chest (Uzb., sandyk). Step-​by-​step, the girls’ parents buy kitchen utensils, blankets and clothing. Items that are prepared for a dowry may have to last for ten years or more. A dowry can also be a collection of decorative objects such as: carpets, bedding, souvenirs and jewellery, precious stones, and fabrics of different colours, sizes, forms and designs. The women will wear these clothes and use their dowry for many years. The ‘cultural logic’ of dowry payments in anthropology is explained as a form of inheritance from parents to daughters (cf. Comaroff, 1980). In this regard, Uzbek bilateral descent is associated with daughters inheriting a share of their parents’ property (either as dowry, or at a parents’ death, or in between). Yet, the dowry as a form of women’s inheritance is an ambivalent practice with regard to women’s agency, independence, or rights, since it obviously allows husbands and their family members to access –​even control –​their wives’ inheritance, as a condition of accepting the brides (Sharma, 1984). The husbands’ family and his parents do provide a small portion of bride-​wealth (Uzb., kalyng) which mainly takes the form of food given at the young woman’s farewell. The woman’s parents usually make a big effort to organize her farewell and cover the majority of the costs relating to the marriage ceremony. The wedding ceremony has become a space for families to flaunt their status, prestige and wealth (Rasulova, 2009; Askarov, 2019; Trevisani, 2016.). This burden is underlined by the proverb ‘Parents who have married off their daughters cannot recover for 40 years.’ The financial costs of marrying off a daughter 182

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​

are so high that many parents have to start preparations well in advance or they could not afford to cover their daughter’s marriage ceremony. Marriage is not the end of the story, however, because this is justg the beginning of the support relationship. In terms of economic transfers between males, there is a chain from fathers-​in-​ law to sons-​in-​law, and on to the sons-​in-​law of the latter. There is a special support relationship between daughter’s parents towards their son-​in-​law. The wife’s family takes care of the husband, too, and his parents are released from the whole equation of care in the new couple’s early marriage. In reality, a woman’s parents (and her relatives) provide a lot, even after the daughter’s marriage. What we see is that goods and services flow from a father to his daughter and her husband, and from these to their daughter and her husband. Uzbeks seem to have partible inheritance (meaning inheritance is divided more or less equally among children), but families also try to keep the ownership and operation of a craft or trade within a single family unit. It is no surprise that this kind of arrangement of marriage and succession can be used to manipulate property ownership. To this end, paernts give sons their shares of inheritance in the form of skills, education and lifestyle investments that allow them to have their own professions. A family with a daughter may make her the primary heir of the family’s property, and after her marriage to someone with the right economic and administrative skills, give the new husband a share of the inheritance in form of the dowry. Together, then, with their two shares, the new couple assumes ownership of the wife’s family property. This pattern –​of inheritance down the female line by a very male-​oriented cultural group –​has lasted for a number of generations.

DYNAMICS OF PLACE IN MARRIAGE The traditional Uzbek marriage customs, as described above, changed during and after the Osh conflict. Uzbek parents in Osh feared that their daughters might be raped, and they feared the consequent humiliation and disgrace of the family. In 2010, they were therefore trying to make arrangements to marry their single daughters as quickly as possible. Marriage transferred responsibility for the safety, honour and dignity of the girls to the husband and in-​laws. It became a strategy to avoid disgrace and offence. The marriages were undertaken in the name of the daughter’s ‘security’, although the meaning of this concept shifted rapidly and the outcomes are ambiguous. During the events of 2010 and immediately after, many young women were given away in marriage without kalyng. The future husband’s parents came and hurriedly took the young women, offering only a kilogram of meat and rice. Uzbek communities beyond the city of Osh actively used this opportunity to wed their sons to maidens from conflict zones, as this was cheap and easy. Another negative factor for Uzbek families was the abolition of the dowry, which had provided a certain guarantee of a successful marriage and a good life for a woman. Although marriage without a dowry expedites the release of girls into the ‘market’, many grooms and their mothers find it difficult to value the wife (or daughter-​in-​law) who enters their house ‘with empty hands’. Abandoning the kalyng and dowry has had a devastating impact on the value of a wife in many Uzbek families (Ismailbekova, 2019). 183

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​

Endogamous marriage preferences were stretched to include the entire ethnic group, and Uzbek families started searching for a quick match with outsiders (Uzb., zhat jak) at any distance. The frequency of marriage to unknown men in Uzbek communities far from the place of conflict increased. My informants did not tell me that such marriages were a conscious strategy to save the women, but leaving a dangerous place (Osh) without a doubt offered them some protection. Beyond the normal boundaries of kin, neighbourhood (mahalla), and village, marriage brought the whole Uzbek ethnic group into a larger and stronger solidarity unit of newly forged kin alliances (Ismailbekova, 2019). However, because the pre-​marital considerations were narrowed down to a focus on ethnicity and a safe place, and because marriage could send a woman very far away from her natal kin groups, many young brides now found themselves in very insecure situations. A decade after the conflict, as the political situation in Kyrgyzstan is becoming more or less stable for ethnic Uzbeks, marriage practices are returning to a ‘normal state’, with proximity in kin and spatial terms resuming prominence over ethnic and safety considerations.

CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter was to demonstrate the strategies of maternal kin in the support of daughters after their marriage in an ethnic group that generally appears patriarchal. As we have seen, there are basic disagreements in anthropology on the role of kinship and the motivations for people to be involved in kinship relations. Functionalist arguments focus on altruism, meaning that people help a more or less wide range of relatives according to need. In the case of Uzbeks, this would mean that a married woman’s maternal relatives would help her and her children according to their needs, which is indeed true. But economic arguments focus more directly on the strategic ways in which kinship is used to advance the interests of the Uzbek daughters and securing their material resources. Finally, the cultural perspective argues that learned moral values prompt a person to help relatives. In this case, it would be the local idea that daughters are vulnerable (ojiza) just like invalids and incapable of helping themselves, that motivates their parents to provide ‘security’ through marriage (ideally at close proximity with close kin, or in case of local danger, at a safe distance). The same idea motivates a wide network of matrilateral kinspeople to provide ‘care’ and ‘support’ for women and their children after marriage. Each of these perspectives seems to hold some truth in the case of Uzbeks in post-​conflict Osh. The recent shift of marriage strategies among Uzbeks in response to ethnic conflict highlights the difficulty of distinguishing individual and collective ‘needs’ and ‘interests’. Here, Uzbek families very quickly adjusted the meaning of ojiza; this was no longer primarily about vulnerability in securing material resources for one’s self and children in a husband’s home. It was, more clearly, about girls’ physical and sexual vulnerability in a hostile environment, and about the existential security of an ethnic group’s honour through its women’s virtue (Ismailbekova, 2019). Post-​conflict marriages were more motivated by drawing ethnic boundaries between two groups while in peaceful times, marriage practices are shaped more by economic rationale. Still, who is it that is cared for and protected by a marriage among close kin in close 184

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​

proximity? Cousin-​marriages and neighbour-​marriages keep a woman close to the kin who ‘care’ about her. Such marriages also secure family property and are thought to minimize the risk of divorce. But this pattern does not always work, as the case of Marhoba shows, who found her cousin marriage ‘disgusting’ and left her husband. As mentioned elsewhere, ‘the sense of belonging and the desirable future of people are mutually constitutive’ (Féaux de la Croix and Ismailbekova (2014: 1). The internal dynamics of Uzbek marriages and marriage strategies can be seen as future-​oriented. While patriarchy is obvious, as are normative values of parental control about gender and marriage among Uzbeks, women’s ‘weakness’ is produced to create ‘ethnic’ cohesion and repeated marital alliances between the same families. Thus marriage arrangements within short distances are preferred in order to provide future-​oriented care. Women also continue to ‘belong’ to their natal families after marriage in order to enjoy care, support and emotional security.

NOTE 1 Based on kinship network research, people’s genealogical knowledge was horizontal.

REFERENCES Abashin, Sergei 2011. Natsionalnoe stroitelstvo v Kyrgzystane i problema uzbekskogo menshin​ stva. Fergana News, 11 October, www.ferg​anan​ews.com/​arti​cle.php?id=​7126 Abu-​Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women”. American Ethnologist, 17(1): 41–​55 Adapon, Joy 2008. Culinary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg Ardener, S. 2005. “Ardener’s ‘muted groups’: The genesis of an idea and its praxis” Women and Language, 28(2), 50–​54. Askarov. Mirzohid 2019. Tŭj: keca, ʙugun va ertaga: etnografik tahlil. Zhamiat. (Tŭj: yesterday, today and tomorrow: ethnographic analysis) https://​uzan​alyt​ics.com/​jami​yat/​4046/​ Atakhanov, Shavkat and Asankanov, Abylabek. 2020. “Security Practices and the Survival of Cafes in Southern Kyrgyzstan”. In M. von Boemcken et al. (eds.), Surviving Everyday Life. The Securityscapes of Threatened People in Kyrgyzstan, pp 47–​70. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Becker, G. 1991. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Björkdahl, A. and J. Mannergren Selimovic 2017 “Feeling Silence in a Place of Pain”. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19(3): 383–​385. Carsten, Janet (ed.). 2000. Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Cleuziou, Juliette. 2017. “Towards Matrifocal Families? Relations in Transnational and Single Parent Families in Tajikistan”. in Sophie Roche (ed.). The Family in Central Asia, Past and Present: New perspectives, pp. 309–​336. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Comaroff, J. L. (ed.).1980 The Meaning of Marriage Payments. New York: Academic Press. Edgar, Adrienne Lynn. 2007. “Marriage, Modernity, and the ‘Friendship of Nations’: Interethnic Intimacy in Post-​War Central Asia in Comparative Perspective”, Central Asian Survey, 26(4): 581–​599. Evans, Harriet. 2008. The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Asian Voices). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Féaux de la Croix, J., and Ismailbekova, A. 2014. “Ethnographies of Belonging and the Future in Kyrgyzstan: Introduction to Themed Section of AEER”. Anthropology of East Europe Review, 32(2), 1–​16. 185

—​​​​ A k s a n a I s m a i l b e k o v a —​​​ Fong, Vanessa. 2002. “China’s One-​Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters”. American Anthropologist, 104(4): 1098–​1109. Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order; the Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hardenberg, Roland 2009. “Reconsidering ‚‘Tribe’, ‘Clan’ and ‘Relatedness’: A Comparison of Social Categorization in Central and South Asia. Scrutiny”: A Journal of International and Pakistan Studies, 1(1): 37–​62. Hudson, Alfred Emmons. 1964. Kazak Social Structure. New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files Press. Ismailbekova, Aksana. 2017. Blood Ties and the Native Sons: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ismailbekova, Aksana .2019. “From Endogamous Marriage to Ethnicity: Uzbek Community Survival Strategy After the 2010 Conflict in Osh”, Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, 58 (3): 134–​154. Jacquesson, Svetlana. 2013. “From Herd Breeding to Land Farming: Social Uses of Descent and Kinship in a Kyrgyz Village”. In P.Akçali and C. Engin-​ Demir (eds.), Politics, Identity and Education in Central Asia: Post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan, pp. 98–​117. London and New York: Routledge. Jefferey, Patricia and Jefferey, Roger. 1996. Don’t Marry me to a Plowman. Women’s Everyday Lives in Rural North India. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kikuta, H. 2016. “Remittances, Rituals and Reconsidering Women’s Norms in Mahallas: Emigrant Labour and its Social Effects in Ferghana Valley”. Central Asian Survey, 35(1): 91–​104. Lévi-​ Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf). New York: Basic Books. Liu, Morgan. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne. Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh, PA:University of Pittsburgh Press. Megoran, Nick. 2012. “Averting Violence in Kyrgyzstan: Understanding and Responding to Nationalism”. Russia and Eurasia Programme Paper: 2012/​03. pp. 1–​35 www.staff.ncl. ac.uk/​nick.mego​ran/​pdf/​megor​an_​a​vert​ing.pdf Megoran, Nick. 2017. Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-​Kyrgyzstan Boundary. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Monogarova, L.F., and Muhiddinov, I. 1992. Sovremennaya selskaya semya tajikov. Narody Sodruzhestva Nezavisimyh gosudarstv. VIII.Tadjiki. part 1. Moskva: Izdatelstvo Nauka. Mukhopadhyay, Carol, and Seymour, Susan. 1994. Women, Education, And Family Structure In India. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic (NSC), 2020. Demograficheski ezhegodnik Kyrgyzkoi Respubliki (Demographic Yearbook of the Kyrgyz Republic). Bishkek: National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic. Rasulova, Ziyodakhon. 2009. O‘zbeklarning Nikoh to‘yigacha Bo‘lgan Marosimlari (Qalin Berish Odati Misolida) (Pre-​ wedding ceremonies of the Uzbeks). Tashkent: Fan va texnologiya. Read, Rosie, and Thelen, Tatjana. 2007. “Introduction. Social Security and Care After Socialism: Reconfigurations of Public and Private”. Focaal 50: 3–​18. Reeves, Madeleine. 2010. “The ethnicisation of violence in Southern Kyrgyzstan”. Published 10 June. OpenDemocracy www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​odr/​ethnic​isat​ion-​of-​viole​nce-​in-​ south​ern-​kyr​gyzs​tan-​0/​ Sahlins, M. 2012. What Kinship is: And What it is Not. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

186

—​​​​ D a u g h t e r s a s O j i z a —​​​​ Schielke, Samuli. 2020. Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press Schneider, David M. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Seymour, Susan. 1999. Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sharma, Ursula. 1984. “Dowry in North India: Its Consequences for Women”. In Renee Hirschon  (ed.), Women and Property—​ Women as Property, pp. 62–​ 74. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Suhareva, O.A. 1978. Traditizia semeion-​rodstvennyh brakov u narodov Srednei Azii. //​ Semja i semeinye obryady u narodov Srednei Azii I Kazakstana. Moskva: Izdetelstvo Nauka. Tillion, Germaine.1983. The Republic of Cousins: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society; London: Al Saqi Books. Trevisani, Tommaso. 2016. “Modern Weddings in Uzbekistan: Ritual Change from ‘Above’ and from ‘Below’”, Central Asian Survey, 35(1): 61–​75. Vasil’yeva, G. P., and Karmysheva, B. K. 1969. Etnograficheskiye ocherki uzbekskogo sel’skogo naseleniya . Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Nauka.

187

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NEW CHURCHES AND THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AGENDA IN KYRGYZSTAN Noor O’Neill Borbieva

The Soviet regime was a self-​consciously modernizing power that believed religion posed an obstacle to social progress and economic development, and whose profound impact on religious life across its territory has been described as “secularizing” (Khalid 2003; Ro’i 1995). Theorists of secularism, however, note that the process is not monolithic; secularism is experienced in different ways in different places (Asad 2003; Casanova 1994; Gellner 2001; Mahmood 2015). In this chapter, I argue that although the Soviet regime secularized its territories in some ways (it encouraged the privatization of religion and created a differentiated public sphere in which religion was just one domain among many), it did not make Soviet communities more amenable to rapid religious pluralization, a process some post-​Soviet observers have called the “religious marketplace” (Hann 2000). This is evident, I argue, in the reception of expatriate religious workers and local converts in Kyrgyzstan and the failure of religious tolerance activism conducted by the development community.

FROM THE SOVIET ERA TO INDEPENDENCE During 70 years of dominance, the Soviet regime oversaw eras of aggressive campaigns against religion and eras of permissiveness (Keller 2001; Ro’i 2000; Saroyan 1997). The most aggressive campaigns seized the financial resources of religious institutions, destroyed religious infrastructure, and imprisoned and killed clerics. During the least aggressive eras, such as during and after World War II and in the 1980s, the Soviet regime tolerated religion but also invested in apparatus to control it. An example is the religious “directorates,” which oversaw the functioning of religious schools and houses of worship, accredited clergy, and approved religious publications. The directorate whose jurisdiction was Central Asian Muslims is known by the acronym SADUM (Ro’i 2000: 100–​104; Saroyan 1997). Research on religious change during the Soviet era suggests that the aggressive promotion of socialist atheism, together with the social costs of religious observance, reduced the scope of religion in people’s lives, meaning the range of social contexts to which religion could be applied was reduced (Geertz 1968: 112). The regime took over sectors—​education, the court system, social welfare, even communal holidays—​that 188

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-15

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

had previously been controlled by religious institutions. Rituals such as Muslim daily prayers and fasting were no longer observed in public, although they continued to be practiced at home, especially by elders and women (Kuchumkulova 2007: 166; Privratsky 2001; Ro’i 2000; Tett 1994). The regime secularized society in the sense of increasing what José Casanova calls “differentiation” and “privatization”: religion was demarcated as a discrete domain distinguishable from and equal to other domains, and religious practice largely left the public domain (Casanova 1994). As a discrete domain, however, religion persisted, as was evident in the survival of rituals in the domestic sphere, a tendency to link religion to ethnic identity, and the retention of religious elements in important rituals of the life cycle: births, circumcisions, and deaths (Babadjanov 2004: 159; Kuchumkulova 2007: 166; Privratsky 2001; Ro’i 2000: 462; Tett 1994). After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, religious practice resurged noticeably across the former Soviet region (Ro’i 1995; Saroyan 1997). David Lewis, an anthropologist and missionary who traveled throughout the former Soviet Union (fSU) shortly after independence, saw widespread and diverse practice of religion wherever he went. He concluded that atheism must have had a weak hold on Soviet citizens, challenged as it was by the “tendency for ordinary people to seek meaning in terms of a religious view of the universe” (Lewis 2000: 15). The religious resurgence after independence included renewed interest in the spiritual traditions I refer to as “indigenous,” to indicate that they were present in the former Soviet Union before the Soviet era. These included Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, shamanism, and others. The resurgence also opened a space for what I refer to as “new churches” and their foreign representatives, including Pentecostals, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons, and non-​denominational Protestants.1 Even after 70 years of Soviet-​sponsored secularization, citizens were not prepared for the social disruptions that would accompany the rapid establishment of a competitive religious marketplace.

BECOMING CHRISTIAN IN KYRGYZSTAN All five formerly Soviet Central Asian republics give constitutional guarantees of religious freedom to their citizens.2 All five republics also limit religious activity through regulating associational behavior and proselytism by foreign groups. Furthermore, hostility toward new churches and their adherents remains widespread. Members of new churches feel threatened not only with persecution by the state, but also ostracism on the part of relatives and friends. Even as interest in new churches has grown, so has prejudice against them. Kyrgyzstan, where I conducted two years of ethnographic research (2003–​05), was a safe place for foreign, proselytizing groups relative to the other republics. At the time of my research, new churches worked openly to attract converts. It was not uncommon, on a crowded boulevard in the capital city of Bishkek, to be approached by people handing out slips of paper inviting you to a prayer meeting or information session. Religious workers routinely canvased urban apartment complexes. It was rare to meet a Kyrgyzstani citizen who did not know several people or even entire families who had joined one of these new churches. The exact number of Christian converts in Kyrgyzstan at the time of my research is hard to determine, but estimates 189

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

range from 20,000 (Pelkmans 2007: 883) to 100,000 (Ahmad 2004). Between 1996 and 2005, the Kyrgyz State Commission for Religious Affairs (SCRA) had registered 851 foreign Christian missionaries and 265 Protestant houses of worship (USDS 2005). One report suggested that conversion from Islam to evangelical Christianity had reduced the percentage of Muslims in the Kyrgyz population by 5 percent (from 84 percent in 2001 to 79.3 percent in 2004) (Ahmad 2004). In my research on new churches, I focused on young adults who converted to Protestant Christianity from Islam and young adults who had contact with Protestant Christian churches but did not convert (Borbieva 2012).3 Converts to Protestant Christianity in Kyrgyzstan are diverse; they are all ages and represent many ethnicities and origin faiths. (Readers may be surprised to learn that many Russians have left the Orthodox Church to join Protestant congregations.) Most of my informants were ethnically Kyrgyz. They grew up in Muslim families with a sense of Muslim identity, but very few grew up practicing Islam. All my informants learned about Christianity through contact with expatriates, either foreigners working in Kyrgyzstan in a secular capacity, or foreigners who presented themselves as religious workers. I also interviewed expatriate religious workers and observed public and private events, such as worship services and youth groups. Most of the young Kyrgyzstanis I interviewed were first exposed to Christianity while attending universities in urban areas. Many new churches ran extracurricular activities in these institutions. A group I call “New Time Workers” (or NTW4) was active in universities across the republic. An international organization, NTW did not hide its church affiliation, but its formal outreach activity was secular. Pastor Brett Robinson, the group’s American director at the time of my research, told me that NTW maintained a list of activities that they were prepared to run at universities. They circulated the list with university administrators, who decided which activities they wanted on their campuses. The list included social clubs with a focus on sports, English, music, or other interests. The list also included seminars on leadership, drug and alcohol abuse, love and marriage, AIDS, computer literacy, financial literacy, and other relevant topics. Pastor Robinson told me one of their most popular seminars was “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People,” based on the best-​selling book of the same name (Covey 1997). NTW did not proselytize at these university-​sponsored events, but used these events to establish contacts among students. Pastor Robinson told me that when they first started working in Kyrgyzstan, “We had a lot of problems. We didn’t keep our religious work separate from other work. We learned our lesson quickly.” Specifically, they learned that when they organized an activity, like a party or English club, they should wait until the end of the activity to offer to talk to people about Christianity, and even then, they should offer to meet at another time.5 My experience at the meeting of an NTW music club confirmed information I heard from Pastor Robinson. I was invited to attend by Elmira, a young woman who was in an English class I taught at a local language institute. She told me to meet her at the music conservatory in Bishkek one night, assuring me that it would be a fun gathering of young people interested in music. The club met in a small, dim concert hall with a stage and two grand pianos. When I arrived, there were about 15 young people sitting around the room, chatting (Elmira was not one of them). Shortly after I arrived, a young Kyrgyz woman got up to announce the start of the club. She 190

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

introduced herself as Rahat and pointed to the club’s co-​director, Kubanych, sitting in the front row. Rahat began the meeting with two ice-​breakers. In the first game, recorded music was played from a cassette player, and everyone danced. When the music stopped, everyone had to grab a partner. Anyone left without a partner had to do the bidding of the group. In the second game, there were two teams. The teams, in turn, sang songs that included the word “love” (in Russian, “lyubov”) until one team could not think of a song. Next there were musical performances. Several people sang, and some played guitar or piano. After the games and performances, we had refreshments—​cake and juice—​to celebrate the one-​month anniversary of the club. Kubanych addressed the group while we ate; he acknowledged NTW’s sponsorship of the club and talked about his vision for the club. He wanted the club to be fun, but he also thought it should be a place for serious musicians to meet and strive for professional standards. Finally, he asked everyone to introduce themselves, and we did so. That ended the formal part of the meeting, but participants continued to eat refreshments, chat, and take photos. Before and after the meeting, I talked to some of the participants. One young woman was a singer. She was studying classical voice at the conservatory and had seen fliers advertising the club. Two young women I met taught at the language school where I worked and had also been invited by Elmira (we commiserated over Elmira’s absence). One young man told me he was a drummer and was there to meet musicians to play with, preferably in a band. I was startled when he asked me, “Are you a believer?” Aside from the drummer’s question, Kubanych’s mention of NTW, and religious references in some of the songs, Christianity was not discussed. Instead, the club seemed genuinely intended to be a place for young people to explore their love of music. It also provided an opportunity for Rahat and Kubanych, who were employed by NTW to do outreach, to meet young people with whom they might develop closer relationships—​ relationships that could provide opportunities for conversations about religion. My research suggests that after these initial contacts, religious workers invited interested students to private parties. I did not attend any of these parties, but many of my informants described them. According to their accounts, these parties were attended by both men and women, and they were hosted by expatriates, usually a husband-​ and-​ wife team, in a private home. The parties included sing-​ alongs, with partygoers playing guitar, and food. The songs and much of the conversation referenced religion. The parties were often attended by expatriates, giving university students a chance to practice English and establish connections in desirable international networks. At the parties, guests were often given Bibles or invited to religious services. Whether they later converted or not, my informants described the parties as welcoming and fun. One university student told me that when she first began attending these parties, she did not realize they were “Christian parties.” She liked the parties, especially when people would sit in a group and sing together, but when she realized the hosts wanted her to convert, she stopped going: “I know my religion. I am Muslim and I don’t want to change. Other young people don’t know about Islam and that’s why they become Christian.” 191

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

Asel, another university student, told me her English teacher invited her to parties he and his wife threw at their home. These parties were attended by expatriates, and English was the main language spoken. At the beginning of the parties, there was little mention of religion, but later on, the group would sing religious songs or talk about the Bible. After she attended a few of these parties, Asel’s teacher gave her a Russian Bible. At the time, her family was experiencing some difficulties, and she felt disillusioned, noting that her troubles intensified just as she was getting involved with the Christian group. I cannot say whether Asel’s disquiet was the result of a fear that God was punishing her for considering conversion, or if she was just overwhelmed by her personal difficulties. I was interested less in her exact motivations than in the fact that stress led her to drift away from the Christian group rather than, as was true of other informants, toward it. Asel ultimately stopped attending the parties and began avoiding her English teacher. She told me she now realized that Christians used something she called “a non-​persuasive argument”6: “It appeals to emotions, but it is not clear or logical. People who do not know a lot about other religions or are not well-​educated will find it easy to join.” Ulan is the same age as Asel, but he was not a student. He had moved to Bishkek to find work and met Adam, a religious worker from Korea, through work. They became friends and started going out socially. Ulan told me that Adam invited him to play in soccer games and later to parties at Adam’s house. These parties included Russians, Koreans, and Kyrgyz of all ages. Ulan recounted that at the parties, the men sat around with guitars and sang, and the women made cookies. There would be talk about the Bible and at the end, everyone would hold hands in a circle and pray to God. Ulan did not feel comfortable praying in that way, but he considered Adam a friend and did not want Adam to think he did not like Adam because Adam was Christian. Then, Adam invited Ulan to a worship service at a large theater in Bishkek. Again, Ulan went because he did not want to hurt Adam’s feelings. Finally, when Adam started pressuring Ulan to get baptized, Ulan decided to end the friendship; he stopped responding to Adam’s invitations. Ulan told me, “I know who I am. I am Muslim, my parents are Muslim, and my grandparents were Muslim. I have been Muslim since I was born, so why would I change? Christianity scares some people because they don’t know who they are and know they could change. But it doesn’t scare me because I know who I am and that I won’t change.” Young Kyrgyzstanis who did convert often followed this trajectory: they went to parties, grew close to expatriate religious workers, attended religious services, and ultimately joined a congregation. The narratives they told me, however, focused not on the parties and conversations, but on how their lives had improved when they joined the Church and the profound impact of Christ in their lives. For them, conversion meant gaining a companion, an ever-​present, always loving interlocutor. “When I became Christian,” one convert told me, “I learned that anyone can talk with God and Jesus anytime. God and Jesus are always listening.” They talked about how Christianity helped them overcome personal weaknesses and give up self-​destructive behaviors, whether it was drug abuse, fighting, or criminal activity such as stealing. They told me that the Church gave them hope: hope that they would be saved in the hereafter and hope that the Church would improve social conditions in Kyrgyzstan.

192

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

Many converts I met came to Christianity after briefly exploring a devout practice of Islam. One informant had been an observant Muslim, but he recalled being an angry and resentful person at that time in his life. When his brother converted to Christianity, he noticed that his brother became happier, so he learned more about Christianity and ultimately converted. Some embraced Christianity after a traumatic experience, such as the death of a relative, the divorce of parents, an illness, the loss of a job, or financial difficulty. Kubanych, from the music club, told me later in an interview, “I used to be a hooligan. I used to be involved with drugs and gangs. I used to fight with boys. I was also very religious. I went to the mosque. I prayed. I thought I was so holy, and yet I did all those bad things. And then I changed. How did I change? Jesus changed me [Kyrg.: Isa meni özgörttü].” Kubanych talked about other friends and family members who had converted and became more helpful and loving. “Jesus changed my mother,” he said. “Now she truly wants to help others.” The church services I attended demonstrated the emotional and spiritual appeal of Christianity. In impassioned sermons, pastors argued that expanding the number of believers in Kyrgyzstan was the best way to solve Kyrgyzstan’s problems. They read key biblical passages and connected those passages to contemporary issues. In one sermon I heard, the pastor urged congregants to reflect on the prophet Daniel’s intelligence and honesty, and how his qualities had led him to success as an advisor to the king. The pastor urged his listeners to emulate Daniel in working for the improvement of Kyrgyzstani society. Church services fostered a sense of community. They included moving songs in Russian, Kyrgyz, and English. They often included appeals, when congregants could share their troubles and request that others pray for them. They included testimonials, when congregants described how God had intervened in their lives. I heard one congregant talk about how God had helped him sell his house for a high price so he could pay off his debts. I heard another tell how, in response to prayer, she had been reunited with her daughter after many years of estrangement. At the end of the services, congregants enjoyed refreshments and socialized. For many converts, the Church became their primary social network. Congregants celebrated holidays and rites of passage (e.g., weddings) together, gathered to study the Bible, and provided each other with emotional and financial support. Many converts brought relatives into the Church. Although foreign religious groups operated mostly in cities, the community of Kyrgyzstani Christians they established expanded outreach to villages, opening village churches and installing Kyrgyzstani pastors. Kyrgyzstani converts like Kubanych and Rahat were hired by organizations like NTW to do this outreach. Others traveled abroad to study theology so that they could come back and work as pastors. Pastor Robinson told me that about 10 percent of the students NTW attracted through their university outreach worked for them after graduation, doing outreach and other work that expanded the organization’s capacity. The growth of the evangelical community was slow and difficult, but it was steady, and many Kyrgyzstani Christians were optimistic that as more Kyrgyzstanis learned about Christ, Kyrgyzstan would become a less corrupt, more prosperous nation. One expatriate worker told me, “We believe Kyrgyzstan could become the next South Korea.”

193

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

HOSTILITY Although religious workers and converts expressed optimism about the future of the Church in Kyrgyzstan, my research, other ethnography (e.g., Pelkmans 2007, 2009a), and reports by international media outlets suggest that hostility toward new churches among the general population was widespread. The most thorough reporting has been conducted by outlets focused on religious freedom. The two that have proven most useful for my research are the International Religious Freedom Report (IRFR), published annually by the U.S. Department of State (USDS), which compiles information on every country in the world, including basic statistics on religious affiliation and persecution and significant changes since the previous report, and Forum 18,7 a news service run out of Oslo, Norway. Forum 18 is named for Article 18 in the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which establishes a right to freedom of religion. Although Forum 18 identifies itself as “a Christian initiative,” it reports on state abuse against members of any faith group. These sources document that in Kyrgyzstan in the early years of independence, hostility toward new churches manifested as social ostracism, threats of violence, actual violence, damage to property, and resource conflicts. In addition, one recurring source of conflict was burial rights (e.g., Ismanov 2004). In Kyrgyzstani villages, burial grounds are religious spaces. In multi-​ethnic communities, members of Muslim ethnic groups (Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Uighur, etc.) are buried separately from members of Christian ethnic groups (Russians, Germans, etc.). Those who convert to Christianity from Islam may expect to be buried near their ancestors, but their relatives or the leaders of their village may object. In some cases, these disputes have led to conflict. In one case, villagers blocked a road so that the body of a Christian convert could not be carried to the village cemetery (Rotar 2006a). In another case, the body of a convert was exhumed multiple times because different parties in the village believed it had been buried improperly (Bayram 2017). Particularly distressing are the reports of violence. In December 2000 in a village in southern Kyrgyzstan, a hundred people attacked the house of a family known to include converts to Protestant Christianity (Ismanov 2004). In December 2005, an elderly convert in the Yssyk Köl oblast’ (province) was murdered by a group of young men angered by his proselytism (Rotar 2006a). In July 2006, a Protestant pastor in the Osh oblast’ was attacked by a mob and seriously injured. The mob burned religious literature found on his property (Rotar 2006d). In August 2006, Protestant missionaries from Bishkek who were preaching in a village in the Naryn oblast’ were attacked by residents (Rotar 2006d). Many more incidents have been reported and many go unreported. International observers were often struck by the failure of Kyrgyzstani law enforcement to protect these congregations. Their reports reveal that law enforcement was often reluctant to defend religious minorities because of the intensity of public sentiment against the churches. One official noted, “Practically at every meeting with people in the south we hear demands to ban Protestant churches that engage in propaganda among Muslims” (Rotar 2006b). These officials viewed discouraging proselytism as the best way to keep the peace (Rotar 2006b). During my research, some informants who had not converted told me that they stopped going to parties and withdrew from relationships with religious workers out of fear that their conversion would cause rifts in their families and communities. 194

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

Informants who had converted described how conversion altered their relationships with friends and family. One young woman in Bishkek was told to leave the apartment she shared with her sisters, because her parents feared if she lived with her sisters, she would convert them. Others talked about how conversion brought shame to their families in small village communities. Still others hesitated to inform relatives of their conversion, hoping to avoid bringing shame to their families. Foreign religious workers with visas that allowed them to proselytize expressed fear that any misstep could get them kicked out of the country (or worse). Other foreign religious workers simply did not disclose their religious intentions and instead worked in secular capacities, such as teaching English or working in the development sector.8

EXPLAINING HOSTILITY During my research, I heard a variety of explanations for hostility toward new churches. One explanation I heard, almost exclusively from expatriate religious workers, was that hostility was a symptom of the “clash of civilizations.” This was a reference to the work of Samuel Huntington, who argued that the world is dominated by large, civilizational complexes that can never peacefully coexist (1996). Richard McAuliffe, an American pastor and the leader of a religious non-​ governmental organization (NGO) in Kyrgyzstan, told me in 2004, “They talk about a clash of civilizations. I don’t know, I haven’t read the man’s book.” He went on to note that when you have two religions (Islam and Christianity) that both claim absolute truth and both proselytize in an era of intensifying globalization, they are going to come into contact: “And at that point there will be conflict.”9 A related explanation for religious conflict offered by members of the international community and commonly featured in reporting of the time, was that Kyrgyzstanis, and particularly Kyrgyzstani Muslims, were inherently intolerant. A Forum 18 report declared, “The main problem of intolerance in everyday life is intolerance by members of the majority religious community in Central Asia” (Rotar 2006c). These explanations, which assume that hostility over religion is derived from differences in the beliefs, values, and practices of the faiths in question (or of the people qua adherents to those faiths), are problematic. In no case of religious conflict in Kyrgyzstan that I have heard or read about were underlying differences between Islam and Christianity the cause of conflict, nor does any case confirm the thesis that Kyrgyzstani Muslims are uniquely intolerant. It is useful to reflect on the irony of Pastor McAuliffe’s words. Although the pastor seemed convinced that these two faiths were diametrically opposed, when he described the conflict between them, his words linked conflict not to ideological differences, but to ideological similarities, specifically how Christianity and Islam (at least the variants of these faiths he was familiar with) both claim absolute truth, and both compel their adherents to proselytize. These explanations are problematic, furthermore, because they ignore the fact that Muslims and Christians (and indeed members of many spiritual traditions) have long coexisted in Central Asia peacefully (Foltz 2010). The historical record suggests that pre-​Soviet Central Asian communities accommodated great spiritual diversity. The productive tension among different cultural complexes (Persian, Arab, Turkic, Russian), ways of life (settled, agricultural, nomadic, pastoral), and 195

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

faiths (Zoroastrianism, shamanism, animism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity) nurtured diverse approaches to spirituality. Even Islam, the region’s dominant faith, was less a standardized tradition than a diverse system of practices and institutions that was incorporated into other systems, or into which other systems were incorporated (DeWeese 1994; Privratsky 2001; Yavuz 2008). This openness to diversity continued in the modern era. In mixed-​ethnic communities in the Soviet era and since independence, Christians and Muslims attend each other’s events, participate in each other’s rituals, and intermarry. An official from the SCRA told Forum 18, “Local [Muslims] are very friendly to the Orthodox and there have even been occasions when they helped them to build churches” (Rotar 2006b). The 2006 IRFR for Kyrgyzstan commented, “The generally amicable relationship among religious groups in society contributed to religious freedom. Members of the two major religious groups, Islam and the Russian Orthodox Church, respect each other’s major holy days and exchange holy day greetings” (USDS 2006). A story from my fieldwork illustrates the type of interfaith respect alluded to in these accounts. The story was related to me by a Kyrgyz family whose members identify as Muslim and, when I knew them, observed some Muslim practices, including reciting the Qur’an and fasting. When they purchased a cow from a Russian neighbor and the cow became ill, they believed that the cow had been bewitched (Kz., dubalangan) and conducted a Qur’anic recitation to heal the cow. This did not help. They spoke about the issue to their neighbor, who pointed out that since the cow had come from a Christian family, it was a Christian cow, so in order to cure the cow they would have to use a Christian prayer, not a Muslim one. The neighbor brought holy water from her church and taught the Kyrgyz family a Christian prayer to recite while sprinkling the water over the cow. The eldest daughter, who performed the ritual, told me she felt uncomfortable at first, because she wondered if the actions went against Islam, but then she decided that they did not. “Islam says there is just one God,” she told me. “It doesn’t matter in the end because it’s the same God.” (The cow recovered.) A better understanding of the hostility in the early 2000s is arrived at by attending to the meaning of conversion, which in many Kyrgyzstani communities signals a repudiation of family and ethnic identity.10 Many Kyrgyzstanis view religious identity, ethnic identity, and family identity as closely linked; they are part of a unified inheritance that one receives from one’s ancestors. The repudiation of religious identity, therefore, could be understood as a rejection of one’s ancestors; it signaled the rejection of one’s most urgent and sacred duty: praying for one’s ancestors to ease their suffering in the afterlife (DeWeese 1994; Privratsky 2001; Rotar 2006a). Because of the profound implications of these repudiations, conversion could bring shame to an entire family. Therefore, families felt compelled to ostracize members who had converted. Another reason for hostility toward new churches was the impact conversion had on delicate social networks in small communities. At the time of my research, most expatriate religious workers and organizations operated in urban areas where the religious marketplace was well established and where delicate networks of exchange and obligation were uncommon. When a university student who had joined a church returned to their natal village, when religious workers proselytized in villages, or when a pastor moved to a village to set up a church, they could have a profound impact on village life. Village social networks were reinforced not only by a shared 196

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

sense of identity, but also through rituals, rites of passage, communal feasts, and exchanges, many of which have religious significance (cf. Shabdan and Liu, this volume). When people convert and leave these social networks, the networks weaken. Churches contributed to this dynamic; some churches asked converts to avoid communal observances that were not Christian, and others asked converts to minimize contact with non-​Christian families and neighbors. It is no wonder, then, that a successful new church in a small village, which could make religious identity (and the obligations to community, family and ancestors it implied) fungible, was viewed by many as a threat to individual and communal well-​being. Although I did not spend time in villages studying the impact of churches, evidence of these dynamics appeared in my conversations with converts, and they have been documented in international reports and other ethnographic accounts (e.g., Pelkmans 2017). One convert told me that although his entire family became Christian, “When I go to my village, people don’t talk to me normally.” When his grandmother died, her relatives would not let his family use their boz üi (yurt) for the funeral feast, citing his family’s faith. Forum 18 reported that in one village, the imam (Islamic cleric) decided that an elderly Christian convert should not be allowed to attend weddings and funerals in the village. The man’s son commented to the reporter, “The Kyrgyz traditionally celebrate all the important events in life together. Therefore the fact that my father was not allowed to attend community events was a painful ordeal for him” (Rotar 2006a). As the above story suggests, religious leaders, whether Muslim, Orthodox, or Catholic officials, often encouraged hostility toward new churches. Conversations I had as well as reports published at the time (e.g., Ahmad 2004; Ismanov 2004; Domagalskaya and Toralieva 2003), revealed that these leaders were anxious about losing adherents to new churches (cf. Nasritdinov, this volume). To the press, they complained about the way the new churches “split the population into small groups” (Domagalskaya and Toralieva 2003). A key point is that these leaders were not hostile toward each other. Among the indigenous Muslim and Christian congregations, “neither of which poacheds the other’s followers” (Domagalskaya and Toralieva 2003; see also Rotar 2006b). They considered themselves united in the face of a shared enemy.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AS A POLITICAL PROJECT I turn now to the international community’s response to religious conflict in Kyrgyzstan. The response was shaped less by the experiences of Kyrgyzstani communities than by the growing power of an international religious freedom movement. The movement can be traced back to activism in the United States in the 1990s that was led by prominent evangelical personalities and organizations (Haynes 2012; Hertzke 2004; Marsden 2008). With the help of voters across the political spectrum who cared about human rights, the movement secured the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998. The law created an Office of Religious Freedom at the U.S. State Department, which publishes the IRFR. The IRFR’s findings impact U.S. foreign policy. States that do not protect citizens’ religious freedoms, and especially states that do not protect religious minorities, can face public scrutiny and sanctions (Haynes 2012: 129; Hertzke 2004: 302; Marsden 2008: 118). 197

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

The power of this movement led American diplomatic and aid communities in Kyrgyzstan to prioritize religious freedom (or, alternatively, “religious tolerance”) in their outreach and aid. One example I learned about during my research was the International Visitors (IV) program, an exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Embassy. The embassy sent several cohorts of religious leaders to the United States through the IV program to visit houses of worship and talk with American religious leaders. The goal of these trips was to introduce Kyrgyzstani leaders to the American model of secularism in which many religious persuasions can coexist harmoniously in the public sphere. Participants I talked with returned much impressed by the cooperation they saw in the United States among representatives of different faiths and eager to begin interfaith work in Kyrgyzstan. One participant had attended a “Coexist” festival and upon return, secured funding to develop and run a workshop that educated Kyrgyzstani NGO leaders on the Coexist model of religious and cultural diversity. Another impact of the religious freedom movement on the development community in Kyrgyzstan was the increasing amount of funding available for projects designed to promote religious tolerance. The development community at the time comprised a growing number of NGOs. These independent, non-​profit organizations promoted social and institutional reform, often at the grass-​roots level and with the help of foreign funding.11 Many NGOs were already engaged in conflict mediation and tolerance education in response to concerns about ethnic divisions, competition over natural resources, and tensions at borders. When funding organizations signaled their interest in “religious tolerance,” these NGOs pivoted easily, quickly winning grants that focused on religious conflict. The NGOs that engaged in religious tolerance activism included both secular organizations, funded by international NGOs or foreign states, and faith-​ based organizations (FBOs), funded by public and private money.12 Secular NGOs funded community roundtables that brought religious and civil leaders together to talk about potential sources of conflict, such as burial rights. NGOs also conducted trainings and workshops, where they schooled Kyrgyzstanis on the importance of religious freedom, insisting that citizens of liberal, modern democracies should have the right to choose what they believe and with whom they associate, and that anything less was a denial of basic human rights. The FBOs I studied organized interfaith mixers and summer camps for young people. They embraced the language of the religious freedom agenda, framing their work in term of multiculturalism. An American FBO worker told me that one of the guiding principles of his organization was to help different cultural groups appreciate the richness of other culture groups: “We believe it is important to teach others to appreciate the wonder and beauty of a culture. We believe that culture should be a means of connecting not a barrier to understanding.” One FBO’s mission statement said its goal was to help “different cultures to understand each other’s uniqueness while learning to peacefully co-​exist and appreciate differing values.” Its website noted its desire to foster “the formation of a national identity in a multi-​cultural society, foster the role of free, peaceful religious diversity, and promote good citizenship.”13 In observing religious tolerance activism, I was often struck by how detached it was from the actual causes of conflict. In funded programs, enthusiastic activists drew on the interfaith model of religious freedom familiar in the United States (Race 1983, 2001). In this model, religions are freely chosen, bounded, and mutually exclusive 198

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

entities that are mostly independent of other categories of identity and spheres of activity. This model is equivalent to the “religious marketplace” model, in which a plethora of religions operate in the public domain, where they pedal their versions of community and salvation to potential believers and vie for congregants. This activism was problematic not only for the way it misrepresented one model of religious diversity as the only possible model,14 but also in its implicit suggestion that Kyrgyzstanis needed to be taught tolerance, as if Kyrgyzstanis were inexperienced with and had nothing to contribute to discussions of diversity. This oversight may have been connected to the international community’s reliance on liberal discourses of freedom. International development workers I talked with were quick to note the lack of social freedoms in Kyrgyzstani communities (exemplified by restrictions on whom one could marry and where one could live after marriage—​choices that were often limited out of deference to community expectations). They were also quick to connect that lack to the stigma attached to choosing one’s religion, and they referenced both as reasons Kyrgyzstanis were hostile toward new churches. This logic is informed by liberal discourses that understand freedom to imply an agent’s ability to “freely” “choose” among clearly demarcated and mutually exclusive identity categories. This perspective fails to recognize that although these communities foreclose some freedoms (e.g., the ability to choose one’s religion or social network) when they insist on non-​negotiable links among religion, ethnicity, and family, they allow others (e.g., being able to adhere to varied combinations of spiritual practices and beliefs while still identifying as “Muslim”). Above, I described a Muslim Kyrgyz family I knew that conducted a Christian ritual. They were free to conduct the ritual because the links among religion, family, and ethnicity were still tightly connected in their worldview; their actions could not be interpreted as a repudiation of their Muslim identity.15 Similarly, long before the arrival of either new churches or religious tolerance activists, I learned from informants, people felt free to attend the life-​cycle rituals of villagers of other faiths, and even participate in those rituals; they were content that no one would misinterpret participation as repudiating an identity no one believed could be given up. In this way, the clarity and immovability of boundaries separating members of different religious-​ethnic groups facilitated cross-​boundary interaction, religious experimentation, and harmony within diversity.

AFTERWORD Recent reports on religious conflict suggest that hostility toward new churches remains high in Kyrgyzstan (Bayram 2010, 2017; USDS 2020). One indication of this is that the legal environment has become more restrictive toward new churches in recent years. A Law on Religion, passed in 2009 during the administration of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, raised the number of members necessary for registering a religious group from 10 to 200, prohibited aggressive proselytism, and required that all religious literature be examined by the state (USDS 2013: 2). Subsequently, the administration of Almazbek Atambayev criticized constitutional clauses establishing the freedom of religion and threatened to add further restrictions to the 2009 law. These new restrictions suggest that the dynamics I observed in the early 2000s persist. The Kyrgyzstani state continues to walk a thin line, between trying to please the 199

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

international community by allowing some forms of religious diversity and managing the very real threat that diversity poses to the peace.

NOTES 1 In this chapter I focus on non-​Islamic groups. Many new Islamic groups have entered the region since independence, as I and others have discussed elsewhere (e.g., Borbieva 2017, Hölzchen this volume, Nasritdinov this volume). 2 Information on religious freedom in the individual republics is available in the International Religious Freedom Report (IRFR), produced by the United States Department of State’s (USDS’s) Office of International Religious Freedom. www.state.gov/​international-religious-freedom-reports/​. Last accessed 5/29/23. 3 In my earlier work, I drew on scholarship that addressed conversion as an individual, psychological event, a strategic choice and/​or outcome of agentive reflection on different belief systems (Horton 1971; James 1997 [1902]; Nock 1961 [1933]; Rambo 1993: 111). I also drew on scholarship that considered historical and socio-​economic factors that shaped conversion’s meaning for and impact on larger communities (Comaroff 1985; Hefner 1987, 1993a; Kipp 1995; Pelkmans 2009a, Rambo 1993; Snow and Machalek 1984). I argued that conversion in Kyrgyzstan must be understood by integrating these perspectives. It is both an individual/​strategic choice and a response to a complex historical context (see also Pelkmans 2005, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2009d, 2014). 4 The names of informants and Christian organizations have been changed. 5 I did not record interviews but took detailed notes during each encounter. In quoting my informants, I have tried to balance the risk of misrepresenting their words with the goal of recreating the spirit of the conversation. For this reason, I have kept quotations short, but I have not eschewed quotations entirely. 6 Asel used this English phrase (Asel is an advanced English speaker, and we spoke in English). She suggested to me that she had taken the word from her psychology studies but did not mention a specific source. 7 www.foru​m18.org/​foru​m18.php 8 Operation World, a guidebook for evangelical Christians, calls missionaries who do secular work in order to gain access to target communities where public sentiment or political realities are hostile to Christianity, “tentmakers,” after Paul in Acts 18:3 (Mandryk 2010). 9 This explanation was not based strictly on Huntington’s model, which does not include mobile ideologies but instead posits vast geographical regions as dominated by unified cultural ideas. In his model, the United States and Western Europe formed the cultural complex called “Western Christendom,” and the Central Asian states were part of the “Islamic world.” Most of the Soviet Union, other than Central Asia, formed what he called “Orthodox Christendom.” Although I do not address it in my discussion above, the urgent and voluminous criticism of Huntington’s work by anthropologists bears mentioning. A good place to start is Herzfeld (1997), who notes the dangerous naivete that informs Huntington’s theorization of culture. 10 Pelkmans (2005) has explored how the Christian community has tried to work around this. 11 The growing number of NGOs in the region was testament to the development community’s interest in promoting democracy through strengthening “civil society,” the non-​state, non-​ market sector of human activity in which citizens voluntarily associate to articulate and defend their interests (Aksartova 2009; Starr 1999). 12 I conducted research shortly after the George W. Bush administration in the United States passed legislation allowing FBOs to receive development aid (Marsden 2008: 72; Stockman

200

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​ et al. 2006). When I arrived in Kyrgyzstan, the development community was about equally divided between secular workers (associated with embassies and international NGOs) and religious workers (associated with FBOs, some of which were registered as religious organizations and others that were registered as development organizations). 13 Unfortunately, the website no longer exists. I last accessed the page in 2011. Although both religious and secular development workers I met expressed support for liberal values such as multiculturalism and human rights, for secular workers, democracy and the development of a vibrant religious marketplace were the end goals. For religious workers, religious freedom was an intermediate step in the creation of societies that were receptive to hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This difference became evident to me during conversations with religious workers. Although publicly they promoted respect for religious diversity, in private they often denigrated indigenous faiths. Islam was “a prison” in which people watched each other to make sure they behaved correctly. Indigenous traditions of healing and nature worship were “pagan” and “idolatrous.” When I asked Kubanych whether religious diversity would improve life in Kyrgyzstan, his answer was unequivocal: “No. We have always had lots of religions in Kyrgyzstan, but they do not help us. Religion is about laws and rules. It doesn’t change the heart. Only faith—​faith in the Truth, in Jesus Christ—​will help Kyrgyzstan.” These conversations also revealed that when Christians talked about “freedom,” they were only superficially referring to the liberal notion of freedom of conscience that secular organizations like the UN connected to religious freedom. For Christians, the real meaning of “freedom” was the saving power of Jesus on the Cross, and the Church taught that one became free only by surrendering oneself to that power. The global Church supported a religious freedom agenda that empowered a secular ideal they rejected because they viewed pluralization and privatization (which increased as that secular ideal was promoted) as necessary evils that aided their global mission. In the final stages of the Church’s work, they assumed, secularism itself would be overturned (Haynes 2012: 41; Marsden 2008: 12). 14 Which it most definitely is not. See the discussion by Michael Lambek, who describes an alternative model characterized by “simultaneous polyreligious practice.” In Madagascar, he finds, diverse spiritual traditions exist peacefully, not because national or international monitors protect religious minorities, but because there is no perception of boundaries between the traditions. Instead, Christianity, Islam, and indigenous traditions are perceived as fluid categories that overlap. An individual can identify with or partake of one, two, or all of these traditions (Lambek 2015: 293–​294). Parts of East Asia also embrace models of religious coexistence that are not reflected in the international religious freedom agenda’s model. In Japan and South Korea, for example, there is no expectation that worshippers express exclusive adherence to only one spiritual tradition (e.g., Buddhism or Shintoism), but they can turn to different traditions depending on the context (Anderson and Young 2010). The view that a religion is a community of believers who claim exclusive access to truth is quite unusual, a product of the historical development of the Christian Church, as many commentators have noted (e.g., Gray 2002: 127). 15 Elsewhere I have explored changes in Kyrgyzstani Islam (especially ideas about Muslim identity) (Borbieva 2017) that echo the influence of new churches. Both perspectives seek to detach religion from ethnic identity and at the same time increase the importance of behavior as a marker of religious identity. Put differently, both new Islamic discourses and new churches give people the “freedom” to join, but less freedom to interpret the tradition once they join.

201

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​

REFERENCES Ahmad, Damir. 2004. “Proselytization eats away at Muslim majority in Kyrgyzstan.” IslamOnline.net. Last accessed 12/​27/​11. Aksartova, Sada. 2009. “Promoting civil society or diffusing NGOs? U.S. donors in the Former Soviet Union.” In Globalization, Philanthropy, and Civil Society: Projecting Institutional Logics Abroad, edited by David C. Hammack and Steven Heydemann, 160–​ 191. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anderson, Leona M., and Pamela Dickey. Young, eds. 2010. Women and Religious Traditions. Second edition. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Babadjanov, Bakhtiyar. 2004. “From colonization to Bolshevization: Some political and legislative aspects of molding a ‘Soviet Islam’ in Central Asia.” In Central Asian Law: An Historical Overview, edited by Wallace Stephen Johnson, 153–​172. University of Kansas. Bayram, Mushfig. 2010. “Kyrgyzstan: Restore religious freedom at least to the level we had before Bakiev.” Forum 18 News Service. www.foru​m18.org/​Arch​ive.php?art​icle​_​id=​1432. Last accessed 3/​22/​23. —​—​—​. 2017. “Kyrgyzstan: Impunity for Body Snatching Officials.” Forum 18 News Service. www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2266. Last accessed 5/29/23 Borbieva, Noor O’Neill. 2012. “Foreign faiths and national renewal: Christian conversion among Kyrgyz youth.” Culture and Religion 13 (1): 41–​63. —​—​—​. 2017. “The ascendance of orthodoxy: Nation building and religious pluralism in Central Asia.” In Islam: Society and Politics in Central Asia, edited by Pauline Jones, 151–​ 172. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Casanova, José. 1994. “Secularization, enlightenment, and modern religion.” In Public Religions in the Modern World, 11–​39. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Covey, Stephen R. 1997. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. G. K. Hall. DeWeese, Devin. 1994. “The religious environment: Worldview, ritual, and communal status.” In Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition, 17–​66. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Domagalskaya, Natalia, and Gulnura Toralieva. 2003. “Missionaries offer faith and food to Kyrgyz.” Institute for War and Peace Reporting. https://iwpr.net/global-voices/missionariesoffer-faith-and-food-kyrgyz. Last accessed 5/29/23. Foltz, Richard C. 2010. “The Silk Road and its travelers.” In Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, 1–​22. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gellner, David N. 2001. “Studying secularism, practising secularism. Anthropological perspectives.” Social Anthropology 9 (3): 337–​340. Gray, John. 2002. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hann, Chris. 2000. “Problems with the (de)privatization of religion.” Anthropology Today 16 (6): 14–​20. Haynes, Jeffrey. 2007. Religion and Development: Conflict or Cooperation? Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. —​—​—​. 2012. Religious Transnational Actors and Soft Power. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. 202

— ​​​​ T h e r e l i g i o u s f r e e d o m a g e n d a i n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​ Hefner, Robert W. 1987. “The political economy of Islamic conversion in modern East Java.” In Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse, edited by William R. Roff, 53–​78. Berkeley: University of California Press. —​—​—​, ed. 1993. Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hertzke, Allen D. 2004. Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. “Anthropology and the politics of significance.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41 (3): 107–​138. Horton, Robin. 1971. “African conversion.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41 (2): 85–​108. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ismanov, Ahmed. 2004. “Protestants in Kyrgyzstan face hostile reception.” Eurasianet.org. https://​eur​asia​net.org/​prot​esta​nts-​in-​kyr​gyzs​tan-​face-​host​ile-​recept​ion. Last accessed 5/29/23. James, William. 1997 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Touchstone. Keller, Shoshana. 2001. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–​1941. Westport, CT: Praeger. Khalid, Adeeb. 2003. “A secular Islam: Nation, state, and religion in Uzbekistan.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 35 (4): 573–​598. Kipp, Rita Smith. 1995. “Conversion by affiliation: The history of the Karo Batak Protestant Church.” American Ethnologist 22 (4): 868–​882. Kuchumkulova, Elmira M. 2007. “Kyrgyz nomadic customs and the impact of re-​Islamization after independence.” Ph.D., Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Washington. Lambek, Michael. 2015. “Is religion free?” In Politics of Religious Freedom, edited by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin, 289–​ 300. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, David C. 2000. After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. Surrey, UK: Curzon. Mahmood, Saba. 2015. “Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics.” In Politics of Religious Freedom, edited by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin, 142–​148. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mandryk, Jason. 2010. Operation World. Seventh edition. Colorado Springs, CO: Biblica Publishing. Marsden, Lee. 2008. For God’s Sake: The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy. London: Zed Books. Nock, Arthur Darby. 1961 [1933]. Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2005. “Missionary encounters in Kyrgyzstan: Challenging the national ideal.” Central Eurasian Studies Review 4 (2): 13–​16. —​—​—​. 2007. “ ‘Culture’ as a tool and an obstacle: Missionary encounters in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13: 881–​899. —​—​—​, ed. 2009a. Conversion After Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union. New York: Berghahn. —​—​—​. 2009b. “Introduction: Post-​Soviet space and the unexpected turns of religious life.” In Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union, edited by Mathijs Pelkmans, 1–​16. New York: Berghahn. —​ —​ —​ . 2009c. “Temporary conversions: Encounters with Pentecostalism in Muslim Kyrgyzstan.” In Conversion After Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union, edited by Mathijs Pelkmans, 143–​162. New York: Berghahn. 203

—​​​​ N o o r O ’ N e i l l B o r b i e v a —​​​ —​—​—​. 2009d. “The ‘transparency’ of Christian proselytizing in Kyrgyzstan.” Anthropological Quarterly 82 (2): 423–​446. —​ —​ —​ . 2014. “Paradoxes of religious freedom and repression in (post-​ )Soviet contexts.” Journal of Law and Religion 29 (3): 436–​446. —​—​—​. 2017. Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Privratsky, Bruce G. 2001. Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond, UK: Curzon. Race, Alan. 1983. Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. —​—​—​. 2001. Interfaith Encounter: The Twin Tracks of Theology and Dialogue. London: SCM Press. Rambo, Lewis R. 1993. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ro’i, Yaacov. 1995. “The secularization of Islam and the USSR’s Muslim areas.” In Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies, edited by Yaacov Ro’i, 5–​20. London: Frank Cass. —​—​—​. 2000. Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev. New York: Columbia University Press. Rotar, Igor. 2006a. “Kyrgyzstan: Intolerance against Christians highlighted by murder.” Forum 18 News Service. www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=729. Last accessed 5/29/23. —​—​—​. 2006b. “Kyrgyzstan: New law to restrict religious freedom?” Forum 18 News Service. www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=810. Last accessed 5/29/23. —​—​—​. 2006c. “Central Asia: Religious intolerance in Central Asia.” Forum 18 News Service. www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=810. Last accessed 5/29/23. —​—​—​. 2006d. “Kyrgyzstan: Mob goes unpunished as intolerance of religious freedom rises.” Forum 18 News Service. www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=846. Last accessed 5/29/23. Saroyan, Mark. 1997. Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union. Edited by Edward W. Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press. Snow, David A., and Richard Machalek. 1984. “The sociology of conversion.” Annual Review of Sociology 10: 167–​190. Starr, S. Frederick. 1999. “Civil society in Central Asia.” In Civil society in Central Asia, edited by M. Holt Ruffin and Daniel Waugh, 27–​33. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Stockman, Farah, Michael Kranish, Peter S. Canellos, and Kevin Baron. 2006. “Bush brings faith to foreign aid.” Boston Globe, October 8, 2006, A1. Tett, Gillian. 1994. “ ‘Guardians of the Faith?’: Gender and Religion in an (ex) Soviet Tajik Village.” In Muslim Women’s Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality, edited by Camillia Fawzi El-​Solh and Judy Mabro, 128–​151. Providence, RI: Berg. US D[epartment of] S[tate]. 2005. International Religious Freedom Report, Kyrgyzstan. Human Rights and Labor Bureau of Democracy. https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/ irf/2005/51562.htm. Last accessed 5/29/23. —​—​—​. 2006. International Religious Freedom Report. Human Rights and Labor Bureau of Democracy. https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2006/71389.htm. Last accessed 5/29/23. —​—​—​. 2013. International Religious Freedom Report. Human Rights and Labor Bureau of Democracy. https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/222545.pdf. Last accessed 5/29/23. —​—​—​. 2020. International Religious Freedom Report. Human Rights and Labor Bureau of Democracy. www.state.gov/reports/2020-report-on-international-religious-freedom/kyrgyzstan/. Last accessed 5/29/23. Yavuz, M. Hakan. 2008. “The trifurcated Islam of Central Asia: A Turkish perspective.” In Asian Islam in the Twenty-​First Century, edited by John L. Esposito, John Obert Voll, and Osman Bakar, 109–​144. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 204

PART III

CARE AND INTERDEPENDENCE

Feminist scholars have long drawn attention to the physical, ethical and affective labour involved in social reproduction. They have highlighted the invisible economies of care that sustain social life, and the differential demands that caring for and caring about others place on unequally positioned individuals. They have pointed out the tensions that this can create in the most intimate spaces of family and conjugal life. In this section, we examine care next to social interdependence for several reasons. The idea of interdependence creates analytical flexibility, independent of particular categories like class or gender, to think through human interactions. These can range from material support to affection, authority, disciplining and reputation-​ making (cf. Liu, this volume). Many of these interactions can be interpreted as forms of care: the notion of interdependency highlights that there are several sides to such relationships. The chapters in this section take us deep inside domestic and quasi-​domestic space, highlighting relational complexities and experimental forms that are easily glossed over in unidimensional accounts of ‘patriarchy’ or ‘gerontocracy’ in Central Asia. Empirically, the chapters explore how care and social interdependence are negotiated in a wide range of settings, from homes to residential neighbourhoods, homeless shelters to social media. They show how care is gendered and raced, and how such structuring contributes to its misrecognition as ‘natural’. This naturalisation helps to reproduce these dynamics in a context of massive transnational labour migration and growing gaps between rich and poor. This group of authors consider how marginalised individuals access the goods and services needed for survival, when formal systems of care are in retreat. And they show how care can become entangled with clientelism and coercion. The section begins with Morgan Liu’s study of the residential neighbourhood, or mahalla, as a material space of ethical self-​formation and social navigation. Mahalla architecture and technologies of visibility and mutual presencing create a particular arena in which asymmetrical obligations of respect and care are worked out. It is in the mahalla realm that individuals show respect to kin members and fellow residents through the exchange of food, services, honorifics and collective labour. For some, mahalla life is experienced as oppressive: particularly for those such as sexual minorities, converts to Christianity or adherents of reformist Islam, who need to conceal DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-16

205

—​​​​ C a r e a n d i n t e r d e p e n d e n c e —​​​

elements of themselves from their neighbours. It can also be a place of particularly oppressive control for daughters-​in-​law, who may be treated as a source of free labour (cf. Ismailbekova, this volume). But the mahalla, like the safe house described in Grace Zhou’s chapter, also affords a degree of social protection and recognition. Care and control, as both authors show, should be understood less as binary opposites, and more as aspects of interdependency that often go together. Grace Zhou explores such entanglements through the struggles of substance-​ addicted and homeless people to access care in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. After the end of the Soviet welfare state, Zhou’s interlocutors navigate a complex social and institutional landscape, in which actors ‘repurpose old systems, mixing them with new forms’. In a region that is typically glossed as a site of strong patriarchal norms and rigid ethnic and clan identities, the author demonstrates a surprising malleability in these identities. Whereas these categories are often the base of denying someone full personhood, actors such as local NGOs draw on the language of (quasi)-​kin relations to organise support and channel inclusion. The work of ‘kinning’ also figures in Marhabo Saparova’s remarkable research with Turkmen workers in Turkey. Drawing on extended interviews with migrating women, Saparova shows how the exploitation of Turkmen domestic servants is facilitated and normalised through discourses of family and ‘Turkic kinship’. These discourses allow commodified care to be reframed –​and hence endlessly extended –​as familial ‘support’. In a context where Turkey and Turkmenistan proclaim the principle of ‘two states, one nation’, a work permit system nevertheless makes migrating women highly dependent on their domestic employer. Marhabo Saparova contextualises the personal experience of Turkmen women in the large-​scale incorporation of women into global capitalism, and discusses how they navigate forms of precarity built into ambiguous legal, labour and family relations. Finally, Juliette Cleuziou lays out the role new information and communication technologies have come to play in maintaining transnational family relations between Tajikistan and Russia. She outlines how these function to realise care in its different forms (financial, moral, emotional), but also to exercise control along lines of gender and generation. Remittances, for instance, are usually sent to the head of the household, and young wives left behind often bear the full burden of handling familial relations with in-​laws. But care does always run within the family: some Tajikistani migrant groups in Russia organise collective forms of care, for example, around funerals, that may compete with familial reciprocities. Three core insights run through this section. First, rather than treating care as a self-​evident ‘good’ or as a natural manifestation of filial, conjugal, or parental affection, the chapters approach it as a complex relationship, grounded in all of the messiness of everyday struggles. Second, the contributors highlight the ‘slippiness’ and ambivalence of care: the thin lines that separate care, control and unfreedom. Third, the chapters highlight the importance of attending empirically to the domestic sphere, a realm often associated with intimacy and protection. They clarify how the domestic interlocks with systems of domination such as race, gender, class and age. The contributions particularly demonstrate the close meshing between family and state ideologies and rhetoric, one grafting on to the other. Authors like Marhabo

206

—​​​​ C a r e a n d i n t e r d e p e n d e n c e —​​​​

Saparova, or Kerstin Klenke and Noor Borbieva elsewhere in the volume, make clear the broader impact of global economies and orders that perpetuate and expand unequal interdependence, as well as documenting resistance against unwanted forms of ‘care’ –​most gravely, through the internment camps of Xinjiang (Byler, this volume).

207

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THEORIZING CENTRAL ASIAN NEIGHBOURHOODS AS SOCIAL INTERDEPENDENCE, STATE ENCOUNTER, AND NARRATIVE Morgan Y. Liu INTRODUCTION If you want to know somebody well, go see where they live. Homes are where people conduct themselves in unguarded, routine ways. Everyday family and communal activity take place there, especially in urban Central Asia –​keeping house, preparing food, watching children, studying for school, playing games, sharing meals, seeing friends, entertaining guests, holding Islamic lessons, repairing houses, servicing cars, growing fruits, tending animals, running small businesses, making deals, watching TV, following social media, pursuing hobbies, and hosting weddings. Neighbourhood harbors a remarkably wide gamut of what people are involved in and care the most about. Scholarly attention on urban residential neighbourhoods allows access to all of these phenomena and how they might be interrelated, helping to identify trends in society, politics, and economy. Domestic spaces offer views of the nature and networks of social relations that may have a crucial bearing on how obligations, allegiances, alliances, ethics, and power operate more widely. A home visit for tea or a wedding may perform a promise for political support or seal a business deal. The anthropological study of neighbourhoods can thus yield more than the documentation of cultural practices and local color. It offers concrete sites from which to understand everyday enactments of social processes and their meanings. Central Asians live in all sorts of neighbourhoods, reflecting the diverse geography, climate, economies, architectural traditions, state policies, and developmental histories of particular places across the region. This essay concerns a type of residential quarter called a mahalla. It portrays mahallas as a spatial and social form of life, associated with specifiable varieties of interpersonal dynamics, communal uses of space, material practices, social imaginaries, and articulations with state power. The claim here is not that these socio-​spatial characteristics are uniform within or unique to mahallas.1 Rather, mahallas constitute a particular convergence of socio-​spatial characteristics that could shed light on Central Asian society more broadly, such as understanding the formation of subjects and communities. Pondering mahallas may also inspire theoretical reflection on anthropological concerns such as places as sites that produce social imaginaries; claims about tradition and morality as negotiated DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-17

209

—​​​​ M o r g a n Y. L i u —​​​

positions in social fields; embodiment, sensoria, and space as constitutive of everyday practices; social categories and hierarchies as emergent from social interaction, materiality and discursivity as co-​productive of subjectivity; and infrastructure and technologies of visibility as central to state-​citizen encounters.2 These theoretical issues will be unpacked and explained through ethnographically grounded examples set in mahallas. Ethnographic moments are drawn from 26 years of fieldwork in and writing about Uzbek-​majority mahallas in southern Kyrgyzstan, especially in Osh (Liu 2012) and Jalal-​ Abad (2015; n.d.); and Uzbekistan (2005), especially in Tashkent and Namangan.

MAHALLAS AS LAYERED PLACES What is a mahalla? The answer depends to some extent on person and context. From a city administrator’s view, a mahalla is a territory with definite boundaries, a name or number, and a governing committee that ultimately submits to the municipal government. For the many residents of the city living in Soviet-​era apartment blocks or more recently self-​built residential districts called novostroiki, mahallas are the older parts of the city. In multi-​ethnic cities, mahallas can be associated with specific ethnic populations and cultures (such as Osh mahallas with Uzbeks), even though few are truly mono-​ethnic in composition; in Uzbekistani cities, mahallas tend not to be ethnically marked, and the term can be used as a generic category for urban neighbourhoods of any kind. For mahalla residents, one’s mahalla can serve as a key identifier of one’s social location within the city. Mahallas in this sense may not have clear borders but are often referred to by the major street running through them. It was this layered character of the mahalla that first attracted me to investigate them while I was studying in Osh. The first layer I encountered was a mental distinction among residents between mahallas and the “modern” parts of the city. I became acquainted with the latter as an exchange student at Osh State University in the spring of 1994, spending all of my time among the dormitories, campus buildings, main streets, public library, stores, markets, cafes, theatres, and apartment neighbourhoods. For several months I did not set foot into a mahalla because my social world at the time derived from my connections with this Kyrgyz-​dominant university, and most of the Kyrgyz dwell and spend time in the urban sections built under and after the Soviet era, with more recent migrants from rural areas and younger families living in the novostroiki areas on Osh’s periphery opened after the 1990 Osh Riots. One Uzbek professor there, however, offered to take me on a tour of a mahalla in order to show me what she called, “the real Osh,” meaning (putting aside here the particular ethnic politics of Uzbek claims about the city) the way Osh supposedly existed for centuries before Soviet rule. The mahalla we entered was just across the street from my dormitory, but it seemed a world away. The moment we turned from the main street onto a narrower street of the residential neighbourhood, the character of the buildings and spaces changed. Houses were mostly single story, some with hand-​made walls, with metal gates that led into the interior courtyards around which each house was oriented. Sounds of car traffic receded as the voices of conversations from within house courtyards and the noises of penned animals were heard. The scent of baked bread or burning wood wafted in the air. Streets were sometimes winding, sometimes unpaved, sometimes 210

—​​​​ T h e o r i z i n g C e n t r a l A s i a n n e i g h b o u r h o o d s —​​​​

with various groups of people conducting all sorts of activity on them. It seemed that few outsiders ventured onto those streets, those who did not live there or personally knew someone who did. The streets had the quality of “semi-​private space,” a term used by Lila Abu-​Lughod to describe the narrow alleyways of Middle Eastern cities where domestic work and neighbourly socialization occupy spaces that are legally public but treated as the domain of locals (1987). The courtyards (dvory) between apartment blocks from another variety of “public-​private place” in use by residents and senses of territoriality, as Schöder finds in Bishkek (Schröder 2017:52–​74; see also Schröder this volume). The sense that mahalla streets were intimately connected to community life activity gave this kind of neighbourhood a look and feel decidedly different from the parts of the city I had known until then, which appeared to belong to a broader urban public and the state. After I began investigating Osh’s mahallas, I found that they were more complicated than my Uzbek professor’s characterizations during my first tour. While the mahalla/​ modern city distinction was found in the way that all Osh residents talked about and dwelled in the city, and was thus in that sense socially real, the distinction is actually not absolute. Tracing Osh’s history of urban development through interviews and written sources, I realized that mahallas themselves progressively changed in organization, layout, legal status, and materiality across the Soviet period (Liu 2012:74–​ 104) so that they are no less “modern” or new than the city’s wide boulevards and Lenin statues. Mahallas are relatively “old” in the sense that many were constituted as neighbourhoods before the construction of Soviet apartments and novostroiki houses, but they were not old physically in their construction materials nor organizationally in their relation with the state. Some mahallas were organized or absorbed from nearby collective farm villages starting from Osh’s post-​war industrial boom. I found similar mental bifurcations between Old City and New City within cities with extant pre-​Soviet cores for Tashkent, Namangan, Bukhara, and Jalal-​Abad. The lesson here is that mahallas, even as they are adaptable and renewable forms of Central Asian neighbourhood, are often treated as if they represent traditional, even “authentic,” ways of life. Imaginaries of mahallas as realms of distinct manners rooted in pre-​modern heritage are partly grounded in the forms of social life that tend to be found there. Mahalla social life is important, however, not because it displays so-​called “ethnic traditions,” but because it reveals how social categories operate and how those categories emerge from everyday interaction. This view may give insight about how relational dynamics such as obligation, hierarchy, cleavage, and alliance work in society generally.

SOCIAL INTERDEPENDENCE An insightful approach to mapping out local social life is to focus on how it is made up of relations of mutual dependence. The term “social interdependence” is meant to capture a wide range of human interactions concerning financial support, material provisioning, physical and reputational protection, mutual obligation, authority, influence, affection, teaching, disciplining, reprimanding, encouraging, and so forth. The term enables flexible thinking about the various bonds between people without presupposing fixed social categories like gender, class, or ethnicity; and without assuming fixed hierarchies and relations between them. For example, Don Kalb uses this term 211

—​​​​ M o r g a n Y. L i u —​​​

in his post-​Marxist approach to class as an emergent phenomenon (2015:15–​16). This means that analysis should not start with class as a given, but should look at actual interactions and dependencies to see how class is dynamically made real and made complicated. The same approach to all social divisions would yield more nuanced and processual analyses of Central Asian societies. Using the notion of social interdependence, anthropological studies rooted in neighbourhoods permit a wide consideration of how residents are involved in each other’s lives generally. Strong and criss-​crossing relations of social interdependence characterize mahalla life. Senses of reciprocal obligation and acts of mutual aid are found in hospitality (see Marsden, this volume) or communal activities such as monetary and labour exchanges, rotating savings and credit initiatives, mutual assistance and non-​compensated labour, housing construction and contributions to charity, … non-​compensated community project[s]‌(hashar) … where local residents cooperate with one another … [for] constructing irrigation facilities, cleaning streets, asphalting roads, building houses or mosques, organising weddings, funerals and circumcision feasts and many other services not provided by the state. (Urinboyev 2018:70) One result of these community sensibilities and practices is that residents of mahallas often treat and talk about their residential neighbourhood as a particular social world, when seen with respect to the entire city. There are behaviors they may engage in differently when at home or in their own mahallas, under the gaze of family and neighbours, compared to when they are in the so-​called “new” parts of their city or when they may be abroad working. I spent time during the late 1990s, for example, hanging out with a cohort of late teen male Uzbeks living in Osh mahallas. These relatively affluent, unmarried young men, finished with secondary education and working only part-​time with their family businesses (mostly trade and bazaar selling) had much leisure time. When they were in mahalla houses, they kept their speech and conduct relatively tame, and showed respectful deference to the parents. I saw, however, that the boys immensely enjoyed the independence of entertaining themselves outside the mahalla. Owning cars, they spent that time together in many places throughout the city: in each other’s homes, restaurants outside of mahallas, billiard rooms, and video game salons. They told raunchy jokes; they burst out laughing; they wrestled; they behaved as they could not within mahallas. Meanwhile, their sisters spent much of their daily routines in heavy housework, even if they also worked or studied outside their neighbourhoods. Expectations of proper female behavior are more socially enforceable within mahallas, where they generally spend the most time. Gendered differences in youth independence are thus related to routine spatial mobility within the city, specifically the right to spend regular leisure time outside the mahalla. This is one sense in which the mahalla is treated as realm of distinct manners: a mahalla resident’s behavior is partly keyed to place. The reason for this is that being in a mahalla means being subject to a constant, informal, mutual monitoring that is visual and auditory –​one is seen and heard in various ways because of the spatial organization and material properties of houses and streets. It means standing in continual streams of information flow about each 212

—​​​​ T h e o r i z i n g C e n t r a l A s i a n n e i g h b o u r h o o d s —​​​​

other (who got divorced, who just returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca, whose children are working where in Russia), conveyed face to face and via social media, constructing the sense that “all the mahalla knows.” Digital communication can extend information circulation and social interdependence to wherever there is a carrier connection, enabling the emergence of enduring, virtual mahallas across transnational distances, such as tying Uzbek labor migrants in Moscow to their mahallas in rural Fergana, Uzbekistan (Urinboyev 2017). But in other ways, the social dynamics of neighbourhood are primarily established and perpetuated in bodily presence, as discussed below. Mahallas have long acted like overlapping networks of chat groups before the arrival of mobile telephones and social media apps in the 2000s. In other words, these neighbourhoods have long defined spaces of intense information circulation, more so than within apartment or novostroiki districts. The sense that one is constantly subject to the awareness and commentary of neighbours to an extent not found in other kinds of neighbourhoods forms another reason that many treat mahallas as distinctive realms, an instance of where social processes produce senses of locality (Appadurai 1996). The dense matrix of information and interdependencies that constitute mahallas as a particular kind of locality also produces the social categories of their inhabitants. In the pre-​digital age, friends visiting each other’s houses needed to call out loud the names of the one they wanted to see from the street outside the house gate (there were no doorbells in these houses). Sitting in the courtyard of a house, I regularly heard the names of individuals being bellowed out. All neighbours within earshot could hear that, and known people had recognizable voices. This meant that everyone always knew who was consorting with whom. The acoustic properties of open courtyard-​ centered houses of the mahalla enabled this kind of mutual monitoring –​the particular architecture of these houses mattered in this social process. Gate-​calling helped produce the category of cohort or social peers, because when neighbours repeatedly heard certain names being called out by certain voices, those persons were being associated with each other, reinforcing the cohesiveness of that social category. It was a regular mahalla practice that dynamically bound certain groups of people as properly belonging together. The practice of calling at the gate also served also to maintain relations of hierarchy and separateness. Only certain categories of people could summon others. A young man, for example, could not summon his elder, nor a young woman a man who is not her husband or child. These snapshots of encounters also reveal that details of bodily presence in street and house spaces, and the sensorial experience of them, matter in the conduct of social relations in the mahalla. The maintenance of social distinction and hierarchy emerging from the practice of gate-​calling is possible only because of the blocked lines of sight between streets and houses, and the open spheres of audition that allows a voice to carry into interior spaces of houses through courtyards. Habitual embodied conduct in particular spaces on streets and in houses makes social categories and authority real to the residents. Body and space are thus irreducibly integral to the functioning of social interdependence. These examples from the mahalla (see also, Liu 2012:125–​147), contribute to the growing awareness in the anthropology of Central Asia about the benefits of research “from the body,” with focused attention to how embodied subjects engage their social worlds, which, as the above examples suggest, may yield insights missed otherwise (Csordas 1990). 213

—​​​​ M o r g a n Y. L i u —​​​

These vignettes capture the flavor of why some consider the mahalla as a distinct social world, understood with respect to the putative Old City/​New City dichotomy. There are particular ways of conducting life that shape and are shaped by assumptions about social categories and their relationships (social ontologies and hierarchies). On one hand, women, men, children, youth, elders, rich, and poor behave in certain ways toward each other because they belong to those categories. On the other, those patterns of everyday practice make such categories socially real in the first place –​ habitual practice enacts ontology (Escobar 2018:92–​104). It goes both ways. In the flow of mahalla life, social categories and social action are mutually enforcing and productive. What this approach avoids is the assumption that social ontologies are prior to social life, or that they are always stable or totalizing. Social categories are meaningful and necessary for making sense of neighbourhood life, but they are also emergent, relative, partial, and subject to shift. And so, mahalla social life is not organized by single, uncontested visions of harmony and order. For many living there, the mahalla seems an oppressive place, where one’s words, deeds, and connections are always subject to comment, disapproval, mockery, sanction, or retribution. Circulations of personal information, gossip, and rumor result in pressures to conform to communal standards of behavior. Several older men told me stories of the history of their neighbourhoods, narrating the mahalla as a community that promotes proper etiquette and morals for its residents. They talked about how individuals should render respect to their seniors, reflected in bodily comportment on mahalla streets, care for the material conditions of the neighbourhood, participate in the common work to benefit the community. But not everyone conforms, not all the time. Different kinds of perceived outsiders reside in the neighbourhoods, and their presence is variously tolerated, or not. They remain social outsiders to some extent because their presence represents aberrations to those moral visions of mahalla community. Ethnic others, which in Osh includes Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Chechens, Meskhetian Turks, Lulis (“Gypsies”), Kyrgyz, and a few foreigners in mahallas, generally maintain good relations with their Uzbek neighbours, especially families who have been there from Soviet times, when there was more ethnic diversity in the quarters of urban southern Kyrgyzstan. Divorce happens, and the aftermath affects men and women differently. Because men tend to stay in the house of their parents after marriage and having children (until they have the financial resources to find a house of their own, except for the youngest son inherting the parents’ house), divorce is less disruptive for men (for Uzbek marriage practices, see Ismailbekova, this volume). A young man I knew remarried a few years after his divorce, without kids, and the patterns of his work and family life mostly continued throughout. Women divorcees, however, usually return to their natal home with any of their children. They assume the role of one of the household kelins, daughters-​in-​ law, performing the great work needed to maintain the courtyard house and care for her parents, and find it difficult to remarry. One divorcee whom I knew did manage to remarry and move to Tashkent with her son. Single women living alone tend to be viewed with suspicion, the subject of gossip about possible illegal or immoral activities. I heard about a single woman who bought a house in a mahalla. The elders mobilized and served her an ultimatum to either get married, stop receiving men to her house, or get out. She eventually moved out. Because everyday life is highly 214

—​​​​ T h e o r i z i n g C e n t r a l A s i a n n e i g h b o u r h o o d s —​​​​

interdependent on the material help of neighbours, social death in a mahalla spells the end of a viable existence there. Not everyone conforms, but there is a price to pay. Disability tends to be viewed with shame and willful denial. The differently abled are mostly kept socially isolated in their homes, treated as invisible by their families. I got to know a family living in a house on a large plot of land, with multiple structures, and spent much time interviewing the patriarch about his family’s history. It was months into our relationship that I found out about the existence of his unmarried adult daughter living there, who had a shriveled arm. I did not meet this young woman for so long partly because a mahalla house enables a degree of separation between family members and their routine activities (compare also Zhou, this volume). The spatial organization of these houses enables compartmentalization of social life and roles to occur within even relatively small land areas, particularly between men’s activities (growing fruits or flowers for the market, baking bread for sale, fixing cars) and women’s (cleaning, preparing food, washing clothes, caring for small children). All of this explains why I did not run into the differently abled daughter of the large house after months of visiting the household and meeting all the other members. When I did happen to meet her in the house, she seemed very pleasant, intelligent, and curious about me. But after talking for so long in detail about the history of the family, I was surprised that the patriarch never mentioned this daughter of his. The omission showed that he was extremely dismissive of her importance, no doubt due to her gender, limitations to do housework, and perceived unmarriageability. There are active communities of the disabled in Central Asia, but they have low public visibility. On a Tashkent bus I once caught two passengers conversing in sign language, but this was a rare encounter. Other types of non-​conformists to dominant social ideals are also pressured to live quiet lives in the mahalla. Sexual minorities, transgender individuals, converts to Christianity, adherents to “foreign” movements of Islam, the highly educated, and the foreign educated, cultivate variously double lives that maintain a veneer of conformity in order to live with less conflict in the mahalla. These varieties of social diversity reveal conformity in the mahalla as a complex matter that belies its simple representation as a conservative social world. Pressures to follow certain norms of behavior and identification are, to be sure, persistent and strong. Those pressures are justified and intensified by certain narratives of moral order and ethnic tradition about the mahalla (considered below). However, as compelling as social norms and enacted ontologies appear, they are not completely fixed or totalizing. The neighbourhood, rather, marks a field of negotiation between different ways of being in the world. Central Asians are thus revealed to be not merely reproducers of traditions and mentalities but creative adaptors to constraint and change.

STATE-​C ITIZEN ENCOUNTERS Central Asian urban neighbourhoods also form sites through which state and citizen meet. Residential quarters have long formed the basic units of city administration since pre-​Soviet times. The Soviet and post-​Soviet governments have operated policies, programs, and services with neighbourhood-​level administration, which are locally elected or appointed committees (mahalkom, domkom, etc.). The committee leaders (usually men, sometimes women) act as intermediaries between residents and the 215

—​​​​ M o r g a n Y. L i u —​​​

municipal government, mediating flows of information and petitions up the administrative hierarchy, and monies, decisions, directives, and projects down it. In various times and places, the neighbourhood committees administer financial and material aid to the local poor and widows, resolve disputes, organize cooperative construction, manage pooled assets (like tables, chairs, cooking cauldrons for weddings and celebrations), register young men for the draft, report residence census figures, and implement policy, for example, the mass unveiling campaigns of women in the 1930s (Kamp 2006; Northrop 2004). In southern Kyrgyzstani cities, where many neighbourhoods are Uzbek-​majority, the daily push-​ and-​ pull negotiations of mahalla committees with the Kyrgyz-​ dominated city administration over resources and policy have implications for the perception of ethnic equity amidst delicate inter-​ethnic relations, especially after violent events in 1990 and 2010. Osh has a coordinating committee of the city’s mahalla heads, whose job is to gather requests from the mahallas and negotiate with the mayor’s office. Much of their work concern maintaining or improving utilities and roads. This coordinating committee was housed during the 1990s in a lone green trailer halfway up Solomon Mountain, the geographical feature dominating Osh’s skyline. The staff revealed to me their frustration with the city administration, whose policies they perceived to favor ethnic Kyrgyz. Some Uzbek-​majority mahallas that Uzbeks considered an integral part of Osh are officially designated as lying outside, whereas Kyrgyz-​majority novostroiki neighbourhoods on former agricultural lands on the city’s periphery, and even an ex-​state farm village a few kilometers away, also Kyrgyz-​majority, are considered inside Osh. Moreover, newer lands opened to establish new Uzbek-​majority mahallas have been relegated to hilly lands south of the city. These policies meant that Kyrgyz received the best new housing lands, enjoyed better access to city infrastructure, and increased their official percentage of Osh’s population. Such grievances, which I found many Osh Uzbeks expressing in the 1990s (Liu 2012:91–​102), formed the political reality under which the mahalla coordinating committee had to work. This reality was not available for negotiation. Rather, the work of this coordinating committee concerned incremental improvements to the material conditions within the mahallas. At one point in my conversation, a staff member nudged another, saying, “Why are you telling him all this?” He saw such talk as politically sensitive and futile. The latter defiantly replied, “Bilsin! (That he may know!)” There are times when an ethnographer is treated as a witness to experienced injustice. Uzbekistan’s mahallas reveal a very different kind of state-​citizen encounter. The Uzbekistani state began transforming the mahalla into a more formal administrative instrument for implementing social policy soon after independence, with the adoption of the Mahalla Law in 1993, revised in 1999, and, in the Soviet tradition of state-​driven campaigns, 2003 was proclaimed the Year of the Mahalla (Mahalla Yili). Mahallas became the state’s main agency for dispensing social welfare, maintaining social stability, and monitoring the citizenry (Urinboyev 2011). The state’s focus on them comes in part because the mahalla is seen as a kind of “microcosm of social solidarity which provides a model for relations within wider society” (Rasanayagam 2009:115). The idea is, to manage the mahalla is to manage Uzbekistan. The neighbourhood was an important site for another kind of state-​ citizen encounter during the Soviet period –​the mahalla was where many Central Asians 216

—​​​​ T h e o r i z i n g C e n t r a l A s i a n n e i g h b o u r h o o d s —​​​​

became more Soviet and more modern. Part of my fieldwork in Osh involved asking long-​term residents to talk about how their mahallas developed over time. Over much tea, some of those living in the centuries-​old mahallas at the city center talked about their family’s large landholding there in pre-​Soviet times (one said, “Nikolai vaktida, in [Tsar] Nicholas’ times”). This was successively divided up as sons grew up, got married, and received their own portions of the family property, so that many families in the mahalla today are second and third patrilineal cousins. In newer mahallas, residents told of when the city was much smaller, and their neighbourhood was a collective farm village outside the urban core. Over the twentieth century, especially after World War II, Osh expanded, absorbing surrounding villages into its urban fabric. The incorporation meant the coming of infrastructure (dates are somewhat variable, depending on where): planned street-​grid layouts and paved roads (1940s onward), bus routes, factory-​manufactured housing material (mostly post-​war), electricity (1960s), and gas (1980s). Older residents recounted the advent of each of these to their neighbourhoods, weaving the collective history into their personal histories. One talked about the advent of factory-​manufactured roofing tiles for houses, replacing the former thatch and mud materials. Roof shingles meant homeowners no longer had to fix leaks after every rainstorm. Another recalled getting his first television, now that the mahalla had electricity, and described struggling with the rabbit-​ ear antennae to get a signal. Bit by bit, layer by layer, the mahalla was becoming materially modern. In parallel to developments in city infrastructure and organization also came social change. As mahalla houses and streets began to look different with the new materials and layouts, the people residing in them shifted to the jobs and roles of an industrializing, modernizing economy. After the middle of the twentieth century, progressively fewer worked as farmers and more in the various professions: drivers, cooks, construction workers, shopkeepers, managers, teachers, doctors, artists, electricians, engineers, and pesticide specialists. These were the new occupations as Osh’s post-​war industry took off, and institutions of higher education trained skilled professionals for the new economy (notably the Osh Pedagogical Institute, later becoming Osh State University). With literacy, mahalla inhabitants became consumers of and producers for institutions of media, technology, and culture. The new infrastructures of Soviet life were thus both material (electrical grids and paved streets) and discursive (house addresses and mass education), and both played roles in the making of modern subjects, in the sense that historians use (see also Abashin 2015). Partly in the neighbourhoods where their daily lives were grounded, and in conjunction with other sites, Central Asians were becoming more socially modern. One man’s account offers a glimpse of how local government administration intersected with ordinary lives. He told me of when he left to fight the “Fascists” on the Front during WWII, his first time away from home. He wrote letters to his mother, but his home address changed twice during his deployment according to administrative shuffles. At first, he addressed letters home to the center of his collective farm, then his mahalla fell under the Suzak Region, and then finally under Osh City, where it sits today. This man experienced the changes to his mahalla organization through the act of wartime letter-​writing. The war itself, with its broadly shared, purpose-​ driven material sacrifices felt in every neighbourhood, also consolidated Central Asian sentiments of being Soviet citizens. However, the administrative changes experienced 217

—​​​​ M o r g a n Y. L i u —​​​

by my wartime letter-​writer showed only a small piece of how Soviet administration incorporated the mahalla into its governance of Central Asian populations. Earlier in the twentieth century, houses had no addresses at all. Residents were found through local knowledge –​just ask where so-​and-​so lived. My letter-​writer’s first mail to his mother went to his collective farm center, where everyone there knew where his mother lived. Addresses came later, and that entailed needing to name every street and to assign house numbers, and to put each mahalla into a definite administrative unit. Some mahallas were physically reconfigured, replacing the tangle of winding and dead-​end streets with rational rectilinear grids (what one resident called shahmat sistemasi, a chessboard system). That fixed each resident with unambiguous, specifiable coordinates. This process was part of making Central Asian citizens more visible and countable to the Soviet party-​state for planning and conscription purposes, an essential characteristic of modern government (Scott 1998). The mahalla had to be made legible to power. However, to this day, they tend to be regarded by state authorities and non-​residents as relatively opaque, unnavigable spaces (especially in Uzbek-​majority Kyrgyzstani cities, where neighbourhoods carry ethno-​political significance), despite their progressive rationalization across the twentieth century. For example, even though each street has an official name, residents tend not to use them in providing directions, and street signs are not always easy to find. Rather than taking a bird’s eye, map view of the city, residents use landmarks and orientation from a pedestrian’s walking perspective (cf. de Certeau 1984). Navigating some mahallas today involves a measure of embodied skill and local knowledge, precisely what state rationalization aimed to make obsolete. What the Soviet and post-​Soviet states regard as the “incomplete modernization” of mahallas points to a broader issue. On one hand, mahallas are “unmodern” in the sense that they have not been made fully legible for the state or visitors –​they did not become the rational Paris of Haussmann’s mid-​nineteenth-​century renovation. On the other hand, mahallas did become modern in a meaningful way because they were absorbed into the material infrastructures, legal-​ administrative bureaucracies, and municipal planning to manage different aspects of citizen lives. The mahalla understood as both profoundly and incompletely transformed could stand as a spatial metaphor for Soviet rule in Central Asia more broadly. The mahalla’s “both-​and” ambiguity captures something characteristic about Soviet Central Asian experience.

NEIGHBOURHOOD AS NARRATIVE The neighbourhood is a narrative too. Talk about neighbourhoods reveals how people see themselves, locate others socially, and interpret socio-​economic change. The close social interdependence within residential quarters can instill a sense of place-​based identification, reflecting shared history and stakes. One can have pride in being from certain neighbourhoods, particularly mahallas with a centuries-​old pedigree. Some know that their mahallas used to be named after the craft trade formerly concentrated there –​the tanners, the metal smiths, the alabaster workers. Others were quarters named after the gates (darvoza) marking their entrances, the passed-​down accounts of which reflect traces of the city’s pre-​Soviet organization. While urban districts have official names and numbers under city administration 218

—​​​​ T h e o r i z i n g C e n t r a l A s i a n n e i g h b o u r h o o d s —​​​​

maps, people in everyday talk refer to neighbourhoods by informal, often Soviet-​era designations, by a main street, or by a significant landmark. Those vernacular place names make the city “imageable” or comprehensible (Lynch 1960), and can become part of how people regard themselves and others, which occurs also in other forms of neighbourhoods, such as apartment complexes (Schröder 2017). Narratives of neighbourhood can also make sense of tremendous change. During times of crisis, the neighbourhood itself can become a figure of thought mobilized to capture aspirations about what society ought to be. When the first post-​Soviet decade saw a surge in unemployment and inflation, ideals about the neighbourhood as a training ground for communal values and ethical order provided stable touchpoints anchored in place, where hard work, honesty, and concern for others were cultivated, especially for the younger generation. Practices enacting social interdependencies and communal solidarity help maintain the idea of the neighbourhood as a reproducer of moral community. Neighbourhood-​based moral discourse may also be directed at the growth of wealth inequalities since independence. Some families became rich by shuttle trade starting in the 1990s, and others in migrant labor starting in the 2000s, and they put their wealth into large houses, cars, and lavish weddings. The materiality of wealth came on display where the fast circulations of knowledge ensured that every neighbour knew, potentially causing resentment within tightly knit communities. Social tensions were mitigated by notions of “good wealth,” whereby families using their money for the common good (aiding the poor or widows, providing jobs to residents, underwriting the construction of a neighbourhood mosque) earn the praise of the neighbourhood. The moral discourse of good versus bad wealth rooted in mahalla life also helps explain the power of grand Uzbek patrons in southern Kyrgyzstan until 2010, who built institutions as platforms for accumulating great economic and political capital. Men like Alisher and Davran Sabirov in Osh, and Kadyrjan Batyrov in Jalal-​Abad branded themselves as great benefactors, seeking the economic prosperity of their cities, leveraging the trope of the generous patron. This may be an instance where social ontologies enacted and rooted in neighbourhoods carry over to wider society and politics.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NEIGHBOURHOOD IN CENTRAL ASIA Why examine Central Asian neighbourhoods anthropologically? Neighbourhoods present complex nexuses in which issues playing out in the region find domestic and communal root. They are where one learns to be a person in particular ways, shaping modes of thinking and acting in endeavors beyond home. Everyday neighbourhood activity helps establish and routinize the social reality of interdependencies, obligations, networks, and hierarchies. Neighbourhoods are also important sites in which people experience major historical shifts and are forged as citizens in their encounter with the state. They form a basis of identification of self and others, gathering narratives that impute certain social and moral characteristics to people and place. Anthropologists can examine embodiment, space, materiality, narrativity, and power. The span of insights here should not surprise, given that neighbourhood life is where one’s continual involvements and deepest commitments are worked out. 219

—​​​​ M o r g a n Y. L i u —​​​

The anthropological study of neighbourhood thus yields much more than the documentation of local culture. It provides leverage for comprehending society and politics in Central Asia.

NOTES 1 Orientations and attitudes toward neighbourhood space of some descriptions below have parallels in, for example, a Bishkek apartment neighbourhood (Schröder 2017 and this volume). And while this essay primarily concerns urban neighbourhoods, residential areas in some rural villages have housing layouts and social dynamics that resemble the descriptions below, although with lower population density. 2 Social imaginaries are tacit assumptions about who the significant social categories and actors are in a given society, their mutual relations of power, and what justifies that social order (Castoriadis (1998[1975]).

REFERENCES Abashin, Sergei N. 2015. Sovetskiĭ kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizat͡sieĭ. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Abu-​Lughod, Janet L. 1987. The Islamic city –​historic myth, Islamic essence and contemporary relevance. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 19:155–​76. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. The production of locality. In Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, ed. A Appadurai, pp. 178–​200. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1998 (1975). The imaginary institution of society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos 18(1):5–​47. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kalb, Don. 2015. Introduction: class and the new anthropological holism. In Anthropologies of class: power, practice and inequality, eds. JG Carrier, D Kalb, pp. 1–​27. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kamp, Marianne R. 2006. The new woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, modernity, and unveiling under communism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Liu, Morgan Y. 2005. Hierarchies of place, hierarchies of empowerment: Geographies of talk about postsocialist change in Uzbekistan. Nationalities Papers 33(3):423–​438. —​—​—​. 2012. Under Solomon’s throne: Uzbek visions of renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. —​—​—​. 2015. Urban materiality and its stakes in southern Kyrgyzstan. Quaderni Storici 2015(2):385–​408. —​—​—​. n.d. When elites make the weather and fix intractable problems: Structural power to create political possibility in Kyrgyzstan. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The image of the city. Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press. Northrop, Douglas. 2004. Veiled empire: Gender and power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rasanayagam, Johan. 2009. Morality, self and power: The idea of the mahalla in Uzbekistan. In The anthropology of moralities, ed. M Heintz, pp. 102–​117. New York: Berghahn Books. Schröder, Philipp. 2017. Bishkek boys: Neighbourhood youth and urban change in Kyrgyzstan’s capital. New York: Berghahn Books.

220

—​​​​ T h e o r i z i n g C e n t r a l A s i a n n e i g h b o u r h o o d s —​​​​ Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Urinboyev, Rustamjon. 2011. Bridging the state and society: Case study of Mahalla institutions in Uzbekistan. In Norms between Law and Society: A Collection of Essays from Doctoral Candidates from Different Academic Subjects and Different Parts of the World, ed. H Hyden, pp. 115–​133. Lund: Lund University. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. Establishing an ‘Uzbek mahalla’ via smartphones and social media. In Constructing the Uzbek state: Narratives of post-​Soviet years, ed. M Laruelle, pp. 119–​148. Lanham, MD, New York and London: Lexington Books. —​—​—​. 2018. Mahalla. In The global encyclopedia of informality: Understanding social and cultural complexity, ed. A Ledeneva, pp. 69–​72. London: University College London Press.

221

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE MARGINS Care and ambivalence in southern Kyrgyzstan Grace H. Zhou A DEATH IN THE COMMUNITY Dina lay on the bottom of a bunk bed in a community centre for narkomanki2 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. She was young, perhaps only 18 or 19. Her face was pale and puffy. Her body, swaddled in blankets, was swollen and immobile. She was suffering from acute hypertension and had spent the morning vomiting blood. After being turned away by the provincial hospital and not knowing where else to go, she’d stumbled into the community centre while I was on duty as a volunteer.3 Run by a local non-​profit, the ‘Community’, as the centre was called, provided services to groups of women that were deemed ‘high risk’ and ‘vulnerable’, primarily drug users and sex workers. The other women at the Community gathered around Dina’s supine shape on the bed. One speculated that she could have tuberculosis. Another whispered privately that it might be HIV, that she knew the young woman was a prostitute and had recently serviced an HIV-​positive client. Lena, the attendant of the community centre, admonished Dina and sharply asked if she’d been using drugs. Lena spoke from experience. She was herself a former opioid addict who now managed the centre as an informally trained social worker. Conversation turned into a chorus of complaints about the lack of reliable medical services in Osh. The women complained that hospitals and clinics were often short on space and therefore reluctant to admit those with no connections or who were unwilling to pay steep bribes. Everyone knew someone who had died because they were not able to access medical care. Friends had been lost to illnesses, overdoses, infected abscesses, but mostly neglect. Dina’s health fluctuated over the next months, from winter to spring into summer. The community organisation’s medical funds were depleted from paying the costs of her treatments and hospitalisation. Staff members got into arguments with doctors on the many occasions that they refused to treat her or admit her. This happened again and again. Dina was ultimately diagnosed with renal failure. The NGO didn’t have the budget to support her indefinite and costly thrice-​weekly hemodialysis treatment. They tried to track down Dina’s mother, her only known relation, but their attempts ended only in further frustration. Her mother was herself homeless, and struggled with alcoholism. Despite intermittent phases of better health when she returned to live at the Community, Dina passed away seven months after our initial encounter. Toward the 1

222

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-18

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

end of her life, a church became her only hospice.4 When she died, she was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard, though as a Tatar, she should have received a Muslim burial. After Dina’s death, Jyldyz, a social worker at the NGO, reflected mournfully on the course of unfortunate events. Only a few weeks earlier, she had seen Dina at the hospital. She was sitting alone in the lobby and looked like she had been waiting there for a long time. Heartened by the sight of a familiar face, Dina beseeched Jyldyz to convince the hospital to admit her. The doctors and medical staff, however, were unmoved and refused to provide even palliative care. ‘Why are you trying to help her’? they asked Jyldyz. The hospital had pointed this question at the director of the non-​profit and various other staff members over the months as Dina’s health deteriorated. They didn’t understand why they cared about her, a prostitute5 and a social outcast, someone who was marginalised by the multiply intersecting stigmas of her subject position. Jyldyz mused, ‘Maybe if it had been her mother there crying for her, begging the doctors and the authorities … they would have been moved by a mother’s tears. But instead she only had us, workers from some NGO’. That was their last encounter. Jyldyz and I sat with the heaviness of Dina’s death. ‘I can still see her face, begging me for help’, she said, conjuring the image of Dina’s tired, pleading face, desperate for acceptance at a hospital that repeatedly refused her. This chapter explores the valences of life and death for those on the margins of contemporary Kyrgyzstan’s social order. I begin with a local non-​profit’s futile efforts to mediate proper care and treatment for Dina because it raises important questions about the terms of inclusion and exclusion in post-​Soviet Central Asia. Witnessing those around Dina grapple with her care and death, I wondered about the significance they attributed to her absent mother. How and why was she invoked by institutional staff and why was her absence problematic? More broadly, what forms of kinship facilitate access to care, welfare and belonging for those who are not legible as properly social persons, that is, someone who is seen as having full social, political, legal and moral status? And what recourse might be available for marginalised and socially ‘disembedded’ populations –​those who are homeless, undocumented, or without proper kin? I consider both attachments to normative and emergent forms of kinship as a nexus of capitalist transformation in post-​Soviet Central Asia, a region that is typically glossed as a site of strong patriarchal families, clan identity and rigid ethnic categories (Ismailbekova, 2018; Collins, 2003, 2006; Roche, 2017; Werner, 1998, 2009). Kinship is often tied to networks of access, of socio-​economic opportunity, survivalist strategies and ethnic identity. However, this chapter reveals a more complicated picture of care in post-​socialist Kyrgyzstan, one in which ambivalence and care are intertwined. Alongside demands placed on ‘traditional’ family forms and kin-​relations with the retreat of the socialist state, I argue that care has also been displaced and delegated to emergent social formations, including quasi-​ kin configurations and informal institutions, complicating more straightforward narratives of the post-​Soviet erosion of welfare that circulate through public discourse. Through my encounters, conversations and observations among marginalised groups in southern Kyrgyzstan, I saw the ways that outcasts like Dina were repeatedly locked out of official channels

223

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​

Figure 15.1  A client at the Community, a centre in Osh run by a local non-​profit that provides shelter and services to vulnerable groups of women.

of welfare and stripped of formal entitlements. At the same time, I witnessed unconventional relational strategies being deployed to facilitate social and bureaucratic incorporation.

FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE During fieldwork in Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan’s main urban centre, I encountered the Uzbek saying: ‘kelishimiz ham, ketishimiz ham pul ekan’ –​‘both our coming into the world and our going from it require money.’ The remark was sometimes delivered cynically, sometimes indignantly, and sometimes with a resigned sigh. It was deployed as a statement on the newfound conditions of post-​socialist life. My interlocutors used the expression to comment on contexts where they observed the apparent commodification of relations at important junctures of life and death. When asked to elaborate, many told a now-​familiar story: that until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, citizens of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic had lived with the guarantee that they would be taken care of ‘from the cradle to the grave’. They gave birth in state-​run hospitals, received childcare and a free education, entered adulthood with the promise of full employment and retirement pensions, and received free medical care when they were ill, because the state determined the forms of participation that merited recognition, the categories of people who would receive benefits and the 224

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

terms by which they would be served. The unexpected end of the Soviet Union spelled the demise of not only an economic programme, but of an integrated welfare system alongside its attendant structure of social relations. Many born during the Soviet era hedge their critiques of the new Kyrgyz national state –​once touted in the West as the only Central Asian democracy, produced in part through rapid market liberalisation as the first former Soviet republic to join the World Trade Organization –​behind complaints about underfunded hospitals that function through bribery, and about the costly private clinics that have mushroomed in recent years. In their wistful remembrance of bygone life, burial and graves were paid for by the state. But now, in contrast, ‘qabristonlarga ham pul kerak’, even burial required money. Of course, this nostalgic view of the Soviet welfare state is an over-​generalised one. Historians and scholars of the Soviet Union have written that contrary to official narratives of seamless socialist bureaucracy, the Soviet system relied on, created and reinforced relational networks of access. Daily life, whether it was securing a coveted apartment, desirable job, or ordinary consumer goods within a shortage economy, was lubricated by blat, personalistic connections and cash (Ledeneva, 1996; Lemon, 1998; Kotkin, 1995; Mandel and Humphrey, 2002; Humphrey, 1998). The official economy fed into and sustained a parallel ‘shadow economy’, which was to become the scaffolds of the post-​Soviet market-​driven economy. Therefore, I do not take my interlocutors’ claims about the positive security of the socialist era as historical fact. Rather, I interpret them as performative scripts that reveal more about orientations towards the present than the past (Ries, 1997). These narratives lament the loss of a way of life. They display an embodied sense of unease and dissatisfaction with current social and political systems, and serve to implicitly, if not overtly, critique the inequalities of contemporary power structures. Indeed, state-​citizen relations are undergoing major transformations in the post-​ socialist era, despite continuities in the ways that people have always had to make do to navigate the shortcomings of official distribution channels. Experiences of institutional detachment or even neglect sharply contrast with many people’s sense of normalcy and horizon of expectations during the later decades of the Soviet period. In some ways, these changes are not unique. Anthropologists have been writing about experiences of growing precarity due to neoliberal reforms and processes of marketisation, decentralisation and deindustrialisation in various contexts around the world, from Chile to Italy to the ‘post-​Fordist’ United States (Han, 2012; Muehlebach, 2012; Fennell, 2015; Ong, 2006; Ferguson, 2015; Allison, 2013, 2016). These narratives describe a post-​welfare era in which state guarantees have been whittled away, overtaken by market-​based access to care and leading to increased burdens on families and informal institutions to fill in ever-​widening gaps. In many cases, the nuclear family has been pushed to the fore as a site of livelihood generation, mutuality and care. Those sectors of the population who are less resourced and more marginalised, without either money or relations, are therefore at greater risk of exclusion and abandonment. In post-​Soviet Central Asia, kinship relations and its extensions, such as ethnic affinity and relational networks, have been crucial to livelihood strategies after the end of the socialist regime. The experience of welfare and the work of ‘care’ have in many ways devolved to ‘traditional’ or ‘biological’ social structures, accessed through intimate ties and personal networks (Ismailbekova, 2014). Those writing 225

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​

about processes of economic liberalisation in the country describe ‘how familial and social networks can provide vital resources in the absence of a strong welfare state and well-​developed markets, particularly for poor households as they strive to meet basic needs’ (Sanghera et al., 2011, p. 169). Some see this as a ‘re-​emergence’ of pre-​Soviet attachments after the reign of a socialist system that undermined ‘traditional’ ties and identities in favour of more communalistic affiliations. Others point to the ways in which kinship and other forms of partitioned identity –​such as clan networks and place-​based affinities –​remained important, or were even reinforced, during the Soviet era (Verdery, 1991). It could be argued that kinship has never not been important in understandings and analysis of Central Asia, as much as in the lived experiences of everyday life in the region (Werner, 1998; Roche, 2017). Communal ties have long been considered ‘anchors in times of transition’, and ‘mutual accountability and support remain hallmarks of community identity and solidarity in Central Asia. Extended families, clans, villages, and tribes share risks resources, and rewards. Members support each other in order to uphold the community’s power, status, and honor’ (Sahadeo and Zanca, 2007, pp. 33–​34). It is perhaps this apparent ubiquity of relational support –​an informal social safety net –​that in some ways disguises or masks conditions of dispossession and homelessness in southern Kyrgzystan. The presence of those like Dina in the social fabric of Osh is often not obvious, even to locals and long-​time residents. Surprise at the phenomenon of homelessness was reflected in a question that I encountered on numerous occasions in reference to the United States: ‘Is it true that there are many homeless in America, sleeping in the streets?’ My interlocutors expressed shock or shook their heads with pity when I confirmed that homelessness was not a rare sight in US cities. They wanted to know how this could happen. How could people end up in the streets in one of the world’s most prosperous nations? The implication was that although Kyrgyzstan was a poorer nation by all accounts, homelessness was not perceived as a significant problem. Poverty is far from foreign in Kyrgyzstan, where remittances from temporary labor migrants abroad equate to over a third of the country’s GDP (World Bank, 2018). Statistics from the Asian Development Bank in 2017 claim that a quarter of the population lives below the national poverty line (25.6 per cent). But the particular issue of homelessness is not a visible problem in Osh, where displaced or dispossessed individuals are typically taken into the households of kin and extended relations. For locals, homelessness often connotes exceptionally destabilising conditions and is sometimes accompanied by implicit moral judgements as to why someone has been ‘rejected’ by kin. Through my research at non-​profits, rehabilitation centres, methadone clinics, brothels and drop-​in centres in Osh, I met a cross-​section of dispossessed communities living on the edge of homelessness and navigating interlinked systems of social and institutional exclusion. These individuals are socially disembedded, meaning that they lack relational networks of support. Traditional kinship structures offer them little assistance. The experiences of these marginalised individuals serve as a reminder not to romanticise the resilience of kinship in the face of precarity. The devolution of care from institutional structures to the family form often reifies particular forms of kinship, family and conjugal relations, leading to the moralisation of these relational 226

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

configurations and to moral prescriptions about proper affective ties and intimate duties (Borovoy, 2005; Garcia, 2010; Muehlebach, 2012; Knight, 2015). This naturalisation, valorisation and moralisation of familial support is often accompanied by gendered, hierarchical, or otherwise unequal expectations. It is especially dangerous in those cases where the family is loaded as the primary bearer of care even as it is also a site of entrenched abuse, addiction, neglect and oppression. This was often the case for those I met soliciting care and services from alternative sources, like the Community where Dina sought refuge. The family form is not a neutral entity that merely fills a void or vacuum left in the wake of state transformations. It is always a historically and institutionally sedimented set of relations. The labour of care and social reproduction located within the site of the family is always already specifically gendered (Federici, 2012; Yanagisako and Collier, 1987; Sacks, 1974; Collins, 2000).

THE ABSENT MOTHER Two months before Dina’s passing, I walked into the office and Lyuba, the director of the community non-​profit said to me, ‘Dina is dead.’ When I responded with shock, she clarified the situation with both exasperation and defeat: ‘sShe isn’t dead yet, but she will be soon.’ Lyuba was upset that despite the serious situation, Dina’s mother was doing nothing for her daughter. NGO staff had been trying to chase her down for weeks. When they found her, she refused to help, saying that her own living conditions were unstable. She insisted that Dina should stay at the Community. ‘But she can’t live at the Community forever’, Lyuba exclaimed, ‘We don’t know how to care for her in her condition. We’re not a hospital’! When Lyuba went to the hospital to plead with medical staff, the head doctor accused her of wanting Dina to die at the hospital, rather than on their watch. Of course! Lyuba told him, you are a hospital after all! After a heated argument, the doctor agreed to admit her into hospice care for another week. The organisation’s accountant joined our conversation. She’d gone to visit Dina just the day before to bring her homemade soup. Her mother was there too, it turned out, but she was drunk and had come empty-​handed. ‘She didn’t even bring a bottle of water for her daughter’, the accountant said, shaking her head. The two women continued to rebuke Dina’s mother for her selfishness and irresponsibility, blaming her for this situation. They interpreted her inability to support or care for her daughter as neglect. Later, they named it as a major reason for Dina’s death. Those who attended to Dina during her illness witnessed that life –​in this case, her health and well-​being –​and death not only revolved around money, or her lack of it, but also her lack of relational ties, properly constituted by kin. Dina’s situation compelled some around her to ask, who should have been responsible for the labor of caring? Who was responsible for her death? And repeatedly, they returned to the figure of the absent mother. The alkashka.6 The NGO workers struggled in frustration against the provincial hospital’s repeated refusals. They lamented the limits of their own funds and capabilities. But like Jyldyz, who was upset that the hospital refused to do more, they ultimately invoked the failure of Dina’s mother. Grappling with 227

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​

this tragic loss, they pinned Dina’s deterioration and death on her mother’s failure to care for her and to speak or plead on her behalf. Perhaps a mother’s tears could have moved the hardened hearts of jaded and underpaid medical doctors. The invocation of Dina’s mother exemplifies a particularly gendered burden of responsibility. Feminist Marxists have advocated for forms of struggle that could break the structure of domestic work, arguing that women’s incorporation into waged labour was not a path to liberation. They wrote that the struggle for women was a refusal of work and rejection of home altogether –​‘for we have worked enough’ (Federici, 2012). Soviet revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai, head of the Communist Party’s Women’s Division until 1922, passionately agreed that the bourgeois family form was a site of women’s oppression and should disappear under communism. But despite overt goals for women’s emancipation in the early Soviet period, gender policies from the mid-​1930s onward effectively reinforced women’s reproductive labour, in addition to encouraging their added participation in the productive work force. Historians grappling with the contradictions of these gender programmes have noted that in the ideal model of the Soviet family, the role of the family patriarch was not erased, but rather taken over by the state (Ashwin, 2000; Attwood, 1990). This direct insertion of the state into the domain of the family meant that the liberation of women from ‘bourgeois’ family structures was marked by their increased dependence on state institutions and public services. Reproduction and domestic work were nevertheless reinscribed as women’s responsibility, only now they were to be performed publicly, in service of the socialist project (Temkina and Rotkirch, 1997). In other words, the fathers’ role was symbolically and materially appropriated by the state in the officially reconstituted Soviet family, while mothers were effectively positioned as mediators between that state and her children. It is significant that it was Dina’s mother who was repeatedly summoned. She was summoned by NGO staff who searched for her in public bathhouses where she sometimes worked as a janitor, by health professionals who questioned her absence, and by Jyldyz in her musing that only a mother’s tears would have been able to move unrelenting medical staff to attention. According to those who sought to help her, only a mother could have made an outcast like Dina’s position legible, her need for care legitimately urgent. But it was not her mother –​herself a flawed alcoholic and a bomzh7 –​who was invoked in these situations. I interpreted the summoning to be an invocation of the ideal Soviet Mother, one decorated with Stakhanovite medals for prolific child-​bearing in Soviet times, an award still echoed in Kyrgyzstan’s yearly ‘Mother Heroine’ or Baatyr Ene ceremony where over 1,600 mothers with seven or more children are honored each May with a medal by presidential decree. She is the mother cast into stone in a monument called ‘Mothers’ Tears’, erected in Osh in 2011, featuring two weeping women of Uzbek and Kyrgyz ethnicity embracing each other to compel a community split by the ethnic conflict to unite, to save their sons of present and future.8 These mothers had worked tirelessly in their youth at factories, processing silk and cotton, or on collective farms, tending crops and cows. Soviet propaganda extolled this particular model of woman, while others who didn’t comply –​the unenlightened, the deviant, the wanton –​were deemed in need of reeducation. And eventually they all but ‘disappeared’ from official records and rhetoric with claims that the socialist project had successfully eradicated such

228

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

immoralities. These model mothers were not alcoholics, and their daughters were not prostitutes. Dina’s death due to medical and social exclusion unfortunately confirms that it is those on the margins who neither have the means nor relations who are ‘let to die’, in Foucault’s formulation of governmentality (2007). She was an outcast in her own society, in a country that no longer provided for the welfare of its citizens, in a region dependent on international donor funding and global health projects that are increasingly trickling away as the post-​Soviet ‘transition’ or ‘transformation’ period stretches toward three decades. However, the question still remains: how do marginalised groups get by in a place like southern Kyrgyzstan, so seemingly bound by structures of embeddedness and relationality? What recourse might be available for those who are marginalised and without proper kin? Are there other relational arrangements and modes of care that are emerging in this context? What is perhaps surprising in Dina’s situation is that despite rigidly structured forms of social and bureaucratic neglect for those on the moral margins, there are also emergent formations of care that draw on familiar scripts, but also sometimes circumvent them. There are surprising and complex entanglements of ambivalence, judgement and care in a landscape of experimentation, a social landscape that is perhaps more flexible than is often assumed at first glance. With the loosening of ideologies in the post-​socialist era, we see examples of people and even institutions inserting elements of compassionate action into the organisation and distribution of welfare (Brković, 2017). They navigate the ambiguity of widespread legal and economic dispossession by repurposing old systems, mixing them with new forms, and experimenting with other possible ways of being and relating. The staff at the non-​profit Community and their investment in Dina’s medical treatment is one such example of this, and likewise the missionary church that eventually took her into the hospice and buried her. NGO workers at the Community repeatedly struggled to have Dina admitted to the hospital. They spent a large portion of the organisation’s medical budget on her medication and dialysis despite limited funds, which they receive from Western donors and global health projects that prescribe certain indicators and guidelines. Among these guidelines is the demand to provide services and care for target numbers of ‘clients’. Fulfilling these high quotas for donor indicators was a recurring struggle at the organisation. Rather than maximising their outreach to longer rosters of anonymous individuals, the NGO usually ended up working long-​term with smaller groups of regular clients, sometimes resorting to misreporting regular clients as new ones to comply with donor indicators. I witnessed numerous situations of personal and organisational commitment to, as well as emotional entanglement with, particular clients that led not only to the flouting of international development’s impersonal guidelines, but also to conflict and disagreement between NGO staff. Though non-​profit workers ultimately deferred blame for Dina’s death to her mother’s inability or refusal to plead on her behalf, their moral judgements around ‘proper’ motherhood and its gendered responsibilities coexisted with a compassionate commitment to her care, to the extent possible. This simultaneity of condemnation and care paints a more complicated picture about ‘life and death in the margins’ of post-​socialist Kyrgyzstan than narratives about the neoliberal marketisation of

229

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​

welfare suggest. In this landscape of social experimentation, even the family form may not be as fixed as it initially appears.

ALKASH During my time in southern Kyrgyzstan, I became close with an Uzbek family headed by Alisher, a respected doctor and Soviet-​trained narcologist,9 and his wife Rayhon, a psychologist. They lived in a house in an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Osh, with two adult sons, a daughter, a daughter-​in-​law, and three grandchildren. For the most part, their home exemplified a typical Uzbek dwelling with multi-​generational rooms encircling a courtyard. New additions were added when needed. The house grew along with its family, breathing and pulsing to the rhythmic order of birth and marriage and death.10 During my first visit to Alisher and Rayhon’s home, I noticed something atypical about the family. I was introduced to their older son, Ivan, who had a grooved and lined face that belied his age. He was a frequent figure in the garden, glumly chain-​smoking, dressed in paint-​splattered pink pinstripe pajamas. In warm summer months, he slept on a so’ri, a raised wooden platform, in a corner of the courtyard. He ate his meals there alone and watched TV late into the night. He was sullen and didn’t speak much, but had a gruff, sarcastic sense of humour. Ivan and his brother Timur were in charge of labour-​intensive tasks around the property. They worked alongside each other, stacking bricks, pouring concrete, rebuilding the chicken coop, tilling the garden and carrying out other manual chores in a perpetual, seemingly never-​ending quest for home improvement. Ivan worked outside the home at times, cleaning and guarding Alisher’s office, a non-​ profit that provided services for intravenous drug users. One summer, Timur purchased the sawed-​off tail end of a defunct shipping container and decided to convert it into a stationary supplies store. Every day, the two of them trudged across the Ak-​Buura River to the other side of town, where they worked to transform the container into a shop that never saw a grand opening. It remained empty years later, white-​washed walls quickly gathering dust, colorful banners fading in the sun. I learned that Ivan had been struggling with alcohol dependency since his late teens. Alisher and Rayhon endeavoured to control Ivan’s alcoholism, to protect him from his habit. The family did their best to restrict his access to cash and to restrain his movements. But every few months, Ivan would relapse. He would run away and binge drink until he passed out in the street. Timur would drive out in search of him, and then the family would send him to a nearby NGO-​run treatment centre until he managed to recover from the latest bout. What was atypical about this household was that Ivan was not a biological member of the family. No stranger encountering Timur and Ivan working side-​by-​side would ever mistake them as brothers, though that’s how they referred to each other. In contrast to his Uzbek family, Ivan was a Russian man who was in his mid-​40s when I met him, though he looked older. When Kyrgyzstan was still the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, Alisher had been head doctor at the municipal hospital’s narcology unit. Ivan had arrived as a patient struggling with alcoholism, barely 20 years old. He seemed alone in the world. 230

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

An orphan at a young age, Ivan found his world crumbling beneath him just as he reached adulthood. He hadn’t thought much about his future, but he expected that he would work in one of the factories located around Osh, a prominent source of employment in southern Kyrgyzstan. Almost immediately upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these factories crumbled, along with programmes that supported orphaned youth like him. The possibility of employment vanished into thin air. Without a job and without family, Ivan was in limbo. He couldn’t even manage to get a passport or residency permit from this country of his birth. He turned to vodka and was eventually drawn into a treatment programme run by Alisher. After a few years, Alisher and his family decided to move Ivan from the treatment centre into their own modest house. In their own telling, he became like a second son to them. Timur was only a child when Ivan became a regular figure in the household, and grew up in his presence. ‘He seemed so helpless’, Alisher explained to me when I asked what prompted him to move Ivan from a clinical space into his home. ‘He really had no one. We found that he had a brother who migrated to Russia, but his brother refused to accept him –​ he rejected him on live TV’! He was referring to a popular Russian reality TV show in the 1990s and 2000s that attempted to dramatically reunite family members separated as a result of various historical contingencies, from the Second World War to the break-​up of the Soviet Union. Ivan’s story was picked up by the show, but when they tracked down his brother and contacted him, he refused to acknowledge his younger sibling. When I met him, Ivan had been living with Alisher’s family for nearly two decades. Coming back year after year, I would almost always find him there, inevitably smoking a cigarette in his rough corner of the yard. On one visit on an August afternoon in 2015, Alisher came home from work with a joyous announcement. After many long months running back and forth between government offices, his efforts to track down Ivan’s records in order to secure him a new passport had finally proven fruitful. He showed me the crisp blue document. Alisher said with relief that now, Ivan would finally be recognised as a citizen of Kyrgyzstan. If he was ever again arrested or found in the street by the police, he would be protected with legal documentation. ‘But, we can’t give Ivan his passport’, he explained to me. ‘He might trade it for a bottle of vodka or lose it during his next relapse. I’ll hold on to it for safe-​keeping.’ Ivan puffed on his cigarette, making no move to protest. Alisher’s efforts to secure Ivan’s passport was no easy feat. It was also a gesture loaded with social and symbolic importance. Given the particular legacies of the Soviet system, a passport is not merely personal identification or a piece of documentation. Rather, it confers full personhood through legal, political and social recognition. Caroline Humphrey has written about a Russian friend who tells her that, ‘A human being consists of three things: a body, a soul, and a passport’ (2002: 26). She lists a trail of paperwork that is necessary for social integration, from propiska (the internal passport), to the work booklet or trudovaia knizhka, which contained an individual’s work record. In the Soviet era, these documents were interlinked, where ‘A loss of one official status threatens the unraveling of the whole edifice, that is, descent into the wilderness of having no entitlements at all’ (2002: 26–​27). Because one’s registration documents conferred entitlements to pensions, work permits, medical 231

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​

care and other social benefits, the loss of this essential form of registration meant the loss of political and social belonging. The experience of dispossession therefore, is keenly felt as an intertwining of bureaucratic exclusion and social marginalisation. Across the post-​Soviet sphere, in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere in Central Asia, dispossession and homelessness remain marked by this lack of social and bureaucratic status. Documentation continues to be an important requirement of full social personhood. But whereas the socialist work collective was once a primary supplier of necessary documentation, the decline of formal employment and wage labour has elevated the family and other kin-​based relational units as the central means for securing entitlements and accessing care. Alisher’s tireless efforts over months and even years to negotiate difficult bureaucratic processes in order to obtain Ivan’s passport is thus a testament of his commitments to his informally adopted son. At the same time, I wondered about Alisher’s comment that he would hold onto the passport for safe keeping. I wondered how Ivan felt about this constraint, especially when experienced alongside the prescribed limitations on his access to money and freedom of movement. I weighed these questions during one particularly serious relapse that Ivan experienced in 2017. The family had helped him secure a paying job with the city gas department, digging pipes along one of the city’s thoroughfares. One day, he didn’t come home. They guessed what must have happened. Timur went out in search of him and when he found him drunk in the streets, Ivan angrily declined assistance and refused to be taken to the treatment centre. Moreover, he was bad-​mouthing Alisher to his acquaintances, complaining to whoever would listen that the family was too controlling. Hurt and dispirited, Rayhon and Alisher swore that this was the last straw. They wouldn’t be letting Ivan back into the house. Some months later, I ran into Ivan at a rehabilitation centre, a nondescript house on a hill in the verdant outskirts of the city. He popped out of a room wearing his usual weary and disgruntled expression, but seemed pleasantly surprised to see me. He asked me how Alisher and his family were doing and told me to pass along his greetings. The man who headed the rehabilitation centre noted that Ivan was improving and would be ready to go home soon. When I mentioned our meeting to Rayhon, she sighed and looked dejected: ‘For twenty years, it’s always the same cycle. Every few months, he relapses. I’m tired.’ As spring became summer and summer turned into autumn, Ivan remained at the rehabilitation centre even though he begged the family to let him come back. He offered to stay at the office and help with janitorial and nightly guard duties. But while Alisher had forgiven him, Rayhon was slow to relent. In order to maintain his place in the family, Ivan had to carry out the particular duties of son and to comply with the requirements of filial deference in a patriarchal family. He laboured to negotiate familial loss, state abandonment and social marginalisation through the fraught and fragile process of kin-​making. The relations of kinship he took part in were not formalised through contract or law, but rather based in practice, in bodily orientations and actions. Ivan laboured to properly fulfil the normative role that would legitimate him as an acceptable and deserving dependent. At the same time, he struggled with the extent and demands of this labour, which is revealed in the rift between his sober compliance and his drunk disobedience. 232

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

In a way, the limitations on Ivan’s independence are indicative of his belonging to a family, not his exclusion from kinship ties. His lack of freedom to come and go as he pleased and his household labour were mirrored in the restraints and demands that Alisher and Rayhon placed on their kelin or daughter-​in-​law, as well as on their biological children, though to a lesser extent. Families everywhere, like those in Central Asia, are structured by hierarchical and ambiguous relations, unequal and uncompensated labour demands and constraints on autonomy. Care can quickly slip into control under the guise of protection. Ivan’s vulnerability, compounded by his alcohol dependence, makes the oppressive, controlling and unequal practices that exist within all familial arrangements starkly visible. However, I am less interested in care’s entanglements with control, violence and exploitation, than in uneasy dependencies that offer shelter, belonging and care to those who are otherwise excluded from formal recognition and services. As with the contradictions in Dina’s case at the Community, Ivan’s place in his adoptive household simultaneously demonstrates the reification of the patriarchal family, even as it reveals the family form itself to be flexible and open to new possibilities. Contrary to the supposed rigidity of ‘traditional’ structures, family here shows the ability to reach across difference, to incorporate those who are not biological kin, and even those who are ethnic Others. It may draw on known scripts of filial piety, but it also exceeds them. Ivan’s chosen family –​rather, the one that chose him –​is at times an uneasy and asymmetrical arrangement, but it illuminates the entanglements of ambivalence and care in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. Unlike a rehabilitation clinic or Soviet narcology unit, however, where he might cycle through endless relapses and still be admitted, Ivan can only disappoint Alisher and his family so many times before he hurts them beyond repair. This, perhaps, is part of the vulnerable exchange of kinship.

AMBIVALENCE AND CARE Čarna Brković (2017, p. 6) has written about the ambiguities of welfare provision in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where welfare or social protection was understood ‘as both a citizenship right and a gift of compassionate persons within a local community’. Her interlocutors had to navigate –​and in some cases, manipulate –​ambiguous determinations of ‘who should be responsible for providing what, to whom, and on what grounds’ (p. 15). Similarly in Kyrgyzstan, ambiguity aptly describes a situational uncertainty over the provision of care in which clientelism often mediates access. However, in my analysis I use the term ‘ambivalence’ to highlight an affective orientation, experience, or understanding of the world that makes space for ambiguity, paradox and even contradiction. In her work on Serbia, Deana Jovanović (2016, pp. 2–​3) states that ambivalence is a disposition of being ‘both/​and’, of feeling ‘in between’. She engages with the sociologist Neil Smelser’s idea that ‘dependent situations breed ambivalence’ because dependence, whether material or emotional, ‘entails a certain entrapment’ (Smelser, 1998, p. 8). Jovanović argues that ambivalence is ‘an effect and a coping mechanism in a social environment where people [are] dependent on what they wanted to eliminate and escape’ (p.4). While the ethnography I foreground in this chapter certainly demonstrates the ambivalent entanglements of dependence and care, I do 233

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​

not see ambivalence itself as a mode of coping, nor dependence as entrapment that my interlocutors were merely trying to escape. Instead, relations of dependence –​as uneasy as they sometimes were –​were carefully cultivated and maintained, such that they might even be regarded as active endeavours (Ferguson, 2013). Ivan’s story in particular depicts how marginalised groups strategically employed the ambivalence of kinship-​based formations to claim the right to be cared for. In the face of institutional failures to grapple with the provision of welfare after the collapse of a long-​standing socialist system, new formations of care have become visible, even as certain attachments and expectations persist. My intention in this chapter has been to show how marginalised individuals like Dina and Ivan fail to be made eligible for care on certain levels, while at the same time finding emergent or unexpected solidarities that help them to regain recognition and belonging, however fragile and tenuous that might be. There were many others like them that I encountered during my fieldwork in southern Kyrgyzstan: a social worker who joked that she had come to resemble a mamasha, or pimp, in order to protect sex workers under her watch from abuses by both police and clients; female addicts who partnered up with ‘husbands’, trading their domestic and intimate labours for shelter; an old spinster who eked out a living through fortune-​telling, who so impressed a well-​to-​do client that she was invited to move into one of her benefactress’s many homes. Thus, it might be said that care in contemporary Kyrgyzstan is not defined by a singular ‘post-​socialist’ logic, though in popular narratives such a logic might be invoked as a system that appears almost wholly market-​driven and capitalistic. Rather, forms of care –​especially for marginalised populations –​exist in a field of experimentation, multiplicity, ambivalence, and emergent possibility. This chapter reveals some of these ambiguous, and at times uneasy, dependencies that offer shelter, belonging and care to those who are otherwise excluded from formal recognition and services.

NOTES 1 All names are pseudonyms to ensure anonymity and confidentiality. 2 The acronym-​ turned-​ moniker LUIN (litsa, upotrebliaiushchie inektsionnye narkotiki or ‘people who use injectable narcotics’) is used in biomedical lingo to refer to this population. However, drug users in Osh who were serviced by the community centre referred to themselves as ‘addicts’ (narkomany or narkomanki, with the feminine inflection, because this space was one reserved for female clients). 3 From late 2016 to early 2017, I spent a few months working as a stand-​in attendant at a community centre for female addicts in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, until the local NGO where I was conducting participant-​observation could hire a more permanent social worker for the role. 4 Locals described the church as a ‘cult’ or a ‘sect’. It wasn’t the notable Russian Orthodox Church near city centre but more likely a missionary-​run project. 5 I use the terms ‘prostitute’, prostitutka (Russian) and jalap (Kyrgyz and Uzbek) when mimicking or reflecting terminology used by an interlocutor; I use the term ‘sex worker’ when the text is reflecting my own explanatory or descriptive language. 6 Russian for alcoholic with feminine inflection. The term was frequently and colloquially used by Community staff and clients alike. 7 The derogatory category of bomzh began as a bureaucratic acronym of the Soviet system, Bez Opredelennogo Mesta Zhitel’stva, which means ‘without a specific place of residence’ (Höjdestrand, 2009). The designation of bomzh during the Soviet era was merely an 234

— ​​​​ C a r e a n d a m b i v a l e n c e i n s o u t h e r n K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

administrative one. Anyone who lacked registration at a permanent address, or propiska, was a bomzh. However, in the late Soviet and especially the post-​Soviet periods, the term came to encompass multilayered aspects of social exclusion similar to the English term ‘bum’. 8 The ‘June Events’ (Iiun’skie Sobytiia), as the ethnic conflict is colloquially called, devastated the southern cities of Osh and Jalal-​Abad in June 2010, on the heels of the Kyrgyz Revolution in April 2010 that deposed then-​president Kurmanbek Bakiyev. It resulted in the destruction of businesses, homes and neighbourhoods, particularly in ethnic Uzbek areas, and to the death of hundreds if not thousands, as well as hundreds of thousands displaced (ICG, 2012). 9 Narcology was Soviet addiction medicine. See: Raikhel (2016). 10 See Morgan Liu’s chapter in this volume.

REFERENCES Allison, A. (2013) Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Allison, A. (2016) ‘Precarity’, Cultural Anthropology website. Available at: https://​jour​nal.cula​ nth.org/​index.php/​ca/​precar​ity-​com​ment​ary-​by-​anne-​alli​son (Accessed: 9 December 2020). Ashwin, S. (2000) Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Russia. London: Routledge. Attwood, L. (1990) The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex Role Socialization in the USSR. London: Macmillan. Borovoy, A. (2005) The Too-​ Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brković, Č. (2017) Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina. New York: Berghahn Books. Collins, K. (2003) ‘The Political Role of Clans in Central Asia’, Comparative Politics, 35(2), pp. 171–​190. Collins, K. (2006) Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, P.H. (2000) ‘Work, Family, and Black Women’s Oppression’, in Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Federici, S. (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Fennell, C. (2015) Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-​ Welfare Chicago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferguson, J. (2013) ‘Declarations of Dependence’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, pp. 223–​242. Ferguson, J. (2015) Give a Man a Fish: Reflections of the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–​ 1978. New York: Picador. Garcia, A. (2010) The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press. Han, C. (2012) Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press. Höjdestrand, T. (2009) Needed by Nobody: Homelessness and Humanness in Post-​Socialist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Humphrey, C. (1998) Marx Went Away, but Karl Stayed Behind. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Humphrey, C. (2002) The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 235

—​​​​ G r a c e H . Z h o u —​​​ International Crisis Group (2012) ‘Kyrgyzstan: Widening Ethnic Divisions in the South’, Asia Report No. 222. Available at: www.cris​isgr​oup.org/​eur​ope-​cent​ral-​asia/​cent​ral-​asia/​kyr​gyzs​ tan/​kyr​gyzs​tan-​widen​ing-​eth​nic-​divisi​ons-​south Ismailbekova, A. (2014) ‘Securing Future Lives of Children Through Ritualized Parenthood in the Village of Bulak, Kyrgyzstan’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 32(2), pp. 17–​32. Ismailbekova, A. (2018) ‘Mapping Lineage Leadership in Kyrgyzstan: Lineage Associations and Informal Governance’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 143(2), pp. 195–​219. Jovanović, D. (2016) ‘Ambivalence and the Study of Contradictions”, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(3), pp. 1–​6. Knight, K.R. (2015) addicted.pregnant.poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kotkin, S. (1995) Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ledeneva, A.V. (1996) ‘Between Gfit and Commodity: The Phenomenon of “Blat”’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 19(3), pp. 43–​66. Lemon, A. (1998) ‘ “Your Eyes Are Green like Dollars”: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia’, Cultural Anthropology, 13(1), pp. 2–​55. Mandel, R. and Humphrey, C. (2002) Markets and Moralities. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Muehlebach, A. (2012) The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ong, A. (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Raikhel, E. (2016) Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-​Soviet Clinic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ries, N. (1997) Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roche, S. (2017) The Family in Central Asia: New Perspectives. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Sacks, K. (1974) ‘Engels Revisited: Women, the Organisation of Production, and Private Property’, in Lamphere, L. and Rosaldo, M. (eds.) Women, Culture, and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 207–​222. Sahadeo, J. and Zanca, R. (2007) Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sanghera, B., Ablezova, M. and Botoeva, A. (2011) ‘Everyday Morality in Families and a Critique of Social Capital: An Investigation into Moral Judgements, Responsibilities, and Sentiments in Kyrgyzstani Households’, Theory and Society, 40, pp. 167–​190. Smelser, N. (1998) ‘The Rational and the Ambivalent in the Social Sciences’, American Sociological Review, 63(1), pp. 1–​16. Temkina, A. and Rotkirch, A. (1997) ‘Soviet Gender Contracts and their Shifts in Contemporary Russia’, in Temkina, A. (ed.) Russia in Transition. Helsinki: Kikimora Publishers, pp. 183–​207. Verdery, K. (1991) National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. Werner, C. (1998) ‘Household Networks and the Security of Mutual Indebtedness in Rural Kazakstan’, Central Asia Survey, 17(4), pp. 572–​612 Werner, C. (2009) ‘Bride Abduction in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Marking a Shift Towards Patriarchy Through Local Discourses of Shame and Tradition’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(2), pp. 314–​331. World Bank Group (2018) ‘Kyrgyz Republic: From Vulnerability to Prosperity’, Systematic Country Diagnostic. Available at: https://​openkn​owle​dge.worldb​ank.org/​han​dle/​ 10986/​30462 Yanagisako, S. and Collier, J. (1987) Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 236

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BARGAINING OVER CARE AND CONTROL Money transfers and ICT-​based communication in transnational families between Tajikistan and Russia Juliette Cleuziou INTRODUCTION Transnational families have been at the centre of much of the literature on international  migration since the late 1990s, epitomising globalised processes ‘from below’, as well as individual agency in the face of politicised border controls, economic constraints and administrative regulations. Transnational families can be understood as ‘families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, i.e. “familyhood”, even across national borders’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002, p.3). More recently, and influenced by developments in anthropological studies of kinship, one of the key features of transnational families has been identified as the provision and circulation of care among its members (Hoschild 2000; Baldassar and Merla 2014). Understanding transnational families as a process (that of ‘making a family’), the circulation of care framework echoes, to some extent, the approach developed by the ‘New Kinship’ studies in the late 1980s (Déchaux 2008). According to this approach, kinship should be explored not solely through a set of descriptive facts such as lineage or genealogy, descent and marriage. Instead, it should be understood as a relational process based on intersubjectivity that evolves over time, and as a constellation of relations that generates a ‘mutuality of being [through which] people are intrinsic to one another’s existence’ (Sahlins 2013, p.2). However, this shift towards a practice-​based understanding of family formation should not obscure the fact that kinship can also be fraught with tension, jealousy and violence, features which are closely linked both to ideologically marked (and often conservative) norms and to the relationships of dependence and reciprocity on which kinship is often based. As Janet Carsten notes, ‘Differentiation, hierarchy, exclusion, and abuse are (…) also part of what kinship does or enables’ (Carsten 2013, p.247; see also Cleuziou and McBrien 2020). Taking inspiration from Carsten’s words and, more generally, from a feminist approach to kinship (see, among others, MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Borneman 2001), I also address the circulation of transnational care among Tajikistani families in its coercive dimensions. DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-19

237

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

Transnational care is defined here as a variety of practices that family members operate across national borders, ranging from daily communication (emotional support) to the satisfaction of economic survival needs (economic support). Its negative dimensions are manifested in various ways, from progressive indifference to the display of control and the exercise of forms of psychological or symbolic violence. Following Baldassar and Merla (2014), I understand both the circulation of care and its effects to constitute ‘reciprocal, multidirectional and asymmetrical exchange[s]‌’ which may evolve over time (p.25). In this chapter, I focus on Tajikistani1 transnational families spread between Tajikistan and Russia, whom I have met since 2012 in both countries, in an attempt to avoid the trap of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck 2007). I explore some dimensions of the circulation of care (both in its integrative and exclusive dimensions) and the ways in which it contributes to shaping these families. I show that transnational care, as I observed among Tajikistani families, operates primarily through money transfers and an ‘ICT-​based co-​presence’ (Baldassar et al. 2016). I then highlight how, in this context, caring is rarely separated from some sort of control, or the search for it. Bargaining over care and manifestations of control hence emerge as a fundamental element in transnational relations. Finally, I provide an example of ‘collectivised’ transnational care between Russia and Tajikistan. In some parts of Russia, Tajikistani migrants, living with different administrative statuses (from Russian citizens to temporary workers), have organised collective forms of care distribution that may go beyond transnational family care, sometimes reinforcing the latter, and sometimes competing with it. Throughout this analysis, I focus on two dimensions of particular importance to Tajik norms and practices of kinship, namely gender and generation. In doing so, my aim is to provide a glimpse of the great diversity of ‘transnational families’ among the population originating from Tajikistan. While there is no singular transnational family, I nonetheless try to show some of the common challenges that the members of Tajikistani families face when maintaining a sense of ‘family-​hood’ across borders.

FAMILY BONDING, CARE AND INTIMACY IN TAJIKISTANI FAMILIES –​ KEEPING A SENSE OF ‘FAMILY-​H OOD’ DESPITE GEOGRAPHIC DISTANCE Migration from Tajikistan to Russia is a major source of income for Tajikistani families, and remittances sent from Russia have significantly supported the national GDP over the last decade (see World Bank Group 2019, p.8). As a ‘family affair’ (Reeves 2017), decisions concerning migration are embedded ‘within domestic economics and local structures of value (…) Men and women typically migrate for the family’ (2017, p.279). The vast majority (over 90 per cent) of Tajikistani outmigrants are men, aged from 18 to 65 years old, who find jobs mostly in construction, services (transportations, communication, trade and repair), and agriculture (Bakozoda et al. 2019, p.28).2 Their administrative and legal status may vary from informal temporary workers to permanent residents, or even citizens of the Russian Federation. The length of stay in Russia may range from a few months (seasonal) to several years without interruption, and even permanent resettlement. The mobility of women, aged parents and children has also increased since the 1990s,whether for work, family reunion, or 238

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​

education; but while the migration of women has been explored (Khusenova 2010; Kholmatova 2018; Kasymova 2020), the mobility of aged parents and children has remained comparatively underexamined. As a result, transnational families, despite their diversity in terms of origin, resources, or education, predominantly consist of mobile middle-​aged men, while the vast majority of elderly parents, wives and children remain at home, or occasionally circulate between the two countries. These gendered and generational divisions of work and mobility3 are thus important features of the transnational communication and circulation of care that I examine in the following sections.

ICTS, MONEY TRANSFERS AND TRANSNATIONAL TIES Mukhabbat, born in 1976, lives in a two-​room apartment in a five-​storey building on the outskirts of Dushanbe. She and her husband moved there with their three children a few years earlier, from her in-​laws’ house located in a nearby village. Her husband has been working in Russia for the past 13 years, coming back to Tajikistan for a month or two each year. Mukhabbat used to work in a fast-​food chain, but the very low wages she then earned together with the costs linked to working far from home (on transportation, food, etc.) and the constraints of carrying out basic care tasks (taking her children to school, helping them with their homework, preparing dinner, etc.) convinced her to leave her job. The benefit of paid work was too low. Since then, the family’s only source of income is her husband’s work on construction sites in Russia: he is part of a small brigade organised with his three brothers, with whom he also shares the cost of food and housing. They restore dachas and private flats. When there is work, wages are good and he is able to send her about US$500 per month, which she collects from the bank. When work is scarce, he sends smaller sums according to his family’s needs, usually after a discussion with Mukhabbat over the phone to decide which purchases to prioritise. One day, as I was visiting Mukhabbat in March 2012, she was discussing with her husband about buying a new fridge and the different models she had seen. Another time, she was discussing the possibility of their son taking the medical school exams after high school, and the advantages and disadvantages of paying the very high entrance fees (bribes). The low cost of international phone calls (see Figure 16.1) allowed these conversations to take place as if ‘across a kitchen table’ (Vertovec 2004, p.222). The literature on transnational families has highlighted how the development of ICTs and ‘polymedia environments’ (Madianou and Miller 2013) more generally allows migrants and their families to develop various modes of relating across space. Affordability and availability of the media have become less of a challenge, and the variety of these media has grown: in Tajikistan and Russia, for example, many people have several sim cards, which they can alternate according to their needs (in terms of costs, spheres of relation, useful apps, and so forth).4 Various authors have explored modes of belonging to transnational families through mundane daily communication, processes of long-​ distance kinning (be it parenting, mothering, fathering, and so forth) and the building of ‘long-​distance intimacy’, which depend on individual histories as well as on social and institutional contexts (Parreñas 2005; Wilding 2006; Carling et al. 2012; Kilkey and Merla 2014). For instance, 239

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

Figure 16.1  ‘Two countries in one sim-​card. Profitable calls in Russia and Tajikistan’ Megafon commercial for cheap transnational tariffs, Tajikistan, 2021.

Mukhabbat sometimes goes shopping while her children sit at home, talking on the phone with their father: the latter uses the video call option as a virtual baby-​sitting tool. Moreover, in the context of precarious living conditions, economic crises and Russia’s harsh migration policies5 that increase uncertainty about the possibility for people to return home (Thieme 2014; Abashin 2017; Brednikova 2017), the possibility of regular communication may prove beneficial for many Tajikistani couples and families. Physical absence may be compensated for by the multiplicity of forms of co-​presence (phone and video calls, photographs, chat, etc.)6 and the circulation of objects, money, gifts and information among family members, all of which can be a manifestation of care and affection (Ibañez Tirado 2019; see also the typology suggested by Baldassar 2008). Overall, ICT-​based communications allow for demonstrations of affection, which in the context of mobility cannot be achieved through daily domestic acts. The maintenance of emotional ties feeds bonds of solidarity and enacts a sense of belonging to the family, which Bryceson and Vuorela call ‘family-​hood’ (2002, p.3). In Mukhabbat’s household, the circulation of transnational care is distributed according to a rather traditional gender and generational divide: while she and her children provide emotional support to their husband and father, the latter provides, in addition, material support. However, disagreement on how one cares may also rise (see also Aitieva 2020). Once, Mukhabbat told me that she was upset because her husband had sent chocolates and candies from Russia to their children. ‘He should not spend that kind of money on chocolates!’ she said, ‘we could spend that money on something else.’ Financial stress generates tensions between the desire to show affection and the need to save money. In addition, Mukhabbat has made several allusions to the competition that may arise between family members (beyond her household): her husband’s parents, for instance –​whom she did not particularly 240

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​

like –​relied on the support of their four sons. The latter all work in Russia, and Mukhabbat knows ‘for sure’ that they send them money. When I asked her how much they would send, she replied: ‘I never ask how much my husband sends to his parents. I am sure he and his brothers do, but it is their business.’ However, she expresses doubts when he says he does not have enough money to pay for the children’s school uniforms: ‘I wonder if he still sends money to his parents … .’

SEEKING TRANSNATIONAL INTIMACY: A CHALLENGE FRAMED BY LOCAL NORMS AND VALUES Gulnora’s situation provides a striking contrast with the case of Mukhabbat above. She lives with her husband’s family in a village, southeast of Dushanbe, in a mountainous area. She and Dilshod, her husband, had been neighbours, and he had engaged in migration even before their marriage. She liked him and agreed to marry him, knowing that he would be working abroad ‘at the beginning’, but she thought that she would be able to join him in Russia sooner or later. When I met her for the first time in 2012, however, their older daughter had already turned seven, and Gulnora had still not gone to Russia. Although she gets along quite well with her in-​laws (their two families also have friendly relations), her own parents had moved away to Dushanbe, leaving her alone in the village. She thus depends on her in-​laws’ income and their goodwill when it comes to family matters or for any kind of purchase. Gulnora also mentioned several times that while her husband’s money was used to support the extended family, money from her brother-​in-​law (Dilshod’s older brother, who is also in Russia and whose wife lives with her) was used to build himself a separate house. While this sometimes seemed ‘reasonable’ to her, since the elder brother is supposed to leave the parental home earlier according to local norms, she also experienced this as unfair: why should her husband’s money not also be spent on building a house for their own children? The most striking differences between Mukhabbat and Gulnora’s situations lay, however, in their opportunities for accessing intimacy (see Figure 16.2). While regular calls allowed Mukhabbat and her husband to build some marital privacy at a distance, Gulnora did not have access to this kind of relation. Gulnora also has a cell

Figure 16.2  T-​Cell commercial for the smartphone application ‘Chi gap’ (‘what are you saying?’), showing a young man in Russia (identifiable from Moscow’s Red Square behind him) and his wife in Tajikistan (identifiable via Dushanbe’s Rudaki statue) talking on the phone for a cheap tariff. The gender division of mobility is often represented in phone companies or online banking commercials, Tajikistan, 2021. 241

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

phone but never really uses it; she never has credit on it and her husband never tops it up. Her husband calls several times a week, but on his father’s mobile phone. When the latter picks up the phone, saying ‘Allo Dilshod!’ everyone gathers around him, waiting for the phone to be passed from hand to hand. The circulation of the phone, as well as the demonstration of care it enacts, follows an obvious hierarchical order. First, Dilshod talks to his father, then to his mother, then to Gulnora ‘when there is a need’. Several times, I saw the parents hang up without Gulnora having had time to talk to him. Gulnora said to me then: ‘There was no need, they had to discuss things about the house.’ This reminds us that while technologies can open the way for a new ‘transnational habitus’ (Nedelcu 2012), ‘they are also socialized within the relations they mediate’ (Baldassar et al. 2016, p.135). The order of communication reflects the hierarchy that structures the household and the relations of power in which the couple is entangled: marital intimacy is not impossible, but may be tightly constrained under the roof of the elders. This dynamic is all the more stark in extended households, where relatives working abroad send remittances in the name of the household head (typically the father or mother-​in-​law, sometimes a brother-​in-​law), who then decides how to spend it, or how to distribute it among household members. As an example, Gulnora almost never touches bank notes, and never –​not even once –​received money directly from her husband, a common situation for many women living with their in-​laws in Tajikistan, especially in rural areas. On another occasion, when I saw Gulnora taking the phone and going to another room to seek more privacy, her mother-​in-​law remarked, ‘She has some secrets to hide.’ This comment, although meant as a joke, illustrates how long-​distance intimacy is all the more challenging when it may look suspicious in the eyes of the in-​laws, if not in the eyes of the neighbourhood. A woman from the same village, aged about 50, told me once: ‘I’m not going to let my daughter-​in-​law have a phone of her own; the neighbours who would see her talking would immediately think that she’s talking to a lover instead of my son.’ Also concerned with preserving their reputation, I have come across several cases where families had hidden for many years from their neighbours and extended family the fact that they had heard nothing from their relative in Russia, to avoid feeling ashamed and to save face. Transnational intimacy thus arises from specific configurations, social and family relationships, and access to communication technologies. In the above examples, intimacy appears as a close bond created between a worker abroad and his or her relatives at home, in the context of mutually expected behaviours and reciprocity. Intimate relationships may be exposed to individual and collective assessment, be it mockery or moral judgement, and may be discussed collectively in the village or the neighbourhood. In this context, the strengthening of transnational couples’ intimacy also relies on the ability to make one’s needs and desires relevant and legitimate in the eyes of the remote spouse –​in particular in the eyes of the one who provides economic means. While Mukhabbat has the opportunity to make her husband understand their needs (their children’s, her own), Gulnora rarely has it. She is not the one in charge of the house; her needs and those of her children are usually arbitrated by the decisions of her in-​laws –​a situation that she described as potentially painful, and leading to emotional distancing from her husband.

242

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​

WHEN CARING MEANS CONTROLLING: THE OTHER FACET OF UBIQUITOUS TRANSNATIONALISM Gender norms and remote jealousy The ‘ordinary co-​presence routines’ (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016, p.203) permitted by ICTs also have more contrasting, and certainly less positive, consequences in terms of mutual surveillance, especially between husbands and wives. The almost unlimited co-​ presence via ICTs enables displaying control over one’s relatives (in both directions), but often with asymmetrical opportunities to exercise it (see also Hannaford 2015). In Tajikistan, even women who are de facto household leaders in their husband’s absence may be subjected to control (of their behaviours, movements, purchases, and so forth). The example of Saodat, a woman in her late thirties living in Dushanbe, is telling. Her relationship with her husband has never really been good. Saodat experienced her early marriage at the age of 17 as a forced marriage and, according to her, her husband had never agreed to let her study or work to support their family. They also have different views on their children’s future: while Saodat wants their elder son to begin vocational training, her husband asked her to organise his travel to Russia (applying for a passport, buying appropriate clothes, etc.). He wants their son to start working with him on construction sites. Saodat complains: My husband does not allow me to work, but he wants our son to join him in Russia! I don’t want this, I think our son should study first, he’s too young [17 y.o.]. And working in Russia may be dangerous. My husband decided I could not work –​well let him take the responsibility to provide for the family, instead of burdening my son with it! In her eyes, their diverging views stem from their different social backgrounds (‘You know, he comes from a traditional family. I think he’d be ashamed if his wife was working’). These differences have concrete consequences for the way they experience transnational relations: Saodat usually feels relieved when her husband goes back to Russia, whereas he experiences migration as a painful separation from his family. One day, as I was visiting her, Saodat was telling one of her friends about the last fight she had had with him. He wanted her to get a new landline phone, but she did not. When I asked what the problem was, she replied: The only reason he wants this phone is to be able to control when we are home and when we are not. He can call me on my cell phone! If I don’t want to answer, I don’t answer, or I give the phone to my children. But there is no way I will buy a new landline! The main reason is that he wants to control what I do, or what my children do. While on many occasions, women I met told me that the more a man calls, the more he actually cares, other experiences reflect more negative feelings and interpretations of this search for regular communication. Saodat is one example among many of women who were struggling with increased ‘jealousy’, or what they felt were 243

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

attempts by their husbands to control them. This reminds us that being de facto heads of the household (as Saodat is) does not equate to being independent. Saodat remains dependent on her husband’s income and his wish to control family life (as well as the fact that he has money) undermines Saodat’s efforts to create a more balanced relationship between them (and make her opinions count). She feels that the space she has in her daily life to act, given her husband’s physical absence, may be threatened at any moment by his attempts to control, to financially blackmail, or to exert psychological pressure via ICT-​based communication. Thus, transnational relationships (or the technologies used to mediate them) do not escape the system of values and norms in which individuals have been socialised. As Reeves (2011, p.564) notes, ‘family honour is felt to depend upon –​indeed, to be effectively embodied in –​the behaviour of its younger female members.’ Attempts to display control over one’s wife and children is often triggered by the fear of losing face: the fear of gossip and rumour (‘what would the neighbours say?’), which may travel across borders and feeds men’s shame-​anxiety (Beyer 2016) at a distance. Gossip also works as a permanent reminder of one’s social position and moral duties according to age, gender and marital status within the larger community, and despite geographic distances. Moreover, shame-​anxiety is reinforced by the use of phone cameras, which may prevent women from risking transgressing their husband’s rules; divorces can in fact occur on the basis of denunciation messages and compromising photos sent by anonymous senders, as the controversy generated by ‘SMS divorces’ reminds us (Najibullah 2011). In turn, women tend to create ways to bypass their husbands’ control: by arguing over the phone, not answering, calling back later, lying or relying on the complicity of relatives, neighbours and friends who support them. While there are many stories of men who watch over their wives through their relatives –​including asking them to visit them without warning –​women’s jealousy is also a subject that often came up during my research. Despite the fact that a large number of women did not know much about the living conditions of their husbands in Russia (e.g., their address, the names of their roommates or of the company for which they work, their exact job, their salary, etc.), they could nevertheless obtain information by mobilising other networks. The large number of Tajikistani migrant workers in Russia sometimes allows them to find out about their husbands’ actual lifestyle. Shahnoza, 42 years old, lives in a village south of Dushanbe. Her husband has been working in Russia for more than ten years. She once told me: ‘I know for example that my husband doesn’t have a second wife: my sister’s husband’s brother lives not far from him, and he went to his place several times. I know.’ Yet, while men’s jealousy is more often socially accepted as a manifestation of care and legitimate control, women’s jealousy must be hidden: women should not create a public ‘scandal’. Shahnoza adds: ‘But they all have a mistress over there, what can we do against Russian women? They want us to be respectable, honest, good Muslim women, but they also want to run after short skirts and a beautiful silhouette. I also have a beautiful silhouette if I show it … .’ In long-​distant relationships, Tajikistani women are often haunted by gendered stereotypes emanating from colonial representations of the superiority of Russian women over Tajik ones. Their supposedly greater beauty, financial autonomy, or sexual skills stem from historical Soviet images of the ‘modern’ Russians and the ‘traditional’ Tajiks (Behzadi and Direnberger 2020). Even when deprived of all these features, they still have their citizenship, which can be attractive 244

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​

to men looking for ways to stay in Russia; thus competition with Russian women is often experienced as unfair. In all, gender representations do not seem necessarily to be challenged by long-​ distance relationships (Hegland 2010). On the contrary, in the Tajikistani context, young women married to a ‘Rossiyanin’7 cannot but feel even more the pressure to comply with gendered social norms. Women should sustain a man’s house in their absence, but also actively participate in social events that contribute to making their husband virtually ‘present’ in the neighbourhood. Men must combine filial duty and the role of breadwinner to achieve the cultural ideal of manhood in Russia (Reeves 2011; Cleuziou 2013; Kasymova 2020). Research on women migrants also shows that while traditional gender roles may be challenged, families with female migrants while men sit at home still consider themselves to be ‘abnormal’ (Kholmatova 2018; Kasymova 2020). As Mahler (2001, p.611) put it, ‘(…) though people negotiate gender across transnational space (…) transnational space does not appear to be a place where the hierarchy of gender relations is reconfigured.’ Further, as already highlighted by feminist studies, families are not only secure and protective places, there may also be the place where control over bodies and behaviours may be rigidly enforced; this statement also applies to transnational families. In this regard, the separation of spouses seems to have made relatively little difference to the situation of many women living in transnational households in Tajikistan.8 On the other hand, parent-​child relationships seem to be more open to adjustment, at least to some extent.

Parent-​child relationships under pressure? Long-​distance relationships make it clear, if need be, that family relationships also result from individual choices –​and in particular the choices of migrants –​to maintain them in specific circumstances (see, for example, Bathaïe 2011). While for some Tajikistani men, Russia is a place where they may experience poverty, uncertainty (Reeves 2015), violence and stigmatisation (Agadjanian et al. 2017), for others (and sometimes, simultaneously), Russia may also appear as a space of freedom that can offer opportunities for achieving individual desires, and which may stand in contrast with family expectations in Tajikistan (Roche 2014). The discrepancy between these two dimensions of male experience of migration, as well as the differential mobility (and hence competition) that may occur among brothers who aim to leave (Reeves 2017), may lead to disputes and, sometimes, irreversible family ruptures. The example of Shoira is telling: she lived with her in-​laws for 15 years, while her husband was living abroad from the second day of their marriage, coming back very rarely. Her husband barely called her, his parents, or their children at home, and sent irregular, small amounts of money. Tensions were already quite marked between Shoira’s husband and his father, but reached a peak when, after a two-​day return trip for his mother’s funeral, Shoira’s husband left again for Russia without telling anyone. His father decided that he would then cut all relations to his son by expelling his daughter-​in-​law (Shoira) and grandchildren from the parental house. In this case, parental/​filial relationships were eventually denied after Shoira’s husband did not comply with his expected caring obligations. 245

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

Shoira’s children have not had any contact with their father and have rarely visited their grandfather since then. While many Tajikistani men come back to Tajikistan to get married and provide a daughter-​in-​law for the house, this engagement may not suffice to ensure the unity of the family. As discussed above, the circulation of care through communication and money are also important factors. Moreover, given the increasing length of their stay in Russia, numerous Tajikistani men have started another family, with a partner/​wife and sometimes children, in Russia. In their situation, they face dilemmas of care provision for both families in Tajikistan and Russia, each embodying different family expectations: ‘the first wife is for the parents, the second is for the heart’, as the saying goes (Cleuziou 2016, p.83). Here, the asymmetry of care giving is visible in the fact that while Shoira’s husband seemed to be able to ‘afford’ a family break-​up, this was not the case for Shoira, who had no income, nor for her former father-​in-​law, whose care she still felt responsible for several years later when he became seriously ill. Thus, the transnational family is also a place where positions of power are renegotiated, often to the advantage of migrant men who have the economic resources to do so.

DO TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES ‘DISSOLVE’ WITHIN THE COMMUNITY? COLLECTIVE CAREGIVING BETWEEN RUSSIA AND TAJIKISTAN After 25 years of intense international migrations, the family is not the only place through which care circulates transnationally. My final example will be Mansur, whose family fled from Tajikistan to Russia when he was 6 years old, after their village became the scene of violent combat during the Civil War (1992–​97). Since then, he has been living, studying, working and got married in Russia, surrounded by his grandparents, parents and brothers, most of his aunts, uncles and cousins, but also many other villagers who have settled in the same town in Russia, in constant flux since the late 1990s. If needed, he sends money to family members who remained in the village from time to time, and he calls them regularly via Viber, especially his maternal grandmother, to whom he is quite close, and who has visited him three times in Russia since the 1990s. Although he never returned to Tajikistan, his extended family also maintain close connections with families who come from the same village in Tajikistan and who now live in Russia; they live nearby, they share meals, cars and houses, they marry each other, and of course they invite each other to major events such as weddings, circumcisions and funerals. Since the mid-​2010s, they have also been organising collective money transfers to their home village in Tajikistan. Thus, in addition to ‘in-​family’ money transfers –​the most common way of sending remittances home –​ collective forms of support have been emerging, similarly to what has been developing in other transnational contexts. Aitieva (2015) and Urinboyev (2017) have already noted the importance of the ‘community’ in relations between Central Asia and Russia. This extends to the circulation of information and the social pressure it may exert on individuals in Russia, as well as the importance of telephone-​based connections between people from the same village, spread out across borders, and which contribute to transnational place-​making (Urinboyev 2017, p.122). Mansur’s 246

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​

community goes even further, as it mutualises financial resources and redistributes them when necessary, either to people in need in Russia or in Tajikistan (for medical care, funerals, construction, or support after natural disasters or during the COVID-​ 19 pandemic, and so forth). In doing so, it illustrates the emergence of a new transnational community habitus. One day in August 2017, the leaders of the community in Russia –​which is to say, the elders of the largest extended families –​suggested at a meeting that, at the request of the village, all ‘villagers’ residing in Russia should contribute towards the restoration of the gymnasium at one of the village schools. Some of the participants replied that they had not returned to Tajikistan for years and that their own children would never attend this particular school. Given their low salaries, they saw their contribution as an undesirable expense, as this collective funding would not directly benefit their families, nor their other relatives at home. However, in the end they complied with this obligation, as the pressure of collective norms was considered too great. As they said at the end of the meeting, they could not take the risk of disassociating themselves from the village in Tajikistan. Indeed, it is within this network that they socialise, find work and possibly help in case of difficulties. The provision of care along transnational links does not only follow family or friendship relations: the circulation of care between Russia and Tajikistan through community links and beyond the family sphere emerges as a possible way to secure one’s future in Russia. However, family and community demands may compete with each other (see Figure 16.3).

Figure 16.3  ‘With online Eskhata the distance is closed.’ Commercial of Eskhata bank reflecting the importance of money transfers sent by Tajikistanis in Russia to their relatives at home, Tajikistan, 2021. 247

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

There is no doubt that international migrations can entail socio-​economic changes in both sending and receiving countries, in terms of gender and generation hierarchies, family rituals and other practices. By providing ‘care work’ for their members ‘here’ and ‘there’, transnational communities partially assume the responsibilities usually attributed to the family. In fact, in doing so, they tend to replicate a model of family-​ community relations that already exists in Tajikistan, and in Central Asia more generally. At the same time, it should be noted that while community affairs are the responsibility of men in Tajikistan (Roche 2019), men who are in Russia also take on some of the caring tasks, which are usually assigned to women in Tajikistan. The other side of the coin, again, is that the community thus constituted may exert greater control over individuals and impose normative behaviours –​including gender and generation relations. It remains to be seen to what extent the Tajikistanis who have resettled permanently in Russia will actively seek this ‘collectivisation’ of the circulation of care through community support, given the ‘coercive quality of intersubjectivity’ (Carsten 2013, p.247) that it generates within it. As a result, two diverging –​yet sometimes complementary –​processes seem to take place on the basis of transnational family ties, which reflect the constant negotiations between seeking care and avoiding control, at different levels. On the one hand, and as Mansur’s example showed, international migrations have contributed to multiple forms of family territorialisation ‘here’ (in Tajikistan) and ‘there’ (in Russia), and to increasing the intertwining of family relations with wider sociality networks (and thus resources) in both locations. In addition, the growth of diasporic organisations, migrant-​supporting NGOs and informal organisations of mutual help, which have been quite visible during the COVID-​19 pandemic, for example, may help people to strengthen their position and social support networks (Kluczewska and Korneev 2018; Cleuziou 2022). Thus, today, communication, money and support may link a group of (not necessarily related) migrants somewhere in Russia to their home village in Tajikistan, beyond family ties. These developments herald the maintenance and even strengthening of transnational links, and even more so to a ‘transnational moral territoriality’ (Lacroix 2019; see also Cleuziou and Ismailbekova 2023) in the years to come. On the other hand, transnational families do not always know, or necessarily choose to mix with, these groups when they appear. My own research shows, for example, that solidarity groups appear more frequently among people originating from villages rather than urban dwellings (Cleuziou 2022). Aitieva (2015), who researched Kyrgyzstani transnational families, argues that migratory strategies have tended to delineate clearer nuclear families, some of which then progressively detach themselves from their extensive network of relatedness. While these processes allow families a more effective form of family planning that tends to allocate resources to fewer household members, small families also face the risk of falling into greater isolation.

CONCLUSION Exploring various forms of the circulation of care enables us to follow how transnational family members adjust relations, hierarchies and values to transnational contexts. Specifically, I have shown how individuals and families are willing (or not) 248

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​

to maintain kin relations through the circulation of care. Transnational families are the product of daily efforts of communication, where individuals employ multiple ways of demonstrating and enacting care and control, feeding in turn a certain feeling of obligation towards family members. Sending money or gifts, providing guarantees (of fidelity, reputation, or support), sharing news and secrets, are all forms of circulation that contribute to building various forms of co-​presence and intimacy despite distance, and are crucial for practicing kinship and ‘doing family’. The exploration of virtual ubiquity offered by seemingly unlimited ICT-​based communication offers illuminating examples of the processual dimension of kinship and relatedness in both their integrative and discriminating, creative and conservative dimensions. Overall, Tajikistani international migration has contributed significantly to reinforcing expected gender roles and gender imbalances in terms of life choices: men migrate and provide for their families, while women –​who embody the reputation of men –​ care for children and their homes, and sometimes work. When women migrate too, their mobility is still most often tinged with negative representations, and/​or (re) framed by domestic roles in Russia. For both men and women, migration primarily serves family reproduction and normative gender roles, in which spaces for individual expression may, however, be negotiated little by little. The circulation of care also provides an avenue for understanding kinship beyond rigid definitions of the family as a structure or as a once-​ and-​ for-​ all circumscribed unit (e.g., as a nuclear family, a household, a bloodline, etc.). Family relationships can become entangled in wider networks such as the village or community. However, if other groups outside the family can take on activities of care for its members, both in their integration and exclusion dimensions, what then remains specific to (transnational) family relationships? As Carsten (2013, p.248) put it several years ago, ‘it is in the gradual accumulation of everyday experiences through living together over time—​in both the ritual and non-​ritual moments—​ that kinship acquires its particular power.’ The transnational intimate relationships that I explore here may provide one of the answers, although more research is needed on how intimate relationships among family members are framed by and adapted to transnational space.

NOTES 1 ‘Tajikistani’ refers to people who live in Tajikistan; ‘Tajik’ refers to their ethnicity. 2 Women who migrate tend to work in service sectors (elderly and child care, cleaning, etc.). 3 Reeves (2011) speaks about ‘differential mobility’. 4 The World Bank indicates that in Tajikistan, in 2017, there were 111 mobile phone subscriptions for 100 people (and 9,904,000 mobile subscriptions for a population of 8,880,170). https://​data.worldb​ank.org/​indica​tor/​IT.CEL.SETS.P2?end=​2017&locati​ons=​ TJ&start=​2000 5 Let alone the recent sanitary crises. 6 The COVID-​19 crisis severely constrained people’s mobility and seemed to have encouraged online participation in mortuary wakes. 7 ‘Rossiyanin’ is a term used in Russian by Tajiks to refer to a migrant worker in Russia, whether or not he has obtained Russian citizenship. 8 Although it should be noted that for some women, the migration of men may appear to be a relief in light of the fact that domestic violence is still widespread in the country. 249

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​

REFERENCES Abashin, S.N. 2017. Возвращение Мигрантов Домой: Перспективы Антропологического Изучения (Migrants Returning Home: Perspectives of Anthropological Research). Журнал “ЭО” №3. http://​jour​nal.iea.ras.ru/​curr​ent.htm, accessed July 31, 2017. Agadjanian, V., Menjívar, C. and N. Zotova. 2017. Legality, Racialization, and Immigrants’ Experience of Ethnoracial Harassment in Russia. Social Problems 64(4): 558–​576. Aitieva, M.D. 2015. Reconstituting Transnational Families. An Ethnographic Analysis of Family Practices between Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, University of Manchester. —​—​—​ 2020. Денежные переводы: нереалистичные ожидания и конфликтующие обязанности по отношению к семье, pp.106–​146 in Abashin, S. and Bredkikova O. (eds.), Жить в двух мирах. Переосмысляя транснационализм и транслокальность, Moscow, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenye. Bakozoda, K., Abdulloev,I. and P Khakimov, et al. 2019. Migration, Living Conditions and Skills: Panel Study –​Tajikistan, 2018. Dushanbe: JICA Research Institute. Baldassar, L. 2008. Missing Kin and Longing to Be Together: Emotions and the Construction of Co-​Presence in Transnational Relationships. Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3): 247–​266. Baldassar, L. and Merla, L. 2014. Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life. New York: Routledge. Baldassar, L., Nedelcu, M., Merla, L. and R. Wilding. 2016. ICT-​ Based Co-​ Presence in Transnational Families and Communities: Challenging the Premise of Face-​ to-​ Face Proximity in Sustaining Relationships. Global Networks 16(2): 133–​144. Bathaïe, A. 2011. Les relations familiales à distance. Ethnographies des migrations afghanes. Autrepart 57–​58(1): 59. Beck, U. 2007. The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails. Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–​8): 286–​290. Behzadi, N. E. and Direnberger, L. 2020. Gender and Ethnicity in the Soviet Muslim Peripheries: A Feminist Postcolonial Geography of Women’s Work in the Tajik SSR (1950–​ 1991). Central Asian Survey 39(2): 202–​219. Beyer, J. 2016. The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan. Central Eurasia in Context. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Borneman, J. 2001. Caring and Being Cared for: Displacing Marriage, Kinship, Gender and Sexuality, pp.29–​46 in Faubion, J. (ed.) The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Brednikova, O. E. 2017. (Не)Возврощение Домой: Могут Ли Стать Мигранты Бывшими? ((Not) Returning Home: Can Migrants Become Former Migrants?). Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie 3: 32–​47. Bryceson, D., and Vuorela, U. 2002. The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks. Questia –​online. www.ques​tia.com/​libr​ary/​102286​977/​the-​transn​atio​ nal-​fam​ily-​new-​europ​ean-​fronti​ers-​and, accessed 18 May 2020. Carling, J., Menjívar, C. and L. Schmalzbauer. 2012. Central Themes in the Study of Transnational Parenthood. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38(2): 191–​217. Carsten, J. 2013. What Kinship Does—​and How. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 245–​251. Cleuziou, J. 2013. Argent russe, cérémonies tadjikes: faire et défaire les liens. Autrepart 67–​ 68(4): 137–​153. —​—​—​2016.‘A Second Wife Is Not Really a Wife’: Polygyny, Gender Relations and Economic Realities in Tajikistan. Central Asian Survey 35(1): 76–​90. —​—​—​2022. Au nom des morts. Gestion collective des défunts tadjikistanais en Russie. In Kobelinsky, C. and Rachédi, L. (eds.), Les futurs rêvés des morts, Paris: Pétra. 250

—​​​​ B a r g a i n i n g o v e r c a r e a n d c o n t r o l —​​​​ —​—​—​and Ismailbekova, A. 2023. Transferring Deceased Bodies, Building Transnational Communities. The Case of Kyrgyz and Tajik Migrants in Russia. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 39(1): 77–​100. —​—​—​and McBrien, J. 2020. Introduction: Marriage Quandaries in Central Asia. Oriente Moderno 100(2): 121–​146. Collier, J.F. and Yanagisako, S.J. 1987. Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Déchaux, J.-​H. 2008. Kinship Studies: Neoclassicism and New Wave. A Critical Review. Revue française de sociologie 49(5): 215–​243. Ginsburg, F.D. and Rapp, R. (eds.) 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hannaford, D. 2015. Technologies of the Spouse: Intimate Surveillance in Senegalese Transnational Marriages. Global Networks 15(1): 43–​59. Hegland, M.E. 2010. Tajik Male Labour Migration and Women Left Behind: Can They Resist Gender and Generational Hierarchies? Anthropology of the Middle East 5(2): 16–​35. Hoschild, A.R. 2000. The Nanny Chain. The American Prospect 11: 1–​4. Ibañez Tirado, D. 2019. ‘We Sit and Wait’: Migration, Mobility and Temporality in Guliston, Southern Tajikistan. Current Sociology 67(2): 315–​333. Kasymova, S. 2020. Гендерные Аспекты Миграционных Процессов в Tаджикистане: Вызовы Времени и Варианты Выбора (Gender Aspects of Migration Processes in Tajikistan: Challenges of Time and Various Choices). Dushanbe: Irfon. Kholmatova, N. 2018. Changing the Face of Labor Migration? The Feminization of Migration from Tajikistan to Russia, pp.42–​54 in Laruelle, M. and Schenk, C. (eds.) Eurasia on the Move: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Dynamic Migration Region. Washington DC: George Washington University. Khusenova, N. 2010. La Féminisation Des Migrations de Travail Tadjikes En Russie, pp.278–​ 296 in Laruelle, M. (ed.) Dynamiques Migratoires et Changements Sociétaux en Asie Centrale. Paris: Petra. Kilkey, M. and Merla, L. 2014. Situating Transnational Families’ Care-​Giving Arrangements: The Role of Institutional Contexts. Global Networks 14(2): 210–​229. Kluczewska, K. and Korneev, O. 2018. Politics in the Tajik Emigrant Community Complex. Revue d’Études Comparatives Est-​Ouest 4(4): 27–​58. Lacroix, T. 2019. Transferts migratoires, institutions sociales migrantes et territorialité morale transnationale. L’espace politique 38(2): 555–​565. MacCormack, C.P. and Strathern, M. 1980 Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Madianou, M. and Miller, D. 2013. Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169–​187. Mahler, S.J. 2001. Transnational Relationships: The Struggle to Communicate Across Borders. Identities 7(4): 583–​619. Najibullah, F. 2011. Tajik Fatwa Bans SMS-​Divorce. RFERL. www.rferl.org/​cont​ent/​tajik_​fatw​ a_​ba​ns_​s​ms_​d​ivor​ces/​3553​754.html, accessed January 15, 2016. Nedelcu, M. 2012. Migrants’ New Transnational Habitus: Rethinking Migration Through a Cosmopolitan Lens in the Digital Age. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38(9): 1339–​1356. Nedelcu, M. and Wyss, M. 2016. ‘Doing Family’ through ICT-​ Mediated Ordinary Co-​Presence: Transnational Communication Practices of Romanian Migrants in Switzerland. Global Networks 16(2): 202–​218. Parreñas, R. 2005. Long Distance Intimacy: Class, Gender and Intergenerational Relations between Mothers and Children in Filipino Transnational Families. Global Networks 5(4): 317–​336. 251

—​​​​ J u l i e t t e C l e u z i o u —​​​ Reeves, M. 2011. Staying Put? Towards a Relational Politics of Mobility at a Time of Migration. Central Asian Survey 30(3–​4): 555–​576. —​—​—​2015. Living from the Nerves: Deportability, Indeterminacy, and the “Feel of Law” in Migrant Moscow. Social Analysis 59(4): 119–​136. —​—​—​2017. A Family Affair, pp.273–​288. In Roche, S. (ed.) The Family in Central Asia. New Perspectives sually without work permits. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Roche, S. 2014. Domesticating Youth: Youth Bulges and Its Socio-​Political Implications in Tajikistan. Integration and Conflict Studies, volume 8. New York: Berghahn. —​—​—​ 2019. The Faceless Terrorist: A Study of Critical Events in Tajikistan. Transcultural Research –​Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer International Publishing. www.sprin​ger.com/​gp/​book/​978303​0038​427, accessed 28 April 2020. Sahlins, M. 2013. What Is Kinship Is … And Is Not. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Thieme, S. 2014. Coming Home? Patterns and Characteristics of Return Migration in Kyrgyzstan. International Migration 52(5): 127–​143. Urinboyev, R., 2017. Establishing an “Uzbek Mahalla” via Smartphones and Social Media: Everyday Transnational Lives of Uzbek Labor Migrants in Russia, pp. 119–​148. In M. Laruelle (ed.) Constructing the Uzbek State: Narratives of Post-​Soviet Years. Boulder, CO: Lexington. Vertovec, S. 2004. Cheap Calls: The Social Glue of Migrant Transnationalism. Global Networks 4(2): 219–​224. Wilding, R. 2006. ‘Virtual’ Intimacies? Families Communicating across Transnational Contexts. Global Networks 6(2): 125–​142. World Bank Group. 2019. Heightening Fiscal Risks in Tajikistan, Country Economic Update. Washington, DC: The World Bank Publications.

252

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

OUTSOURCING DOMESTIC CARE Gendered labour mobility and ambiguities of Turkmen migrant work in Istanbul Marhabo Saparova INTRODUCTION I guess I am one of the lucky ones. When I first arrived in Istanbul, I started working as a domestic worker. It is not easy to work in someone’s household; it is a foreign house. I heard many stories about bad families. But the first family accepted me as their own; they called me their daughter. (Bahar, Interview, 2015) Bahar (45), a Turkmen migrant woman, told me her story while stirring a pot of pudding on the stove in the kitchen of her employer’s house. When Bahar first arrived in Istanbul in 2007, she was employed as a live-​in domestic worker and caretaker for an elderly couple who constantly reminded her that she was ‘not the maid of the house’, she is ‘their daughter’, and ‘a part of the house’. Turkmen women have become one of the new actors in domestic servitude in post-​1990s Turkey (Akalın 2007; Erder and Kaska 2012). Like other Central Asian women, they have been integrated into the labour market and private households in Turkey through the discursive frame of familial and ethnic affinity. This frame serves as a medium for the domestication of migrant labour, confining it to the familial site which is rendered as devoid of any form of labour. In this chapter, I argue that domestication is a mode of labour exploitation that extends from the legal and policy terrain to relationships in the private household. This chapter recounts migration and labour stories of women from Turkmenistan working in Turkey with a specific focus on the negotiations and strategies of navigation they employ against the legal uncertainties, fraught emotional work and ambiguous boundaries within the private households in which they are employed. Over the course of many years, I had the privilege of getting to know and listening to many migrant domestic and care workers from Turkmenistan who shared their stories of living in a state of uncertainty, precarity and in-​betweenness. The data for this chapter stems from these conversations, ethnographic observations, and the semi-​structured interviews I conducted with 18 women in Turkey and Turkmenistan between 2015 and 2020. Except for two interviews held in the private households of the interlocutors’ employers, most of the interviews were conducted in the women’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-20

253

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​

own rented apartments or public spaces in Istanbul. Six interviews were with returned migrants in their houses in Turkmenistan. The age of my interlocutors ranged from 25 to 61 years old and most of them were from the urban centres of the south-​eastern and north-​eastern provinces of Turkmenistan. Twelve of these women had graduated from either vocational school or college and the remaining six had finished secondary school prior to their departure. In this chapter, after providing a brief historical context for the wave of post-​ 1990s labour migration from Turkmenistan to Turkey, I focus on how domestic and care workers from Turkmenistan experience and manage their enforced precarity. In the first part of the chapter, I discuss the socio-​historical context and explore the legal framework which determines the everyday life of migrant workers from Turkmenistan in Turkey. From this perspective of legality, I then examine the liminal states of live-​in care workers and link domesticity to wider societal structures in which private and intimate relations articulate the intersections between state, subject, labour and market.

FEMINISATION OF MIGRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA According to the latest official statistics from the Turkish Statistical Institution (TurksStat 2019) and the Presidency of Migration Management (PMM 2023) in Turkey, citizens of Turkmenistan are among the largest group of migrants obtaining residence permits in Turkey (after Iraqi and Syrian refugees). In a report from the Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Services in Turkey (2019), 6,128 Turkmen migrants (4,633 female and 1,495 male) received work permits in 2019, the fourth largest group after Syrian, Ukrainian and Kyrgyz migrants.1 Official statistics should be treated with a degree of caution, not least because many Turkmen migrants, while entering Turkey legally, are employed without work permits and are thus invisible within official employment data (see also Eraliev and Urinboyev, this volume). Nonetheless, for all their imprecision, official statistics on entry and employment status in Turkey suggest that among those leaving Turkmenistan for work, Turkey is an important destination, particularly for women. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that there are 195,000 Turkmenistani official ‘migrants’ living outside Turkmenistan (92,357 male and 102,563 female migrants) (IOM 2021),2 while a report for the International Labour Organization (ILO) points to the routinised employment of women from states of the former Soviet Union who move to become domestic workers in Turkey, usually without work permits (Toksöz et al. 2012; Toksöz 2020). As part of the mass post-​1990s feminisation of (labour) migration in Central Asia, many young and middle-​aged Turkmen women have joined the global trend of moving abroad to work in the service sector, predominantly as nannies/​care providers, domestic workers, or employees in the entertainment sector. The feminisation of migration, inextricable from the feminisation of labour and the feminisation of poverty, describes the large-​scale incorporation of (usually poor or working-​class) women into global capitalism, and highlights the gendered dimensions of economic restructuring in different parts of the world. Feminisation refers to the increased precarity of labour (in general by the engineered substitution of female labour in labour roles previously only held by men), the devaluation 254

—​​​​ T u r k m e n m i g r a n t w o r k i n I s t a n b u l —​​​​

of work in sectors where women dominate the labour pool, and the simultaneous commodification of skills and capabilities traditionally associated with women as caregivers (Ong 1991; Salzinger 2003). As the international market of domestic and care work intersects with national regimes of gendered labour, the embeddedness of domestic and care work in global structural inequalities is revealed. Domestic and care work continues to be largely invisible in terms of its productive value due to the representation of nuclear heterosexual families as sites of love and care, devoid of any kind of labour –​compensated or not. In the tradition of intersectional scholarship that scrutinises power dynamics, discourses, institutions, social norms and identities, many migration scholars emphasise the intersections of multiple, interlocking systems of domination, such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, age and others in the experiences of migrants (Morokvasic 1984; Hondagneu-​Sotelo 2000; Donato et al. 2006; Yuval-​Davis 2006; Lutz and Palenga-​Möllenbeck 2011; Anthias 2012). The globally common exploitation of domestic and care work to provide services upholding gendered, classed and racialised/​ethicised structures in support of more privileged households and families is well documented. The situation of Filipina caregivers in Los Angeles and Rome (Parrenas 2008), Hong Kong (Constable 1999), and Malaysia (Chin 2013); Caribbean nannies in New York (Colen 1995); Mexican and Latina house cleaners in California (Hondagneu-​Sotelo 2007); Ukrainian domestic workers in Italy and California (Solari 2017), and Sri Lankan maids in Saudi Arabia (Gamburd 2000) all illustrate instances of a more universal context of exploitation. This migrant labour frees the female employers of the households from their reproductive labour through labour displacement to ethnically, legally and economically marginalised migrant women’s bodies. Furthermore, the patriarchal gender order of the household is reinforced through exploitative economic relations, as the embodied labour is still governed by and assigned as a responsibility of a female employer, now with additional layers of macro (state) and micro (household) surveillance-​managed capitalism (Barua et al. 2017; Lee, Johnson and McCahill 2018; Marti 2019; Zulfiqar 2019). While the case of Turkmen migrant women providing domestic and care services in middle-​and upper-​middle-​class households in Turkey replicates some global patterns, it also displays its own particularities. These particularities, in part, emanate from the socio-​political history of the region and localities. The gradual dissolution of the Soviet Union has led to significant economic, political, cultural and social transformations in post-1990s Turkmenistan since the 1990s. In turn, new regional geopolitical alignments and transnational flows in Central Asia led to the formation of novel migration routes and forms of mobilities. Amid this widespread domestic and regional economic chaos, free-​ wheeling privatisation, the erosion of social welfare programmes and the loss of state-​ guaranteed employment, many women started to engage in the informal business of shuttle trading and employment in domestic service for both survival and as newly available opportunities for capital accumulation. As primary agents in the informal post-​socialist domestic economy, migrant Turkmen women built and maintained transnational networks that informed later family and labour migration trends. While Russia had historically been the main destination for trade, labour, and educational migration during the Soviet regime,3 Turkey eventually emerged as an alternative, ‘safer’ and culturally closer destination. As many of my interlocutors noted, the ease of finding jobs in the flexible and informal domestic and care work market, 255

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​

the cultural and linguistic proximity, previously established migrant networks and Turkey’s visa-​free entry for citizens of Turkmenistan at the time of my research played a vital role in their choice of destination.4 The pre-​departure aspirations (fantasies and dreams of a promising future) of migrant Turkmen women have also been shaped by folk narratives of life in Turkey (primarily Istanbul) as modern, cosmopolitan and progressive; these have been created not only by popular Turkish soap operas5 but also by the stories of returned Turkmen women shuttle traders. As one of my interviewees commented: I used to watch Turkish shows, you know, and I fell in love with Istanbul. I heard so many stories from our businesswomen and I imagined myself walking on the coast, going to all those historical places, especially Kız Kulesi [The Maiden’s Tower]. I imagined myself working for a year or two and then enrolling at a university and studying, you know, like you did. (Maya, Interview, 2015) Although post-1990s labour mobility from Turkmenistan (and Central Asia in general) is shaped by economic motivations and regional historical mobilities, the strong state-​sanctioned promotion of nationalist consciousness as well as the discursive shift from the Soviet rhetoric of the ‘friendship of peoples’ (druzhba narodov) to the discourse of ‘Turkic kinship’ (Türki Cumhuriyetler akrabalığı) cannot be overlooked as significant drivers of migration patterns. Moreover, ethno-​religious notions of belonging in Turkey placed migrants from Turkmenistan (and other Turkic peoples) in higher positions in migrant hierarchies and migrant sense of deservingness (Parla 2019). This Turkish state-​supported concept of pan-​Turkic sentiment does not, however, necessarily protect migrants from exploitative national labour markets and ambiguous migration regulations. In the case of domestic and care work, this concept contributes to further invisibility, devaluation and domestication of migrant labour. Nonetheless, kinship and knowledge networks paired with ostensible ethno-​ religious similarities render Turkey a popular destination for women seeking work. As an extension of this discursively framed, yet practically contingent ‘affinity’, the rhetoric of ‘two states, one nation’ has been constantly used by politicians and media to describe the relationship between Turkmenistan and Turkey, and to ascribe familial affiliation to the populations of these countries. In the following sections, I briefly describe the liminal legalities of sending and receiving countries to explain how the legal terrain produces vulnerable migrant populations caught in between legal traps and forced into the role of supplicants.

IN-​B ETWEEN LEGALITIES Citizens of Turkmenistan did not need a visa to travel to Turkey up until September 2022. While visa-​free travel played a significant role in facilitating migration to Turkey, the reinstating of the visa regime between Turkey and Turkmenistan has since slowed but not halted the pace of outgoing migration. Recent changes in the passport and migration systems in both Turkmenistan and Turkey have led labour migrants to develop novel solutions to pursue increasingly precarious labour opportunities. In 256

—​​​​ T u r k m e n m i g r a n t w o r k i n I s t a n b u l —​​​​

January 2020, Jeren (41), an experienced labour migrant, told me she was making plans to move to Northern Cyprus with her family after 12 years of living and working in Istanbul. When I asked her the reason for her move, she replied: ‘Haven’t you heard? Turkey is no longer renewing our residence permits, we will try to get our residence permits in Cyprus.’ Later in our conversation, Jeren revealed that her biometric passport had expired a year ago and she had not travelled back to Turkmenistan to renew it. Her acquaintances in Cyprus had assured Jeren that it should be possible to get a residence permit with an expired passport. Caught in between evolving national laws, pressing economic circumstances and international capitalist labour markets, which both encourage and exploit precarity, the exigent solutions that Jeren and other migrants have developed in such liminal legal conditions are a reasonable response to ensure their survival. However, this one small corner of the Turkmen migrant worker experience in Turkey is characteristic of the broader migration situation in Turkey stemming from its national transformation from a migrant-​sending country to a migrant-​recipient and migrant-​transit country, beginning in the late 1980s. Due to several factors –​such as the spread of market fundamentalism, geopolitical and economic turbulences in the neighbouring countries, and an increased demand for cheap disposable labour –​ up until the 2000s, Turkey had a relatively flexible border policy allowing visa-​free entrances and overstays to accommodate the needs of the labour market. Visa waiver agreements from the 1980s granted ease of entrance to the country but did not provide any prospects for long-​term legalisation (either as a resident or as a worker), or citizenship. Despite legally entering Turkey, the majority of migrants still easily lapse into the status of undocumentedness by overstaying the allowed 30 (or, for citizens of some countries, 90) days. Since the early 2000s, the already complicated bureaucratic processes in Turkey have been revised several times; producing additional loopholes and categories of differentiation among refugee and migrant populations. The Turkish state began to regularise the flow of migration under the Law on Foreigners and International Protection No. 6458/​2014, the first comprehensive migration law that aimed to standardise migration practices and align them with the international human rights norms. This new systemic regulation presented an opportunity for labour migrants from Turkmenistan to legalise their status and obtain an exemption from the binding agreement of a work permit. To obtain the residence permit, applicants are required to pay a fine for overstaying and formally re-​entering the country.6 A residency permit does not provide the rights and the privileges offered by a work permit (such as access to social services); however, it does grant access to housing7 and emergency (and basic) healthcare services. While the new systematic regulations of 2014 have initiated some changes on paper and in practice, the most recent regulation (2 December 2019) enforces a discontinuation of the extension of short-​term residency permits. According to this new regulation, renewing applicants must leave Turkey for a year and re-​enter to obtain a new residency permit (PMM 2019). However, as described in Jeren’s narrative, re-​entry requirements present a unique challenge for undocumented Turkmen migrants due to the non-​renewability of their biometric passports abroad. Moreover, the work permit system in Turkey promulgates multi-​layered bureaucratic ambiguities that keeps an overwhelming majority of Turkmen women migrants in the state of undocumentedness (Akalın, 2018; Cogan, 2019; Toksöz, 2020). 257

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​

The work permit system in Turkey is a binding agreement that ties a migrant employee to a specific employment site or to a specific employer. Expiration of the work permit or breach/​termination of the work contract results in discontinuation of the legal stay. Hence, even in the case of an employer’s fault in breaking the contract or allowing a permit to lapse, a migrant worker is at risk of deportation unless a new work contract/​permit is issued. In addition to the difficulties of dealing with bureaucratic requirements that are best characterised by opacity and inconsistency, most employers do not obtain work permits, either to avoid the tedious bureaucratic hassle themselves, or to evade insurance payments as required by Turkish employment law. While it is relatively easy to become a legal resident for a year upon arrival in Turkey, it is quite challenging to obtain longer-​term legal residency. Obtaining legal residency for a longer period entails precarity and ambiguity, and requires a huge amount of bureaucratic literacy, effort and expenditure. Although a lack of coherent policies seems to provide some flexibility and mobility to migrants, the ambiguous interpretation of laws and the delegation of arbitrary decision-​making power to state officials increases labour exploitation, gender-​based violence and other discriminatory acts against migrants. In the following section, I delve into the particularities of living-​in arrangements in the context of Turkey.

AVAILABILITY AND MOBILITY OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC LABOUR IN TURKEY Six days a week we live their [employers’] lives. We have only one day for ourselves. (Maya, Interview, 2015) Migrant domestic work in Turkey can be characterised by three major post-​ Ottoman stages: the 1964 anti-​slavery ban which ended the system of evlatlıks (‘adopted daughters’), who were enslaved girls used for domestic servitude; a subsequent period lasting until the 1980s marked by industrialisation and rural-​to-​urban migration, that brought the figure of the rural (migrant) woman (day cleaners) into the paid domestic service of middle-​and upper-​middle-​class households (Kalaycıoğlu and Rittersberger-​Tılıç 2000; Özbay 2007, 2012), and the internationalisation of migrant domestic labour beginning in the 1990s. However, across these three periods, Özbay (2012) takes pains to emphasise that domestic service in Turkey has predominantly been outsourced to ‘Other’ women, no matter their place of origin. Across these time periods, living-​in arrangements emerge as a distinguishing marker between local and migrant domestic workers whose services are accommodated and integrated in the already well-​established domestic labour market (Akalın 2015). The demands of care work that require constant presence and attention to the infirm, elderly, or very young are predominantly allocated to migrant workers through the living-​in arrangement. As Akalın describes, ‘the demand for migrant domestic work in Turkey is a demand for the potential of “available” labour power’ (2015, p.68). She defines availability as, ‘a labour capacity that emerges in migrant domestics’ live-​ in working status’ (ibid.). Availability is not simply being available in the job market 258

—​​​​ T u r k m e n m i g r a n t w o r k i n I s t a n b u l —​​​​

or a spatial one associated with the live-​in arrangements. Availability also has spatio-​ temporal dimensions such as being on-​call all the time: live-​in migrant nannies and domestic workers usually work six days a week and get a single day off. The living-​in arrangement does offer economic benefits for migrant women as it reduces many recurring living expenses such as renting an apartment, paying for utilities, or commuting to work in a metropolis. The majority of Turkmen migrant domestic workers are undocumented; living in an employer’s home thus also provides a modicum of protection from being apprehended and deported. Most migrant women who live ‘out’ are either married (and live with their husbands), or get married after they migrate to Turkey and subsequently move out of the employer’s household. The arrival of a husband or male kin significantly affects the lives and employment conditions of women migrants: they have to change their live-​in arrangements to live-​out, which in turn introduces new living expenses and limitations to their on-​ call employment opportunities. For domestic care work, not being single presents various challenges when finding work. Numerous ads from employment firms list ‘unmarried/​single’, ‘without child/​ren’, ‘married, with a remote husband’, or ‘married, with grown-​up children’ as preferred characteristics for live-​in workers. Ads found in public Facebook groups for job announcements list the following priorities of the employers: Looking for a helper (preferably single and around 25 years old), who will be assisting me with the care of my two and half-​year-​old son, housework, cleaning, and ironing. A day off will be on a weekday, salary 2800TL (~500USD) (Büyükçekmece) (6 December 2019).8 A family of five, living in four-​storey villa (the fourth floor is not used) in Beykoz Acarkent, is looking for a single woman up to 30 years old, who speaks English, is not illegal, and who can travel with the family on holidays. We have a cat. No cooking. Salary (live-​in) 3400 TL (~$440) (20 October 2020).9 In her study of the complex demand for migrant domestic work in Turkey, Akalın similarly argues that employers in Turkey are not looking for certain ‘personalities as fixed entities’ in their migrant workers, but rather the capacity of migrant workers to be shaped according to the employer’s needs (2007, p.222). Most of my interlocutors stated that their working hours usually depended on the demands, schedules and whims of their employers. Employed as nannies or caretakers, the duties of Turkmen migrant live-​in workers are not simply limited to the care of household dependents, rather they were expected to do, as Maya (33) articulates, ‘everything one can imagine in the house: from sewing the buttons to cooking meals and salads, from greeting guests to meeting all the needs of the grandma (including bathing) and looking after a dog’. Maya complained many times throughout our conversations that her duties were not limited to taking care of her employer’s child: she was also expected to cook, clean the house, do the family’s laundry and, in her last job as a nanny in 2015, she was a cashier and accountant at her employer’s small boutique near their house in the evenings. While at first her evening ‘help’ was temporary, it quickly turned into a full-​time condition of her employment without additional payment. Over time, her evening working hours were stretched late into the night and at one point her unpaid ‘shifts’ were extended to 3 o’clock in the morning, finally forcing her to quit. Maya 259

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​

and the majority of the Central Asian migrant domestic workers I encountered also accompanied their employers to their summer houses or to other holiday destinations. During these trips, migrant domestic workers usually do not have their days off and their duties can extend to extra services that they are not paid for. The local or live-​ out domestic and care workers cannot, nor are commonly expected to, provide such mobility. The next section details how Turkmen migrant women are integrated into the private household through the family/​ethno-​religious kinship framework, which shapes the social relations and boundaries within this setting.

‘ONE OF THE FAMILY’: THE DOMESTICATION OF LABOUR AND (RE)DRAWING SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES It is not only the working hours and duties that are blurred in the private setting. The blurring of work and not-​work in cohabiting care work turns these outsider women into an ‘integral’ figure within the employer’s family. Since a migrant worker’s workplace is the private household of her employers, their own individual private lives become inextricably mixed with household/​employment affairs. The geopolitical narrative of Turkey positioning itself as a beneficent regional hegemon and helping brother of Turkic states also permeates the private household in various modes and forms. In addition to referring to Turkmen migrant workers in familial/​ kin terms (which is a common practice in Turkey), many employers use ethnoreligious discourses to justify the integration of Central Asian migrants into the national precarious migrant labour pool. In my conversations with the employers of Turkmen migrants, Turkish employers frequently corrected me when I referred to Turkmen migrants as ‘migrants’: ‘Turkmens are not migrants; they are our brothers and sisters. They’re here temporarily, until it gets better in their country, they’re earning their bread here’ (fieldnotes, 2020). Through the rhetorical device of helping out ostensibly poor kin, the poorly compensated and precarious presence of Turkmen migrants in Turkish homes is neatly naturalised. This naturalisation renders the hierarchical relationships invisible and prevents the translation of migrants’ rights and needs into migration policies and the legal landscape. The deployment of a ‘one of the family’ rhetoric is not unique to the Turkish context, but is rather a common technique of the domestication and exploitation of migrant workers. In her research on domestic workers, Akalın notes that domestication is the ultimate step in making ‘a perfect migrant domestic worker’ who needs to be able to ‘assume all the responsibilities and initiatives that a perfect housewife would be expected to, while being denied the right to step out of that role’ (2007, p.223). Once assimilated into the domestic sphere, a migrant domestic worker is expected to put aside the fact that she is employed professionally and instead embrace her employers’ house as her own, and her role and ‘natural’ responsibilities of a housewife (Akalın, 2007, p.220). Among the women I spoke with who worked in Turkish homes, it was noted how the particular category of feminised care work and the kinship-​situated gender role could vary from job to job and house to house. For Bahar (45), who was working in her second household since her arrival in Istanbul in 2007, switching households for her also meant switching her female-​kin role. In her first place of employment, she was ‘a daughter’ of the elderly couple she served, but in her second and current household, she was taking care of a daughter of the 260

—​​​​ T u r k m e n m i g r a n t w o r k i n I s t a n b u l —​​​​

family as ‘a sister’. Bahar often described her employers’ approach as protective and caring. This protection, however, carries a paternalist character and extends from the realm of the private household to her day off and the (vaguely defined) private space of a migrant worker. Bahar’s employers warned her against visiting certain neighbourhoods and places in Istanbul on her day off, or entering the house after a specific hour in the evening. Regulating the mobility of a migrant woman also occurs under the rhetoric of the ‘protection of the family member’. The motivation of the employers to help is grounded in the discourse of the family and ethnic kin framework, which disguises the asymmetrical relationship: between a position of power and possession, and a position of precarity and dispossession. The familial references reiterate and disguise the ambiguity and hierarchy in the relationships between the employer and the employee and, on many occasions, allows employers to ask for ‘friendly’ help (in the form of service) that usually turns into unpaid work. The fragility and hierarchy of this relationship and discourse emerges at the moments of disagreements and tensions between an employer and a migrant worker. As soon as a dispute arises, the boundaries are re-​shaped or accentuated, highlighting class, gender, age and ethnic/​national distinctions. One of the main boundary-​setting practices in the realm of the private space of the family occurs during dining and food-​sharing practices. My interlocutors describe different situations in which they were either deprived of food in their employer’s house, or left out of the ‘familial ritual’. The exclusion of the migrant domestic workers from the food-​sharing practice that unites family and reaffirms the social relations and hierarchies is an instance of re-​stating the symbolic boundaries. Paradoxically, most migrant women cook and set the table for their employers, but are not allowed to eat the same meal, or to sit together with the family at the same table. During one of our conversations, Maral (28), a domestic worker, mocked her employer, a famous singer in Turkey, for her ‘ridiculous’ behaviour and her practice of keeping the refrigerator locked so that her domestic workers ‘could not touch her food’. Similarly, Maya, who was designing a specific nutrition plan and cooking for her employers who were retired university professors, confronted her employers for not buying groceries for her: ‘When they brought the groceries, I was both disappointed and angry. They bought two pieces of steak and everything else was portioned for two people. I told them I also have to eat in this house, and they need to buy groceries for three.’ Moreover, this exclusion was not set only within the boundaries of the private household: Nergiz accompanied her employers to restaurants to look after their child, but food was never ordered for her. Among other kin-​making practices, food-​ sharing behaviour features as one of the oldest models of social connectivity and a strong predictor of familial relatedness. Thus, the narratives of Turkmen migrant women excluded from familial food-​sharing quickly perforate the ‘one of the family’ discourse and suggest that the use of gendered kinship titles for migrant domestic workers is rather a comfort-​making mechanism for employers to use in masking the economic exploitation of women caregivers in their homes, while simultaneously granting them intimate, even if tightly prescribed and subservient, access to their everyday life. The living-​in caregiver arrangement cannot be seen merely as an opportunity for the caregivers to save more money to send back home, nor only as a space of blatant exploitation. Rather, the relationship between the employer and the employee 261

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​

is a complex, situationally navigated ‘working relationship that is characterised by multiple interlocking asymmetries’ (Lutz 2011, p.110). The ‘one of the family’ discourse complicates and blurs the boundaries of the employer-​employee relationship and serves as a concealing frame for the emerging modes of hierarchy in the power relations between the employer and the employee. Hence, in case of Turkmen labour mobility, the domestication of migrant labour and migrants permeates through two overlapping discourses: the state-​promoted rhetoric of ‘two states, one nation’ and the ‘one of the family’ rhetoric at the level of the private household. However, this domestication is negotiated and manoeuvred around in various ways on a daily basis.

‘EXI(GEN)T’ STRATEGIES AND KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS Narratives of Turkmen domestic workers not only point to their acute awareness of their precarious working and living conditions in Turkey and of the domestication of their labour, but also convene the ways in which they navigate these conditions. Many migrant domestic workers manage to negotiate their working hours and duties in the later stages of their employment. Newly arrived migrant women do not usually make strict demands regarding their time and duties, but learn these negotiation strategies from more experienced migrant women workers. For instance, Maya had been mentoring her cousin, Nergiz (30), since her arrival at the end of 2018, and advised her to choose ‘the exit strategy’ and quit her job in cases of disagreements and abusive treatment by her employers: I have been here and worked in the households for 14 years and I know all their tricks. Just the other day, I was in the bedroom cleaning, when my employer called me from the living room and asked me to fetch a remote control which was right beside her on the coach she was sitting on. ‘This is absurd’, I told her [the employer]. I always say: Nergiz, do not do everything they [employers] tell you to do. Her employer made her walk on the carpet with white socks after cleaning and if the sock had any tiny dirt on it, Nergiz had to clean it again. I tell Nergiz all the time, there are plenty of jobs, do not endure all their [employers’] whims. (Maya, Interview, 2019) After three months of exploitative working conditions (including very long working hours, no days off and her employer withholding her salary) Nergiz quit her first job by escaping through the window: ‘I just packed my things, threw them out of the window, and walked out of the door. I could not stay in that house anymore, I just escaped. I did not have a phone at that time, so she [the employer] was not able to find me’ (Nergiz, Interview, March 2020). With Maya’s help, Nergiz found another job as a domestic worker. Similarly, during one of their trips to a holiday resort, Maya’s employers repeatedly extended the duration of their stay, which not only exhausted Maya (who was working without days off), but also disrupted her plans and visits to a doctor. Maya ended up buying her own ticket back to Istanbul and left her employers at their holiday resort. This unexpected ‘exit’ strategy creates disruptions and anxieties in employers’ lives, as they are dependent on the availability and portability of migrant labour. Migrant domestic workers are aware of this anxiety and, from time to time, utilise 262

—​​​​ T u r k m e n m i g r a n t w o r k i n I s t a n b u l —​​​​

it against their employers. Working in one household for a long time is not a very common story. Jemal and her employers did not have big disagreements over the clarity of duties, working conditions, or salary. Despite this, she would utilise the threat of quitting to swiftly end even the smallest of debates. Jemal’s cultural capital as a former teacher, her thoroughness in performing her job, and the emotional connection she built with the child she cared for over the years provide her with the leverage to negotiate her duties, working hours, conditions and salary. The possibility of a ‘quick exit’ (due to the absence of written contracts or a work permit) in some ways keeps the ground stable by potentially depriving employers of available and portable migrant labour. Exit (or the possibility of exit) is not the only strategy of migrant domestic workers. Turkmen migrant domestic workers also set boundaries within the household by voicing their demands or acquiring new skills that make them less disposable. Tanya (58), a nanny from Turkmenistan who previously worked in Russia as a shopkeeper and moved to Istanbul in 2016, was quite flustered at the new ‘tacit’ ask of her employer: My employer brought houseplants last week and was insinuating that I should be looking after them, and I said ‘No, they are your plants; you should look after them.’ These are the small things that make your life even more difficult here, and they are annoying. (Tanya, Interview, October 2019) When I met Tanya on her days off, or on some special days such as birthday celebration gatherings of Turkmen migrant women, her immediate advice to recently arrived women was to set their boundaries from the beginning. Similarly, the set of skills that Maya learned after working in a dietician’s household, such as her knowledge about the nutritional composition of different dishes or ability to cook meals for those who had specific nutritional requirements, helped her to claim higher pay10 and to set firm boundaries in her household tasks. Setting clear boundaries within the private household, whether regarding the proximity of their relationship, the space, time, or duties, is not an easy task, yet it is an important step in the everyday lives of live-​in migrant domestic workers and care providers. These crucial tactics are shared among the tight networks of domestic workers, either on their day-​off gatherings or in online messaging groups on WhatsApp or Imo.

CONCLUSION The liminality of women’s lives in the world of transnational domestic and care work is well documented, even if the lives and work of these women is as neglected in labour laws (Blackett 2019) and academic literature, just as it is in the everyday popular imagination. The navigation of precarity and ambiguity define the migration experience of many Turkmen domestic and care workers in Turkey. These ambiguities are produced by ever-​changing legal regulations that ‘integrate’ ethnic kin into the disposable labour market through the frameworks of ‘two states, one nation’ and ‘one of the family’. The question of uncertainty and precarity for Turkmen migrant women is intrinsically connected to becoming undocumented, as the failure to achieve legal 263

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​

residency status not only exposes Turkmen migrant women to exploitative working conditions and degrading living conditions but also, once deported, limits their possibilities for further mobility. The precarity of Turkmen migrant women’s experience and the ineffectiveness of (state) regulations over their labour also affords them a freedom (albeit a limited one) that migrant women can utilise to marginally improve their working situations. These uncertainties extend from migration policies to the private household. The mode of encounters between Turkish employers and Turkmen domestic workers are shaped by the migration regulations as, for instance, the legal presence of domestic workers depends on their employers’ disposition. Hence, the family and ethnic kinship discourse operates as a framework across various scales: while Turkey frames Turkmen migrants as part of a shared national lineage, employers in Turkey similarly lean towards a discourse of ‘family’ with their live-​in employees. In both cases, however, this integration through domestication seems to trivialise power imbalances that are at work in forms of establishing boundaries of nation, country, home and work. By necessity, migrant workers invent tactics to manoeuvre around these domestication frameworks, the structural uncertainties and their relationships with the employers and, in some cases, leverage these tactics to their advantage. Precarious working and living conditions increase the need for survival strategies that rely on social, neighbour, friendship and kinship networks. Turkmen migrant domestic and care workers depend heavily on these tight knowledge-​sharing networks to navigate through uncertainties in their migration journeys.

NOTES 1 These numbers depict the steady growth in migration from Turkmenistan since 2010. For more detailed information, see: https://​aileve​cali​sma.gov.tr/​istati​stik​ler/​cali​sma-​hay​ati-​ist​atis​ tikl​eri/​resmi-​ist​atis​tik-​progr​ami/​yaban​cila​rin-​cali​sma-​izinl​eri/​ 2 For more information see: https://​migr​atio​ndat​apor​tal.org/​data?i=​sto​ck_​a​bs_​&t=​2020& cm49=​795 3 The xenophobia and racism against Central Asians in Russia have been exacerbated since the fall of the Soviet Union. For more on racism in Russia, see: Zakharov (2015). 4 The visa-​free regime between the two countries was cancelled in September 2022. The reinstatement of the visa regime added another layer of mobility obstruction but the analysis of the new regulation is beyond the purview of this chapter. 5 For more on the influence of Turkish soap operas in the region, see Rousselın (2013; Yörük and Vatikiotis (2013). 6 The level of the fines depends on the number of days of the overstay. For more information on entry bans or fines for violation of the legal stay in Turkey, see https://​en.goc.gov.tr/​ statem​ent-​regard​ing-t​ he-​proh​ibit​ion-​of-​entry-​that-​shall-​be-​appl​ied-​to-​the-​for​eign​ers-​who-​ viol​ate-​the-​right-​to-​legal-​stay 7 Landlords in Turkey ask for copies of residence permits when they rent their apartments to migrants. 8 Büyükçekmece 2,5 yaşındaki oğlumuzun bakımında bana yardım edecek kalan zamanlar da ev işleri ütü temizlik vs yapabilecek hafta içi izin kullanan tercihen bekar 25 yaş civarı yardımcı arıyorum maaş izin içinde 2800. 9 Beykoz Acarkent 4 katlı villa (ama üst kat kullanılmıyor) 5 kişilik ailesinde ev işlerini yapacak 30 yaş aşmamış bekar, Türkçe bilen, kaçak olmayan, aile ile tatile gidebilen bayan eleman. Evde kedi var. *Yemek yapmayacaksınız* Yatılı 3400tl. 264

—​​​​ T u r k m e n m i g r a n t w o r k i n I s t a n b u l —​​​​ 10 The salaries of migrant domestic workers vary in response to several conditions (the workload, the number of people in the household, the number of children/​sick people who need care services, etc.) and fluctuates between $350 and $700. The average salaries for live-​in domestic workers are around $400–​500.

REFERENCES Akalın, A. (2007). ‘Hired as a caregiver, demanded as a housewife: Becoming a migrant domestic worker in Turkey’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 14(3): 209–​225. Doi:10.1177/​ 1350506807079011. Akalın, A. (2015). ‘Motherhood as the value of labour: The migrant domestic workers’ market in Turkey’. Australian Feminist Studies 30(83): 65–​81. Akalın, A. (2018). ‘Affective precarity: The migrant domestic worker’. South Atlantic Quarterly 117(2): 420–​429. Doi:10.1215/​00382876-​4374933. Anthias, F. (2012). ‘Transnational mobilities, migration research and intersectionality’. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 2(2): 102–​110. Barua, P., Waldrop, A. and Haukanes, H. (2017). ‘From benevolent maternalism to the market logic: Exploring discursive boundary making in domestic work relations in India’. Critical Asian Studies 49(4): 481–​500. Blackett, A. (2019). Everyday transgressions: Domestic workers’ transnational challenge to international labor law. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Chin, C.B. (2013). Cosmopolitan sex workers: Women and migration in a global city. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cogan, K. (2019). ‘Death in Turkey shines light on Central Asian domestic workers’. Eurasianet, 21 October. Available at: https://​eur​asia​net.org/​death-​in-​tur​key-​shi​nes-​light-​on-​cent​ral-​ asian-​domes​tic-​work​ers (Accessed: 31 January 2021). Colen, S. (1995). ‘Like a mother to them’: Stratified reproduction and West Indian child care workers and employers in New York. In F. Ginsberg & R. Rapp (Eds.), Conceiving the new world order (pp. 78–​102). Berkeley: University of California Press. Constable, N. (1999). ‘At home but not at home: Filipina narratives of ambivalent returns’. Cultural Anthropology 14(2): 203–​228. Doi:10.1525/​can.1999.14.2.203. Donato, K.M., Gabaccia, D., Holdaway, J., Manalansan, M. and Pessar, P. (2006). ‘A glass half full? Gender in migration studies’. International Migration Review 40(1): 3–​26. Erder, S. and Kaska, S. (2012). ‘Turkey in the new migration era: Migrants between regularity and irregularity’, pp.113–​132 in Paçacı Elitok, S. and Straubhaar, T. (eds.) Turkey, migration and the EU . Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Gamburd, M.R. (2000). The kitchen spoon’s handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s migrant housemaids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hondagneu-​Sotelo, P. (2000). ‘Feminism and migration’. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 571(1): 107–​120. Hondagneu-​ Sotelo, P. (2007). Doméstica: Immigrant workers cleaning and caring in the shadows of affluence, with a new preface. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. IOM (International Organization for Migration) (2021). https://​migr​atio​ndat​apor​tal.org/​ data?i=​sto​ck_​a​bs_​&t=​2020&cm49=​795 (Accessed: 5 April 2023). Kalaycıoğlu, S. and Rittersberger-​Tılıç, H. (2000). Evlerimizdeki Gündelikçi Kadınlar [The live-​out workers in our homes]. Ankara: Su Yayınları. Lee, M., Johnson, M., and McCahill, M. (2018). ‘Race, gender, and surveillance of migrant domestic workers in Asia’, pp.13–​28 in Bosworth, M., Parmar, A. and Vázquez, Y. (eds.) Race, criminal justice, and migration control–​ Enforcing the boundaries of belonging. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 265

—​​​​ M a r h a b o S a p a r o v a —​​​ Lutz, H. (2011). The new maids: Transnational women and the care economy. London: Zed Books Ltd. Lutz, H. and Palenga-​Möllenbeck, E. (2011). ‘Care, gender and migration: Towards a theory of transnational domestic work migration in Europe’. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 19(3): 349–​364. Marti, G. (2019). ‘The effects of multilevel governance on the rights of migrant domestic workers in Singapore’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45(8): 1345–​1360. Morokvasic, M. (1984). ‘Women in migration’. The International Migration Review 18: 882–​1382. Ong, A. (1991). ‘The gender and labor politics of postmodernity’. Annual Review of Anthropology 20(1): 279–​309. Özbay, F. (2007). ‘Kölelikten Evlatlıga: Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Kölecilik ve Dönüş̧ümü [From slaves to adopted daughters: Slavery and its transformation in the Ottoman Empire].’, paper presented to the L’Esclavage africain sous l’Empire ottoman et les adoptions d’enfants d’esclaves’ Conference, Paris. Özbay, F. (2012) ‘Türkiye’de Ev Emeğinin Dönüşümü: Göç Ettirilen Kölelerden Kaçak Göçmen İs ̧çilere [The transformation of domestic work in Turkey: From displaced slaves to illegal migrant workers]’, pp.116–​159 in Makal, A. and Toksöz, G. (eds.) Geçmişten Günümüze Türkiye’de Kadın Emeği [Women’s Labour in Turkey, From Past to Present]. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Yayınevi. Parla, A. (2019). Precarious hope: migration and the limits of belonging in Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Parrenas, R.S. (2008). The force of domesticity: Filipina migrants and globalization. New York: NYU Press. PMM (Presidency of Migration Management) (2023). www.goc.gov.tr/​ika​met-​izinl​eri (Accessed: 5 April 2023). Rousselın, M. (2013).‘Turkish soap power: International perspectives and domestic paradoxes’. Euxeinos 10: 16–​22. Salzinger, L. (2003). Genders in production: Making workers in Mexico’s global factories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Solari, C.D. (2017). On the shoulders of grandmothers: Gender, migration, and post-​Soviet nation-​state building. London: Routledge. Toksöz, G. (2020). ‘The gendered impacts of migration and welfare regimes: Migrant women workers in Turkey’, pp.69–​92 in Williams, L., Coşkun, E. and Kaşka, S. (eds.) Women, Migration and Asylum in Turkey . Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan/​Springer. Toksöz, G., Erdoğdu, S. and Kaşka, S. (2012). ‘Türkiye’ye Düzensiz Emek Göçü ve Göçmenlerin İşgücü Piyasasındaki Durumları’, IOM Türkiye, Proje Raporları. TurksStat (2019). https://​data.tuik.gov.tr/​Bul​ten/​Index?p=​Intern​atio​nal-​Migrat​ion-​Sta​tist​ics-​ 2019-​33709 (Accessed: 5 April 2023). Yörük, Z. and Vatikiotis, P. (2013). ‘Turkey, the Middle East & the media | Soft power or illusion of hegemony: The case of the Turkish soap opera “Colonialism”’. International Journal of Communication 7: 2361–​2385. Yuval-​Davis, N. (2006). ‘Intersectionality and feminist politics’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 193–​209. Zakharov, N. (2015). Race and racism in Russia. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan/​Springer. Zulfiqar, G.M. (2019). ‘Dirt, foreignness, and surveillance: The shifting relations of domestic work in Pakistan’. Organization 26(3): 321–​336.

266

PART IV

NAVIGATING THE STATE

In one sense, the anthropology of Central Asia hardly needs a separate section on ‘navigating the state’. State effects, whether in the form of Soviet and successor-​state economic policies (G. Botoeva, Trevisani), in violent struggles for political power in Afghanistan (Murtazashvili) and Tajikistan (Scarborough), or in attempts to control particular religious groups (Nasritdinov) are evident on every page of this book. In other words, for twentieth-​century Central Asia, it has never been an option to analytically ‘ignore’ state structures and actors. This section features a political anthropology that takes the experience of statehood head-​on, as representation, repression, but also promoting certain forms of cultural production. Anthropologists have contributed substantial ethnographic work in the region to notions of citizenship, border-​making and large infrastructure and representational projects, such as the new Kazakhstani capital Astana. There is also an important body of work that critically engages with notions of citizenship, ‘national culture’, ‘civil society’ and development policy (see the Introduction to this volume). Perhaps surprisingly for the post-​Soviet context, there has however been relatively little work directly on state bureaucracies, welfare, corruption, the military, or political elites: this is a field wide open for investigation. Neither the anthropology of planning, nor of influential policy frameworks such as the Chinese ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ have received much attention to date, this work being left mostly to other disciplines, it seems. Proving an exception to this general picture, Agnieszka Joniak-​Lüthi’s contribution traces the inadvertent effect of new state-​sponsored transport infrastructures in Xinjiang. These initiatives feature glossy images of ‘free’ highways praised for developing the local economy. The many discriminatory identity checks at roadblocks are not featured, nor how new train lines facilitate mass migration of Han Chinese to the region. Examining these effects, the author shows how transport systems in fact intersect with social relations and ethnicised hierarchies, making long-​distance bus routes for example into predominantly Uyghur and lower-​class travel infrastructures. Elena Borisova’s chapter on northern Tajikistan turns to a less material form of state intervention: language ideologies. Describing language hierarchies around literary Tajik, Uzbek and Russian, she explores how families negotiate schooling choices, work and migrant opportunities in a fast-​changing arena of valuing different kinds of proficiency. While the Tajikistani government promotes a new kind of literary DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-21

267

—​​​​ N a v i g a t i n g t h e s t a t e —​​​

Tajik that few feel confident in, Uzbek is demoted as ‘useless’, not offering any of the mobilities that other languages promise. Like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan has pursued highly interventionist policies on ‘national’ culture. In ‘Sonic Statecrafting’, Kerstin Klenke analyses the surprisingly meteoric career of the Soviet ‘estrada’ musical genre in Uzbekistan. In the early twenty-​first century, the Uzbekistani government embraced ‘national estrada’ as a sonic incarnation of state ideology. Kerstin Klenke here argues for the continued significance of Soviet understandings in connecting music, performers and the state. The government’s reliance on estrada for patriotic moral messaging both gives performers enormous status and visibility, as well as submitting them to a strict and controversial licencing system. Malika Bahovadinova’s analyses of international migration policies that aim to ‘prepare’ migrant workers equally highlights government attempts to shape desirable worker-​subjects and citizens. Affecting up to 6 million Central Asian migrant workers in Russia alone, she describes how policies such as compulsory health insurance which are purported to benefit migrants, actually increase their precarity. Malika Bahovadinova describes the working contexts of local NGO workers, who may themselves be subject to precarity. In their work, appreciating the vulnerability of migrant workers transforms into figuring them as ignorant and potentially endangering self and others. As they articulate technologies to shape ideal migrant workers, she finds avowedly supportive international NGOs create virtually unattainable demands, and spaces for state administrations to generate income from migrants who ‘fall short’ of these expectations.This volume’s Part IV concludes with a searing analysis of the violent paternalism in Xinjiang by Darren Byler. Since 2014, over a million Muslims in northwest China have disappeared into a massive internment camp system, with many more subjected to home inspections and street controls. As the Chinese government tries to erase indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh identities, people experience ‘re-​education time’ as a trauma-​filled temporality in which their human autonomy becomes highly restricted. A surveillance system forces Han and Muslim citizens into coercive pseudo-​familial relations, often providing opportunities for sexual predation and pressures that break families apart. As in the case of the migration bureaucracies described by Bahovadinova, we find here a violent system intimately affecting millions of people while purporting to act in the interests of ‘peace’ and ‘development’. As a coda to introducing political anthropology in Central Asia, it should be noted that none of these essays reflect on the recent intensification of violence in Xinjiang, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Here, levels of violence and repression have reached such a pitch that anthropologists largely find fieldwork personally unsafe, and interactions too risky for their interlocutors. Meanwhile, the Covid-​19 pandemic has limited observation and interaction with the important protest movements and social unrest emerging in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 2022. We look forward to ethnographic analyses that make use of the available arenas of interaction online and in diasporas.

268

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ETHNICISING INFRASTRUCTURE Roads, railways and differential mobility in northwest China Agnieszka Joniak-​Lüthi INTRODUCTION As recently as the late 1990s, travelling in northwest China outside of urban areas was mostly done on sand, stone and gravel roads, or through a roadless terrain across the highland steppes and rocky deserts. The newly built roads we now see, by contrast, are smooth and black, and exude state confidence. Following the investment in infrastructure that formed part of the Open Up the West (Ch.: Xibu Da Kaifa) programme announced in 1999, and which extended to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) commencing in 2013, many thousands of kilometres of roads and railways have been built in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The material changes brought about by this infrastructural investment are impressive to some, while intimidating to others. Maps of Xinjiang portray roads and railways as continuous, confident lines apparently accessible in the same way to all (Joniak-​Lüthi 2020, p.2). Photographic depictions of the new roads found on the website of the China Road and Bridge Corporation (Zhongguo Luqiao), China State Construction (Zhongjian) and other Chinese companies also confront the viewer with images of smooth and open roads stretching off to the horizon (see Figure 18.1). The status of such roads is ambiguous: do the images reveal roads already constructed, or merely a photoshopped projection of an infrastructural ‘future perfect’ (Hetherington 2019)? As with maps, no human or animal presence disturbs the geometry of their clean lines. However, as I explore in this chapter, the everyday practice of travel is significantly more complex than is suggested by such images. Xinjiang is inhabited by various population groups including Uyghurs, Han, Dungan/​Hui, Kazakhs, Mongols and Kyrgyz. Mobility here is stratified along ethnic and class lines. An individual’s minzu status (a collective ascription modelled on Soviet nationality) as well as their household registration (Ch. hukou) and paternal ancestral origin (Ch. ji) determine where, how far, and how quickly an individual is effectively able to travel.1 The maps and official images of connectivity never show the hundreds of roadblocks that exist along these smooth new roads, sometimes even preceding their construction (see Figure 18.2). Roadblocks are located at county borders, on access roads to cities and towns, along border roads, expressways, provincial roads and village roads. These roadblocks differ in their appearance. Sometimes there is a DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-22

269

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

Figure 18.1  Screenshot of the China Road and Bridge Corporation website. Source: www.crbc.com/​site/​crb​cEN/​index.html

Figure 18.2  A roadblock under construction on the Naryn–​Kucha road. Photo: Agnieszka Joniak-​Lüthi, 2015. 270

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​

rope spread across the road between two chairs on which police officers or informal militias sit and control the traffic. At other locations, they are firmly inscribed in the place: marked by barriers, roadside shelters and buildings. These roadblocks filter people according to their minzu, their hukou status, and place of origin, making travel particularly difficult for Uyghur and other Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang, who have a rural household registration and paternal origin in Xinjiang. In 2015, two years after the launch of the BRI, the stated aim of which is to facilitate mobility across Eurasia, the filtering and control of movement in Xinjiang intensified with the introduction of ‘convenient citizen cards’ (Ch. bianminka) for all those with paternal ancestry in Xinjiang. Anyone wishing to travel beyond the immediate vicinity of their town or village had to apply to the local government for this card. The intensity of the checks and the presence of heavily armed police personnel has increased over roughly the same period; even between my research visits in 2015 and 2016, the change was significant. Since then, the proliferation of roadblocks outside urban areas is paralleled by the construction of police stations at nearly every crossing in cities, towns and villages. This is accompanied by omnipresent surveillance cameras and regular iris, ID and mobile phone scans at the entrance to almost all buildings. After the appointment of Chen Quanguo as the Party Secretary of Xinjiang in 2016, restrictions on travel for the Muslim minzu were further intensified, as have their mass detention in camps and prisons, and other forms of exclusion and state violence (Zenz 2018; Byler 2019; Leibold 2019; Steenberg and Rippa 2019). Hence, at the time of writing in 2020, the infrastructure to go potentially anywhere in Xinjiang is in place, but few Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other members of the Muslim population of more than 11 million people are actually able to travel freely. In addition to those who cannot move because they are detained, others are quasi-​incarcerated in their villages and towns and are not free to journey on any kind of road either, whether old and potholed, or new and asphalted. It is this relationship between individual’s minzu or nationality status and transport infrastructure in Xinjiang that forms the empirical core of this chapter. Minzu are population categories modelled on Soviet nationalities. Fifty-​ six minzu were officially recognised by the Chinese state in the 1950s, among them Mongols, Dai, Miao, Kazakhs and Uyghurs. In some cases, the ascription of minzu labels reflected the wishes of the group in question, while in others they were ascribed arbitrarily. Whatever their history, since the 1950s these identity categories have –​in analytical terms –​become ‘ethnicised’: they have become enmeshed in everyday identity processes that can be analytically rendered as processes of ethnicity (Joniak-​Lüthi 2015). In the present chapter, I thus conceptualise minzu as an ethnic ascription. My aim here is to explore the associations of transport infrastructure in Xinjiang –​which in the popular understanding comprises both immobile components such as roads and railway tracks, and mobile elements like buses and trains –​with those ethnic identities and the role of infrastructure in everyday processes of ethnicity. In my analysis, I draw on material collected during ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Xinjiang in 2011–​2012 and two-​month research visits in 2015 and 2016. The main language of my research was Chinese, as my work originally focused on Han Chinese migrants and settlers in Xinjiang. I used Chinese when interviewing my Han Chinese research participants; then, as my research expanded beyond its original scope, I also used it to interview Uyghur government and Party officials, as 271

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

well as many middle-​class Uyghurs who were comfortable in that language. Other conversations were conducted in Uyghur, in which case an Uyghur colleague or friend acted as interpreter. My own Uyghur was sufficient for basic conversations. In the cities, some of my Uyghur interlocutors (among those aged between 20 and 45) expressed a wish to speak German or English with me in order to practice their language skills, but also to emphasise their sense of linguistic connectivity with the world beyond China’s borders. During my research, which focused on Uyghur-​dominated southern Xinjiang, I conducted around four hundred conversations about infrastructure and travel with my Han and Uyghur interlocutors in restaurants, cafes, at their homes, or in parks. I also travelled regularly using various means of transport: trains, sleeper and other long-​distance buses, collective taxis, cabs and the private cars of my Uyghur and Han interlocutors, as well as those belonging to my closer Uyghur and Han friends. The aim of this ethnography ‘on the road’ was to gain insight into the mobility practices of my research participants, in addition to listening to their stories. I aimed to learn about travel through different eyes, including Han and Uyghur villagers, government officials, businesspeople, migrants and students. Furthermore, I walked extensively along roads. Being a passenger and walking were both crucial for experiencing the realities of travel with my body: for example, the sense of insecurity at roadblocks, or the soporific smoothness of an asphalt surface after a long ride on a stony track. The feeling of the soles of my shoes melting on an asphalt road across the Taklamakan Desert –​like the tyres of those few trucks that dared to drive it during the day –​was most insightful, too. Travelling in various types of vehicles and on foot was also essential for understanding the satisfaction of Uyghur farmers when, rather than tramping through the dust, they could take an asphalt road to and from their fields. Interviews, observations and those embodied experiences were all necessary to grasp how conflicted many of my Uyghur interlocutors felt: their satisfaction with some practices that the new roads made possible went hand-​in -​hand with insecurity and discontent about what roads and railways ‘do’ across other scales, such as facilitating the extraction of Xinjiang’s minerals for the Chinese national economy, or exacerbating Han Chinese migration to the region. As scholars have found elsewhere, transport infrastructure in Xinjiang simultaneously delights and disenchants (Dalakoglou 2010; Harvey and Knox 2012). It is a site onto which hopes and dreams of better futures, as well as fears and insecurities, are all projected.

TRANSPORT AND TRAVEL IN XINJIANG In technocratic terms, the expansion of the road network in Xinjiang has been impressive, especially since the year 2000. The total length of roads increased from around 33,000km in 1999 to 186,000km by 2017.2 Moreover, many kilometres of existing roads have been upgraded and asphalted. Railroads have expanded at a slower pace than highways, but in southern Xinjiang, the Urumchi–​Kashgar line (1446km) was completed in 1999 and in 2011 extended to Hotan (485km) (see Figure 18.3). In 2018, construction began on the 825km section linking Hotan and Charklik/​ Ruoqiang, where the line connects with the roughly 1200km Golmud–​Korla section.3 In addition to these railroads, a resource-​extraction line between Kumul/​Hami and 272

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​

the centre of the Lop Nor Basin has been constructed to facilitate the transportation of potash extracted in Lop Nor and vital in the production of fertilizers for Chinese agriculture. Although significant expansion of low-​quality roads built through the mass mobilisation of unremunerated non-​professionals had taken place already in the 1950s and 1960s, the prioritisation of eastern China for infrastructural investment until the late 1990s was reflected in the overall poor condition of transport infrastructure and long travel times in western China. The announcement of the Open Up the West programme in 1999 signalled a change. The programme explicitly targeted the ‘development’ (Ch. fazhan) and ‘opening up’ (Ch. kaifa) of the west, including border regions such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, but also large agricultural provinces like Sichuan, mountainous Guizhou and the central Chinese province of Shaanxi. The meaning and implementation of this state-​led programme and its outcomes have been critically debated (cf. Yeh 2007; Woodworth 2011), yet it seems safe to say that increasing western China’s infrastructural integration with eastern provinces has been among its main aims. The launch of Open Up the West effected an increase in infrastructure construction which, based on accounts of local inhabitants, further intensified in the twenty-​first century with the introduction of a flurry of state-​ driven urbanisation programmes, the construction of the so-​called ‘socialist villages’ in the countryside, the building of pipelines for resource imports from Central Asia and resource transfers from Xinjiang to eastern China, the East–​West assistance programme (Ch.: Duikou Zhiyuan) and eventually the BRI.

Figure 18.3  Map of Xinjiang. 273

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

THE UNPLANNED EFFECTS OF INFRASTRUCTURE In China, as elsewhere across the world, new roads and railways are discussed in state and corporate language as harbingers of development, modernity and prosperity for all. In Xinjiang, the discourse about the work purportedly done by infrastructure is a fusion of globally circulating modernisation theory and Chinese social, cultural and material evolutionism inspired most prominently by Lewis Henry Morgan. Han Chinese supremacism and racism (Leibold 2010; Cheng 2017), as well as violent state paternalism, also underpin the top-​down development programmes in which infrastructure construction plays a key role. Xinjiang’s roadsides and highway bridges are decorated with ever larger banners telling readers that ‘If you want to become wealthy, build a road first’ (Yaoxiang fu, xian xiulu), or exhorting onlookers: ‘Let’s develop Xinjiang’s transport industry, let’s develop a “moderately prosperous society” ’ (Fazhan Xinjiang jiaotong qiye, quanmian fazhan xiaokang shehui). Transport is seen to bring about both material and metaphysical transformations. One banner exhorts, ‘If we want the economy to develop, we must develop transport first’ (Jingji yao fazhan, jiaotong bi xian xing). Another states, poetically, ‘When roads are built, feelings can connect; when roads are built, wealth can travel along them’ (Lu tong qing tong, lu tong fu tong). Such visions also animated many of my conversations. As Mr Abdukerim,4 one of my government interlocutors in Korla who drove me around to show off the ‘progress’, told me in a markedly familiar turn of phrase: The government’s plan is to connect all villages by roads, and to link them to water pipelines and TV broadcasting. Look, this road was a dirt track until recently, now it is paved –​see how convenient it has become. There is a saying in Uyghur: ‘If you desire wealth, build roads first’ (Yao xiang fu, xian xiu lu). ‘When there are no roads, people can’t connect’ (Lu bu tong, ren ye bu tong).’ Roads bring education, economic development. Look, there is a taxi in front of us. Previously there were no taxis in the countryside –​no taxi would come down here, the roads were too bad. It has become so convenient now. People can go to the bazaar, sell their products. Now the government cares about the countryside … The countryside used to have only dirt roads, and the towns had asphalt. Now it’s the same for all, the differences were evened out. Everybody has asphalt now. (Fieldwork interview, Korla, September 2012) In the roadside slogans above, and in Mr Abdukerim’s statement seasoned with those very same slogans, technologies such as roads are discursively represented as ‘clean’ objects separated from the politics of the everyday (cf. Appel 2012). If agentive, they are thought of as having effects that can be clearly defined and delineated: they bring wealth, and develop the local economy and education. In this chapter, my aim is to complicate this understanding of the effects of infrastructure. I approach infrastructure such as roads as sites in which specific social relations intersect and accumulate over time, forming a unique social-​material-​political terrain (Joniak-​Lüthi 2019, p.145). Harvey, Bruun Jensen and Morita encourage us to think of infrastructure as ‘extended material assemblages that generate effects and structure social relations, either through engineered … or non-​engineered … activities’ (2017, p.5). Thinking 274

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​

of infrastructure as an accumulation of relations, which render it a unique social-​ political-​cultural ‘terrain’ that affects individual experience, helps to make sense of the research material that I present below. Harvey, Bruun Jensen and Morita’s definition, on the other hand, illuminates how the nominal effects of infrastructure –​ what it is expected to do –​are often overwhelmed by the flurry of unforeseen and unplanned effects and resonances that any infrastructure generates in its everyday life. The ethnicisation of infrastructure in Xinjiang –​that is, the association of specific transport infrastructure with a particular ethnicity, and the ascription of quasi-​ethnic identities to buses and trains, roads and railway tracks –​is one such effect. In the analysis that follows, I focus on transport infrastructure as a site for discussing ethnicity and negotiating identities. I also consider the structural reasons for the ethnicisation of transport infrastructure in southern Xinjiang, alongside the actual practices of travel. Further, I discuss the ways in which infrastructure elicits commentary, especially among my Uyghur interlocutors, about economic inequalities, structural discrimination and undesired ethnic proximations, and conclude by showing how these associations continue to fuel efforts to mark and maintain ethnic boundaries.

TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE AND ETHNICITY In regions ridden with ethnic conflict, infrastructure rarely escapes unscathed. In southern Xinjiang, one topic that came up frequently in conversations about travel with both Uyghurs and Han Chinese was their preference for one or another means of transport. The debate typically centred on trains as opposed to buses. I was told by the overwhelming majority of my Han interlocutors that they preferred to travel by train rather than long-​distance and sleeper buses. The majority of Uyghur interlocutors, on the other hand, emphasised that they preferred travelling by bus; in fact, they found trains inconvenient. Remarkably, a few of my Han interlocutors who had grown up in southern Xinjiang also explicitly stated that they enjoyed travelling on long-​distance buses. There were also gender and class differences within these preferences. For example, middle-​class Uyghurs and Han expressed a preference for planes, or for driving their own car. State employees of both minzu, who can claim expenses for train tickets but not bus journeys, highlighted the comfort of trains. And for young, unmarried Uyghur women travelling alone for work or study, planes were considered the least morally ambiguous environment. Actual use of transport was much more diverse and flexible than the discourse surrounding it and decisions regarding actual travel were made pragmatically, depending on the concrete situation. Both the Uyghurs and the Han agreed that sleeper and other long-​distance buses were faster in southern Xinjiang than the train. While the 1000km between Urumchi and Aqsu took around 21 hours by train in good weather, a sleeper bus could cover the distance in 12 or 13 hours –​unless the drivers had extra freight to deliver in the towns along the way, in which case the journey could become significantly longer. However, trains are sometimes late too. Particularly in winter and spring, strong winds, dusty weather and sandstorms can block travel for many hours. Moreover, southern Xinjiang relies upon a single-​ track railway, which means that trains can only pass each other at the rare stations. Additionally, freight trains appear to enjoy priority over passenger trains in Xinjiang, a fact which further slows down travel. 275

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

Despite their slow pace, the trains were always full. At the time of my research, Uyghurs used them as a cheap means of transport between the cities of southern Xinjiang, with the majority of Uyghur passengers occupying the cheapest class (Ch. yingzuo, ‘hard seats’). Han dominated in the other two classes: hard sleeper (Ch. yingwo) and soft sleeper (Ch. ruanwo), and were usually reimbursed by government and Party institutions, as well as companies sending their employees on delegations. Flying was theoretically the fastest option but had its limitations. There were no direct flights between the cities of southern Xinjiang at the time of my research; all routes went via Urumchi first. Flying was also expensive compared to hard seat and hard sleeper classes on trains and in buses. In dust storms and sandstorms, or during strong winds (all frequent occurrences in southern Xinjiang), planes would not take off for days. While some middle-​class Uyghurs expressed a preference for travelling in their own cars, in fact very few private vehicles could be spotted on the expressways between cities in southern Xinjiang. The distances between conurbations are large (on average 200–​300km), the landscape is dull, and summer temperatures are very high. In addition, dusty weather and sandstorms, which occur on one third of days throughout the year, turn driving alone into a high-​risk activity. The often monochrome, yellowish landscape is considered dangerously monotonous by drivers and the possibility of getting stranded without any immediate access to help is a factor carefully considered when planning a car journey. Differences in actual ways of travelling notwithstanding, the opinions articulated were clear: when asked about their travel preferences, most of the Han interviewees argued that trains were better than buses because they were ‘convenient’ (Ch. fangbian) and ‘clean’ (Ch. ganjing). The majority of my Uyghur research participants claimed, very much to the contrary, that sleeper and other long-​distance buses were fast, convenient and clean, while trains were uncomfortable and dirty. The following excerpt from a conversation with an Uyghur driver of a collective taxi during a 300km ride between Tashkorgan and Kashgar is one example of this widespread idea: Agnieszka:  How do you usually travel? Uyghur taxi driver:  I drive my own car, this is the most convenient way. When you are tired, you can stop and sleep, you don’t have to travel with many people. I hate trains. Trains are so crowded, there are so many people, they smell so badly (chou de hen). In the past, trains used to be really stinky. Many Han people travelled by train … Now it is better, trains have become cleaner, but all the same I don’t like them … Buses are better than trains; there are fewer people, they are less crowded. (Fieldwork interview, Kashgar, August 2012) This extract shows the typical course of many conversations. We usually started with actual practices, after which the conversation would spontaneously turn to a discussion of preferences and associations. As this dialogue illustrates, trains were largely associated with Han travel. Long-​distance buses, on the other hand, were typically described as Uyghur spaces by both Uyghurs and Han. Further, the above conversation was also characteristic in terms of how it mapped notions of purity and dirtiness onto transport infrastructures, a discourse that also manifests in the conversation between a Han businessman from Wenzhou in eastern China and a Uyghur bus driver on a bus from Aqsu to Hotan, which I recount below. The Han businessman was on 276

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​

his first journey to Hotan to prospect for business opportunities. He was interested in land prices, date plantations and jade, for which Hotan is famous. This Han man and I were sitting at the front of the bus, entertaining the Uyghur bus driver with conversation and doing our best to keep him awake during the monotonous seven-​hour ride across the desert. Conversation among the three of us drifted between the topics of the increasing temperature on the bus, the broken AC and bodily odours, but as with so many others, it took an unexpected turn: Han businessman: I came to Xinjiang by plane. When I first arrived, it was difficult. There are many Uyghurs here. I wasn’t used to that … At the beginning, I had problems tolerating the way Uyghurs smell. For instance, like our driver here. Uyghur bus driver: For you, our washing habits are difficult to accept. For us, other things are difficult to accept. For example, we don’t dare to travel by train (Ch. women bu gan shang huoche). You [Han] do everything in one place there: eat, pee, shit, use your hands without washing them. For us this is insufferable, we find it disgusting. (Fieldwork interview, Aqsu–​Hotan bus, June 2011) This chat between total strangers reveals that perceived differences do not necessarily preclude other forms of cordiality. The shared aim of crossing the desert safely and the shared experience of unbearable heat in the confined space of the bus made the words, which in other circumstances could cause offence, harmless. Both men smiled during the conversation, which after a few minutes moved smoothly to a new topic, namely that mothers in both Uyghur and Han society do not enjoy due respect. The two exchanged telephone numbers at the end of the trip in expectation of undertaking some potential future business together. Similarly to a number of other Uyghur interlocutors, the two Uyghur drivers cited above both regarded trains as uncomfortable, even disgusting. When speaking Chinese, they referred to trains as ‘inconvenient’ (bu fangbian): a term used to describe situations that do not feel right and are not in accordance with popular norms of what is proper. For example, a Uyghur colleague of mine said that it was ‘inconvenient’ for her to attend the wedding of her Han workmate, where pork would be served and people would be drinking heavily. That rail travel was perceived as similarly morally ambiguous by many of my Uyghur interlocutors was connected to the train’s popular association with Han-​ness: travelling by train would bring Uyghurs into an undesired close proximity to Han, inserting them into a Han space. As the opinion expressed by the bus driver above reflects, even the standard, China-​wide design of the train carriage itself, in which the bathrooms are located right next to the seating and sleeping compartments, could be considered improper. In long-​distance buses, which in southern Xinjiang are largely owned and operated by Uyghurs, the toilet issue is handled very differently: the onboard toilets typically go unused and the bathroom-​by-​design is refunctioned into additional luggage space. To provide some measure of comfort, buses simply stop from time to time at roadside toilet facilities. Opinions suggesting that the Chinese language-​dominated environment of the train felt uncomfortable, that the train was full of ‘unfamiliar people’ and that the food served and consumed on trains ‘smelled strange’ (i.e., was haram) were 277

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

regularly aired by my Uyghur interlocutors. Consider the following statement from Mrs Raihan, an elderly Uyghur woman born in Aqsu, a government employee at the time of our conversation, whom I met for dinner at her home: Agnieszka: Do you fly when you travel in Xinjiang? Mrs Raihan: Yes, I do. But I tell you that it is not a nice thing, there are only Han on the plane, no one to talk to. That is why I like travelling by long-​distance bus. You can chat, you can ask the drivers to stop for prayer, and they might do it. Of course, they also follow a timetable but it is much more flexible … Uyghurs like to travel by bus. On the train we feel uncomfortable … On the train everything is in Chinese. All the announcements are in Chinese and food is not halal. (Fieldwork interview, Urumchi, August 2015) When we met again sometime later for another long conversation, Mrs. Raihan asked me: Do you know this little mocking rhyme from back in the day? It went like this: ‘As soon as the train signal sounds, Henan [people] arrive in Xinjiang, a pole and two baskets on their shoulders, they loudly cry: “Come and buy baby chickens! [For only] one kuai three”.’ Mrs Raihan recounted that this verse was popular in the 1960s when the railway from eastern China first reached Urumchi. For her, it demonstrated that right from the beginning, trains in Xinjiang were associated with Han settlers from eastern China, and not only by Uyghurs but also by the local Han (Bendi Hanzu) –​that is, those Han who already lived in Xinjiang before 1949, or who had settled across Xinjiang in Uyghur towns and villages following the Communist takeover. She continued: ‘this rhyme is originally in Chinese, it was invented by the local Han who –​like us –​didn’t like the new Han migrants, many of whom came from Henan Province.’ This association between the railway and the Han settlement of Xinjiang still prevails. An excerpt from a conversation with Mrs Adalet, an elderly Uyghur woman from Aqsu, offers an example of how the link is typically made: Mrs Adalet:  Aqsu has had a train line for a little over a decade [since 1999]. Since then, many Han started to come. Agnieszka:  And before that? Were they not coming by bus? Mrs Adalet:  No, there were very few of them. I don’t know why. Maybe they like to come in large groups by train. (Fieldwork interview, Aqsu, November 2011) As I discussed the extension of the railway to Hotan with Mr Memet, a local Uyghur businessman, he offered a similar explanation: Agnieszka:  I hear that Hotan has a new train line. Mr Memet:  Yes, now even more Han will come here; they always follow the train line. (Fieldwork interview, Hotan, June 2011) 278

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​

My Han Chinese interlocutors also associated trains with Han migrants, but their observation of this connection was not accompanied by signs of visible frustration, as was the case for my Uyghur interlocutors. For example, when I inquired as to why I was so often unable to purchase train tickets (they seemed always to be sold out), Mrs. Xie, the Han owner of a bookstore that I frequented, replied: In September it is difficult [to buy train tickets] because [Han] cotton-​pickers are coming [from other provinces]. The government even reserves whole trains for them from their place of origin to Aqsu, or further afield. About 300,000 people are needed in Xinjiang every year for the cotton-​picking season. Next there is the October national holiday and train tickets are again hard to get hold of. Millions of migrant workers all over China go home for a holiday, including those in Xinjiang. Then, in November and December, the cotton-​pickers and construction workers go back to their home provinces for the winter and train tickets will once more be sold out. (Fieldwork interview, Urumchi, August 2015) Tickets are similarly impossible to come by around Chinese New Year in January/​ February. Mrs Xie suggested to me seriously that if I wanted to travel by train it was best to go in March, before the seasonal Han migrants arrived in Xinjiang to commence their work in agriculture and construction. For my Han interviewees, this connection between Han immigration and trains was not problematic. On the contrary, trains helped to populate Xinjiang with ‘familiar people’ and made it feel ‘less empty’, as the bookstore owner said. Interestingly, however, some of my Uyghur interlocutors, especially those who were fluent in Chinese and were state-​employed, and thus able to get their train tickets reimbursed, proposed an alternative interpretation of train travel that was clearly aimed at challenging the narrative of Xinjiang’s trains as the Han means of transport. As Mr Islam, a secondary school teacher from Kashgar, explained during one of our conversations: You know, Uyghurs like to go to Urumchi, it has thirty higher-​ education institutions. They also head to inner China to do business, or to northern Xinjiang … With the train, it’s very convenient. When I go to Beijing or Urumchi for further education, I either take the train or fly. I am a teacher, I can have the cost reimbursed … The train is much more convenient than a long-​distance bus. On the train, it is easier to make namaz (Ch. and U. zuo namaz, ‘to pray’) and to read. There is a toilet, it is clean, there is more space: I mean in the sleeper compartment, I always take the sleeper. On the bus you can just lie down, you cannot read, it’s bumpy and the air is bad. It is also really inconvenient for praying. (Fieldwork interview, Kashgar, October 2012) Experiences of rail travel are thus to a certain extent class-​and employment-​specific. What the above excerpt also shows is Mr Islam’s attempt to reclaim trains as a space in which Uyghurs should feel as comfortable as Han, without becoming like them. Still, the general sense of insecurity relating to the social and political changes of which the expanding railway is a sign was not absent from the stories of middle-​class state employees like Mr. Islam either. A diffuse feeling of uneasiness about what these 279

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

developments would bring for the Uyghurs accompanied nearly every conversation. The railway –​much more straightforwardly than roads –​was perceived to be part of a political project aiming for the expansion of centralised power, the spread of the Chinese language as the only standard of communication, integration in nationwide infrastructure grids and, more generally, greater state access and control. Since trains, like planes, only serve larger cities, for the 65 per cent of Uyghurs who live in the countryside (Bellér-​Hann 2012, p.204), rail or air travel often necessitates another long bus or collective-​taxi journey from the train station or the airport back to their villages. This structural difference adds a further dimension to Uyghur ‘preferences’ for long-​distance buses: in fact, they are the only means of transport that directly connects smaller towns to cities. The ways in which the railway operates implies that it was not built with the intention of serving everyone, but rather to connect urban centres in order to facilitate administrative circulation between them. The formal and streamlined nature of bureaucratic procedures at train stations and their Chinese-​language environment further reinforce this impression. At the time of my research, they stood in sharp contrast to long-​distance bus stations, which were less formal and often Uyghur-​dominated in terms of food sold, language spoken, employees, drivers and passengers.

CONCLUSION Structural inequality in access to infrastructure exists and has a significant impact on the different ways that Han and Uyghur individuals use and perceive transport in Xinjiang. Class and employment also play a part, both in articulated preferences and in actual practices. At the same time, my research shows that Uyghurs and Han who had never travelled by train or long-​distance bus in southern Xinjiang, and who in fact had never even been to the region, also had strong opinions about these different modes of transport and tended to think of them as though they had quasi-​ethnic identities. The factors that made buses feel familiar and convenient to the Uyghurs, such as the language of the drivers, Uyghur co-​passengers, the food consumed, films shown and music played, made them seem unfamiliar to most Han. The same was true of trains, but in essentially the opposite direction. The state-​owned railways, with their standard design, the Chinese language as the lingua franca of information and communication and the association of trains with the influx of Han migrants all converged to create an ambience that was perceived as uncomfortable by many of my Uyghur interlocutors. Since so few of them regularly flew, they remained largely unaware of the fact that planes, to a much greater degree than trains, were actually the Han means of transport, conveying Party cadres and government officials, businesspeople and representatives of state-​owned enterprises: the key actors driving Xinjiang’s resource extraction and top-​down infrastructure expansion, and determining the policies to be implemented in the region. Political and business actors advertise roads and railways in Xinjiang as being at once ‘clean’ and ethnically unmarked: as mere bundles of potentialities that realise developmental visions. However, my research shows that those objects are inherently enmeshed in discourses and practices of ethnicity. Selwyn (2001) demonstrates, through the example of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, how infrastructures in places ridden with ethno-​national conflicts are usually also entangled in them. They 280

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​

can be built in very specific ways: to separate, to discriminate, to block, or to bypass (cf. Correia 2019). Here my aim was to focus not so much on the materiality of a specific infrastructure built to separate or discriminate, but rather to show how every infrastructure has a ‘superfluity of meaning’ (Humphrey 2005) that exceeds its nominal function and intended effects. Infrastructure is a dense terrain of accumulated experience. These place-​and time-​specific accumulations affect the perception and uses of infrastructure, and manifest in sometimes unexpected ways: for example, in the association of a specific infrastructure with a particular ethnicity and the ascription of quasi-​ethnic identities to it. The ethnicisation of trains and buses is one of many unforeseen resonances created by the merging of transport technologies with the specific social-​political-​economic terrain of southern Xinjiang. Infrastructure here becomes inherently enmeshed in everyday practices and discourses of ethnicity, a material object that facilitates the narration and performance of identities. What these resonances look like in 2020/​2021, at the time of writing of this article and less than five years after my last stint of fieldwork, is difficult to imagine. The material presented above from my research between 2011 and 2016 is largely of archival value. What it describes is no more. The government-​advertised purpose of infrastructure to connect and distribute wealth equally, and its actual use, have drifted further apart since my last visit to the region. The categories of individuals, commodities, information and capital permitted to travel along the roads and on railways into, out of, and within Xinjiang today are strictly defined and limited. Most of the Turkic, Muslim, and in particular the rural population is de facto excluded from this freedom of circulation due to government-​imposed restrictions on their mobility. The Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang are now immobilised in very different ways compared to even a decade ago, when roads were in a much worse condition but people were more free to travel and there were not government-​disappeared individuals in nearly every family. The sanitised photographs of empty roads presented on the websites of Chinese state-​owned construction companies mentioned at the beginning of this chapter may thus, ironically, be taken as an actual illustration of the many exclusions enacted in relation to transport infrastructure in Xinjiang. It appears that in the post-​2016 reality of the region, were it not for the thousands of trucks bringing in commodities from central China and in turn taking Xinjiang’s precious resources away to inner China, the expressways would be like those empty roads-​cum-​fetishes of socialist modernity described by Dimitris Dalakoglou (2010). In contemporary Xinjiang, we can see yet more kilometres of expressways, provincial roads, border roads, county and village roads, as well as freight and passenger railways, being built every day. However, they remain without any direct effect on or role in the distribution of wealth, social capital, or decision making. These infrastructures are most certainly not generating ‘the good life’. Paradoxically, the more roads and railways that are built, the less the people living in the region –​especially Uyghurs and other Muslim inhabitants of southern Xinjiang –​may enjoy the connectivity and opportunities that such infrastructures would seem to promise.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my dear Uyghur colleagues who made my research in Xinjiang possible and enjoyable. I have not heard from them in years. 281

—​​​​ A g n i e s z k a J o n i a k - L ü t h i —​​​

Some of them have been disappeared into detention centres, others have been under house arrest, and still others suffer because their loved ones have lost their health in the camps. Their situation is unimaginable. Second, I thank my Han and Uyghur interlocutors for the time they took to explain things to me. I hope very much that they are well, but I also worry that they are not. Further, a big thank you to the two editors, Madeleine and Jeanne, for their very helpful and inspiring comments on the various drafts of this chapter. I also thank the participants in the ‘China’s Domestic Infrastructure’ workshop, hosted by the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences in January 2020 in Hong Kong, for their comments on some of the ideas that I have developed here. The fieldwork on which this article is based was generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

NOTES 1 Very few Han in southern Xinjiang where I conducted my research have a paternal ancestral origin there. 2 The numbers since 2006 also include village roads (Huihuang Xinjiang Bianweihui 2009: 444–​46). The figures from 2017 come from: www.xinhua​net.com/​engl​ish/​2019-​10/​ 23/​c_​13​8496​247.htm 3 www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​bpe4​jKg2​9qk; https://​baike.baidu.com/​item/​和若铁路 4 All names are pseudonymised.

REFERENCES Appel, H. 2012. ‘Offshore work: Oil, Modularity, and the How of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea’. American Ethnologist 39 (4): 692–​709. Bellér-​ Hann, I. 2012 ‘  “Gateway to the Western Regions”: State-​ Society Relations and Differentiating Uighur Marginality in China’s Northwest’, pp. 203–​ 22 in Rajkai, Z. and Bellér-​ Hann, I. (eds.) Frontiers and Boundaries: Encounters on China’s Margins. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Byler, D. 2019. ‘Preventative Policing as Community Detention in Northwest China’. [Online] Made in China (July–​September 2019). Available at https://​mad​einc​hina​jour​nal.com/​2019/​ 10/​25/​preve​ntat​ive-​polic​ing-​as-​commun​ity-​detent​ion-​in-​northw​est-​china/​ Cheng, Y. 2017. ‘Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor? –​Genetics, Anthropology, and the Politics of Racial Nationalism in China’. Journal of Asian Studies 76 (3): 575–​602. Correia, J.E. 2019. ‘Arrested Infrastructure: Roadwork, Rights, Racialized Geographies’. Roadsides 2: 14–​24. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.26034/​roadsi​des-​20190​023. Dalakoglou, D. 2010. ‘The Road: An Ethnography of the Albanian-​ Greek Cross-​ Border Motorway’. American Ethnologist 37 (1): 132–​49. Harvey, P., Bruun Jensen, C. and Morita, A. 2017. ‘Introduction: Infrastructural Complications’, pp. 1–​22 in Harvey, P., Bruun Jensen, C. and Morita, A. (eds.) Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London and New York: Routledge. Harvey, P. and Knox, H. 2012. ‘The Enchantments of Infrastructure’. Mobilities 7 (4): 521–​36. Hetherington, K. 2019. ‘Surveying the Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development and the Promise of Infrastructure’ pp. 40–​50 in Harvey, P., Bruun Jensen, C. and Morita, A. (eds.) Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. New York: Routledge.

282

—​​​​ D i f f e r e n t i a l m o b i l i t y i n n o r t h w e s t C h i n a —​​​​ Huihuang Xinjiang Bianweihui (ed.). 2009. Huihuang Xinjiang: Xin Zhongguo chengli 60 nian Xinjiang fazhan licheng. Wulumuqi: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe. Humphrey, C. 2005. ‘Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (1): 39–​58. Joniak-​Lüthi, A. 2020. ‘A Road, a Disappearing River and Fragile Connectivity in Sino-​Inner Asian Borderlands’. Political Geography 78: 1–​11. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​ j.pol​geo.2019.102​122. Joniak-​Lüthi, A. 2019. ‘Introduction: Infrastructure as an Asynchronic Timescape’. Roadsides 1: 3–​10. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.26034/​roadsi​des-​20190​012 Joniak-​Lüthi, A. 2015. The Han: China’s Diverse Majority. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Leibold, J. 2019. ‘Surveillance in China’s Xinjiang Region: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement’. Journal of Contemporary China 29 (121): 46–​60. Available at: Doi:10.1080/​ 10670564.2019.1621529 Leibold, J. 2010. ‘More Than a Category: Han Supremacism on the Chinese Internet’. The China Quarterly 203: 539–​59. Selwyn, T. 2001. ‘Landscapes of Separation: Reflections on the Symbolism of By-​pass Roads in Palestine’, pp. 225–​40 in Bender, B. and Winer, M. (eds.) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford and New York: Berg. Steenberg, R. and Rippa, A. 2019. ‘Development for all? State Schemes, Security, and Marginalization in Kashgar, Xinjiang’. Critical Asian Studies 51: 274–​95. Woodworth, M.D. 2011. ‘Frontier Boomtown Urbanism in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’. Cross-​Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-​journal) 1 (1): 1–​26. Yeh, E.T. 2007. ‘Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (3): 593–​612. Zenz, A. 2018. ‘“Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude”: China’s Political Re-​education Campaign in Xinjiang’. Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 102–​28.

283

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LANGUAGE CHOICES, FUTURE IMAGINARIES, AND THE LIVED HIERARCHY OF LANGUAGES IN POST-​I NDUSTRIAL TAJIKISTAN Elena Borisova INTRODUCTION One autumn day of 2017, I was giving an extra English lesson to some outstanding students at the local school named after Yurii Gagarin –​the first Soviet man to conquer outer space. The school was located in Mehnat,1 one of the urban-​ type settlements (Rus. poselok gorodskogo tipa) in the Sughd region of northern Tajikistan. It operates two languages of instruction –​Tajik and Russian. As I was going over some complicated case of present perfect, a tall quietly-​spoken boy entered the classroom followed by Marhabo,2 a young English teacher who came from a ‘mixed’ Tatar-​Uzbek Russophone family. She was married to an Uzbek seasonal migrant worker-​cum-​recent Russian citizen. Marhabo introduced the boy to us and said he had just joined ‘11 A’ (one of the Russian-​medium classes) after having studied in the so-​called ‘Turkish lyceum’ in the regional centre, the city of Khujand. She forgot to tell me that the young man could barely speak Russian because the languages of instruction in that lyceum were Tajik and English, with Turkish studied as a foreign language. Usually, I would explain some grammar rules to my students in Russian and then give examples in English. But he had difficulty understanding my Russian, while the other students could barely understand my English, so I had to switch between the two, sometimes invoking my (then) poor knowledge of Tajik grammar to draw comparisons. However, had my Tajik been perfect, it would not have helped me because my students’ mother-​tongue and their first language of everyday communication was Uzbek. Later on I discussed that student’s struggle to quickly pick up some Russian with Aliia Khamidovna, Marhabo’s mother and a well-​known and respected teacher of Russian at the Gagarin school. She sighed: You see, what can he learn this way? Many parents don’t understand, they wake up at the last moment and send their children to our Russian classes because they want to prepare them for [migration to] Russia. Why hadn’t they sent him to us earlier? Turkish is prestigious but useless here because only a few truly rich people can afford to go to Turkey. Either way, everyone goes to Russia. 284

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-23

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

My teaching encounter captured in this short vignette illustrates the linguistic complexity of the place. Mehnat is located in the ethnically diverse southwest of the Fergana Valley in the north of Tajikistan bordering Uzbekistan. It is a part of a local administrative unit inhabited by around 14,000 people but constantly growing, despite mass migration to Russia. Mehnat is a place where three mutually unintelligible languages operate –​Uzbek (a Turkic language), Tajik (Indo-​Iranian language, sometimes regarded as a variety of Persian), and Russian. While Tajik is the official state language, Uzbek is the first language for the majority of local inhabitants. Tajik operates through several idioms –​the ‘high’ literary standard used in official register and the ‘low’ colloquial variant used here –​the regional northern dialect of Tajik. Russian functions both as a linguistic heritage of the Soviet past and the second language for some locals, but also as a foreign language for the younger generations who experience its growing popularity in the light of routinised labour migration to Russia. On top of this complexity, the popularity of English as a global language is increasing among youth, and it has also become possible to study Turkish, Chinese and Arabic. As the primary languages of communication in the region, Uzbek and Tajik are unevenly spread, and linguistic patterns vary from village to village, or sometimes between neighbourhoods. Intermarriages seem to be quite common: kinship connections, geographical distance, and social status are more important factors for choosing a spouse than ethnicity or language (cf. Finke and Sancak 2012; see also Ismailbekova this volume). Some neighbourhoods are more ‘mixed’ than the others, with a big part of the population being multilingual in some form. This ‘mixed’ character (Taj. ‘aralash’), as a distinct feature of the borderland region and an embodied quality of its population, is jokingly invoked by my interlocutors as ‘oltmish panj (‘oltmish’ means ‘sixty’ in Uzbek, ‘panj’ is ‘five’ in Tajik). The vocabulary of hybridity emerges both from the historically close coexistence of different ethnic groups and large-​ scale population shifts induced by the Soviet modernisation project. Local inhabitants often invoke this vocabulary as signifying mutual respect, harmony and peace (Taj. ‘tinjī’). While in practice historically close coexistence of different idioms has resulted in languages permeating and influencing each other on many levels and ‘creating complex Turkic and Iranian dialect continua’ (Bahry 2016), they are clearly delineated by the language policy and state agencies’ attempts to implement it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly established Central Asian states engaged in a process of nation-​building based on essentialist discourses about the ancient presence of nations on their contemporary territories.3 As powerful markers of national identity, titular languages have also been turned into an instrument of nation-​building and arenas of ‘return’ to historical and cultural heritage. There are important differences in language politics among the states in the region, depending on the nature of their leaders’ nation-​building projects, their international orientations, demographic shifts, economic resources and the degree of authoritarianism in imposing decisions about language on the populations (Fierman 2021). The main common feature has been the attempt to raise the status and extend the use of titular languages to replace Russian, the dominating language in the official sphere. However, Russian still enjoys high prestige –​a situation similar to other post-​colonial contexts (Korth 2005; Casale and Posel 2011; Chakraborty and Bakshi 2016; Agadjanian and Nedoluzhko 2021).

285

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

The changes in language legislation were accompanied by the attempts to further standardise and codify titular languages. As Milroy (2001) notices, such codifications are part of the process of historicisation of the language. Claims that the language has ‘a continuous unbroken history, a respectable and legitimate ancestry and a long pedigree’ (Milroy 2001, 549) legitimise the establishment of the standard variety as the language of the nation state, while simultaneously creating lesser varieties or dialects. Very often a ‘pure’ and ‘unmixed’ character of the standard is foregrounded in the process, and attempts to divorce it from contact languages by calquing and replacing loanwords are made (Thomas 1991; Abercrombie 2017). In Tajikistan, intrusive language policy regularly makes the news: among the recent instances of ‘purification’ are alterations in local toponyms of Russian, Uzbek and Arabic origins, the creation of the list of recommended authentically Tajik names, and imposition of fines on the businesses and media ‘polluting’ the Tajik language by foreign words (Ivanov 2018; Sputnik 2017; Gulkhodzha 2016; RIA 2016). Against these developments, scholars have paid much attention to the questions of language and power by looking at language policy and its implementation in different domains (Kellner-​Heinkele and Landau 2012; Bahry et al. 2017), the marginalisation of minority languages (Fierman 2012), and the reception of the ‘Law on Language’ (1989) by local elites and the educated capital’s residents (Perry 1996) in Tajikistan. However, beyond a few notable exceptions (Korth 2005; Khudoikulova 2015; Bahry 2016; Mostowlansky 2017; Ismailbekova 2020), actual language ecologies of particular local places, and ordinary people’s attitudes to their idioms in the context of state attempts to steer language change have received significantly less attention. This chapter contributes to the debates on language in the region by analysing the complexity of language ideologies and language strategies ‘on the ground’. Ethnographically, I focus on the multilingual and ethnically diverse community of practice of Mehnat. I show that while the state is promoting a certain hierarchy of languages placing the emergent variety of literary Tajik at the top, people’s attitudes to different idioms and their language choices are tied to past and future imaginaries rooted in specific experiences of place, gender, class and families’ strategies in seeking social mobility. My analysis is inspired by several insights drawn from the studies of multilingualism and diglossia4 in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Firstly, rather than language as an ‘inalienable trait’ or an inherent characteristic of a group, I see language as an unequally distributed resource and a skill people are willing to cultivate and mobilise in different situations (Heller 2012). Secondly, I find a language ecology framework productive for attending to the linguistic complexity of a particular local place, since its starting point is not a set of selected languages as abstract systems but a set of practices used by ‘people or communities in unique settings for particular purposes’ (Bahry 2016, 12). Taken together, these approaches allow us to displace the focus of analysis from the essentialised connection between language, ethnicity and territory to the fluidity and diversity of language practices and strategies. The material in this chapter comes from an ethnographic study I conducted in Mehnat in 2017–​18. Although language was not a primary focus of my research, my awareness about the lived experiences of language issues in the region developed with my own attempts to learn Tajik with the help of a private tutor. My Tajik host family also witnessed my attempts to learn and practice Tajik in real-​life situations. Positioning myself as a language learner 286

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

elicited language attitudes to different local idioms and illuminated language ideologies, language practices, and the discrepancies between them (Abercrombie 2017; Esler 2019). My positionality as a native speaker of Russian –​a language charged with high symbolic and pragmatic value for both elder and younger generations in Mehnat –​exposed metalinguistic discourses about everyday speech practices and linguistic aspirations.

INTERNATIONALIST PAST AND POST-​I NDUSTRIAL PRESENT The very emergence of Mehnat as a distinct place on the map is intimately linked with the Soviet modernisation project. The post-​Second World War Soviet development policies transformed the economic organisation of Central Asia, leading to massive population shifts and changing the social and cultural dynamic of local places (Mostowlansky 2017; Kalinovsky 2018). Population shifts were accompanied by changes in language repertoires and the emergence of a particular hierarchy of languages, with Russian at the top. In the 1950s, a major extractive industry was built in the area of the future urban-​type settlement of Mehnat. The implementation of such an ambitious project dictated the need to mobilise human resources with different kinds of expertise. Many of the newcomers were Russian-​speaking specialists and young graduates from different parts of the Soviet Union –​engineers, teachers, nurses and doctors (Peyrouse 2013). The Russian language functioned as a lingua franca among different ethnic groups and Germans, Ukrainians, Koreans, Tatars, and other ethnic groups merged in the collective memory of the locals into the vast category of ‘Russians’ (russkie) or ‘Europeans’ (evropeitsy). The construction of the factory was finished by 1956. The new place that grew out of this infrastructural project was assigned the status of poselok gorodskogo tipa (Rus. ‘urban-​type settlement’) and named Mehnat (Taj. ‘labour’) after the idea of culturally and ethnically diverse socialist labour. The factory soon became very important for the region as the sole provider of work and welfare for a large part of the local population. This role was connected to the gradually emerging material and social infrastructure: a comprehensive school, a kindergarten, a library, a hospital, public baths, and a House of Culture. All these institutions prompted specific forms of inter-​ethnic sociality. Current residents nostalgically describe this sociality through the vocabulary of togetherness and harmony as opposed to today’s ‘separateness’ and lack of institutionalised opportunities for mingling of different genders, ethnic and professional groups (cf. Abercrombie 2017 on the role of Turkish in Kosovo) (see Figure 19.1). Writing about the establishment of planned villages and international mono industrial towns in Central Asia, Madeleine Reeves shows how a specific kind of Moscow provisioning (moskovskoe obespechenie), opening access to unique quality goods, transformed perceived ‘lived distance’ between the centre and peripheries (Reeves 2014, 110–​18; Mostowlansky 2017, 36–​50). Apart from the material infrastructure, the connection between the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ was manifested in a certain type of ‘upbringing’, which implied fluency in Russian language and culture and a commitment to internationalism. Mehnat’s affective connections with other parts of the Soviet Union were effectively sustained through multiple trajectories of people and things. Although the poselok did not receive Moscow provisioning 287

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

Figure 19.1  The House of Culture in Mehnat. Image by Borisova 2018.

and never saw an abundance of goods shipped directly from Moscow, the goods produced at the local factory were shipped all the way to Moscow, and the local youth travelled to the western part of the USSR for education and military service. This contributed to shaping an imaginary of Mehnat as a distinct place of modernity, a ‘civilised’ place. Inhabited by people who ‘believed they were modern’ (McBrien 2009, 131; Borisova 2021b), this place fostered specific forms of inter-​ ethnic sociality, mediated through the Russian language which had come to be seen as an ‘organic’ part of this modernity. However, after collapse of the Soviet Union, Mehnat’s modernity was put in question by the processes of de-​industrialisation and de-​urbanisation fuelled by the economic restructuring and the subsequent Civil War (Ibañez-​Tirado 2015; Scarborough, this volume). As a result of several waves of out-​migration by Russian-​speaking residents, Tajikistan lost more of its Russian population than other Central Asian republics. In 2010, its Russian-​speaking population was estimated as 34,838, with the majority residing in cities (Bahry et al. 2017). Although ‘Russians’ have left Mehnat and the ethnic and linguistic composition of the place had changed, the Russian language is still present. Sending one’s child to a Russian class is a common practice among native speakers of Uzbek and Tajik. The Gagarin school accommodates more than a thousand students and is one of the last distinctly ‘international’ places associated with a certain type of upbringing and aesthetics. With its busy social life and frequent public events (competitions, performances, games), the school became a unique arena for a certain kind of mixed-​gender socialisation for both children and teachers (see Figure 19.2). 288

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

Figure 19.2  Regular morning school assembly (lineika). Image by Borisova 2017.

Today, past connections map onto new mobile trajectories. With migration becoming a key element of people’s livelihoods in rural Tajikistan, Russia has emerged as a place to turn to when one needs to ‘find money’ (Taj. pul ëftan) (Rahmonova-​Schwarz 2012; see also Eraliev and Urinboyev, this volume). More importantly, large-​scale migration to Russian cities contributes to sustaining a unique identity of the place and its inhabitants as modern. Houses built to accommodate Russian labour in the 1950s are transformed into migrant two-​storey mansions making use of the money, aesthetics and skills migrants acquired in Russia doing evroremont (Rus. ‘eurorepair’) for the Russian middle class. Fluency in Russian triggers pride when graduates of the local school excel in the Russian Language, History, and Law exam that migrant workers must take as an ‘integration requirement’ to obtain a working license (patent) in Russia since 2015 (Dolzhikova and Kunovski 2018). More often, people manage to secure Russian passports according to several pathways with simplified criteria of eligibility, including proficiency in Russian (Borisova 2020). Migrants’ remittances contribute to the struggle for becoming ‘modern’ once again, giving many families the opportunity to pay for their children’s education. The number of young people studying in Russian universities is also on the rise, as Russian universities are trying to increase the admission of international students by introducing higher admission quotas for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Thus, my interlocutors’ desires to speak Russian ‘without an accent’ or to master new literary Tajik addressed in the following sections need to be understood in context. This 289

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

context covers experiences of living and imagining one’s past and present in a place constituted by multi-​layered histories of mobilities and identified as modern.

‘THIS IS NOT OUR LANGUAGE’: ON THE EMERGENT HIERARCHY OF LANGUAGES After Independence, as other Central Asian republics, Tajikistan has passed a number of laws and regulations in 1989, privileging the Tajik language over Russian as the single official language to be used in the public sphere. This was followed by a series of language planning interventions targeting its status and structure. These interventions have been intensified after the second Law on Language (2009) stripped Russian of the status of the ‘language of interethnic communication’ (Rus. iazyk mezhnatsional’nogo obshcheniia).5 The Law compelled all citizens to be proficient in the official state language (Taj. zaboni davlatī) (Art. 3.2) and made its use mandatory in administration (Art. 5), although it was yet to undergo the process of standardisation. As in other Central Asian republics, local elites were mostly educated in Russian and many were not fluent in their titular languages, although they recognised them as their native tongues (Kosmarskaya and Kosmarski 2019). Thus, this intervention ‘turned well-​educated specialists into illiterate dabblers desperately trying to catch up with the new, hastily constructed language of administration’ (Mostowlansky 2017, 121). As a result, those who could not use Tajik in an official capacity faced the risk of losing their positions as state workers. Although the importance of knowing literary Tajik for one’s future education and career increased, the practical aspect of its delivery to non-​native speakers remained problematic. The methods used in the classroom rely on memorisation, focusing on grammar rather than communication skills, and on teaching of patriotic content: this mirrors the methods used to teach Russian in Soviet times (Korth 2005, 97–​102). I started to learn Tajik using textbooks designed for teaching the state language (zaboni davlatī) to non-​native speakers, the same books that my Uzbek students used. Although I started with the primary school books and thought I would rapidly pick up the basics, the books turned out to be unnecessarily complicated, unsystematic, and far divorced from actual language practices. Even the most basic vocabulary they featured, such as ‘a table’ (miz), ‘a chair’ (kursī), or ‘a fork’ (changcha), was never used in everyday conversations: my interlocutors always used the Russian loanwords ‘stol’, ‘stul’ and ‘vilka’ instead. As a result, my Uzbek students often complained that Tajik was a very difficult language to learn and ascribed this to the inherent qualities of the language itself, rather than the absence of viable teaching methods. However, it was not just non-​native speakers who found contemporary Tajik language difficult. When I asked one of my multilingual interlocutors from the Tajik-​ Uzbek mixed family, a woman in her 60s, why they did not watch Tajik TV channels and preferred to tune their satellites to Uzbek ones instead, she said ‘We don’t understand anything, there are so many new words! Eto ne nash iazyk!’ (Rus. ‘this is not our language’). The Law on Language compelled all citizens to know Tajik in its specific ‘correct’ standardised version (Art. 3.6.). Yet, what this version is or should be has been constantly subject to change and contestation. The literary Tajik language (zaboni adabii Tojik) my interlocutors learned during their socialisation in Soviet schools and 290

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

universities was originally developed by Tajik intellectuals in the Latin, and later the Cyrillic script in the 1920–​1940s. As a newly established separate SSR, Tajikistan needed its own national language, and it was standardised based on the Bukharan dialect (Ido 2014). Its phonology, vocabulary and syntax were deliberately divorced from literary Persian and significantly influenced by Uzbek and Russian (Perry 1996). In the Independence period, a newly established Language and Terminology Committee and local linguists actively engaged in further standardisation, codification and ‘purification’ of the Tajik language from foreign influences. As a result, many Russian and Uzbek loanwords were replaced by Persian vocabulary or calques, some of which sounded odd to Tajik native speakers.6 For instance, one of the teachers at the Gagarin school ridiculed the new word for a ‘doctor’, who instead of phonetically adapted from Russian dukhtur had become a Persian pizishk. She claimed, laughing, that for someone who is familiar with Russian swearing it sounds ‘nearly obscene’. In a recent post (from 22 April 2021) in the Facebook’s group uniting the citizens of Khujand, one user initiated the discussion on language (in Russian): I wake up in the morning, scroll through Facebook, come across posts in Tajik and I don’t understand 50% of words. Where do these incomprehensible words come from? I am myself Tajik, I went to a Tajik school, when I watched TV in my childhood, I understood everything. Now I don’t understand my own language neither on TV nor on Internet … What is going on?’ The state’s efforts to create a new standard premised on this purist ideology transformed the literary variant my interlocutors, educated in the late Soviet time, had learned, which was allegedly closer to their everyday speech practices. This process is ongoing and contested: while many people reject this new language as artificially constructed, some regret that they ‘do not know their own language’, meaning that they have not mastered the new standard (on the terms ‘native/​one’s own language’, see Korth 2005, 172–​76). Both native and non-​native speakers must learn this new standard through formal education: very often they must use the help of private tutors if they aspire to enrol in universities in Tajikistan. As proficiency achieved through formal learning is perceived as a part of one’s cultural capital, and is generally valued more than language skills picked up in informal settings (Moore 2004), knowledge of the new literary Tajik had come to be associated with the status of an educated individual (khondagī). Both variants have certain domains of operation: prestigious as it is, literary Tajik is not used in everyday communication as to avoid being labelled a snob. On the other hand, speaking colloquial Tajik at official events signals a lack of education and professional training. The prevalence of standard language ideology means that literary Tajik is perceived as the only ‘correct’ and superior form. That is why it was impossible to persuade my tutors to teach me a functional variety of Tajik, so that I could communicate with people in everyday situations (Pickett 2017; Abercrombie 2017). The state’s manipulation of the Tajik language in the name of its revival and purification, and the efforts to secure its place at the top of the state’s hierarchy of languages have further reinforced a diglossic situation in the region. From the state’s perspective, the hierarchy of languages looks straightforward, unequivocally positioning literary Tajik at the top and tying it to the Tajik identity. However, language hierarchies 291

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

‘on the ground’ may be configured differently. In multilingual communities of practice such as Mehnat, the hierarchy of languages is organised as a continuum with more than one ‘low’ and ‘high’ language. Uzbek, relegated to the private domain, is at the bottom, colloquial Tajik (kūchagī) is in the middle, and literary Tajik (adabī) is at the top together with Russian. Similar to other post-​colonial situations, although not demographically dominant, Russian is symbolically and pragmatically important and many people demonstrate the desire to learn or know it better.7 What idiom is prioritised in different settings depends on the contextual factors. I will unpack some of them in the next section by looking at language choices in the schooling of younger generations.

LANGUAGE CHOICES AND GENDERED FUTURES After Independence, the Tajikistani state officially committed to supporting minority languages in education. In recent years, both the government and local linguists put a lot of emphasis on promoting foreign languages –​Russian and English, in the first place (Shambezoda 2019). In his many speeches, President Emomali Rahmon regularly highlights that a modern Tajik citizen should speak at least three foreign languages, including Russian and English to meet the demands of contemporary globalised world. However, the lack of economic and human resources has meant that in practice the efforts of implementing language policy mostly focused on developing Tajik-​medium education, treating other languages as ‘problems in securing titular language rights’ (Bahry et al. 2017, 17). In 2009, there were 31 per cent of schools with languages of instruction other than Tajik; ten years later, 89 per cent of students were enrolled in Tajik-​medium classes (Fergana 2019).8 For the Gagarin school, which previously treated Uzbek and Russian as the languages of instruction and Tajik as a second language, this has meant that the Uzbek classes have been removed and Tajik has become the new language of instruction. All students in Russian classes must study Tajik as the state language, but the methods of teaching I mentioned above rarely allow them to reach a level of proficiency sufficient to enter universities in Tajikistan.9 The process of shutting down Uzbek classes was meant to leave enough time for both teachers and students to adapt, but eventually, the Uzbek-​speaking students were abruptly transferred to Tajik-​medium classes. Since 2014, every school graduate, regardless of their school’s language of instruction, needs to pass a mandatory Tajik language test to enrol in university. Those who are not proficient in the ‘correct’ version of Tajik risk being excluded from higher education. Thus, the choice whether to send one’s child to a Tajik-​or Russian-​medium class has become more consequential for Mehnat’s residents. In her work on the Uzbek minority in the city of Osh, Aksana Ismailbekova (2020) argues that cultivating the ability to speak ‘Russian without an accent’ becomes a strategy of securing viable futures for children. In post-​conflict Osh, education in the Uzbek language is in decline: experiences of discrimination, border closures with Uzbekistan and mass labour migration to Russia push parents to send their children to private Russian-​medium kindergartens and schools, as they see a lack of future prospects in Osh. The context of Mehnat is different: there were no ethnic conflicts and the idiom of hybridity and harmony is prevalent. I nevertheless find interpreting 292

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

language choices vis-​à-​vis people’s future imaginaries and struggles to create security for their children a productive approach. In what follows, I analyse cultivating proficiency in each of the three languages –​Uzbek, Tajik and Russian –​against certain future imaginaries, which are gendered and tied to families’ strategies for attaining upward social mobility. Freely used in Soviet times, Uzbek is now considered useless for professional futures: there is no opportunity to obtain further education in Uzbek and make a career in Tajikistan, and going to Uzbekistan is no longer an option.10 This determines the low prestige of Uzbek among Uzbek speakers themselves (see also sociolinguistic studies such as Kellner-​Heinkele and Landau 2012; Khudoikulova 2015). While my Tajik interlocutors were delighted when I started to learn Tajik, my Uzbek students were surprised when I tried to pick up some Uzbek and advised me to focus my efforts on more ‘useful’ languages, for example, Chinese. While Tajikistan has a significant Uzbek minority of 15–​25 per cent, the ethno-​national Tajikistani state privileges ethnic Tajiks in high-​ranking positions, excluding minorities from access to resources and political power (Fumagalli 2007). Many of my interlocutors explained their lack of access to positions in state service or promotions by their belonging to the Uzbek minority.11 For instance, Marhabo’s husband, who went to a Russian class and had a degree in computer science, explained his decision to pursue a ‘migrant career’ and Russian citizenship as being precipitated by belonging to the Uzbek minority, which closed off his career opportunities in Tajikistan. The opportunities of Uzbek graduates of Russian classes to carve out their pathway to social mobility in Tajikistan are thus limited. Usually, they either go to Russia as migrant workers after school or try to enrol in Russian colleges or universities; a few enrol in colleges and universities in Tajikistan. Sending one’s child to a Tajik class is an option for those parents who envisage their children’s future in Tajikistan, while Russian classes are overcrowded with those who want to prepare their children for migration. They hope that proficiency in Russian will help them navigate Russian labour and housing markets and protect them from discrimination and police harassment (Terrelonge 2016).12 Migration in Tajikistan is highly gendered, with men constituting almost 90 per cent of the migration flow. Male and female mobilities are moralised differently: while men’s long-​ term migration is celebrated as a fulfilment of filial and conjugal duty, the increase of women’s mobility raises suspicion about sexual mores and casts a shadow on a family’s reputation (Reeves 2011; Cleuziou, this volume). Girls’ futures are envisioned through emplacement in their future husbands’ homes, where they will be serving (Taj. khizmat kardan) their conjugal kin as kelin (daughter-​in-​law). As a result, proficiency in the state language is considered more important for them. In the case where a girl marries into a predominantly Tajik family, she would have a common language of communication with her new kin. But even if she ends up in an ethnically mixed and multilingual family, speaking Tajik would make it easier for her to demonstrate respect and recognition of authority to close and distant kin. In addition, if the young woman speaks the ‘correct’ literary version of Tajik, she will be seen as educated and possessing some cultural capital, which can increase her value to her new family. Finally, given unequal power relations inherent to the role of a new daughter-​in-​law (Turaeva 2017), many parents see educating their daughters in Tajik at college or university level as a security strategy. They believe that in case of divorce, having 293

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

a qualification will help them find a job and provide for themselves. As the former headmaster at Gagarin school pointed out, pursuing an education in teaching or nursing is desirable for girls, because of flexible employment options that are easy to combine with household and child-​rearing duties. This logic results in a visible gender imbalance at school: Russian classes are packed with boys, while girls are sent to Tajik classes (see Figure 19.3). Although morally contested in the village, studying and living in Russia becomes the youth’s horizon, with desires for mobility, freedom and better life prospects attached to it (Borisova 2021a). Many dream of continuing their education in Russia. However, securing a state-​funded place in a Russian university is a challenging task, given that the local school faces a constant shortage of Russian textbooks and lack of qualified staff fluent in Russian. Apart from the Russian and Uzbek philology pathways, higher education is mostly available in Tajik. As a result, one cannot study, for instance, mathematics or biology in Russian at university level. There were many young female teachers at Gagarin school who struggled to teach these subjects in Russian and/​or in Tajik. For example, a native Uzbek speaker now in her 30s, attended an Uzbek-medium class before studying mathematics in Tajik at university. She was subsequently pressured to teach mathematics both in Tajik and in Russian at school. The region’s administration persistently tries to shut down Russian classes, as they believe that schoolteachers are not qualified enough to be able to deliver lessons in Russian. However, demand among parents is only growing. As the teacher

Figure 19.3  Distributing lessons for the following term among young teachers of Russian. The poster on the wall praises the beauty of the Russian language as a treasure to be preserved. Image by Borisova 2018. 294

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

of Russian Aliia Khamidovna noted, ‘We warn parents that we have no staff, we have no textbooks, your children might not be able to get sufficient knowledge in different subjects. But they don’t care about subjects. They say they’ll be happy if their children pick up at least some Russian.’

SPEAKING RUSSIAN ‘WITHOUT AN ACCENT’ Having shown that in Mehnat, cultivating proficiency in both ‘high’ idioms, Russian and Tajik, can be a strategy of securing gendered futures for younger generations, I will now turn to the generation whose subjecthood was at least partly formed in late Soviet years. Focusing on one Tajik man’s efforts to cultivate ‘accentless’ Russian (Rus. bez aktsenta), I will show that proficiency in Russian is not a solely pragmatic strategy to imagine and materialise viable futures in Russia. Standing for broader ideas about class, modernity and cosmopolitanism, competence in Russian allows people to position themselves in a certain way in their communities in Tajikistan. I met Farhod when he appeared on the doorstep of my temporary accommodation to invite me to move in with his family. A state-​employed singer (artist)13 in his 40s, he was driven by a strong desire to improve his Russian. He invested a lot of hope in my year-​long stay at his house: he constantly urged his family to speak Russian at least with me, if not among themselves, and developed some creative solutions to facilitate the process. Although our communication in Russian was flowing better every day, Farhod was never happy about his progress, and dramatically exclaimed ‘Oh, we are such idiots! Every educated person here knows Russian but us! You can’t imagine how shameful [Rus. pozor] it is for me! We’re so uncivilised [Rus. ‘netsivilizovannye’]!’ Farhod was born in 1977 and therefore did not go through the same Soviet institutes of socialisation, unlike his elder brothers who served in the Soviet Army and went to colleges and universities where Russian was the primary language of communication. His youth corresponded with the Civil War (1992–​97), which interrupted his plans of pursuing formal education in the musical academy. The fact that he could not finish his studies, coupled with the specific relations of competition in sibling hierarchies, added to his feelings of inferiority in relation to his siblings (Roche 2014). He complained that his brothers were mocking his incompetence in Russian: ‘I have ten brothers and sisters and they all can speak Russian very well and I am the last one, that’s why I’m an idiot! They mock me all the time!’ However, his siblings’ proficiency in Russian was not necessarily significantly better than his. It is because Farhod’s evaluations were rooted in the high symbolic value the Russian language bore for him, that he put unreasonably high demands on his learning and was not able to see his own progress. In her study of language attitudes in Kyrgyzstan, Britta Korth (2005) points to the feeling of shame in her interlocutors who were unable to speak Russian. She interprets this as the result of the Soviet rule, which imposed ideas about Russian’s structural and functional superiority on Kyrgyz speakers and created a feeling of ‘linguistic inferiority’ in them. Farhod did not express negative attitudes to the Tajik language but instead, highly valued Tajik-​Russian bilingualism. His preoccupation with mastering Russian himself and teaching it to his children had both pragmatic and symbolic layers: he clearly wanted to prepare for the possibility of migration to Russia but, more importantly, he wanted to fit the image of 295

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

what in his opinion constituted a kul’turnyi chelovek (Rus. ‘a cultured man’). In Mehnat, the word kul’turnyi constitutes a part of lexicon of modernity inherited from the Soviet modernisation projects, alongside with tsivilizovannyi (civilised) and sovremennyi (modern) borrowed from Russian (Borisova 2021b, see also Mostowlansky 2017). Volkov (2000, 223–​25) points to the linguistic aspect of kul’turnost’ (Rus. ‘culturedness’) in the making of a ‘cultured man’ during the early Soviet period. A certain kul’tura rechi (Rus. ‘culture of speech’) manifest in the ‘mastery of a correct, literary speech-​manner’ came to be perceived as ‘inalienable from the personality’, thus signifying one’s personal level of ‘culturedness’ more than any external attribute. Moreover, although Tajikistan’s internationalist past has long gone, knowing Russian is still associated with cosmopolitan aspirations and the ability to interact outside regional boundaries, as Mostowlansky (2017, 21) showed in the case of the Pamir. Thus, Farhod associated ‘accentless’ Russian with being educated, ‘civilised’, and belonging to the ‘intelligentsia’ strata, rather than just the ability to communicate in Russian. Farhod’s bitter complaints about his inability to speak Russian ‘correctly’ and his longing to be a kult’turnyi chelovek can be interpreted as desire to position himself as a part of the kind of modernity-​in-​the-​past that he never fully experienced. As McBrien (2009) showed, modernity may not only be tied to the present state or a desired future, but can also be experienced as a ‘longing for a modern past’. Her interlocutor, Mukaddas, in the small Kyrgyz town, was the same age as Farhod, and considered herself to be educated and modern. Unlike her, Farhod felt that he had never been fully modern: partly because his plans for education were disrupted by the harsh realities of the Civil War; partly because he never joined the Soviet Army like his brothers; and partly because he never enjoyed the ‘bohemian’ life of a student in the cosmopolitan, Russian-​speaking city of Tashkent, like his eldest brother. The Russian language was an ‘organic’ part of that modernity, so cultivating ‘accentless’ Russian became a crucial part of his efforts to position himself as ‘having been and being modern’ (McBrien 2009). This longing for a modernity that he never had a chance to be a part of translated into him associating proficiency in Russian with a higher status in the present: the status he aspired to, but which remained unattainable for him because of a lack of alternative avenues for social mobility.

CONCLUSION As the Central Asian republic that suffered a civil war, with a dramatic drop in living standard and loss of almost all of its Russian population, the scholarly and public imagination often inserts post-​Soviet Tajikistan in narratives about religious ‘revival’, re-​traditionalisation, and ethnic nationalism. Language figures in these discussions as an obvious marker of ethno-​national identity, an object of state interventions, and a convenient tool of nation-​building. In the scholarly literature on Tajikistan I surveyed, the Russian language is usually considered against demographic shifts and the population’s declining proficiency in it. Uzbek is perceived in the context of ethnic discrimination, while Tajik is subject to evaluations of ‘success’ regarding the implementation of the language policy. In this chapter, however, I moved my ethnographic and analytic gaze to the lived realities of language in the context of statecraft, mass migration to Russia and people’s projects of self-​cultivation. This allowed me to 296

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​

position language attitudes and choices ‘on the ground’ within the context of long-​ term developments in national policies alongside people’s strategies for sustaining their livelihoods. This move also let me discuss how non-​elite subjects in one distinct place, located far away from the centres of power and decision-​making, make sense of language policies. My aim was to foreground the often overlooked complexity of people’s everyday engagements with language. While governments perceive and try to manipulate language in the name of ethno-​national identity, for people of Central Asia, while certainly also symbolic of ethnic identity, language constitutes a wider arena for carving out desirable future trajectories, and a more variable resource for crafting a certain kind of self. Inspired by a language ecology approach and approaching language as a resource, I looked at its developments through the prism of locality. However, instead of treating place as a silent background against which people’s relationships with language unfold, I showed that the experiences of living in a place with a particular imagination of past and future actively shapes people’s perceptions of language, their language choices, and linguistic aspirations. Like many other places in Central Asia, Mehnat came into being through a large-​scale Soviet modernisation project, premised on the mobility of labour and the cultivation of a commitment to internationalism. This put it in the category of places imagined as ‘modern’ and cosmopolitan, with Russian language once a lingua franca for its diverse populations. Today, Mehnat forms a multilingual and ethnically diverse community of practice, where the state’s attempts to cultivate ‘pure’ Tajik and impose this new high register in the public sphere has reinforced diglossia and resulted in the consolidation of a vernacular hierarchy of languages with two ‘low’ (Uzbek and colloquial Tajik) and two ‘high’ (literary Tajik and Russian) idioms. In Mehnat, where the major share of population identifies as Uzbek or ethnically ‘mixed’, proficiency in the Uzbek language is not valued as a resource for carving out viable futures in Tajikistan. This is similar to the situation described in the studies of Uzbek minority in Kyrgyzstan by Ismailbekova (2020), Agadjanian and Nedoluzhko (2021). In order to be recognised as educated and pursue social mobility in Tajikistan, one must be well-​spoken in the new literary Tajik language. In the light of high reliance on work in Russia as a source for livelihoods, many people find themselves needing to fit the image of a ‘prepared’ migrant worker (Bahovadinova, this volume) knowledgeable in Russian language, culture and law. At the same time, Russian still often stands for modernity, cosmopolitanism and an ability to communicate with diverse populations, especially for the generations educated in socialist times. Against this backdrop, achieving proficiency in it stands for social mobility aspirations, be it through the pursuit of a better life in Russia for younger generations, or cultivating oneself as a modern person through claiming belonging to the modernity-in-the-past for the generation of Farhod. Generations of sociolinguists studying multilingualism and diglossia have struggled to connect macro-​ level analysis of language ideologies and policies to micro-​level speech practices (Wei 2012). This chapter is not an exception: while I situated my ethnographic material in wider political developments and changes in political economy, my findings are limited and tied to a very particular context. More extensive mixed-​method research is needed to enrich our understanding of the language ecologies of both urban and less studied rural places in Central Asia. Bridging 297

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​

the disjuncture between different levels to theorise language choices, strategies and imaginaries, it is important to stop treating languages as bounded entities ‘organically’ belonging to one ethnic group.

NOTES 1 This is not the settlement’s real name. I chose the name Mehnat (Taj. ‘labour’) because it comes up several times for villages, urban-​type settlements and towns in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan which emerged during Soviet time and were considered ethnically and culturally mixed. 2 For ethical reasons, all names are pseudonyms. 3 In Tajikistan, the ‘drive for authenticity’ led to rewriting history to foreground the modern Tajikistan’s connection to the ninth-​and tenth-​century Samanid empire and competition for historical heritage with neighbouring Uzbekistan (Suyarkulova 2013; Blakkisrud and Kuziev 2019). 4 Diglossia is a stable language situation in which a language community uses two languages or functional varieties of the same language in different domains. These are a vernacular variety used in everyday speech (Low variety) and a highly codified standard (High variety) used in the official sphere, education, literature but never used in ordinary speech. H variety is perceived as more prestigious and is learned through formal education (Ferguson 1959). 5 The law caused heated debate at the time. It presents a contradiction: according to the Constitution (1994), Russian remains the language of inter-​ethnic communication while all nations and ethnic groups have the right to freely use their own languages (art. 2). 6 At the beginning, nationalist-​minded elites started the discussion about a possible return to the Persian (Arabic-​ based) script, however, apart from expelling distinctly Russian letters –​ ц (ts), щ (shch), ы (y), and ь (soft sign) –​Tajikistan opted against introducing the Latin script, unlike Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Kellner-​Heinkele and Landau, 2012). 7 Keller-​Heinkele and Landau (2012) and Nagzibekova (2010) reference a quantitative study showing that 96 per cent of Tajiks expressed a desire to know Russian better. Unfortunately, they do not elaborate on the context of the study. 8 This included the mixed-​medium schools –​673 Uzbek, 232 Russian, 33 Kyrgyz, 6 Turkmen and 1 English (Bahry et al. 2017, 10). In 2019, there were 150 mixed-​medium schools with Russian as one of the languages of instruction: 126 with Tajik and Russian languages of instruction, 16 with Uzbek, Russian, and Tajik, 1 with Russian, Kyrgyz, and Tajik, and 7 with Russian, English and Tajik languages (Shambezoda 2019). 9 The situation in Tajik classes is the reverse: three hours of Russian as a foreign language is mandatory, but students are rarely able to master it without taking private lessons. 10 In Soviet times, Tajiks from Uzbekistan studied in universities and colleges in Tajikistan, while Uzbeks from Tajikistan and other Central Asian republics went to study in Uzbekistan. After Independence, the internal borders were converted into international boundaries with strict visa controls and customs regulations, which have complicated travel immensely and disturbed local ways of life (Reeves 2014). The border remained closed until March 2018. 11 One’s ethnic belonging (natsional’nost’) used to be written in the infamous ‘fifth line’ in one’s passport (see Baiburin 2017). Hence the widespread practice of people changing their natsional’nost’ in their documents. This explains a sharp drop in the number of people identified as Uzbek in between 1989 and 2010 censuses, from 23.5 to 15.3 per cent (Fierman 2012; Kellner-​Heinkele and Landau 2012). 12 This is also the official rhetoric of the International Organisation for Migration in Tajikistan (Bahovadinova, this volume). 298

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​ 13 The Russian word artist is a polysemantic word, which broadly denotes people belonging to the arts community –​singers, musicians, actors and dancers. In Soviet times, there was a separate niche of artisty estrady –​singers politically and socially approved and authorised by the state, who also performed at private life-​cycle events (see Klenke 2019).

REFERENCES Abercrombie, Amelia. 2017. “Mixing and Unmixing Languages: Romani Multilingualism in Post-​Socialist, Post-​Conflict Kosovo.” PhD Thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. Agadjanian, Victor, and Lesia Nedoluzhko. 2021. “Imperial Legacies, Nation Building, and Geopolitics: Ethno-​Regional Divides and the Russian Language in Central Asia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45 (19): 1846–​72. Bahry, Stephen A. 2016. “Language Ecology: Understanding Central Asian Multilingualism.” In Language Change in Central Asia, edited by Elise S. Ahn and Juldyz Smagulova, 11–​32. Boston, MA; Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Bahry, Stephen, Sarfaroz Niyozov, Duishon Alievich Shamatov, Elise Ahn, and Juldyz Smagulova. 2017. “Bilingual Education in Central Asia.” In Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Encyclopedia of Language and Education, edited by Ofelia García, Angel Lin, and Stephen May, Third Edition, 1–​22. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Baiburin, Al’bert. 2017. Sovetskii Pasport: Istoriia, Struktura, Praktiki. St Petersburg: Evropeiskii Universitet v Sankt-​Peterburge. Blakkisrud, Helge, and Faruh Kuziev. 2019. “Museums, Memory and Meaning-​Creation: (Re) Constructing the Tajik Nation.” Nations and Nationalism 25 (3): 997–​1017. Borisova, Elena. 2020. “The Limits of Strategic Citizenship: Affective Engagements with Russian Passports in the Context of Migration from Tajikistan.” Social Anthropology 28 (4): 827–​42. —​ —​ —​ . 2021a. “Detskaia Mobil’nost’ i Transnatsional’noe Voobrazhenie (Na Primere Transnatsional’nykh Semei Iz Severnogo Tadzhikistana).” In Zhit’ v Dvukh Mirakh: Pereosmysliaia Transnatsionalizm i Translokal’nost’, 147–​ 99. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. —​—​—​. 2021b. “Locating the Good Life: Paradoxes of Migration in Post-​Soviet Tajikistan.” PhD Thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. Casale, Daniela, and Dorrit Posel. 2011. “English Language Proficiency and Earnings in a Developing Country: The Case of South Africa.” The Journal of Socio-​ Economics 40 (4): 385–​93. Chakraborty, Tanika, and Shilpi Kapur Bakshi. 2016. “English Language Premium: Evidence from a Policy Experiment in India.” Economics of Education Review 50: 1–​16. Dolzhikova, Anzhela V., and Marina N. Kunovski. 2018. “Integration Examination in the Russian Federation. Three Years of Experience and Research: Success or Failure?” Training, Language and Culture 2 (1): 8–​22. Esler, Dominic. 2019. “Dealing with Diglossia: Language Learning as Ethnography.” In Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Research, edited by Robert Gibb, Annabel Tremlett, and Julien Danero Iglesias, 70–​82. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Fergana. 2019. “V Tadzhikistane Podschitali Kolichestvo Obuchiushchikhsia Na Russkom Iazyke.” https://​ferg​ana.news/​news/​104​570/​. Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. “Diglossia.” Word (Worcester) 15 (2): 325–​40. Fierman, William. 2012. “The Fate of Uzbek Language in the ‘Other’ Central Asian Republics.” In Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and Its Neighbors: The Changing Politics of Language Choice, edited by Harold F. Schiffman. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill.

299

—​​​​ E l e n a B o r i s o v a —​​​ —​—​—​. 2021. “Language Policy and Language in Central Asia.” In Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia, 391–​408. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Finke, Peter, and Meltem Sancak. 2012. “To Be an Uzbek or Not to Be a Tajik? Ethnicity and Locality in the Bukhara Oasis.” Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie 137 (1): 47–​70. Fumagalli, Matteo. 2007.“Framing Ethnic Minority Mobilisation in Central Asia: The Cases of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.” Europe –​Asia Studies 59 (4): 567–​90. Gulkhodzha, Shakhlo. 2016. “Komitet Po Iazyku i Terminologii Ob’iavil Voinu ‘Chuzhdym Slovam.’ ” 2016. Heller, Monica. 2012. “Ethnography From Community and Identity to Process and Practice.” In Multilingualism, Discourse, and Ethnography, edited by Sheena Gardner and Marilyn Martin-​Jones, 24–​33. New York: Routledge. Ibañez-​Tirado, Diana. 2015. “ ‘How Can I Be Post-​Soviet If I Was Never Soviet?’ Rethinking Categories of Time and Social Change –​A Perspective from Kulob, Southern Tajikistan.” Central Asian Survey 34 (2): 190–​203. Ido, Shinji. 2014. “Bukharan Tajik.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 44 (1): 87–​102. Ismailbekova, Aksana. 2020. “Securing the Future of Children and Youth: Uzbek Private Kindergartens and Schools in Osh.” In Surviving Everyday Life: The Securityscapes of Threatened People in Kyrgyzstan, edited by Marc von Boemcken, Nina Bagdasarova, and Aksana Ismailbekova, 71–​91. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Ivanov, Andrei. 2018. “Nad Tadzhikami Izdevaiutsia i Stiraiut Pamiat’: Kak Vospitanie Patriotizma Prevratilos’ Dlia Grazhdan v Postoiannye Pobory.” https://​news.ru/​world/​tadzh​ ikis​tan-​gor​oda-​imena/​. Kalinovsky, Artemy M. 2018. Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kellner-​Heinkele, Barbara, and Jacob M. Landau. 2012. Language Politics in Contemporary Central Asia: National and Ethnic Identity and the Soviet Legacy. London; New York: I.B. Tauris. Khudoikulova, Noora. 2015. “Linguistic Situation in Tajikistan: Language Use in Public Space.” Russian Journal of Communication 7 (2): 164–​78. Klenke, Kerstin. 2019. The Sound State of Uzbekistan Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era. SOAS Musicology Series. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Korth, Britta. 2005. Language Attitudes towards Kyrgyz and Russian: Discourse, Education and Policy in Post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Bern: P. Lang. Kosmarskaya, Natalya, and Artyom Kosmarski. 2019. “ ‘Russian Culture’ in Central Asia as a Transethnic Phenomenon.” In Global Russian Cultures, edited by Kevin M.F. Platt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. McBrien, Julie. 2009. “Mukadas’s Struggle: Veils and Modernity in Kyrgyzstan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (Islam, Politics, Anthropology): S127–​44. Milroy, James. 2001. “Language Ideologies and the Consequences of Standardization.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (4): 530–​55. Moore, Leslie C. 2004. “Second language acquisition and use in the Mandara Mountains.” In Africa Meets Europe: Language Contact in West Africa, edited by George Echu and Samuel Gyasi Obeng, 131–​48. New York: Nova Science. Mostowlansky, Till. 2017. Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nagzibekova, Mehrinisso. 2010. “Osobennosti Razvitiia Russkogo Iazyka v Tadzhikistane.” In Slavica Helsingiensia 40. Instrumentarium of Linguistics: Sociolinguistic Approaches to Non-​Standard Russian, edited by Arto Samuel Mustajoki, Nikolai Vakhtin, and Ekaterina Protasova, 227–​38. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto.

300

— ​​​​ L a n g u a g e c h o i c e s a n d f u t u r e i m a g i n a r i e s i n T a j i k i s t a n —​​​​ Perry, John R. 1996. “From Persian To Tajik To Persian: Culture, Politics and Law Reshape a Central Asian Language.” Linguistic Studies in the Non-​ Slavic Languages of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic Republics, July: 279–​305. Peyrouse, Sebastien. 2013. “Former Colonists On The Move: The Migration of Russian-​ Speaking Populations.” In Migration and Social Upheaval as the Face of Globalization in Central Asia, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 215–​39. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill. Pickett, James. 2017. “Categorically Misleading, Dialectically Misconceived: Language Textbooks and Pedagogic Participation in Central Asian Nation-​Building Projects.” Central Asian Survey 36 (4): 555–​74. Rahmonova-​ Schwarz, Delia. 2012. Family and Transnation Mobility in Post-​ Soviet Central Asia: Labour Migration from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to Russia. Bielefeld: Nomos. Reeves, Madeleine. 2011. “Staying Put? Towards a Relational Politics of Mobility at a Time of Migration.” Central Asian Survey 30 (3–​4): 555–​76. —​—​—​. 2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. RIA. 2016. “V Tadzhikistane Zhurnalistov Budut Shtrafovat’ Za Narushenie Norm Gosiazyka.” 2016. https://​ria.ru/​20160​801/​147​3317​280.html. Roche, Sophie. 2014. Domesticating Youth: Youth Bulges and Its Socio-​Political Implications in Tajikistan. Integration and Conflict Studies, Volume 8. New York: Berghahn. Shambezoda, Khusrab. 2019. “Mnogoiazychnoe Obrazovanie v Mnogonatsional’nom Sotsiume (Na Primere Respubliki Tadzhikistan).” In Russian Language in the Multilingual World, edited by Ahti Nikunlassi and Ekaterina Protassova, 166–​74. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Sputnik. 2017. “ZAGSy Tadzhikistana Ne Registriruiut ‘neodobrennye’ Imena Detey.” 2017. https://​tj.sput​nikn​ews.ru/​20170​619/​tadzh​ikis​tan-​zags-​otk​azyv​ayut​sya-​vyda​vat-​metr​iki-​ imena-​ne-​iz-​reyes​tra-​102​2607​891.html. Suyarkulova, Mohira. 2013. “Statehood as Dialogue: Conflicting Historical Narratives of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.” In The Transformation of Tajikistan: The Sources of Statehood, edited by John Heathershaw and Edmund Herzig. London: Routledge. Terrelonge, Leroy. 2016. “Language Policies and Labor Migration: The Case of Tajikistan.” In Language Change in Central Asia, edited by Elise S Ahn and Juldyz Smagulova, 223–​44. Boston, MA; Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. Studies in Language and Linguistics. London: Longman. Turaeva, Rano. 2017. “Kelin in Central Asia: The Social Status of Young Brides as Liminal Phase.” In The Family in Central Asia: New Perspectives, edited by Sophie Roche, 171–​83. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Volkov, Vadim. 2000. “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process.” In Stalinism: New Directions, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, 210–​31. London; New York: Routledge. Wei, Li. 2012. “Introduction.” In Multilingualism, Discourse, and Ethnography, edited by Sheena Gardner and Marilyn Martin-​Jones, 19–​23. New York: Routledge.

301

CHAPTER TWENTY

SONIC STATECRAFTING The politics of popular music in Uzbekistan Kerstin Klenke BEARDS AND LICENCES The year 2019 started with business as usual for the Uzbek estrada scene. In January, O’zbekkonsert, the unit dealing with this particular genre of popular music within Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Culture, organised a press conference to address several questions. O’zbekkonsert had provoked these questions itself over the past months, when refusing singer Sanjar Djavberdiev, aka San Jay, a performance licence: were male estrada artists allowed to perform wearing a beard? Do beards fit the national mentality, or may they have a negative effect on young listeners? And are beards of foreign acts to be treated differently from those of local performers? Finally, O’zbekkonsert did not put a ban on beards –​but the answers its representatives gave at the press conference left no doubt that Uzbek estrada artists should preferably be neatly shaven. Most probably, in the year before O’zbekkonsert had just forgotten about beards when preparing a list of ‘inappropriate actions’,1 including inacceptable topics, indecent styles and improper settings for estrada songs and video clips. Beards could have easily found their place next to the items on that list: tattoos; ripped clothes and revealing dresses; singing while lying in bed; the display of luxury in videoclips, if not prompted by corresponding lyrics; disrespect for sacred places and monuments; product placement; male cross-​dressing and men wearing jewellery; misuse of state symbols (coat of arms, flag, president); promoting sexual lust and seduction, drugs and alcohol, terrorism and subversion.2 Beards had, however, already been a topic earlier in 2018, when O’zbekkonsert had summoned 85 estrada artists for the meeting ‘The Role of National Estrada in the Spiritual Education of Young People and Artist Etiquette’. Here, male artists had been criticised for letting their beards grow during Ramadan, female artists for donning headscarves and wearing modest dress –​and posting photos of themselves in their various fasting styles on social media. ‘Religion does not need the propaganda of artists’, the 81 artists present had been told, whereas the four artists absent from the meeting had their performance licences withdrawn afterwards for failing to attend.3 None of these events will have come as a surprise or a shock to anyone in Uzbekistan. The compatibility of estrada and beards –​or the compatibility of estrada and Islam –​ are topics that vanish and resurface in Uzbek public and political discourse with 302

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-24

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

predictable regularity, and the punitive withdrawal of performance licences in the estrada scene has been an almost daily act in Uzbekistan for about 20 years.4 Estrada came as a Russian Soviet import to Central Asia –​as to other parts of the socialist world. From an entertainment format comparable to music hall it gradually developed into mainstream pop (Mulladzhanov 2003; Yusupov 2004). Today, it dominates Uzbekistan’s soundscape like no other musical genre and is a crucial element of wedding entertainment. Under the presidency of Islom Karimov, however, it became more than that: the Uzbek government selected estrada to be the sonic incarnation of national independence ideology. It devised an elaborate administrative and legal structure to foster and shape, regulate and control the scene as part of its ‘patriotisation policies’, involving political personnel up to the highest ranks of the state (Klenke 2019, pp. 251ff.). The ultimate goal was to create milliy estrada, national estrada, as an emblem of the nation in sound. To achieve this, in many respects, authoritarian Uzbekistan took Soviet cultural engineering to its extreme, and produced a peculiarly dense entanglement between the spheres of popular music and state politics. Estrada was made an essential element of building the body politic and shaping society, the auditory domain thus not secondary to other fields and means of governing. I here explore this unique form of sonic statecrafting in Central Asia: How did the Uzbek state in the Karimov era govern estrada –​and govern through estrada? Why was it so concerned about estrada in the first place? How has Islom Karimov’s successor, president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, dealt with this heritage? And, finally: why did 2019 not end with ‘business as usual’ for the Uzbek estrada scene?

NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE IDEOLOGY AND PATRIOTISATION POLICIES Upon taking office in 1992 until his death in 2016, president Islom Karimov published regularly and extensively on politics, economics and religion. Around the year 2000, the forging of a national independence ideology became a priority for him.5 This ideology superseded Marxism-​Leninism as socio-​political theory, but it kept one of the most fundamental principles of Marxism-​Leninism –​the idea that socio-​political development proceeds in an ordered form of unilineal, teleological evolution. Communism, however, the former destination of this advance, was replaced with an independent democratic nation state as the not-​yet-​reached apex of progress. Apart from sketching grand lines of socio-​political development, Uzbek national independence ideology promoted first and foremost an assemblage of values, such as a life in friendship, peace and harmony, the sacralisation of the concepts of homeland and family, love for the Uzbek language, religious tolerance, as well as the adaptation of the best achievements of other countries and peoples. Besides religious tolerance, religion plays a rather minor role in national independence ideology. In its stead, another concept became central: spirituality (ma’naviyat) which denotes something like an internal state of mind, a primordial property of every Uzbek, uniting the nation. With the term ‘spirituality’ incorporating the good side of Islam, the term ‘religion’ came to be increasingly imbued negatively with the meaning of radical, political Islam in Karimov’s writings (Hilgers 2009; Kendzior 2014; Khalid 2007). 303

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​

Just as Marxism-​Leninism before it, national independence ideology was said to need care and cultivation. While it was thought to emanate from the people themselves, still not everyone was thought to be sufficiently permeated by it. Taking care of ideological impregnation was particularly important in the face of other ideologies that were supposedly threatening to infest the nation. At varying times with varying intensity, pan-​Turkism, political Islam and commercialism as a purveyor of western amorality were claimed as the worst menaces in the field of ideologies since independence –​and they had an infamous predecessor: communism. In official writings in the Karimov era, the Soviet era was invariably depicted as a bleak period, save for a few figures that were rehabilitated as defenders of the national cause during difficult times. However, despite being a Soviet heritage, estrada was not seen as in any way problematically tainted by this origin. Rather, it was –​and is –​perceived as a universal and thus unmarked art form that can and needs to be enriched with national, regional, or local elements (see Adams 2010, pp. 78f.). Patriotisation had been a topic in Uzbekistan, before national independence ideology was put high on the agenda from 2000 onwards. It had also been part of music policies. Already in 1996, for example, the government had established a huge nation-​wide song contest called ‘Uzbekistan –​My Homeland’, which produced about 10,000 songs eulogising Uzbekistan in varying degrees every year. Just as in general politics, however, so in the field of culture, patriotisation became a far more important and institutionalised issue after the year 2000. While the mandate to adjust cultural activities to the tenets of national independence ideology came to pertain to all the arts, it was estrada that was affected most by these mainstreaming measures. For various reasons elaborated below, in 2001, the genre was chosen as a major instrument for inculcating the newly canonised national independence ideology in the population. Estrada was meant to be more than a mere medium, however. It was to become the sonic representation of national independence ideology itself –​and even furnished with its own state institution.

O’ZBEKNAVO –​ AN INSTITUTION FOR ESTRADA O’zbeknavo was established in 1996 as a governmental ‘tour-​concert association’ and as such administered a wide array of ensembles and artists in the fields of music, dance and comedy. In 2001, however, a resolution of Uzbekistan’s Cabinet of Ministers considerably changed its responsibilities.6 From then onwards until its dissolution into O’zbekkonsert in 2017, O’zbeknavo was Uzbekistan’s ‘estrada association’, with a head office in Tashkent’s Turkiston Palace and regional branches in the provinces and Karakalpakstan (see Figure 20.1). On paper, O’zbeknavo was just the executive organ of the ‘Council for the Development and Coordination of National Estrada Art’, a body of 40–​60 high-​ranking politicians, heads of cultural and educational institutions, senior scholars, famous artists, composers and media figures, which received additional support from the ‘Fund for the Development of Estrada Art’ and the ‘Group of Representatives of Creative Support’. In public discourse in Uzbekistan, however, this differentiated administrative structure became blurred and anything that happened within the structure as a whole was usually subsumed under the label O’zbeknavo –​a practice I will follow here for reasons of simplicity. Between 2001 and 2017, further resolutions by the Cabinet of Ministers introduced various 304

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

Figure 20.1  The Turkiston Palace, one of the biggest concert halls in Tashkent and seat of O’zbeknavo and later O’zbekkonsert at its rear side. The caption on the monument reads: ‘Uzbekistan’s future is a great state’ (2005, photo: Kerstin Klenke).

changes in responsibility and accountability, but on the whole, O’zbeknavo’s tasks remained threefold: ideological-​aesthetic, administrative and organisational. In the ideological-​aesthetic sphere, O’zbeknavo was meant, on the one hand, to combat ‘artistic shallowness’ and ensure that, in particular, young estrada artists attained ‘professional and spiritual perfection’, and on the other, to encourage the creation of songs that ‘teach young people love for the Homeland [and educate them] in loyal spirit to the ideas of national independence’. In combination, ‘estrada’s national identity’ was at stake and –​as befits a sonic representation of ideology –​the well-​being and future of the nation itself. To fulfil this ideological-​ aesthetic task, O’zbeknavo was granted a powerful administrative position: it became the sole agency in Uzbekistan for the issuance of performance licences and concert certificates. In comparison with the Soviet era, such a measure of control over artists’ aesthetic output was not a novelty. Various institutions had had their so-​called ‘artistic councils’ (khudsovety) or similar bodies, through which they had judged the suitability of repertoires and levels of professionalism. The innovation was the fact that this measure of control was not coupled with professional artists being employed and thus paid by state organisations. From 2001 onward, a performance licence was granted for a limited span of time with the option of prolongation; it came with a fee, but exempted estrada artists from 305

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​

paying tax on any income generated from their performances. In order to obtain a licence, artists had to submit an application and supporting documentation to O’zbeknavo, including information on their musical education and their repertoire. O’zbeknavo not only decided between rejection and approval, but also which kind of licence an artist would obtain. Between 2001 and 2017, the details of the licensing system changed several times, but the general structure stayed the same: the kinds of licences granted and their respective fees were determined by the interplay between an artist’s estimated professional qualification or fame and thus expected income on the one hand (the rating group), and the envisaged performance activities on the other (the licence category). Here, the main difference always lay between artists seeking to perform at private events or in restaurants only, and those wanting to additionally give concerts and have their songs and video clips rotated on radio and TV. Upon approval and determination of the category and rating group, artists would sign a licence contract with O’zbeknavo, which determined various rights and duties. For several years at least, the latter included the following: ‘to participate in events determined by the state and government’ and ‘to conduct anniversaries, festivities at a high musical and artistic level’; in addition, the contract included a prohibition: ‘the performance of works that are opposed to our national and pan-​human spiritual values is forbidden.’ For concerts, already licenced artists had to apply for a separate certificate at O’zbeknavo, again with various documents including the concert scenario and the list of participants, upon request they had to additionally hand in song lyrics, the compère’s text, posters, information on decorations, etc. An application for a concert certificate was to be reviewed on the basis of ‘ideological-​artistic’ criteria, but also whether the proposed scenario sufficiently reflected ‘feelings of devotion to the Homeland (vatan), such as love for the motherland (ona yurt)’ (NN-​I 2010). Any kind of performance activity without a licence was forbidden, and from 2007 onwards, O’zbeknavo was supposed to monitor and ensure that only artists with a valid licence were recorded; it was also meant to prevent radio and TV stations in Uzbekistan from broadcasting songs and video clips by unlicenced Uzbekistani artists. Concerning organisational tasks, O’zbeknavo was to engage in various activities, ranging from sending estrada artists to school or university festivities to conducting auditions for the grand state spectacles of Navro’z and Independence Day (Adams 2010), from establishing ‘cultural-​enlightening events’ for young people to organising academic conferences, and from staffing local folk fairs with estrada artists to participating in the administration of lavish national competitions (see Figure 20.2).7 But what was the concrete aim of all this bureaucracy around estrada? What was expected as the aesthetic result of the envisaged convergence of estrada with national independence ideology? The imaginary ideal musical product of all these efforts was milliy estrada, national estrada.

Milliy Estrada Milliy estrada was probably the most widely used and discussed term I encountered during fieldwork, in conversations with government officials and artists, teachers and students, journalists and scholars, as well as in the press. The omnipresence of 306

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

Figure 20.2  At the folk fair for Independence Day in Alisher Navoiy National Park. The banners on stage read: ‘Congratulations on your holiday, dear fellow citizens!’ and ‘The homeland is singular –​the homeland is unique’ (Tashkent, 2008, photo: Kerstin Klenke).

the term was and is, however, not in any way matched by a clarity of definition. Some people claim that all estrada made in Uzbekistan is by default milliy, but the overwhelming majority of the people I spoke with, and of those writing or a talking about music in the media, demand estrada to have certain ingredients, deemed specifically Uzbek, in order to deserve the label ‘milliy’. Despite being a contested concept, especially at its fringes, there are some qualities that make estrada milliy for most, or at least many people in Uzbekistan. Here, I will focus on the rather undisputed ones –​ language, content and musical properties –​which in actual practice are still subject to interpretation and a matter of negotiation with a potential for conflict. Milliy estrada is sung in Uzbek and while it can take up regional dialects such as Khorezmian, it should not include lower-​class or youth slang and swear words. ‘Adequate’ lyrics are either new poems composed by contemporary professional Uzbek writers, older, even centuries old verses, adaptations of Uzbek folksong texts or parts of epics prevalent in Uzbekistan. In any case, lyrics should not be banal, but ‘substantial’. Asked about suitable content for milliy estrada, in 2005, a government official came up with the following assortment of desired and impermissible topics –​already foreshadowing the 2019 list of ‘inappropriate actions’ mentioned at the beginning:

307

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​

One can sing about love, about the homeland, about anything, but it is forbidden [to sing about] religion, […] or to propagate terrorism, rape. […] Shoot, rape people, that is not allowed. He should sing about the homeland, about love, about what he wants, about flowers, [there are] so many topics. [But] there are several topics which one must not touch: prostitution, pornography, drugs, terrorists, religion. (November 2005)8 ‘Songs about the homeland’, so-​called ‘vatan songs’, are certainly the supreme discipline of milliy estrada. One type of suitable content for vatan songs are events, heroes and heroines from those eras of Uzbekistan’s history and prehistory, which are part of current state-​ sanctioned national historiography. Another type are accolades to Uzbekistan’s president by proxy –​that is, eulogies to great leaders of the past, just hinting at parallels to present-​day leadership, and the appraisal of achievements since independence or the achievement of independence as such. Also more general lyrics extolling the beauty and bounty of Uzbekistan, the gentleness and generosity of its people, as well as depicting colourful traditions and customs can qualify as vatan songs –​as do texts that just express one’s love for the country. The opening lines of Feruza Djumaniyozova’s 2005 song ‘O’zbegim’ are a good example for this: If you ask of what lineage and origin I am –​I am a beloved one of my free homeland, I am an Uzbek girl and a child of my holy Uzbekistan. I am a truly dear one to my father and my mother. I am a child of my blooming oasis home Khorezm. That religion, and particularly Islam, is not considered a suitable topic for milliy estrada must be seen in context with national independence ideology, where, as already mentioned, the word ‘religion’ gradually acquired the meaning of radical political Islam. Thus, when O’zbekkonsert criticised estrada artists for posting photos of themselves in devout dress and demeanour on social media during Ramadan in 2018, it implicitly accused them of potentially promoting political Islam, if not terrorism. The rationale behind this criticism is still the same as explained by a high-​ranking O’zbeknavo official to me in 2005: Singers are idols. They influence the people and we try to influence the singers. […] Estrada stars are idols. What they do, is law for many. If a star wears a red T-​shirt, everybody immediately wears a red T-​shirt. Money plays a big role for estrada stars. Extremists could exploit that, in that they offer stars money for singing about certain topics. (November 2005) Love is an appropriate subject of milliy estrada, if either focusing on forms of family love, such as children’s love for their parents and vice versa, or if portraying chaste forms of affection in a heterosexual setting. Pre-​marital or marital intimacy is only acceptable if hinted at, and wrapped up in morally impeccable allusions. This also concerns descriptions of female beauty, which should stay, as a state official remarked, ‘above the neck’. 308

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

With regard to its musical properties, milliy estrada should have discernible references to older Uzbek musical traditions by including elements from either folk or classical court music such as characteristic musical instruments, melodies and modes, or rhythmic formulas, as well as particular vocal ornamentation techniques or singing styles (Djumaev 2005, Levin 1996, Merchant 2015). Rarely discussed or even mentioned, however, is the fact that Uzbekistan shares musical traditions and instruments with neighbouring countries which, consequently, lack any kind of national exclusivity and make questionable their capability to sonically and visually signify Uzbekistan’s musical uniqueness. There are other facets that play into the concept of milliy estrada, ranging from the role of foreign music, dress and behaviour at concerts, haircuts and dancing in video clips, to artists’ behaviour in their personal life. All this is in line with more general social policies trying to implement what is often termed o’zbekchilik, a presumed essential ‘Uzbekness’, entailing rigid ideas about proper comportment in public and private. Despite these details and this far reach, it is necessary to keep in mind that overall, milliy estrada is not a well-​defined concept. Still, the Uzbek government under president Islom Karimov accorded the development of the genre into a more milliy direction a matter of extreme importance. But why is estrada attributed such a key role? In order to answer this question, I will look at how estrada is supposed to function and what it is supposed to effect.

NATIONALIST REALISM AND THE WORKINGS OF MILLIY ESTRADA Our new estrada was mobilising viewers, teaching them, educating, developing, and perfecting their taste –​while entertaining and making them happy. What could well be a statement on milliy estrada by an O’zbeknavo official in 2015, actually stems from Leonid Utyosov, a prominent representative of Soviet estrada and dates back to 1961 (quoted in MacFadyen 2002, p. 118). This compatibility is the logical consequence of the flourishing afterlife of Soviet understandings of culture and its politics in independent Uzbekistan. For just as national independence ideology owes much to Marxism-​Leninism, the concept of milliy estrada and ideas about its functioning draw on one of the central Soviet directives in the sphere of culture: socialist realism. This aesthetic mandate demanded the arts not to depict ‘objective reality’, but ‘reality in its revolutionary development’, in order to effect ‘the ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism’ (Zhdanov 1934, p. 4). In comparison, at the base of milliy estrada, there is something which I have elsewhere termed a mandate of ‘nationalist realism’: to depict reality as developing –​that is, to depict a slightly better, brighter and thus heightened version of reality. It should anticipate life as it would be further ahead on Uzbekistan’s path of progress, with the aim of effecting the ideological transformation of the Uzbekistani people in the spirit of nationalism (Klenke 2019, pp. 254ff.). Thus, at least in government discourse, milliy estrada is conceived as serving a purpose –​beyond providing pleasure or income. It is seen as an integral part or even a motor of socio-​political development and thus the country’s progress itself. 309

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​

Uzbek musicologists Olim Bekov and Davlat Mullajonov are very explicit about this entanglement: [I]‌n strengthening peace […], in perfecting the people’s moral qualities and in educating and raising their aesthetic tastes, estrada has its own position among the art forms. […] [I]n the instrument of estrada music there lies the possibility to express [those] feelings that are considered the most noble and sacred, [that is, feelings] of love, kindness and devotion to the Homeland, and to place them into the heart of millions. […] The glory of our dear homeland, which develops day by day and implements socio-​economic reforms step by step, [as well as] the bright future of its independence are directly linked to singing praises to spirituality, first of all to love and kindness to the Homeland, and to our eternal values. (Bekov & Mullajonov 2001, pp. 136, 138) But how exactly is estrada to achieve all this?

Power and impact Official documents reliably and routinely stress estrada’s pedagogic value, and I cannot remember even one conversation which did not, at some point, touch the genre’s educational effect –​such as this one with a colleague: If you look at Iran or the Taliban: Uzbekistan is surrounded [sic] by Islam. There is the possibility of war. Here are a lot of young people. What do they need? They could go to the mosque and learn, rebel. Now, they have courses in ideology during the semester, and during the holidays, they have estrada. (August 2004) Education in the context of estrada, however, is not meant to offer people something to critically reflect upon and cause them to intellectually grow. It is conceived more as an automatic process of instilment, an immediate and unfiltered diffusion into a person’s mind and heart. Thus, the concept of ‘education through estrada’ assumes a similarly simple mechanism as that of ideological drenching, presented earlier. Just as being filled with national independence ideology is thought to leave no space for other ideologies in a person’s mind and heart, being faced with estrada is supposed to inevitably result in an unimpeded influx, leaving a person soaked with ideas and emotions. This, in turn, makes estrada so attractive for exactly the task of spreading national independence ideology, but it also makes it extremely dangerous. In an interview, talking about estrada that is not milliy, an Uzbek colleague evoked probably the strongest image possible for describing the genre’s immense power –​and its devastating effects, if not properly used: You listen to [a popular song] at home, you walk on the street, it will be played [on radio & tv] the whole day, it subconsciously takes effect, it is always there, it does not go away. This means, it is a strong weapon. I consider a song an atomic bomb. It can explode. It has no weight, no colour, no smell. It injures the heart and is just gone. Like the radiation disease after Hiroshima, it will destroy the roots. (October 2004) 310

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

While not everybody I spoke with would have employed such violent metaphors, ideas about the extraordinary power estrada is presumably charged with and its supposedly immediate effect on listeners are extremely common. In addition, the accessibility of the genre for people of all social backgrounds and all generations, and in particular its attractiveness for young people, heightens estrada’s suitability for sonifying politics. Last but not least, the estrada scene’s ability to quickly react to current affairs by almost immediately producing new songs and videoclips, when deemed necessary, are a major advantage –​but also a potential danger –​for any political project. None of the other measures undertaken to align the Uzbekistani citizenry with national independence ideology, from campaigns for decent dress (see Figure 20.3) and the strengthening of mahalla committees to regular courses in ideology at universities, could match estrada in these central characteristics: accessibility, attractiveness and affect. All this helps explain why the Uzbek government under Islom Karimov paid so much attention to this genre and not only wanted milliy estrada to be produced in high quality, but also in great quantity. It spent comparably few financial resources on making estrada milliy, but an immense amount of human resources by keeping masses of people engaged with milliy estrada, mostly in its vatan song variant, for vast spans of time. Every year over several months, competitions such as ‘You are Singular, Sacred Homeland’ kept thousands of Uzbekistanis, from toddlers to ministers, busy

Figure 20.3  Promoting ‘Students’ clothing culture at Uzbekistan’s State Conservatory’ (Tashkent, 2016, photo: Kerstin Klenke). 311

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​

organising, composing, writing, rehearsing, singing, playing, recording, listening, judging and reporting in connection with these and myriad other competitions, more often than not on patriotic themes. The preparations for the two great state holidays, Navro’z and Independence, meant an additional immersion in milliy estrada for several weeks each, albeit for a smaller number and range of people, while the holidays themselves were an opportunity to clutter radio and TV with vatan songs in the weeks before and after (Megoran 2008a).

RESPONSES TO MILLIY ESTRADA Milliy estrada certainly does not provoke only unrestricted enthusiasm, but it is very popular in Uzbekistan and the repertoire of many estrada singers happens to somehow naturally be milliy, at least to a great extent. Musically, this is just how these artists imagine Uzbek estrada to be: rooted in folk or classical traditions and sung in Uzbek. This is also how most wedding parties imagine their evening entertainment to be: danceable across generations with ‘decent’ lyrics. Consequently, much of what the concept of milliy estrada entails in terms of music, language, content and even dress, widely resonates with the expectations of estrada’s audience and with the ideas many artists have about their music. And beyond personal taste, many people consider it normal –​or even necessary –​for a proper nation state to have its own musical state emblem such as milliy estrada. It would thus be misleading to dismiss milliy estrada as merely the brainchild of cultural politics, an official ploy to bother artists, coopt them for an unpopular state project and indoctrinate the Uzbekistani citizenry with official ideology. This even applies to what I called the supreme discipline of milliy estrada, vatan songs, ‘songs about the homeland’, which are certainly the most overtly patriotic part of estrada in general. All estrada artists are supposed to have them in their repertoire, some include them rather reluctantly, but others spoke about their duty and a few about their pride to contribute to this kind of musical patriotisation and sonic nation building. Among audiences, however, interest in these songs is generally rather low. They are not popular fare for wedding entertainment, and many people are outright annoyed about their presence in the public soundscape, particularly around state holidays, when it is hard to evade them. Still, there are a handful among the thousands of these songs, which almost everybody somehow likes, is even deeply moved by –​or considers at least vital for uniting the Uzbek citizenry and spreading optimism in difficult times.9 More profound resentment around the term and practices of milliy estrada centres on the narrowness of the concept itself and on the strong government thrust towards making all Uzbek estrada milliy. Artists, fans and other protagonists of the estrada scene, among them government staff, have regularly –​some in private, some in public –​labelled the official take on milliy estrada suffocating, wishing for more stylistic variety within milliy estrada, and for more stylistic variety within estrada in general. This will to diversify music, lyrics, videoclips, stage shows and dress, coupled with the fact that the government is not the financial motor of the scene and lacks resources for control, is the main reason for the situation that a lot of Uzbekistani estrada is far from milliy –​not even considering the presence of foreign pop music

312

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

on the radio or the internet. It is also the main reason for negotiations and conflicts between artists and government organs, including the withdrawal of licences. Artists’ and fans’ criticism of the current concept of milliy estrada is often coupled with positive references to the shape of estrada in the Uzbek SSR, which is presented as having been musically much more varied and thus interesting, but could still be claimed and successfully marketed as a truly Uzbek version of estrada. To many artists I talked with, milliy estrada, as officially promoted by O’zbeknavo, was the sonic incarnation of what they perceived to be a backward and isolated country –​and not the audio version of a grand state with a great history and an equally great future, as stated by national independence ideology. In this vein, a singer with the peak of his career in the Soviet era remarked the following: The Soviet Union, I mean, what a country this was! Big and powerful, everyone was in awe. If you said ‘I am an artist from the Soviet Union’, that was something. You were something. But now? ‘I am from Uzbekistan.’ What kind of impression does this make? Most people do not even know where it is. (July 2004) For some artists, especially those with experience of working in the music business outside of Uzbekistan, the whole idea of serving people, country, or government seems an absurd and somehow shameful anachronism. Others do not resent the Uzbek government’s expectation that they dedicate their talents to the cause of statecrafting. Their concept of artisthood includes ideas about duty and service –​whether relating these ideas to older regional traditions such as court musicians, to the Soviet concept of cultural worker, or to a personal religious mandate. And they do not perceive the administrative efforts of the Uzbek government in the field of estrada as control or repression, at least in theory. For them, music is just too important to not be made part of governing, to be left without state direction, and they see the existence of an estrada administration as an unmistakable sign that the government understands its responsibilities in the realm of music. What they do resent, however, is how estrada administration works in practice –​ and, as I noticed over the years, this resentment grew stronger, the longer O’zbeknavo existed. Apart from discontents over how the vagueness of the milliy estrada concept was used by officials to suspend or withdraw licences, dissatisfaction concerned demands on time, rude treatment, corruption and outright harassment. Obliged by their licence contracts ‘to participate in events determined by the state and government’, estrada artists spend up to several months each year at auditions, rehearsals, concerts and competitions, as mentioned above. Even those generally willing to serve people, nation and/​or government increasingly mentioned they felt treated like servants; some even likened their role to slaves, while others compared themselves to prostitutes. These were mostly comments in personal conversations, more rarely in public –​for example, in social media. For them, the contractual arrangement is lopsided: a powerful, but shady economy of prestige, including state awards and other privileges, does not make up for the perceived lacked of direct reciprocity. In their opinion, the government has forsaken its normal allocative duties, not properly honouring its artists’ commitment for performing the state in sound, for example through direct remuneration, a legal system securing authors’ and performers’ rights,

313

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​

or at least respectful treatment. Many artists feel that attempts at state control over estrada have tightened, while deeper knowledge about the workings of pop music outside of Uzbekistan make them aware of the idiosyncracy of the system they are working in. Most estrada artists I met, however, take the administrative system for granted and just learn to navigate it. Some try to evade licensing altogether in the hope of not getting caught –​a hope that is not unfounded, as O’zbeknavo’s and O’zbekkonsert’s monitoring aspirations have never been fully realised. Others even profit immensely from the licensing administration in place, especially the more famous ones who are able to earn immense riches by the deal of ‘no tax in return for concert commitments’, and they enjoy various privileges. If they are dissatisfied with estrada policies, they rather keep this to themselves, because fame alone does not save anyone from repercussions. Inappropriate lyrics, indecent videoclips, improper behaviour at weddings, non-​attendance when summoned, open critique, or opposition to directives –​all these can and regularly do get artists into trouble, whether they are estrada newcomers or superstars. Licence suspensions, mostly for a few weeks, but sometimes for years, are the most frequent consequence, but there have also been reports of verbal and physical abuse. Those hit by longer suspensions usually relocate their performance activities to other countries, often to Kazakhstan, sometimes to Turkey and the Russian Federation, until they are able to get back in favour. Despite the tight bureaucratic structure, the harsh practices of estrada administration and the conceptual narrowness of milliy estrada, many Uzbekistani estrada artists, composers and lyricists considered themselves to lead something like normal lives in music –​in Karimov-​era authoritarianism. Anyone with ambitions to voice general political criticism, opposition, or resistance in popular music would have chosen other genres such as rap or rock music.

POST-​K ARIMOV ESTRADA In February 2017, just a few months after Islom Karimov’s death in September 2016, Karimov’s successor, president Shavkat Mirziyoyev ordered O’zbeknavo to be dissolved and merged with O’zbekraqs, until then the Association for National Dance, into a new unit called O’zbekkonsert. In spring 2020, it is obvious that O’zbekkonsert has by and large just continued what O’zbeknavo started. National independence ideology à la Karimov might have waned as the explicit overall framework for making estrada to sonify state politics, but O’zbekkonsert’s activities seem like revenants of similar efforts in the 2000s and 2010s; unsurprisingly, public statements sound strikingly familiar, too, and the end of O’zbeknavo has not been the end of the licensing system. All these continuities might easily distract from the fact that there actually seems to be some change under way –​the year 2019 certainly did not end with business as usual for the Uzbek estrada scene as it started. On 14 October, well-​known estrada artist Jahongir Otajonov had his licence withdrawn. Guests at a wedding party had showered him with Uzbek banknotes, and the financial ovation had been filmed and appeared on the internet. As the Uzbek currency, so’m, depicts Uzbekistan’s coat of arms, this act constituted a clear ‘misuse of state symbols’, as laid down in O’zbekkonsert’s list of ‘inappropriate actions’ for estrada artists. 314

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

Had this been business as usual, Jahongir Otajonov would have quietly bargained with O’zbekkonsert to have his licence restored. However, he publicly labelled the licence suspension a human rights violation –​and openly received powerful support: Komil Allamjonov, chairman of the Information and Mass Communications Agency and former press secretary to president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, wrote on Telegram: ‘I love to listen to the songs of Jahongir Otajonov with my family and children! For this we do not need a licence!’ Aziza Umarova, now executive director of a consulting company in Uzbekistan after a UN career, was even more explicit. In a Facebook post, she compared Uzbekistan to North Korea and questioned the need for an institution like O’zbekkonsert: In order to chase popular artists along personal networks to ‘parties’ or weddings of ‘buddies’ without payment? In order to drive young pretty female singers into free love? In order to make money on permits? To break the backbone of artists?10 Reposts and posts in a similar vein quickly filled social media. The criticism directed at O’zbekkonsert was nothing new; neither was the question of whether licences were needed at all. But the fact that they were voiced openly by well-​known figures from the sphere of politics and business was new. Komil Allamjonov’s intervention was probably even without precedent: a high-​ranking civil servant publicly condemning the actions of a high-​ranking government institution. On 16 October, Jahongir Otajonov’s performance licence was revalidated, but this was not the end of the affair. ‘Is the issuance and withdrawal of licence[s]‌for local performers a manifestation of censorship?’ a journalist asked the Minister of Culture and the director of O’zbekkonsert at a press conference on 27 November 2019.11 Censorship is against Uzbekistan’s constitution, so both, of course, denied this. But can there be a rebirth of business as usual in Uzbek estrada? A tacit return from accusations of violating the constitution to the topic of beards, which started off the year 2019, seems at least difficult. The grander question is, however, whether president Shavkat Mirziyoyev will want to continue the tradition of sonic statecrafting –​and if so, whether estrada would be his genre of choice.

NOTES 1 All translations from Russian and Uzbek are my own. 2 https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​201​9102​8170​712/​http://​uzbek​konc​ert.uz/​uz/​press​_​cen​ter/​ news/​O’zbek​kons​ert/​-​zbekk​onts​ert-​dav​lat-​massas​asi-​oshid​agi-​shi-​lar-​va-​ula​rga-​ishlan​gan-​ video​klip​lar-​sav​iyas​ini-​ba-​olash/​ 3 https://​kun.uz/​47061​079 4 This chapter is based on extensive fieldwork and some archival research in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, between 2003 and 2016 and primarily draws on findings more elaborately presented in Klenke (2019). 5 Islom Karimov most concisely expounded national independence ideology in Karimov 1998, 2000a, 2000b and 2002. The most detailed analyses of Uzbekistan’s national independence ideology in western scholarship are those of March (2002 and 2003) and Megoran (2008b). 6 This resolution was PKM 272-​2001. All quotations in this section are taken from this document unless noted otherwise. 315

—​​​​ K e r s t i n K l e n k e —​​​ 7 Musical training of estrada artists rests with regular schools, lyceums, colleges and the conservatory, as well as afternoon music schools and private tuition. A career in estrada in Uzbekistan does not, however, necessarily depend on musical talent, as playback singing is a common practice. If one aims at stardom –​with or without vocal abilities –​it is vital to have financial backing for promotion, in the form of private means or a collaboration with a producer. 8 To protect their identity I have anonymised all of my interlocutors. I also obscure the exact dates, when interviews took place and identify them only by month and year. 9 Prominent among these popular vatan songs are Yulduz Usmanova’s ‘We will give you to no one, Uzbekistan’ and Severa Nazarkhan’s ‘You are my grand one, my homeland’. 10 https://​podro​bno.uz/​cat/​obches​tvo/​uzbekk​onts​ert-​yavl​yaet​sya-​prya​mym-​nasled​iem-​totali​ tarn​ogo-​kontro​lya-​v-​sssr-​aziza-​umar​ova-​podd​erzh​ala/​ 11 https://​rep​ost.uz/​licenz​iya

REFERENCES Adams, L. 2010, The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Bekov, O.A. & Mullajonov, D.M. 2001, ‘Milliy estrada musiqasi’, in H. Karamatov et al. (eds.), O’zbekiston san’ati (1991–​2001 yillar), Sharq, Tashkent, pp. 135–​140. Djumaev, A. 2005, ‘Musical Heritage and National Identity in Uzbekistan’, Ethnomusicology Forum, vol. 14, no. 2, pp.165–​184. Hilgers, I. 2009, Why Do Uzbeks Have to Be Muslims? Exploring Religiosity in the Ferghana Valley, LIT, Berlin. Karimov, I. 1998, Ideology –​the Uniting Principle of Nation, Society and State. Answers to the Questions of Editor-​in-​Chief of the Tafakkur Magazine, O’zbekiston, Tashkent. —​—​—​ 2000a ‘Ideologii͡a nat͡sional’noĭ nezavisimosti –​ ubezhdenie naroda i vera v velikoe budushchee’, in I. Karimov, Nasha vysshaya t͡sel’ –​nezavisimost’ i prot͡svetanie rodiny, svoboda i blagopoluchie naroda, O‘zbekiston, Tashkent, pp. 476–​495. —​—​—​ 2000b, ‘Nat͡sional’nai͡a ideologii͡a –​ dli͡a nas istochnik dukhovno-​nravstvennoĭ sily v stroitel’stve gosudarstva i obshchestva’, in I. Karimov, Nasha vysshaya t͡sel’ –​nezavisimost’ i prot͡svetanie rodiny, svoboda i blagopoluchie naroda, O’zbekiston, Tashkent, pp. 449–​461. —​—​—​ 2002, ‘Nepovtorimyĭ khram muzyki’, in I. Karimov, Za bezopasnost’ i mir nado borot’si͡a, O’zbekiston, Tashkent, pp. 289–​295. Kendzior, S. 2014, ‘Reclaiming Ma’naviyat: Morality, Criminality, and Dissident Politics in Uzbekistan’, in Reeves, M., Rasanayagam, J. & Beyer, J. (eds.), Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia. Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. 223–​242. Khalid, A. 2007, Islam after Communism. Religion and Politics in Central Asia, University of California Press, Berkeley. Klenke, K. 2019, The Sound State of Uzbekistan. Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era, Routledge, London. Levin, T. 1996, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York), Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis. MacFadyen, D. 2002, Songs for Fat People. Affect, Emotion and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song 1900–​1955, McGill –​Queen’s University Press, Montreal. March, A.F. 2002, ‘The Use and Abuse of History: “National Ideology” as Transcendental Object in Islam Karimov’s “Ideology of National Independence”’, Central Asian Survey, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 371–​384.

316

— ​​​​ T h e p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l a r m u s i c i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​ —​—​—​2003. ‘State Ideology and the Legitimation of Authoritarianism: The Case of Post-​ Soviet Uzbekistan’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 209–​232. Megoran, N. 2008a, ‘From Presidential Podium to Pop Music: Everyday Discourses of Geopolitical Danger in Uzbekistan’, in Pain, R. & Smith, S. (eds.), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life, Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, pp. 25–​35. —​—​—​2008b. ‘Framing Andijon, Narrating the Nation: Islam Karimov’s Account of the Events of 13 May 2005’, Central Asian Survey, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 15–​31. Merchant, T. 2015, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan. From Courtyard to Conservatory, University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Mulladzhanov, D. 2003, ‘Uzbekskai͡a muzykal’nai͡a ėstrada perioda nezavisimosta’, in Sasaki, S. (ed.), Anthropological Studies on the Structural Transitions of Ethnic and/​or Regional Communities in Post-​Socialist States, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, pp. 127–​138. NN-​I 2010, O’zbekiston Respublikasi hududida kontsertlar va tomosha tadbirlarini tashkil etish uchun bir marotabalik gastrol-​kontsert guvohnomasi berish. Document signed by the Minister of Culture and Sport and the Chairman of the Council for the Development and Coordination of National Estrada Art, 05.02.2010, Tashkent. PKM-​272 2001, Estrada qo’shiqchilik san’atini yanada rivojlantirish to’g’risida. Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic Uzbekistan, no. 272, 26 June, Tashkent. Yusupov, L. 2004, Istoriya uzbekskoĭ muzykal’noĭ ėstrady. Monografii͡a, I.A. Bunin Yelets State University, Yelets. Zhdanov, A.A. 1934, Rech’ sekretari͡a ZK VKP(b) A. A. Zhdanova, in Pervyĭ vsesoyuznyĭ s’’ezd sovetskikh pisateleĭ 1934. Stenograficheskiĭ otchet, Khudozhestvennai͡a Literatura, Moscow, pp. 2–​5.

317

CHAPTER TWENTY-​O NE

BEFORE THE LAW Policy, practice and the search for the ‘Prepared Migrant Worker’ in the transnational migration bureaucracy Malika Bahovadinova INTRODUCTION: THE FORCE OF CARE In March 2015, Zebo sat on a bench in St Petersburg airport, awaiting her deportation. Upon arrival from Dushanbe, she had learned that as a Tajik citizen she was required to purchase medical insurance to enter Russia. After passing through passport control, the passengers from her flight were rounded up by burly men representing the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS) and cornered into a small room. There, identities of passengers were checked to establish whether their names were on the database of so-​called ‘blacklisted’ workers.1 In violation of Russia’s anti-​monopoly law, all were instructed to purchase medical insurance from the single provider available. Debit and credit cards were not accepted for this purchase, only cash. When Zebo said that she did not have any Russian cash on her, the FMS official smirked, and suggested that if she could not pay, she would be deported. Zebo suggested in turn that this would be okay. In the meantime, the other passengers were vivaciously asking each other for Russian money, sharing money, and purchasing their medical insurance. For many in the migration bureaucracy, this story would serve as one more proof of the general ‘lack of knowledge’ about the laws and regulations of Russian Federation –​on Zebo’s part, as well as on the part of many others on the flight. Zebo, however, was a manager in one of the UN organizations working on migration management in Tajikistan that was tasked with preparing migrant workers for Russia, including increasing their legal knowledge through pre-​departure orientations. She had been in the middle of this bureaucracy, which was, as it ironically turned out, not aware that St Petersburg’s City Administration was introducing its own city policies. Medical insurance conjures up images of care for migrant bodies: the idea that, if needed, one could be provided with medical treatment in migration. In practice, however, passengers were rounded up by large and imposing men, ordered to leave their luggage unattended, and ushered into a cramped and dark room. Crowded together, they were ordered to purchase medical insurance. All this did not feel like care. Was Zebo a migrant worker? She was undeniably about to become an ‘illegal migrant worker’, whose illegality rested on her lack of preparedness for migration. Eventually, 318

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-25

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

she was able to enter Russia because, after watching her sit on a bench, another of the FMS officers suggested that she cross into the airport’s exit hall and collect rubles from the friend who had come to meet her. ‘Unprepared’ (nepodgotevlenyi) is a common epithet used in the migration management bureaucracy about people arriving from Central Asia to Russia, which on average receives around 5–​6 million people a year who come for work.2 The bureaucracy, which includes the employees of state institutions, employees of NGOs, and bureaucrats in international organizations is tasked with improving the migration management system to eradicate ‘unpreparedness’. In Tajikistan, its main function is to deliver pre-​departure orientations (PDO), which in this context has largely meant transmitting Russian migration legislation and social expectations of migrant workers. By providing legal knowledge, the bureaucracy is meant to increase the legality of migrant workers in Russia. Scholars working on the intersection of migration management and illegalities, however, have pointed to the ways that immigration law produces illegality. Nicholas De Genova (2002, 422–​424) considers illegality as a juridical category and a political identity emerging through the development and the application of immigration law. Analysing the dynamics of migrant workers’ racialization in Russia, Madeleine Reeves (2013, 509) has looked at the ‘productive performance of law’, where interactions between racializing practices and documentary regimes produce the profiling of untrustworthy migrant bodies. According to this, intermediation between the law and its ‘application’ produce the very illegalities nominally meant to be reduced. Recent work also illuminates aspects of the financial benefits reaped by the increased illegalization of mobility. In her work on Russian migration management, Caress Schenk (2018) sees migration law in Russia as written in such a way to maintain the levels of ‘illegality’, to sustain everyone in the migration bureaucracy (Schenk, 2018). This is not specific to Russia: Ruben Andersson (2014) has termed the corresponding European bureaucracy a ‘migration industry’. Andersson analyses the European response to its ‘migration crisis’, in which migrant workers’ illegality is produced, packaged and ultimately made profitable. Illegality becomes a commodity from which all participants in the industry can make a profit. I add an additional dimension to the study of migration bureaucracy and infrastructure by illuminating the gap that occurs ‘before the law’. In particular, I am interested in what happens within the migration bureaucracy before policies such as the obligatory medical insurance are introduced. How does it come about that the law is written to produce illegality? How do bureaucrats negotiate and explain the need to introduce policies that ultimately produce what they are trying to eliminate? This chapter focuses on these processes through the lens of representation: creating legibility and the presence of ‘migrant workers’. It also illustrates how the discourse of ‘unprepared’ or ‘unskilled’ workers is developed through these processes and how the figure of the desirable ‘migrant worker’ is constituted. What is important are the kinds of imaginations and knowledge required to produce legibility and moral superiority, or, following Anelise Riles (2004), understanding ‘how knowledge [comes] to be understood as knowledge in the first place’. This focus on representations is important as they are worked into the bureaucratic instruments of government. The idea of a migrant worker helps to tailor the 319

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​

legal infrastructure to a specific context and to produce divergent experiences of the law and everyday lives in migration. Migration law is highly context-​specific despite global parallels.3 In this case, the law is a reflection of an idea about a person in migration, and this is the heart of bureaucracy’s epistemic violence: the representation of people in migration as ‘migrant workers’, a category that consumes images of their labour, its application, economic value, class position, and populist anxieties about the presence of alien bodies. Methodologically, this chapter examines the official and unofficial encounters between bureaucrats and citizens in sending and receiving countries. Before a policy takes shape and place, complaints, frustrations and ideas about migrant workers are voiced and negotiated. The informality of many of the statements presented here are of particular importance, as they open up opportunities to study the representation of migrant workers beyond their bounded institutional portraits, making delineations between bureaucrats of international, state, or non-​ governmental organizations unfruitful. This is not a story about who migrant workers are, but rather about how we come to understand who they are: through which technologies of power, and to what ends, representations appear and become entrenched. During a workshop held in Dushanbe in late 2012 on the protection of migrant workers’ rights, the participants were split into small groups to work on specific tasks. I joined a small group of bureaucrats, largely represented by the employees of Russian NGOs; we were tasked to work on the theme of ‘social protection of migrant workers’. There were about five of us, clustered around a flip chart in order eventually to produce the walls of white paper that would include identified problems, gaps and solutions to these problems. When our group had all taken their seats, Sonya Olifova,4 the director of a human rights NGO in Russia, started to sum up the problems of migrant workers’ social protection in Russia: ’We go half a step forward and two back’, she said, stating that 68 per cent of the Russian population experienced aggressive feelings towards migrant workers. Politicians and journalists alike, she argued, capitalize on these feelings: Social protection is possible only in the context of cooperation between two countries [Tajikistan and Russia]. And the problem is –​Tajikistan is pushing out unprepared (vytalkivaet nepodgotovlennikh) people. The international organizations came up with a beautiful (prekrasnyi) initiative [pre-​departure orientation], but for some reason migrant workers are not interested in receiving consultations. In her remarks, Soniya blamed Tajikistan for failing to uphold its share of a bargain with Russia: it did not prepare migrant workers for migration to Russia, which, she explained, found reflection in the Russian public’s dissatisfaction with migration in general. Afterwards, Dmitriy, a man in his 40s working at a regional Russian NGO, said that one of the group’s recommendations should be the introduction of obligatory medical insurance ‘for them [migrant workers] upon entry into Russia’. Sonya, however, reminded him about the challenges such a proposal would face: some migrant workers were legal, while others were illegal; how in practice would this all work? 320

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

She proposed a compromise: obligatory medical insurance for documented (‘legal’) migrant workers, and voluntary medical insurance for undocumented workers. For Dmitriy, however, obligatory insurance verified at entry into Russia meant that everyone would be covered, and thus could receive medical help in Russia. In the end, after debates, the group compromised to recommend the idea of ‘voluntary medical insurance, which would lead to the protection of migrant workers’ rights and also contribute to a decrease in dissatisfaction (nedovol’stvo) among the local population’. This event that took place three years prior to Zebo’s trip to St Petersburg. It involved discussions of medical insurance as an instrument of care for the social protection of migrant workers, promoted by Russian human rights activists and NGO workers. Dmitriy’s tone during the discussion was righteous. He argued that workers needed medical coverage in Russia. A mere three years later, in 2015, all ‘migrant workers’ arriving to Russia would be required to purchase medical insurance, as well as pass Russian language and history tests and a medical examination. This package of examinations and documents was to produce a properly ‘prepared’ and medically safe migrant worker. The deeply racialized image of migrant bodies carrying disease was well ingrained in the bureaucracy long before the introduction of obligatory medical insurance (Bahovadinova 2016). Depictions of unsanitary life ‘out there’ made people coming to work to Russia a focused site of health-​related interventions, notably the obligation to pass medical checks to prove one’s good health, in order to work in Russia. The medical insurance, officially called the ‘Voluntary Medical Coverage Policy’ (polis dobrovolnogo meditsinskogo strakhovaniia), first introduced by St Petersburg and later in all regions of Russia is an artifact of representation: of a person viewed strictly as a racialized migrant body. The interrelation of racism and medical concerns are intertwined in the discourse of care for migrant bodies. Here is an excerpt from a recent PDO manual for migrant workers: a 73-​page document written in authoritative and instructive Russian, meant to prepare migrant workers for work in Russia. This document was produced by the Swiss organization Helvetas with funding from the European Union, channelled through an intermediary of the International Center for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). The manual instructs workers to: Observe sanitary dwelling norms –​no less than 6 sq. meters per person. The violation of sanitary norms can cause lots of problems: the worsening of tenants’ health , damage to the apartment’s assets, conflicts with neighbors and the owner of the apartment, and/​or police visits. (Helvetas 2020) This PDO manual was nominally written in Tajikistan in 2020, and represents a fairly standard PDO document. The readership is instructed to: learn Russian laws and language, bring an amount equivalent to US$1,000 to Russia to register and acquire legal documents, have a work contract, observe sanitary norms, and learn how to deal with police and police raids. When I approached NGOs in Tajikistan and asked about the organization that had developed this document, however, I learned that the Tajik office of Helvetas had chosen to contract a group of lawyers from Russia to write the manual. 321

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​

Events and documents bring together bureaucrats and produce the discursive sites of interaction and exchange. Ideas about migrant workers’ needs, their bodily risks and threats, and their unpreparedness for migration circulated widely in the bureaucracy, with local bureaucrats resisting but internalizing such images. At the same time, knowledge about who migrant workers are reflects more global and general shifts in the treatment of migrant labour. As Mathew Hull (2015) suggested when looking at the material co-​production of bureaucracy in Pakistan, the post-​colonial influence on states can be overstated at the expense of new technologies of government and bureaucratic practice. ‘Seeing’, or selecting what ‘not to see’, in relation to migrant workers is a process situated in the wider field of not only post-​colonial bonds between Tajikistan and Russia, but also in shifts in the treatment of labour. The latter evaluates the transnational and global productions of who migrant workers are; the first situates these co-​produced individuals in historically situated relations of power. Looking at these aspects of bureaucratic legibility in coordination will provide a fruitful entry point for an analysis of migrant workers’ representations in the migration bureaucracy: using ‘how one sees’ and ‘what one sees’ as a complement to the process of legibility and practice.

LOOKING FOR THE GAZE: THE MAKING OF A MIGRANT WORKER One morning in the autumn of 2012, Hamid Avlonov, an employee of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Tajikistan, was preparing for his trip to a campsite outside of Dushanbe, where a three-​day training programme for students from throughout Tajikistan was being held. The organizers of the camp had approached IOM to present their work to ‘future leaders’ at the camp. Hamid was going to speak on behalf of IOM about migration. He was waiting for Rustam, a former IOM employee who was now working for the World Bank’s labour migration project as a consultant, with whom he planned to travel. Formally, Rustam was representing the Tajik Migration Service, the state institution in charge of migration, but he was receiving his salary from the World Bank as part of a development programme. Relatively low-​ranking in the migration management bureaucracy, Rustam and Hamid were occasionally tasked with distributing pre-​departure orientations. Once Rustam arrived, we loaded into a large white IOM jeep and headed to the Romit Valley, where the training was taking place in a former Soviet sanatorium. The complex was built over a large territory, separated and demarcated from the surrounding mountains and river by a fence. Inside, fruit trees were planted throughout, with tiny one-​room houses distributed along an alley. Some young people were peeking out of the houses, while others were already hanging out on benches along the alley, chatting with each other. Once we arrived, the students hurried into a central theatre. Hamid spoke first. In Tajik, he introduced the students to IOM, which they learned had opened in the country in 1993 to help repatriate Tajik refugees from Afghanistan during and after the civil war. After the history of IOM in Tajikistan, he spoke about IOM’s current work with migrant workers, who, he said, did not know the Russian language or the local culture. Because they did not have any professional qualifications, they needed IOM’s assistance. These deficiencies, Hamid summed up, meant that all that migrant workers can do is ‘dirty work’. This dirty work also meant 322

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

that migrant workers were bringing diseases back to Tajikistan, which explained the IOM health unit’s work. Rustam then presented a more theoretical and statistical analysis of labour migration, speaking of waves, numbers and the establishment of the Tajik Migration Service, a government institution meant to regulate mobility. These statements about migrant workers were not received with appreciation. The students criticized not only the organization’s work, but also the very idea that migrant workers were identified only to illegality or ‘dirty work’. A young woman from a village in the north of Tajikistan said that every year dead bodies were returned from Russia. Those migrants had children at home, she said –​what has the government done to protect such families? A young man asked why migrant workers should need to learn all the Russian laws before travelling. When they go, he said, they are not expecting legal problems to occur. If they expected this, why would they go in the first place? Considering the lack of social protection in Tajikistan and the ambiguous legal environment in Russia, the students refused to simplify the definition of migrant workers into the ‘unprepared’ subjects argued for by Hamid and others in the bureaucracy. At the same time, Rustam and Hamid also suffered from their own lack of language skills. Both had come to work for IOM in the early 1990s, and had since been gradually pushed out by younger professionals arriving with solid English skills, who had been increasingly receiving education in the West. Both Rustam and Hamid were trilingual; both spoke Russian and Tajik, with Hamid adding Uzbek and Rustam Shugni. Without English skills, however, they were unable to land stable jobs with the organizations in which they were working as consultant (i.e., non-​permanent) staff. Without stable employment, both were also embodying the labour insecurities endemic to the staff of international organizations. They found it hard to adapt to the constant changes and quick turnover of projects in international organizations, spending from six months to a year unemployed and waiting for new projects to start, at the mercy of their former colleagues who might always select a younger person with English-​language skills. Hamid lost his job soon after our trip to the camp, as the IOM project where he worked was ‘completed’. In his late 50s, he was unable to find an alternative position with an international organization. The representations of migrant workers that Hamid shared with students reflected images of ‘unprepared’ workers that were widely circulating in the bureaucracy. Two years later, I heard a very similar portrait of migrant workers provided by Nazarali Kandov, the head of a department in Tajikistan’s Migration Service. Nazarali was attending a workshop organized by an international organization working on migration and development, a workshop meant for the employees of state institutions. It began with a foreign expert trying to define a ‘migrant’: she indicated frustration that UN statistics failed to account for seasonal migrant workers. Nazarali interrupted her and asked to provide a bit of context, worrying that the expert was not familiar with the local situation, simultaneously also indicating his authority within the group. He explained that there had been three waves of migration from Tajikistan to Russia. The first wave, he said, had consisted of Russian and other non-​Tajik nationals leaving Tajikistan right before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The second wave had been comprised of Tajik elites who followed the first group. And the third, he said, was a group comprised of young and unprepared people. Nazarali summarized

323

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​

this third contingent as the ‘worst group’ (samaia khudshaia) amongst all three waves of migration. The third, he added, needed more active governmental support: Migrants are the most vulnerable. Why? Because they do not know their rights, nor the language; they are subjected to labour exploitation and slavery. Because of [their] unregulated status[5] they have driven themselves (zagnali sebia) into unregulated status, by not knowing [their] rights and [the] language. These images mirrored the frustrations voiced by Russian migration management bureaucrats about migrant workers during events in Tajikistan, or in the mass media. Some Russian bureaucrats even went as far as to be ‘irritated’ by the increasing number of Central Asian migrant workers with lower levels of Russian-​language knowledge (Bahovadinova 2016, 193). The coalescence of bureaucrats’ imaginations of just who migrant workers were in migration produced the content of ‘being’ migrant workers. There was particular emphasis on the connection between illegality and the Russian language. This was specifically noted in 2012 at the workshop on the protection of migrant workers’ rights discussed earlier: a Russian FMS official attending the event said that the FMS was introducing language exams for all migrant workers in Russia. Referring to the critique of this initiative from amongst human rights groups, he noted: ‘Some speak as if [iakobi] this is a violation human rights. A migrant who knows the language can protect herself/​himself.’ The ability or failure to protect oneself –​and to remain ‘documented’ –​this argument posits, rests on a migrant worker’s capacity to know the Russian language. The legal practice, as a story related in an interview with a Russian human rights lawyer eight years later demonstrates, supports this linkage, but perhaps not in the way that the FMS official meant. When 30 migrant workers were rounded up in a raid in St Petersburg, their interrogation reports (protokol doprosa) were written in Russian, and the majority of detained workers signed it without being given a translation of the document (itself a violation of legal proceedings in Russia) or knowledge that the report cited their admitting to having stayed illegally in Russia. Only one woman wrote ‘I have read the report and do not agree with it’ (‘s protokolom oznakomilas’ i nesoglasna’) before signing. While the rest were issued orders of administrative removal (a self-​financed deportation from Russia for a period of five years) after a court hearing, this woman remained in Russia, as the court could not remove her speedily and instead sent her case for further investigation. In this specific case, illegality rested less with one’s illegal status or the knowledge of Russian, and more with the assumptions of illegality written into the documents signed often in situations of militarized raids and intimidation. If they all had refused to sign, this would have created a very long and complicated bureaucratic procedure of proving their undocumented status: distinctions between documented and undocumented, or legal and illegal, is procedurally ambiguous until proof of either is provided. Indeed, knowledge of Russian but also confidence to reject the premise of the document in this specific case was the way out of ‘illegality’ in Russia. In contrast, Nazarali had also provided a vision of the ‘prepared’ migrant worker: these were the former Soviet citizens who had left Tajikistan during ‘earlier waves’ of migration. They knew the Russian language, were adapted to Soviet [Russian] culture and were generally educated. One of these ‘prepared’ individuals 324

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

was Firdavs, a man in his early 40s, whom I met in Moscow. He had started to work in Russia after he left Tajikistan in the late 1990s, shortly after graduating from university at the end of the Tajik civil war. His family was from southern Tajikistan, where his mother was still living at the time, while he and his siblings were living at relatives’ homes in Dushanbe to study at university. He had been keen on moving to Russia for work after completing university, something that his mother forbade him to do. Eventually, he borrowed money for a plane ticket from his aunts, who agreed to lend him money in secret. When he purchased the ticket, he thus ‘ran away’, not telling his immediate family. At the time, he was the first in his extended family to leave for Russia for work. After five or six years in Siberia, he and Vera, his wife whom he had met in Yekaterinburg, decided to move to Moscow as the salaries there were higher and the climate less severe. Upon arriving in Moscow, they rented a small studio apartment on the outskirts of the city and worked from early morning to evening: he in construction and she in retail. Vera was a Russian citizen, while Firdavs, a Tajik citizen, was fluent in Russian (it was his native language) and university educated. Yet both made sure to move through the city quickly, avoiding the police and frequent documents checks in the streets. The owners of their studio, like the absolute majority of property owners in Moscow, refused to register their tenants. Having no official Moscow residency registration, they were thus both ‘illegal’ in Moscow,6 although very ‘prepared’ according to the migration bureaucracy’s representations. His wife said that it was easier for her to avoid the police checks, because she was a blonde woman. Firdavs had to work harder to avoid the police in the streets. When I met him in 2015 for coffee, he was already a Russian citizen but still worked in construction.7

LABOUR MARKET AND VALUE When, in the formal setting of an interview, I would ask bureaucrats from the migration bureaucracy in Tajikistan about whom they were working for, they would all say: for migrant workers. This specific bureaucracy is (in theory) built to represent migrant workers’ interests in Tajikistan. Here, Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 70–​74) discussion of Marx’s ideas of representation provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the workings of bureaucracy and the representations of its ‘beneficiaries’. For Marx, Spivak writes, there are two meanings of ‘representation’: first, as vertreten –​to represent in a first sense, by proxy, for example when a political party or a union represents a worker; and second, as darstellen –​to re-​present in a second sense, which Spivak says can be understood as ‘topology’, or, in the present case, the process of producing a collage-​style image of a inherently unskilled ‘migrant worker’. Following this dual meaning of representation, we can then say that this migration bureaucracy is built for migrant workers insofar as it represents them and their ‘interests’. The question this raises is the following: can a bureaucracy represent (vertreten) the interests of migrant workers when it relies on re-​presenting (darstellen) them as ‘migrant workers’, a concept that is, as this chapter has illustrated, developed globally, circulated regionally, and packaged and subject to bureaucratic intervention in Moscow, Geneva, and Austria? Attention to this particular type of bureaucratic representation is important, as it flattens citizens for bureaucratic molding into subjects of the Russian law. In doing so, it not only forecloses the multiplicity of 325

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​

migration experience (Feldmen 2011), but also produces representations of people as strictly migrant workers, as manpower for the Russian market. The representation of a person as a ‘migrant worker’ cannot be separated from the conditions in which he or she works, nor from the terms, such as ‘unskilled’ or ‘unprepared’ that are used to describe an individual’s interaction with these conditions. In unpacking these terms, it becomes clear that the conditions of work and form of application of labour power are definitive for understanding how migrant workers have been seen from within a governing logic. In his work Wage Labour and Capital, Karl Marx (2006 [1891], 16) suggested: ‘To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical, signifies only this: that capital and wage-​labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other.’ In this relationship, a worker sells his commodity, labour power, to capital for his wage. This is a specific form of labour power, or, as Marx suggests, a portion of his ‘life activity’, which he is selling to a firm. The product of his labour, accordingly, is not the goal of his life, but we can perhaps assume it to be the means for sustaining life. Marx extrapolates: And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on –​is this 12 hours’ weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-​breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. (Marx 2006 [1891], 9) While Marx’s view of workers as strictly victims of capital is problematic, his analysis of wage work and capital is quite useful when thinking about the re-​presentations in by the migration bureaucracy. For this bureaucracy, the representation of a ‘migrant worker’ created what we can call the social value of migrant labour, which is situated in various images of migrant workers’ labour conditions and the application of their labour power in Russia. Crucially, the images only have to do with Marx’s shovelling, stone-​breaking and building –​not with any aspect of life outside of the wage-​labor-​ capital nexus. One of the bluntest representations was offered by the St Petersburg city administration, which published a brochure for migrant workers as part of a programme entitled ‘Tolerance’ (tolerantnost’). The brochure was available in four languages: Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz and Russian, and was supported by the FMS office in St Petersburg and funded by the organization DanChurchAid in Central Asia (Levitina 2012). In the brochure, a smiley, likable and amiable broom, palette knife, paint-​roller and paintbrush arrive in Russia and are met by humans who teach and explain to them how to live Russia. The tools giggle during a medical examination in which a doctor checks for and teaches them about HIV; they then enjoy stacking bricks, laughing and joking in the process. They are also told what not to do: don’t wear their national dress, be noisy at night, wear sport costumes, spit and spread trash, or go outside in a bathrobe (see Figures 21.1 and 21.2). Interestingly, the tools’ hands and legs are painted black, compared to the beige colouring of the human’s hands in the brochure. Not coincidentally, people from Central Asia are called ‘blacks’ (cherniye) in Russia. Before racialized laws and practices are enacted, there is a racial lenses of ‘seeing’ who people are, or rather who 326

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

Figure 21.1  Migrant workers depicted as tools laying bricks: ‘In order to safeguard your health and life, be attentive, and follow safety procedures!’ Image source: www.the-​vill​age.ru/​ vill​age/​city/​situat​ion/​118​264-​venik-​i-​valik

the ‘tools’ are, and how they should relate to humans. This is the topological portrait of a migrant in Russia: denied humanity altogether and represented as an extension of the jobs that non-​citizens occupy in Russia; little more than a body providing what the Russian labour market needs. Here, ‘tolerance’ is based on the total adaptation and normalization of racism. As Gulnara Ibraeva and colleagues (2014) have observed, the idealized image of a Central Asian worker amongst Russian officials and the local population is an invisible worker who occupies low-​paid and un-​prestigious jobs, someone who is fully assimilated, but also expected to eventually leave. In these representations, the conditions of work and life in migration are attributed to workers’ inability to be ‘prepared’ for the labour market: to master the Russian language, know the local laws, and to receive training before departure. If they were to normalize into the conditions expected in Russia, this brochure and other interventions suggest, they would be as pleased by bricklaying as the broom, palette knife, paint-​ roller and paintbrush. These assumptions are visible in the PDOs produced today and the discussions between bureaucrats about migrant workers and their failure to prepare for Russia. Human rights activists, such as Dmitriy or Sonya, 327

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​

Figure 21.2  Saying goodbye to ‘tools’ at the airport (source: www.the-​vill​age.ru/​vill​age/​city/​ situat​ion/​118​264-​venik-​i-​valik. Image source: www.the-​vill​age.ru/​vill​age/​city/​situat​ion/​118​264-​venik-​i-​valik

also have consumed the populist fear of ‘free’ services being provided to undeserving ‘others’. Many proposals nominally meant to represent migrant workers’ rights are couched in ways of re-​presenting them and moulding them into desired ‘migrant workers’. Sergei, a young human rights lawyer from Russia, for example, was enthusiastic in 2018 about a series of changes made to Russian law that now required migrant workers to purchase ‘work permits’ (patenty). Describing the legal changes to state officials in Tajikistan, he suggested that the introduction of work permits, which radically increased the costs of migration to Russia and thus indebtedness, was a great opportunity to finally deliver knowledge. It was an opportunity, he said, for people to spend time ‘learning’ the Russian language and laws and to become more ‘prepared’. Throughout the migration bureaucracy, migrant workers are ‘unprepared’ because they are ‘migrant workers’ and therefore unprepared, a tautological circuit of bureaucratic logic. What is important is not only the process of individualization of responsibility in such representations (Feldmen 2011), but also the processes of making individualization possible. Considering the role of ideology and bureaucrats’ roles in producing and re-​producing what Göran Therborn has termed a thought-​system 328

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

and social practice reframes bureaucrats in the migration management bureaucracy not as producers of ideology, but as its subjects. Therborn (1999, 28) writes that the ‘ideological dimension of the form in which one is relates to the Other’, in other words ‘the dominating subject is translated into attempts to mould the dominated’. If applied to bureaucrats (whether Russian, Tajik, or international) and their relationship to migrant workers, then the dominating subject is produced and is translated in the institutional response to an ‘unskilled’ or ‘unprepared’ migrant worker. Ironically, this process is effective in the bureaucracy itself, where people like Hamid and Rustam internalize representations, despite quite often being cynical about Russian law and the legal environment. These bureaucrats are hardly naïve about the legal environment surrounding migration, with officials often remarking on the punishing nature of migration law. However, the image of an ‘unprepared’ migrant worker renders the subject legible as a target of bureaucratic interventions and management. Resisting but also internalizing these representations, bureaucrats in state and international organizations in Tajikistan are tasked with teaching migrant workers the very law that produces the direct and moral domination over their racialized bodies. This epistemic violence of categorization underpins the migration management bureaucracy, just as the field of knowledge production about who people are integrates bureaucrats from various institutions into the migration management bureaucracy. By representing people as ‘migrant workers’, the bureaucracy reifies itself while foreclosing other alternative ways of seeing and acting. When considering how the bureucracy comes to consume and reproduce representations of people who cross borders for work, however, the most important point is its value as a bureaucracy of the international division of labour.8 Shedding such terms as ‘sending’ or ‘receiving’ countries, and bringing in international organizations, which are also part of the process of representation and knowledge production, provides a lens through which to understand how racism penetrates and is normalized in the international migration bureaucracy.

CONCLUSION Discussing labour migration during one of his annual dialogues with the public, President Vladimir Putin noted that while Russian workers could and should replace migrant workers in some economic spheres, such as the service sector, this was not universally true. According to Putin, labour-​intensive and difficult work that was detrimental to workers’ health, for instance in construction, would be a good space for migrant labour (Vesti 2013).9 These and similar political positions have a clear re-​presenting and compounding effect on those who arrive to work in Russia from Central Asia. As described earlier, Firdavs had a university degree, but when he arrived in Russia in the late 1990s, his education was not required for any of the positions he occupied; instead, he became a construction worker on construction sites in Russia. The migration bureaucracy in Tajikistan would argue that it represents the interests of citizens (and former citizens) like Firdavs, but by circulating and adapting pre-​departure orientations written in Russia and funded by international donors, it instead re-​presents them as ‘unprepared’ and ‘unskilled’. Such images are further saturated by globally circulated ideas about Muslims as dangerous, promoting IOM missions in Central Asia to seek money from USAID in order to research migrant 329

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​

workers’ ‘vulnerability’ for radicalization (Kluczewska 2020). Such research frames a large proportion of Tajikistani citizens as potential suspects for radicalization –​a line of thinking that both the Tajik and Russian governments have also embraced (Bahovadinova 2016). In this chapter, I have attempted to illustrate these kinds of exchanges: the shared cooperation between bureaucrats in research, meetings and PDOs, which form the topological layers of an image of a ‘migrant worker’, producing in the end an ‘unskilled’, but also dangerous person. Racialized policy emerges in the gaps before the development of law. Representations make people into migrant workers, and are part and parcel of the process of legibility. Here, discussion of ‘obligatory’ or ‘voluntary’ actions reflect not only the technologies of power in use and how negotiation over these practices produces imaginations about who migrant workers are, but also the relevant bureaucratic instruments and policies of ‘care’, control, and, as Caress Shenk (2018) suggested, financial extortion. Care for migrant workers’ health and simultaneous concern for populist anxieties about migrants as a burden on taxpayers has produced a policy that involves ‘seeing’ a person from various sites of authority (citizens, bureaucrats, human rights lawyers), locations (Russia, Tajikistan, Geneva, or other global and often European imaginations distributed by media), and positions (care for citizens, control of aliens, punishment of illegals, a cure for populism). The concept of ‘unpreparedness’ in many regards reproduced and brought alive a subject in need of education. As Daromir Rudnyckyj’s (2004) analysis of NGOs’ governmentality in Indonesia illustrated, migration management produces technologies of servitude and of rationalizing labour flows to wealthier countries, in which ‘prospective migrants are trained to acquire skills and dispositions expected of domestic workers’ including obedience (ibid., 417). Building on research considering government across national boundaries, Rudnickyj suggests analysing policies and mechanisms of migrant workers’ international management (ibid., 411). Before being managed and governed, however, who ‘migrant workers’ are must be negotiated and re-​presented, processes that this chapter has worked to explicate. With the category of ‘migrant worker’ almost inexorably bound to re-​presentations of unpreparedness and hard labour, it can be unclear how to speak about the actual people who travel from Tajikistan to Russia for work. This has led some researchers, such as Sergei Abashin (2012) to suggest alternative categories, such as ‘migrantskost’ (migrantness) as a more useful category of experience. Another option might be to think about the language used by the individuals travelling from Tajikistan to Russia for work. Rather than calling themselves ‘migrant workers’ or ‘migrants’, these individuals refer to themselves as ‘muhojir’, a word that is often translated from Tajik as ‘migrant’ but in fact means ‘traveller’, or ‘one who moves’.10 This word has no negative connotation, and simply denotes movement without further categorization. As Khalimakhon Khushkadamova and Anna Berezina (2019, 130–​131) have argued, moreover, the Tajik-​language categories of ‘gharib’ (one who travels far) or ‘gharibi’ (life abroad) carry with them a sense of obligation and care for those weathering the harsh path of travel –​but no approbation for those travelling. This is not to argue that the migration management bureaucracy should use this more emic and gentler view of mobility, but rather to illustrate the gulf between representations.

330

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​

It may also be worth considering ways of overcoming the gulf between life in migration and the re-​presentations made of it. In a 2019 music video, the Tajik-​ Russian singer Manizha, who calls herself a ‘mestizo’, suggested that this would involve outsiders in Russia embracing their difference and rejecting the importance of what Russians think of them.11 Playing on Russian grammar, her video depicts a thief named ‘Padezh’ (‘declension’) who steals something important to people. What is important varies: for some it is a national dance, or a traditional hat, their language, a passport. The meaning of this process of loss, Manizha suggests, is conforming to expectations of ‘proper’ behaviour in Russia and ‘declining’ one’s own values, heritage and interests. It is fundamentally a matter of ‘declining oneself’ (skloniat’ sebia) in order to adhere to the re-​presentations made by others. This is not tolerance or cosmopolitanism, Manizha says, but self-​denial. Defeating ‘Padezh’ in her clip and wearing ostentatious gold attire in reflection of stereotypes about Central Asians, Manizha ends the video by returning the stolen passports, unibrows, and gold teeth. Declension, she says, is akin to hiding your wings.

NOTES 1 The blacklist, or ‘list’ (spisok in Russian) is an emic term used in Tajikistan to explain the Russian system of re-​entry bans; in practice, this is an electronic database containing data on individuals who are prohibited entry to Russia for a specific or indefinite period. See Kubal 2017; Reeves 2016; Bahovadinova 2016. 2 I use statistics from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for 2019 to derive this number. I do not count the categories of ‘tourism’, ‘private’ and ‘student’ entries, and consider only those who enter only for purposes of ‘work’. See https://​мвд.рф/​Delja​teln​ost/​sta​tist​ics/​ migrac​ionn​aya/​item/​19365​693/​, last accessed August 2020. 3 The post-​Soviet context offers visa-​free mobility to migrant workers, and this in turn creates a divergent experience of the law, everyday life, and experience of migration. 4 All names in this article have been anonymized, including of state officials. Institutions and organizations, however, have not been masked. 5 The words ‘unregulated’ and ‘undocumented are terms used and promoted by human rights organizations to avoid the word ‘illegal’. 6 According to Russian law, any individual, citizen or not, is required to register his or her place of factual residence with the local division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; doing so as a renter is dependent upon the agreement of the landlord. Failure to register or to be found living in a location different from one’s registration is illegal. 7 This is not to suggest that citizenship does not allow opportunities for professional growth and change. My research with Tokhir Kalandarov into dual citizenship has illustrated that in order to change profession, one is often required to change citizenship. This further supports the points made here: the jobs migrant workers occupy are defined not by their skills, rather by the legal and social environment they work in. 8 On the production of migrant labour within the international division of labour, see Kearney 1991; De Genova 2005; Sassen 1999; Willen 2007. 9 The willingness to fill labour-​intensive and unattractive jobs with ‘outside’ labour is also to some degree an extension of earlier Soviet practices. See Bahovadinova 2016; Bahovadinova and Scarborough 2018. 10 The word ‘muhojir’ (‘muhajir’) originally comes from the name given to the first converts to Islam, who travelled with the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. If anything, it carries a positive connotation.

331

—​​​​ M a l i k a B a h o v a d i n o v a —​​​ 11 See Manizha’s song ‘Nedoslavianka’ and the accompanying music video online at: https://​ www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​csan​yIAY​jN4.

REFERENCES Abashin, Sergei (2012). ‘Sredneaziatskaia migratsiia: praktiki, lokal’nye soeobshchestva, transnatsionalizm.’ Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 4. Andersson, R. (2014). Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press). Bahovadinova, M. (2016) Ideologies of labour: The bureaucratic management of migration in post-​Soviet Tajikistan (PhD dissertation, Indiana University). Bahovadinova, M. and I. Scarborough (2018). ‘Capitalism fulfills the final Five-​Year Plan: How Soviet-​era migration programs came to fruition in post-​Soviet Eurasia.’ In Eurasia on the move: Interdisciplinary approaches to a dynamic migration region, edited by Marlene Laruelle and Caress Schenk (Washington, DC: CAP): 1–​11. De Genova, N. (2002). ‘Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–​447. De Genova, N. (2005). Working the boundaries: Race, space, and ‘illegality’ in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Feldman, G. (2011). The migration apparatus: security, labor, and policymaking in the European Union (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Helvetas (2020). Trudovaia migratsiia iz Respubliki Tadzhikistan v Rossiiskuiu Federatsiiu. Posobie po predviezdnoi podgotovke (Dushanbe). Hull, Matthew (2015). Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press). Ibraeva G., А. Niyazov, M. Ablezova, and A. Moldosheva (2014). Gender and migration research report (ICCO Cooperation, Bishkek). Kearney, M. (1991). ‘Borders and boundaries of state and self at the end of empire.’ Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (1): 52–​74. Khushkadamova, Kh.O and A.B. Berezina (2019). ‘Kontsept gharibi (‘skitanie’) v tadzhikskoi iazykovoi kul’ture: opyt lingvokul’turnogo analiza,’ Filologicheskie nauki v MGIMO 18 (2): 128–​135. Kluczewska, Karolina (2020). ‘Knowledge production at the IOM: Looking for local knowledge in Tajikistan.’ In The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ in critical perspective, edited by Martin Geiger and Antoine Pecoud (London: Palgrave Macmillan): 173–​194. Kubal, A. (2017). ‘Entry bar as surreptitious deportation? Zapret na v’ezd in Russian immigration law and practice: A comparative perspective.’ Law & Social Inquiry 42 (3): 744–​768. Levitina, Lyudmila (2012). ‘V broshiure o telerantnosti migrantov izobrazili v vide shpatelia i venika,’ The Village, 18 October. Online: www.the-​vill​age.ru/​vill​age/​city/​situat​ion/​118​ 264-​venik-​i-​valik. Marx, Karl (2006 [1891]). Wage labour and capital. Online: www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​ works/​downl​oad/​pdf/​wage-​lab​our-​capi​tal.pdf. Reeves, M. (2013). ‘Clean fake: Authenticating documents and persons in migrant Moscow.’ American Ethnologist 40(3): 508–​524. Reeves, M. (2016). ‘The black list: On infrastructural indeterminacy and its reverberations.’ In Infrastructures and social complexity: A companion, edited by Penelope Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Asturo Morita (London: Routledge): 314–​326.

332

—​​​​ B e f o r e t h e l a w —​​​​ Riles, Annelise (2004). ‘Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge.’ American Ethnologist 31 (3): 392–​405. Rudnyckyj, D. (2004). ‘Technologies of servitude: Governmentality and Indonesian transnational labor migration.’ Anthropological Quarterly 77 (3): 407–​434. Sassen, S. (1999). Guests and aliens (New York: New Press). Schenk, C. (2018). Why control immigration? Strategic uses of migration management in Russia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: MacMillion Education). Therborn, G. (1999) The ideology of power and the power of ideology (London: Verso). Vesti (2013). ‘Putin: v torgovle migranty ne nuzhny.’ Vesti.ru, 3 October. Online: www.vesti.ru/​ doc.html?id=​1137​594&cid=​7. Willen, S.S. (2007). ‘Toward a critical phenomenology of ‘illegality’: State power, criminalization, and abjectivity among undocumented migrant workers in Tel Aviv, Israel.’ International Migration 45 (3): 8–​38.

333

CHAPTER TWENTY-​T WO

REEDUCATION TIME The banality of violent paternalism in Xinjiang Darren Byler In the spring of 2019, a young Han college student in the United States who I will refer to as Lu Yin, called me to tell me about her experiences with the Muslim reeducation system in Northwest China. Over the next few weeks we spoke for many hours on the phone about how the attitudes of her relatives were changing back in her home in Southern Xinjiang. One of the things she had anticipated most about going home was the opportunity she would have to eat Uyghur food. But when she returned in 2018, all of the Uyghur restaurants near her home village had been closed. In order to find a decent Uyghur meal of polu, a kind of rice pilaf made with lamb, carrots, and cumin that is a staple dish across Central Asia, they had to travel to a nearby city, nearly 45 minutes away. When they arrived at this higher-​end restaurant, she found that inside it was “completely abandoned.” It felt extremely odd to eat a meal in an opulent space in the company of only her relatives. “Where is everyone?” she wondered. On the third day of her visit, her uncle, a powerful official in her segregated Han community within a broader Uyghur majority area, said that he would arrange for her to have a home-​cooked meal in the home of a Uyghur family he knew. It was after dark when they pulled up in the SUV of one of her uncle’s colleagues. The house that they were visiting was a small mud-​brick house, built in the typical courtyard style. As she entered the home, she noticed that the TV was on and that there was a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Inside, a middle-​aged Uyghur couple greeted them effusively in heavily-​accented Chinese. The food was ready and waiting for them, a meal that must have cost the family a considerable amount given their economic status as rural farmers. “They presented us with polu, the good kind with the leg of lamb,” Lu Yin said. What happened next took her by surprise. As they began eating, the Uyghur hosts immediately started talking about “reeducation” centers. “They said in those places the guards ask, ‘Who provides your daily bread?’ and the answer is always ‘Xi Jinping! If you don’t answer this way then you don’t get fed!’ ” The turn in the conversation and the calm manner with which the couple spoke of the intimate and quotidian banality of state power and Xi Jinping as a benevolent figurehead shocked Lu Yin. What was even more startling was that none of her relatives challenged what they said. “Nobody questioned this, the Uyghur family said all of this incredibly matter-​of-​factly,” she remembered. In fact, her family members responded to this 334

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-26

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​

discussion of the mass internment camps by using cliched phrases and euphemisms about ethnic harmony and defeating the three evil forces of “separatism, extremism and terrorism.” Lu Yin was stunned. She said, “Everyone was talking in slogans.” As she observed the scene and listened to what they were saying, she realized that the slogans were not just in what her family members were saying. She said, “Inside the house, there were slogans pasted everywhere.” Her relatives, the Uyghur hosts, their home, and their village had been transformed by the ‘reeducation’ campaign. “No one interrupted the Uyghurs while they were speaking. No one contradicted what they said. When there was a gap in conversation the refrain (from everyone around the table) was ‘Uyghurs are so bad!’ (Ch: Weiwu’erzu hen huai!) The Uyghur husband and wife said in response, ‘Yes. Uyghurs are so bad.’ ”1 As they drove away from the Uyghur home, Lu Yin asked her aunt what relationship they had with the host family. She explained they had been “assigned” to that family. Like over 1.1 million other mostly Han civil servants and Communist Party members, they had been compelled to “volunteer” in a “becoming family” (Ch: jiedui renqin) program (Byler 2018). Beginning in 2014 at the start of the “People’s War,” Han civil servants and Party members were often coerced and incentivized to participate in three distinct waves of the program by both threats of demotion and job loss and the promise of promotion and bonuses. The program appeared to be an inversion of programs during the Maoist period in which “sent down youth” were assigned to work in rural villages and “learn from the common people.” In this context, the mostly urban Han guests were sent to monitor and instruct their ethnic minority hosts. She said, “Sometimes we bring them rice (as gifts for hosting us) during our visits.” The Uyghur couple was their “younger brother and sister”—​a paternalistic way of referring to the subordinated status of Uyghurs relative to “higher culture” (Ch: wenhua gao) Han “older brothers and sisters.” Over the past year, Lu Yin’s relatives had been tasked with visiting them regularly; sometimes they stayed overnight. The visits had become normal, a regular part of their monthly, sometimes weekly, schedule. During the drive back to their home, Lu Yin’s aunt began to repeat some of the things that had been discussed over dinner. Over and over she said: “ ‘Uyghurs are so bad.’ ‘Uyghurs are so bad.’ ‘Islam is bad.’ ‘Even the Hui (Chinese Muslims) are bad too.” The others in the SUV joined in the conversation, repeating the same lines, blaming the Uyghurs for the need for the reeducation program. Lu Yin remained silent, listening quietly to the way her family members had been overwhelmed by a form of Islamophobia that she could not help but think of as racist. Since 2016, when Lu Yin had last returned to Xinjiang, her family members had been pulled into reeducation time as agents of a kind of violent paternalism. This chapter examines the way the “reeducation” campaign in Xinjiang creates a regularized system of violent paternalism directed toward Muslim populations in Northwest China. Since 2015, work units, neighborhood watch cadres, police contractors, and visiting “relatives” working in combination with technological surveillance systems have sought to normalize daily and/​or weekly forms of symbolic and social violence throughout the region. These state-​sponsored forms of political “intimacy,” which scholars have shown is a key aspect of state power and colonial rule (Kleinman 2000; Stoler 2010), is an essential part of establishing a new social order. It is important to name these forces as interlinked with physical violence, rather than 335

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​

a more benign term like “pressure,” because as Scheper-​Hughes and Bourgois note, “violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality –​force, assault, or the infliction of pain—​alone. The social and cultural dimensions of violence are what gives violence its power and meaning” (2004: 1). In the context of contemporary China, such systems of social violence are premised in part on earlier moments of political revolution in which “class enemies” or “counterrevolutionaries” were purged from society (Kleinman 2000; Grose 2019). The current system in Northwest China is pointed not at class struggle, but at an ethno-​racial antagonism between members of the Han majority population of China and Turkic Muslim minorities who claim parts of Xinjiang as their homeland. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan between 2018 and 2020, this chapter demonstrates the unthinking banality of the reeducation system. This data is comprised by approximately ten interviews with Han civil servants in Xinjiang and two immediate family members of such civil servants in North America immediately after returning from Xinjiang; and interviews with 40 Turkic Muslim former detainees and their relatives who fled across the border to Kazakhstan after the reeducation campaign began. In 2018, as an anthropologist returning to a region where I had spent two years researching Han and Uighur social life, I observed and interviewed Han civilian state workers who were tasked with enacting the reeducation campaign in predominantly Uyghur urban districts and towns across Southern Xinjiang.2 In 2020, I traveled to Kazakhstan where I interviewed dozens of Uyghurs and Kazakhs who had recently fled across the border. I asked both groups how the campaign was implemented in the intimate spaces of Muslim homes, in the carceral spaces of the camps, and in the productive spaces of communal life.3 This research is also supplemented by numerous government documents, including campaign directives, manuals and diary entries by Han civil servants who served as “relatives.” By showing how the system was regularized in the spaces of homes, neighborhoods, and reeducation camps, the chapter demonstrates how paternalist violence is regularized and dispersed by introducing new rhythms to daily life. As this violence is naturalized, it becomes unthought, producing the conditions that Hannah Arendt (2006) defines as “the banal”—​a kind of everyday, mundane normalness that prevents individuals from recognizing their complicity in structures of violence. The chapter argues that Uyghurs and Kazakhs have entered a new iteration of temporal transformation, which I refer to as “reeducation time.” By placing their current experience in conversation with historical moments in Chinese and Soviet history, anthropological analytics of paternalist power, and the social construction of time, this chapter develops a framework for understanding the relationship between temporality and contemporary colonial violence. Violent paternalism—​here defined as an attempt by Han “older brothers and sisters” to replace subordinated Turkic Muslim identities with Han cultural values and state ideologies through banal processes of reeducation—​produces a new trauma-​filled experience of time where spaces of human autonomy are increasingly limited for Uyghurs and Kazakhs, and the Han citizens who are tasked with carrying it out. Yet despite this, Uyghur and Kazakh human autonomy, forms of agency, and power generated through social relations, continues to survive in the midst of reeducation time.

336

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​

WHAT IS STATE PATERNALISM? State paternalism centers on programmatic intervention in the lives of individuals and constraints on community autonomy (Ben-​Ishai 2012). These disciplinary interventions are rationalized as in the “best interest” of the populations they target. In some cases, as in the prevention of epidemics and other basic protections, these interventions do in fact serve the best interests of the population as a whole, including minorities. Yet, particularly in anti-​democratic authoritarian contexts, where the agency of individuals is deeply constricted, these interventions are often shaped and defined by those in power. By assuming the role of the benevolent paternal protector, state authorities and their proxies disavow the violence they are enacting by assuming that targeted individuals are not able to act autonomously for their own good, and the good of the larger public. Like forms of paternalism which center on relations of dominance in dysfunctional families or racist institutions, at the center of this dynamic are relations of power. Those who are targeted by such systemic interventions struggle to maintain forms of power over their own lives, while state authorities attempt to limit the ability of targeted individuals to make choices that fall outside the parameters of their controls. Unlike forms of state paternalism that are aimed at class or political antagonisms which often operate within a single epistemic or social sphere, in colonial circumstances, state paternalism often attempts to eliminate the social difference of targeted populations (Wolfe 2006). In such contexts, the colonized find their own life paths, their social relations, their love interests, and their cultural and religious values shaped by state authorities. Writing in relation to the European colonization of Indonesia, Ann Stoler argues that intimate interventions in sexual relations, family structure, and other aspects of daily life should be seen as a “strategic site of colonial governance, not a supplementary point of entry into the subtle injustices of the colonial order” (Stoler 2001: 893). Within such racialized regimes of truth, colonial authorities ranging from elementary school teachers, to security workers and camp wardens, see the intimate, epistemic expressions of the colonized as squarely at the center of “matters of the state” (Stoler 2001: 894). Colonization, as expressed, for example, through aboriginal residential schools and family separation in North America and Australia, must be understood as a structuring process rather than a singular event because of this sweeping and deep intimacy, established over a long duration (Wolfe 1999).

WHAT IS CAMPAIGN TIME? Often in discussions of state paternalism or political revolution, anthropologists and historians focus on the effects of state paternalism on social space and relations. However, the temporal dimensions of personal autonomy and collective self-​ determination are equally important. After all, people lay claims to place through their occupation of space. Rights to land are often contingent on staying put over a long duration. In the same way, an autonomous social order demands a temporal rhythm which is self-​determined. All of these forms of temporality can be affected by the revolutionary movement of political campaigns and the imposition of colonial

337

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​

relations. In such periods, the time of the home, the time of the neighborhood and workplace, and ultimately, the time of the social future are redefined by the state and those who accrue power and capital through the campaign. Anthropologists have shown that time is always socially constituted at both the level of contemporary political economy and lived experience (Harms 2013).4 As with experiences of space, the historically-​situated social environment in which time is experienced radically transforms its effects. For instance, time in a vibrant bazaar or chaotic carnival may appear to pass more quickly than moments of collective mourning or personal reflection. Yet, for someone whose daily work is in a carnival or funeral home, the same periods of time might appear to pass at a normal pace. This is because experiences of time can be linked not only to publicly-​circulated affects and personal moods, but also to economic productivity and political power. As Karl Marx (2005) demonstrated through his labor theory of value, in the hands of a capitalist, time becomes a commodity which can be exploited to produce surplus value. The historian E.P. Thompson (1967) shows that as this logic penetrates societies, it begins to shape self-​discipline and what counts as normal life. The control of time by those who own the means of production and determine the values of social reproduction is correlated to control of social life. Historians of the Soviet Union and Maoist China have long argued that in most cases, socialist revolutionary political movements resulted in periods of paternalist intervention in the proletarian, peasant, and colonial populations they purported to liberate (Strauss 2002). Scholars of the Soviet Union have noted that the dynamics and institutional process behind “The Terror” of the 1930s resulted in state interventions in a wide range of quotidian aspects of life. These spaces of intervention included “housing, urban form, popular culture, the economy, management, population migration, social structure, politics, values, and just about everything else one could think of, from styles of dress to modes of reasoning” (Kotkin 1997: 355). Likewise, scholars of Soviet Central Asia have examined the way intimate forms of gendered violence are associated with the unveiling campaigns of hujum or “assault” which targeted Turkic Muslim women. They show how this state violence moved from the intimacy of religious piety to all expressions of Turkic Muslim social values which stood in opposition to the socialist project (Northrup 2004; Kamp 2011). In Turkic Central Asia, attacks on indigenous society went far deeper than simply religious and gendered practice, they attacked the epistemic foundations of Turkic traditional knowledge by attacking sociality through imposed language and logics.5 In China, a similar process played out from the 1950s to the 1970s. The historian Gail Hershatter has identified these decades as a transient period of “campaign time” (Hershatter 2014: 4, 65–​66, 183), in which a new regime of law and discipline was normalized across the nation. As Hershatter points out, over the decades, the rhythms of “campaign time” shifted the dynamic of “domestic time.” This produced a new gendered division of labor. For instance, during periods such as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, women were sent to work in fields while men were sent to work in factories. Hershatter shows that while campaign time was disaggregated into constituent elements in particular localities across the entire nation, in general the national mobilization effort had profound effects among the more than 500 million people who made up the population at the time. Often the people carrying out these changes did not index them to the goals of the national campaign, but rather to the 338

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​

changes they produced in their daily life and intimate relations. For them, the effects of the campaign were measured not by national achievements as much as through family separations that stretched into years, increased weekly workloads, and finding enough to eat on a daily basis. As Eli Friedman (2014) has demonstrated, since the Chinese turn toward a market economy in the 1980s, state paternalism has continued to be manifested in forms of political intervention that appear to be disconnected from citizen demands, but nevertheless respond to them. As I will show below, the reeducation campaign in Xinjiang is a contemporary iteration of this dynamic.

THE CONTEXT OF THE XINJIANG REEDUCATION CAMPAIGN Since 2017, reports have found their way out of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of a new concentrated campaign which echoes earlier moments of violent state paternalism, but is now concentrated in a single frontier region (Smith Finley 2019).6 The new political campaign does not target class struggle and political dissent, but instead the religious and cultural life of the region’s Muslims. It does this through a network of razor-​wire-​ringed internment camps that China’s government at times has dubbed “vocational training centers” (Ch: zhiye peixun zhongxin). State authorities describe such efforts as an extension of the government’s decades-​ long endeavor to eradicate the perceived “violent terrorism, ethnic separatism, and religious extremism” of the ethnic minority Muslim population in Xinjiang. These broad labels were often used as legal tools to delegitimate the Uyghur right to protest against the state-​mandated initiative to encourage Han settler migration in the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands through a series of “Open Up the West” and “New Silk Road” development initiatives that began in the 2000s. Many people native to the region saw their lands and societies being partitioned by new zoning mechanisms, new Han settlement, and the hard infrastructures of commerce (see Joniak-​Lüthi, this volume). These changes led to an inflation in the basic costs of living which in turn produced new forms of poverty and desperation, particularly in Uyghur society (see Tohti 2015; Byler 2022). Protests over land seizures, police brutality, and competition for jobs in the region in turn prompted widespread state violence toward minority populations. The resulting atmosphere of brutal “crack-​downs” or “hard-​ strike campaigns” and injustice produced a cascading spiral of conflict and violence between Uyghur civilians and the police and Han civilians, both in the province and in other parts of the country (Cliff 2012). The new “reeducation” campaign through which state authorities are attempting to transform Turkic Muslim societies builds on the disavowal of colonial domination. It rests instead on the assumption that most Uyghurs and significant numbers of Kazakhs are terrorists-​in-​waiting. They are often presumed to be “untrustworthy” simply by virtue of their ethnic affiliation, age, employment, and travel history (Smith Finley 2019). Turkic minorities, especially Uyghurs, who have practiced embodied forms of Islam through regular mosque attendance, studied or taught unauthorized forms of Islam (see Harris, this volume), or wrote about Uyghur history (see Bellér-​ Hann, this volume), are often automatically detained and sent to the “reeducation” camps. In what follows I examine how reeducation time was disaggregated into constituent elements in these different domains 339

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​

HOME INSPECTION TIME Since 2017, variations of the “becoming family” scene that I presented at the opening of this chapter have been iterated on a regular basis in millions of homes across the Uyghur region. Initially during these visits, the bodies and belongings of targeted individuals were scanned by both Muslim and Han security workers for illegal electronics, such as unregistered smart phones, SD cards and CDs that might contain Islamic instruction. In general though, these visits were viewed by Uyghurs and Kazakhs as tests of their political comportment and their embrace of Chinese national cultural values. They transformed their home into political stages where every belonging, aesthetic choice, bite of meat and alcoholic drink was evaluated by their guests. Even the openness of the children to the uninvited guests was an object of scrutiny. If the children were reluctant to talk to them, it could be taken as an indication that the parents had taught them to avoid speaking Chinese or interacting with non-​Muslims. In some cases, these visits invited intimate forms of sexual violence which in turn resulted in social fragmentation. A Kazakh woman named Sholpan Amerkhan, who fled across the border to Kazakhstan in 2018, told me that during the regular visits in the homes of ethnic minority women whose husbands had been taken to the “reeducation” camps, Han male “relatives” often pressured women to drink liquor and dance with them. She said, “The Han men always went to the females’ homes. There were a lot of divorces as a result of this.” The way these state-​permitted forms of sexual violence happened over and over again drove many women to feel they had no choice but to leave their husbands.7 If they severed familial ties and denounced their husbands as religious “extremists,” they were often no longer subjected to mandated state visits by the “relatives.” Sholpan’s own sister-​in-​law, who was married to the brother of Sholpan’s husband, left her husband for this reason. She told Sholpan, “Being part of this family is just too complicated.” In other cases, unlike the visit Lu Yin attended, both the guests and the hosts made informal agreements to simply stage the visit for the monitoring gaze of higher-​level state officials. An Uyghur young man who I will call Merdan told me that when “the relatives” visited his sister-​in-​law’s home on some occasions, they simply staged a photo on the sleeping platform that forms the center of Kazakh and Uyghur domestic life.8 Sholpan said that, in her case, the Han man who was assigned to her family was not interested in her. “He called me ‘elder brother’s wife’ (Ch: saozi).” In doing this, he placed himself in a diminished role as a “younger brother” even though he actually occupied the “older brother” social position as a Han person; he also respectfully recognized Sholpan’s marriage status. Continuing Sholpan said, “My husband drove long distances, so my cadre often spent the night in my house when I was alone. I made him stay in the front room.” Over time they worked out an agreement. “I would say he came even if he did not. So he wouldn’t come if my husband was gone. I told him that I would not make him ‘pay’ for the visit if he did this.” Through the agreement, “the relative” saved several hundred yuan in gifts of rice, oil, and other staples that civil servants were instructed by the Party leaders to give to their Muslim hosts, and Sholpan was able to preserve her dignity. Although, these “gifts” were actually quite small, not nearly enough to pay for the interruption to daily work, or in some cases the productive labor of a missing relative, not to mention the emotional 340

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​

trauma and stigma such visits caused to Uyghur and Kazakh hosts, in this case it was enough to dissuade Sholpan’s assigned “relative” from following through with the visit. Publicly, however, on WeChat and in conversations with the local neighborhood watch unit at weekly flag-​raising ceremonies that became mandatory during the reeducation campaign, she shared staged photos and anecdotes of these false visits and how much she had learned about political ideology.

CHECKPOINT TIME Over the course of a month, Sholpan said that policing contractors (Ch: xiejing) scanned her smartphone using a plug-​in device multiple times. As a former policing contractor from Sholpan’s home county put it in another interview, these scans were intended to assess past digital behavior, GPS-​tracked movement, and the social network of the smartphone owner. The contractor, named Baimurat, said that the scans were intended to reveal “information about whether or not the person had worn a veil, had installed Whatsapp, had traveled to Kazakhstan, all sorts of things like that.” Fortunately for Sholpan, her scan always came back “clean” (Kz: taza), because she had purchased her iPhone from someone from Kazakhstan and therefore she was able to fully delete her past activity. She said, “Otherwise I would have definitely been sent to the camp, because I had a lot of religious content on my phone before I ‘cleaned’ it.” Indeed, dozens of former detainees and Xinjiang inhabitants who I interviewed over the past three years have told me that digital violations were used as a primary form of evidence of their need for reeducation. After her relatives were taken to the camp, Sholpan pretended she was extremely busy with her work as a hairdresser, so she would not be home if there was an inspection or the “relative” paid a visit. This activity however produced its own form of exposure. In her commute to her storefront and other daily activities, she went through multiple turnstiles where she placed her ID card on the scanner and peered into the camera. “Over the course of a single day, I had my ID and face scanned more than ten times. Almost every shopping area has a face scan checkpoint.” Over time, these checks, more so than the invasive phone checks, became routine. But they could never relax: as public citizens they could always be called into action in the campaign. Sholpan remembered, “In my beauty salon, we were forced to install a ‘one-​button’ alarm (and speaker system). If the siren went off I had to take a club and go gather with other ‘safety volunteers.’ ” They were supposed to always be vigilant for the potential of “terrorist” attacks, a threat which most Turkic Muslims I interviewed believed were primarily a pretext to take away their time by involving them in the reeducation campaign. Neighborhood watch authorities told them that if they did not respond to the “terrorism” drill siren, their businesses would be closed. If it happened too often, they would be detained. Sholpan kept a smile on her face whenever she was in public, even during political meetings when her family members were denounced as extremists. She said this too became a normal part of reeducation time: We were criticized many, many times in front of others in the village and we were not permitted to defend ourselves. Other [Kazakh] villagers started to treat us like we were a bad family. For example, our neighbors stopped visiting our 341

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​

family. They thought we were “terrorists.” They put us in this kind of condition. It is impossible to express how this feels. Reeducation time pushed her to spend the bulk of her time with her mother-​in-​ law and husband and their occasional Han “relative,” isolating herself further from broader social relations, because of the way people feared associating with someone deemed a potential “terrorist.” Checkpoint time and home inspection time produced a banal ebb and flow of insecurity and violation mixed with moments of private autonomy. It became normal to be denounced, ignored, and inspected over and over again. Spending time outside of the gaze of the state began to feel like an exception to the rule.

CAMP TIME Inside the reeducation camps, it was much more difficult to maintain a sense of private autonomy. A Kazakh man named Erzhan Qurban said that during the first two months of his detention in the camps, “I thought of my wife Maynur and my three children. Sometime later, I only thought about food” (Die Zeit 2018). Erzhan’s description of this temporal shift, as familial ties are fractured, resonated with numerous other former-​detainee accounts. Sometimes this shift happened more violently. A former detainee who I will call Gulnar told me in a January 2020 interview in Kazakhstan, that when she first arrived in the camp in early 2018, many of the young mothers who were detained with her in the cell were crying for their children. She said, “Many of the young women were screaming because their children were still in their homes. Then the police came and took them away, several hours later [the women] came back and were silent. They had been beaten severely.” Through furtive whispers she learned that some of them had infants that were still at home: “One told me that there was no one to take care of her baby as far as she knew, because her husband had also been taken.” Over time, the social isolation, family separation, and continuous surveillance became radically disempowering. For another former detainee I interviewed in January 2020, a Kazakh farmer who I will call Adilbek, one of the most difficult experiences of life in the camp was being forced to misrepresent reality over and over again. This was particularly painful during monthly visits with his relatives in a visiting area adjacent to the camp: When it was time to see a relative who came to see you, we were taken to the visiting area with a black hood over our head and our hands shackled behind us … Before we entered the visiting area the guards took our shackles and hoods off, and they also put their clubs down, so my relatives couldn’t see this. There was always someone watching, taking notes. We had to say everything is good. Before we went in they said “Do not cry. Do not talk about your problems. You must say everything is great.” Although everyone in the room knew that what Adilbek was forced to say was not true, no one was able to contradict this staged reality. Continuing, he said: 342

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​

There were cameras. They were watching everything. We couldn’t say anything. I would just ask if (my relatives) could see my children, if they could contact them, and they would shake their heads. They would not come alone. They came with the village leader (Ch: duizhang). They were also very scared. Remembering this several months later in the safety of Kazakhstan brought tears to Adilbek’s eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand and drew in a long breath: “It is very difficult to stay alive if you don’t even have the right to speak, to say what is happening to you.” Camp time forced people to put their lives on hold indefinitely. On a state-​ authorized visit to a camp in 2019, a North American reporter furtively snapped an image of an Uyghur inscription etched into the wall of a cell. It read, “This dorm room is an outstanding dorm room. Hang in there my heart.” Many of the former detainees I interviewed, said that one of the most difficult aspects of being in the camp was not knowing when, if ever, they might be released. The lack of control over bodily movements and speech, and hunger and sickness wore their bodies down physically and mentally. It made them distant from the time of their loved ones outside the camp. Time began to center around staying alive by saying and doing what they were asked to do. In an interview in 2020, Akida Pulat, the daughter of a detained anthropologist, Rahile Dawut, told me that on her birthday she hoped her mom was thinking of her. In the past, her mother had always been the first person to call her and wish her a wonderful new year of life. Some of the former detainees I interviewed, such as Adilbek, said they did think of their children on a regular basis, but others said they lost track of important dates and in some cases, they did not think of their family for long periods of time. For some, even birthday time, the ritual time of maternal and familial love, was overtaken by camp time. Everything fell away, aside from the near future demands of eating and drinking, using the toilet, staying healthy, and not stepping out of line.9

HAN CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN VIOLENT PATERNALISM The more than 1 million Han citizens who carried out the reeducation campaign as proxies for the state also experienced forms of coercion to enact violent paternalism. Yet despite the threats of demotion and criticism that hung over their heads, they carried a great deal more privilege than the Uyghurs and Kazakhs the campaign targeted. They did not feel panicked at checkpoints or worried about home invasions. Yet despite this different social positioning, reeducation time also began to structure their daily life. Lu Yin, the young Han woman whose observations open this chapter, was struck by the way her Han relatives’ daily conversation was racialized by the campaign. “What was most striking to me was the way [my relatives] had become so expressively racist,” she said. “Around 75 percent of the time [the Uyghur ‘problem’] was the topic of their conversation.” Often they discussed the way Uyghurs needed to “forget about Islam” and adapt Chinese national culture. They discussed the sacrifices they had made to help Uyghurs overcome their “backwardness” (Ch: luohou), how economic activity had been stifled, how they gave of their time to become “big sisters 343

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​

and brothers” to the Uyghur family. They also complained about the checkpoints, because occasionally they had to wait while Uyghurs were checked. Lu Yin said this racialized, paternalistic discourse of naturalized superiority was particularly alarming because of its regularity: “When I visited in 2016, these [casual forms of paternalism and racism] only came up two or three times per day. Now it was something people brought up 20 or 30 times per day.” Whenever there was a lull in conversation, her relatives and their neighbors would exclaim: “Uyghurs are so bad!” And then begin to talk about the need to control backward, ungrateful, and violent Muslims. She said that before the campaign had become an intense and unthought banal aspect of daily life, her relatives had often expressed sympathy for Uyghurs, since they could see that Uyghurs were being pushed out of their homes and could not find jobs. She recalled her aunt responding, back in 2012, to the sight of a Uyghur woman sweeping the street, dressed all in orange, wearing a face-​mask against the dust and the shame of unclean labor. Her aunt had said it was a shame that even Uyghurs who had good educations and tried to be good Chinese citizens were not able to find any jobs besides selling kabobs and sweeping the streets. By 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs were placed in the camps, all signs of this sympathy were gone. Reeducation time produced a banal ethno-​racial antipathy, mixed with paternalistic refrains which disavowed the violence of the state-​mandated campaign and the role Han settlers play as an underlying cause of Uyghur protest. Lu Yin’s father told her that once all the Uyghurs are reeducated, the economy “would be amazing.” To him, it meant that though Han settlers would need to make sacrifices in the present, the only way to move forward was by supporting the reeducation effort. In his analysis of state responses to labor activism elsewhere in contemporary China, Eli Friedman (2014) notes that the party-​state often appears to act paternalistically rather than in direct response to community demands. He shows that Chinese state authorities often brutally respond to protests with immediate arrests and beatings, but then often in a delayed and distanced manner they begin to shift policies to accommodate citizens’ demands. This, he argues, results in citizens being “alienated from the political object that they themselves have produced” (Friedman 2014, 1001). In a similar way, Han settler demands for the Chinese state to control Uyghurs who protested the loss of their land and way of life during the “Open Up the West” campaign in the 2000s (Cliff 2012), appear to them to be disconnected from the reeducation campaign.10 In fact, the reeducation camps were an extension of Han settlers’ more general antipathy and fear towards the Muslim minorities whose land they had expropriated. The violent paternalism, and the changes in temporality it has enacted, particularly in Uyghur and Kazakh communities, might appear to be solely a top-​down initiative, but in fact it was the earlier processes of colonization and Uyghur exclusion that called it into existence. The racialization of Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims as backward citizens in need of state paternalist intervention, and the way Han citizens unthinkingly naturalized their own superiority and role as state proxies in this process, functioned as a way of distancing Han citizens from their own culpability in the violent program of action. Unlike other spaces of state violence, such as Syria in the 2000s where public and everyday speech and behavior is not as tightly policed (see, for example, 344

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​

Anderson 2013), reeducation time in Xinjiang was often marked by an absence of self-​introspection and the forms of agency and empathy this offered. Instead, many Han people, like Lu Yin’s relatives, reluctantly accepted their role in the reeducation of the Uyghur family they were assigned to, while blaming the need for reeducation on the “badness” of the Uyghurs. What shocked Lu Yin was the apparent inability of her relatives to recognize and enunciate their own “involvement” as a cause of the campaign (Anderson 2013). They failed to recognize their own role, in an aggregate sense, as settlers in a Uyghur majority area, in creating conditions which Uyghurs felt they had no choice but to protest. The normalization of state-​directed interventions to stop Uyghur protests and radically diminish Uyghur attachments to their ethnicity and religion—​through regularized private and public examinations and the dehumanizing space of the camps—​has produced an unthinking banality to this paternalism. This normalization, along with the distancing effects of surveillance technology, produces an unthinking reliance on procedure and technical examinations that enact radical limits on Uyghur and Kazakh personal and community autonomy. Yet, despite the pervasiveness of political imposition and social dislocations, Uyghurs and Kazakhs, and perhaps to a greater extent, Han people, strove to find limited forms of autonomy despite the new rhythms of life. Clearly, the campaign time of the reeducation system is restructuring their lives, but it does not encompass them entirely. The stories Sholpan, Adilbek, and others shared with me conveyed a sense of recognition of the type of self they were being called on to enact. They understood the need to join in a particular recognition of state power with their Han “relatives,” in which the latter were also complicit. Some, like Sholpan, were able to grasp small measures of agency by negotiating the timing and duration of the visits by their assigned “relatives.” Some Han people, particularly those who grew up with Uyghur friends and classmates, were able at least partially to recognize the immense harms the system enacted. In some cases, they allowed Uyghurs to use their phones to get news out to relatives abroad, or they vouched for Uyghur friends to try to prevent their detention. But as Lu Yin and numerous others I have interviewed have noted, these efforts were relatively rare. Reeducation time was never fully finalized, but it wore on, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Han individuals producing a new experience of the present and their agency within it. Some of them recalled that the intensity of campaign times of the Maoist past eventually dissipated, leaving behind a new normal temporality. In general, though, the campaign worked to transform the social order, reducing the space for thought and resistance, and through this, producing a banal, everyday acceptance of violent paternalism.

CONCLUSION Since 2017, the capillary spread of reeducation time throughout Uyghur, Kazakh, and, to a lesser extent, Han life began to produce a new social order. It began to foreclose certain life paths, certain forms of religious and cultural identification and through this, produce new temporalities in individual and community life. One domain where this is most pronounced was in the way inter-​ethnic relations and state power began to transform daily life through home inspections, the regular threat of gendered violence, checkpoints, and the ultimate vulnerability of camp life. Moving to a larger 345

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​

timescale, this new form of temporality implies a structure of social replacement (Wolfe 2006). Over a longer duration, a normalization of intimate violence begins to produce forms of estrangement from ethnic temporalities and life rituals. Outside the camps, neighbors stopped visiting each other; in the camps, detainees at times forgot their children’s birthdays. The horizon of the future was contracted. Ultimately, this chapter shows that regularized state paternalism begins to fracture Muslim families and retract Uyghur and Kazakh futures in Xinjiang.

NOTES 1 Looking back at what was said during the meal, Lu Yin surmised that the Uyghur hosts “wanted to distance themselves from those ‘other Uyghurs.’ ” They wanted to show us that they understood what could happen to them if they didn’t show that they were “trustworthy.” They wanted to show the visitors that just like for Han people the police monitoring of “separatism, extremism and terrorism” made them feel safer. They were trying to act as though they too were afraid of the “bad Uyghurs.” 2 Over my time there and in Chinese and English language conversations online, both before and after my visit, I interviewed them about the temporal dimensions of the campaign. Some of these discussions were quite brief exchanges, while others were developed over several visits and elaborate meals. I found that by positioning myself as a Chinese-​speaking researcher interested in how Han people were experiencing the changes in their life, at that time, Han “volunteers” in the reeducation system were often willing to discuss their experiences and perspectives. This was even more the case with people like Lu Yin, who, having read some of my earlier work (Byler 2018), initiated a discussion. She wanted me to convey her experiences in the hope that other Han people would recognize how anti-​Uyghur racism was being normalized among Han people in Northwest China by the reeducation system. 3 Since I was introduced to them by a fellow researcher as a Uyghur speaker who had spent years living in and researching their communities across the border, and was now writing a book about the reeducation system, they were often willing to sit with me for hours discussing the detail of the way reeducation time had transformed their lives. Aside from Sholpan Amerkhan, Baimurat, Akida Polat, Rahile Dawut, who have all appeared in mainstream media accounts, names of my informants have been changed to protect their identities. 4 While in many societies people have similar conceptualizations of time, the precise ways in which people divide up their days and weeks vary in relation to work they do and the social norms associated with that work (Harms 2013). 5 While in both China and the Soviet Union, these campaigns were often followed by periods of relaxation and the celebration of permitted forms of Turkic Muslim culture, the campaigns nevertheless had the effect of reshaping the norms of these societies. 6 Initially, the Chinese government denied the existence of the extra-​legal “reeducation” camp system that forms the basis of this new system. Government authorities have also systematically barred investigators and researchers from traveling freely and investigating the situation. Citizens of the region are threatened with detention for revealing “state secrets” if they speak about the campaign to outsiders. 7 See Stoler 2010 for comparative cases of colonial, gendered violence. 8 Rather than actually enacting the intimacy of “older Han brothers and sisters” sleeping on individualized quilted cotton mats (Uy: körpe) next to their adopted hosts, they just posted images simulating this paternal act on the WeChat social media channel they shared with local authorities. 346

— ​​​​ T h e b a n a l i t y o f v i o l e n t p a t e r n a l i s m i n X i n j i a n g —​​​​ 9 This erasure of non-​camp time recalls a haunting passage from Primo Levi regarding his own time in Auschwitz: “For months and years, the problem of the remote future has grown pale to them and has lost all intensity in the face of the far more urgent and concrete problems of the near future: how much one will eat today, if it will snow, if there will be coal to unload” (Levi 1993: 36). 10 As Tom Cliff (2012) has shown, after large-​scale inter-​ethnic violence in the city of Ürümchi in 2009, Han settlers petitioned the state in advocating for “stability” in the region.

REFERENCES Anderson, P. (2013). “The politics of scorn in Syria and the agency of narrated involvement.” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3), 463–​481. Arendt, Hannah. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Press. Ben-​Ishai, E. (2012). “The new paternalism: An analysis of power, state intervention, and autonomy.” Political Research Quarterly, 65(1), 151–​165. Byler, D. (2022). Terror capitalism: Uyghur dispossession and masculinity in a Chinese city. Duke University Press. (2018). “Violent paternalism: On the banality of Uyghur unfreedom.” The Asia-​Pacific Journal, 16(24), 4. Cliff, T. (2012). “The partnership of stability in Xinjiang: State–​society interactions following the July 2009 unrest.” The China Journal, 68, 79–​105. Die Zeit (2019). “Ihr seid keine Menschen.” www.zeit.de/​2019/​32/​zwan​gsla​ger-​xinji​ang-​musl​ ime-​china-​zeu​gen-​men​sche​nrec​hte/​seite-​2 Friedman, E. (2014). “Alienated politics: Labour insurgency and the paternalistic state in China.” Development and Change, 45(5), 1001–​1018. Grose, T. (2019). “How China’s government conflates Uighur identity with mental illness.” China File, www.chinaf​i le.com/​report​ing-​opin​ion/​viewpo​int/​once-​their-​men​tal-​state-​heal​ thy-​they-​will-​be-​able-​live-​happ​ily-​soci​ety. Harms, E. (2013). “Eviction time in the new Saigon: Temporalities of displacement in the rubble of development.” Cultural Anthropology, 28(2), 344–​368. Hershatter, G. (2014). The gender of memory: Rural women and China’s collective past (Vol. 8). University of California Press. Kamp, M. (2011). The new woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, modernity, and unveiling under communism. University of Washington Press. Kleinman, A. (2000). “The violences of everyday life: The multiple forms and dynamics of social violence.” in Violence and subjectivity. Ed. Veena Das, Arthur Klienman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds. University of California Press, 226–​241. Kotkin, S. (1997). Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as civilization. University of California Press. Levi, Primo. (1993 [1958]). Survival in Auschwitz. (Stuart Woolf, trans.). Collier Books. Marx, K. (2005[1857]). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. Penguin UK. Northrop, D. (2004). Veiled empire: Gender and power in Stalinist Central Asia. Cornell University Press. Scheper-​Hughes, N., & Bourgois, P. I. (Eds.). (2004). Violence in war and peace: An anthology. Blackwell Publishing. Smith Finley, J. (2019). “Securitization, insecurity and conflict in contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC counter-​terrorism evolved into state terror?” Central Asian Survey, 38(1), 1–​28. Stoler, A. L. (2010). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. University of California Press. Stoler, A. L. (2001). “Matters of intimacy as matters of state: A response.” The Journal of American History, 88(3), 893–​897. 347

—​​​​ D a r r e n B y l e r —​​​ Strauss, J. C. (2002). “Paternalist terror: The campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries and regime consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950–​1953.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44(1), 80–​105. Tohti, I. (2015). “Present-​day ethnic problems in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.” China Change (Cindy Carter, trans.). http://​bit.ly/​1KDY​Tfo Thompson, E. P. (1967). “Time, work-​discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past & present, 38, 56–​97. Wolfe, P. (2006). “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387–​409. Wolfe, P. (1999). Settler colonialism. A&C Black.

348

PART V

PERSONS, HEALING, AND MORE-​T HAN-​H UMAN WORLDS

This section explores the classic anthropological topic of personhood through the angle of healing, spirit-​encounters and –​intriguingly –​the only chapter on sport in our collection. In cases drawn from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, all four chapters discuss the value of engaging with other-​than-​human beings as well as the ambiguities and risks surrounding such encounters. This group of authors asserts the intellectual necessity of taking human experiences with other-​than-​human beings seriously. In ‘The Art of Interpreting Visionary Dreams’, Maria Louw argues that her interlocutors treat meaningful dreams as a space of possibility, both for alternative versions of life, but also as a place for the yearnings and regrets around the shadow-​ sides of life. She explores the influence of Central Asian Sufism on the practice of interpreting dreams, connecting to her earlier analyses of Sufi practices in Uzbekistan. This chapter also addresses the issue of (virtuous) ageing, a topic that would deserve more attention in the region. Danuta Penkala-​Gawęcka’s contribution on ‘Healing with Spirits: Human and More-​than-​Human Healing Agency in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan’ points out the huge diversity of spirit-​beings that healers seek to enlist, including the ‘albarsty’ female demon widely known among Turkic peoples, a spirit that gives Louw’s interlocutors horrifying night-​time experiences. Such encounters with jinn, prophets and saints are a space of uncertainty which people feel more or less competent to interpret or control. The most routine other-​than-​human encounter for Central Asians tends to be with ancestor spirits, who are usually considered the most ‘safe’ and helpful, fulfilling a ‘recognised role as moral and religious guides’ (Montgomery, this volume). As Penkala-​Gawęcka puts it, these mundane interactions are likely at the heart of the popularity of spiritual healing practices in the region. She describes the path of becoming such a healer, from the spirit ‘call’ to the negotiation with spirit-​helpers and the tensions around obedience, mutual favours and punishment. Varying degrees of ambiguity are also frequently evident in people’s assessment of these practices in relation to Islam. In comparison with the dominance over spirits claimed by shamans in earlier ethnographies of Eurasia, Penkala-​Gawęcka identifies a more collaborative rather than ‘ruling’ relationship with spirits. Both discussions highlight the difficulty even healers experience in ‘dealing with things you don’t believe in’ (Louw, this volume). De facto religious pluralism is a DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-27

349

— ​​​​ P e r s o n s , h e a l i n g , a n d m o r e - t h a n - h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​

prominent phenomenon explored ethnographically elsewhere (Borbieva, this volume; see also the Introduction to this volume), and is coupled in this section with medical pluralism. Different concepts of the body and health standing side-​ by-​ side and being drawn on eclectically are the main subject in Baktygul Shabdan’s ‘Early Childhood Health Care in Rural Kyrgyzstan’. Beyond the ethnographic fascination with professional healers, she highlights the little-​discussed expertise of lay ‘mother-​ doctors’ and ‘mother-​healers’. She describes these ‘invisible experts’ as pursuing a holistic understanding of caring for body and soul, for example, when treating the culturally specific phenomena of kirene or lifting a ‘fallen heart’. She finds mothers undogmatically and creatively navigating the medical systems available, perhaps calling in a mullah for prayer, as well as visiting the local polyclinic for treatment. Baktygul Shabdan’s work is one of the few examples of both medical anthropology and explicit examinations of the body in the region. Human and non-​ human bodies feature quite differently in Brinton Ahlin’s ‘Drunkenness and Authority Between Animal and Human Worlds: On the Partridge Hunt in Tajikistan’. Drawing on Butler and Hegel, Brinton Ahlin shows how this masculine animal sport is used as an arena to enjoy a state of being ‘mast’: the same kind of aggressive jouissance and power that people experience as both attractive and dangerous in society. Both excessive indulgence in alcohol and the power-​politics of local ‘big men’ are described as ‘mast’. Male partridges are highly prized and carefully groomed to display this kind of machismo on behalf of their owner. The hunt is thus a place for experimenting safely with a kind of power that elsewhere draws fascination and condemnation, for example, in the display of opulent wealth. The author comments that the figure of ‘mast’ serves as ‘a productive metaphor for the postsocialist political moment’ (Ahlin, this volume). But unlike the crazy-​drunk states of half-​shamans described in Mongolia by Morten Pedersen, cock partridges provide a way of both embracing and managing the emotional ambivalence around these visceral desires. Ahlin’s foray into the power of the partridge gives us a rare discussion of masculine gendering practices in Central Asia, from the perspective of otherwise rather disempowered men. Overall, this section reveals surprising links between the expanding and contracting forms of agency, for example, mother-​doctors, ‘traditional’ healers, or university students reflecting on electrically vivid dreams. In sum, we find complex and ambiguous more-​than-​human worlds that people draw on, apparently with rather satisfying results for their existential quandaries.

350

CHAPTER TWENTY-​T HREE

THE ART OF INTERPRETING VISIONARY DREAMS Maria Louw INTRODUCTION In Central Asia, dreams are often seen as potential sources of omens and divine revelations. Drawing on fieldwork material from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, this chapter explores the meaning of dreams and dream interpretation practices in the region. More particularly, it focuses on visionary dreams: a term I use in a very broad sense for dreams which are seen as embodying some kind of truth or insight into otherwise hidden dimensions of reality. Visionary dreams bring attention to possibilities people otherwise may not have noticed, in the past, the present and the future, and sometimes involve encounters with prophets, saints, ancestor spirits, or other spectral beings1. I begin by discussing some of the more common frameworks for interpretation through which people in the region seek to understand their dreams. After that, I present three empirical examples, which demonstrate how dream interpretation may unfold in practice, and the imprints dreams may have on waking life. Taking my point of departure from these examples, I discuss dreams as spaces of possibility which put the here-​and-​now into perspective and allow alternative versions of self and others to emerge which may or may not be actualised. Focusing on dreams, I will argue, becomes a lens for exploring the relation between the actual and the possible; between lives as they are actually lived among people from various walks of life in Central Asia and the more intangible hopes and regrets that lurk in the shadows of these lives.

FRAMEWORKS FOR INTERPRETATION In Central Asia, as in many other parts of the world, dreams are borderlands between the manifest and hidden dimensions of reality. Dreaming is potentially seen as a gateway to spatial or temporal realms other than the waking one (cf. Heijnen and Edgar 2010; Mittermaier 2011) and thus to establishing relations that cross temporal and spatial boundaries. How these spatial or temporal realms are understood depends on the more particular worldviews at play in the life of the dreamer, as well as other people who may become involved in the interpretation of a dream. As will become apparent in the examples presented below, a variety of different interpretive DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-28

351

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​

Figure 23.1  Dreams may be a lens to explore the intangible hopes, fears and regrets that accompany a life.

frameworks are very often at play when people try to understand the meaning of a dream themselves, or in dialogue with others. And although many, when asked about the meanings of dreams, will present something that seems like a catalogue of common symbols with conventional meanings, dream interpretation in practice is most often characterised by doubt, scepticism, hesitation and the switching back and forth between several possible meanings. One interpretive framework many people may draw on is that of Islam. In the Islamic world, whether among Sunnis, Shias, or Sufis, dreams are often seen as potential sources of omens and divine revelations (see Edgar 2011; Louw 2007, 2010, 2014, 2017 and 2022; Mittermaier 2011 and 2012; Privratsky 2001 and Rasanayagam 2011). While divination is condemned in the Qur’an and considered to be unlawful by most Islamic scholars, due to the prophetic example of Muhammed, dream interpretation is generally acceptable and can be seen as what Iain Edgar in a discussion of the dream in Islam has termed a ‘potential technology of the sacred’ (Edgar 2011: 122, see also Katz 2012). It is not, however, all dreams that are seen as revealing Divine truths: it is common in Islam to distinguish between three kinds of dreams: dreams caused by and expressing the dreamer’s desires and worries, dreams induced by Satan or by evil spirits,2 and divinely inspired dreams (Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2012: 249, 352

— ​​​​ T h e a r t o f i n t e r p r e t i n g v i s i o n a r y d r e a m s —​​​​

Mittermaier 2011: 6). While attention to dreams and the practice of dream interpretation can be found in all branches of Islam, including militant Islamism (cf. Edgar 2011), dreams have been particularly accentuated in Sufism:3 throughout the history of Sufism, dreams have been considered a central means of communicating with the divine, with deceased shaykhs and prophets, and a medium offering glimpses of otherwise hidden dimensions of reality (Heijnen and Edgar 2010: 221–​222; Katz 2012; Knysh 2012). Visionary dreams are fundamentally unpredictable –​they come to the dreamer, sometimes when they are least expected and as such, as Amira Mittermaier has so tellingly put it, they are reminders of ‘the unpredictability of divine interventions and the contingency of life itself’ (Mittermaier 2012: 247). Nevertheless, some people, in Central Asia as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world, are seen as more receptive to Divinely inspired dreams than others: a susceptibility which may be cultivated through spirituality and morally righteous living, but which may also be inherited or just unexpectedly given to a person. Across Central Asia, dream visions often play a role when people gifted with the ability to heal or predict the future come to realise that they are indeed gifted and ought to use their gifts in order to help others (see also Penkala-​Gawęcka 2013). In Kyrgyzstan, talking of the importance of dreams among the Kyrgyz, people will often draw your attention to the fact that dreams play central roles as sources of predictions in the epic ‘Manas’, which is considered the Kyrgyz national epic, and which is often referred to as a major source of what Kyrgyzchylyk (‘Kyrgyzness’) is all about. Furthermore, the reciters of the epic, the manaschys, are usually called to their task by the spirits of the deceased in dreams. In these dreams, they meet a character from the epic or a previous prominent manaschy who tells them to become manaschys themselves (Bakchiev and Egemberdieva 2007). And just as there are people who are seen, or who experience themselves, as particularly gifted, there are certain places that are seen as particularly favourable to Divine dream encounters; where the barrier between heaven and earth is experienced as thinner4 than is most commonly the case (cf. Armbrecht 2009: 87): sacred places in nature or places connected with ‘saints’.5 Sometimes people visit such places to sleep, in order to search for guidance and encouragement in their dreams (see also Dubuisson 2017: 74). Other common interpretational frameworks are sometimes at play in people’s interpretations of dreams, including those of Freud and Jung, for example, which I have sometimes heard mentioned by urban intellectuals, and according to which dreams are all about the dreamer herself, dream characters revealing aspects of oneself as in the Jungian approach, or giving one access to the subconscious as in Freud’s understanding. And then there are various ‘traditional’ sources for the interpretation of dreams, sometimes handed down from one generation to the next. Many, when asked about the meaning of dreams, will refer to such ‘traditional’ ways of interpreting common dream symbols: a snake is commonly interpreted as bringing wealth; raw meat and the loss of teeth are omens of death; shoes are symbols of marriage. In practice, however, interpretation is much more complex: omens are never unambiguous, but always open to interpretation, and sometimes a symbol may show up to mean the opposite of its conventional meaning –​for example, the loss of teeth may forebode a new life. Through ritual practices which manipulate dream omens, furthermore, people sometimes seek to affect what is about to happen. Such practices are usually 353

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​

not very spectacular: it can be a short prayer to God, it can be lighting candles for the ancestor spirits, hoping for their help, or it can be speaking to the bad omen over a cup of water and then throwing out the water. It can also just be the attempt to practise ‘positive thinking’, to forget the omen –​following the idea that omens might not be realised if they are deleted from memory and never narrated. Moreover, there is a strong sense that visionary dreams fundamentally defy expression, that the mere act of telling about such dreams betrays the dreams, and that the real dream might be radically different from the dream as narrated. In the following part of this chapter, I will present three empirical examples, which will demonstrate how dream interpretation may unfold in practice, and the imprints dreams may have on waking life.

DREAMING ABOUT MECCA In the years following independence, a central concern of many people in Uzbekistan was exploring what it meant to be Muslim (Louw 2007; Rasanayagam 2011; Hilgers 2009; Kehl-​Bodrogi 2008). People’s understandings of Muslim-​ness were often, as Johan Rasanayagam has pointed out, profoundly informed by ‘direct encounters with the Divine and spirit agents in the context of visiting shrines, in dreams, and in the course of illness and healing’ (Rasanayagam 2011: 63). When I did my fieldwork for my PhD in Bukhara in 1998–​2000, I also met several people whose dreams –​in which they encountered prophets and saints –​had inspired, sometimes, a dedication of their lives to the studying and practicing of Islam, to healing, or to the rebuilding of and service for others at shrines (cf. also Dubuisson 2017: 73), or more generally to the rebuilding of moral worlds in which their actions mattered and were meaningful in terms of larger values and ideals (Louw 2007). More modestly, visionary dreams sometimes provided people with advice and moral guidance in particular situations and mattered a lot to many in the challenging years after independence. Let me provide an example.6 I met Shoira7 in the summer of 1998 at the shrine of Sayfiddin Buxoriy in Bukhara. She came while I was talking with the shrine guardian there and joined our conversation. When she heard where I came from, she immediately kissed my cheeks and said that it was a God’s miracle that I had heard about the saints of Bukhara up there in the far-​away North when there were people living next to the shrines of these saints who, being blinded by the 70 years of Soviet rule, did not pay them any attention. She had come there to pray, she told us, because a man at the bank where she worked was trying to have her fired in order to obtain her position for himself. He was spreading evil gossip about her, sending her the evil eye,8 and saying that she was a bad woman who had orphaned her children by divorcing her husband. A few weeks later, I met up with Shoira in her apartment where she lived with her two sons, aged 8 and 18. She had divorced her husband immediately after the birth of her younger son. The husband drank too much, and once in a while he would come home drunk and beat her up and trash the apartment, shouting and smashing bottles against the walls. When he beat her up, in spite of her being heavily pregnant, she decided to divorce him, and she had managed to stand by her decision in spite of the fact that everybody in her immediate surroundings –​her own family, her family-​in-​ law, her neighbours and the mahalla (neighbourhood) committee –​tried to talk her 354

— ​​​​ T h e a r t o f i n t e r p r e t i n g v i s i o n a r y d r e a m s —​​​​

out of it and find a way to reconcile her to her husband. The social stigma attached to her as a divorced woman was something she and her children had had to struggle with on a daily basis from that time onward. Economically, she was fairly well off, though. She had a job in a bank and supplemented her income by sewing for other people, so she managed to support herself and her children. Unfortunately, she suffered from a chronic illness, which in periods made her not only unable to work, but also unable to take care of her home and look after her children. On such occasions, she would visit one of Bukhara’s shrines; if she was too ill to do so, saints and prophets –​notably Bahouddin Naqshband (who lent his name to the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order and is considered Bukhara’s ‘patron saint’ by many), Ayub (known as Job in the Bible), the prophet Iso (Jesus) and Ibn Sina (also considered a saint by Shoira) –​appeared in her dreams and made her feel better, providing her with renewed strength. It was, she told me, a mójiza (miracle),9 that she was able to sit and talk with me: If a doctor from England, America or Germany examined me, he would not be able to understand why I am actually feeling so well. My health is bad, I am very ill. But thanks to God I manage, even though I have lots of work, both in the bank and at home. Thanks to God’s miracle. I asked her about how things were going at her job; if she still had problems with the man who gossiped about her, who was trying to get her fired. She told me that by a miracle he had been fired himself, as God had protected her from his evil eye. And she repeated what she had told me before: that if somebody wanted to hurt her, he would be hurt himself; that she was under God’s protection. She linked this protection to the fact that she had believed strongly in God ever since her childhood, having been influenced by her mother and grandmother, who were both tabibs, traditional healers, and her grandfather, a mullah who possessed miraculous powers and was able to make the course of a river turn 180 degrees. Because of her strong faith, Shoira said, miracles happened around her all the time. Whenever she felt paralysed, unable to act –​because of her illness, because of economic troubles, or because of people sending the evil eye –​she only needed to be patient, and things would solve themselves. Just like when she finally got her divorce, or when her tormentor at the bank eventually got fired. Like the last time she fell ill and had been unable to look after her children, and a neighbour showed up with dinner for them. And like the last time the Hajj season had begun, and a close acquaintance of hers left for Mecca: Shoira wished that she had been able to go herself, but it was much too expensive for her. She asked him to bring her some water from the zemzem well.10 He agreed and kept his promise. Shoira visited him, drank the water and went home: It was Sunday night. I did dua Fatiha [the first Sura (Chapter) of the Qur’an, which is often used in prayer]. It was two o’clock in the morning. ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘I am a poor person, I do not have any money. If it became possible for me too, I would be very happy … if I could come to Mecca, visit the Ka’ba, make ziyarat [visit to a sacred place]. If God wants it, it will also become possible for me to go there,’ I said. Then I suddenly fell asleep. And in my dream, I saw three 355

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​

old men who showed me Mecca and the Arafat Mountains. There were camels. It was as if I were there myself. It was indeed a miracle. In her dreams, then, Shoira was able to visit places she was not able to visit in waking life, and thus to properly live the pious self she felt she had always been, but which she had been unable properly to live in her waking life, due to economic constraints and illness: a pious self which remained important to her in spite of the fact that it was unrecognised by most others.

THE CARE OF THE ANCESTOR SPIRITS As Eva-​Marie Dubuisson has put it, ‘Throughout Inner Asia, the relationship between the living and their ancestors, those who have come before, is a critical component of both structuring a cultural worldview and imagining a social future’ (Dubuisson 2017: 3). And dreams, as she writes, comprise one of the most important ‘spaces in which ancestors can communicate with the living and where a mutual relationship of care and guidance is actively enacted in the world’ (ibid.: 4–​5, 52–​53). This is the case in Kazakhstan, where Dubuisson has explored the presence of ancestors within cultural, political and spiritual discourses, as well as in Kyrgyzstan where I have explored the significance of dreams in which the arbak (spirits) of ancestors engage with the living. Arbak follow the lives of the living and often seek to interfere with them. They also play a central role in the way Kyrgyz people practise Islam: many Kyrgyz peoples’ relationship with the Qur’an, for example, is limited to the verses which are recited on their ancestors’ memorial days, or which they might recite themselves when their ancestors, as it is believed, visit them in their homes on Thursdays or Fridays in order to see how they are doing. Ancestors also show up in people’s dreams. Even if the arbak might not show themselves directly, Kyrgyz people often interpret voices, images and feelings experienced in dreams as ayan (signs) from the arbak. Arbak may bring omens: if, for example, a person dreams that an ancestor walks away with a living person, it is usually interpreted as a sign that this person will soon die or fall seriously ill, whereas when a person receives something from an ancestor, it is usually considered a good omen. Arbak remind people about things they have forgotten, reprove them if they have done something wrong, warn them if they are about to make a wrong decision, but also give courage and moral authority to insecure and morally dubious acts (cf. Bakchiev and Egemberdieva 2007; Louw 2010, 2014, 2017 and 2022). Whereas, among the younger generations, such dreams often bring omens for the future, helping to envision and revise life trajectories (see Louw 2010 for examples), among older people, they equally often appear as hinges to unlived lives: lives that could have been but were never fully realised. Let me provide an example taken from a recent project of mine which focuses on Kyrgyz people who grow old in the absence of their close family members and which, among other themes, explores the role of the ancestor spirits in the lives of older people.11 Gulbara points in the direction of the kitchen. She explains that she recently put up a bed there, as this is the place her husband usually lies down to take a rest when he visits her. Previously, he used to lie down on the floor, but she wanted to make things a bit nicer for him. Gulbara wants to make things nice for us as well, my field assistant and I, as we visit her in the late summer of 2018. She is nearly blind –​she 356

— ​​​​ T h e a r t o f i n t e r p r e t i n g v i s i o n a r y d r e a m s —​​​​

laughingly points out that neither of her husbands (she had been married twice) ever laid a hand on her, but now the walls would beat her when she moved around her little house. Nonetheless, she keeps jumping from her little chair and to the kitchen to fetch the things she has prepared for us, commenting on their health benefits: steamed potatoes (they are healthier than boiled potatoes, she says), butter (which helps you to gain weight), blueberry jam (full of vitamins, which will get you through the winter), pillows that will make our stay more comfortable. To our protests, she replies that doing her house chores keeps her fit. Other babushkas she knows have children and grandchildren who help them cook, eat, wash and go to the bathroom, and that makes them weak. She is strong because there is no one to take care of her. ‘They all died’, she repeats several times. When Gulbara is finally persuaded to sit down, she laughs and tells us that she has so many stories to tell that one could write a book about her. The stories Gulbara tells –​supported by black-​and-​white photographs she pulls out from her cupboard –​ are stories about a life which, so it seems, has been devoted to the care of others, but also about one loss after the other of those she cared about and who cared for her. When she was a young schoolgirl, her father, like so many of his generation, left to fight in the Second World War and never returned. Her mother, then, in accordance with Kyrgyz tradition, married her husband’s younger brother. The mother, however, got seriously ill. For two years, Gulbara took care of her –​Gulbara did not know what was wrong with her mother, but recalled how she lay in bed with a huge swollen stomach until she died at the age of 37. Before she passed away, Gulbara’s mother made sure that Gulbara –​who was 15 at that time –​got married. Gulbara became pregnant and gave birth to her first child when she was still 15. The child was born premature and died after a few months. Gulbara, as she recounted, did not feel particularly sad when the child died. Quite on the contrary, she felt a sense of relief as there was no longer anything that tied her to her husband’s house. Then she left her husband and moved back to her childhood home in order to take care of her younger brothers. She remarried when she was 17 years old, this time with a good man who helped to raise her brothers. ‘They were not hungry; they were not unhappy. I did my best for them. They were brought up to become good persons with good manners. I looked after them all the time. I helped them to marry’, she says. Now they had all died: her husband, her brothers and their spouses. Her nieces and nephews rarely visit her: ‘They do not come and drink tea; they do not ask how I am doing.’ There is not much care to expect from the state either: Gulbara recalls how she suffered from a shortness of breath last winter and went to the hospital, prepared with blankets, and pots and pans for a longer stay. She was not admitted to the hospital, but was instead sent home with a prescription of some pills that were way too expensive for her to buy. Now, she said, she had become her own doctor. She had learned to treat herself and to give herself massage when her body was aching. She knew what to eat and what not to eat. But Gulbara was not alone. The spirits of those who had died would often dwell in her house. When she told us that she had put up a bed for her husband to make his time in the house more comfortable, I asked her if she could tell us more about him and the other spirits who visited her. ‘I live with them,’ she said and shrugged her shoulders as if she did not know what to say. They would come to her in her dreams, giving her ayan (omens), as ancestor spirits sometimes do, but more often they would 357

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​

just arrive and be there. Take a nap and leave again. When she was ill, they would encourage her to persevere: ‘Eat well’, ‘Rest well’, they would say. They would drink tea with her and ask how she was doing. Drinking tea, giving advice and encouragement, asking how she was doing. It would be hard to think of anything more ordinary, and for Gulbara there was not much to talk about. And yet, the ways of the ancestors were not all that clear to her. She recalled that she recently had an ayan in which she saw her father. He came with two other men. They were on horseback, and they took her and rode up a hill. There they left her and went away. When ancestor spirits take a person with them in a dream, it is usually taken as a sign that the person will soon join them. Gulbara did not understand why her father left her and did not take her with him. She was prepared to leave this world, feeling more and more unconnected from the lives of the living. She had already distributed most of her belongings among her nieces and nephews in order to avoid fights over her possessions upon her death. But the spirits encouraged her to persevere.

HAUNTED BY THE ALBARSTY What are you supposed to do when, in your dreams, you encounter beings of a different ontological register than the one you adhere to, beings who disorient you with their insistent presence? Such is often the challenge of people who, for various reasons, have distanced themselves from the worldviews of their families and home communities: atheists and agnostics, for example, or converts to different religions. In Kyrgyzstan, since independence, different Christian Protestant denominations have grown markedly in number (Borbieva 2012 and in this volume; McBrien and Pelkmans 2008; Pelkmans 2007 and 2009; Peyrouse 2004). Christian converts often face the accusation of having betrayed their Muslim faith and community. Many feel that they have to walk a fine line between their own faith and participation in Christian communities on the one hand, and their respect and care for their families and ancestral communities on the other. The example below comes from a project I have recently started up, and which focuses on questions about community, belonging and ethics among Kyrgyz converts to Christianity.12 Aigerim, in her own words, started her journey to becoming Christian when she experienced the healing power of Jesus after a traumatic incident which happened when she was around 12 years old. After the incident, which had left her in a state of shock, she became sick: her hands became numb, and she started suffering from anxiety and, in particular, the fear of death. She had recurrent dreams about graves and woke up in the morning fearing that this day she would die. She was treated with tranquillisers, but they only helped her briefly. One day, a relative of hers who had become Christian (Baptist) went with her pastor to see Aigerim. The pastor put her hand on her head and prayed, and Aigerim felt something bad and powerful leave her. Before leaving, the pastor gave Aigerim some books about Christianity which she read with interest until her father discovered them and threw them out. Aigerim’s family were Muslims of the ‘traditional’ kind, as she termed it: that is, they did not pray five times a day, neither did they fast during Ramadan. Instead, their relationship with Islam, to a large extent, revolved around the ancestor spirits for whom they would cook boorsok13 and read the Qur’an every Thursday. The family, 358

— ​​​​ T h e a r t o f i n t e r p r e t i n g v i s i o n a r y d r e a m s —​​​​

furthermore, were proud of having several strong mullahs among their ancestors. Upon discovering her books, Aigerim’s father told her that her religion was Islam, and nothing more was to be said about that. Time passed, and the anxiety and the feeling of numbness came back. Aigerim’s father, then, took her every day to a famous mullah who lived in the neighbouring village, one hour by horse across a big river. Her grandmother, who was gifted with an ability of healing by the force of Umai Ene,14 also tried to cure her: ‘Your heart is fallen down’ (Ky: ju̇rȯk tu̇shtu̇), she repeatedly told me, and put her fingers under my ribs and tried to push upwards, all the time saying, “this is not my hand, this is Umai Ene’s hand” ’.15 The grandmother’s treatment, however, did not help Aigerim. As she recalls her teenage years, she was sick most of the time, but nevertheless she did well in school and, upon graduating, went to Bishkek to study at the American University. There she befriended a Chinese woman who was also a Baptist missionary and started attending church. This, she recalls, made her anxiety disappear for good. At the same time, however, her relationship with her parents and relatives troubled her. She was not sure if her father knew about her choice of religion, but her mother did, and she was not happy about it. For people in her village, Aigerim said, the name ‘Baptist’ had the connotations of people drinking human blood and eating babies, and when her mother first visited her in Bishkek and discovered her Bible, she started crying and telling her she was bringing shame to her family. After some time, however, Aigerim’s mother seemed to have become more or less reconciled with the thought of her daughter being a Christian, seeing that it did not lead her to do bad things. Other things were troubling Aigerim, however. In her family, Aigerim had always been the person who suffered the albarsty attacks the most. In traditional Kyrgyz understanding,16 the albarsty is a kind of demon which attacks people while they are asleep, attempting to suffocate them. The sleeping person experiences waking up but being unable to move or to utter a sound, often accompanied by the sense of a (malevolent) presence of some sort or the feeling of pressure on one’s chest or throat: the feeling of being suffocated. Although a demon is perceived to be involved, and although the experience in itself may be frightening, an albarsty attack is often interpreted in a positive way: as a sign of good things coming one’s way or as a possible sign of kyrgyzchylyk, in this context understood as being gifted with special abilities (for healing, for example), or being selected for a particular spiritual mission (Aitpaeva 2008). Aigerim had been told that her grandfather also experienced albarsty attacks when he was alive. The grandfather had been a very strong mullah, and people reasoned that the special powers he possessed had somehow been transmitted to Aigerim, and that the albarsty attacks were signs of this. Aigerim, however, was not interested in practicing kyrgyzchylyk, and she did not believe that the albarsty was an omen, whether good or bad. The albarsty was present, though (cf. Orsi 2016), and something she had to respond to. On advice from her Christian sister, she put her Bible under her pillow and taught herself to pray or to invoke the voice of her pastor when she experienced attacks by the albarsty, and that helped, she thought. But the attacks did not go away. When I told Aigerim that I occasionally had the same experience (although I have learned to refer to it as ‘sleep paralysis’), but for some reason only when 359

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​

I was in Kyrgyzstan, she reasoned that the experience, after all, might be related to Kyrgyz spirituality, in the positive sense of the term. However, she was not sure of this.

SPACES OF POSSIBILITY Many things could be said about the above examples which throw us into the lives of three different Central Asian women –​Shoira in Bukhara in the late 1990s, and Gulbara and Aigerim in Bishkek around 20 years later. In the examples given here, we witness situations where dreams inspire or confound these lives; where dreams matter (Mittermaier 2011), whether by bringing inspiration, comfort, confusion, or anxiety. One may say that visionary dreams are some kind of hyper-​real materialisations of that which has not yet materialised, and which may never materialise, but which is nevertheless experienced as real, and real in a more urgent sense than the sense-​ impressions of everyday life. What often distinguishes visionary dreams and makes it possible to distinguish them from ordinary or meaningless dreams is indeed that the dream’s sense impressions –​images, moods, feelings, sounds and smells –​are experienced as extraordinarily real (see also Louw 2010). As such, they open up spaces of possibility: possibilities for the future, but also possibilities that could have materialised if circumstances had been different. The possibilities direct attention to the fact that there are always several paths a life can take, and that possible and unlived lives may mean just as much to a person as the life that is actually lived. Shoira, for example, may never actually go to Mecca, but to her, the dream-​travel to Mecca represented something more real than the hardship that characterised her life in Bukhara; it allowed her to be a pious self that was hardly recognised by people around her, but which nevertheless mattered to her sense of self and maybe helped her endure. Similarly, Gulbara’s relationship with the ancestor spirits, in a way, was more real –​in the sense of being more involving and more important for her sense of self and the moral world that was hers –​than her relationship with her living relatives and other contemporaries. It made her able to live the respected and generous elderly self that could have materialised in this world if circumstances had been different (see also Louw 2022), although the ayan, as her recounting of the dream about her father shows, would sometimes leave her puzzled rather than comforted. For Aigerim, the hyper-​reality of the albarsty experience was more disturbing: Her relatives treated it as a possible sign of kyrgyzchylyk, and thus as visionary, but it did not fit her sense of self and her moral world. Nevertheless, it had an intense realness to it that she had to respond to in some way. As spaces of possibility, dreams often become social riddles several people are involved in solving. As already mentioned, the meanings of dreams are never absolutely clear; they are always ambiguous and open to different interpretations. A person should always be cautious when it comes to telling other people about dreams –​and bad omens in particular –​as other peoples’ intentions can influence one’s fate when it materialises in omens, and as the mere act of telling other people about dreams might make them come true. Nonetheless, people often discuss dreams with individuals they trust and whose opinions they respect and take into consideration. Doing this, they conjure up various possible scenarios and test their social and moral resonance. This, perhaps, becomes most clear in the case of Aigerim and her discussions of the 360

— ​​​​ T h e a r t o f i n t e r p r e t i n g v i s i o n a r y d r e a m s —​​​​

albarsty experience with her Christian sister (who advised her to put a Bible under her pillow as a defence against the albarsty), with her family (who tended to see the experience as a good omen and a sign of kyrgyzchylyk), and with me (who had similar experiences but a different name for them) –​and who was still not really sure about how to understand and respond to it.

CONCLUSION Zooming into the ways visionary dreams matter in the lives of people in Central Asia –​whether as inspiration, as comfort, or as riddles –​I have made the argument that dreams may be seen as spaces of possibility which put the here-​and-​now into perspective and allow alternative versions of self and others to emerge. Focusing on dreams, thus, becomes a lens to exploring the relation between the actual and the possible; between lives as they are actually lived among people from various walks of life in Central Asia, but also the more intangible hopes and regrets that lurk in the shadows of these lives, sometimes informing them directly, sometimes lending them a more affective tone or counterweight. These can be lives that Central Asian people wish they could have lived –​lives they somehow live in realms that may be hidden from the sight of others –​lives they hope to live in the future –​or lives they are not sure if they want to live or not.

NOTES 1 The concept of ‘visionary dream’, thus, should be read as an analytical concept covering a rather broad range of emic terms, which I will refer to in each of the empirical examples. 2 See Dubuisson 2017: 38–​41 for an example from Kazakhstan. 3 Tasawwuf (Arabic), or Sufism, designates the ‘mystical’ branch, or dimension, of Islam. Some of the world’s larger Sufi tariqas (‘ways’ or ‘orders’) originate in Central Asia. The Naqshbandiyya tariqa, in particular, has played a very important role in forming practices and understandings of Islam in the region. For a general introduction to Sufism, see Schimmel 1975. For discussions of the history of Sufism in Central Asia, see Algar 1990a and 1990b; Deweese and Gross 2018. 4 In her beautiful account of her fieldwork in northeastern Nepal, Ann Armbrecht employs the concept of ‘thin places’ –​a concept with its roots in Celtic spirituality –​to help her understand the way certain places are perceived as particularly significant and powerful. Thin places are places where deities have made their mark on the land and where there is only a thin veil between this world and the other world. 5 I use the term ‘saint’ as an approximate translation of the Arabic term wali, which refers to a person who, by the Grace of God, or that person’s exemplary life, holds a special relationship with God and possesses baraka (blessing power). 6 An extended discussion of the example as well as other examples from Uzbekistan can be found in Louw 2007. 7 All names of my interlocutors in this chapter are pseudonyms. 8 The concept of the evil eye (kinna or kóz in Uzbek; chasm in Tajik) refers to the evil and destructive power of a hateful or envious glance toward other people and their possessions. The power of such a glance may cause illness, accidents, death, or loss of belongings or just general misfortune (see also Kehl-​Bodrogi 2008:130). References to the concept of the evil eye are geographically and historically widespread (Migliore 1997) and found all over Central Asia as well. 361

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​ 9 In Islam, it is common to distinguish between mójiza and karama, which may both roughly be translated as ‘miracle’. Mójiza, however, refers to miracles bestowed by God and performed by a prophet, whereas karama refers to miracles bestowed by God and performed by anyone else. Shoira, however, like many other Uzbek Muslims, used the terms interchangeably. 10 The zemzem well is situated in the great Mosque in Mecca. During the Hajj, the pilgrims drink from the zemzem well, which is considered healing, and frequently bring home bottles of water for relatives and friends. 11 Fieldwork was conducted in several shorter periods between 2018 and 2020, and in cooperation with the NGO Babushka Adoption. 12 Fieldwork for the project was conducted in 2020. 13 Pieces of fried dough which are often served for festive occasions and for the ancestor spirits who are said to feed from their smell. 14 A pre-​Islamic female deity considered particularly important for motherhood, fertility and the well-​being of children, who is often invoked in contemporary traditional healing practices. 15 A ‘fallen heart’, in local understanding, is a condition characterised by fatigue or depression, and usually caused by a sudden shock (see Tulebaeva 2017 and Shabdan, this volume; also Rasanayagam 2011: 181). 16 Varieties of the figure of the albarsty are found all over Central Asia and among Turkic peoples and their neighbours more generally (Dallos 2019), and it has been the subject of much interest in ethnographic and folklore studies. Soviet ethnographers tended to approach the albarsty as a remnant of pre-​Islamic beliefs (see, for example, Baialieva 1972: 98–​100; Snesarev 1969: 32).

REFERENCES Aitpaeva, Gulnara (2008) “Kyrgyzchylyk. Searching new paradigms for ancient practices”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 17: 66–​83. Algar, Hamid (1990a) “A brief history of the Naqshbandi order”, in M. Gaborieau, A. Popovic and T. Zarcone (eds) Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique Musulman. Istanbul/​Paris: ISIS Algar, Hamid (1990b) “Political aspects of Naqshbandi history”, in M. Gaborieau, A. Popovic and T. Zarcone (eds) Naqshbandis: cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique Musulman. Istanbul/​Paris: ISIS Armbrecht, Ann (2009) Thin Places. A Pilgrimage Home. New York: Columbia University Press. Asad, Talal (1986) “The idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Occasional Paper Series. Baialieva, Toktobübü (1972) Doislamskie verovaniia I ikh perezhitki u kirgizov. Frunze: Ilim. Bakchiev, Talantaaly, and Aida Egemberdieva (2007) “The role of initiation in the Kyrgyz world”, in Gulnara Aitpaeva (ed.) Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas. Bishkek: Maxprint. Borbieva, Noor O’Neill (2012b) “Foreign faiths and national renewal: Christian conversion among Kyrgyz youth”, Culture and Religion 13(1): 41–​63. Dallos, Edina (2019) “Albasty: A female demon of the Turkic people”, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64(2): 413–​424. Deweese, Devin and Jo-​Ann Gross (eds) (2018): Sufism in Central Asia. New Perspectives on Sufi Traditions, 15th–​21st Centuries. Leiden: Brill. Dubuisson, Eva-​Marie (2017) Living Language in Kazakhstan. The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 362

— ​​​​ T h e a r t o f i n t e r p r e t i n g v i s i o n a r y d r e a m s —​​​​ Edgar, Iain R. (2011) The Dream in Islam: From Qur’anic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Heijnen, Adriënne and Ian Edgar (2010) “Imprints of dreaming”, in History and Anthropology 21 (3): 217–​226. Hilgers, Irene (2009). Why Do Uzbeks Have to Be Muslims? Exploring Religiosity in the Ferghana Valley. Münster: Lit Verlag. Katz, Jonathan G. (2012) “Dreams and their interpretation in Sufi thought and practice”, in Felek, Özgen and Alexander Knysh (eds) Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kehl-​Bodrogi, Krisztina (2008) Religion is not so Strong Here. Muslim Religious Life in Khorezm After Socialism. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Münster: Lit Verlag. Knysh, Alexander (2012) “Introduction”, in Felek, Özgen and Alexander Knysh (eds) Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Louw, Maria (2007) Everyday Islam in Post-​ Soviet Central Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Louw, Maria (2010). “Dreaming up futures: Dream omens and magic in Bishkek”. History and Anthropology, 21(3): 277–​292. Louw, Maria (2014) “The art of dealing with things you do not believe in: Dream omens and their meanings in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan”, in Vibeke Steffen, Kirsten Marie Raahauge and Steffen Jøhncke (eds) On the Limits of Reason –​New Perspectives in Anthropological Studies of Magic, Social technology, and uncertainty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Louw, Maria (2017) “Burdening visions: The haunting of the unseen in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan”, https://​link.sprin​ger.com/​arti​cle/​10.1007/​s11​562-​017-​0403-​9 Louw, Maria (2022) “Virtuous aging in uncanny moral worlds: Being old and Kyrgyz in the absence of the young”, in Cheryl Mattingly and Lone Grøn (eds) Imagistic Care. Troubling Intimate Others and the Good Life in Old Age. New York: Fordham University Press. McBrien, J. and Mathijs Pelkmans (2008) “Turning Marx on his head: Missionaries, “extremists” and archaic secularists in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan, Critique of Anthropology 28(1): 87–​103. Migliore, S. (1997) Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress. Toronto, Buffalo, NY and London: University of Toronto Press. Mittermaier, Amira (2011) Dreams that Matter. Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mittermaier, Amira (2012) “Dreams from elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope of self-​cultivation”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 247–​265. Orsi, Robert A. (2016) History and Presence. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pelkmans, Mathijs (2007) “Culture as a tool and an obstacle: Missionary encounters in post-​ Soviet Kyrgyzstan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881–​899. Pelkmans, Mathijs (2009) “Temporary Conversions: Encounters with Pentecostalism in Muslim Kyrgyzstan”, in Mathijs Pelkmans (ed.) Conversion After Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union. New York and Oxford:Berghahn. Penkala-​Gawęcka, Danuta (2013) “Mentally ill or chosen by spirits? ‘Shamanic illness’ and the revival of Kazakh traditional medicine in post-​Soviet Kazakhstan”, Central Asian Survey 32(1): 37–​51. Peyrouse, Sebastian (2004) “Christianity and nationality in Soviet and post-​Soviet Central Asia: Mutual intrusions and instrumentalizations,” Nationalities Papers 32(3): 651–​674. Privratsky, Bruce (2001) Muslim Turkistan. Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. London: Taylor and Francis.

363

—​​​​ M a r i a L o u w —​​​ Rasanayagam, Johan (2011) Islam in Post-​Soviet Uzbekistan. The Morality of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schimmel, Annemarie (1975) Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Snesarev, Gleb Paulovich (1969) Relikty domusul’manskikh verovanii i obriadov u uzbekov Khorezma. Moscow: Nauka. Tulebaeva, Baktygul (2017) “In search of the good life. Value conflicts and dilemmas in the practice of Islam in Kochkor, Kyrgyzstan”, in R. Hardenberg (ed.) Approaching Ritual Economy: Socio-​Cosmic Fields in Globalized Contexts. Tübingen: SFB 1070 Publications.

364

CHAPTER TWENTY-​F OUR

EARLY CHILDHOOD HEALTH CARE IN RURAL KYRGYZSTAN Baktygul Shabdan INTRODUCTION In autumn 2012, a sick 5-​year-​old boy was brought to the clinic in Kochkor, a village in the northern part of Kyrgyzstan. The pediatrician was told that the boy was limp, inattentive and had no appetite. Janara eje,1 a local pediatrician in her mid-​40s, suspected that it was jaundice, which was common during that period. She checked the child’s eyes, throat, stomach and feet. The boy, in fear of the doctor, said that he felt fine and was not sick anymore. When Janara eje asked when the child started to feel sick, his carer said the child had been in that condition for the last three days. It was not the first time that carers mentioned keeping their sick children at home for several days before bringing them to the clinic. This lack of seeking timely medical attention annoyed Janara eje, who blamed Kyrgyz people for keeping their ill children at home with the hope that God would save them by uttering ‘May God protect you!’ (Kyrg. ‘Kudai saktasyn!’). Similarly, several mothers in Kochkor confessed that they take their ill child to a doctor only when their home treatments do not help, or when they are convinced that the illness has developed into a more severe stage and is beyond their ability to cure it. This, according to Janara eje, is a big problem. However, mothers look at it differently. Mothers who have several children –​and this is not a rare case in Kyrgyzstan since large families are common –​consider themselves to be somewhat like ‘health experts’ which results in them keeping their sick children at home for the first few days before determining what source of treatment to pursue next. In this chapter, I will deal with the case of ‘mother-​doctors’ and ‘mother-​healers’ as gatekeepers of their children’s health. For these mothers, children’s health is not so much about disease or illness, but is characterized by ‘everydayness’ and ‘domesticity’.2 At the same time, the proper development of a child is very much a social and cultural process, rather than solely a biological or natural one: a process in which various values, norms and policies are interwoven and actions are taken to shape the healthy body of a child. I will demonstrate how female caretakers skilfully navigate among diverse medical systems, such as biomedicine or folk healing, thereby blurring the boundary between conventional and alternative medicine. After providing more detailed illustration of my observation in the clinic of Kochkor village and conversation with Janara eje, I will discuss the concept of DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-29

365

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​

medical pluralism in general and explore how it plays out in Kochkor. This section will illustrate changes in Kyrgyzstan through the nation-​wide health care reform programmes which have also transformed the country’s health-​seeking practices. Sources on medical pluralism (Pool and Geissler, 2005; Singer and Baer, 2011) suggest that we look not at medical systems and how they interact with each other, but at practices concerning the maintenance of health, or what is done if one gets ill. This idea will be developed in two ethnographic sections on lay ‘mother-​doctors’ and ‘mother-​healers’ that will deal with local ideas and practices of maintaining children’s health and well-​being. My illustration of mothers as health experts demonstrates how treatment methods by lay people in the popular sector, as defined by Kleinman (1978), are widely practiced in Kochkor. Usually, lay people’s treatment practices are not considered in medical anthropological sources as part of medical pluralism. I argue that this should be reconsidered, especially in child health care practices. I will reflect on the everydayness and domesticity of child health that involves many agents, especially in the home setting, and creates a landscape of medical syncretism.

THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IN KOCHKOR I met Janara eje in October 2012, on the very first day of my visit to the Kochkor hospital. After receiving permission from the head physician to observe hospital life and observe work in the clinic, I was taken by his assistant to a small two-storey building with a sign that read ‘No.1 Kelechek Family Medical Practitioners Group’ (see Figure 24.1).3 The narrow and dark corridor inside the building was full of

Figure 24.1  No.1 Kelechek Family Medical Practitioners Group, one of the hospital buildings in Kochkor. Photograph by the author, 2012. 366

— ​​​​ E a r l y c h i l d h o o d h e a l t h c a r e i n r u r a l K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

patients, some occupying a few benches but most of them just standing while waiting for their turn to be seen. We reached the Room No. 3, where the queue was the longest. We entered the room. Janara eje was sitting in the middle of the room and was giving a patient consultation. This was not an intimate and confidential atmosphere, where normally a doctor sees one patient only. The benches on two sides of the room were occupied by about five or six patients, young and old, who, while waiting for their turn, were also witnessing how other patients shared details of their health concerns with the doctor. The first thing that caught my attention in the bright room were several colourful and catchy posters about a breastfeeding campaign and child growth charts promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO), and distributed with the help of other international development organizations, such as UNICEF, USAID (US Agency for International Development) and the Swiss Red Cross. Although the room was meant for patients of all ages, the presence of posters mostly related to children, such as family planning and immunization charts, indicated how the development and improvement of children’s health was a policy emphasis among locally active international organizations. Since independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has been facing drastic transformations, especially in its health care system. As a young nation-​state, Kyrgyzstan was not able to financially sustain the Soviet-​era health care system, which led to a deterioration in health care services and an increase in informal ‘under-​the-​table’ payments. Comparative research also indicates the visible growth in the use of ‘alternative medicine’ in some countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Stickley et al., 2013; see also Brown and Rusinova, 2002).4 In support of the local health care system, international organizations and the Ministry of Health of the Kyrgyz Republic launched several National Health Reform Programmes, such as Manas (1996–​2006), Manas Taalimi (2006–​10) and Den Sooluk (2012–​18).5 Maternal and child health was one of the priorities of these programmes, which the Kyrgyzstani state was aiming to target as part of the UN-​based initiative, the Millennium Development Goals. The pediatrician Janara eje has been working as a ‘general practitioner’ since the village hospital was transformed into a Family Medical Practitioners Group in the early 2000s as part of these health reform programmes. Like other general practitioners, she sees both children and adults. Still, many mothers prefer to bring their children to her and not to other general practitioners. I noticed that she was distributing a brochure to young mothers, which contained information on children’s physical and mental development, healthy nutrition, an immunization calendar and the symptoms of various children’s illnesses. Janara eje questioned the mothers: ‘Are you only breastfeeding? Do not give additional food until your child is six months old.’ ‘Why do you give sheep fat tail (Kyrg. kuiruk mai) to your baby, this is what our mothers did in the past (Kyrg. ilgeri), now you should not do that!’6 ‘Are you playing with your baby? Your baby can see already. Put something colourful in front of it, so the baby will see it. See this chart’, as she pointed at the yellow brochure. By asking these questions in a commanding tone and sometimes by scolding first-​time mothers, Janara eje was eagerly following the advice indicated in the brochure, which was produced according to WHO guidelines. Whether the mothers follow the guidelines provided in the brochure is another issue. Janara eje stated: ‘Not everyone uses this brochure. Among mothers, there are 367

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​

those who are responsible and there are also those who are not. If I ask them, all of them say that they follow the advice, but I can see that some do not.’ Later when I checked with the mothers on this account, a few confirmed the pediatrician’s suspicion: ‘Of course I say that I use the brochure and follow the instructions of our pediatrician, otherwise she will scold me’, was what one young mother confessed. Another one had to search for the brochure at home that she found on the top of the cupboard among papers which seemed to be put there and forgotten. However, such indicators should not create an impression that mothers in Kochkor are ignorant and do not invest in the healthy growth of their children. There are many more local ideas and practices related to children’s health in Kochkor, such as ideas about a child’s body, certain culture-​bound child-​related afflictions, or harmful supernatural beings that can cause illness or disturbances in a child. As I discuss below, mothers actively try to avoid these dangers, or resort to alternative medicine by turning to healers or mullahs for treatment. Later, when I interviewed Janara eje, I learned that as a biomedical specialist she does not deny the use of alternative medicine. She mentioned that she also sends her young patients to healers.7 If she diagnoses no pathology, but the child keeps crying, shows anxiety, or grows weaker, she advises the parents take the child to the apalar (a local term for healers, which literally means ‘elderly women’):8 Sometimes a child keeps crying even if everything is normal, or has a fever without any reason. A child can be exposed to kirene.9 I believe there is kirene. Before, I never believed in healers, but after my own child’s case [which was many years ago] I started to believe in them. My son had a fever for ten days, without any reason. Nothing could be found in his throat and he did not have a runny nose. We used to have one apa [old woman] named Tucha. As soon as she saw my son, his fever would break … If there is no pathology in a child, I suggest that parents try a healer … But now I do not visit healers myself and do not take my children either … My husband reads namaz [meaning that he prays, and is a devout Muslim] and he says that the rituals that healers perform are bidaiat.10 We do not follow them, we do not follow the old ways of the Kyrgyz. Sometimes I want to, but my husband is strongly against that, he says it is bidaiat … Instead, I read Fatikha sura11 if my children get ill. Although Janara eje believes in this cultural notion of ‘ill health’ called kirene and sends her patients to healers, she herself does not turn to them. The revival of Islam in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan has also brought a renewal in many Muslims’ everyday lives, including changed ideas about healthy lifestyles and the healthy growth of a child. There are several health-​related phenomena like kirene and life-​cycle rituals conducted for children in Kochkor, which pious Muslims, similar to Janara eje, stopped performing by stating that they are ‘bidaiat’ –​an innovation which was not mentioned in the Quran. According to them, conducting those rituals is considered sinful. On the contrary, it might cause illness in children, as punishment from Allah for their parents’ sins. Therefore, many pious Muslims stopped visiting traditional healers and instead turn to mullahs, Islamic specialists. My conversation with Janara eje identified biomedicine, local traditional healing and Islamic medicine

368

— ​​​​ E a r l y c h i l d h o o d h e a l t h c a r e i n r u r a l K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

as the three main treatment sources which serve as a basis to discuss medical pluralism in Kochkor.

MEDICAL PLURALISM RECONSIDERED The role of culture in the perception of health and illness and in shaping health-​ seeking practices is very important and complex. Health is not a purely biological condition, and is not only about the absence of disease. Health, as defined by the WHO, is also a positive state of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-​being, which is very much culturally constructed (Sobo, 2004). Similarly, illness is also a cultural construct. Differentiating illness from disease, Kleinman identifies disease as a ‘natural process’, while the experience of illness is a ‘cultural or symbolic reality’ (2010, p. 86). Cross-​cultural anthropological studies have shown how perceptions of health and illness depend on a balanced relationship between individuals and their social, natural and spiritual environments (see Singer and Baer, 2011). Consequently, varying perceptions of health and illness imply diverse preventive and curative methods and sources. The existence of several medical systems within one society that can coexist in cooperative or competitive ways is often referred to as ‘medical pluralism’ (Baer, 2004).12 Most of the early literature on medical pluralism operated within a dichotomy such as ‘biomedicine’ versus ‘traditional medicine’ (see Hörbst et al., 2017). First, this misleading dichotomy still persists in contemporary medical anthropological sources and the works of policy-​makers (Pool and Geissler, 2005; Singer and Baer, 2011; Hörbst et al., 2017). Second, medical anthropology most often deals with ‘experts’, be they biomedical specialists or local traditional healers, such as mediums, diviners, herbalists, or bonesetters. Lay people and their treatment practices conducted within a household are usually not included in discussions of medical pluralism.13 As we will see, in Kochkor, the active involvement of lay people in their children’s health care makes a substantial part of local medical pluralism, which mixes biomedicine and traditional medicine. This demonstrates the need to think beyond biomedical specialist versus traditional healer binaries and acknowledge the importance of lay people in looking after children’s health. If we turn to the critiques of the approaches to ‘medical pluralism’, they note that in order to learn about this phenomenon, one should not necessarily examine ‘medical systems’ such as biomedicine and traditional medicine, but also look at diverse healing techniques or practices from a layperson’s perspective, that is, as Pool and Geissler put it ‘what people actually do when they are ill or suffer misfortune’ (2005, p. 45). This oversight makes Kleinman’s (1978) three-​fold categorization of the health system –​professional (biomedicine), folk (traditional healers) and popular (lay people) –​a usefully inclusive approach (see Figure 24.2). Kleinman’s diagram clearly illustrates the important role of lay people in health care practices. According to him, the popular arena ‘comprises principally the family context of sickness and care, but also includes social network and community activities’ (1978, p. 86). His research in Taiwan demonstrates that about 70–​90 per cent of illnesses are handled in this popular domain. The same idea is shared by other scholars, who recognize the importance of the household as ‘a key unit in therapy-​ seeking’ (see Sobo, 2004, pp.5–​6), or of the use of home remedies which is usually

369

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​

Figure 24.2  Kleinman’s diagram: popular, professional and folk sectors (1978, p. 86). Re-​designed by the author.

Figure 24.3  Four sources of treatment in Kochkor. Designed by the author.

the first source someone turns to before seeking help from healers or medical doctors (Foster, 2010). Similar to Janara eje, local people in Kochkor in their health narratives mentioned three main categories of treatment sources (see Figure 24.3). The first (top) are biomedical doctors, the second one (left) are apalar (healers) and the third (right) are mullahs. Although it was not claimed by my interlocutors themselves, still, based on their health narratives and my observations of health care practices in home settings, I would add to the local medical system also a fourth category: the popular arena (in the middle), as noted by Kleinman (1978). The popular arena of health care provided by female members of the household is an important part of the health sector in Kochkor, especially in child health care. As the 370

— ​​​​ E a r l y c h i l d h o o d h e a l t h c a r e i n r u r a l K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

diagram demonstrates, the popular arena, in the main, consists of lay ‘mother-​doctors’ and ‘mother-​healers’, whose role I will discuss later in this chapter. The revival of Islam in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan has introduced other health-​related practices among lay people, both female and male, such as reading suras from the Quran, which I have discussed extensively elsewhere (Tulebaeva, 2017a; 2017b). Lay people’s involvement in health activities, and especially that of female household members, such as mothers and grandmothers, in maintaining the health of children, is such a normal experience that people do not even stress that this is a health-​related practice at all. This could be due to the common perception that the role of mothers in maintaining the health of their household’s members is seen as a ‘natural expression of womanhood’ (Clark, 1993, cited in Amuyunzu, 1998, p. 490). In addition, the everyday nature of child health, which is less often about illness or misfortune, is a natural flow in and integral part of care for normal child development. This care includes practices such as keeping certain body parts warm, looking after the child’s diet and nutrition, or avoiding dangers that can lead to illness. These forms of care contribute to the active and naturally assumed role of mothers. This domain, however, is left unacknowledged in discussions of medical pluralism. In the context of post-​Soviet Kochkor, how a household maintains its members’ health is not only defined by local perceptions of health and illness, but also influenced by transformations in the nation-​wide health care system, as promoted by many international development organizations. Heavily based on the philosophy of ‘self-​help’, one of the main targets of the new health care system was to empower and encourage lay people in taking responsibility for their own health (Ibraimova et al., 2011). The goal of educating the population on health and self-​care can be noticed in the display of the posters in the Kochkor clinic. As Janara eje mentioned ‘Now consciousness (Rus. soznanie) has grown. Now parents bring their children for vaccinations themselves. Before [i.e., during the Soviet era] this was not so.’ This comment echoes scholars’ analyses of people’s heavy reliance on the Soviet state for their health care (see Sheahan, 1995; Field, 2002; Michaels, 2003). The state had great authority over people’s health, which was constantly monitored, resulting in an ‘ultimate manifestation of paternalism’ (Kornai and Eggleston, 2001, p. 62).14 With the collapse of the Soviet system and deteriorating state health care, the family, as an institution, became almost solely responsible for the health and well-​being of its family members. The concept of self-​help, promoted by international development agencies and actively encouraged among the population with the help of medical doctors such as Janara eje, serves as the foundation for creating knowledgeable and responsible subjects.15 I concentrate below on under-​studied aspects of mothers’ active health care practices, who try to ensure their children’s healthy growth in the home setting.

SELF-​L ABELLED MOTHER-​D OCTORS Janara eje had condemned mothers for keeping their ill children at home for several days before seeking formal medical help. In response to my question about why they did not take their ill children immediately to the doctor, some of my interlocutors replied: ‘After raising so many children, we ourselves have become doctors!’ or ‘I used to ask for advice from others when I gave birth to my first child, but for the rest [following children] I myself have become experienced.’ A grandmother in her 371

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​

80s stated: ‘After experiencing so many deaths of my children, I myself have become a doctor!’16 These are some of the ‘local rationalities’ (Dixon et al., 2013) regarding the health-​seeking behaviour of mothers. However, as demonstrated below, I argue that the way mothers feel responsible for their children’s health is also related to the ‘everydayness’ of children’s health conditions. Gulnara eje is in her mid-​40s and a mother of three children. She looks after the health of her family, especially the children, both in times of ailments and in everyday life to prevent future ailments. She often prepares beshbarmak (a Kyrgyz national dish of meat with noodles), or shorpo (broth) for dinner. She explained: ‘We live in a mountainous place and especially in Kochkor in winters, when it is windy and cold, we need broth and we need meat. If we do not eat meat, then we will be having runny noses! (murdubuzdan suu agat!)’ Fatty meat, not lean, is usually served in Kyrgyz households. In fact, fatty meat is considered to be of good quality and it is usually offered to honoured guests. In this case, meat with fat is considered to be ‘strong’ food, which fortifies those who must endure cold and windy winters in Kochkor and also helps to maintain health. When Gulnara eje’s youngest child Nurai was five, she was not a good eater and this was considered unhealthy. This worried Gulnara eje first of all because of her daughter’s visible appearance. ‘Look, she is very thin,’ she said to me, pointing to Nurai. Indeed, not only for her, but also for other mothers in Kochkor, a healthy child is a chubby child. If a child eats a lot and has a good appetite, it is a sign of healthy growth, which makes parents happy. As Nurai did not eat much, Gulnara eje made sure that her thin daughter took some vitamins. She was a constant client of her relative, whose occupation was to deliver medications and vitamins to the local pharmacies in Kochkor. From time to time, Nurai was also given a half-​spoonful of white powder from a small jar kept in the refrigerator. I later learned that it was the finely ground shell of a hen’s egg, which was believed to be a rich source of calcium. ‘An old egg is not suitable, it should be a freshly laid egg which is still warm,’ Gulnara eje said when she explained to me how she prepared this powder. She learned about this folk medicine (Rus. narodnaia meditsina) in a newspaper which she had read while sitting in her shop. The knowledge of the self-​claimed ‘mother-​doctors’ like Gulnara eje is also complemented by articles in newspapers and from health programmes on Russian-​language television channels such as “Zhit’ zdorovo!” (“Live healthy!”) and “Malakhov +​” where advice is provided on a range of health-​related topics. ‘Tong mai’ (tallow, lit. ‘frozen fat’) is another ‘universal’ remedy that Gulnara eje uses when her children are exposed to cold, and suffer from illnesses such as flus or coughs. Tong mai is mutton fat which is rendered first in a heated pan, then separated from any impurities and cooled down. When it cools down it becomes hard, as if frozen. Applying tong mai to a sick child is classified as a Kyrgyz method of treatment, or kyrgyzcha.17 When I asked mothers about the treatment methods they used when their children got sick, many started their treatment narratives in the following way: ‘Kyrgyzcha ele kylam’ (‘I simply do it the Kyrgyz way’), and they stated that they used tong mai. This method is categorized as ‘kyrgyzcha’ (the Kyrgyz way), because it is part of traditional medicine and considered different from conventional biomedicine. Tong mai has the capability to ‘heat up’ a body, which carers believe is a perfect remedy to use when a person is exposed to cold. 372

— ​​​​ E a r l y c h i l d h o o d h e a l t h c a r e i n r u r a l K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

Kochkorians also attend to some vulnerable parts of the body.18 For example, people keep the head and feet warm. Similar to the germ theory of disease, in Kochkor, people follow a ‘cold theory of illness’ which I contend is different from the ‘hot-​cold theory of illness’.19 For example, if a child starts to cough, they say ‘öpkösünö suuk tiidi’ –​a child’s lung has been exposed to cold.20 They apply tong mai to heat up the child’s chest and back. If a child has a runny nose, tong mai will be applied on and inside the nose. If a child urinates constantly, people believe that his or her (usually it is girls who have such cases) bladder has been exposed to cold, and they apply tong mai to heat it up. If a child has problems with their digestive system and vomits, mothers believe that the child’s tummy has been exposed to cold and they heat up the tummy by applying tong mai and massaging and wrapping it warmly with a jooluk (head scarf). Tong mai is regarded as such a strong remedy that some mothers avoid it for their newborn and small babies stating that it is too ‘heavy’ for them.21 Gulnara eje also used her ‘medical’ knowledge and helped her neighbours and relatives when their children got ill. For instance, once she helped her neighbour, a young mother, to end her 4-​year-​old child’s fever: Gulnara eje removed the child’s clothes and then rubbed their whole body with vodka, which was a common practice in Kochkor for bringing down a feverish child’s temperature. Another time, she shared the leftover medication that she had in her medicine chest with her sister, whose son was ill with the same diagnosis that Gulnara eje’s daughter Nurai had several months previously. The ‘life’ of medication, including antibiotics, which can be purchased without requiring a doctor’s prescription and easily circulated among neighbours and relatives, also reveals people’s reluctance to turn to medical specialists for consultation. As discussed in the following section, in fact, not all illnesses are considered curable by medical specialists, but can be cured by lay mothers themselves.

LAY MOTHER-​H EALERS There are several culture-​bound afflictions to which children in Kochkor are believed to be exposed. These afflictions are also cured in a Kyrgyz way –​‘kyrgyzcha’ –​which is differentiated from modern biomedical treatment. The most common condition is called kirene, bringing imbalance to a child’s health. Kirene usually occurs when a small child is among many adults, where adults might admire the child for being cute or chubby. I was told that if a child is exposed to kirene –​perceived as a heavy aura –​the child’s pure and weak body may not be able to withstand it (Kyrg. Balaga oor bolup kalat). This exposure provokes the child to cry a lot, vomit and feel weak. ‘Kirene has entered’ (kirene kirdi), as my interlocutors described this affliction.22 There are different rituals against kirene. As Janara eje mentioned, some of them are conducted by traditional healers. However, in many cases, lay mothers or grandmothers can also conduct certain rituals against kirene. The most popular treatment that I heard from mothers was to put some ashes into a tea bowl (chyny) and add seven kinds of ‘tastes’ (daam), such as sugar, salt, pepper, flour and other tastes, depending on what is available in the home.23 After adding seven tastes to the ash, the mother then covers the bowl with a napkin and touches 12 parts (12 müchö) of the body of the affected child with the tea bowl, while uttering phrases, such as: ‘Kirene chygyp ket’ (kirene, come out) or ‘Menin kolum emes, Umai ene,

373

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​

Batma-​Zuura apanyn kolu’ (This is not my hand, but the hand of mother Umai, mother Batma-​Zuura).24 Umai and Batma-​Zuura are the patronesses of children and health.25 Even as a Kyrgyz person, I was surprised to find out that in Kochkor many mothers whom I interviewed knew how to perform some healing rituals for their children. For example, conducting a ritual against kirene does not require any sacred knowledge or power. Rather, it is seen as a normal everyday life phenomenon as Burul eje (in her mid-​40s) put it: Baktygul:  Which rituals do you conduct when your children are ill? Burul eje: Various, I conduct a ritual against kirene with bread, paper, juniper (archa). I lift the child’s heart [against jürök tüshüü, when a child gets frightened] as we do in a normal way (kadimkidei ele).26 Baktygul:  How do you do that? Burul eje:  I lift the heart from under the chest [demonstrates gently by lifting fingers upwards under the ribs]. Baktygul:  What other rituals do you perform? Burul eje:  (laughs) That’s it. In order to conduct more, one has to be a healer. I heard the local phrase ‘kadimkidei ele yrymyn jasaibyz’ –​‘we conduct a ritual as normal/​as usual’ –​from many mothers. This sense of normality is not associated with the spiritual power that local healers (apalar) are believed to possess. Neither is it counted as a particular treatment method at all. Rather, mothers in Kochkor see it as keeping their children healthy on a normal daily basis by skilfully navigating among diverse medical practices.

CONCLUSION The examples that I brought in this chapter illustrate the breadth of the notion of ‘child health’ in Kochkor, which is not only about the absence of disease or negative factors of ill-​being, but is an everyday process that entails healthy nutrition, the protection of a child’s fragile body from cold, and local beliefs about kirene. Even notions of proper Muslimness, such as avoiding practices that are classified as ‘bidaiat’, can directly affect children’s healthy growth. Through exploring diverse local understandings of childhood health, this chapter highlighted the important role of lay people, especially of mothers, who try to serve as the gatekeepers of their children’s health. My observations in Kochkor clinic and interviews with biomedical practitioners illustrated how the state biomedical health care, supported by various international development organizations, promotes the idea of self-​help and encourages the lay population to look after their own health. In addition, the ‘everydayness’ of children’s health conditions allows mothers to employ a certain kind of expertise and authority in the popular sector of the health care system, by navigating diverse available sources of treatment. Because of their important everyday care and decision-​making, I call them ‘mother-​doctors’ or ‘mother-​healers’: they are neither biomedical health experts nor local traditional healers (apalar), but they play not a lesser, but rather an even more important role, in promoting the health of children in Kochkor. The above-​mentioned examples of 374

— ​​​​ E a r l y c h i l d h o o d h e a l t h c a r e i n r u r a l K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​

mothers’ expertise, which is usually not considered as part of a plural medical landscape, demonstrates the usefulness of reconsidering the binary categories of experts in biomedicine versus traditional medicine, which I further demonstrated ethnographically based on local notions of child health and health care practices. In this chapter, I only covered children’s physical development with diverse treatment methods. One should note that according to local ideas, a child’s mental and emotional development, the development of a child with a proper moral education or the conduct of culturally defined life-​cycle rituals, are also an integral part of the healthy development of children in Kochkor. Studying these aspects of local perceptions of children’s healthy development further would help to balance the prevailing sources of international development agencies, which are usually concerned only with the negative aspects of children’s health in Kyrgyzstan, such as malnutrition, child stunting and early mortality. A more holistic approach that takes account of the real decision-​makers like mothers and grandmothers and their range of choices would help us attain a better understanding of local practices and contribute to successful intervention policies on children’s health and development.

NOTES 1 The Kyrgyz word ‘eje’ [edȝe] is translated as ‘sister’, but it is also used when one addresses a female person older than oneself as a term of respect. 2 See Sholkamy (1997) for a similar account of children’s health in Egypt. 3 Original version: ‘No.1 Kelechek üi-​bülölük darygerler tobu’. 4 Scholars note that the use of alternative medicine was also facilitated by a revival of ‘traditional culture’ (see Stickley et al., 2013, p. 2). 5 Starting in 2019, a fourth-​generation strategy programme ‘Healthy person –​prosperous country 2019–​2030’ has been launched by the Ministry of Health of the Kyrgyz Republic. 6 I have heard some mothers in Kochkor stating that their newborn babies were given sheep fat tail (kuiruk mai) as per suggestion, or directly by mothers or mothers-​in-​law, as it was a practice that Kyrgyz people believed would cleanse and oil the intestines of the baby. However, this sheep fat is not given on a regular basis. 7 This is also common among medical doctors in other Central Asian countries (see Keshavjee, 1998 for Tajikistan; Tursunova et al., 2014 for Uzbekistan). 8 A similar account can be found among the people in Russia, when practitioners of alternative medicine are referred as ‘babki’ (knowledgeable old women) and non-​traditional medicine is characterized as ‘grandma’s methods’ (see Brown and Rusinova, 2002; Iarskaia-​ Smirnova and Romanov, 2009). 9 Kirene is culture-​bound affliction, which will be explained below. Local people say: ‘Kirene kirip kalat’ (lit., ‘kirene can enter [a body]’). 10 This is a Kyrgyz version of the Arabic word ‘bid’ah’, which means illegitimate innovations which were not mentioned in Islamic scripture. 11 Al-​Fatihah sura is the opening chapter of the Quran. 12 The official medical system during the Soviet time was ‘exclusive’ in the sense that it recognized only biomedicine and excluded all alternative forms of healing, interpreting them as a sign of backwardness (see Michaels, 2003; Stickley et al., 2013). 13 In the context of Central Asia, similarly, most sources deal with professional healers as part of complementary and alternative medicine. See Aitpaeva et al. (2007), Aitpaeva (2009), and also this volume, for Kyrgyzstan; Penkala Gawęcka (2009; 2013; 2017) for Kyrgyzstan 375

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​ and Kazakhstan; Keshavjee (1998) for Tajikistan, and Rasanayagam (2006) and Hohmann (2010) for Uzbekistan. 14 Iarskaia-​Smirnova and Romanov note that the Soviet state and its agents ‘carried out this double-​faced task of care and control at all levels of social life’ (2009, p. 1). 15 See Ibraimova et al. (2011) for further details. 16 I heard this several times from old ladies who noted that they had given birth to many children, sometimes more than ten, but not all of them survived. They said: ‘This many [saying a number] of them are on the earth, and this many are under the earth.’ 17 It should be noted that ‘kyrgyzcha’ is different from another local notion of ‘kyrgyzchylyk’, which is usually related to local traditional healing and Kyrgyz spirituality. See also Aitpaeva, this volume. 18 See Helman (1984) for more information on vulnerable parts of the body from medical anthropological perspectives. 19 In Kochkor, I rarely came across the notion of ‘hot-​cold’ and how a person’s health condition is affected by this. Mothers mentioned how a boy is hot and a girl is cold. This is why girls get exposed to cold easily (suuktap kalat) and they need shorpo (broth), which is believed to heat them up. 20 In this context, people use the word ‘lung’ in the singular. 21 It should be made clear that the practice of using ‘tong mai’ with its heating-​up quality is different from the practice of giving ‘kuiruk mai’ (sheep fat tail) to newborn babies to cleanse their intestines, a practice which Janara eje was against. 22 People in Kochkor differentiated ‘kirene’ from the evil eye (‘koz tiiüü’). 23 Some of them use seven pieces of bread or paper, instead of ashes with seven tastes. 24 The idea of ‘12 parts’ (12 müchö) is common among Kyrgyz people. For example, one informant counted them as: the head, two shoulders, two arms, the areas around the heart, the back, the stomach, two knees and two legs. 25 On the practice of mixing appeals to Islamic saints and spirits with non-​Islamic roots, see Penkala-​Gawęcka and Aitpaeva, this volume. 26 When a child gets a sudden fright, it is believed that their heart falls down (jürök tüshüü). The way that this illness is handled by ‘lifting’ this fallen heart echoes Nichter and Nichter (1996), who underline that perceptions of how the body works shapes the way illnesses are handled.

REFERENCES Aitpaeva, G. (2009) Sacred sites of Issyk-​Kol: Spiritual power, pilgrimage and art. Bishkek: Aigine Cultural Research Center. Aitpaeva, G.A., Egemberdieva, A. and Toktogulova, M. (2007) Mazar worship in Kyrgyzstan: rituals and practitioners in Talas. Bishkek: Aigine Cultural Research Center. Amuyunzu, M. (1998) ‘Willing the spirits to reveal themselves: Rural Kenyan mothers’ responsibility to restore their children’s health’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12(4), pp. 490–​502. Baer, H.A. (2004) ‘Medical pluralism’, In Ember, C. and Ember M. (eds.) Encyclopedia of medical anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures. New York: Kluwer Academic/​ Plenum Publishers, pp. 109–​116. Brown, J.V. and Rusinova, N.L. (2002) ‘ “Curing and crippling”: Biomedical and alternative healing in post-​Soviet Russia’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 583(1), pp. 160–​172.

376

— ​​​​ E a r l y c h i l d h o o d h e a l t h c a r e i n r u r a l K y r g y z s t a n —​​​​ Dixon, J., Banwell, C., and Ulijaszek S. (2013) ‘When culture impacts health’, In Banwell, C., Ulijaszek, S. and Dixon, J. (eds.) When culture impacts health: Global lessons for effective health research. London: Academic Press, pp. 1–​11. Field, M.G. (2002) ‘The Soviet legacy: The past as prologue’, In Falkingham, J., Healy, J. and McKee, M. (eds.) Health care in central Asia. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. 67–​75. Foster, G. (2010) ‘Medical anthropology and international health planning’, In Good, B.J., Fischer, M.M., Willen, S.S. and Good, M.J.D. (eds.) A reader in medical anthropology: theoretical trajectories, emergent realities. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, pp. 394–​404. Helman, C. (1984) Culture, health and illness. Bristol: John Wright & Sons Ltd. Hohmann, S. (2010) ‘National identity and invented tradition: The rehabilitation of traditional medicine in post-​Soviet Uzbekistan’, The China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, 8(3), pp. 129–​148. Hörbst, V., Gerrets, R., & Schirripa, P. (2017) ‘Revisiting medical pluralism’, L’Uomo società tradizione sviluppo, 42(1), pp. 7–​26. Iarskaia-​ Smirnova, E. and Romanov, P. (2009) ‘The rhetoric and practice of modernisation: Soviet social policy, 1917–​1930s’, In Hauss, G. and Schulte, D. (eds.) Dual Mandate. Opladen and Farmington Hills, MI: Verlag Barbara Budrich, pp. 150–​164. Ibraimova, A., Akkazieva, B., Ibraimov, A., Manzhieva, E. and Rechel, B. (2011) ‘Kyrgyzstan: Health system review’, Health Systems in Transition, 13(3), 1–​152. Keshavjee, S. (1998) Medicines and transitions: The political economy of health and social change in post-​Soviet Badakhshan, Tajikistan. PhD Thesis. Harvard University, USA. Kleinman, A. (1978) ‘Concepts and a model for the comparison of medical systems as cultural systems’, Social Science & Medicine. Part B: Medical Anthropology, 12, pp. 85–​93. Kleinman, A.M. (2010) ‘Medicine’s symbolic reality: On a central problem in the philosophy of medicine’, In Good, B.J., Fischer, M.M., Willen, S.S. and Good, M.J.D. (eds.) A reader in medical anthropology: Theoretical trajectories, emergent realities. Malden, MA: Wiley-​ Blackwell, pp. 85–​90. Kornai, J. and Eggleston, K. (2001) ‘Choice and solidarity: The health sector in Eastern Europe and proposals for reform’, International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, 1(1), pp. 59–​84. Michaels, P. (2003) Curative powers: Medicine and empire in Stalin’s Central Asia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nichter, M. and Nichter, M. (1996) Anthropology and international health: Asian case studies. London and New York: Routledge. Penkala-​Gawęcka, D. (2009) ‘Kazakh medical traditions in present-​day Kazakhstan: Locally rooted, regionally and globally flavoured’, In Pstrusin´ska J. and Gacek T. (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 272–​283. Penkala-​Gawęcka, D. (2013) ‘Mentally ill or chosen by spirits? “Shamanic illness” and the revival of Kazakh traditional medicine in post-​Soviet Kazakhstan’, Central Asian Survey, 32(1), pp. 37–​51. Penkala-​Gawęcka, D. (2017) ‘Legitimacy and authority of complementary medicine practitioners in post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan. The role and use of tradition’, Rocznik Orientalistyczny, LXX, 1, 20–​32. Pool, R., & Geissler, W. (2005) Medical anthropology. Berkshire, UK: McGraw-​Hill Education. Rasanayagam, J. (2006) ‘Healing with spirits and the formation of Muslim selfhood in postSoviet Uzbekistan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(2), pp. 377–​393. Sheahan, M.D. (1995) ‘Prevention in Poland: Health care system reform’, Public Health Reports, 110(3), pp. 289–​294.

377

—​​​​ B a k t y g u l S h a b d a n —​​​ Sholkamy, H.M. (1997) Children’s health and well-​ being: An ethnography of an upper Egyptian village. PhD thesis. The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Singer, M., & Baer, H. (2011) Introducing medical anthropology: A discipline in action. Plymouth: AltaMira Press. Sobo, E. (2004) ‘Theoretical and applied issues in cross-​cultural health research: Key concepts and controversies’, In Ember, C. and Ember M. (eds.) Encyclopedia of medical anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures. New York: Kluwer Academic/​Plenum Publishers, pp. 3–​11. Stickley, A., Koyanagi, A., Richardson, E., Roberts, B., Balabanova, D. and McKee, M. (2013) ‘Prevalence and factors associated with the use of alternative (folk) medicine practitioners in 8 countries of the former Soviet Union’, BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 13, 83. Tulebaeva, B. (2017a) ‘In search of the good life. Value conflicts and dilemmas in the practice of Islam in Kochkor, Kyrgyzstan’, In Hardenberg, R. (ed.) Approaching ritual economy: Socio-​ cosmic fields in globalized contexts. Tübingen: SFB 1070 Publications, pp. 71–​103. Tulebaeva, B. (2017b) Born Kyrgyz, raised as Russians and buried as Arabs: Negotiating childhood and personhood in Kyrgyzstan. PhD thesis. Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Tursunova, Z., Kamp, M., Azizova, N. and Azizova, L. (2014) ‘Cultural patterns of health care beliefs and practices among Muslim women in Uzbekistan’, Health, Culture and Society, 6(1), pp. 46–​61.

378

CHAPTER TWENTY-​F IVE

DRUNKENNESS AND AUTHORITY BETWEEN ANIMAL AND HUMAN WORLDS On the partridge hunt in Tajikistan Brinton Ahlin Like so many visitors to the home of Hoji Sulaimon, a shaykh who lived in the vicinity of a pilgrimage site in southern Tajikistan near the city of Shahritus, one of the first things that I noticed was the caged bird hanging in the shade of a tree in the courtyard. Red-​beaked with a thick black camouflage colouring running across its head and down its white-​and-​black-​speckled chest, this bird –​a rock partridge of the Alectoris chukar variety, or kabk in Tajik –​was visually striking (see Figure 25.1). As my gaze settled for a moment on the bird, the ever-​observant Hoji Sulaimon, a retired collective farm engineer and somewhat ostentatiously turban-​clad Muslim notable, broke into a smile, his eyes sparkling under his high brow. ‘Just wait for springtime,’ he would say to me, more than once and with a hint of mystery, ‘and I will take you on a hunt with these birds in the mountains.’ It would be the spring of 2016 before I could participate in such a hunt first-​ hand, nearly a year after I had settled into the area for long-​term research. From the summer of 2015 onward, I often took my meals with Hoji Sulaimon or others under the watchful gaze of these birds, who were positioned outside in the courtyard in the warmer months and inside near the hearth in the winter. I had regular opportunities to observe the special care and attention given to the partridges –​above and beyond anything conferred on dogs, cats, cows, sheep, or other animals that were part of daily life in this region. The birds were clearly a prestige item –​and their price on the local market, if you could even find one to buy, reflected this. Was the appeal of these birds primarily an aesthetic one? A form of conspicuous consumption? Some men, such as Hoji Sulaimon, considered their birds priceless and would only ever exchange them as gift items, a kind of extension of their magnanimous personhood. What was it that was so captivating about these birds to a certain cadre of men in these villages? The more I came to participate in the partridge hunts, the more I became convinced that the answer to this question was to be found in the complex and often vicarious set of relations that these activities set into motion between birds and men. A sustained reflection on these partridges can illuminate, with some analytical precision, a difficult-​to-​articulate cultural ambivalence in Tajikistan and suggest one manner in which it is managed and domesticated in practice. My contention, in short, is that in working to understanding what constitutes the appeal of this sport and its avian protagonists, we can shed some light on how DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-30

379

—​​​​ B r i n t o n A h l i n —​​​

Figure 25.1  Chukar partridge in captivity on the hunt.

authority, virility and excess come to be ambivalently valued in Tajik society. Why turn to a partridge hunt in addressing these questions? It offers us a productive relational analytic that begins at precisely the point where discursive explanations from my interlocutors began to falter –​the point where the proverbial emic frame started to reach its limits. The presumption of such an approach is that by construing the boundaries of animal and human worlds, whether in Central Asia or beyond, as fluid and dynamic, we can gain fresh insights into salient cultural problems that are not fully articulated in other domains.1 While the range of ambivalences that the partridge hunt, let alone other domains of human-​animal interaction, could speak to is extensive, this chapter will concentrate specifically on one element that is the subject of much local discussion, and that bears a surprising relevance to partridge in particular: the state of being mast. ‘Mast’ is the Tajik adjective for being drunk, usually but not always as a result of alcohol consumption. Drunkenness of various kinds is, of course, a long-​standing feature of life in Central Asia, but what interests us here is the way in which it is also one of those aspects of social life that is characterised by its quintessential ambivalence, at times enthusiastically embraced and at other times pointedly disavowed. Here especially, the relations that adhere in the partridge hunt may clarify an attitude towards drunkenness that is quite widespread in Tajikistan, but less easy to express explicitly in discursive registers of value. But let us first introduce the hunt itself.

380

— ​​​​ D r u n k e n n e s s a n d a u t h o r i t y i n a n i m a l a n d h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​​

PARTRIDGE HUNTING AND ITS ENIGMATIC APPEAL The hunting season begins in the spring, just as the partridge breeding season is getting underway. Around this time, the Chukar cocks begin to compete for hens, eventually pairing off from their usual small coveys to nest monogamously with an individual mate. Early in the season, many cocks are still seeking mates or have just mated, while in the later part of the season, the hen’s eggs have already been laid in the nest. The mountains around Shahritus are relatively low-​lying, well under a thousand metres from the valley floor, but they are filled with small canyons encrusted with brush-​laden rocky ledges; these are ideal nesting places for these partridges due to their protection from land-​bound predators. Dwelling in these environs, the birds within the territory communicate with each other through distinctive calls and these can be heard echoing through these rocky ravines during the spring season. The hunting activity of Tajiks around Shahritus takes advantage of the natural context of this mating environment in an attempt to draw in wild partridges and snare them. The main asset of any partridge hunter is his own live domesticated partridge, acquired on a previous hunt or, more rarely, purchased from another hunter. The hunting partridge is in nearly all cases a male, a cock. These birds are kept in captivity year-​round in the homes of local sportsmen, living in cages made of either dull metal or rounded wooden stalks and reeds, and awaiting the much-​anticipated spring hunt. At the time of the hunt, the birds are brought to the mountains and placed in rocky nesting areas covered with branches and brush. The area in the immediate vicinity of the caged bird, hidden in the brush, is then staked with circular snares crafted out of twisted fishing line strung out at intervals of approximately 10 centimetres. The goal of the hunt is to use the domesticated partridge to call out and attract wild ones. By signalling its presence to competing cocks in the area, it draws them in to fight for their territory. During mating season and the nesting period that follows, cocks become famously aggressive defenders of their nests, picking fights unsparingly with intruding birds. If the hunting partridge’s call is successful, it will draw its opponent to its hiding place, where the cock will soon find its neck caught in one of the barely visible nooses of fishing line dotting the area around the caged bird. Meanwhile, the hunter will crouch in the bushes about 10 metres away, wait for the snare to catch, and then run in to grab the bird and stuff it into his cloth hunting pouch. It is the responsibility of the hunting partridge to let out a call to attract other birds and the best cocks are those filled with fighting spirit, sparring for a duel at the first opportunity. This process is known as eliciting a response-​call (khonondan). In recent years, hunters have begun recording the sounds of their hunting birds on their recorder-​equipped cell phones and playing them back as a way to coax their birds into calling during the hunt. While this tactic is often surprisingly effective, it is still no substitute for a naturally bellicose fighting cock, which can attract birds from several kilometres distant with its full-​throated notes of aggression. The goal of partridge hunting is not to eat the partridges, but to capture them alive and unharmed, domesticate them, and use them to go out partridge hunting once again. In this way, the purpose of hunting is self-​referential: one captures birds to facilitate future hunts in an unending cycle.

381

—​​​​ B r i n t o n A h l i n —​​​

While the appeal of this kind of hunt is immediately and viscerally obvious to the Tajik men who engage in it, it is by no means self-​evident to the wider circle of Tajiks outside of the close vicinity of Shahritus and other hotbeds of Chukar hunting, such as the Gharm district. Why, many non-​hunters wondered aloud to me, would one want to hunt these birds if one is not going to eat them? The whole thing struck many non-​hunters as a pointless and gruelling exercise in hardship conducted at the significant expense of diesel fuel, time and physical energy. While much of my ethnographic labour near Shahritus involved eliciting answers and explanations from community members about the various motivations and rationales driving their actions, in the case of the partridge hunt, such queries were routinely met with a shrug. When asked directly, most hunters could not articulate a compelling explanation of their own intense fascination with this somewhat eccentric sport. Instead, they narrated it in terms of an inarticulable ‘high’ that they could not easily live without, something that ‘we must do’, in the words of one hunter. What was it that animated the risk-​taking and pleasures of the hunt? What was its appeal?

ANIMAL-​H UMAN RELATIONS ON THE HUNT We can begin to assay an answer to this question by looking at the relations this activity sets in motion between birds and men. Recent work in multi-​species ethnography and a revival of interest in animism by way of ontological differences have, each in their own way, foregrounded the dynamic and intersubjective qualities of human-​animal contact (Descola 2013; Govindrajan 2018; Willerslev 2007). At the same time, they build on a legacy of anthropologists looking to animal encounters for insights into human worlds. In Clifford Geertz’s famous analysis of the Balinese cockfight, he suggested that the fights between cocks (always to the death) were in fact fights between men, metaphorical battles of status and prestige that evoked emotions in a manner akin to theatrical or literary art (Geertz 1973, 417). In Tajik partridge hunting, the symbolic relations embedded in the contest between the two cocks –​ captive and hunted –​were of a quite different character, but, as with the Balinese case, the nature of the relationship between man and bird is a productive point of entry to the relevant cultural worlds. Schematically, the relation between hunter and cock in the Tajik case took two forms –​identification and domination –​that were both essential to the local meaning and significance attributed to the activity. There was no question that the identification between the captive cock and the man was essential to the experience of the hunt.2 It was the domesticated bird, however, that was effectively the surrogate for the hunter in the effort to attract and capture the wild partridge. The prowess of one’s partridge was directly linked to one’s worldly prestige and one’s success in the hunt. The increasing popularity of the hunt in the mid-​2010s had made the most virile birds incredibly valuable. In 2016, even a greenhorn bird of mediocre calling ability would sell for 800–​1,000 somoni, roughly three months’ salary for an average wage labourer in the country. More experienced and proven birds could sometimes fetch six times this amount –​4,800–​6,000 somoni (from US$600–​700). Though men from all classes of society aspired to participate in the hunt, it was considered to be a fairly expensive sport for most. Those who did have partridges, however, tended to take care of them attentively and live with them intimately. During the hunt. the birds often travelled while tucked 382

— ​​​​ D r u n k e n n e s s a n d a u t h o r i t y i n a n i m a l a n d h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​​

warmly into the sweater or coat of the hunter, their heads visible, bobbing out of the hunter’s jacket. They slept near the heat of the wooden stove in their cages in the same tent as the hunters. During the rest of the year, the birds lived in cages inside the house or out in the courtyard, receiving daily feedings and waterings. One hunting shaykh claimed that the care his wife offered to his birds was directly responsible for the bird’s calling abilities. A bird that is well cared for (nigohbin kard), he noted, will be healthy and vital for the hunt. While identification between hunter and bird was strong, the relationship was, of course, one of inherent inequality. In the initial days following the bird’s capture, the hunter began a process of asserting his mastery over the bird through a hazing-​like ritual. Birds were kept in heavy cloth bags in total darkness for days at a time to render them docile to their new condition. They were only slowly reintroduced to the light and offered food by their new master. Despite being well-​fed and enjoying close quarters with the hunters, the lowly status of such birds was never far away. When they failed to live up to the expectations of their owner, they were routinely verbally or physically assaulted in retaliation. How to interpret this somewhat quixotic combination of close identification with the bird on the hunt and aggressive domination of it in other contexts? One potential –​and to my mind, convincing –​reading of the situation is suggested by means of a juxtaposition with the master–​slave dialectic theorised by G.W.F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1977 [1807]), with the hunter as lord and the bird as bondsman. The relation of slave to master in this philosophical parable originated with a ‘life-​and-​death struggle’ between the two parties, much as the relation between bird and hunter begins with the risk-​laden subjugation of the bird on the hunt and its ultimate acquiescence to bondage (Hegel 1977 [1807], 109). Although Tajiks did not refer to their birds as literal slaves, their words and actions vis-​à-​vis the birds often conveyed the general sense of such a relationship. Once domesticated, the birds were kept confined to their cages for most of the year, released inside the house for at most a few hours a week, often on Fridays. Reflecting on their permanent status as unwilling captives on one such Friday, Hoji Sulaimon noted to me that these birds still required some modicum of periodic freedom as they too were ‘living things (jondor)’. The bird’s freedom (or deprivation thereof), its cage and the owner’s mediating role all suggested to me that the bird’s subjectivity, like that of the Hegelian slave, was both superficially acknowledged and demeaned in such encounters. But why mediate one’s subjectivity through a slave at all? Would it not be easier to relate to oneself directly? Here Hegel may offer some important clues. He developed his theory of the master–​slave relation as part of a broader attempt at grappling with the relational nature of all identity. Whereas many of his predecessors had conceived of the self as an independent or autonomous entity, Hegel affirmed that becoming self-​conscious required that other subjects acknowledge the self. For the purposes of this chapter, suffice it to say that the denouement of this process entailed, for Hegel, staking one’s life and killing another to attain this certainty of self. But if one eliminated this recognising ‘other’ in this manner, who could affirm the protagonist? Hegel was interested in the problem of how to actualise the self via a more sustainable set of relations –​mastery itself being an indirect metaphor for the fulfilment of the self’s desires. Self-​affirmation for Hegel was like a hunger that needed to be satiated, but whose very satiation, as with physical hunger, was destined to return 383

—​​​​ B r i n t o n A h l i n —​​​

anew the next morning. It is in the context of the temporary nature of self-​affirmation that the introduction of a longer-​term intermediary –​the bondsman –​allowed for a more stable set of relations to take hold between one’s self and one’s appetites, desires and consciousness. On the partridge hunt, the agency of the hunter –​his independence –​is maintained and asserted through the capture of the bird, just as the independence of the lord is forged and reproduced through his relation with the bondsman. Part of the appeal of the partridge hunt, no doubt, lies specifically in the ongoing relations of subjugation it initiates and the more permanent sense of mastery it affords as a result. The hunter’s relation to the hunted animal is not over at the moment of victory: it endures, to reaffirm the hunter’s sense of authority at home and in future hunts. The captive partridge, through which the activity of hunting is in fact conducted, has the advantage of allowing the hunter to experience the sense of mastery and pleasure derived from the hunt as his own, while leaving the undesirable or ‘independent’ elements of its performance to his captive bird. The hunter, for example, can take credit for a successful hunt, but he can likewise blame failures on the fecklessness of his bird. It is this incomplete or partial identification of the hunter with the captive partridge that, in a Hegelian mould, makes it such a powerful cultural framework for experiencing the pleasures of a certain kind of authority and mastery, the implications of which we will see shortly. When Hegel observes that the lord ‘takes to himself only the dependent aspect of the thing and has the pure enjoyment of it’, leaving the independent aspect to his bondsman, he is really discussing how the addition of an intermediary allows one to satiate one’s desires while pawning off on another being the elements of this pleasurable experience that are unsavoury, unwanted, or complicating for one’s subjectivity (Hegel 1977 [1807], 116). The triad of lord-​bondsman-​thing thus provides a comparatively enduring and stable set of relations through which the subject can seek and experience satisfaction. It is a means of overcoming the fleeting character of recognition and enjoyment to construct a system of relations through which the master’s subjectivity –​in a world where all subjectivity is relational, performative and hence unstable –​can ultimately endure without the constant threat of being undermined. Within such a framework of partial identifications and the parcelling-​out of experience into different moments experienced by different beings, it makes sense that the hunter relates ambivalently to his bird –​identifying with it when felicitous, but distancing it from himself as his slave when desirable. Through the lens of this set of relations, the figure of the captive partridge can offer us insights into the psychic life of power within a community, the partridge serving as a cultural metaphor and a window onto broader sets of power relations and legitimacy in Tajik society (Butler 1997).

THE VICARIOUS PARTRIDGE AND ITS DRUNKENNESS How exactly did a partridge become an aggressive fighting cock that could successfully serve its master in the hunting enterprise, enticing other birds to come in close for a fight? The propensity of a Chukar partridge to spar for a fight and call in his rivals was directly related to his state of excitement. This behaviour was a function of the increasingly aggressive territoriality of the birds in the late stages of the mating season after they had paired off. As hunters were quick to point out, the ability of a 384

— ​​​​ D r u n k e n n e s s a n d a u t h o r i t y i n a n i m a l a n d h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​​

bird to actually fight with his rival was somewhat beside the point. What mattered was the bird’s bellicosity and confidence –​his inclination to pick a fight rather than his ability to win one. It was widely believed that the fatter and healthier the bird, the more likely he was to enter this state of excitement. The bird was, in Tajik terms, drunk or ‘mast’. Mast was indeed the only term used to describe the excited state of these cocks, and the more excitable one’s bird, the more valuable it was. These drunken partridges were willing –​whether able or not –​to defend their territory and hens from the slightest encroachment. For a bird to be drunk was to be out-​of-​control in terms of aggression in this act of defence, and to call for a fight at the most minute offence. The best cocks were drunkenly overexcited to the point of frenzy. They had to be kept in cages covered by heavy fabrics, because the smallest glimpse of daylight outside would be enough to get them calling uncontrollably before the hunters had properly hidden themselves in the brush. They sought out rival birds to fight, without the slightest consideration of their contender’s prowess, or even a hint of caution or trepidation. They were all pride and all arrogance. In practice, a bird’s propensity to drunkenness was partly related to its bodily build and size: larger birds with weightier plumage were more likely to manifest the state of mast, but the essence of it often had as much to do with the bird’s personality and training. The haughty partridge was painstakingly sought after and, after capture, its propensity to become drunk was assiduously cultivated. In the days leading up to a hunt, the hunter would prepare a special mix of food for his partridge, crushing pistachios, almonds and walnuts and mixing them with a combination of diced boiled eggs and raw eggs. He would then carefully roll them into little black gooey balls, placing them in the feeding dish adjacent to the bird’s cage. Feeding this to the bird over several days, it would at first enter a state of lethargy, putting its head down as if it were asleep. This state also signified that the bird was ‘mast’. Some referred to this prelude to the state of mast as ‘full’, using the Tajik notion of ser in a way that clearly meant over-​satiated. The animal had had so much to eat that it was absolutely stuffed, absorbing the energy that would cause it to be manifestly ‘mast’ out on the hunt. On the day of the hunt itself, the bird’s tail (kun) would be warmed beforehand as a way of ‘exciting’ the bird. This notion of excitement was generally expressed with the Russian word vozbuzhdat’, signalling excitement with all its sexual connotations. Some men purchased special incandescent light bulbs for this purpose, which they then affixed to their car batteries to light while out in the mountains. On one morning day-​trip, we arrived at the foot of the mountains around 5 a.m., well before first light. As we waited for dawn to approach, we started a gulkhan or bonfire, whose express purpose was to ‘warm the tail of the bird’ prior to the hunt. On more extended overnight trips, the birds would sometimes sleep next to a wood stove set up in the hunters’ canvas tent. The best drunken partridges were ones who, cultivated and cared for appropriately, would perform their drunken aggression reliably and sustain it year over year and hunt over hunt. Some hunters selling birds would try to hop them up on narcotics (banga), leading them to perform impressively for a few days or a week. After this initial period of overstimulation, however, the birds would begin to put their heads down and were ‘finished off (tamom)’. Unlike a stuffed or ‘full’ bird primed for action, however, these exhausted and finished birds would die shortly thereafter. The 385

—​​​​ B r i n t o n A h l i n —​​​

artificial highs and lows induced by narcotic stimulants were ultimately unsustainable, producing a short burst of energy that killed the bird instead of enlivening it. The supreme goal for any partridge hunter, then, was to capture, cultivate and excite a hunting cock that was out-​of-​control in a sustainable, rather than a fleeting way. One needed to keep the tension of its drunken state of excitation alive and prevent it from fizzling out. That the relation between bird and hunter be sustainable and ongoing in this way is an exceedingly important detail, resonating in many ways with the logic behind the master–​slave dialectic. The trick of the master–​slave dialectic for Hegel is that it established a permanent relation between master and slave that could provide the ongoing mutuality and inequality of relations essential to the master’s sense of himself as a master. Even more critically, however, the master–​slave dynamic divides the various dimensions of experience across multiple entities in a way that is advantageous to the master. Similarily, the uncontrollable, vital and virile energy of the partridge, expressed through the phenomenon of its drunkenness, is captured, controlled and harnessed by the hunter in ways that enhance his own subjectivity as master. Meanwhile, the undesirable and unsavoury or problematic effects of the drunkenness and excitation are left entirely to the bird, not the hunter. In short, the hunter is able to partake of the enjoyment of drunkenness without actually getting drunk. But did Tajiks actually want to get ‘mast’ in this way? What were the broader cultural resonances and ambivalences of ‘being mast’ that the hunt invoked?

THE MEANING OF ‘BEING MAST’ IN TAJIKISTAN Nearly every observer or participant of Central Asian society has had the experience of either seeing men get drunk or facilitating the drunkenness of other men at weddings or other occasions of hospitality, even as many of these same men would openly complain about alcohol’s vices and harms in other contexts. Such a phenomenon could just as easily be chalked up to the vagaries of the human condition, of course, as to something uniquely Central Asian. While weddings, as paradigmatic sites of national culture and magnanimous excess, are a clear site of ambivalence around drunkenness, it was only in another context –​all-​male mountain camp-​outs with long-​time classmates –​that I came to fully appreciate the degree to which the Tajik adjective for drunkenness, mast, evoked a wider world of meanings and subjectivities that went far beyond the simple act of drinking alcohol. In the spring of 2016, I had the opportunity to participate in an annual gathering of men from the nearby village of Lenin. Recurring, lifelong gatherings of classmates were relatively commonly throughout Tajikistan, though many in the village of Lenin prided themselves on their unique tradition of taking such gatherings into the hillsides around the village each spring. While some suggested that the special local fondness for this activity had its origins in attitudes towards hunting, these trips had a rather different purpose, oriented towards bonding and relaxation with friends. In my own participation in such a trip, the event began as ten of us piled into the back of a tractor-​trailer one spring day and set off with bundles of canvas, blankets and food to make camp at the foot of a small mountain on the edge of the Beshkent Valley. Although at least three of us were prayer-​reading non-​drinkers, it did not take long for me to realise that, for many of the others, alcohol consumption was a 386

— ​​​​ D r u n k e n n e s s a n d a u t h o r i t y i n a n i m a l a n d h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​​

much-​anticipated component of the trip. One fellow began pouring shots of vodka in the back of the trailer while we were still shaking and rattling down the gravel roads. Mountains, I soon learned, had a reputation as places for drinking, even though not everyone partook. When offering an explanation for the purpose of the get-​togethers, the men repeatedly invoked the importance of preserving their ‘collective’ (Ru. kollektiv)’, drawing on a Russian-​language concept associated with communist equality and fraternity. At every meal, special care was taken to distribute all of the meat equally among participants, ‘even-​steven like brothers (Ru. po-​bratski)’, lest anyone get inadvertently offended or slighted. Alcohol –​at least for those who did not consider themselves prayer-​readers –​was a means of heightening the state of camaraderie and out-​of-​ the-​ordinariness that existed during these several days of annual male bonding, away from the cares and worries of village life. The euphoric culmination of the event, I came to learn, was in the evening, after we had already finished eating and playing card games in the tent. The men gathered outside the tent to start a gulkhan, which I was told represented not merely a campfire but one that was surrounded by friends and company (Ru. kompaniia). The driver turned on his booming tractor stereo system and soon Russian, Tajik and Uzbek pop music was reverberating through the mountain gorge, blaring into the darkness. A number of fellows had been drinking since lunchtime and were already quite inebriated by the time the music started. With little hesitation, they started singing along and dancing around the fire, wildly waving their arms and legs. The intrepid initiators of this impromptu dance party in the mountains soon recruited all to join in. Everyone participated –​the drunk, the not-​drunk and even a very sober professional mullah. As all danced, thorn brush and pistachio-​tree wood were piled onto the gulkhan, its flames leaping ever upward towards the night sky. Then the chant began: ‘Get drunk! Get mast (mast shav)!’ Some of the men were undeniably drunk already, but the completely sober Ibrohim, who forswore alcohol years ago to take up prayers, was leading the chant, increasingly synced to the beat of the music and dance rhythm. The sober mullah joined in as well, making for a decidedly odd and colourful scene around the fire. How could these specific individuals of all people seemingly endorse drunkenness? It was events such as these that slowly led me to the conclusion that drunkenness, as conveyed by the Tajik word mast, was not merely something associated with drinking too much alcohol. It was a powerful cultural metaphor for releasing one’s self-​control, letting oneself free in ways that were potentially manifestations of extreme jouissance, even if they were also potentially dangerous. In outward form, the act of dancing, especially out-​of-​control dancing that was common for inebriated men, epitomised this state of drunkenness. To become mast was, in short, to let go and to be carefree. Alcohol, of course, could greatly facilitate this process, but the drunken state itself transcended the substance and had a kind of cultural value that the ‘haram’ substance of alcohol itself lacked. Clear valorisations of drunkenness were visible both at these mountain bonfires and at village weddings, even by people who otherwise decried the evils of the substance most associated with drunkenness. The idea of ‘mast’ was thus fissured with ambivalence and contradiction –​something that both attracted and repelled the villagers of Lenin, especially in moments of heightened socialisation and ritual action. 387

—​​​​ B r i n t o n A h l i n —​​​

DRUNKENNESS AND POWER BEYOND THE HUNT The partridge hunt is a highly limited social form, but the broader, intersecting parallels between drunken birds and drunken men are clear. Given the ambivalent valuation of drunkenness via alcohol –​subject to moral denunciation, yet positively embraced in certain spaces –​the extension of drunkenness of a related but slightly different kind to the animal world makes a perfect kind of sense. The allure and the appeal of drunkenness –​its jouissance, its uncontrollability, its aggression –​can all be vicariously embraced by the hunter through his identification with his bird, but all of the moral illegitimacy, social stigma and physical after-​effects that this special state of excitation entails are effortlessly disposed of. The partridge and its drunkenness thus provide a kind of resolution to a notable cultural ambivalence, reminiscent in many ways of a range of ambivalences observed by anthropologists in other Islamic contexts (Marsden 2007; Schielke 2009). What is it, precisely, that these masters are partaking of in this drunkenness? It is not the intoxicating effects per se, I maintain, but the image of power that they represent. This is an aggressive, territorial patriarchal power that is pleasurably excessive even while socially dangerous. Within Tajik society, it is often roundly criticised in its alcohol-​induced form, though in certain ritualised spaces such as weddings and male-​bonding trips, it is nonetheless embraced and even justified. In this broader cultural context, the partridge hunt, with its carefully constructed relationship between hunter and cock, is a space of experimentation in which the fantasies and desires of this kind of quasi-​forbidden power can be lived and experienced without overstepping socially legitimate norms and Islamic moral codes. It is an embrace of the desirable aspects of the excess and the ‘haram’ without their problematic internalisation or ingestion, preserving the bodily purity so thoroughly emphasised in more religious contexts. It has the added benefit, of course, of affirming the hunter’s general sense of authority as a master, establishing his own self through the captivity of the recognising partridge. It is, in short, a compelling restructuring, a practical working-​ out, of a deeply rooted social ambivalence. This exercise in the cultural management of the ambivalent desire for the forbidden or disavowed, moreover, can offer us insights into the broader context of power, authority and legitimacy in contemporary Tajikistan. The metaphor of drunkenness –​ mast –​once again offers an especially compelling entry point into the problematic. When Tajiks were decrying problems of contemporary Tajik society, especially its corruption and its ethical shortcomings, they often said that the real problem was that people had become addicted to wealth and excess. In the words of one middle-​ aged interlocutor of mine, people had become ‘mast’ with wealth, feasting and the easy life. While hunger was often just out of sight for the poorer segments of the population, others had become ‘drunk from eating fried meat every day (gushtbirën har ruz)’, with meat symbolising the most desirable and most expensive food that was routinely consumed. Money in particular was presented as having the capacity to make someone drunk, though it had a worthy competitor in the concept of an authoritative government position, an office that invariably enriched its holder. This concept could apply to anyone who suddenly came into wealth. The nearby resident Jonibek, who was given the appointment of collecting money at the pay-​per-​use toilets in the vicinity 388

— ​​​​ D r u n k e n n e s s a n d a u t h o r i t y i n a n i m a l a n d h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​​

of the nearby shrine of Forty-​Four Springs, was from a poor family, but his life soon improved dramatically as he started ‘eating’ the small token sums that were paid each time a visitor used the facilities under his control. When his son and daughter-​in-​law began fighting, leading him to seek prayers and other remedies from various shaykhs of the shrine to reconcile them again, those around the shrine began to see a relation between his new position and these domestic troubles. A respected female neighbour explained to me that he had become ‘mast’ from all of the money he received from his new posting at the toilet facilities. Many Tajiks noted that those who received cars, houses and other forms of wealth with ease were more likely to experience domestic strife, divorce, or other problems that resulted from getting ‘drunk’ from the ‘easy life (zindagii sabuq)’. While this charge of being ‘drunk with money’ or wealth was made against anyone whose life had quickly grown too ostentatious, the quintessential case study and the broader subtext for the claim was the behaviour of the political leadership class in the country. Nearly every government position, it was believed, was filled with either a relative of the president or a friend who had paid a princely sum to acquire the appointment. Individuals who were allegedly well-​acquainted with these matters informed me that acquiring posts such as district-​level governor or police chief, for example, had a fixed price of US$30,000, an absurdly large sum in a country where most manual wage labour paid approximately US$2 per day. Locals around Shahritus frequently noted that this kind of drunkenness from wealth could not endure. But the charge of drunkenness was, in my view, something more than a partly veiled critique of the president and his circle of power in the country. When we see it in light of the kinds of ambivalent relationships evident in partridge hunting, ritual settings and other areas of Tajik life, it explains not just the way in which politics has gotten out of control, but the way in which the excess it represented was, at times, perversely desirable. There is, in effect, a kind of embrace of the excess that is expressed through drunkenness, a phenomenon which on its face is also associated with the repulsive and the forbidden. This authority is expressed through a sense of mastery and an embrace of the out-​of-​control potency such power conveys. The example of partridge hunting suggests that Tajiks did not seek to avoid drunkenness per se, but desired, instead, to partake of the excessive potency it symbolised in a way that was reproducible and defensible. The out-​of-​control excess of the political sphere –​especially its construction of sumptuous presidential palaces, public parks and other government buildings –​was seen as highly desirable by many. This was true, as has been noted in other post-​socialist cities, even when it was clear that much of what was built could not be easily used by most of the population, was being built with corrupt funds and would remain empty (Grant 2014; Pelkmans 2003). This makes, perhaps, a certain amount of sense when we consider that excess and its ambivalence reappeared in contexts throughout Tajik life, including ostentatious weddings, luxurious spreads of food for guests, and self-​effacing deference to figures of authority. Any given Tajik would tell you that such things were unnecessary, irrational, or harmful, and if it were not a cultural expectation, they would not engage in them, but in practice it was obvious that their embrace of the excess occasionally tapped into deep-​seated pleasures and desires. This ambivalent orientation towards authority is, admittedly, one of the most analytically inscrutable and difficult modalities of power, but the example of the 389

—​​​​ B r i n t o n A h l i n —​​​

partridge puts it in somewhat more concrete and perceptible terms (Kojève 2014; Sennett 1980). It also offers us a compelling point of comparison with other ways of understanding drunkenness and excess in political terms. Morten Axel Pedersen has noted that post-​socialist Mongolia was haunted by a proliferation of half-​shamans prone to ‘unpredictable, extreme, and downright “crazy” ’ fits of drunken rage, a notion locally referred to as agsan (Pedersen 2011, 7). In Pedersen’s account, this much-​feared drunkenness was a rich figure for understanding the incomplete and problematic transformation from socialism to post-​socialism, leading to a surplus of shamanism, but a paucity of shamans able to manage or control this spiritual energy. The figure of the agsan-​prone half-​shaman became one way to account for and embody this loss of control. In Tajikistan, the notion of drunkenness in ‘mast’ was also a productive metaphor for the post-​socialist political moment, but it was not something to be feared, as in the Mongolian case, but something to be embraced even as it was disavowed. Pedersen opposed the notion of agsan to that of shamanism as two rather different things. But the Tajik case suggests how the ambivalence of drunkenness could be indicative of a broader ambivalence about political excess and the enduring appeal of wealth and position (2011, 41). Instead of a case of spiritual management via shamans and other religious practitioners, this chapter has offered instead a cultural practice of a quite different kind –​partridge hunting –​as a way in which this ambivalence could be expressed, managed and viscerally embraced. It thereby offers us a sense of the ways in which the idioms and metaphors used to describe the political must be seen within the context of a rich landscape of culturally informed desires and longings.

NOTES 1 In this presumption, I contribute to a broader anthropological literature that has mobilised ethnography to look at the ways animal lives commingle with human ones across the world, perhaps best exemplified in a recent ethnography of South Asia by Radikha Govindrajan (2018). I am also inspired to take a closer look at animals in the Muslim world by recent scholarship in Islamic studies that questions the supremacy of the human in a range of canonical theological texts, even as the aim of these interventions differ from my goals in this essay (Tlili 2012). 2 Though the double entendre for the word ‘cock’ noted in the Balinese case did not have a direct linguistic corollary in the Tajik one. The Tajik word for ‘rooster’ is ‘khurus’, which was sometimes used to refer to alpha-​male figures, human and animal alike, but the equivalence with the phallus did not translate.

REFERENCES Butler, J. (1997) The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Descola, P. (2013) Beyond nature and culture. Translated by J. Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. (1973) ‘Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight’, in The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books, pp. 412–​453. Govindrajan, R. (2018) Animal intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grant, B. (2014) ‘The edifice complex: architecture and the political life of surplus in the new Baku’, Public Culture, 26(3), pp. 501–​528. 390

— ​​​​ D r u n k e n n e s s a n d a u t h o r i t y i n a n i m a l a n d h u m a n w o r l d s —​​​​ Hegel, G.W.F. (1977 [1807]) Phenomenology of spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kojève, A. (2014) The notion of authority (a brief presentation). Edited by F. Terre. Translated by H. Weslati. New York: Verso. Marsden, M. (2007) ‘All-​male sonic gatherings, Islamic reform, and masculinity in northern Pakistan’, American Ethnologist, 34(3), pp. 473–​490. Pedersen, M.A. (2011) Not quite shamans: Spirit worlds and political lives in northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pelkmans, M. (2003) ‘The social life of empty buildings: Imagining the transition in post-​Soviet Ajaria’, Focaal –​European Journal of Anthropology, 41, pp. 121–​135. Schielke, S. (2009) ‘Being good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, fragmentation, and the moral self in the lives of young Egyptians’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, pp. S24–​S40. Sennett, R. (1980) Authority. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tlili, S. (2012) Animals in the Qur’an. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willerslev, R. (2007) Soul hunters: Hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

391

CHAPTER TWENTY-​S IX

HEALING WITH SPIRITS Human and more-​than-​human healing agency in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan Danuta Penkala-​Gawęcka INTRODUCTION Healing with the aid of spirits, or spiritual healing, is one of the most popular traditional methods of dealing with illness and other misfortunes in Central Asia. In Soviet ethnography, such healing practices were usually studied as ‘survivals’ or ‘remnants’ (perezhitki) of ‘pre-​Islamic’ belief systems (see also Abashin, this volume). In the post-​ Soviet era, they have been approached variously as a continuation of old shamanic traditions, as an expression of everyday Islam, and/​or as an important part of a diversified field of complementary and alternative medicine. This chapter focuses on healing with spirits in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, foregrounding the complex relationships between humans (healers in particular) and spirits. Drawing on anthropological debates concerning personhood and relationality, situated in conversation with the ‘ontological/​relational turn’ and ‘new animism’, I address the issues of human and other-​or more-​than-​human interrelations within the form of healing based on the engagement of a spiritual agency, especially that of ancestor spirits. While researchers have already made efforts to study relations between healers and spirits (and other non-​human beings) in other sociocultural contexts such as South America and Siberia, the agency of spirits as part of their encounters with healers has rarely been addressed in the context of Central Asian healing. Following Rasanayagam (2011, pp.207–​209), I contend that we should ‘take spirits seriously’, since they are taken seriously by many people in the region. As I explore in this chapter, they are also of foremost importance for healers in their calling and practice. The insights afforded by the new animism literature are particularly productive for understanding this relationship between healer, spirit and patient. As Harvey argues, this view recognises that for many people ‘the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others’ (2006, p.xi). Hence, personhood is not restricted to humans, and includes not only deities and spirits –​i.e., ‘human-​like beings’ (Harvey 2006, p.xii) –​but may also refer to different categories of ‘other-​than-​human beings’ (e.g., animals, plants, or rocks). Taking inspiration from this approach, I argue that the worlds of the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz are inhabited not only by humans, but also various spirits, helpful and malevolent, who interfere in many ways in people’s lives and engage in complex relations 392

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-31

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​

with them. I focus on the personhood and agency of such spirits, expressed in the influence they exert on people’s perceptions, decisions and actions. My analysis is grounded in longitudinal research in Kazakhstan (Almaty) between 1995 and 2000, and three fieldwork seasons in Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek) between 2011 and 2013. In Almaty, I studied complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and its relationship with biomedicine, while my research in Bishkek focused on people’s health-​seeking strategies and choices.1 In Almaty, I was able to establish close and enduring relationships with several healers, including those who healed with the aid of spirits, and to accompany them in the process of their development. In Bishkek, though the main purpose of my study was different, I talked with some spiritual healers, conducting unstructured interviews and observing their healing sessions. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the experiences of two women: Rakhilyam from Almaty, an extraordinary healer who aspired to become a world-​ famous bakhshy (shaman), and Kunduz2 from Bishkek, who was much more modest and a more ‘typical’ spiritual healer. Rakhilyam, when I met her in 1996, was an energetic, cheerful Uyghur woman in her early fifties, full of ideas and plans for the future, and consistently striving for further spiritual development. Kunduz, a friendly 60-​ year-​old woman, had many patients and felt appreciated as an experienced healer, but expressed her disappointment at the official decisions which led in 2011 to the dismantling of ‘Beyish’, the folk medicine centre where she had successfully worked previously, having completed courses and received a certificate in nursing. For my analysis, I also draw on conversations with ‘ordinary’ people of different ages whom I met in various places such as doctors’ or healers’ consultation and waiting rooms, bazaars, offices and parks.

LIVING WITH SPIRITS Many scholars working in Central Asia have noted the importance of ancestor spirits in local peoples’ spirit worlds. Privratsky (2001) discusses remembering ancestors as part of Kazakhs’ religious collective memory. Dubuisson (2017) writes of an ‘ancestral worldview’ in Kazakhstan, and Aldakeeva (2009) shows the persistence and strength of ties with ancestor spirits among the Kyrgyz. These authors have highlighted the complex interrelations between people and ancestor spirits (Kaz. aruaq, Kyrg. arbak3) who are intensely interested in the lives and moral conduct of their descendants. Ancestors must be respected and remembered, which entails practices of feeding them with the aroma of cooking oil on Thursdays and Fridays, while ritually frying special bread or pastries (Privratsky 2001; Aldakeeva 2009). Reading from the Quran to honour the ancestors is an indispensable part of this ritual. Ritual offerings, including distributing bread (‘seven pastries’) among the neighbours and reciting Quranic verses, are also performed if someone has ‘had a dream’, which is a warning from the ancestors that they feel forgotten. Ancestor spirits convey their wishes and demands to their descendants through dreams or dream-​like visions. The moral aspect of ancestors’ interventions in the affairs of the living is striking: they prompt their descendants to change their lives, e.g., to quit drinking and smoking. Dubuisson (2017) discusses bata (blessing) as a channel used by aruaqs, also regarded as a form of spiritual healing. She argues that ‘ancestors’ advice and blessing … together become a moral guidepost for 393

—​​​​ D a n u t a P e n k a l a - G a w ę c k a —​​​

contemporary families and communities’ (2017, p.4). Zarina, a 24-​year-​old lawyer working for an international organisation in Bishkek, explained that when in a dream the spirit of her deceased mother gave her something, she knew that something good would happen. She was convinced that her late parents were supporting her. Louw (2010), in her in-​depth analysis of dream omens among the Kyrgyz in Bishkek, reveals how arbaks send their signs and revelations through special dreams (ayan). Arbaks ‘reprove people if they have done something wrong … but also give courage and moral authority to insecure and morally dubious acts’ (Louw 2010, p.281; see also Louw, this volume). The agency of spirits is considered powerful. Their messages are often communicated at sacred sites –​mazars –​where ancestors and saints were buried or where they left signs of their presence (Dubuisson 2017, pp.56–​83). Sacrifices of animals and fried bread (shared and eaten by pilgrims) are made there, and prayers are offered (Aitpaeva 2006). It is ancestor spirits who decide whether to contact with the living (Privratsky 2001, p.119; Aldakeeva 2009), which confirms their agency and their leading role in forging a relationship with their descendants. Indeed, ancestor spirits are among the most important actors in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz spirit worlds, playing a vital part in everyday religious life and commonly respected in a similar way to Muslim saints. Ancestor spirits and relations with them are perceived by many Kazakhs and Kyrgyz as intrinsic to their identity as Muslims, despite the ambiguous attitude of scripturalist Islam to these beings. Together with some other kinds of spirits, ancestor spirits are generally recognised by the representatives of purist trends in Islam, but it is stressed that they should not be venerated or receive offerings. Visiting mazars is strongly challenged by new currents of orthopraxic Islam (see Aitpaeva, this volume). In this context, people often claim that the ancestors are remembered and communicated with because they remain ‘part of the family’ (Montgomery 2016, p.85). It should be noted, however, that such more-​than-​human beings may be excluded from the ontologies of the exponents of scripturalist Islam, since in their view no mediators between God and human beings are acceptable (Aldakeeva 2009; Montgomery 2016). The ‘more-​than-​human worlds’ of the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz are also inhabited by other spirits, including malicious agents of illness and other misfortunes. Among them are jinns (Kaz., Kyrg. jin), known from the Quran, who therefore have a religious legitimacy together with angels. Jinns are generally perceived as evil spirits, although sometimes they are rather neutral or can even act as healers’ spirit helpers. According to the elaborate descriptions of Central Asian spiritual worlds in Russian and Soviet scholarship (e.g., Baialieva 1972; Mustafina 1992), jinns appear in a human guise, but also as animals. They are understood to inhabit cemeteries, abandoned houses, or dark, dirty and wet places, and because they are mainly active at night, such locations should be avoided after sunset. Rakhilyam, for instance, related her experience during a visit to a sacred site: at night, she left the area of the mazar together with her female companions, ‘to do their business outside’. ‘Suddenly, out of nowhere’, she recalled, ‘a dog showed up. When we moved, it disappeared … Jinns can reveal themselves in various guises.’ Contact with jinns, or offending them (even accidentally), may cause specific health problems, especially mental disorders or other severe illnesses (cf. Rasanayagam 2006, 2011, for Uzbekistan). Rakhilyam claimed that in the late 1980s, jinns paralysed the left side of her body because she had unwittingly offended 394

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​

them by pouring dirty water out in the yard after washing. She was punished by the spirits: they ‘hit’ her. She added that this was connected to her spirituality, since –​as she had been unaware of at the time –​‘spiritual’ (Kaz. aruaqty, Russ. dukhovnaia, dukhovnyi) persons are particularly vulnerable to attacks by jinns. This term refers to individuals who are close to the world of spirits, and who can enter into special relationships with them. Privratsky argues that Kazakhs often use the collective term jin-​shaytan (jinns-​ devils) to denote such beings, since at present ‘Kazak demonology is uncomplicated’ and other spirits, ‘such as the peri, albastı, and martū from the Turko-​Persian tradition, are rarely mentioned’ (2001, p.234). However, while I did not hear about peri or martu, my research revealed that albasty (Kaz.)/​albarsty (Kyrg.) are still well recognised. Russian and Soviet ethnography documented that such spirits were widely known and feared across Central Asia, and while they were considered especially dangerous to women in childbirth and infants, they could also haunt a chosen victim and suffocate them at night (Baialieva 1972, pp.96–​100; Basilov 1992; Mustafina 1992). In Bishkek, my interlocutors quite often recalled their own experiences or talked about their relatives or friends, mostly women, who had been harassed by albarsty. Aygul, an economist by training who lost her job at a government office and now sold fruit and vegetables at the bazaar, related her terrifying but luckily rare encounter with albarsty. When she went to bed and started to fall asleep, she saw someone coming. He looked just like her husband and began to suffocate her, while her husband was lying by her side. Aygul said: ‘I could not move, although I tried. I lost my voice, my hands and legs were lifeless.’ She added that her mother had similar frightening visits almost every night, and explained that bread or a knife (traditionally used against evil powers) might be put under the pillow for protection. In other cases, the victims did not see the albarsty, but rather felt their presence. According to some interlocutors’ advice, the best means of protection against this creature is prayer.

HEALING WITH SPIRITS While spirits are thus felt to have a powerful agency of their own, there are a wide variety of practitioners in Central Asia who deal with illness and other kinds of misfortune by mobilising this agency and healing with the help of spirits. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, such healers are generally referred to by the generic term emshi (Kaz.)/​emchi (Kyrg.). This wider category includes tawip (Kaz.)/​tabyp (Kyrg.), who mainly use pulse diagnostics;4 palshy (Kaz.)/​kozu achyk (Kyrg.), who can see the future and practise divination (Privratsky 2001; Duyshembiyeva 2005; Biard 2013); molda (Kaz.)/​moldo (Kyrg.), mullahs who heal with verses from the Quran, and shamans baqsy (Kaz.)/​bakshy or bubu5 (Kyrg.). This last category of healers is rarely found today. One of my interlocutors, a female doctor and healer from Almaty, said that shamans ‘act as a bridge between earth and heaven’ and added that this gift has become very rare nowadays. Healers themselves typically use the general term emshi/​emchi. These terms, however, are not stable: a healer’s self-​ascription may differ from how they are referred to by their clients, and may change depending on shifting associations and perceptions. For example, mullah-​healers in Turkistan preferred to be called emshi, not tawip, which was considered a ‘lesser designation’ 395

—​​​​ D a n u t a P e n k a l a - G a w ę c k a —​​​

(Privratsky 2001, p.195) and, according to Pelkmans (2017, p.152), Kyrgyz healers avoided using the term bakshy since they did not dare to compare themselves with the powerful shamans of the past. By contrast, Rakhilyam not only called herself a bakhshy (Uyg.), but was also recognised as such both in her Uyghur neighbourhood near Almaty and in the city where she worked at a private centre for complementary medicine. Rakhilyam’s young daughter was also taking her first steps as a bakhshy. It should be noted that healing practices overlap and are hybridised: healers often adopt elements of other kinds of treatments, including relatively new ones such as the use of ‘extrasensory’ methods and the concept of bioenergy, which has gained in popularity since the 1980s.

Response to the spirit calling A recurrent motif in my interlocutors’ narratives and in other spiritual healers’ stories found in the literature is the calling by spirits, which is recognised as a driving force in their path to healing. This component of healers’ vocation, described in detail in Russian and Soviet ethnographic reports, has remained crucial for entering the healing practice in Central Asia. It is the ancestor spirits who choose a future healer from among their descendants and who convey this calling to them in dreams or dream-​visions. While recalling the conditions of their first encounter and subsequent frequent contacts with these spirits, the healers I spoke with often hesitated about what to call this specific state. Kunduz speculated: ‘[it was] in a dream … no … I say dream, but it is not a dream … I do not know how to explain it … .’ Such doubts show that this state is perceived as unusual, different from everyday experience, and difficult to put into words. These ‘dreams’ might happen both at night and during the daytime. Such illuminations may occur at mazars, places marked with spirits’ presence (Aitpaeva 2006). When healers talked about their visions, they usually described figures of elders (Kaz. aqsaqal, Kyrg. aksakal) with white beards and in white clothes, who urged them to heal people. Sometimes, a future healer would recognise their particular ancestor(s) among the elders. For instance, Kunduz said that it was her (matrilineal) grandfather who came to her together with other old men, including a moldo whom she had met in her childhood. She did not remember her grandfather well, as he had died at the age of 100 when she was five, but she saw him in the dream. He started his calling with the words: ‘Read namaz [five daily prayers]. I am your grandfather. Heal people!’ He had been a healer himself, and later Kunduz’s mother had also begun healing, although not on a regular basis. Kunduz, an economist, had been working at the bank at the time, near the end of the 1980s, and –​as she explained to me –​she had not believed in her mother’s healing abilities. She also found her own calling, at the beginning of the 1990s, difficult to understand and to accept. Similarly, Rakhilyam did not know, in 1987 or subsequently, the meaning of the signs sent by spirits, including episodes of paralysis of the left side of her body, pains and strange behaviour. Elsewhere (Penkala-​Gawęcka 2013, 2014), I have described her thorny path to healing and the role of an elderly Uyghur healer in revealing to the future bakhshy what those painful and frightening experiences meant. In many cases that I observed during my research, the ancestors’ message was also unclear at first. The meaning of future healers’ experiences, commonly accompanied by symptoms of 396

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​

an ‘initiation illness’ –​the pressure from the spirits in emic terms –​was often revealed to them by an experienced healer, a mullah, or other ‘pious’ person. For example, a Kazakh woman from Almaty said that her spiritual calling was disclosed to her by an old, pious woman near the mausoleum of the famous Muslim saint Ahmad Yasawi in Turkistan. Such revelations often happen in the course of treatment. I saw many healing séances performed by bakhshy Rakhilyam in different places, including at her apprentice’s house, in her own house and at centres for complementary medicine in Almaty (see Figure 26.1). Some of these sessions finished with a diagnosis of extraordinary abilities in a patient recognised as a ‘spiritual’ person (cf. Privratsky 2001, pp.212, 228), who was informed about a gift presented to them by spirits, including clairvoyance and/​or healing. In the case of a 19-​year-​old Uyghur girl, Rakhilyam specified after the séance that the girl had been offered the gift of healing with the help of spirits in bird shape, and the ‘molda gift’, i.e., the ability to heal with prayers from the Quran.6 In addition, the bakhshy explained to the chosen individuals that they must accept the gift and obey the will of the spirits, otherwise their illness would continue and they or their relatives may even be punished with death. Such perceptions of the sufferings of a future healer and their fear of ancestors’ revenge for disobedience were characteristic of traditional views on the shamanic vocation and have remained salient today. Basilov (1992, pp.106–​142) and Baialieva (1972, pp.123–​126) both describe a ‘shamanic illness’ caused by spirits demanding subordination to their will as a precondition for recovery (cf. Privratsky 2001, pp.230–​231). Kunduz said that when she opposed her spirits’ orders and did not want to become a healer, they punished her with paralysis of one side of her face and warned (in case of her further disobedience) that ‘we will take the other side, you will

Figure 26.1  Rakhilyam’s healing séance (Photograph by the author, 1996). 397

—​​​​ D a n u t a P e n k a l a - G a w ę c k a —​​​

lie in bed, you will stay in bed for the rest of your life.’ Rakhilyam and many other healers in Almaty and Bishkek related similar experiences. They could not understand their conditions, which were often regarded by them and the others as mental disorders and could not be treated by doctors (Penkala-​Gawęcka 2013). Only after visiting a skilled healer was the reason for their suffering and possible relief revealed. Experienced healers acted as mediators or channels, conveying and translating spirits’ messages to the chosen individuals. In the first phase of a healer’s journey, ancestor spirits are the most active more-​ than-​human persons. They choose a future healer from among their descendants, and a healers’ legitimacy, in turn, is enhanced by references to shamans, strong healers, or mullahs/​imams among their ancestors, patrilineal and/​or matrilineal. When a chosen person does not want to accept the calling, spirits exert their power, forcing them to obey their will. Disobedience can bring drastic consequences. At this stage, the agency of ancestor spirits is undoubtedly very strong, but there is still some room for negotiation. Sometimes it was possible to plead for and receive some postponement of the calling, if the appointed person did not feel ready to accept the gift. Rakhilyam’s daughter, for instance, had been offered the shamanic and clairvoyant gift when she was 17, but she was afraid to accept it and asked the spirits to ‘pass the gift’ to her mother. In this way, she was able to postpone the spirits’ calling for a couple of years and Rakhilyam’s shamanic abilities were concomitantly enhanced, although she did not receive the gift of clairvoyance. Others may try to reject the gift altogether. Rasanayagam (2011, p.186) gives the example of an Uzbek who had dream-​visions and encounters with spirits but refused to become a healer, in line with his efforts to be a ‘good Muslim’. However, a complete rejection of the spirit gift seems impossible. Kunduz had tried to pass it to a woman healer who then became her master. She offered her own spirits to this healer, and requested: ‘Take it from me, all of that … I have a good job at the bank, why should I heal people?’ However, the healer answered: ‘I have my own spirits, I do not need yours’, and she repeated: ‘You will heal people!’ Kunduz eventually agreed because she was afraid that ‘they’ (the spirits) would carry out their threat. Despite the crucial role of ancestor spirits, healers often stress that in fact they received their gift from God, through the spirits. It should be noted that not only do spirits make threats and punish people for disobedience, but they often help future healers to find and follow the right way. For instance, they may show them in a dream a person who should become their master and then help them to find that healer, as happened to Kunduz. Some of Rakhilyam’s patients whom she recognised as ‘spiritual’ also claimed that they had previously seen her in their dreams. The process of the development of a healer involves, among other things, visiting mazars, praying and making offerings there in order to receive the blessing of saints and other spirits, so as to ‘collect’ helping spirits and patrons. According to Rakhilyam, who helped several neophytes to ‘open their way’, acquiring spiritual protectors and helpers is necessary, but it should be accompanied by purification in the course of healing sessions and starting along the ‘true’ Muslim life. Indeed, while the assistance of experienced healers is recognised, it is the spirits who are understood to be the primary instructor, teaching the chosen one in dreams and visions how to heal people. Basilov (1992, pp.121–​125) points out that Central Asian shamans were dependent on their spirits, who passed all necessary knowledge on to them. I heard 398

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​

similar claims from many healers, although they admitted that their masters helped them in purification, offered some advice and gave blessings. Thus, the significance of their apprenticeship –​although visible –​is usually downplayed in the accounts of healers. In contrast, healers are convinced of the essential role of spirits who pass the healing gift and knowledge to the chosen ones (cf. Bellér-​Hann 2001; Kehl-​Bodrogi 2008, p.217). Kunduz, for instance, recounted stories of her grandfather and his companions appearing in dreams and teaching her how to make pulse diagnoses and how to heal. Then they ordered her to check one of their pulses and tell which illness he had suffered from and what had caused his death. She explained that she had passed such ‘exams’ several times –​checking the spirits’ pulses and accurately diagnosing their illnesses and operations in life. A candidate is obliged to receive a blessing (Kaz., Kyrg. bata, Uyg. duga) from an experienced healer, who usually passes on some spirits to the neophyte or entrusts them to their care –​as when Rakhilyam was blessed by her master, an elderly Uyghur bakhshy. It is the spirits, however, who determine when a future healer is ready to start practising independently, and they channel this message to their master. When she herself was ordered by the spirits to give her blessing to her apprentice for the first time, Rakhilyam hesitated, since she did not know what to say. The spirits soothed her: ‘Don’t be afraid, we will speak through your mouth.’ Only when her spirits had repeatedly urged her to give her blessing to her apprentice did Rakhilyam obey. This shows the capacity of the healer’s agency, associated in this case with her own experience and doubts about the proper behaviour of an adept in the future. The main concern of experienced healers was about the possible involvement of beginners in black magic, leading them to neglect their religious obligations. That was the reason for Kunduz’s decision not to take on apprentices, after some disappointing experiences. Her spirits warned her: ‘Their sins are your shir [deadly, unforgivable sin –​from Arabic shirk]’, and she was afraid of the punishment for her apprentices’ bad behaviour. The spirits’ calling can be experienced as both compelling and socially burdensome. My interlocutors stressed that the blessing acquired from the neophyte’s family is necessary for a successful practice, but if someone’s close relatives are against taking on this burden, then obedience to spirits should outweigh family harmony. Several female healers had divorced their husbands, including a historian from Almaty who quit her profession to follow the spirit calling, even as her husband, a professor, forbade her to take this step. As an atheist, he did not believe in ‘such things’ and treated his wife’s behaviour as a sign of her mental illness, forcing her to divorce him. Similarly, both Rakhilyam’s and her daughter’s first marriages were dissolved because their husbands had no understanding of their vocation and were drunkards, which was unacceptable for those aspiring to spiritual development.

Complex relations between healers and spirits The role of spirits as protectors and helpers also remains essential to the future development of a healer. Healers seek the aid of a variety of powerful spirits, among them those of ancestors, saints and heroes, whose blessing can be obtained, first of all, at mazars. Emshi/​emchi often visit sacred sites in a group led by the most experienced and respected among them. Rakhilyam recounted numerous visits to mazars with her 399

—​​​​ D a n u t a P e n k a l a - G a w ę c k a —​​​

colleagues and apprentices, and described in detail how her voice and movements changed when she channelled saints’ and other spirits’ bata to them. Kunduz recalled the blessing which she received from the spirit of Kange apa (the distorted name of Kanykei apa), wife of Manas (a famous hero of the Kyrgyz epic), at his mausoleum near Talas where she went with her master. Among her spirit helpers were arbaks and a spirit named Zurkor. Sometimes healers did not want to reveal the names of their spirits for fear of their rivals’ envy, as was explained by a young adept who said that she never revealed the name of her pir,7 the head spirit, even to her master healer. By contrast, Rakhilyam eagerly presented her numerous spirits, whom she called ‘my people’ (cf. Basilov 1992, p.231; Rasanayagam 2011, pp.225–​226), to me, stressing their personhood, but also emphasising her own agency and control over them. During my long acquaintance with this bakhshy, I was able to observe her development, based mainly on gaining more and more spiritual protectors. She used to write their names down in her notebook, but after several months she had ‘collected’ so many that it was impossible for her to remember and enumerate all of them. In her effort to become a strong and widely known bakhshy, Rakhilyam travelled to many sacred sites and received blessings not only from numerous Islamic saints and heroes at mazars in different parts of Central Asia, but also from Orthodox saints, Jesus Christ –​during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land –​and the ‘living saint’ Sai Baba in India, among others.8 She stressed that it was the spirits (those both of dead and living persons) who urged her to come and who then led her. While healers’ powers depend on the range and strength of their spirit helpers, sometimes they avoided accepting a particular spirit’s offer. Unlike Rakhilyam, for instance, Kunduz did not like to become involved with non-​Muslim spirits. She told me about a Russian woman who used to come to her in a ‘dream’ and wanted to teach her palm reading. Kunduz answered: ‘You are Russian … I cannot accept all [spirits].’ While Rakhilyam said that she was able to heal patients of different ethnic and religious backgrounds thanks to the variety of her spirit helpers, her daughter explained that since her spirits were solely Muslim people, she could help only Muslims. Unlike her, Kunduz claimed that she could also treat Russian and other non-​Muslim patients. Spirits also exerted control through prohibition and punishment. Kunduz said that her spirits forbade her from performing spells under threat of ripping out her eyes. Rakhilyam recalled that she had been reprimanded by her spirits for disobedience, when she decided to study for certification from the Centre of Eastern and Contemporary Medicine in Almaty. Only later did she realise that they had been trying to warn her about various dangers connected with this place, a ‘hotspot of evil spirits’. Many healers there, in her words, were ‘black’ (performing black magic), therefore Rakhilyam’s spirits forbade her to work at this centre. Spirits would remain on guard to guarantee the proper behaviour and moral conduct of healers. As the bakhshy explained, if a healer subordinates herself to such ‘black powers’, their spirits would go away. In addition, a novice who does not have strong spirits is vulnerable to the attacks of ‘black’ healers who can take away their spirits, ‘closing his/​ her way’. These statements show a complex interplay between the agency of healers and spirits, and the importance of healers’ efforts to gain the support of powerful spiritual protectors. Spirits can also ask their protégé for a favour. A good example is a request by the mullah spirit who came to Kunduz together with her grandfather. He asked her to 400

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​

Figure 26.2  Rakhilyam with her patient during the healing session (Photograph by the author, 1998).

visit his children and pass on to them a warning along with an order to read namaz. He added: ‘They all drink vodka now. You tell them to quit drinking and to read namaz.’ Kunduz answered: ‘Ata [Father], they will not believe me, they will laugh at me. You should rather go yourself to them and tell them this.’ However, the spirit explained that he was unable to do that, and was relying on her help. Kunduz fulfilled his request, but the mullah’s son and two daughters did not respect their father’s wishes. This case shows that a healer’s agency in the human environment may be sometimes stronger than that of spirits. According to the shared conviction of healers, it is essentially spirits’ agency that brings results during treatment. Healing at mazars is considered particularly effective because of the proximity of powerful spirits (Duyshembiyeva 2005; Aitpaeva 2006). My interlocutors repeated that their spirits came to purify and heal patients (cf. Privratsky 2001, p.233). Rakhilyam pointed out: ‘It is they [spirits] who lead me. I know [after the séance] who came to me, but when I have another patient, other spirits will come. They decide themselves.’ However, it was she who summoned her spirit helpers at the beginning of the séance, after invocations to Allah and the saints. When she entered a trance-​like state, chanted, shouted, twisted her body and made various gestures (see Figure 26.2), her behaviour expressed the nature of the spirits 401

—​​​​ D a n u t a P e n k a l a - G a w ę c k a —​​​

who had come to her. For example, she flapped her arms like a bird or hissed and slithered like a snake. Interestingly, Rakhilyam maintained that after the séance, at night, her spirits would come to the patient to continue healing. As she said to one of her patients: At 10 p.m. my spirits will come [to you] … Don’t be afraid if you have chills or feel heat … Your body will feel someone’s touch, you will hear someone opening the door, someone’s footsteps. But only until five in the morning. Then they will leave. Although Rakhilyam mentioned in passing that she would send the spirits to the patient, it rather seems that both agencies ‘cooperate’ in this case. In a similar vein, Kunduz recounted how her patients could see both her and the spirits who had healed them during the séance in their dreams. Spiritual individuals may experience the presence of spirits and contact them in different ways. They may see, hear, feel or smell them. Kunduz, reflecting on her feelings when her grandfather and other elders came to teach her to make a diagnosis and how to heal, said, with visible emotion: I was afraid of them, because I felt a bad smell coming from them, something like dampness … I thought: ‘They are all dead men, all dead’ … I was scared, terribly scared! Rakhilyam’s daughter, who had a gift of clairvoyance, could see her spirits and described the most important among them as a huge, half-​human and half-​animal creature in a black coat, with a deer’s head. Other healers were able to see, hear, or feel the spirits, sensing their presence and pressure. Rakhilyam ‘felt them with her body’ during healing séances and in her daily activities, where they sometimes came completely unexpectedly. When she met a person possessed by evil spirits, her spirit helpers immediately expressed their disgust and revulsion through her facial expression: an ugly grimace. Unlike most of my interlocutors, for whom the spirits were experienced as helpers who were physically external to them, for Rakhilyam, their presence was bodily, revealing themselves and acting through her voice, expressions and bodily movements. Rakhilyam’s absorbing stories shed further light on an important sensory side of healers’ relations with spirits. She referred, for example, to her experience of taking part in a healing session performed collectively by a group of healers, when she was a beginner: Suddenly, a three-​headed dragon came to me. I was like a dragon. I felt it all. Fire came out of my hands, I felt that I had three heads. I was hissing like a dragon; sparks started flying around … This happened to me for the first time. After healing sessions, healers usually ask their patients to relate their feelings, and these reports are often full of interesting details of bodily experiences, interpreted as signs of close contact with spirits. A young Uyghur man, a journalist, recognised by Rakhilyam as chosen by spirits and having strong healers among his ancestors, admitted that when the bakhshy handed something to him (in her words, it was the 402

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​

gift from his ancestor spirits) near the end of the séance, he clearly felt its weight. I observed both of their movements and saw how this slight man bent under the weight of that invisible gift. I argue that such sensory aspects of the experiences of healers and their patients are important because they reveal the tangibility and intercorporeality of their relations with the spirits. Indeed, Rakhilyam encouraged me several times to get a diagnosis and to receive healing during her séance, pointing out that I should ‘feel it [spirits’ presence and actions] with [my] body’.9 In addition to transmitting the healing gift, spirits are believed to pass on to healers some particular objects which legitimise their vocation and are used in healing practice. These are, commonly, a whip (Kaz. qamshy, Kyrg. kamchy), which serves to expel evil spirits, Muslim prayer beads (Kaz. taspi, Kyrg. tespe), and sometimes also stones (Kaz. qumalaq, Kyrg. kumalak) used for divination. Healers usually display these objects received from spirits along with other, similar objects given to them by master healers during the blessing ceremony. Kunduz showed me 41 small stones called kumalak that had been handed to her in a dream by her grandfather, and two kamchys, one given to her by her master and the other by the spirits. This is significant: gifts from humans and spirits are treated as equally material and real. For healers and their patients, both human and more-​than-​human, both bodily persons and spirit persons are equally real. They inhabit a shared life-​world and relate to each other.

CONCLUSION The ethnographic examples explored in this chapter illuminate the complex relationship between healers and spirits that exists in contemporary Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and the nature of the healing agency of spirits, a theme still under-​ explored in anthropological research on Central Asia. I have shown how the perspective of new animism, understood as a relational ontology (Halbmayer 2012), allows us to understand the dynamic interaction between healers and the more-​than-​human persons who inhabit their world. This ontology is not uncontested: there exist significant tensions in attitudes to the existence and agency of spirits, connected to the increasing influence of scripturalist Islam in the region. Nonetheless, for many people in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, their worlds include not only humans, but also other-​ or more-​than-​human beings. These include ancestor spirits, who interfere in the lives of their descendants, and other spirit persons, both helpful (such as saints) and malevolent (such as jinns). As we have seen, healers understand their strength as deriving primarily from the number and strength of their spirit helpers. However, while subordination to the will of the spirits seems crucial in the first phase of the relationship (although sometimes their orders are contested), during the process of development healers gain more scope to exert their own agency. This is reflected in negotiations with spirits, the active search for blessings from mighty patrons, or the ability to summon spirit helpers in the course of healing, despite common claims about spirits’ powerful and decisive healing agency. Tensions and ruptures can occur in this relationship since spirits demand obedience and, above all, the proper moral conduct and observance of religious duties from their chosen individuals. More often, however, the interrelationships between healers and spirits are characterised by collaboration, 403

—​​​​ D a n u t a P e n k a l a - G a w ę c k a —​​​

which seems apparent in the case of Rakhilyam. This differs from the understanding of shamans of the past, who –​according to Russian and Soviet reports –​ruled their spirits (e.g., Baialieva 1972, p.118) and could even send their ‘army’ to fight with another shaman’s spirits. In general, spiritual healers today present themselves as good Muslims who appeal to God, Islamic saints and other Muslim spirits when healing. The stance of scripturalist Islam towards ancestor spirits is ambiguous, but the role of these spirits as patrons and helpers of healers is compatible with the widely held recognition of spirits’ presence and active participation in their descendants’ lives. This analysis helps us to understand the durable popularity of healing with spirits in Central Asia following the dissolution of the USSR. Indeed, it is precisely the strength of ideas and practices commemorating ancestors, including ancestor spirits’ recognised role as moral and religious guides in everyday life, that accounts for the popularity and vitality of spiritual healing in the region today.

NOTES 1 My research in Kyrgyzstan was funded by Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Centre, Poland) under the grant N N109 186440. 2 I have changed the names of my interlocutors, with one exception: the late Rakhilyam who, as I presume, would have been proud to have her name popularised. 3 Here and throughout I do not use the Kazakh or Kyrgyz plurals, using the English plural form where necessary (e.g., mazars). 4 Their diagnoses are based on checking the patient’s pulse, but they usually relate this skill to the spirits’ guidance. 5 Bubu –​a female shaman in Kyrgyzstan. 6 It is significant that healers who combine both traditional and new methods perceive them as having similar origins. For example, Ainagul, a healer from Bishkek who used bee sting therapy, claimed that she had received her gift from ancestor spirits together with the skills of spiritual healing and divination. 7 Pir is the term used for Sufi masters, who often became saints. 8 In addition, among Rakhilyam’s spirits were such persons as Japanese karate fighters and an Indian movie star. 9 Although this would have been an invaluable experience, I did not take up her challenge. First, I had already undergone other treatment offered by a healer, and afterwards I felt really bad. Second, and more importantly, I was afraid that Rakhilyam would diagnose me as a spiritual person. She had suggested such a possibility before, and I already knew of all the dangerous consequences of rejecting the spirit calling.

REFERENCES Aitpaeva, G. 2006. The Phenomenon of Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan. Interweaving of Mythology and Reality, pp.118–​123 in Schaaf, T. and Lee, C. (eds.) Conserving cultural and biological diversity. The role of sacred natural sites and cultural landscapes. Paris: UNESCO. Aldakeeva, G. 2009. Rol’ i mesto dukhov predkov v kul’turnoi zhizni kyrgyzov [Role and Place of the Ancestor Spirits in Cultural Life of the Kyrgyz], pp.256–​265 in Aitpaeva, G. and Egemberdieva, A. (eds.) Sviatye mesta Issyk-​Kulya: palomnichestvo, dar, masterstvo [Sacred Sites of Issyk-​Kul: Pilgrimages, Gift, Mastery]. Bishkek: Kul’turno-​issledovatel’skii tsentr “Aigine”. 404

—​​​​ H e a l i n g w i t h S p i r i t s —​​​​ Baialieva, T.D. 1972. Doislamskie verovaniia i ikh perezhitki u kirgizov [Pre-​Islamic Beliefs and Their Survivals among the Kyrgyz]. Frunze: Izdatelstvo “Ilim”. Basilov, V. 1992. Shamanstvo u narodov Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana [Shamanism among the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]. Moskva: Nauka. Bellér-​Hann, I. 2001. Rivalry and Solidarity among Uyghur Healers in Kazakhstan. Inner Asia 3: 73–​98. DOI: 10.1163/​146481701793647714 Biard, A. 2013. Interrelation to the Invisible in Kirghizistan, pp.79–​94 in Zarcone, T. and Hobart, A. (eds.) Shamanism and Islam: Sufism, healing rituals and spirits in the Muslim World. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Dubuisson, E.M. 2017. Living language in Kazakhstan: the dialogic emergence of an ancestral worldview. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Duyshembiyeva, J. 2005. Kyrgyz Healing Practices: Some Field Notes. The Silk Road 3(2): 38–​44. Halbmayer, E. 2012. Debating Animism, Perspectivism and the Construction of Ontologies. Indiana 29: 9–​23. DOI: 10.18441/​ind.v29i0.9-​23 Harvey, G. 2006. Animism: Respecting the living world. New York: Columbia University Press. Kehl-​Bodrogi, K. 2008. “Religion is not so strong here”: Muslim religious life in Khorezm after socialism. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Louw, M.E. 2010. Dreaming up Futures: Dream Omens and Magic in Bishkek. History and Anthropology 21(3): 277–​292. DOI: 10.1080/​02757206.2010.496780 Montgomery, D.W. 2016. Practising Islam: Knowledge, experience, and social navigation in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mustafina, R. 1992. Predstavleniia, kul’ty, obriady u kazakhov [Perceptions, Cults and Rituals among the Kazakhs]. Alma-​Ata: Kazak universiteti. Pelkmans, M. 2017. Fragile conviction: Changing ideological landscapes in urban Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Penkala-​Gawęcka, D. 2013. Mentally Ill or Chosen by Spirits? ‘Shamanic Illness’ and the Revival of Kazakh Traditional Medicine in Post-​Soviet Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey 32(1): 37–​51. DOI: 10.1080/​02634937.2013.771872 Penkala-​Gawęcka, D. 2014. The Way of the Shaman and the Revival of Spiritual Healing in Post-​Soviet Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Shaman 22(1–​2): 57–​81. Privratsky, B.G. 2001. Muslim Turkistan: Kazak religion and collective memory. Richmond: Curzon Press. Rasanayagam, J. 2006. Healing with Spirits and the Formation of Muslim Selfhood in Post-​Soviet Uzbekistan. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 377–​ 393. DOI: 10.1111/​j.1467-​9655.2006.00296.x Rasanayagam, J. 2011. Islam in post-​ Soviet Uzbekistan: the morality of experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/​CBO9780511719950

405

PART VI

ETHICAL REPERTOIRES

Of all the sections in this book, ‘Ethical Repertoires’ perhaps best represents the multiplicity of moral universes in Central Asia. Although Central Asian citizens themselves sometimes describe this situation variously as ‘chaos’ or a ‘marketplace’ of ideals, these generalisations do not grasp how many people in fact skilfully weave their own ethical practice from the available schools of thought. Judith Beyer’s consideration of the plural origins of legal practice in Kyrgyzstan’s courts of elders makes a strong case for such inter-​weaving. Taking her departure from a family dispute over access to agricultural land, she traces how elders and contestants call on and relate legal notions from different authoritative bodies such as custom, interpretations of the sharia and state legislation. She goes further in arguing that in fact these are not completely distinct bodies of knowledge, but that they overlap: which genre of legal speech comes to dominate depends on the situation and actors involved. In his chapter on ideals of hospitality, Magnus Marsden addresses a key practice that many Central Asians highlight as a distinctive element of their selfhood, a reputation marked, for example, by the proliferation of Central Asian restaurants in the Middle East. But rather than treating hospitality as a mark of ‘tribal’ societies or as gendered forms of ‘honour’, Magnus Marsden explores the moral ambiguity of hospitality. While selfless hosting may be publicly praised in some situations, the Central Asians he interacts with make nuanced judgements on hosting. They may thus also hold in mind, and sometimes exercise, pragmatic self-​interest through shows of hospitality. Based on fieldwork in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, readers are introduced both to the commercial aspect of making and maintaining trust, for example, in the merchant diaspora. But hospitality can also take on threatening forms and be a way of exerting political control and rule, as in the case of the author’s encounter with local security officials in northern Afghanistan. How to make a living and maintain social relations is a key theme continued in Emil Nasritdinov’s chapter on the Kyrgyzstani Tablighi Jamaat, an influential Muslim missionising group. As a car dealer, is it possible to maintain a balance between a spiritual and worldly life? The author describes the strategies Tablighis employ to live righteously and pursue their missionising duties, even in spheres that are considered morally dangerous, such as markets. By contrast, a Tablighi sub-​group advocating a full retreat from a sinful world comes under surveillance by the security services. Both DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-32

407

—​​​​ E t h i c a l r e p e r t o i r e s —​​​​

ways of being Tabligh seek forms of justice, and reject both the preponderant socialist and capitalist values. Working lives are a persistent theme in this volume, with contributions on traders, care and domestic labourers, potters, healers, mobile pastoralists, as well as musicians and artisanal gold miners. In her chapter, Eeva Kesküla takes the value of industrial workers’ lives head on. Documenting the aftermath of a lethal gas explosion at an Indian-​owned coal mine in Kazakhstan, she discusses major changes in how the life and work of miners has come to be valued, since the late Soviet period. The author accompanies activist struggles over how to compensate for loss of a worker’s life or health. While some anthropologists have argued that mining money is ‘dirty’ and best spent quickly, Eva Kesküla argues that at this mine, both salaries and compensation have become part of a long-​term cycle of exchange, reproducing the value of family and hard working lives. Although still morally ambiguous, monetary ‘gifts’ from the mine owners are still taken as part of the respect that miners want in return for risking their life and health, especially in a situation where cost-​saving measures are apparently increasing their risks. How to live well: this is the key question animating all the chapters in ‘Ethical Repertoires’. This question is echoed in more directly political ways in ‘Solidarity and Struggle’ and in relation to livelihoods in ‘Everyday Moral Economies’. If uni-​vocal leadership on moral issues may be sparse (and if enforced through state governments, often in fact resisted) in Central Asia, the ethnographies here are a world away from the moral vacuum so often invoked in the post-​Soviet space. Rather, we see both individuals and groups making use of a wide range of ethical repertoires, to figure life out.

408

CHAPTER TWENTY-​S EVEN

LEGAL PLURALISM IN CENTRAL ASIA The customization of state and religious law in Kyrgyzstan Judith Beyer INTRODUCTION In Talas province in Northern Kyrgyzstan, agreements between two or more parties are often concluded by shaking hands and reminding one another that “Kudai1 (God) is watching.” Between 2005 and 2015, during fieldwork in two adjacent mountain villages, male villagers would regularly gather in a kurultai (people’s council) in spring to discuss when the herders leave the village with their animals to set out for the spring pastures (zhailoo) and when they would return. Every year, a list of fines was worked out for how much a herder had to pay, if the animals had destroyed a freshly sown field, or the harvest of a fellow villager. A villager could take his or her complaint to the court of elders (aksakal courts; lit. court of whitebeards) in case of a dispute. Villagers regard both oral agreements and handshakes as well as the writing down of fines as in alignment with Kyrgyz2 customary law (salt). However, they always avoided handing the list to the village council (aiyldyk kenesh), in whose name it would be issued and subsequently sent to the department of justice in Talas city, about 40 kilometers away, as this would have turned “village law” (aiyldyk myizam) into state law (Russ. zakon). Villagers who otherwise spoke only Kyrgyz would use the Russian term for law in this case to emphasize its foreignness. Rather than “the state” “swallowing” (zhutuu) customary law, my interlocutors often presented salt to me as being capable of rendering state law, religious law and even international legal concepts such as human rights “customary.” I have referred to this rhetorical strategy of incorporating what I call “non-​customary law” into customary law as “customization” (Beyer, 2006; 2015). In this chapter, I focus on two dynamics of such customization: first, the alignment of customary law (Kyrg. salt) with state law, as it often occurs in the case of the Kyrgyz courts of elders, and second, the merging of custom with Islamic law (shariat). My goal in this chapter is to describe the selective invocation of plural legal arguments and their subsequent interpretation in local fora, and then to compare these with the legal provisions and the institutional set-​ups provided by state authorities. My data stems from long-​term fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan which I carried out between 2005 and 2015. Apart from participating in court proceedings, my data consists of collected legal and official documents, audio transcripts of free-​flowing talk and notes on observations. I also gathered data from public debates in the country in local DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-33

409

—​​​​ J u d i t h B e y e r —​​​​

print media and state television, as well as online. Before turning to my ethnographic material, I shall introduce the concept of legal pluralism and link it to the concept of rhetorical emergence, drawing on linguistic anthropology. I argue that thus understood, the concept of legal pluralism allows us to capture how actors creatively combine elements from different legal repertoires in a particular situation at hand.

THE RHETORICAL EMERGENCE OF LEGAL PLURALISM Legal pluralism is an established transdisciplinary concept that has been employed in anthropology, sociology, political science, development and environmental studies and more recently also in law. Focusing on legal pluralism, researchers explore diverse topics ranging from dispute resolution, human and minority rights, non-​ governmental and international institutions, governance, the rule of law, to issues of globalization and transnationalism, to name just a few. Legal pluralism challenges the normative position of the state as the sole guarantor of order. It implies that the concept of “law” is no longer reserved for state law, but equally holds for religious and customary legal repertoires. Any discussion of the term needs to be carefully contextualized both historically as well as socially—​often it is local actors themselves who hold diverging views about the legitimacy of a particular legal order, or take on opposing positions in regard to how these orders relate to one another (for overviews, see von Benda-​Beckmann, K., 1984; von Benda-​Beckmann F., 2002). Rather than forming a theory of its own, legal pluralism is a sensitizing concept, that scrutinizes the very idea of law as a foundation. An emphasis on the rhetorical emergence of law as it is inherent in legal pluralism can account for its prevalence in Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian countries. It focuses on what people say law is, and what they do in the name of the law. In this chapter, my starting point is to argue that rather than establishing whether the term “legal pluralism” is justified, or whether we have a situation that deserves to be called by this concept (as in the literature), I focus on how actors invoke different normative legal repertoires in a concrete situation. I argue that we should understand legal pluralism not as the precondition that allows for cases to be dealt with and adjudicated in a plural legal manner; rather, it should be considered a possible outcome whose rhetorical emergence empirically varies from case to case. Depending on the situation, legal pluralism does not define the set-​up of a case from the beginning, but rather becomes created intersubjectively in situ by the disputing parties involved in the case. In the strict sense of the term, we should only speak of legal pluralism when more than one legal order gets invoked in one particular situated case. That is, the sheer existence of the aksakal courts next to state courts in Kyrgyzstan would not suffice for a situation to be referred to as legally pluralistic. Only when legal elements get invoked in one case that are locally understood to belong to different repertoires do we speak of legal pluralism. In the words of Franz von Benda-​Beckmann, the concept of legal pluralism should be reserved for “the theoretical possibility of more than one legal order or mechanism within one socio-​political space, based on different sources of ultimate validity and maintained by forms of organization other than the state” (F. von Benda-​Beckmann 2002, p. 37; original emphasis). According to this understanding, legal pluralism can become a possible attribute or a universal feature of any socio-​political space, 410

—​​​​ Ky r g y z s t a t e a n d r e l i g i o u s l a w —​​​​

thereby decoupling “law” from the state and opening up the concept of “law” for other repertoires to acquire proper legal functions.3 The increasing acceptance of legal pluralism both in academia and in policy-​ oriented practice needs to be understood as an effect of the transnationalization of law. Through colonial export in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up until the current time, an increasing juridification or legal intensification as a way to govern and regulate has led to local law becoming more and more diverse (von Benda-​ Beckmann, K., 2000; Merry, 1997; Niezen, 2010). Even so-​called “customary” legal institutions that were intended to operate on the basis of customs and traditions, such as the Kyrgyz aksakal courts or the Uzbek mahalla committees, are often rather recent inventions, revitalizations, or a curious mix of these if one dares to look closely (Beyer, 2006). Rather than dismantle their “real” origin, however, a legal anthropological take on this subject is to understand how actors invoke different types of law by drawing on, for example, “tradition,” “the state,” religious law, or “human rights.” With the concept of legal pluralism, we ask what actors hope to achieve when invoking different legal repertoires in a particular situation, rather than how “traditional” or how “official” a certain law really is. This takes us to the importance of the spoken word. For a long time, the codification of law had been viewed as the centrally defining feature that allowed for a shift from mere “custom” to “customary law” in all colonial contexts, including Tsarist-​and Soviet-​era Central Asia. Once written down, it could then be labeled as “primitive” and was subsequently abolished in order to make way for modern state law. However, what Russian administrators eventually got rid of in 1927 was a Westernized notion of “customary law” that they had created in part themselves, through forcing it into written form (Martin, 2001). What once existed only as part of dialogue and oral negotiation was first turned into regulations (erezhe) which were supposed to be applied exclusively in customary courts (courts of bii) or Islamic courts (courts of kazy), no longer during gatherings (kurultai) or by lineage elders (uruu aksakaldar). Members of these courts, which were heavily supervised by and incorporated into the Russian legal system, nevertheless drew from both custom and sharia, not bothering about the official delineation of these two legal repertoires by the Russian administrators.4 Before the Russian administrators began to change the legal landscape, the local way to solve disputes in Central Asia had thus already been a legally pluralistic one that mirrored the extensive connectivity of the region’s sedentary and nomadic territories. It became even more diverse with the arrival of Russian state law, Soviet revolutionary law (Massell, 1980) and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, international law, including the human rights treaties. From a legal anthropological perspective, all these legal repertoires need to be examined under the aspect of their practice, that is, their actual emergence in situ rather than their mere existence. Taking the example of human rights, for example, “The practice of human rights describes all of the many ways in which social actors across the range talk about, advocate for, criticize, study, legally enact, vernacularize, and so on, the idea of human rights in its various forms” (Goodale 2007, p. 24; emphasis added). This leads me to what I call the rhetorical emergence of legal pluralism. Setting out from Roman Jakobson’s (Jakobson 1990) early observation that folktales are inherently dialogic in nature, I hold that customary law, with its heavy reliance on proverbs, sayings, or the invocation of tradition, should be investigated from a 411

—​​​​ J u d i t h B e y e r —​​​​

positionality of emergence. The same goes for non-​customary legal repertoires. It is in its moment of actual invocation, that law begins to conjure its aura, rather than posessing an aura already from the start. The latter is a rather essentializing view, but one which is often pursued in legal studies that focus more on technical aspects of the law than on a critical approach, often mirroring, rather than analyzing, the very process through which law is endowed with such grandiosity. This does not mean, of course, that actors make up law as they go along, or that a mere utterance of something being “law” suffices in every case. Rather, each utterance, as the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, “is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 91). More than other speech genres perhaps, legal talk operates with connecting these “dangerous words” (Brenneis and Myers, 1984) and aligning them into a system or apparatus that then takes on agency of its own. Suddenly, it is no longer people, but “the law” itself, that commands. Invoking the law is often aimed at not only winning an argument, but at overpowering the other and shutting down alternative voices. This proves particularly powerful when performed in front of an audience who serves as witness to such “law in action.” Moreover, law receives additional support from a wide range of embodied practices and material objects: Polite forms of address, the swearing of oaths, having to stand up in front of judges, the carrying or displaying of text artefacts, the wearing of particular attire and the fact that it is often spoken in surroundings that are meant to be intimidating. These are only some of the many ways in which the law has come to “speak for itself.” In the case of legal pluralism, we encounter an interesting twist on this prototypical situation, as not only different interpretations from one legal repertoire get juxtaposed in the course of a legal argument, but laws from different legal repertoires are positioned against one another or—​as in the cases I will explore below—​are forged together by disputing parties in order to pre-​empt, as I will argue, the very juxtaposition of legal repertoires that would have occurred in other places. Rather than keeping the two repertoires apart while applying them both to a situation at hand, what emerges is “a compounding structuration,” as Franz von Benda-​Beckmann (1984, p. 31) termed it. By drawing from elements of different legal repertoires and combining them “in compounded legal rationalization and justification schemes” (ibid.), legal plurality appeases. Because it offers juridical decisions in more than one “language,” it is more likely to get accepted by all disputing parties. Legal pluralism is therefore prone to be used for dispute resolution in mediation contexts such as the aksakal courts or mosque gatherings where there is, in the end, no enforceable judgment possible, but only a compromise to be offered on which the parties can agree upon—​or not. In the following, I shall first take the case of a dispute settlement procedure in a Kyrgyz aksakal court to describe and analyze how actors creatively actualize newly entwined legal concepts and the multiplex roles the head of the court assumed when trying to appease the disputing parties. In a second ethnographic example, I illustrate how Islamic law (Kyrg. shariat) became customized by combining shariat and customary law (Kyrg. salt) into a new compounded concept and describe how this played out at the level of mosque gatherings in my fieldwork village in Northern Kyrgyzstan. 412

—​​​​ Ky r g y z s t a t e a n d r e l i g i o u s l a w —​​​​

THE CUSTOMIZATION OF LAW IN THE KYRGYZ AKSAKAL COURTS In spring 2006, Kudaibergen Ata instructed me to pick up three brothers: the fourth brother was not at home and sent his son instead. Altogether eight people, my partner and my research assistant included, we drove to a land plot just outside the eastern border of the village. Kudaibergen Ata was the head of the aksakal court of the village of Aral in Northern Kyrgyzstan, where I lived from 2005 until 2006. He had “invited” the brothers to their land plot around which their dispute had arisen. In 1993, the first president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, had introduced the aksakal courts throughout the country as a revitalized traditional legal institution. Two years later, he announced “the formation of a wide network of autonomous and active civil institutions, independent of state and political structures.” In 2002, the law on the aksakal courts was officialized and stipulated that the judges of these courts “judge according to moral norms that reflect the customs and traditions of the Kyrgyz,” without further specifying what these are or where they are to be found. With a new version of the country’s constitution adopted via a nationwide referendum in April 2021, the law continues to stress the importance of tradition already in the preamble. But the constitution now also anchors this concept in a new institution: that of a national people’s council (kurultai) which we already encountered at the beginning of this chapter in its impromptu version at the village level.5 In the name of “people’s customs and traditions” (Art. 21,1), we have seen an expansion of presidential powers from one head of state to the next since the country’s independence in 1991. Current President Sadyr Japarov is now able to select and dismiss judges of the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court as well as lower-​level courts, and has the power to dissolve local councils (kenesh), as well as initiate laws and referendums, thus effectively able to subvert the separation of powers. Invoking tradition “provides political actors and local elites with a source of legitimacy for an existing social order or for an intended direction of change” (Beyer and Finke, 2019, p. 322). However, this rhetorical strategy is not reserved for high-​level state bureaucrats: in my work on the aksakal courts, I have demonstrated how an institution that was set up to be top-​down in the early 1990s as an alternative to state courts, while remaining firmly entrenched in state law, was locally appropriated by the rural population. The courts of elders were turned into something they came to describe as “always having been ours.” I have argued that although officially framed as giving more rights to the regions, decentralization measures such as the aksakal courts can just as easily be interpreted as less work and expense for the central state. I have traced how cases were relegated from the regional courts to the rural municipalities, in an effort to ease the burden of cases from state court judges. But what constitutes “minor” for some might be “major” for others: agricultural disputes, or those around grazing rights or violence related to alcoholism, for example, are by no means “minor” in rural areas. By having their cases relegated to the village level, claimants become deprived of formal judicial expertise and decision-​making (Beyer, 2015; 2016). The legal anthropologist Laura Nader (Nader, 2002) has famously referred to cases that are placed outside the judicial system as “garbage cases” that, from the perspective of the state, are not worth dealing with. However, a large percentage of village disputes never leave the village because villagers often agree that problems should not “get 413

—​​​​ J u d i t h B e y e r —​​​​

out” (tchykpa). This, in turn, means that they will automatically be dealt with from within the realm of the household, the lineage (uruu), or between lineages residing in the same place. My ethnographic description of the dispute among four brothers in rural Kyrgyzstan complicates the notion of customary law that is often associated with long-​established, practiced and cherished traditions. The year after one of these brothers had written a complaint letter (aryz), Kudaibergen Ata had already given a decision in an aksakal court session regarding the four brothers’ plots of land. His decision (Russ. akt) had also been written down, but in the following year, the dispute erupted again and this time Kudaibergen Ata decided to solve it on the spot instead of at the mayor’s office, as it often happened. The first thing the youngest brother Üsönkul Baike6 said to Kudaibergen Ata after having climbed into my car was “We are ashamed of what people might say” (Elden uialyp ölö turgan bolduk), to which the aksakal replied “You could have solved it yourself.” Once we arrived at the field, Üsönkul Baike and my research assistant began measuring the entire land plot, while I stayed behind with the aksakal and the oldest brother, Zarl Baike, listening in on their conversation. The absent brother’s son was instructed to carry the measuring instrument (saryzhan7), thus doing the menial labour. What followed were three hours of wild calculation and discussion. While we were waiting for the final decision that seemed to me to be based upon the fair division of land into four plots, another young man approached us, after having spotted us standing in the open field. He asked whether we were authorized to measure land and that he, too, had a problem in his family which he had addressed in written form to the village mayor already a year ago. Before Kudaibergen Ata could answer him, Zarl Baike did: “Don’t go to [mayor’s first name]. Come straight to this person [Kudaibergen Ata]. He can come even tomorrow with his commission.” The latter comment referred to me and my research assistant. It was our “foreign” presence (my assistant was not from the area, not even from the same province) that had probably furthered such identification. In the case of the four brothers, it became clear to me only after a while of listening to the unfolding conversation that all of them possessed expert knowledge about how land should be divided according to state law, and how big each parcel was supposed to be. The actual problem lay elsewhere: there was, to begin with, the fact that Aral had been among the first villages to undergo privatization already in 1991. Aral had distributed land parcels that were comparatively smaller to those distributed in other villages which went through the procedure only several years later (Beyer, 2011). Villagers knew about their relative disadvantage: Not having enough land for oneself was a common narrative; even those from the same village were all in the same boat in this regard. On the other hand, the brothers reassured me several times that “land is not a big deal.” Why then measure it and why fight over it again when the issue had been solved? It turned out that the actual complaint of one of the four brothers was not about property, but about access: he could not reach his land plot, for there was no road leading to it. One of the brothers had prepared his own land, including what was once thought to function as a road and so separating his own and his brother’s land in a way that would allow them to move machinery onto the land plots without destroying each other’s harvest: Üsön:  Everyone has a road. And when it comes to me, there is no road. Zarl:  Ok, wait! 414

—​​​​ Ky r g y z s t a t e a n d r e l i g i o u s l a w —​​​​

Üsön:  No “wait!” When there is a chance to speak up, one should speak! (Söz kezegi kelgende, aitysh kerek!). Zarl (to KA):  There was a road for him. We left it for him [meaning last year]. Üsön: There was no road. Where did you leave me a road, Baike (older brother)? Don’t lie (Kalp aitpa)! There is no need for that. May land fall down deep into the earth (Zher kara zherge kirsin8)! Disputing the original numbers and re-​calculating numerous times, in the end the brothers aligned their final outcome with the numbers they remembered from last year and negotiated with one another and with Kudaibergen Ata until everyone agreed. Kudaibergen Ata wrote a decision (akt) on the spot and had me sign it as part of his “commission,” thereby putting my presence to immediate usage. I therefore vouched for the procedure and acted as a witness. After the akt had been signed by all disputing parties, the aksakal, now visibly tired, addressed the siblings: KA:  Should you fight again, I will hand the case over to the regional court. You are four siblings. You have a common father and mother. You [Zarl] are the oldest aksakal. Respect your aksakal [to other brothers]. You [Zarl], be fair. Keep this in the dark/​quiet? (Bul eki zhakka chykpasyn). Keep this dark, so that people don’t say “[their father’s name] children did this”. Üsön:  We embarrassed you (Uialat ekensing). His threat of handing their case over to the court was immediately followed by an appeal to what people in Kyrgyzstan would consider traditional values or simple “the Kyrygz way” (kyrgyzcha) of handling such issues: Kudaibergen Ata appealed to the fact that one needs to respect the elders, in this case the oldest of the four brothers. Also, that all four brothers should feel indebted to their parents and that it will be their father’s name, which will be spoken about in a bad way, should this dispute “get out.” While Üsön Baike had accused his brothers by arguing that “you should have measured precisely, so that we don’t have any conflicts” (Tak tak salyp tashtagyla, boldu ech neme zhok), in the end the dispute was not about the fair division of land at all, but about venting one’s grievance in front of an audience, particularly in front of Kudaibergen Ata and his “commission,” whose authority lay precisely in the overlapping of different competencies. In his role as judge (sot, lit. “court”), he embodied a state institution, but he was also an aksakal, a fellow-​villager, a lineage-​member and in other cases, even a direct relative of one of the disputing parties. Throughout my research, I came to see how Kudaibergen Ata embraced all these different roles and tactically foregrounded sometimes one over the other, thereby consciously drawing on different legal and cultural repertoires, depending on the situation at hand and what he considered to be most helpful in directing a case. For him, a case was successfully solved when he did not have to transfer the case to the regional court, or even inform the mayor. He preferred to do things ooz eki (orally) and was proud when he managed to do so, but frequently invoked “the state” and state courts in particular, to threaten the disputing parties, thus drawing on different legal repertoires (state and customary) to increase the likelihood that his judgment was indeed adhered to. 415

—​​​​ J u d i t h B e y e r —​​​​

The matter at hand was thus about access. Access both in a rhetorical sense, namely of being able to address the aksakal and to create a dispute “case” that allowed the siblings to voice their problems in the presence of another party, instead of quarreling amongst themselves at home. But access also in a material sense since it was not the size of each land plot turned out to be the problem, but rather the lack of a road for everyone to reach their parcel of land in the first place. Ribot and Peluso (2003, p. 153) have distinguished property from access and defined the latter as “the ability to derive benefits from things,” in contrast to the former, which is defined as the right to do so. If access is feasible, actors hold “a bundle of powers” (ibid.) in contrast to “a bundle of rights” as Maine (1861) had originally characterized property relations. While the case was thus framed in the idiom of land and rights and Kudaibergen Ata invoked both “the state” and customary law, threatening to take the case further up the legal institutions, I suggest that the invocation of different legal repertoires and the multiplex role of the aksakal himself allowed for a situation where—​rather than overpowering the siblings or shutting them down—​the disputing parties could voice their opinion, quarrel openly and eventually reconcile. They no longer blamed each other but ended the dispute, as they did not want to further embarrass the elder and shared an interest to keep things “inside.” The way aksakal courts work in practice, particularly in regard to how they address a potential plurality of legal repertoires, is thus very different from how state legal provisions have envisioned the institution to operate.

THE CUSTOMIZATION OF SHARIAT “This is salt, not shariat. People enjoy prosperity. When people have, they give [elde bar bolgondon kiyin bere beret].” With this statement, Kudaibergen Ata referred to particular practices during mourning rituals, where the invited guests spend large amounts of money on items such as carpets and clothes when their relative, fellow-​ lineage member or former classmate had died or was mourned a year or three years after having passed away (Beyer, 2016). In 2015, the central government, particularly the ministry of finance, had tried to curb this practice, which state officials deemed “irrational” and “a waste of money.” It was, they argued, a manifestation of salt gone wrong. In the above quote, Kudaibergen Ata linked two legal repertoires with one another—​Islamic law and customary law. But it had been the country’s president at the time, Almaz Atambaev, who had issued a decree (Russ. ukaz) in which “excessive spending” during mourning rituals was forbidden and in which he invoked shariat and salt simultaneously. When I spoke to the village imam, Nasir Baike, about the decree, he labeled the textual document “the President’s fatwa” and updated me on recent developments in terms of compounded law-​making: “Now there is such a thing called salttuu shariat. Atambaev, the President, accepted it. Our Prophet also said to practice and use salt, which would not harm or violate shariat.” We can understand this neologism of “customary shariat” as the customization of Islamic law, or as the Islamization of custom. I tend towards the first translation as my interlocutors usually gave salt predominance over other legal repertoires, including shariat. I interpret this concept as yet another attempt by “the state” to firmly entrench customary law within its realm—​this time by bringing shariat and salt in a relation of harmonious co-​existence. Since in Kudaibergen Ata’s words, it is 416

—​​​​ Ky r g y z s t a t e a n d r e l i g i o u s l a w —​​​​

impossible “to get away from salt” (salttan chykpaisyng da), a particular version of salt needs to be promoted. This type of social engineering is not much different from the 1920s, when “local customs and traditions” became incorporated in Russian state law that was applied throughout Central Asia. Now we see a “tamed” version where customary law is allowed to exist only when supervised by state or religious authorities (Beyer, 2022). However, people’s perspective on the role of salt in comparison to state law and religious law is different. When I asked Kudaibergen Ata how exactly these legal repertoires related to one another in the case of the President’s fatwa, he answered: Originally, shariat was totally separate, but now it has become part of salt. We are not letting go of salt (saltty ketibei atyrbyz biz). Ninety percent of the people live with salt (salt menen zhashap atyr), ten percent live with shariat (shariat menen). A person should live according to shariat. It is a law given to you from Allah. People should follow the path of shariat. Now they do not follow. But when I observed him in interaction with the younger village imams, for example, Kudaibergen Ata would challenge their knowledge of Islam, which they had acquired in obligatory training courses in Bishkek, or even abroad in Tajikistan. Referring to the imams as “children” (baldar), it was the elders who led discussions in the mosque or spoke about the “proper” way of shariat, while the religious authorities often remained quiet, thus not challenging the aksakals’ authority openly. Here, as well, we have a clash between state legal pluralism and the way the different legal repertoires operate in practice. The state has continuously tried to streamline what counts as shariat by controlling the imams through the muftiyat: they need to participate in a compulsory religious education program, have to take tests and even receive state salaries. Knowing that ignoring customary law is impossible, the President even invented a new compounded concept of “customary shariat,” thus staying in line with his predecessors and followers who have proven particularly inventive in trying to incorporate custom into state legislation. However, the imams’ knowledge of shariat is challenged by the elders who have never received a formal education in “Islam,” but regard shariat as part and parcel of their daily conduct. Shariat has always been customized and is locally understood as “the path” of life—​the literal translation of the concept from Arabic. As such, it has always been much more encompassing than the concept of law (zakon) which remains bound to the state. We thus witness in contemporary times the continuation of a situation that was typical for Central Asia before the Russians arrived. When the khanate of Kokand was established in the southern Fergana Valley in 1709–​10, the khans tried to replace earlier Turko-​ Mongolian laws with Islamic law, but at no point did jurisdiction, taxation, and education follow Islamic principles exclusively (Newby, 2005; Sartori, 2014). This does not mean that Islamic law was not practiced at all among the non-​sedentary population; rather, it has always been applied at the same time as customary law (Frank, 2014). Despite previous and novel entanglements, people in contemporary Kyrgyzstan continue to exclaim that salt “wins” over shariat (salt zhenget), even if some say that it should be otherwise. “We are not letting go of salt” (saltty ketibei atyrbyz biz) is a common expression, as is “salt is changing with the times” (zamanga zharasha 417

—​​​​ J u d i t h B e y e r —​​​​

salt özgörüp kelatat). While the first expression emphasizes the force of custom, the second shows that salt is not a fixed body of laws at all, but in constant flux, adapting and appropriating novel elements: salt is watched over so that it always remains “ours.” This emic perspective is very much in line with anthropological work on the concept of tradition, which is understood as “a fluid and transforming agent with no real end” (Hunn, 1993, p. 13; see also Beyer and Finke, 2019). The maintenance of clearly separate legal repertoires is thus not only difficult; it would miss the very characteristic of how both legal pluralism and tradition operate in Kyrgyzstan. All three repertoires—​salt, shariat, and state law—​overlap: which of them is considered dominant or more legible depends on the situation and the actors involved.

CONCLUSION Very little is original in law; throughout history, transpositions from one legal repertoire into another have been the rule rather than the exception. Legal pluralism has therefore become an accepted concept within legal anthropology that allows one to describe and analyze the effects of the invocation of plural legal orders, within a given dispute context. But legal pluralism has also been accused of being essentialist and culturalist, for it has traditionally left the idea of closed systems of different orders of legality intact. After the interpretative turn, scholars have however come to acknowledge that “ ‘Law’ here, there, or anywhere, is part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real” (Geertz, 2000 [1983], p. 184) where “words are keys to understanding the social institutions and cultural formulations that surround them and give them meaning” (Merry, 1988, p. 886). Tapping into different legal repertoires that are held as an “armoury of arguments” as Martin Chanock (1985) once famously put it, can be a way to address social transformation and to legitimize and rationalize one’s behavior: “In this changing world claims about custom [are| competitive rather than descriptive” (1985, p. 17), Chanock argues for the case of Malawi and Zambia. Based on my work in Kyrgyzstan, the same can be said for Central Asia. As anthropologists, we should refrain from advocating legal pluralism in such contexts as a more “culture-​friendly” or encompassing way to deal with questions of order, sanctioning or indeed harmony, since “Plurality may actually reinforce structures of inequality as the plurality of forums available decreases the binding power of any law” (von Benda-​Beckmann et al., 2009, p. 12). The latter is what we currently see happening in Kyrgyzstan, where trust in state courts has continuously been eroding and where neo-​traditional institutions such as the aksakal courts or, more recently, the kurultai have come to be appropriated by the state. While hoping to tap into the symbolic power of these cultural models and practices that people in Kyrgyzstan cherish, state officials turn them into institutions of the state, thereby repeating the policies of the late Russian Empire. The state thus provides for the theoretical possibility of legal pluralism to exist as part of state law by incorporating the concept of salt and that of shariat into state legislation. In practice, as I have shown in my ethnographic examples—​be it in the aksakal courts or in the mosques—​we encounter a practice I have termed “customization,” that places salt firmly “on top” of different legal orders. It is an empirical

418

—​​​​ Ky r g y z s t a t e a n d r e l i g i o u s l a w —​​​​

question and one to observe over time, whether this hierarchical ordering will change in the future.

NOTES 1 All words in italics are Kyrgyz unless indicated otherwise. 2 I will use the term “Kyrgyz” as an ethnonym and the term “Kyrgyzstani” in order to refer to the country’s citizenry. In my fieldsite, the aksakal courts were entirely staffed by Kyrgyz men, but in the capital, Bishkek, I have encountered also Kyrgyzstani women of Uzbek, Tatar, or Kazakh ethnicity, who served as members or heads of the court (see Beyer, 2015). 3 On the semi-​autonomy of such socio-​political spaces, see the classic article by Moore (1973). 4 Throughout the Islamic world, custom and customary law have been crucial for the formation of Islamic law (Schacht, 1982 [1964], p. 63), but it remained outside of the scope of scholarly attention which devoted itself to the systematic foundation of classical Islamic law for the purpose of theory-​building. See Sartori (2014, 19) on the “everyday literacy of Central Asian nomads” that allowed for the application of shari’a alongside customary law and Scheele (2010) for a similar situation of legal entwinement in colonial Algeria under French jurisdiction. 5 Whereas in the previous laws, a kurultai did not even constitute a representative body of local self-​governance and its decisions were only advisory in nature, not legally binding (On Local Self Governance, No. 101, July 15, 2011, Art 59,2), the new constitution has defined the national kurultai as a “public-​representative assembly” which has the right of legislative initiative (Art. 85), is represented in the Judicial Council (Art 96,7) and which may even make proposals to dismiss members of the Cabinet of Ministers and Heads of executive bodies (Art 70,4). See, in particular, the preamble and Art. 21,1 on “traditions and customs,” Art. 10,4 on “national and moral values” and Art. 20,3 on “patriotism.” 6 Baike means Uncle and is the polite way of addressing an older male person in northern Kyrgyzstan. 7 A saryzhan is a hand-​made wooden instrument, used to measure out 2 meters. 8 To condemn something to “fall into the earth” is a common idiom in Kyrgyz. Here, it is land itself that is condemned—​as something that always gives rise to dispute since villagers’ livelihood depends on it.

REFERENCES Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benda-​Beckmann, Franz von 2002. Who’s afraid of legal pluralism? The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 47. 37–​82. —​—​—​, Keebet von Benda-​Beckmann and Julia Eckert (eds.) 2009. Rules of law and laws of ruling: On the governance of law. Farnham: Ashgate. Benda-​Beckmann, Keebet von 1984. The broken stairways to consensus: Village justice and state courts in Minangkabau. Dordrecht: Foris Publ. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-​, Land-​en Volkenkunde). —​ —​ —​2000. Transnational dimensions of legal pluralism. Folk Law and Legal Pluralism: Challenges on the Third Millennium, University of Chile. In: Benda-​Beckmann, Franz von and Gerhard Anders (eds.) Reader: Anthropology of law. Arnhem and Gouda: Quint BV. 163–​176.

419

—​​​​ J u d i t h B e y e r —​​​​ Beyer, Judith 2006. Revitalisation, invention and continued existence of the Kyrgyz aksakal courts. Listening to pluralistic accounts of history. . The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 53/​54. 141–​175. —​—​—​2011. Settling descent. Place making and genealogy in Talas, Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey 30. 455–​468. —​—​—​2015. Customizations of law. Courts of elders (aksakal courts) in rural and urban Kyrgyzstan. PoLAR. Special issue. Melissa Demian (ed.). 38/​1. 53–​71. —​—​—​ 2016. The force of custom. Law and the ordering of everyday life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. —​—​—​2022. Law. In: Montgomery, David (ed.) Central Asia. Contexts for understanding, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. —​—​—​and Peter Finke. 2019. Practices of traditionalization in Central Asia. Central Asian Survey 38/​3: 310–​328. Brenneis, Donald and Fred Myers (eds.) 1984. Dangerous words: Language and politics in the Pacific. New York and London: New York University Press. Chanock, Martin 1985. Law, custom and social order. The colonial experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frank, Allen 2014. A month among the Qazaqs in the Emirate of Bukhara. Observations on Islamic knowledge in a nomadic environment. In: Paolo Sartori (ed.) Explorations in the social history of modern Central Asia. Leiden: Brill. 247–​266. Geertz, Clifford 2000 [1983] . Local knowledge. Fact and law in comparative perspective. In: Clifford Geertz (ed.) Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology, 3rd edition. New York: Basic Books. 167–​234. Goodale, Mark 2007. Locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local. In: Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (eds.) The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local. New York: Cambridge University. Press. 1–​38. Hunn, Elizabeth 1993. What is traditional ecological knowledge? In: Nancy Williams and Graham Baines (eds.) Traditional ecological knowledge. Wisdom for sustainable development , Canberra: Center for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University. 13–​15. Jakobson, Roman 1990. Langue and parole: Code and message. In: Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-​Burston (eds.) On language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 80–​109. Maine, Henry S. 1861. Ancient law. Its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas. London: John Murray. Martin, Virginia 2001. Law and custom in the steppe. The Kazakhs of the middle horde and Russian colonialism in the nineteenth century. Richmond: Curzon. Massell, Gregory 1980 [1968] . Revolutionary law in Soviet Central Asia. In: Donald Black and Maureen Mileski (eds.) The social organization of law. New York: Academic Press. 226–​261. Merry, Sally Engle 1988. Legal pluralism. Law and Society Review 22/​5: 869–​896. —​—​—​1997. Legal pluralism and transnational culture: The Ka Ho’okolokolonui Kanaka Maori tribunal. In: Wilson, Richard A. (ed.) Human rights, culture and context: Anthropological perspectives. London: Pluto Press. 28–​48. Moore, Sally Falk 1973. Law and social change. The semi-​autonomous social field as an appropriate subject of study. Law and Society Review 7/​4. 719–​746. Nader, Laura 2002. The life of the law. Anthropological projects. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Newby, Laura. 2005. The empire and the khanate. A political history of Qing relations with Khoqand c. 1760–​1860. Leiden: Brill. Niezen, Ron. 2010. Public justice and the anthropology of law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 420

—​​​​ Ky r g y z s t a t e a n d r e l i g i o u s l a w —​​​​ Ribot, Jesse and Nancy Peluso. 2003. A theory of access. Rural Sociology 68/​2. 153–​181. Sartori, Paolo. 2014. Explorations in the social history of modern Central Asia (19th–​early 20th century). Leiden: Brill. Schacht, Joseph. 1982 [1964]. An introduction to Islamic law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scheele, Judith. 2010. Councils without custom, qadis without state: Property and community in the Algerian Touat. Islamic Law and Society, 17. 350–​374.

421

CHAPTER TWENTY-​E IGHT

HOSPITALITY IN CENTRAL ASIA Magnus Marsden

INTRODUCTION Hospitality has for long lain at the heart of the ways in which Central Asian peoples and societies have been regarded by and presented themselves to outsiders. From the accounts of nineteenth-​century travellers to Central Asia (Vámbéry 2014 [1863]), to more recent discussions by anthropologists who have worked in the region, hospitality is a theme that transcends representations of Central Asia (Lindholm 1982) Early images of Central Asian hospitality tended to revolve around the figure of the local ruler dispensing largesse in generous yet unpredictable ways to his guests (Elphinstone 2015 [1815]: 355–​357). More recent anthropological accounts explore the provision of hospitality in the course of ‘everyday life’ in Central Asia: they emphasise the significance of offering hospitality to religious and political leadership (Edwards 1996), and the social networks of provisioning and support that Central Asians have fashioned in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union (Werner 1998; Zanca 2003). Anthropology has also shone light on the complexity and dynamism of Central Asian practices of hospitality in the context of migration: hospitality plays an important role in the lives of migrant labourers in Russia (Reeves 2016), and in the identities and ethical universes of Afghan refugees in Europe (Marsden 2012). These are interesting cases because of the ways in which hospitality is enacted outside of the context with which it is often most associated –​the home –​and by individuals and communities leading precarious existences. Mobile Central Asians have not only deployed hospitality as a way of maintaining selfhood and ethical integrity in settings outside their region; as the burgeoning number of Central Asian restaurants in many parts of the world suggests, being hospitable also has important commercial dimensions that Central Asian communities have skilfully exploited in multiple settings. In the broader anthropological literature, there is a tendency to use the notion of ‘commercialisation’ to point towards the ways in which images of hospitality change as they have become goods for sale and commodities that are circulated (Shryock 2004: 38; cf. Selwyn 2010). An understanding of hospitality in Central Asia, however, requires recognition of the long-​term historical intersections between commerce and hospitality. In Central Asian societies, the enactment of hospitality has been culturally and institutionally embedded in the provisioning of mobile merchants and commercial personnel. The historic 422

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-34

—​​​​ H o s p i t a l i t y i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

commercial aspects of hospitality in Central Asia makes its enactment distinctive in important ways from the societies of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, in which hospitality has largely been regarded by anthropologists through the lens of moral concepts such as honour and masculine forms of individual autonomy (e.g., Herzfeld 1985; Lindholm 1982). This chapter seeks to place some of the key debates in the study of hospitality in Central Asia and beyond in relation to my own fieldwork in the region. Having conducted fieldwork in villages in Tajikistan, with Afghan traders and refugees in Afghanistan and in the diaspora, as well as with village Muslims in northern Pakistan who regarded themselves as being ‘culturally’ Central rather than Southern Asian, above all I have come to recognise the significance but also diversity of Central Asian modes of ‘being hospitable’ ( referred to in Farsi as mehman dusti) and the importance of understanding these in the context of specific political and economic contexts.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HOSPITALITY IN CENTRAL ASIA AND BEYOND The powerful image of the generous host ready to sacrifice all for the sake of their guests has ambiguous and multidimensional implications, and these reflect the complex dynamics of hospitality in settings within and beyond Central Asia. On the one hand, ethnographic material concerning the enactment of hospitality points toward the intersection of local notions of ethics, generosity and aesthetics that often crystallise in relation to a complex culture of hospitality (Benhabib 2003; Shryock 2008, 2012). In recent anthropology, indeed, a rich body of scholarship exists on the insights that considerations of guest-​host relations offers into the ‘key symbols’ or specificities of particular cultures (Ortner 1973). In his study of the Swat Pashtun, for instance, Charles Lindholm (1982) emphasised the extent to which culture and personhood in Swat was characterised by a tension between ‘generosity’ and ‘jealousy’ –​the tension illustrated the moral and social anxieties that go along with the practice of hospitality in many societies within and beyond the region (cf. Meneley 1998). More recently, anthropologists have emphasised not only the act of giving and receiving hospitality, but also the importance of the form in which this is done (Humphrey 2012). The recognition of form has brought attention to the aesthetic aspects of hospitality in Central Asian societies and the importance of these in shaping the nature of the social relationships and rituals with which hospitality is entwined. On the other hand, if much scholarship focuses on morality, ethics and aesthetics, then an equally powerful concern in the literature surrounds the power dynamics that are also an inherent feature of the provision and acceptance of hospitality. Not only is hospitality often a focus of the image presented of societies by outsiders, but also the foundation of the purified images in relationship to which societies present themselves to the world (Herzfeld 1985; Shryock 2012). Recent theorisation of hospitality by anthropologists has been wary of the tendency to interpret it as a one-​dimensional moral good. While acts of hospitality characterised by warmth and generosity are rightly the centrepiece of anthropological discussions of Central Asian hospitality, it is also the case that the acceptance of hospitality is also often a source 423

—​​​​ M a g n u s M a r s d e n —​​​​

of anxiety, both by anthropologists and by their hosts. As scholars have shown in many contexts, the provision of hospitality is often a way in which power hierarchies are enforced, enacted and materialised (Herzfeld 1987). Instead, hosts exert a form of control and power over their guests which can blur the boundary between hospitality and imprisonment (e.g., Candea and de Coll 2012). Furthermore, hospitality is also central to the ways in which the movement and independence of visitors is watched and curtailed, often having important implications for women, minorities and the poor (Lindhom 1982). Hospitality also often emerges as a focus of discussion among policy makers. Indeed, the reputation of Central Asians as being founts of unique forms of hospitality is an aspect of life in the region that engenders suspicion amongst policy makers concerned with the region. The case of the Taliban refusing to hand Osama bin Laden over to the United States in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 attacks –​supposedly because of their attachment to the principle of nanawatia (the commitment to provide refuge to guests that forms an important aspect of the Pashtun moral code, or Pashtunwali) –​is an especially pertinent example of this (e.g., Atran 2010). The fixation of US policy makers and the academics who advise them with regard to Pashtunwali and the principle of nanawatia also evidenced the dangerous role that simplified abstractions of Central Asian culture have played in the region’s interactions with the wider world, underscoring the need for layered and contextual understandings of its culture. A central problem with locating political choices in supposed ‘traditional cultures’ is that doing so reduces complex forms of political agency to apparently unchanging cultures and traditions, and elides the importance of exploring the diverse ways in which communities regard the relationship between the domains of culture and of politics.

HOSPITALITY, POWER AND SURVEILLANCE Guest-​host relations in Central Asia rarely simply involve individuals, but are also inflected with power dynamics involving local communities, state authorities and sometimes international actors involved in complex geopolitical processes. It is tempting to see practices of hospitality as existing in a domain divorced from that of the state and of illustrating instead the hierarchies and power dynamics of local societies. Yet, in fact, the provision, acceptance and experience of hospitality in Central Asia is thoroughly shaped by a long history of state-​society relations that continues to be of relevance and importance in the present day. This is the case not merely in countries in the region that have been directly influenced by the Soviet legacy, but also those outside of the former Soviet realm in which both local state structures and those of the postcolonial state have similarly used local practices of hospitality as a site through which to monitor, control and police local communities. Historically, the provision of hospitality is an arena of life in which political entities in Central Asia have played a major role in shaping and influencing. The rulers of the princely state of Chitral, which today forms two administrative districts in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwah Province, for example, appointed specific families to act as the official providers of hospitality to the region’s princely and aristocratic families and their guests during their travels across the realm. Referred to in Khowar using 424

—​​​​ H o s p i t a l i t y i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

the term ashimat, such families historically emphasised their role as the official hosts of the realm’s rulers as a marker of their high status in Chitral’s hierarchically layered society (Baig 2004). By the time I conducted fieldwork in the region in the late 1990s, however, families of less noble background –​including those identifying as the yuft (smallholders) and chermuzh (serfs) poked fun at the gullibility of the region’s mid-​ ranking aristocracy (adamzada), remarking that ‘they crowed about being forced to serve food to the princes.’ More recently, countries across the region, including Afghanistan and Tajikistan, have enforced limits on the number of guests and range of dishes that may be served at weddings –​legislation that clearly illustrates the degree to which hospitality is very much a matter of concern for the state (Ibañez Tirado 2013). During fieldwork, my most dramatic experience of both the power dynamics of guest-​host relations took place in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz in the spring of 2008. At the time, I was conducting research on the experiences of return to Afghanistan by families that had been based as refugees over many years in northern Pakistan. One family that I knew especially well had returned to Kunduz in Afghanistan from Chitral in 2003; they hosted me in their home during my stays in the city, and also helped me to visit other families there who had returned in recent years from Pakistan. On one evening, I was taken to see a family that had lived in Pakistan for over 20 years; since returning to Afghanistan, the father of the family who had served in the mujahidin during the war against the Soviet and Afghan armies had become an important figure in the social and political dynamics of Kunduz: he would go on in later years to be elected as an MP to Afghanistan’s Parliament. During an evening of discussion with the man and the many guests who gathered each evening in his house, I was abruptly informed that the Chief of Police of Kunduz had asked who the foreigner (khariji) staying in the house was, and requested that I travel to his residence in the police station to meet him. A car was sent to pick me up from my host’s house, and I was driven at high speed through the narrow streets of the dark city to see the Chief. Having been introduced to the Chief, I was asked what I was doing in Kunduz and how I had come to know my host family as well as the man whom I was visiting. Answering the questions, I felt somewhat terrified by the situation in which I found myself: I did not know why the Chief was taking an interest in my activities in the city, or, indeed, when I would be granted permission to return to my friends’ house. At the time, levels of violence by anti-​government militia groups identifying themselves as being Taliban were rising in Kunduz and the city’s inhabitants widely remarked that ‘outside’ forces were coordinating the activities of the militants. More generally in Afghanistan, the legacy of British imperial activity in the country means that ‘the English’ (inglis) are widely regarded as clever yet mischievous actors invariably ‘doing politics’ (siyasat kardan) of one sort or another and in a manner that contravenes the interests of ordinary Afghans. I assumed that while my host trusted that I was indeed conducting research in the city, the Chief of Police may well have come to the conclusion that I was an agent whose activities required investigation. I then sought to keep conversation flowing by asking my host about the dynamics of the city, although he was too engrossed in an Indian soap opera drama and rebuffed my inquiries remarking, ‘Let’s have a discussion about Afghan culture another day.’ After some time, I suggested to the Chief that I leave him to his work as he must be a busy man, but was told politely but firmly that it was early and there was no need for 425

—​​​​ M a g n u s M a r s d e n —​​​​

me to leave. A little later, the Chief’s employees served us ishlaqi –​a unique and rarely available dish prepared by Afghanistan’s ethnically Turkmen communities involving meat being stuffed in a bread casing –​that had been provided by the Chief’s local contacts in the Turkmen community. The Chief then arranged for me to be driven back to my friend’s house and I did not hear from him again during the visit. The following year, however, after hearing from my friends that I was in Afghanistan, he invited me to his Kabul residence (having been posted to the city to a high-​level position in the security forces) and told me that on this occasion I should eat properly as last time I had been too scared and lost my appetite. The Chief’s remark suggested to me that the element of fear I had experienced having been ‘invited’ as a guest to his home the year previously had been intentional. The Chief held the mujahidin figure whom I was visiting in a great deal of respect because the latter had been a prominent figure in the jihad against the Soviet Army in the 1990s and continued to be influential in Kunduz. The men’s relationship ensured that little or no acrimony arose because of my being spirited off to the Police Chief’s house. On other occasions, however, the willingness of state authorities to intervene in the hospitality practices of local communities has become a source of tension during fieldwork. This was the case during a spell of fieldwork in Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor in 2010. The Wakhan corridor is a wide, high mountain valley that is divided politically by the Afghanistan-​Tajikistan boundary that runs through the Pyanj River. In places, the Wakhan corridor is also within a couple of hours’ walk from border crossings with Pakistan. In the context of research into the cross-​border relationships between families in the region, I travelled to the headquarters of Afghan Wakhan, Khandud, along with a Wakhi scholar of Tajik nationality based in the UK. In Khandud, we immediately went to the home of my colleague’s Afghan Wakhi relatives, and were about to settle down for a night of hospitality when, minutes after our arrival, Afghan security officials arrived at the house to inspect our passports and visas. While the security officials were also from Afghan Badakhshan, they hailed from the neighbouring district of Shughnan and spoke a language (Shughni) distinct from that of our hosts. Shughnan is well-​known in Afghanistan for having produced security officials during the rule of the pro-​Soviet government of the 1980s –​having served the communist governments of the 1980s and early 1990s, these officials went on to work both for the mujahidin (1992–​96) and the Taliban (1996–​2001). My Wakhi hosts remarked to one another that the only reason that the Shughni officials had disturbed us was because they used every opportunity to show off their power and influence to the poorer and less influential villagers in whose locality they were living; requesting to see our passports, they remarked, was a way in which the officials could humiliate their status as ‘hosts’ (mezban). Our hosts remonstrated with the officials, telling them there was no need to trouble the guests (mehman) by asking to see their visas; they could vouch we had come by road having legally crossed the border into Afghanistan from Tajikistan, and had not made the illegal crossing over the river. The officials did not relent, however, and insisted on checking our documents. On this occasion, in addition to the presence of a suspect ‘inglis’, the fact that a Wakhi-​ speaker from a village ‘across the river’ was also present, further raised, according to our hosts, the suspicions of the security officials about our motives for visiting the village. Eventually, however, all were relieved when the security officials had left the home for the nearby station. Later in the evening, a villager arrived with a bottle of 426

—​​​​ H o s p i t a l i t y i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

vodka that, he told us, his relatives had brought to him having secretly crossed the river that marked the boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Acts of hospitality, are often regarded by anthropologists as marking distinctions between those who provide hospitality and those who receive it (Candea and da Coll 2012). In the examples discussed above, however, a boundary of equal if not more importance concerned that between hosts and local security officials –​state officials sought to question the ability of locals to realise the ambition of acting as autonomous hosts for their guests. This aspect of the role played by power in the enactment of hospitality in Central Asia is an important dimension of many encounters, but it is especially visible in the cases described above because of the nature of the guests involved: foreigners from countries regarded with suspicion in Afghanistan. The domain of hospitality does not exist in isolation from the state, and one of the ways in which states and their authorities seek to assert control of local communities in Central Asia is by monitoring and restricting their ability to play an autonomous role in the provision of hospitality, both to ‘outsiders’ and, as work on regulations relating to the holding of marriage demonstrates, to ‘insiders’ (Ibañez Tirado 2013). Images of Central Asian societies being governed by cultural codes of conduct such as Pashtunwali elide the significance of the state to the experience of hospitality in the region and flatten the understanding of its cultures of hospitality.

THE MORAL AMBIGUITIES OF HOSPITALITY Central Asian practices of hospitality are diverse and intersect with understandings of local identities and moral and ethical universes in multiple ways. Ethnographic studies of the region attest, indeed, to a wide range of attitudes towards and practices of hospitality. One end of this spectrum includes settings in which notions of hospitality accord with theorisations of it as a moral and ethical ambition that revolves around the selfless provision of shelter and food to strangers without the expectation of return, a practice that involves the conversion of strangers into friends (Werbner 2016). At the other end of the spectrum, however, communities –​including the Afghan traders with whom I have worked –​hold and publicly advocate understandings of hospitality that recognise the importance of interest and instrumentality (Marsden 2012). For such groups, providing hospitality to strangers might be regarded as being dangerous, unnecessary and demonstrating a lack of prudence on the part of hosts. The attitudes, of course, of many communities and actors in the region occupy the space between these poles in an extended continuum: communities might publicly emphasise the selfless principle of hospitality, but simultaneously recognise in private the role played by ‘the interests’ in all aspects of lived human interaction. In Central Asia as in other world regions, hospitality has come to be deployed in some ethnographic literature as a ‘key symbol’ in relationship to the making of cultural and sociological generalisations (Ortner 1973). Understandings of hospitality as a selfless act devoid of the aspiration of future exchange are often connected to broader cultural ideology that regards all forms of exchange as being morally problematic because of its inherent capacity to generate unequal relationships –​an ideology that anthropologists have historically analysed as important for supposedly ‘egalitarian’ ‘tribal societies’ (Sneath 2007). Studies of traditional expressions of tribal hospitality often emphasise the degree to which ideal forms of hospitality are 427

—​​​​ M a g n u s M a r s d e n —​​​​

regarded as being non-​reciprocal, arguing that this attitude is embedded in ‘tribal cultures’ that demonstrate a ‘wariness for trade’, ‘historic disdain for commerce’ and ‘preference for unrestricted giving’ (e.g., Dresch 1998: 126–​127; Lindholme 1982). More recently, scholars have questioned the extent to which cultural ideologies have played an unchanging role in the region’s societies (Marsden and Hopkins 2012). The historic participation of tribes in long-​distance exchange, including acting as loan providers in neighbouring regions, especially South Asia, for example, contests the notion that tribal culture is inevitably wary of exchange (Hanifi 2011). A result of such one-​dimensional thinking about the relationship between tradition, politics and daily practice has been to reinforce generalising modes of thinking about ‘Afghan culture’ and the ‘tribal’ nature of its peoples. These have been especially visible over the past two decades of international intervention during which time schemes such as the ‘human terrain system’ have employed anthropologists because of their supposed expertise in Afghanistan’s tribal culture and its traditional institutions (Gonzalez 2017). Such modes of reasoning build on colonial knowledge formations (Marsden and Hopkins 2012) and are themselves connected to the current international intervention and the emphasis its proponents have placed on the importance of engaging with Afghans in relation to simplified understandings of ‘local culture’ (Hakimi 2013). In the context of such simplistic understanding of tribal societies, anthropologists have sought to explore the diverse understandings and practices of hospitality in Central Asia. Trade, for example, has historically played a significant role in the social and economic dynamics of the region. In contexts beyond Central Asia, scholars have documented the complex relationship of trading groups to the provision of hospitality (Slezkine 2006). The durability of mercantile communities often depends on their maintaining boundaries between themselves and the majority populations of the societies in which they live, at the same time as establishing connections with significant actors in such societies. As a result, trading communities often regard hospitality ambiguously: they at once guard boundaries between themselves and wider societies, and limit social interactivity, but, at the same time, recognise the value of hospitality in building social relationships, especially with holders of political and economic influence, that are important for their commercial activities. Historians have demonstrated, for example, the ways in which merchant communities often maintained two households: one for receiving state officials and guests, and another for demonstrating their commitment to community boundaries (Bayly 1993). Such multi-​layered practices of hospitality are also a visible aspect of the social practices of Afghan merchants with whom I have worked, many of whom are part of expansive Eurasia-​wide commercial networks. Traders active in long-​distance and often transnational networks distinguish between the practices of hospitality they adopt for those who are and are not members of the networks in which they work (e.g., Marsden 2012). If homes are settings in which fellow traders from the community are invited to meals of home-​cooked foods and relaxed hospitality, then outsiders are invited to public eateries and restaurants, often owned and run by Afghans. Indeed, among such traders, hospitality in the home, far from being regarded as something that can be deployed to forge social relationships, is often instead enacted in the context of a tie of trust having already been established: hospitality affirms but does not make trust for the traders. By contrast, traders seeking to build relationships of trust with strangers will invite them first to meals in restaurants, before demonstrating 428

—​​​​ H o s p i t a l i t y i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

a closer and trusting relationship through an act of hospitality in the home. This processual mode of hospitality constitutes a very different understanding of hospitality from theoretical models that depict the purest forms of hospitality as being the uncalculated embrace of the unknown stranger. The attitudes of traders towards hospitality also brings to light the complex way in which the enactment of hospitality is gendered. The traders with whom I have worked, the vast majority of whom are men, challenge the tendency to think of hospitality in Central Asia as revolving around the figure of the all-​powerful and patriarchal male host. Traders often live and work away from their home for years on end; while some travel with their families, many live apart from their wives and children. During such ‘periods of travel’ (musaafiri), they emphasise their need to learn how to look after a home and to care for both themselves and their guests. Such men earn reputations in the communities with which they identify for their homeliness and prowess in the field of housework and cooking; some are also renowned for their ability to care for people, even as they might also be mocked for being overly feminine (Marsden 2012, 2020). Importantly, while traders may revert to more traditional modes of acting as hosts in the settings in which they live with their families, many lead more complex lives: some act, for example, as the principle providers of care for their children, for example (for a case study, see Marsden 2020). In comparison to tribes, traders tend to hold more nuanced views about the relationship of hospitality to interest. On the one hand, they publicly downplay the expectation of cycles of exchange, but, on the other, recognise that long-​term interests are often an important motivation of being hospitable. Such ambiguities are often evident in the micro-​dynamics of hospitality encounters involving traders. Traders act in a manner that seeks to reduce the scope for acts of hospitality being associated with the intention of future exchanges: they briskly whisk gifts out of sight and refuse to look at or comment upon them, for example. Yet traders widely acknowledge among themselves that being in a position to offer hospitality to relevant individuals in the settings in which they work puts them in a better position to trade than those unable or unwilling to do so. Indeed, traders occasionally remark to one another that having spent so many dollars on a guest he was unable to do what they had hoped he would; such expenditure is known as ‘paisa-​e muft’ (money for free).

THE COMMERCIALISATION OF HOSPITALITY? The ‘commercialisation’ of hospitality is clearly an important aspect of daily life in any Central Asian settings, especially in the context of so-​called ‘Silk Road tourism’; the transformation of local understandings of hospitality engendered by such processes are a rich site for future anthropological investigation, as too are images of the region’s supposedly ‘unique’ hospitality in Silk Road advertising. At the same time, however, the relationship between hospitality and commerce in Central Asia culture and society is long and complex. Living in close proximity to historic trading routes that connected China to Europe and Asian societies to the north and south between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, Central Asia and its people are renowned both for their mobility along such corridors of connectivity, as well as in establishing institutions, most notably lodges and inns (caravanserai), that enabled both mobile merchants and commodities to traverse through Central Asia (e.g., 429

—​​​​ M a g n u s M a r s d e n —​​​​

Hansen 2012, Dale 2002, Levi 1999). In her study of mobile Bukharan merchants in Siberia, Erica Monahan (2015) discusses how Bukharan families who settled in Siberia offered hospitality to peripatetic merchants from Bukhara travelling there on shorter trading sorties. Yet Monahan also documents the ways in which such merchants complained to Siberia’s authorities of the costs of their acting as hosts to merchants from their homeland, urging the opening of functioning caravanserais. In addition to establishing such spaces of hospitality with the requirements of traders in mind, Central Asians also established lodges that served the needs of the region’s pilgrims, especially those making their way on a combination of sea and land routes from the region to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz (Zarcone 2009): far from being simple commercial spaces, such places of rest combined multiple functions and also straddled the boundary between commerce and hospitality (Smith 1980). The caravanserai, thus, straddled boundaries between commercial interest and hospitality, as well as between religious charity and trade. The historically important relationship between commerce and hospitality in Central Asia is a critical reminder of the need to resist the temptation of seeing processes of ‘commercialisation’ as being inevitably modern. In the context of the significance of Central Asia and its mobile communities to contemporary forms of economic globalisation, the region’s people continue to play an important role in building the social infrastructures of hospitality that make possible various forms of mobility and trade (Ibañez Tirado 2018). In the settings of the former Soviet Union, especially cities in Russia and Ukraine, mobile entrepreneurs from Central Asia are active participants in the restaurant and café sector, establishing a range of type of institutions, many of which satisfy the culinary requirements of labourers and traders working in markets and bazaars from Central Asia and beyond (Nikolotov 2019). Beyond the formerly Soviet world, merchants from Central Asia inevitably play an active role in the ‘foodways’ of Asian cities. Stephan Emmrich (2018) has documented the significance of restaurants to the identities of Tajik businessmen in Dubai, for example. Diana Ibañez Tirado (2018) explores the role played by Central Asian eateries in the international trade city of Yiwu in eastern China. Afghan traders enjoy renown in the diverse and mobile populations of inter-​Asian hubs of trade and commerce for establishing restaurants that successfully cater to the diverse tastes of culturally diverse clienteles (Marsden 2021). In cities ranging from Jeddah and Dubai in the Arabian Peninsula, to Yiwu on China’s eastern seaboard, to Istanbul in Turkey, Afghan restaurants provide modified versions of Central Asian dishes that are consumed not merely by mobile Afghans but also by traders from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as locals in each of the settings in which they work. Managing and running such establishments requires the deployment of complex skills of cultural brokerage and mediation that are similar in some respects to those evinced by the individuals and communities responsible for caravanserais but also novel in particular ways. Such skills include the design of menus that are able to attract merchants from the Arab world, West Africa and Eastern Europe, spaces that facilitate cross-​ cultural encounters between Afghan traders and Chinese suppliers, and contexts in which traders feel confident in sharing sensitive information with one another, even as they complain of pervasive surveillance by the authorities of the countries in which they are based. 430

—​​​​ H o s p i t a l i t y i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​

Furthermore, such intensely commercial sites of hospitality have a wider cultural influence in the settings in which they are based. If Central Asia continues to be regarded by scholars and policy makers as being peripheral in multiple respects from the dynamics of Asia and Eurasia, then the pervasive presence of Central Asian restaurateurs in Asia’s great commercial nodes ensures that the region’s cultural influence is registered by local and mobile populations.

CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to emphasise the dynamic and contested nature of practices of, and discourses about, hospitality in Central Asia. It has questioned the tendency for attempts to understand the role played by hospitality in Afghanistan in particular, to focus on tribal and rural contexts, and, instead, argued that being hospitable is an aspect of life in the country and Central Asia more generally that intermeshes with other complex domains, including the surveillance practices of the modern state, as well as its historic political entities, the giving and receiving of favours, the moral evaluation of the wealthy and the powerful, and the role that commerce has historically played in the cultural and social dynamics of Central Asia more generally. At the same time, the chapter has also sought to emphasise the diversity of ways in which Central Asians think about and practice hospitality, thereby challenging the notion that this field of life is best thought of ethnographically in relation to a ‘true’ or culturally universal and morally pure form that is untainted either by human interest or instrumentality. In reality, a historical approach to the understanding of hospitality suggests that it is an important area of human life precisely because of the creative tension that exists within it between selflessness and instrumentality.

REFERENCES Atran, Scott. 2010. Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values and What it Means to be Human, London: Allen Lane. Baig, Rehmat Karim. 2004. Chitral: A Study in Statecraft, 1320–​ 1969, Peshawar: IUCN Pakistan. Bayly, C. 1993 Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Benhabib, S. 2003. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Candea, M. and G. da Coll. 2012. ‘Introduction: The Return to Hospitality’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (S1), S1–​S19 Dale, Stephen. 2002. Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–​1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dresch, Paul. 1998. ‘Mutual Deception: Totality, Exchange and Islam in the Middle East’. In W James and N Allen (eds.), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 111–​33. Edwards, D. 1996. Heroes of the Day: Moral Faultlines along the Afghan Frontier, Berkeley: University of California Press. Elphinstone, Mountstuart. 2015 [1815]. An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary and India. Comprising a View of the Afghaun Nation and a History of the Dooraunee Monarchy. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications: 431

—​​​​ M a g n u s M a r s d e n —​​​​ Emmrich Stephan, Manja. 2018. ‘Playing Cosmopolitan: Muslim Self-​fashioning, Migration, and (Be-​)Longing in the Tajik Dubai Business Sector’, in M. Laurelle (ed.), Being Muslim in Asia, Leiden: Brill, pp. 187–​207. Gonzalez, Roberto. 2017. ‘Beyond the Human Terrain System: A Brief Critical History (and a Look Ahead)’. Journal of the Academy of the Social Sciences 15 (2): 227–​240. Hakimi, Aziz A. 2013. ‘Getting Savages to Fight Barbarians: Counterinsurgency and the Remaking of Afghanistan’. Central Asian Survey 32 (3): 388–​405. Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud. 2011. Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hansen, Valerie. 2012. Silk Road: A New History, Oxford: Oxford University Press Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​ —​ —​ . 1987. ‘  “As in your own house”: Hospitality, Ethnography and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society’, in D. Gilmore (ed.), Honour and Shame in the Unity of the Mediterranean, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Humphrey, Caroline. 2012. ‘Hospitality and tone: holding patterns for strangeness in rural Mongolia’, JRAI special issue: The Return to Hospitality: Strangers, Guests, and Ambiguous Encounters, edited by Matei Candea and Giovanni Da Col, 63–​75. Ibañez Tirado, Diana. 2013. Temporality and Subjectivity in Kulob, Southern Tajikistan: An Ethnography of Ordinary People and Their Everyday Lives, Unpublished PhD Thesis, SOAS, University of London. —​—​—​. 2018. ‘Hierarchies of Trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: The Case of an Uzbek Merchant Family from Tajikistan’. History and Anthropology 29, 31–​47. Levi, Scott. 1999. ‘India, Russia and the Eighteenth-​Century Transformation of the Central Asian Caravan Trade’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42 (4): 519–​548. —​—​—​. 2002. The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–​1900. Leiden: Brill. Lindholm, Charles. 1982. Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pakhtun of Northern Pakistan, New York: Columbia University Press. Marsden, Magnus. 2012. ‘Fatal Embrace: Trading in Hospitality on the Frontiers of South and Central Asia’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18 (s1): 117–​130. —​ —​ —​ . 2020. ‘Manly Merchants: Commerce, Mobility and Masculinity Among Afghan Traders in Eurasia’. Anthropology of the Middle East 14 (2): 55–​76. —​—​—​. 2021. Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​and Hopkins, Benjamin. 2012. Fragments of the Afghan Frontier. London: Hurst; New York: Columbia University Press. Meneley, A. 1998. Tournaments of Value: Sociality and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Monahan, Erika. 2015. The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nikolotov, Anton. 2019. ‘Volatile Conviviality: Joking relations in Moscow’s marginal marketplace’. Modern Asian Studies 53 (3): 874–​903. Ortner, Sherry. 1973. ‘On Key Symbols’. American Anthropologist 75 (5): 1338–​46/​ Reeves, Madeleine. 2016. ‘Diplomat, Landlord, Con-​artist, Thief: Housing Brokers and the Mediation of Risk in Migrant Moscow’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 34 (2): 93–​109. Selwyn, T. 2010. ‘An Anthropology of Hospitality’, in C. Lashley and A. Morrison (eds.) Search of Hospitality: Theoretical Perspectives and Debates, Oxford: Butterworth and Heinemann.

432

—​​​​ H o s p i t a l i t y i n C e n t r a l A s i a —​​​​ Shryock, A. 2004. ‘The New Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host and Guest in the Culture of Public Display’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46: 35–​62. —​ —​ —​ . 2008. ‘Thinking about Hospitality, with Derrida, Kant and the Balga Bedouin’. Anthropos 103: 405–​21. —​ —​ —​ . 2012. ‘Breaking Hospitality Apart: Bad Hosts, Bad Guests, and the Problem of Sovereignty’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (S1): 20–​33. Slezkine, Yuri. 2006. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Grace Martin 1980. ‘The Özbek Tekkes of Istanbul’. Der Islam, 57 (1): 130–​39. Sneath, David. 2007. The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia. New York: Columbia University Press. Vámbéry, Arminius. 2014 [1863]. Travels in Central Asia Performed in the Year 1863. Createspace Independent Publishers. Werbner, Pnina. 2016. ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition Sufi Networks, Hospitality, and Translocal Inclusivity’, in Leon Buskins and Annemarie Sandwijk, Islamic Studies in the Twenty-​first Century, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 223–​239. Werner, Cynthia. 1998. ‘Household Networks and the Security of Mutual Indebtedness in Rural Kazakstan’. Central Asian Survey 17 (4): 597–​612. Zanca, Russell. 2003. ‘Take! Take! Take! Host-​Guest Relations and All that Food: Uzbek Hospitality Past and Present’. Anthropology of East Europe Review, 21 (1): 8–​16. Zarcon, Thierry V. 2009. Sufi Pilgrims from Central Asia and India in Jerusalem. Kyoto: Research Center for Islamic Area Studies Center for Islamic Area Studies at Kyoto University (KIAS).

433

CHAPTER TWENTY-​N INE

MOBILE LIVELIHOODS OF KYRGYZ TABLIGHI JAMAAT Living between two worlds Emil Nasritdinov TWO FINGERS “Look at these two fingers”—​says an elderly Kyrgyz Tablighi aksakal with a long white beard and wrinkled kind face. He is sticking the index and middle fingers of his right hand right into my face. He moves them apart making a V-​sign and bringing them together again several times, before settling on a closed position to grab my full attention: These two fingers are like din [religion] and duniya [world]. They are always together, yet this one (he uses an index finger from his left hand to point to the middle finger on his right hand) is slightly longer. This is din. You cannot separate din from duniya, you must work and provide for your family, but din is still slightly more important, just like this finger is slightly longer than this one. Do you understand? I do. But only in theory. I also understand that bringing the two different worlds together and living on the border is not as easy as closing on two fingers. It means continuous going back and forth, daily crossing of boundaries, switching the modes of thinking, switching codes, balancing, negotiating, submerging and reemerging. It seems so much easier to live in just one world, it does not matter which one. You just set your speed, fix it on a cruiser mode, go into a semi-​autopilot and enjoy the scenery outside. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years and by the time you wake up, you are almost 50 and the scenery outside hasn’t changed a bit. I shake off my thoughts, look at the aksakal and force a smile: “Rahmat ata” (“Thank you father”; “father” here is a respectful reference to someone much older). I have started this chapter with this description of my own experience for a reason. I am writing this chapter both as a practicing Muslim and a member of the Kyrgyz Tablighi Jamaat1 community—​the main protagonists of this chapter—​on the one hand and as scholar/​ethnographer of religion on the other. I do not have a theological education, but I have been practicing Islam and have been familiar with Tablighi Jamaat for nearly twenty years. Somewhat halfway through this period, I also started

434

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-35

— ​​​​ Ky r g y z T a b l i g h i J a m a a t : l i v i n g b e t w e e n t w o w o r l d s —​​​​

writing about my experience of Islam and Tablighi Jamaat and about the lives of other people and communities in Kyrgyzstan affected by Islam. So, on the one hand, I have an advantage of having first-​hand experience of the main theme in question in this chapter and I have very good connections with the community members. On the other hand, being an insider, I sometimes struggle with the lack of distance. This must be acknowledged, so that the reader knows where some of my views come from. Yet, when I weigh all pros and cons of me being the insider to the community I describe, I believe that there are more pros: as a practicing Muslim and practicing Tablighi, I have a deeper understanding of the subject; while on the other hand, my anthropological background gives me more interesting analytical perspectives on the practice itself (including on the question of din vs. duniya and question of border crossing between the two raised in this introduction) than those of regular members and observers of the movement. Living on the border between two worlds—​ is what many davatchys2 (local name for the members of Tablighi Jamaat movement (see Hölzchen, this volume) in Kyrgyzstan have been doing for years since the mid-​90s. The Tablighi worldview does not appreciate monasticism. It demands of a person to be an active member of society, to be productive economically, to contribute, to excel in one’s work and to study. Yet, while recognizing the importance of all worldly matters, it also places them in a secondary position, while giving priority to the matters and affairs of religion. A committed davatchy gives a significant amount of time daily, weekly, monthly and yearly to engagement in various Tablighi activities in the mosque and regularly traveling with the jamaat (group) on trips of different lengths (for example, three days, forty days, even up to four months). It is hard to do both and commit to one’s worldly and religious obligations: this is why many give up. The majority, like myself, end up living in the duniya, while being sympathetic to the Tablighi cause and joining Tablighi trips from time to time, deluding themselves into the belief that one day they will commit. The minority goes to the other extreme: they give up the world and devote themselves completely to the matters of din. They quit their jobs and businesses and live by exercising their belief in the power of the creator to sustain them and their families without intermediaries. Harmless monks as they are, in Kyrgyzstan, this small group calls themselves Yakyn Inkar (conviction and rejection), and was banned by the state as an extremist organization (see below). The absurdity of such labeling aside, the ban just shows how post-​Soviet traditions are very different from those of Buddhist, Catholic and Orthodox Christian cultures with their strong appreciation of monasticism. Perhaps, the Soviet policy of criminalizing loitering and “parasitism” also still has a very strong legacy here. Yet, these two groups aside, there is still a handful of Tablighi members who manage to combine the two worlds and lead active religious and economic lives. What kind of strategies do they use to do so? This is the main question of this chapter. To answer this question, I will focus on the most common form of economic activity for Tablighis in Kyrgyzstan—​commerce. I will proceed by looking at the trading and religious activities of Kyrgyz Tablighis in Bishkek’s Avtorynok market for cars. At the end of the chapter, I return to the controversy around Yakyn Inkar.

435

—​​​​ E m i l N a s r i t d i n o v —​​​​

COMMERCE Tablighi Jamaat in Kyrgyzstan represents a very economically diverse group. While it is generally believed that the majority are from the economically less advantageous layers, the middle class is quite solidly represented and there are also some members from wealthier groups. In regard to their occupations, the group is also quite diverse, as much as the economic situation in Kyrgyzstan allows that. There are professionals such as businessmen, doctors and farmers. However, for a number of reasons, the most common type of economic activity for Tablighis is commerce. First of all, commerce is convenient, because it gives Tablighis the flexibility to leave their work whenever they need to travel. Secondly, in the context of post-​ Soviet mass unemployment, many people became engaged in cross-​border trade with neighboring countries and started working in large markets in Kyrgyzstan. As a result, commerce became quite a socially acceptable and profitable occupation. Some traders who had professional jobs in the past (e.g., engineers, teachers, doctors who lost their jobs, or whose salaries became unsatisfactory with the post-​ Soviet economic collapse) were somewhat ashamed of their trading activity in bazaars, but for Tablighis this was not a problem at all, because trade itself is considered Sunnah—​the practice of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). Since one of the main goals of Tablighis is to emulate the Prophet (SAW), following his economic traits was quite appreciated. Many Tablighis went even further in connecting their commerce with the mosque, by trading in various kinds of religious merchandise. Many mosques have small shops on their territory, while the Central Mosque in Bishkek has nearly twenty shops and trading tables. These shops stock Islamic clothing, including typical Tablighi-​style clothes from India or Pakistan, Islamic literature in Russian and Kyrgyz languages, including the main books used by Tablighis, non-​alcoholic oil scents, miswaks (wooden toothbrush), beads, traditional Islamic medicine, and even halal food products. Having a workplace just next to the mosque makes it easy for Tablighi to attend daily prayers with their jamaat and participate in the daily and weekly Tablighi activities in the mosque. A socially active Tablighi life also helps such traders to extend the network of their potential customers. Combining economic and religious interests helps Tablighis overcome the din–​ duniya dissonance in their life, have a more coherent lifestyle and stay within the bounds of religious space, even in the times when they are not engaged in Tablighi work. Another popular Tablighi commercial path is the trade in halal meat products. Many halal butcher shops are also conveniently located close to mosques. The typical sunnah-​style dress of Tablighi halal butchers (skull-​cap, long dress below knees and loose pants with the cut above the ankles) becomes a competitive advantage, because it makes the halal-​ness of meat seem more trustworthy and authentic. For Tablighis themselves, this work is seen not only as an income opportunity, but also as a service to the Muslim community, and this also helps them overcome the conceptual distance between din and duniya. Interestingly, many of these Muslim shops today can be found in the major bazaars of the country. In the next section, we will look at the relationship between two unique Central Asian places: bazaars and mosques. 436

— ​​​​ Ky r g y z T a b l i g h i J a m a a t : l i v i n g b e t w e e n t w o w o r l d s —​​​​

THE BEST AND THE WORST OF PLACES Prophet Muhammad (SAW) recommended a special dua (supplication) to be recited before entering the market for the protection from its evils. Yet, he himself was a merchant and so were many of his sahabahs (companions). Trading in the bazaar often involves risks, especially for wholesale traders. There are so many external factors outside of traders’ control (greedy customs officers, fluctuating prices of, and demand for, goods, delays in delivery and so on) which can make some traders more superstitious; they employ such practices as burning ysyryk (Peganum harmala—​a folk medicine plant) and hanging amulets inside trading stalls. Trading in the bazaar also makes some traders more religious: they pray five times daily, attend mosque and engage in missionary and charity work as a way of earning God’s favor. The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) called bazaars the worst places, and mosques the best places, because a bazaar makes a person forget the Creator and engages the heart in worldly matters, as opposed to the mosque where it is easy for one to remember Allah. One of my Tablighi informants gave the following explanations for this. Everything is created by Allah and He is the only one worthy of praise. The same applies to the goods sold in the market: people only used raw materials supplied to them by Allah, and manufactured goods, which they were selling in the markets. But to sell their goods, many people start praising them. Bazaars are the places where a lot of goods are sold and a lot of such praising and advertisement is done. Tablighis see bazaars as places where there is a lot of room for shaitan (Satan) to maneuver and affect people. In such a view, shaitan forces people to cheat, to not disclose the defects of the merchandise, to give wrong measures of weight, etc. For these reasons, bazaars are places which are disliked by Allah. Yet, if we look at the history of the Islamic world, we can find much evidence of how trade and religion were strongly interconnected and how the two places—​ bazaar and mosque—​act as the two key components of Islamic urban infrastructure. They were often adjacent to each other and in some cases, mosques were located inside bazaars. This can be explained as a simple matter of convenience: the large number of traders, who spent a significant part of their day in the bazaar, needed a mosque nearby, so that they would not have to leave their trading places for too long, when they go to perform their daily prayers. Many famous Central Asian cities, such as Bukhara, Khiva and Samarqand were located on the routes of the ancient Silk Road, which connected China with the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Russia and Europe. This trading network was functioning since about the second century BC. In his book Religions on the Silk Road, Richard Foltz (2010) describes the key role of the Silk Road as a channel for the movement of religious ideas. He describes how in the pre-​Islamic Central Asia, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity were spreading through the Road’s networks, and how Islam spread and became a dominant religion in the region because the territory was so well interconnected. Islam significantly spread with the help of Muslim merchants caravaning the paths and trading in the bazaars of the ancient Silk Road. Since then, bazaars and mosques flourished in Central Asia. The cities of Central Asia were not only the biggest bazaars on the Silk Road, they were also the centers of Islamic knowledge, and homes to hundreds of mosques and madrasas. But with the 437

—​​​​ E m i l N a s r i t d i n o v —​​​​

establishment of Soviet rule, this ancient trading network was completely blocked, and Central Asian trade turned north towards Russia. Similarly, with the blockage of the Silk Road, the “religious” spine of the region was also broken. Central Asia was isolated from its Muslim neighbor regions and other kinds of ideas started flowing from the North, mostly in the form of communist atheist propaganda. The collapse of the Soviet economy and communist ideology in 1991 brought the revival of both cross-​border trade (Spector, 2017; Karrar, this volume) and Islam (Heyat, 2004). In post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan, bazaars mushroomed and so did mosques, which were often built inside or just next to bazaars. Large quantities of cheap goods produced in China made their way into Central Asia and then further into Russia and Kazakhstan via Kyrgyzstani markets (Nasritdinov & O’Connor, 2009). Nearly a hundred markets were established or revived in the country. In a similar way, Central Asian borders opened up for religious ideas and many mosques were built. Today, almost every village in the country has a mosque and there are about 4,000 mosques all together. We can see how the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the revival of both trade and religion and the expansion of both bazaars and mosques. In my attempt to understand the way Tablighis navigate the borders of two worlds (religious and worldly), I am going to discuss various strategies used by Tablighis who sell cars in the Avtorynok (car market) located at the western entrance to Bishkek. Throughout the discussion, I will be exploring the theme of barakat (blessing) as related to trade, and to what one could call a “risk economy,” and analyze how the connection between trade and religion is developing in the discourses of Tablighi traders in Kyrgyzstan.

AVTORYNOK The car market Avtorynok was established in the western outskirts of Bishkek in 1970s during Soviet times. At that time, one could only buy Soviet cars there, such as Zhiguli, Moskvich, Zaporozhets. In the early 1990s, when borders opened up, the first peregonshiki (transporters) started going to Germany. The break-​ up of the Soviet Union left a large population and a tremendous deficit of cars. People were “hungry” for cars and suddenly there was this huge market with a big demand for foreign cars. My friend Amir-​baike (name has been changed) has been involved with car trading since 1998. He is now a real legend in the market. He works only two days a week—​ Saturday and Sunday. These are the days the market is working. He devotes the other five days of the week to family, mosque and Tablighi activities. These two days of work are sufficient for him to raise his three sons and to travel around the world for spiritual purposes: he has been to India, Bangladesh, Russia, Kazakhstan, sometimes spending four months there. He has two houses in Bishkek, one of which he rents out. He originally started as a transporter going to Latvia to deliver cars. He went twice, but then realized that it was too risky: at that time, there were racketeers in Belorussia, Latvia and in Kazakhstan; car accidents related to long driving were frequent, and one needed larger sums of money to make transporting profitable. There was no point of bringing just one car—​one had to buy at least three, four, or

438

— ​​​​ Ky r g y z T a b l i g h i J a m a a t : l i v i n g b e t w e e n t w o w o r l d s —​​​​

more: one car would be driven to Bishkek by a buyer himself, while the other cars would be sent by train or trailer. So, instead Amir-​baike decided to work as a reseller in the market. He would buy a car, add a bit on the top and resell it. I was told by my other friends in the market that when other traders would hardly sell one car per week, he would be selling two cars per day. There are many stories about him. For example, the best season for selling cars is in the fall during the harvest when everybody has money. Logically, it would make sense to be active during this period, but Amir-​baike would leave for his 40-​day or four-​month Tablighi journeys. He would return in winter during the dead trading season, and when nobody else could sell, he would compensate for everything he lost during the peak season. When explaining his secrets, his friends would say—​he has more kurbani (sacrifice) than many others. Another story explains how some Tablighi people act against traditional bazaar logic. For example, it is recommended that a car should stay in one place, so that a potential buyer who circles a market in the search of a car would remember its location and if he likes it, he would come back to where he saw it. Bakyt-​domla (name changed)—​the imam of a mosque who is also an Islamic scholar and a car dealer—​ would do the opposite: he would stay in one place for some time and then move to another one and still manage to sell the car. He would also intentionally buy a car, which seemed completely unsellable and then sell it with a high profit. Bakyt-​domla is also famous for another story. From an Islamic perspective, it is acceptable not to return the merchandise back once it was sold, but it is highly encouraged to do so: there is a promise that a palace in Jannat (paradise) is given to the one who allows the merchandise to be returned. Bakyt-​domla once sold an old Mazda four times. Three times it was returned to him, but he never refused to take it back and he always returned the purchaser’s money. When he finally sold it for the fourth time, he earned as much as from four regular deals. Stories like this are very important in the discourses of Kyrgyz Tablighi traders. They help establish the logic, and explain and comprehend the risks associated with trade. There are many similar stories. Whether they are true or not is a different question, but the fact is they strongly affect the behavior and trading practices of Muslims in Kyrgyzstani markets. Two other ways of increasing one’s success in trade are shared among the traders. The first is through charity: it is believed that if a Muslim shares his wealth, Allah compensates him at least ten times. Out of the ten-​time compensation, one-​tenth is given in this world and nine-​tenths are preserved for the reward in the next world.3 It is believed that provision for every human being has been predestined, and one cannot change it by doing extra work in the market, or taking more risks. The only way of changing one’s destiny in regards to provision is through the increase of charity. Sadaka—​charity is usually given secretly, so that “one’s left hand does not know what the right hand does.”4 Because of this, nobody reveals how much they give. Occasionally, from indirect conversations with Amir-​baike, I could only guess, and it seemed quite a lot (see also Botoeva’s paper in this volume, on the moral economy of the halal industry in Kyrgyzstan). The second way of increasing success in trade is through religious amals (activities). These include: spending more time in the mosque, praying tahajud namaz

439

—​​​​ E m i l N a s r i t d i n o v —​​​​

(night prayer), fasting, inviting other people to join Islam, going in the path of Allah. One Tablighi trader explained this concept to me by citing the example of a pre-​paid mobile operator: We all put money to our respective accounts and use it until one day the money in the account is finished and the operator is saying: “Please add money to your balance.” When a Muslim is involved in religious activities, his balance of rewards and favors from God is increasing, but when his balance of good deeds is used up and not refilled, the problems start. (Interview with a Tablighi trader in the Avtorynok, Bishkek) Another important point is that Tablighis believe that when a person is engaged in religious activities, his duas (supplications) are more likely to be accepted, including those with a request for success in trade. These narratives and stories are shared among Tablighi car-​ dealers. What is interesting is that they are often more important than real-​life interactions. One could expect that the mosque would serve as a place where strong social networks are established, which then could be used in trade. However, Islamic scholars in Kyrgyzstan do not recommend combining “business with pleasure,” in order to avoid conflicting situations, where business relations would affect the friendship and spiritual connections among the Muslim dealers. So, these networks function mostly on the level of information sharing, but also as time spent together. I was told how ten Tablighis would align their cars for sale in the market, then sit in one of them and have one of them talk about the greatness of Allah and invite everybody to follow the Islamic practices and be an active Muslim. This way they were earning the favors of Allah and increasing the chances for successful deals. Sometimes, Tablighis would put money together in order to buy a car and sell it together, with an understanding that for two or more people there is more yrysky (destined provision) and it is easier to sell the car that way.5 There was a story of one Tablighi who could not sell his car for a very long time. Other Tablighis called a mashvara (council) and decided to put together the sum and buy it from him. Once they did that, they sold it together in no time. Finally, all Tablighi car dealers I interviewed point out the importance of telling a potential buyer all the defects of the car. It works against the bazaar logic, but at the same time—​it increases the consumers’ trust. Often, a customer would listen to the seller describe all the car’s defects, go away for some time, but eventually return because at least he knows with more certainty what is wrong with the car he is buying. Successful traders had another practice that also acted against the logic of the bazaar. Past midday, while trade was at its peak, they would pack and leave the market in order to be in time for prayer in the mosque, if there was no mosque in the market itself. At that time of the day, there was little traffic in the market and they would easily leave the place. But those who stayed until afternoon often would get stuck in traffic for a couple of hours, because of the bottlenecks at the market exits. It was not a surprise that three years ago a new mosque was built—​just across the road from the Autorynok. It is quite large in size, but not as lively as the one in Dordoi. One problem with it is that the market works only on weekends; on 440

— ​​​​ Ky r g y z T a b l i g h i J a m a a t : l i v i n g b e t w e e n t w o w o r l d s —​​​​

weekdays, there are not many people around. Yet, there are efforts by the jamaats from other localities to bring the mosque to life. Time will show if this mosque will become an important part of the bazari community and whether there will be a successful partnership between the two. Meanwhile, Amir-​baike describes that even though he spends only two days a week in the bazaar, these two days have a strong negative effect on him. They draw his energy and the motivation that he builds up during the week. He feels exhausted and emptied after working in the market, and it takes him a few days to recover. It does cost some effort for Amir-​baike to return to the market and he does feel tempted not to, but his family obligations and his position in regards to balancing religious and worldly affairs compel him to return. Yet, he knows several of his friends who found worldly matters too heavy and too distracting from their religious lives and decided to devote their lives to worship alone. He does not appreciate their choice; he is quite critical of it, like many other Tablighis, and he wishes better for them and their families. In the next section, we will steal a glance into the lives of those who decided to stay on the religious side of the din vs. duniya equilibrium.

YAKYN INKAR: CONVICTION AND REJECTION The Tablighi message in general is quite straightforward: the closer you follow the Sunnah and the more you pray, perform zikr (remembrance of God), obtain knowledge, and make dawah (inviting others to join Islam), the better. Very simple mathematics are at work here, with all good actions translated into rewards in the next life. However, there are issues that are not as easy to “economize”—​issues that have inherent contradictions and demand more nuance. One of such contradictory and delicate questions is that of wealth. A number of authors point to the Tablighis’ emphasis on modesty and simplicity and not attaching oneself to the pleasures and riches of this life, at the cost of bounties promised by Allah as a reward in the next life. The Kyrgyz Tablighis’ discourse on wealth is more complicated though. On the one hand, there is a lot of discouragement of worldly pursuit, as in the hadith frequently mentioned in the bayans (sermons) about a rich person having to wait for 500 years before entering paradise after a poor person does, or in the frequently cited Quranic verse warning a person to not let his wealth and his family distract him from his duties to Allah. On the other hand, poverty is described as potentially leading a person to despair, loss of hope and eventual loss of faith, and characters of wealthy sahabas (companions of the Prophet), such as Abdur-​Rahman Ibn ‘Awf are strongly praised for being successful businessmen and sharing their wealth with the community. So, the ideal perhaps lies somewhere in the middle, and a more balanced average Tablighi discourse on wealth runs a very fine line between the rejection of duniya (this world) and the importance of it. This discourse unfortunately has become a reason behind the main schism among Kyrgyz Tablighi. For people living in an economy that does not provide many employment or income opportunities, aTablighi philosophy that justifies and appreciates poverty can become too comforting. It offers a convenient reason to withdraw from worldly pursuits and devote oneself to God and activities at the mosque. It is often emphasized that the main purpose of going on the davaat (prosyletizing) journey is to affirm one’s own yakyn (conviction) in kalimah (declaration of faith) “La ilaha 441

—​​​​ E m i l N a s r i t d i n o v —​​​​

illallah, Muhammadur Rasulullah” (There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger). The meaning of this kalimah is discussed and repeated on a daily basis during the trips. In the Tablighi version, the main meaning of kalimah is that everything that happens in people’s life, happens by the will of Allah and nothing can benefit or harm people without His will. Tablighis are encouraged to see the world as the world of means: food is the means through which Allah satisfies people’s hunger; medicine is the means through which Allah gives health. The fact that medicine may help one patient but not the other, in the Tablighi view, explains that it is not the medicine, but rather Allah who cures illness. The same logic applies to work: people tend to believe that it is work that pays for bills and gives them money to buy things, while in reality Allah does not need work to provide for a person, He can provide directly from his kazyna (heavenly storage). The amount of yrysky (provision) that a person is destined to receive in his lifetime has been written millions of years ago. So, some Tablighis have been taking this message too literally, arguing that they do not need to work because their provision does not depend on it, and that it is better to devote one’s life to the mosque and missionary work. Such a philosophy began to become popular and even institutionalize itself in the late 2000s. One of the most popular figures was Nurulloh sheikh from the village of Belovodskoe, near Bishkek. Popular myths about him describe how he put a hand into his right pocket every morning and found a 500-​som bill there. Thus, it was said, he did not have to work and could devote all his time to davaat. Abdurakhman sheikh had a number of followers in Belovedskoe and sympathizers in other places. People began to call this vaguely defined group Yakyn Inkar (conviction and rejection, that is, conviction in God’s power and rejection of worldly concerns), while a follower would be called yakynshik (-​shik being the Russian suffix for someone who is connected to some activity). The origins of this term are not easy to trace: it is not clear whether the group members came up with this name themselves, or whether they were labeled in this way by others. Almost from the time it appeared, the term yakynshik had a negative connotation and not just among outsiders, but also among other Tablighis. It so happened that such practices were met with strong disapproval from the Tablighi leadership in the country; many concerns were expressed at mashvara (councils) on various levels, stating that the Yakyn Inkar style of preaching would push people away from Tablighi Jamaat, because it shows Tablighis as lazy, fanatical and fatalistic. So, the leaders attempted to talk common sense into Nurulloh sheikh and his supporters, urging them to return to a more socially acceptable way of Tablighi life, that balances spiritual and economic commitments and responsibilities. The message did not get through and as a result, the Tablighi community became divided. Feeling that they were under unjustified criticism, many yakynshiks stopped attending mashvaras (councils) and began to arrange their own davaat trips without consultation with the Ruh Jamaat (a group that has a roster of mosques, keeps a record of davaat trips and and decides which mosques jamaats should travel to). Yakynshiks also slightly modified their physical appearance. The main distinctions included: always wearing long Islamic dress, wearing a turban instead of a skullcap, and most notably, letting the hair grow to one arm’s length, which was also Sunnah. The group did not have a solid structure and never caused conflicts with regular Tablighis, but the divide was still unfortunate and many Tablighis were concerned about the consequences. 442

— ​​​​ Ky r g y z T a b l i g h i J a m a a t : l i v i n g b e t w e e n t w o w o r l d s —​​​​

If Tablighi Jamaat is a global phenomenon, the Yakyn Inkar is a uniquely local Kyrgyz practice. The term “Yakyn Inkar” is also a local Kyrgyz invention: “Yakyn” means conviction, and “inkar,” rejection. Together, the term means to develop the conviction that everything (including provision) is from God and to reject worldly matters, including the need to work. If one googles the title, the only references that come out are about Kyrgyzstan. The discourses about the need to work are not unique only to Kyrgyzstan; they can be found almost in all Tablighi communities around the world. But as far as my knowledge extends, only in Kyrgyzstan has the group institutionalized and developed its own name. This is further evidence for the way global ideas adapt to local conditions. During my trip to India, we had a couple of fellows from Kazakhstan in our jamaat, who had a very similar attitude to life and they manifested it in similar ways. For example, one of them had the skin on his feet all cracked, which gave him severe pain and made it difficult to work. I had a special cream, which could help him cure it, but he refused to apply it, saying that Prophet Muhammad (SAW) did not use such creams and that God was in no need of this cream to cure him. The other Kazakh fellow used to train his yakyn in his own unique ways. For example, if he was sitting at one end of the dostorkhon (table cloth) and he saw bananas at the opposite end, instead of asking other jamaat members to pass one to him, he would make an internal supplication asking Allah to give the banana to him. If a person on the other end decided to distribute bananas or asked if others wanted some, then he saw his supplication as answered. If nobody made a move and he did not get any bananas, then this meant that banana was not in his yrysky for that day. For him, this was one of his daily exercises in refuting the help of creations and relying on the help of the creator only. His favorite story to tell during his bayans (sermons) was that of Prophet Ibrahim, who was thrown into the fire and repeatedly refused the help of angels who offered to rescue him. “Are you Haliq [creator] or mahlyuk [creation]?” was Ibrahim’s question and upon hearing that angels were creations, he would say: “Then, I am in no need of your help. Allah is sufficient for me.” The story ends with Allah making the temperature of the fire so pleasant and cool that Ibrahim eventually thought of his time inside the fire as the best time of his life. Stories of that sort were abounding in yakynshiks’ narratives. According to my observations in India, such strong rejections of duniya were not common among other “Russian” (post-​Soviet) jamaats, but mostly among the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs.6 Interestingly, Indian sheikhs knew about this tendency among Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, and while I was at the Nizamudin Margaz in Delhi, I listened to several bayans by the local veterans of the movement specifically for Kyrgyz and Kazakhs. In these bayans, they emphasized the necessity to study, work and be active members of public (but not political) life. It is suggested that the dawah of a person who has a job and worldly responsibilities is more effective than that of a person who does not, because it shows that one could be materially involved, yet participate in the Tabligh. So, both in India and at home, Kyrgyz Tablighis are regularly reminded about the need to work and earn halal income to provide for their families. In the summer of 2017, Yakyn Inkar was banned by the Oktyabrskii Court in Bishkek as an extremist organization.7 The decision itself is quite absurd, because of all Islamic groups in Kyrgyzstan, Yakyn Inkar is probably the least harmful. The 443

—​​​​ E m i l N a s r i t d i n o v —​​​​

followers do not even want to work, let alone speak of political claims. One of the justifications for the ban was the refusal of some yakynshiks to send their children to school, or to vaccinate children. Such cases attracted a lot of media attention and public criticism. Since the group was banned, a number of followers were arrested and the group became less visible. This does not mean that they all started working, but they try to keep a low profile.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have described how Tablighis negotiate the two worlds: duniya and din. While some prefer to negate the physical world and devote themselves to religion and davaat activities, others choose worldly matters and distance themselves from Tablighi practice by remaining sympathizers. Yet, some try to balance the two worlds. A large number of such Tablighis revive the Sunnah by engaging in trade, and become innovative in their trading practices. Some decide to sell Islamic merchandise in the shops near the mosque; others come up with all kinds of interesting Islamic strategies to make their trade successful, resulting in interesting connections between mosques and bazaars. As years go by, and devoted Tablighis accumulate experience in maintaining such a balance, going back and forth between din and duniya, we observe the emergence of a new culture and tradition. In many ways, this revolutionizes the post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstani worldview, yet does so subtly and unnoticeably. It provides new perspectives on the economy, new priorities in life, and new social, economic and religious practices. Together, these constitute a new (for Kyrgyzstan) lifestyle that in some ways defies both the socialist logic of the Soviet past and the capitalist logic of post-​Soviet liberal economy.

NOTES 1 Tablighi Jamaat is a movement for the revival of Islam that originated in India in the late 1920s under the guidance of the scholar Maulyana Ilyas Khandahlavi. The movement is apolitical and its main goal involves calling Muslims to be better Muslims and reminding them about their religious duties. Members of the movement do not intentionally preach to non-​Muslims (unless requested/​approached by the latter themselves). One of the main activities is traveling for religious purposes for the periods of three days, 40 days, or four months, during which they usually stay in the mosque, where they have lessons among themselves, talk to mosque visitors and go out to the streets and houses to invite Muslims to the mosque. Over the last century, the movement first became popular in India and then spread all across the world. Its first members came to Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s and reached the peak of popularity in the 2000s (Balci, 2012) 2 Davatchy is a Kyrgyz term for someone who is engaged in Dawah (Arabic)—​call to Islam. It so happened that since the 1990s, this term was used instead of Tabligh and nowadays, many people (both participants and outsiders) are not familiar with the term Tabligh. 3 This sounds like “banking thinking” with calculations and in my opinion, it is. I have often heard the folk expression of investing into “Akhirat Bank.” Akhirat is an Arabic term for the “next world.” There are many places in the Qur’an, where Allah asks people to give Him a loan (by doing charity). The theme of rewards is also strongly present and based on precise calculations. For example, a prayer offered in the mosque is 27 times better than a prayer performed at home. In that regard, Islam is not a completely altruistic religion: it motivates 444

— ​​​​ Ky r g y z T a b l i g h i J a m a a t : l i v i n g b e t w e e n t w o w o r l d s —​​​​ people to do good deeds by promising rewards in both this world and the next. Another example that comes from a hadith: if a Muslim visits another Muslim who is ill, 70,000 angels make supplications for him while he is doing it. 4 This comes from a hadith narrated by Abu Hurairah: “A man who gives in charity and hides it, such that his left hand does not know what his right hand gives in charity; and a man who remembered Allah in private and so his eyes shed tears.” (Saheeh al-​Bukhari (English trans.) vol. 1, p. 356, no.629 and Saheeh Muslim (English trans.) vol. 2, p. 493, no. 2248). The meaning of this is to keep one’s charity discreet. 5 For example, a person is destined to receive $500 in provision this month, while he is trying to sell a car with the profit of $1,000. If he sells it himself, he will not be able to sell it, since the requested amount is larger than what he is destined to receive. However, if he sells it with another person, they split the provision in two and he receives his $500. 6 On different attitudes to work and potential links to mobile pastoralist and agriculturalist legacies, see Nasritdinov (2012). 7 Azattyk (2017):. Sud zapretil deyatelnost techeniya “Yakyn Inkar” (The court has banned the activity of “Yakyn Inkar” movement), https://​rus.azat​tyk.org/​a/​28625​354.html accessed October 5, 2021. In my opinion, the Court’s decision was motivated by the desire to find scapegoats in their policies against radicalization. They couldn’t find Tablighi Jamaat extremists, so they selected Yakyn Inkar as a group within Tablighi Jamaat, which was more extreme in regards to such matters as employment, school and vaccinations and which was not under the control of the Muftiyat (like other Tablighis), thus banned it.

REFERENCES Azattyk (2017) “Sud zapretil deyatelnost techeniya ‘Yakyn Inkar’ ” (The court has banned the activity of “Yakyn Inkar” movement), https://​rus.azat​tyk.org/​a/​28625​354.html, accessed October 5, 2021. Balci, B. (2012) “The rise of the Jama’at al Tabligh in Kyrgyzstan: the revival of Islamic ties between the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia?” Central Asian Survey, 31(1): 61–​76 Foltz, R. (2010) Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Heyat, F. (2004) “Re-​ Islamisation in Kyrgyzstan: Gender, New Poverty and the Moral Dimension.” Central Asian Survey, 23 (3–​4): 275–​287. Nasritdinov, E. (2012) “Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travellers.” In: Forum AI: Unsettling Nomadism/​ОСТРАНЕНИЕ НОМА ДИЗМА, edited by Serguei A. Oushakine. Ab Imperio (2), 145–​167. Nasritdinov E. & K. O’Connor (2009) Regional Change in Kyrgyzstan: Bazaars, Cross-​Border Trade and Social Networks. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. Spector, R. (2017) Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

445

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE VALUE OF A DEAD MINER Industrial accidents, compensation and fairness in Kazakhstan Eeva Kesküla The management and employees of the company share the pain of loss and express deep condolences to the families and friends of the deceased. Assistance to the families of the victims will be provided in full. All costs for the organization and holding of the burial are covered by the company… . ArcelorMittal’s spokesperson in Karaganda, Kazakhstan on 1 September 2017 (Kazinform, 2017).

On 31 August 2017, three young miners died when methane gas burst into part of a mine in the Karaganda area where coal miners were working. Three days later, they were buried, commemorated with speeches by relatives and the officials of the mining and steel company ArcelorMittal. The miners’ photos, and large colourful flowers decorated the graves in the steppe cemetery where tombstones would be placed (Figure 30.1). In the nearby mining town of Shakhtinsk, relatives and colleagues gathered in a café for the wake. In the hallway of the café, large photos of the miners were mounted, with a piece of bread placed in front of each picture. The food on the tables remained almost untouched: big trays of fruit and salads lay next to the unopened vodka bottles. People came together, said a few words and then each went their own way. Real commemorations would take place later in less formal home settings. The brother-​in-​law of one of the miners, Maxim, came to talk to me, the foreign anthropologist, at an empty table, so as not to disturb the relatives. Still shocked, he told me how Maxim had been a wonderful person, a good worker, taking care of his family well. He added that the compensation for the death would be worth ten times Maxim’s annual salary. This chapter focuses on two fundamental aspects of miners’ lives: industrial accidents and subsequent compensation in the Karaganda coal-​ mining area of Central Kazakhstan. Mining is hard and dangerous work, but also supplies a relatively well-​paid and stable income. The job comes with a known trade-​off: industrial accidents are frequent. When these happen, the company pays a compensation and it is quite common to begin talking about this as soon as someone dies. Looking at such compensations in the cultural context of post-​Soviet industrial labour gives us an insight into the moral economy of mining communities of Kazakhstan. In the following analysis, I show that the assumption of a moral and just compensation are 446

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-36

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

Figure 30.1  The grave of a young miner after the funeral. Copyright: Eeva Kesküla, 2017.

tied to the histories and cosmologies of the particular place and to the moral world of the post-​Soviet industrial working class more generally. While elsewhere (Kesküla 2018b) I have focused on the reasons why accidents happen, I here examine this question: in the given political and economic circumstances and histories, what is considered a fair compensation for those miners who have lost their lives and how does this reproduce the community and its values?

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: LONG AND SHORT CYCLES OF EXCHANGE, COMPENSATION AND MORAL ECONOMY In the economic anthropology classic Money and the morality of exchange, Bloch and Parry (1989) suggest that in different cultural contexts, there exist two cycles of exchange: ‘the cycle of short-​term exchange which is the legitimate domain of individual –​often acquisitive –​activity, and a cycle of long-​term exchanges concerned with the reproduction of the social and cosmic order’ (p.2). In most societies, the two exchange cycles of different lengths exist side by side and depend on each other. In Western cultural spaces, they note, money is associated with the short-​term individual cycle in contrast to the enduring long-​term relationships that reproduce society. According to Bloch and Parry, in non-​Western cultural contexts, this distinction is not as sharp. Numerous ethnographic examples show that money from mining is usually associated with the short-​term cycle. For example, in the context of the Mongolian 447

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​

gold rush, Mette High (2013) describes money from mining being seen as ‘polluted’, that is, retaining a strong attachment to its impure origin. Cosmologically, it is related to the dirty and dangerous realm of the underground, and the act of mining, especially at the moment of extraction, is tied to notions of danger and pollution. Such money can cause illness and is best kept in circulation and not stored at home or in a bank account. Similarly, Werthmann (2003) describes how, in Burkina Faso, money earned from mining is considered ‘bitter’ and should never be used for continuing the cycle of life, such as using it to pay a brideprice, sponsor life-​cycle rituals, acquire cattle, or any other kinship practices with long-​term consequences, because the cattle or wives are likely to die. In both cases, the money is best spent on perishable goods, entertainment and alcohol. My ethnography shows that in large-​scale industrial mining in Kazakhstan, mining money does not belong only to the short term-​cycle. On the contrary, money, both in the form of wages, as well as a compensation for accidental death fits the long-​term cycle of exchange related to enduring values of family, a good home and respect for hard work. Something seemingly dry and technical like ‘ten annual salaries’ is full of moral ambiguities related to reproducing a certain way of life. As Prentice (2019) argues, compensation for industrial accidents contains not only two sets of values, the ethical one and the financial one, but ‘rather multiple, competing values’ (p. 160). She shows that pricing formulae can become a site where ethical values can be made into quantifiable commitments. Workers’ compensation is simultaneously technical and moral, raising questions about legitimate entitlements and responsibilities, as well as boundaries of solidarity (Prentice, 2019: 166). To understand the value system through which miners see the world and where paying compensation fits, I draw on E.P. Thompson’s (1971) and Scott’s (1976) analyses of the moral economy of peasants and the poor. The term ‘moral economy’ refers to particular relations of reciprocal exchange between the elite and the subaltern class. It describes the notion of economic justice and what are the expectations of entitlements, what is fair to be expected in terms of economic subsistence or other forms of support. Violations of this normative reciprocal contract can lead to outrage and riots (Scott, 1976). Based on long-​term fieldwork with mining communities in Estonia and Kazakhstan, I have proposed a scheme of the moral economy of miners: here, they believe that their contribution to wider society is their hard work and the sacrifice of their health. In return for this, they expect money (a high salary) and respect. Such an equation was made in both settings and was particularly true for male miners, who considered themselves to be the breadwinners for their family and wealth-​creators for the mine (Kesküla, 2018c; Kesküla, 2012: ch.3). This model is present in both the short-​term individual exchanges and the long-​term reproduction of the family, community and cosmology. In the light of numerous industrial accidents that I was told about or witnessed in the Karaganda area, I here attempt to explore how the model works in the case of loss of life and the struggles around what is deemed moral and fair in compensation settlement. My discussions about the fairness of compensation took place with families of the victims of a previous explosion, during fieldwork in 2014–​15. The 2017 tragedy took place just as I was about to leave Shakhtinsk, where I had been researching memories of a mining disaster that took place in 2006. After the 2017 explosion, I talked with mine workers, trade union representatives and distant relatives or friends of the dead miners, as well 448

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

as other inhabitants of Shakhtinsk, who all had an opinion about the matter. Since I did not personally know the families of the three deceased miners, I decided not to approach them so soon after the tragic accident.

THE HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HEALTH AND SAFETY IN MINING Grief came to our mini-​towns, dead miners in the rubble were carried to heaven. Absolutely nothing changed, people perished for Mittal, only a spoon tinkled against a cup of London tea. In ‘London Tea’ (2015), the punk-​rock group Nomady from the Karaganda area sing about a methane gas explosion in 2003 in the ArcelorMittal Temirtau (AMT) Shakhtinskaya coal mine that left 23 dead. The author of the song, Nurlan Nurkeev, a former miner himself, sings how despite several explosions and grief that shook all the ‘mini-​towns’ built around the mines, safety was not improved. In the song, he imagines the owner of the company, the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, drinking his tea at the headquarters of ArcelorMittal in London, as if nothing particular happened at all. Despite being only in his mid-​forties, Nurlan is limping and had already had a hip operation, due to work injuries. Admittedly, mining has always been a dangerous profession. As I heard multiple times while conducting fieldwork with miners in Kazakhstan as well as Estonia, one human life for one million tonnes of coal mined was a common, informally accepted formula in Soviet-​era coal mining. Nevertheless, when the global steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal bought the Karaganda area steel works and coal mines from the state in 1996, mortal accidents became more frequent despite the decreased mining volumes. Table 30.1 shows that major mining accidents also took place regularly in the Karaganda region in the Soviet period. Nevertheless, they were most frequent in 2004–​09 after the mines were bought, 97 deaths occurring just due to explosions. Although 1978–​83 were also years when 107 people died in major accidents, production volumes and the number of staff were significantly higher in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1980, 43.6 million tonnes of coal were mined in the underground mines of Karaganda, compared to 10.2 in 2010. In 1990, the coal basin consisted of 26 working mines and 100,000 people employed in the coal industry, compared to just eight mines and 18,000 people in 2010. The press, independent trade unions and miners themselves associated these explosions with the privatisation of the mines by ArcelorMittal and the ‘irresponsibility’ of the new owner (Global Action on ArcelorMittal, 2009). After the 2006 explosion in the Lenin mine that left 40 dead, Mittal promised significant improvements in health and safety, and modernisation of the outdated and dangerous mining equipment. Yet, another 30 miners died in a methane gas explosion in the Abaiskaya mine in 2008 alongside smaller accidents that continue every year (see Table 30.1). Despite receiving more than US$400 million in public loans from international financial institutions, including a US$100 million credit to improve safety, it was often unclear to the public and the banks how the loans were spent 449

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​ Table 30.1  Mining accidents in Karaganda area, 1961–​2009. (Source: MiningWiki, Hawcroft Consulting International, ArcelorMittal).

Year

Name of mine

Town

Accident

Fatalities

1961 1968

Mine nr 18 Kuzembayeva

Karaganda Saran

Fire Carbon monoxide poisoning in methane gas explosion

48 17

1976

Stakhanov

Karaganda

Methane gas explosion

6

1978

Sokurskaya

Saran

Methane gas explosion

60

1980

Kalinina

Abai

Explosion of gas and coal dust

7

1983

50 years from October Revolution

Karaganda

Methane gas explosion (2 separate occasions)

40

1989

Kuzembayeva

Saran

Sudden outburst of coal and gas

1994

Kazakhstanskaya

Shakhtinsk

Explosion of gas and coal dust

13

2004

Shakhtinskaya

Shakhtinsk

Methane gas explosion

23

2006

Lenina

Shakhtinsk

Methane gas explosion

41

2008

Abaiskaya

Abai

Methane gas explosion, longwall

30

2009

Tentekskaya

Shakhtinsk

Sudden outburst of coal and gas, development

5

2011

Kuzembaeva

Saran

Outburst in mine development

2

2012

Kazakhstanskaya

Shakhtinsk

Outburst in mine development

1

2016

Saranskaya

Saran

Cable of transport cart broke, crushed miners

4

2017

Kazakhstanskaya

Shakhtinsk

Outburst in mine development

3

4

(Bacheva-​McGrath, 2011; Global Action on ArcelorMittal, 2009). A lot of equipment remained outdated, and due to the shortage of staff and demands on speedy production, the management and workers jointly agreed to bypass certain health and safety rules (Kesküla, 2018b). In 2014, I had the opportunity to accompany independent international auditors to the AMT mines. As a result of their inspection, the auditors strongly suggested installing additional methane-​gas monitors and CO detection systems, and improving maintenance of conveyor belts, indicating that the situation 450

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

was far from perfect. In 2017, I nevertheless attended the funeral of three miners after a gas explosion.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF COMPENSATION: MATERIAL SUPPORT OR COMPENSATION FOR MORAL DAMAGES? After the explosion that killed 40 miners of Lenin mine in 2006, miners and other residents of the mining town of Shakhtinsk took to the streets, expressing their outrage about the status quo. They protested not only because of the health and safety issues, but also over low pay and the generally poor quality of life in the mining towns. Galya, from the coal-​processing plant, remembered: We saw after the 2006 explosion that miners went in groups, bags over their shoulders, they went for several days to the main square and when our neighbours said that miners are striking, we also went. Then the Trade Union [representative] came and even the Indian came and promised that there would be changes. In Shakhtinsk, ‘The Indian’ is a derogatory term with racist connotations referring mostly to Lakshmi Mittal, ArcelorMittal’s CEO, and usually used in the context that ‘everything started going downhill after the Indian bought the mines’, or marking the Indian’s’ lack of interest in mine development and investment. In this context, Galya’s recollection had two implications: firstly emphasising the racial otherness of the CEO, whereby Russian-​speaking Galya could claim the civilisational and moral superiority of Shakhtinsk’s inhabitants, and secondly, emphasising the seriousness of the situation since the foreign top management rarely visited the mining towns.1 After the protests, miners’ salaries were significantly raised, and Mittal publicly promised to invest in the modernisation of machinery and new health and safety equipment. The 2006 explosion also resulted in negotiations and court cases determining what kind of compensations were considered ‘fair’ (spravedlivaia) and ‘sufficient’ (dostatochnaia) according to local activists, miners’ family members and unions. Under an earlier Kazakhstani ‘Law on labour protection’, the employer was obliged to pay ‘material assistance’ of ten times the annual salaries for each employee who died at workplace accidents: families who lost their members in the 2004 mine explosion received this compensation promptly. In 2005, the law was annulled and the coal workers’ union Korgau and AMT negotiated a compensation which was fixed to 1.5 million Tenge (about €9,500, according to 2006 rate). With the 2006 explosion at the Lenin mine, the union negotiated an increase to ten times the annual salary, which was labelled ‘compensation for moral damages’ (kompensatsiia moral’nogo vreda) and subject to income tax, unlike the previous ‘material assistance’. Miners’ widows formed the association ‘Miners’ Families’ and addressed the decreased payment in the press and later in court, demanding additional payment due to the unfair ‘death tax’. The director of economic affairs of AMT’s coal department explained that this decision to call it the compensation of ‘moral damages’ was taken collectively together with the trade union, and should not be taken as charity, since AMT is not a charitable organisation (Novyĭ vestnik, 2006). This explanation can be interpreted as a shift in how the compensation was seen by the company. According 451

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​

to the previous categorisation, the company was (morally) responsible for the family members left behind and had to provide assistance for the family of the miner to continue their lives. In the new formulation, it was purely the business of giving a compensation of a lump sum for the individual deceased worker (upon which tax was paid), that had little to do with moral sentiments or charity. Perhaps a poor PR-​ performance by the company, this statement together with the legal change can be seen as a shift, where the employer attempts to remove itself from the long-​term cycle of exchange related to enduring values into the short-​term cycle of exchange, related to individual acquisitions. But shifting the registers of what the compensation for a miners’ life was supposed to be was faced with moral objections. Dissatisfied with the approach and the size of the compensation, miners’ widows took AMT to court and gained additional benefits. These related to the long-​term goals of supporting the miners’ families, and embedded AMT in the social relations of the mining town. The widows gained the company’s obligation to pay for their children’s education (fees and living costs including applied or academic tertiary education) and an obligation to cover renovations and buy housing for the deceased miners’ children. These obligations were supported by the official trade union Korgau, which managed to later add them to the collective labour agreement (CLA). By 2017, the official compensation fixed in the CLA included the costs of the funeral, the wake and commemorations after seven days, 40 days and a year; ten times the annual salary of the miner paid out to his family, vouchers for sanatoria and medical institutions for the family, and tuition fees for miners’ children. Furthermore, AMT promised to pay back the family’s loans and consumer credits. ‘Assistance to the families of the victims will be provided in full’, said the AMT spokesperson when the three miners died in 2017, reverting back to the discourse of material assistance. I would argue that as a result of the struggle around the compensation, most benefits listed in the CLA are related to reproducing the long-​term moral order of the mining community and the concept of a good and dignified life. The recipients considered them fair as they roughly corresponded to the scheme of working hard and sacrificing health for money and respect.

FAIR COMPENSATION: MONEY AND RESPECT FOR THE REPRODUCTION OF SOCIETY When looking at the discourses around the compensation in 2017, there are two dimensions that help make sense of the value world in which the compensations are placed. One of them corresponds to the long-​term cycle that Bloch and Parry talk about and the reproduction of miners’ communities, life worlds and values, as opposed to the short-​term cycles of exchange that are directed toward individual gain and fast circulation. The other dimension is related to whether the compensation is considered fair or morally acceptable by the different actors involved. These two dimensions partially overlap. After the 2017 explosion, I talked to Natalya Tomilova, a lawyer and the head of the Shakhtinsk-​based NGO, ‘Miners’ Families’. Natalya’s sister lost her husband in the 2006 explosion along with 40 other casualties, Natalya’s own miner husband had died in a workplace accident a decade earlier. She started to represent miners’ widows after the 2006 explosion and the organisation’s relentless work in court has 452

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

ensured that certain benefits were included in the CLA. Natalya was a vocal critic of continuing poor standards of health and safety, but believed that at least the compensation was some kind of consolation. Of course, no compensation would be enough because it would not return a son to his mother, (however much money you give her, she will be crying nevertheless!) but if the miner was earning 300,000 tenge a month, it adds up to 20–​ 30 million tenge and this is certainly something! Natalya believed that a fair compensation would at least acknowledge that the miner’s life meant something, his work was appreciated, and something can be done even after his death: ‘Let’s realise his dream, complete the project that he dreamed of or do something else with the money!’ She emphasised that the money allows the family to continue living and thriving, and that the compensation is valuable and acceptable because it acknowledges the worth of the dead miner’s work, his effort in labour. Similarly, AMT’s promise of paying off loans mostly taken for renovation or buying a house, were seen as a way of continuing the core values and a way of living even when the breadwinner of the family was gone. ‘I think paying off loans is a great support for the family,’ said my friend Galya, the coal-​processing plant worker, a few days after the 2017 accident, as we were drinking tea at her flat under new wallpaper imitating a leafy green jungle. ‘It is more money than the miner’s family ever had when he was alive.’ She had heard that one of the three miners had just bought a house still under construction; now the company would cover the building costs (echoing Natalya’s idea about realising the dead miners’ dream). Both of these statements also emphasised that the sum, if paid out in one instalment, was quite significant and therefore acceptable. Central to a Karaganda’s miner’s life and family is their home. Despite living in modest one-​to-​four-​room flats of five-​and nine-​storey Soviet pre-​fabricated blocks in mini-​towns built on the open windy steppes (Figure 30.2), miners invest a lot of effort in decorating them and often proudly compared their beautiful homes to the run-​down apartments of their relatives living in Russia who would spend their money drinking or travelling rather than investing in renovations. For Kazakhstani miners, home is one of their core values and their dwellings had to be beautiful and freshly decorated, showing that it was a miner’s home, property of the local elite who could afford something for their hard work. A survey of mine workers which I conducted showed that out of 25 people who had taken out a loan, five had taken it to buy a flat and seven for home renovations (followed by buying a car and their children’s education). Men took great pride in having done the renovations themselves, being able to do everything from plumbing and electricity to painting. Home was also a place where a miner could rest and where the gendered division of labour of miners’ lives were most clear, as the women had to tend to the everyday domestic chores of looking after the miner tired from work. Similarly to company towns in various locations (Brown, 2013; Parry, 2013), miners’ freshly renovated apartments produced the illusion of middle-​classness, of being the comfortable and wealthy aristocracy of labour in the mining town. Therefore, even when the miner died, money from mining (in the form of compensation) was expected to be invested in long-​term 453

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​

Figure 30.2  Two coal processing plant workers standing in front of their home in Shakhtinsk. Copyright: Eeva Kesküla, 2014.

projects like a home that was worthy of a miner. Buying flats for miners’ children also often supported the ideal where children could have a home of their own not far from their parents, an aspect of reproducing the community and way of life that was endangered by the lack of recruitment of miners’ children to their parents’ company (Kesküla, 2018a). Besides receiving a dignified payment, both living and dead miners required respect. Another investment in the long-​term cycle of exchange was made by erecting memorials for miners. It was not possible to bring up the bodies of the 2008 Abai mine explosion victims from the shaft where coal still keeps burning at a high temperature. To commemorate the 30 who died, a statue was placed on the spot in the steppe where the underground explosion took place. On top of the memorial platform, stands the statue of a woman holding a small child’s hand with her head lowered in mourning in front of a miner’s helmet (Figure 30.3). A commemorative ceremony attended by city and province officials, corporate representatives, and mining families is held on the anniversary of the explosion every year. Just as respect in the form of symbols, statues, events and awards is important for working and retired living miners, the families expect the same respect and commemorative events for those who died. The statues and commemorations are part of the system of exchange for 454

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

Figure 30.3  The 2008 Abai mine explosion memorial in the steppe. Copyright: Eeva Kesküla, 2014.

the life of the dead miner, reproducing the social and ideological systems ‘concerned with a time-​scale far longer than the individual human life’ (Parry and Bloch, 1989).

THE LONG-​T ERM CYCLE AND AMBIGUOUS FAIRNESS OF COMPENSATION To further the analysis, I will give two examples where the compensation was meant for reproducing the long-​term cycle of the community, but where the assessments of fairness were ambiguous. The legal and taxation nuances of whether the compensation of ten times the annual salary was ‘material assistance’ or ‘compensation of moral damages’ still played a role in my conversations in 2014–​17. In conversation in September 2017, Natalya Tomilova from Miners’ Families argued that ten times the annual salary was not a good way of calculating the compensation. The miners’ salaries differed when they were alive, but the moral damage of death was equal to all families, regardless how much the miner earned: It is not appropriate that the damage is tied to wages. In this way, if the cleaning lady of the factory falls and breaks her arm, she receives the ‘moral damage’ based on her salary of 30,000 tenge (€75), for example. But if a mine director breaks his finger, he will receive ten times more because his salary is 1 million tenge (€2,500). What do the wages have to do with it? Is the cleaner morally less affected than the director? Does she suffer less? Because this is the moral, not 455

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​

physical, suffering of each victim. But everyone turns a blind eye because this is fixed in the collective labour agreement. She also believed that dividing the compensation equally among remaining family members was not the most efficient way of dealing with the families’ different circumstances. It seems that the earlier way of distributing material assistance was more sensitive to the income of the remaining family members, the number of children and the living conditions. I heard at least one miner’s widow complaining that she had three children, but received the same amount as those with fewer children or none at all. The moral assessment of the exact sum of compensation compared to others was ambiguous. Even those directly affected by the compensation’s connection to the salary, such as the miner’s widow, Lena, were not completely sure about whether and how this was fair or unfair. Lena’s husband died in the 2006 accident, when her children were 17 and 21. The first time I met her at the coal-​processing factory where she was working, our conversation somehow quickly drifted to the question of compensation. She explained that the compensation was paid based on the miner’s salary, rank and seniority. For her husband, who was of a fairly high rank and had a higher salary for being a veteran of the Afghan War, she received more than the families of younger miners who had worked for fewer years. Even though she seemed to imply that it was not quite fair, she nevertheless accepted that the families of engineers and managers received a larger sum, without giving much thought to why this was. I suggest that the ambiguity of whether the compensation tied to wages is fair comes from the fact that for miners, value comes from labour and their wages were a clear and measured way of confirming the value of the work they did. Miners believe that their hard work makes them a worthy person and a fair exchange for this is a high salary. Both in Estonia and Kazakhstan, miners emphasised the strong work ethic of mine workers, describing difficult working conditions and echoing the Soviet discourse glorifying miners’ work (Kesküla, 2018c). Furthermore, the Karaganda miners appreciated hard work because of the history of the Karaganda area, the site of former labour camps where deportees had to endure incessant hard labour (Brown, 2001), in order to become recognised as Soviet citizens (Barnes, 2011). Themes of hard work and skill resonate with Trevisani’s (2018) description of ArcelorMittal’s Temirtau steel plant, where workers take pride in their abilities to keep the antiquated machinery running: their care for the machinery expresses moral superiority to the indifferent new owners. Women workers of the coal-​ processing plant near Shakhtinsk were proud of their endurance in coal shovelling, outdoing male miners (Kesküla, 2021). A fair compensation for miners, dead or alive, is recognition of their hard work. The decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union have seen transformations in the attitudes towards work (Féaux de la Croix, 2014; Kamp, 2005; Reeves, 2013; Rigi, 2003) and the workers’ self-​identity. Some working-​class values have however remained unchanged. For example, working-​class Kyrgyz present themselves as caring, altruistic and looking after family members and neighbours, or piously draw moral boundaries in contrast to the corrupt nouveau riche (Satybaldieva, 2018). Reeves (2021) suggests that perhaps particularly in the former Soviet mining regions there is an ethic of hard physical work which 456

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

is compensated with sufficient pay. She shows that for Kyrgyz migrants from such regions, this morality and pride in hard work remains, even when the hard work is done as migrants in poor conditions in Russia. Even in this new context, hard work generated ‘honest, earned money’ that would be used to benefit the family and the community and to build a future for one’s children. Emphasising the value of well-​paid work, another type of compensation tailored towards the reproduction of the miner’s way of life at the workplace consisted of job offers at AMT to the relatives of the deceased. Though perhaps not considered as outright immoral, there was something uneasy and eerie about it to me as an outsider, but not necessarily to the miners. It was a pragmatic offer for the family: AMT paid the highest salaries in the region and with the breadwinner absent, they had to sustain their livelihoods. Furthermore, finding jobs for miners’ children was never easy (Kesküla, 2018a). The increased precaritisation of labour in Kazakhstan (Jumambayev, 2016) was felt particularly hard in mono-​industrial settings. ‘Kuda devatsia?’ asked the sons and nephews of deceased miners, meaning that there was nothing else to do, as they took up these mining jobs to feed their own families. Lena, who lost her husband in the explosion of 2006, took up a job in the mine where her husband had worked, since her salary in the bread factory was very small and she still had children and herself to support. She worked there for four years after the explosion, but found it ‘too hard for the soul’ to see Vladimir’s former colleagues every day, as well as the engineers who were found responsible for the accident (eight middle managers and technical staff received prison terms of up to three-​and-​a-​half years for safety breaches that contributed to the blast). To get away from the mine, she asked to be transferred to the coal-​processing plant of the same company. I was stunned when I found out that Lena’s son works in the same mine where his father had died as an underground mine worker. I asked Lena how it was possible that her son wanted to work in the mines after what happened to his father, but Lena said, ‘Where else would he go? These cities are especially built to serve the mines, if the mines go, that’s it.’ Lena’s son was studying to become a mining engineer, his tuition fees were paid by AMT, which was another way of ensuring that the mining communities continue, despite industrial disasters. Lena’s son-​in-​law was a miner in the same mine. In such dangerous jobs, death was simply something that was not discussed every day, in a context when going to work and this type of compensation was accepted. The promise of monetary compensation and hiring relatives was reassuring to those already working in the mines. The trade union representative in charge of Health and Safety, cynically called the compensation ‘a moral bribe’ (moral’nye vziatki) for those who continue working in the mine after some their colleagues died in mining accidents and for the new recruits. ‘Does the company care about the family?’ he asked a rhetorical question and answered it himself: No, they need another person to come there and work and feel, if something happens to me, my family is provided for (moia sem’ya obespechena). The compensation is made so that another person would not be afraid to go and work there. So that they would see: if I die, someone will be taking care of my family. (Interview, 7 September 2017) 457

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​

Therefore, besides the almost unavoidable hardship for relatives taking up a job in the mine, the ambiguity about the fairness of this deal is echoed in the trade union rep’s quote above: it is a way of ensuring that even when something happens, the compensations and hiring practices ensure that life in the mining families continues. The implication of this promise, that one might lose one’s life in the workplace, is however always the other side of this exchange.

THE SHORT-​T ERM CYCLE AND THE UNFAIRNESS OF COMPENSATION The ideal type model of exchange relations between the employer and the workers appeared the following: miners go to work, take a risk, and if something happens to them, they know that their families have a home, their children are taken care of and their relatives have a job with a good salary for the region. Those families whose breadwinners put more years into toiling for the mine, get recognised more for the sacrifice. Hard work and loss of life/​health is compensated with money and respect. However, the reality was more complex, even unfair. Despite the different moral significance compared to ‘polluted’ mining money in Mongolia or Burkina Faso, the Kazakhstani compensation money was problematic in several ways. First, like polluted money, it had to be spent quickly. The reasons for this were not however linked to the local cosmology, but rather to the devaluation of the tenge accompanied by inflation. Artyom, Maxim’s relative with 20 years of underground work experience, was drinking vodka in his dacha after the wake and advising that whatever money the relatives receive, would have to be spent quickly, because in Kazakhstan, money had the tendency to vanish. The tenge had been devalued twice in the previous three years, so this observation was based on real and recent life experiences. Indeed, the miner’s widow Lena who received a lump sum of about 11 million tenge after Vladimir’s death, confirmed that the money disappeared quickly. In her case, she stated that 5 million of it went on the funeral, despite the fact that the company paid for the coffin and the wake. Furthermore, she still regretted the income tax that was deducted from the lump sum. Artyom also noted that whatever pay rise miners had gained after the 2006 protests, had by 2017 been eaten up by inflation. In Soviet times, he added, miners lived affluently and could buy cars and furniture, but now, ‘a miner cannot afford anything, everything has to be bought with credit!’ His remark points to a key issue: the salaries of miners who were alive were considered too low for their valuable labour. The ‘moral damages’ for the dead miners were tied to the wages of living workers: as long as working miners did not get what was deemed fair by miners, the dead ones were also affected by unfairness. Therefore, the living miners’ salary had to be increased first, for the compensation money to go further. Furthermore, some of the compensation money was so elusive that it never materialised, as AMT did not meet its side of moral obligations of exchange. Lena complained that the mine was still withholding on buying flats for the children of dead miners after the 2006 explosion, and that her children now had to live in rented accommodation. Lena was active in the Miners’ Families group, and had been meeting 458

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​

with the general director of AMT to discuss the issue. ‘Me and five other women went to Temirtau to discuss the issue. The general director told us that if he gives the money to us six, then also the other victims will want that compensation. But that is what we wanted, that all children should get the flat’ (interview, 13 February 2014). She was disillusioned about the process of going back and forth with the employer for years. The widows were treated in a way that made her feel the need to remind herself that it was not the miners’ widows who had done anything bad, or wrong –​it was the company. During our conversation in 2014, Miners’ Families had just taken AMT to court to finally solve the issue. ‘We do it to get the flats for their children, but also for respect, justice and that others would know about the explosion and its consequences’, she explained during our interview, in a little control room close to her work area in the factory. Therefore, the company as an exchange partner in the long-​term values reproduction of mining communities was neither keeping to their moral obligations of paying the money, nor to the obligation of respecting miners and their families.

CONCLUSION I started this chapter by introducing the insight that looking into the lives and moral economies of post-​Soviet miners over the years has provided me with: miners believe that they contribute their hard work and sacrifice their health for the general good of society and in return, they want money and respect. When this formula shifts out of balance, it leads to dissatisfaction, be it loud complaining, wildcat strikes, or protest meetings. Undeniably, miners are well aware of the risks that they take in their work and know that at some point they might not lose only their health, but also their life. As Bloch and Parry (1989) show in their cross-​cultural analysis of money and the morality of exchange, the short-​term cycle of exchange related to quick money is often considered immoral and needs to be purified in order not to bring misfortune in long-​term reproduction of kin and society. In other contexts, such as Mongolia and Burkina Faso, money received for mining is considered especially problematic. In contrast, the cosmology of a post-​Soviet miner values wages for honest and hard work as the most moral of incomes, as long as it provides a dignified living and allows continuing meaningful social and family life. Furthermore, the sphere of money is not disembedded from the sphere of life; rather, the value of life and the value of money are intimately linked to each other. What this case shows about industrial labour in Central Asia is that despite core values and hierarchies of professions radically changing over the last 30 years, current-​day miners still cherish labour, family, money and respect, as is typical of mining communities with a particular historical continuity with Soviet discourse on the value of labour. This seems to be a constant, despite worsening economic, labour, and health and safety conditions making mining accidents excessively frequent.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This chapter is dedicated to all miners who are risking their lives every day. The research was supported by Estonian Research Council Grant 1263, ‘The political economy of industrial health and safety: a social anthropology perspective’. 459

—​​​​ E e v a K e s k ü l a —​​​​

NOTE 1 In the AMT’s steel plant in Temirtau where people had more everyday encounters with the South Asian top management, Trevisani (2019) describes blaming ‘the Indians’ for lack of investment and profiteering at the expense of workers. But at the same time, he reports, this shared dislike for ‘the Indians’ unifies the inhabitants of a city that is otherwise ever more fragmented by ethnicity and employment.

REFERENCES Bacheva-​Mcgrath, F. 2011. Economy & business: European Bank pumps money Into Kazakh oil and gas. Transitions Online. Barnes, S. A. 2011. Death and redemption: The gulag and the shaping of Soviet society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, K. 2001. Gridded lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are nearly the same place. The American Historical Review, 106, 17–​48. Brown, K. L. 2013. Plutopia: Nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Féaux De La Croix, J. 2014. After the worker state: Competing and converging frames of valuing labor in rural Kyrgyzstan. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 6, 77–​100. Global Action on Arcelormittal 2009. ArcelorMittal: Going nowhere slowly. A review of the global steel giant’s environmental and social impacts in 2008–​2009. Friends of the Earth Europe, CEE Bankwatch Network and Global Action on ArcelorMittal. High, M. 2013. Polluted money, polluted wealth: Emerging regimes of value in the Mongolian gold rush. American Ethnologist, 40, 676–​688. Jumambayev, S. 2016. The precarization of employment: A case of Kazakhstan. Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business, 3, 59–​66. Kamp, M. 2005. Gender ideals and income realities: Discourses about labor and gender in Uzbekistan. Nationalities Papers, 33, 403–​422. Kazinform. 2017. По 10 годовых зарплат получат семьи погибших шахтеров «Казахстанской». Available: www.inf​orm.kz/​ru/​po-​10-​godo​vyh-​zarp​lat-​poluc​hat-​sem-​i-​pogibs​hih-​shahte​rov-​ kaz​ahst​ansk​oy_​a​3060​598 [Accessed 31 August 2020]. Kesküla, E. 2012. Mining postsocialism: Work, class and ethnicity in an Estonian mine. PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmith’s, University of London. Kesküla, E. 2018a. Miners and their children: The remaking of the Soviet working class in Kazakhstan. In: Hann, C. & Parry, J. (eds.) Industrial labor on the margins of capitalism. Precarity, class and the neoliberal subject. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Kesküla, E. 2018b. Risky encounters: The ritual prevention of accidents in the coal mines of Kazakhstan. In: Pijpers, R. J. & Eriksen, T. H. (eds.) Mining encounters: Extractive industries in an overheated world. London: Pluto Press. Kesküla, E. 2018c. Waste people/​value producers: Ambiguity, indeterminacy and post-​socialist Russian-​speaking miners. In: Alexander, C. & Sanchez, A. (eds.) Indeterminacy: Waste, value and the imagination. London and New York: Berghahn. Kesküla, E. 2021. Austerity, skill and gendered work in Kazakhstan’s heavy industry. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27. Nomady 2015. Лондонский чай. London Tea. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA1A_N-TVY8. Novyĭ Vestnik. 2006. 7 миллионов за моральный вред. Шахтерские вдовы идут в суд. Available: https://​onl​ine.zakon.kz/​Docum​ent/​?doc​_​id=​30081​001 [Accessed 19 June 2021].

460

— ​​​​ T h e v a l u e o f a d e a d m i n e r i n K a z a k h s t a n —​​​​ Parry, J. 2013. The ‘embourgeoisement’ of a ‘proletarian vanguard’? In: Jodhka, S. (ed.) Interrogating India’s modernity: Democracy, identity, and citizenship. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Parry, J. P. & Bloch, M. 1989. Money and the morality of exchange. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Prentice, R. 2019. Just compensation? The price of death and injury after the Rana Plaza Garment Factory collapse. The Politics and Ethics of the Just Price (Research in Economic Anthropology), 39, 157–​178. Reeves, M. 2013. Migration, masculinity, and transformations of social space in the Sokh Valley, Uzbekistan. In: Laruelle, M. (ed.) Migration and social upheaval as the face of globalization in Central Asia. Leiden: Brill. Reeves, M. 2021. Migratory lives. In: Montgomery, D. (ed.) Central Asia: Contexts for understanding. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press Rigi, J. 2003. The conditions of post-​Soviet dispossessed youth and work in Almaty,Kazakhstan. Critique of Anthropology, 23, 35–​49. Satybaldieva, E. 2018. Working class subjectivities and neoliberalisation in Kyrgyzstan: Developing alternative moral selves. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 31, 31–​47. Scott, J. C. 1976. The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Thompson, E. P. 1971. The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, 76–​136. Trevisani, T. 2018. Work, precarity and resistance: Company and contract labor in Kazakhstan’s former Soviet steel town. In: Hann, C. & Parry, J. (eds.) Industrial labor on the margins of capitalism. Precarity, class and the neoliberal subject. London and New York: Berghahn. Trevisani, T. 2019. The veterans’ gala: The use of tradition in an industrial labour conflict in contemporary Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey, 38, 381–​399. Werthmann, K. 2003. Cowries, gold and ‘bitter money’. Gold-​mining and notions of ill-​gotten wealth in Burkina Faso. Paideuma, 49, 105–​124.

461

PART VII

EVERYDAY MORAL ECONOMIES

The circulation of things (in the broadest sense, including services) is a classic theme in anthropology. Because of a strong Communist claim to doing things differently from the capitalist world, anthropology both on the Soviet and post-​Soviet world has been particularly fascinated with this economic ‘otherness’. Anglophone anthropologists coming to Central Asia, often for the first time, in the 1990s found themselves documenting massive and painful redistributions of ownership in each republic. They described the impoverishment of many –​including that of academic colleagues –​ and attendant mass migrations. They also described the emergence of a very wealthy political and economic elite. Ever since, the evaluation of the Soviet legacy is often an explicit backdrop to people’s reflection on how they see their livelihood options in producing, distributing and consuming goods. What do the classic Polanyian concepts of reciprocity, redistribution and exchange mean here, in a society-​wide, often emotive debate about what system is ‘better’ for whom? From cotton farming on misused soils to offering halal child-​care, the authors in this section all discuss arenas of value-​inflected economic decisions and actions. In asking ‘Who owns the (good) land?’, Tommaso Trevisani pinpoints a key question not only in agriculture, but for generations of policy-​makers and activists in the region. Drawing on fieldwork with different types of farms in southern Kazakhstan, he analyses the effects of policies which privilege large farms that are able to invest in ameliorating irrigation infrastructures. He clearly shows how the short-​term cycle of profits, already articulated through other vocabularies in the Soviet period, has led to waves of ‘infertilising’ large swathes of agricultural soils. He thus outlines a major upstream cause of the near-​disappearance of the Aral Sea, one of the largest human-​ caused environmental catastrophes. Gulzat Botoeva takes up the question of agricultural production and relates it to another form of rural extraction: gold mining in Kyrgyzstan. Concerned with the delegitimisation of both artisanal miners and mining protesters in the press as plain greedy or criminal, she documents the emergence of opposing assessments of mining in affected villages. She usefully shows how both repudiating mining firms and the decision to try to benefit from their extraction project are shaped by financial impoverishment and debt, catalysed by neoliberal financial policies in the country. While the author chronicles the increased polarisation of local relationships around the mining question, she also describes how locals have DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-37

463

—​​​​ E v e r y d a y m o r a l e c o n o m i e s —​​​​

learned to navigate multi-​polar livelihoods, juggling risks and profits in herding, cultivating wheat and artisanal gold mining. Hasan Karrar’s chapter focuses on a hub for selling agricultural and pastoralist produce, as well as gold jewellery: the Central Asian bazaar. Like Carole Ferret’s analysis of pastoralism (this volume), rather than describing some age-​old, static image –​here of ‘the’ Central Asian bazaar, Karrar emphasises flexibility around a working principle as the secret of the region’s thriving, large-​scale bazaar economies. The author critically reflects on the notion of ‘neoliberalism’, and what twenty-​first-​ century market mechanisms come to mean in the region. As in Gulzat Botoeva’s analysis of mining, he highlights the blurring of private and public, of intransparency as a driving force in globalising bazaar spaces and circulations. Setting her discussion of halal businesses in the context of the anthropology of Islam, Aisalkyn Botoeva describes the halal label not as a clear category, nor even an aspiration that people stick to in a necessarily unilinear way. Halal emerges as a question, debated in families, at mosque fora, online and through national muftiate fatwas. Is the highly prized, mildly alcoholic fermented mare’s milk halal? How do you do halal child-​care? Perhaps surprisingly, this question is not the only one moving Muslims, but rather, halal is taken more broadly as a possible counter-​model to the corruption and violence experienced so often in state and public encounters. And sometimes halal also appears simply a pragmatic business strategy. As in Baktygul Shabdan’s contribution to this volume, everyday decisions around food, health and the body turn out to have complex moral dimensions, negotiated in the context of people’s livelihood options. As Aisalkyn Botoeva points out, Central Asians negotiate multiple sources of authority and persuasion, be they banking, religious, or business leaders around permissible, just and desirable individual and collective life models. This section particularly highlights successive, and increasing waves of precarisation. This recognition is concomitant with an enduring ability of bazaar traders, herders, café owners, small-​scale miners and wheat growers to weather and surf economic cataclysms and make a living –​often with some self-​respect –​amid uncertainty. Together, the contributions reveal the long-​term ecological and cross-​ generational consequences, structured for example through ownership relations, debt and moments of resource re-​distribution, that shape how Central Asians engage in exchange.

464

CHAPTER THIRTY-​O NE

WHO OWNS THE (GOOD) LAND? Cotton farming, land ownership and salinised soils in southern Central Asia Tommaso Trevisani INTRODUCTION If my land could speak, it would say: ‘I got sick and you did not care, now you are the one who is crying.’ (Cotton farmer, Mirzakent, Southern Kazakhstan) Land degradation is increasingly threatening agricultural systems and rural livelihoods on a vast scale across Central Asia, where cotton farmers represent the backbone of irrigation-​based agriculture and face the brunt of the threat. Questions of agricultural production and preservation are complicated by evolving policies and land-​ownership patterns. Farmers juggle concern for their short-​term gains and the long-​term preservation of their soils and many, as in the quote above, struggle to find a balance. This chapter explores these problems through the view from Maktaaral District, Kazakhstan’s southernmost and most important cotton-​producing region. It addresses how agricultural actors emerging from the post-​ Soviet ownership regime are coping with the challenge of land degradation. Previous studies of post-​ socialist transformations of rural communities in irrigated areas of Central Asia have emphasised the changing gender, property and power relations in agricultural production (Kandiyoti 2003; Trevisani 2011; Zanca 2011; Hofman 2019). They documented the lingering claims and resentments of those penalised by the outcome of a decollectivisation that has advantaged the rich and powerful, opening up a gap between winners and losers during the process of reform (Hann et al. 2003; Trevisani 2011). However, the environmental dimension of the transition to post-​socialist agriculture has remained underexplored. The case of Maktaaral contributes to current debates on changing land ownership and decreasing options for small farmers to make a living from agriculture in Central Asia by emphasising the increasing role of land degradation and conservation for social differentiation. It shows how well-intentioned policies addressing agricultural sustainability emergencies have aggravated socio-​economic and environmental disparities among ‘small’ producers and large farms, effectively decoupling concerns over environmental sustainability and justice (Agyeman et al. 2003). Recent debates on environmental justice in Central Asia have deployed the concept DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-38

465

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​

of ‘econationalism’ (Dubuisson 2020), also emphasising local forms of resistance against external (i.e., state or foreign) actors (Weinthal and Watters 2010; Wooden 2018). Unlike these examples, in post-​socialist cotton agriculture it is not easy to point to the ‘villain’ in local reasonings on land conservation. As agricultural actors’ understandings of environmental responsibility and just sustainability (Mohai et al., 2009) shift along with their changing patterns of livelihood and land ownership, post-​collective Maktaaral makes an interesting case for addressing local reasonings on environmental futures.

LAND DEGRADATION AND COTTON OASES IN CENTRAL ASIA The vast majority of the population living in semi-​ arid southern Central Asia is concentrated in the densely populated irrigated zones in which agriculture still represents the major pillar of the economy.1 Large, irrigated fluvial oases have characterised the Syr Darya and Amu Darya basin regions for millennia (Andrianov 2016), but their surface was disproportionately and unsustainably expanded in Soviet years (Teichman 2016; Obertreis 2017). Soviet policymakers imposed a cotton monoculture on local producers in the areas suitable for the crop (Thurman 1999). Large amounts of water were diverted from the main rivers to newly cleared fields on formerly uncultivated lands, and cotton acreage and output grew on a vast scale.2 Through this process, society and the environment were radically transformed, leaving behind an ambiguous legacy now being confronted by the post-​Soviet Central Asian republics: on the one hand, the Soviet cotton policy has been the foundation for development, modernisation and vibrant rural communities that had found their economic reason in the Soviet-​made collective cotton farms (Roy 1999; Trevisani 2011); on the other hand, this same policy has left a trail of economic, environmental and human disasters,3 culminating in the well-​known Aral Sea catastrophe (Fusco and Quagliarotti 2016). Land degradation, especially in the form of soil salinisation, is another aspect of this legacy. Although environmental protests over the misuse and privatisation of land are on the rise, and a new grassroots activism increasingly challenges government and private commercial interests over environmental issues (Dubuisson 2020), the problem of agricultural land degradation has not received much specific attention. The creeping, diffuse and delayed nature of its impact on agriculture has contributed to the underestimation of the importance of the problem in the public perception. At the same time, the massive scale of land degradation increasingly undermines the productivity of Central Asia’s most valuable and fertile land (Mirzabaev et al. 2016), raising concerns about food security and the need for a critical rethinking of current agricultural practices (Djanibekov et al. 2016). Returning to the legacy of Soviet cotton farming, current practices are, however, still difficult to change. Wasteful water use, incorrect water management and a lack of proper drainage are the main causes of excess salinisation in irrigated soils in Central Asia.4 In heavily salinised regions of the lower Syr Darya and Amu Darya, previously irrigated areas have been turned into arid pasturelands, with limited use other than for grazing sheep and camels.5 A saline crust covers the worst affected land like a white 466

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​

blanket, turning formerly cultivated land into a salty desert. People in these regions have experienced progressive decline in health and living standards, and have had to recentre their livelihoods around pastoralism, entrepreneurship, or employment outside agriculture, or have migrated in search of work and better living conditions. Further upstream, environmental and social impact of soil salinisation on people has been less harsh, but it is increasing. Here, the agricultural landscape is still shaped by closely spaced irrigated plots and soil deterioration is less visible to the naked eye. Occasional saline spots can dot cotton fields, while sporadic saline plots can even stand out in the flat and monotonous cotton landscape for their lush and wild vegetation. This is because after crop growing has stopped, ploughing is not done anymore and salt-​resistant weeds, bushes and grasses can thrive, provided the land is not too salinised (see Figure 31.1). In these upstream areas, farmers continue to engage in irrigated agriculture, but now they struggle with declining harvests which are increasing pressure on rural livelihoods. Soviet soil scientists and irrigation engineers have gained decades of experience in their struggle to mitigate the phenomenon of secondary (irrigation-​induced) soil salinity (Elie 2015; Prilutskaya 2017). After initial difficulties, their knowledge helped to set up a sophisticated irrigation and drainage infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s that enabled cotton growers in many parts of Soviet Central Asia to keep the effects of soil salinity at bay by managing irrigation and groundwater levels (Borovsky 1982; Moroz 1993). Central provisioning from Moscow, generous budgets, equipment and

Figure 31.1  Abandoned farmland in the Maktaaral District. (September 2017). 467

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​

personnel, and very low energy prices were the preconditions for these achievements. Thirty years later, the deterioration in agricultural and hydraulic infrastructure installed in Soviet times for large-​scale irrigation schemes have caused environmental problems previously confined to downstream and marginal regions to come closer to the ‘core’ upstream cotton oases.

THE SETTING Maktaaral District comprises Kazakhstan’s territory in the ‘Hungry Steppe’. Also called Mirzacho’l steppe (in Kazakh and Uzbek), it is a vast and flat southeastern extension of the Kyzyl Kum desert. It appears on maps as a semi-​exclave surrounded by Uzbekistani territory and separated from Kazakhstan’s mainland by the Syr Darya and the Shardara reservoir. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was part of one large and undivided irrigation scheme, progressively developed over the previous 150 years, first under Tsarist and later under Soviet rule (Matley 1970; Bichsel 2012). Aptly, Maktaaral means ‘cotton island’ in Kazakh. Today, it is a densely populated and intensively irrigated cotton region.6 While offering few employment opportunities outside agriculture, its agricultural land quality is declining as a consequence of the decay of Soviet-​era irrigation infrastructure that has occurred during the post-​ Soviet years (Otarov 2017). In Maktaaral, Soviet achievements in soil-​salinity management are still the benchmark against which current problems in managing salinity are measured by farmers, irrigation professionals and government officials. Newly independent Kazakhstan adjusted to the critical post-​ Soviet budget shortage by adopting liberal reforms, curbing subsidies for agriculture and breaking up the large collective farms, whose lands were gradually transferred to much smaller, individually owned farms (Toleubayev et al. 2010). As a consequence, the agricultural sector was hit by crisis during the 1990s. Agricultural production contracted, and rural living conditions worsened significantly. In Maktaaral District, a gradual recovery, stimulated by entrepreneurial freedoms that were not available to cotton producers in neighbouring Uzbekistan, the regional cotton champion (Kandiyoti 2003; Spoor 2009), only began after the turn of the millennium. While the state maintained control of all levels of the ‘strategic’ (because it was crucial for the state budget) cotton sector in Uzbekistan, in Kazakhstan the Soviet state-​procurement system was abolished, cotton gins were privatised and transactions between producers and gins were deregulated. Private ginneries provided motivation for growing cotton by supporting small-​scale producers with guaranteed purchase orders and credits, even attracting cotton smuggled from Uzbekistan, where state-​controlled prices were less attractive to producers. Beginning in 2003, the growing demand for cotton by gins caused a veritable cotton boom among small farms (Petrick et al. 2017). Due to farms’ small size and lack of capital, cotton gins retained the dominant position in this process. Cotton acreage rose, and yields per hectare climbed from the low base during the period of Soviet collapse, but farmers were making profits ‘against’ their soils as a short-​term economic logic prevailed, especially among risk-​ averse poorer smallholders lacking the skills and resources to diversify and improve their agriculture. After years of disinvestment and deregulation, circumstances pressured the government to intervene. Kazakhstan’s oil boom in the first decade of the 2000s allowed 468

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​

the government to re-​invest heavily in agriculture by introducing crop subsidies and investing in large infrastructural projects (Dudwick et al. 2007; Petrick et al. 2017). Maktaaral’s drainage system, the maintenance and administration of which had been initially devolved to local stakeholders, was taken over by the government in 2011 with the aim of establishing modern drainage at no cost to farmers (however, by 2017 only a third of the Soviet-​era capacities had been re-​established). Farmers welcomed these policies, but their outcome affected farmers in an imbalanced way, favouring large farms over smaller ones. Today in Maktaaral, farmers are experiencing many difficulties and challenges, and the importance of soil salinity as a factor threatening rural livelihoods and well-​being is not always recognised or prioritised by farmers. Small and large farm holdings face different conditions. Increasing soil salinity hits the weakest harder and deepens pre-​existing inequalities. Furthermore, in addition to being ill-​equipped for commercial farming, smallholdings often amplify the problem of land degradation as a consequence of their focus (and dependency) on immediate returns or present-​ day problems. Let me illustrate this ethnographically, by presenting evidence from a cotton farm of 10.5 hectares managed by Begbol, a farmer-​cum-​police lieutenant in his thirties.

SMALL FARMS ON LARGE PLOTS On a visit to Begbol’s family in late September 2017, the many still unopened cotton bolls were a reason for anxiety. Across the region, the cotton bug had hit farmers’ harvests particularly hard that year. The family had decided to further delay the hiring of a cotton harvester in the hope that more bolls would open over the next days, but they were also aware that many cotton bolls, damaged by insects, would not now open. Postponing the harvest is risky, since a sudden change in the weather can further diminish the quality of the cotton and thus potential earnings, and Begbol feared that this year’s harvest would not bring in enough income even to cover the expenditures incurred to raise the crop. In his recounting of the year, he likened cotton growing to an arduous race against time: always behind schedules dictated by the crop. Seeding occurred late, because the field could not be prepared for it on time. Small farms like his often lack tractors and rely on hired machinery, which is scarce, expensive and unreliable during bottleneck periods. Leaching, a water-​consuming Soviet-​era practice, is done by farmers to reduce soil salinity before seeding. Once centrally implemented by the collective farm, nowadays ‘100 single farms are in the waiting line’ for water. Begbol’s turn came late that year, and delayed preparations for seeding. When the cotton blossomed, it became obvious that the seed obtained through the local cotton ginneries was of poor quality. Once guaranteed by specialised research institutes, seed quality has progressively declined (Dosbieva 2007). Nowadays, quality import-​seed is available for purchase, but ordinary farmers can seldom afford it. The water supply for irrigation during the crucial summer period became more problematic, since Uzbekistan –​further upstream –​had reduced the water capacity of the Dostyk (‘Friendship’) canal after a drought (Petrick et al. 2017, p.444). Although it had been an abundance of water that year, circumstances led to the water benefiting the bug more than the cotton. In an attempt to mitigate the problem, Begbol spent three times as much money as usual on pesticides. Since 469

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​

the neighbouring farmers did not follow his example, this extra expenditure was to no avail for Begbol’s farm. After every round of pesticides, the bug would come back again more vigorously from the neighbour’s plot. Begbol knew that soil salinity was a district-​wide problem, but knowledge about the specific situation on his land was vague and he felt more pressed by the lack of pesticides able to contain the pest than by the malfunctioning drainage: ‘We are not afraid of the salt; we fear the bug’, he told me at our first meeting. Later, he was surprised to find that on the soil-​salinity map of the district provided to me by officials, his land was indicated to be ‘moderately salinised’. Begbol’s father, a retired bookkeeper in the former kolkhoz, thought otherwise. Having spent a life over cotton charts and comparing those of the kolkhoz with records taken since the family farm was set up in 2001, he saw a decline in yields from 3–​4 tons per hectare when these lands were in use by the kolkhoz’s brigade back in his youth in the early 1980s, to the 2.5 tons per hectare the family farm yielded on average since its founding in 2001. For him, the reason for the difference was the deteriorating drainage. Ultimately, if the bug was the main culprit for a bad season for Begbol, according to his father, the soil salinity combined with the high groundwater caused by bad drainage had weakened the plants and made them more vulnerable to pest attacks, which was the crucial long-​term cause of declining yields (see Figure 31.2, which shows the cotton plants on Begbol’s farm).

Figure 31.2  Cotton plants on salinised soil. 470

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​

The farmers’ ‘egoism’ and ‘poor knowledge’ of individual farmers were, according to Begbol’s father, the fundamental difference from collective farming. Decisions on crops have wide-​ ranging consequences in densely spaced irrigated agriculture, where land usage has an influence over the soil salinity and crop growth of neighbouring plots. Rice cultivation, for instance, is water intensive, and can lower the yields of adjoining cotton plots by raising groundwater levels. Pests and weeds can jump from a neglected field to the next. In the past, crop plans and irrigation schedules were decided at the level of the kolkhoz, following expert knowledge and production plans dictated from the top-​down. Fragmented plots and schedules can be a source of stress for farmers today. In recent years, Begbol attempted a rudimentary form of crop-​rotation scheme to improve soil quality, but the effect was disappointing, and he felt that he lacked informed advice. On the collective farm, the chief agronomist monitored crop growth and had the knowledge, means and authority to impose appropriate measures if necessary. Although farmers appreciate their individual freedom and value their ownership of the land dearly, many miss such an authoritative figure today. All these problems give a sense of small-​scale farmers’ challenges in the process of readjusting cotton cultivation that had been developed for very large collective farms to very small family enterprises. What holds for the containment of pests also applies to plot levelling, fertilising, irrigation, crop choice, etc. Begbol expressed strong feelings for his land and wished to protect and improve it, while lamenting that he did not know how to do it properly. With privatisation, farming was reconverted from large collective farms to ‘individualized’ (Lerman et al. 2004) farm smallholdings, but the norms and practices for land use and protection, first developed to be managed at a large scale, did not change. Farming cotton on the former collective farm’s large plots presupposes an interdependency, knowledge and use of technology that transcends the boundaries of the individual farms, making it comparatively onerous for small farms to protect and improve land quality.

PRIVATISATION After the collapse of the USSR, kolkhozy and sovkhozy at first were transformed into cooperatives and joint stock companies, and families received a share determined by household size and employment history in the collective farm (Spoor 1999; Toleubayev et al. 2010). These reformed collectives were technically owned by the former employees-​ turned-​ shareholders, but de facto still managed centrally and top-​down by the farm manager. Like the previous collective farms, there was also a marked workplace hierarchy in these reformed large farms between the more skilled and powerful farm management (chairman, senior staff) and ordinary farmers (kolkhozniki). During the socialist period, the collective farm manager was a powerful and respected position. The power discrepancy between manager and ordinary workers reflected the management’s allocative and redistributive capacities (Verdery 1996). After socialism, farm managers and senior staff played a key role in determining the privatisation of land and assets of the reformed collective farms, including shaping how shares were converted into actual property. Those who had moved away from the kolkhoz before shares became personalised into demarcated ownership lost their right to land or compensation.7 By exiting collective agriculture with farms larger, better equipped and more competitive than those of ordinary 471

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​

farmers, this outcome of decollectivisation enabled former kolkhoz managers and their associates to reproduce a hierarchy of power that was already emerging within collective farms during the Soviet years (Nazpary 2001). Farm managers ended up with the larger and better slice of lands and assets (Toleubayev et al. 2010, pp.356–​7), earning the envy and resentment of the disadvantaged others.8 While some saw this outcome of reforms as justified by farm managers’ stronger experience, skills and connections (see Lampland 2002), others vented their frustration over irregularities and malpractice: ‘Our chairman took the best lands for himself and got away with it’, as Begbol argued. His father spoke with regret about the end of their post-​Soviet cooperative, lamenting that ‘everyone is on his own’ now. He envied the villages where some form of more egalitarian collective agriculture had persisted, giving the example of a single-​managed farm cooperative of 200 shareholding families, mostly smallholdings, in support of the claim that the break-​up of their cooperative had been avoidable. The single-​managed cooperative’s chairman, himself the owner of the largest estate in the cooperative, explained the reason for the cooperative’s success in this way: We are all relatives. We came from Tajikistan to live and work together in this village. My father had been chairman, when he died people voted me in as their chief. It is necessary to understand the people. If you want to live with them you must be able to work with them. We built a school, kindergarten, pipes for drinking water. It is also necessary not to be too greedy and fill one’s mouth; otherwise the collective would have dissolved. Powerful managers of large farms or cooperatives tend to overstate their altruism as much as ordinary smallholders tend to see the grass as being greener on the other side of one’s cooperative’s fence. This notwithstanding, even this idealised case, despite the manager’s rhetoric of kinship solidarity, was marked by wide disparities between ordinary shareholders and farm management. Overall, land reform created more than 20,000 farms and cooperatives in Maktaaral District. According to the district’s department for agriculture, only a few in each former kolkhoz had large estates with 50 or more hectares, while 70 per cent of agricultural land consisted of farm smallholdings of less than five hectares. This is barely sufficient to provide a living for a family, and ‘small’ farmers in Maktaaral District must diversify their income sources and livelihood strategies. People integrate agricultural profits with other sources of income or rent, and rely on the mutual support of relatives. Those who do not have sizeable farmland either engage in temporary labour migration to cities or work as drivers, or are employed for low salaries in public service jobs in village schools, nurseries, medical centres, or the police. For many ‘small’ cotton farmers, the expectation was that the government at some point would step in to provide them with decent jobs. In the meantime, pensions and remittances contribute towards much of villagers’ expenditures and are a part of modest agricultural family budgets. Nonetheless, even among reform ‘losers’, privatisation is seldom questioned as such. Ordinary farmers’ criticism of the unfair advantages over access to farmland by the powerful, and their own attachment to their newly won ownership titles, are kept in a balance. In Kazakhstan, most agricultural land still legally belongs to the 472

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​

state, and land is leased to farmers on long-​term contracts. Land taxation is low, but producers are compelled to maintain land quality, or must otherwise return the land. Decollectivisation introduced long-​term land leaseholds that farmers understand as being almost equivalent to full property ownership. Officials say the government believes that only large farm units are capable of shouldering agriculture’s mounting problems. In 2016, new legislation aimed at stimulating farm-​size growth by granting credit for the subsidised purchase of machinery and tractors to farms or cooperatives larger than 50 hectares was introduced. In theory, smallholders can pool their plots into larger units and access these financial instruments. In practice, since trust in the post-​Soviet land arrangements is limited (see Giordano and Kostova 2002) and marked by the experience of power-​ grabs by farm managers, ordinary farmers struggle to meet the threshold. Thus government policies end up strengthening farms that are already comparatively stronger, thereby deepening existing rural inequalities: some large farms that enjoy good services and soils can make good profits, whereas the majority of smallholders are struggling with low yields and they fear for their existence.

LARGE FARMS In Maktaaral, the owners of large farms or heads of cooperatives are often also important personalities (such as members of regional or district assemblies, former akims (governors), sons of kolkhoz managers …) and, as in Uzbekistan (cf. Wegerich 2010; Trevisani 2011), strong networks seem to be a prerequisite for (and consequence of) having large areas of land under their control. In 2016, Maktaaral District’s largest privately owned farm covered 500 hectares and was owned by Urbol, the son of a renowned and heavily decorated former kolkhoz director, who left the cooperative after obtaining the sizeable estate in 1997. At the time of my visit, he was growing cotton on 200 hectares; the remaining lands were planted with different high-​value crops that were sold directly to purchasers in Russia and northern Kazakhstan. These lucrative deals made the farm less dependent on credit, and put it in a comfortable bargaining position with the local cotton gins. By contrast, smallholdings often lack the advance capital to finance the operations necessary to grow cotton. Typically, they have run out of cash while preparing the fields long before the harvest and, in 2016, according to the district’s agricultural department, about 80 per cent of the district’s farms had signed futures contracts with cotton gins (in Begbol’s case, at an interest rate of 17 per cent). Urbol’s farm boasted modern technology, elite-​ seed and other innovations, introduced following business trips to Europe and the United States. Soil salinisation had never been a pressing issue on this farm, because the land was not exposed to high groundwater levels. The farm owner believed that soil salinity was a problem for the government to solve, but that ‘where the government cannot solve it, the farmer must take the problem’s solution into his own hands’, while also deeming ‘small’ farmers incapable of doing so because of their small-​scale interests, lack of means and low competence. By contrast, he praised the modern technology and finances of a livestock family farm he had visited in the United States, where 12,000 cattle were managed by only twelve people, seeing it as a model for his own farm’s development. His farm was equipped with 35 tractors, the newest ones purchased with government 473

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​

credit. It employed 37 staff; a fraction of the workers once employed by the former collective farm to work on such an estate. Large farm owners tend to minimise the number of workers in order to economise and increase their profits, but former cooperative farm managers such as Urbol are often divided between their individual interest in profits and, rooted in villagers’ kolkhoz-​era expectations of redistribution, social pressure to demonstrate some social responsibility or philanthropy. Urbol presented me with the sponsoring of a park and a statue to the memory of his father as an example of his ‘giving back’ to the native village. However, this self-​interested sponsoring could scarcely have met the expectations of redistribution of his many co-​villagers who were in need of jobs or land, and shows how large farmers can rebuff villagers’ claims to an older moral economy (Hann et al. 2003), while rhetorically pretending to do the opposite. Wealthy farmers and heads of cooperatives in Maktaaral enthusiastically reported a new regulation introduced in 2016, whereby holders of long-​term land leases would become able to turn their leases into full property ownership upon payment of the relatively affordable sum of 136,000 Kazakhstani tenge (approximately US$400) per hectare (price varying with land quality), or paying 50 per cent of the sum and paying the rest over ten years. Begbol, like many smallholding farmers, was reluctant to invest in this operation due to insufficient capital, while Urbol revealed that he had already converted part of his large estate into full property ownership and planned to convert more in the future. In 2016, the government announced a nationwide sale and lease of 1.7 million hectares of land, also considering the possibility for foreign investors to lease land, but finally had to step back from this initiative due to vehement protests.9 Nationwide protests against land privatisation (Dubuisson 2020) found little resonance in Maktaaral, since the prospect of foreign corporations taking over agriculture in this intensively farmed area seemed remote to the farmers I spoke to. While opposing land transfers to foreigners, even smallholders in Maktaaral did not voice opposition to the possibility of the full privatisation of land in the belief they would also benefit from it. For the farmers I spoke to, the question was rather when and not if the full privatisation of land would occur. Farmers such as Begbol, or those with even smaller holdings, understand their current challenge as keeping afloat in the hope of seeing their leaseholds turned into full property ownership in the future. At the other end of the agricultural hierarchy, larger farmers can look more optimistically to the future, in the conviction that the government will prioritise large farms’ improvement over those of smaller ones.

SMALL FARMS When the cooperative was liquidated, Begbol’s family ended up occupying part of an 18-​hectare plot, once managed as a single unit by the collective brigade and now split between his family and another farm. On paper, Begbol’s farm was two distinct units, registered respectively in his father and his older brother’s names. Since his brother had recently migrated for a job in town, these adjacent lands were managed as a single unit by Begbol on behalf of the whole family. The burden of the labour-​ intensive agricultural work over the growing period mostly stayed within the family. Until recently, farmers would hire low-​paid seasonal labourers from Uzbekistan under 474

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​

highly exploitative conditions (Dosbiev 2007), but a hardening of the border regime made this more difficult. Begbol had hired Uzbek labourers in the past, but was no longer doing this because ‘you have to constantly look after workers, or else they will cheat on you’, and because of the ‘hassle with our migration police’ that requires paperwork and the payment of fees (or bribes). However, many smallholdings still depend on hired work and tractors, especially when farms are so small that migrant remittances outmatch potential farm earnings. In similar cases, some family members may migrate for work while others stay behind to guard their leaseholds. For those who lack farmland or income from business or employment, informal land-​use deals can be a source of agricultural revenue. Usually, such arrangements occur among small farmers and the deal is for a season, involving high-​value cash crops that can be sold at local markets or abroad. Farmer Zhengiz’ plot of 4 hectares, for instance, was too small to feed his family of five: ‘There are plenty of people, few jobs. People go abroad or to big cities in search for jobs. My wife is a teacher and earns little money. I am a farmer, but our land is not enough for us.’ Six extra hectares were rented from acquaintances who had relocated to Almaty for work. Zhengiz managed the land so as to maximise his profit regardless of its long-​term conservation, and justified this by saying: ‘The owner doesn’t care, he tries to get as much cash as he can from renting it to me.’ In Maktaaral and elsewhere (see Rasanayagam (2011) for Uzbekistan, for instance), sub-​letting land is a widespread form of agricultural entrepreneurship, representing an important opportunity for generating income in the absence of other jobs, enabling tillers to find additional land to grow cash crops. Sub-​letting farmland deals are illegal because they encourage short-​term, yield output-​dominated thinking that fosters soil depletion and undermines soil improvement and protection. Although it threatens soil quality, the practice is tolerated by the authorities to some degree, in the awareness that in the absence of jobs or adequate welfare, rural livelihoods depend on it. In 2017, Begbol made 1.7 tonnes per hectare at a time when cotton farmers in Maktaaral said that profits start to pour into farmers’ pockets, after production costs (such as machinery and hired labour) are subtracted, when harvests are higher than 1.5 tonnes per hectare.10 Begbol calculated that, at current costs and prices, even in a good year the farm was too small for his family of six to live on without other sources of income: ‘US$200 per month for a year of hard work in a good year –​and thank you for that.’ Farm incomes, higher at the beginning of the cotton boom, have been eroded by rising input costs, growing interest rates for futures contracts, lower farmgate cotton prices and deteriorating soils. After working in the field, Begbol changed from his work clothes into a clean police uniform for duty on patrol service. His salary as a police lieutenant, his father’s pension and some remittances sent by the brother in Almaty complemented the family budget. As with many other small family farms, agricultural earnings were but one source of income among others. However, for many of them, as Begbol put it, cotton increasingly resembled ‘an expensive hobby’: one that in the current context can hardly be afforded by those who are not well-​resourced farmers with large landholdings and access to capital. Ordinary farmers’ concerns about the future of their farms are somewhat tempered by the government’s recent subsidisation of agriculture and investment in rural areas. These measures, however, do not address smallholders’ specific problems, so much 475

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​

Figure 31.3  –​Cotton farmer and his grandchild, Maktaaral District. (September 2017).

as buy time for them to adjust to a future in which large-​scale farming could become predominant once again. As the perspective of finding more remunerative urban jobs attracts the rural youth more than farm work, Begbol also imagines the future for some of his children will be to go to study and find a job in a large city, while at the same time also hoping that the family farm will go on, somehow. Although rural living standards lag behind in comparison to urban livelihoods and salaries, and despite his farm’s uncertain outlook, Begbol viewed the government policy favourably. In his village he pointed at a renovated school, a newly paved road, a nearby medical centre, and finally at his own police uniform, as examples of ‘what the government is doing for us’: that is, the ‘class’ of small farm owners like those depicted in Figure 31.3.

THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE IN CENTRAL ASIA’S ‘COTTON OASES’ (AND IN MAKTAARAL) Central Asian governments nowadays face the dilemma of either committing to expensive and complex land reclamation or abandoning valuable land to certain decline and deterioration, thus exacerbating social problems. In the local perception, governments not only ‘inherited’ the responsibility for difficult problems created by Soviet policies and standards (Dubuisson 2020: p.10), they must also confront

476

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​

rural people’s expectations for employment and living standards which, during the Soviet period, compensated citizens for collective agriculture’s negative effects and strengthened their acquiescence with top-​down mandated economic policies (Wheeler 2018). Following the end of collective agriculture, for many newly established petty family farms, the introduction of private land ownership is an inadequate, if not illusory, replacement for the loss of past entitlements and securities, even more so since land degradation increasingly undermines the potential to make profits on their privately owned land. For these reasons, in Central Asia’s ‘cotton oases’, land degradation presents itself as a threat to the established agrarian structure both for governments and ordinary farmers. Whereas the former must reconsider the terms of the Soviet-​era ‘cotton bargain’ (raising acceptance for cotton monoculture imposed top-​down through redistributive policies and welfare) and finding no easy solution, the latter face shrinking options to make a living from agriculture. In the case of Kazakhstan’s most prominent ‘cotton oasis’, agricultural production is becoming more diversified and re-​centred around more efficient large farms and cooperatives, backed by government-​provided irrigation and drainage services. However, as the burden caused by land degradation weights unequally on agricultural producers, government policies fail to reconcile issues of environmental justice with economic efficiency (Agyeman et al. 2003). Recent social and economic restructuring has been unbalanced, favouring large farm holders over small farms, but also tolerating economic behaviour that does not foster sustainable land use (particularly among smallholders). In ‘cotton oases’ such as Maktaaral, privatisation and environmental degradation have deepened preexisting divides. It remains to be seen, here and elsewhere in Central Asia, whether future government policies will be able to mitigate inequalities by integrating ‘small’ farmers into virtuous cooperatives, or by reforming the framework of agriculture so as to make small holdings economically sound and environmentally sustainable, or whether policies will simply cement or even amplify existing disparities as leased land is turned into commoditised property. Resolving these issues pertaining to land ownership, environmental justice and sustainability are on the horizon for the future of Central Asia’s irrigated agriculture.11

NOTES 1 Nearly 60 per cent of Central Asia’s overall population is rural, but only 25 per cent of the overall surface is arable land, most of which is irrigated due to the semi-​arid climate. In contrast with the thinly populated steppe zone, in irrigated oases the population density is high, and the ratio of arable land per rural resident across the country ranges from 0.2 to 0.5 hectares, while agriculture’s share of gross domestic product is high (Lerman 2013). 2 In the Soviet ‘cotton belt’ (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and southern Kazakhstan), the area cultivated with cotton increased from 441,600 hectares in 1913 to ca. 2 million of hectares in 1980, while cotton output reached more than 5 million tons in 1980, ten times the output of 1913 (Spoor 2009, p.141). 3 Some of the negative consequences of the Soviet cotton policy included environmental ruination (Rumer 1991; Fusco and Quagliarotti 2016), inefficient and deficit-​ridden collective agricultural farms (Lerman et al. 2004) and health-​related problems caused by excessive

477

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​ use of pesticides (Fusco and Quagliarotti 2016, p.328), not to mention the forced labour and deportations faced by millions (Teichmann 2016). 4 Region-​wide, irrigation induced (i.e., secondary) soil salinisation is a consequence of the combination of rising groundwater levels, poor water quality, adverse climatic factors, inadequate infrastructure and poor water management (cf. Shainberg and Shalnevet 1984; Babaev 1999). Intensive soil exploitation, evaporation and use of (mildly) salinised water for irrigation have led to increased salinity levels in soil and in groundwater. High groundwater levels affect cultivation when they reach the roots of the plants, inhibiting their growth and their crops. Groundwater rises when water is not properly drained away from the fields after irrigation. This occurs when water leaks from irrigation channels, which is the case when they are not paved, or when excessive amounts of water reach the fields, which happens with water logging and soil leaching (cf. Lamers and Martius 2016, pp.70–​72). 5 Such as those around the former Aral Sea (Dzhumashev et al. 2013; Wheeler 2021). 6 In 2016, Kazakhstan’s Maktaaral District comprised 144,575 hectares of irrigated land, with a population of 305,000 (source: Maktaaral District Department for Agriculture). 7 In Maktaaral, these were mainly people of Slavic and European backgrounds who had arrived during the Soviet period. Slavic and European nationalities left en masse after the collapse of the USSR. In 2016, Tajiks (25,258) and Uzbeks (11,586) were the most common nationalities after the Kazakhs (253,942), while Russians, Germans and other nationalities were hardly represented any more in the census. Source: Agency for strategic planning and reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Bureau of National Statistics, 2016. ‘Chislennost naseleniya kyzylordinskoj oblasti po otdelnym ethnosam na nachalo 2016 goda’ http://​stat. gov.kz/​. 8 For a detailed description of a similar outcome of decollectivisation in Uzbekistan, see Trevisani (2011). 9 See Kazakhstan: Government Accepts Defeat Over Land Sale Plans, http://​www.eur​asia​ net.org/​node/​78651, accessed: 15 May 2016. 10 The purchase of seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, and the rent of machinery service for seeding, ploughing and levelling were the most expensive items over the growing season. By comparison, land tax, income tax and water consumption did not weigh as heavily. 11 Research for this paper was carried out within the framework of the DFG-​funded SFB 923 project ‘Threatened Orders’ at the University of Tübingen, and benefited from cooperation with the IAMO Agrichange Project (Halle, Germany). Thanks to Iroda Aminova, Saule Burkitbaeva and Inkar Saudambekova for their cooperation with field visits in 2016 and 2017 in the Maktaaral region; Aibek Samakov and Xeniya Prilutskaya assisted in translation.

REFERENCES Andrianov, B. (author), Mantellini, S. (ed.). 2016. Ancient Irrigation System of the Aral Sea Area: The History, Origin and Development of Irrigated Agriculture. Oxford: Oxbow. Agyeman, J., Bullard, R.D. and Evans, B. 2003. Introduction: Joined-​up Thinking: Bringing Together Sustainability, Environmental Justice, and Equity, pp.1–​18 in Agyeman, J., R.D. Bullard and B. Evans (eds.) Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. London: Earthscan/​MIT Press. Babaev, A.G. 1999. Desert Problems and Desertification in Central Asia. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-​Verlag. Bichsel, C. 2012. “The Drought Does Not Cause Fear”. Irrigation History in Central Asia. Revue d‘etudes comparatives Est-​ouest, 43 (1–​2): 73–​108. 478

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​ Borovskiy, V.M. 1982. Formirovanie zasolennykh pochv i galogeokhimicheskie provincii Kazakhstana. Alma-​Ata: Akademiya Nauk Kaz. SSR. Djanibekov, U., Villamor, G.B., Dzhakypbekova, K., Chamberlain, J. and Jianchu Xu. 2016. Adoption of Sustainable Land Uses in Post-​Soviet Central Asia: The Case for Agroforestry. Sustainability, 8, 1030; doi:10.3390/​su8101030 Dosbiev, D. 2007. The Dark Side of White Gold in South Kazakhstan, pp.133–​137 in Kandiyoti, D. (ed.) The Cotton Sector in Central Asia: Economic Policy and development challenges. London: University of London, SOAS. 133–​137. Dosbieva, O. 2007. Kazakhstan’s Cotton Market, pp.129–​132 in Kandiyoti, D. (ed.) The Cotton Sector in Central Asia: Economic Policy and development challenges. University of London, SOAS. Dubuisson, E.M. 2020. Whose World? Discourses of Protection for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources in Kazakhstan, Problems of Post-​Communism, 69 (4–​5). doi.org/​ 10.1080/​10758216.2020.1788398 Dudwick, N., K. Fock, and D.J. Sedik (eds.) 2007. Land Reform and Farm Restructuring In Transition Countries: The Experience of Bulgaria, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. World Bank working paper 104. Washington, DC: World Bank. Dzhumashev, A., O. Guenther and T. Loy (eds.). 2013. Aral Histories. Geschichte und Erinnerung im Delta des Amudarja. Reichert: Wiesbaden. Elie, M. 2015. Formulating the Global Environment: Soviet Soil Scientists and the International Desertification Discussion, 1968–​ 91. The Slavonic and East European Review, 93 (1): 181–​204. Fusco, I. and Quagliarotti, D. 2016. A Transdisciplinary History of the Disappearance of the Aral Sea. Global Environment, 9 (2): 296–​341. Giordano, C. and Kostova, D. 2002. The Social Production of Mistrust, pp.74–​92 in Hann, C. (ed.) Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge. Gleason, G. 1983. The Pakhta Programme: The Politics of Sowing Cotton in Uzbekistan. Central Asian Survey, 2 (2): 109–​120. Hann, C. and the Property Relations Group. 2003. The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition, Münster: LIT Verlag. Hofman, I. 2019. Cotton, control and continuity in disguise. The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan. Dissertation, University of Leiden. Kandiyoti, D. 2003. The Cry for Land: Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan. Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1–​2): 225–​256. Lampland, M. 2002. The Advantages of Being Collectivized: Cooperative Farm Managers in the Postsocialist Economy, pp.31–​56 in Hann, C. (ed.). Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge. Lamers J. and Martius, C. 2016. Central Asia: Separating Facts from Fiction, pp.67–​77 in Freedman, E. and M. Neuzil (eds.) Environmental Crises in Central Asia: From Steppes to Seas, from Deserts to Glaciers. London: Routledge. Lerman, Z., C. Csaki and G. Feder (eds.) 2004. Agriculture in Transition. Land Policies and Evolving Farm Structures in Post-​Soviet Countries. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Lerman, Z. 2013. Structure and Performance of Agriculture in Central Asia. Discussion Paper 8.13. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Matley, I. 1970. The Golodnaya Steppe: A Russian Irrigation Venture in Central Asia. Geographical Review, 60 (3): 328–​346. Mirzabaev, A., J. Goedecke, O. Dubovyk, U. Djanibekov, Q. Bao Le and A. Aw-​Hassan. 2016. Economics of Land Degradation in Central Asia, pp.261–​ 290 in Nkoya, E., A. Mirzabaev, and J. von Braun (eds.) Economics of Land Degradation and Improvement –​ A Global Assessment for Sustainable Developments. Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer-​Verlag. 479

—​​​​ T o m m a s o T r e v i s a n i —​​​​ Mohai P., D. Pellow and J. Timmons-​Roberts. 2009. Environmental Justice. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 34: 405–​30. Moroz, I.R. 1993. Uluchshenie Zasolennykh Zemel’. Alma-​Ata: Kaynar. Nazpary, J. 2001. Post-​Soviet Chaos. London: Pluto Press. Obertreis, J. 2017. Imperial Desert Dreams. Cotton growing and irrigation in Central Asia 1860–​1991. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. Otarov, A. 2017. Ispol’sovanie GIS tekhnologiy i dannykh DZZ dla ocenki degradacii oroshaemykh pochv yuzhnykh oblastey Kazakhstana. Almaty: U.U.Uspanov Kazakh Research Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry. Petrick, M., D. Oshakbayev, R. Taitukova and N. Djanibekov. 2017. The Return of the Regulator: Kazakhstan’s Cotton Sector Reforms Since Independence. Central Asian Survey 36 (4): 430–​452. Prilutskaya, X. 2017. Siuzhety iz istorii bor’by s vtorichnym zasoleniem pochv Golodnoi stepi, pp.105–​113, in Materials of the Scientific-​Practical Conference ‘A man in history: Sources about scientific and technical intellectuals of Kazakhstan. 1920–​1950’, Almaty. Roy, O. 1999. Kolkhoz and Civil Society in the Independent States of Central Asia, pp. 109–​ 121 in Holt Ruffin, M. and D. Waugh (eds.) Civil Society in Central Asia. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Rumer, B. 1991. Central Asia’s Cotton Economy and Its Costs, pp. 62–​89 in Fierman, W. (ed.) Central Asia: The Failed Transformation. Boulder, CO: Westview. Rasanayagam, J. 2011. Informal Economy, Informal State: The Case of Uzbekistan. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 31 (11/​12): 681–​696. Shainberg, I. and Shalnevet, J. (eds.). 1984. Soil Salinity Under Irrigation. Processes and Management. Berlin: Springer-​Verlag. Spoor, M. 1999. Agrarian Transition in Former Soviet Central Asia: A Comparative Study of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Working Paper 298. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. Spoor, M. 2009. Cotton and Rural Livelihoods in Former Soviet Central Asia, pp.138–​156 in Spoor, M. (ed.) The Political Economy of Rural Livelihoods in Transition Economies. London and New York: Routledge. Teichmann, C. 2016. Macht der Unordnung. Stalins Herrschaft in Zentralasien 1920–​1950. Hamburg: Verlag des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung. Thurman, M. 1999. The “Command-​Administrative System” in Cotton Farming in Uzbekistan 1920s to Present. Papers on Inner Asia No. 32. Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. Toleubayev, Ka., K. Jansen and A. van Huis. 2010. Knowledge and Agrarian Decollectivisation in Kazakhstan, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37 (2): 353–​ 377, doi: 10.1080/​ 03066151003595069 Trevisani, T. 2011. Land and Power in Khorezm. Farmers, Communities and the State in Uzbekistan’s Decollectivisation, Berlin: LIT Verlag. Verdery, K. 1996. What was Socialism, What Comes Next. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weinthal, E. and Watters, K. 2010. Transnational Environmental Activism in Central Asia: The Coupling of Domestic Law and International Conventions. Environmental Politics, 19 (5): 782–​807 Wheeler, W. 2021. Environment and Post-​Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region: Sea Changes. London: UCL Press. Wheeler, W. 2018. Mitigating Disaster: The Aral Sea and (post-​ )Soviet Property, Global Environment, 11: 346–​376. Wooden, A. 2018. “Much Wealth is Hidden in Her Bosom”: Echoes of Soviet Development in Gold Extraction and Resistance in Kyrgyzstan, Ab Imperio, 2/​2018: 145–​168. 480

—​​​​ W h o o w n s t h e ( g o o d ) l a n d ? —​​​​ Wegerich, K. 2010. Handing Over the Sunset. External Factors Influencing the Establishment of Water User Associations in Uzbekistan: Evidence from Khorezm Province. Göttingen: Cuvillier. Zanca, R. 2011. Life in an Uzbek Muslim Village: Cotton Farming after Communism. Belmont: Wadsworth.

481

CHAPTER THIRTY-​T WO

CHANGING PASTORAL LIVELIHOODS Carole Ferret

INTRODUCTION Central Asia is usually divided between the sedentary agricultural world of the oases, constituting a central core located south of the Syr Daria, and the world of nomadic pastoralism, mainly in the steppes but also in deserts and mountains, stretching in a vast northerly crescent over most of what is now Kazakhstan and extending from northern Turkmenistan to the centre of Kyrgyzstan (see Dağyeli, this volume). While this division is somewhat schematic, blurred by the development of agriculture and the settlement of nomads in the twentieth century,1 the dichotomy between nomadic pastoralists and sedentary farmers persists in the Central Asian cultural area. Mobile and multispecies pastoralism was a means of subsistence for many Central Asian populations, and is still a significant source of income for much of the rural population today. Whether they are despised as obsolete or idealised as representing tradition, the pastoral activities that consist of tending livestock and processing animal products are generally viewed as unchanging by academic and political commentators alike.2 On several occasions over the past century, pastoralism seemed doomed to die out, whether following collectivisation or decollectivisation, only to rise again. Is this representation of pastoral life as unvarying, under constant threat of dying out, but barely susceptible to change, truly justified? I seek to answer this question here by addressing three topics of academic debate: first, the relationship between nomadism and change, questioning the nomads’ apparent spatio-​temporal fixity; second, Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoral history over the past century; and third, the transformation of breeding techniques and relationships to animals, questioning the applicability of the ‘animal turn’ in the social sciences to this ethnographic case. I will draw, sometimes implicitly, on a non-​exhaustive survey of the ethnographic literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-​first century, as well as on my own field studies conducted since 1994 in several regions of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.3

482

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-39

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

THE NOMAD WHO DOES NOT MOVE? Nomadism and movement Pastoralism is a mode of extensive stockbreeding in which herbivores are reared in herds. ‘Extensive’ is a relative term, entailing a low density of animals per surface unit (Landais and Balent 1993, pp.18–​19) and, as a corollary, feeding by grazing with very limited use of inputs. Pastoralism prompts nomadism when pastoralists accompany the movement of herds according to a seasonal cycle of pasture rotation that optimises both natural resources and livestock comfort. Pastoral nomadism is essentially defined by the residential mobility of pastoralists and their families, but not all population movement can be classified as nomadic (Legrand 2007, pp.122–​3). Several researchers have even interpreted nomadism as the negation of movement. First, unlike wandering or searching for new spaces, nomadism involves stable itineraries that are repeated year after year. Second, the nomadic journey itself is ritualised, as though removed from ordinary time (Chabros and Dulam 1990, pp.27–​30; Humphrey 1995, pp. 142–​3). Third, nomads seem to make every effort to ensure stability and continuity around the centre of gravity that is their home. In Central Asia, the yurt represents a fixed point of reference, despite its mobility. Everyone’s place in the yurt is strictly ordered and the direction of the yurt, facing east for Turkic peoples, is also invariable (Ferret 2005–​06, pp.148–​57). Fourth, nomadic movement offers a way of levelling out climate variability, thus stabilising the living conditions of herders and livestock. In short, nomadic movement does not imply change, but rather stability. As for the value that nomads themselves ascribe to movement, some ambivalence can be detected between the common situation in Central Asia in which pastoral mobility is viewed as a necessity –​sometimes even a ‘boring, laborious’ one –​imposed by livestock (Humphrey 1995, p.158. See also Finke 1995, p.206; Werner 2000, p.24) and other cases, among some Siberian reindeer herders, among whom mobility is valued in its own right (e.g., Habeck 2006).4 The Kazakh herders whom I asked about this admitted that they ‘did not like moving around’ (see also Chabros and Dulam 1990, p.29) and never travelled more than required by the size of their herd (Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012, August 2013). For the four reasons mentioned above, nomadism can be seen as ‘negating movement’ (Humphrey 1995, pp.142–​3). However, is it true to claim, as Pederson does (2016, p.229) following Deleuze and Guattari, that ‘it is therefore false to define the nomad by movement’, or that ‘the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move’ (1987 [1980], p.381; original emphasis), because he inhabits an open smooth space in which paths rather than the points are important ? The section of A Thousand Plateaus known as the ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ (1987 [1980]), frequently quoted by twenty-​first-​century anthropologists of nomadism,5 lacks ethnographic foundation. Apart from the appeal of paradox, ‘the nomad who does not move’ risks prompting a return to an ahistorical image of nomads with an unchanging lifestyle, shut away in an eternal present, irreducibly different from sedentary populations (Ferret 2012). Nomadic pastoralists move ‘to remain the same’ (Pedersen 2016, p.228) or, to be more precise, in order for their livestock to enjoy the most stable grazing conditions 483

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​

possible, following the new grass according to the habitual nomadic journey (Ferret 2021). However, rather than claiming that nomads ‘do not move’, it would be more accurate to imagine them as those who, in order to keep pace with the changing environment, with its seasonal contrasts exacerbated by the continental climate–​must move with it. In other words, nomads have to move around so that their environment changes less. All movement implies a point of reference, but nomads do indeed move. Furthermore, theirs is a shifting form of mobility, alternating between sedentarism and nomadism.

The shifting pastoral mobility of Central Asian pastoralists The mobility of Central Asian pastoralists is both shifting and diverse, as illustrated by the example of the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz who are not, or are no longer, strictly speaking nomads. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, detailed inquiries conducted in the context of Russian colonisation (Materialy… 1898–​ 1909) showed diverse forms of pastoral mobility, ranging from strict nomadism to sedentarism. The most frequent nomadic pattern was quasi-​nomadism (the whole human group moves, but remains at its winter station for more than three months) and semi-​nomadism (a small part of the population remains in the same place all year round, while the rest moves with the livestock) (Ferret 2014a, p.971). The configurations of nomadic itineraries depended more upon local conditions than upon ethnicity. In the deserts and the steppes, they mainly followed a meridian axis, moving north in the summer and south in the winter, across distances ranging from a few dozen to hundreds of kilometres, while in mountainous areas their axis was altitudinal, moving to mountain pastures in summer and to valleys in winter across shorter distances.6 In general, pastoralists spend the cold season in the areas with the least snow and the warm season in the least arid places, playing on latitude, altitude and the orientation of the mountain slopes. The quality of a pasture is relative to a given livestock species and season. It depends on the type, quantity and quality of vegetation cover, the direction of the wind, the absence of insects and accessibility of watering points. Despite their relative stability, itineraries can vary from year to year in both path and range, according to a variety of factors, such as the state of the herd, climate conditions, political or economic considerations, changes in land rights and personal circumstances. The same principles regulate contemporary mobile pastoralism, though today the vast majority of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz have a sedentary lifestyle. Most of the rural population continues to rear heavy and light beasts (sheep being the most numerous, followed by cattle, goats, horses and camels in decreasing order), but the small herds now graze around the villages all year long and the larger herds around remote farms, sometimes moving in transhumance led by professional shepherds. In some cases, quasi-​sedentarism prevails within agro-​pastoral family smallholdings whereby one part of an extended family moves with the livestock to different seasonal stations following either a meridian axis (Robinson and Milner-​Gulland 2003; Kerven et al. 2006), or an altitudinal one (Hauck et al. 2016, pp.105–​7; Ferret 2018), while another part of the same family remains in the village (see Figure 32.1).

484

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

Figure 32.1  Preparation for the transhumance. Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012. Photo Carole Ferret.

THE VAGARIES OF PASTORAL HISTORY OVER THE PAST CENTURY Pastoralist time Pastoralist time appears at first glance to be cyclical, insofar as it is repeated from year to year and follows the rhythm of the seasons and the breeding calendar of livestock (Ferret 2021). Furthermore, pastoral production techniques use few tools and change little over time. This time stands in marked contrast with the linear time of the Russian and Soviet colonisers, who promoted an evolutionist conception of progress7 and caused great upheavals. Agriculture was intensified by speeding up the natural growth of vegetation and animals (see below on early lambing). Superimposed on this contrast between cyclical and linear time is the distinction between the feeling of being encompassed by nature and the will to exert dominance over it. However, these oppositions between Central Asian and Russian world views are not absolute, and over-​exaggerating them risks producing Manichean stereotypes. First, the nomadic cycle is not a perfectly circular movement of identical repetition, but is rather a spiral with variations from one year to the next (Humphrey 1995, p.143). Next, pastoral history is punctuated by moments of radical change. Peoples without writing do still have a history. If pastoral life is overwhelmingly viewed as unchanging,8 this is above all because it is not well known. As soon as it is described in greater detail, a more complicated picture emerges of diverse forms of mobility and types of pastoral activities. In Central Asia, from as early as the eighteenth century, observers have reported some fixed settlements, agricultural practices, or shifts 485

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​

between nomadic and sedentary ways of life.9 The diversity of forms of Central Asian pastoral nomadism, linked to local conditions and individual circumstances, may be considered the rule rather than the exception. Such diversity does not necessarily reflect the different stages of a general process of sedentarisation from a hypothetical original context of pure universal nomadism (Ferret 2014a, p.993; 2016, p.179). Without going into detail concerning how the twentieth century unfolded for Central Asian pastoralists as analysed by historians, I mention below its milestones as cited by my informants or in ethno-​historical narratives.

Collectivisation The collectivisation of the 1930s and the ensuing famine were rarely mentioned by my informants, even the elderly, despite the devastating consequences for the Kazakh population, a quarter of whom perished during this time (Cameron 2016).10 Ăbdīmanap, born in 1907, told me that he fled with his family to China where he lived from 1931 to 1959 (Kaz./​AA/​Kegen, July 1994), as did Īslamshaiyr, born in 1917 (Kaz./​ Semip./​ Zharmin, August 1994), and Toqtybai and Medet, who only returned after two generations (Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012). Dauren’s mother was the only survivor of a family of eight children. Arsha, born in 1917, remembered having eaten snake, donkey and dog in 1932, and having married in order to escape from famine (Kaz./​Sud/​Tolebi, Sept. 1995). In the early 1930s, the people who had not fled were de facto immobilised along with their surviving livestock (Olcott 1981; Ohayon 2006). This immobilisation was both the cause and the consequence of the catastrophe: the livestock concentrated by process of collectivisation perished due to insufficient grazing, and once herds had been decimated, nomadism was deprived of its raison d’être. However, this event was perceived to be similar to a great zhūt, a regular scourge of bad climatic conditions that wipes out livestock. Structural changes to pastoral organisation occurred somewhat later (Jacquesson 2010a, p.142). Collectivisation was less devastating in Kyrgyzstan. In the Naryn Region, the older inhabitants’ memories qualify the idea of any radical break with the past: the population was less often nomadic that one might think before the 1930s, and less often sedentary afterward. In the kolkhozy, people continued to follow a nomadic mode of life in family groups, which were now referred to as ‘brigades’ (Dienes 1975, pp.361–​2; Boyanin 2011). The disastrous results of collectivisation made a return to mobile pastoralism inevitable, in the shape of a compromise that has been described as ‘pastoral communism’ (Boyanin 2011, p.293) or ‘intensive pastoralism’ (Ohayon 2017) –​or more precisely intensified –​characterised by the dissociation between the human habitat and the movement of herds.11 The latter were no longer accompanied by the entire population, but instead only by professional shepherds, The pastoral system was no longer a question of ‘nomadism’ but of ‘transhumant stockbreeding’. The felt yurts were now secondary rather than primary homes, replaced by mud brick or wooden houses (Vostrov and Kauanova 1972, pp.75, 107 sq.; Ohayon 2006, p.173, 337 sq.). The first kolkhozy (collective farms) left an imprint of difficult times in the memories of my informants. Kolkhozniki did not receive a salary but rather income in kind, distributed once a year according to the number of workdays 486

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

(trudoden’) recorded (Abramzon et al. 1958, p.129). They had no annual holiday, no weekly day of rest and no passport, which meant that they were unable to travel freely. Qasymbek, a former shepherd born in 1937 and one of the aqsaqals (elders) in the village where I lived, told me that ‘at the time of the kolkhoz’ (in the 1940s) every family, including his parents, had to give 100 kg of wheat per year and received 10 kg of flour in return. A guard kept watch to ensure that no one picked up the grains of wheat that fell to the ground, but they would go into the fields at night to collect some (Kaz./​South/​Tolebi, May 2008). In the 1950s, entire auls (both villages and lineage groups in this case) were suddenly displaced to barren land to carry out agricultural projects. In addition to the hardships of exile, the survivors of this ordeal were marked by the fact that they were then deprived of the livestock so dear to them (Ferret 2017, p.170). In the 1960s, some kolkhozy were grouped together into sovkhozy (state farms) and the working conditions of kolkhozniki and sovkhozniki were aligned, with all workers receiving salaries, paid holidays and a pension. My informants experienced the changes as considerable social progress. However, private ownership of livestock, already limited to a few head per household, was restricted further still, and requisitions resumed under Khrushchev. Private livestock were mixed with the collective herd and, in case of inspection, parents tasked their children with hiding animals in a neighbouring aul (Kaz./​South/​Tolebi, June 1997). Stockbreeding became specialised and professionalised, with each worker either focused on one species or category of livestock (ewes, yearlings, etc.), within a brigade, which was responsible for larger herds, or assigned to one particular task, e.g., milking, sheering, etc. (Jacquesson 2010a, p.159–​169; Ferret 2017, p.163).

Decollectivisation After the dissolution of the USSR, the 1990s saw a further period of upheaval and uncertainty, in comparison to the past when ‘the State guaranteed everything for us’ (Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012). Public services collapsed, salaries were no longer paid for months or even years and the privatisation of collective goods, including livestock, took place inequitably, in ways that were undermined by corruption and at the cost of enormous waste (Ferret 2017, p.174–​7). The opposite cause produced the same effects: decollectivisation in the 1990s resulted in a decline in livestock numbers similar to that caused by collectivisation in the 1930s. Sheep and goat numbers in Kazakhstan, which had fallen from 26 million head in 1927 to 1.4 million in 1932, dropped from 36 million in 1991 to 9.5 million in 1999. This phenomenon can also be explained by the lack of financial liquidity and the hyperinflation that transformed sheep into a substitute currency. However, stockbreeding was not privatised all at once –​or at the same speed –​across the five now-​independent Central Asian republics. Reforms were rolled out rapidly in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. However, in Tajikistan, the kolkhozy remained in place through the 1990s, and transhumance continued across the borders with Uzbekistan, until these closed in 1999 (Abashin 2015, pp.374–​5; Dörre 2016). The dramatic fall in livestock numbers, the state’s disengagement from stockbreeding, the reduction of this activity to subsistence for the family unit and an overall sense of the end of an era led many ethnologists once again to announce the death of 487

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​

Central Asian pastoralism, as implied by the title of Pétric’s book We ate our sheep (2013; see also Vuillemenot 2009). Some ex-​Soviet ethnographers argued that this world had in fact already disappeared several decades earlier (Sitnianskiĭ 1997, p.85; Khazanov 2012, p.157). Unemployment and low local salaries led to a rural exodus and large-​scale international labour migration, with emigration from Kyrgyzstan and immigration into Kazakhstan. Thus, the Central Asian mobility most studied currently in the social sciences is no longer pastoral, but rather based on labour or ethnic migration (cf. Meirkhan; Cleuziou this volume). Some research has focused on stockbreeding, but this is mainly in development studies with a view to aligning future policy with ecological good practice (Jungbluth and Schillhorn van Veen 2004; Gintzburger et al. 2005; Liechti 2012; Levine et al. 2017). Social science studies, predominantly of Kyrgyz as opposed to Kazakh rural life, have focused on land reform (Jacquesson 2010b; Robinson et al. 2017)‬‬, the process of privatisation (Yoshida 2005), or the reorganisation of agricultural smallholdings in the five republics (Hazanov 2017a and 2017b; Robinson 2020) leading to increased socio-​economic inequalities (Werner 2000; Shigaeva et al. 2007), and much more rarely on herding practices. The reforms were often muddled and contradictory, plunging rural populations into uncertainty, with a lack of clear information leaving them worried about making the wrong choices concerning livestock species or type of organisation, or about losing the use of acquired rights (especially grazing rights) (Schillhorn van Veen 1995, p.9; Steimann 2011; Khazanov 2012, pp.148–​50). Inequality increased considerably in the villages and among stockbreeders: between owners of vastly different numbers of livestock and between salaried shepherds and assistant shepherds with no job security. The latter are often men without homes or family ties, who receive no wages but only board and lodging. At the other end of the social ladder, larger owners soon became wealthy: on his first transhumance in 1996, Ernat led a flock of 20 sheep; in 2013, he owned over 1,000 along with 40 cows and 60 horses (Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, 2012, 2013). After the year 2000, the herds were built up again. Today in Kazakhstan, sheep and goat numbers have risen to 19 million head, with cattle having reached their previous numbers (7.4 million) and horses having surpassed them (2.8 million). In Kyrgyzstan, this recovery was aided in part by remittance funds from labour migration (Schoch et al. 2010). Some stockbreeders returned to mobile pastoralism because the overgrazed surroundings of the villages could no longer provide sufficient grazing (Ferret 2018). The owners of the largest herds were able to recolonise remote land that had temporarily been abandoned (Kerven et al. 2015). However, these examples do not point to a general return to the previous nomadic pastoralism. On the contrary, shepherds who had been forced to engage in systematic transhumance under the kolkhoz now sometimes decide to spend all year at their winter station when the size of their herd permits so as to avoid the trouble and hardship of moving to summer pastures, while others send an assistant there to care only for the small livestock. These choices are not definitive and can change from one year to the next, depending on circumstances (Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012, August 2013). Pastoral mobility is no longer automatic, but rather is linked to individual strategies and has thus regained its flexibility (see Figure 32.2).

488

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

Figure 32.2  A flock of fat-​tailed sheep coming back to the village in the evening, Kaz./​ South/​Tolebi, April 2008. Photo Carole Ferret.

CHANGES IN STOCKBREEDING TECHNIQUES AND RELATIONSHIPS TO LIVESTOCK Black sheep and white sheep Sovietisation transformed breeding techniques whilst maintaining mobile pastoralism through transhumance. The mottos of this transformation were ‘rationalisation’, ‘intensification’, ‘specialisation’ and ‘improvement’. The shift to more intensive feeding was intended to defeat the scourge of unpredictable weather by building up fodder reserves. However, these remained chronically insufficient (Ohayon 2017). The needs of the animals were scientifically defined and standardised, with food rations for each category of livestock calculated according to species, breed, age, sex, degree of fattening, reproductive stage and season (Ferret 2017). Pastoral know-​how was made explicit and standardised under the leadership of zootechnicians who, claiming to know better than the shepherds, largely took decision-​making powers away from the latter. No longer able to use their own initiative, shepherds became less interested in whether or not the collective livestock prospered, despite a reward system for good results (fertility rates, quantities produced) and fines in the case of losses. Specialisation also restricted each person’s know-​how to a narrow area of expertise. Concentration in large production units, in which large herds were entrusted to brigades of several workers, mitigated against the shepherds’ individual knowledge of the animals. Nevertheless, these trends were tempered by the fact that the private ownership of a few head of livestock continued. 489

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​

At the same time, local breeds were ‘improved’: first by crossing local females with imported males of ‘cultivated’ breeds, and then by intensified feeding (fodder supply and stabling).12 The ensuing increase in productivity, combined with a rise in livestock numbers, was planned in order to considerably increase the production of animal products (meat, milk, wool), as this slogan illustrates: ‘Let us make Kazakhstan the main centre for socialist stockbreeding in the east of the USSR’ (Shaiahmetov 1949). Wool production in Kazakhstan increased, in thousands of tonnes, from 13 in 1940 to 66 in 1960 and 108 in 1990 (falling to 22 in 1999 and rising slightly to 39 in 2019). Central Asian sheep breeding was firmly directed towards the production of wool, described, like cotton, as ‘white gold’ (compare Dağyeli, this volume). The local fat-​ tailed sheep with dark coats were replaced by clouds of white Merino crossbreeds with fine, abundant wool. Some Merinos had been imported to Central Asia already from the beginning of the twentieth century, but the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz did not like their suint smell, which gave an unpleasant taste to the meat. Some even claimed they were dog-​sheep hybrids (Bezvuglyĭ 1916). Following collectivisation, ‘people were even persecuted for calling the newly introduced white sheep “dogs” […], perhaps for not showing respect for state property and thus the state’ (Boyanin 2011, p.289). Referring to the livestock as ‘dogs’ was indeed an insult in Central Asia, where dogs guard homes but do not herd flocks. Control was tightened over livestock reproduction: for sheep, techniques of artificial insemination were introduced from the 1940s, increasing the reproductive capacity of elite rams tenfold; reproductive pairs were strictly matched according to their breed and ‘classification’ (depending on their measurements, and on the quality and quantity of their products). This also involved a race to achieve record fertility rates in ewes; the proactive promotion of early lambing, in February–​March for the fat-​tailed sheep; and the introduction of systematic weaning at four months (Ferret 2017). Animal husbandry techniques therefore changed over the twentieth century. The original low-​intervention approach of extensive pastoralism –​requiring few inputs and little labour, and using herd mobility to take advantage of natural variations in vegetation and climate, but remaining at the mercy of the vagaries of nature that could wipe out the livestock in bad years –​shifted towards more intensive feeding and greater intervention in livestock reproduction. Originally, the five species of livestock (sheep, cattle, goats, horses, and camels) were polyvalent and complementary, both in their herding (successive grazing in winter, with horses clearing the snow for other species that followed) and their uses (they all provided milk, meat, fuel, leather, hair or wool, and the larger livestock served as a source of transport and energy). They were then separated and looked after by specialised shepherds, whilst themselves becoming specialised: sheep for wool, cattle for milk, horses for labour until the 1960s, and then for meat and secondarily for milk. Meanwhile camels, which served above all as pack animals, lost much of their usefulness once transportation had become mechanised. The specialisation of livestock species and the standardisation of their treatment according to their category are common to all modern stockbreeding practices, and not specific to the Soviet system. These are inherent features of what I have described elsewhere as an a priori mode of action, which is standardised, systematised and 490

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

planified, and contrasts with a posteriori opportunistic and improvised action (Ferret 2014b). The implementation of these systematic plans did not necessarily fulfil their goal –​indeed, far from it –​but their existence, imposed from above, and the formal obligation for herders to comply with them, stands in marked contrast to the post-​ Soviet lack of centralised planning. After independence, the fragmentation of livestock due to privatisation and the sharp fall in their numbers made it impossible to continue to pursue standardisation. Animals of different breeds, sex, class and age were grouped together in mixed herds which were formed according to agreements between owners rather than on the basis of animal characteristics (Kaz/​Raĭymbek, Tolebi). Their treatment became de facto undifferentiated, reversing the previous categorisation. As state intervention waned, so too did zootechnical breed selection. Control over reproduction and veterinary monitoring was loosened considerably. Furthermore, the price of wool plummeted, transforming this precious commodity into a wasted product (McGuire 2016, p.58). In the Tolebi district, black sheep replaced the white sheep, whereas in Raĭymbek, Merino hybrids continued to be bred, but now for their meat (see Figure 32.3). However, the trend towards intensification was not reversed. In the 1990s, the interruption of pastoral mobility increased the need to use fodder. Some stockbreeders even developed strategies to fatten up cattle (Martinière 2012), horses (Ferret 2017, p.179), and sheep (McGuire 2016, pp.62–​3) which, while costly in terms of inputs, were also very profitable in the short term (Kaz/​Tolebi).

Figure 32.3  A few rare dark fat-​tailed sheep among a flock of white Arkharo-​Merinos arriving in the summer pastures, Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek, June 2012. Photo Carole Ferret. 491

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​

Relationships with animals For several decades now, the field of animal studies has seen an ‘animal turn’, which claims to go beyond the dualism of Western naturalist ontology with its dichotomy between nature and culture, and to decentre the perspectival dominance of humans through multispecies ethnography.13 Many of these studies overestimate the innovative features of their approach insofar as, despite their revolutionary stance, they explore fairly classic topics in fairly classic ways such as a focus on animal consecration ritual or herd management (White and Fijn 2020).14 So far, this ‘turn’ has had comparatively little impact on Central Asian studies, unlike in Siberian studies (e.g., Pedersen 2001; Willerslev 2004). Siberian culture has been taken to be a model of animism, analogous to that of the Amazon, even though the widening of the gulf between ‘us’ in the West and ‘them’ in Siberia often requires stylisation and the selective deployment of ethnographic evidence. It is notable that when Broz (2007) applied Viveiros de Castros’s Amazonian perspectivism to the Altaians and when Fijn (2011) proposed the notion of a symmetrical relationship of ‘co-​domestication’ between Mongols and their herds, they did not use the usual translation of the Turkic and Mongolian word mal as ‘livestock’, preferring instead ‘domesticated animal’ and ‘herd animal’ respectively. Obviously, their arguments would not have been well-​served by the connotation of commodity present in the term ‘livestock’. However, in Central Asia, livestock are indeed treated as commodities: edible ones that serve as a unit of value and as a unit of account. In Turkic languages, mal refers to both ‘livestock’ and ‘wealth’ (Radloff 1893, IV-​2, pp.2035–​6), a meaning that took on a new resonance with privatisation. The herders with whom I lived in the 1990s and 2000s set one part of their herds aside for the eventual wedding of the eldest son, another part for the studies of a younger son, as a sort of trust fund with four legs (Kaz./​Tolebi, Raĭymbek; McGuire 2016). Livestock are also living beings which grow, multiply and have needs. The more that the livestock’s needs are satisfied, the better that human needs will be satisfied. That livestock are both a commodity and food does not prevent Central Asian pastoralists from ascribing agency to them: the ability to choose the right pasture, the best path, pure water, the right moment to move, and so on. They recognise these aptitudes and draw on them every day when they herd their animals. This is true not only of the horses they ride, but also of all the large livestock that mainly look after themselves, and of the lead goats (serke) in flocks (Ferret 2014b; 2018). The herd, being cohesive and gregarious, is viewed as a collective agent (Bumochir et al. 2020), meaning that a mixed or newly formed flock will be harder to control (Kaz./​Raĭymbek, 2012–​13). This animal agency does not preclude a relationship of domination between animals and humans, which it would be short-​sighted and naïve to deny (McGough 2019). Reciprocity does not imply symmetry. Simply, for example, the difference –​particularly compared to European classical riding –​is that Central Asian riders do not pursue domination as an end in itself, for the satisfaction of being obeyed, but rather for its efficiency (Ferret 2006, p.777). Herding varies considerably according to the season and the species of livestock. The discontinuity in action, which I have shown elsewhere to be a distinctive feature 492

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

of Yakut horse-​breeding in Siberia (Ferret 2006; 2014b), cannot be extended to all Eurasian pastoralism (Stépanoff et al. 2017), and especially not to small livestock in Central Asia which, unlike large livestock, are kept under continuous watch. While the lives of animals and humans are closely intertwined and their destinies inextricably linked, the idea that they might form a hybrid community of humans and non-​humans is completely foreign to Central Asian pastoralists. It sounded incongruous to those I asked about it on the field. In their view, animals have a more ambiguous status that depends on several parameters and cannot be reduced to a one-​dimensional hierarchy in which beings are ranked according to their degree of agency. Asserting that horses are noble does not prevent them from being eaten. Horse meat is the most highly prized of all meats and essential to the funeral ceremonies of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz who, like the Yakuts, are at once both horse-​eaters and horse-​ lovers (Ferret 2010). Considering sheep to be so stupid that they must be led by the cleverer goats does not prevent a strong preference for the former: it is unthinkable to offer goat meat (said to be ‘cold’, Ferret 2004) to a guest and some herders do not even count goats in the flock (Kaz/​Raĭymbek, Tolebi). In Central Asian pastoralism, as elsewhere, the subject of anthropology is the human community: how people act among themselves and towards the animals.

CONCLUSION This overview of changing pastoral livelihoods shows that the idea of a traditional Central Asian pastoral system has little meaning, given its many variations. Studying this system requires comparing specific historical situations in order to identify changes, in ways that are substantiated. Specific contexts must be described in all their complexity, without fearing inconsistencies, whether in forms of mobility or in relationships with animals. The debates about nomadic life and in animal studies show that exaggerating the otherness of Central Asian pastoralism in order to set up a radical opposition with a similarly caricatured Western model risks giving a distorted account of reality. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, pastoralism –​which previously represented the main (if not the only) way of life for Kazakhs and Kyrgyz alike –​ has become simply one possible activity among others. While the blurred, folkloric memory of pastoralism may have served as a basis for constructing national identities at the moment of independence, this does not mean that it has disappeared from rural realities. The two opposing shocks of collectivisation and decollectivisation had similarly disastrous consequences for livestock, but were not ultimately fatal to pastoralism, which has persisted inspite of them. One of the paradoxes of Central Asian pastoralism consists in the fact that it is thought to be both unchanging and constantly in danger of extinction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chermak (1906) penned an article ironically titled ‘Are the Kazakhs dying out?’, in which he emphasised the adaptability of Kazakh pastoralism and expressed his lack of concern about any threat of extinction. Since then, this extinction has been announced on several occasions, alongside a somewhat morbid fascination with searching for the ‘last’ nomad, that is specific to the romantic construction of anthropology as a discipline (Fabre and Jamin 2012). Pastoralism is held to be constantly on the point of dying out, or to have done so already, and yet, at 493

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​

the same time, to be incapable of change. Its demise is assumed because it is believed to be unchanging but, on the contrary, the pastoral way of life is founded on flexibility. It is in its very nature to change.

NOTES 1 After the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the legalisation of colonisation in 1889, the steppes saw a massive influx of Russian peasants. By 1916, Slavs made up 42 per cent of the population in the Ural, Turgaĭ, Akmolinsk, and Semipalatinsk oblast (Olcott 1987, p.90). From 1954 onwards, Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign resulted in 45 million hectares of land being put to cultivation thanks to the arrival of 300,000 colonisers, particularly Komsomol activists. 2 For examples of these two antithetical viewpoints either praising or condemning nomadism, see Ferret 2012, 2016. 3 For the primary sources, see my articles cited in the bibliography. Some field data is indicated in the text, with the location and date (for the Kazakhstan districts: Kaz./​South/​Tolebi in southern Kazakhstan; Kaz./​AA/​Raĭymbek in the Almaty region; Kaz./​Semip./​Zharmin, in the Semipalatinsk region). 4 The status given to nomads by the sedentary, who distrust ‘homeless’ people whom they consider to be backward and uncontrollable, is another issue which I do not address here. On that topic, see, e.g., Ushakin 2012, Ferret 2016, Bissenova this volume. 5 See, indicatively Serguei Oushakine [Ushakin 2012], Morten Pedersen (2016), Grégory Delaplace (2008). The latter quotes Deleuze in the epigraph to his book: ‘The nomads have no history; they only have a geography.’ He does qualify this peremptory assertion on p.140, but without rejecting its allochronic essentialisation of nomads. 6 For a more detailed analysis of these itineraries, see Ferret 2013, 2014a, 2018 for the Kazakhs; Jacquesson 2003, 2010a for the Kyrgyz; and Finke 1995, 2003 for the Kazakhs of Western Mongolia. 7 For more on the Russian-​Kazakh debate about sedentarism see Ferret 2016, and on the alleged atemporality of the steppe nomads, see Ferret 2012. 8 For example, ‘Until the mid-​ 19th century Central Asia remained virtually unchanged as a land of pastoral nomads migrating vertically and horizontally over vast stretches’ (Schillhorn van Veen 1995, p.38). 9 On the reversible nature of the shift from nomadism to sedentarism, see Salzman (1980, pp.13–​14) who questions the idea that socio-​cultural change is necessarily irreversible, directional and cumulative. 10 For an autobiographical narrative of this period, see Shayakhmetov 2006. 11 ‘Pastoral communism’ refers to improvements in education, medicine, veterinary science and animal husbandry, despite low incomes not enabling the individual accumulation of wealth, while pastoralism (extensive by definition) was ‘intensified’ through increasing recourse to fodder. Intensification does not necessarily imply an increase in livestock numbers. 12 On the creation of the Novokirghiz horse using a similar procedure, see Ferret 2011. 13 See, e.g., Kirksey and Helmreich 2010. For a critical analysis of this literature, see Manceron 2016 and Guillo 2015. 14 As Smart (2014: p.4) notes, ‘Bringing other species back in also brings us back to classical ethnography.’

494

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abashin, S.N. 2015. Sovetskiĭ kishlak: mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsieĭ. Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Abramzon, S.M., K.I. Antipina, G.P. Vasil’eva, E.I. Mahova and D. Sulaĭmanov. 1958. Byt kolhoznikov kirgizskih seleniĭ Darhan i Chichkan. Moskva: Izd. ANSSSR. Bezvuglyĭ, L.F. 1916. Otchet po proizvedennomu v 1914 g. obsledovaniiu zhivotnovodstva v Pishpekskom uezde Semirechenskoĭ oblasti. Petrograd: M.Z. Departament zemledeliia. Boyanin, Y. 2011. The Kyrgyz of Naryn in the Early Soviet Period: A Study Examining Settlement, Collectivisation and Dekulakisation on the Basis of Oral Evidence. Inner Asia 13(2): 279–​96. Broz, L. 2007. Pastoral Perspectivism: A View from Altai. Inner Asia 9(2): 291–​310. Bumochir, D., B. Ichinkhorloo and A. Ahearn. 2020. Herd Agency: Rethinking Herd-​Herder Relations in Mongolia and Qinghai, China. Inner Asia 22(2): 183–​98. Cameron, S. 2016. The Kazakh Famine of 1930–​33: Current Research and New Directions. East/​West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 3(2): 117–​32. Chermak, L. 1906. Vymiraiut-​li kirgizy? Sibirskie voprosy 2: 115–​25. Chabros, K. and S. Dulam. 1990. La nomadisation mongole: techniques et symbolique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Delaplace, G. 2009. L’invention des morts: sépultures, fantômes et photographie en Mongolie contemporaine. Paris: EPHE. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dienes, L. 1975. Pasturalism in Turkestan: Its Decline and Its Persistence. Soviet Studies 27(3): 343–​65. Dörre, A. 2016. Changes in the Relationship Between Borders and Pastoral Mobility in Mountain Regions of Central Asia, pp. 95–​112 in H. Kreutzmann and T. Watanabe (eds.), Mapping Transition in the Pamirs. Cham: Springer. Fabre, D. and J. Jamin. 2012. A Few Considerations on the Relations between Anthropology and Literature. L’Homme 203/​204: 579–​612. Ferret, C. 2004. De l’attache des chevaux à la fécondation des femmes en passant par la cuisine. Quelques pistes pour l’exploration des notions altaïques de chaud et de froid. Études rurales 171: 243–​70. —​—​—​. 2005–​6. Un espace à l’aune du bétail. Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 36/​37: 139–​62. —​—​—​. 2006. Techniques iakoutes aux confins de la civilisation altaïque du cheval: contribution à une anthropologie de l’action. Thèse de doctorat. Paris: EHESS. —​—​—​. 2010. Hippophiles et hippophages. Anthropozoologica 45(1): 115–​35. —​—​—​. 2011. À chacun son cheval! Identités nationales et races équines en ex-​URSS (à partir des exemples turkmène, kirghize et iakoute). Cahiers d’Asie centrale 19/​20: 405–​58. —​—​—​. 2012. La figure atemporelle du « nomade des steppes » pp.167–​82 in N. Schlanger and A.-​C. Taylor (eds.), La Préhistoire des autres. Paris: La Découverte. —​—​—​. 2013. Le pastoralisme nomade dans les steppes kazakhes, pp.38–​42 in C. Stépanoff, C. Ferret, G. Lacaze and J. Thorez (eds.), Nomadismes d’Asie centrale et septentrionale. Paris: A.Colin —​—​—​. 2014a. Discontinuités spatiales et pastoralisme nomade en Asie intérieure au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 69(4): 957–​96. —​—​—​. 2014b. Towards an Anthropology of Action: From Pastoral Techniques to Modes of Action. Journal of Material Culture 19(3): 279–​302. —​ —​ —​ . 2016. The Ambiguities of The Kazakhs’ Nomadic Heritage. Nomadic Peoples 20(2): 176–​99 (and long version in French).

495

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​ —​—​—​. 2017. Bêtes et gens. Techniques pastorales dans deux aouls kazakhs. Études rurales, 200: 156–​97. —​—​—​. 2018. Mobile Pastoralism a Century Apart: Continuity and Change in South-​eastern Kazakhstan, 1910 and 2012. Central Asian Survey 37(4): 503–​25. —​—​—​. 2021. Keeping Pace with the Seasons: The Pastoral Lives of Yakuts and Kazakhs, Whether Nomadic or Not, pp.105–​31 in A. Averbouh, N. Goutas and S. Méry (eds.), Nomad lives: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day. Paris: Publications scientifiques du Museum national d’histoire naturelle. Fijn, N. 2011. Living with Herds: Human-​ Animal Co-​ existence in Mongolia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finke, P. 1995. Kazak Pastoralists in Western Mongolia: Economic and Social Change in the Course of Privatization. Nomadic Peoples 36/​37: 195–​216. —​ —​ —​ . 2003. Le pastoralisme dans l’ouest de la Mongolie: contraintes, motivations et variations. Cahiers d’Asie centrale 11/​12: 245–​65. Gintzburger, G., H.N. Le Houérou and K.N. Toderich. 2005. The Steppes of Middle Asia: Post-​ 1991 Agricultural and Rangeland Adjustment. Arid Land Research and Management 19(3): 215–​39. Guillo, D. 2015. What is the Place of Animals in the Social Sciences? Revue française de sociologie 56(1): 135–​63. Habeck, J.O. 2006. Experience, Movement and Mobility: Komi Reindeer Herders’ Perception of the Environment. Nomadic Peoples 10(2): 123–​41. Hauck, M., G.T. Artykbaeva, T.N. Zozulya and C. Dulamsuren. 2016. Pastoral Livestock Husbandry and Rural Livelihoods in the Forest-​Steppe of East Kazakhstan. Journal of Arid Environments 133: 102–​11. Hazanov, А.М. 2017a. Posle sotsializma: Sud’by skotovodstva v Tsentral’noĭ Azii, Mongolii i Rossii. Vestnik antropologii 38(2): 5–​23. —​—​—​. 2017b. Mobil’noe skotovodstvo v postkommunisticheskih stranah Tsentral’noĭ Azii. Ètnograficheskoe obozrenie 6: 57–​73. Humphrey, C. 1995. Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia, pp.135–​62 in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds.), The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jacquesson, S. 2003. Au cœur du Tian Chan: histoire et devenir de la transhumance au Kirghizstan. Cahiers d’Asie centrale 11/​12: 203–​44. —​—​—​. 2010a. Pastoréalismes. Anthropologie historique des processus d’identification et d’intégration chez les Kirghiz du Tian Shan intérieur. Wiesbaden: Reichert. —​—​—​. 2010b. Reforming Pastoral Land Use in Kyrgyzstan: From Clan and Custom to Self-​ government and Tradition. Central Asian Survey 29(1): 103–​18. Jungbluth, F. and T. Schillhorn van Veen. 2004. Kazakhstan’s Livestock Sector: Supporting its Revival. Washington, DC: World Bank. Kerven, C., I.I. Alimaev, R. Behnke, G. Davidson, N. Malmakov, A. Smailov and I. Wright 2006. Fragmenting Pastoral Mobility: Changing Grazing Patterns in Post-​ Soviet Kazakhstan, pp.  99–​110 in D.J. Bedunah, E.D. McArthur and M.E. Fernandez-​Gimenez (eds.), Rangelands of Central Asia. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture. Kerven, C., S. Robinson, R. Behnke, E.J. Milner-​Gulland and K. Kushenov. 2015. A Pastoral Frontier: From Chaos to Capitalism and the Re-​colonisation of the Kazakh Rangelands. Journal of Arid Environments 127: 106–​19. Khazanov, A.M. 2012. Pastoralism and Property Relations in Contemporary Kazakhstan, pp. 141–​ 57 in A.M. Khazanov and G. Schlee (eds.), Who Owns the Stock? New-​ York: Berghahn Books. Kirksey, S.E. and S. Helmreich. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545–​76.

496

—​​​​ C h a n g i n g p a s t o r a l l i v e l i h o o d s —​​​​ Landais, É. and G. Balent. 1993. Introduction à l’étude des systèmes d’élevage extensif, pp. 13–​36 in Landais, É. and G. Balent (eds), Pratiques d’élevage extensif. Versailles: INRA. Legrand, J. 2007. Migrations ou nomadisme. Diogène 218: 116–​23. Levine, J., A.Isaeva et al. 2017. A Cognitive Approach to the Post-​Soviet Central Asian Pasture Puzzle: New Data from Kyrgyzstan. Regional Environmental Change 17(3): 941–​47. Liechti, K. 2012. The Meanings of Pasture in Resource Degradation Negotiations: Evidence from Post-​Socialist Rural Kyrgyzstan. Mountain Research and Development 32(3): 304–​12. Manceron, V. 2016. Exil ou agentivité? Ce que l’anthropologie fabrique avec les animaux. L’Année sociologique 66(2): 279–​98. de la Martinière, R. 2012. Recompositions agropastorales et développement de la filière bovine dans un système économique libéralisé (oblast’ de la Chuy, Kirghizstan). Revue d’études comparatives Est-​Ouest 43(1/​2): 137–​66. Materialy po kirgizskomu zemlepol’zovaniiu, sobrannye i razrabotannye èkspeditsieĭ po issledovaniiu stepnyh oblasteĭ. 1898–​1909. Voronezh/​Omsk/​St-​Peterburg: M.Z. i G.I. McGough, L.M. 2019. Partnerships and Understanding Between Kazakh Pastoralists and Golden Eagles of the Altai Mountains: A Multi-​species Ethnography. PhD, University of St Andrews, Scotland. McGuire, G. 2016. By Coin or By Kine? Barter and Pastoral Production in Kazakhstan. Ethnos 81(1): 53–​74. Ohayon, I. 2006. La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline: collectivisation et changement social, 1928–​1945. Paris: Maisonneuve-​Larose. —​—​—​. 2017. Après la sédentarisation. Le pastoralisme intensif et ses conséquences au Kazakhstan soviétique (1960–​1980). Études rurales 200: 130–​55. Olcott, M.B. 1981. The Collectivization Drive in Kazakhstan. Russian Review 40(2): 122–​42. —​—​—​. 1987. The Kazakhs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pedersen, M.A. 2001. Totemism, Animism and North Asian Indigenous Ontologies. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(3): 411–​27. —​—​—​. 2016. Moving to Remain the Same: An Anthropological Theory of Nomadism, pp. 219–​ 43 in P. Charbonnier, G. Salmon and P. Skafish (eds.), Comparative Metaphysics Ontology After Anthropology. London and New York: Rowman/​Littlefield. Pétric, B. 2013. On a mangé nos moutons: le Kirghizstan, du berger au biznesman. Paris: Belin. Radloff, W. 1893. Opyt slovaria tiurkskih narechiĭ. 4 vols. St.-​Petersburg. Robinson, S. and E.J. Milner-​Gulland. 2003. Contraction in Livestock Mobility Resulting from State Farm Re-​organisation, pp. 128–​45 in C. Kerven (ed.), Prospects for Pastoralism in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. London: Routledge. Robinson, S. 2020. Livestock in Central Asia: From Rural Subsistence to Engine of Growth? Discussion paper 193. Halle: Leibniz IAMO. Robinson, S., C. Jamsranjav and K. Gillin. 2017. Pastoral Property Rights in Central Asia. Factors and Actors Driving the Reform Agenda. Études rurales 200: 220–​53. Shaiahmetov, Zh. 1949. Prevratim Kazahstan v osnovuiu bazu sotsialisticheskogo zhivotnovodstva na vostoke SSSR. Alma-​Ata: Kaz. ob. gos. izd. Salzman, P.C. (ed.). 1980. When Nomads Settle: Processes of Sedentarization as Adaptation and Response. New York: Praeger. Schillhorn van Veen, T.W. 1995. The Kyrgyz Sheep Herders at a Crossroads. Pastoral Development Network Series 38: 1–​14. Schoch, N., B. Steimann and S. Thieme. 2010. Migration and Animal Husbandry: Competing or Complementary Livelihood Strategies. Evidence from Kyrgyzstan. Natural Resources Forum 34(3): 211–​21. Shayakhmetov, M. 2006. The Silent Steppe: The Story of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin. London: Stacey.

497

—​​​​ C a r o l e F e r r e t —​​​​ Shigaeva, J., M. Kollmair, P. Niederer and D. Maselli. 2007. Livelihoods in Transition: Changing Land Use Strategies and Ecological Implications in a Post-​ Soviet setting (Kyrgyzstan). Central Asian Survey 26(3): 389–​406. Sitnianskiĭ, G.Iu 1997. Hoziaĭstvennyĭ god sovremennogo kirgizskogo zhivotnovoda. Ètnograficheskoe obozrenie 5: 76–​88. Smart, A. 2014. Critical Perspectives on Multispecies Ethnography. Critique of Anthropology 34(1): 3–​7. Steimann, B. 2011. Making a Living in Uncertainty: Agro-​Pastoral Livelihoods and Institutional Transformations in Post-​Socialist Rural Kyrgyzstan. Zürich: Universität Zürich. Stépanoff, C., C. Marchina, C. Fossier and N. Bureau. 2017. Animal Autonomy and Intermittent Coexistences: North Asian Modes of Herding. Current Anthropology 58(1): 57–​81. Ushakin, S. 2012. O liudiah v puti: nomadizm segodnia. Ab Imperio 2012(2): 53–​82. Vostrov, V.V. and H.A. Kauanova. 1972. Material’naia kul’tura kazahskogo naroda na sovremennom ètape. Alma-​Ata: Nauka. Vuillemenot, A.-​M. 2009. La yourte et la mesure du monde: avec les nomades au Kazakhstan. Louvain-​la-​neuve: Academia-​Bruylant. Werner, C. 2000. A Profile of Rural Life in Kazakstan, 1994–​1998: Comments and Suggestions for Further Research. Washington, DC: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. White, T. and N. Fijn. 2020. Multispecies Co-​existence in Inner Asia. Introduction: Resituating Domestication in Inner Asia. Inner Asia 22(2): 162–​82. Willerslev, R. 2004. Not Animal, Not Not-​ Animal: Hunting, Imitation and Empathetic Knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(3): 629–​52. Yoshida, S. 2005. Ethnographic Study of Privatisation in a Kyrgyz Village: Patrilineal Kin and Independent Farmers. Inner Asia 7(2): 215–​47.

498

CHAPTER THIRY-​T HREE

SMALL-​S CALE GOLD MINING COMMUNITIES IN KYRGYZSTAN Torn between extraction projects Gulzat Botoeva INTRODUCTION Kyrgyzstan’s unequal incorporation into the global economy since its independence in 1991 has been inseparable from the commoditization of its mineral wealth. With encouragement from the World Bank, which identified mineral export as a central mechanism for post-​Soviet poverty reduction (Hacher, 2014), Kyrgyzstan since the 1990s has prioritized the development of large mineral deposits, first discovered in the Soviet era. Among the first and most contentious of these was the Kumtor mine in Issyk-​Kul region, which led to the extraction of 396 metric tonnes of ore gold from 1992 using the open-​pit mining method promoted by the Canadian Cameco Corporation (Asanov, 2018). By 2020, this project alone accounted for 12.5 per cent of GDP with its 23 per cent of the share in extractive industries (Kumtor, 2021). There have been other attempts at large-​scale mining elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan, but these have been beset by internal difficulties and the tides of political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan. Attempts to start mineral development at Jer-​Ui in Talas region, for instance, which was discovered to have around 80 tonnes of gold ore by Soviet geologists in 1969, have been stymied by internal company conflicts (Asanov, 2018) with exploitation beginning in 2021. In the light of these obstacles, the Kyrgyzstani government has sought to bring a number of small and medium-​sized mining sites under exploitation since early 2010 (IMF, 2017). In the last two decades, the government has granted 593 licenses for geological exploration and 104 licenses for exploitation (53 are already extracting gold and the other 51 are in a preparatory stage). In total, 39 companies were registered for mining gold as of 2018 (Asanov, 2018). Tensions and conflicts between local populations and large-​scale mining companies have been well documented in the scholarly literature since the turn of the millennium (Gullette and Kalybekova, 2014; Wooden, 2013, 2017). Exploration and mineral development by medium and smaller mining projects in the last decade has also triggered a wave of protests around the country (Nogoibaeva, 2016). The government persists in identifying the protests as markers of local obstruction (Ocakli et al., 2020) that are likely to be driven by criminal intent (Doolotkeldieva, 2023; Gullette and Kalybekova, 2014; Nogoibaeyva, 2016). Only in rare cases are such movements seen as raising truly legitimate ecological concerns and/​or labour issues (although see Doolotkeldieva, 2023). Despite the dominant institutional discourse DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-40

499

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

in Kyrgyzstan, a growing literature on extractive industries demonstrates a variety of institutional factors that have led to protests, including concerns over high-​level corruption (Doolot and Heathershaw, 2015), an absence of trust and cooperation between national-​level actors, and the failure of the government to ensure that international procedures are followed (Ocakli et al., 2020). The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) framework, for instance, which Kyrgyzstan joined in the 1990s as a means of increasing the transparency and accountability of extractive industries, was discontinued in 2017 due to Kyrgyzstan’s non-​compliance with the set rules (Furstenberg, 2015). Instead of recognizing such failures, the government has instead prioritized Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a primary policy framework for addressing grievances around mining and its environmental consequences. CSR refers to an internationally recognized set of policies that have been devised by the international community in an attempt to deal with the ecological and environmental disasters that the neoliberal approach to mineral development has created in resource-​rich developing countries (Hatcher, 2014). In Kyrgyzstan, however, CSR has become a vehicle –​perhaps even a smokescreen –​for managing conflict between mining companies and the local population (Doolotkeldieva, 2020). This has led to the deligitimation and even criminalization of protesting communities, while ignoring the wider implications of extensive mineral exploitation (Ocakli et al., 2020; Gullette and Kalybekova, 2014; Nogoibaeyva, 2016). Small-​scale mining has certainly met with considerable opposition in Kyrgyzstan. However, emerging research on extractive industries in Kyrgyzstan (Doolotkeldieva, 2023), as in other developing countries, reveals that local responses to mineral development are diverse and sometimes contradictory (Bebbington et al., 2008; Conde and Le Billon, 2017). As Mestre (2017), in her research on the involvement of artisanal miners in pastoral committees has shown, community itself should not be approached as something homogenous or static. There may be divergent attitudes towards a particular mine within the same village and even the same family. Equipped with this understanding, analysis of the ‘messy ground’ (Doolotkeldieva, 2023) involves accounting for a plurality of local voices, rather than diminishing their differences and homogenizing their points of view, as the main national actors do. This in turn reveals that, despite diverging opinions within the mining communities, the problems that are raised by people are not just ‘local’ complaints but rather are rooted in the economic opportunities and livelihoods that formal or informal mining can create for them. Moreover, it shows how il/​legal mineral extraction is tied to other forms of neoliberal projects of extraction: crediting system and pasture use. This chapter, therefore, aims to present how extractive mining introduces tensions and conflicts within the local community affected by mining in Kyrgyzstan’s Naryn region. Tensions, however local they might seem, reveal that people become torn between diverging livelihoods offered by various extractive projects. While gold-​ mining disputes initiate the tensions, fear of debt to the banking system and hopes of improving livelihoods through increased pastoral activities of herding add fuel to the conflict. I draw my ethnographic base on a series of meetings that took place in August 2019 around Kum-​Bel mining site, involving villagers, local authorities and representatives of the mining company. Discussions focused on opposition to the official mining site at Kum-​Bel, opposition which had taken momentum from a wider protest movement against a larger mining site in Solton-​Sary. What captured my 500

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

interest in the Kum-​Bel discussions was the divergence of local community opinion among the various groups that had different interests in either protesting against or supporting the official mine. While the Solton-​Sary protests had threatened the work of the mining company and involved local and national authorities to find a resolution to the conflict, the events in Kum-​Bel revealed important tensions and cleavages within –​as well as between –​the main opposing sites: local people, the mining company and the state. The conversations and meetings that I recorded revealed that there were diverse voices and interests among the four villages directly affected by the mining at Kum-​ Bel. These differences stemmed from their reliance upon divergent economic livelihood strategies: for some at the meeting, formal mineral development either provided them with jobs and was considered as contributing to the development of the community through the CSR programme. For others, it was seen as threatening the artisanal mining and husbandry activities upon which their families depended. In the analysis that follows, I explore the mining-​related tensions and conflicts that emanated in a few villages directly affected by mining operations in Naryn, before focusing on the lines of disagreement that emerged in one village meeting. In capturing this controversy, I seek not only to articulate diverse voices, but to show how the diversity of economic needs and survival strategies disrupt any homogenizing view of ‘local needs’ in rural Naryn –​or, indeed, elsewhere in Central Asia. While ‘local needs’ are often treated as existing in a vacuum, I argue how such diverse interests are in fact inseparable from the wider economic and political developments occurring within the country and the region.

CONFLICTS AND TENSIONS AROUND GOLD-​M INING SITES IN NARYN The mining conflicts that I witnessed in 2019 were far from the first to take place in Naryn. Large protests against mining firms in Kum-​Bel and Solton-​Sary had started around 2011, when mining licences were granted to foreign-​owned firms (Interviews, 2017). In 2009, one of the mining sites called Buchuk at Solton-​Sary, which had been exploited by the state-​owned company, ‘Kyrgyz Altyn’ since the beginning of the 2000s (Mestre, 2017), was sold to the Chinese-​owned ‘Zhong Ji Mining’ company (Atabaeva, 2019). Following large protests in 2010 and 2011, the Chinese company discontinued its work. In 2011, protests against a Russian company which had received a licence to explore the mining site at Kum-​Bel, resulted in the re-​licensing of the site to a local Kyrgyz company. The Solton-​Sary protests in August 2019, which drew about 700–​1,000 people, were a result of a particular sequence of events. A few weeks prior to the protest, news began to spread through a WhatsApp messenger group that children staying with a shepherd’s family at the pastures for the summer holidays had suddenly become ill, developing a skin rash. Together with news about a livestock drought, this provoked a lot of uneasiness about the kind of chemicals being used for mountaintop removal mining, and whether these chemicals were poisonous to people, animals and the wider pasture ecology. As tensions rose, speculation grew among concerned Altyn1 villagers, as substantive information was hard to come by. Reports began to circulate that 501

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

cyanide was being used to extract the gold, with many among the local population believing this would result in mass casualties. For Chynara eje (eje is the respected referral to an older woman), one of the protest participants from Kichine-​Too village, it was the news about water contamination that made her join the protests. As she said: ‘I was particularly disgusted by the news that the Chinese workers built a lavatory right where the river begins. That river goes through our village, where we collect water for drinking’ (Interview, August 2019). The circulating rumours made Kichine-​Too villagers feel disgust, as well as fear for their health. These rumours were followed, a few days later, by news of a fight between a few Kyrgyz men and Chinese workers near the mining site. This led villagers to gather in Solton-​Sary’s pastures near the mining site, and call for the area to be completely closed off to the Chinese-​ owned mine (Atabaeva, 2019). As Janybek, a 36-​year-​old man from Altyn village told me in August 2019: ‘The news that a few men were beaten up spread very quickly and made people angry about how Chinese were coming to our country and then beating local, Kyrgyz people up.’ As in other global settings, the Chinese presence at the mine brought together concerns about economic well-​being, physical safety, and the future generations of the nation itself. While such concerns about Solton-​Sary were widely shared, the meetings that were held about the Kum-​Bel mining site shortly after the Solton-​Sary protests were more equivocal (see Table 33.1). While some villagers from Kichine-​Too started talks about additional protests against the mining site at Kum-​Bel, their mobilization, inspired by the Solton-​Sary protests, was not fully supported by their fellow villagers and their vote to close down the company that received the operating licence for one year did not receive unanimous support. Indeed, some people from neighbouring villages responded either with full support for the Kum-​Bel mining site, or with conditional support if the company was willing to extend their CSR programme. In reality, only large companies operating on big mining sites were supposed to implement CSR programmes among the communities effected by mining. However, even smaller organizations were expected to have development strategies under the umbrella of CSR programmes (Doolotkeldieva, 2020). The local people were hoping to get a new water pump to bring the water up the hill to irrigate their agricultural land.

Table 33.1  Sequence of events around Solton-​Sary and Kum-​Bel mining sites in August 2019.

5–​7 August 2019

12 August 2019

14 August 2019

Protests against the ‘Zhong Ji Mining’ company, Solton-​ Sary site Participating villages: Altyn, Kumush, Chopoluu, Kichine-​Too Meeting for Kichine-​Too villagers concerning ‘AT Mineralz’, Kum-​Bel site Participating village:Kichine-​Too Large meeting that brought together people from three villages, local authorities and representatives of ‘AT mineralz’, Kum-​Bel site Participating villages: Kichine-​Too, Asyl-​Tash, Kayingdy 502

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

They said that when the company received a local agreement (local licence) for mining, the representatives of their village were not present. The administration of the mine decided to stop any more production pending further negotiations with the local people. During small gatherings that I attended, as well as a large meeting that brought people from four different villages along with the local authorities and representatives of the mining company, it was possible to observe how various interests among the local population came into conflict. Three particular factors can explain different responses to Kum-​Bel and Solton-​ Sary. The first one is related to ownership: Kum-​Bel was owned and operated by a Kyrgyz and not a Chinese company, preventing the kind of strongly nationalist sentiment that had turned the Solton-​Sary protests into a conflict between the company and local people.2 Second, the difference in the amount of gold deposits at the respective sites led the companies to employ different techniques for gold extraction. One of the three companies that started extracting gold from Kum-​Bel was ‘AT mineralz’, which was given a licence for mining of 2.3 hectares of land (1,285 kg of gold deposits). Solton-​Sary, by contrast, was operating on a much larger scale. The Chinese company, Zhong Ji Mining, had obtained two licences: one for geological exploration of 1,500 hectares of land and another one for the mining of 44 hectares of land (with approximately 11–​12 tonnes of gold deposits). Third, at Solton-​Sary, the Chinese company used the mountain-​top removal extraction method, using explosives to penetrate the mountains. The use of explosives caused dust to spread across the summer pastures, where shepherds looked after large numbers of livestock from surrounding villages during the summer months. The company was also building a factory for processing the gold on site. ‘AT mineralz’, in contrast, was transporting all mined stones to the Kara-​Balta processing plant for extracting the gold as it did not build a processing factory on the site. The smaller size of the Kum-​Bel site compared to Solton-​Sary, and the different techniques of mineral extraction, led many local people to argue that their response should also be different. Responses in the surrounding villages were far from uniform, however, reflecting the different investments that the local population had in formal and artisanal mining and their relations to other livelihood strategies, as I now explore in more detail.

Resistance against formal mining companies and the defence of pasture land The main opposition group initiating discussion around protest against the Kum-​ Bel mining site in the summer of 2019 came from Kichine-​Too village. There are at least two reasons why opposition was strongly felt here. First, members of the village had taken part in the larger protests against the Solton-​Sary mining site at the beginning of August. Although most of the protesters against Zhong Ji Mining were from three villages –​Altyn, Kumush and Chopoluu –​that were administratively linked with the pastures located in Solton-​Sary, the Kichine-​Too villagers participated due to their fear of water contamination downstream. The small river that travelled through their village, providing it with drinking water, had its source in the Solton-​Sary pastures. Second, an active group of people from Kichine-​Too were also former artisanal miners at the Kum-​Bel site. This gave them close connections to the protesters from Altyn. 503

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

Figure 33.1  Meeting in the Kichine-​Too village. Photo by author.

I attended two meetings organized in opposition to the Kum-​Bel mine in August 2019: a smaller meeting in Kichine-​Too village (see Figure 33.1) and a meeting of people from the four villages of Kichine-​Too, Asyl-​Tash, Taldy-​Suu and Kayingdy with the local administration and representatives of ‘AT-​mineralz’. In both cases, villagers expressed concerns about the environmental effects of mining on the pastures that surround the sites. Kemelbek baike (respected referral to an older man), a man in his mid-​40s who was very active in both meetings, told me in an interview: ‘I am really worried about pasture land, as we don’t know what kind of chemicals the company is using to mine gold. That is really bad for pastures.’ The belief that pastures can be contaminated by mining activities was related to various aspects of rural life in the most mountainous region of Kyrgyzstan. As other scholars have noted, pasture land has as much a symbolic as a material value in Kyrgyzstan. Pastures are regarded as places of purity (tazalyk) that provide refuge not only from economic hardships; they offer a ‘sense of citizenry, [a]‌symbol of nationhood for future generations’ (Féaux de la Croix, 2014). As Kenesh baike said: ‘What are we going to leave to our children? We have got these mountains from our ancestors but will not be able to pass them over to our children’ (Interview, August 2019). In the public imagination, if no mountains are left, it is difficult to envisage an emplaced future for one’s children. The belief that the loss of pastures equates to a loss of self, is directly related to livelihood strategies of investing in livestock as a business plan in an agricultural sector of the economy which has been promoted over the last two decades. One of the main financial institutions for rural population, Ayil-​Bank, had given loans for livestock investment as an agricultural development strategy (Ngo, 2008).3 An emphasis on 504

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

‘self-​help’, and specifically herding as a way of doing business in an agricultural context, has led to increased local investment in livestock breeding, creating pressures on fragile pasture lands. This is not surprising, since 85 per cent of the population living outside of Naryn city are involved in agriculture (cultivation of land and animal husbandry) (UCA 2014, cited in Shygaeva et al., 2016: 92). For the majority of families, livestock breeding is one of the main sources of income since pastures, with their rugged topography and little precipitation, constitutes the primary type of land in the region (Shygaeva et al., 2016: 92). Husbandry also resonates with the traditional basis of the Kyrgyz pastoral economy during the Soviet and pre-​Soviet eras. However, reliance on livestock breeding as one of the main livelihood strategies has led to overgrazing and degradation of vegetation in the nearby and easily accessible pastures. Jumadil baike, a man in his 60s, shared his concerns about pasture degradation, stressing pressures on a finite collective resource: ‘The number of livestock in the village is growing, the pasture land is quite small. Bit by bit, they [the mining companies] will be moving down to where our pastures are located. We don’t have big pastures like they do in Aksai,4 which I visited last year’ (Interview, August 2019). Good and accessible pasture land has become scarce, creating tensions not only between local communities and mining companies, but between herding communities. During my visit in 2021, a Batyr ata (old man) in his 70s, shared his worries about conflicts over Kum-​Bel pastures between Naryn and Kochjor raions (districts), which happened due to administrative arrangements and misunderstandings since the Soviet period, when different districts used to lease out the pastures to each other (Interview, August 2021). Although Levine and colleagues (2017) argue that the governmental estimate that 70 per cent of pastures are degraded is more alarmist and a result of a mismatch in terminology, some other studies still believe that there is an ongoing general trend of pasture degradation (Sabyrbekov, 2019). Uncertainty and lack of opportunities in off-​farm income have been found to be reasons for keeping the same number of livestock or even increasing them among herders (Zhumanova, 2016). Concerns about pastures also extended to worries about water, as most of the small and medium-​sized mining sites were located near the site of a spring that feeds the local river supply. Conversations at both meetings revealed that people were worried about various effects on the water supply caused by mining, including the destruction of glaciers, which are the main source of water in the mountains, and contamination caused by chemical and mechanical extraction methods. The rumour that the Chinese company that started mining in Solton-​Sary had contaminated the river spread to the Kum-​Bel mining site. During the main meeting, some people from Kichine-​Too and other villages voiced their concerns that any mining activities could lead to the disappearance of water –​and thus to their own future survival in this place.

THE CSR POLICY: ISSUES OF TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY If concerns about ecology of pastures and rivers led some at the meeting to actively protest against the formal mining development at Kum-​Bel, for others, the primary focus of their frustration was the lack of transparency and accountability in the local 505

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

Figure 33.2  General meeting in Asyl-​Tash. Photo by author (August, 2019).

consultation process. In the village of Kayingdy, for instance, a chronic lack of irrigation water in spring and summer necessitates use of a water pump to bring water up to the village from the Naryn river during the irrigation season. Although many from the village raised the issue of water resources, their concern was less about future contamination of water supplies than an immediate concern with access to irrigation water, and a perceived lack of consultation with villagers and some local authorities while obtaining their ‘local licence’ from the community. During the general meeting (see Figure 33.2), an aksakal (elderly man) in his 70s and the local ayil-​bashchy (community leader) stressed that Kayingdy villagers were excluded from the initial stage of the decision-​making process when the company was seeking the communities’ agreement for mining as part of the CSR strategy. As the aksakal pointed out at the meeting, ‘The [previous] meeting with the community did not have a quorum and we [members of our village] did not have a chance to participate in it.’ Although the group voicing this concern was not dominant during the meeting, research in other parts of the country has shown how CSR strategies that are intended to diffuse conflicts between mining companies and local communities often have the effect of amplifying intra-​ community conflicts (Doolotkeldieva, 2020). The CSR strategy can create an unequal power relation between various communities, where some are able to increase the contributions from the mining companies to their local budget while others are left out. Moreover, the practical implementation of CSR strategies has often served to mute opposition through the co-​optation of ‘authoritative’ village voices, such as those of village elders. As Nogoibaeva (2016) has shown, the use of local traditions for organizing social celebrations, and the offering of presents for celebration of certain occasions can contribute to tensions between various groups between communities. Mining companies have sometimes used the local traditional rituals of collecting a 506

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

‘blessing’ from the elders of the community to obtain their social licence (Nogoibaeva 2016). In both meetings about the ‘AT-​Mineralz’ company, there were some concerns that elders might have given a blessing (bata) to the mineral extraction as they had been given presents and invited to a social celebration organized by the company. These accusations were immediately refuted by the representative of the local administration and towards the end of large meeting, the head of the mining company had promised to build a water pump for Kayingdy, extending the financial contribution to the improvement of infrastructure to one more village.

MINE-​C OMPANY SUPPORTERS: CAUGHT BETWEEN POVERTY OR A DEBT TRAP If the meeting revealed various sources of local concern with the mining operation at Kum-​Bel among herders and artisanal miners, it also highlighted the economic dependence of many families on income from the mining company. During both meetings, and in subsequent interviews with people from four different villages, I was able to hear voices of support for the ‘AT-​Mineralz’ company. Their responses varied from loud support of the company during the official meeting to voices of quiet agreement, not openly discussed with the main protesters, but shared with me and my research assistant during the interviews. The most visible and outspoken supporters of the Kum-​Bel mine were a group of women who sat together in the front rows of the hall and actively defended the company at the large meeting. These were the wives of the men who were selected by the company to work on the mining site, as part of the agreement between local communities and the company. The organization promised to employ 70 men from the villages, and the wives of some of them considered closure of the official mining site to be a threat to their families’ livelihoods. Wives, rather than the employed men, were not ashamed to voice their concerns about their need to feed their children on the salaries earned at the mine, and how they were supposed to live if the mine was stopped. At that time, their husbands were paid 15,000 soms (£187) per 15 days of shift work. Local teachers, for example, received a salary of 6,000 soms (£37.50) for their full-​time work at schools.5 These concerns were magnified, as I discovered during interviews, as they feared that they were not going to be put back on the social support list. When men started working at the mine, women explained, their families were immediately taken off the register for receipt of child benefits. Even if the man was subsequently made redundant, those benefits were reinstated only with difficulty and after significant delay. Interviews in 2017 have also confirmed how some families with many children in rural Naryn were already bearing the consequences of the government’s tightening up the requirements for a social support called ‘help for families’. Many families complained that they have been removed from the list of those receiving social support, as social workers were given new guidelines for eligibility. Women with 4–​5 children complained that the social workers were counting any type of cars the family owned (whether road-​worthy or not), or one or two cows, or the size of their land plot as the criteria for removing their names from the list of social support recipients. Families were eligible for ‘help for families’ if their total family income was lower 507

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

than 900 soms (£10.50) per month in 2017 (Kurenev, 2017). Women at the meeting feared that they might not get back on the list of recipients as they had already been taken off, when their husbands were employed. The other voice, more discreet and almost hidden to fellow villagers, was also in support of official mining due to their income received from the mine. However, their reasoning was related to their decisions to take out loans against the salaries they received from the mine. They explained that their strategy of further improving their livelihood strategies was based on obtaining large credits while having a steady income, which they planned to use for paying the high interest rates set by banks and micro-​credit organizations. Asylbek, a man in his early 30s, explained that he decided to get credit from the bank, as he wanted to extend the small shop built as a room adjacent to his parents’ house, and also invest into building his own house. Talant, a man in his mid-​40s, needed money for the renovation of his family home. In the interviews with me, they spoke of their worries about repayment of their debt if income from the mining job stopped. The recent research on financial crediting institutions in Kyrgyzstan revealed that their worries were not unfounded, but rather based on the reality of the people taking loans from micro-​financial organizations and banks. Without a good salary and other financial strategies, debt accrued through financial organizations could entrap families in either constant cycles of borrowing, further indebting them, or could lead to housing repossessions as their properties were used as collaterals against loans. Despite the micro-​finance industry being presented as the main mechanism for accessing finance and development in rural areas, the recent research reveals how these loans have led to the indebtedness of many families in the country (Satybaldieva, 2021). As the government deregulated financial institutions in 2002, allowing micro-​finance organizations to establish their own size of loans and interest rates –​as well as commission and penalty rates (Sultakeev et al., 2018: 25) –​Kyrgyzstan became a country with one of the highest interest rates for credit in the world. Indebtedness to micro-​financial organizations had led to anti-​debt movements mobilized by predominantly rural women borrowers against usurious lending practices in Kyrgyzstan (Satybaldieva, 2021).

MULTI-​L AYERED INTERESTS OF ARTISANAL MINERS Limited access to gold deposits informally controlled by artisanal miners from Kichine-​Too and Altyn, became a cornerstone of the conflict of interests between different villagers, when it came to the meeting about the Kum-​Bel mining site. Artisanal miners were not trusted in their protests against the formal mining site, as they were seen as having vested, illegal interests in the mineral wealth of the mountains. Despite the fact that the Kichine-​Too activists were raising ecological concerns in relation to what mining can do to pastures, their voices were met with a certain amount of scepticism not only by representatives of the local administration and the mining company, but also by other villagers. As one woman shouted during the meeting, ‘You, Kichine-​Too people had access to the mines before and never allowed us to come near them, this is now our turn! We [too] should also get some benefit from these mines!’ This reference to Kichine-​Too artisanal mining revealed the tensions between various groups of people in terms of mineral development. Protesters, in 508

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

opposition, claimed that their resistance to official mining was mainly explained by the government and media as a strategy of halting any non-​governmental sponsored extraction of minerals. Kichine-​Too villagers’ mining activities lasted for about two years in 2016–​2017. Following similar tactics employed by Altyn artisanal miners, they formed mining groups mainly from within their own village. As Azamat baike said in an interview in 2019: Some men from Asyl-​Tash were interested in learning how to mine. But when they went to Kum-​Bel, they were met by a group of men from Kichine-​Too, who told them that they should leave and not come back. Everybody in the region knew that miners were overseen by ‘chernye’ [slang expression for criminal organizations] in Naryn city and therefore Asyl-​Tash men have approached them through some other contacts. After the agreement was given, they were let back to Kum-​Bel too. As Azamat baike, a man in his 60s, told me during our interview: ‘They got used to it: five guys would go to the mountains, collect the stones, come back and grind them in the factories that they also built in Kichine-​Too and have some money. They already have some idea that these stones would have some gold and these stones would not.’ Kichine-​Too, and especially Altyn miners, according to Azamat baike, had some knowledge and equipment to pursue their mining activities. Miners usually travelled to the mining sites in Solton-​Sary and Kum-​Bel in groups, staying there 10–​30 days, depending on their work, and transporting large stones in large trucks back to the villages. As Kichine-​Too villagers learnt to mine around 2016 and relied on grinding the stones at factories in Altyn village, a year later they were investing into stone-​grinding factories in Kichine-​Too village as well. More critical understanding of the situation and the context under which artisanal miners work, continued to mine and their connections to criminal groups is needed. As my research revealed, there have been attempts to legalize and formalize mining activities done by local villagers in the past. When I visited Altyn in 2017, I learned how miners tried to legalize their activities, only to be told that the only way is to purchase a licence, as all companies do. They calculated the cost and quickly realized that it was not possible, and other alternatives were not offered by the government. But, since mining was one of the more rewarding livelihood activities, the artisanal miners continued their work. However, it got pushed into the grey area in between informal/​ illegal markets: as they needed to fund their stone-​grinding factories, the miners sell their gold through un-​official routes. Criminal groups, in the case of Kum-​Bel, were not directly involved in mining, but had their own contacts mining on the site. They also provided an informal control of access to the site. Furthermore, it is important to note that artisanal mining was one of the strategies used by communities living in areas with mineral development (Mestre, 2017; Tiainen et al., 2014). Previous research on communities involved in artisanal mining in Naryn region has shown how farmers who have learned to mine have re-​invested their money back into animal husbandry (Mestre, 2017). They learned to juggle their

509

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

time and efforts between herding, cultivating wheat and mining for gold. At different times, one activity was more successful than the other ones. My interviews in 2017 confirm this observation. Many people reflected on how artisanal mining allowed Altyn villagers, who had struggled in the 1990s and early 2000s, to invest to land cultivation and livestock. In an interview in August 2017, Turar baike told me: I have been working at ayiul-​okmotu (local authority) for a long time, and remember that in 2005 we used to count the number of households that did not have any livestock. According to our calculations, we had about 120 households with no livestock assets but because that would be considered as too high, we used to put 60 as official numbers. Nowadays, we don’t have any households that do not have any livestock. Although Kichine-​Too artisanal miners did not work at Kum-​Bel for as long as Altyn miners at Solton-​Sary, they also mentioned that they have been buying second-​ hand cars, renovating their houses and investing into husbandry from income generated by mining gold.

CONCLUSION Extraction of in/​formal gold brings out tensions among the local population, feeds on the desires to improve their livelihoods and further disrupts some local connections and ties between families and villages. These tensions and disparities, despite being localized in these rural, mountainous communities in Naryn region, are the results of neoliberal extraction projects set loose in the country in the last three decades. A detailed focus on the local needs and economic situation of various groups of the people involved in protests about a small mining site in Kum-​Bel reveals that the local community is not a homogenous entity, and that ideas of justice that people support around mining are more complex than those presented by the government and media. Deepened stratification of population meant various groups of people face different and manifold challenges and their responses to legal/​illegal mining are a result of diverging livelihood strategies that they employ. The irony is that these diverging strategies are part of neoliberal projects of extraction and exploitation of people and land. Tensions around gold mining in Naryn, thus, should be understood as part of the entanglement of at least three extraction projects: gold, money and livestock. The government and mining companies collide in their discourse that extraction of minerals –​in this case, gold –​is a separate sector of the economy and if fully capitalized could lead to development, boosting the whole economy. This approach overlooks the fact that extraction is not simply a process of determining the location of mineral deposits and renting out the nature reserves to local or foreign investors. Extraction happens in the mountains, full of glaciers, water springs, pastures located further down, fields and villages in the valleys. They are not separate, independently existing economic systems but part of one ecosystem. The governmental strategy of exploiting small and medium-​sized mining sites, furthermore, shows how the development strategy on paper collides with the realities of 510

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

communities facing it. The close proximity of small and medium-​sized mining sites to the pastures that host grazing livestock in summer season and are a source of running water in lower valleys is problematic. Protests against Kum-​Bel and Solton-​Sary voice the critique of this decision made by the government without considering the environmental effects of mining projects on the livelihoods of communities living nearby. People fear that such extractive projects do not support their current and future livelihoods as agricultural and pastoral communities. Increasing cultivation of land and livestock numbers is an investment strategy for these families and their local economy. Though even this strategy, despite being the closest to the local ways of life, should be understood as an extraction project that exploits pastures and can lead to their degradation, if livestock numbers are increased uncontrollably. Thus, protests against formal mining projects go in parallel with conflicts for clean water and pastures for livestock that are ripping apart communities in recent years. Similar tactics of road closures, and not allowing herders from other regions to pass through to the summer pastures are also employed in long disputes. Ironically, most of the investors into livestock breeding are former artisanal miners. However, the government and the companies, instead of listening to their ecological and environmental fears and demands, have only stressed the artisanal miners’ association to local criminal groups to deligitimize and further criminalize protesters. Local criminal groups might have their own interest in providing protection to some of the artisanal miners, but I argue that their role has been strengthened through criminalization of artisanal mining by the state. It also does not mean that ecological and environmental concerns are not real. Though supporters of formal mining companies were presented as the true voice of local people, my research revealed that their response comes from a place of fear of being affected by either governmental policies or exploitative financial organizations. The former, represented by wives of some of the official employees of the mining company, feel betrayed by the government as their child benefits were stopped since their husbands started working for the company. Since their livelihood strategy was not pastoral-​based, their main fear was how to provide food on the table to their children. Whereas, the other supporting group feared getting trapped into debt through what was initially perceived as a good opportunity to use stable income from their mining job to secure loans. They needed to make money to secure high-​interest payments for another neoliberal extraction project: extraction of money by financial organizations. Falling into the debt trap or back into poverty felt much worse than allowing the mining companies to extract gold. For both of these groups of people, the fear of the present loomed larger than the fear of the future –​and what could happen to the pastures felt too much in the distant future. Other groups voiced their concerns that their small village was excluded from the local licensing process and demanded inclusion into the social package, as it was with other villages. This chapter was able to present how mining conflicts bring out tensions, fears and desires that local people have in relation not only to mining projects, but other economic projects as well. Though these conflicts are localized and divide people into various groups in an otherwise closely-​knit community, they are deeply seated within the ‘extraction’ mode of governance. 511

—​​​​ G u l z a t B o t o e v a —​​​​

NOTES 1 All village names and names of people have been changed to maintain confidentiality. 2 Every Chinese mining company in Kyrgyzstan and neighbouring Tajikistan have seen local contestations through protests (van der Kley, 2020). 3 In fact, 81 per cent of loans given out by Ayil-​Bank in 2006 were for livestock breeding (NGO, 2008, p. 17). 4 Aksai pastures are located in At-​Bashi region of Naryn oblast, spreading over 419,637 ha of land, compared to Naryn region of Naryn oblast, which had 300,599 hectares as their pasture land. 5 Salaries for schoolteachers were increased in 2015. Before that, a local teacher from Altyn explained, she was getting paid 2,000 soms (£25).

REFERENCES Asanov, B. (2018) ‘Kyrgyzstan: Increased conflicts around gold mining sites’, Azzattyk. 1 November. Available at: https://​rus.azat​tyk.org/​a/​kyrgyz​stan​_​gol​d_​mi​nes/​29576​512.html (Accessed: 10 March 2020). Atabaeva, B. (2019) ‘Chinese mining company in Kyrgyzstan suspected of playing havoc with ecology’, Indepthnews.net, 19 August. Available at www.sdg​sfor​all.net/​index.php/​goal-​13-​ 14-​15/​1106-​chin​ese-​min​ing-​comp​any-​in-​kyr​gyzs​tan-​suspec​ted-​of-​play​ing-​havoc-​with-​ecol​ ogy (Accessed: 2 May 2020). Bebbington, A., Bebbington, D. H., Bury, J., Lingan, J., Muñoz, J. P., and Scurrah, M. (2008). ‘Mining and social movements: struggles over livelihood and rural territorial development in the Andes’, World Development, 36(12), pp. 2888–​2905. Conde, M. and Le Billon, P. (2017) ‘Why do some communities resist mining projects while others do not?’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 4(3), pp. 681–​697. Doolot, A. and Heathershaw, J. (2015) ‘State as resource, mediator and performer: Understanding the local and global politics of gold mining in Kyrgyzstan’, Central Asian Survey, 34(1), pp. 93–​109. Doolotkeldieva, A. (2020) ‘Regulating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the large-​scale mining sector of Kyrgyzstan’, OSCE Academy Policy Brief, 60, pp. 1–​10. Doolotkeldieva, A. (2023) ‘Managing gold extraction through technocratic discourse in post-​socialist Kyrgyzstan’, in Behzadi, N., Doering, N. and Postar, S. (eds) Extraction/​ Exclusion: Beyond Binaries in Resource Knowledge and Practice, Roman & Littlefield International. Féaux de la Croix, J. (2014) ‘“Bringing lights to the yurts”: Visions of future and belonging surrounding pastures and hydropower in Kyrgyzstan’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 32(2), pp. 49–​67. Furstenberg, S. (2015) ‘Consolidating global governance in nondemocratic countries: Critical reflections on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Kyrgyzstan’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 2(3), pp. 462–​471. Gullette, D. and Kalybekova, A. (2014) Agreement under pressure: Gold mining and protests in the Kyrgyz Republic. Brussels: Friedrich-​Ebert-​Stiftung. Hatcher, P. (2014) Regimes of risk: The World Bank and the transformation of mining in Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. High, M. M. (2017) Fear and fortune: Spirit worlds and emerging economies in the Mongolian gold rush. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. IMF (International Monetary Fund) (2017) The Kyrgyz Republic: Poverty reduction strategy paper. Washington, DC: IMF.

512

— ​​​​ S m a l l - s c a l e g o l d m i n i n g c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​ Kumtor (2021) Contribution to the Kyrgyz economy. Available at: www.kum​tor.kg/​en/​contr​ ibut​ion-​to-​the-​kyr​gyz-​econ​omy/​ (Accessed: 19 November 2021). Kurenev, G. (2017) ‘Guaranteed minimal income has risen three times during the 5 year period’, Vb.kg, 15 March. Available at: www.vb.kg/​doc/​356901_​garantirovannyy_​minimalnyy_​ dohod_​za_​5_​le​t_​vy​ros_​bole​e_​ch​em_​v​_​3_​r​aza.html (Accessed: 20 December 2021). Levine, J., Isaeva, A., Eddy, I., Foggin, M., Gergel, S., Hagerman, S. and Zerriffi, H. (2017) ‘A cognitive approach to the post-​Soviet Central Asian pasture puzzle: new data from Kyrgyzstan’, Regional Environmental Change, 17(3), pp. 941–​947. Mestre, I. (2017) ‘When shepherds mine mountains: The impact of artisanal mining on agropastoral systems in Kyrgyzstan. Case study of Naryn Province’, Journal of Alpine Research /​Revue de géographie alpine, 105 (1), pp. 1–​18. Ngo, T.M.P. (2008) ‘Microfinance and gender empowerment in Kyrgyzstan’, Report for The World Bank-​Agriculture and Rural Development Department. CRED. Nogoibaeva, E. (2016) The Gold of Batken. Bishkek. Ocaklı, B., Krueger, T. and Niewöhner, J. (2020) ‘Shades of conflict in Kyrgyzstan: National actor perceptions and behaviour in mining. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1), pp. 191–​207. Sabyrbekov, R. (2019) ‘Income diversification strategies among pastoralists in Central Asia: Findings from Kyrgyzstan’, Pastoralism, 9(1), pp. 1–​13. Satybaldieva, E. (2021) ‘Bad debt: The women’s mobilization against the financial industry in Kyrgyzstan’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, 12(2), pp. 169–​181. Shygaeva, J., Hagerman, S., Zerriffi, H., Hergarten, C., Isaeva, A., Mamadalieva, Z., and Foggin, M. (2016). ‘Decentralizing governance of agropastoral systems in Kyrgyzstan: An assessment of recent pasture reforms’, Mountain Research and Development, 36(1), pp. 91–​101. Sultakeev, K., Karymshakov, K. and Sulaimanova, B. (2018) ‘The impact of microfinance on entrepreneurship in Kyrgyzstan’, Acta Oeconomica Pragensia, 26(2), pp. 24–​40. Tiainen, H., Sairinen, R., and Novikov, V. (2014) ‘Mining in the Chatkal Valley in Kyrgyzstan –​ Challenge of social sustainability’, Resources Policy, (39), pp. 80–​87. van der Kley, D. (2020) ‘Chinese companies’ localization in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’, Problems of Post-​Communism, 67(3), pp. 241–​250. Wooden, A. E. (2013) ‘Another way of saying enough: Environmental concern and popular mobilization in Kyrgyzstan’, Post-​Soviet Affairs, 29(4), pp. 314–​353. Wooden, A. E. (2017) ‘Images of harm, imagining justice’, in Jalbert, K., Willow, A., Casagrande, D., and Paladino, S. (eds) ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures. New York: Routledge. Zhumanova, M., Wrage-​Mönnig, N. and Darr, D. (2016) ‘Farmers’ decision-​making and land use changes in Kyrgyz agropastoral systems’, Mountain Research and Development, 36(4), pp. 506–​517.

513

CHAPTER THIRTY-​F OUR

THE CENTRAL ASIAN BAZAAR SINCE 1991 Hasan H. Karrar

In this chapter, I address two questions. First, how have bazaars in Central Asia evolved in the three decades since the region became independent? And second, what explains these transformations? I start from the premise that since 1991, bazaars in Central Asia have contoured both to local specificities and to long-​distance travel of consumer goods between factory and market, which, since the 1980s, has been a defining feature of consumption globally. I will put forward two arguments. First, I will argue that as an institution, the large post-​Soviet Central Asian bazaars—​the subject of this chapter—​must be considered within the political context in which they emerged. The owners of the largest bazaars in Central Asia frequently have close ties to, or are in government, underscoring the fact that the development of bazaars in the region cannot be dissociated from the self-​ interest of Central Asia’s political leaders. Put simply, it was private—​not public—​ interest that was a determinant in how the new marketplaces developed. The resulting lack of transparency regarding earnings, ownership, and rents (Fehlings and Karrar 2020) are reflexive of political authority and private interest in the region. Thus, bazaar trading illustrates how household savings were invested in small business to generate modest profits and how some of these became rent. As an extension, bazaars are simultaneously a source of livelihood for millions and a source of wealth for a small number of bazaar owners. My second argument is that the bazaar is a globalized space. The bazaar is a rich place to think about grassroots globalization in the region, offering insights into how Central Asia fits into “global circuits of accumulation,” where under globalization, the world is brought into a “single mode of production,” that leads to “the organic integration of different countries and regions into a global economy” (Robinson 2001, 159). In Central Asia’s large bazaars, examples of globalization are omnipresent: buyers and sellers from distant locales; cargo being shipped to and from the bazaar; multiple currencies in circulation. These large bazaars have bus and shared-​taxi terminals, as well as cargo packaging and forwarding facilities, usually the busiest places in the markets. Besides people and merchandise, as I describe in this chapter, information and money, in the form of multiple currencies, also circulate in the bazaar (see also Karrar 2017).

514

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-41

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​

This chapter also offers a modest theoretical intervention by nuancing how we might approach bazaars today. Beginning in the mid-​twentieth century, the bazaar became the non-​normative “other” for markets, which, unlike the bazaar, was meant to be modern and rational. Behind the bazaar-​market binary was the distinction between development and underdevelopment, between so-​called “traditional” societies and “modern” ones. These distinctions had emerged from an ideological framing of social science inquiry during the Cold War. They were also a product of a longer, frequently understated history of globalism, which Walter D. Mignolo describes as “Western modern/​colonial designs, and Westernization of the world, unipolarity and rhetoric of salvation” (2020, 2). A closer examination of the Central Asian bazaar offers an opportunity to move beyond what was essentially an epistemic appropriation of Asia by the West (Mignolo 2011, 175), in which a few countries were seen to be ahead, with the rest in a perpetual race to catch up. This chapter has two parts. The first part begins with an overview of Central Asian bazaars. It also considers how bazaars were approached by post-​war social sciences, before moving onto ownership and rent in Central Asian bazaars—​in other words, particularities which shaped how regional bazaars developed and why they have continued to transform. In the second part, I look at how the bazaar is a globalized space through which people and merchandise, money and information pass. In the conclusion, I situate Central Asia within neoliberal production and consumption. Not only is this an attempt to move away from thinking about the bazaar as a non-​ normative marketplace, but is illustrative of how, under neoliberalism, one sees the blurring of the private and public (Connell and Dados 2014, 127).

FOREGROUNDING THE LOCAL: CONTEXT MATTERS For the non-​specialist, “Central Asia” and “bazaar” will likely conjure an image of an exoticized marketplace; in reality, bazaars in Central Asia are more likely to appear like a warehouse. Let me begin by describing what a typical urban bazaar in Central Asia might look like. The largest urban bazaars in Central Asia today, as well as many of the small ones, tend to be “container bazaars,” in which steel shipping containers are re-​purposed as sales outlets. In outward form, the container distinguishes the bazaar from shops or shopping centers; as I explain below, although many container bazaars have been replaced by purpose-​built mall infrastructure, the container was an important step in how the post-​Soviet bazaar developed (see Figure 34.1). In a container bazaar, one unit will typically be comprised of two containers, the second stacked atop the first: the top is for storage, and the lower is the sales outlet. Surrounding infrastructure is similarly basic: a steel awning, and an aisle with a cemented floor wide enough for push carts. Unlike shops, the outlets usually do not have names, and are denoted instead, by a number. Each outlet is an independent business, usually family run, although they may occasionally employ staff. It is rare that a single individual will have two entirely different types of businesses, dealing for example, in garments and electrical fixtures, although successful traders will sometimes have more than one outlet. With the exception of Shoro in Kyrgyzstan—​a company that manufactures and sells local beverages “on tap” on the street side—​neither franchises nor corporations have operations at the bazaar.

515

—​​​​ H a s a n H . K a r r a r —​​​​

Figure 34.1  The large bazaars in Central Asia tend to be container bazaars where shipping containers are repurposed as outlets. Here a buyer purchases from the wholesale section of Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar. Image courtesy of the author.

About half the sellers are women. The multi-​ethnic demographics of where bazaars are situated are reflected in the bazaar, too. For example, Dordoi in Kyrgyzstan’s capital-​ city Bishkek, has Kyrgyz and Russian sellers; in Kara-​ Suu, in southern Kyrgyzstan, one meets both Kyrgyz and Uzbek. Ethnic clustering is sometimes evident, which may be explained by networks. For example, “Europa,” the sub-​bazaar in Dordoi for relatively high-​end clothing, has a higher number of Russian sellers who boast of commercial ties to Eastern Europe from where they import garments. Bolashak, in the Barakholka, a sprawling bazaar in Almty, Kazakhstan, is a wholesale sub-​bazaar mostly for shoes, which has a large number of Tajik sellers who have established a niche for themselves. The larger Central Asian bazaars are retail and wholesale. The distinction between retail and wholesale is an intra-​bazaar one, revealing how the bazaars are spatialized by rent and by trading volume. Rents are highest in the wholesale sectors of the bazaar. Wholesale is also clustered, which attracts customers and has the benefit of information spillover. The retail portions of the bazaar are less specialized. Here, a row of retail shoe outlets might be interspersed with a handbag seller, a luggage outlet, perhaps an outlet where umbrellas are being sold. Beyond the retail outlets are people selling merchandise from metal stalls, beyond which is usually still another layer, of pushcarts and hawkers who spill onto the pavements and into the parking areas (see Figure 34.2).

516

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​

Figure 34.2  On the outskirts of the bazaar, one tends to see pushcarts, as well as goods being sold from stalls, as here at the Barakholka market, in Almaty. Image courtesy of the author.

The origins of small trading in Central Asia after 1991 are well-​covered in scholarship and need only be described briefly here. The years following independence saw sharp economic contraction across Central Asia. People lost jobs, money and pensions lost value. To make ends meet, tens of millions of people across the former Soviet Union took to shuttle-​trading, or self-​importing goods primarily from China and Turkey, but also the Gulf States and South Asia. Many of these goods—​alongside used household items—​were sold on curbsides, in underpasses, and in vacant lots or former kolkhoz markets often outside the city center. In Dordoi, the Barakholka, and in Kara-​Suu bazaar, shipping containers were purposed as sales outlets at the end of the 1990s, marking a transition from earlier open-​air markets, to the bazaar acquiring its current institutional form (Humphrey 2002; Spector 2017; Pomfret and Anderson 2001). Containers are modular infrastructure. They permit easy expansion, which can be as simple as adding containers to an existing row, or building a new row without requiring heavy construction or investment. Besides a bigger bazaar, expansion permits new ownership and revised rent structures. Often, these take the form of new sub-​bazaars within existing bazaars. (I first witnessed this between my 2013 and 2014 visits to Bishkek, when “Eurasia,” a new sub-​bazaar of Dordoi was built and starting functioning, much to my surprise.) In time, these sub-​bazaars become specialized. In Dordoi, for example, “Zhonghai” is the go-​to sub-​bazaar for Chinese-​ manufactured hardware and appliances, and “Europa” for higher-​end clothing.

517

—​​​​ H a s a n H . K a r r a r —​​​​

Post-​war social sciences drew a clear line from traditional societies to the bazaar. Bazaars were seen neither as places of entrepreneurship, nor of accumulation (Rotblat 1972). For anthropologist Clifford Geertz, exchanges in the bazaar were not uniform and impersonal, as they purportedly were in the global North. Based on fieldwork in Indonesia in the 1950s, and Morocco in the 1970s, Geertz had argued that in the bazaar, exchanges were localized, information was scarce, and interpersonal relationships influenced availability, price and quality (Geertz 1963, 1978). Concurrently, as societies modernized and national economies matured, bazaars were expected to transition to modern markets. Here, Geertz was following a linear Rostovian model of development. In Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in two Indonesian Towns (1963), Geertz deployed Rostow’s vocabulary for the different stages of economic growth as national economies marched towards the final, so-​ called “take-​off” stage of economic development (Rostow 1960). If the bazaar was axiomatic of traditional societies, then the modern market—​with its business firm-​ type micro-​economies—​was an institution to be found in the advanced economies of the world. Bazaars in Central Asia challenge a traditional versus modern marketplace typology for three reasons. First, in Central Asia, the bazaar is part of a cultural lexicon. Bazaars will continue into the future, I’ve been told by traders. “It’s part of our culture,” I was told by a seller in Dordoi bazaar in July 2014, with a hint of defiance. Which culture was that, I asked? “Islamic culture,” came the reply. Appropriating the bazaar as a cultural trope sidesteps questions of development and modernity; instead as per this view, the bazaar has purportedly been around since the beginning of Islam, and will continue indefinitely into the future. (This opinion is not shared by many in government, who would prefer to see the bazaars adopt a “civilized” outward form.) Second, although the Central Asian bazaar had antecedents under the Soviet Union—​notably in barakholkas (flea markets) and kolkhoz markets, where individuals could legally buy and sell (Katsenelinboigen 1977)—​in its present iteration, the post-​Soviet bazaar emerged in-​step with the newly independent states, which saw the assertion of sovereignty, the launching of new currencies, and membership in regional and global trading partnerships. Similar to their counterparts elsewhere in the developing world, bazaar traders in Central Asia too skillfully negotiate shifting border regulations and checkpoints (Karrar 2017, 2019; Ngo and Hung 2019). Put differently, the emergence of sovereign states, changing monetary regulation, and new border regimes illustrate evolving polities that bazaars adapted to: the bazaar was not an institution stuck in time. Third, bazaars have continued to proliferate in Central Asia. During yearly visits to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan between 2013 and 2018, I have seen the number of outlets increase. I find this noteworthy, given an underlying discourse about impediments to bazaar trade. In 2013, in Kara-​Suu, traders had bitterly complained about the 2010 border closure, which stemmed the flow of buyers from neighboring Andijan province in Uzbekistan. That summer, Kara-​Suu traders had insisted that the present bazaar was but a shadow of its heydays, by which they meant the time leading up to the March 2010 border closure (note that the border had been shut about three months prior to the violence in the summer of 2010, in nearby Osh). In Dordoi, in 2013 and 2014, I heard deep-​seated apprehension about joining the Customs Union; traders had then foretold that being locked into a trading bloc with 518

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​

Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Russia would require Kyrgyzstan to implement new import protocols which would see increased tariffs on merchandise imported from China. And yet, despite Kyrgyzstan’s accession to the Customs Union, the bazaar continued to grow in size. A similar expansion in size is also evident in the Barakholka; although the Almaty city administration has been attempting to “civilize” marketplaces such as the Barakholka since 2013, the marketplace continued to expand (Alff 2017; Karrar 2019). How do we then explain bazaar growth? The simple explanation for bazaar growth is that it remains an important source of urban and peri-​urban employment, driven, in part, by growing demand. Although it is difficult to precisely measure employment—​does one include auxiliary services? part-​time workers?—​anywhere between 10 and 20 percent of Almaty and Bishkek’s workforce may be employed in the cities’ largest bazaars, or in related services. In June 2013, the Dordoi bazaar administration told me that 60,000 people were employed at Dordoi, and that there were 20,000 outlets; estimates for the Barakholka are much higher, between 200,000 to a quarter-​million for traders and those employed in related services (Kumenev 2018; Sholk 2018). These numbers are largely explained by limited employment opportunities. When I asked traders in Kara-​Suu in June 2013 why they start trading, they uniformly complain about the lack of opportunity in southern Kyrgyzstan. Shoe sellers from Tajikistan in Almaty’s Barakholka confessed to my research assistant in 2017—​herself from Tajikistan, then studying in Almaty—​ that if they could make even a hundred dollars in profit every month in Tajikistan, they would never relocate to Almaty. Another reason why bazaars continue to evolve is because bazaar owners frequently enjoy positions of authority in, or have close ties to the government; rent from the bazaar reinforces their power. In Central Asia, bazaar ownership is complex and varied. It is also opaque (Karrar 2019; Spector 2008). For example, the present Barakholka bazaar has its origins in a barakholka (flea market) in the 1960s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the former trading ground served as a place for open-​air trading, eventually becoming acquired during the privatization drive of the 1990s, although exactly who the owners are is not talked about on the bazaar floor. Let me return to the idea of the modular bazaar, where expansion could be as simple as adding another row of shipping containers on unused land, without heavy investment in construction or infrastructure. While this is seemingly uncomplicated, it required political power and networks to utilize or acquire land. Subsequently, authority is required to regulate the bazaar space, and to extract rent. The bazaars I describe today sprawl on land that prior to 1991 had been public. Kara-​Suu bazaar, for example, is located on former kolkhoz land. Traders I had spoken with in Kara-​ Suu in 2014 describe how, towards the end of perestroika, Manas Turataly, founder of the Kara-​Suu bazaar, was instrumental in convincing Soviet authorities for the need of a large bazaar in the Ferghana valley (Kara-​Suu has also served Andijan province in neighboring Uzbekistan). Turataly is frequently recalled as a paternalistic figure by traders, who had built a bazaar for the good of the people; a statue of the man, smartly dressed and striding purposefully greets visitors at the entrance to the marketplace. Yet masked by this narrative is the story of what happened after Turataly: violent ownership disputes and clashing strongmen led to two bazaar directors being assassinated in quick succession in 2005 (AKPI Press 2005; Interfax 2005; Kabar 2005). 519

—​​​​ H a s a n H . K a r r a r —​​​​

This is illustrative of how, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was “vast unregulated public property” everywhere, that would “entice many top officials” (Åslund 2013, 175). Owning container bazaars was a quick and easy way of generating return with minimum investment, provided one had the connections, and in some cases, the muscle to do so. In 2018, Barakholka traders described to me a nexus of property owners, financiers, and contractors as the people behind the bazaar. While the traders I speak with are unable or unwilling to name individuals, for them, the property owners, financiers, and contractors constitute interest groups who have captured power in the country. These are variously described as the “top 2 percent,” who control wealth in Kazakhstan, or those who draw rent upwards. For the traders, ownership at the Barakholka mirrors authority structures at the state level: opaque, top-​down, and non-​representative. At first glance, bazaar ownership in Kyrgyzstan appears less discreet. Businessperson Askar Salymbekov, who has diversified business holdings including dairy, hospitality, and sports, is widely known as the person who owns most of Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar (Alff 2014; Hale 2015). But Dordoi bazaar is also said to have other owners, whose identity is less well known. Kara-​Suu bazaar is similar. Manas Turataly Uulu is the present bazaar director, and part-​owner (he is the son of Manas Turataly). Besides Turataly, there are said to be about half a dozen major shareholders in the bazaar, although when I spoke with him in June 2013, Turataly did not dwell on who they were. In both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, people with a financial stake in the bazaar also occupied positions of power. Salymbekov and Turatalay were both local functionaries under the Soviet Union; Salymbekov was member of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League (Hale 2015, 102). Since independence, Salymbekov, Dordoi’s largest stakeholder, has occupied influential positions such as governor of Naryn province and mayor of Bishkek. An interim director of Kara-​Suu bazaar—​ one of the Kara-​Suu directors assassinated in 2005—​Bayaman Erkinbayev was a three-​time parliamentarian, who briefly enjoyed close ties with President Kurmanbek Bakiev. In Tajikistan too, the president and his close associates are said to control the country’s largest bazaars and lucrative trade routes, such as the one from China (Mostowlansky 2017). Across the region, there is a nexus between bazaar ownership and people either in government or with close ties to power; for them, the bazaar serves as a steady source of revenue in the form of rent. Consider that in the Barakhola and Dordoi, monthly rents on containers in prime wholesale locations can go as high as US$4,000. While some traders will end up buying their own containers, they do so at astronomical costs, and will continue to pay service fees. Irrespective, the bazaar continues to generate rent. Rents—​similar to how much traders earn—​do not appear as earnings in official records. The bazaar economy tends to be a cash economy, and in fieldwork between 2013 and 2018, I do not recall electronic payments, scanning, or even a cash register. In fact, in a self-​randomized closed survey of 300 traders at Dordoi in 2016, my colleague Philippe Rudaz and I learned that more than 80 percent of traders do not have bank accounts (see also Rudaz 2020). Estimates for the size of the undocumented economy vary between 25–​40 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP, and 35–​45 percent for Kazakhstan (Karrar 2019). In an undocumented economy, bazaars are a resource pool from which cash is regularly extracted. 520

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​

In this way, private fiscal interests supersede those of the public. Writing at the end of the World War II, Karl Polanyi had warned against a market system in which there was an absence of protectionism. Instead, for early nineteenth-​century Britain, Polanyi described a double-​movement, which saw increased marketization and protectionism, the latter the responsibility of the state (1944). As Robert Sidelsky also argues, market systems require a state “to curb its excesses, distribute its fruits in an equitable way, and mitigates its hardships.” Nation states,” Sidelsky continues, “were created to do this” (2018, 373). In Central Asia, official protectionist mechanisms are not readily present. Instead, there has been a persistent effort to control marketplaces and leverage transnational flows for private gain, a process I will pick up in the following section on globalization.

GLOBALIZATION: TRANSNATIONAL MARKETS Signs of globalization are commonplace in large Central Asian bazaars. Banners will prominently announce imports from Turkey, European models adorn posters, as do logos of North American sportswear. There are also more subtle examples of globalization. On occasion, I have found myself amidst a row of outlets, where, to my untrained eye, it initially appears as if everyone is selling the same thing. But when I start conversing with the sellers, it becomes clear that there are small, but not insignificant differences in the merchandise. These are the result of informed choices made by the seller. In June 2013, one Dordoi shoe seller told me, “I pick the latest Italian designs from the Internet, and I forward them to my manufacturer in China. But I have to tell them not to use the best quality leather, which is too expensive. That would drive the price up.” He then added: “My buyers are from Russia and they won’t spend beyond a particular price point.” This vignette reveals at least four global connections: knowledge of European fashion, a working relationship with a reliable manufacturer in China, understanding the equilibrium between quality and price, and appreciation of who the buyers are. I had a similar conversation the following year, in July 2014, speaking to a female shoe seller in Dordoi bazaar. She beamed as I complemented her on a smart display. “But how do you know which shoes to display upfront?” I asked, genuinely baffled. “Simple,” she replied. “When I go to Istanbul to shop, I observe what they have on display. Those items become my top shelf items.” For an item to sell well, it need not be a replica of a designer label. The same year, a Dordoi handbag seller explained to me how she was compelled to make regular trips to China if she was going to stay competitive. Handbag designs are changing all the time, she said matter-​ of-​factly. I nodded vigorously, trying to appear knowledgeable but actually having learned something new! Simultaneously, this type of information also trickles down to the buyers. The bazaars I study are buyers’ markets: it is common to see shoppers survey the market before making their purchase. In my multiple visits, I have never witnessed hard bargaining, suggesting that by surveying the market floor, buyers quickly develop a sense of median price. Cash, in particular the US dollar, is a ubiquitous global commodity. There are three points I want to make about cash in the Central Asian bazaar. First, in the Central Asian bazaars I have studied, cash is not only readily changed for the purpose of buying goods or sending money, but there is a trade in money—​that is, money is 521

—​​​​ H a s a n H . K a r r a r —​​​​

the commodity being traded. Money changers will prominently display conversion rates of multiple currencies; not only does the displayed conversion rate keep changing, but the actual buying and selling rate fluctuates depending on how much one wants to convert, what currency one is converting and, of course, the quality of the banknotes (see Figure 34.3). Second, bazaar trade—​and shuttle trade—​remains a cash-​bound vocation (Fehlings 2020). Gordon Mathews has described small trading as a “world run by cash” (2011, 27). In the bazaar survey I described earlier, Rudaz and I learned that up to 58 percent of traders in the Barakholka, and nearly 70 percent of traders in Kara-​Suu, would be willing to conduct transactions in US dollars (the corresponding figure for Dordoi was lower, although there was a greater reliance on the Kazakh tenge and Russian ruble). Money changers in the bazaar prominently display exchange rates; indeed, the traders Rudaz and I spoke with in the Barakholka, Dordoi, and Kara-​Suu in 2016 and 2017 confirmed that they checked the exchange rate daily, often more than once. As Frank Fanselow poignantly observed for India, in a bazaar “money is the most reliable and predictable commodity” (1990, 251).

Figure 34.3  In Central Asia’s large bazaars, multiple currencies are freely traded. In this image, taken in Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar, exchange rates are prominently displayed. Image courtesy of the author. 522

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​

That being said, it is also important to point out that the movement of money across long distances has become more sophisticated in recent years. This is my third point with regard to money: the modalities of how it is used and moved are not unchanging. In a recent article, Philipp Schröder describes new Central Asian intermediaries in China, who speak the language, and have an intimate familiarity with not only local manufacturing, but also money and export regulations (2020). Here too, we see money as a globalized commodity, being managed and moved through new global intermediaries. The global connections I describe began emerging in different parts of the world in the 1980s; in practical terms, they were enabled by a rollback of Keynesian protectionist measures, finding ideological traction in the collapse of the Soviet Union (Skidelsky 2018; Mignolo 2020). Soon afterwards, Central Asian traders—​similar to their African, Afghan, and South Asian counterparts—​took to shuttling goods between their home countries, China, the Gulf States, and Southeast Asia (Mathews 2011; Marsden 2016). This has variously been described as “globalization from below,” or “low-​end globalization.” Gordon Mathews, for example, describes “low-​ end globalization,” as “traders carrying their goods by suitcase, container or truck across continents and borders with minimal interference from borders and copyright” (2011, 27). Alejandro Portes describes globalization from below as a large working-​class underbelly, created as a result of capital mobility and transnational manufacturing (1997). In its contemporary iteration, globalization is evidenced in global manufacturing, finance, and supply chains. But representations of global connections in the bazaar—​people and goods, information and money—​should not be seen as unrestricted; undergirding these global connections are individuals exercising agency. Besides the traders and the buyers, alongside bazaar owners this list would include border officials, transporters, and police, as well as a wide spectrum of individuals who staff civil administration in locales where the bazaars are located. Insofar as we can talk of a “state,” the state should be imagined as a set of actors “doing things” as “collective historical agents” (Robinson 2001, 164). Alongside the bazaar, the border is where commercial interests coalesce (Karrar 2019). Borders are where sovereignty manifests itself in the form of personnel (security, border agents), infrastructure (check posts), and institutions (immigration and customs). Located within the bazaar are services to facilitate border crossings. Within Dordoi, for example, is a packaging and freight-​ forwarding terminal where transport time and cost to locations across Kazakhstan and Russia are prominently displayed. Marshrutkas (minivans) and shared taxis ply the route between Dordoi and the Kyrgyzstan-​Kazakhstan border at Korday; similarly, there are daily buses bringing in day-​shoppers from Kazakhstan. It is at the actual border where the final determination of who, and what, can and cannot enter. The border and the bazaar can be said to be connected (Karrar 2019). Based on our structured interviews in 2016 and 2017, Rudaz and I estimated that in Dordoi, nearly 65 percent of the buyers were from Kazakhstan, and nearly 14 percent of the buyers in the Barakhola were from Russia; about 5 percent of the buyers in Dordoi were from Russia (see also Karrar 2017; Rudaz 2020). These findings reveal the entrepôt status of the two marketplaces; they are also consistent with earlier published estimates that about three-​quarter of the goods imported into Kyrgyzstan were re-​exported to other countries (Kaminski and Rabbaland 2013). 523

—​​​​ H a s a n H . K a r r a r —​​​​

Certainly until 2015, when Kyrgyzstan entered the Customs Union, it was easier to import goods into Kyrgyzstan and then re-​export them onwards to locales elsewhere in Central Asia and Russia. Even after the Customs Union, importers I spoke with in Kazakhstan in 2017 affirmed that importing goods through Kyrgyzstan remained an option because of the ease of undervaluing consignments. The addition of a handover step between the manufacturer, say in China, and the consumer outside of Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan, not only adds to the cost of an item but generates income and rent at that particular locale. In July 2014, traders in Kara-​Suu told me a story to explain the 2010 border closure with Andijan, which as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, was sealed not following the June violence in Osh, but three months earlier in March. According to the traders, shortly before the border closure, Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov had visited Andijan and expressed his disapproval at goods being routed through Kyrgyzstan. “We have land, we have containers,” Kara-​Suu traders quoted Karimov as saying. We need to build our own bazaar, Karimov allegedly proposed. Regardless of whether this story is true, since the early 2000s, the Uzbekistan press had been critical of goods re-​imported from Kyrgyzstan, accusing its neighbor of concealing the final destination of goods that it was importing into Kyrgyzstan, and of dumping poor-​quality goods on Uzbekistan (Uzbek Television 2003). This is one way globalization was enabled by the state; at times, it was also contentious.

CONCLUSION: BAZAARS AND THE GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL ECONOMY? Traders in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan will recall how in the early 1990s, they would trade off of blankets that were laid on the ground. “We used to sit under the open sky,” I have been told more than once. “When it rained or snowed, we would pack up and go home,” traders would reminisce grimly. Over the past 30 years, the bazaar has changed considerably; indeed, in some parts of Central Asia, the bazaar has undergone a makeover. Over the course of three annual visits to the Barakholka, between 2016 and 2018, I have witnessed how many of the container bazaars have been removed, and given way to purpose-​built malls. When I met with him in his office in June 2013, Manaas Turataly Uulu had unrolled blueprints for my benefit, explaining plans to upgrade infrastructure, manage traffic, improve sanitation at Kara-​Suu bazaar. Similarly, in my August 2016 interview with Dordoi’s director, he described how there were plans for adding a mall to the Dordoi bazaar because malls were more civilized trading places; two Bishkek undergraduate students, who were assisting me with fieldwork and who had accompanied me to the interview, nodded vigorously. The most obvious way of explaining how bazaars evolve is as national development, in which traders and bazaar owners discovered a niche following the collapse of the Soviet Union: the former by leveraging price arbitrages and catering to demand, the latter by securing property and building bazaars which funneled rent to itself. But these processes were also coterminous with the emergence of a neoliberal global economy. The question that can then be asked is whether political economy and globalization at the bazaar is in fact a story of neoliberal production and consumption extending down to the bazaar floor? 524

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​

Critical social sciences literature on neoliberalism is vast, and there is divergence in how the term is used. That being said, neoliberalism remains an essential analytical frame for thinking through how variously, since the 1970s, countries around the world have witnessed a scale-​back of protectionism, of marketization of public goods and services, deindustrialization, as well as precarity and increased income disparity (Galbraith and Heath 2016, 127). What might Central Asia—​our region of study—​ bring to the conversation on neoliberalism? Conversely, does a turn-​of-​the-​century neoliberal epoch—​one of globalized production and consumption—​add anything to how we conceptualize the Central Asian bazaar, or to how one might understand rent and globalization? I would posit that the processes I have described in this chapter encourage us to think about contemporary bazaars in Central Asia as part of a global story of neoliberal transformation. Globalized production and consumption require new flows of commodities and capital across national borders (Ong 2006; Sassen 2006). Certainly, as we see in the case of commodity flows into and through Central Asia, border regulations are frequently bypassed, which raises broader questions about how we have traditionally understood the role of the nation-​state and how sovereignty is negotiated. Our discussion on bazaars moves the institution beyond post-​war typologies that had relegated these marketplaces to localized and highly personalized forms of exchange. Instead, in Central Asia after 1991, we begin to see the bazaar embedded in state formation and commodity flows, processes that are both contemporary and global. The nation-​state, which was meant to regulate production and consumption, is bypassed by transnational flows, not accidentally, but because greater marketization is ultimately beneficial to either corporations, or as is frequently the case in Central Asia, to individuals; in the story I tell here, these would be the bazaar owners and state officials. The bazaar, I would suggest, is at the center of a transnational space, which—​by way of private not public interests—​extends beyond nation-​state boundaries, and which allows us to build new understanding on how we think about the bazaar.

REFERENCES AKPI Press. 2005. Kyrgyz Businessman’s Supporters Rally over Murder. September 5. Accessed through BBC Monitoring International Reports. Alff, Henryk. 2017. Red Lines for Uncivilized Trade? Fixity, Mobility and Positionality on Almaty’s Changing Bazaars. In Area Studies at Crossroad: Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn, eds. Katharine Mielka and Anna-​ Katharina Hornidge, 121–​ 139. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Alff, Henry. 2014. Post-​Soviet Positionalities: Relations, Flows and the Transformation of Bishkek’s Dordoy Bazaar. In: Tracing Connections: Exploration of Spaces and Places in Asian Contexts, eds. Henry Alff and Andreas Benz, 71–​90. Berlin: Wiesenschaftlicher. Åslund, Anders. 2013. How Capitalism was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connell, Raewyn and Nour Dados. 2014. Where in the World Does Neoliberalism come from? The Market Agenda in Southern Perspective. Theory and Society 43: 117—​138. Fanselow, Frank. 1990. The Bazaar Economy or How Bizarre is the Bazaar Really? Man 25(2): 250–​265. 525

—​​​​ H a s a n H . K a r r a r —​​​​ Fehlings, Susanne. 2020. Doing Business in Yabaolu Market, Beijing: (Inter-​ )ethnic Entrepreneurship, Trust and Friendship between Caucasian and Chinese Traders. Central Asian Survey 39(1): 95–​115. Fehlings, Susanne and Hasan H. Karrar. 2020. Negotiating State and Society: The Normative Informal Economies of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Central Asian Survey 39(1): 1–​10. Galbraith, James K. and Anthony Heath. 2016. Power and Inequality. In: Who Runs the Economy? The Role of Power in the Economy, eds Robert Skidelsky and Nan Craig, 121–​ 137. London: Palgrave. Geertz, Clifford. 1978. The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing. The American Economic Review 68(2): 28–​32. Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hale, Henry E. 2015. Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Interfax. 2005. Prominent Kyrgyz MP Killed in Capital. September 22. Accessed through BBC Selected Wire Articles: Russia. Kabar. 2005. More Disturbances at Market in Southern Kyrgyzstan. July 8. Accessed through BBC Monitoring International Reports. Kaminski Bartlomeij and Gaël Rabbaland. 2013. Entrepôt for Chinese Consumer Goods in Central Asia: The Puzzle of Re-​exports through Kyrgyz Bazaars. Eurasian Geography and Economics 50(5): 581–​590. Karrar, Hasan H. 2019. Between Border and Bazaar: Central Asia”s Informal Economy. Journal of Contemporary Asia 49(2): 272–​293. Karrar, Hasan H. 2017. Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi and Kara-​Suu Bazaars: Mobility, Globalization and Survival in Two Central Asian Markets. Globalizations 14(4): 643–​657. Katsenelinboigen, A. 1977. Coloured Markets in the Soviet Union. Soviet Studies 29(1): 62–​85. Kyzy, Gulzina Karym. 2001. Kyrgyz Shuttle Trade in Crisis. CACI Analyst, August 1. www. caci​anal​yst.org/​publi​cati​ons/​field-​repo​rts/​item/​7347-​field-​repo​rts-​caci-​anal​yst-​2001-​8-​1-​ art-​7347.html (Accessed August 3, 2020). Kumenev, Almaz. 2018. Kazakhstan: Sun Setting on Almaty’s Chaotic Barakholka Bazaar. Eurasiannet, November 21. https://​eur​asia​net.org/​kaz​akhs​tan-​sun-​sett​ing-​on-​alma​tys-​chao​ tic-​bar​akho​lka-​baz​aar (Accessed December 15, 2020). Marsden, Magnus. 2016. Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers. London: Oxford University Press. Mathews, Gordon. 2011. Ghetto at the Centre of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mignolo, Walter D. 2020. Coloniality and Globalization: A Decolonial Take. Globalizations 18(3): 1–​18. Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Global South and World Dis/​order. Journal of Anthropological Research 67(2): 165–​188. Mostowlansky, Till. 2017. Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan”s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburg Press. Ngo, Tak-​Wing and Eva Hung. 2019. The Political Economy of Border Checkpoints in Shadow Exchanges. Journal of Contemporary Asia 49(2): 178–​192. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Times. New York: Beacon Press.

526

—​​​​ T h e C e n t r a l A s i a n b a z a a r s i n c e 1 9 9 1 —​​​​ Pomfret, Richard and Kathryn Anderson. 2001. Economic Development Strategies in Central Asia since 1991. Asian Studies Review 25(2): 185–​200. Portes, Alejandro. 1997. Globalization from Below: The Rise of Transnational Communities. Volume 98, Issue 8 of CMD Working Paper Series. http://​maxwe​ber.hun​ter.cuny.edu/​eres/​ docs/​eres/​SOC2​17_​P​IMEN​TEL/​por​tes.pdf (Accessed August 4, 2020). Robinson, William I. 2001. Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State. Theory and Society 30(2): 157–​200. Rostow, Walt Whitman. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-​Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rotblat, Howard J. 1972. Structural Impediments to Change in the Qazvin Bazaar. Iranian Studies 5(4): 130–​148. Rudaz, Philippe. 2020. Trading in Lilo and Dordoi Bazaars: Frontiers of Formality, Entrepreneurship and Globalization. Central Asian Survey 39(1): 11–​32. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schröder, Philipp. 2020. Business 2.0: Kyrgyzstan Middlemen in Guangzhou. Central Asian Survey 39(1): 116–​134. Sholk, Dena. 2018. Barakholka (Kazakhstan). In: Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Vol. 2, Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity, ed. Alena Ledeneva, 125–​129. London: UCL Press. Skidelsky, Robert. 2018. Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spector, Regine. 2017. Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Spector, Regine. 2008. Bazaar Politics: The Fate of Marketplaces in Kazakhstan. Problems of Post-​Communism 55(6): 42–​53. Uzbek Television (First Channel). 2003. Uzbek Officials lash “Economic Aggression” of Neighboring States. January 22. Accessed through BBC Summary of World Broadcasts.

527

CHAPTER THIRTY-​F IVE

HALAL AS A SITE OF DILEMMA AND NEGOTIATION Aisalkyn Botoeva

INTRODUCTION As we sat down beneath the terrace of the restaurant that Ainoor owned in Bishkek, she shared with me how she shifted to offering halal food. She and her husband took inspiration from their trip to Bukhara, where chaikhanas (teahouses) only serve several varieties of tea and the regionally famous plov (savoury meat and rice dish). Ainoor decided to fashion their restaurant after those teahouses, and to brand their place as halal, which meant no sales of alcohol and cigarettes, only halal food and beverages. As they gradually grew their customer base, Ainoor and her husband appreciated the reputation that their restaurant gained locally as a clean (taza in Kyrgyz, denoting both physical and moral purity) and a family-​friendly place. Yet, as their experience showed, running such a business also meant they had to rise to the challenge of navigating ambiguity and dilemma. As they sourced their meat and other ingredients from places that were recommended to them, they also heard of fraudulent companies such as Baamda,1 which were certified by the Muftiate as halal food producers but allegedly used haram (prohibited) products including American-​ imported poultry. Moreover, some beverages that are loved and regarded as the national heritage, like kymys (fermented mare’s milk), may possibly be haram due to their minor alcoholic content.2 Where should one draw the line between haram and halal? Ainoor was not the first respondent among those who ran a halal business in Kyrgyzstan to express such concern. Other entrepreneurs regularly offered lengthy discussions of what it meant to them to be in the halal sector, and how they altered their business practices accordingly.3 More often than not, respondents shared accounts of the ‘grey areas’ (Riaz & Chaudry 2004) they faced in their work, including having to resolve questions around liminal goods, services and practices –​those that are neither clearly permissible nor unlawful according to religious tenets. In this chapter, I focus on the case of halal food to illustrate how entrepreneurs as well as other actors including religious authorities and the broader public in Kyrgyzstan have negotiated and reflected on the religious rules, as they applied these rules to mundane practices. In a context of economic and political turbulence, ideological divisions, growing divides between haves and have-​nots, as well as worries over social ills such as immoral 528

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-42

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​

profiteering and aggression, entrepreneurs who tuned into Islamic tenets within the economic realm, have drawn on Islam among other ‘moral fields’ (Fadil & Fernando 2015), including ethnic and national sensibilities, Soviet habitus and market liberalism among others, as they navigated a constantly changing world. Along with their concerns over how to interpret and practice halal, market actors sometimes faced the question of how to reconcile the differences in connotation between more recently adopted Arabic concepts and their equivalents in Kyrgyz, aram and adal. People in Kyrgyzstan started using the Arabic terms halal (permissible) and haram (prohibited) only in the last three decades, and now use them interchangeably with their Kyrgyz equivalents. Following this colloquial convention I use the terms interchangeably, although there are some differences in how people use words. In Kyrgyz, one may attribute principles of integrity and honesty to adal ish (here literally ‘halal work’, but in Kyrgyz, generally meaning work based on good intentions) and may also use aram to connote something bad like in a saying akkan suuda aram jok (‘there is nothing bad in a flowing river’, meaning that one can drink river water safely). What market actors emphasise as objects of concern, and what they overlook, is itself illuminating. For example, as entrepreneurs speak of the intrinsic qualities of halal meat, they prioritise the proper slaughtering of livestock while overlooking the conditions in which livestock is kept. In a more contentious case, the halal status of fermented drinks such as kymys and bozo serves as a front in the battle between contending sources of national identification –​that is, religious doctrine and national custom. Religious authorities aim to wield their authority, but also yield (at times) to public opinion and the sentiments of ethno-​national heritage, subsequently using non-​religious sources of authority such as medical doctors to bolster their claims. Through these and other cases, I demonstrate that the halal economy is not about clear-​cut prescriptions of what is permissible and prohibited that practitioners need to follow. It has instead opened up space for debate and deliberation, as a result of which entrepreneurs in the sector ended up transforming both their pious practice and the conventional scripts of doing business. This case study speaks to the broader studies of everyday Islam (Marsden 2005; Schielke 2009), in which authors have questioned the over-​emphasis on ethical self-​cultivation and ideals of perfect religious conduct (Mahmood 2005). Schielke, for instance has argued that Saba Mahmood, in her influential study of ethical self-​cultivation, Politics of Piety (2005), misrepresents piety as a unilinear path on the way to perfection, rather than showing the complexities of how pious people in the contemporary world have to navigate among a variety of moral registers that are not always rooted in religious discursive traditions, including nationalism, consumerism and globalism (Schielke 2009). In his study of Chitral Muslims in North-​Western Pakistan, Marsden (2005) shows how ‘living Islam’ is not just about leading a pious lifestyle, but involves subtle strategising projects to navigate between the dictates of hardliner religious authorities and different degrees and versions of ‘Islamic’ norms. The examples in this chapter are illustrative of such blind spots and discrepancies in moral reasoning as well as competing dynamics of authority in interpretations of religious tenets. Rather than simply showing how practitioners in the halal economy strive to be morally proper, I offer a discussion of how this space is also shaped by ‘conflicts, ambiguities, double standards, fractures and shifts’ (Schielke 2009: 38). 529

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​

‘HARAM FOOD MAKES YOU AGGRESSIVE’: IMAGINED IMPACTS OF HALAL FOOD ON THE BODY AND THE SOCIETY I met Japar, a young and eager Kyrgyz entrepreneur, in the city of Osh, where he managed his family-​owned business producing jam. He was in his late twenties, had recently joined Tablighi Jamaat,4 and was happy about the sense of brotherhood and belonging that this religious group gave him. Content that he was on a path to strengthen his yiman (faith), he wanted to make sure that the food his company produced was halal. He discussed the importance of halal food through anecdotal observations: These days there are all kinds of chemically-​laden products, and you can really see their effect on people. We all witness on a regular basis how drivers get into fights over minor road accidents. I think it’s because they don’t eat halal food. If they’d eat halal and did halal kind of work, it would all be ibadat (worship or service to God in Arabic). Take the example of Malaysia, a Muslim country where they have gone ahead of other Muslim countries in halal production. I’ve heard that people are very polite there and they apologise even if they accidentally bump into each other on the streets. Interview conducted in Osh, 11 July 2014 Japar, like many others in Kyrgyzstan, drew a close connection between haram or halal food and the physical and spiritual well-​being of individuals and the broader society. Entrepreneurs like Japar often argue, along with religious schoolteachers, religious authorities and halal certifiers, that haram food can make one physically malnourished and weak, mentally unable to comprehend information, or psychologically predisposed to impatience and aggression. It was not surprising, my respondents would say, that the Kyrgyzstani society suffers from excessive aggression and animosity that seemed omnipresent in public space. Respondents often asserted that if only people were more knowledgeable about what food and beverages they consumed and provided to their children, pedestrians would not get cursed at when crossing the street, students would not be yelled at by teachers at school, and people would generally not face so much aggression in public. One of the basic principles in Islam states that everything created by Allah is permitted, with a few exceptions. These exceptions include pork, the meat of animals that were not slaughtered properly and whose blood was not bled out, and intoxicants such as alcohol and drugs (Regenstein et al. 2003). These are the tenets with which even secular respondents most often demonstrated familiarity in interviews. What complicated the situation, however, according to my respondents, was that haram foods and consumables were not a discrete category that included pork, alcoholic beverages and tobacco, but instead could include seemingly benign foods like yogurt, cakes, candy bars and others if they contained ingredients that were not produced and sourced properly. With the expansion of the halal economy starting from late 1990s, deliberations and debates have developed regarding how to produce, sell and consume halal food and beverages. These debates took place in the sermons in mosques,

530

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​

Figure 35.1  A scene from a halal bakery in Osh. Photo by author.

in televised teachings by religious authorities, in workshops and lessons at schools and colleges, and in online forums and trainings delivered by private halal certifiers. Japar was among a number of entrepreneurs who had gone through a training and obtained a document issued by certifiers testifying that his products were halal. In making his jam, he explained, ‘We have always used only natural ingredients. We use berries, water and sugar and we don’t use preservatives. Even if our jam ends up being more expensive, it will be adal.’ Although sugar is technically not a ‘natural’ ingredient and can be unhealthy in excessive amounts, for Japar, it was more important that he did not use any chemicals to enhance the flavours, or preservatives to prolong the shelf-​life of his products (see Figure 35.1). Another of my respondents, the owner and manager of a private Muslim childcare centre in Bishkek, Aziza, shared her experience of learning more about halal over time: ‘We always thought we were complying with all the rules, but it turns out we had been eating all kinds of things that include haram ingredients. All those candies containing pork gelatine … just imagine how many children we had given all the prohibited food!’ To illustrate the consequences of consuming haram goods, she talked about procedures of slaughtering: You know that there’s a certain order, and rules of slaughtering livestock, right? For one thing, a slaughterer is not supposed to sharpen a knife in front of the

531

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​

animal, because that will cause the animal to be afraid and have an adrenaline rush. All of that adrenaline will then stay in the meat that we’ll consume if not drained … no wonder why so much aggression comes out of people! Interview conducted in Bishkek, 11 June 2014 Aziza prioritised feeding the children at her private Muslim childcare halal food, since to her mind it affected their physical and mental well-​being and subsequently their ability to obtain a well-​rounded education and religious knowledge. As I sat with her on the second floor of the private house that she rented for the childcare centre, children went up and down the stairs during recess. Some of them came up to the water dispenser standing next to her desk. ‘What do you say before drinking your water?’ –​she inquired from each child –​reminding them to say their dua (prayers). Aziza’s journey as an entrepreneur began in the mid-​2000s after deciding to be ‘closer to God’, which she now expressed by veiling, attending Quran study groups, fasting and engaging in charitable work. She had already put in several years as a teacher in public secondary and higher education before opening her own centre, and during the interview she depicted public and government-​run institutions as spaces with little oversight and lax discipline: I first worked in college teaching English language and literature, and used to wonder why students knew so little. But later, when I transferred to teach at a public high school, I realised some of the reasons. The principal of the school used to arrive only at ten in the morning, as though it was her private school. She drove a Land Rover, and that is with the salary that she supposedly made in a public institution [implying that she was only able to afford such a car by taking bribes]. I was already veiled at that point, and she asked me to take it off. I told her I couldn’t … A principal who smoked, who didn’t have any oversight of how classes were running (our schedules changed all the time) … how could you trust such a school to give good education to children? Interview conducted in Bishkek, 11 June 2014 For Aziza, the public educational system lacked not only discipline, but also integrity and a sense of community. Hence her conviction that bringing piety and Islamic tenets into education through her private business allowed her to socialise the young generation properly. In her words, the youth were lacking in ze’en (overall ability and comprehension, Kyrgyz), because they were not getting enough attention from parents, spending too much time watching foreign cartoons, and not eating nutritious food.5 Similar rhetoric is advanced by a rising religious authority, Nurjigit Kadyrbekov, a young ustaz (teacher or mentor) who is well-​regarded and gets invited as a guest speaker to various conventions, workshops and trainings. In a video of one of his public speeches, in a crowded room full of college students, parents and teachers, he emphasised, ‘For knowledge to stick, eat adal food!’ (Ilim jugush üchün, adal tamak jegile in Kyrgyz). By drawing a direct cause-​and-​effect relationship between adal food and one’s dexterity and quick-​wittedness, he wove together themes of forced secularism during the Soviet period and low levels of faith, the importance of renewed religious aspirations, and the challenges of engaging a younger generation who are lacking in ze’en: 532

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​

Why do you think our generations are lacking people like Ishak Razzakov [the first secretary of the Communist Party of Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (KSSR)], Abdykadyr Orozbekov [the first Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the KSSR], Bayaly Isakeev [member of the Council of the People’s Commissars of the KSSR,] and Kasym Tynystanov [a prominent Kyrgyz 9scientist, politician and poet]? How did they reach prominence? That’s because their fathers and mothers did not feed them aram food. In the past, Kyrgyz people used to die from starvation, but now people are dying from eating too much. Aram food can lead to heart problems. Ask any doctor and they will agree that food turns into blood. That’s why many madrassahs these days started preparing their own food and even raising their own sheep. If the food is good, children’s ze’en will be stronger. In the 70 years [of the Soviet rule] we ate different kinds of things, and it turns out we spoiled our ze’en, our yiman [faith]. Apalar (mothers), please pay close attention to what kind of food you give your children. Kadyrbekov 2019 Nobody in the audience challenged the speaker that all the people he had listed came to prominence in the early to mid-​Soviet period, at the time of militant anti-​ religious propaganda. Why cite mostly Soviet apparatchiks as examples of Kyrgyz crème de la crème, rather than mentioning famous writers, artists, and maybe even dissidents? Did the people he mentioned distinguish adal and aram food? The audience overlooked these discrepancies in Kadyrbekov’s narrative, appearing to sense and share the speaker’s frustration with the broader problem at hand, namely, the lack of ze’en or intellectual grasp and agility among younger generations.

‘HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT KYMYS ISN’T HALAL?’ HALAL AS A SITE OF DILEMMA AND NEGOTIATION Halal is not a fixed and stable prescription, but rather a site of doubt, dilemma and negotiation. One telling example that illustrates this point in Kyrgyzstan is the case of kymys, a fermented drink from mare’s milk, traditional in the cultures of Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Mongols and other nomadic peoples. This drink has long been revered in Kyrgyzstan and the broader Central Asian region for its alleged restorative health benefits. Because of its mild alcoholic content, however, many pious Muslims have started to question if it is a halal product to consume. Discussions around kymys have taken place in settings that ranged from informal gatherings to mosque sermons, and online forums. On one of these Russian-​language online platforms, Asar forum, a user named Abdulaziz posted in 2008 ‘Assalamu aleikum, brothers! I would like to know about kymys, is it permitted or prohibited and is there a special fatwa (a ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized authority)?’ (Islamskiy forum, 2008). In response to this question, he received a number of posts from users that appeared under Arabic sounding names such as Abu Amina, Adil Abu Bakr and Daud Al-​Hanbali. Some of the users retorted back ‘Well, why shouldn’t it be permitted, because it doesn’t have anything haram in it?’ Whereas others shared that they like to be on the side of caution. One of the users with a nickname ‘Committed to Allah’ (pokorivshiysya 533

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​

Allahu) shared a lengthy response, claiming that he had consulted five different sources on this topic, including ustaz Ibrahim, an imam of the Ahlu-​Sunnah mosque in Kazakhstan, Sheikh Rinat Abu Muhammad, his grandmother, books on nomadic life, as well as additional information from Wikipedia. Based on these sources, he shared that kymys and its alcoholic content can vary depending on the leaven, duration and conditions of fermentation. If it goes through a long process of fermentation, it may be intoxicating due to its higher alcoholic content. It may therefore be advisable to drink fresh kymys. Following this post, other users questioned if it was possible to distinguish the freshly made drink from one with longer fermentation. Due to these uncertainties, perhaps it was best to avoid it altogether. The statements of respected religious authorities clearly added to the ambiguous status of kymys. Sheikh Rinat allegedly stated that the drink is not haram in itself, but some who drink it on an empty stomach may feel drunk. In such cases, it would certainly be considered haram. Another user, Muslim_​ru, chimed in drawing from his educational background in the food industry: ‘It is important to take into account that alcohol formation is not an instantaneous process, and depends on the temperature, time and other factors’ (Islamskiy forum, 2008). He concluded that it appears that it is important to take into account personal sensations when using products like kymys, since it may make some quite intoxicated just like wine. This episode from an online forum discussion illustrates the contentious and difficult process of translating religious tenets to the everyday concerns and practices. This difficulty is true not only in Kyrgyzstan, but in any context where halal is produced and consumed by those who are religiously or otherwise inclined. Existing research points to these long-​standing dilemmas when it comes to halal –​how can one be sure that the poultry sold in a supermarket, for example, was killed according to halal rules (Waarden & Dalen, 2011; Deeb & Harb, 2013)? Or how does one as a business owner know whether an Islamic bank from which one took out a loan is compliant with all of the religious tenets deemed important? Such questions were ubiquitous across the different sites of my fieldwork, as was the tacit recognition by my respondents that it was often difficult to draw the line between halal and haram goods. In such ambiguous situations, many chose to rely on religious authorities. One of the revered religious authorities in his time, Chubak aji Jalilov used to receive the same questions about kymys after his mosque sermons, as well as after his televised lessons. Known as the head of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Kyrgyzstan in 2010–​12 and member of the Council of Ulema in Kyrgyzstan, Chubak Aji never tired of answering questions from his followers, questions that ranged from the permissibility of polygamy by the Quran to the permissibility of bank loans. In a televised question-​and-​answer session with his audience from 2017, Chubak Aji shared his thoughts about kymys: Kymys is not aram. Some claim that you will become incapacitated if you drink kymys, but you can behave like a drunken person by just overeating wheat porridge for example. Now, some people add all kinds of things to kymys, like raisin and navat (crystallised sugar) to increase its alcoholic content. In such a case, that drink should be considered aram, because it is an alcoholic beverage derived from kymys. Sheikh Chubak Ajy 2017 534

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​

Such responses from respected religious authorities further bolstered the status of kymys as an authentic piece of national heritage, which could not be labelled haram, as this rhetoric would suggest that it was harmful and impure. The justification for the halal status of this much-​loved beverage was rooted in the rhetoric that it is mostly consumed for restorative rather than recreational purposes. After extensive debates and deliberations, the Muftiate in Kyrgyzstan finally issued a fatwa,6 that kymys was to be regarded halal, since its alleged health benefits outweigh its negligible alcoholic content (see Figure 35.2). While the fatwa may have resolved the question for a while, a similar debate sparked after the Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Kyrgyzstan declared in early 2020, that bozo, another traditional drink, was to be prohibited. Bozo is a thick fermented drink made from millet, corn and barley and may contain up to 4 per cent of alcoholic content. One of the religious authorities, Chubak Aji had already been vocal about bozo being haram. In 2016 in one of his televised meetings he stated: ‘I talked about the benefits of bozo with a doctor. He told me that it only improves appetite since its sour, but otherwise does not have any benefits. Therefore it should not be allowed’ (Sheikh Chubak Ajy, 2016). The Muftiate’s fatwa prohibiting the use of bozo was met by a pushback from people who argued that it is no different than kymys, and is considered part of the Kyrgyz and other nomadic tribes’ traditional heritage. The broader public debate ensued and many market actors, especially bozo producers and sellers, claimed that the Muftiate should better be prohibiting Coca-​Cola and Fanta, instead of nit-​picking beverages that were so ingrained in local Kyrgyz traditions and lifestyle (Mir 24, 2020). Journalists

Figure 35.2  Chubak aji Jalilov tasting one of the products at a halal expo in Kyrgyzstan. Source: https://​halal.kg 535

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​

reported what medical experts had to say about bozo and its distinction from kymys. According to the deputy director of the Narcology Centre, Tatyana Borisova, bozo has only an insignificant alcoholic content and one would have to drink a bucket-​full of it to become drunk. In contrast, a mug of kymys would equal a mug of beer (Kloop, 2020). Another doctor, Asel Sydykbekova, was reported to say that bozo is very beneficial for health as it is based on sprouted wheat: ‘It contains vitamin B and doctors recommend it to patients with low haemoglobin and low blood pressure in conjunction with other supplements’ (Ulanova, 2020). In response to the public uproar, the Muftiate shared that they had not issued a fatwa, but rather a strong recommendation from the religious leaders to not consume this beverage. They noted that every pious person could make the decision for themselves. The debate around permissibility of kymyz and bozo posed various questions to religious-​identifying publics: how to decide whether a certain food product is haram or halal; whether religious authorities are always right when they make strong recommendations or issue a fatwa; when traditional values and practices can undermine religious prescriptions; and finally, how to hold together different sources of authority and expertise. Rather than simply a story of localisation of Islam, these episodes show how Kyrgyzstani people are negotiating Muslimness and are engaging with competing conceptions of religious as well as traditional and national identities reflexively, figuring out where Islamic tenets have space for flexibility and interpretation along the way (cf., Marsden 2005) (see Figure 35.3).

Figure 35.3  A poster advertising Muslim women’s apparel. Pictures illustrate both modern Muslim outlooks as well as Kyrgyz traditional outfits with a modern flare. Photo by author. 536

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​

As these episodes also illustrate, what is at stake in these debates is not just competing moralities (or what is morally right) but also competing sources of knowledge, authority, and expertise (who has a say in what is religiously right). Elsewhere, I discuss how third-​party halal certifiers gain authority through creation of collective understandings of what is halal and Islamic but also through reliance on local and transnational networks of religious authority (Botoeva 2020). In each of these cases, the authenticity of religious edicts is verified by reference to multiple sources of authority, and sometimes even religious leaders themselves have to rely on secular authorities like medical doctors. This is far from unique to Kyrgyzstan or Central Asia. The budding literature in economic sociology offers examples of many different markets ranging from finance (Mackenzie 2003; Sinclair 2014) to antique commodities (Bogdanova 2013), and even labour markets (Gerlach 2013), where the value and the actual quality of goods (or services) maybe invisible or opaque (Beckert 2013; Beckert & Musselin 2013). Consumers and other market actors rely on ‘judgment devices’, such as experts, guidebooks and reviews, as well as third-​party certifiers, who may be competing for authority. The next section discusses how these deliberations have both broadened conceptions of halal as something that encompasses ‘everything that makes Allah happy’ (cf., Henig 2020), prompting entrepreneurs to rethink conventional cultural scripts for running a business.

‘IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT FOOD’ A WIDER CULTURAL REPERTOIRE ABOUT GOOD ACTIONS Ainoor, who was introduced above, initially started her shift to the halal mode of doing business by banning sales and consumption of alcohol and tobacco on the premises of her restaurant. At the time of our interview, Ainoor wondered how much longer they would maintain their halal practices, noting that the owners and managers of halal cafes tread a thin line. The co-​investors of her restaurant voiced concerns that they were losing 30 per cent of their potential profits and suggested that they switch back to the non-​halal mode. Ainoor, although not a pious Muslim herself, was against this decision and stated that her own informal survey among the employees showed that 80 per cent of the workers wanted the cafe to stay halal: They say that it’s harder to deal with drunken clients. It’s more stressful, even though they may leave more tips. And of course, not all people who drink cause trouble, but our employees are already used to leaving work on time and not having to stay overtime because of clients who can get carried away when they start drinking.  Interview conducted in Bishkek, 26 July 2014 Ainoor’s case is illustrative of two broader processes. First, not all entrepreneurs in the halal sector were in it because of religious conviction. Ainoor herself had long ago converted to Christian Baptist. Other entrepreneurs of Kyrgyz, Russian, Korean backgrounds, who did not identify as Muslims or as pious, ended up in the halal sector mostly because of their expectation that it was a growing market and would eventually be more profitable than their conventional equivalents. Second, entrepreneurs in 537

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​

general, regardless of their religious affiliations and the type of business, do tend to seek a moral anchor –​principles that can guide them throughout their work and set them apart from those who are seen as immoral and greedy. This is to say that entrepreneurs in the halal sector, like Ainoor and others, are far from the only ones who want to lead a ‘clean’ business, or who are concerned with the state of society. While some draw on religious literature, mosque sermons and televised lectures by religious leaders, others draw from Western-​style motivational speakers and business coaches who guide them in leading a resourceful but also morally proper and meaningful work. Most of these sources deploy similar narratives –​that what made food halal was not just about ingredients, but rather the broader spectrum of practices at work. Religious authorities emphasise this often in their sermons. In the same video of his public speech referenced above, standing in front of the audience of students, teachers and their parents, Nurjigit Kadyrbekov spoke of the importance of ‘clean money’ and ‘clean profit’ as he lectured about halal food. Addressing the youth in the audience, he encouraged them to ask their parents what the sources of their income were. ‘Ask your parents how they are earning their money, especially if you notice that they are getting drawn into corruption.’ This was also important to remember as their parents went to tois (festive celebrations): it was good to pay attention to who was throwing the festivities and how they earned their money. ‘Perhaps they deceived, robbed and stole?’ Kadyrbekov asked is audience. ‘In that case the food your parents bring from the toi is not adal’ (Kadyrbekov 2019). Referencing sermons and speeches like Nurjigit Kadyrbekov’s, entrepreneurs in the halal sector often echoed the importance of instilling principles of honesty, integrity and the avoiding harm in their work. Ainoor, for example, compared her restaurant to the other location in their chain and proudly stated that her restaurant consistently earned higher profit margins despite the fact that the seating capacity was smaller at her place. This is because she treated the employees right, asked their opinion when making decisions, paid them on time and generally trusted them, she explained. This way the employees were less likely to steal and deceive her –​a common problem that managers faced at workplaces, as she contended. All of these acts were halal, because they not only pleased God, but they also created value to offset what had historically been unjust and tainted practices. Likewise, entrepreneurs commonly voiced their efforts to reconsider and change their relationship with state officials. In the contemporary Bosnian context, Henig (2020: 180) discusses how Bosnian Muslim entrepreneurs engaged in ‘halal giving’, which included a myriad of acts, practices and events of care for oneself and others as they sought to counteract the post-​war Bosnian state, ‘which does not care for its citizens, is perceived not only as corrupt and dysfunctional but also as being haram, that is, immoral and polluted’. Typically, business owners in Kyrgyzstan and the broader former Soviet space, are accustomed to solving disputes with ‘street-​level bureaucrats’ through bribes or protection payments (Ledeneva 1998), with tax officers often identified as some of the most corrupt. Although admitting that they still do give bribes when demanded, many of my respondents talked about the moral complexity of acts they experienced as inescapable. Some referred to religious authorities who allegedly recommend that giving bribes ‘when the other party demands it’ is not a sin –​just like eating haram food is forgivable if done unknowingly. Others stressed that since taxes in any case merely enter the wallets of highly positioned officials, withholding 538

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​

them was itself an ethical act of refusal. Ainoor made a sharp moral distinction between government agencies concerned with fire and sanitary regulations, which she did bribe, and the tax officials, who would turn a blind eye to her double-​book accounting practices in exchange for a monthly fee: We have our cash register and we give a receipt to every customer. We pay our taxes. But as you know, our menu isn’t pricey in comparison to other places in the city. And it’s like a small secret, but the tax office has its own rates for all restaurants and cafes. We pay them a certain rate every month. Why do we pay them? This way, they take 30 per cent less taxes from us. That’s how it works. Interview conducted in Bishkek, 26 July 2014 Such reflections illuminate the ‘complex moral landscape’ (Deeb & Harb 2013) that emerged at the intersections of Islam, Soviet habitus, and the market economy in Kyrgyzstan. These processes are certainly not unique to Kyrgyzstan. Marsden (2016) rejects common portrayals of Afghan traders as drug barons, victims, or refugees, and instead explores the ways in which Afghan traders present themselves as diplomats who reflect upon the importance of being drust (honest) and baghayrat (honourable) men, as they sense different contexts and shift their moral codes and rules accordingly. Kalieszewska (2020), who studied Dagestani entrepreneurs in Makhachkala, in the Russian Federation, examines ‘halal landscapes’ or ways in which they avoid making profit from deception and usury, and instead aim to instil honesty in their work. Such entrepreneurs are not passively implementing Muslim authorities’ messages, but rather selectively choosing which messages resonate with them, and moving away from official discourses of Islam as they seek their own path of piety. Here I have sought to reveal not only how entrepreneurs in the halal sector strive to be morally proper, but also the competing dynamics of authority, the blind spots and discrepancies in moral reasoning which they negotiate in practice. The examples of bozo and kymys show how religious authorities themselves draw selectively upon secular authorities to justify their decisions and religious edicts. Moreover, the examples from the advocates of halal food demonstrate that good intentions about the cultivation of moral persons through ‘good food’ bracket off the humane raising and handling of animals. Finally, the examples from Ainoor’s business practice, in which being a good employer entails both paying her staff well and bribing the tax inspectorate, speak to the constant balancing acts in which my informants are engaged. In these examples, the state is not outside of the spectrum of moral valuation. Indeed, it is precisely because entrepreneurs see the tax inspectorate as one of the most corrupt agencies that they feel justified in tax evasion. The blind spot in this reasoning is that by withholding taxes and bribing tax officers, entrepreneurs are perpetuating cycles of corruption. Yet, because commands to pay bribes emanate from the state bureaucrats and that because they believe that taxes do not benefit the broader public, entrepreneurs deem themselves to be free of sin.

CONCLUSION Secularist critiques often target those in the halal sector as opportunists who seek to profit from the religious aspirations of pious Muslims. My research shows, 539

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​

however, that entrepreneurs in the halal economy were busy (re)thinking which Islamic tenets were important to the conduct of taza business. Entrepreneurs commonly extended their understanding of halal to a wide array of business practices and activities, that went beyond their efforts to secure and use proper food ingredients in their production and sales. While halal food and beverages as a market segment expanded economic opportunities, engagement in this sector also widened the opportunities for market actors to deliberate, reflect and practice what they viewed as good vs. bad, proper vs. improper, moral vs. corrupt. These efforts have not necessarily led them to perfect religious conduct close to the ideal ethical lifestyle, but working in the halal sector prompted them to rethink the scripts for business management, including their relations with employees and their engagement with the state. Such deliberations do not occur in a vacuum. Entrepreneurs who produce halal food intermingle their understandings and beliefs around religious tenets with their ethno-​national sense of belonging, their experience of doing business in a relatively new market economy, as well as their fantasies and aspirations for being a better Muslim, a more affluent person who is respected, and an agent capable of bringing about a better future. The halal economy should be understood, then, not only as a space of economic possibility, or a domain where pious Muslims follow clear-​cut prescriptions of what is permissible and prohibited, but as the space for the negotiation of uncertainty about the very scope and demands of leading a ‘good life’. As they engage in deliberations on how to translate certain religious tenets into practice, entrepreneurs transform both their pious practice and conventional scripts of doing business in contemporary Kyrgyzstan.

NOTES 1 The real company’s name is anonymised, as well as all the names of respondents other than public figures such as religious authorities. 2 The alcoholic content in kymys ranges from 1–​3 per cent, depending on fermentation. This is lower than an average alcoholic content in beer, which is around 5 per cent. 3 My broader research explores how Islam may provide new repertoires of contention to social groups that align or clash along ethno-​national, spiritual and, more importantly, class lines. In Botoeva 2018, for example, I study variations in how followers of different Islamic movements in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, have espoused distinct orientations of Islamism. In this entry, I choose not to focus on these variations, and instead focus on shared experiences that resonate with the experiences of pious Muslims and the secular public in Kyrgyzstan. 4 With an estimated global following of around 12–​15 million, Tablighi Jamaat has expanded across Central Asia in the past decade. Originating in early 1920s in India (Ismailbekova & Nasritdinov 2012), the movement identifies itself as a peaceful and apolitical brand of Islam, in which new members join the ranks primarily through dava’at groups, going with missionaries door to door (Reetz 2008). The new administration in the Muftiate of Kyrgyzstan officially voiced its approval of Tablighi Jamaat in 2012, even instituting a new dava’at department at the time of my fieldwork. Nevertheless, public disapproval around proselytisers and missionary trips is still stark 5 At the time of my fieldwork between 2012 and 2015, Muslim childcare centres represented a small segment (roughly 5–​10 per cent) of the private education sector in Bishkek. They relied 540

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​ on the word of mouth as well as advertisement on certain online platforms like Muslimbiz, along with other businesses run by Muslims and for the pious Muslims. 6 Religious-​legal rulings and opinions issued by imams that apply to specific cases of contemporary life.

REFERENCES Beckert, J. (2013). Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in the Economy, Theory & Society, 42(March), 219–​240. Beckert, J., & Musselin, C. (Eds.). (2013). Constructing Quality: The Classification of Goods in Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bogdanova, E. (2013). Account of the Past: Mechanisms of Quality Construction in the Market for Antiques. In Constructing Quality: The Classification of Goods in Markets, edited by J. Beckert & C. Musselin (pp. 153–​173). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Botoeva, A., (2018). Islam and the Spirits of Capitalism: Competing Articulations of the Islamic Economy, Politics & Society, 46(2), 235–​264. Botoeva, A., (2020). Measuring the Unmeasurable? Production & Certification of Halal Goods and Services, Sociology of Islam, 8(4), 364–​386. Chubak Ajy, Sheikh, (2016). Adal aram maselesi. Bozo ichse bolobu?[Online video]. Available at: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​WNF_​hVvv​Lzg (Accessed: 2 April 2021). Chubak Ajy, Sheikh, (2017). Kymyz menen araktyn aiyrmasy barby? [Onlive video]. Available at: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​i-​ia7I​HRa-​M (Accessed: 2 April 2021). Deeb, L. & Harb, M., (2013). Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fadil, N. & Fernando, M., (2015). Rediscovering the ‘Everyday’ Muslim. Notes on Anthropological Divide. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(2), 59–​88. Gerlach, P. (2013). Evaluation Practices in Internal Labor Markets: Constructing Engineering Managers’ Qualification in French and German Automotive Firms. In Constructing Quality: The Classification of Goods in Markets , edited by J. Beckert & C. Musselin (pp. 126–​150). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henig, D. (2020). Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Humphrey, C., (2002). The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Islamskiy forum, (2008). O Kumyse. Available at: www.asar-​forum.com/​viewto​pic.php?t=​ 759&p=​6923 (Accessed: 2 April 2021). Ismailbekova, A. & Nasritdinov. E., (2012). Transnational Religious Networks in Central Asia: Structure, Travel, and Culture of Kyrgyz Tablighi Jama’at. Transnational Social Review: A Social Work Journal 2(2), 177–​95. Kadyrbekov, N., (2019). Ilim jugush uchun adal tamak jegile. [Online video]. Available at: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​L6a4​Rl1T​ND4 (Accessed: 2 April, 2021). Kalinovsky, A., (2015). Tractors, Power Lines, and the Welfare State: The Contradictions of Soviet Development in Post-​World War II. Asiatische Studien –​Etudes Asiatiques, 69(3), 563–​592. Kaliszewska, I., (2020). Halal Landscapes of Dagestani Entrepreneurs in Makhachkala. Ethnicities, 20(4), 1–​23. Kamp, M., (2010). Where Did the Mullahs Go? Oral Histories from Rural Uzbekistan, Welt des Islams 50(3), 503–​531. Khalid, A., (2007). Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia. Oakland: University of California Press. 541

—​​​​ A i s a l k y n B o t o e v a —​​​​ Kloop, (2020), DUMK Kygyrzstana: Bozo –​nel’zya, kumys –​mojno. Available at: https://​ kloop.kg/​blog/​2020/​02/​07/​dumk-​kyrg​yzst​ana-​bozo-​nel​zya-​kumys-​moz​hno/​?fbc​lid=​IwAR0 cVRauUoftqWENwUXlXRVBhOq7gcFn​mky8​LJRi​2gvg​9nWP​GFrT​nChB​ucE (Accessed: 2 April 2021). Ledeneva, A., (1998). Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liu, M., (2012). Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Louw, M. E., (2007). Everyday Islam in Post-​ Soviet Central Asia. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. MacKenzie, D., (2003). Opening the Black Boxes of Global Finance, paper originally presented to the workshop ‘Approaches to Global Finance’, University of Warwick, February. Marsden. M., (2005). Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-​West Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsden. M., (2016). Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maurer, B., (2005). Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McBrien, J., (2009). Mukadas’s Struggle: Veils and Modernity in Kyrgyzstan. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 127–​44. McBrien, J., (2012). Watching Clone: Brazilian Soap Operas and Muslimness in Kyrgyzstan. Material Religion, 8(3), 374–​396. Mir 24, (2020). Napitok bozo priznan alkogol’nym v Kyrgyzstane [Online video]. Available at: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​bRgU​PCne​gzk (Accessed: 2 April 2021). Nazpary, J., (2002). Post-​ Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto Press. Northrop, D., (2004). Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pitluck, A., (2012). Islamic Banking and Finance: Alternative or Facade? in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, edited by Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollard, J., & Samers M., (2007). Islamic Banking and Finance: Postcolonial Political Economy and the Decentering of Economic Geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(3), 313–​330. Privratsky, B., (2001). Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond: Curzon Press. Reetz, Dietrich., 2008. The ‘Faith Bureaucracy’ of the Tablighi Jama’at. An Insight into Their System of Self Organization (Intizam), in Colonialism, Modernity, and Religious Identities: Religious Reform Movements in South Asia, edited by G. Beckerlegge. Oxford and Delhi: Oxford University Press. Regenstein, J. M., Chaudry, M. M., & Regenstein, C. E. (2003). The Kosher and Halal Food Laws. Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, 2(3), 111–​127. Riaz, M. & Chaudry, M., (2004). Halal Food Production. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis. Schielke, S., (2009). Everyday Islam: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schielke, S., (2010). Second Thoughts About the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life. ZMO Working Papers, 2, 1–​16. Sinclair, T., (2014). The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of Creditworthiness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tasar, E. M., (2012). Soviet Policies toward Islam, in Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective, edited by Philip Muehlenbeck. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 542

— ​​​​ H a l a l a s a s i t e o f d i l e m m a a n d n e g o t i a t i o n —​​​​ Tobin, S. A., (2016). Everyday Piety. Islam and Economy in Jordan. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Ulanova, B., (2020). Muftiyat zapretil bozo. A chto govoryat vrachi? Kaktus media. Available at: https://​kak​tus.media/​doc/​400043​_​myf​tiia​t_​za​pret​il_​b​ozo._​a_​c​hto_​govo​riat​_​vra​chi.html (Accessed: 2 April 2021) van Waarden, F. & van Dalen R., (2011). Hallmarking Halal the Market for Halal Certificates: Competitive Private Regulation. Jerusalem Papers in Regulation & Governance, 33, 1–​39. Warde, I., (2010). Islamic Finance in the Global Economy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wherry, F., (2012). Performance Circuits in the Marketplace. Politics & Society, 40(2), 203–​21.

543

PART VIII

MOBILITY AND MIGRATION

With countries such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan sadly long in the top ten of global remittance dependency, how could we not include a book section on migration? And yet, we debated what to call this section: as Malika Bahovadinova (this volume) points out, ‘the’ migrant is so often powerfully projected as a person of low status, problematically ‘other’. Such stereotypes have deleterious consequences for people living all kinds of lives that encompass different parts of the world. Historically famous for forms of connectivity such as ‘Silk Roads’ and ‘Nomadism’, Central Asia has long been an arena of translocal flows, be it producing and transporting goods between Europe and Asia, or birthing influential Sufi religious orders. Thus broadening the discussion to other forms of movement than migration seemed a self-​evident analytical move. Movement is central to several other contributions to this volume: mobile pastoralism (Ferret) and pilgrimage (Aitpaeva), as well as the dynamics of hospitality (Marsden). Bringing in large-​scale regional and global dynamics, Gulzat Botoeva and Eeva Kesküla discuss the impact of international investment in resource extraction, while Agnieszka Joniak-​Lüthi highlights the political and ethnicising dimensions of Belt and Road Initiative infrastructures in Xinjiang. Though anthropologists of Central Asia have produced important work on the ‘social life’ of borders and internal migration (see the General Introduction), we have not been able to include this work here. There are several forms of mobility that would deserve more attention from anthropologists: studying the spatial mobility of elites, and the movement of ‘big money’ has to date remained the province of political scientists. Similarly, though Haruka Kikuta and Stephanie Bunn discuss tourism in the context of craft production (this volume), the broader impacts of domestic tourism and travel for example, remain understudied. Said Reza Kazemi launches our discussion of mobility and migration by focusing on the interconnected changes of financial flows and kinship. Documenting how an Afghan family ‘goes global’, he demonstrates how remittances not only move spatially, but also between siblings and generations. As one index of mutual care, the direction and size of financial contributions is a sensitive topic, in a shifting balance between maintaining a home for parents in Kabul, and investing in making new homes in Europe. Diana Ibañez-​Tirado’s contribution explores a further dimension of living abroad: the different subjectivities of two Tajik women traders in China. DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-43

545

—​​​​ M o b i l i t y a n d m i g r a t i o n —​​​​

If, in the post-​Soviet 1990s, shuttle-​trade was considered rather degrading, she here draws a portrait of young women who emphasise self-​confidence in their ability to overcome hardship as traders. While the trader Parveez relishes ‘mixing’ (as she puts it) between Russian-​and Arabic-​speaking circles, Gulnora is more engaged in local forms of Islamic self-​fashioning. As the author argues, while these traders feel like ‘world-​takers’, they both still need to carefully negotiate the opportunities and risks of these cosmopolitan environments. Continuing close attention to the gendering of migrant experience in their ethnography of Uzbek migrant workers, Sherzod Eraliev and Rustamjon Urinboyevlay out the very different terrains of Moscow and Istanbul. They unpack the puzzle of why, despite the repressive legal landscape in Russia, so many male Uzbeks still prefer working there, to the overtly less threatening landscape in Turkey. Examining the labour and solidarity networks available at these sites, the authors explain why the female majority of Uzbeks in Istanbul has such a strikingly different experience. Focusing on the concrete experience of ‘migrant agency’, they come to the rather surprising conclusion that it is not in Moscow, with its prevalent gender equality discourses, but rather in Istanbul that female migrants feel more empowered. (For a striking contrast in the experience of Turkmen domestic helpers in Turkey, see Saparova, this volume). In the concluding chapter of this section, Till Mostowlansky traces the diasporic history of the Pamiris. This diverse group was already highly mobile in the Soviet Union, and then became part of global Shia Ismaili networks after the Cold War. What does ‘diaspora’ mean to Pamiris, and how do they maintain a sense of being ethnically particular and globally Ismaili? Till Mostowlansky shows how their inclusion in the ‘pluralistic’ Ismaili world runs along persistent lines of power asymmetry, and sometimes discordant visions of connectivity and communal relations. Viewed together, the chapters of this section highlight both the force of international and national regulations that people are subject to in shaping their working lives, building relationships and livelihoods. At the same time, they emphasise the differential experience and situational agency of people moving between social and spatial contexts. It is perhaps striking that compared to the case of the Pamiri diaspora, or for instance Jewish and Armenian diasporas, we do not yet see really powerful, unified political forms of diaspora emerging yet among the millions of Central Asians abroad. It remains to be seen what kinds of collective experience, whether the confidence of trading networks, or the experience of discrimination, would catalyse this kind of cohesion.

546

CHAPTER THIRTY-​S IX

THE MONEY OF HOME Remittances and the remaking of an Afghan transnational family Said Reza Kazemi In early 2014, I received an invitation to attend the home of Hakimi, the father of an Afghan family whose transnational ties I explore in this chapter.1 Hakimi and his wife, Maleka, lived on their own in a well-​equipped rented unit in a recently constructed apartment complex in a well-​to-​do area of Kabul city.2 At the time of the invitation, their five sons and two daughters were all living abroad. The apartment complex had a grocery store and a watchman in the courtyard and a cleaner who appeared regularly to sweep the commonly used stairs and take the garbage out. The couple had hired a maid to help Maleka with the housework. I had always seen Hakimi well-​dressed and his residence tidy, partly because there were no children and grandchildren around. This time, however, he was even better dressed than usual, and his residence seemed even neater. I realised why soon after my arrival: the invitation was in fact for the benefit of prospective future in-​laws, represented by two closely related men who were then in Afghanistan. Hakimi and Maleka were seeking permission for a female relative of the two men, who was living in Australia at the time, to marry Ezzat, one of their then two unmarried sons. The prospective bride’s parents were living in Iran at the time, which is why the male relatives were invited to represent her family. Despite the high stakes of the invitation, no word about marriage passed during the meal. The host and guests instead talked about Afghanistan’s deteriorating situation, including insecurity and criminality in the capital and elsewhere in the country. As I later found out, the purpose of the meal was for the two sides to ‘see’ one another and so serve as a ‘reality check’. As part of a long matrimonial discussion and decision-​making process which was concluded only two years later, the dinner invitation was a well-​organised performance by Hakimi and Maleka in front of an important audience. This was manifest in the kind and variety of the food they served on the dastarkhan (tablecloth) on the carpet on the floor, and the way Hakimi comported himself (clothing, speaking, hosting) in his interaction with the two main invitees. Maleka only very briefly showed up to say hello before retreating to the women’s quarters, remaining mostly in the kitchen. After the key invitees had left, as I was helping to take things from the dastarkhan back to the kitchen, Maleka complained about how exhausted she and her maid, who had left before the guests came in, were, preparing the event ‘az sobh ta shab’ (‘from morning till night’). DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-44

547

—​​​​ S a i d R e z a K a z e m i —​​​​

Figure 36.1  Hakimi’s family.

This vignette reveals the betrothal strategy of an Afghan family that is globalised through the dispersion of all of its sons and daughters. Even as the parents remained in Kabul by late 2020, their efforts were oriented towards crafting a future for their son outside Afghanistan by betrothing him to an Australia-​based Afghan woman, on the expectation that he would later join her there. The concern to make their son a home away from the ‘homeland’ is shaped by experience of protracted war between the mid-​1990s and the turn of the 2010s. Their efforts, and the resources available to them to do so, are also profoundly shaped by the role of remittance transfers –​the money migrants circulate in their families –​ in maintaining and remaking their family over time and space. Engaging with anthropological research on remittances, I argue that the monetary flows have acted as a strong socio-​material basis for the transnationalisation of this family. Not only have remittance flows and transnational mobilities occurred concurrently. Remittances have also flowed along complex pathways across and within generations. Mobilities and resources have been directed to recent new homes, away from the Afghan ‘homeland’. This chapter is based on multi-​sited ethnographic research that I have conducted with members of this patrilineal and patriarchal family since the early 2010s (see Figure 36.1). The family are Shia Sayyed (Kopecky 1982) from the central province of Ghazni, but have lived for years in the capital, Kabul. Because I am a relative of theirs, it has been possible for me as a man to enter their geographically dispersed homes and to observe and communicate with different members of this Afghan transnational family, including the wife and younger daughter. As part of my research, in 2010, 2013 and 2014, I visited and stayed with their two eldest Denmark-​based sons, Muhammad and Ahmad, and their nuclear families, lasting about one-​and-​a-​half months in total. From 2013 to 2020, I have also intermittently visited the parents, Hakimi and Maleka, in Kabul, listening to their family life stories and generally keeping abreast of developments in their family, before they, too, left for Denmark.

548

—​​​​ R e m i t t a n c e s i n a n A f g h a n t r a n s n a t i o n a l f a m i l y —​​​​

A FAMILY GOES GLOBAL In the course of the last quarter century, Hakimi’s family have taken up residence across four continents (Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania) (Kazemi 2018: 93–​112). The first transregional move came in 1996, during the chaotic period of mujahedin rule in Afghanistan. Indiscriminate rocket shelling left Hakimi’s middle (among the living) son, Zaki, seriously injured, leading to the amputation of his leg. In the wake of an attempted abduction, from which the eldest son, Muhammad, managed to escape unscathed, the family fled to Pakistan. From there, Muhammad later moved to Denmark through a migrant smuggling network. He was unmarried at the time and ended up in Denmark because his father’s maternal aunt’s son, who was in Norway and was on vacation in Pakistan, told him about ‘life in Scandinavia’, pointing to the existence of a long-​ running Afghan ‘migratory social capital’ (Harpviken 2014: 12). In this case, the relative put Muhammad in touch with an experienced qachaqbar (migrant smuggler), who arranged Muhammad’s departure to Europe by air and told him about the then (1990s) blanket acceptance of Afghan asylum-​seekers as refugees in Scandinavian countries such as Denmark. The second move was made not by the other sons, but by the elder of Hakimi and Maleka’s two daughters, Arezu, in 1998. With their eldest son already in Denmark, and contrary to their Shia Sayyed religious practice (which permits only the taking of wives from the Hazaras rather than the giving of wives to them), the Hakimis agreed to marry Arezu off to a Hazara Afghan man who had already migrated to the Netherlands. In this sense, the mobility of the Hakimi sons increased the mobility of the daughters, even as the movement of the daughters was conditional upon male chaperoning and support (an Afghan husband in the case of the Hakimi daughters). The same logic –​permissibility to go abroad by first marrying an Afghan man there –​ was repeated in the case of the younger daughter, Diana, who married and then joined a distantly related Afghan man in the UK in 2011. ‘Everyone in our family had gone or was going abroad, so I followed suit or I would be left alone in Afghanistan’, she told me in late 2013, while we were both accidentally visiting Muhammad and Ahmad and their nuclear families in Denmark with Diana having flown there from the UK on a visa. The two cases of Afghan men marrying and then bringing the Hakimi daughters to Europe also gesture towards the widespread male Afghan diaspora ideal and practice, according to which, as Ahmad put it, ‘a foreign woman won’t make a wife for an Afghan man’: a reminder that gender relations and inequalities operate not only within but also between countries (Mahler and Pessar 2001). Three of the four remaining Hakimi sons followed in the footsteps of Muhammad. The second son, Ahmad, who was also unmarried at the time, left Pakistan in a risky migrant smuggling odyssey in 2001, just before the Taleban regime was brought down in Afghanistan by the US-​led international intervention. The remaining two sons left Afghanistan around 2014, by which time the US and NATO troops were drawing down their engagement in the country, even as fighting was escalating between the government and the Taleban insurgents. Ezzat, the fourth surviving son, migrated to Denmark through a dangerous smuggling journey in 2013, but later ended up working for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in Italy, Albania and Iraq. In 2018, he joined his wife in Australia, about two years after holding their wedding ceremony in Iran, which in turn came about two years after the dinner invitation described above. 549

—​​​​ S a i d R e z a K a z e m i —​​​​

Mujtaba, the youngest son, followed Ezzat in 2014 and is now living in Denmark; at the time of writing, he remains the only unmarried child in the family. The middle son, Zaki, migrated from India to join his intended wife in the US in 2017, mostly in an attempt to escape family control. Apart from Zaki, who has consciously sought a different migratory path, all of the remaining brothers decided, or at least sought, to join Muhammad in Denmark. Ezzat could not do so because his asylum claim was rejected in Denmark, and so he was deported to Italy where he had first set his foot on EU soil. ‘I obviously aimed at going to Denmark because Muhammad was already there. He wanted to have me by his side’, said Ahmad, summing up this family strategy. Once migration was initiated, it remained both a way for the Hakimis to escape from and cope with the war, but it was also a strategic choice to improve their living conditions. As scholarly literature on Afghanistan has demonstrated (Monsutti 2005; Harpviken 2009), the boundaries between forced (refugee) and voluntary (economic migrant) migrations are often fuzzy in practice, even in the context of a deadly and devastating war that has lasted for over four decades in Afghanistan. Of all the Hakimi children, for instance, it was Muhammad who migrated under the most coercive conditions, but his migration also had an ‘economic’ dimension: in addition to the violent conflict that was a factor for his migration, he also noted that ‘there was almost no work in Afghanistan to make a living.’ The family’s patterns of migration also reveal a second element that has been less explored in the scholarly literature: the concern, through migration and marriage, to establish and maintain a home away from the homeland, Afghanistan. The literature on Afghan migration has stressed the importance of circular, two-​way flows of Afghans from and to Afghanistan, captured by Alessandro Monsutti’s (2005: 146) evocative expression ‘raft o amad’ (‘goings and comings’). In contrast with this characterisation, the Hakimis’ energies have been focused mostly on the raft, rather than the amad, as they have actively sought to distance their family life from Afghanistan for the last quarter of a century. This strategy stands in contrast with the findings of research, for instance, on Afghan-​American professionals who, through their return visits to Afghanistan, reappraised their ideas of where their ‘homes’ actually were and found out that ‘Currently [2012, that is, before the drawdown of the US-​led international intervention], Afghanistan is a place in which to earn money, while the Bay Area [California] is one in which to live safely and comfortably’ (Oeppen 2013: 275). By the mid-​2010s, for the Hakimis at least, return visits to Afghanistan had come to a halt. Indeed, the family had been planning to take the elderly parents out of Afghanistan, too, which they finally managed to accomplish in late 2020, months before the Taleban takeover in August 2021. As a result, the family has lost its close ties to Afghanistan, apart from occasionally staying in touch with some of their kin, especially as far as the parents are concerned. This also means there has been decreasing positive valence to the ‘homeland’ and, as a corollary, increasing deprioritisation and exclusion of Afghanistan in the family’s notion of ‘multiple homes’ (Oeppen 2013: 275–​276).

AT THE CRUX OF TRANSNATIONAL FAMILY MATTERS: MONEY AND ITS MOVEMENTS Money has been flowing among transnationally scattered Hakimi family members during the entire history of their migrations from the mid-​1990s to the present. 550

—​​​​ R e m i t t a n c e s i n a n A f g h a n t r a n s n a t i o n a l f a m i l y —​​​​

Remittances have played varied roles in the transnational family life of the Hakimis in at least four respects. First, remittances have, often concurrent with their transnational migrations, flowed not only down the generations (from parents to children) but also up the generations (from children to parents) and within the generation (between male siblings), creating strong parent-​child and male inter-​sibling interdependencies in the process. Second, remittances have increasingly materialised the care the Hakimi children have provided for their parents from afar, in spite of a deeply held cultural value, on the part of both children and parents, about the importance of in-​person family care in old age. Third, despite the value attached to care, the practical sharing and spending of remittances have proved conflictual, as seen in controversies among the providing siblings, and between them and those, including parents, who have depended on the financial flows for their ways of living. Last but not least, remittances provide important insights into how and where this family and its members see their futures, including a shifting of resources towards new homes, mainly in Denmark. These findings substantiate but also complicate recent anthropological studies of remittances and transnational family life, which point to the ways that remittances materialise care (Coe 2011), with financial transfers constituting a ‘substance of relatedness’ between family members on a par with the sharing of food and biogenetic material (Zharkevich 2019). I turn to these four points below.

REMITTANCE FLOWS DOWN, HORIZONTAL TO AND UP THE GENERATIONS A focus on the lives of this family across generations (Kazemi 2018: 36–​112) reveals that remittances have flowed down, within and up the generations during the last quarter of a century. Most anthropologically oriented remittance research has highlighted the importance of transfers from migrant parents to children, or from husbands to wives who have ‘stayed put’ (Coe 2011; Fouratt 2017; Zharkevich 2019; cf. Baldassar 2007). For the Hakimis, remittances first began flowing down the generations (from parents to children) and away from home, because they were purposively used to fund the migrant smugglings of the two eldest sons. The father, Hakimi, and the eldest son, Muhammad, never told me how much money they paid the smuggler for the latter’s migration, but it can be assumed to have been a substantial payment, given that Muhammad was air-​smuggled, as Hakimi put it, ‘like a guest’ (‘mehmanwari’). More importantly, the migrant smuggling of the second son, Ahmad, came at a heavy price. Following Muhammad’s suggestion, Hakimi sold his family house in Kabul and spent it on sending Ahmad to Denmark as well. ‘The house was sold for 11,500 US dollars [in 1999/​2000], but its price has now [2014] gone up to something like 100,000 US dollars’, Ahmad told me in 2014, indicating how deeply, but always in an unspoken and implicit way, the selling of the Kabul family house is anchored in the collective memory –​and sacrifice –​of the Hakimis. This crucial initial support tied the two eldest sons firmly to the rest of the family, especially to the parents and younger male siblings, who had unstated rights to whatever sum had financed the elder sons’ migrant smugglings, chiefly the selling of the Kabul house. As a result, Muhammad and Ahmad pooled around US$50,000 from years of savings from their shared burger restaurant work to co-​finance the migrant smugglings of their two younger male siblings, Ezzat and Mujtaba. As for the middle 551

—​​​​ S a i d R e z a K a z e m i —​​​​

son, Zaki, Muhammad and Ahmad regularly sent him remittances of about US$300–​ 500 per month while he was in Kabul, and later in India for the medical treatment of his war-​induced disability. As stated above, Zaki separated his way from his family by going to the US where he joined his wife, which is why his other brothers did not pool their savings to fund his way out of the country and the region, although Muhammad once told me it was also Zaki’s ‘share’ (‘sahm’) and ‘right (‘haq’) to have received family-​sponsored financial support for his migration. All these remittances have flowed within the generation (that is, between male siblings) rather than across. At the same time, remittances have followed a less common direction from children to parents. Soon after Muhammad was accepted as a refugee and settled in Denmark, he began sending money back to his parents. Ahmad, too, began funding family remittances soon after achieving refugee status and making an income in the Scandinavian country. When they and their nuclear families co-​resided prior to 2013 (Ahmad’s first son had just been born then), the two elder brothers decided to divide responsibility for family expenditures: Ahmad covered the living costs of his parents and Zaki in Afghanistan, while Muhammad covered their living expenses in Denmark. After the two younger brothers were also brought to, and settled in Europe (Ezzat later joining his wife in Australia, as described above), Muhammad and Ahmad involved the younger brothers in contributing to the family remittances, not only for the parents in Kabul, but also for Zaki in Kabul, India and later the US. As for the two daughters, they are viewed by the father and sons as ‘wives of their husbands’ and thus have not been expected to provide remittances. ‘Their money is their husbands’ money’, Muhammad explained emphatically. Remittances sent by the daughters were seen as neither desirable nor practicable, both unwanted and subject to their husbands’ approval, at least as viewed by the men in this family. As far as I am aware, the married daughters have not received remittances either, because they are seen as belonging, through their marriages, to different family networks and subject to different dynamics of reciprocity and obligation. However, it may be that they step in to support their parents and male siblings should there be an unexpected need for their role, or vice versa. In any case, the sisters have provided crucial non-​material support for family members who find themselves in distress.

REMITTANCES MATERIALISE CARE As other scholars have noted for Ghanaian (Coe 2011) and Italian (Baldassar 2007) transnational families, there is a material aspect to care in Afghan families such as the Hakimis. This is because care is basically seen as providing living needs by parents who have given the very gift of life to children in the first instance, which is then generally reciprocated by children when parents age, cannot work any longer, fall ill and become frail over time. The care parents give their children is viewed as ‘entrustment’ (Parker Shipton, quoted in Coe 2011: 14), in which the initial parental care makes the children obligated to return it in the future. It is this reciprocity that makes familial childcare and eldercare interconnected and even sequential. Likewise, in the Hakimi children, the conviction that family members should remember and comply by the ‘intergenerational contract’ –​the unwritten pact of shifting care relationships and responsibilities between parents and children over time –​ran deep, as Ahmad once told me while driving his car one midnight in late 2013: 552

—​​​​ R e m i t t a n c e s i n a n A f g h a n t r a n s n a t i o n a l f a m i l y —​​​​

My brothers and I are now young, but our parents are getting older day by day. We could simply stop supporting them, but we’d never do that. If we were to do so, the same thing would happen to us when we ourselves get older and our children grow up. If we stop caring for our parents, our children won’t care for us in old age either … . However, because all their sons and daughters had gone abroad one after the other by 2014, Hakimi and Maleka had, until late 2020, no one from their own family with or around them and, more importantly, no one to care for them in person as they were ageing. Aged respectively 69 and 60 in 2014, Hakimi and Maleka were often unwell: Hakimi had diabetes, while Maleka’s medical condition(s) remained unknown to me. As a result, direct care had increasingly been financialised in the form of remittances coming to them from their sons from afar and outsourced to non-​family members. In the 1990s, remittances to the family amounted to a few hundred US dollars per month. By 2013, however, remittances to parents and the middle son had increased substantially. In one instance when I was visiting them in Denmark and then returning to Afghanistan in 2014, Muhammad and Ahmad gave me 12,000 Danish krones (worth about US$1,950 at the time) to take to their parents in Kabul. They said that it was to cover three months’ rent for the flat in which their parents were living –​the one referred to in the opening ­vignette –​amounting to a rent of around US$650 per month. In addition, they were sending around US$1,000 per month to cover their parents’ living and health costs, including paying for the maid who helped Maleka with the housework and hosting the parents’ many and frequent guests. In addition, they were sending Zaki, who was then in India for the treatment of his disability, around US$500 per month. The sons who were abroad had never stopped sending money to their parents and brother during the entire period of their absence. The sons typically sent money to their family members through the informal fund transfer system known as hawala (Arabic, literally meaning ‘transfer’). Hawala constitutes an extended informal fund transfer mechanism that has operated in Afghanistan and the Middle East for centuries. While this system has been abused for criminal purposes in a context marked by war, weak governance and a criminal economy (Thompson 2006), it has also been instrumental to the sustaining of livelihoods and social relationships for many Afghans, migrants in particular (Monsutti 2005: 173–​205; Hanifi 2006). The hawala, as used by the Hakimis to circulate remittances in their family, has become far more efficient than descriptions of its functioning in the 1990s (Monsutti 2005: 173–​205) and the early 2000s (Hanifi 2006). In an example that I recorded in 2013 when I stayed with them in Denmark, Ahmad called an Afghan shopkeeper in another Danish town who worked as a hawaladar (hawala dealer). He and Muhammad had come to know the hawaladar when they previously lived in that town through their Afghan acquaintances. He asked the hawaladar to remit US$2,000 to his parents in Kabul, saying he would pay the remittance amount and the transfer charge (2 per cent) when they next met, either directly himself or through an acquaintance who happened to travel between the two towns. The dealer gave him a hawala code which he then passed to his parents by calling them over the phone. The father then approached or sent someone to the hawaladar’s counterpart in Kabul’s bustling Sara-​ye Shahzada Money Exchange 553

—​​​​ S a i d R e z a K a z e m i —​​​​

Market after confirming the hawala code. Since they had become acquainted with the hawaladars both in Denmark and Afghanistan by then, it was no longer needed to give any identity proof such as tazkera (Afghan national ID card) or passport. The Denmark-​ and Afghanistan-​based hawaladars would then settle their accounts through either ‘reverse’ hawala or bank transfer, directly or indirectly. The hawala has always had a solid social basis for its smooth functioning: not only has it kept the senders and the receivers related, but it has also reproduced their ties with those such as the hawaladars –​always some relatives or acquaintances –​that have had an interest in keeping the system running. I could never get to the bottom of the ‘cultural calculus that is finely tuned to discerning how much a caregiver [a remittance sender, in our case] is able to provide’ (Coe 2011: 12). But it was clear that the sons were remitting quite substantial amounts of money that could, as Muhammad put it, ‘enable our family to throw money and live a comfortable and lavish life back in Kabul’. Despite this material comfort, however, not only the parents but also the children –​both the sons and daughters –​were at times mentally and emotionally painfully torn by the physical separation and by the inability to be co-​present with, and to care for, their ageing parents, until late 2020 when the parents also went to Denmark. Maleka described poignantly the anguish she felt when her last son left: When Mujtaba went to Denmark, I couldn’t sleep until he joined his elder brothers there safe and sound … His father and I were constantly in touch with Muhammad and Ahmad there to see if there was any news about him. I was crying at night that my last son also left us alone here [Kabul] and went to Europe. Our house is empty without him. I’m still crying when I talk to him, especially when I see and feel his empty place in our house. I often stand by the window, looking at people, particularly children, outside; they remind me of my children. I sometimes have nightmares in the dead of the night about my children abroad, so I call them, but I often don’t get through, because times are different here and there, or because my children are busy at their jobs and can’t reply. I feel extremely sad and cry copiously.

REMITTANCE DISPUTES As remittances have mostly flowed within and up the generations in this family, so too have the disputes over their distribution. Understanding these controversies is important, because they reveal how normative values of care for one’s family are contested when it comes to the practicalities of their implementation. After all, some must work (hard) to earn remittances and then send them to some others who in turn find ways to spend them. This both produces and perpetuates a cycle of earning, sending, receiving and expending remittances. For the Hakimi sons, both the sharing of family remittance funding and the direction in which the remittances should flow have been disputed, which can be called horizontal contestation. As we have seen above, the two elder sons, Muhammad and Ahmad, co-​financed the migrant smuggling of the two younger sons, Ezzat and Mujtaba, in 2013 and 2014. Both younger sons were ultimately successful in their migratory ventures: Ezzat worked with his two elder brothers 554

—​​​​ R e m i t t a n c e s i n a n A f g h a n t r a n s n a t i o n a l f a m i l y —​​​​

for a while and, following the rejection of his asylum claim and deportation to Italy, ended up working for the UN, at some stage reportedly making some US$12,000 a month, while Mujtaba achieved refugee status and continued to work with his two elder brothers in their burger restaurant business in Denmark. With Ezzat and Mujtaba beginning to work and to earn money, the elder brothers began involving them in financing family remittances. This created tensions among the four brothers. During fieldwork in 2013 and 2014, I used to visit the Hakimi brothers’ burger restaurant most days. Initially, I did not notice the brewing tensions among the four brothers. One night on the way home in late 2013, I saw Muhammad talking loudly to Ezzat, asking why he did not want to share in covering their transnational family costs. Ahmad was listening intently to the discussion, while Ezzat remained silent. The conversation took place in the car, away from Muhammad’s and Ahmad’s wives and children. I was witness to another situation in 2014, when Muhammad was quite loudly convincing a similarly quiet Mujtaba to begin sharing family remittance provision. In these two instances, the two younger brothers did not show any reaction, but, as I later found out, their passive resistance to being included in family remittance-​ sharing arrangements stemmed from their unstated stance that, as the two eldest brothers who had started sending remittances home in the first place, Muhammad and Ahmad should shoulder the entire responsibility to continue to do so, irrespective of changes in the personal situations of their younger brothers post-​migration. They knew, but never expressed it as far as I observed them, that if they did begin taking part in covering family remittances, they would then have to keep doing so. The two elder brothers, by contrast, felt that obligations towards the family back home (at that stage consisting of the parents and middle son) were shared and so should the responsibility to contribute to the remittances that flowed to them. Ultimately, however, the two elder brothers did convince –​and compel –​the two younger ones to start sharing in the financing of family remittances. As for the middle son, Zaki, the horizontal contestation was over the direction in which remittances should flow and, more specifically, in what quantities. Given his war-​induced disability, Zaki did not work. Besides, not only did he not contribute to providing family remittances, but he received and spent them in Kabul and India. The real, serious clash with Zaki, however, came after he moved to the US in 2017. Arguing that living in the US was much more expensive than in Afghanistan or India, he had kept demanding money from his brothers (including what they saw as the shocking amount of US$10,000 in one instance). His brothers were increasingly discontent and this was expressed by, as I once observed, Muhammad shouting at him over the smartphone and by not replying to his calls and text messages. While Zaki may have had an unstated claim to shared family material resources that had gone into funding the migrant smugglings of Muhammad and Ahmad, the two elder brothers had come to believe that the very fact of sending remittances and habituating Zaki to them had been wrong from the beginning, by discouraging him from searching for work and making a living on his own. It was an open secret to this family and their relatives that Zaki lived a pleasure-​seeking life from the hard-​earned remittances of his brothers. Notably, however, although Zaki’s relations with his two elder brothers had been tense for years, they had not stopped sending him money, even if it was not as much as he had wanted to receive. 555

—​​​​ S a i d R e z a K a z e m i —​​​​

As for the parents, disputes have occurred only over the size of remittances, which can be called contestation up the generations. As mentioned above, I was not able to get to the root of the cultural calculus of how much should be remitted to the family by the mid-​2010s, although all indications pointed to substantial amounts of money (that is, about US$1,000 per month, on top of several hundred US dollars for the monthly apartment rent and about US$500 for the middle son). Any increase beyond that basic arithmetic sometimes proved conflictual. In a couple of instances which I heard about within this family, the parents had demanded more money, possibly out of concern for the status of visiting relatives and the demand to show them adequate hospitality. On such occasions, Muhammad could become angry at his father, even shouting: ‘We’re toiling in Denmark, working from day to night and all seven days of the week, but you [family in Afghanistan] want even more [remittances].’ He had also insisted that they were not ‘sitting on a treasure in Denmark’. He had later calmed down and apologised to his parents. Muhammad and Ahmad did indeed work very hard in Denmark, around 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The brothers, including Ezzat and Mujtaba after they arrived, seldom went on holiday. Overall, remittance flows can and do reveal conflicts between normative values of caring for one’s family and the practical actualisation of such abstract values. At the same time, as far as I have observed this family, in making remittances flow, there was no explicit reference to the parents’ care for the sons in their childhood, or the middle son’s claim upon the Kabul family house that was sold to finance the second son’s migrant journey to Denmark on the suggestion of the first. Openly stating such sensitive topics is very likely to be destabilising, for it could ‘destroy the feelings and commitments that enable reciprocal exchanges within families, such as the shared well-​being of the family or the sense of trust that one can turn to relations in times of trouble’ (Coe 2011: 17). Despite all the tensions over the sharing, directionality and size of remittances, the Hakimis had managed to weather remittance-​related intra-​ family conflicts and move on.

REMITTANCES POINT TO WHERE HOME IS In addition to materialising care and forging interdependencies, albeit with occasional moments of conflict, remittance flows among the Hakimis also reveal how family members were seeing and actively trying to construct their futures. Much of the scholarly literature has stressed the role of the Afghan diaspora in reconstruction, development and even state-​building in Afghanistan post-​2001 (Oeppen 2010; Danstrøm et al. 2015), showing that ‘remittances –​even when destined for individual households –​ represent links between migrants and sending nations and communities’ (Fouratt 2017: 795). The Hakimis, by contrast, have been entirely focused on their own family life, rather than broader and more abstract community or national matters. Its transnationally distributed members have remitted money to their family members back in Afghanistan to be used primarily as income to cover their running costs, including those of apartment rental, utilities, food, clothing and healthcare costs. This family has not invested any of its remittances in buying a piece of land, constructing a house, doing some business or supporting any reconstruction or development efforts in the ‘home’ country. Only once did I observe one of the Hakimi sons, Ahmad, sending a remittance of about US$200 to the family of an Afghan girl who 556

—​​​​ R e m i t t a n c e s i n a n A f g h a n t r a n s n a t i o n a l f a m i l y —​​​​

had been severely abused and needed money for her medical treatment. This, though, was an exceptional case, as Ahmad had come to know the plight of that girl through social media. Instead, the Hakimis have rather invested their material resources (including, critically, the Kabul family house) in sending their sons abroad, mainly to Denmark, where the two eldest sons have invested their savings in further developing their burger restaurant business and forming families by bringing their Afghan wives there. As we have seen, the sons eventually planned to bring their parents from Afghanistan to Denmark as well, which they did in late 2020. So the Hakimis have been getting themselves settled in new homes away from the ‘homeland’, as Ahmad put it: We have restaurants to run here [Denmark]. We want to … expand our business. We also have formed families here. Our kids were born here. They go to school here. So we have been digging ourselves further and further down in Danish soil. As a result, whatever remittances have flowed in the direction of Afghanistan have done so only to cover the day-​to-​day living costs of the parents and the middle son when he was also there. The main material resources of this family have gone into further establishing and improving their living conditions in countries such as Denmark and Australia. This is mostly because of what this family suffered from Afghanistan’s protracted war, especially in the 1990s, when its eldest son was kidnapped but later escaped from his abductors unharmed, its middle son was injured and lost a leg in indiscriminate rocket shelling, and the family was displaced under extremely difficult conditions. Moreover, they staunchly believe, as Muhammad and Ahmad kept saying to me, ‘Afghanistan won’t get fine’ (‘Afghanistan jor namisha’). So they have been constructing new homes away from the ‘homeland’, to which there is currently, and likely into the future, little desire –​and even decreasing possibility–​to return.

CONCLUSION This chapter has explored how an Afghan family has become global through the migrations of its sons and daughters during the last 25 years. What sets their migrations apart from existing accounts of transnational Afghan familyhood is not so much the blurriness of voluntary and forced movements during the various stages of the long war in Afghanistan, but rather the fact that this family has used transnational mobility as a strategy to increasingly distance itself from its ‘homeland’. Towards the mid-​2010s, the sons’ and daughters’ return visits to Afghanistan had stopped, and they were planning to bring their ageing parents to Denmark, which they eventually did in late 2020, severing any material family connection to Afghanistan in a way that questions dominant accounts of circular, two-​way flows of migration from and to the country. For this family, Afghanistan is increasingly deprioritised and excluded in their strategies of home-​, family-​and future-​making. Remittances have played a crucial role in sustaining the family across countries and continents, acting as both a socio-​material foundation for individual life projects and a source of moral connection across generations. In particular, we have seen how remittances have increasingly materialised the care the children have given their parents at a physical distance until late 2020, despite the high cultural value that 557

—​​​​ S a i d R e z a K a z e m i —​​​​

is attached to in-​person care. Such ‘outsourcing’ of care is not without tensions: as we have seen, the financing, directionality and size of remittances have all proved conflictual for this family, putting the deeply held value of care to the test. As a flexible and tractable resource, remittances also point to the futures that this family has been crafting. By concentrating their remittances on providing only day-​to-​day living expenses in Afghanistan rather than reconstituting a family house there, these financial flows also point to a shift of resources away from the ‘original’ home. In a wider regional context where investing in both ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ have been widely stressed as a key value for migrant communities, this shift towards re-​siting home and family point to the specificity of war and its impacts. The Hakimi family’s decisions are inseparable from the experience of protracted armed conflict, from which this family directly suffered in the mid-​1990s, shaping not only their remittance behaviour but also the very concept of ‘home’ as a place of material and affective attachment.

NOTES 1 Said Reza Kazemi was a PhD student in the Junior Research Group C16 ‘Demographic Turn in the Junction of Cultures’ coordinated by Sophie Roche at the Cluster ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at Heidelberg University (2014–​16) and a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Herat and Kabul in Afghanistan (2018–​21). He would like to thank the Hakimis and the two mentioned institutions, without whom it was not possible to write this chapter. He would also like to thank the co-​editors of this book for their useful and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 To protect the privacy of this family and its members, I have changed all their names.

REFERENCES Baldassar, L. (2007), ‘Transnational Families and Aged Care: The Mobility of Care and the Migrancy of Ageing’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (2): 275–​297. Coe, C. (2011), ‘What is Love? The Materiality of Care in Ghanaian Transnational Families’, International Migration 49 (6): 7–​24. Danstrøm, M.S., Kleist, N., Sørensen, N.N. (2015), Somali and Afghan Diaspora Associations in Development and Relief Cooperation, DIIS Report 13, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Fouratt, C.E. (2017), ‘Love for the Land: Remittances and Care in a Nicaraguan Transnational Community’, Latin American Research Review 52 (5): 792–​806. Hanifi, S.M. (2006), ‘Material and Social Remittances to Afghanistan’, in C. Wescott and J. Brinkerhoff (eds.), Converting Migration Drains into Gains: Harnessing the Resources of Overseas Professionals, Manila: Asian Development Bank. Harpviken, K.B. (2009), Social Networks and Migration in Wartime Afghanistan, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harpviken, K.B. (2014), ‘Split Return: Transnational Household Strategies in Afghan Repatriation’, International Migration 52 (6): 57–​71. Kazemi, S.R. (2018), Narrating and Practicing Family: An Ethnography of an Afghan Transnational Family, PhD thesis, Heidelberg University. Kopecky, L.-​M. (1982), ‘The Imami Sayyed of the Hazarajat: The Maintenance of their Elite Position’, Folk 24: 89–​110. Mahler, S.J. and Pessar, P.R. (2001), ‘Gendered Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender across Transnational Spaces’, Identities 7 (4): 441–​459. 558

—​​​​ R e m i t t a n c e s i n a n A f g h a n t r a n s n a t i o n a l f a m i l y —​​​​ Monsutti, A. (2005), War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan, New York: Routledge. Oeppen, C. (2010), ‘The Afghan Diaspora and its Involvement in the Reconstruction of Afghanistan’, in C. Oeppen and A. Schlenkhoof (eds.), Beyond the ‘Wild Tribes’: Understanding Modern Afghanistan and its Diaspora, London: Hurst. Oeppen, C. (2013), ‘A Stranger at “Home”: Interactions between Transnational Return Visits and Integration for Afghan-​American Professionals’, Global Networks 13 (2): 261–​278. Thompson, E.A. (2006), ‘The Nexus of Drug Trafficking and Hawala in Afghanistan’, in D. Buddenberg and W.A. Byrd (eds.), Afghanistan’s Drug Industry: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics and Implications for Counter-​Narcotics Policy, Kabul: UNODC and World Bank. Zharkevish, I. (2019), ‘Money and Blood: Remittances as a Substance of Relatedness in Transnational Families in Nepal’, American Anthropologist 121 (4): 884–​896.

559

CHAPTER THIRTY-​S EVEN

GENDERED WORLDS AND COSMOPOLITAN LIVES Muslim female traders in Yiwu and Dushanbe Diana Ibañez-​Tirado INTRODUCTION Based on research conducted in Yiwu and Dushanbe, this chapter explores how gender dynamics of international trade, Muslim subjectivities and dispositions towards cosmopolitanism coalesce.1 Yiwu is a city of 2 million inhabitants located in the Chinese province of Zhejiang. This city is famous among overseas traders because it is one of the most important global commercial nodes to procure small commodities of everyday use (Marsden, 2018; Anderson, 2020; Rui, 2018; Sha, 2020). In the city, there are foreign traders who have established trading and cargo companies and live there on a relatively permanent basis, and those who visit the city to supply their shops in their home-​countries and beyond. From an ethnographic perspective, this work provides a detailed consideration of the trajectories of Gulnora and Parveena –​female traders who lived and worked between China (mainly in Yiwu, but also with commercial activities in the cities of Guangzhou, Urumqi and Hunan), and Tajikistan (mainly Dushanbe). These traders’ age, educational background, business trajectory, level of prosperity and commitment to religion differed. Both, however, referred to themselves as Muslim and considered religious practice and morality (akhloq) including aspects of their behaviour (ratfor) and reputation (naam; shohrat) important dimensions of their daily lives, travels and commercial transactions in China and Tajikistan. They also cited that being a trader, businessperson, or merchant (tojir; businessman), as well as working in China was their own choice and preferred job. These women’s choice, I argue, encompasses their search for forms of knowledge, autonomy and openness to diversity that can be encompassed by concepts of cosmopolitanism, and that despite cosmopolitanism’s tensions and conflicts, these traders embrace as rewarding and desirable.

MUSLIM COSMOPOLITANISM My interlocutors did not refer to ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a term.2 Instead, Gulnora used aralash, a word that in Tajik language means ‘mixed’ (adj.), ‘mixture’ (noun), and ‘to mix’, ‘to meddle in something’ and ‘to intervene’ (verb). Aralash, translated here as ‘mix and match’ and ‘to intervene’, designates a diversity of peoples, histories, backgrounds, objects, languages, technologies, foods and places that Gulnora 560

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-45

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

cited as available to her in her endeavours to know more about the world. From such ‘mix and match’, Gulnora tended to select those aspects that informed and contributed to her interest in Islamic knowledge, forms of piety and the ‘engagement in reform-​minded self-​making projects linked to Muslim business and entrepreneurialism’ (Stephan-​Emmrich, 2017: 290). Gulnora, as well as my second interlocutor, Parveena, also used the word in Tajik omekhta (mixed; mixture) to describe Yiwu as a diverse place. In contrast to Gulnora, however, Parveena was more interested in the forms of autonomy that the ‘mixture’ of Yiwu had to offer to a Tajik woman like her. In Parveena’s description of herself, she was a good Muslim (namozkhonda –​literally, someone who recites prayers) who fasted in Ramadan, and cared about her behaviour and reputation. At the same time, Parveena also described herself as ‘relaxed’ (original in English), which meant that she distanced herself from the ‘strict’ (sakht) practices of veiling and clothing of women like Gulnora. Gendered forms of sociality were also registers of moral conduct and piety (toqua) that Tajik female traders in Yiwu used to evaluate themselves and in relation to one another. Muslim female traders in Yiwu told me that they felt under pressure to self-​ regulate their interactions with men, as they felt constantly policed, especially by their fellow Muslim, including business partners and clients. Gulnora said that she only spoke to men in Yiwu if her commercial transactions required her to do so, and for such transactions, she preferred to be accompanied in her travels by her son or, on rare occasions, her husband. For her part, Parveena cultivated companionship with men in Yiwu beyond the realms of business and trade; her assets, and then loss of capital, have been closely interlinked to the backing or departure of men at different stages of her life –​as I will discuss in more detail below. Parveena thus used the Tajik word jahongiri (world-​wanderer, lit. ‘world-​taker’) to refer to herself and her principles of embracing the diverse range of convoluted sociality she encountered in Yiwu, as well her aspirations to continue discovering more about both the positive, as well as more conflictual, aspects of the world. Aralash (mix and match), omekhta (diversity) and jahongiri (world-​wanderer) convey ideas of cosmopolitanism –​a disputed term that, in this ethnographic case, is used to appeal to my informants’ self-​reflections, and their notions of living and attempting to thrive commercially in and through the cultural, political, religious and aesthetic diversity available in Yiwu. Thus, I situate my work in the expanding literature on Muslim cosmopolitanism because this is useful to encompass the notions of aralash, omekhta and jahongiri as these convey a ‘sense of being well-​versed in the world’ as categories of imagination and forms of experience, and as competence, practices and dispositions, as well as cultural and social conditions that ‘allow Muslims to inhabit the contemporary world’ (Leichman and Schiltz, 2012, p. 2). In Yiwu, and more broadly in the Chinese cities where my interlocutors worked, this world was accessible to them as a ‘mix and match’ from where to choose and in which to intervene: world, interventions and choices informed these women’s reflections of what it means to be a female Muslim trader. As numerous scholars have argued, however, the concept of cosmopolitanism also necessitates overcoming normative and idealised visions of tolerance, coexistence and openness to diversity towards visions of the world that involve ‘tensions, dislocations and displacements’ (Feener and Gedacht, 2018: p. viii), as well as unpredictability, ambivalence and ‘degradation’ (Glick Schiller and Irving, 2017, p. 36; cf. Humphrey 561

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​

and Skvirskaja, 2012; Marsden, 2020). Hence, whilst trying to prosper as international traders, Gulnora and Parveena also found cosmopolitanism contradictory, and at times, full of conflictive encounters. Yet, learning to navigate agonistic forms of sociality brought about by Yiwu’s diversity was also fulfilling for these women. As Parveena explained to me once, overcoming different forms of conflict and sorrow (gham) is what equipped female traders like her, who temporarily worked far from home, to be ‘world-​takers’.

LONG-​D ISTANCE COMMERCE: GENDERED WORLDS There is an extensive historical and anthropological literature that deals with the lives of foreign male traders, travellers and scholars of Muslim background in Asia and beyond, who contributed to shape and inhabit diverse forms of cosmopolitanism (e.g. Alavi, 2015; Marsden, 2016; Simpson and Kresse,2008). Fewer works touch upon their female counterparts. Overall, there is an imbalance in the literature researching female Muslim traders in Asia and the Middle East, one that warrants further scholarly investigations. In part, this is because of a scholarly tendency to prioritise the figure of male merchants, intellectuals and travellers as protagonists (cf. Fyzee-​Rahamin et.al., 2010; Stephan-​Emmrich, 2019; Buitelaar et.al., 2020). In part, it is because, in Muslim-​ majority countries in North Africa, West and South East Asia where patriarchal notions of masculine authority prevail, international trade is still evaluated as a predominantly male occupation. Women undertaking public commercial activities that involve working in markets, and even more, conducting unaccompanied travel and transactions, continue to be stigmatised, to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, research has shown that Muslim women indeed have engaged in commercial activities worldwide, as my interlocutor, Gulnora, also emphasised, pointing to Prophet Muhammad’s wife, Khadija, as an example of a successful female trader in the history of Islam (e.g., Haji Idris, 1991; Aljunied, 2017; Buggenhagen, 2012a; Findly, 1988; Zakaria, 2001; Heyat, 2002; Stephan-​Emmrich and Mirzoev, 2016). The engagement of Central Asian women in trade in the 1990s is also a notable example of female merchants of Muslim background involved in long-​distance commerce, but their contribution to shaping notions and practices related to cosmopolitanism in and beyond the region has been under-​explored. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the number of people from Central Asia and the broader region that turned to trade expanded considerably (Karrar, 2016). From its Russian name chelnoki (shuttle), the so-​called ‘shuttle traders’ bought goods mainly in Turkey and China, and transported them in relatively small quantities to their home-​countries, so as to avoid import taxes (Humphrey, 1999; Mukhina, 2009; Holzlehner, 2014). Shuttle trade and associated commercial practices after the end of socialism involved moral evaluations, often detrimental towards trade and traders. The ‘morality of markets’, as an over-​arching post-​socialist concept, was underpinned by the relatively generalised perception among new traders that the socialist state had stopped providing its citizens with jobs and sustainable sources of income (Humphrey and Mandel, 2002). Commerce beyond the control of socialist states had been stigmatised as damaging to society, and highly skilled workers and professionals joining a demeaning activity such as shuttle trade added to the feelings of shame 562

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

and humiliation (Niyozov and Shamatov, 2006). By the mid-​1990s, approximately 30 million people across the former Soviet Union worked as ‘shuttle traders’, and 80 per cent of them were women (Mukhina, 2002). In Central Asia, the majority of women working as traders were Muslim, and, according to Turaeva’s work, 33 per cent of them had previously been housewives (Turaeva, 2010: p. 11; cf. Niyozov and Shamatov, 2006). The relatively sudden and paramount participation of women in trade has made the post-​Soviet/​socialist regions a particularly stimulating expanse to scrutinise the gendered aspects of international commerce and entrepreneurship (e.g., Yükseker, 2007; Turaeva, 2010; Werner, 2003; Özcan, 2006; Fehlings, 2019). Gendered aspects of shuttle trade in the 1990s from Russia and Central Asia have involved women presenting themselves, or being perceived, as having ‘natural’ qualities for commerce.3 For example, they are supposed to know more about fashion than men, and to be able to use their beauty to lower prices from male suppliers; they also presented themselves as more emotional and helpless than men when facing border officials requesting documents or bribes (Yükseker, 2007). Another gendered aspect of this trade has included the assumption that women tend to suffer physically more than men from aching muscles whilst carrying heavy goods, and from stress because of the risks they undertake when transporting goods in illegal ways, and the long periods of absence from home (Mukhina, 2009; Turaeva, 2010). In an evaluation about what shuttle trade meant to people in the post-​Soviet region, most scholars have concluded that this activity was a temporary means of survival in the face of economic crisis, and that it impacted women in particularly powerful ways. The scholarly focus about the impact of shuttle trade in women’s family life has been especially connected to women’s traditional roles in relationship to men –​that is, as mothers, wives, or divorcees. Indeed, most Central Asian female traders have been in charge not only of their commercial activities, but also domestic work, childcare and other forms of family care, in a context in which they must negotiate prevailing patriarchal norms and an increasing attentiveness to their Muslim identity. This chapter aims to contribute to existing works by highlighting that some Tajik female traders also inhabit a world beyond that of trade for ‘survival’, family care and lack of choices. As I will show, some of my female interlocutours seek to present themselves as self-​directed traders living, or aiming to build, autonomous lives, even if they remain involved with their families in Dushanbe; they negotiate diverse expectations according to their gender and Muslim identities in both China and Tajikistan, as well as in other countries they have visited for business or leisure, including the UAE, India and Malaysia. Whilst moving between countries, these women have managed to thrive and amass considerable sums of money, reputation and wealth, or at least, acquire professional experience and aptitudes to conduct the self-​directed lives they desire or envision. By emphasising my interlocutours’ narratives of success and disappointment that cut across registers of diversity, piety and knowledge, I suggest that female traders also contribute to shaping the cosmopolitan worlds they value as fulfilling (cf. Aslanian, 2011), and that these are permeated by significant gendered aspects of these women’s Muslim identities and subjectivities. In shaping and negotiating their cosmopolitan lives, these women do not only make a living from trade, but also find pleasure, fulfilment and different forms of autonomy that they value as significant for thriving in their profession. 563

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​

YIWU: A MUSLIM MALE-​C ENTERED TRADING HUB With the exclusion of overseas Chinese who constitute half of the foreign population in Yiwu, the majority of foreigners are men –​indeed, Muslim men. In 2011, for example, it was reported that 70 per cent of foreign traders in Yiwu were from the Middle East and North Africa (Belguidoum and Pliez, 2015). Significant numbers of Muslim foreign traders in Yiwu include men from Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, some of whom work and live in the West (Ibañez-​Tirado and Marsden, 2020). In this Muslim male-​centered environment, who are the Muslim female traders? In Yiwu, there is a significant presence of Muslim women catering to foreigners: they work in business and related services as factory suppliers, translators, waitresses, hotel administrators and housekeepers. Most of them are citizens of China from Uyghur, Hui and Kazakh backgrounds. Muslim women from countries such as Nigeria, Somalia, Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, for example, conduct trade mainly in Guangzhou, but can be seen in Yiwu for shorter trips (cf. Bodomo and Ma, 2010). Less prominent in numbers are the female traders from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Turkmen, Kazakh and Chechen Muslim female traders were more prominent as temporary visitors to Yiwu than those from Tajikistan. In 2016, there were three important trading and cargo companies and two restaurants from Tajikistan in Yiwu (see Figure 37.1). During my fieldwork, I spoke with around thirty male and

Figure 37.1  Billboard of a cargo company shipping goods from Yiwu to Tajikistan. Photo by Diana Ibañez-​Tirado, Yiwu, 2018. 564

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

female traders from Tajikistan in Yiwu, of both Uzbek and Tajik background: seven of them were women. Two of these traders, including Gulnora, travelled to Yiwu approximately two times every year, and stayed on business trips usually no longer than two weeks. Five female traders, including Parveena, lived in Yiwu, working in trading companies and conducting independent commerce in their free time; some of them combined these activities with studying in regional Chinese universities (see Ibañez-​Tirado, 2018, 2019). This assortment of male and female traders from Tajikistan and beyond engaged with their Muslim heritage in varied ways. Although male Muslim traders from around the world tended to go to Friday prayers in Yiwu’s main mosque (a structure that could host up to 10,000 people, including women), I did not know any female trader from Central Asia who went to this mosque. These women, as many traders did, used the prayer rooms available in most halal restaurants in the city (see Figure 37.2). Some of my Muslim interlocutors combined praying with attending parties in Yiwu’s nightclubs and karaoke bars; others did not pray at all. In between deceptively opposite ends of being Muslim and performing religious practices, there were are numerous ways of ‘articulating’ Islam in the city. By ‘articulating Islam’, Marsden and Retsikas (2013) refer to the ways in which social actors deal with their Muslim backgrounds in diverse situations and contexts: at different moments of their everyday lives Islam is invoked, and at others, it remains indiscernible. As I will explore in the following ethnographic section, these processes of articulation underpinned my interlocutors’ ways of navigating diversity and contributed to shaping their gendered cosmopolitan lives.

Figure 37.2  USSR halal restaurant in Yiwu. Photo: Diana Ibañez-​Tirado, Yiwu, 2016. 565

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​

GULNORA: PIETY AND COSMOPOLITANISM ‘MIX AND MATCH’ ‘My daughter is two years old. I called her Haticha’, Gulnora, a Tajik female trader told me once in a Tajik restaurant close to Yiwu’s Futian market. Gulnora explained that Haticha was the Tajik form of Khadija. Khadija, she went on, was the first wife of Prophet Muhammad and the first person who had embraced Islam. Very importantly, Khadija had been a remarkable trader too. Veiled in satr (or hijab), and accompanied by her 14-​year-​old son who, as she put it to me, acted as her mahram (guardian; escort) during her business trips, Gulnora told me: ‘For me Islam is everything. Trade is my work and my life. Thanks [to] God I received [good] fortune (khushvakht), and I have the wish that, God willing, my daughter will be like Khadija.’ With this type of statement, Gulnora not only showed her knowledge about the history of Islam and trade, but also the expectations she had for the successful business she had established over the years: she wished that Haticha could follow in her mother’s footsteps. Having been born in Dushanbe, Gulnora dropped out of school at the age of 17 in the early 2000s, at which time she began to trade in textiles from one market to another in the city. Two years later, and with the approval of her parents, she gathered $3,000 in savings and credit from acquaintances, and travelled for the first time to the city of Urumqi in China’s Xinjiang province. That first trip brought her $2,000 in profit. In 2005, when Gulnora was already a relatively prosperous trader, she began to sell perfume in Tajikistan, first purchased in Dubai, and then in Yiwu. Then she spent $15,000 in merchandise, and after three years her capital had reached $120,000. Gulnora had also invested part of her profits in buying property in Dushanbe. Gulnora’s husband, she explained, did not have the same good fortune (khushvakht) in trade, so he usually stayed in Dushanbe running their three wholesale shops and collecting debts –​an activity she considered to be for ‘men’, because problematic debtors (qarzdor) could be violent (jangali). Debtors (including family members) were most of their local clients, who bought goods on credit from them, or shopkeepers who paid rent for shops and warehouses. Gulnora had legal ownership of some of these properties, and her husband others. Every time Gulnora launched a business, she said, she obtained a good profit, even if she had to face fierce competition among local traders, ruthless fights with debtors, and Tajikistan’s continuous economic crisis. As ‘God provided’ her (khudadod) with good fortune in such an unstable environment, she strengthened her commitment to God by fashioning herself as a devout Muslim day-​by-​day. She began to question her own conduct, and to regularly spend time in prayer and fasting (cf. McBrien, 2018; Stephan-​Emmrich, 2019). More recently and informed by the ‘mix and match’ (aralash) of Muslim people, knowledge and technologies in Yiwu, she had also memorised nearly half of the Qur’an in Arabic. She did so with an application that a Chinese Hui man downloaded in her mobile phone when she went to top up her credit near Yiwu’s Night Market.4 Describing herself as a strict (sakht) and pious Muslim (namozkhonda), who felt more unrestricted about 566

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

her religion (din) in China than in Tajikistan, Gulnora tended to walk with her son to Yiwu’s predominantly Arabic-​speaking area known as ‘Maedah’, and requested her son to speak in English to the retail traders (mainly Muslim Hui and Uyghur) selling Islam-​related paraphernalia including praying beads, books, software and artworks (see Figure 37.3). Gulnora said that she preferred to connect with Hui and Arab traders selling Islam-​related products in Maedah than with other Tajik, Russian and Persian speakers in the neighbourhood with whom she could communicate more fluently because they shared intelligible languages. Gulnora perceived the former as providing her with knowledge about Islam whilst being respectful towards her during interactions; the latter, she said, attended this neighbourhood mainly for leisure and were less devoted to religious practice. As Gulnora’s daughter’s name (Haticha) was relevant for Gulnora’s commercial and religious life, her idea of making her son her travel companion for two or three weeks in Yiwu, and referring to him as her mahram (escort; guardian) is revealing. It is common knowledge that in places such as Saudi Arabia, women were required to be escorted outdoors by a male mahram relative (e.g., husband, son, brother), but this is not the case in Tajikistan. Women in Tajikistan prefer to be accompanied when journeying outdoors, especially in shopping trips, by other women. Indeed, when I visited Gulnora in Dushanbe, her son was attending a Russian school and she moved confidently in Kurbon bazaar without a male companion. If she was accompanied

Figure 37.3  Retail vendor of art and prints in Yiwu’s Night Market. Photo: Diana Ibañez-​ Tirado, 2016. 567

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​

by a male relative, usually her husband, she did not refer to him as her mahram –​a term that denotes Gulnora’s progressively acquired knowledge and commitment to Muslim practice thanks to both her good fortune in trade, and Yiwu’s cosmopolitan environment. Gulnora felt that in Yiwu she needed a mahram to acquire legitimacy when interacting with unrelated men, whilst in Dushanbe she did not. Gulnora was aware that referring to a mahram in her home country might have been unintelligible for her local clients and customers, and might have attracted the attention of Tajikistan’s authorities, who are suspicious of the country’s citizens becoming more interested in Islam. Gulnora’s case suggests a cosmopolitan gendered world marked by the availability of diversity in Yiwu, a diversity that she refers to as aralash (mix and match) and includes an environment with different people, languages, food, religions, registers of morality, as well as forms of Islamic knowledge and practice emanating from Muslim traders from China and the rest of the world. Aralash as a dimension of cosmopolitanism also comprises the process of deciding how, with whom and in which context to intervene: Gulnora reflected and decided how to engage with the available modalities and disparate registers of Muslim practice in the city, and thus, she also contributed to shaping Yiwu’s diversity. Rather than being marked by linguistic, national, or regional commonalities with traders in Yiwu who spoke Persian or Russian languages, Gulnora’s cosmopolitan life was mainly defined by her and her interlocutors’ ways of articulating Islam: she decided to mix and match through exchanges with unrelated Hui, Uyghur, Arab and other foreign male merchants who ran specific businesses in the city, and were perceived by her and others to be attuned to Muslim piety. Whilst intervening in Yiwu’s diversity, Gulnora also decided to present herself principally as a Muslim woman who was the ‘boss’ of her own company and conducted international trade independently from her husband. As a Muslim woman who valued piety, she was accompanied by her teenage son, referred to as her mahram. In the next section, I explore the case of a younger and less prosperous trader, Parveena, who also interacted in Yiwu’s diversity with the aim of pursuing a cosmopolitan life.

PARVEENA: A WORLD’S WANDERER Parveena was born in Dushanbe, and at the time of our first meeting in 2016, she was 23 years old and had been living in Yiwu for about a year. Parveena spoke Tajik, Russian and English fluently; she used spoken Chinese on a daily basis, and had begun to learn Arabic. Parveena’s parents had initiated their businesses as shuttle traders in the early 1990s in Urumqi, so the first time she went to China, she accompanied her parents on a business trip when she was six years old. In her childhood, she also travelled with them to Dubai. Her father used to purchase mobile phones, air conditioners and televisions whilst her mother dealt with fabrics. The couple opened a shop in the 2000s near Dushanbe’s Rudaki Street –​the most exclusive road in Tajikistan’s capital. Parveena’s parents became relatively affluent traders travelling to the Emirates, Russia and China, and often took their only child on their trips. This is uncommon among Central Asian traders, who tend to have numerous children and leave them 568

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

under their relatives’ care back home –​interestingly, Gulnora’s case shows that she also travelled with her teenage son. Parveena told me that she grew up travelling and learning to live everywhere, and that this type of mobile life was the main reason why she found it ‘impossible’ to live in Tajikistan. Before settling in Yiwu, Parveena had lived for two years in Russia, where her father had opened a shop in partnership with one of his brothers. When her father died, Parveena and her mother left Russia. Back in Dushanbe, they unsuccessfully tried to recover their shop from Parveena’s father’s relatives, who had taken possession of it. As a result of these events, Parveena’s mother did not have enough capital to continue conducting international business, so she worked as a shopkeeper in Dushanbe. Years afterwards, Parveena’s mother became the second wife of a Tajik man who also had businesses in Russia and Tajikistan, and they began to travel together to China to supply this man’s shops with building materials and light machinery. Parveena accompanied her mother and step-​father to Yiwu. She then enrolled in a university in China and settled in Yiwu. Her decision to stay there was supported by her step-​ father and mother, because Parveena could not only study, but also purchase and export goods for them. Parveena herself delivered small orders to her few clients in Dushanbe: mainly packets of cosmetics and high-​end clothing. Parveena then met Asadullah, a male ‘friend’ (original in English), who was a wealthy Syrian trader who had lived in Yiwu for more than ten years and exported commodities to the Middle East and the US. Parveena’s family approved their friendship, and her step-​father even talked with Asadullah. Asadullah said that he was considering marrying Parveena, and thus began to pay for her university fees, her private Chinese-​language tuition, and all of her other expenses including Parveena’s upmarket apartment. Parveena lived independently there, and her mother and step-​ father also stayed in it during their business trips to Yiwu. Asadullah was a busy trader who spent most of his time between his office in Yiwu and his travels to diverse cities in China. Spending most days without seeing Asadullah, Parveena used to organise all-​women gatherings with her friends. She often socialised with women like herself from Tajikistan –​who were simultaneously working in trade whilst studying. If for Gulnora exchanges with unrelated men were a source of apprehension, for Parveena it was the sociality with Tajik female companions that eventually became a concern. She said that they were gossiping in both Yiwu and Tajikistan about her friendship with Asadullah –​a point that shows the tensions and dislocations brought about by Parveena’s choice of how to intervene in Yiwu’s ‘mix and match’ environment. One day during Ramadan when one of these Tajik girls, veiled in satr (hijab), asked Parveena (dressed in a top-​brand knee-​length dress) if she did not fear God for being ‘shameless’ (besharm), they had a particularly bitter argument. Parveena accused her Tajik girlfriend of hypocrisy (duruyagi), as she argued that the girl was pretending to be a good Muslim by veiling, but she was secretly dating a wealthy foreign merchant too. After insulting one another, they put an end to their friendship and to Parveena’s all-​female gatherings in her flat. Parveena then turned to her Russian girlfriends for companionship. These were Russian women who were working as translators, designers and accountants in export companies in Yiwu, and they tended to gather in European-​style cafeterias. Eventually, Parveena felt that, being Tajik and Muslim, she did not fully fit in with her Russian companions –​even if she, like these women, was ‘independent’, spoke Russian 569

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​

and had lived in Russia for two years. Hence, Parveena began to seek the companionship of a Muslim Egyptian woman in her 50s from Cairo who ran a design company for the Middle East in Yiwu, and also of a Muslim Lebanese-​Ukrainian woman, married to a Syrian-​Lebanese man. The couple ran a retail shop of ‘Muslim fashion’ (mainly dresses allegedly brought from the Gulf) in one of Yiwu’s main streets (see Figure 37.4). Having been raised by her Ukrainian mother in Kyiv before moving to Beirut with her father, the shopkeeper was able to speak Russian with Parveena. In the evenings when Parveena was not with her Russian girlfriends, she went to briefly chat inside this shop frequented by other women from the Middle East and North Africa (e.g., Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia). In contrast to Gulnora, who was the ‘boss’ of her own company, most of the women gathered there had accompanied their husbands, who owned or worked in trading companies in the city. From the Egyptian fashion designer and women who briefly joined the informal gatherings, Parveena began to learn Arabic through daily conversations that were supported by all levels of English spoken by the attendees. These women’s conversations were mainly about Parveena’s growing interest in Arabic language, the war in Syria, and Muslim practices in the Middle East. With their phones, they also exchanged photos, images of products, memes, as well as blessings and quotes about religion, such as ‘Jumma Mubarak’ (Blessed Friday), or ‘the veil does not hide the girl’s shortcomings but shows her commitment to Allah.’ They also discussed in what

Figure 37.4  One of the numerous shops selling Muslim clothes in Yiwu’s area known by foreigners as ‘Maedah’. Photo: Diana Ibañez-​Tirado, 2018. 570

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

situations of real life they could apply the quotes from Qur’an circulating throughout their social media. Aware of the tensions arising from the diversity of opinions, backgrounds, nationalities and personal trajectories of the women gathered there, as well as the conflictive geopolitics in the Middle East, Central Asia and China, the Egyptian designer often highlighted that they should not talk about politics or Islam, but about fashion, cookery and music. ‘This is not the office of the Muslim brotherhood, girls!’ the Egyptian woman said once in a teasing tone, trying to reduce the tension brought about by a conversation about the war in Syria. ‘Come on let’s sing!’ she added. Conversations then tended to turn towards music and recipes, business advice, commentary about family life, and stories about people they knew in Yiwu. One night when Parveena noticed that negative gossip turned towards a woman who was not present, she told me that this was one of the reasons why she never spoke to these women about Asadullah: she was afraid of these women’s criticism. Parveena said that her relation with this male Syrian trader could only be a suitable topic of conversation when talking to her Russian girlfriends, who did not express moral judgements about this type of mixed gender companionships. Hence, Parveena shifted between sociality with Russians and Muslim Arabs, but this lasted less than two years –​roughly the time when she and Asadullah were together. After a trip to Syria and Lebanon to visit his relatives, Asadullah told Parveena that he was ready to marry a Syrian woman and that this agreement had been forced upon him by his parents. This coincided with Parveena’s expiration of her student visa. Heartbroken and without enough capital to sustain her own business, Parveena emptied her flat in Yiwu and flew back to Dushanbe. Back home, her mother had separated from Parveena’s step-​father. Again, this woman had not been able to secure capital to continue her trade in China. When I met Parveena in Dushanbe after she left Yiwu, she told me that she felt ‘dead’ (murdagi) there, whilst refusing her relatives’ attempts to find her a suitable husband. Parveena wanted to go back to the bubbly sociality in Yiwu (even if this was full of tensions), because she wanted to live an independent life, and start her own trading company. After some months of feeling ‘dead’ in Dushanbe, Parveena managed to move back to China –​ this time to a city in the province of Hunan. A Chinese woman she knew from Yiwu offered her a job in the marketing area of her factory and company: Parveena had experience in customer services and trade. Parveena could work in spoken-​Chinese, English, Russian and Tajik/​Persian languages, and to greet and have basic conversations in Arabic. Similarly to Parveena, other Tajik and Uzbek young women were highly valued as skilled employees by Chinese suppliers whose main clients were from Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Middle East, as well as from the different trading diasporas that distribute products from China to markets in Europe and North America (see, e.g., Marsden, 2021). Women like Parveena are regarded by Chinese factory owners as resourceful and independent, and as having the ability to speak numerous languages, deal with a great diversity of buyers and suppliers, and, very importantly, shift registers of sociality and comportment to cater for their Muslim clients in a professional way. Parveena was charged with learning the specifications of products this factory produced in different languages, and with travelling between Yiwu and Hunan with foreign clients to show them the factory and products, and answer the clients’ questions and requests. The 571

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​

last time I met Parveena in 2018 in Yiwu, her plans were to save money from her job in Hunan so she could be able to start her own business –​this time, she said, taking trade more seriously, and men like Asadullah less so. Parveena’s example shows how assessing and learning to navigate the tensions and conflictual situations brought about by the ‘mix and match’ environment of Yiwu is required from women like her to participate in such diversity, and achieve the cosmopolitan life that they most desired: in Parveena’s case, as an autonomous, economically self-​sufficient, and well-​informed Muslim ‘world-​taker’ (jahongiri). Parveena’s capital and then loss of her investments were in close relation to important men in her life: her father, step-​father and Asadullah, who, for different reasons, stopped supporting her. She, however, recognised that regardless of men-​ related heartbreak, loss and misfortunes in her life, her experiences arising from her friendship with Syrian, Russian, Tajik and other diverse people in Yiwu have affected her understanding of the world, and encouraged her even further to pursue forms of personal and economic autonomy. Whilst for Gulnora her good fortune in commerce initially triggered her interest in Yiwu’s ‘mix and match’ in terms of Islamic knowledge and piety, for Parveena dealing with the conflictive and gendered sociality of Yiwu’s diversity enabled her to envision herself as a cosmopolitan –​a ‘world-​taker’.

CONCLUSIONS In contrast to the Central Asian traders who in the 1990s took part in ‘shuttle trade’ (chelnoki) as a ‘shameful’ form of ‘survival’, Gulnora and Parveena regarded themselves as being international traders, and working in China the most desirable way of making a living. I have argued that whilst trying to prosper as international traders, Gulnora and Parveena also pursued self-​directed forms of cosmopolitan life that, despite its contradictions and tensions, they embraced as rewarding. Yiwu’s ‘mix and match’ was available to these traders as diversity that involved different types of knowledge, people, languages and forms of sociality from which to choose and intervene. These women’s choices and interventions were informed by gendered and religious subjectivities. In deciding when, how and with whom to conduct different forms of exchange, these women contribute to shaping forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism in relation to long-​distance commerce. The intricate and fluctuating geopolitics of China and Tajikistan regarding their Muslim populations in more recent years are aspects of broader processes that have remained unexplored in this chapter, but provide a fertile ground for future research on proscribed cosmopolitan competences (e.g., Buggenhagen, 2012b), and other power relations of coercion and rivalry (e.g., Feener and Gedacht, 2018) in the making of Muslim cosmopolitanism and gendered trajectories of trade. As we have seen in the examples presented here, Parveena’s apartment with her Tajik female peers, the European-​style restaurants that Russians frequented, the retail shops selling Muslim clothes mainly to Arabs, and the mobile services catered for by Hui and Uyghur men are stimulating settings for exploring diverse forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism. Female Muslim traders such as Gulnora and Parveena make conscious efforts in shifting between different spaces and forms of sociality on a day-​to-​day basis; although being Muslim is definitely an important part of their lives, they do not seek to mould themselves only in relationship to fellow Muslims –​nor do they move 572

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​

toward simplistically strict forms of piety and behaviour. The search for sociality with Muslim women of Arab background and exchanges with Muslim foreign and local men (accompanied by a mahram) characterises these women’s Muslim cosmopolitanism, as well as their attempts at avoiding such types of sociality and comportment altogether, for instance by mingling with Russians, so to adapt to the different circumstances in which they move and work. For these women, being a cosmopolitan Muslim trader thus requires skills to navigate the conflictive aspects of sociality in Yiwu and Dushanbe, and overcome heartbreak, insolvency, conflict and failure. As Muslim women, they recognise that they must negotiate potential accusations of immorality for pursuing exchanges and/​or friendship with unrelated men in situations characterised by both cultural diversity and commercial rivalry. They also face challenges when pursuing knowledge about Islam in complex geopolitical contexts, in which different actors are distrustful of Muslim practices in everyday situations, as well as of alleged political subversion based on religious radicalisation. However, it is because of these contentious situations arising in ordinary sociality, rather than despite of them, that Gulnora sees herself as having become a successful and prosperous trader and ‘the boss’ of her own company who has been ‘provided by God’, and Parveena sees herself as a ‘world-​taker’ attempting to become autonomous and economically self-​sufficient. These women are not surviving from, or shameful of their occupation. They both take pride and fulfilment in and from international trade, and as such, they contribute to shaping gendered cosmopolitan worlds in the realms of long-​distance commerce.

FUNDING The research upon which this article is based was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 669 132 –​TRODITIES.

NOTES 1 I conducted eight months of anthropological fieldwork in Yiwu, China (2016, 2018), and one month in Tajikistan (2017). My methodology included participant observation (PO), open-​ended interviews, and a mapping of Yiwu’s Futian Market and international restaurants, mainly along Chozhou Lu Street, as well as the ‘Maedah’ and ‘Changchung’ neighbourhoods. PO in Yiwu also involved five months of studying Mandarin in one of the city’s school for foreigners. In both Yiwu and Dushanbe, PO included visiting wholesale shops, factories, shipping companies, warehouses and places of leisure with informants. The interactions were mainly conducted in Tajik and Russian languages. 2 There are concepts in the history of the Islamic world and political philosophy that in Persian appeal to ‘cosmopolitanism’ (e.g., jahonwatani and jahanshahrha; See cf.: Hanley, 2008; Green, 2016.). My informants did not refer to these words. 3 Processes concerning how gendered ideas or practices in marketplaces come to be seen as ‘natural’ are a fertile ground for further research; see, for example, Randall, 2004. 4 These shops were public and commonplace in Yiwu during my fieldwork (2016–​18). In my last visit in November 2018, however, the number of such Muslim retailers had decreased dramatically. Surveillance, policing and control exercised by the local and national 573

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​ government of Xinjiang’s populations (e.g., Smith Finley, 2019) may have affected previously public expressions of Muslim practice or commercial transaction of Islam-​related products in the city.

REFERENCES Alavi, S., 2008. Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-​Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–​1900. London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Alavi, S., 2015. Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aljunied, K., 2017. Muslim Cosmopolitanism. Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Anderson, P., 2020. Not a Silk Road: Trading networks between China and the Middle East as a dynamic interaction of competing Eurasian geographies. Journal of Global Networks, 20 (4): pp. 708–​724. Aslanian, S. D., 2011. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the global trade networks of Armenian merchants from New Julfa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Belguidoum, S., and Pliez, O., 2015. Yiwu: The creation of a global market town in China. Journal of Urban Research, 12: pp. 1–​14. Bodomo, A. and Ma, G., 2010. From Guangzhou to Yiwu: Emerging facets of the African Diaspora in China. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies –​Multi-​, Inter-​and Transdisciplinarity, 5: pp. 283–​289. Buggenhagen, B. A., 2012a. Muslim Families in Global Senegal: Money takes care of shame. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Buggenhagen, B. A., 2012b. Fashioning Piety: Women’s dress, money, and faith among Senegalese Muslims in New York City. City & Society, 24 (1): pp. 84–​104. Buitelaar, M., M. Stephan-​Emmrich, and V. Thimm, 2020, Introduction: Muslim Pilgrimage through the lens of women’s new mobilities. In: Buitelaar, M., M. Stephan-​Emmrich and V. Thimm (eds.), Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring Gender, Religion, and Mobility. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–​18. Buitelaar, M., M. Stephan-​Emmrich, and V. Thimm (eds.). 2020. Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond: Reconfiguring Gender, Religion, and Mobility. New York: Routledge. Feener, M. and Gedacht, J. (eds.) 2018. Challenging Cosmopolitanism: Coercion, Mobility and Displacement in Islamic Asia, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fehlings, S. 2019. Informal Trade and Globalization in the Caucasus and Post-​ Soviet Eurasia. In: M. Stephan-​Emmrich and P. Schröeder (eds.) 2019. Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas: Re-​thinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, pp. 229–​261. Findly, E., 1988. The Capture of Maryam-​uz-​Zamānī’s Ship: Mughal women and European traders. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 108 (2): pp. 227–​238. Fyzee-​ Rahamin, Atiya Begum, Sunil Sharma, and Siobhan Lambert-​ Hurley. 2010. Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Glick Schiller, N. and A. Irving. 2017. Whose Cosmopolitanism?: Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents. New York: Berghahn. Green, N. 2016. The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim city in Asia’s future. History and Anthropology, 27 (3): pp. 273–​295. Haji Idris, N. A., 1991. The Role of Muslim Women Traders in Kelantan. In: A. Mohamad (ed.) The Muslim Private Sector in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 122–​150. 574

—​​​​ G e n d e r e d w o r l d s a n d c o s m o p o l i t a n l i v e s —​​​​ Hanley, W., 2008. Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies. History Compass, 6 (5): pp. 1346–​1367. Heyat, F., 2002. Azeri Women in Transition. Women in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Azerbaijan. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Holzlehner, T., 2014. Trading Against the State: II/​legal cross-​border networks in the Russian Far East. Etnofoor, 26 (1): pp. 13–​38. Humphrey, C., 1999., Traders ‘Disorder’ and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Russia. In: M. Burawoy and K. Verdery (eds) Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp.19–​52. Humphrey, C. and R. Mandel (eds.), 2002. Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Humphrey, C. and V. Skvirskaja., 2009. Trading Places: Post-​socialist container markets and the city. Focaal, 55: pp. 61–​67. Humphrey, C. and V. Skvirskaja., 2012. Introduction. In: Humphrey, C. and V. Skvirskaja (eds.) Post-​Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–​16. Ibañez-​Tirado, D., 2018. Hierarchies of Trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: The case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan. History and Anthropology, 29, sup1: pp. S31–​S47. Ibañez-​Tirado, D., 2019. West-​Central Asia: A comparative analysis of students’ trajectories in Russia (Moscow) from the 1980s and China (Yiwu) from the 2000s. Journal of Eurasian Studies, 10 (1): pp. 48–​60. Ibañez-​Tirado, D. and Marsden, M., 2020. Trade ‘Outside the Law’: Uzbek and Afghan transnational merchants between Yiwu and South-​Central Asia. Central Asian Survey, 39 (1): pp. 135–​154. Karrar, H., 2016. The Resumption of the Sino-​Central Asian trade, c. 1983–​94: Confidence building and reform along a Cold War fault line. Central Asian Survey, 35 (3): pp. 334–​350. Leichtman, M. and Schulz, D., 2012. Introduction to Special Issue: Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Movement, Identity, and Contemporary Reconfigurations, City & Society, 24 (1): pp. 1–​6. Marsden, M., 2016. Trading worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers. London: Hurst and Company. Marsden, M., 2018. Islamic Cosmopolitanism out of Muslim Asia: Hindu-​Muslim business co-​operation between Odessa and Yiwu. History and Anthropology, 29 (1): pp. 121–​139. Marsden, M., 2020. The Alternative Histories of Muslim Asia’s Urban Centres: De-​ cosmopolitanisation and beyond. Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, 38 (1). pp. 9–​32. Marsden, M., 2021. Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics Across Eurasia. Cambridge UK, and NY: Cambridge University Press Marsden, M. and Retsikas, K., 2013. Introduction. In: Marsden M and Retsikas K (eds.) Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 1–​31. McBrien, J., 2018. From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. Baltimore, MD: Project Muse. Mukhina, I., 2009. New Losses, New Opportunities: (Soviet) women in the shuttle trade, 1987–​1998. Journal of Social History, 43 (2): pp. 341–​359. Niyozov, S. and Shamatov, D., 2006. Trading or Teaching: Dilemmas of everyday life economy in Central Asia. Inner Asia, 8 (2): pp. 229–​262. Özcan, G. B., 2006. Djamila’s Journey from Kolkhoz to Bazaar: Female entrepreneurs in Kyrgyzstan. In: Wleter, F., D. Smalbone and N. B. Isakova (eds.) Enterprising Women in Transition Economies. Hampshire: Ashgate, pp. 93–​115. Randall, A., 2004. Legitimizing Soviet Trade: Gender and the feminization of the retail workforce in the Soviet 1930s. Journal of Social History, 37 (4): pp. 965–​990. 575

—​​​​ D i a n a I b a ñ e z - T i r a d o —​​​​ Rui, H., 2018. Yiwu: Historical transformation and contributing factors. History and Anthropology, 29, pp. 14–​30. Sha (Saheira Haliel), H., 2020. Transnational Marriage in Yiwu, China: Trade, settlement and mobility. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46 (11): pp. 2326–​2345. Simpson, E. and K. Kresse, 2008. Introduction: Cosmopolitanism Contested : Anthropology and history in the Western Indian Ocean. In: Simpson, E. and K. Kresse (eds.) Struggling with History: Islam and cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–​41. Smith Finley, J. 2019. Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang. Central Asian Survey, 38 (1): pp. 1–​26. Stephan-​Emmrich, M. 2017. Playing Cosmopolitan: Muslim self-​fashioning, migration, and (be-​)longing in the Tajik Dubai business sector. Central Asian Affairs, 4 (3): pp. 270–​291. Stephan-​Emmrich, Manja. 2019. iPhones, Emotions, Mediations: Tracing translocality in the pious endeavours of Tajik migrants in the United Arab Emirates. In: M. Stephan-​Emmrich and P. Schröeder (eds.) 2019. Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas: Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, pp. 291–​317, Stephan-​ Emmrich, M. and A. Mirzoev. 2016. The Manufacturing of Islamic lifestyles in Tajikistan Through the Prism of Dushanbe’s Bazaars. Central Asian Survey, 35 (2): pp. 157–​177. Turaeva, M., 2010. Women’s Health in Central Asia: The case of female suitcase traders. Anthropology of the Middle East, 5 (2): pp. 2–​13. Werner, C., 2003. Between Market and Family: Women on the New Silk Road. In: C. Gracia (ed.), Gender at Work in Economic Life. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, pp. 115–​124. Yükseker, D., 2007. Economy and Gender in the Urban Borderland: The public culture of Laleli, Istanbul. In: A. Cinar and B. Thomas (eds.) The Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 17–​31. Zakaria, J., 2001. Entrepreneurs at Home: Secluded Muslim women and hidden economic activities in northern Nigeria.,Nordic Journal of African Studies, 10 (1): pp. 107–​123.

576

CHAPTER THIRTY-​E IGHT

INFORMALITY AND UZBEK MIGRANT NETWORKS IN RUSSIA AND TURKEY Sherzod Eraliev and Rustamjon Urinboyev INTRODUCTION Walking through the streets of the Kumkapi neighbourhood in Istanbul, there are dozens of cafés and restaurants serving Uzbek food, numerous cargo companies that ship clothes to Uzbekistan, many clothing stores and stalls selling Uzbek fashions suitable, and even nos (Uzbek snuff) sold by a local Uzbek-​speaking Turk. Historically one of the most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in Istanbul, in the last decade, Kumkapi has become a hub for migrant workers from Uzbekistan. These large-​ scale migratory flows have been facilitated by Turkey’s visa-​free regime for Uzbek citizens and existing shuttle-​trade ties. Since 2013, migration has been magnified by the introduction of the so-​called ‘entry-​ban’ legislation in Russia: a draconian system of restrictions prohibiting re-​entry to Russia for five or ten years following minor administrative offences. This legislation compelled many entry-​banned Uzbek migrants to reorient their migration destination from Russia to Turkey. Unlike in Russia, where migrants suffer from police corruption and extremely high legalisation costs, Uzbek migrants in Istanbul do not have to pay bribes to Turkish police officers and can find work without any residence or work permit, due to the Turkish authorities’ tacit acceptance of cheap and legally unprotected migrant labour. Thus, the Turkish migrant labour market seems like a good alternative to the ever-​tightening Russian migration regime, allowing many entry-​banned Uzbek migrants to continue to support their families. Despite this comparatively liberal migration regime, however, many of the Uzbek migrants we encountered in Istanbul, especially those who had previously worked in Russia, were not happy with their migration experience in Turkey, and planned to return to Russia as soon as their entry ban had expired. The reasons for such negative comparisons were often linked to the informality, the modes of incorporation into the labour market, the role of social networks and the importance of having a shared sense of ‘the rules of the game’ under the conditions of informal employment. When comparing his migrant adventures in Russia and Turkey, Pulat (a pseudonym), the main hero of our chapter, drew a striking comparison between the two migration situations: one that goes a long way to explaining Uzbeks’ often-​stated preference for Russia: ‘Turkda iymon bor, lekin insof yoq. Orisda iymon yoq, lekin insof bor,’ roughly translated as ‘Turks have faith [in Islam] but no sense of justice, Russians DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-46

577

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​

have no faith [in Islam] but a sense of justice.’ These remarks led us to rethink our pre-​fieldwork assumption that Uzbeks would feel ‘closer’ to Turkey for a host of linguistic, cultural, religious, economic and legal reasons. The main puzzle which led us to write this chapter was an attempt to understand how and why, despite all the challenges associated with navigating the repressive legal landscape in Russia, for many Uzbek migrants we met in Istanbul, Moscow seemed a place of greater agency and opportunity than Istanbul. Pulat’s fascinating comment about iymon and insof and how it maps on to Russians and Turks is the ‘itch’ that this chapter seeks to scratch. We explore the Russian and Turkish migration regimes in terms of Uzbek migrants’ patterns of residence, incorporation into the labour market, gendered experiences of migration, and experiences of agency and capacity to navigate an opaque legal regime. We draw on a multi-​ sited transnational ethnography of Uzbek migrant workers between Uzbekistan, Moscow and Istanbul that we conducted between 2014 and 2020, including six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kumkapi between January 2019 and August 2020. During our fieldwork, we rented mattress space in shared apartments where migrants lived, we were present at migrants’ workplaces at different times, we participated in migrants’ daily lives, accompanying migrants on the streets, inviting them for lunch or dinner in cafés and ‘hanging out’ together in bars. In addition, we maintained regular contact with informants via smartphone-​ based social media applications, through which they shared various news items, videos, and photos, and spread gossip and rumours when someone acted unfairly toward others. This chapter centres on a single case study to illustrate, ethnographically and biographically, how Uzbek migrants navigate the corrupt legal system and shadow economy challenges, and how they produce various forms of informal governance and legal order to organise their precarious livelihoods. Through a focus on the life history of Pulat and his adventures in Moscow and Istanbul, our analysis reveals striking differences and similarities between the two cities in terms of migrant experience, moral assessment and legal adaptation. This comparison allows us to explore the interconnections between migrant agency, informality and the networks of trust and solidarity in hybrid political regimes.

RUSSIAN AND TURKISH MIGRATION REGIMES IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Russia and Turkey have traditionally been viewed as countries of emigration. However, in the last two decades, both Russia and Turkey have become key immigration hubs worldwide, due to their improved economic conditions and geopolitical developments among their neighbouring countries. After the United States, Germany and Saudi Arabia, Russia is the fourth largest recipient of migrants in the world, with 11.6 million foreign-​born individuals residing on its territory (UN DESA 2019). Turkey is also one of the key destinations for migrants regionally, hosting 3.7 million foreign-​born people, the majority of them (64.4 per cent) being refugees from war-​ torn Syria (IOM 2019). Russia is the primary destination for migrants from Uzbekistan. Higher salaries, a constant demand for cheap labour, a shrinking labour force and a visa-​free regime 578

— ​​​​ U z b e k m i g r a n t n e t w o r k s i n R u s s i a a n d T u r k e y —​​​​

have attracted millions of migrant workers to Russia. Nearly 2.2 million Uzbek citizens were present on the territory of the Russian Federation in 2019 (RANEPA 2019). Unlike the Kyrgyz, another large migrant group from Central Asia, Uzbek migration to Russia is mostly male-​dominated: men constitute up to 85 per cent of migrants (Rocheva and Varshaver 2017, p.92). While construction sites, housing and communal services, agriculture, transportation and similar areas where physical strength is required mostly employ men, female migrants can find jobs predominantly in trade (supermarkets, shops), catering (restaurants, hotels, food factories), domestic care and cleaning services. Host to the largest number of refugees from neighbouring war-​torn Syria, Turkey also receives large numbers of migrant workers from most of the post-​Soviet republics. Uzbek shuttle traders appeared in Turkey as early as the 1990s. However, widespread migration started only in the 2000s and 2010s with economic improvement in Turkey and growing unemployment in Uzbekistan. The share of Uzbek migrants increased rapidly starting in the mid-​2010s, due to the tightening of immigration laws (discussed further below) and economic stagnation in Russia. Unlike in Russia, the share of female migrants in the Turkish labour market is significant (44.6 per cent), due to high demand for a female labour force in sectors such as domestic care (taking care of children, the sick and elderly), cleaning and textiles and garments (Toksöz and Ulutaş 2012; UNDESA 2019; see also Saparova, this volume). Male migrants mainly work in construction, services (hotels, restaurants) and in textile and garment workshops. The majority of Uzbek migrants find jobs in Istanbul, the country’s largest city and the largest transit hub in the region. There are no clear figures on the number of Uzbeks in Turkey. However, remittances sent to Uzbekistan through official channels indicate the presence of a large number of Uzbeks in Turkey. In 2018, remittances from Russia (where there were more than 2 million Uzbek migrants) reached US$4 billion, while remittances from Turkey exceeded US$200 million (CBU 2019). Moreover, due to the existence of shuttle trade between Turkey and Uzbekistan, a large share of remittances to Uzbekistan are transferred informally through shuttle traders (i.e., transferred in person). This provides the basis for an estimate of more than 100,000 Uzbek migrants in Turkey. Living as undocumented, and employment in the informal economy, are a way of life for many migrants in Russia and Turkey. For example, due to complicated and expensive legalisation procedures, as well as the corrupt legal system in Russia, many Central Asian migrants are compelled to find jobs in the shadow economy where they can survive without documents (see, e.g., Urinboyev 2020, pp.35–​39). In an attempt to fight undocumented migration, Russian authorities have intensified immigration controls and introduced a number of highly punitive measures for individuals found to be in violation of residence or employment regulations. Amongst these legal interventions, the entry ban law was the most severe sanction that was gradually brought into force in Russia in 2012 and 2013 (Kubal 2016). Migrants who committed two or more administrative offences, or who overstayed, were subsequently banned from entering Russia for three, five, or ten years, depending on the length of overstay. By February 2014, 600,000 migrants, mostly from Central Asia, had been issued entry bans; this figure reached 2 million people by mid-​2016 (Kirillova 2016). These legislative interventions have had mixed effects. Some migrants learned 579

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​

to sidestep restrictions by buying ‘clean fake’ immigration papers (Reeves 2013), while others limited their return trips home and concentrated instead on one long stay, during which they attempted to earn as much as possible. At the same time, a large number of entry-​banned migrants returned home and had to choose other destinations for labour migration, such as Turkey or Kazakhstan, while awaiting the expiration of their ban. This led to a rise in the already increasing number of Central Asian, especially Uzbek, migrants in Turkey. Migrants experience a similarly restrictive legal environment in Turkey. Unlike in Russia, it is not the employee, but the employer who applies for a work permit in Turkey. Since hiring a foreigner is more expensive and is associated with difficult bureaucratic procedures, employers often hire foreign workers informally. Therefore, a large proportion of migrant workers in Turkey resort to the informal economy where they can find employment without any documents (Toksoz et al. 2012). However, unlike Russia where foreigners who violate immigration laws face severe penalties, migrants in Turkey are able to work without documents, suffer less from police corruption and enjoy relatively unimpeded mobility in the cities due to relatively liberal immigration enforcement. Overstayers have two options when leaving Turkey: they can either choose to accept an entry ban for up to five years, or pay a fine (the amount depends on the length of overstay) at the border, and return after a couple of months. Owing to such a relatively liberal immigration regime, informality is part and parcel of the migrant labour market in Turkey. Notwithstanding these differences, both Russia and Turkey share many common features in terms of non-​democratic rule, the weak rule of law, a poor human rights record, limits on the activities of civil society, widespread corruption and large informal economies, which do not allow migrants to engage in legal claim-​making and collective mobilisation. As a result, informal work, non-​payment of wages, discrimination in the form of unequal pay for equal work and long working hours and exploitation are common working-​life experiences for Uzbek migrants in both Russia and Turkey. These hardships are often accompanied by poor housing, a lack of access to public healthcare and exposure to general discrimination and xenophobia. However, these challenges and uncertainties stemming from undocumentedness and informal employment can partly be overcome by relying on migrant transnational networks and informal channels that provide alternative means of survival and redress in precarious migration contexts. The network of shops, cafés and services catering to the Uzbek community in Kumkapi serve as vivid illustration of this phenomenon. Kumkapi is the most ethnically and culturally diverse quarter in the Fatih district of Istanbul. Historically considered a home to Armenian and Greek minorities, Kumkapi’s ethnic composition began to change rapidly with the emigration of those minorities in 1950s and the settlement of internal migrants from various parts of Turkey (Biehl 2015). Thanks to the neighbouring shopping areas of Laleli, the Kumkapi quarter started to attract international migrants from Moldova to Pakistan and Syria to Senegal over subsequent decades. More recently, Kumkapi has become a predominantly Uzbek quarter (with African-​dominant adjoining streets), where thousands of Uzbek migrant workers reside and work.1 Kumkapi, in the words of many Uzbek migrants we encountered there, is an ‘Uzbek mahalla’, where there are hundreds of Uzbek migrants on the streets and almost everyone, even local Turks and Kurds, speak or understand the 580

— ​​​​ U z b e k m i g r a n t n e t w o r k s i n R u s s i a a n d T u r k e y —​​​​

Uzbek language. Beyond the plethora of cafés and restaurants serving Uzbek food, it is very easy for Uzbek (as well as other) migrants to find accommodation in Kumkapi, which usually involves sharing an apartment with up to 10–​15 people. Uzbeks who live in other districts of Istanbul come to Kumkapi at the weekends to meet and socialise with their friends in Uzbek cafés. Therefore, many newly arrived migrants stay in shared apartments in Kumkapi and undergo their initial adaptation to the Turkish labour market in this neighbourhood. Moreover, Kumkapi neighbours with the shopping areas of Laleli, frequented by a large number of shuttle traders from Uzbekistan. In addition, the availability of cargo services in the area means that on their days off, Uzbek migrants working in other parts of Istanbul can shop in the neighbourhood and send their garments and remittances home directly from the Kumkapi area. The recent transformation of Kumkapi into an Uzbek enclave has led to the emergence of an informal adaptation and social control infrastructure through which it is possible to receive information about accommodation and jobs, meet new people and join different networks, learn about how to navigate the immigration rules, and gather information and rumours about Uzbek migrants living in Istanbul. Informal residence and employment were a way of life for our informants: more than 90 per cent of the Uzbek migrants we met here (and in other parts of Istanbul) during our fieldwork possessed neither a residence permit nor a work permit. Unlike in Istanbul, there are no ethnic enclaves in Moscow; migrant communities are dispersed and live in different parts of the city.2 This can largely be explained by the social mixing and the absence of spatial segregation in Moscow, inherited from the Soviet period, which allows migrants to find accommodation in any area of Moscow (Demintseva 2017). There are numerous Uzbek cafés in Moscow, but they are not tied to a specific locality and often relocate from one place to another. Migrants usually work long hours without any days off in different parts of the city, which leaves little or no time for physical meetings with their ethnic communities and networks. Another reason for the absence of ethnic enclaves is the economic and social stratification in Moscow. Unlike in Istanbul where migrant-​oriented jobs are concentrated in specific districts and neighbourhoods (e.g., Bağcilar, Bayrampaşa, Fatih, Ümraniye, Zeytinburnu), in Moscow, jobs are not tied to a specific locality. Rather, Uzbeks’ insertion into the Moscow labour market is much more dispersed. It is possible to spot Uzbeks in any district of Moscow. Corrupt and draconian policing practices also compel migrants to minimise their presence in public places. Even if migrants possess all of the documents required by the law, they are often asked for bribes when stopped by the police on the street or in the metro. Because of these experiences, Uzbek migrants do not organise in public places in Moscow and try to make themselves as invisible as possible. Istanbul and Moscow thus represent two different forms of migrant incorporation and adaptation into the host society: the former based on an ‘ethnic enclave’ with its own spatial structure and border, and the latter constituted primarily in virtual space, with smartphones and social media serving as a means for place-​making and networking. In the next section, these two different forms of Uzbek migrant incorporation will be illustrated through the example of Pulat, who worked in Moscow and Istanbul during 2014–​19 and experienced many challenges during his initial migration periods. Thanks to his knowledge of the informal rules of survival and street life, and his ability to adjust to changing circumstances, Pulat could adapt to 581

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​

the labour market, legal environment and host society. Between 2014 and 2020, we maintained regular contact with him and closely observed the developments in his life through field trips and smartphone-​based communication. This difficult endeavour was possible, given that Pulat and the first author of this paper hail from the same region in Uzbekistan, which enabled us to build a trusting relationship and gain access to his daily life and routine of activities in Moscow and Istanbul. Observing his life afforded us the opportunity to collect his narratives relating to Uzbek migrant networks and their transnational practices, informality and the street world, and to observe situations in which he navigated immigration and labour laws and solved problems through informal rules and channels.

PULAT’S ADVENTURES IN MOSCOW AND ISTANBUL: INFORMALITY, AGENCY AND NAVIGATING CHALLENGES IN PRECARIOUS MIGRATION CONTEXTS Twenty-​eight-​year-​old Pulat is a migrant from the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan. He is a sociable and street-​smart individual. He arrived in Moscow in December 2013 shortly after finishing vocational college in rural Fergana. Before coming to Moscow, he had worked as a kirakash in his home village Shabboda (a pseudonym), a common, informal taxi-​driving job in Uzbekistan that requires drivers to navigate the legal system, to negotiate power relations and to adjust to quickly changing circumstances. It was as an unofficial taxi driver that Pulat became street smart and developed the skills in navigating the legal restrictions that later helped him to adapt to the precarious conditions and uncertain legal environment in Russia. In November 2013, a local scandal concerning the arrest of twelve individuals who were allegedly involved in religious extremism forced Pulat to dramatically alter his livelihood strategy. As Pulat worked as a taxi driver, these twelve individuals who had been arrested were his frequent customers, and Pulat often drove them to different places when they attended weekly religious events. It was highly likely that the Uzbek National Security Service (SNB) would also be interested in interrogating Pulat due to his regular contact with them. Not wanting to be interrogated (and possibly tortured) by the SNB, Pulat quickly made the decision to leave for Russia and to work there for some time until the scandal had blown over. Pulat arrived in Moscow in December 2013. His decision to migrate to Moscow was primarily driven by the fact that many of his co-​villagers worked there. Pulat estimated that there were at least 200 migrants from Shabboda village (out of a total population of 18,000 villagers) working in different places in Moscow city and Moscow province. The existence of such village-​based networks in Moscow created a sense of social responsibility among villagers –​a sense that they must care for one another during their time in Russia. Several villagers worked as intermediaries in Moscow’s construction sector, serving as gatekeepers to villagers seeking access to the Russian migrant labour market. Based on these social norms and expectations, Pulat was confident that going to Moscow meant joining his village networks there. As expected, after his arrival at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, Pulat was picked up by a fellow villager and stayed with him in his accommodation for a few days. 582

— ​​​​ U z b e k m i g r a n t n e t w o r k s i n R u s s i a a n d T u r k e y —​​​​

It took only three days for Pulat to find a koiko-​mesto (a mattress-​sized sleeping space) in a shared apartment in the north of Moscow. However, his new koiko-​mates were not co-​villagers, but Uzbek migrants he had met for the first time in Moscow and who came from different regions in Uzbekistan.3 Like many other Uzbek migrants, Pulat also regularly renewed his immigration documents at Moscow’s Kazan railway station –​the most popular ‘legalisation’ site among migrants, where it is possible to buy fake and ‘clean fake’ immigration documents, including a fake Russian passport. When stopped by Russian police officers, Pulat would typically remain calm, lying confidently that he had all of the required documents. When these strategies failed, he paid a 1,000–​2,000 rouble bribe to the police to avoid legal sanctions and deportation. Fraud (lohotron in Russian) cases are common in Moscow, whereby employers cheat migrants and do not pay their salaries. To minimise these risks, and following the advice of his village networks, Pulat approached Ravshan, a co-​ villager and a work team leader (brigadir) at a construction site in Balashikha, a small town in Moscow province. Coming from the same village established both a social bond and a sense of social responsibility in the workers’ minds. The families of both the brigadir and Pulat in Uzbekistan share a territory and interact daily to such a degree that non-​payment of the agreed salary would trigger a chain reaction, with Pulat’s family able to exert direct pressure on the brigadir’s family in the village, something that could not happen if the two men’s families lived far from one another. This mechanism of informal social control has increased in the last five years, owing to the proliferation of smartphones and social media applications (e.g., WhatsApp, Telegram Messenger) in Uzbek villages (Urinboyev 2018). Kinship and common village origins were quite important in this regard, and enabled Pulat to adapt to his new environment and save enough money for the next steps in his ‘migrant career’ in Moscow. As Pulat was street smart and ambitious, he did not want to remain in the construction sector for long. In May 2015, using his savings from the construction work in Moscow, Pulat purchased a Daewoo Nexia, a car made in Uzbekistan which enjoys wide popularity among Uzbek migrants in Russia. Owning a car meant that Pulat could work as a taxi driver in Moscow city, a job that he did before coming to Moscow. As a taxi driver, Pulat earned around 40,000 roubles (appr. US$750 in 2015) per month, and acquired a higher social status among his co-​villagers, given that he earned more money and did not have to do chernaya rabota (low-​status work, such as construction, agriculture, or janitorial services). Since working as a taxi driver involved frequent interactions and informal transactions with traffic police officers, Pulat often carried counterfeit money with him, and skilfully passed these notes (tucked inside his passport and driving licence) to police officers as a bribe when they stopped him in public places. Pulat knew that police would not have the time or the chance to check the authenticity of the money in a public space. Working as a taxi driver also allowed Pulat to make many acquaintances from the street world, among them Chechen and Dagestani protection racketeers who acted as ‘qozi’ (informal street judges) in the shadow economy, providing contract enforcement and dispute resolution services for a fee (usually 20 per cent of the total sum of money recovered). The demand for the services of protection racketeers was particularly high in sectors such as construction, market trade and agriculture, where many migrants worked without any documents or a formal employment contract. Given 583

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​

his good connections with protection racketeers, Pulat often helped his co-​villagers when they experienced problems with getting paid for their work. Pulat and his co-​villagers existed at the centre of a complex network of intertwining relationships. Although the villagers did not share communal accommodation and worked in different places in Moscow, they maintained daily contact with one another through smartphone-​based messaging apps. Villagers met in person only a few times per month when they visited the mosque near Moscow’s Otradnoye metro for Friday prayers, when they celebrated someone’s birthday, or when they visited different Moscow brothels to have sex with Uzbek migrant sex workers. Most contact was virtual, given that rapacious Russian police officers wandered all corners of Moscow in the hope of extorting money from migrants. Smartphones and social media were thus used as a means for reproducing village-​level social relations and norms, enabling migrants to reproduce an informal social safety net in Moscow (see Figure 38.1). Villagers quickly informed each other and mobilised resources when someone fell ill, was caught by the police, needed to send something home, or desperately needed money. These forms of solidarity and mutual help were identical to the daily practices observed in Pulat’s home village in Fergana, and were village based. Indeed, Uzbek solidarity and mutual help networks revolved more frequently around village-​level identities and less on regional and ethnic identities. Elder migrants and ‘fixers’ like Pulat played a key role in such village-​level mutual aid practices. One of the most important forms of solidarity enacted by these networks was the collecting of money in the case of repatriating a deceased co-​villager from Russia to Uzbekistan. In a context of precarious and unregulated construction work, death, illness and job-​related accidents were not uncommon. When someone died, news spread swiftly among villagers, as migrants immediately contacted their mahalla networks via smartphones and social media. There was no standard amount for contributions, and migrants determined how much to contribute based on their financial situation and income level. Because the threat of death was ever-​present in migrants’ lives, news of

Figure 38.1  Pulat and his co-​villagers waiting for Chechen protection racketeers. 584

— ​​​​ U z b e k m i g r a n t n e t w o r k s i n R u s s i a a n d T u r k e y —​​​​

a death deeply affected everyone, and many migrants stepped forward to assist with the repatriation expenses.4 In the absence of regular personal contact, smartphones and social media thus served as a means of establishing a ‘digital mahalla’ in Moscow, reproducing and maintaining village-​level identities, social norms and relationships across distances. Pulat’s adventures in Moscow came to an end in 2018 following the death of Islom Karimov in 2016 and the election of Shavkat Mirziyoyev as the new president of Uzbekistan. One of the most visible changes in the new government’s policies was the release of thousands of prisoners charged with religious extremism. The twelve individuals in Shabboda village, whose imprisonment in 2013 had forced Pulat to migrate to Russia, were also released. These changes meant that it was now safe for Pulat to return home. In August 2018, after nearly five years of musofirchilik (migranthood) in Russia, Pulat returned to his home village in Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, Pulat’s euphoria and happiness only lasted three months, and he soon realised that many things had changed since he had left the village. It was no longer possible to make a decent living, due to economic decline and growing unemployment as many migrants were unable to return to Russia as a result of the entry-​ban legislation, which created fierce competition for local jobs. Even informal taxi-​driving had become unprofitable since many (former) migrants had invested their savings in purchasing cars, leading to a proliferation of taxi drivers in both rural and urban areas in Uzbekistan. At the same time, Pulat found it hard to reintegrate into village life, as he was accustomed to an urban lifestyle in which he could make many decisions without consulting his brothers and parents. The desire for a stable income and autonomy from his family members incited him to return to his migrant life. However, it was not possible for Pulat to return to Russia, due to the entry ban that he had received. As Pulat worked and lived in Russia without authentic immigration papers, he knew that he would get an entry ban when leaving the territory of Russia. As expected, at Vnukovo airport, as he was going through the passport control, he was informed that he had received a 10-​year entry ban. He was not the only person in the village with an entry ban. Many other entry-​banned villagers were changing their migration routes to Kazakhstan or Turkey, depending on their connections and preferences. Pulat too, joined these new migratory flows, and chose Istanbul as his new destination, since one of his classmates was already working there. Pulat arrived in Istanbul in November 2018. Based on his Moscow experiences, Pulat was under the assumption that he would have to obtain fake immigration documents, deal with corrupt police officers and minimise his visibility in public places in order to avoid immigration raids. Much to his surprise, he found a completely new socio-​legal environment in Istanbul. Unlike in Moscow, Pulat did not have to pay bribes to Turkish police, and he enjoyed relatively free mobility in the city, given the absence of frequent police and immigration checks. It is worth noting in this respect that while Russian police regularly use racial profiling (mostly of ‘Asian-​ looking’ people) when stopping passers-​by for document checks, Uzbek migrants in Istanbul are typically able to ‘pass’ as a local. Even if Turkish police officers stop a migrant on the street, they are not interested in checking whether they have immigration documents, but rather whether the migrant is carrying any narcotics or weapons in their pocket or bag. Like many Uzbek migrants, Pulat also settled in Kumkapi, as one could easily find informal employment here. 585

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​

Figure 38.2  Everyday life in Kumkapi.

Despite the liberal immigration environment and the existence of an Uzbek ethnic enclave in Kumkapi, Pulat found that he had less agency and navigational opportunities in Istanbul than he had had in Moscow (see Figure 38.2). This can be explained by two interlinked factors. First, many migrants in Istanbul are heavily dependent on various informal intermediaries (shirkat) to find a job. The shirkat can be a local Turk, Kurd, or a female Uzbek or Turkmen migrant with strong connections to Turkish employers. The shirkat receives 50 per cent of the migrant’s first salary for finding them a job. The migrant him-​or herself is not involved in these transactions; rather, the shirkat receives the payment directly from the employer. But this is not the end of story. It is in the interests of the shirkat that migrants remain in a precarious situation and lose their jobs frequently. This means that every time a migrant loses their job, they are forced to turn to a shirkat to find a new one. The shirkat thus maintains regular communication with employers, encouraging them to fire their worker if they do not like them. During his first six-​month stay, Pulat was fired from his job three times; in his opinion, due to the shirkats’ predatory practices. Even though Pulat was street smart and had considerable migration experience, his navigational skills did not help much in Istanbul. In Moscow, despite corrupt policing practices, widespread xenophobia and informal employment, Pulat had more agency and he could capitalise on his village networks and the informal institutions that offered alternative 586

— ​​​​ U z b e k m i g r a n t n e t w o r k s i n R u s s i a a n d T u r k e y —​​​​

means of adaptation and redress. Of course, shirkat-​type intermediaries also existed in Moscow, but Pulat could seek redress from the Chechens if intermediaries tried to exploit him and his co-​villagers. In Istanbul, such informal channels and village networks did not exist (or he could not reach out to them), making Pulat vulnerable to the shirkats’ abusive practices. Second, severe labour exploitation and non-​payment of salaries was also common practice in Istanbul’s labour market. Like many other migrants, Pulat was expected to work twelve hours a day, with little or no time off and with very low pay, around US$10 per day. Since Turkish employers hired migrants without any formal employment contract, the non-​payment, delay, or partial payment of salaries was also a widespread phenomenon in migrants’ daily lives. These exploitative practices were simply unacceptable for street-​smart and experienced migrants like Pulat, who had never faced such challenges in the past. Unlike in Moscow where Pulat used various informal channels, village norms and transnational pressures to recover unpaid salaries, there was no informal enforcement mechanism that he could rely on when faced with such uncertainties in Istanbul. In addition, there was no chain migration from Pulat’s village to Istanbul, which prevented Pulat from establishing the kind of village-​level support network that existed in Moscow. He simply felt himself to be totally helpless in Istanbul, even though he lived in an ‘Uzbek mahalla’ in Kumkapi, where Uzbek migrant workers constituted the absolute majority locally. Because of his daily experiences of exploitation, Pulat was nostalgic for his Russian experiences and planned to return to Russia as soon as his entry ban had expired. He frequently referred to the existence of the street law, the informal institutions and kinship and village networks in Moscow that enabled him and many other Uzbek migrants to have more control over their working conditions, and to seek redress when faced with the uncertainties and risks of informal employment. Pulat’s case epitomises the experiences of male Uzbek migrants. Female Uzbek migrants, who constituted approximately 75 per cent of the Uzbek migrant population in Istanbul (according to the rough estimate of our informants), were better positioned in the Turkish labour market, due to the high demand for female migrants in labour-​intensive and feminised sectors of the Turkish economy; these included domestic care, textiles and garments workshops, supermarkets, cleaning, and hotel and restaurant work. Due to the high demand and the highly gendered nature of the Turkish economy, female Uzbek migrants had more control over their working lives and could easily move from one job to another, while males had limited employment opportunities. As a result, Uzbek female migrants were able to develop strong networks and information channels in Istanbul (compare Saparova, this volume, for the situation of female Turkmen migrants). These existing networks of Uzbek female migrants nonetheless provided some support to male migrants. Street-​ smart migrants like Pulat quickly tapped into existing female networks and received support from them when they needed help. There was a high demand for male partners among Uzbek female migrants who sought intimate relationships. In Moscow, Pulat had had to pay for sex with Uzbek migrant sex workers. In Istanbul, the situation was reversed: it was men who were scarce, and women constituted the vast majority of the Uzbek migrant population. As Pulat commented, many Uzbek women ‘rented’ him and provided him with free dinner and a one-​night hotel stay and, in return, Pulat satisfied their sexual desire. In 587

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​

Pulat’s reckoning, this acceptance of female dominance marked a significant change in his life and worldview about gender hierarchies: the product of his precarious situation in the Turkish labour market.

CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter has explored the differences and similarities between Russian and Turkish migration regimes through a comparative, ethnographically and biographically based study of Uzbek migrants’ daily experiences in Moscow and Istanbul. Pulat’s biography and adventures in Moscow and Istanbul have revealed the interconnections between various structural and individual factors, and the importance of networks of trust and solidarity in conditions of precarious employment in the shadow economy. Although Pulat is just one among many Uzbeks who have experienced both Russian and Turkish migration contexts in recent years, his encounters can serve as a lens to understand migrant agency and experiences in hybrid political regimes. Our study’s findings indicate that Russia remains the preferred destination for Uzbeks, despite its repressive and corrupt immigration legal regime. Before starting fieldwork in Turkey, we had assumed that Uzbek migrants would prefer it to Russia, both because of shared religious and cultural traditions, and because of linguistic similarities that make learning Turkish much easier than mastering Russian for an ordinary Uzbek. However, this perceived ‘easiness’ of Turkey as a migrant destination did not necessarily reflect the reality. Indeed, Russia seemed more preferable, at least for those (male) migrants who had a chance to compare both countries. Pulat’s comments about ‘iymon’ and ‘insof’ and the different modes of labour market incorporation, varying ‘rules of the game’ in the shadow economy and the lack or presence of networks of trust and solidarity clearly explain why migrants such as Pulat feel Moscow to be a place of greater agency and freedom than Istanbul. The chapter has also provided intriguing insights into the gendered experiences of migration to Russia and Turkey, which deserve further comparative research. Our fieldwork suggests that many female Uzbek migrants feel relatively more empowered in Turkey, a Muslim-​majority country with traditional gender hierarchies, than in Russia, where discourses of gender equality are more prominent. These findings point to the fact that migrant legal adaptation and agency in precarious migration contexts are heavily dependent on the existence of informal channels and practices that offer alternative means for organising migrant livelihoods. They also demonstrate the importance of a context-​sensitive understanding of ‘migrant agency’: one that takes into account how patterns of migrant adaptation intersect not only with the broader socio-​legal environment, labour market organisation and type of political regime, but also with existing social networks and gendered opportunities for navigating the legal landscape.

FUNDING ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This research was supported by several funding agencies: the Swedish Research Council (dnr D0734401), the European Commission H2020-​ MSCA-​IF-​ EF-​ ST (grant number 751911), the Kone Foundation (grant identification code f577aa), the University of Helsinki (Three-​Year Grants Programme), the Academy of Finland 588

— ​​​​ U z b e k m i g r a n t n e t w o r k s i n R u s s i a a n d T u r k e y —​​​​

(grant number 338349), the Riksbankens Jubileumsfonden (MHI19-​1428:1) and the European Commission H2020-​MSCA-​RISE-​2019 ‘CENTRAL ASIAN LAW’ (grant number 870647).

NOTES 1 The first groups of Uzbeks to arrive in Turkey were those who fled the Soviet Union in the 1920s–​1930s. They have moved to different parts of the country and already have integrated into society. 2 However, some areas of Moscow, which host industrial zones and fruit/​vegetable markets such as Kapotnya (Cherkizon) or Food-​city (thus ‘migrant-​friendly’ districts), have a higher concentration of Central Asian migrants. 3 Due to high rental prices, it is common practice among migrants in Moscow to share an apartment with individuals that they have never met before. 4 Starting from 2018–​2019, the government of Uzbekistan began to cover repatriation costs.

REFERENCES Biehl, S.K., 2015. Spatializing diversities, diversifying spaces: Housing experiences and home space perceptions in a migrant hub of Istanbul. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(4): 596–​607. CBU, 2019. Payment Balance, International Investment Position and Foreign Debt of the Republic of Uzbekistan in 2018. Tashkent: Central Bank of Uzbekistan. Demintseva, E., 2017. Labour migrants in post-​Soviet Moscow: Patterns of settlement. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(15): 1–​17. Eder, M., 2015. Turkey’s neoliberal transformation and changing migration regime: The case of female migrant workers, pp.133–​150 in S. Castles, D. Ozkul, and M.A. Cubas, (eds.) Social Transformation and Migration. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ICG, 2018. Turkey’s Syrian Refugees: Defusing Metropolitan Tensions. Brussels: International Crisis Group, No. 248. IOM, 2019. World Migration Report 2020. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Kirillova, O., 2016. Two million migrant violators will never return to Russia [in Russian] (1 July). Available from: www.inter​fax.ru/​interv​iew/​516​300. [Accessed 27 June 2020]. Kubal, A., 2016. Entry bar as surreptitious deportation? Zapret na v’ezd in Russian Immigration Law and Practice: A Comparative Perspective. Law & Social Inquiry, 42(3): 744–​768. Mirziyoyev, S., 2017. President’s state of the union in parliament. 22 December. [online]. Available from: http://​uza.uz/​oz/​docume​nts/​zbekis​ton-​respu​blik​asi-​pre​zide​nti-​shav​kat-​ mirziy​eevn​ing-​oliy-​22-​12-​2017 [Accessed 26 June 2020]. RANEPA, 2019. Monitoring ekonomicheskoi situatsii v Rossii [Monitoring of economic situation in Russia], No. 12 (95). Available from: www.ran​epa.ru/​ima​ges/​News/​2019-​07/​ 22-​07-​2019-​mon​itor​ing.pdf?fbc​lid=​IwAR3​R2UU​3QJS​847K​vzqS​9VeA​bDK-​ZrZSC​oqFG​ qnFZ​BzYE​ZAR2​RT0Y​SUxz​PVw [Accessed 23 June 2020]. Reeves, M., 2013. Clean fake: Authenticating documents and persons in migrant Moscow. American Ethnologist, 40(3): 508–​524. Resmi Gazete, 2018. Karar Sayisi 317. Available from: www.resm​igaz​ete.gov.tr/​eski​ler/​2018/​ 11/​20181​111-​2.pdf [Accessed 24 June 2020]. Rocheva, A. and Varshaver, E., 2017. Gender dimension of migration from Central Asia to the Russian Federation. Asia-​Pacific Population Journal, 32 (2): 87–​136. Şenses, N., 2016. Rethinking migration in the context of precarity: The case of Turkey. Critical Sociology, 42 (7–​8): 975–​987. 589

—​​​​ S h e r z o d E r a l i e v a n d R u s t a m j o n U r i n b o y e v —​​​​ Toksoz, G., Erdogdu, S., and Kaska, S., 2012. Irregular labour migration in Turkey and situation of migrant workers in the labour market. International Organization for Migration (IOM). Available from: https://​publi​cati​ons.iom.int/​books/​mrs-​no-​12-​irregu​lar-​migrat​ion-​ tur​key [Accessed 24 March 2023]. Toksöz, G. and Ulutaş, Ç.Ü., 2012. Is migration feminized? Turkey, Migration and the EU: Potentials, Challenges and Opportunities, (5): 85–​112. UN DESA, 2019. International Migrant Stock 2019. New York: UN DESA, Population Division. Urinboyev, R., 2017. Establishing an “Uzbek mahalla” via smartphones and social media: Everyday transnational lives of Uzbek labor migrants in Russia, pp. 119–​148 in M. Laruelle (ed.) Constructing the Uzbek State: Narratives of Post-​Soviet Years. Boulder, CO: Lexington Books. Urinboyev, R., 2018. Migration, transnationalism, and social change in Central Asia: Everyday transnational lives of Uzbek migrants in Russia, pp.27–​41 in L. Marlene and S. Caress, (eds.) Eurasia on the Move. Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Dynamic Migration Region. Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Central Asia Program. Urinboyev, R., 2020. Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia. Oakland: University of California

590

CHAPTER THIRTY-​N INE

DIASPORAS OF EMPIRE Ismaili networks and Pamiri migration Till Mostowlansky

INTRODUCTION Over the past decade, I have conducted anthropological research with families in the town of Murghab in Tajikistan.1 The town is located in the country’s easternmost region, and people in Murghab live lives influenced by connectivity to faraway places, including Qumsangir in south-​west Tajikistan, the capital Dushanbe, Moscow, and cities in Siberia, as well as in Europe and North America. Some of them have established business connections via transnational networks, travelled for education, employed kin relations to pursue temporary labour migration, or managed to raise funds to visit their relatives living abroad. Yet the majority stays put in terms of physical mobility and engages in differently mediated forms of interaction: news about relatives and friends in other places often reach them through visitors and increasingly via mobile technologies that were first introduced to Murghab in the late 2000s. The specific places to which people are connected have radically changed in the course of the past century, but it is important to stress that connectivity as such is not simply the outcome of present-​day globalization and technological innovation. My interlocutors in the town of Murghab are part of a minority population of around 2,000. They are Shia Ismaili Muslims who speak Pamiri languages, while the majority of people in Murghab –​a settlement with around 7,000 inhabitants –​are Sunni Muslims and speakers of Kyrgyz. In the broader context of eastern Tajikistan’s Gorno-​Badakhshan Autonomous Region, or simply ‘the Pamirs’ (Pomir), in which speakers of Pamir languages and, more importantly, Ismailis are dominant, this minority status stands out. It points to complex relations between people having different linguistic, religious and ethnic identities, and between places considered ‘central’ and ‘marginal’. It also speaks to modes of internal migration that people in the area have experienced over the course of the past century. The women and men in Murghab who refer to themselves as ‘Pamiris’ (Pomiri) largely trace their origins back to two mountain valleys in the vicinity, Bartang and Wakhan, where mutually unintelligible languages, Bartangi and Wakhi, are spoken. They do, however, share the common religious identity of Ismaili Islam. In the following, I investigate the broader historical and political processes that have DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-47

591

—​​​​ T i l l M o s t o w l a n s k y —​​​​

enabled the emergence of complex forms of subjectivity on a variety of scales, ranging from the individual level in small towns like Murghab to the broader post-​Soviet space, transnational institutions, and aspirations of a global community. I thereby suggest that we can observe an ephemeral, yet historically persistent mode of contact that is the result of regimes of political and economic transformation, the creation of global borderlands, war and oppression, humanitarian intervention, and religious mobility. For the analysis of the lives of Pamiris in Murghab and their wider networks of mobility and connectivity, the concept of ‘diaspora’ usefully frames the fragmentation that is inherent to both the social landscapes of the Pamirs and related spaces outside the region. In this context, it is important to look beyond the classical notion of diaspora as a movement from homogeneity to mobility and dispersion (Brubaker 2005: 2). Rather, I propose that the Pamiri diaspora is characterized by two distinct interpretations of the concept that shed light on the contradictory forces that many people in and from the Pamirs have had to navigate in recent decades. In doing so, I work with Ho’s (2004: 14) distinction between diaspora as ‘the notion of a people who were originally homogeneous, then moved’ and, conversely, diaspora as people ‘who moved, and as they did so became homogenized politically’. In the first case, which Ho calls the ‘Jewish model’ that has dominated much research on diaspora, sociality develops in a particular way: dispersion starts from a ‘bounded’ social or spatial entity, for instance an ethnic group or a country. In the latter case, however, which Ho dubs the ‘British model’, diaspora is a composite and ‘mobility is a process which reshapes the basic units of sociality’. In his study of Hadrami diaspora across the Indian Ocean, Ho shows that the ‘British model’ involves belonging to an empire across space and time in which composite, genealogically rooted identities span vast geographical distances. In the case of Hadramis, the religious mission also played a formative role in articulating universal ambitions that went beyond those envisaged by the British Empire. Building on these insights, in this chapter I explore how both readings of diaspora contribute to an understanding of how Pamiris in and outside the Pamirs make sense of being ethnically particular and globally Ismaili. I develop the chapter’s argument in three steps: in the first section, I delve more deeply into the discussion of diaspora and its specific meanings in the interaction between Pamiris and the (Soviet) state, particularly in historical perspective. In the second section, I analyse transnational Ismaili institutions as having emerged out of imperial networks in the British Empire and as having established early twentieth-​century links with the Pamirs from this vantage point. In the third section, I shed light on the processes of integration and alienation that these two models of diasporic existence encapsulate. I conclude by returning to Murghab as a microcosm of both Pamiri and Ismaili diaspora.

MULTIPLE DIASPORAS In his study of transnational Ismaili institutions and their relations with Ismaili subjects around the globe, Steinberg (2011: 15) distinguishes between a diasporic, mobile Ismaili elite with origins in the Indian subcontinent, on the one hand, and autochthonous, ‘less mobile’, Ismaili populations in, among other places, the ‘borderlands’ of the Himalayas, on the other hand. In this framework, the Pamirs are 592

—​​​​ I s m a i l i n e t w o r k s a n d Pa m i r i m i g r a t i o n —​​​​

part of the Himalayas, and Steinberg looks at Pamiris primarily as global Ismailis in the making. While he notices processes of alignment and resistance in the relationship between ordinary Pamiris and transnational Ismaili actors that have unfolded since the end of the Cold War, Steinberg’s gaze is ultimately an institutional one that emphasizes globality over locality. This approach is useful for sketching an Ismaili globalization that, Steinberg (2011: 16) argues, ‘can, in sum, be seen as a process in which scattered marginal populations are socialized to the values of modernity, capitalism, rational individualism, and modern discourses of rights and membership’. This process, Steinberg suggests, tells us ‘the story of the gradual incorporation of those remote communities [e.g., the Pamiris] into the global polity’ in an attempt to achieve ‘consolidation into a single global structure’ and ‘inculcation with enthusiasm for prescribed Ismaʿili ideals’. While I generally agree with Steinberg’s interpretation of the relations between transnational institutions and local subjects, I argue that this particular view also hides the longer history of mobility and diasporic modernization that Pamiris have experienced over the course of the twentieth century. Rather than limiting our analysis to the dichotomy ‘mobile diaspora vs. less-​mobile autochthonous community’, I propose to think of Pamiris as defined by multiple forms of diasporic existence that derive from very different types of globalization. These different forms are, from a historical perspective, marked by socialism and the Cold War as much as by wealthy trading networks and neoliberalism. In the following, I turn to my ethnographic data to make these abstract historical processes, which come together in contemporary everyday life in the Pamirs as ‘entangling modernity’ (Mostowlansky 2017), more palpable. As for many Pamiris in Murghab, tracking and remembering genealogy and history are important to Murod and his family. Sadly, Murod, who was in his late sixties when I first met him in 2010, passed away a few years ago, but I was fortunate to enjoy his and his family’s company whenever I visited Tajikistan between 2010 and 2016. During this period, I learned a great deal about Murod’s view of the world as a place in motion that is marked by constantly emerging ‘homelands’ (vatan) with different ‘homes’ (khona). In my conversations with Murod, origin seemed rather unimportant, even though he described himself as having lived in Murghab since ‘ancient times’ (qadimi). By ‘ancient times’ he meant the 1960s, when he moved to Murghab from the village in the upper Ghunt Valley where he was born. Earlier, his grandparents had moved to his place of birth after a massive earthquake struck in the neighbouring Bartang Valley in 1911, resulting in the formation of Lake Sarez. During the years of my research in Murghab, I met several families who referred to this incident in their biographies. One time in 2011, feeling quite sure that I had figured out where Murod ‘originated’ from, I said to him, ‘So you’re really from Bartang, right? A Bartangi?’ Murod did not seem impressed with my conclusion and replied, ‘Well, this is what they say today ‒ Bartangi, Wakhi, Shughnoni … Back when I was a child nobody used these words.’ As our conversation progressed, Murod explained that, according to his parents, before their ancestors settled in Bartang, they had lived in Iran. How and when they left Iran and moved to Bartang seemed unclear. Murod saw this as part of a genealogy that was transmitted through stories full of superhuman beings and actions, but which nobody had cared to write down. While Murod knew exactly what had happened 593

—​​​​ T i l l M o s t o w l a n s k y —​​​​

during this period, it seemed hard to find words to describe and categorize the people who lived then. Who were they? How did they refer to themselves? ‘Panj tan’, said Murod. ‘ “Five people”, they told others, because they were Shia and revered the progeny of Prophet Muhammad.’ By ‘five people’, Murod meant the Prophet’s family and its elevated status in Shia Islam, which was, as it is today, dominant in the Pamirs. But were there other categories that they would use? ‘Perhaps Tojik [Tajik], I don’t know. It’s still unclear.’ Discussions of this kind with Murod, and in fact with many other people in Murghab, were often circular. They were in part influenced by the fact that we could not escape the spectre of the twentieth century in which the Soviet experience, and its afterlives in independent Tajikistan, had so fundamentally shaped how people think and talk about themselves, their relations to the state, and the multiplicity of selves that they display in different contexts. While this is the case for much of Central Asia, people in the Pamirs were subjected to liminal forms of categorization throughout the Soviet period and beyond that have resulted in a high degree of uncertainty with respect to linguistic identities, minority status, and citizenship (Bliss 2006; Mostowlansky 2017). In the 1920s, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was established, and the titular nationality (here read ‘ethnic group’) was officially declared to be ‘Tajik’. However, in order to come up with a coherent and large enough population of ‘ethnic Tajiks’ to make the new republic a viable polity within the Soviet system, several quite distinct groups had to be conflated under the umbrella term ‘Tajiks’, on the basis of shared language and religion. In this regard, the status of the area encompassing the Pamir Mountains was defined as special and declared an ‘autonomous region’. This decision was based on linguistic diversity, as the Pamir languages were recognized as distinct from the Persian languages and dialects that were spoken in other parts of Tajikistan, and on religious difference, as most people in the Pamirs appeared to be Shia Muslims, which distinguished them from the majority of Sunni Muslim in the rest of Tajikistan (Bergne 2007: 32). This new usage of the term ‘Tajik’ conflicted with earlier understandings that were prevalent in the Pamirs (Dagiev 2019). Thus, in the course of the twentieth century, a range of alternative, overlapping categories ‒ referring to elevation (‘Mountain Tajiks’), local varieties of Pamir languages (e.g., ‘Bartangi’, etc.), territory (‘Pamiri’), and religion (‘Ismaili’) ‒ emerged so that people could maintain the distinctions among the various groups making up the newly defined titular nationality ‘Tajik’. The dispersal of people from the Pamirs to places where they are considered strangers began soon after the foundation of the Tajik SSR in 1929 and continues, under different circumstances, today. Mobility from contexts of perceived homogeneity to diasporic settings, like Murod’s family with their voluntary move from Shughnan to Murghab in the 1960s, is just one of many forms of migration that Pamiris have engaged in since the 1930s. For instance, a significant number of so-​called ‘Mountain Tajiks’ (gornye tadzhiki) were forcibly resettled from the Pamirs, including the Bartang Valley, to Qumsangir in south-​west Tajikistan prior to 1937. The Soviet government framed this resettlement as reversing pre-​Soviet ‘feudal’ policies that had allegedly forced people into mountainous areas. However, Soviet-​era resettlement was actually implemented to facilitate the construction of irrigation systems and cotton production in a sparsely populated region (Nourzhanov and Bleuer 2013: 71). 594

—​​​​ I s m a i l i n e t w o r k s a n d Pa m i r i m i g r a t i o n —​​​​

As a result of these resettlement programs, Murod and many people in Murghab and other parts of the Pamirs still have close relatives in places like Qumsangir. Other forms of mobility throughout the Soviet period –​for education, work and marriage –​ also led to temporary and permanent migration from the Pamirs to the Tajik capital Dushanbe, to various places in Central Asia, and to economic centres across the Soviet Union. As the financial and cultural centre of the Soviet Union, Moscow in particular achieved an elevated status as an economically and aesthetically desirable destination among people in the Pamirs, and continues to host a large community of Pamiris from a wide range of migratory backgrounds, professions and citizenships. Thus, the patterns of labour migration that we see today from the Pamirs abroad –​ largely to wealthier places in Russia and Kazakhstan –​follow the networks that were established over decades of intra-​Soviet mobility (Sahadeo 2012, 2016). If we can speak of a common Pamiri identity among people who now live scattered across vast expanses in Tajikistan, Central Asia and the former Soviet Union, it is largely a reference to geographical space. Even if people refuse to use the name ‘Pamiri’ to describe themselves –​for instance, to avoid undermining their sense of overarching solidarity and unity as Tajik citizens –​being ‘from the Pamirs’ (az Pomir) is often still an important marker. Living outside, but being from the Pamirs and maintaining connections to people and places there –​physical, virtual, ideational –​is thus a form of diasporic existence that corresponds to what Ho (2004: 214) calls the ‘Jewish model’ of diaspora, that now characterizes ‘almost every ethnic group, country, or separatist movement’. However, people in the Pamirs, and especially those who are part of the region’s majority Shia Ismaili community, make manifest an entirely different concept of diaspora. Transnational Ismaili institutions have been promoting the idea of a shared diasporic existence without a homeland since the days of the British Empire. While these institutions were not able to maintain links to people in the Pamirs during most of the Soviet period, the end of the Cold War led to an immediate surge in connectivity that has fundamentally transformed people’s lives in the Pamirs and in places that host the Pamiri diaspora.

IMPERIAL NETWORKS, HUMANITARIAN ASPIRATIONS There is a dearth of sources on how exactly people from the Pamirs engaged with Ismaili institutions prior to and during the Soviet period. Yet, looking at the broader region, we find traces of Pamiri people’s presence within these contexts. For instance, a local history from today’s northern Pakistan, written by a man called Qudratullah Beg (1967), describes the establishment of Ismaili institutions in Hunza and Gilgit between the 1930s and the 1950s (Mostowlansky 2020). Qudratullah Beg’s involvement in this process entailed multiple journeys from the so-​called ‘British northern frontier’ to Bombay, where the Aga Khan III –​then the Ismaili Imam of the time –​was periodically based. On one of his journeys in 1933, as he reached the Aga Khan III’s court in Bombay, Qudratullah Beg met co-​religionists from the northern borderlands covering parts of Afghanistan, China and Soviet Central Asia, whom he subsumed under the umbrella term (in Urdu) ‘Central Asian community’ (Sentral Ashya ki jama’at). He thereby referred to geographical commonalities as well as common, regionally specific Ismaili traditions and practices going back to the eleventh-​century missionary 595

—​​​​ T i l l M o s t o w l a n s k y —​​​​

and philosopher Nasir-​i Khusraw (Beben 2015). As we learn from Qudratullah Beg, this distinct ‘Central Asian community’ in Bombay, embedded in the larger framework of Ismailis from across Asia and Africa, dated back to the influence of another, much more recent Ismaili missionary and envoy who had visited the Pamirs and surrounding areas a decade earlier. In 1923, this man –​Pir Sabzali –​travelled from India to the Pamirs as well as to parts of today’s Afghanistan, China and Pakistan (Remtilla 2012: 46; Steinberg 2011: 53; Tajddin Sadik Ali 2001). Sent by the Aga Khan III, Pir Sabzali was given the task of gaining more knowledge about the Central Asian Ismailis, a group that seemed remote and distant from Bombay, at a point when the Aga Khan’s power and influence was on the rise. The loyalty of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Ismaili imams to the British government, alongside a decisive victory in a Bombay court case involving the Aga Khan’s right to collect tithes and taxes, had strengthened their standing vis-​à-​vis followers in different parts of the British Empire. By the time of the reign of Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III (1885–​1957), even far-​flung pockets of Ismailis had become connected to institutions in Bombay (Daftary 2007: 463–​496; Green 2011: 155–​178; Mukherjee 2017). Steinberg (2011: 39) argues that the British Empire’s ‘concert of forces and moments’ in the Indian Ocean world was crucial to the creation of an Ismaili diaspora that brought together and profoundly changed previously ‘scattered communities’ under a single infrastructure. This infrastructure entailed the Aga Khan’s status as prince, a ruler over a political subdivision within the empire that came with a population but without a territory. It is at this point that the ‘British model’ of diaspora (Ho 2004) became relevant for Ismailis –​first in a trans-​imperial sense and then in a global perspective. Ismaili elites and the entourage of the Aga Khan became immersed in the categories and classifications of the British Empire in India. In this process, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Khojas, a trading caste navigating economic networks between India and East Africa (Akhtar 2016), emerged as a dominant Ismaili group. The ‘composite’ nature of Ismaili diasporic existence, a result of the interaction between pre-​colonial identities and practices, on the one hand, and colonial classification, law and economy on the other, became a blueprint for the imagination of an Ismaili community across Asia and Africa, and later –​as a result of post-​colonial migration –​in Europe and North America. During the Soviet period, people in the Pamirs remained excluded from this particular process of diasporic incorporation that came with the idea of a de-​territorialized Ismaili polity (Mostowlansky 2018). While Pamiris followed Soviet patterns of mobility –​as described in the previous section –​central Ismaili institutions began to build large-​scale charitable organizations that followed the dominant Western post-​ Second World War development and relief paradigm. Still under the Aga Khan III, an expanding set of institutions emerged in the European post-​war context that aimed at supporting but also religiously administering Ismaili communities that were largely situated in decolonizing settings in Asia and Africa. The Aga Khan III’s perception of the situation in the Soviet Union makes it clear that his disconnection with people of Ismaili conviction in the Pamirs derived, on the one hand, from a lack of political opportunity. Correspondence and the collection of even symbolic ‘tribute’ from Central Asia were simply impossible under Soviet rule. On the other hand, the Aga Khan III’s (1954: 183) overriding rationale ‒ that 596

—​​​​ I s m a i l i n e t w o r k s a n d Pa m i r i m i g r a t i o n —​​​​

Ismailis had to be a good citizens of the state in which they resided ‒ led him to publicly reiterate the official Communist Party line that Ismailis in the Soviet Union were ‘not persecuted’ and were ‘quite free in their religious life’. However, as the divide in economic orientation and emerging ethnic and religious identities between Ismailis in the Soviet Union and the rest of the world grew over the course of the Cold War, central Ismaili religious and humanitarian institutions’ access to the Soviet realm became ever more strictly curtailed. Many of my Ismaili interlocutors in Tajikistan who are old enough to remember the 1970s and the 1980s told me that –​while they venerated and prayed to their imam –​they had virtually no knowledge of change outside the Soviet Union. This included not only developments in global Ismailism and changes in rituals, but even the transition from the Aga Khan III to the Aga Khan IV in 1957. As Remtilla (2012: 149) describes in her study of post-​socialist Ismailism in the Pamirs, only occasional news about the new imam made it into the region. For instance, Remtilla notes that people in the Pamirs learned from a magazine photograph that Prince Shah Karim Al Hussaini Aga Khan IV, grandson of the Aga Khan III, had become the forty-​ ninth Ismaili imam. Prayers, however, often continued to address the previous Aga Khan, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought an influx of new institutions, ideas and diasporic organization under the pressure of the Tajik civil war. The Tajik civil war ravaged the country from 1992 to 1997 (Epkenhans 2016; Nourzhanov and Bleuer 2013: 323–​335). In the winter of 1992‒93 in the Pamirs, approximately 180,000 inhabitants and several tens of thousands of refugees were cut off from other parts of Tajikistan (Bliss 2006: 4; Middleton 2016). Facing starvation after the Soviet system of provisioning had collapsed, people were dependent on alternate support lines from the outside (Keshavjee 2014). The first and most important actor to enter the region at that stage was the Aga Khan Foundation, which developed links to Gorno-​Badakhshan, both through Ismaili ties and against the backdrop of development work in northern Pakistan. In the war years, the Aga Khan Foundation partially fulfilled the role of the Soviet state by provisioning people, even to the point of emulating the paternalistic relationship that had characterized Soviet state‒citizen relations in the Pamirs. Remtilla (2012: 82) calls this relationship an ‘economy of grace’ in which citizens received and were made to feel that they could never do quite enough to match what the state provided to them. In the context of independent Tajikistan, Remtilla observes that this relationship of ‘grace’ shifted from a link between the state and its citizens to an emerging bond between Ismaili institutions and the people in the Pamirs, in which the Aga Khan, representing the Ismaili imamate, featured as a new ‘master’ (soheb). The relationship of dependency between wealthy Ismaili institutions with global aspirations and people in the Pamirs is a specific one in the sense that it developed in the context of an extraordinarily bloody civil war and a looming famine. However, the relationship also reveals more general processes in global Ismailism, in which poor, underprivileged pockets of Ismailis become the subjects of a complex of religious and humanitarian institutions under the auspices of the Aga Khan in a way that is reminiscent of a polity. This status receives symbolic expression through a formal constitution, a flag and a large administrative apparatus. Ismaili institutions also enact statecraft in actual diplomatic interventions, infrastructure projects, educational institutions and a quasi-​welfare system. Throughout the twentieth century, sustaining 597

—​​​​ T i l l M o s t o w l a n s k y —​​​​

and expanding this polity was dependent on identifying historically validated Ismaili communities and teaching them how to practise and embody ‘modern’ Ismailism (Steinberg 2011: 59). Contemporary Ismaili proselytizing has remained restricted to the incorporation and transformation of already existing Ismaili ‘diasporas’. The composite nature of this expanding and transforming polity has thus resulted in a diasporic organization that allows multiple homelands, citizenships, traditions and ethnicities to be subsumed under a widely propagated ideology of pluralism. In the following section –​based on historical material and ethnographic data –​ I discuss the encounter between this composite, networked and increasingly global sense of Ismaili existence and the Pamiri notion of territorialized diaspora that developed in the Soviet Union.

TERRITORIAL TEMPTATIONS IN A DIASPORIC WORLD People from the Pamirs involved in Ismaili institutions often navigate seemingly contradictory forces, interests, economic rationales and historical legacies between the Aga Khan IV’s headquarters in Europe, Tajikistan’s increasingly repressive political system, and calls for Pamiri allegiance to, or emancipation from, both. The career of Yodgor Faizov, a previous governor of Tajikistan’s Gorno-​Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which encompasses the Pamirs, encapsulates this complexity in a nutshell. It also indicates the extent to which Ismaili composite diasporic forms have managed to incorporate individuals and groups with diverse and sometimes opposing backgrounds and aims. When I met Faizov in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, more than a decade ago as a PhD student conducting fieldwork, he was the CEO of the Aga Khan Foundation in Tajikistan. Before rising to this position, he had worked for the foundation starting in the midst of the civil war in 1993. Prior to this, Faizov had led Gorno-​Badakhshan’s Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party in Soviet times. In 2018 –​a year of major political tensions between Pamiri militia leaders and the central government –​Yodgor Faizov was appointed governor of Gorno-​Badakhshan through a presidential executive order. This career path leading from Soviet party positions to Ismaili institutions and back to government is not uncommon in Tajikistan. One of my interlocutors, Manzura, a woman in her thirties, was working in an Ismaili institution in Khorog, the capital of Gorno-​Badakhshan. When I spoke with her in 2016 she told me, ‘Everybody here knows that if you want to be successful in the imam’s [i.e., the Aga Khan’s] institutions or in government, you should have been in the Komsomol, or be a child of someone who was.’ Working through and gaining access to resources via ‘cadres’ and the centres of political power has been a hallmark of Ismaili institutions since their rise in the course of the twentieth century. Their emergence in lockstep with British imperial institutions emphasizes this, as does the Aga Khan Foundation’s firm embedding in Geneva, the capital of the international humanitarian and development world. This mingling with diplomats, heads of state and billionaires has also worked in favour of those Ismailis who were in vulnerable minority positions in many settings of the post-​colonial world. The most striking example of the effects of these connections is perhaps the 1972 expulsion of so-​called ‘Asians’ from Uganda under Idi Amin, among them thousands of Ismailis who were rendered stateless and had to leave the 598

—​​​​ I s m a i l i n e t w o r k s a n d Pa m i r i m i g r a t i o n —​​​​

country. The Aga Khan IV’s close relationship with then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau opened the possibility for permanent refuge for many of these Ismailis in Canada (Mohammedi 2017: 3). In the case of the Pamirs, Ismaili institutions have faced a considerably more ambivalent situation, operating in a region where many people were openly at war with Tajikistan’s central government in the 1990s and where tensions, surveillance and militancy continue to define everyday life. In this context, Ismaili institutions have had to speak to a heterogeneous mass of people from the Pamirs who often adhere to opposing political stances and have conflicting territorial claims, not only in the region, but in diasporic settings across the post-​Soviet space. The Aga Khan IV’s first visit to and encounter with Ismailis from the former Soviet Union happened in Moscow in 1995. This occasion was celebrated in the city’s storied 1980 Olympic Stadium, an impressive and fitting venue given Moscow’s lasting political and cultural impact on the geographically distant Pamirs. There the Aga Khan pronounced that, despite ‘the spiritual bond that links each Murid [i.e., member of the Ismaili community] –​through time, across history, across geography –​with the Imam-​of-​the-​Time’, this visit to Moscow was his first contact in person with his community ‘in Central Asia’ (Al Hussaini 2009: 921). This first physical encounter between the Aga Khan IV and parts of his lost ‘Central Asian community’ (as first labelled by Qudratullah Beg 1967) was thus not only an occasion of post-​Cold War reconnection; it was also the meeting of two diasporic systems –​one of the Soviet kind and the other born in the British Empire, re-​imagined to fit post-​colonial, liberal pluralism (Dewji 2018). Looking at the Aga Khan’s farman, or decree, presented to his audience during the meeting (mulaqat) in Moscow, it becomes evident that he must have been keenly aware of the delicate nature of the encounter. Parts of the speech, published for Ismailis who did not participate in the meeting, remind post-​Soviet Ismailis that they are now part of a larger community of murids that consists of people from many different places: Today you will realise that there are Murids here from many different parts of the world. You are all brothers and sisters. For the Imam you are all brothers and sisters, wherever you come from. And it is My deepest hope and prayer that you will put this relationship into effect in your lives every day. And remember that if you come from different countries, with different languages, with different traditions that is a strength, because there is strength in pluralism. There is strength in societies of different backgrounds coming together. And therefore, if in due course, there are matters to be interpreted, and particularly matters of faith, it is the Imam who will make those decisions. It is the Imam who will guide the Jamat so that, more and more, in time, it comes together in the interpretation of its faith, in the quality of its life, perhaps, one day, in a nearly common language. (Al Hussaini 2009: 922) This utopia of a new unity in the post-​Cold War era –​delivered in a top-​down, hierarchically structured setting of religious governance –​reflects the 1990s liberal discourse of social encounters in a free and borderless world, but it could not be 599

—​​​​ T i l l M o s t o w l a n s k y —​​​​

further from the lived realities of people in the Pamirs. Pamiri militias were part of the United Tajik Opposition during the civil war, and Pamiri civilians were subjected to targeted killings in Dushanbe during that time. This legacy continues to rise to the surface in conflicts between militias and the central government, and the aspiration of the Pamirs, or Badakhshan, becoming a territorially defined homeland of Ismaili Pamiris has not lost its hold on people’s imaginations. Particularly since a period of open warfare in Khorog in 2012, the sense of the region as an ethnically (Pamiri) and religiously (Ismaili) defined territorial entity has been enshrined in popular culture. For instance, to this day, Pamiri musicians both in the diaspora and locally promote this powerful, affective image of resistance. Employing local idioms and word-​of-​ mouth publicity that are harder for security services to trace, they thereby influence how young Pamiris situate themselves in the world, the state, and vis-​à-​vis Ismaili institutions (Mostowlansky 2019). Despite the official representation of harmonious and unified relations among Ismaili institutions, people from the Pamirs, and Ismailis from all over the world, everyday encounters as well as internal communications have long shown otherwise. For early development specialists, the socialist legacy constituted an obstacle to societal improvement in the Pamirs (AKF 1993); changes in Ismailism intended to align the ritual practices of Pamiris with those of other Ismailis were met with discontent and occasional resistance (Haqnazarov 2008; Lashkariev 2016); and the Pamiris’ forced integration into a hierarchical system of developmental and religious administration normalized their position as needy supplicants, always on the receiving end of these transactions (Devji 2009). In this hierarchy, historical legacy and current socio-​economic status are of great importance. In my conversations with Ismailis who hail from places outside the Pamirs and reside in North America, Europe or economic centres in Asia, Pamiris –​along with Ismailis from bordering parts of Afghanistan, China and Pakistan –​are featured as poor, rooted in local ‘traditions’, and ‘backward’ in a rather romanticized sense. In the case of the Pamirs, this perception sometimes also included views of the Soviet legacy as a hindrance to their integration in a capitalist system. While conducting research in South East Asia in 2016 I met Zahra, a middle-​aged woman who was an Ismaili and a citizen of Singapore. Of Indian origin, Zahra’s family has been residing in the former colonial port cities of South East Asia, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, for generations. Being part of this former British world of maritime trading networks gave her family a privileged position in the diasporic imagination of global Ismaili institutions. Via these institutions she paid the ‘tithe’ (dasond) to the imam, intending to contribute to the Aga Khan Development Network’s humanitarian and development initiatives and thereby ultimately to ‘give’ to underprivileged Ismailis in Central Asia and war-​torn Syria. She herself also offered free, Internet-​based English lessons and educational guidance to Ismailis in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. These people from the ‘northern frontier’, as Zahra called the region (in keeping with the British colonial gaze), were in need of constant support and charity. Like many other comparatively wealthy Ismailis residing in economically privileged settings around the world, she followed a development logic that constitutes a key component of global Ismailism today and defines selected diasporas as in perpetual need of assistance and improvement. 600

—​​​​ I s m a i l i n e t w o r k s a n d Pa m i r i m i g r a t i o n —​​​​

CONCLUSION In Murghab, the small town high up in the eastern Pamirs, the coming together of Pamiri migratory pathways and global Ismailism manifests itself in many situations. As a minority in Murghab, Pamiris ‒ with their different genealogies and identities ‒ have always had to navigate a number of different forces simultaneously –​coming from within as well as from the outside. In Soviet times, job opportunities (rather than forced relocations, as in other parts of the Pamirs) enticed them to move to the high-​altitude town, where they encountered a diverse, Russian-​speaking environment comprising, among others, Kyrgyz, Russians, Ukrainians and Uzbeks. In this context, as my interlocutors who could remember the 1960s and 1970s told me, being Ismaili was subordinated to being Soviet and being ‘from the Pamirs’. As Ismaili institutions physically entered the Pamirs in the wake of a humanitarian crisis ‒ the Tajik civil war ‒ a powerful historical legacy of religious connectivity could be accessed and adapted. People did not cease to follow the connections that they had established in the Soviet Union, and in fact the majority of Pamiris continue to navigate within this space. In Murghab, transformation and change came gradually: in the 1990s, the Aga Khan Foundation opened a local branch that offered employment in development projects. The Ismaili religious specialist –​the khalifa –​while remaining a car mechanic, gave up drinking and became incorporated in the chain of command leading up to the imam. Young people aspired to learn English and follow the Ismaili educational programs situated around the globe in several different diasporic contexts. Ho’s (2004) distinction between two models of diaspora –​one depicting movement from assumed homogeneity to dispersion, and the other bringing disparate peoples together in a composite social formation –​sheds light on the different forces at work in the Pamirs. Nevertheless, these two models should not be understood as mere static reflections of reality. Rather, they are useful tools that provide orientation in reading the complexity of everyday encounters in Tajikistan and other places where Ismaili institutions and Pamiris intersect. At these points of intersection, distinct historical legacies –​from the colonial Indian Ocean world to the Soviet Union –​meet and nurture new social formations whose individual parts were previously deemed to be separate and disconnected.

EPILOGUE Academic publications often take a long time to see the light of day. I wrote this chapter in 2020 and finalized editorial work on it in early 2021. My ethnography is therefore limited to the period leading up to 2019, the year in which I last visited Tajikistan. Much has happened since then in the Pamirs. The pandemic has given way to a state of war between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and the Tajik government has doubled down on its repressive measures against dissent in the Pamirs (Mostowlansky 2022). Hundreds of activists, as well as ordinary people, have been arrested and disappeared. Beyond that, taking steps unimaginable after the civil war, the government has also begun to push Ismaili institutions out of Tajikistan. These violent interventions have directly impacted people’s everyday lives. They can no longer express their Ismaili-​ness beyond private spaces. Public expressions of Ismaili Islam are no longer permitted, and the pursuit of Ismaili education abroad is banned (Roof-​Top.info 2023). Taken together, the persecution of Pamiris on political, ethnic 601

—​​​​ T i l l M o s t o w l a n s k y —​​​​

and religious grounds has consequences for how to read this chapter. While I am confident that my analysis of the coming together of two different models of diaspora still provides an accurate picture of social processes in the Pamirs, the relationship between Pamiris and global Ismaili networks is rapidly changing. How this change will play out exactly remains to be seen. However, as Pamiris continue to be under heavy assault by the Tajik state, both as ethnic and religious others, we will likely, and sadly, see more forced displacement, violence and the formation of new diasporic communities.

NOTE 1 Research for this chapter has been enabled by the Swiss National Science Foundation grants PZ00P1_​174163 and PCEFP1_​203319. At the Geneva Graduate Institute, I am indebted to my colleagues at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology as well as the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.

REFERENCES AKF. 1993. ‘Mission Report on the Medium Term Development of Gorno-​ Badakhshan.’ Geneva: Aga Khan Foundation. Akhtar, Iqbal. 2016. The Khoja of Tanzania: Discontinuities of a Postcolonial Religious Identity. Leiden: Brill. Al Hussaini, Noor Mawlana Shah Karim. 2009. Kalam-​e Imam-​e Zaman: Farmans 1957–​ 2009, Golden Edition. Canada: No publisher. Beben, Daniel. 2015. The Legendary Biographies Nasir-​i Khusraw: Memory and Textualization in Early Modern Persian Isma’ilism. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Indiana University. Beg, Qudratullah. 1967. Tarikh-​e-​tamir-​e-​Sentral Jama’at Khana-​ye Gilgit [The History of the Construction of the Central Jama’atkhana of Gilgit]. Baltit: no publisher. Bergne, Paul. 2007. The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and Origins of the Republic. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Bliss, Frank. 2006. Social and Economic Change in the Pamirs: Gorno-​Badakhshan, Tajikistan. London and New York: Routledge. Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. ‘The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1), 1–​19. Daftary, Farhad. 2007. The Ismaʼilis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dagiev, Dagikhudo. 2019. ‘Pamiri Ethnic Identity and Its Evolution in Post-​Soviet Tajikistan.’ In: Dagikhudo Dagiev and Carole Faucher (eds.). Identity, History and Trans-​Nationality in Central Asia: The Mountain Communities of Pamir. London and New York: Routledge, 23–​44. Devji, Faisal. 2009. ‘Preface.’ In: Marc van Grondelle. The Ismailis in the Colonial Era: Modernity, Empire and Islam. London: Hurst & Company, ix–​xvi. Dewji, Sahir. 2018. ‘The Aga Khan’s Discourse of Applied Pluralism: Converging the “Religious” and the “Secular”.’ Studies in Religions /​Sciences Religieuses 47(1), 78–​106. Epkenhans, Tim. 2016. The Origins of the Civil War in Tajikistan: Nationalism, Islamism, and Violent Conflict in Post-​Soviet Space. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Green, Nile. 2011. Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the Western Indian Ocean, 1840–​1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haqnazarov, Imomnazar. 2008. ‘Reflections: Critical Insights into the Realities of Life of the Ismaili Jamat and the Impact of the AKDN Institutions on the Economy of GBAO’ (edited and translated by Soultaniyoz Khojaniyozov).’ Unpublished report, Khorog.

602

—​​​​ I s m a i l i n e t w o r k s a n d Pa m i r i m i g r a t i o n —​​​​ Ho, Engseng. 2004. ‘Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: A View From the Other Boat.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 46(2), 210–​246. Keshavjee, Salmaan (2014). Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health. Oakland: University of California Press. Lashkariev, Amrisho. 2016. The Construction of Boundaries and Identity through Ritual Performance by a Small Ismaili Community of Gorno-​ Badakhshan. Bonn: Politischer Arbeitskreis Schulen e.V. Middleton, Robert. 2016. ‘History of the Development of the Pamir Region of Tajikistan (Gorno-​Badakhshan).’ In Mapping Transition in the Pamirs: Changing Human-​ Environmental Landscapes, 245–​65. Edited by Hermann Kreutzmann and Teiji Watanabe. Dordrecht: Springer. Mohammedi, Shezan. 2017. ‘Gifts from Amin’: The Resettlement, Integration, and Identities of Ugandan Asian Refugees in Canada. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Western Ontario. Mostowlansky, Till. 2017. Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mostowlansky, Till. 2018. ‘Development Institutions and Religious Networks in the Pamirian Borderlands.’ In: Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer and Alessandro Rippa (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. New York and London: Routledge, 385–​395. Mostowlansky, Till. 2019. ‘Faraway Siblings So Close: Ephemeral Conviviality across the Wakhan Divide.’ Modern Asian Studies 53(3), 943–​977. Mostowlansky, Till. 2020. ‘Humanitarian Affect: Islam, Aid and Emotional Impulse in Northern Pakistan.’ History and Anthropology 31(2), 236–​256. Mostowlansky, Till. 2022. ‘Dying Dreams in Tajikistan’s Global Borderland.’ Current History 121(837), 277–​282. Mukherjee, Soumen. 2017. Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nourzhanov, Kirill and Christian Bleuer. 2013. Tajikistan: A Political and Social History. Canberra: Australian National University EPress. Remtilla, Aliaa. 2012. Re-​Producing Social Relations: Political and Economic Change and Islam in Post-​ Soviet Tajik Ishkashim. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester. Roof-​Top.info. 2023. ‘What is Happening in Tajikistan?’ Roof-​Top.info. Accessed 6 March 2023: https://​wecha​nge.de/​proj​ect/​roof-​top-​info/​file/​bac​kgro​und-​info​rmat​ion-​on-​the-​situat​ ion-​in-​kh/​downl​oad/​Bac​kgro​und-​info​rmat​ion-​on-​the-​situat​ion-​in-​Khor​ugh.pdf Sahadeo, Jeff. 2012. ‘Soviet ‘Blacks’ and Place Making in Leningrad and Moscow.’ Slavic Review 71(2), 331–​358. Sahadeo, Jeff. 2016. ‘Black Snouts Go Home! Migration and Race in Late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow’ Journal of Modern History 88(4), 797–​826. Shah, Sultan Muhammad. 1954. The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time. London: Cassell and Company. Steinberg, Jonah. 2011. Ismaili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Tajddin Sadik Ali, Mumtaz Ali. 2001. ‘Voyage of Pir Sabzali in Central Asia.’ Ismaili.net. Accessed 28 April 2020: www.isma​ili.net/​herit​age/​node/​1627

603

PART IX

MATERIAL CULTURE, PERFORMANCE AND SKILL

This section delves into long-​standing anthropological interests around the arts and cultural production –​broadly understood. Although the six chapters cover a very wide range of creativity, from film production to crafting genealogies, they can only give a glimpse of the myriad ways of beautiful and meaningful craftsmanship in Central Asia. Astonishing arts such as miniature-​painting, fabulous carpet-​weaving, architecture and musical genres have long drawn interest in the region. Studies of material culture have remained a consistent, though now comparatively minor, interest for anthropologists. By contrast, perhaps remarkably, the newer generations of visual and media anthropology have not received a lot of attention. Cloé Drieu draws our attention to the beginnings of film-​making in Central Asia, focusing on a small, thriving, highly pressured and dangerous period of Uzbek film-​ making in the 1920s and 1930s. She describes how both ethnic Russian and Uzbek film-​directors made use of Soviet policies promoting the establishment of film in Central Asia, while at the same time treading the narrow (and sometimes impossible) path of permissibility in Soviet cultural production. Today, the ferment of these first films from Uzbek studios reflect a search for articulating local realities and identities, in relation to the Soviet nation-​building project. Where Cloé Drieu describes the establishment of a brand-​new form of creativity in the early twentieth century, Stephanie Bunn focuses on some of the oldest crafts cultivated in Central Asia: tent and textile making. Centre stage of the discussion is taken by the question of learning these skills and technologies, especially among (sometimes former) pastoralists. She describes how craftswomen in particular understand inter-​ generational teaching through forms of observation and apprenticeship, but also through inspired dreams. Gaining the skill to draw a beautiful felt carpet pattern, however, encompasses much more than technical proficiency. Craftspeople understand it as an ability connected to other practices, all born from an ethic that connects people and their natural surroundings in a harmonious, well-​balanced way. Though the historical context of urban guilds such as gold-​embroiderers in Central Asia might look quite different, Stephanie Bunn finds a common thread of considering craftsmanship a blessing and gift that needs to be looked after. Haruka Kikuta echoes both the family-​and guild-​context of production for textiles, and the political constraints of film-​making. How do Uzbek pottery masters negotiate DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-48

605

—​​​​ M a t e r i a l c u l t u r e , p e r f o r m a n c e a n d s k i l l —​​​​

their own sense of quality alongside Soviet and now tourist demands for ‘authenticity’ and new tastes? She documents both the changing labour practices and attempts to control forms of production and sales, from guilds to Soviet factories to contemporary craft associations. Haruka Kikuta shows how these developments correlate with changes in the forms and styles of pottery wares. A concern with giving the past its proper due is also foregrounded in Svetlana Jacquesson’s analysis of genealogies in Kyrgyzstan. She departs from the fascination of post-​Soviet citizens and political analysts alike with ‘clan-​based politics’, while also arguing against the assertion by many anthropologists that descent groups do not matter that much, in public life. In this chapter, Svetlana Jacquesson describes how widespread concern for (re-​) learning patrilineal descent lines has given clan organisations a special place as heritage custodians. These groups work to codify genealogical knowledge in hundreds of publications, events and monuments that promote a heightened clan identity. They also make efforts to ‘sanitise’ clan histories and gatherings, downplaying inter-​group rivalries and advocating ethno-​national harmony. If Kyrgyz ethnic heritage is experiencing a decided upswing, Ildikó Bellér-​Hann traces a much less buoyant trajectory for Uyghur history-​writing in Xinjiang. Since the drastic recent suppression of most forms of Uyghur cultural production, local histories such as ‘The Watchtowers of Qumul’ have become even more important points of ‘meta-​heritage’ in Uyghur frames of interpreting their past and present. The analysis traces how local historians –​sometimes obliquely –​discuss Islam, ideas of self-​defence, heroism and social justice. Nathan Light takes up another important thread of Uyghur cultural production with the muqam song and music genre. As in the case of pottery and films in Uzbekistan, state policies strongly shape cultural output: in this case, PRC messaging on the deep continuity of the Chinese state, harmoniously embracing minority cultures. Muqam as separated from a pan-​Turkic or pan-​Islamic tradition is permissible and supported, experiencing a reformulation as a kind of ‘ideologically disciplined collective property’ (Light, this volume). Despite these enduring attempts to ‘fix’ the meaning of muqam, it remains a flexible practice open to interpretative arguments between officials, scholars and performers. Encompassing literature, music, textiles, pottery, film, oral and written history-​ making, the chapters in this section clearly reflect a fast-​evolving field of performance and making. It is striking how tenaciously skills are safeguarded and adapted in line with Central Asian ideas of meaningful and precious art forms, even under the most repressive and controlling conditions.

606

CHAPTER FORTY

UZBEK CINEMA AS A LENS ON EARLY SOVIET STATE-​ AND NATION-​B UILDING Cloé Drieu Anthropologists and political scientists have rarely taken fiction films as a subject of research, preferring to produce documentary and ethnographic films, or, more recently, to analyse short videos taken by anonymous people on mobile phones during the recent revolts in the Arab and Muslim world and widely disseminated on the internet (see, for instance, Boëx 2014). Long-​length feature fiction films have constituted a field often worked on by cultural studies specialists or historians, mainly from the perspectives of cinema historic and aesthetic analysis, relying on a well-​tested methodology. As far as Soviet cinema is concerned, film studies are mostly based on classic titles or major cinematographers with undeniable artistic qualities or skills, such as S. Eisenstein, V. Poudovkin, or Dziga Vertov, for instance. This leaves aside middle-​ brow fiction films, which quantitatively represents the major part of film production, often created by film-​makers who did not fully master cinematographic techniques. As I will show in this chapter through the example of early Soviet Uzbekistan, this type of film is however worth our attention, especially in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. I here focus on the example of the nascent film industry of the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet Uzbekistan.1 Fourteen long-​feature films were produced between 1924 and 1937, including valuable films by Uzbek film-​makers such as Nabi Ganiev and Suleyman Khojaev, as well as by cinematographers from Soviet Russia. These films were of diverse quality, including two or three great films, along with ones of low narrative and artistic quality. The example of Uzbekistan is unique in Central Asia, since in the other republics, the first generations of native film-​makers came onto the scene only later –​during or after the Second World War. How do films bear witness to a tragic history? From the beginning, Soviet films –​ henceforth Uzbek ones –​were meant to serve political power and the modernisation process. In the early twentieth century, whether for Moscow, Tashkent, or Samarkand, cinema was conceived as a symbol and an agent of modernity and political education, as much by ideologues of the Bolshevik regime such as Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky, and to a lesser extent, the Jadid Muslim reformists of Turkestan.2 This original perspective led to the progressive formation, in the 1920s and 1930s, of a strong system of ideological constraints and censorship but, by the same token, a system that financed film production and diffusion with a state-​centralised institutions and a more or less well-​developed network of distribution and cinema theatres. Indeed, it is crucial DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-49

607

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​

to comprehend fiction films as a product of an entire collective social and political system; the relationship between Moscow and a peripheral republic like the Uzbek SSR was also a key factor and a specificity of the Soviet Union. Analysing the system of film production sheds light on the way a central domination was imposed. As the French historian Marc Ferro has observed, ‘even when under surveillance, film bears witness’ (1993: 39), but I argue further that especially when under surveillance, film bears witness. To embrace all the peculiarities of the Soviet system of the 1920s and 1930s through Uzbek films, classic narrative analysis of the film (plot structure, motifs used, cutting techniques …) must be combined with both an in-​depth study of the context, in which films were produced thanks to an extensive reading of archival material, as well as a study of their reception, relying mostly on the press and the minutes/​the reports/​the transcripts of censorship committees. These three levels of analysis (roughly speaking: production, filmic discourse, reception) and the links between them constitute what I propose to call the fait cinématographique (‘cinematographic fact’) –​derived from Marcel Mauss’ concept of ‘total social fact’3 –​ which is dynamic in its structure. Cinema reflects and creates both a social and a political reality (see Drieu 2019: 13–​19). It involves a chain of agents ranging from the most important down to the most insignificant, taking in central or national bodies commissioning the film down to mere extras, and including indigenous and non-​indigenous artists, administrative staff, and, finally, the public. This perspective is not very common, since Soviet film studies focus often on analysing the plot, filmic aesthetic and artistic influences, mostly because there are no sources on the production or reception, or no easy access to them. Long-​feature films analysed in context are a perfect object to examine state-​building and nation-​building, and the socio-​political history of Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s. Such an analysis provides a precise radiography of the scale and the stages of the transformations that occurred in Central Asia during this peculiar period.4 The current Central Asian nation-​states rose from the ashes of the colonial system established in the mid-​nineteenth century. The Soviet nationalities policy, based on the delimitation of administrative boundaries, development of national state structures and promotion of national cultures (languages, music, theatre, literature, cinema), was working at full speed in the 1920s and 1930s and radically transformed national identities, through a massive and violent process of modernisation (sedentarisation, collectivisation).5 The Soviet Stalinist state had been consolidated by the end of the 1930s, centralised and fully ideologised, at least in the public space. The interwar period was crucial, a key moment in the formation of Central Asian nations and states that has left traces remaining to this day. Cinema renders these developments perfectly.

CINEMA TO UNVEIL THE FORMATION OF SOVIET IMPERIAL STATE STRUCTURE In these past decades, a dynamic debate on the nature of the Soviet state has been led among historians to comprehend it, beyond its constitutional legal forms. Concepts of ‘federation’, ‘multinational federation’, or ‘nation-​state’ are of little use to understand how the Soviet system actually functioned in the interwar period (see, further, 608

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​

Lirou 2009). The notion of ‘empire’, currently much in vogue, characterises a set of power practices that could be easily applied to the Soviet case. Up until the 1990s, deprecatory connotations associated with the term empire –​in reference to the European colonial empires, mostly French and British –​were applied to the USSR to denounce and delegitimise a form of domination.6 With the opening of the archives and resultant work that has emerged over the past twenty years, the history of Soviet Union and Central Asia began to look far more complicated, and the concept of empire has been used in a more neutral manner. Some historians have put forward a definition of empire applied specifically to the Soviet case,7 but the work that probably offered the best insight into my personal understanding of empire was the introduction of the collective book edited by Maurice Duverger (1980, 7–​21). Drawing on these works, I propose to define empire in its Soviet version, as a state possessing a vast, multinational territory, with centralised administration and communication; moreover, a personalised power (in Stalinist times) tended to impose, unilaterally and hierarchically, a system which, though universal in intent, was rooted in national differentiation between cultures (Drieu 2019, 123–​124). Cinematographic activity can provide concrete examples to better understand the construction of the Soviet imperial system and how it functioned. The shift toward an imperial state structure at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s can be understood through three different angles in cinema. The first is the process of economic and institutional centralisation of the film industry, while central power imposed its own vision and planning with the creation of ‘Soiuzkino’, a supra-​ national body which regulated film production at the Soviet scale (i.e., economic unification). The second angle concerns the political ‘cleansings’ that tightened the ideological control of the centre over the staff’s political consciousness in all Soviet film studios and organisations (i.e., ideological unification). The third one comprises more material questions, such as the expansion of projection facilities (film distribution, construction of cinema theatres, mobile equipment), that offer a better network for the ideology to be disseminated over the Soviet territory. The whole process of economic and ideological hyper-​centralisation achieved in the 1930s catalysed the progressive disappearance of national and territorial autonomies that were obtained in the early 1920s, after the collapse of the Russian empire, the February and October revolutions and the civil wars. With the passing of years, the multilateral and mutual relationship between the centre and the periphery became one way (from the centre exclusively to the periphery) (Drieu 2019, 123–​157). Since it is not possible to go into detail here regarding this three-​angled process of subordination, I will focus on the institutional and economic centralisation of cinematographic activities from 1924 –​ with the ethno-​territorial delimitation of Uzbekistan –​until the centralisation of 1930, fully achieved in 1934. Soviet institutional and economic history often seems dry, with a multitude of departments and organisations, creations and dissolutions, that structured, destructured and restructured the cinematographic field over time. This history, as reflected in the archives of Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros), film studio (Uzbekfilm) and film organisation (Uzbekkino) were consulted and perfectly reflect this process.8 Film activity in Central Asia was in its infancy during the civil war until the beginning of the year 1924, when the first film studio ever established named Bukhkino was created in Bukhara (Bukharan Republic or BNRS9), at the initiative of the Bukharan 609

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​

government (Bratoliubov 1976, 99).10 The first fiction film, Minaret of Death, by V. Viskovskii, a de-​politised Oriental adventurous romance complete with harem, belly dancing and snake performances, was produced and rapidly released. It became a huge success, both in the USSR and abroad.11 The Bukharan film studio only ever released this one film. At the end of 1924, with the birth of Soviet Uzbekistan that integrated the Bukharan Republic (BNRS), a new film organisation called Uzbekkino was created. It absorbed all the small and localised film structures (distribution bureaus, film or photography departments) that had existed before. The following period –​a short one, but dynamic and enthusiastic –​gave birth to a truly national and territorially based cinema. Indeed, until 1928, Uzbekistan (especially Sovnarkom and Narkompros) had full control of its film policy and enjoyed a true cultural autonomy. Uzbek authorities themselves determined the subject of the films, as well as financing, distribution and censorship according to the will of local institutions. Uzbekistan’s territorial and cultural independence was also preserved between 1924 and 1928, when Uzbekkino refused to join an all-​Soviet republics organisation (called Vostokkino), that gathered several cinema departments in Soviet autonomous republics and administrative territories from Siberia and Caucasus (Chomentowski 2016). In the Uzbek SSR Uzbekkino was responsible for distribution and exploitation, and the film studio ‘Star of the Orient’ (Sharq Iulduzi) for film production. The working conditions were hectic, since film studios were located in the old madrassa of Sheykhantaur in Tashkent, where electricity provision was problematic (see Figure 40.1).12 Nevertheless, nine feature films were made and distributed between 1924/​25 and 1928, when financial difficulties and incompetent accounting emerged. This bad economic situation led to the studios’ activities being suspended (konservatsiia) from January to April 1929 with staff finding themselves unemployed. Failure to produce any films meant there was no income to reinvest in film production.13 With this debacle, the degree of cultural autonomy acquired on a national and territorial basis continued to decline. However, for Moscow, the cultural autonomy of the peripheral republics such as Uzbekistan was never meant to last. The political aim to achieve central and total control over the Soviet peripheries was clear as early as September 1922, but it took time to be implemented. As Stalin then wrote in a letter to Lenin, ‘the peripheries must in general submit incontestably to the centre … ’ (Gatagova 2005, 78). Ten years later, this ambition was largely realised. Along with the Cultural Revolution and the first Five-​Year Plan (1928–​32), several restructurings occurred in the field of cinema, such as the creation of Soiuzkino, a Soviet supra-​national film organisation. Founded in February 1930, Soiuzkino began to centralise all Soviet film activity under the supervision of the Supreme Economic Council (Kepley 1996). It provided unified commercial, economic and financial management for a short period, while still leaving ideological management to the national republics’ Commissariats for Education, before finally controlling it. At the beginning of the 1930s, Soiuzkino headed all the film organisations of the Soviet republics, including Uzbek SSR; Soiuzkino conducted planning at the USSR level, regulating production activities and investments (studios, network of film theatres, etc.). It was henceforth the only organisation allowed to enter into bilateral contacts, preventing Uzbekkino from directly exporting its films abroad. This step meant that national republics had virtually lost all their autonomy. 610

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​

Figure 40.1  Shaykhantaur medresseh, transformed into a film studio. UzRKSOKh 0-​77376 (i.e., Republic of Uzbekistan Central State Archives for cinematographic, photographic and phonographic documents //​Uzbekiston Respublikasi Kino, Surat va Ovozli Khujjatlar or UzRKSOKh).

To fully understand this process of a centralised subordination, it is important to ask how the Uzbek authorities reacted to economic centralisation. They were not actually opposed to this process in principle, and accepted certain forms of delegating authority, especially because the Uzbek film industry was going through a difficult economic situation. However, their attitude was inspired by their federal conception of the Soviet state. If ‘subordination’ could procure certain advantages, such as resources and economies of scale, Uzbek authorities believed they could retain some degree of representation and room for manoeuvre. Setting up a central unified body such as Soiuzkino was considered ‘rational and a necessary step’. Decision-​makers in the Uzbek SSR emphasised how important it was for the Republic to be able to defend its interests and conserve its national prerogatives with a right of veto on the Soiuzkino management board.14 Unfortunately, there was no real possibility to negotiate further, since with the 1928 freezing of the Uzbek studios, Uzbek authorities had no more impact on the Soviet film market. Institutional and administrative transformations were taken a step further with the second Five-​Year Plan, which definitively introduced an integrated economic system, that was thus not viable on a national scale.15 Moscow’s conception of the state (economic and strictly centralised and hierarchical) was considered interventionist and regulatory by Uzbek authorities. This ‘operative misunderstanding’ on the nature of the federal state generated pronounced tensions that profoundly affected the structure of the empire. This was 611

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​

the political and institutional context in which the first generation of Uzbek film-​ makers took hold of the camera.

FROM COLONIAL TO NATIONALIST CINEMA The lens of film-​ making reveals the institutional and economic mechanisms deployed by the Soviet centre to dominate the Uzbek periphery. But this dominance was not only structural and institutional, it was also the result of the struggle over symbols and representations. Here, a more precise focus on filmic analysis enlightens the socio-​political imaginaries: it provides information about the symbolic elements constitutive of collective identities at a time when national and nationalist discourses were particularly prevalent. It allows us to understand the way symbolic dominance had been developing, and to emphasise genuine agency of the periphery to retain its autonomy in order to represent itself on screen. ‘Nation’, ‘policy of nationalities’ and ‘national identity’ are key issues in respect with political imaginaries and the history of Central Asia, especially in the 1920s and the 1930s (see Bregel 1996; Martin 2001; Hirsch 2000; Haugen 2003; Suny and Martin 2001; Khalid 2015). If discussion on such social sciences issues as ‘identity’ may sometimes seem trite, it is however relevant in the case of the region under consideration, a former colonial province named Turkestan before 1917, where populations were categorised by the state, but perceived themselves differently on the ground through local interactions. Present-​day ethnonyms such as Tajiks, Uzbeks and others were not in use at that time (see Baldauf 1991; Cadiot 2007; Hirsch 2005). They are historical constructs implemented by state policies in the 1920s. I propose to discuss these through films. Until 1928, films produced in the Uzbek SSR had a lot in common with the ones produced in a colonial context, a category already well studied in the French and British literature and cinema (for instance, Memmi 1985; Benali 1998; O’Brien 1997). Invited by the Uzbek cinema organisation Uzbekkino (since there was no local cinematographic elite), the film-​makers who directed films in the 1920s were coming from Soviet Russia. They were trained during the late imperial-​to-​early Soviet period and continued conveying their own imaginary about Central Asia. Film plots were supposed to take place in the region, but without any realism; what was depicted was more an Orient as an imaginary territory, disconnected from its own specific social, human and historical reality (Drieu 2019, 54–​66). Films were colonial in their representations, either exotic and orientalist, as in Minaret of Death or The Muslim Women (D. Bassalygo 1925), or integrating the new Soviet codes but still perpetuating a colonial-​type discourse, emphasising a kind of Russo-​Soviet ‘civilising’ mission, such as in the films From Under the Vaults of the Mosque (K. Gertel 1927) or The Leper (O. Frelikh 1928). These films stigmatised the indigenous populations and their way of life; native populations were merely ‘part of the decor’, embodying immobilism stretching back through the centuries to the Middle Ages. They were depicted as dangerous and unsavoury, dehumanised and animalised, or characterised by their bestiality and aggressiveness, awakening fear and suspicion (Drieu 2019, 66–​82). In respect to the situation examined in the first part of this chapter on state structure, this phase of film production seemed contradictory: whilst the production system rested on cultural national autonomous bases, it produced, however, colonial-​type 612

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​

films, delegitimising any role of the native population in the Soviet interwar history the films represented. However, colonial representations emerged only during a short period, until The Jackals of Ravat by K. Gertel’ (1928), that marked a turning point and a shift toward a true national cinema. Filmic representations were rapidly decolonised, thanks to the ‘nativisation’ of the staff (scriptwriter, actors and later film-​makers), a better collaboration with what was called ‘ethnographic consultants’, a crucial element in this process. Some consideration should be made here regarding the category of ‘national cinema’, something that could be determined according to the nationality of the film-​maker and crew members,16 though not exclusively. Although the director was not local, The Jackals of Ravat was however considered the ‘first Uzbek national film’ (uzbekning tungghach kartinkasi) for different reasons –​the authenticity of the representation being a critical component, as underlined by the press.17 Thanks to a majority of Uzbek actors –​but not yet actresses, Uzbek women were still played by Russians –​ The Jackals of Ravat was perceived as a good collaboration between an outside-​based crew and the Uzbek authorities, a story rooted in local traditions and customs; the audience saw and recognised itself on the screen, for the very first time since the birth of film production in Uzbekistan: When people started talking about the Uzbekkino production The Jackals of Ravat, coming out on screen, I very much wanted to go and see it but I had doubts … Because the experience of the previous years had more than once turned out to be right. So, I went to see The Jackals of Ravat with doubt and anxiety. But I did not regret it … I saw the dishonest bai, the poor peasant, Karamat-​bibi, the domla-​imam, Saqyq, Jalil, luxurious ceremonies, the poor landless peasant who, lacking class consciousness, is abused by the Basmachis and joins the ranks of the jackals … And I don’t know what the impression of most Europeans was when this film was screened or what they understood, but every Uzbek was delighted and appreciated this screening. A. Qodiri, « Râvât qâshqirlâri », Qizil Uzbekiston, 28 April 1927 Public validation of the filmic representation as ‘Uzbek’ was a fundamental criterion. Other films produced at this period supported women’s emancipation campaigns or anti-​religious propaganda, and strengthened the national character of Uzbek film industry (Drieu 2019: 96–​122). Understanding this phase and the change from colonial to national representations in films also fuels the debate over the paradigm of coloniality, endorsing Slezkine (2000) and Khalid’s (2006) viewpoints, for whom it is not readily applicable to Soviet Central Asia.18 The next stage of nationalist cinema (1928–​35) took place in the context of the centralisation described above, when Nabi Ganiev (1904–​54) and Suleyman Khojaev (1892–​1937), the first Uzbek film-​makers, had started to direct films. Ganiev never joined the Communist Party, but he is still nowadays unanimously recognized as the founding father of Uzbek national cinema.19 As for Khojaev, he was a former Muslim reformist (jadid), who joined the Communist Party after the February Revolution and took an active part in the modernisation policies of the new-​born Soviet state. He made only one film on the 1916 uprisings,20 that was banned from the screen and led to his imprisonment. He was sentenced to death during the Stalinist terror (1937–​38). 613

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​

Although these two biographies seem very different, both men made films that can be categorised as ‘nationalist’, giving way to a more exclusive and defensive image of their national community, one particularly defiant of the Russians. The nationalist character of their film was determined in respect with the cinematographic representation, and the resistance deployed in the interstices of the filmic discourse or during the production process.21 Ganiev, for instance, used in Upsurge (1931) all the positive Soviet stereotypes of Socialist Realism about production (Stakhanovites, socialist emulation, output records, the ‘friendship of people’ atmosphere in the factory, etc.), by the same token, criticising laziness, sabotage and traitors. But on closer inspection, more hidden anti-​ Russian and anti-​Bolshevik stances emerge: Russian workers were only depicted as drunkards, lazy and spoiling the production pace, while the only native political orator that ‘speaks Bolshevik’ was made an object of ridicule. Native Uzbek workers, on the other hand, were dynamic, efficient and favoured gender equality. The true proletariat was Uzbek and Ganiev insisted on the hierarchy that subverted the stereotypes of political guides being solely of Russian origin. In contrast to Ganiev, Khojaev chose a nostalgic register for his only long feature film Before Dawn (Khojaev 1934) achieved in 1934 and anchored in the late colonial past with a theme on 1916 uprisings.22 The film was supposed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Uzbek SSR and in doing so, Khojaev sought to contribute on screen to the first founding myth used in the 1920s and early 1930s to legitimise the Soviet state in its Central Asian margins. Set in 1916, the plot follows the life of two peasants (a son named Qadyr and his father Batyr), who could not handle the economic difficulties and the Russian-​colonial exploitation, that eventually lead to Batyr’s death and Qadyr’s revolt. But the subject as well as the film treatment were too ambiguous: denouncing Russian colonial domination could be read as a critic of the Soviet way of power as it was often the case in literature.23 On the one hand, he opted for the form of historical reconstitution that recalled Muslim reformist literary heritage and that resorted to fiction to spread political ideas (Dudoignon 2002). On the other hand, like Ganiev, Khojaev failed in demonstrating the ‘proletarian solidarity’ between Russians and Uzbeks, an aspect of the film which came in for extensive criticism: it was directed primarily against the ‘nationalist’ character of the film, the ‘bourgeois interpretation’ of the revolts; the Repertoire Committee of Soviet Russia underlined Khojaev’s ‘inability to make the ideological transition between the movement of the 1916 revolts and the October Revolution and deplored that the ‘ideological desire to show the birth of class consciousness of the forgotten people during the period of the tsarist regime resulted in … an adventurous undertaking even.’24 His filmic discourse totally denied a ‘revolutionary paternity’ to either Russia or the Russians, as the main character Qadyr was the only one to symbolise the revolt against the established colonial order. Qadyr, with whom the spectator was identified on several occasions thanks to film editing techniques (mostly objective camera), was a non-​hero, a low-​status seasonal worker, who pointed to a social colonial reality made up of unemployment and pauperisation, until he rebelled at the very end of the film; the last sequence showed him at the head of a crowd of men and women (Khojaev 1934: 79). Qadyr embodied a successful revolt and the long-​lasting birth of a leader without any Russian intercession. Khojaev had appropriated class discourse, that he placed at the service of pan-​Turkestani national liberation. The film 614

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​

was censored, and Khojaev was convicted for nationalism and sent to prison in 1934 before being shot in 1937 (Akbarov 2005: 54). Ganiev was also put in jail but was released during the Great Patriotic war. In the framework of film production that I am analysing from the start in this chapter, the symbolic violence and domination reached a peak in 1937, of course along with Red Terror that killed about 1 million Soviet people (Werth 2006). An analysis of The Oath by Usol’tsev-​Garf (1937) shows perfectly this peculiar moment, when Uzbek films turned talking, whereas no more native film-​makers were longer available. The production was full of obstacles and delays, hate and tensions between professional newcomers from Soviet Russia and the local Uzbek staff, as evidenced in numerous letters and articles of denunciation and insults, published in the most widespread newspapers Pravda Vostoka and Komsomolets Uzbekistana (Drieu 2019, 204–​225). A re-​written script by the Russian crew was, for example, imposed with violence, as it implied a Russian Bolshevik as central and the hero of the plot, a character who had not appeared in the first version written by Uzbek scriptwriters; while the newly purchased sound-​technical equipment was destroyed in an ‘accidental fire’.25 Surprisingly enough, these vivid tensions were not reflected on screen: the hero named Andrei Kravtsov, represented as a Christ-​like and sacrificial figure, endured many sufferings for the happiness of the Uzbek people, as he helped its rural population to implement agrarian reforms and to build Socialism.26 The mismatch between the representation of sovereign power (The Oath) and its reality (Stalinist terror) was inordinate in scale. In the film, the Bolshevik Kravtsov sacrificed himself for the good of the Uzbek people and, by patience and compassion, trained a group of what could be called ‘national disciples’, whereas in fact the main architects of Soviet power in Uzbekistan and much of its intellectual elite –​along with several thousand anonymous people –​were arrested and shot. The Oath met a genuine political success. Presented in Moscow during the decade of Uzbek art (May 1937), the film was saluted by officials and press. Vecherniaia Moskva underlined for instance the cinematic mastery of the film-​maker in the scenes depicting the popular celebration of Soviet land reforms praised in the film, and in those showing ‘the strong and unalterable friendship between the peasants and the Russian Bolshevik’.27 Film distribution was huge: 150 copies were released in Uzbekistan alone, with 300 copies distributed in total for the entire USSR.28 The Oath was the quintessence of cultural Stalinism,29 consecrating both Socialist Realism and the dictum of ‘national in form, proletarian in content’.30

CONCLUSION Cinema nourishes and refines debates of social sciences, those in particular that have been animating the field of Soviet and Central Asian studies these past post-​Soviet decades, namely the concepts of empire, nation or national culture, as well as the idea of identity or the paradigm of coloniality. Fiction films were examined in this chapter as source and an object of history. The fait cinématographique had been explored chronologically, and allowed apprehending the structure within which films were produced, but also the representations they conveyed. Uzbek SSR benefited from cultural autonomy and had the entire command of its film policy, until 1931 and the process of centralisation of the cinema activities. As far as the representations are 615

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​

concerned, colonial-​type ones produced in the films made between 1924 and 1928, such as The Minaret of the Death, Under the Vaults of the Mosque or The Leper, gave way to representations that were national in kind with The Ravat of Jackals (1928–​ 1931), before becoming nationalist in the beginning of 1930s until 1934 with Upsurge and Before Dawn, while the Soviet film industry became centralised. Representations eventually turned totalitarian in 1937 with The Oath, when Uzbekistan was denied any possibility of cinematographic self-​representation.

NOTES 1 Or Uzbek Socialist Soviet Republic (SSR), one of the 15 republics that formed Soviet Union. 2 For the first discourses on cinema as a means for propaganda, mass education and communication with the multilingual and illiterate populations of USSR, see Youngblood (1991), Laurent (2000 and 2003), Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh (1993), Kenez (1972). In Central Asia (Turkestan at that time), Mahmudhoja Behbudi wrote about theatre as a mirror image of society faults that could help it improving, M. Behbudi, ‘Teatr nadur?’, Oiina, 10 May 1914; Mirmuhsin described film theater as a place for ‘edification’ (dar al ibrat), Mirmuhsin, ‘Bizlar ham ‘ibrat alailuk,’ Turkiston Vilayatining Gazetasi, 27 July 1914. 3 Representing human society in miniature, cinema is an object where ‘all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time’, see Mauss (2004, 147). More conceptual works were of great advantages, such as Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (2010), who studied the large-​scale interactions between different actors and agents in the fields of art, as well as the works by the ethno-​musicologist Jean-​Jacques Nattiez (1974) on ‘tripartite semiological division’. 4 I spent about ten years studying it, with long fieldworks in the Uzbek State Archive (UzRMDA), Film State Archive (Gosfilmofond or GFF), Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Russian State Archives of of Socio-​Political History (RGASPI), located in Moscow. 5 Some examples on nationalities policy, see Martin (2001), Hirsch (2000 and 2005), on violent modernisation, see Ohayon (2006), on national identities see Khalid (1998 and 2015) or Haugen (2003). 6 See the works in Western languages of a fairly liberal, conservative and anti-​Soviet bent with parts about Central Asia such as Caroe (1953), Kolarz (1952), Conquest (1986), and Pipes (1954). Using the expression ‘Soviet empire’ is also a way of implying that it was soon to collapse (Beissinger 2006). For a longer discussion on anti-​imperialist discourses made by the first Bolsheviks, first and foremost Lenin and later Stalin (see Drieu: 2019, 8–​13). 7 As a starting point for defining the concept, see Doyle (1986) and Motyl (2001). For Suny (2001, 25), empire is ‘a particular form of domination or control between two units set apart in a hierarchical, inequitable relationship, more precisely a composite state in which a metropole dominates a periphery to the disadvantage of the periphery’. Blitstein (2006, 197–​219) suggests to think in terms of state structures and comparison with the functioning of nation-​state, while Beissinger (2006, 155) and Martin (2002, 105), rather than focusing on objective power structures, insist on the advantages of a subjective approach, based on how State policies are perceived). 8 I will use hence after the expression ‘Uzbek authorities’ not to bother too much the reader with the complexity of Soviet States departments. 9 On the history of The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic or BNSR, see Khalid 2010. 10 BNSR (Bukharskaia Narodnaia Sovetskaia Respublika) is the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, which existed from 1920 to 1924, with the old town of Bukhara as its capital. 616

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​ 11 The commercial success of the film was notable. It was fifth in the 1928 ranking of Soviet films by foreign sales behind Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. In November 1927, the film was sold to 14 countries, including Germany, Austria, Romania and numerous Latin American countries (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, etc.), E. Kaufman, ‘Nashi kino-​fil’my za granitsei’, Vecherniaia Moskva, 1 June 1928 and E. Kaufman, ‘Sovietskaia kartina na vneshnem rynke’, Kino-​front, no. 6, 15 April 1927. 12 The electricity supply for instance depended on tramways; the laboratory was operational only between midnight and six in the morning. 13 UzRMDA 94/​5/​334 pp. 67, 73. 14 UzRMDA 89/​1/​285 pp. 37, 77–​78; UzRMDA 837/​9/​695 p. 58; Sovnarkom decision taken 4 August 1930, UzRMDA 837/​16/​109 p. 130. 15 Setting up the State Directorate for the Film and Photo Industry (GUKF) to replace Soiuzkino (USSR Sovnarkom decree of 11 February 1933). This decision was validated in Uzbekistan in May 1933, and the Uzbekistan Directorate for the Film Industry was created UzRMDA 837/​11/​819 p. 101; UzRMDA 837/​11/​824 p. 41. It comprised two distinct entities: Uzbekfilm (film production) and Uzbekkino (distribution and network of film theatres) that were no longer run by a national Uzbek higher authority, but by distinct Soviet directorates. This split between production and distribution meant the film industry was henceforth no longer viable. 16 See, for instance, the system used in the association Europas Cinema based in France –​for which I had been working two years –​that established a formula of 19 points, according to different criteria (nationality of the film-​maker, scriptwriter, main actors, etc.: https://​www. eur​opa-​cine​mas.org/​activi​tes/​Aides_​et_​S​outi​ens/​souti​ens-​fin​anci​ers-​aux-​cine​mas (especially point D) 17 See the critiques by two Uzbek writers, A. Qodiri, ‘Râvât qâshqirlâri’, Qizil Uzbekiston, 28 April 1927; Said Ziia, ‘Râvât qâshqirlâri’ uzbikning tungghach kartinkkasi’, Qizil Uzbekiston, 20 April 1927, p. 3. 18 Slezkine (2000) and Khalid (2006) brought three main reasons to refute colonialism: (1) even if many similarities exist in economics and demographics (Vichnevski 1995), the nature of the Soviet State, and the extent of its interventionism and policies uniformly implemented throughout Soviet territory, are more suggestive of a comparison with the policies of a State such as Kemalist Turkey than with those pursued by the French or British governments regarding their colonies (Khalid 2006; Edgar 2006); (2) all ‘Soviet subjects’, irrespective of their republic, enjoyed equal rights and were equal citizens of the same State, albeit of distinct nationality (no radical racial alterity); (3) colonialism is underpinned by the supremacy of a people regarded as imperial and entrusted with a mission, and this is only partially analogous to the Soviet system, for proportionately the Russians were the main victims of their ‘own’ system of domination. Marc Ferro also argues that the idea of colonialism can be applied to the Russian empire, but not to the USSR (Ferro 2003, 75–​ 80). Several authors are more dubious, such as Hirsch (2005) and Northrop (2004). 19 Takhir and Zukhra (1945) is a classic; see Khudonazar (2014, 201–​227). 20 The uprisings occurred after the Tsar and his military staff decided, in June and July 1916, to form Central Asian populations into labour battalions. The event was used by the Soviet power in the 1920 and mid-​1930s as a founding myth, merging anti-​imperial and anti-​colonial aspirations with Russian anti-​tsarist ones. On the history of the revolts, see Chokobaeva et al. (2019), and on historiography, see Drieu 2014. 21 Scott’s (1990) ideas of ‘public transcript’ and ‘hidden transcript’ were particularly appropriate to track down some hidden shots (plan in French) that could be revealed thanks to a meticulous filmic analysis (plan by plan), especially for Ganiev’s films like Upsurge (1931), Ramazan (1932) and Jigit (1934). For full analysis, see Drieu (2019, 164–​180). 22 For full analysis of Before Dawn, see Drieu (2019, 180–​198). 617

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​ 23 For examples in literature, see Lyons (2001 and 2003). 24 Pravda Vostoka, 11 September 1933 and 28 February 1934, GFF 1/​2/​1/​933. 25 ‘Proisshestviia, pozhar na kinofrabrike’, Pravda Vostoka, 27 March 1936. 26 Despite political atheism, religious elements (taken from Christianity and Islam) were deployed in the film to spread Bolshevik ideas in the eyes of the Muslim population. On that matter, see Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh (1993), Drieu (2010 and 2019). 27 L. Vaks, ‘Kliatva’, Vecherniaia Moskva, 27 May 1937. 28 ‘Ogromnyi uspekh “Kliatva” ’, Pravda Vostoka, 15 July 1937; ‘ “Kliatva’ na ekranakh Moskvy i Tashkenta’, Pravda Vostoka, 29 July 1937. 29 Defined as a ‘cultural monologism’ based on a unique, unitary, vertical, hierarchical practice (Robin: 1986, 20). 30 A slogan that had been approved in the resolutions of the 16th Congress of the All-​Union Communist Party (27 June 1930), but first pronounced by Stalin on 18 May 1925 in a speech delivered at a student meeting at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, Stalin, ‘O politicheskikh zadachakh Universiteta Narodov Vostoka’, Pravda, 22 May 1925.

REFERENCES Akbarov, Hamidulla, Kino san’ati tarikhi, Tachkent, Toshkent islom universiteti, 2005. Baldauf, Ingeborg, ‘Some Thoughts on the Making of the Uzbek Nation,’ Cahiers du monde russe, 32 (1), 1991, pp.79–​96. Becker, Howard, Les Mondes de l’art, Paris, Flammarion, 2010. Beissinger, Mark R., ‘Soviet Empire as “Family Resemblance”,’ Slavic Review, 65 (2), 2006, pp. 294–​303. Benali, Abdelkader, Le Cinéma colonial du Maghreb, Paris, Cerf, 1998. Blitstein, Peter, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet nationality policy in its comparative context,’ Slavic Review, 65 (2), 2006, pp. 273–​293. Boëx, Cécile, Cinéma et politique en Syrie: Ecritures cinématographiques de la contestation en régime autoritaire, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014. Bratoliubov, Sergei, Na zare sovetskoi kinematografii, Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1976. Bregel, Yuri, ‘Notes on the Study of Central Asia,’ Papers on Inner Asia, 28, 1996. Cadiot, Juliette, Le laboratoire impérial, Russie–​URSS (1860–​1940), Paris, CNRS Editions, 2007. Caroe, Sir Olaf, Soviet Empire: the Turks on Central Asia and Stalinism, London and New York, Macmillan, 1953. Chokobaeva, Aminat, Drieu, Cloé and Morisson, Alexander (eds.), The 1916 Central Asian Revolt. Rethinking the History of a Collapsing Empire in the age of War and Revolution, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019. Chomentowski, Gabrielle, Filmer l’Orient: politique des nationalités et cinéma en Union soviétique 1917–​1938, Paris, Petra, 2016. Conquest, Robert (ed.), The Last Empire, Nationality and the Soviet Future, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution Press, 1986. Drieu, Cloé, ‘Cinema, Local Power and the Central State: Agencies in Early anti-​religious propaganda in Uzbekistan,’ Die Welt des Islams, 50 (2010), pp. 532–​558. —​—​—​,‘L’impact de la Première Guerre mondiale en Asie centrale: des révoltes de 1916 aux enjeux politiques et scientifiques de leur historiographie,’ Histoire@politique, Jan.–​ Apr. 2014. —​—​—​, Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan (1919–​ 1937), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2019. 618

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​ Doyle, Michael W., Empires, Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1986. Dudoignon, Stéphane A., ‘Islam et nationalisme en Asie centrale au début de la période soviétique (1924–​ 1937). L’exemple de l’Ouzbékistan à travers quelques sources littéraires,’ Revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée, 95-​96-​97-​98, 2002, pp. 127–​165. Duverger, Maurice (dir.), Le concept d’empire, Paris, PUF, 1980. Edgar, Adrienne, ‘Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet ‘emancipation’ of Muslim women in pan-​Islamic perspective,’ Slavic Review, 65 (2), 2006, pp. 252–​272. Ferro, Marc, Cinéma et histoire, Paris, Denoël Gonthier, 1993. —​ —​ —​ , ‘Le colonialisme, envers de la colonisation,’ in M. Ferro (dir.), Le livre noir du colonialisme. xvie-​xxie: de l’extermination à la repentance, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003, pp. 9–​49. Frodon, Jean-​Michel, La Projection nationale: cinéma et nation, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998. Gatagova, L. C., Kosheleva, L. P., and Rogovaia, L. A., TSK RKP (b) –​VKP (b) i natsional’nyi vopros, (1918–​1933), Moscow, Rosspen, 2005. Haugen, Arne, The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hirsch, Francine, ‘Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-​making and the formation of soviet national identities,’ Russian Review 59 (2), 2000, pp. 201–​226. —​—​—​, Empire of Nations, New York, Cornell University Press, 2005. Hjort, Mette, and Mackenzie, Scott (eds), Cinema and Nation, London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Kenez, Peter, Cinema and Soviet Society 1917–​ 1953, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972. Kepley, Vance, ‘The first Perestroika: Soviet cinema under the first five-​year plan,’ Cinema Journal, 35 (4), 1996, pp. 31–​53. Khalid, Adeeb, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998. —​—​—​, ‘Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in comparative perspective,’ Slavic Review, 65 (2), 2006, pp. 231–​251. —​—​—​, ‘The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim Sources,’ Die Welt des Islams, 50 (3–​4), 2010, pp. 335–​361. —​—​—​, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2015. Khojaev, Suleyman, Tong Oldidan (pered rassvetom), Moscow, Tashkent, Soagiz, 1933. Khudonazar, Anahita, ‘Within the Soviet Constraints: Politics for children in the visual culture of the 1930s and 1940s,’ in Drieu, Cloé (ed.), Écrans d’Orient: propagande, innovation et résistance dans les cinémas de Turquie, d’Iran et d’Asie centrale (1897–​1945), Paris, Karthala, coll. « Terres et gens d’Islam », 2014, pp. 201–​227. Kolarz, Walter, Russia and Her Colonies, London, G. Philipp and sons, 1952. Laurent, Natacha, L’œil du kremlin, cinéma et censure en URSS sous Staline (1928–​1953), Paris, Édition Privat, 2000. —​—​—​ (ed.), Le cinéma « stalinien »: question d’histoire, Toulouse, Presses universitaires du Mirail, Cinémathèque de Toulouse, 2003. Lirou, Raphaëlle, La Russie entre fédération et empire. Contribution à la définition constitutionnelle de l’État russe, Clermont-​Ferrand, Fondation Varenne, 2009. Lyons, Shawn, ‘Resisting Colonialism in the Uzbek Historical Novel kecha va kunduz (night and day), 1936,’ Inner Asia, 3 (2), 2001, pp. 175–​192. —​—​—​, ‘Chase Away This Pig From the Mosque: Eastern politics in the Indian dramas of Abdurauf Fitrat,’ Central Asian Survey, 22 (2/​3), 2003, pp. 299–​313.

619

—​​​​ C l o é D r i e u —​​​​ Martin, Terry, The Affirmation Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union (1923–​1939), Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press, 2001. —​—​—​, ‘The Soviet Union as Empire: Salvaging a dubious analytical category,’ Ab Imperio 2, 2002, pp. 91–​105. Mauss, Marcel, ‘Essai sur le don,’ Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris, PUF, 2004. Memmi, Albert, Portrait du colonisé, portrait du colonisateur, Paris, Gallimard/​folio, 1985. Motyl, Alexander J., Imperial Ends, The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001. Nattiez, Jean-​Jacques ‘Sur les relations entre sociologie et sémiologie musicales,’ International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 1974, 5(1). Northrop, Douglas, Veiled Empire: Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia, Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press, 2004. O’Brien, Charles, ‘The “cinéma colonial” of 1930s France: Film Narration as Spatial Practice,’ in Bernstein, Matthew, and Studlar, Gaylyn, (eds.) Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 1997, pp. 99–​129. Ohayon, Isabelle, La Sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline: collectivisation et changement social (1928–​1945), Paris, Ifeac/​Maisonneuve et Larose, 2006. Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism 1917–​1923, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1954. Robin, Régine, Le Réalisme socialiste, une esthétique impossible, Paris, Payot, 1986. Shlapentokh, Dmitry, and Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Soviet Cinematography (1918–​ 1991), Ideological Conflict and Social Reality, New York, Aldine de Gruyer, 1993. Slezkine, Yuri, ‘Commentary: Imperialism as the highest stage of socialism,’ Russian Review 59(2), 2000, pp. 227–​234. Suny, Ronald G., ‘Constructing Primordialism: Old histories for new nations,’ The Journal of Modern History, 73, 2001, pp. 871–​878. Suny, R. G., and Martin, Terry (eds.), A State of Nations, Empire and Nation-​Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, Oxford, Oxford Press University, 2001. Vichnevski, Anatoli, ‘L’Asie centrale post-​soviétique : entre le colonialisme et la modernité’, Revue d’études comparatives Est-​Ouest, 26(4), 1995, pp. 101–​123. Vichnevski, Anatoli, La Faucille et le rouble, la modernisation conservatrice en URSS, Paris, Gallimard, 2000. Werth, Nicolas, ‘Les opérations de masses de la ‘Grande Terreur’ en URSS, 1937–​ 1938,’ Bulletin de l’ihtp, 86, 2006, pp. 16–​167. Youngblood, Denise, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era (1918–​1935), Austin, University of Texas Press, 1991.

Uzbek SSR Filmography The Minaret of Death [Rus. minaret smerty] by V. Viskovskii (Bukhkino, 1925). The Muslim Woman [Rus. musulmanka] by D. Bassalygo (Proletkino, 1925). The Second Wife [Rus. vtoraia zhena] by M. Doronin (Uzbekkino, 1927). The Jackals of Ravat [Rus. shakaly ravata, Uzb. ravot qashqirlari] by K. Gertel’ (Uzbekkino, 1927). Chachvon [Rus. chadra or chachvan, Uzb. chachvon] by M. Averbakh (Uzbekkino, 1927). From Beneath the Vaults of the Mosque [Rus. iz-​ pod svodov mecheti] by K. Gertel’ (Uzbekkino, 1928). The Leper [Rus. prokazhennaia] by O. Frelikh (Uzbekkino, 1928). The Ishan’s Fiancée [Rus. doch’ sviatogo, Uzb. avliia qizi] by O. Frelikh (Uzbekkino, 1931). Her Right [Rus. ee pravo] by G. Cherniak (Uzbekkino, 1931).

620

— ​​​​ U z b e k c i n e m a a n d e a r l y S o v i e t s t a t e - a n d n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g —​​​​ Upsurge [Rus. pod’’em] by N. Ganiev (Uzbekkino, 1931). Ramazan [Rus. and Uzb., ramazan] by N. Ganiev (Uzbekkino, 1932). Before Dawn [Rus. pered rassvetom, Uzb. tong oldidan] by S. Khojaev (Uzbekkino, 1934). Jigit [Rus. dzhigit or egit, Uzb. iigit] by N. Ganiev (Uzbekkino, 1935). The Oath [Rus. kliatva, Uzb. qasam] by A. Usol’tsev-​garf (Uzbekkino, 1937).

621

CHAPTER FORTY-​O NE

IN THE BLOOD AND THROUGH THE SPIRIT Learning Central Asian textile skills Stephanie Bunn INTRODUCTION Until the 1920s, skilled textile production in Central Asia took place in two ostensibly distinct spheres. On the one hand was the comparatively informal, domestic textile production that predominated among herding and village-​dwelling peoples. Here, richly decorated textiles were made by women as part of their household tasks, usually learned from a young girl’s mother or mother-​in-​law. Textiles such as felt floor coverings, woven carpets, patchwork, or embroidered hangings were made in the company of others and given for dowry goods or as gifts. It was considered shameful to sell them, and the skill was often deemed to be ‘in the blood’ (kanybyzda). On the other hand, there was the more formal workshop production of urban Tajiks, Uzbeks and Uyghurs in larger town and city bazaars such as Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Mazar-​i-​Sharif, Balkh and Kashgar. Here, goods were made to be sold. Such workshops were usually the preserve of men, with skills learned through apprenticeship or passed from father to son. Knowledge was authorised through guilds, each of which was associated with specific religious practices. Such guilds had operated in this region for centuries, although they are rarely encountered today. This contrast between domestic textile production and historical bazaar workshops could be understood as falling neatly along oppositional lines such as female/​male; informal/​formal; home/​bazaar; nomadic/​settled; shamanist/​Islamic; gifted/​sold. However, a closer look at Central Asian craft practices also suggests several unifying features in terms of the way in which skills are come by and learned, the values attached to them and to their products, revealing a commonality of purpose, motivation and inspiration. This dynamic between domestic and urban textiles skills, their unified approach to learning, and the value accorded to them form the subject of this chapter, which draws on both ethnographic and historical data.

CHANGING TEXTILE SKILFULNESS Comprehensive documentation of Central Asian textile skills prior to the Russian conquest is rare, especially for women’s domestic textile work. Historic accounts noted a gold embroiderers’ quarter in Samarkand in the fourteenth century, while in Turkey, the felt-​workers’ guild was described as attending a ‘guild parade’ at the 622

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-50

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

circumcision festival of Sultan Ahmed II in 1582 (see Gervers 1974, p.28). Even before this, in twelfth-​century Anatolia, the Akhis (chivalrous brotherhoods of young men) formed one of the early artisan guilds, with their first leader being reputedly a master felt-​maker (Arnakis 1953, pp.233–​4; Bunn 2010). Later nineteenth-​century documentation of regional crafts accompanied textile industrialisation, which heralded the demise of the very handwork it described, as did cheap imports such as factory-​produced cotton (von Schwartz 1900; Jasiewicz 1991; Sukhareva 1976). Following the October Revolution, regional guild organisations were considered to be manifestations of ‘feudal practices’, and were transformed into cooperatives (Khakimov 1999, p.8). Sewing machines were introduced to the region and incorporated into domestic textile practices such as kurak (patchwork) and small-​scale syrmak and shyrdak (felt applique and mosaic patterned work). In the 1960s, the increasing shift to industrial production led to the ‘liquidation’ of artisanal cooperatives, transitioning almost all textile practices into mass production and textile ‘Arts Industries’. Specialist textiles came to be made more for tourists than for special occasions, (Baratova and Makhamova 1999, pp.73–​4). Many textile skills such as gold embroidery and silk weaving became mechanised, while others just stopped being produced. Some hand-​skills, such as Turkmen carpet-​making, were housed in what were termed ‘factories’, despite a continuing reliance on hand-​ woven technology. At the same time, regional textiles, such as Turkmen carpets, Uzbek ikat, Tajik and Uzbek embroidered susanis, and Kyrgyz and Kazakh felt artefacts, became emblematic of the Soviet Union’s aspirational ‘internationalism’. Occasionally, women’s textile skills, always valued in the home, were honoured by the state, with some women receiving medals for their skills. Artists’ unions such as Kyal (Kyrgyzstan), or Usto and Mussavir (Uzbekistan) were formed, with outlet shops where ‘traditional’ hand-​made products could be sold, particularly to foreign visitors (see Figure 41.1). There were also occasional ‘revivals’ of traditional skills, as concern grew over the loss of unique textile practices. However, within the Soviet economy, there were also limitations on what could be sold, and market practices were discouraged, and even punished by imprisonment. Independence for the former Central Asian Soviet Republics and globalisation brought further change, privatisation and commercialisation through international initiatives, including input from the World Bank, the UN and regional NGOs. During my early fieldwork in the 1990s, these organisations saw textiles as one area where skilled craft workers, especially women, could develop financial independence, even where such skills had previously been employed solely for domestic use. In the process, a new model of how textile skills were understood to be learned, made and exchanged was added to the regional approach to textile skill and learning, with new initiatives and international training. Today some skills survive, some guild practices have been restored, and the dynamic process of learning and communicating skilled practices continues.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE Whether at home or in workshops, one unifying feature of textile production concerns the learning of skilled practice through apprenticeship. Such learning, in both domestic and more formal workshop settings, involves observing others, and 623

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

Figure 41.1  Felt toys for tourists (source: photo by the author).

imitating and practicing the skill concerned with the help of more skilled practitioners. It takes place ‘on the job’, without knowing the rules in advance, or even having them distilled into helpful summaries which are then articulated. Within learning theory, apprenticeship approaches stress the context-​based, practical and improvisatory nature of skill acquisition, despite the apparent formality of such learning at times (Coy 1989; Rogoff 1990; Lave and Wenger 1991; Palsson 1994). By contrast, social historians and ethnographers who participated in Soviet research expeditions of the 1950s and 1960s tended to assume a more formal approach to how skills and traditional craft practices might be communicated, being perhaps less concerned with the learning process than craft’s associated activities, rituals and artefacts. Scholars such as Bernshtam (1948), Antipina (1962), Sukhareva (1962) and Tursunov (1974) were fascinated by traditional skills, but their focus tended to be on them as ‘vestiges of the past’ that needed to be documented before they ceased to be practiced, or as manifesting a lack of social progress despite the Soviet transformation of society (see Snesarev 1957). Implicit in this more formal approach to learning is an assumption that knowledge or skill constitutes a discrete body of information which can be communicated between one individual mind and another, which the learner absorbs, then later retrieves and applies. Such a view was also held by many European and American scholars until the late twentieth century. It assumes that learning is best done by individuals away from real life, in a ‘neutral’ situation such as a school with peers, rather 624

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

than alongside experts or more experienced elders, such as older siblings, parents, or the master of a workshop. Ironically, the Russian educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s approach to learning as a social experience, garnered through practice with others, has strongly influenced recent European and American thinkers on apprenticeship. Vygotsky’s notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’, where educators pitched or scaffolded new tasks for learners so they could develop their skills step-​by-​step (1978), was pivotal for what has come to be known as apprenticeship theory. Vygotsky was not interested in apprenticeship per se, however.1 While his ideas influenced the whole Soviet approach to education, they had less of an impact on the work of Soviet historians or ethnographers. Apprenticeship theory considers that childhood upbringing is closer to the way an apprentice learns than the more formal schooled approach of inculcating knowledge. Thus, the inexperienced learn from caregivers or masters –​experts who structure simple tasks and extend them, while the learner watches, tries things out and takes risks, building ever more complex skills and knowledge, often in a way that can never be written down. The unskilled novice begins on the periphery of an activity, and through repeated practice of simple, mundane tasks, moves towards the centre of action, joining other, more skilled workers. Lave and Wenger, drawing on Vygotsky, coined the term ‘zone of peripheral participation’ to describe this process (1991). Similarly, Barbara Rogoff uses the concept ‘guided participation’ to illustrate how children learn from parents and caregivers. Parents, she argues, structure or scaffold what is to be learned, creating bridges between the known and the unknown so that children can learn tasks they are capable of achieving, then extend and develop their skills (1990).

HOMELY ‘APPRENTICESHIPS’ ‘Sit down, my girl, sit down. May your backside be a stone and your hand a bird’’ (Turkmen proverb, cited in Andrews and Andrews 1976, p.6). In the mid-​1990s, I learned Central Asian textile skills by living with two families in Kyrgyzstan, one on the lowland shores of Lake Issyk-​kul, and one in high mountain Ala To’o. This was not a formal apprenticeship. Here, textiles were not made to be sold, and this was not a workshop in which just one craft activity took place. Nevertheless, I began my work with an agreement with each family that they would help me to learn felt-​making, and they took a lot of trouble to do so. As I learned to make felt, I also witnessed children being brought up and everyday family life. Indeed, it was hard to separate these processes. There is, or was, no formal apprenticeship for learning such domestic textile skills among formerly nomadic people in this region. It was simply a part of growing up for many young girls, an ongoing preparation for their wedding, since they needed felts, quilts, carpets and many bags for their dowry. Once they became a kelin (daughter-​ in-​law), many of these activities would take second place to housework, managing a home and, among groups such as Iranian Turkmen, making felts for sale –​a woman’s only source of income for this group (Andrews and Andrews 1976, p.6) (Figure 41.2). 625

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

Figure 41.2  Felts for sale in Ashkhabad bazaar (source: St John Simpson).

Thus, in the past, a young girl learned much of her decorative textile work, such as embroidery, before her wedding, after which she had less time for such activities. Learning these skills were simply an element of a girl’s upbringing or tarbiya, yet many elements of what is considered the apprenticeship method, outlined above, can be found in how these children learn. Until the age of five or six, Kyrgyz children seemed, to my eyes, to be very free. There was not the same separation between children’s and adults’ lives as there is in Europe or North America. Until they started school at seven, children could play around working adults and were encouraged to help with adult tasks as soon as they wanted to and were able. They were given tasks that a European adult might think of as dangerous, such as handling sharp tools like sheep shears, chasing sheep into the corral, or keeping a runaway stallion away from the mares –​all means of extending children’s skills. Adults might structure tasks for even very small children while they themselves were working: ‘Go and get the water to clean the sheep’s intestines’; ‘Hold the roof rib while we put up the boz üy (tent)’, and so on. Likewise, children might put themselves in the way of learning such skills as interested them by watching, mimicking and trying to do it themselves. They were drawn to the focus of action and sat watchfully until they were asked to help: to pass the tar to daub onto a sheep’s bluebottle wound, for instance, or to beat wool to separate the fibres for felt-​making. 626

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

Figure 41.3  Munara imitating her grandmother Sabira palming yak hair rope (source: photo by the author).

I have never forgotten Munara, aged three, watching her chong apa (grandmother), Sabira, make yak-​hair rope by hand-​palming, a not inconsiderable and dexterous skill. Munara positioned herself and her hands in exactly the position of her chong apa, already keen to learn (see Figure 41.3). There is a difference between dominant European notions of ‘education’, encompassing both learning and teaching, and the Kyrgyz term, tarbiya, which means simply ‘upbringing’, reflecting a less formal, apprenticeship-​type approach. The latter is illustrated by Rogoff’s notion of ‘non-​declarative learning’, in which adults demonstrate a skill by example, wait for children to show an interest in learning it and then encourage them (1990). Here, young Kyrgyz learners are not understood as passive absorbers of skills. They want to learn, to stretch themselves, they are watching, ‘looking over people’s shoulders’. Both observation and practice are important. As they watch, what they observe can resonate in the body of the learner, as it did with Munara learning to hand-​palm (cf. Wacquant 2004). Thus, practical skills are learned and picked up by children throughout childhood in a manner very close to apprenticeship. They learn through trying and through practice. The process is both informal and improvisatory: textile skills, movements, layouts and patterns are all picked up by young people as they go along. The main consideration is that the child should show an interest: they have to want to learn, to watch and to try. One of my close field companions, Sabira, said that at age 15 or 16, she learned to make felt from her mother. She also learned how to milk mares, make rawhide containers (saba’a), do kurak patchwork, process milk and many other domestic skills. She said that of all her brothers and sisters who saw their mother work at these 627

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

crafts, she was the only one who practiced them when she left home. She never made her own children learn such skills: that was not the way. Parents watch and help children and, when they are old enough, the children try it if they want to. As this approach applies equally to young men learning craft skills among formerly nomadic peoples in this region, Sapar the jygachy (woodworker), a boz üy (felt tent)-​maker, similarly ‘stood behind’ his father, watching how he worked. Sapar made his first boz üy from start to finish at 16. He left home to work as a taxi driver, then later returned to look after his parents and make a living from making boz üys as his father became too old to continue. While I was there, his own son Yrdan was ‘standing behind’ Sapar. Sapar’s wife explained this mode of learning as follows: Sapar doesn’t teach his sons, he waits until they show an interest. They begin to do the work. At first, he doesn’t say anything. When they begin to work, then he shows them how to do it. Perhaps he understands when they can do something. The fathers do, and the sons sit behind them, and they begin to do. All the time, Yrdan is behind his father as he is working. To become a tent-​maker, Sapar said, you simply have to want to learn: to make the kyk (fermenting sheep dung) for heating the wood to bend it, to care for the willow trees used for the frames, to make the roof ring or tündük, and so on. Today, married with a young family, Yrdan and his wife run the family’s boz üy business. In general, then, this approach, common among many herding peoples in Central Asia, reveals a view of learning that values intention, effort and self-​motivation. It is considered important for children to be active agents in their own education, and it is unusual to push a child to learn. Rather, the view is that they should show an interest to learn a skill of their own accord. There may be social pressure to learn craft skills, and one companion told me that her mother beat her until she learned, but in general, the view is that the children have to want to take on a craft skill. Underpinning this rather uncoercive approach to learning, however, lies a distinctive understanding of skill which contrasts with the more democratic approach of apprenticeship theory. In this approach, while a person must try hard, at the same time, not everyone can be an expert: rather, one must be born to it. An ability or skill lies ‘in the blood’ –​kanybyzda. Indeed, this is exactly why parents often wait to see if the child shows an interest, because the capacity to excel is a ‘birth gift’. One specific person, I was told, would become ill if he did not hunt, as it was ‘in his blood’. This gift must also not be abused. Another friend had to put away his gun and stop hunting because his daughter had become ill: he had hunted too much, a view of the relationship between humans and the environment which resonates with shamanism. The balance on which his skill had depended had been decentred by excessive hunting. This approach applies to all manner of skills from hunting to shamanism, singing epic poetry, and craft work or women’s textile crafts. Only a master, or cheber (one born with the skill) may be invited to draw the pattern for a Kyrgyz shyrdak, an activity for which she would also be feasted or given a reward. While most women could do the general textile work, and there were always many helpers to stitch and quilt, the main skill, the drawing of patterns, lay ‘in the blood’. Similarly, it was mainly these skilful women who were deemed able to understand the patterns. This view applied to textile skills across the region. 628

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

WOMEN’S TEXTILE SKILFULNESS The miracle created by the hands of the makers, Its beauty (körk) extends through the land (jer), encompassing the sentient world. These ideas (oy) and visions (körköm) are recollected, and inscribed by the people Directed by the patterns (oyum) of shyrdak. (Chochunbaeva 2016, p.231 [my translation]) While a skill might be ‘in the blood’, effort was still considered necessary to learn these skills. Almost always in the past, and occasionally still today, a young Kyrgyz girl would learn to make textiles for her marriage by helping her mother. Textiles necessary for a ‘traditional’ Kyrgyz home included felt shyrdak or ala ki’iz, kurak (patchwork), töshök, jötöshök and göldölöng (bedding quilts), embroidered tush ki’iz (amuletic tent hangings) and a variety of bags and bands. In south Kyrgyzstan, women also wove pile carpets. Each regional group across Central Asia made their own forms of textiles required for a new home: Turkmen carpets and embroideries; Lakai Uzbek embroidered tent furniture and Tajik and settled Uzbek susanis (embroidered wall hangings and bed covers). Many of these skills –​embroidery, patchwork, felt-​ making, braiding –​had been learned by most women by the time of their wedding. Amongst all nomadic herding groups in this region, many such artefacts were made for a married home until about 50–​60 years ago (see Figure 41.4).

Figure 41.4  Tajik Kyrgyz bedding pile (source: photo by the author). 629

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

Central Asian felt tents are quite neutral in tone from the outside, being made from either beige or grey felt, yet to enter a traditional nomadic home is to be dazzled by colour and dexterity. Here the full range of a wife’s skills is displayed, culminating directly ahead in the tör, the place of honour, comprising the juk or bedding pile, opposite the tent door. There are also carpets or felt rugs on the floor, wall hangings and multiple bags and bands. Even in contemporary homes in the region, from villages to cities, bedding piles of embroidered and patchwork quilts may still be displayed as markers of the wealth and gifts received at one’s wedding. In the past, this creation of textile brilliance extended to animal trappings, clothing and even to small household items such as potholders, door mats and scissor bags (Bunn 2010). The value attached to beautiful handmade textiles also reflects the moral and ethical qualities which are learned alongside textile-​making. As Mauss has shown, learning a skill and learning culture are not two different processes (1973 [1935]). These techniques du corps are both skilful and social, and are learned at the same time. The value attached to self-​motivation, for example, is relevant not just for learning craft skills, but also for one’s social and moral person. To be good at making Kyrgyz textiles requires both inborn skill and effort, araket. The determination tartyp (self-​discipline) and effort put into textile-​making are admired and valued alongside the person’s talent and the artefacts made. The Kyrgyz proverb ‘Araketke bereket’ (‘You will be blessed if you try hard’) reflects this view. Thus, as a future kelin in a herding community in the past, being dexterous and adept at specific textile skills would indicate the special kind of moral person who could make a beautiful home, provide adequate bedding and hospitality for guests, along with having the nerve to milk mares, cooking well, bearing children, and generally being hard-​working (Bunn 2018, p.438). Portisch similarly remarks for Kazakh herders in Mongolia that ‘a daughter-​in-​law sitting about idly is considered ill-​mannered’, while a woman ‘who creates and maintains a beautifully decorated home is admired as hard working and gifted’ (2010, p.568). The textiles themselves also embody these values. Until recently, working on textiles for one’s own wedding provided the opportunity to sew all the hopes and wishes for one’s future and one’s family into the artefact. My felt teacher, Kenje, told me that all her aims and ideas (oy) for her future family, from births and deaths to the number of children she would have, were stitched into her wedding felt and its patterns (oyum) (Bunn 1995–​96). At the same time, when made by others and gifted, textiles brought prestige, incorporating the skill, effort and care of the maker and giver. They were thus also a ‘blessing’, and were considered shameful to sell, such was the agency embodied in them, incorporated through the skill and work of the maker. Chochunbaeva (2016, p.255) suggests that in a Kyrgyz shyrdak, ‘each pattern is a visualisation of blessing and wishes for well-​being by the artisan.’ To give a handmade textile, whether a coat or a carpet, was, and is, both a blessing and a sign of honour. Along with perceiving skill as a gift, the patterns, imagery and aesthetic of Central Asian textiles also reflect people’s sense of the sacred, and their understanding of the interconnected relationship between people and their environment. Again, balance is key. In Kazakh syrmak or Kyrgyz shyrdak, whether created using appliqué or intarsia (mosaic work), the foreground and background patterns are integrated so 630

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

that neither predominate. When cutting out patterns, one is always aware of the relation between the part and the whole, drawing the inside and outside of the motif at the same time. This balanced pattern, with its entwined animal and bone motifs, gives a sense of interconnection and equal weight between people, animals and their environment, reflecting an understanding that the destinies of human and non-​human inhabitants of the environment are interconnected. This sense of balance is exactly why the acquaintance mentioned above had to stop hunting. With Kyrgyz felt, this effect is emphasised through the way patterns are cut from two different coloured felts at once, then inserting the negative of each cut-​out pattern into its opposite, thus wasting no fabric and effectively gaining two felts each time (see Figure 41.5). This is never traditionally copied from a stencil or pattern. The balanced pattern is improvisatory, made anew each time, as are the intentions sewn into it, in a similar way to the renewal of sung epic poems. Thus, no two Kyrgyz felt textiles are alike. A similar ‘positive and negative’ effect is also created in Lakai Uzbek embroidery and Turkmen appliqué (see Figure 41.6). From Kyrgyzstan to Mongolia, while making felt, practices which might please the spirits are also carried out. These include sprinkling fermented mare’s milk over the roll of felt or to the four directions, or burning juniper, archa, for purification. In Mongolia, Batchuluun (2000) describes women rubbing their hands with fat, greasing the felt roller, offering milk and other dairy products to inspire blessings and reciting riddles, even holding rituals, to ensure the felt’s success. While some are focused on wishes for a good outcome, others parallel the songs a shaman might sing to call up powerful spirits:

Figure 41.5 Kygyz shyrdak (source: photo by the author). 631

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

Figure 41.6  Uzbek embroidered felt with positive and negative imagery (source: photo by the author).

Behind the home, those who sit Those who ride the high-​headed brown horse Those who toss water and snow Those who eat yoghurt … The material aspect of the textile is also important. While a textile may incorporate skill, hope or beauty, it can protect and nurture as well as convey prestige. Kurak (patchwork) illustrates this well, as Christine Martens describes (2017). A technique practiced for thousands of years in this region, kurak is significant during lifecycle events, and is linked both to cloth’s capacity to be cut up and remade into strongly constructed, bright, deflective patterns, and also to its capacity to hold memory through association and belonging. A Kyrgyz ‘extra-​sense’ or ‘köz achyk’ (lit.: open-​ eye) once explained to me that kurak, through its construction from multiple elements of well-​used textiles and their association with past family members, forever gave an artefact a nurturing role for those in the present: a legacy of well-​being and productivity from past ancestors. In its strong and vital patterning, it also acts as an almost visceral deflector against the evil eye (Bunn 2009). Andrews similarly describes how garments decorated with embroidery act as deflectors of the evil eye, with motifs such as doga, dogaciq (amulets), or dagdan (talismans), while Martens draws parallels between the ‘sacred scraps’ of cloth tied to mazars, springs, and other sacred sites, and the scraps sewn into garments (Andrews and Andrews 1976; Martens 2017) (see Figure 41.7).

632

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

Figure 41.7  Kurak (source: Kyrgyz Art Museum, Bishkek).

SKILFUL LEARNING IN THE BAZAAR Throughout Turkistan all the crafts are performed at a modest scale by a few craftsmen with the simplest apparatus imaginable. There is not a trace of anything like a factory, or the mass-​production that would go with it. Most crafts are pursued in the bazaars in the ordinary open shops, which hardly differ, or do not differ at all, from the retail shops. The products are sold then and there. There are only a few craftsmen, whose work requires more room, or special arrangements which cannot be made in the limited spaces in the bazaar, such as cartwrights, potters, weavers, tanners, sawyers and iron-​smelters. These usually set up workshops at home, or simply in the open streets or squares. (von Schwarz 1900, trans. Peter Alford Andrews) 2 In the late nineteenth century, a typical urban textile workshop would have been led by a master craftsman (usta, ustad-​kar, ustoz), who would have had two or three apprentices (shogird) working under him. Trades were often passed down from father to son as a family business, but young men from other backgrounds could also apprentice to the master (Akhilova 1999, p.86; see also Kikuta, this volume). Boys

633

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

would generally begin their apprenticeship between 10 to 14 years old and trained for several years, depending on the trade and how long it took them to become proficient. During this time, they often lived with the master or in a dormitory, sharing meals but receiving no payment until they could work skilfully at speed (Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.70). The training period began with a ‘binding-​over’ ceremony, referred to in Khorezm as ‘patiya-​piravi’, committing the apprentice to work for the master for a certain period (Peshchereva 1955, p.280, Jasiewicz 1991, p.175;). The commitment was enshrined in a written agreement, with evidence for such agreements dating back to the sixteenth century (Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.69; Mukhminova 1972). When the novice had produced a quality piece of work and was considered proficient enough to become a fully-​fledged practitioner, the apprenticeship culminated in a ‘passing-​out’ ceremony, the kamar baste (Atajanova 2009). These ceremonies were specific to each craft and varied from place to place. In advance of the ceremony, the apprentice might demonstrate his skill in the marketplace (Dzhabbarov 1971), or present the master with his ‘piece’. The accompanying feast, even if small, had to be financed by the trainee and, owing to the cost, could result in the training period lasting for some time. At this point, he could become a journeyman, able to travel for up to a day’s journey from the workshop to work in other towns, and also learn from other masters, gaining additional skills. Following several years’ experience, a journeyman could then become a master, although for some crafts, the move was more direct (Jasiewicz 1991, pp.171–​180) Within this process, Central Asian guilds acted as associations of artisans and craft workshops which united to further common interests, including mutual aid and protection. They regulated the prices, quality and distribution of goods, and participated in both the adoption of apprentices and their release (Hale and Fitz Gibbon 1988, p.12; Jasiewicz 1991, pp.171–​180). Each guild was usually devoted to a specific craft, although larger ones, such as Bukhara’s weaving guild, were even divided into small sub-​guilds (jaribs). The leading figures in each guild were the bubu/​baba, its moral leader who oversaw the protection of apprentices and live-​in hand-​workers, and the aksakal, who took on a range of authoritative and administrative roles. The aksakal represented the guild to the wholesale purchasers in the marketplace, and even at the Amir’s court, negotiating large orders and ensuring quality. In Bukhara, the last great Central Asian city to be annexed by the Russians in the mid-​nineteenth century, 51 neighbourhoods were occupied by different kinds of weavers alone (Sukhareva 1976). Multiple textiles were produced: from ikat, gold embroidery and woven carpets to printed cotton. Ikat or abr production provides some insights to the mid-​nineteenth-​century Bukharan guild system. Abr is a woven silk textile in which the binding (abrbandi) and ‘tie-​dyeing’ of the warps results in a soft-​edged, blurred pattern, hence the name, meaning ‘cloud’.3 Abr is seen in archival photographs of sumptuous robes and hangings and, like many other trades, its production expanded following Russian annexation of the region, moving from small-​ scale workshops to larger artels where merchant entrepreneurs assumed greater importance than the traditional masters (Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997) (see Figure 41.8). Multiple guilds (silk-​ reelers, warp-​ binders, silk-​ weavers, dyers and spinners) were involved, although the craftsmen who marked and tied the warp for dyeing (abrbandchi) were key (ibid.). Alongside guild workers and apprentices were 634

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

the hired workers (khalfa) who worked on a piecework basis, and homeworkers (harchibaft) who worked on their own looms (ibid., p.66). The latter had little guild protection or control over prices. In Bukhara, guilds sometimes maintained a dormitory for hired, itinerant, out-​of-​town workers, helping them to find work, and where the baba of the guild often lived, acting as a protector of the workers and apprentices, and even keeping his own loom there (ibid., pp.62, 69). The gold embroiders’ guild also had significant standing in Bukhara. Handcrafted textiles decorated with gold and silver thread included wedding canopies and curtains (chimildik), prayer mats (joy namaz), horse regalia and many items of women’s clothing, from paranji (long-​sleeved women’s cloaks worn over the head) to makhsi or ichigi (velvet boots with soft soles). The nineteenth-​century Amir of Bukhara had a large gold embroidery workshop based at his residence, and there were 20 other large workshops in the city (Akhilova 1999). Colours, designs and even pattern names, such as ‘Kashgar flower’ suggest borrowings from and links with Uyghur workshops in Xinjiang. As with abr, a variety of experts were involved, from pattern cutters to embroiderers, some of whom also operated their own guilds (ibid.). As with other

Figure 41.8  Guard outside the Emir’s palace, Bukhara, wearing ikat (source: Prokudin Gorky archive, out of copyright 1910–​20s, over a hundred years old). 635

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

guild crafts, this was a male preserve, but if there were many orders then close female relatives of the master could assist. Indeed, there were working craftswomen, as Jasiewicz describes (1991, pp.172–​ 173), yet there are no records of guild-​like organisations for women textile workers in nineteenth-​century Bukhara. However, there were few formal craft associations composed entirely of women, such as cotton spinners and textile home-​weavers who maintained the rites and practices key to the craft process. Here, the role of baba was taken by a kaivoni, who represented female homeworkers in, for example, silk fabric weaving, and worked with guild members’ wives. Some nomadic women also made goods to sell: Turkmen women still make felt for the bazaar, as do female carpet weavers in southern Kyrgyzstan, but the majority of goods for sale were made by men (see Figure 41.2).

GUILDS AND THE SACRED Each guild had a founder or patron saint who was invoked during key events and feasts, and whose miraculous endowment with the craft skill was acknowledged as a gift from God. These patron saints, known as Khazrat (Arabic) or Pir (Farsi), had varied origins. Some were linked to Islam, such as Khazrati Ali, who gave the final sheen to materials like silk, or the fourteenth-​century Bukhara Sufi saint, Bahauddin Naqshband, whose role was more mutable: he had been described as founder of weaving, warp binding in abr, or simply patterning (Naqshband lit.: ‘one who draws the patterns’). Patrons could also be biblical figures, such as David, the patron of all metal crafts, including gold embroidery; Archangel Michael, founder of silk and muslin weavers in Khojent; or Shabi Nabi, the founder of all weaving, who sprang from the seed of Adam without the help of Eve (Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.65). There were Zoroastrian, Sufi and even animistic figures such as Khazrati Burkh, the ‘Drunken Holy Man’, the patron of woven animal fibres (ibid.), along with Eve and a variety of great-​grandmothers (bibi or momoko), who were patrons of women’s craft professions (Jasiewicz 1991, p.174). Eve and Bibi Fatima, for example, were the patronesses of spinning (Tursunov 1974, pp.163–​164; Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.65). As with many accounts of mythical origins, descriptions of these characters were embellished in local stories, which varied from region to region. The patron’s expertise was considered to be gifted to the individual artisan, who also had the right to improve it, and even to innovate (Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997). Yet, sanctions might also be imposed for breaking traditional practices (Sukhareva 1960, p.203). This understanding also allowed for the creation of patrons for newly developed crafts and guilds (Sukhareva 1962, p.180). Shaitan, the devil, was also involved, albeit beyond the guild. He was acknowledged as being responsible for clever technical innovations; indeed, people thought it was not possible to conduct craftwork successfully without his help. This cleverness entitled him to a part of the weaver’s earnings, the so-​called khakkhash-​kar, although it is not clear how he collected his due (Sukhareva 1981, p.34; Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.65). Sufi saints, being both wise and unpredictable, were also credited with innovation. Origin stories linking patrons with their skills and activities, such as prayers spoken at specific stages in the making process, were enshrined in the guild covenant. These could be oral or written. In writing, they took the form of risola, handwritten 636

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

or lithographed booklets containing legends of the patrons’ activities. Risolas might also contain a chronological list of masters, beginning with the most recent, along with prayers and verses from the Koran to be read while carrying out certain tasks, specific times for lighting candles and principles of behaviour associated with the craft (Jasiewicz 1991, p.175). Thus, they acted as both prayer books and amulets, as Sukhareva describes (1960, p.201), and were carefully looked after (see Figure 41.9). Jasiewicz noted that several he came across in northern Afghanistan were kept wrapped in a shawl, while others were worn by craftsmen, in their headwear, for example (1991, p.175). Martens (2007) cites one Tajik textile risola now held in the collection of Bukhara State Museum: … If one does not pay the master on time, he will be regarded suspiciously by the community. If one says bad things about the craft, it is a great sin. In the workshop, all should be friendly and support each other.

Figure 41.9  Fabric merchant, Samarkand 1912–​16, with a framed page from the Koran hanging at the top of his stall (source: Prokudin Gorky archive, 1910–​20s).

637

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​

If you follow the risola, good things will happen. This was passed on from Adam to Muhammed and developed by Bahauddin Naqshbandi. All directions are given to us from them … (Martens, 2007, p.39). At the kamar baste, the passing-​out ceremony, the risola would be read while a sash or belt was put on the apprentice and the master would pronounce a blessing, such as ‘God is great! From henceforth you are a craftsman!’ (Tursunov 1974, pp.119–​151; Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.70). Following questioning on the risola, the apprentice would usually be given a set of tools of the trade by the master (ibid.). For gold embroiderers, this event was called the arvokhi-​piri-​mion-​bandon (lit.: memorial feast of the craft’s patron saint [Akhilova 1999, p.86]), and marked the acceptance of the apprentice into the ranks of living and dead masters, along with a blessing by his master and his ‘release’, fotikha, into the independent practice of his trade (Ershov 1966, p.209; Jasiewicz 1991, p.175). Other ritual activities, including those linked with patron saints, included addressing them when difficult tasks were being carried out (Jasiewicz 1991, p.176). Tools of the trade were considered sacred, and to throw them away was a transgression. When not in use, tools were handled with great respect; spinning wheels were laid on their side, for example. Spinners would avoid working on Wednesdays, Sufi saint Bahauddin Naqshband’s day, because he turned away misfortune (Fitz Gibbon and Hale 1997, p.62); nor would they work on Thursday afternoons or Fridays until after the evening prayer, when they prepared everything for Saturday, a practice known as ‘tying up Saturday’s legs’ (ibid., p.65; Tursunov 1974, p.167).

CONVERGENCES AND CONCLUSIONS I have drawn what may seem to be a series of contrasts between how herding and sedentary people have, until recently, learned textile skills in Central Asia. It seems that for formerly nomadic people, textile skills are ‘in the blood’ while at the same time they are learned informally, mainly by women, in the process of growing up –​as part of life’s necessary skills. Thus, a person must also show an interest, make an effort, and want to learn. In settled communities, especially in the past, men learned their skills through becoming an apprentice and joining a guild, thus having direct access to the line of textile masters who had received their skill as a gift from a saint or other sacred craft ancestor. The learning process here took place through a series of stages. Yet, a closer look reveals there is more to unite these practices than divide them. First, along with the parallels between domestic learning and apprenticeship outlined above, the role of the sacred in the learning process also reveals convergences in regional understandings associated with skill and learning. In both cases, we see how craft skills arise from the world of the spirit, in a similar vein to shamanism, or a religious calling. This is why such skills are understood to be ‘in the blood’, and why people are concerned that children should show an interest before taking up a craft. It would be unwise either to force a person to learn a skill, or to deny it. Second, we see how in both cases a skill is also understood to be a gift or a blessing. Although many textile practices are largely collective, the ability to direct

638

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​

proceedings –​to draw and cut out the patterns for a Kyrgyz felt shyrdak, for ­example –​can only be done by a cheber, an usta, or masteritza. She will be invited and celebrated for her skill. These exceptionally skilful women who can draw the patterns by eye, and who know their meanings, are sometimes described as ‘a little bit shaman’. For male skills, from eagle hunting to epic poem singing, skill was also linked to one’s destiny: indeed, a person might become ill if they did not take it up (Bunn 2000). In workshops, male artisans receive their skill from the guild’s patron and, again, while they work hard to learn, their skill is also a gift. Such gifts or blessings must be treated with respect, and the whole making process is marked by acts of gratitude to the guild’s saint. Thus, a maker might call upon the saint, burn candles, or recite parts of the risola while he works. In both cases, aspects of the process inspire blessings, riddles, or rituals to ensure success, from prayers for a fortuitous result, to songs a shaman might sing to summon the spirits. How textile skills are learnt in this region reveals many practices which parallel processes outlined in apprentice theory, characterised by watching, learning, sustained effort and determination. However, the link between skill and the sacred reveals that skill is also valued as a gift, albeit one that must be worked hard for. It may be ‘in the blood’ and tied to one’s destiny, or linked to a master through past generations in the male line, but this gift is not to be taken lightly, and the patron, whether spirit or a saint, needs frequent acknowledgement and reciprocation.

NOTES 1 He used his work on scaffolded learning when teaching children with learning difficulties at the Institute of Defectology in Moscow and the Home for Blind-​Deaf children in Zagorsk. 2 Von Schwarz was head of the Astronomical Institute at Tashkent for 15 years towards the end of the nineteenth century. I am indebted to Peter Alford Andrews for this translation of Von Schwarz and for pointing me towards this invaluable source. 3 The practice continues in both Uzbekistan and Xinjiang today, where it has recently been documented by the BBC’s Handmade on the Silk Road programme.

REFERENCES Akhilova, K. 1999. ‘Gold embroidery’, in Khakimov, A.A. and Akhmedov, A. (eds.) Atlas of Central Asian artistic crafts and trades: V 1 Uzbekistan. Tashkent: Sharq. Andrews, M. and Andrews, P. 1976. Turkmen needlework: Dressmaking and embroidery among the Türkmen of Iran. London: Central Asian Research Centre, No. 2. Antipina, K. 1962. Osobennosti Materialnoy Kultury i Prikladnovo Iskusstva Yuzjnykh Kirgizov (Special Features of the Material Culture and Decorative Arts of the South Kyrgyz). Frunze: Akademii Nauk Kirgizskoy SSR. Arnakis, G.G. 1953. ‘Futuwwa traditions in the Ottoman Empire: Akhis, Bektasi dervishes and craftsmen’. Journal of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, 12(4) (October): 232–​247. Atajanova, D. 2009. ‘Craftsmen’s ritual “Kamar Baste” (initiation of apprentice into master) in Central Asia’. Sanat, 1 (January): 841–​845. Baratova, Sh. and Makhamova, S.M. 1999. ‘Decorative fabrics’. in Khakimov, A.A. and Akhmedov, A. (eds.) Atlas of Central Asian artistic crafts and trades: V 1 Uzbekistan. Tashkent: Sharq. 639

—​​​​ S t e p h a n i e B u n n —​​​​ Batchuluun, L. 2000. Felt art of the Mongols. Ulaan Baatar: Mongolian University of Arts and Culture. Bernshtam, A.N. 1948. ‘Kirgizskii narodni povestvovatelni uzor’ (Kyrgyz narrative folk pattern). In I.A. Orbeli (ed.) Kirgizskii Natzionalnii Uzor (Kyrgyz national pattern). Leningrad and Frunze: Kirgizskii Filial Akademii Nauk SSSR and Gosudarstvenni Ermitazh. Bunn, S.J. 1995–​96. ‘Kyrgyz shyrdak’. Textile Museum Journal 34–​35: 75–​91. Bunn, S.J. 2000. The house of meaning. Tents and tent dwellings among the Kyrgyz of Central Asia. PhD dissertation, University of Manchester. Bunn, S.J. 2009. ‘Transformations’, pp. 175–​ 190 in Gunn, W. (ed.) Fieldnotes and sketchbooks: Challenging the boundaries between description and processes of describing. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Bunn, S.J. 2010. Nomadic felts. London: British Museum Press. Bunn, S.J. 2018. ‘The beautiful and the blessed: Brightness, balance and bones in Kyrgyz shyrdak felt’, pp. 434–​448 in Bunn, S. (ed.) Anthropology and beauty: from aesthetics to creativity. London: Routledge. Chochunbayeva, D. 2016. Shyrdak: Kyrgyz felt rugs. Bishkek: CACSARC Coy, M. 1989. Apprenticeship, from theory to method and back again. New York: Suny Press. Dzhabbarov, I.M. 1971. ‘Remeclo uzbyekov yuzhnovo Khorezm v kontze 19–​nachalo 20th v.’ (Uzbek crafts of Southern Khorezm end 19th–​early 20th centuries.) Srednyeaziatskii ethnograficheskiii cbornik. Vol III.L. Ershov, N.N. 1966. ‘Domashniye promysly i remesla’ (Domestic crafts and trades). In Kislyakov, N.A. and Pisarchik, A.K. (eds.) Tadzhiki Karategin i Darvaza. Dushanbe: Izdatyelstzvo Donish. Fitz Gibbon, K. and Hale, A. 1997. Ikat: Splendid silks of Central Asia. London: Lawrence King. Gervers, V. 1974. ‘Methods of traditional feltmaking in Anatolia and Iran’. Bulletin du Centre Internationale d’Etude des Textiles Anciens 38(2): 152–​162. Hale, A. and Fitz Gibbon, K. 1988. ‘Introduction’. In Rau, P. (ed.) Ikats: Woven silks from Central Asia: the Rau collection. London: Basil Blackwell and the Crafts Council. Jasiewicz, Z. 1991. ‘Professional beliefs and rituals among craftsmen in Central Asia: genetic and functional interpretation’, pp. 171–​180 in S. Akiner, S. (ed.) Cultural change and continuity in Central Asia. London: Kegan Paul International. Khakimov, A.A. and Akhmedov, A. 1999. Atlas of Central Asian artistic crafts and trades: V 1 Uzbekistan. Tashkent: Sharq. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martens, C. 2007. ‘Tradition and transformation’. Hermitage/​Terra Incognita 8: 38–​41. Martens, C. 2017. Sacred scraps. Lincoln, NE: International Quilt Study Centre and Museum. Mauss, M. 1973 [1935]. ‘Techniques of the body’. Economy and Society 2(1): 70–​88. Mukhminova, R.G. 1972. ‘Training of specialist-​handcraftsmen in Samarkand in the 16th century’. Social Science in Uzbekistan, no. 10. Palsson, G. 1994. ‘Enskilment at sea’. Man (N.S.) 29(4): 901–​927. Peshchereva, E.M. 1955. ‘Bukarskiye zolotoshvye’. (Bukharan gold embroidery). Sbornik Muzeya Antropologii i Etnografii, Vol. 16: 265–​285. Portisch, A. 2010. ‘The craft of skilled learning: Kazakh women’s everyday practices in western Mongolia’. Making knowledge, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Special Issue 16(S1): S62–​S79. Rogoff, B. 1990. Apprenticeship in thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snesarev, G.P. 1974 [1957]. ‘On some causes of the persistence of religo-​customary survivals among the Khorezm Uzbeks’, pp. 215–​238 in Dunn, S.P. and Dunn, E. (eds.) Introduction to Soviet ethnography. Berkeley, CA: Highgate Road Social Science Research Station.

640

—​​​​ C e n t r a l A s i a n t e x t i l e s k i l l s —​​​​ Sukhareva, O. A. 1960. ‘K voprosu o genesis professionalikh kultov u Tajikov i Uzbyekov’ (On the question of the origins of professional cults among Tajiks and Uzbeks), pp.195–​207 in Kislyakov, N.A. and Pisarchik, A.P. (eds.) Pamyati M.S.Andreeva (Festschrift for M.S. Andreeva). Stalinabad SSR: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk Tajikskoy SSR. Sukhareva, O.A. 1962. Pozdnefeodalnova goroda Bukhara kontsa XIX–​nachala XX v. (The late feudal town of Bukhara from the late 19th–​early 20th centuries). Tashkent: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk Uzbeskoy SSR. Sukhareva, O.A. 1976. Kvartalnaya obshchina pozdnefeodalnova goroda Bukhara. (Neighbourhood communities of the late feudal town of Bukhara). Moscow. Sukhareva, O.A. 1981. O tkatskikh remeslyakh v Samarkande. (Weaving trades of Samarkand). Dushanbe. Tursonov, N.O. 1974. Iz istorii gorodskovo remesla severnovo Tajikistana (History of urban trades in northern Tajikistan). Dushanbe. Vygotsky, L.S 1978. Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. von Schwartz, F. 1900. Turkestan: Die Wege der indogermanischen Volker. Freiburg Wacquant, L. 2004. Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

641

CHAPTER FORTY-​T WO

THE DIFFERENTIATED AUTHENTICITIES OF RISHTON POTTERY IN UZBEKISTAN Haruka Kikuta INTRODUCTION Rishton pottery has been very popular among foreign tourists as an exotic and handy souvenir of Uzbekistan since the late 1990s. Souvenir shops in major tourist destinations –​such as Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and the capital, Tashkent- far from the Fergana Valley where Rishton is located –​are also filled with colourful Rishton pottery products. This phenomenon is due to the hard work of the pottery masters who lost the stable workplace of Soviet state-​owned pottery factories after Uzbekistan’s independence. They have transformed local handicrafts that were mainly for daily use into attractive products for tourists, to survive in the midst of major social and economic changes, which is why the authenticity of their products is questioned. Although their struggles are locally and historically limited, the structures in which the crafts and artisans are situated is very similar to those in many other places where the artisans’ livelihoods rely on making souvenirs for tourists. Thus, examining the case of Rishton pottery expands our understanding of the notion of authenticity in global handicraft markets. According to the traditional view of authenticity, many crafts that have a practical and cultural meaning for local residents are likely to lose their shape, function and meaning to meet the expectations of foreign tourists (Swanson and Timothy 2012). The concept of singular authenticity is associated with genuineness –​that is, marking a particular time and place, and accompanied by specific symbolism. However, some anthropological and sociological studies related to ethnic and tourist crafts have recognised that, in the age of global markets, authenticity does not exist transcendentally and immutably, but becomes differentiated in the contexts of production and exchange among artisans, buyers and consumers (Appadurai 1986; Fine 2003; Velthuis 2003; Wherry 2006). This is a concept of multiple or differentiated authenticities. Similarly, Clifford notes the changes in the fluidity and value of the categories created for objects that circulate in various cross-​cultural spaces, referring to it as the ‘arts and culture system’ (Clifford 1988). This chapter recognises how the concept of differentiated authenticities appropriately illuminates the struggles of Rishton potters following independence. In the Soviet era, although they were forced to copy the samples decided by the arts committee in Tashkent, Rishton potters maintained a very stable output, salary and 642

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-51

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

social security. However, after independence, in order to sell products to tourists from abroad as independent potters, they had to create products that reflected the tastes of buyers and consumers, while still appealing to the specific traditions of Rishton pottery. Since the late 1990s, when Rishton potters began to adapt to this new situation, the patterns and shapes of Rishton pottery rapidly became diversified. The shapes and patterns (jugs, vegetation patterns, pomegranates, fish, etc.), often found in nineteenth-​century products, are painted in finer detail in today’s products. Many pottery masters arrange these regular motifs using their own imagination. In addition to traditional plates and bowls, a wide variety of products, such as coffee cups and accessory cases with lids are produced. Some potters have introduced new methods of pottery from abroad, such as dot painting, and using decals of Uzbekistan’s major tourism spots. This diversification of Rishton ceramic products was criticised by some researchers: ‘their [potters’] quest does not always produce good results and often becomes eclectic’ (Alieva 2001, p.63). However, even in the nineteenth century (which is considered to be the golden age of Rishton’s blue pottery), products were not only created with fine blue patterns on a white background, but also included various colours; furthermore, the patterns were made according to customers’ orders (Kikuta 2013; Peshchreva 1959). Platters and vases with cobalt-​blue patterns on a white background were certainly a popular staple among the wealthy at the time, but this should not be thought of as the only format in the absolute and singular tradition of Rishton pottery. Rather than considering the modern products as authentic and real, or inauthentic and fake, in a binary opposition, the concept of differentiated authenticities is more suitable for describing the potters’ struggle to make a living using local crafts and for analysing how they interpret their handicrafts’ authenticity. Compared to other pottery towns in Uzbekistan, Rishton has a much larger number of potters, which leads to fierce competition among them to bring out the multiple meanings of authenticity. In other pottery towns, such as Urgut, Gijduvon, Andijon and Gurumsaray, only one or perhaps a few families inherited the traditional pottery industry after the drastic changes in the industrial structure in the Soviet era. These potters inevitably become authorities on their handicrafts if they follow the pattern and shape inherited from their ancestors (Kikuta 2019). In comparison, there are dozens of skilled masters in Rishton, including potters who have worked the profession, handed down for generations. Given their many rivals, Rishton potters have no choice but to always be aware of the authenticity of their products, and to differentiate them from others, to appeal to buyers and consumers. In this chapter, to understand the multiple authenticities of Rishton pottery, the social aspects of the pottery technique used by the master potters are shown in a four-​ vector model. As a result, the difference in the assertion of authenticity among potters is shown. It is revealed that the social valuation of the same technique can change over time. Through this analysis, I will show that understanding the social position of the technique supporting handicrafts is very useful in understanding the differentiation of authenticities among artisans. This chapter is based on the fieldwork that I conducted in Rishton beginning in 2002. I interviewed nearly a hundred potters in the Uzbek language from 2002 to 2004, spending an hour or so with each. Since then, I visited the town for almost a month each year to continue to investigate the changes in Rishton’s society and its 643

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

pottery. In 2018 and 2019, I conducted additional detailed interviews with five major potters in the town. In the following sections, this chapter provides a brief overview of the Rishton pottery industry’s history, revealing the quest for authenticity which took place at the end of the Soviet era. Following this, I describe the major changes to the structure of Rishton’s pottery industry following independence, and how authenticity becomes rapidly focused and differentiated. To clarify further, the next section presents the features of the products of two masters in a four-​vector model, according to the social aspect of the pottery’s technique; finally, the relationships with the masters’ assertions of authenticity are analysed.

THE BEGINNING OF THE SEARCH FOR ‘AUTHENTICITY’ IN RISHTON POTTERY This section provides an overview of the history of Rishton pottery and explains that, despite a major change in the production system during the Soviet era, some techniques and forms of apprenticeship remained. At the end of the Soviet era, local masters who had trained through apprenticeships began their quest to establish the authentic Rishton pottery. Rishton, with a population of approximately fifty thousand in 2016, is one of the leading pottery towns in Central Asia. The city and its suburbs are rich in fine clay, and the pottery industry has flourished for more than a thousand years (Kodzaeva 1998, p.2). In the nineteenth century, Rishton was famous across Central Asia for producing the best-​quality pottery, with cobalt-​blue patterns on a white background, and a semi-​porcelain product called chinni, which is thin and hard. In addition to these expensive kinds of pottery, which are meant as gifts, Rishton made many pottery products in various colours and patterns for everyday use. However, with the growing demand for Russian porcelain, which was more durable and thinner than pottery at the end of the century, Rishton pottery gradually lost its appeal in the market (Mirzaakhmedov 1990, p.67; Peshchereva 1959, p.202). At that time, Rishton pottery was a domestic handicraft industry, in which one craftsman was responsible for the entire production process. The pottery masters (known as usta or ustoz) were all male and owned their studios, with several male assistants (xalifa) and apprentice boys (shogird) helping in the operations. To become an independent master, one had to learn all the skills involved in pottery making beginning in one’s teenage years, and then hold a large banquet (anjuman) where all the famous masters would come to pronounce their approval. Most xalifas were not able to host this banquet, and continued to work for others for the rest of their lives without their own studios (Peshchereva 1959, pp.344–​355). The Soviet government, which established control of the area in the 1920s, imposed the collectivisation of pottery production to eliminate such ownership gaps in pottery production and to promote socialism in the region. In the early 1920s, the first collective workplace, called Khimtrud, was established (Rakhimov 1961, pp.20–​ 21), and thereafter, the number of collective workplaces increased. In the late 1930s, home pottery making was banned, and most of the masters moved their production 644

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

to collective workplaces, but some of them abandoned pottery following the loss of their studios. By 1941, the collectivisation of Rishton pottery was complete (Peshchereva 1959, p.209). Gradually, the production union repeatedly reorganised and transformed these workplaces into large-​scale factories. Everything, from the supply of raw materials to decisions regarding the products and their distribution, was carried out according to the state plan. The potters on the site were called usta or ustoz, and they received wages as labourers by fulfilling their quota of work. The career stage of xalifa disappeared, because the workplaces no longer belonged to individuals. However, according to today’s masters, even in Soviet times, many sons and male relatives of pottery masters regularly came to the collective workplace to help with the work. Although these boys were not formal members of the factory, they were called apprentices (shogird), and their help was indispensable for the work of the factory. After several years of learning pottery from their masters at the factory, the eager youths secured formal positions at the factory. In other words, even after collectivisation, potters in Rishton generally grew up through the traditional apprenticeship system, in which ancient pottery techniques, patterns and meanings were passed down to the next generation. The next major change in Rishton pottery production was during the late 1960s, with the onset of mechanisation and technological innovation. The foot-​kicking wheels were replaced by electric ones; wood-​and gasoline-​fuelled kilns were replaced by gas-​fired ones, and pottery moulds were introduced. In 1972, the national ceramic factory, called Rishton Badiiy Kulolchilik Buyumlari Zavodi, was established; it introduced a streamlined production process with conveyor belts. The factory workers, called ishchi, received six months of training; they specialised in one part of the entire process, and most of the pottery painters were young women. The Tashkent Artistic Committee determined the samples to be made by the factory, and a large quantity of daily-​use tableware and vases with chemical pigments and lead glazes were produced (Rakhimov 1974). Although some Soviet ethnographers assessed such products as ‘non-​traditional pottery’ and regretted the ‘decline in tradition’ (Rakhimov 1961, p.82; Zhadova 1974, p.21), Rishton became the main producer of daily-​use pottery in Central Asia in the late Soviet era, employing more than 2,000 workers (see Figure 42.1). Some skilled masters were permitted to have their own rooms on factory grounds, and they carried out all the processes of pottery making by themselves, with their apprentices, producing special souvenirs (Kikuta 2009; 2013; 2017). One such master was Ibragim Komilov (1926–​2003), who was a seventh-​generation potter in Rishton. He had learned from his masters the various skills of traditional Rishton pottery, such as old patterns, their meanings and the unique forms of pottery. He regretted that these old ceramic techniques were lost due to not being used in the Soviet factory products, especially the national ash glaze called ishqor, famous for lending a unique colour to the pottery, which was popular during the nineteenth century. Sadly, the proportions of the blend had been forgotten or lost during the middle of the Soviet era. Privately, he began the search for these lost technologies in the 1970s, trying to find the recipe for ishqor, and began to experiment with producing it again after a few years’ search. At the end of the Soviet era, riding on the spirit of perestroika reform, the Rishton Ceramics Factory was given the freedom to continue to follow samples from 645

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

Figure 42.1  A master looks at his productions from the 1970s (2003, photo by the author).

Tashkent, or to allow local masters to decide on the colour of some products (Kikuta 2013; 2017). The masters who had strongly cultivated respect for their masters under the apprenticeship system wanted to revive and apply the traditional colours and motifs that had been passed down in Rishton for generations, rather than creating products from scratch. They formed a group of about 25–​30 people, called the ‘creative group’ (ijodiy groux) with Mr Komilov and his colleagues, to make new products that reflected the tradition of Rishton pottery. The members of this group went to Moscow’s Museum of Oriental Studies and the Hermitage in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to view the samples of Rishton pottery from the nineteenth century; thus, they restored the old patterns and forms, and applied them to new products. These products were sold in the salons of Tashkent as expensive gifts, separate from the mass-​produced commodities, with profits returning to the creators of the models. After independence, the active operation of the ‘creative group’ was praised highly by the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan for reviving the tradition of Rishton pottery (Kodzaeva 1998, p.5; Alieva and Khakimov 1999, pp.17–​18). Thus, the quest for authenticity in Rishton pottery began at the end of the Soviet era. However, most of the items then produced were sold as gifts for the domestic market, with almost no connection to the global market (see Figure 42.2). 646

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

Figure 42.2  Master Komilov’s works with national ash glaze from the 1990s (2003, photo by author).

CONNECTING TO THE GLOBAL MARKET: RISHTON POTTERY AFTER INDEPENDENCE This section describes how Rishton ceramics began to open up to the global market after the independence of Uzbekistan, and the quest for authenticity progressed rapidly and became differentiated. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the state-​run factory became privately owned, but managing the factory became more difficult year by year, and the number of products made in the factory decreased sharply (Kikuta 2013; 2017). This was because an increasing number of people, mainly skilled masters, began to establish their own pottery production at their workshops. This individualisation of production was supported by a presidential decree issued in 1997, ‘On state support methods for reviving the artistic craftsmanship and craft art of the people’. The decree was ordained to establish the National Association of Artisans (Xalq Hunarmandlari Uyushmasi, hereinafter referred to as the Craftsmen’s Association), to support the artisans who were members of this association, and to revive artistic ‘craftmanship (O‘zbekiston 1997). The purpose of this policy was to increase nationalism by promoting ethnic culture, and to allow artisans all over Uzbekistan to earn a living by personally producing and selling crafts to foreign tourists, whose numbers have been increasing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

647

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

Based on this decree, the Rishton branch of the Craftsmen’s Association was established in 1997. Potters left the factory, set up a kiln on their own premises, joined the Craftsmen’s Association and began to work on pottery while receiving preferential treatment regarding taxation. The number of members of the Association reached 130 in 1998, while 40–​50 regularly participated in trade shows in Tashkent and sold decorative pottery, mainly to foreign tourists (Kodzaeva 1998, p.9). These masters had been trained for years in the national ceramic factory during the Soviet era, and were responsible for all the processes involved in shaping and firing the local clay into the final products. They used their technique to develop products that foreign tourists could easily transport home. For example, in Uzbekistani daily life, for ceremonies that involve a large number of people, a large plate with a diameter of 30cm was used for pilaf, but it was difficult for foreign customers to put in a suitcase and take home, so smaller plates with a diameter of 5–​10cm were made. For the pattern, the masters divided the inside of the plate into small sections and drew a small geometric pattern in each one. One master explained this to me thus: ‘It looks very delicate and sells well. Each piece has a different pattern, so the customers cannot decide which one to buy, and in the end buy many pieces.’ However, another master said, ‘Actually their value is not high, because it’s easy for apprentices to put a geometric pattern in a section of a few centimetres. It’s much more difficult to draw large patterns, such as flowers and jugs, on the blank background.’ Smaller, finer-​ patterned pottery became a popular souvenir among tourists in the 2000s; thus, hundreds of residents were involved in making and selling these products. The common path along which local people enter the pottery industry is as follows: residents who were previously completely unaware of pottery making begin apprenticing with their neighbours and relatives for several months to learn how to make one product, or the process of making pottery. Next, they begin to produce one kind of pottery at home or repeat that one particular process, and sell it to people or wholesalers who carry out the next process. In this way, the division of labour in pottery making has spread throughout the town. In addition to making pottery, there are various jobs relating to the process, such as collecting and selling B-​ class products, transporting them to tourist cities, and digging and preparing clay for pottery. People who lost their jobs at state-​owned enterprises and young people who could not find a job after graduating from school survived the economic difficulties after independence through working in the pottery industry in Rishton. The privatisation of the production system of Rishton pottery and its widespread growth, however, also caused serious problems, such as overproduction and low prices. One master explained it to me as follows: Since around the year 2000, the emergence of sham potters [kulolcha, implying not a real potter or kulol] and vendors has reduced the value of Rishton pottery […] If one person makes a shape that sells well, the next day, its imitation will appear in the bazaar. Those who buy and sell are responsible for the increase in the number of people who just imitate without learning. They are not merchants, they just buy very cheaply and put us in great danger. When foreign tourists come to our country, those venders sell their products at very low prices in Khiva, Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, demeaning its value. It is difficult to call their

648

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

commodities Rishton pottery. There are no traditions left. The sham potters just put detailed patterns on pottery and think they are very beautiful. (A pottery master in his 40s, October 2003) Another master criticised not only the producers of low-​priced pottery and their vendors, but also young potters, who try to earn a quick income rather than spending years learning pottery making: In the olden days, if you became someone’s apprentice, you worked with your master for five or six years at least. If your master was not satisfied, you worked with him for up to 40 years. Nowadays, young people come to me and say, ‘Make me your apprentice and give me lessons’, and after working for a month and learning one or two decorative patterns, they leave, saying, ‘You did not raise me from an apprentice.’ Then, they begin to produce pottery at home with only one design. (A pottery master in his 50s, May 2003) Why was there an increase in the numbers of such young people? It is generally accepted that masters are required to provide their apprentices with food and a small amount of money. In the late Soviet era, masters at the Rishton ceramic factory could afford to give their apprentices food and money while training them carefully over several years. After independence, however, the state enterprises no longer provided stable jobs and salaries, and young people were forced to complete their training in a short period in order to start earning money. The Craftsmen’s Association has failed to implement effective measures to deal with the problems of overproduction and falling prices. Some of the Association’s board members sometimes stop by to check the quality of its members’ products and to provide guidelines if the quality is declining, but it does not have the authority to regulate the shape and colour of the products, quantity of sales, or channels of sale. The manager of Rishton’s branch wanted to establish a copyright on patterns and forms against rampant plagiarism, but he lacked the authority or funds to register and monitor such a system, as there is no law in place to limit intellectual copyrights and protect artisanship. In addition to the underdeveloped law, I believe that the community is tolerant of new entrants to the trade and morally unaccepting of the monopolisation of skills, as evidenced by the proverb, ‘caravans are many, so that there must be profit for everyone’ (karvon ko‘p, rizq bo‘ladi). One could not also refuse to teach a skill when requested by one’s relatives and neighbours to sustain a livelihood, especially during the hard times following independence. It was socially acceptable only to keep the truly difficult and delicate skills secret, such as making the blend for ishqor, the natural ash glaze, except from close apprentices or children. In this way, following the independence of Uzbekistan, Rishton pottery attracted attention from the rapidly increasing number of foreign tourists as souvenirs. Moreover, it began to connect to the global market, and the products immediately became diversified. Meanwhile, the number of pottery workers has increased so much that no one can control the quality and quantity of the products made, causing problems such as price reduction and over-​competition.

649

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

TWO MASTERS’ SEARCH FOR RISHTON POTTERY AUTHENTICITY This section deals with two well-​known and economically successful Rishton masters. Both of their products are very popular with tourists as authentic Rishton pottery. However, their approaches to authenticity and traditional techniques are completely different. The first master, Zafar, tries to create something different from the traditional Rishton pottery, while the second master, Asad, tries to create works that make use of traditional techniques. In this section, we divide the pottery techniques into four social aspects and analyse their relationship with differentiated authenticity. Master Zafar (pseudonym, b. 1960s) was born and raised in Rishton. His father and grandfather were both cooks, but he was interested in pottery, and began to learn from some masters at the Rishton pottery factory when he was 12 years old. With hard work and dedication, he became a good master by the time he graduated from the eleventh grade. After returning from military service, he became a painter (rassom) at the factory, but he was only allowed to follow the given pattern. As a young and talented master, he soon became eager to make something new, rather than just tableware. During his off-​hours, he attempted to make ceramic figures, which did not exist in the Rishton tradition at that time. In Central Asia, villages like Uba and Karatag were famous for producing ceramic dolls, but in Rishton, producing such dolls attracted opposition from older masters because it could be considered as violating Islamic teachings, which forbid idolatry. However, Zafar’s interpretation of ceramic dolls was different. When I asked if doll making was against Islam, he replied: ‘Now it’s nothing, it’s an art. In the past, when people used to worship this kind of thing, it was bad. Now, we have reason and do not worship dolls’ (Zafar, November 2003). Thus, around 1980, he succeeded in producing such figures. However, it was still a rare product, made in very small quantities. After independence, Zafar, like many other masters, opened a studio in his home and began producing his products himself. He started developing products that were different from the usual small plates and bowls. He arranged and sold the dolls that he created for tourists. The dolls were less than 10cm tall, of ethnically dressed old Uzbek men with local specialties: melons, watermelons, breads (non), and so on. Initially, they were exhibited at the Craftsmen’s Association and some souvenir stores in Tashkent; then they became very popular with foreign tourists as a unique souvenir from Uzbekistan, and wholesalers regularly came to Zafar’s studio to collect products. Eventually, the types of dolls increased, including a decorative plate to which dolls were attached to reproduce the traditional landscape of Uzbekistan (see Figure 42.3). Zafar achieved financial success from these ceramic dolls, and in 2000 he was elected ‘National Master of Uzbekistan’ (O‘zbekiston xalq ustasi), which gave him authority as a great master in the region. In Rishton, seeing Zafar’s success, a number of inhabitants began to make similar dolls in folk costumes, but Zafar said he was not too concerned. Rather, he emphasised they should create their own new products: ‘They can’t make my level of products. It’s OK for me that other potters learn from my products. However, they shouldn’t just imitate mine. They should create something new. If a person thinks, he can think of new products’ (Zafar, November 2003). 650

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

Figure 42.3  Zafar’s works (2003, photo by the author).

It seemed that he had a strong conviction that he still had the power to create other new things. When I asked him why he did not make the typical blue plates that other pottery masters made for tourists, he replied confidently: There are many masters who make this kind of pottery. I can make them, too, but other works also come from my hand […] We have to do what no one else is doing. However, most potters’ heads are not shaped [i.e., they haven’t got a good brain for originality]. They say that, if they can make a quick buck with a common product, they will be fine. However, if you make something new, it will be better. Ceramics will move forward. (Zafar, November 2003) Zafar also expected that over time, the social position of the products he created would change. When I asked him if his dolls and abstract paintings could be regarded as a part of ‘the tradition of Rishton pottery’, he answered as follows: They are not included in the national tradition (milliy an’ana) of Rishton pottery. They are innovations (yangilik). Tradition came to us from our ancestors. We must develop it again and pass it on to our descendants, and then, it will be ‘our ancestor’s thing’ in a hundred years. (Zafar, November 2003)

651

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

Figure 42.4  Diagrammatic representation of the social aspects of pottery technique.

Figure 42.5  Diagrammatic representation of the axes of authenticity in Zafar’s pottery dolls.

Here, I present a diagram that divides the technique of ceramic art into four vectors: new/​old and exclusive/​common (see Figure 42.4 above). In this diagram, Zafar’s doll product was initially located on Side A as a new and unique innovation in the four-​sided view, but then imitations began to spread, and it moved to Side B. In addition, Zafar himself is aware that the social value of his technique can change, and his quote shows that he believes that doll making will eventually move to Side C and become a tradition of the local pottery industry (see Figure 42.5 below). Zafar wants to recreate Side A innovations that would bring great economic benefits and the potential to develop the entire Rishton pottery industry; at the time of his interview, he was experimenting with abstract paintings on plates. Next, let us look at another famous master, Asadbek. Master Asadbek (a pseudonym, b. 1958) is one of the most well-​known masters of Rishton pottery. Although he did not belong to a family of potters, from the age of 12, he began to learn from his masters in the national factory and, because of his skill, he was selected to be the head painter at the factory. He took a lively interest in and participated in the ‘creative group’ mentioned above at the end of the Soviet era. He also won the Craftsmen’s Association’s national competition in 2001. His skill is recognised internationally, and he is invited to various places such as Russia, England and Japan to hold exhibitions. A feature of his work is the research and application of traditional techniques in his own way. For example, in the early 2000s, he revived a technique of painting called tagi siyoh, which features black or brown backgrounds. He also revived a motif known as ‘happiness birds’, which was inspired by Persian plates. The late Master Komilov often drew birds, but while 652

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

his rustic bird paintings were similar on every plate, Asadbek’s birds had different patterns for each work. Furthermore, he reconstructed an ochre colour, which is known as ‘camel’s dung’; this technique was the speciality of Master Mazoir, who was a famous potter in Rishton at the end of the nineteenth century. This colour contrasted beautifully when drawn on a light blue plate. In recent years, he has been working tirelessly to use glaze containing a deliberately small amount of ishqor to produce matte-​finished products. This production technique was inspired by the matte pilaf platters that the late Master Komilov occasionally created at the factory. When he served pilaf, which contained a lot of fat, the platter’s surface gradually became more lustrous because of the fat; this allowed people to tell how often they ate pilaf. When I met with Asadbek in 2018, he told me that the matte process was very popular with European tourists, and that he was applying it to a variety of products, including plates and jars. In this way, Asadbek is different from Zafar (who tries to create something new from scratch), and tries to make use of the existing tradition. Once, when I asked him, ‘Don’t you want to break away from tradition?’, he said: No, no. Tradition –​this is a treasure that never ends. It is a very big treasure, and you can take as much as you want from it. The more you are interested in it, the more you can take from it, and the greater the number of new things that will come out of it. Actually, it is very old, but for you, it is new. This is very interesting. The more you go into tradition, the more you can develop your worldview […] There is a phrase that goes like this: ‘The newest and most beautiful thing is the old.’ When you do something, you have to preserve tradition. If there is no tradition in the foundation of the product, no new styles will emerge. (Asadbek, October 2003) In our diagram, Asadbek’s technique is located on Side D (see Figure 42.6 above). He revived the techniques which were once common on Side C and monopolised them to gain the authority and financial benefits of an excellent Rishton potter. These techniques are not something that can be copied easily, because the glaze and pigments

Figure 42.6  Diagrammatic representation of the axes of authenticity in Asadbek’s pottery. 653

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

require complicated blending and firing skills. Asadbek understands the importance of secrets and states the need to monopolise the value of the technique he uses: It’s often said in Rishton that the great masters of the past ‘have gone without telling a secret’, and I think this is correct. Still, the master tells the secret to his children and his favourite apprentices, because they work together and know the value of the secret technique. Masters also know that they are hard workers (mehnatkash). This maintains the value of the profession (kasb). You don’t have to tell it [the secret] to irresponsible potters (kulolcha), who don’t know the value. What is the reason why the secret appeared in pottery? If everyone knew the secret, the high value of ceramics would be lost. (Asadbek, October 2003) Thus, Asadbek is well aware that the economic or artistic value of pottery will decline as it shifts from Side D to Side C or B. To prevent this, he believes that only those who grew up in an apprenticeship, loved ceramics and knew the importance of tradition should inherit the secret techniques: ‘If you learn at your master’s home, you can return to tradition faster. It is important to teach affection for the work and craftsmanship from a young age’ (Asadbek, July 2003). In another interview, Asadbek added: In addition to the colour, shape and production method, I also wanted to preserve the apprentice training process. It is a tradition that must be preserved […] The master must pass on his knowledge of the art to his apprentices. Disciplining the apprentices in the spirit of the tradition (an’ana ruxida tarbiyalash) is considered fundamental to the preservation of tradition. (Asadbek, October 2003) In 2003, Asadbek built his own workshop, and has been actively teaching his young apprentices since then. There are always some teenage boys and youths in their 20s in Asadbek’s workshop, and they learn various skills through performing different tasks, such as kneading clay, painting and firing their works in the kiln (see Figure 42.7).

CONCLUSION In post-​independence Uzbekistan, Rishton pottery has rapidly diversified due to its connection to the global market; it is no longer confined only to blue and white colour schemes. Furthermore, potters are now more willing to adopt all kinds of global fashions. Some people think that most Rishton pottery today is no longer authentic, and that the tradition is disappearing. Nevertheless, if we consider the history of Rishton pottery more carefully, the fine cobalt-​blue vegetation-​patterned pottery on a white background, which is now regarded as the tradition of Rishton pottery in academia, was certainly a fashionable product in the nineteenth century. In fact, many other products have been made according to the customers’ order for centuries, with various colours and patterns. Therefore, limiting the authenticity of Rishton pottery to cobalt blue would not be appropriate. 654

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​

Figure 42.7  Sample of Asadbek’s work from 2018 (photo by Vladimir Kovrein).

To understand the authenticity of Rishton pottery after independence, I adopted the perspective of differentiated authenticities in this chapter. Based on this view, the authenticity of modern handicrafts in global markets is not absolute and unchanging, but is interpreted differently in the interactions between artisans, sellers and consumers from various cultural backgrounds. To understand the struggle and the pursuit of authenticity by Rishton pottery masters, this chapter presents two masters’ pottery techniques using a four-​vector diagram of social aspects, and clarifies how the concepts of authenticity are related to this arrangement. The first master, Zafar, created a small doll that had never been seen previously in Rishton pottery. His products were positioned in Side A of the four-​vector diagram, as they were ‘new’ and ‘exclusive’ when they were produced in the 1990s. Small ceramic dolls with ethnic clothes have rapidly become one of the standards of tourist souvenirs and have brought Zafar great financial success, as well as a reputation in the local community. As many residents began to imitate Zafar, the dolls in the Rishton pottery industry moved to Side B, with features of both ‘new’ and ‘common’. Zafar further predicts that in the future, doll making will shift to Side C, with features of ‘old’ and ‘common’, and become a part of the tradition of Rishton pottery. In other words, he believes that the authenticity of the Rishton pottery can be renewed through innovations. 655

—​​​​ H a r u k a K i k u t a —​​​​

Another master, Asadbek, believes that if there is no tradition in the foundation of a product, no new styles will emerge. He refers to reviving lost techniques from old pottery and uses them exclusively in his work. Therefore, his products can be positioned on Side D, between the ‘old’ and ‘exclusive’ vectors. Other potters cannot easily imitate his advanced techniques. He is well aware that the value of his product is further enhanced by his monopoly, and is slowly teaching his skills to only his best apprentices. He believes that it is the traditional technique that underpins the authenticity of the Rishton pottery, which is inherited through apprenticeship with a very limited number of good masters, and the secrecy surrounding the skills preserves its value. In this way, using the four-​vector diagram of handicrafts’ technique, we can understand the difference in the assertion of authenticity among potters, and understand that the value of the same technique changes over time. In considering the way in which ethnic and tourist crafts are distributed through the global handicrafts market, it is important to carefully follow the interpretations of authenticity and the fluctuation of value; these change, are differentiated, and diversify in the exchange and distribution of the objects. To that end, this chapter has schematised the social position and characteristics of the technique that underpins handicrafts, and attempted to capture multiple interpretations of authenticity and their transitions on the part of the creator.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank my informants and the potters in Rishton, as well as the editors of this volume, and Editage (www.edit​age.com) for English language editing.

REFERENCES Alieva, S. 2001. Badiiy kulollik, pp.61–​69 in Hakimov, A. (ed.), O‘zbekiston san’ati (1991–​ 2001 yillar). Tashkent: Sharq. Alieva, S. and Khakimov, A. 1999. Ceramics, pp.11–​19 in Khakimov, A.A. and Akhmedov, A. (eds.), Atlas of Central Asian artistic crafts and trades, vol. 1. Tashkent: Sharq. Appadurai, A. 1986. Introduction: commodities and the politics of value, pp.3–​ 63 in Appadurai, A. (ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture: Twentieth-​century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fine, G.A. 2003. Crafting authenticity: the validation of identity in self-​taught art. Theory and Society 32(2): 153–​180. Kikuta, H. 2009. A master is greater than a father: Rearrangements of traditions among Muslim artisans in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Uzbekistan, pp.89–​122 in Wood, D.C. (ed.), Economic development, integration, and morality in Asia and the Americas (Research in Economic Anthropology 29). Bingley, UK: JAI Press/​Emerald Publishing Limited. Kikuta, H. 2013. Uzubekisutan no seijya suukei [Veneration of Pir Saints in Uzbekistan]. Tokyo: Fukyosya [In Japanese]. Kikuta, H. 2017. Venerating the pir: Patron saints of Muslim ceramists in Uzbekistan. Central Asian Survey 36(2): 195–​211.

656

— ​​​​ D i f f e r e n t a u t h e n t i c i t i e s o f R i s h t o n p o t t e r y i n U z b e k i s t a n —​​​​ Kikuta, H. 2019. Uzbekistan’s potteries: Reviving tradition of the Silk Road. Sapporo: Kyodo Bunkasya [In Japanese]. Kodzaeva, L.X-​M. 1998. Keramika Rishtana, traditsii i mastera. Tashkent: Institut Otkrytoe Obshchestvo. Mirzaakhmedov, D.K. 1990. K istorii khudozhestvennoi kul’tury Bukhary. Tashkent: Fan. O‘zbekiston Respublikasi oliy majlisining axborotnomasi 1997. O‘zbekiston respublikasi prezidentining 《Xalq badiiy hunarmandchiliklari va amaliy san’atini yanada rivojlantirishni davlat yo‘li bilan qo‘llab-​quvvatlash chora-​tadbirlari to‘g‘risida》gi farmoni. 31 March: 21–​23. Peshchereva, E.M. 1959. Goncharnoe proizvodstvo v Srednei Azii. Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiya Nauk SSSR. Rakhimov, M.K. 1961. Khudozhestvennaya keramika Uzbekistana. Tashkent: Akademiya Nauk UzSSR. Rakhimov, M.K. 1974. Bugungi kulolchilik. O‘zbekiston Madaniyati, 15, 2 November. Swanson, K. and Timothy, D. 2012. Souvenirs: Icons of meaning, commercialization and commoditization. Tourism Management 33(3): 489–​499. Velthuis, O. 2003. Symbolic meanings of prices: Constructing the value of contemporary art in Amsterdam and New York galleries. Theory and Society 32(2): 181–​215. Wherry, F.F. 2006. The social sources of authenticity in global handicraft markets: Evidence from Northern Thailand. Journal of Consumer Culture 6(1): 5–​32. Zhadova, L. 1974. Polivnaya keramika, pp.15–​ 26 in Bubnova, L.S. (ed.), Sovremennaya keramika narodnykh masterov Srednei Azii. Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik.

657

CHAPTER FORTY-​T HREE

CLANS AS HERITAGE COMMUNITIES IN KYRGYZSTAN Svetlana Jacquesson

CLANS AS HERITAGE COMMUNITIES IN KYRGYZSTAN Throughout my fieldwork experience in Kyrgyzstan (1998–​ 2018), I have been fascinated with a genre of local publications known as sanjïras, or genealogies. Sanjïras were banned under Soviet rule as celebrations of traditional identities and communities incompatible with a socialist modernity but, with independence, publishing genealogies became a ‘fashion’ and genealogies became ‘the most demanded commodity on the book market’ (Attokurov 1995, p. 5). In their post-​Soviet form, genealogies comprise genealogical charts, ancestries and narratives of the ancestors from whom patrilineally defined groups (referred to as uruu or ‘clans’) derive their origin. I myself have studied clan communities and recorded oral genealogies in the field, and I have also built a private collection of nearly 150 genealogy books published over a quarter of a century, between 1991 and 2016. In this chapter, I offer some insights into the changing meaning of genealogies and genealogy-​defined communities. I do so by allowing my fieldwork experience to serve as a counterpoint to an anthropologically informed scrutiny of the books in my collection and a source-​based investigation of the conditions of their production. Other scholars of Central Asia have drawn attention to the political significance and everyday salience of both clans and genealogies. Such studies were initiated in the early 2000s by anthropologically minded political science scholars who claimed that clan identities played a major role in the formation of post-​Soviet political factions and in the ways these political factions recruited supporters (Schatz 2004; Collins 2006; cf. Gullette 2010b). Though political science scholars failed to provide convincing ethnographic evidence to substantiate the genealogical relatedness between leaders and supporters, ‘clan politics’ was and remains a buzzword in various strands of political commentary. More importantly, it is a favourite with the local news media, and it has found traction among rank-​and-​file citizens for whom the Soviet stigma on clans as ‘survivals from the past’ still rings true. Following in the steps of political science scholars, and in an attempt to vindicate or falsify their conceptualisation of political clans, anthropologists have produced study after study on the vitality of local or village-​level clans as networks of social support and ritual obligations (Hardenberg 2010; Reeves 2012; Botoeva 2015; Light 2015; Beyer 2016; Ismailbekova 2017). They have described in detail how the rights 658

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-52

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

and duties inherent in clan membership were negotiated under Soviet rule, and how clan communities embraced Soviet modernisation while continuing to maintain traditional patterns of socialities and obligations (Yoshida 2005; Jacquesson 2010a; Beyer 2011). In these studies, anthropologists also emphasised the importance of clan membership as a mechanism of social integration and the obligation that local people feel to take part in clan-​framed activities. A handful of studies spread between 2010 and 2018 have drawn attention to the growing number of locally produced clan genealogies (Jacquesson 2012; Hardenberg 2012). However, the tendency within anthropological scholarship has been to problematise the deficiencies of popular genealogical knowledge and to argue that genealogical knowledge does not matter in everyday life; that many social actors are not interested in genealogy, though they comply with the obligations derived from their belonging to a clan; that few social actors are knowledgeable about genealogies; and that when they ‘need’ genealogical knowledge, they refer to sanjïrachï, or local experts (Beyer 2011; Light 2018). In all of the existing studies, genealogies are conceptualised as local lore that has been orally transmitted or preserved by the sanjïrachï who used to ‘recite’ them. Few, if any, studies problematise the relationship between the relentless production of genealogies since independence on the one hand, and the changing practices of clan communities and the evolving meanings of clan identities on the other.1 Nor does the existing scholarship explore the possibility of a nation-​wide (or, one is tempted to add, nation-​deep) clan dynamic, or of a particular twist in the practice of clan identities within a post-​Soviet, neoliberal and democratic framework. Instead, clan communities remain locked in the villages and continue to be analysed overwhelmingly as traditional networks of support. However, as I will discuss further in this chapter, from 2009 on, various clan-​based institutions including clan and inter-​clan conventions (kurultay), clan and inter-​clan councils (ordo kengesh), as well as clan associations (uruu koomu) have been mushrooming in Kyrgyzstan. These institutions advocate for clans as heritage and for clan heritage, genealogies included, and have dived deep in their defence, safeguarding and promotion. In the existing scholarship, on the only occasion in which ‘tribes’ and ‘clans’ in contemporary Kyrgyzstan are considered as ‘heritage categories’ or ‘heritage identities’, ‘heritage’ is used to indicate that they belong to the past (Light 2018). In this chapter, by contrast, I argue that contemporary clans constitute ‘heritage communities’, due to the ways in which heritage as a discourse and practice shapes the relations between and within clan communities and, as importantly, re-​defines how ordinary people experience and reflect upon their clan identities. In order to substantiate these claims, I start by discussing the institutionalisation of clan and inter-​clan councils and conventions, and their rhetoric concerning the importance of clans and clan heritage for securing that most sought-​after commodity of modernity: national unity. Next, I analyse how these new institutions have availed of their position as heritage custodians to actively intervene in the popular practice of genealogies by stretching the boundaries of genealogical lore and by promoting genealogy books as its ultimate repositories. In the third and final section, I offer a snapshot of the heritage-​related activities deployed by clan associations. I foreground practices of sanitisation, folklorisation and festivalisation as key interventions aimed at consolidating clan communities, promoting national unity through clan heritage and fostering inter-​clan cooperation and respect. 659

—​​​​ S v e t l a n a J a c q u e s s o n —​​​​

THE RISE OF CLAN HERITAGE CUSTODIANS On 31 March 2009, in a desperate attempt to suppress economic and political unrest, Kurmanbek Bakiev, Kyrgyzstan’s second president, made public a 25-​ page-​ long ‘Strategy for the country’s renewal’, in which he claimed that the past and current woes of the newly independent state were brought about by the adoption of ‘foreign ideologies’ and suggested instead ‘a balance between necessary innovations and the protection of national distinctiveness (natsional’noe svoeobrazie)’. In the words of Bakiev, or of his advisors: ‘the future of each society depends on the degree to which this society is capable of preserving its identity, unity, and its awareness of its particular history’ (Bakiev 2009).2 Following this invitation, a host of clan-​based institutions appeared on the public stage. Most of these institutions are neo-​traditional to the extent that, as I will discuss in the third section of this chapter, clan councils and clan gatherings had been held informally under the Soviet regime, while inter-​clan conventions are documented for the colonial and pre-​colonial periods. Their leading actors (who, on the inter-​clan level, were overwhelmingly former state officials, parliament members, or thriving businessmen) thus took the president at his word and engaged in the promotion of ‘national distinctiveness’. Between 2009 and 2011 (during which time Kyrgyzstan’s second president was toppled, ethnic clashes led to bloodshed in the south of the country, new parliamentary elections were held as well as a referendum on a new constitution and, finally, a new president was elected), each Kyrgyz clan named a clan leader and a clan council, and the clan councils coalesced within several ephemeral movements whose political imaginary was derived from genealogy in quite neo-​Confucian terms (Aytpaeva and Sezdakhmatova 2012; Jacquesson 2012; Ismailbekova 2018).3 The failure to impose genealogy as a modern principle of orderly government and the election of a new president in 2011 did not discourage the clan councils, but rather steered their activities in a different direction: the protection and promotion of genealogies as ancestral lore. The call to preserve genealogies dates back to the final years of the Soviet regime. A privately sponsored convention of genealogy experts was held in 1990 (Gullette 2010a; Jacquesson 2012), and the very first genealogy, a pocket-​size booklet of 30 pages filled with genealogical charts that was published in 1991, already referred to genealogies as ata muras ‘ancestral lore’ (Umar Uulu 1991). As the number of published genealogies grew, so too did the versions of the genealogical relationships within the Kyrgyz as an ethnic community, the claims lodged by different clans concerning their exceptional contributions to the preservation of Kyrgyz statehood and the quarrels about the clan identities of outstanding sons of the nation, in the distant or recent past.4 This is where inter-​clan councils and conventions intervened. From 2010 on, they took responsibility for reaching a consensus on the correct position of each clan within the genealogical structure of the Kyrgyz, supervising the accurate clan or genealogical identification of present public figures and past heroes, assessing the quality of already published genealogies and supervising the production of new ones. In a manner quite similar to UNESCO’s heritage committees,5 inter-​clan councils and conventions claimed the role of arbiters in assessing clan lore, in preserving it and in dividing it ‘fairly’ between clan communities. Equally importantly, 660

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

they pledged to do so in the name of the unity of the Kyrgyz people, and in defence of Kyrgyz statehood. Clan conventions in the post-​ Bakiev period have become broadly recognised venues for intra-​and inter-​clan interactions where authority on clans and genealogies is both constituted and performed. All include one or several speeches by invited experts on genealogies as pillars of Kyrgyz identity and unity and on the importance of preserving them for the future generations (Jetigen 2009; Sarïbagïsh 2010; Jediger 2012). Many of these speeches are published in the pages of the local news media, or in subsequent clan or sub-​clan genealogy books (Jetigen 2010; Jediger 2013; 2016a). The most noticeable feature of these speeches is their repetitiveness and the great meaning they attribute to a limited number of catchphrases, the most beloved one being ‘sanjïra kïrgïzdï, kïrgïz sanjïranï saktap kelet’: ‘genealogies preserve the Kyrgyz, Kyrgyz preserve the genealogies.’ Backed by some members of the local academic establishment, clan conventions have reinvigorated the discourses on genealogies as histories rather than folklore or oral lore, and they continue to urge genealogists to abstain from consigning tall stories or hearsay to paper. There is also by now a well-​ established ritual for the commendation and promotion of ‘proper’ genealogies: the book presentation takes place at a clan convention; the book is endorsed by one or several representatives of the academic establishment; its author is rewarded with a national headgear; finally, the book is either distributed for free or sold among the participants at the convention.

GENEALOGY BOOKS AS HERITAGE The injunction is that, as a question of honour (namïs), each clan must publish its genealogy as a book (or, as we might put it, that a clan without a published genealogy is like a nation without a museum); this has been reiterated from one clan convention to another (Jetigen 2009; Arïk Mïrza 2011; Jediger 2013; see Figure 43.1). In following this injunction, clan councils had to overcome two difficulties: first, narratives of the ancestors were far from ubiquitous and, second, there were relatively few experts on genealogy.6 When local lore is lacking, clan councils save face by publishing as sanjïra diverse content with, at one end, compendia of any existing writings on a clan or a locality, including excerpts from Soviet or post-​Soviet encyclopaedias, newspapers, journals and even novels and, on the other, books that are composed almost entirely of genealogical charts and ancestries resulting from extensive surveys and interviews conducted by clan activists. Clan councils advocate that every male Kyrgyz must not only know the direct line of his seven forefathers (jeti ata), but must also ensure that his jeti ata is properly included in the clan genealogy. Accordingly, the prefaces of many recent genealogies provide the telephone numbers of the compilers and urge readers whose jeti ata have been missed out or misrepresented to contact them. Many genealogies published under the auspices of clan councils comprise, or at least claim to comprise, the ancestries of all living male members of a clan: these represent pages and pages filled with names. The auxiliary words used when sorting out ancestries orally are omitted from the genealogy books. Instead, their compilers try to impose some order on the flurry of names by resorting to various kinds of punctuation, numbering, different fonts, or a mixture of all of these. The effect on the reader is overwhelming, and some recent 661

—​​​​ S v e t l a n a J a c q u e s s o n —​​​​

genealogy books contain long instructions on how they should be read or used (e.g., Arïk Mïrza 2011, p.114). Clan councils also promise second and third editions, or reviewed and updated editions, of genealogy books in an attempt to attach value to these books as the most complete and the most reliable medium for the preservation of genealogies (Jetigen 2010; Arïk Mïrza 2011; Solto 2015). Genealogical charts and ancestries, if we trust clan councils, are the essence of the Kyrgyz genealogical tradition (see Figure 43.2). To break the monotony of genealogical charts and ancestries, or to help put flesh on the bones, recently published genealogies feature recreations of the portraits of famous ancestors;7 archival photos of the same if they exist (Jediger 2016b); archival or contemporary photos of ancestral tombs and other holy places related to the history of the clan (Arïk Mïrza 2011; Jediger 2016b), and, nearly systematically, long photo galleries of the praiseworthy living members of a clan (e.g., Jediger 2013). Finally, selected photos of clan gatherings allow genealogies to mitigate their overwhelming focus on male individuals or individual ancestries and to depict the clans as communities whose members –​men and women, old and young –​enjoy national games or feasting together (Arïk Mïrza 2011, pp.244–​248; Jediger 2013; Jediger 2016a). I used to be puzzled by the desire to have genealogies published as books, given the rather lively mediatisation of genealogical knowledge since independence. During my stay in Kyrgyzstan in 2012–​16, I had the impression that genealogies were everywhere: on at least two different televised ‘live shows’ starring genealogy experts –​on Kabar TV and Prime TV KG; in articles published by printed or online newspapers and journals; on websites offering access to available genealogical data (e.g., www. sanj​yra.kg/​) or collecting missing data (e.g., https://​7ata.kg/​), and on social media, where some of the users were desperately seeking information about their clans while others were obligingly uploading published articles or book chapters (see, e.g., ‘Solto uruusu’, http://​die​sel.elcat.kg/​lofi​vers​ion/​index.php?t3926​161.html). I argue that the unity and consensus promoted and promised publicly by the inter-​clan councils are predicated on the canonical, stable and unchanging clan genealogies consigned to books. In the era of digitalisation and new media, books in general, and those printed in several hundred copies in particular, become ‘realms of memory’. As ‘realms of memory’, genealogy books codify the proper relations within and between clans, and master narratives of the past that unite and inspire, and around which other narratives or memories are expected to coalesce. By endorsing books as the ultimate repositories of trustworthy genealogical knowledge, by taking a lead in their compilation, or by offering venues for their recognition and dissemination, inter-​clan and clan councils also demonstrate their capacity to govern clans by subjecting them to consensual boundaries and to new ways of being surveyed, visualised and celebrated.8

CLANS AS HERITAGE COMMUNITIES I noted in the chapter’s introduction that insufficient and unequally distributed knowledge of genealogical relations or their irrelevance in everyday life have been emphasised in several recent anthropological studies. The loss of genealogical knowledge was also a major argument that clan councils used in order to constitute themselves as defenders and custodians of clan lore. I suggest, however, that in both cases 662

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

Figure 43.1  The covers of genealogy books reassert 1) the old age of genealogies (as old as petroglyphs); 2) the role of elders –​ak sakal –​in their preservation and transmission; 3) relatedness through sharing a common putative ancestor or the same root (as in a tree); 4) pride in the land inhabited and bequeathed by the ancestors. Images taken from: 1) Imanaliev, M. 1995. Kïrgïz sanjïrasï. Bishkek: Sham. 2) Temiraltytegin, A. 2016. Sanjïra. Bishkek: Sil’va. 3) Abykaev, A. 2016. Uluu Jantay sanjïrasï. Bishkek: Turar. 4) Ismailov, B. 2012. At-​Bashïlïk Azïktar. Bishkek: Biyiktik. 663

—​​​​ S v e t l a n a J a c q u e s s o n —​​​​

the alleged lack, loss, or irrelevance of genealogical knowledge arises from the way it is defined. If genealogical knowledge is reduced to ‘reciting’ –​be it the names of ancestors or stories about them –​it is indeed the case that there are not many people who are adept at this. However, it is important to note that there may have been relatively few such adepts in the past, too. While it is difficult to deny the oral transmission of genealogical knowledge, it is important to acknowledge that oral transmission should not be reduced to public or private recitations. In the present (as in the past), genealogical relations are made relevant through ritual –​by burying the living and commemorating the dead (Jacquesson 2008, 2013; Hardenberg 2010; Beyer 2016) –​ and through various narratives attached to the localities that have been inhabited by the ancestors, or their tombs.9 In the same way that Maurice Godelier (2004) pleads with anthropologists to discuss arable land if they want to study kinship, I suggest that the best way to access and assess genealogical knowledge is not to look for connoisseurs capable of reciting it. Instead, a student of Kyrgyz genealogies should discuss feasts, commemorations, or landmarks (in particular tombs and shrines) that serve, in the same way as genealogy books, as ‘realms of memory’, where genealogical knowledge is rendered meaningful and, by the same move, actualised and learned. Since 2010, clan associations10 have been actively working for the (re)creation of such ‘realms of memory’ and the maintenance and multiplication of practices and rituals that actualise genealogical belonging and genealogical knowledge. These associations have restored existing ancestral tombs or shrines (Munduz 2009; Arïk Mïrza 2011, pp.240–​243); claimed historical remains as ancestral tombs (Jetigen 2009; Solto 2012); reburied ancestors and raised memorials to honour them (Jediger 2010); constructed monuments to celebrate illustrious clan members (Jetigen 2009; Solto 2012; Arïk Mïrza 2018a); immortalised ancestors by giving their names to villages, streets, shops, restaurants, etc.; commemorated the death anniversaries of glorious ancestors (Jediger 2010; Arïk Mïrza 2018b), and organised conferences on the genealogy or history of clans (Jediger 2012; Tagay Biy 2017). To give but just one example illustrating the scale of these activities and demonstrating that they are not confined uniquely to the countryside, in 2011, during a feverish state-​led campaign promoting the Manas epic in order to have it added to UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage, the Solto Ata clan association boldly opposed the proposal by some prominent MPs to change the name of the capital from Bishkek to Manas. While the Manas epic and its eponymous hero have been consistently promoted as a ‘national treasure’ and a ‘national hero’ since independence, Bishkek Baatyr (Bishkek the Bold) is claimed as an ancestor by the Solto clan. Many of these activities were initiated shortly after independence (Jacquesson 2010b; Beyer 2011). While in the early years, they were conducted in isolation, or in the name of a single clan (and thus suspected of the much dreaded ‘clan chauvinism’), since 2010, clan-​related activities have been sanitised in the name of ‘clan patriotism’. The clan gathering of the Jediger, organised by the Jediger association and named after the putative ancestor of the clan, Koylon Ata, on 12 May 2012, in Maylïsuu (Jalal-​Abad Region, southern Kyrgyzstan), provides a good example of how this ‘sanitisation’ has been conducted. Rather than holding the gathering informally, the Jediger association posted several press releases about the event: first announcing it, and then describing in detail what happened and how. The main goal of the gathering, according to these press 664

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

Figure 43.2  Various ways of representing ancestries as genealogical charts: while in the first genealogy books (upper left) genealogical charts were like illustrations, subsequently they became more ‘data-bound’ Images taken from: 1) Zakirov, S. and T. Asanaliev. 1991. Sayaktïn sanjïrasï. Cholpon-​Ata: s.n. 2) Bökölöev, B. 2007. Jetigen. Bishkek: Ideya. 3) Mambetaliev, T., ed., 2009. Jetigen sanïrasï: birinchi basïlïshï. Bishkek: Gülchynar. 4) Isaev, K. 2008. Bosteri jana Bosterilikter. Bishkek: s.n.

665

—​​​​ S v e t l a n a J a c q u e s s o n —​​​​

releases, was to strengthen the unity of northern and southern Kyrgyz and to reinforce the solidarity (ïntïmak) of the Jediger clan. Besides Jediger coming from all over the country, 18 Kyrgyz clans from northern Kyrgyzstan honoured the Jediger invitation and sent guests to join the gathering, while the southern regions were represented by the coordinators of two clan associations: Adigine from Osh and Munduz from Jalal-​ Abad. As part of the gathering, a conference dedicated to the history of the Kyrgyz took place at the local House of Culture. It was attended by representatives of the National Association of Historians and featured a local historian endorsed by the Jediger association as an expert on the genealogy of the clan. The conference opened with a performance of Kyrgyzstan’s national anthem and then the anthem of the Jediger clan. At the end of the conference, the president of the National Association of Historians and the author of the history of the Jediger clan each received a racehorse as a gift on behalf of the Jediger clan.11 For the people of Maylïsuu, the day of the clan gathering became a day of joyful festivities. Guests were received ‘according to custom’ and accommodated in 50 yurts, each of which had a different traditional design. Seven horses were butchered for the feast by the seven sub-​clans (major genealogical lines) of the Jediger, with each sub-​clan attending to 35 guests. At the town stadium, competitions in traditional games attracted a sea of spectators and the winners received lavish prizes. Following the games, the representatives of all invited clans took turns on a podium and delivered speeches celebrating the unity of northern and southern Kyrgyz and praising the solidarity and hospitality of the Jediger clan (Jediger 2012). As mentioned above, inter-​clan gatherings were documented during the colonial period when clan leaders and their followers used to meet either annually, in order to discuss and actualise regulations based on custom and, thus, to avoid conflict or bloodshed (Kozhonaliev 1963), or on an ad hoc basis, such as for the commemoration of the death of an outstanding clan member (Jacquesson 2008; 2013). The historical data for translocal gatherings of single clans during the colonial period is sparse. Instead, there are multiple well-​documented cases during the Soviet period (see, e.g., Malabaev 1996). In all of these cases, a dozen men from one village travelled informally to another village to meet or establish contact with the locals who share the same clan identity. The travellers were received and hosted for several days, memories were exchanged and genealogies discussed in an attempt to repair broken genealogical links, or to determine missing ones. In some cases, a return visit followed, and the connection was maintained over the years; in other cases, the connection was interrupted again. These practices increased during the first decade of independence. At that time, however, such clan gatherings remained informal, as well as closed to non-​clan members, fostering suspicion among the public and triggering various speculations over their ‘hidden’ agendas.12 The model of what I refer to as ‘sanitised’ clan gatherings seems to have been established by the meeting of the Munduz in 2009, and the practice has been maintained ever since, with the 2012 Jediger gathering described above being one of many.13 By ‘sanitised’, I mean that in their post-​2010 form, clan gatherings are announced and described by press releases, held publicly and always with the participation of representatives of several clans in a purposeful demonstration of transparency. The various speakers take great pains to alleviate inter-​clan competition or tensions, which had been present in the historical precedents of these gatherings,14 666

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​

and instead to foreground the ways in which such gatherings contribute to the promotion of cooperation and respect between clans, to the unification of clans within the country, and therefore to the unification of the country itself. When it comes to the style of socialising and entertainment during these gatherings, even a cursory look at the clan gatherings’ photos that are published in genealogy books (or at the video clips more and more often uploaded onto YouTube –​see, e.g., Solto 2018; Mungush 2019), reveals that these gatherings have joined the global fashion of ‘festivalisation’: they are events where folklorised representations of clan communities are displayed to both the communities themselves and their guests. The ‘sanitisation’ is thus twofold: first, the discussion of genealogical relations is monopolised by a small number of experts, solemnised and put on stage, and, second, the clan communities themselves are folklorised or festivalised.15 Such folklorisation and festivalisation may equally successfully re-​enact a ‘golden ancestral past’ as participants make an effort to dress in Kyrgyz costume, are entertained by Kyrgyz songs, epics and games, and partake of Kyrgyz dishes, or a ‘nostalgic’ Soviet past, as the gatherings adopt the rigid style of Communist Party meetings and the delivery of long activity reports recreates the spirit of social activism and accountability still associated with the Soviet period.

CONCLUSION In post-​ Bakiev Kyrgyzstan, clan-​ based institutions have seized the opportunity offered by the official discourse on ‘national distinctiveness’ to identify genealogies as heritage and, in the absence of state interest and support, they constituted themselves as heritage custodians. As with any heritage custodians, these clan-​based institutions have developed a discourse on the heritage they claim to protect. In this discourse, they reference an idealised vision of the past in order to reinforce the importance of genealogies as a ‘nationally distinctive’ framework for unity and solidarity in the present. By consistently aligning their discourse with the official rhetoric on the importance of statehood and the need for national unity, and by promoting a spate of ‘authoritative’ or ‘authentic’ expressions of clan identities and loyalties, clan-​based institutions have attempted to undermine what can be called the ‘non-​authorised expressions’ of these identities and loyalties, such as clan votes or clan-​based patron-​ client relations.16 Clan-​based institutions have also availed themselves of widely recognised heritage-​ safeguarding practices –​such as councils, associations, conventions, publications, conferences and festivals –​to act both upon genealogies as heritage items and upon clans themselves as heritage-​bearing communities. These activities can be summarised as the objectification, even the commoditisation, of genealogical knowledge in the shape of genealogy books on the one hand, and the folklorisation and festivalisation of clan communities on the other. Clan-​based institutions are thus in the process of incorporating clan heritage into the national history and culture of Kyrgyzstan under conventions of representation or display that render this clan heritage consensual or mutually recognised between clans, and unthreatening to national unity or sovereign statehood. The volume of genealogy books that have been published, the size and regularity of the ongoing clan gatherings, as well as the scope of heritage-​making activities conducted by clan associations also demonstrate the willingness of contemporary Kyrgyzstanis to endorse clan heritage, to festivalise it, and even to self-​folklorise, by 667

—​​​​ S v e t l a n a J a c q u e s s o n —​​​​

amplifying the local or clan features of cultural expressions and practices and putting them on display for the other clans, or for the nation as a whole. It would not be too far-​fetched to claim that many Kyrgyz became fully reconciled with clans and clan customs, or came to be proud of them, only when clans and clan customs were turned into heritage. Therefore, the current widespread pride in clan identities and communities does not derive from what these communities were in the past, but rather from the ways in which they have been re-​defined as heritage-​bearing communities within the nation-​state in the present. Last but not least, by problematising ‘the heritage turn’ in clan identities in particular, and in other ‘traditional’ or subnational identities in general, and by analysing the discourses and practices that gain traction in shaping clans as heritage communities, we can continue to unpack the ‘cultural stuff’ that constitutes contemporary clan identities, to problematise some of the mechanisms behind their resilience, and to avoid reducing them to ‘blood ties’ or ‘patron-​client’ relations. This is not to deny the capacity of clans to perform politics, but is instead a plea to muster patience and skills in unravelling the ways in which politics is often played out in the language and performance of ‘culture’ itself.

NOTES 1 David Gullette (2010a) analyses how genealogical relatedness or genealogical imagination have been harnessed in the nation-​building project of Kyrgyzstan’s first president Askar Akaev (1990–​2005), while Daniel Prior (2006, 2013) offers ample data on early pre-​Soviet attempts to unite the Kyrgyz as an ethnic group around a charismatic figure whose legitimacy is at least partially derived from his genealogical position. 2 In contrast to his predecessor, Kyrgyzstan’s first president Askar Akaev, Bakiev was neither an eloquent speaker nor a prolific writer. The kind of ‘national distinctiveness’ he was referring to remained largely undefined and thus enabled diverse actors (including the clan institutions discussed in this chapter) to deploy a spate of activities in the name of its protection. Bakiev’s 2009 Strategy should also be read within a broader regional setting in which traditional institutions were being rehabilitated in an attempt to overcome the failures of imported or imposed Western-​style electoral democracies and free markets. The institutionalisation of mahalla (neighbourhood, and neighbourly affordances and constraints) by Uzbekistan’s first president Islom Karimov is one of the best-​studied cases in Central Asia. 3 The genealogically inspired political imaginary took several forms: in one of its more moderate iterations, it required the creation of a supreme supervising or auditing body formed by elected representatives from each clan; in its most radical formulation, it rejected the parliament as a modern institution and argued for a representative, legislative and overseeing assembly based on clan divisions. On genealogy as a principle of orderly government, see Sneath 2007, pp.93–​119. 4 On genealogy-​related disputes prior to 2010, see Jacquesson 2012, 2016. 5 On the UNESCO-​driven world-​wide rush to heritage and on the many common features between clan-​based institutions acting as heritage custodians and institutions for the safeguard of heritage elsewhere in the world, see Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 2004; Hafstein 2007; Smith 2015. 6 Daniel Prior (2013) offers a comprehensive investigation of genealogy as a practice in the pre-​Soviet period. He emphasises that the available historical evidence shows that neither ancestries nor narratives about the ancestors were widespread among Kyrgyz; in contrast, both practices seem to have been limited to a handful of powerful clans from the north of the country. 668

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​ 7 Hardenberg (2012) reports the case of a genealogy compiler who asked an IT expert to recreate the portrait of the putative ancestor of the clan based on the photos of its living male members. 8 On heritage bearing or heritage claiming as subjection, see Hafstein 2007. 9 In the case of Central Asia, such a form of knowledge production and dissemination has been much better problematised and analysed by historians in relation to Muslimness or Muslim religiosity; see, for instance, DeWeese 2000a, 2000b; Thum 2014; Sartori 2019. 10 These are associations that are officially registered under clan names or under the name of the putative ancestor of the clan. They appear as the permanent acting or executive bodies of clan councils. Not all clans have established or registered such associations, and though the existing ones differ in the activities which they prioritise, they are all actively engaged in popularising genealogical knowledge, increasing pride in belonging to a clan, strengthening the solidarity between clan members and maintaining good relations between clans. 11 Though on this particular occasion, it is unclear how the racehorses were procured, all clan members contribute to such gatherings either in cash or in kind (food, drinks, domestic animals to slaughter) and labour, while the richest or ‘big men’ of a clan are expected to stand out by offering more lavish donations. 12 At these gatherings, clans were and are still believed to negotiate some of the rules of intra-​ clan trust and solidarity, for example, the benefits that ordinary clan members can expect in exchange for their votes during parliamentary or presidential elections. Expectations range from investments in local infrastructure to employment opportunities. On the political and economic instrumentalisation of clan identities, see Ismailbekova 2017, 2018. 13 Other clan gatherings are discussed in Jacquesson 2012 and Ismailbekova 2018. 14 On the frequent brawls that marked such gatherings under colonial rule, and the ways in which a clan’s reputation and honour were displayed and disputed in traditional games and verbal contests, see Jacquesson 2013. 15 On ‘sanitisation’, ‘folklorisation’ and ‘festivalisation’ as global practices within the UNESCO-​driven heritage rush, see Hafstein 2018. 16 On clan votes and clan-​based patron-​client relations as ‘non-​authorised expressions’ of clan identities or the ‘hidden agendas’ of clans, see Ismailbekova 2017, 2018.

REFERENCES Arïk Mïrza. 2011. Arïk Mïrza: Arïk tukumu jönündö tarïkhiy sanjïra. Bishkek: s.n. Arïk Mïrza. 2018a. Uruu bashchïnyïn aykeli talashka tüshtü. Azattïk Online, 5 June. www. azat​tyk.org/​a/​issyk​kul-​arykmy​rza-​monum​ent/​29270​524.htm (accessed 15 January 2021). Arïk Mïrza. 2018b. Na Issyk-​kul’e otmetili 450-​letie Aryk Myrza. Kabar Online, http://​kabar. kg/​news/​na-​issyk-​kule-​otmet​ili-​450-​letie-​aryk-​myrza/​ (accessed 15 January 2021). Attokurov, S. 1995. Kïrgïz sanjyïrasï. Bishkek: Kïrgïzstan. Aytpaeva, G. and Sezdakhmatova, Ch. 2012. Kïrgïzstandagï eldik kurultaydïn artïnda emne turat. BBC Kyrgyz Service Online, 6 January, www.bbc.co.uk/​kyr​gyz/​in_​de​pth/​2012/​01/​111​ 227_​my_​t​ake_​on_​k​urul​tay.shtml (accessed 10 September 2021). Bakiev, K. 2009. Kurs na obnovlenie strany prezidenta Kurmanbeka Bakieva. Komsomol’skaia Pravda Online, 5 May, www.kp.kg/​daily/​24287.5/​482​690/​(accessed January 15, 2021). Beyer, J. 2011. Settling descent: Place making and genealogy in Talas, Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey, 30 (3-​4): 455–​468. Beyer, J. 2016. The force of custom: Law and the ordering of everyday life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Botoeva, G. 2015. The monetization of social celebrations in rural Kyrgyzstan: On the uses of hashish money. Central Asian Survey, 34(4): 531–​548.

669

—​​​​ S v e t l a n a J a c q u e s s o n —​​​​ Collins, K. 2006. Clan politics and regime transition in Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeWeese, D. 2000a. Sacred places and “public” narratives: The shrine of Ahmad Yasavi in hagiographical traditions of the Yasavi Sufi order, 16th–​17th centuries. The Muslim World, 90 (3–​4): 353–​376. DeWeese, D. 2000b. Sacred history for a Central Asian town: saints, shrines and legends of origin in histories of Sayram, 18th–​19th centuries. Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, (89–​90): 245–​295 Godelier, M. 2004. Métamorphoses de la parenté. Paris: Fayard. Gullette, D. 2010a. The genealogical construction of the Kyrgyz Republic: kinship, state and “tribalism”. Kent: Global Oriental. Gullette, D. 2010b. The problems of the “clan” politics model of Central Asian statehood: A call for alternative pathways for research, pp.53–​69 in Kavalski, E. (ed.) Stable outside, fragile inside: post-​Soviet statehood in Central Asia. Farnham: Ashgate. Hafstein, V. 2007. Claiming culture: Intangible Heritage Inc., Folklore©, Traditional Knowledge™, pp.75–​100 in Bendix, R., Hemme, D. and Tauschek, M. (eds.) Prädikat “heritage.” Wertschöpfungen aus kulturellen Ressourcen. Münster: Lit Verlag. Hafstein, V. 2012. Cultural heritage, pp.500–​519 in Bendix, R. and Hasan-​Rokem, G. (eds.) A Companion to folklore. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Hafstein, V. 2014. Protection as dispossession: Government in the vernacular, pp.25–​ 57 in Kapchan, D. (ed.) Cultural heritage in transit: Intangible rights as human rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hafstein, V. 2018. Intangible heritage as a festival; or, folklorization revisited. The Journal of American Folklore, 131(520): 127–​149. Hardenberg, R. 2010. How to overcome death? The efficacy of funeral rituals in Kyrgyzstan. Journal of Ritual Studies, 24(1): 29–​43. Hardenberg, R. 2012. Collective, communicative and cultural memories: Examples of local historiography from northern Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey, 31(3): 265–​276. Ismailbekova, A. 2017. Blood ties and the native son: Poetics of patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ismailbekova, A. 2018. Mapping lineage leadership in Kyrgyzstan: Lineage associations and informal governance. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 143: 195–​220.p Jacquesson, S. 2008. The Sore zones of identity: Past and present debates on funerals in Kyrgyzstan. Inner Asia, 10(2): 281–​303. Jacquesson, S. 2010a. Pastoréalismes: Anthropologie historique des processus d’intégration chez les Kirghiz du Tian Shan. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. Jacquesson, S. 2010b. Power play among the Kyrgyz: State versus descent, pp.221–​244 in Charleux, I. (ed.) Representing power in modern Inner Asia: conventions, alternatives and oppositions. Bellingham: Western Washington University. Jacquesson, S. 2012. From clan narratives to clan politics. Central Asian Survey, 31(3): 277–​292. Jacquesson, S. 2013. Performance and poetics in Kyrgyz memorial feasts: The Discursive construction of identity categories, pp.181–​206 in Sartori, P. (ed.) Explorations in the social history of modern Central Asia (19th –​early 20th century). Leiden: Brill. Jacquesson, S. 2016. Genealogies as a craft: The search for “truth” and authority in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, pp.100–​121 in Jacquesson, S. (ed.) History making in Central and Northern Eurasia: contemporary actors and practices. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. Jediger. 2010. Bazïl baatïrga 300 jïl. Kïrgïz Tuusu, 30 September. Jediger. 2012. Jedigerdin jerinde. Kïrgïz Tuusu, 1 June. Jediger. 2013. Koylondon kooz Jediger. Koylon Ata koomduk fondusu. Bishkek: Salam. Jediger. 2016a. Uruuchulduk –​Kïrgïz elinin jashoo özgöchülügü. Jediger uruusunun Üsöndörlör urugu. Bishkek: Uluu Toolor. 670

— ​​​​ C l a n s a s h e r i t a g e c o m m u n i t i e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n —​​​​ Jediger. 2016b. Jediger nasili Kulchagach khan jana anïn urpaktarï. Bishkek: s.n. Jetigen. 2009. Jetigen sanjïrasï: birinchi basïlïshï. Bishkek: Gülchïnar. Jetigen. 2010. Ulut atï ötümdüü bolso, ömürü tatïmduu bolor. Nazar, 29 January. Kirshenblatt-​ Gimblett, B. 2004. Intangible heritage as metacultural production. Museum International, 56 (1–​2): 52–​64. Kozhonaliev, S. 1963. Sud i ugolovnoe obychnoe pravo kirgizov do Oktiabrskoi revoliutsii. Frunze: AN KirSSR. Light, N. 2015. Self-​sufficiency is not enough: Ritual intensification and household economies in a Kyrgyz village, pp.101–​136 in Gudeman, S. and Hann, C. (eds.) Oikos and market: explorations in self-​sufficiency after socialism. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Light, N. 2018. Kyrgyz genealogies and lineages: Histories, everyday life and patriarchal institutions in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Genealogy 2(4), 53; https://​doi.org/​10.3390/​genea​logy​2040​053 Malabaev, J. 1996, Chapkïnchïlar. Bishkek: Ilimder akademiyasïnïn basmakanasï. Munduz. 2009. Munduz uruusunun respublikalïk kurultayï. Asman Press, 1 October. Mungush. 2019. Mungush uruusunun toyu, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​xCHF​T9TK​eZ4 (accessed 15 January 2021) Prior, D. 2006. Heroes, chieftains, and the roots of Kirghiz nationalism. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 6: 71–​88. Prior, D. 2013. The Šabdan Baatır codex: Epic and the writing of northern Kirghiz history. Leiden: Brill. Reeves, M. 2012. Black work, green money: Remittances, ritual, and domestic economies in southern Kyrgyzstan. Slavic Review, 71(1): 108–​134. Sartori, P. 2019. Of Saints, shrines, and tractors: untangling the meaning of Islam in Soviet Central Asia. Journal of Islamic Studies, 30(3): 367–​405. Sarïbagïsh. 2010. Sarïbagïsh uruusunun birinchi kurultayï, Aalam, 4 March. Schatz, E. 2004. Modern clan politics: The power of “blood” in Kazakhstan and beyond. London: University of Washington Press. Smith, L. 2015. Intangible heritage: A challenge to the authorised heritage discourse? Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya, 40: 133–​142. Sneath, D. The headless state: Aristocratic orders, kinship society and misrepresentations of nomadic Inner Asia. New York: Columbia University Press. Solto. 2012. Solto Ata predlagaet rekonstruirovat kinoteatr Issyk-​kul’ v memorial’nyi kompleks Bishkek batyra. KNews Online, 8 February, https://​knews.kg/​2012/​02/​08/​solto-​ata-​pre​ dlag​aet-​reko​nstr​uiro​vat-​kinote​atr-​iss​yik-​kul-​v-​memor​ialn​yiy-​kompl​eks-​bish​kek-​baty​ira/​ (accessed 15 January 2021). Solto. 2015. Solto uulu Kultuu (Chïlpak): sanjïra. Bishkek: Biyiktik. Solto. 2018. Solto 3 kurultayï. 26 October, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​4yQF​pEP5​ajo (accessed 15 January 2021). Tagay Biy. 2017. Tagay biydin 510 jïldïgïna arnalgan ilimiy konferentsiya öttü. Kabar Online, 9 June, http://​kg.kabar.kg/​news/​tagai-​bii​din-​510-​zhy​ldyg​yna-​arnal​gan-​ili​mii-​konfer​entc​iia-​ tt/​(accessed 15 January 2021). Thum, R. 2014. The sacred routes of Uyghur history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Umar Uulu, T. 1991. Kïrgïz sanjïrasï. Bishkek: Arïm. Yoshida, S. 2005. Ethnographic study of privatisation in a Kyrgyz village: Patrilineal kin and independent farmers. Inner Asia, 7: 215–​247.

671

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

UYGHUR SUBNATIONAL HISTORIES AS META-​H ERITAGE 1 Ildikó Bellér-​Hann

China’s Uyghur or Xinjiang problem has complex historical and political roots, but it boils down to the fear that Uyghur separatism will undermine the country’s territorial unity and stability. Uyghurs for their part fear Beijing’s aggressive assimilationist policies. Worsening political conditions impacted indigenous cultural production severely from 2014 and had reached an all-​time low by 2016–​17. Since then, Uyghur cultural expression, including publishing, has been banned (Uyghur Human Rights Project 2018; see also Smith Finley 2019).2 Against the backdrop of the ongoing criminalization of almost all aspects of Uyghur cultural heritage, this chapter focuses on bottom-​up discourses about Uyghur culture as discernible in local histories published during the reform era. Understood as indigenous conceptualizations of the interplay of memory, community and cultural heritage, these texts are significant because they ‘provide an important locus of social cohesion and self-​esteem’ (Reeves & Plets 2016: 203). The shifting registers that inform their articulation reveal much about their cultural context, shaped by heightened accusations of ethno-​nationalism (equated with separatism), while the rights of minority status are nominally upheld. Drawing on the work of François Hartog (2015), I explore Uyghur intellectuals’ strategies to shape a distinctively Uyghur way of organizing and structuring the communal experience of the flow and ruptures of time. Processes of thematic and genre diversification, individual variation and political adjustment testify to the construction of a unique Uyghur ‘regime of historicity’ as defined by Hartog, under reform socialism, that reflects the nature of the shrinking political parameters within which it is situated. I take my cue from Anne Eriksen, who points to the importance of exploring the logic, the value system and the ways of organizing knowledge articulated by each regime (Eriksen 2016: 27). In the context of Xinjiang, the banning of historical and cultural texts amounts to a rupture in Uyghur cultural production. For local actors, the present crisis invests the texts of the preceding period with new significance. Local histories thus become heritage about heritage, a kind of ‘meta-​heritage’.

672

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-53

—​​​​ U y g h u r s u b n a t i o n a l h i s t o r i e s a s m e t a - h e r i t a g e —​​​​

CULTURAL HERITAGE AND LOCAL HISTORY Cultural heritage refers to the legacy of a society from past generations. It typically includes the sites, movable and immovable artifacts, practices, knowledge items, and other things that a group or society has identified as old, important, and therefore worthy of conscious conservation measures, often at the hands of specialised institutions. This invariably comprises only a selection of the total cultural repertory, much of which may not be perceived with similar consciousness. (Brumann 2015: 414) Heritage research has taken off globally as a multi-​disciplinary area of study since the adoption of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage by UNESCO in 1972. Scholars investigate the cultural, economic and political significance of heritage, contestations and negotiations between top-​ down and bottom-​up initiatives, in which diverse actors, institutions, commodification, and ideology all play a part (Bendix et al. 2012). The ‘heritage turn’ made inroads in China in the 1990s and early 2000s. It has been mapped in the context of practices, where the top-​down definitions it signified have often been challenged by local initiatives (Blumenfield & Silverman 2013; Lai 2016; Svensson & Maags 2018). Special attention has been paid to the role of marginalized groups and of unequal power relations both in heritage discourse and in practice (Lowenthal 2005: 78–​86). Uyghur bottom-​up efforts to delineate their cultural legacy pre-​date the ‘heritage turn’: they can be traced back to local histories published in the 1980s in which the concept of heritage is implicit (cf. Jackson 2008: 364). Discussion of Uyghur cultural heritage has been very uneven to date. Several book-​ length studies have been devoted to the muqam, the Uyghur musical tradition that (alongside the mäshräp, an assemblage of performing traditions), has been included in the UNESCO heritage list (Harris 2008; Light 2008; Anderson 2019). Inspired by Michael Herzfeld (1997), Nathan Light operationalizes the concept of cultural intimacy to illuminate the backstage zones and private spaces in which muqam is made (2008; see also Light, this volume). Building on Light’s work, Elise Anderson distinguishes between cultural intimacy and cultural heritage: the latter is publicly disseminated and celebrated (Anderson 2019: 119). My use of ‘cultural heritage’ for Uyghur local histories is warranted by their mostly public character and their thematic diversity that ranges from narratives of moral victory to decline, loss, victimhood, threats to, and even destruction, of esteemed patrimony (Lowenthal 2005: 74–​75; Nora 1989). It is also justified by their authors’ emotional investment in the past, which they conjure up in the present (Hartog 2015: 190–​191). I define local history as an umbrella term for emotionally charged minority identity narratives about a group’s past, which (in the Chinese context) do not negate or challenge official narratives, but are produced at a certain distance from that realm (Jacquesson & Bellér-​Hann 2012).3 Uyghur narratives of the past have pre-​socialist antecedents (Thum 2014), and are embedded in wider Central Asian history-​making practices (Jacquesson 2016). Their modern, socialist variety was produced between 673

—​​​​ I l d i k ó B e l l é r - H a n n —​​​​

the mid-​1980s and 2016. Authored by Uyghur professional and hobby historians in their mother tongue for an Uyghur readership, they comprise a substantial text corpus of hundreds of articles and monographs that were published legally and could be accessed in bookshops and public libraries.4 Since their authors rarely refer to each other, intertextuality is difficult to gauge but can be safely assumed in most cases. In spite of censorship, prior to the ban, such histories enjoyed great popularity among Uyghurs with secondary or higher education, who appreciated alternative sources of historical knowledge to official, state-​sponsored histories. Constituting ‘lynchpins of communal identity’ (Lowenthal 2005: 68), in addition to historical events, such texts typically describe landscape (topography), archaeological remains, Islamic architecture, ethnographic groups and objects, oral and literary traditions, ritual practices, music, song and dance, as well as famous people. In one way or another, most such works speak to collective group identities at the time of writing. For the purposes of this chapter, I have selected three studies that demonstrate the temporal and geographical range and the diversity of approaches in this historiography. They will be presented in chronological order. Of these, the study of the watchtowers of Qumul will receive more detailed treatment, mainly because of its unusual focus on a material object.5 My content analysis of the texts has been informed by insights gained from narrative studies (Bakhtin 1981; Genette 1983; Lyotard 1984; Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988), and long-​term fieldwork in both southern and eastern Xinjiang.

VIGNETTES CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF THE UYGHURS AND KASHGAR (1989) Ibrahim Niyaz’s ‘Brief Historical Narratives’ (Tarikhtin qisqichä bayanlar) published in 1989 is a 300-​page book comprising a series of vignettes from the history of the Uyghurs and of Kashgar. It juxtaposes document-​based historiography with legends and other pieces of oral tradition or hearsay information. Seven articles celebrate Kashgar’s tangible and intangible heritage, without using these terms explicitly. It starts with folk etymologies of the toponym Kashgar, connecting it to the eighth-​ century Arabs, to the Buddhist population, to a locally relevant sort of embroidery as well as to the local landscape. The personal name of Mahmud al-​Kashgari, the celebrated eleventh-​century linguist, is used as proof of the antiquity of the city (Niyaz 1989: 1–​3). Both Kashgari’s dialect dictionary and the eleventh-​century poet Yusuf Hass-​Hajib’s didactic poem are repeatedly praised as local cultural products that have achieved worldwide fame. (Niyaz 1989: 23–​24, 68). The chapter on the building of the city relies on local legends connected to the city’s famous rulers, starting with Satuq Bughra, the first Turkic ruler who, together with his retainers converted to Islam in the tenth century. His successors all contributed to developing the city. Although this sometimes involved exploiting the subject populations, Niyaz says this was always balanced out by good deeds such as moving sacred tombs to the city, constructing city walls and digging irrigation canals to render land reclamation possible. (Niyaz 1989: 7). Two chapters focus on Kashgar’s central mosque that to the present day is perceived as the symbol of Uyghur Islam. 674

—​​​​ U y g h u r s u b n a t i o n a l h i s t o r i e s a s m e t a - h e r i t a g e —​​​​

Considering it a beacon of Uyghur architecture, Niyaz bases his narrative on both historical documents and oral tradition. His narrative about the construction and repeated restorations of the building includes descriptions of the public celebrations of Islamic holidays in and around the mosque. Niyaz emphasizes the significance of the twelve muqam, and the Sufi sama dance on such occasions. While the construction works often required considerable sacrifices from the local population, who on occasion even rebelled against the heavy corvée, the sacred space was successfully extended and beautified over the centuries. Under socialism, it was declared a protected building (Niyaz 1989: 11–​14, 17). Elsewhere, Niyaz extols the Uyghurs as ‘one of the most ancient nations of our country (elimizdiki)’, with a long history before emerging as the ‘fundamental nation’ (asasliq millät) of Xinjiang who possess their own language, script, religion, traditions, history, and literate culture (Niyaz 1988: 101–​105). We also learn that famous scholars, astronomers, healers, writers and poets emerged in Kashgar ‘without the help of foreigners’ (hechqandaq chätning yardimisiz) (Niyaz 1989: 24), and that the city’s celebrated religious as well as secular architecture were constructed by Uyghur craftsmen using local materials (Niyaz 1989: 33–​34). These and similar statements in effect laud the prevalence of autarchy and autochthony among Uyghursʼ ancestors, to which a third principle, that of autonomy, is added through attributing heavily idealised social justice to the rulers of the Yarkand Khanate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, itself a polity comprising local Uyghurs only (Niyaz 1989: 192). This ‘Golden Age’ is brought to an end by the Dzungars, aided by the indigenous Apaq Khoja and the ensuing oppression of the Manchus. Discerned in graphic detail, these are tales of loss and victimhood. Apaq’s portrayal as an oppressive tyrant who promoted Sufism at the expense of scriptural Islam, and who was instrumental in the foreign subjugation of the region, is a well-​ known trope in Uyghur local histories (Thum 2012). It marks a serious rupture in Uyghur history and contributes to the ‘heritage of victims’ (Lowenthal 2005: 75). A similar purpose is served by the brief reference to the disastrous destructions caused by the Cultural Revolution (Niyaz 1989: 34). Affirmative references to communal cohesion are numerous and include the praise of local heroes, scholars and rulers. The efforts of the brave, diligent and intelligent Uyghur people are extolled, especially their successful resistance to inimical external forces, motivated by the desire for freedom and liberty (ärkinlik, azatliq) (Niyaz 1989: 24–​25, 290). While religion is not overtly celebrated except as architectural form, the civilizational achievements of the Uyghur people are largely framed in terms of an Islamic Uyghur culture. Reflecting the political vacillation of the 1980s concerning Sufism, its representation is not without ambiguity. An integral part of local Islamic traditions, Niyaz suggests that it contributed to communal cohesion, as is exemplified by the sama dance. At the same time, a separate chapter denigrates it as a negative force nurturing ignorance, superstition and passivity (Niyaz 1989: 269). In sum, Niyaz presents a series of essays devoted to the history and culture of the Uyghurs as a unified ethnic group, and to the past and its material traces in Kashgar. Occasionally resorting to formulaic socialist language, his celebratory tone of Uyghur cultural legacy is interspersed with tales of collective suffering, misrule, typically by foreigners, exploitation and oppression. 675

—​​​​ I l d i k ó B e l l é r - H a n n —​​​​

SYMBOLS OF CIVILIZATION: THE WATCHTOWERS OF QUMUL (2010) In 2010, Sämät Äsra Tura published a hundred-​page study about the tura, or historical watchtowers that have left numerous traces in the oasis of Qumul.6 Titled The watchtowers of Qumul, this is an unusually focused study, which nevertheless shares many characteristics with other local histories. At first sight, the tura appears to be a material object that is represented by some ruins in and around Qumul and therefore of limited relevance. However, as Äsra’s narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that for him material and immaterial perspectives are of equal significance and that he considers the tura central to the history of Qumul and its peoples. Through folk etymologies the author connects the word tura to the ancestors of the Uyghur people, pushing the history of the Turkic speaking peoples as far back as the eighth–​seventh centuries BCE. He makes no secret of the fact that this surprisingly early dating of the Turkic languages is based on speculation, as is his assumption of the cultural unity of these groups (Äsra Tura 2010: 71). According to his reconstruction, the ancient Tura people represented the first stage of the history of the Old Uyghur nation, following which the ethnonym tura was replaced by Uyghur. However, tura continued to live on in Qumul in local toponyms, lineage and personal names. He relates this gradual shrinking of the semantic field of the word to the scalar reduction of the significance of the once-​powerful Tura nation (Äsra Tura 2010: 98–​99). In an unexpected departure from his stance where the tura are explicitly connected to the Turkic speaking ancestors of the Uyghurs and to their unique (translocal) civilization, in the context of local history, the author stresses the multi-​ethnic, melting pot nature of Qumul, attributing a particular affinity between the Indo-​European population of the Saka and the materiality of the tura (Äsra Tura 2010: 101, 103). Äsra claims that pre-​Islamic religious pluralism was reflected in the use of tura by adherers of totemism, shamanism and Buddhism (Äsra Tura 2010: 126, 155–​157). Äsra invokes the authority of the two celebrated eleventh-​century Turkic language classics of the Islamic era: Mahmud al-​Kashgari’s Compendium of the Turkic Dialects refers to tura as a tangible object, ‘an obstacle used to defend oneself against the enemy’, while Yusuf Hass Hajib’s famous didactic poem, the Qutadgu Bilig, defines knowledge in terms of ‘the strongest tura at the disposal of humans’ (Äsra Tura 2010: 100). These literary allusions aptly capture the dual nature attributed to the tura, both material and immaterial. The tura civilization (mädäniyät) pertaining to the oasis of Qumul, is considered an important constituent of Uyghur civilization. Taking the complex entanglement between tura and his home oasis as his point of departure, the author re-​states the simultaneous presence of both spiritual (manäwi) and material (maddi) perspectives, the former referring to an ethnonym (bir millätning nami), the latter to a material defence mechanism (qarargah) (Äsra Tura 2010: 103–​104). He identifies 168 tura that can be associated with Qumul. In this he relies on both tangible, that is, archaeological –​architectural and intangible, namely linguistic –​folkloristic evidence. The tura as material object had multiple uses; above all, they were an indispensable accompaniment and therefore a sign of urbanization (shähärlishish) (Äsra Tura 2010: 104, 138). As watchtowers, they were important means of communication. 676

—​​​​ U y g h u r s u b n a t i o n a l h i s t o r i e s a s m e t a - h e r i t a g e —​​​​

Local people used fire and smoke signals to report the approaching of the enemy. Tura also served as a place of retreat for local people at the time of war in specific historical periods, and at times of peace they were used as caravanserai (ötäng) (Äsra Tura 2010: 111, 120, 140–​142). The material and toponymic traces of the tura are used as pegs upon which to hang specific periods of oasis history. Thus we learn that during the Oirat attacks, the tura came to stand for local people’s cooperation against the enemy (Äsra Tura 2010: 141). They also became symbols of fighting Qing oppression (Äsra Tura 2010: 142). The postulated association between the tura and the resistance of local people against the external enemy is substantiated solely with reference to toponyms featuring the word tura. In a similar fashion, rich oral traditions are associated with lineage (jämät) and personal names (läqäm) that have tura as their component part. There is no convincing discernment of these three categories of proper names, but their hopeless entanglement is itself proof of their significance in local lore. Adopting tura as part of personal names is interpreted as a sign of civilization/​culture (mädäniyätning bir khil bälgisi) and as part of spiritual civilization. Its general adoption as a surname under the theocratic rule of a local dynasty subordinated to Beijing (seventeenth–​twentieth centuries) is said to have facilitated the day-​to-​day governing of the local population (Äsra Tura 2010: 109). Conceptualized as a cornerstone of Qumul history, the tura’s semantic associations are frequently dichotomized into material and immaterial aspects. In a new twist, the materiality of the tura is juxtaposed with the Qumul muqam, itself perceived as a constituent part of the celebrated Uyghur muqam that has achieved UNESCO listing. The author argues that the muqam was performed near the tura both at times of peace and following a victorious battle (Äsra Tura 2010: 129–​133). Äsra himself had played a prominent part in setting up and later running the Uyghur Muqam centre in Qumul that opened in 2009, and he was familiar with the concept of cultural heritage as promoted by UNESCO and the national-​and regional-​level structures. In spite of this, he only uses the term mädäniyät mirasi, the Uyghur equivalent of ‘cultural heritage’ once (Äsra Tura 2010: 160), although his comprehensive evaluation of both the material and spiritual dimensions of the tura, his frequent allusions to its relationship to Uyghur civilization, and his explicit elevation of it on a par with the muqam are all suggestive of his view that the Qumul tura, together with its cultural associations, should be considered part of this category. Although most of Äsra’s descriptions of the tura are positively connoted, negative notes are not entirely absent from his narrative. He characterizes the long history of Qumul as a history of bloody wars in the course of which it was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt (Äsra Tura 2010: 101–​102). Besides, his work is punctuated by brief references to the iconoclastic devastations of the Cultural Revolution. A typical example is the following: ‘The tura of Älkä was originally three stories high. The ruins of the ancient city built in Älkä neighbourhood by the Älkä tribe were flattened during the Cultural Revolution’ (Äsra Tura 2010: 106; see also pp. 128, 134, 148, 159). Although the perpetrators are not named, the neutrality, brevity and recurrence of the interjections imply the deep impact of this period on the indigenous population and the paradox created by the designation of the campaign and its destruction of local culture. 677

—​​​​ I l d i k ó B e l l é r - H a n n —​​​​

Äsra’s work is a celebration of the tura that stands for Uyghur civilization, punctuated by references to destruction and rupture. He skillfully weaves together a comprehensive oasis history from local fragments preserved by written and oral tradition. Oasis history is framed in terms of decline and scalar reduction, accompanied by many heroic episodes and events informed by the enduring qualities of a great civilization that emerged as a result of progress, cooperation and a sense of unity. The author contends that the numerous traces tura have left should fill local people with pride and they should consider it their duty to study them systematically and in great depth and to spread their knowledge (Äsra Tura 2010: 154, 161). Äsra’s language is free from PRC ideology, just as it is restrained and subtle in its celebration of local identities. Although the history of the tura is narrated in the third-​person singular, the author’s emotional involvement is revealed in his own name, which has ‘Tura’ attached to it as a third component. In sum, Äsra uses the tura, a quintessential symbol of local culture, as a vantage point from which to celebrate both material and spiritual aspects of Qumul and, by extension, Uyghur civilization. His multi-​disciplinary perspective allows for an inclusive conceptualization of the Uyghurs as a distinct community forged by the shared history of successfully fighting off all invaders. This disciplinary eclecticism would be continued by other authors in years to come.

AN ISLAND OF CIVILIZATION (2011) Mätsäydi Mätqasim’s An Island of Civilization (Tarimdiki mädäniyät arili), published in 2011 (Mätqasim 2011), comprises a series of ethnographic snapshots and musings about a subgroup of Uyghurs living in a remote corner of the Taklamakan Desert in the Khotan oasis. I include it in my discussion for several reasons. It illustrates the diversity of Uyghur identity discourse, while its ethnographic presentism is deeply embedded in history, and therefore lends itself equally to historical and to ethnographic analysis. In contrast to Niyaz and Äsra, Mätqasim takes a remote corner of southern Xinjiang and a subgroup of the Uyghurs associated with the region called the ‘River Bank’ (Därya boyi). Supported by a mixed economy in which animal husbandry and farming play an equally important role, the author refers to his protagonists as pastoralists. Unlike Niyaz and Äsra who take up the position of the detached, omniscient, invisible narrator in the third-​person singular, Mätqasim’s choice of the first-​person singular reveals personal, long-​term familiarity with and admiration for these pastoralists, as well as a great deal of self-​reflexivity. He portrays this poor rural community as almost untouched by modernization and on the margins of the state’s reach. Under these conditions, they have preserved their pristine state and are faithful guardians of the best characteristics of Uyghurness. The author’s primarily ethnographic focus on a subgroup of the Uyghurs whose defining positive qualities in his view derive from their proximity to the lifeways of their ancestors, though not a local history per se, shares the goal of the other publications discussed above in its ultimate aim to bolster Uyghur group identity. In this endeavour, Mätqasim enlists local traditions connected to production and consumption, to rituals pertaining to holidays and to the everyday, as well as legends, folk etymologies and folklore, ancient ruins, religious architecture, customs and traditions ensuring social cohesion.

678

—​​​​ U y g h u r s u b n a t i o n a l h i s t o r i e s a s m e t a - h e r i t a g e —​​​​

This historically reflective ethnography covers ground that by and large overlaps with the scope and topics of local histories. They also share the ambition to be comprehensive. Like Äsra, Mätqasim emphasizes the longitudinal continuity connecting present and past. This is ensured through the continuous impact of the ecology, especially of the river, on human life and civilization, including continuities in the use of everyday objects, genealogies, and the survival of a dialect (Mätqasim 2011: 7, 21, 25–​29). We are told that The Tarim [valley] is an eternal topic of Uyghur ecology and civilization. From beginning to end, life here is inextricably tied to the physical environment. In the past, how many Tarim tragedies were caused by an ecological crisis! As a man of the Tarim, I have devoted much thought to the ecological environment (ekologiyälik muhit) and to the ecological civilization created by our ancestors. (Mätqasim 2011: 7) Oral tradition manifested in proverbs and legends is juxtaposed with written tradition in relation to saintly shrines that not only had a sacred book each telling the vitae of the respective saints (täzkirä), but were also places where manuscripts were stored and could be hidden at dangerous times such as the Cultural Revolution (Mätqasim 2011: 38). Occasional references to socialist excesses and their negative consequences are scattered throughout the book and are reminders of the role played by negative historical experiences in the perpetuation of social cohesion (Mätqasim 2011: 29, 31, 32, 116, 180). As in Niyaz’s and Äsra’s works, here too the Cultural Revolution is referred to both as iconoclastic and destructive, as well as a symbol of external threat to local community values. Like Äsra and Niyaz, Mätqasim too is observant of the unity of material and spiritual heritage, for example, when he celebrates the täzkirä both for its contents and tangible materialism. To the extent that he celebrates the material remains of ancient civilizations, such as the ruins of the sand-​buried cities of the desert and the simple but functional ethnographic objects used by the poor pastoralists in everyday life, the author follows the well-​trodden paths of other local historians. But he deviates from them in his evaluation of material objects. At times, he refers to these as complementing immaterial heritage. At other times, his more abstract references to materiality take on negative connotations: materiality as the opposite of spirituality. Described as the descendants of the ancient populations of the sand-​buried ruins, the author considers the complex consequences of the pastoralists’ relative isolation: their extreme poverty and complete disregard for materialism and property, coupled with their heightened moral superiority expressed in numerous qualities such as respect for traditions, solidarity, hospitality, equality, justice, sincerity, generosity, selflessness and perseverance (Mätqasim 2011: 43–​44; 53–​58; 62–​63; 88, 122). Mätqasim considers the poor but pure-​hearted pastoralists of this region ‘the heirs of the civilization of the Tarim basin’, whose lifestyle today replicates that of their ancestors a hundred years before (Mätqasim 2011: 51). Elsewhere, he contends that ‘precious pearls of material/​tangible and spiritual culture have accumulated here that should be inherited/​appropriated and protected’ (Mätqasim 2011: 62).

679

—​​​​ I l d i k ó B e l l é r - H a n n —​​​​

AN UYGHUR REGIME OF HISTORICITY An Uyghur regime of historicity can only be gleaned from past publications, given that publishing is now banned and interviews with authors and readers in Xinjiang are no longer possible.7 The publications reveal a number of changes during the reform period. Conspicuous is the gradual narrowing of the unit of enquiry. The ethnic (Uyghur) and regional (Xinjiang) focus was increasingly supplanted by lower-​level geographical or cultural entities, such as an oasis, a city, a village, or a folkloristic sub-​ethnic group. This fragmentation, also attested in ethnographic publications, may be explained in terms of authors’ efforts to avoid charges of ethno-​nationalism and separatism from the 1990s onwards. They compensate for this narrowing of focus by the metonymic reliance on sub-​regional and sub-​ethnic entities as representative for all Uyghurs. In the 1980s, Islam was presented as a natural constituent of communal identity. But as it came to be associated discursively with political extremism, it had to be marginalized in local identity discourse. Local histories thus served as a barometer of the deteriorating political atmosphere in Xinjiang. However, there was no one-​to-​ one correspondence between turning points of violence in the downward political spiral and ethnic publishing. One reason for this was that minority rights in principle continued to be upheld, even though in Xinjiang they gradually transformed into a legal fiction. Another reason was that the shifting official distinction between legal and illegal, allowed and banned remained vague, leaving much leeway for censors and local authorities for decision-​making and implementation. Another noticeable trend over the years is the diversification of genres and perspectives. Niyaz’s ostensibly document-​based approach was typical of the initial years. It gradually gave way to a more conscious reliance on oral tradition and empirical research methods. Disciplinary and genre eclecticism were reflected in the proliferation of more archaeologically inclined works, historical novels, memoirs and autobiographies.8 The discursive dichotomy between material and spiritual (non-​material) heritage is perpetuated through the inclusion of folkloric and ethnographic materials alongside historical, aesthetic and archaeological approaches to material culture. This is done in a variety of ways. Niyaz merely sets these elements alongside each other, whereas in Äsra’s work they are inextricably entangled, and Mätqasim’s narrative turns them into a contrastive pair. The preference for relying on the evidence of oral tradition is balanced out by the ubiquitous allusions to the two famous eleventh-​ century Karakhanid monuments of Turkic Muslim literary heritage –​Mahmud al-​ Kashgari’s Compendium and Yusuf Hass-​Hajib’s Qutadgu Bilig –​as repositories of Uyghur language, folklore and communal values. The latter is further viewed as the embodiment of good governance and social justice. Other examples not discussed in this chapter include folk etymologies, legends, the contributions of craftworkers, the elevation of scholarship and knowledge, traditional Uyghur medicine and healing, and the celebration of Muslim reformist education (e.g., Niyaz 1989: 28–​34, 68–​ 9, 166; Ismail 2002: 15–​37; Bellér-​Hann, 2016, 2019). These additional topics and structural elements occur with sufficient frequency in the corpus for us to speak of a coherent regime of Uyghur historicity. There is evidence that the authors considered their writings as heritage, although they did not necessarily equate it with the top-​down concept of ‘cultural heritage’ 680

—​​​​ U y g h u r s u b n a t i o n a l h i s t o r i e s a s m e t a - h e r i t a g e —​​​​

they were confronted with in the wake of the heritage turn. Niyaz published his work in the 1980s, before the ‘heritage turn’ had reached China. He identified, selected and promoted material and spiritual elements from the history of the Uyghurs, and Kashgar in particular, to shape the emerging Uyghur identity discourse, stating: ‘We feel proud of our heritage and we have the right to perpetuate it’ (Niyaz 1989: 281). In 2002, Abduläziz Ismail, an author from Qumul, stated that ‘the important yardstick of a nation’s material and spiritual heritage is the level of the state and nation’s scientific and technical development’ (Ismail 2002: 15). By 2005, the expression ‘cultural heritage’ (mädäniy miras) had entered Uyghur discourse. Another local historian identified Kashgar as a region that ‘proves the depth of our ancestors’ cultural heritage as well as its long history’ (Abdurehim Hashim Mäshädi 2005: 18.) But five years later, two of the authors quoted in this article use the concept only once each, despite their evident familiarity with the official usage. Äsra, who was actively involved in the promotion of the Uyghur muqam as cultural heritage in Qumul, drew attention to the heritage value of the tura (Äsra Tura 2010: 160). Mätqasim, himself instrumental in the national listing of the small hat worn by the women of Keriyä (Mätqasim 2011: 1), introduced the term only in the context of its officially endorsed usage, pointing out that the item was included in the Xinjiang list of Cultural Heritage 2008 and in the nationwide list in 2009 (Mätqasim 2011: 160). The apparent hesitation by local authors to embrace the term in their own work, as manifested in these publications, may stem from their quiet insistence on retaining as much control as possible over selecting and defining their cultural legacy. While most topics addressed by Uyghur authors fit easily into the UNESCO definition of cultural heritage, a few remain outside. One of these is the moral dimension that characterizes most Uyghur local histories, ranging from the extremely positive characterization of a group of people such as Mätqasim’s poor pastoralists to the social justice and good governance ideals of a past Golden Age, as represented by Niyaz, and insiders’ heroic fights against invaders, as symbolized by Äsra’s tura. Indigenous definitions include negative experiences that correspond to Lowenthal’s (2005) ‘heritage of victims’. This is illustrated by the decline of the ancient Tura people, but also in the devastations of the Cultural Revolution and the moral threats to the poor pastoralists as modernity penetrates their life worlds.

CONCLUSION Drawing on three examples of Uyghur local history written and published in reform China, I have explored the diversity of indigenous knowledge production that engages explicitly with the experience of the past in relation to the present and the future. I have shown that, in spite of its considerable polyphony, Uyghur heritage discourses have common roots in Uyghur elite efforts to promote group identity, always carefully remaining within the parameters drawn by the state. Even following their exposure to, and in some cases direct involvement with, the ‘heritage turn’ of the 2000s, Uyghur authors tried to maintain the distinctiveness of their bottom-​up heritage discourse. These Uyghur local histories selected locally salient tangible and intangible heritage, utilized a common pool of topics and structural elements, and featured a strong moral component akin to a ‘heritage of victims’. All this lends Uyghur local histories a measure of unity (but not uniformity) and allows the analyst to speak of 681

—​​​​ I l d i k ó B e l l é r - H a n n —​​​​

an Uyghur regime of historicity. Since 2016, Uyghur cultural production, and with it, research and dissemination of local historical knowledge, have ceased entirely. No matter what comes next, this closure amounts to a cultural rupture and an inevitable restructuring of the experience of time. The local histories of the previous generation have thereby themselves been transformed into cultural heritage.

NOTES 1 This research is part of the project ‘Between homogenization and fragmentation: Textual practices as strategies of integration and identity maintenance among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China (20th–​21st centuries)’ funded by the Velux Fonden (Denmark) no. 111687, 2017–​2020. 2 Only state-​defined and state-​sanctioned elements of Uyghur folklore such as dance and music are allowed, which, together with the few remaining Uyghur publications serve the purpose of political propaganda. 3 Some are marked as classified materials (Chin.: neibu), intended for internal or domestic circulation only. 4 Nowadays, they are accessible abroad in large university libraries and private collections. 5 Another reason is that the other two studies have been analysed in greater detail elsewhere (Bellér-​Hann 2020). 6 Situated in Eastern Xinjiang, the oasis of Qumul (Chin.: Hami) for millennia served as a Silk Road trading hub as well as the ‘Gateway to the Western Regions’ or the boundary between Xinjiang and Inland China. 7 Uyghur publishing, including all forms of cultural knowledge production, continues in the diaspora. It is too early to tell to what extent such writings will be conditioned by self-​ censorship, the limitations of accessing written and oral sources and the dramatic changes in life experiences, but a paradigm shift is very likely. 8 The list is long. For specific references and for a more comprehensive treatment of some of these works, see Bellér-​Hann 2020, and Bellér-​Hann 2021.

REFERENCES Anderson, Elise Marie 2019. Imperfect Perfection: Uyghur Muqam and the Practice of Cultural Renovation in the People’s Republic of China, unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology and the Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University. Äsra Tura, Sämät 2010. “Qumuldiki Turalar” [The Watchtowers of Qumul]. Qumul Shährining Tarikh Materiyalliri 10, 69–​169. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bellér-​Hann, Ildikó 2016. “Hapiz Niyaz: Cadre, Muslim, Historian. A Local Intellectual in Eastern Xinjiang,” Études orientales 27–​28, 87–​115. Bellér-​Hann, Ildikó 2019. “Setting an Example: Narrative Strategies and Values in the Shaping of Local History in Xinjiang,” in: Nader Purnakcheband and Florian Saalfeld (eds.) Aus den Tiefenschichten der Texte. Beiträge zur turko-​iranischen Welt von der Islamisierung bis zur Gegenwart. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 293–​311. Bellér-​Hann, Ildikó 2020. “Voicing and Silencing: The Shrinking Space for Uyghur Historical Narratives,” Asian Ethnicity, forthcoming in the Special Issue edited by Ildikó Bellér-​Hann, Aysima Mirsultan and Rune Steenberg (eds.) Voiced and Voiceless in Xinjiang. Minorities, Elites and Narrative Construction. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14631​369.2020.1781​532 682

—​​​​ U y g h u r s u b n a t i o n a l h i s t o r i e s a s m e t a - h e r i t a g e —​​​​ Bellér-​Hann, Ildikó 2021. “Remembering High Socialism. Uyghur memoirs from reform China (1980–​2016)”, in: The Written and the Spoken in Central Asia /​Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in Zentralasien: Festschrift für Ingeborg Baldauf, edited by Redkollegia, (Vol. 4, edition tethys: Wissenschaft /​Science) Potsdam: edition-​tethys. Bendix, Regina F., Aditya Eggert and Arnika Peselmann (eds.) 2012. Heritage Regimes and the State. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag. Blumenfield, Tami and Helaine Silverman 2013. Cultural Heritage Politics in China. New York: Springer. Bovingdon, Gardner 2010. The Uyghurs. Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: Columbia University Press. Bovingdon, Gardner and Nabijan Tursun, 2004. N. “Contested Histories.” In Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, edited by S. Frederick Starr, 353–​374. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Brumann, Christoph 2015. “Cultural Heritage”, in: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 414–​419. Eriksen, Anne 2016. From Antiquities to Heritage. Transformations of Cultural Memory. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Genette, Gérard 1983. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harris, Rachel 2008. The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hartog, François 2015. Regimes of Historicity. Presentism and Experiences of Time. Trans. Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Hämdulla, Äkhmät: Qomul tarikhida ötkän shäkhslär 2012. Beijing: Millätlär Näshriyati. Herzfeld, Michael 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-​ State. New York: Routledge. Ismail, Abduläziz 2002. Muhakimä wä Äslimä. Ürümchi: Shinjiang Khälq Näshriyati. Jackson, Andrew 2008. “Local and Regional History as National Heritage: The Heritage Process and Conceptualizing the Purpose and Practice of Local Historians,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 14(4): 362–​379. Jacquesson, Svetlana, and I. Bellér-​Hann. 2012. Introduction. In S. Jacquesson, and I. Bellér-​ Hann (eds.), Local History as an Identity Discipline. Special issue of Central Asian Survey 31 (3): 239–​59. Jacquesson, Svetlana (ed.) 2016. History Making in Central and Northern Eurasia. Contemporary Actors and Practices. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Lai Guolang 2016. “The Emergence of ‘Cultural Heritage’ in Modern China: a Historical and Legal Perspective”, In: A. Matsuda, and L. E. Mengoni (eds.) Reconsidering Cultural Heritage in East Asia . London: Ubiquity Press, 47–​86. Light, Nathan 2008. Intimate Heritage. Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang. Berlin: LIT. Lowenthal, David 2005. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyotard, Jean-​François 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mäshädi, Abdurrähim Hashim 2005. Atush (1). Kashgar: Qäshqär Uyghur Näshriyati. Mätqasim, Mätqasim 2011. Tarimdiki mädäniyät arili. [The Culture of the Tarim Desert]. Ürümchi: Shinjang Khälq Näshriyati. Niyaz, Ibrahim 1989. Tarikhtin qisqichä bayanlar [Brief Historical Narratives]. Kashgar: Qäshqär Uyghur Näshriyati. Nora, Pierre 1989. “Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations 26: 7–​24.

683

—​​​​ I l d i k ó B e l l é r - H a n n —​​​​ Reeves, Keir and Geirtjan Plets 2016. “Cultural Heritage as a Strategy for Social Needs and Communal Identity”, In: W. Logan, M.N. Craith and U. Kockel (eds.) A Companion to Heritage Studies. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 203–​204. Ricoeur, Jean Paul Gustave 1984, 1985, 1988. Time and Narrative 3 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith Finley, Joanne 2013. The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities und Uyghur-​ Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Smith Finley, Joanne (ed.) 2019. Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang, Special issue, Central Asian Survey 38(1). Svensson, Marina and Maags, Christina (eds.), 2018. Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Thum, Rian 2012. “Beyond Resistance and Nationalism: Local History and the Case of Afaq Khoja.” Central Asian Survey 31, no. 3 (2012):293–​310. Thum, Rian 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Uyghur Human Rights Project 2018. “Extracting Cultural Resources: the Exploitation and Criminalization of Uyghur Cultural Heritage” https://​docs.uhrp.org/​pdf/​Cultural​Reso​urce​ sInt​angi​bleH​erit​age.pdf (last accessed 28 March 2018).

684

CHAPTER FORTY-​F IVE

THE UYGHUR TWELVE MUQAM AND THE PERFORMANCE OF TRADITIONAL LITERATURE Nathan Light INTRODUCTION Uyghur muqam songs are part of the diverse musical and poetic traditions of Central Asia, and have long been part of cultural circulation inside and outside of the Central Asian region. Uyghur muqam traditions (like other music linked to maqām concepts) are diverse and fluid, making the history complex and hard to trace: some muqam performers learned and maintained relatively stable traditions, but others have been more creative and individual, selecting poetry from different oral and written traditions and exchanging tunes and verses with other performers. During the long course of innovation and elaboration, muqam performers have incorporated religious, courtly and popular songs into their repertoires. Verses come from the genres of ghazal,1 dastan,2 and oral folk quatrains and couplets such as hikmät (Harris 2020). Many Uyghur muqam verses are in the Chaghatay literary language and Turki vernaculars that preceded modern Uyghur, but Persian poetry was also performed by some muqamchi (muqam musicians). In the present chapter, I focus on the muqam traditions of the populous Kashgar region of western Xinjiang and the closely related tradition found in the Ili region of northwest Xinjiang. Refugee Uyghur musicians took the Kashgar and Ili tradition abroad to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan beginning in the late 1950s, where it has become well-​established in local Uyghur émigré music conservatories. While the tunes and lyrics of this Kashgar and Ili tradition, now called the Twelve Muqam (On ikki muqam), are largely distinct from other Central Asian traditions, the music has clear links to the varied and flexible modal and rhythmic practices of Arabic-​ Persian-​Turkic maqām and dastgāh music (Harris 2008: 97–​99; Blum 2015). In Uyghur muqam practice, performers spend many years cultivating their skills to make the subtle musical scale changes found within many muqam melodies (Light 2008: 202–​204). Uyghur muqam traditions include widely divergent music and texts with complex histories. Documents and participant narratives from the past two centuries help reconstruct the history of muqams performed in the region stretching from Kashgar to Khotan. Song traditions from other oasis regions in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China have also come to be identified as muqam, although performers often used other terms for their traditional song sequences, such as yurush DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-54

685

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​

or bayawan. Muqam traditions such as those of the Dolan subethnic group (Light 2011a) and Qumul, Turpan and Kucha oases have drawn attention and local enthusiasm over the past forty years, and through collection, research and standardization, canonical versions of these regional traditions are also being established. For example, the regional tradition of Qumul Muqam in eastern Xinjiang has gone from a minor research focus in the 1980s to the basis for opening a large multi-​storey tourist attraction and research institute called the Qumul Muqam Centre in 2009, with daily performances and tours (Tsai 1998; Bellér-​Hann 2014; Mijit 2019). When I began ethnographic research in Xinjiang in 1989, the Uyghur Twelve Muqam had emerged as a ubiquitous element of public culture, appearing in performance, recordings and narratives, and becoming widely known throughout China. Shortly after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, documenting, studying and disseminating a standardized version of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam was made a key aspect of creating a Uyghur classical performance tradition. The powerful chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, Säypidin Äzizi, took a central role in studying, revising and establishing the Uyghur Muqam as a cornerstone of Uyghur culture. Work at the Muqam Research Office and associated Muqam Ensemble and Muqam Group of the Opera Troupe, in Xinjiang’s capital city Ürümchi, comprised recording, transcribing and documenting the music and verses, editing these to establish canonical versions and teaching these to performers throughout Xinjiang (Light 2008: 215). Alongside this, in scholarly and popular media, cultural and political elites shaped public understanding of these musical forms and promoted Uyghur ethnic pride in them. Scholarly debate continues, but dominant official and popular narratives describe the muqam as purely Uyghur cultural forms with a millennium and a half of autochthonous history in the Xinjiang region. Since the establishment of the PRC, politicians, scholars, composers and performers have undertaken cultural development through reshaping cultural materials according to ideological models. Much of this activity is difficult to study ethnographically, because it happens in offstage settings that are limited to authorized participants. In researching the muqam editing process, I heard many details about such events and settings, but narrators often filtered out debate and negotiation. Nonetheless, traces of contention about historical interpretations and selection and composition of music and poetry appear in the resulting muqam song texts, histories, films and other documents. I framed my study of muqam editing as an investigation of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1997; Light 2008; Light 2011b), emphasizing the ways that cultural selection, recreation and negotiation take place away from public view, due to political and cultural sensitivities and to avoid public scrutiny of changes to tradition. Crafting new cultural performances and historical interpretations depended on institutions with restricted access, that shielded the processes of deliberation, editing and production of texts and recordings. Editors framed standardization and canonization of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam as Uyghur cultural development, and set the goal of establishing a large-​scale classical tradition performed by choral ensemble, orchestra and dancers. Politicians and their anointed experts undertook to refine and elaborate regional Uyghur muqam heritage by increasing performance scale to produce a mass ethnic art form that would carry the symbolic capital of classical tradition (Trebinjac 2000). They re-​designed the tradition and expanded it along multiple dimensions: more music, more lyrics, 686

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​

more performers, more instruments (in number and kind), larger audiences and more history. These canonized muqam were designed to become the heritage and pride of Uyghurs and a symbol of their cultural prominence among ethnic musical traditions in China and abroad. However, I suggest that this canon has continued to shift under successive leaders and policies. Changing ideological and cultural contexts undermine stable forms and meanings. Local traditions and individual performers challenge the centralized canon. Further, despite political litanies about the unity of nationalities (Han and minorities) and shared history, scholars and even popular authors have tended to base their claims in historical sources rather than fabricating links to Chinese cultural history.

CULTURAL MODELS AND MODERNIZATION OF MAQOM AND MUQAM Central Asian cultural history in the Soviet Union and Xinjiang are inextricably connected by many forms of cooperation and knowledge exchange. Early Soviet research and institutionalization of Uzbek-​Tajik maqom traditions in the Bukhara, Khorezm and Fergana-​Tashkent regions inspired similar work on Uyghur muqam, even before the establishment of the PRC. Under the influence of European models, both maqom and muqam traditions became identified as “classical” music, and reinvented as “modern” musical traditions through staging, orchestral arrangement, instrumentation and singers and dancers. Editing the muqam tradition has led to tensions between the goals of modernization (zamanivilashturush), focusing on teaching singers and instrumentalists to perform standardized unison arrangements in large ensembles, and the preservation of historical authenticity and tradition.3 One telling result is that although muqam performances retain sections highlighting individual virtuoso singers and musicians, these have been vastly reduced. Soviet and PRC ideals about mass culture established large-​scale performance as the proper realization of prestige music. Theodore Levin describes the institutionalization of maqom in Soviet Uzbekistan in the 1920s as based on European orchestras and choirs, with a half-​dozen to a dozen male and female singers singing in “unison monophony” alternating with “solo episodes”, supported by an ensemble of at least eight instrumentalists: “The result was that the limpid, filigree texture of the melody lines that is such an essential feature of the Shash maqâm became lost in the ensembles’ bloated heterophony of voices and instruments” (Levin 1999: 49). The re-​arrangement of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam performance beginning in the 1950s has restricted solo performance even further than in the Uzbek-​Tajik maqom, and now only the long, free-​rhythm opening song known as muqäddimä (introduction) is performed by a solo muqam singer. The usual arrangement is to have a dozen or more musicians playing and singing in unison on proscenium stages in large halls, and larger open-​air events can even include many dozens of singers and dancers. In 1992, I shared an apartment for a month at the Xinjiang Art Institute in Ürümchi with the Uyghur composer Quddus Khojamyarov. He was born in 1918 near Almaty (then Verniy) in the region that became the Kazakh SSR, and graduated from the Alma-​Ata Conservatory in 1951. As a prominent Central Asian composer, he had been invited to consult about Uyghur traditional music, especially muqam, and offer 687

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​

his expertise on composing new works based in it. However, he was frustrated by new arrangements of muqam music, explaining to me that the Twelve Muqam was like chamber music (kamernaya muzyka) and should not be performed by a large ensemble with dancers. The lyrics should be clear so audiences can appreciate their “emotion and philosophy”, rather than being turned into a “song and dance mess” (Light 2007: 62). He felt the muqam tradition should be carefully preserved, and if larger-​scale versions were created, they should be composed according to European ideas of harmony and instrumentation.

MODERNIZING MUQAM PERFORMERS Despite dominant institutional controls on muqam music, some performers have more autonomy and are able to compose their own works, or select and modify traditional materials into versions that suit their own tastes. Rachel Harris (2008) describes the Uyghur muqam performers Abdulla Mäjnun, Abliz Shakir and Nur Muhämmät Tursun, who attained some independence from or mobility among institutional frames, and crafted their own repertoires.4 Despite being the victim of political persecution in Xinjiang in the 1960s and ’70s and excluded from ensembles and institutions, Abliz Shakir became a successful individual performer and recording star in the 1980s in Xinjiang (Harris 2008: 132–​135). Nonetheless, politicians and institutions did take over and remake muqam heritage by delegitimizing and excluding expert performers who could not adapt to this new regime. In the 1990s, I worked at length with the muqamchi Ömär Akhun, who was born around 1912 near Kashgar and learned muqam performance from his father while they travelled together to local celebrations and tomb festivals. Although he had been brought to Ürümchi in the 1960s to train muqam performers, and had performed in the 1962 film Anarkhan (Anaerhan in Chinese), he was excluded from other institutional roles. The politically sensitive muqam editors baulked at his insistence on retaining traditional religious muqam songs and at his criticisms of inserting Ili muqam songs into the Kashgar repertoire. Although Ömär Akhun lived near the Muqam Research Office on the south side of Ürümchi, he was rarely included in their activities and none of the many publications about the Twelve Muqam mention his contributions. Idealized descriptions of the Twelve Muqam emphasize their length, symmetry and modal and rhythmic complexity. Rachel Harris argues that these ideas contrast with the reality of the Twelve Muqam which exist “less as an actual body of music, and more as a kind of idealized framework surrounding a much more fluid oral tradition” (Harris 2007: 165–​166). The complexities of muqam practice are being reinterpreted to fit models, such as the widely mentioned homology of 12 months and 360 days with the 12 suites and roughly 360 songs of the Twelve Muqam. One Uyghur scholar (Suritan 2009: 60),5 approvingly describes this model of muqam structure as the “numerological beauty of the Twelve Muqam”. Harris shows that the musician Abdulla Mäjnun supports this numerological system, but also acknowledges the reality that many muqam are more fragmentary than systematic: “my job is to put together four Muqam: Bayat, Iraq, Segah, and Äjäm. We don’t know their chong näghmä [great songs] sections at all” (Harris 2009: 167). The new compositions he offered to the Muqam Research Office were apparently received positively. 688

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​

In contrast to Mäjnun’s successful working relations with the muqam canonizers, Ömär Akhun told me that when the editors sought new songs to avoid repetitions from one muqam to another, he offered to provide his own versions, but instead they took songs from Ili muqam tradition to fill perceived gaps in Turdi Akhun’s repertoire (Light 2008: 210). Ömär Akhun stressed traditional settings and style of muqam performance. He echoed Quddus Khojamyarov, saying that there should be few performers and a small and appreciative audience (Light 2008: 198). He described his flexible use of poetic texts in performance, saying that literate performers learned one text for one musical piece: “they would put a whole bäyt [ghazal] in a muqam and [sing it] straight through.” He and Turdi Akhun shared a different approach: “since we are illiterate and depend on our ears, we present our knowledge orally and learn these bäyts with brain and heart, and sing them according to the old way” (Light 2008: 185). This can explain why Turdi Akhun’s songs included verses from multiple ghazals: he chose what to play as he performed, and would fit song and music together by repeating verbal phrases to adjust lines to his music. Verbal repetitions of parts of lines are common in the canonical “modernized” versions as well, while Ömär Akhun sometimes repeated part of the preceding line as well, and in his repetitions even substitutes synonyms to increase clarity and variety (Light 2008: 55, 81). The individualized repertoires and flexible and creative performance skills of these traditional performers is not unlike the oral-​formulaic techniques of epic reciters, and have been largely eliminated by the push for fixed texts and tunes in unison performance.

PERFORMANCE, POLITICS AND EDITED CANONS Since the sixteenth century, scattered written evidence attests to a maqām6 tradition in the area of Yarkand, Kashgar and Khotan in the region known variously as Moghulistan, Alti Shahr, and East Turkistan, before being identified by the Chinese name Xinjiang beginning in 1884. Both written sources and the internal evidence of muqam names and modal structures indicate links to the Middle East and greater Central Asia. Some changes in the tradition have been linked to particular individuals about whose lives we have very few details, such as the Kashgar musician Helim Selim active around 1870, who is sometimes identified as two brothers Helim and Selim. Others mentioned include the performers Karushang Akhun and Mulla Ghayit (Harris 2008: 69; Light 2008: 211). Musical performers appear to have enjoyed court patronage already in the 1870s in the Ili region, but the first muqam performer probably only arrived in Ili from Kashgar in the early 1900s, and a government-​supported professional Ili muqam troupe was established in 1931 (Harris 2008: 30–​33). Research on muqam and other Uyghur performance traditions expanded under the East Turkistan Republic (1944–​ 49), and after the takeover of Xinjiang by the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the nascent research and documentation project established around the Ili Muqam was relocated to Ürümchi (Light 2008: 29–​30). Research in southern Xinjiang led to the discovery of performer Turdi Akhun (1881–​1956) who had a significantly larger muqam repertoire than did performers in the Ili region (Harris 2008: 33). In the 1950s, Turdi Akhun’s repertoire was recorded twice on low-​ quality equipment. These recordings were transcribed as the foundation of the project of 689

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​

documentation, standardization, canonization and institutionalization. The details and personnel of the transcription process of the 1950s have remained largely unrecognized, and the recordings of Turdi Akhun have not been published: I was allowed to listen to a few of the recordings in 1992, but not copy them. Remarkably, Jean During has recently archived at the Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie a digital copy of Turdi Akhun’s Ushshaq muqam recording from 1955 that seems identical to what I listened to in Ürümchi (media examples, Turdi Akhun 1a and 1b). One of the editors of the canonical Twelve Muqam, the literary scholar Abdushukur Turdi (who provided extensive help during my field research), has recently revealed details about the editing project that he seems to have felt were too sensitive earlier (Turdi 2009). He calls attention to the valuable work of the religious literary scholar Nimshehit Damolla Ärmiyä Äli in helping decipher the texts Turdi Akhun performed (cf. Light 2008: 221). He further writes about participating as a junior scholar in the editing work and says that the texts were completed and printed in 1964, but not released publicly, and were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–​ 76). He also mentions another young scholar, Qurban Barat, who rescued a copy of this edition. In 1993, I was able to interview Qurban Barat and he told me about taking a copy of the song texts and burying it near his home in Kashgar in 1966. Only upon revival of support for Uyghur literature and performing arts in the 1980s did he dig it up and publish it (Barat 1986). He suggested to me that this edition did not include all of the muqam texts, because in his childhood he had heard performers sing muqam songs with verse that were entirely in Persian (Light 2008: 219–​220). Muqam editing was a complex and nuanced process that continued over much of the second half of the twentieth century, and even now versions continue to be added to or substituted for those of the major edition published as texts and musical transcriptions in 1994 and video recordings in 2002 (Dawamat and Tursun 1994; Dawamat et al. 2002). In my research, I compared the muqam texts published by Qurban Barat with two different editions published in 1970 and 1987 in Almaty under the editorship of Batur Ärshidinov. Barat (1986) and Ärshidinov (1970) are variant transcriptions of Turdi Akhun’s repertoire although the reasons for differences between them remain unclear. Ärshidinov (1987) presents the Ili Muqam texts. I also compared internally produced versions from the Muqam Research Office and Muqam Ensemble in the 1980s to explore text-​editing decisions and stages in the editing process. My interviews with editors working at the Muqam Research Office also revealed some of their goals. They sought to include more recent verses that would be more comprehensible than those in the classical Chaghatay language, to substitute love verses for more explicitly religious songs, and to provide new texts for verses that Turdi Akhun repeated in multiple songs. They debated whether to replace arcane words with more comprehensible synonyms. Although a few verses were edited to substitute more familiar words, the editors preferred to find authentic but more comprehensible verses (Light 2008: 174, 221–​225). Despite general purism in creating the new Twelve Muqam canon, and complete avoidance of twentieth-​century verses, some pop performers have begun to draw upon Uyghur muqam elements in their songs (Wong 2013), and by 2019 some muqam songs were being sung with nationalist lyrics in Mandarin Chinese (Anonymous 2020). 690

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​

MAKING MUQAM HISTORY Evidence for muqam history is scarce, and from small fragments, grand narratives have grown. As part of distinguishing Uyghur cultural origins from the rest of Central Asian history, one goal has been to create an autochthonous Uyghur muqam history, deriving deep local roots for muqam names from Sanskrit and other languages of the Tarim region in the first millennium (e.g., Rehman 2009). I often heard claims about historical depth and continuity, including that Arabic and Persian muqam names were imposed on existing local Uyghur musical traditions, and that Uyghurs had served as culture donors to China, the Middle East, and even Europe. Uyghurs argued that their culture developed earlier and was richer, so it was subsequently transmitted to less endowed regions. Such popular arguments draw on scholarly works: evidence from Chinese historical documents that described music and musicians coming from the Kushan kingdom to sixth-​century Chinese courts was interpreted by one Uyghur historian thus: “in 517 CE the great Kushan Uyghur musical theorist and musician Sujup Aqari” went to the Chinese capital Changan and “introduced his musical system of five modulations [taranä], seven pitches [awaz], and twelve rhythms [ritm]” (Ämätjan Äkhmidi, cited in Light 2008: 135n). Others argued that early Uyghur musical development and culture donation also meant that the great “Uyghur Qarluq” philosopher and music scholar Abū Nasr Muhammad al-​Fārābī (870–​950) took Uyghur musical knowledge to Arab lands, whence it was taken to Europe (Light 2008: 151; cf. Harris 2007). In creating such histories, scholars first identify culture heroes as “Uyghur”, and then stretch available evidence to make politically useful claims that extend Uyghur influence but also support a unified historiography in which Uyghurs are donors to China. Such deep histories are popular among Uyghurs, because they challenge chauvinist Chinese rhetoric about China’s long history and cultural greatness. Evidence for a long and autochthonous muqam tradition and culture donation helps Uyghurs claim prestige within the sphere of Chinese and wider Eurasian “hierarchies of value” (cf. Herzfeld 2004). Later historical evidence is more directly relevant to muqam history, and its similarly brief narratives have been vastly embellished during recent decades. The most important source is the short manuscript history composed in Khotan in 1854 and called Tavārīkh-​i Mūsīqīyūn (Histories of Musicians, TM) (Mū‘jiz 1982 [1854]; Sumits 2016). A manuscript of TM was discovered in the 1950s and published in a facsimile edition with transcription and annotation in 1982. The TM’s author Mulla ‘Ismatulla Mū‘jiz (his penname is also read as Mojizi), aims to link Turkic legendary history and Eurasian music history to Khotan and Yarkand. He describes musicians in a hagiographic style, integrating accounts of their musical accomplishments and teaching of apprentices with those of spiritual leadership and teaching Islamic knowledge. Mū‘jiz offers details about musical and poetic composition and performance that help us better understand the relationship of performer, composition, and maqām modal system. Although he was apparently not a professional musician, his characterization of musical compositions as based in maqām modes is a valuable document of performance practice. In his biographies, he describes, inter alia, the Timurid musician Pahlavān Muhammad composing his Chahār Zarb and his Chahārgāh “based in the maqām systems”, indicating that the composer creates a version using an existing 691

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​

named system (Light 2008: 162; Sumits 2016: 154). Mū‘jiz’s descriptions of maqām composition have not attracted scholarly or popular interest in Xinjiang, apparently because they contradict the ideal that an authentic tradition should provide stable melodies and texts, rather than serve as a system for creating music and fitting it to verse. The actual flexible performance techniques of Turdi Akhun and Ömär Akhun, and even the work of completing the muqam canon by discovering and creating new muqam songs, are largely concealed behind the public emphasis on restoration and preservation of an existing, unchanging tradition. Despite claims that Uyghur muqam originated in the first millennium, the sixteenth-​century Yarkand Khanate is now seen as a period of muqam revival and canonization. The TM provides a vivid narrative about the ruler Abdurashid Khan (r. 1539–​60), who discovered the musical and poetic talents of the impoverished young Amannisa Khan, married her and brought her to his Yarkand court (Sumits 2016: 157–​158). The TM’s brief mention of Amannisa Khan performing muqam and working with other musicians has been elaborated into a story of a golden age in which Uyghur muqam flourished (Anderson 2012). Amannisa Khan is now recognized as creator of a Uyghur muqam canon, who drew together local and foreign musicians and refined and systematized the muqams that they knew. She taught this new canon to many musicians, while facing threats from conservative Sufi religious authorities who opposed music. The Yarkandi muqam tradition is thus now portrayed as a uniquely Uyghur heritage crafted in the western Xinjiang cultural heartland. Despite the Mongol origins of the Yarkand Khanate, the Yarkand muqam are viewed as thoroughly Uyghur, with limited links to cultural centres such as Herat and Bukhara. Mū‘jiz actually emphasized cultural links to the court culture of Timurid Herat (Sumits 2016), but present-​day accounts ignore this idea. Reflecting China’s strong atheist policies in the 1980s, the Yarkand golden age was portrayed as threatened by Sufi religious authorities who sought to suppress Uyghur musical culture. In the early 1980s, Chairman Säypidin Äzizi himself composed a drama promoting this image of Sufis aspiring to oppressive theocracy. He portrays Abdurashid Khan as protecting Amannisa Khan and other musicians from religious extremists, in a clear allegory for his own work as political leader developing and protecting Uyghur culture from political extremists in China (Light 2008: 170–​ 177). This drama was the basis for the film Mälikä Amannisakhan that appeared in 1993 that credits Säypidin Äzizi as author (Anderson 2012; media example, Amannisa Khan). Nonetheless, by the time of the muqam videos published in 2002, Sufi dervishes have been partially rehabilitated and appear as musicians and dancers (Light 2008: 135–​136). Unfortunately, since 2009, the dogmas and campaigns of the Chinese Communist Party are once again suppressing Uyghur religious practices, and criminalizing both dervish activities and scholarship about them (Byler 2018;, Brophy 2019). The above contest over historical interpretations of Sufism also affects living Sufis and their ashiq7 performance traditions in Khotan. Ethnomusicologist Mu Qian (2018) provides a rich ethnographic portrait of these musicians whose songs are integral parts of their spiritual lives as Sufi ascetics and dervishes, and who struggle to evade oppressive controls on their practices.

692

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​

RECENT CHANGES TO MUQAM TEXTS The changes in muqam texts that I explore in my dissertation (Light 1998) and resulting book (Light 2008) required detailed comparisons of eight different published and unpublished versions. The canon has continued to change through a variety of social, textual and musical processes. Here I discuss some salient examples. The video recordings of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam, published in 2002 under the direction of another former Xinjiang official, Chairman Tömür Dawamat (Dawamat et al. 2002), consist mostly of music arranged for large ensembles as in preceding decades. However, some songs feature one or more lead singers supported by quieter musical and choral ensembles. The lyrics are also clarified through Uyghur subtitles, which vastly improves audience comprehension. The visual content of these videos largely consists of Uyghur traditional narratives and cultural imagery with little connection to the music and lyrics. These are high-​quality productions with professional actors: they include a depiction of Amannisa Khan’s life story (Mushavräk muqam), dastan romance costume dramas interspersed with song and dance performances (Segah, Chahargah, Özhal, Ushshaq, and Nava muqam), looser narratives dominated by song and dance (Rak and Pänjigah muqam), narratives showcasing traditional crafts and cultural practices (Bayat and Iraq muqam), allegorical fantasies (Äjäm muqam), and a simple compilation of song and dance pieces (Chäbbiyat muqam). The dramas and open-​air performances are set in oasis towns, villages and rural desert locations around the Tarim Basin, and many performers are drawn from local ensembles. Although religious practices such as mosque worship do not appear, many scenes show musicians and dancers performing as if they were dervishes doing zikr and sama rituals. These recordings have each been adjusted to last about an hour through excluding or abbreviating some pieces of music. This canon further equalizes and standardizes the varying suites of muqam music. The videos are now widely available online on YouTube and elsewhere, with some recordings displaying texts in both Uyghur and Chinese translation. Despite this standardized version, the repertoires of many musicians who perform Twelve Muqam music are limited to more well-​ known pieces, often considerably shortened, particularly from Rak, Chahargah, Pänjigah, Chäbbiyat and Ushshaq muqam. Audiences accept such abbreviated performances as suitable condensations of the full Twelve Muqam suites. In fact, the techniques for shortening muqam songs resemble improvisatory performance techniques: the overall rising and falling melodic contour is preserved in the shorter versions, rather than simply cutting off the song. In addition, ghazal verses are usually truncated by removing middle couplets and ending with the final couplet because of its importance in identifying the poet, which was also important in traditional performance. Although these shorter versions are likely scripted and rehearsed, they nonetheless resemble the traditional performers’ abilities to modify their songs in response to audience attention and interest. One prominent and unusual song since the 1980s has been the muqäddimä (opening song) of Chäbbiyat Muqam. The poem is apparently from Alī-​Shīr Navā’ī according to the takhallus, although it does not appear in his published works. This love ghazal begins with the phrase Käl äy mähbub-​u mätlubum –​“Come, O my beloved and my desire” –​and then describes the beloved’s body and gives equivalents 693

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​

for each term in Arabic, Persian and then Turkic, beginning with “figure”, “eyebrow”, “eye”, “face”, and so on, ending with “foot” (Light 2008: 228–​229). Remarkably, the first line in each couplet is entirely in Persian, followed by the second line in Turkic. This version was recorded by the Muqam Ensemble in the 1980s and frequently played by other performers in the 1990s, both in Xinjiang and by Uyghurs who had moved abroad. Recent abbreviated examples include one from the Nava Ensemble in Kazakhstan (media example, Chäbbiyat 2), one by Gulmira Abliz, apparently performing in China (media example, Chäbbiyat 3), and a 2006 performance by Abduqadir Yareli on Jean During’s recording entitled Chabbayat Muqam (Kashgar school) (media example, Chäbbiyat 4). Turdi Akhun did not sing this verse, and it replaces his song that appears to have been edited out because of religious content (Light 2008: 228). Now, however, this Käl äy mähbub-​u mätlubum verse has in turn been replaced in the 2002 Chäbbiyat muqäddimä with a poem from the famous eighteenth-​century East Turkistani Sufi leader Khoja Jahan, who used the penname Ärshiy (Jahan Ärshiy 1987; Brophy 2018). This 2002 verse begins Visali häjridin nalan –​“the lament of parting from union” –​and continues with other Sufi love imagery, such as moth and candle, nightingale, and autumn leaves (media example, Chäbbiyat 1). Despite the lack of public comment about these editorial decisions, the prominent use of a verse by a Sufi Khoja leader in the 2002 canon suggests a revaluation of Uyghur religious history. The song comparing terms in Arabic, Persian and Turkic heightens linguistic reflexivity and highlights the complementary languages of literary culture, but did not survive subsequent editing. Recent versions of the Twelve Muqam include other ghazals that are reflexive on the muqam tradition itself. One song by the enduringly popular Sufi dervish and poet Baba Rahim Mashrab (d. 1711; Mu 2018, p.127) was already widely known and performed by Turdi Akhun and others, but not as a prominent muqäddimä song. The poem begins Satarim tariğa jan rištisidin tar ešip salsam –​“if I add a thread from my soul to the strings of my satar” –​and describes playing different muqam as part of wooing the beloved and contemplating God, and ends expressing the poet’s aspiration to drink wine, attain union, and play music. In both the versions of the 1980s and the more recently revised muqam, this ghazal has been included as the muqaddimä song of the first muqam, Rak (media examples, Rak 2 and Rak 3). A further verse thematizing the muqam themselves has been added more recently: the little known ghazal by the East Turkistani poet Molla Sabir binni Abdulqadir Naqis (ca. 1840–​1920) was not performed as a muqam song until the 2002 recording, where it appears as the muqäddimä of Pänjigah muqam (media examples, Pänjigah 1 and Pänjigah 2). Molla Sabir’s text begins Mughänni chek muqami Rakni bäzm ichrä mästanä –​“A singer drunk from the sound of Rak muqam at a feast” –​and continues on the themes of lovers, intoxication, abuse by the ignorant, suffering and singing muqam. Instead of this song, the traditional performer Turdi Akhun had performed religious ghazals by the poets Huvayda and Soburi. In his 1983 drama about Amannisa Khan, Chairman Säypidin Äzizi had already replaced these religious ghazals with his own composition, in which he also lists each muqam by name, but then mentions the dastan and mäshräp sections that were only included muqam songs by Turdi Akhun and others in the first part of the twentieth century. Säypidin’s poem also names 694

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​

songs that make up the muqam (e.g., täzä, nuskha, säliqä, jula, and sänäm, Light 2008: 175). Tellingly, neither this composition, nor other twentieth-​century poems, have attained an enduring place in new versions of the Twelve Muqam. These changes show how the editors have rejected the complex religious imagery of Chaghatay verse preferred by both Ömär Akhun and Turdi Akhun in favour of Sufi love imagery, included more reflexive descriptions of the muqam tradition itself, and avoided modern compositions but increased attention to local, eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Turki verses. They even slip in a love ghazal from the local Sufi ruler Khoja Jahan, suggesting that they accepted this famous Khoja dynast as a worthy participant in –​rather than opponent of –​the music and poetry of popular Sufi culture. These editors and the politicians under whose name this canon was published seem to be tentatively recognizing religious aspects of Uyghur musical culture, both in the form of Khoja Jahan and with the dervish-​like performers in the recordings of 2002. However, this effort contrasts with the realities of everyday life in Xinjiang, in which surveillance and control of Uyghur religious practices intensified under what was called the “People’s War on Terror” (Byler 2018).

HERITAGE FEVER AND HERITAGE SUPPRESSION The preceding account of crafting traditional heritage by transforming the repertoires of individuals into a shared classical tradition displays one pitfall of contemporary heritage production: it easily subordinates cultural performance and performers to bureaucratic and politicized “development”, which in this case focused strongly on expanding the scale and fixing the repertoire to reflect current ideologies. The products of this formalized heritage creation were widely presented on international stages, and presented as treasures of world heritage. Already successful since the 1980s with entries into UNESCO’s World Heritage List, China in the 2000s eagerly pursued applications to UNESCO for the Uyghur muqam and other ethnic traditions in what is sometimes called “intangible cultural heritage fever” (Maags 2018: 122). Widely recognized in China as appealing and valuable intangible cultural heritage, a successful application to UNESCO was made in 2005 under the expansive title “Uyghur Muqam of Xinjiang”. UNESCO accepted the Uyghur Muqam as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and they were subsequently entered into UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. Shortly after this, beginning in 2009, but increasing in 2014 and even more so in 2017, Uyghur cultural traditions came under ever-​stricter regulation as part of the overall policing of Uyghur society (Anderson and Byler 2019; Anonymous 2020). As a result, the three decades of publicity, popularization and worldwide interest in the Uyghur Twelve Muqam as cultural treasures, with many muqam artists performing and making recording abroad, came to a catastrophic end. In some ways, UNESCO recognition was the climax of success and attention, and despite China signing the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, no oversight or even significant criticism has been forthcoming from UNESCO on the increasing abuses over the past decade in Xinjiang (Anonymous 2020). Since 2017, Uyghur scholars, performers, and even members of the Chinese Communist Party with prominent institutional positions, have been arrested, and condemned 695

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​

administratively or by secret trials to re-​education camps, imprisonment, and even death sentences. Under these conditions, Twelve Muqam performance occurs only under strict state surveillance, and research or revival of traditional literature and culture are potentially criminal acts. As the Uyghur scholar forced to identify only as Anonymous (2020: 15) puts it: “The Chinese state’s orchestrated ‘safeguarding’ of Xinjiang Uyghurs’ cultural heritage turns out to be a cynical farce, played out while it is knowingly doing precisely the opposite.”

CONCLUSION What is now generally identified as Uyghur “muqam” song and music consists of shifting and diverse traditions crafted by a wide spectrum of performers across many years. Over the past century, the Uyghur Twelve Muqam have been taken from the repertoire of traditional performers, reinvented and widely publicized as classical Uyghur heritage. More recently, multiple regional muqam traditions have also undergone a similar recreation as local heritage deserving of recognition and local pride. Dominant historical narratives portray each tradition as cohesive and autochthonous, but in fact they emerge from the wide circulation and recreation of cultural material by diverse, often highly mobile performers. In this brief survey, I have focused on the internal changes to the Twelve Muqam tradition as it has been institutionalized and put under politicized management. I have suggested that even this official canon serves as a broad repertoire that undergoes constant change through performer selection and modification, and remains open to new versions in service of the changing goals of those who claim the authority to establish the canon. Despite institutional enclosure and taking control from traditional performers such as Ömär Akhun, the Twelve Muqam do interact with the broader ecosystem of performance genres, settings and practices, although these too are increasingly under threat from Chinese cultural controls (Mu 2020; Harris 2020).

NOTES 1 A strict poetic form consisting of 5–​15 rhymed couplets with the author’s takhallus (penname) appearing in the penultimate line. The lines follow the quantitative meters (patterns of long and short vowels, rather than stress) of classical Arabo-​Persian poetics and the poetic imagery reflects Islamic and Sufi concepts. The ghazal is the most widespread poetic form in the Islamic world. A key source, which unfortunately ignores the hundreds of Central Asian Turkic ghazal poets, is Bauer et al. (2005). 2 Narrative poetry about Islamic heroes and legendary romantic couples, many of which circulate widely in Eurasia in different versions and languages. 3 Muqams are variously identified as classical, elite or popular. Some scholars in China identified Uyghur muqam as “folk classical” (khälq klassik). Soviet scholars identified maqom and muqam music as elite arts, but considered some verses to have come from folk tradition (Light 2008: 27–​29). 4 See also the Uzbek performer Turgun Alimatov and his version of the Shashmaqom (Levin 1999: 52–​66). 5 This 2009 conference volume includes useful contributions by scholars from Xinjiang but many terms and names appear to be transliterated into Chinese and then into English: Suritan

696

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​ is most likely Sultan. Elsewhere in the volume, overeager correction turns the Uyghur name Abdushukur into Abdulshukur. 6 I use the usual transcription from Arabic in this one case. It is difficult to know when “muqam” became the Turki pronunciation of this Arabic word. 7 Ashiq “lover of god”, a Sufi musician (Mu 2018, p. 51).

REFERENCES Media examples: Amannisa Khan. Mälikä Amannisakhan. 1993. Author: Säypidin Äzizi. Director: Wang Yan. Several versions appear on Youtube, including one identified as “Amannisa Khan (Uyghur movie)”, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​dJ7​a2M-​xQaY. More information at: www.imdb. com/​title/​tt0333​073/​[giving title from Chinese transliteration of the Uyghur: Amannishahan]. Chäbbiyat 1. ‘Uigurskii mukam “chabiyat mukami” (s tekstom). www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​ 5zyx​q71m​FGc Accessed 15 January 2021. Chäbbiyat 2. ‘Nava-Otrybok iz mukama chapbayat (narodnaya)’. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​ dBcm​6nmd​ROc Accessed 15 January 2021. Chäbbiyat 3. Gulmira Abliz. “Chabiat muqami”. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​3rs6​B0MP​IHo Accessed 15 January 2021. Chäbbiyat 4. Uyghur muqam. CHABBAYAT. A _​ 01. https://​archi​ves.crem-​cnrs.fr/​archi​ves/​ items/​CNRSM​H_​I_​2019​_​044​_​001​_​01/​ Accessed 15 January 2021. Pänjigah 1. Chinese Uyghur Twelve Muqams –​Uyghur & Chinese Lyrics 5. Penjigah Muqam. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​ptyR​Ai7I​gRE Accessed 15 January 2021. Pänjigah 2. Uyghur muqam. PANJGAH muqam. A _​03. https://​archi​ves.crem-​cnrs.fr/​archi​ves/​ items/​CNRSM​H_​I_​2019​_​044​_​001​_​03/​ Accessed 15 January 2021. 1.Rak Täzä. Chinese Uyghur Twelve Muqams –​Uyghur & Chinese Lyrics 1. Rak Muqam. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?t=​422&v=​k2FB​EbZq​37E Accessed 15 January 2021. 2.Rak Muqädimmä. Chinese Uyghur Twelve Muqams –​Uyghur & Chinese Lyrics 1. Rak Muqam. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?rel​oad=​9&t=​25&v=​k2FB​EbZq​37E Accessed 15 January 2021. Rak 3. Uyghur muqam. RAK bash muqam_​37. https://​archi​ves.crem-​cnrs.fr/​archi​ves/​items/​ CNRSM​H_​I_​2019​_​044​_​001​_​37/​ Accessed 15 January 2021. Turdi Akhun 1a. Uyghur OSHSHAQ muqam. Turdi Akhon _​35. https://​archi​ves.crem-​cnrs.fr/​ archi​ves/​items/​CNRSM​H_​I_​2019​_​044​_​001​_​35/​ Accessed 15 January 2021. Turdi Akhun 1b. Uyghur OSHSHAQ muqam. Turdi Akhon [suite] _​36. https://​archi​ves.crem-​ cnrs.fr/​archi​ves/​items/​CNRSM​H_​I_​2019​_​044​_​001​_​36/​ Accessed 15 January 2021.

Print materials Anderson, Elise. 2012. “The Construction of Āmānnisa Khan as a Uyghur Musical Culture Hero”. Asian Music, 43(1): 64–​90. Anderson, Amy [pseud.] and Darren Byler. 2019. “Eating Hanness”: Uyghur Musical Tradition in a Time of Re-​education. China Perspectives, 2019(3): 17–​26. Accessed at: http://​journ​als. open​edit​ion.org/​chinap​ersp​ecti​ves/​9358 Anonymous. 2020. “You Shall Sing and Dance: Contested ‘Safeguarding’ of Uyghur Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Asian Ethnicity 1–​19. Ärshidinov, Batur. 1970. On ikki muqam (tekistliri). Almuta: Zhazushy. Ärshidinov, Batur. 1987. On ikki muqam. Almuta: Zhazushy. Barat, Qurban. 1986. 12 Muqam Tekistliri. Ürümchi: Shinjang Yashlar-​ösmürlär näshriyati.

697

—​​​​ N a t h a n L i g h t —​​​​ Bauer, Thomas, et al. (eds.). 2005. Ghazal as World Literature 1. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. Accessed at: http://​mena​doc.bib​liot​hek.uni-​halle.de/​inho​use/​cont​ent/​titlei​nfo/​2374​246 Bellér-​Hann, Ildikó. 2014. “The Bulldozer State: Chinese Socialist Development in Xinjiang.” Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 173–​197. Blum, Stephen. 2015, “The Persian Radif in Relation to the Tajik-​Uzbek Šhašmaqom.” This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 167–​179. Brophy, David. 2018. “Confusing Black and White: Naqshbandi Sufi Affiliations and the Transition to Qing Rule in the Tarim Basin.” Late Imperial China 39(1): 29–​65. Brophy, David. 2019. “Good and Bad Muslims in Xinjiang.” Made in China Journal 4: 44–​53. Byler, Darren T. 2018. Spirit Breaking: Uyghur Dispossession, Culture Work and Terror Capitalism in a Chinese Global City. PhD Dissertation. University of Washington. Dawamat, Tömür, and M. Tursun. 1994. Uyghur On Ikki Muqami. 12 Vols. Ürümchi: Shinjang khälq näshriyati. Dawamat, Tömür., A. Abdureshit, and I. Tilivaldi. 2002. Uyghur On Ikki Muqami; Weiwuer Shiermukamu. 12 video discs. Ürümchi: XUAR Radio-​kino-​televiziyä idarisi. Elsner, Jürgen and Gisa Jähnichen, eds. 2009. Muqam In and Outside of Xinjiang/​China, Proceedings of the 6th Meeting of the ICTM Study Group maqam. English version. Ürümchi: Xinjiang Art Photography Publishing House. Harris, Rachel. 2007. “Situating the Twelve Muqam: Between the Arab World and the Tang Court.” Situating the Uyghurs Between China and Central Asia. Ildikó Bellér-​Hann, et al., eds. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, pp. 95–​114. Harris, Rachel. 2008. The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Harris, Rachel. 2009. “Abdulla Mäjnun: Muqam Expert.” Lives in Chinese Music. Helen Rees, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 145–​172. Harris, Rachel. 2020. Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-​ State. New York: Routledge. Herzfeld, Michael. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jahan Ärshiy, Khoja. 1987. Bulaq [literary journal] #21. Ürümchi, pp. 1–​87. Levin, Theodore C. 1999. The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Light, Nathan. 1998. Slippery Paths: The Performance and Canonization of Turkic Literature and Uyghur Muqam Song in Islam and Modernity. PhD dissertation. Indiana University. Light, Nathan. 2007. “Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History”. In Ildikó Bellér-​Hann, et al., eds. Situating the Uyghurs Between China and Central Asia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, pp. 49–​68. Light, Nathan. 2008. Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, 19. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Light, Nathan. 2011a. Media review of “Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan.” Asian Music 42(2): 140–​143. Light, Nathan. 2011b. “Genealogy, History, Nation.” Nationalities Papers 39(1): 33–​53. Maags, Christina. 2018. “Creating a Race to the Top: Hierarchies and Competition Within the Chinese ICH Transmitters System.” In Maags, Christina, and Marina Svensson, eds. Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 121–​144. Accessed at https://​libr​ary.oapen. org/​bitstr​eam/​han​dle/​20.500.12657/​37505/​645​423.pdf.

698

— ​​​​ T h e U y g h u r t w e l v e m u q a m a n d t r a d i t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e —​​​​ Mijit, Mukaddas. 2019. “Un centre de transmission des muqam à Qumul”, version with English subtitles “Qumul Muqam Center”. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​M_​bE​fi5S​_​4k. Accessed 15 January 2021. Mu, Qian. 2018. Experiencing God in Sound: Music and Meaning in Uyghur Sufism. PhD thesis. SOAS, University of London. DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.25501/​SOAS.00032​794 Mu, Qian. 2020. “From Sufism to Communism: Incarnations of the Uyghur Song ‘Imam Hüsäynim’.” Central Asian Survey (2020): 1–​21. Mū‘jiz, Mulla. 1982 [1854]. ‘Ismatulla [Molla Ismätulla binni Molla Nemätulla Mojizi]. Tävarikhi musiqiyun. Änvär Baytur and Χämit Tömür, eds. Beijing: Millätlär näshriyati. Rehman, Abdukerim. 2009. “A Comparative Study of the Twelve Muqam: Uyghur Musical Classic and the Dolan Muqam”. In Elsner and Jähnichen, eds., pp. 1–​15. Sumits, Will. 2016. “Tawārīkh-​i Mūsīqīyūn: The ‘Histories of Musicians’ from Herat and Khotan According to a 19th Century Chaghatai Treatise from Eastern Turkestan.” RTM Revue des Traditions Musicales des Mondes Arabe et Méditerranéenne 10: 127–​200. Suritan, Ajati. 2009. “Muqam: The Beacon that Lights Up the Soul of the Uyghur People”. In Elsner and Jähnichen, eds., pp. 58–​67. Trebinjac, Sabine. 2000. Le pouvoir en chantant: L’art de fabriquer une musique chinoise. Vol. 1. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Tsai, Tsung-​te. 1998. The Music and Tradition of Qumul Muqam in Chinese Turkistan. PhD Dissertation. University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Turdi, Abdulshukur [Abdushukur]. 2009. “On the Twelve Muqam Lyrics Sung by Turdi Ahong [Akhun]”. In lsner and Jähnichen, eds., pp. 16–​29. Wong, Chuen-​Fung. 2013. “Singing Muqam in Uyghur Pop: Minority Modernity and Popular Music in China.” Popular Music and Society 36(1): 98–​118.

699

PART X

SACRED WORLDS

We could have called this section of the book ‘Religious Worlds’. But as with the section on ‘everyday moral economies’, we wanted broad themes to remain recognisable, while shifting the perhaps too solid/​reified notion of ‘religion’, ‘economy’, or ‘health’ as basic anthropological topics. The chapters of ‘Sacred Worlds’ speak equally to chapters, for example, on new churches (O’Neill Borbieva) in ‘solidarity and struggle’, to more-​than-​human agencies (Penkala-​Gawęcka) in our section on personhood, or to living between two worlds as a member of the Tablighi Jamaat (Nasritdinov) in ‘ethical repertoires’. Where Julie McBrien’s discussion of Islam (this volume) focuses on the frames through which Central Asian practices have been interpreted, here David Montgomery takes up how these experiences and interpretations of Islam are put to use in orienting individual action, as well as local and international policies. David Montgomery draws on his ethnography of a group of transport workers to demonstrate the hugely different perspectives on religious practice one may regularly encounter in Central Asia –​all at a single taxi rank. Pointing to the many ethnographic accounts highlighting such diversity of religious experience, the author calls on anthropologists to make these nuances better heard in public settings, which too often treat religion either as a supposed one-​off solution, or as a continual security threat. In her exploration of sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan, Gulnara Aitpaeva draws out how the experience of these mazars is also shaped by such generalising judgements. Since mazars are continuously reshaped and interpreted by practitioners, they have also become the site of local power struggles between female and male site guardians, as well as with reformist Islamic groups. At the same time, national governments seek to use mazars as symbols of state power, with varying degrees of success. Despite these attempts at control, as an interconnected sacred geography of sites, mazars represent a spatial otherwise, a ‘heterotopy’ connected to powerful ancestors and figures such as the hero Manas. Rachel Harris similarly enquires into the wider networks of practice and interpretation that religious practitioners may be affected by. How do Uyghurs experience and perform sermons and recitations of the Qur’an? Describing how this soundscape leaves its mark on listening bodies and on secular places, Harris traces how it has helped to constitute new Uyghur Muslim publics across the former Soviet republics DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-55

701

—​​​​ S a c r e d w o r l d s —​​​​

and in Xinjiang. Digital media and live performances punctuate lively discussions of permissibility: are ornate Egyptian styles of Qur’anic recitation the best form? While we might expect Salafi styles of recitation to accompany Salafi practices, instead, the author describes the cooption of this style by women in Xinjiang, helping to signify them and their Sufi healing rituals as powerfully modern. In many ways, Yanti Hölzchen’s appraisal of the swift spread of mosques in Kyrgyzstan complements Gulnara Aitpaeva’s and Rachel Harris’s site mapping of ‘sacred worlds’. Whereas in the late Soviet period, there were only a handful of mosques permitted in each republic, local and international sponsors have now built shiny new mosques in almost every village. Though mosques may often look like entirely male spheres of religious activity, the author shows how these are interlinked with women’s study circles, and how mosques are more generally integrated with local forms of sociality. Mosque sponsorship can both confer prestige in elections, as well as being criticised as a misguided use of resources that should go into healthcare or formal education. While some Central Asian citizens might well integrate Salafi recordings, Sufi healing practices, and prayer at mosques as well as mazars, others argue for less inclusive versions of religious practice. Thus, in each of the dimensions to sacred worlds explored here, we find a responsiveness to regional and global trends and interpretations of religion, as well as surprisingly assertive responses and sometimes cooptions of these broader trends.

702

CHAPTER FORTY-​S IX

USING EXPERIENCE DIFFERENTLY Religion, security, and anthropology in Central Asia David W. Montgomery

Religious persons have often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner. –​ William James1 The most important ambiguity in the concept of religious experience emerges not from the term religious but from experience. –​ Wayne Proudfoot2

Most people have views on religion –​about what it means, where it belongs, and its role in society. These views are not always grounded in any deep knowledge about religion; people often hold positions with limited knowledge but nonetheless make sense of what they understand in relation to the experiences that have framed a particular worldview. As such, positions on religion are often quite personal, even when presented in normative terms. Even among those who claim indifference toward religion, such feelings are generally limited to the extent religion is seen to impact their lives; as certain religious norms begin to saliently influence the overarching structures of social life, indifference often gives way to a stronger position of support or opposition. People seldom begin from a position of neutrality. They “know” something about religion, and while that may have little to do with a nuanced understanding of doctrine or theology, it is often discussed as a knowledge rooted in experience. Experience is, of course, an endless endeavour. Some experiences come to be held as more formative than others, but there too is a degree of negotiation that takes place over time; people evolve in relation to their surroundings and the ongoing accumulation of navigated experiences. The point for our purposes, however, is that in how experience shapes perspective, it also sets in place a bias for how future information is interpreted. This matters, for how one situates life in relation to religion, influences how the role of religion in society is understood. Here, I focus primarily on Kyrgyzstan, and how people use diverse points of experience to frame the role of religion generally, and Islam specifically, in society. Of particular interest is how various narratives of Islam’s role in society become framed in terms of security that can carry on lives of their own. These reflect more an DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-56

703

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​

ideological bias about the role of religion in society as opposed to an expression of religion as an embodied practice. These narratives include a language of security at local, national, and international levels as well as a question about the role academics can play: how to engage with policy narratives that blur and confound different levels of security, without appreciating local experience and quotidian needs? Two important points need to frame this discussion, however. First, about the nature of analysis: as Clifford Geertz once remarked, religion is “everybody’s favorite dependent variable” (Geertz, 2000, p. 173). In a sense, he is right, for religion is embedded within experiences that add meaning and variety, and it cannot be but connected to multiple aspects of social life, aspects that can be easier to disaggregate for study. But we must also appreciate equally that, for some, religion is understood as an independent variable around which other parts of life fall into place. It is not, for them, simply that economics and politics are the variables that explain religion but rather religion that explains the variables of economics and politics. How we see religion –​as dependent or independent –​is as much a product of bias that shapes analysis, as it is of our experience and engagement with interlocutors. Secondly, however, is that it is important not to make more of religion than do our interlocutors (Schielke, 2010, p. 2). For most, religion, economics, and politics, for example, is not a zero-​sum relationship; there is fluidity in how they are seen to influence social life. But it is equally important not to make less of religion than do our interlocutors and to point out incongruencies in civilizing projects –​often grounded in security language –​that operationalize religion to other ends. Informing how religion gets discussed and thought through, in relation to its role in society, are the variety of experiences used to explain it. Appreciating the multiplicity of religious experience thus requires us to see the varied ways such experiences get used. And as such, it is important to appreciate that it is not only our interlocutors who operationalize experience to shape the role of religion in society. Local and international actors do so as well, oftentimes not appreciating the impact their biases have on how Islam is experienced locally.

EXPERIENCE AS FOUNDATION Taxi drivers have a reputation for knowing the details of a place. They know a city’s layout, how it might be impacted by the time of day and special events, where people go, and sometimes why. In Kyrgyzstan, as elsewhere in the former Soviet states, taxi drivers are an especially diverse lot. After the end of the Soviet Union, many jobs for which people had trained were no longer available, so it was common to find a driver who had worked in another field –​as an electrician, educator, architect, administrator, etc. –​who turned to driving a taxi because it was more profitable than the work for which one had studied, if such work was even available. For most, it was an easy transition; one could secure access to a car and drivers were already familiar with the broad layout of the city or intercity routes. But as with any craft, experience became the reference point for knowledge; living in the area, driving routes, and talking with customers and colleagues shape how place is understood and the relationship one has to those who occupy it. I spent a lot of time with taxi drivers in Kyrgyzstan in the 2000s and 2010s (see Figure 46.1). This included time moving between places, as well as idle times when 704

—​​​​ U s i n g e x p e r i e n c e d i f f e r e n t l y —​​​​

Figure 46.1  A typical taxi stand outside a market, with drivers hoping to catch fares from shoppers, Kyrgyzstan, 2012. Photograph by David W. Montgomery.

drivers waited for fares or worked on their cars. Conversations almost always began with the driver asking me what I was doing –​though many had already heard some variation of the story from others –​and me asking how long they had been driving and what they did before they drove a taxi. This became a way into further conversations about hopes, dreams, and views on many aspects of life in the community. Religion was always a salient topic, in part because it was a topic in which I was interested, but also because, as drivers commonly remarked, it was evolving in dynamic ways that were shaping society and their own understandings of community. People had views on the matter that, in explanation, were connected back to some grounding experience used to shape how everything else was interpreted. Generally, none of those who had prepared for or practiced other careers during the Soviet Union wanted to be taxi drivers. Most entered the job for pragmatic reasons that reflected the limits of other professional opportunities. Many were resigned to the work as simply a means to providing for their families; some were more and others less optimistic about it. Over time, people’s views about driving for a living changed, which both influenced and were influenced by surrounding events. Religion –​which in the Central Asian context primarily meant Islam –​often came up, noted as either a relevant or irrelevant contributor in making sense of one’s circumstances. There was a wide range in views on religion and the extent to which it became part of any meaningful practice varied, but it is important to note that it was not always religion 705

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​

that drove explanations. Yet even when set aside, religion remained present as a variable in conversation. Muktar and Toliq were two taxi drivers in Osh who once were classmates, yet had different life trajectories and referenced religion in very different ways.3 Toliq took to driving taxis right out of high school. Muktar was more ambitious and successful in school and had studied to become an engineer. Muktar characterized himself as an atheist and, not unlike others who did so, he made a distinction of also being culturally Muslim. He attributes a separation of religion between belief and culture to growing up during the Soviet Union when he “didn’t need Islam as faith; society worked fine without it.” But whenever he went anywhere outside of Central Asia, he encountered others characterizing his culture as Muslim. He grew up watching his grandfather pray regularly but his father seldom prayed, and he was never pressured by his father to learn Islam. He characterized his father as being more pragmatic and focused on work and thought that sort of disengagement and a secularized educational experience led his father to be dismissive of religion, while also claiming that he was culturally Muslim. Muktar was not hostile to religion, but he did not like talking with the “new Muslims” –​a term he used to characterize people who were discovering Islam anew and were at times a bit flashy about it. He had learned it was not a productive conversation to have; he preferred to read a book in his car than to engage in discussion with others about Islam. As such, he was often on the periphery of the group of taxi drivers waiting for fares. There was an order to getting walk-​up fares and other drivers included him in the order –​that is, when it was his turn to be the next driver, he was not passed up because he did not talk about religion with others. But he characterized the experience of avoiding discussions about religion as one that was isolating. This was not a complaint, but more a characterization of having fewer friends than he had had earlier in life –​which he saw as being a function of the growing prominence of Islam –​and that he was more comfortable spending his time with his wife and kids. He reminisced about the Soviet days, when he felt he had more friends, more opportunities, and religion played a lesser public role. Toliq, on the other hand, was a bit flashy and more gregarious. He presented himself as an active Muslim and he openly talked about going to the mosque and learning more about Islam. He had an ornament hanging from his rear-​view mirror that had Allah in Arabic on one side and Muhammad on the other (see Figure 46.2), and usually would listen to sermons in Uzbek. Toliq was eager to talk about Islam and the purpose he found within it. He had not been particularly religious during the Soviet period and characterized himself as a bit of a hooligan in his younger years. But amid all the change taking place in the post-​independence 1990s, he began “experimenting with Islam”, by which he meant that he started going to mosque and being caught up in the conversations and excitement of “rediscovering [Islamic] traditions that had been lost during the Soviet times”. When I first got to know Toliq, he drove a small Daewoo Matiz and talked about being able to make a respectable living as a taxi driver. His car was paid for, and fares were abundant enough that his income needs could be met. He characterized his success as the outcome of practicing Islam. “Allah provides all one needs” was a common refrain of his, and while I never pushed him hard on that, he was always quick to use the experience of being a successful taxi driver as proof (cf. Nasritdinov, 706

—​​​​ U s i n g e x p e r i e n c e d i f f e r e n t l y —​​​​

Figure 46.2  An intracity taxi driver with “Allah” and “Muhammad” ornaments hanging on the windshield, Kyrgyzstan, 2006. Photograph by David W. Montgomery.

this volume). He was not a very dedicated high school student and looking back on his wayward years, he characterizes success as anything but certain for him, though it came as he was growing in devoutness and attributed his success to religious commitment. A bit less than a year later, however, Toliq took out a loan to upgrade his car to a used Mercedes-​Benz. His rationale was that a larger, nicer car would get him more fares and more wealth. He described himself as an ambitious businessman and that this move was the next logical step. Exceedingly proud as he was of his new car, his fellow taxi drivers were less sanguine about the wisdom of Toliq’s purchase. When I asked him about the decision, he claimed confidence in faith as the experience of past success demonstrated. But as car payments came due and he had not managed to get more business to cover them, he became more irritable and desperate. He blamed corruption, politics, and economic inequalities for his predicament; others were responsible, not him. Having taken a loss –​not only financially but also to his pride –​he sold his car and got another that was not as nice as his original Daewoo. He still went to mosque regularly, but became less showy about being Muslim and did not want to talk about the experience. At least with me, he did not connect it to his religion or anything to do with his behaviour, but merely a problem of the market: that more people were becoming taxi drivers and thus the market was more saturated. In my years talking with taxi drivers, I never met one who wanted to become a taxi driver, even as some like Toliq and Muktar were able to make ends meet as drivers. Ismoiljon, an ethnic Uzbek blacksmith working in Osh, however, was the only person I met who had wanted to become taxi driver but could not. As a child, Ismoiljon was 707

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​

fascinated by cars and dreamed of driving and working on them. And the money seemed easy as a taxi driver. He did not like school, and he was also uninterested in taking over the family knife-​making business. His father was staunchly opposed to Ismoiljon becoming a taxi driver and jabbed a hot iron rod into Ismoiljon’s right leg in protest. This ended Ismoiljon’s hope of becoming a taxi driver. After a week away, he returned to his father and apprenticed himself as a master knife maker. As time passed and more people took up driving, people came to Ismoiljon asking to borrow money. Comparatively, Ismoiljon had greater economic security than his taxi-​ driving friends and eventually he managed to save enough money –​and develop the interest –​to go on hajj. Reflecting on his life, Ismoiljon framed the experience of not being able to become a taxi driver in providential terms: it “was [written as] Allah’s plan at the start [birth]”. The operative variable here, for our purposes, is of course not that of being or wanting to be a taxi driver, but rather that this was the series of experiences he used to explain the trajectory of his life and the religious views he had developed. Lastly, and similar to Ismoiljon, I share the experiences of Iqbol, a Tablighi Jamat missionary who had studied in India and returned to the southern part of Kyrgyzstan to “help develop [people] as genuine Muslims”, to teach them how to use Islam to interpret the world and make sense of that which they experience. When I first met Iqbol, I was standing next to some acquaintances, including a taxi driver who cautioned me about Iqbol, saying that he was dangerous and had connections to Al-​ Qaeda. I mention this to highlight the role of security in local discussions of Islam, but also the limits of knowledge and the role gossip plays among the public, especially among taxi drivers who are out in public spaces all the time and claim those types of experiences as grounds for their knowledge. The taxi driver who made this comment made a point to keep a distance from Iqbol and his friends. He was himself sceptical of the more conservative type of Islam Iqbol was advocating at the mosque. This taxi driver found Iqbol’s beard and kurta pajamas incongruent with local norms for dress, and he remarked disapprovingly that Iqbol’s wife wore hijab. These observations, combined with contemporary news stories about Al-​Qaeda in Afghanistan, led the taxi driver to interpret –​from a distance –​Iqbol’s activities and motives as being in conflict with the more casual Islamic practice the taxi driver himself practised. It was, in a sense, a fear fed by what he perceived as an affront to how he experienced Islam and felt it should be. Iqbol was, of course, aware that his dress and missionary activities made some people uncomfortable. He grew up in the community in which he was now working, and before going abroad to study, he was clean shaven and dressed consistent with local fashion. His time abroad was influential, however, and it was then, he claimed, that life came together for him, between prayer and study with others. The experience of studying Islam in India was central to how Iqbol understood his missionary activities and the revealed truths he drew upon in the face of some local opposition to his missionizing work. While many variables factored into discussions about Islam with Muktar, Toliq, and Ismoiljon, Iqbol was fairly consistent and seemingly earnest in interpreting the world by treating Islam as an independent variable. Iqbol took seriously that Islam was the cause for all the other effects of the world, and that embracing Islam would lead to a good life. 708

—​​​​ U s i n g e x p e r i e n c e d i f f e r e n t l y —​​​​

For Muktar, Tolik, Ismoiljon, and Iqbol, “experience” was a consistent reference point for grounding their views of the world. Even when Islam was a common point of reference, economics, politics, culture, tradition, etc., were present in discussions. So again, here it is important not to make everything about Islam when people bring in other considerations, in thinking of how and where Islam belongs in their lives. But we should pay attention to how people weigh aspects of life, relative to narratives like those of religion, because people do indeed weigh them differently and we should take those weightings seriously. Iqbol does, for example, seem far more consistent in seeing Islam as the explanatory force of his life, and it shapes how he understands economics, politics, and social life generally. For all four interlocutors, the stories they told drew upon pasts and interpretations that shaped how they understood the present and the trajectory of society.4 Stories, of course, were interpreted and re-​interpreted, especially in the case of Ismoiljon who came to view his experience on hajj as part of a grander providential plan, articulating his past experiences as such when I visited him a few months after his return. Experiences –​interactions between the physical and social world –​are personal, yet also hold meaning in how they are shared, for the worldview they come to represent. These are the views that shape –​or bias –​the perspectives toward religion, how (or if) it is practised and envisioned within the world.

ANTHROPOLOGY, ISLAM, AND THE CONTEXT OF EXPERIENCE The varied experiences of Muktar, Toliq, Ismoiljon, and Iqbol, came only to be known through fieldwork. They are only four among countless examples of how a category like Islam is thought about differently. Those from afar are primarily able to see the diversity of understandings about Islam through the work of anthropologists and others who have conducted long-​term fieldwork, alongside the work of historians who provide a longer view of social change unfolding. For scholars outside the Soviet Union, this was one of the reasons the end of the Soviet era was so significant: not only was it a period of great transformation –​even as processes of change were ongoing –​but it marked a new period of access to observation and engagement. The transformation of the study of Islam in Central Asia over the first three decades of independence has been considerable. To be sure, there was thoughtful research on Islam in Central Asia during the era of the Soviet Union, but because the region was so difficult for Western researchers to access, on-​the-​ground data were hard to come by and the corrective to mischaracterization that fieldwork gives was largely absent. Something that emerged out of these new opportunities of engagement, however, was an appreciation for how researchers influence discourse about Islam at very fundamental levels. Among historians of religion, we see this clearly, as different approaches have shaped how Islam is presented. In an insightful overview of the first 30 years of post-​independence study of Islam, Adeeb Khalid characterizes two different trajectories of historians engaging the story of Islam in Central Asia: one as a more purely essentialized version of what Islam should be from a religious perspective, and the other being grounded more within the complexity of how Islam was experienced and therein lived (Khalid, 2021). What underlies this is the pattern of how (intellectual) bias shapes how religion is viewed; how one prioritizes influences, 709

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​

and how one interprets. And while there are differences in how textual and oral traditions integrate knowledge (Montgomery, 2016), the challenge to understanding Islam historically is to appreciate it within the context of how it is lived, including the social, political, economic, and other factors that shape the opportunities for practising and interpreting life vis-​à-​vis religion (e.g., Khalid, 2007). The contribution of anthropologists working on religion in the region, however, has created a much more nuanced appreciation for the complex ways lives are impacted by, and shape, Islam (cf. McBrien, this volume). Perhaps most significant to a discussion of experience is Johan Rasanayagam’s work on Uzbekistan, which rightly situates experience within a moralizing project. As he argues, people look through the world in moral terms and draw from experience to make sense of the world (Rasanayagam, 2011). Community and social networks influence the interpretations, but people experience the events differently. This matters, as Wendell Schwab shows in his research on the piety movement in Kazakhstan, for we see how a group of observant Muslims nurture community by creating space for “ethical fun” (Schwab, 2015). This of course does not purport to be a universal characterization of “fun”, but highlights how different activities can be experienced as enjoyable –​and moral –​even while others may interpret them as unappealing or restrictive. And thus the work of anthropologists on Islam has been centred around pulling out the nuances of lived experience in different corners of the region, alongside what it means to our understanding of society more broadly. We should, for example, appreciate that a salient part of life is striving for well-​being. Maria Louw speaks to this within the context of Kyrgyzstan and the effort of her Muslim interlocutors to morally strive for a balanced life, one that tends to the obligations of this life and prepares for an afterlife (Louw, 2013). Benjamin Gatling shares a story of Tajiks striving to live a life inspired by Sufism in a way that transcends and makes manageable the challenges of contemporary life (Gatling, 2018). Similarly, Emil Nasritdinov shows how followers of Tablighi Jamat travel, sharing messages of the contribution of Islam to improving life, actively transforming relationships across far-​reaching parts of Kyrgyzstan (Nasritdinov, 2012), while Cynthia Werner, Holly Barcus, and Namara Brede show how Kazakh imams in Western Mongolia make sense of religious change as an opportunity that enhances social and material well-​being (Werner et al., 2013). Ethnographers have also given insights into the diverse ways religion get experienced, including the gendered nature of experience, such as Svetlana Peshkova’s work on female religious authority in Uzbekistan (Peshkova, 2014) and Marintha Miles’ discussion about contemporary Tajik women experiencing the practice of veiling so many years after the Bolshevik and Soviet forced unveiling campaigns (Miles, 2015). Sharing these perspectives help make sense of the political disputes that emerge, such as those of veiling (e.g., Nasritdinov & Esenamanova 2017), or polygamy (Commerico, 2020), as well as more structural implications for how Islam shapes society. Julie McBrien, for example, shows how through secularism the practices of Islam bring about a shift “from belonging to belief” (McBrien, 2017), Vincent Artman notes the complexity around equating nationality to religion (Artman, 2018), and Mathijs Pelkmans (2017) explores the successes and failures of shifting ideologies –​including those of Islam, secularism, and nationalism –​on making sense of the experiences people live. 710

—​​​​ U s i n g e x p e r i e n c e d i f f e r e n t l y —​​​​

There have, of course, been efforts to situate such engagements within a broader discussion about the anthropology of Islam (Rasanayagam, 2006; Montgomery, 2015b), but the point of this brief overview of ethnographic work on Islam is that much has been learned in the years since independence about how people experience Islam. This type of engagement reveals a great deal about the nuances of experience, which in turn offers a sense of how experiences are used beyond specific events. Regrettably, however, such efforts to understand the experience of Islam do not always extend beyond scholarly engagement. And while anthropologists are often the most invested in such stories of diversity, effectively communicating such nuance (and its implications) to the wider public remains a challenge to be met.

ISLAM AND VIEWS ON SECURITY Stories of diversity make generalization more difficult; they complicate efforts to simplify across meso-​and macro-​scales. Yet one of the challenges of governance is to manage a diverse set of needs in a coherent and responsive way. Different types of governance –​from more democratic to more authoritarian –​address these concerns differently, but at a fundamental level, it is a challenge of human security, at times conflated as the challenge of national security. Here, however, the language of nuance matters, as various interlocutors remind us. The nature of experience is, as many ethnographic contributions generally convey in one way or another, often concerned with morality, well-​being, and practical concerns of managing everyday life. But scale and bias play a role, especially in conversations around security and the role of religion in public spaces. In conversations with Muktar, Tolik, Ismoiljon, and Iqbol, concerns of well-​being and security were ever-​present in discussing the news (and gossip) of the day at the taxi stand, market, and mosque, evident alongside descriptions of struggling to make ends meet. Iqbol, however, provided a profound insight into the tension between local and national characterizations of security. Following a series of events wherein a local police officer propositioned a young Kyrgyz university student offering to help her investigate her friend’s mugging in exchange for sex, Iqbol claimed such predation was why Islam should have a more prominent, and dominant, position in society (Montgomery, 2015a). As Iqbol characterized it, the state, acting corruptly through functionaries like the predatory policeman, needed to be held accountable and that a society more deeply committed to Islamic principles would create an all-​around safer environment. Such framing of Islam as the cure to social ills was reasonable given how Iqbol made sense of the world, but this vignette also allows us to appreciate how such claims can seem a reasonable and pragmatic alternative when functionaries of the state are experienced as predatory. This stands in contrast to how Central Asian states and international organization often characterize security, risk, and danger. Even before the independence era, the seemingly ubiquitous narrative has been one that characterizes “radical” Islam as a threat best met by repressive state practices. But “radical” is a slippery term. Living a religious life is a radical way to live but not necessarily threatening to society, and in the case of Iqbol –​as well as Ismoiljon and Toliq, to different degrees –​religious devotion was viewed as a response that could improve society. But states –​really the 711

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​

term is shorthand for functionaries of the state, many who are secular elites –​often use “radical” pejoratively to characterize a counter-​hegemonic viewpoint deemed threatening to the state. Certainly, violent forms of any radicalized system threaten local security, but it is not uncommon for secularists to characterize observant Muslims like Iqbol as radical and thus an object of state security scrutiny, even when available data suggest otherwise. The Islamic Renaissance Party in Tajikistan (IRPT), for example, was an opposition party; after sharing power with the ruling party since 1997, the IRPT, despite supporting secular governance, was outlawed and declared a terrorist organization in 2015. While Islamic radicalism was part of the trope used to justify this ban, in this case the oppositional nature of the party was a more salient factor than its Islamic character (Montgomery and Heathershaw, 2016; Lemon, 2022). In chronicling the suffering of so many people under the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, Bagila Bukharbayeva tells a similar story of strong-​arm tactics against challengers to the state, who were labelled Muslim radicals for trying to practise Islam beyond the strict boundaries of what the state allowed (Bukharbayeva, 2019). Under authoritarian regimes, the nature of experience shifts formidably, and as in the case of Iqbol and the policeman, what may be understood by one as driven by Islam opposing the state may –​at a local level –​be experienced as a response to a state failing to address the needs of the population. In sum, the relationship of Islam to the state has at times been exploited to ends of political expediency, framed in part by those with different experiences of religion and used in ways distinct from how others characterize it. More concretely, Muslims in Central Asia have at times been characterized as radical and dangerous. Islamic radicalism has been a reliable bogeyman for Central Asian states and analysts concerned with state stability. Some of these concerns get reproduced in writing that seems more sensational than empirical, as Hèléne Thibault reminds us in asking, after so much alarmism about the threat of Islam, “Where did all the Wahhabis go?” (Thibault, 2022). It is true that some Central Asians joined Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), but how much that danger can be generalized needs to be understood in context, a context that must be assessed along with the bias that may frame it. In reviewing axiomatic claims about Islam in Central Asia –​for example, about Islamization and radicalism and Muslim groups and political Islam –​we see that a secularist security analysis advanced by policy commentators and academics of security is often shaped by professional agendas and biases of how the world should be. This analysis is often removed from the diverse understandings of Muktar, Toliq, Ismolijon, Iqbol, and others, and from how religion features and is experienced locally. While there have been some instances of violence tied to Islam in the region, this prevalence has been quite small relative to the rhetoric of danger regularly invoked. And the story of Islam and danger becomes far more complicated when exploring causal explanations and discovering that the vast majority had joined radical groups while working as migrant labourers in Russia (Tucker, 2019). The policy responses are quite different if the problem is framed as one of Islamic radicalization –​suggesting a problem lies within Islam, as opposed to a broader problem of migration or economics or politics –​in other words, of being alienated from home and opportunity.

712

—​​​​ U s i n g e x p e r i e n c e d i f f e r e n t l y —​​​​

Usually, policy-​ oriented reports are not publicly challenged in popular media by academics. This may be part of the reason macro-​level analyses seem at times disconnected from micro-​ level experiences. When they are critiqued, it is most commonly done within scholarly publications circles, which often leave intact two different characterizations of the environment: one reflective of broad-​stroke assumptions and another, closer to the ground. In the case of a 2016 International Crisis Group briefing, “Kyrgyzstan: State Fragility and Radicalisation”, however, the characterization of the threat of Islam in Kyrgyzstan was corrected by an open letter signed by 25 scholars of the region who saw deep problems with the assumptions and characterizations driving the ICG report. This was a highly uncommon statement for academics to make, but it was done “for two reasons: 1) to highlight how dystopic characterizations of Islam in the region are more representative of prejudice and bias than they are reflective of Central Asian realities; and 2) in pointing out the methodological shortcomings of the recent ICG report we aim to point constructively to better approaches” (The Diplomat, 2017). The ethnographic work on Islam in the region reviewed above makes very important contributions to understanding the lived environment of religious experience alongside the social, economic, and political challenges people face. What is more, critically engaging the 2016 ICG report was an example of how scholars of Islam in the region help hold accountable a characterization of security and danger that could mislead readers in policy circles. Without translating this context beyond academic scholarship, those less familiar with the region, yet in positions to influence it, risk making ill-​informed decisions with negative consequences. Experience is quite often used to similar ends –​to guide interpretation and action –​but anthropology helps shed light on the variety of experiences –​local and otherwise –​being used to shape knowledge production.

THE USES OF EXPERIENCE I have talked about experience in two different, yet related ways: that of what actually happens to people –​the stories of Muktar, Toliq, Ismoiljon, and Iqbol –​and the reference point of experience that is used to frame worldviews and make sense of appropriate actions –​how bias of unrelated experience may influence interpretation. Of course we know experiences vary, but so too do the ways experiences are used to make sense of events about which no direct experience is held. What one and another experience, and subsequently do with that experience, can lead to different paths taken. In recognizing that there is variety in how experience is applied, it is important to remember the trajectory of experience and to be cautious in projecting one’s own interpretation onto another’s experience. Anthropology is central here, for it draws attention to the varied explanations of experience and how these are used. And perhaps most at risk from glossing over the diversity of experience is religion. Religion is personal, collective, and institutional. People are quick to ascribe meaning to what religion means to another person or context, because of what it means to them. Approaching questions around religion with a level of epistemological humility allows us to be more open to how others experience it. Everyone brings their own experience to a situation, as we see in the 2016 ICG report. We also see this among diplomats and aid workers who come to Central Asia 713

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​

from Afghanistan or Russia and use those experiences to frame their understandings of Islam and place (Abramson et al., 2022). Central Asia is neither Afghanistan nor Russia, despite some connections and past linkages. The work of ethnographers is to show the limits and possibilities of comparison, because in the application of policies people come with their own experiences that are not necessarily reflective of local experiences. Appreciating this helps us see further the biases for and against religion that may underlie seemingly neutral rhetoric (Montgomery et al., 2016). Underlying the variety of meanings attributed to experience, as well as the challenge of ethnography more broadly, is the question of what counts as comparable –​a meaning-​making process that explores how people approximate and compare individual experiences across a collective, and how the particulars of experience in one place are generalized to make sense of corollary experiences in seemingly unrelated places. It is important to remember that experiences are not always used reflexively and that the variety in the use of experience is a story of how one’s biases and prejudices lay claim to a language of action. It is thus a need and a service for scholars to take their research insights on local experience (religious and otherwise) from the university into the wider world.

NOTES 1 James, W. 1982 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, New York: Penguin Books. 378 2 Proudfoot, W. 1985. Religious Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press. xviii. 3 Muktar and Toliq, as well as Iqbol and Ismoiljon (discussed below), are also mentioned in Montgomery, 2016. 4 It is worth noting that people’s tacit understanding of their environment and security can change as dramatic events unfold –​and experience reshapes explanatory narratives –​as Aksana Ismailbekova shows in her discussion of Uzbeks in Osh adapting to newly secure and insecure spaces along ethnic lines following the 2010 conflict. The concerns of the Uzbek taxi drivers she describes are like those of Muktar and Toliq following the 2010 conflict (Ismailbekova, 2018).

REFERENCES Abdugafurova, D. 2018. Islam, Morality and Public Education: Religious Elements of Ethics and Etiquette in the Uzbek School Curriculum. Central Asian Affairs, 5, 213–​232. Abramson, D.M., Adams, L.L. & Montgomery, D.W. 2022. Translating Contexts to Policy. In: Montgomery, D. W. (ed.) Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 715–​723. Artman, V. M. 2018. Nation, Religion, and Theology: What Do We Mean When We Say “Being Kyrgyz Means Being Muslim?”. Central Asian Affairs, 5, 191–​212. Bukharbayeva, B. 2019. The Vanishing Generation: Faith and Uprising in Modern Uzbekistan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Commercio, M. E. 2020. ‘Don’t Become a Lost Specimen!’: Polygyny and Motivational Interconnectivity in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey, 39, 340–​360. The Diplomat. 2017. Understanding Islamic Radicalization in Central Asia: An Open Letter from Central Asia Scholars to the International Crisis Group. 20 January (25 signatories). Available at: https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2017/​01/​unders​tand​ing-​isla​mic-​rad​ical​izat​ion-​in-​ cent​ral-​asia/​. 714

—​​​​ U s i n g e x p e r i e n c e d i f f e r e n t l y —​​​​ Gatling, B. 2018. Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Geertz, C. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. International Crisis Group. 2016. Kyrgyzstan: State Fragility and Radicalisation. Briefing No. 83 /​Europe and Central Asia. 3 October. Available at www.cris​isgr​oup.org/​eur​ope-​cent​ral-​ asia/​cent​ral-​asia/​kyr​gyzs​tan/​kyr​gyzs​tan-​state-​fragil​ity-​And-​Rad​ical​isat​ion Ismailbekova, A. 2018. Secure and Insecure Spaces for Uzbek Businesspeople in Southern Kyrgyzstan. International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 49, 41–​60. Khalid, A. 2007. Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press. Khalid, A. 2021. Central Asian Islam: The State of the Field Thirty Years After Independence. Central Asia Survey, 40, 539–​554. Lemon, E. 2022. Governing Extremism through Communities in Tajikistan. In: Montgomery, D.W. (ed.) Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 594–​598. Louw, M. 2013. Even Honey May Become Bitter When There Ts too Much of It: Islam and the Struggle for a Balanced Existence in Post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey, 32, 514–​526. Mcbrien, J. 2017. From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Miles, M. 2015. Switching to Satr: An Ethnography of the Particular in Women’s Choices in Head Coverings in Tajikistan. Central Asian Affairs, 2, 367–​387. Montgomery, D.W. 2015a. Islam beyond Democracy and State in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Affairs, 2, 35–​50. Montgomery, D.W. 2015b. On Muslims and the Navigation of Religiosity: Notes on the Anthropology of Islam. In: Stewart, P.J. & Strathern, A.J. (eds.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Anthropology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Montgomery, D.W. 2016. Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Montgomery, D.W. & Heathershaw, J. 2016. Islam, Secularism and Danger: A Reconsideration of the Link between Religiosity, Radicalism and Rebellion in Central Asia. Religion, State & Society, 44, 192–​218. Montgomery, D.W., Heathershaw, J., Khalid, A., Lemon, E. & Epkenhans, T. 2016. Researching Islam, Security, and the State in Central Asia: A Round Table Discussion. Review of Middle East Studies, 50, 3–​17. Nasritdinov, E. 2012. Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers. Ab Imperio, 2, 145–​167. Nasritdinov, E. & Esenamanova, N. 2017. The War of Billboards: Hijab, Secularism, and Public Space in Bishkek. Central Asian Affairs, 2, 217–​242. Pelkmans, M. 2017. Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Peshkova, S. 2014. Women, Islam, and Identity: Public Life in Private Spaces in Uzbekistan, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Rasanayagam, J. 2006. Introduction to Special Issue: Post-​Soviet Islam: An Anthropological Perspective. Central Asian Survey, 25, 219–​233. Rasanayagam, J. 2011. Islam in Post-​ Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Rasanayagam, J. 2018. Anthropology in Conversation with an Islamic Tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the Practice of Critique. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24, 90–​106. 715

—​​​​ D a v i d W. M o n t g o m e r y —​​​​ Schielke, S. 2010. Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life. ZMO Working Papers No. 2. Berlin: Zentrum Moderner Orient. Schwab, W. 2015. Islam, Fun, and Social Capital in Kazakhstan. Central Asian Affairs, 2, 51–​70. Thibault, H. 2022. Where Did All the Wahhabis Go? The Evolution of Threat in Central Asian Scholarship. Europe-​Asia Studies, 74, 288–​309. Tucker, N. 2019. Terrorism without a God: Reconsidering Radicalization and Counter-​ Radicalization Models in Central Asia. Central Asia Program Paper, 225. Werner, C., Barcus, H. & Brede, N. 2013. Discovering a Sense of Well-​Being Through the Revival of Islam: Profiles of Kazakh Imams in Western Mongolia. Central Asian Survey, 32, 527–​541.

716

CHAPTER FORTY-​S EVEN

SACRED SITES IN KYRGYZSTAN AS A PHENOMENON OF POWER Gulnara Aitpaeva

INTRODUCTION Growing up in atheist Soviet times, I listened to many stories about pilgrimages to sacred sites. Then during the period of perestroika and the first years of independence (1985–​95), I witnessed how the actions around sacred sites, opening up, constructing and worshipping mazars, became one of the most active and visible forms of returning to what Kyrgyz people considered to be truly “theirs”, traditional and national. What has made pilgrimage to sacred sites so in demand and a stable practice, in these very different periods? An old healer in 2006, one of our first informants in Talas, said that the entire territory of Kyrgyzstan was kasiettuu zher (a sacred land). Thereafter, my colleagues and I heard this idea many times in different parts of the country. Back then, we perceived those statements as a metaphor and an expression of folk beliefs and nationalism. But once we had completed an inventory of the sacred sites and juxtaposed them with the physical map of the country, it became obvious that Kyrgyzstan was in fact permeated by a network of sacred sites. It is a network, indeed, with specific lines, connections and relations.1 The folk metaphor has become a visible, tangible and well-​documented fact.2 Kyrgyz people use such defining words as mazar,3 kasiettuu and yiyk jer to refer to sacred sites. There are sacred mountains, caves, springs, trees, stones, as well as headstones, tombs and memorials in Kyrgyzstan. Kasiettuu and yiyk jer describe a site with a special spiritual power and impact (see Figure 47.1).4

POWER RELATIONS ARE ALWAYS LOCAL Sacred geography is a specific focus through which all domains of the country’s social life can be observed, including power relations. By framing sacred sites as a phenomenon of power relations, I proceed from the theory of power developed by Foucault: power is a totality of the mechanisms and procedures and power relations are formed based on the mobile platform of interactions of various forces (Foucault, 2011, p.14). In this chapter, I argue that there are a “multiplicity of forces” (Foucault) that act in the field of sacred geography and construct it. Sacred site pilgrimage is DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-57

717

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​

Figure 47.1  Praying at the Mausoleum of Shadykan-​Ata, Naryn region, 2014, © Aigine CRC archive.

a spiritual practice comprised of tilek, an intention, yrym-​jyrym, rituals, and kyimyl araket, practices. I consider a wide range of activities around sacred sites as mechanisms and procedures that manifest specific power relations in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. Our research showed that the massive effort to restore mazars had begun earlier than the massive construction program of mosques (Toktogulova, 2007). The sacred geography was restored and reconstructed over a short period with no external support. At the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-​first century, in the context of building an independent Kyrgyzstan, both ordinary citizens and political power-​holders were engaged in the development of the sacred geography. However, primarily recognition of, and pilgrimage to sacred sites became a grass-​ roots method of developing and structuring the state territory. The traditional belief in a sacral connection of the person and site continues to live within the sacred geography all over the country: the more the person and community take care of the mazars, the more well-​being and success the sites grant to people (Samakov and Berkes, 2017, pp. 422–​444). The practitioners and pilgrims believe that the sacredness of a site can help at times of natural disaster and social shocks (Almabekov, 2009, pp. 46–​49; Aidarbekov, 2014, p. 131). The belief in mazars implies reciprocity: the site provides safety and well-​being, and the humans must take care of it. Such a concept of reciprocity is found in many practices related to sacred sites and vividly expressed in the formula arbak yraazy bolmouncha, jashoo onolboit: life won’t get better unless the ancestor spirits are content). Thousands of tuloo rituals, sacrifices of various scales are performed at mazars 718

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​

in memory of the ancestors. The traditional belief in the interlinking of human –​site –​ higher force is the main mechanism producing the power of sacred sites.

REDESIGN OF THE SOCIAL SPACE The Perestroika years in the late 1980s, and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union, caused a fundamental re-​design of the social space. The first wave of massive emigration had already begun during this time, though many ethnic Kyrgyz did not leave. Back then, their main efforts were focused on the territory gained by independent Kyrgyzstan becoming “Kyrgyz”. It was mainly the Kyrgyz-​speaking rural population that was engaged in the restoration of mazars and the formation of the corresponding complex of knowledge and practices. Individual needs for faith and hope, expressed through pilgrimage and care for the mazars, changed the landscape substantially and fixed a national territory within the new political borders. The re-​discovery of old sacred sites as salient and the creation of new sacred sites that had previously not been marked as such was the reaction of local communities to the demise of the Soviet system. Pilgrimage to mazars became one of the strategies for survival and adaptation in the conditions of drastically changing social regimes. If in Soviet times, pilgrimage was a quiet resistance, then in the post-​Soviet period it became a re-​existence.5 In the situation of disintegrating customary public relations, nature and ancestors became the main source of support for indigenous people. Developing the physical space through sacred sites is not a modern invention of the Kyrgyz or other Central Asian people. For a long time, diverse natural sites have been marked as sacred: a lone or a very old big tree, a spring, a salient stone, a cave with dropping water, a juniper growing on a mountainside. Even now, many sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan are “purely” natural. From the point of preserving and worshipping natural sacred sites, Kyrgyz peoples are connected to other indigenous people around the world (Basso, 1996; Schaaf and Lee, 2006; Verschuuren et al., 2010). Often nomads buried the dead near a sacred site (mountain, stone, and tree), then returned to pray. This is one of the ways how complex sacred sites appeared, with burials surrounded by, or connected with, natural landscapes. There are many complex sacred sites6 as well as handmade sacred sites, especially Islamic mausoleums, monuments,and tombs to worship in all Central Asian countries.7

KINDS OF POWER IN SACRED SITES From the standpoint of power relations, the sacred geography is, first, a territory of God. Its most frequently used names at mazars are Jaratkan –​the Creator, Allah-​ Talaa –​the Almighty, and Kudai –​God. When it gets to the form of relationship between the Creator and pilgrims, the full and complete hierarchy is implied, the undoubted subjection of a human to the higher force. The absolute power on the sacred land is divine, and there is only one God. At the same time, every sacred site has its ээ (ee), the spiritual host, or koldoochu, the spiritual guardian.8 Sometimes, people name such hosts kasiet, spiritual beneficial forces. An old bakshy (healer) Chachjibek-​apa from the village Akman in Jalal-​ Abad oblast used to say: “Ak mazarga –​ak chyrak, kok mazarga –​kok chyrak” (A 719

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​

white candle to the white site and a blue candle to the blue site). This formula keeps and transmits the ancient knowledge about the individuality and uniqueness of each site. The uniqueness of a site depends on multiple factors and is subject to different interpretations. The relationship of the spiritual host and pilgrim are strictly hierarchical, as is the relationship between the human and the Creator. The individual making the pilgrimage to a mazar must fully submit him-​or herself to God and the guardian of the site. The rules of submission are formulated in the rules of mazar visitation. Often times, these rules are unwritten and communicated orally, even though at some mazars, one can actually see the code of rules on display. First of all, these rules tame human pride and insolence. Submission and management of this type can be called a disciplinary mechanism of power (Foucault, 2011, pp.23–​27). The rules of mazar visitation are meant for the pilgrim’s body and mind. Starting from advanced mental and bodily preparation for pilgrimage, which is expressed in preparing donations, taking a full or partial ablution, to bowing at the entrance to the mazar, and to complete silence –​all of these are signs of submission to the Almighty and the guardian of the site. Many mazars also have a grounded power embodied in a living person, the custodian shaiyk or karoolchu. Currently, the custodian is a person who knows the history and the specificity of the site, provides information about the rules of visitation, and looks after the preservation of the mazar’s environment. People become shaiyks by descent or circumstantially. As a rule, in both cases, the custodian is a person from the locality in which the mazar is situated. Often, healers who once were cured at the mazar themselves, become its shaiyk. The custodian is never the eesi –​the master or owner of the site. The role is that of a guide to the world of the sacred, who must follow the hierarchical power of that world. The custodian submits to God and the spiritual guardian of the site. However, shaiyks are ordinary earthly people. On the one hand, they demonstrate service to the place and the Almighty; on the other hand, if possible, they establish their authority to control the pilgrims and obtain benefits. The situation is related to the issue of absence of the system to appoint or rotate shaiyks. Shaiyk rotation takes place only in a few large sites in southern Kyrgyzstan. In 2006, 84-​year-​old healer Sonunbubu took us to a beautiful bulak (source) surrounded by high rocks and trees in the Kara Bura district of Talas. It used to be a powerful sacred site, where Sonunbubu began her journey as a healer and custodian, and then brought many pilgrims for healing. However, in the 1990s, the eagle –​the spiritual host of this site –​moved to another side of the mountains and the source lost its kasiet. The mazar’s spiritual beneficial force left the site, because people started coming here for entertainment, with uncovered heads and bringing alcohol. Those who cross the lines of what is allowed at mazars, can even perish: there are plenty of mazar histories about insolent people or their progeny who had a woeful end, reflecting people’s understanding of the spiritual host’s power.9 The simultaneous availability and presence of both the Creator and the spiritual guardian of the place is a power norm of the sacred geography. This norm is strictly hierarchical: the guardians must implement the will of the Creator on the concrete sites, through concrete methods. Sometime, according to the concepts of contemporary mazar practitioners, there can be not one, but also several spiritual guardians 720

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​

and an internal hierarchy among these spiritual guardians. Jenish Kudakeev, the shaiyk of Nyldy Ata, a large sacred complex in Talas, taught us that if the guardians are a snake and eagle, the eagle will represent a higher level of power.

FORCES CONTESTING WITHIN THE SACRED GEOGRAPHY Many pilgrims consider themselves Muslim, perceive this hierarchical sacred power as a given and do not see any contradictions in it. At the same time, the concepts of ee and koldoochu (especially if the koldoochu is an arbak (ancestors’ spirit), the recognition of the power of the guardians triggers heated criticism from certain supporters of Islam. They are the followers of “pure Islam”, who recognize the religious practices only in mosques and that the only “pure Muslim” pilgrimage is to Mecca. From their standpoint, the local pilgrimages and especially the recognition of koldoochu is shirk (idolatry), the biggest sin in Islam, assuming some insults to the Almighty. Different approaches to the sacred sites’ pilgrimage are one of the factors dividing Central Asian citizens into “Islamic” and “traditionalistic” groups.10 In 2004, in order to eliminate what was regarded as a sinful site, the followers of “pure Islam” set fire to the mazar Tugol-​Ata in the village Tash-​Dobo, Naryn region. The pilgrim Bakyt Alybaev was born in Tash-​Dobo and used to worship at this mazar from his childhood. After moving to Bishkek, Bakyt visited the site regularly. The villagers called him to say that a group of seven to ten “sakalchandar” (“bearded men”) arrived at the sacred site, telling local people that they would stop shirk “once and forever” and set fire around the spring, junipers and on the slope of the hills. Bakyt, other traditionalists and local practitioners cleared the site of the remnants of fire and destruction. They made tilek kyluu, a ritual to fulfil a strong desire and kurmandykka chaluu, a collective sacrificing to bring back the kasiet of the site (Aitpaeva and Kojobekova, 2020, pp.255–​257). Now the mazar continues to function. The supporters and custodians of the mazar believe that the site not only grants health and well-​being to many people, but also guarantees safety to the entire locality (Tezekbaev, 2014, pp.41,195) (see Figure 47.2). Meanwhile, the Islamic mazars constitute one of the largest and most widespread networks within the country’s sacred geography.11 The key specific of Islamic mazars is their direct and obvious connection to Islam. As a rule, the names of Islam-​related sites contain such words as ajy (hadji), paigambar (prophet), eshen (ishan), kojo (khoja), sakaba (Prophet Muhammad’s followers), moldo (mullah), and their oral histories preserve stories about the arrival of Muslim missionaries in the region, and the dissemination and protection of Islam. Sometimes Muslim sacred sites, like any other sacred places, have their own specialization or, as is believed by pilgrims, are different from each other in terms of their miraculous properties. It is necessary to note that pilgrimage to any sacred site always includes Islamic elements. Surahs from the Quran are recited at mazars of all types: as in other Central Asian countries, this has become one of the basic rituals during pilgrimages.12 The overwhelming majority of pilgrims consider themselves to be engaged in a Kyrgyz Muslim practice with no reflection on their differentiations or contradictions. 721

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​

Figure 47.2  Talmazar-​Buva mazar, Batken province, 2012, © Aigine CRC archive.

Privratsky has observed the same situation in Kazakhstan and calls this “locally normative popular Islam” (Privatsky, 2001, p.242). The tendency of Islamization or reappropriation of the ancient natural places, which local residents have long worshipped, is observed in all Central Asian countries and beyond.13 There are small groups of Tenirchilik practitioners, who are trying to restore taza kyrgyz zholu (“purely Kyrgyz ways”) of sacred sites pilgrimage with no Qur’an recitation (Tezekbaev, 2004, pp.15–​20). However, currently these groups are too small, compared with the followers of the traditional Islam and “pure” Islam, and cannot compete with the Qur’an adherents.

GENDER ASSYMMETRY AS A TRADITIONAL POWER RELATION J. Beyer and P. Finke have pointed out that the centrality of tradition in contemporary Central Asia cannot be denied (2019, p.310). Salt (tradition), coming down from the ancestors is the key word people use to explain and, sometimes, justify their attitude towards the sacred sites.14 Such traditions are strongly preserved in the name of mazars. A famous Kyrgyz proverb teaches “Bash surasang –​Manjyly-​Ataga bar, mal surasang –​Cholpon-​Ataga 722

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​

bar, tak surasang –​Kochkor-​ Ataga bar, den-​ sooluk surasang –​Ysyk-​ Ataga bar” (If you’re asking for a child, go to Manjyly-​Ata, for wealth –​to Cholpon-​Ata, for power –​to Kochkor-​Ata, and for health –​to Ysyk-​Ata). This proverb contains a folk classification, which is based on the traditional understanding of the site’s specialization. All of the functions, from the conception of a child to obtaining political power, are possessed by the father-​guardians of the sites. Exclusively masculine power is typical for the majority of the sacralized territory. There are just a few mazars called by female names (Jaanbaev, 2014, pp.154). In this regard, gender asymmetry is a norm of the sacred geography. However, it was mostly women who preserved the space of mazars during the Soviet time and it was mainly women who restored them in the post-​Soviet period.15 During these difficult times, there was no need for a gender division. The jobs around sacred sites were not profitable, while caring for the sacred sites was dangerous and could destroy any social career. However, in spite of this, the power mechanisms laid down in harsh patriarchal times were restored exactly according to the old scheme during the period of independence.16 There are no situations in which the fatherly-​ power hierarchy is challenged. Nevertheless, the gender issue has arisen within this sacred geography in the connection with grounded power. In recent years, some Kyrgyz practitioners started using a special term to identify a female shaiyk –​ chyrakchy (initially a person looking after the light or candles). This is a signal about gender divisions that is preserved in the sacred geography. At present, however, mazars, especially the larger ones, are a resource of financial and symbolic capital. As with any resource in the country, there is an ongoing struggle for it. One of the big and regularly visited sites with developed infrastructure is Baitik mazar located near the village Baitik, about 18 kilometres from Bishkek. A single woman B, who was born in the Naryn province and moved to Bishkek about 25 years ago, used to look after Baitik mazar for about 15 years, with no problems in terms of her gender or place of origin. Recently, in the struggle for the grounded power at the mazar, the communities around Baitik recognized both her gender and origin as unsuitable for the role of shaiyk. After a two-​year struggle for her job, B. has become chyrakchy and she had to partner with a karoolchu, a male resident of Baitik village. There are several sacred sites around Bishkek, where both male and female custodians from different parts of the country look after the sites. These sites have much poorer infrastructure and are much less profitable than Baitik mazar: this allows us to assume that in the case of B., her gender became a weak point in the power struggle over an important mazar.

THE POWER OF “MANAS” Scholars associate the origin of the heroic epic “Manas” with the expansion of external forces and struggle of the Kyrgyz for their independence (Moldobaev, 1995, p.86). The “Manas” epic was used as the foundation for national ideology during the presidency of Askar Akaev (Van der Heide, 2008, pp.23–​25). Currently, many Kyrgyz-​speaking citizens of the country strongly associate the epic “Manas” with the idea of independence and statehood.

723

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​

The history of Manas, the hero who united the divided tribes into a single nation with a single territory, is rooted in the depths of the oral tradition of the Kyrgyz people. It is natural that within Kyrgyz’s sacred geography a special group of Manas sites has formed. If we trust the stories told by pilgrims, the remains of the great leader rest not only in Talas, but also in the provinces of Batken, Osh and Jalal-​ Abad. According to one of the unwritten laws of nomadic peoples, the burial sites of the military and other leaders were to be preserved in complete secrecy. Since nobody knows for sure where the great Manas is actually buried, his grave may very well be in any part of the country. The foremost sites associated with the hero are Manas-​Ordo (the headquarters of Manas) in Talas; Jyla-​nach Bugu (Naked Deer) in Jalal-​Abad oblast; Kamanduu-​Kol (Wild Boar Lake) in Issyk-​Kul oblast; Chech-​Dobo (the Hill of Decisions) in Naryn oblast; Kuu-​Kallya or Kokotay mazar (Naked Head or mazar of Kokotay) in Osh oblast; Kyrk-​Chilten (Forty in Batken oblast). Sacred geography is an “Other” space, where narratives about Manas stop being fragments of folklore, and of an ancient imaginary world. At mazars, epic becomes fact: a powerful history which laid the foundation of today’s independent state. Manas becomes a discourse of modern political leadership. Since about 2000, several groups of pilgrims consisting of teachers, doctors and engineers led by their spiritual leaders have been visiting the sacred sites dedicated to Manas and other Fathers to hold the ritual tuloo (sacrificing). These people have different personal reasons to make pilgrimages, but there is one strongly shared goal among those groups: to contribute in building a fair system of government through spiritual actions. The traditional activist Sadyr uulu Jumagazy believes that the main and only clearly negotiated component of this system is the type of leadership and leaders. Like Jumagazy, many participants of the sacrificing rituals think that if the country had such a leader as Manas, then it would have had a different destiny in the almost thirty years of post-​soviet independence. Traditional practitioners are convinced that not only political actors and various NGOs, but also rituals performed at the sacred Manas Ordo in 2005, demolished the power of the first president, and that again in 2010, the “energy of Manas” swept away the power of the second president (Aitpaeva, 2012, p.254). The ritual pilgrimages to the sacred sites of Manas can be associated with the long-​ time epic chanting in non-​sacred zones. These are the grassroots actions aimed at changing a corrupted poor society through the power mechanism that people know and believe in. These cultural actions with a strong political agenda significantly distinguish Kyrgyzstan from other Central Asian countries.

SACRED SITES AT THE CORE OF NATION-​B UILDING In the late twentieth and early twenty-​first century, in the context of building an independent Kyrgyzstan, sacred sites based on ethnic mobilization became the grassroots method for developing and structuring the state territory. No doubt the processes happening “on top”, where the first political technocrats worked on the creation of a state ideology for Kyrgyzstan, influenced the methods at the grassroots level. Yet, it was far from being a one-​way influence: at the dawn of independence, there was an equal and mutual influence travelling both ways: top-​down and bottom-​up. 724

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​

The two first and largest events in nation-​building, the thousandth anniversary of the epic “Manas” in 1995, and the three-​thousandth anniversary of the city of Osh in 2000, were concentrated around the old and famous mazars Manas-​Ordo and Sulaiman-​Too. Both sites had been turned into historical complexes with museums, but they had also continued to function as sites of pilgrimage during the Soviet period. The fact the during the very first years of nation-​building the new political elite of Kyrgyzstan visited such sites, even with just the goal of celebrating cultural and historical phenomena, confirmed the convergence/​alignment of political power and sacred power in this period (Koretskaya, 2014, p.5). Neither these two biggest mazars of the north and south of the country nor common people’s attitude towards them were invented by the ideologists and political technocrats of post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Instead, the belief and attachment of many people to these sites laid the foundation for particular political concepts. Such inclusion of ethnic Kyrgyz people’s values into the government’s affairs appears to be the influence of the grassroots –​the common people –​on the politically powerful. A former ambassador of Kyrgyzstan recounted how the first discussion of the idea to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of “Manas” in 1992 took place at the Academy of Sciences under the leadership of the President-​academician Askar Akaev. The suggestion to celebrate the thousandth jubilee was made by the Academy’s Department of Folklore and Literature. The former ambassador, back then the academic secretary of that department, characterized the reaction of the President as “literally, hysterical”. From the podium, the first President was loudly indignant at the fact the society would be offered folklore at a time when it was vital to build the economy. Nevertheless, a President’s Decree “On Preparations to Celebrate the 1000th Anniversary of the Epic ‘Manas’ ” was issued very soon thereafter (Akmataliev, 2020, pp.1171–​1173). In both cases, the celebration of the jubilees at the national level has led to big changes in the environment of Manas Ordo and Sulaiman-​Too. Here, the environment is understood as “the basis and element of transferring the action” (Foucault, 2011, p.39). If prior to that, the basis at those mazars had been natural phenomena (mountain, caves, trees, springs) and the main action there a direct appeal of the pilgrim to God or other higher forces, after Soviet, and then independent state intervention, the natural basis was undercut and reduced, and people’s attention switched to man-​made monuments and information sources. Based on the biggest events aimed at the establishment of the new Kyrgyz statehood, we can see that mazars have been closely involved in that building process. This is a case showing how the values of ethnic Kyrgyz people were converted into political actions.

A COUNTER-​N ARRATIVE AT A NEWLY EMERGING SACRED SITE In Kyrgyzstan, a few new sacred sites have emerged in connection with recent political events, providing a basis for new pilgrimages. The historical-​memorial complex Ata-​Beiit (Grave of the Fathers) is approximately a 40-​minute drive from Bishkek and was inaugurated in 2000 by President Akaev. Undoubtedly, the creation and opening of this complex is among the most significant 725

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​

acts of nation-​building.17 First, the memorial is based on the act of re-​burial and recognition of the “founding fathers”, those who took part in the creation of the Kirghiz Soviet Republic (Ibraeva, 2018, pp.201–​211; Kojobekova, 2019, pp.158–​183). The museum, the memorial plate in the form of a tunduk (the roof of the yurt), the kiln-​ graves covered by glass, and the monument to the victims of the repressions –​all of these were built into the natural hilly environment. This environment has supported conditions conducive to pilgrimage. In 2008, Chingiz Aitmatov was buried here. The grave of the great writer, wherever it was going to be located, would certainly eventually find its place in the sacred geography. Here, the burial of the writer created the second historical layer of that site. After the events on 7 April 2010, there appeared the third layer of history –​graves of men who perished during the assault on the government’s “White House”. In 2016, an idea to erect a monument commemorating the victims of the 1916 Rebellion developed. It was scheduled to open on 7 April 2020, but unfortunately the Covid-​19 pandemic disrupted all plans. The Ata-​Beeit site is important in respect to the dynamics of both spiritual and political powers. Based on this example, we can observe the very process of making memorial sites, as well as the power interests and mechanism behind it. At Ata-​Beeit, the state has become a main actor in allocating and reconstructing the sacred territory. Under such external circumstances, according to the traditional logic, kasiet should leave the site. Indeed, the sacred zone, which used to be near the kiln-​grave in the form of a ritual yurt, has moved higher up into the mountains. This site reflects the bloody conflict between the political rulers and ordinary citizens of Kyrgyzstan, so it is potentially critical of state actors. When the groups visiting sacred sites of Manas to make tuloo and ask about a new or another type of ruler, they maintain this consciousness and critique. Both a newly emerged site like Ata-​Beeit, as well as the Manas sites, thus contain a strong counter-​narrative to state power that can be activated.

CONCLUSION: SACRED SITES AS KYRGYZ HETEROTOPY As discussed, the physical map of the country is permeated by the sacral geography and the sacred sites concentrate certain types of power relations. The power of Manas and patriarchy, the power of Islamic prophets both coexist and contest each other here. Power relations within the sacred geography reflect the general situation in the country, but simultaneously it has very different meanings and social functions. In this sense, sacred geography is exactly that other space, which Foucault called ‘heterotopy’ (2006, pp.196, 197). Sacred geography is an “Other” space, where mazars are in public use, even if formally they are in private ownership, and even if there are different types of issues, as at the Baitik mazar. Féaux de la Croix noted that “the issues of ownership are muted here” (2017, p.114). Mazars are the only resource in the country that have never been privatized by anyone: they can be equally visited by rich and poor, presidents and opposition leaders, men and women. In other words, this is a territory that equally belongs to all and everybody in need can use it. There are words above the arch at Ata-​Beiit: “Ak iiilet, birok synbait” (the white bends but never breaks). “Ak iiilet, birok synbait” is the formula of power relations 726

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​

that works for the entire sacred space. The power of “ak” in the Kyrgyz philosophy is always positive and very broad. Depending on context, ak means white, light, kind, pure and just. Ak is in the root of the words aktyk and akyikat (transparency and justice). When pilgrims come to the sacred site, they usually come with ak tilek, good intention towards themselves, and their family, work and motherland. In other words, there is an unstoppable, ongoing search for justice on a wide range of issues at sacred sites. Mazars and traditional means of communication replicate the images of Kyrgyz values at any individual site and on the state territory in general, the possibility of happiness on earth for everybody, and the success of the state-​minded rulers and fair governance system. This makes pilgrimage to sacred sites such an in-​demand and sustained practice in very different periods. However, even this is not uncontested, as we saw in this chapter with the burned-​out mazar. During the nation-​building period of the country, the sacred geography became an ethnic Kyrgyz method of developing and structuring the state territory. Based on this method, an “Other” social space emerged, in which the key element is the principle of interconnectedness and reciprocity. This “Other” space as the totality of sacred sites, with equal and public use, is engaged in the search for justice in society itself. Being an initiative and the work of numerous people, mazars were developing and growing stronger by themselves on the wave of nation-​building. Ensuring the sustainability and legitimization of the political power in Kyrgyzstani society has been an acute issue throughout the period of independence. Referencing the experiences of the past and appealing to traditions has been one of the mechanisms used by politicians in order to overcome social controversies and move forward. “Betege ketet –​bel kalat, bekter ketet –​el kalat” (The feather-​grass will fade, but the earth will remain; the rulers will fade, but the people will remain). This proverb invokes ancient Kyrgyz concepts, bringing to mind the constancy and power of “sacred land” and connection to many of the people inhabiting it.

NOTES 1 The understanding of sacred sites as a network came during joint extensive pilgrimages with colleagues from Altay, Russia in 2009–​10. See Mamyev, 2009, pp.286–​300. 2 In 2014, Aigine Cultural Research Centre completed the inventory and developed the list of the sacred sites around the country with detailed descriptions of their location. Based on this information, we produced a hand-​made map. 3 The word mazar derived from Arabic: Miloslavsky et al., 1991, p.300. 4 See more about related definitions in: Féaux de la Croix, 2017, p.114; Aitpaeva, 2013, p.6. 5 See the concept of re-​existence of Adolfo Albana-​Akinte in Tlostanova, 2016. 6 See about natural and complex sites in Kyrgyzstan: Dompke and Musina, 2004, pp.2–​12; Orozbekova, 2013, pp.285–​290; in Tajikistan: Ogudim, 2003, pp.20–​24; Tursunov, 2007; in Kazakstan: Medeuova and Sandybaeva, 2018, pp.437–​441;Muminov, 2006; pp.40,41; in Uzbekistan: Abramson and Karimov, 2007, pp.319–​338; Abashin, 2008; Snesarev, 1969, pp.277–​279; in Turkmenistan: Demidov, 1990, pp.114–​118. 7 Kamolov, 2005, pp.208–​210; Malikov, 2005, pp.129–​144; Muminov, 1996, pp.14–​21; Muzaffar, 2005, pp.18–​22; Sukhareva, 1960, pp.32–​35; Zarcone, 2012, pp.214, 251–​277. 8 See: Bakchiev, 2008, pp.34–​37; Dubashev, 2012, p.13; Dubuisson and Genina, 2012, pp.116, 117; Isaev, 2004, pp.53–​64; Kehl-​Bodrogi, 2008, pp.136–​139; Privratsky, 2001, pp.259–​270; Ranasayagam, 2006, pp.377–​393; Vitebsky, 2012, pp.434–​436. 727

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​ 9 Toktogulova, 2007, pp.327–​335; Féaux de la Croix, J., 2017, pp.114,115 10 Aitpaeva, 2010, pp.224–​236; Louw, 2007, pp.22–​29; Montgomery, 2016, pp.20–​27; Shubel, 2010, pp.340–​353;Toktogulova, 2007, pp.507–​517. 11 Webster, 2015; Begimkulov, 2016; Begimkulov, 2017; Nabiev, 2004. 12 Privratsky, 2001, p.238 13 Gorshunova, 2008, pp.72–​74; Muminov, 2006, pp.40–​41; Henig, 2012, pp.751–​765. 14 Montgomery, 2016, pp.94–​95, Bellér-​Hann, 2010, pp.39–​57. 15 Aitpaeva et al., 2007, pp.351–​376. 16 Similarly the reproduction of patriarchy in Central Asia happens in migration (Reeves, 2013, pp.307–​310; activism (Beyer and Kojobekova, 2019, pp.329–​345), local discourses (Werner, 2009, pp.314–​331). 17 Ibraeva, 2018, pp.201–​211; Kojobekova, 2019, pp.158–​183.

REFERENCES Abashin, S., 2008. Mazar Babo-​ ob: O tipichnosti i atipichnosti svyatykh mest Sredney Azii //​ www.kuns​tkam​era.ru/​lib/​rub​rika​tor/​03/​03_​03/​978-​5-​55431-​158-​9/​ (accessed 10 December 2020). Abramson, D. and Karimov E. 2007. Sacred sites, profane ideologies: Religious pilgrimage and the Uzbek state. In J. Sahadeo and R. Zanca, eds., Everyday Life in Central Asia Past and Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Aidarbekov M., 2014. Koçkor-​Ata ar kanday kırsıktardan saktayt. In: G. Aitpaeva and A. Samakov, eds., The Value of Naryn: Spirited Sites and Blessing Knowledge. Bishkek: St. Art Ltd., pp.131–​133. Aitpaeva G., 2010. Debates around pilgrimage on sacred sites amongst Kyrgyz Muslims. In G.Aitpaeva and A. Egemberdieva, eds., Sacred Sites of Isyk-​Kol: Spiritual Power, Pilgrimage, and Art. Bishkek: Maxprint. Aitpaeva, G., 2012. Jaichylyk: Harmonizing the will of nature and human needs. In: D. Gerten and S. Bergmann, eds., Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles. London: Continuum. Aitpaeva, G., 2013. Sacred Sites of the Southern Kyrgyzstan: Nature, Manas, Islam. Bishkek: St. Art Ltd. Aitpaeva, G., and Kojobekova, A., 2020. Natsional’noye rukovodstvo po okhrane svyashchennykh mest i ritual’nykh praktik. Bishkek: Maxprint. Aitpaeva, G., Toktogulova, M., and Egemberdieva, A., eds. 2007. Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas. Bishkek: Maxprint Akmataliev, A., 2020. Manas. Cbornik dokumentov. Bishkek: Print Express. Almabekov, K., 2009. As long as you respect the earth and water, they will give you their blessing. In: Aitpaeva, G. and Egemberdieva, A., eds, Sacred Sites of Ysyk-​Kol: Spiritual Power, Pilgrimage and Art. Bishkek: Maxprint, pp.46–​49. Asanov, E., 2003. Kyrgyz tarykh. Kyskacha Encyclopedia. Bishkek: Ushkun. Bakchiev, T., 2008. Vvedeniye v Manasovedenie. Bishkek: Teknik. Basso, K., 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places. Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Begimkulov, E., 2016. Şeyitterdin mekeni (Safet-​Bulan. Şah Fazildin okuyası). Bishkek: Kirland. Begimkulov, E., 2017. Kırgızstandın kasiettüü jerleri. Jalal-​Abad oblastı: Padışa-​Ata bayanı, Kayra jaralgan Şor-​Bulak. Bishkek: Kirland. Bellér-​Haan, I., 2010. The mobilization of tradition. Localism and identity among the Uyghur of Xinjiang. In Robert L. Canfield and Gabriele Rasuly-​Paleczek , eds., Ethnicity, Authority, and Power in Central Asia: New games great and small. London: Routledge, pp. 39–​57. 728

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​ Beyer, J., and Finke P., 2019, Practices of traditionalization in Central Asia. Central Asian Survey, 38(3). Beyer, J., and Kojobekova, A. 2019. Women of protest, men of applause: Political activism, gender and tradition in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey, 38(3). Daniliva, N., 2020. Svyashchennyye mesta yakutov. Available at: www.sakh​apar​liam​ent.ru/​ru/​ kult​ura/​ (accessed 12 November 2020). Demidov, S. 1990. Istoriya religioznykh verovaniy narodov Turkmenistana. Ashxabat:Ylym. Dompke, S., and Musina, D., 2004. The Call of Our Ancestors: Natural sacred sites in the Issyk-​Kul Biosphere Territory. Bishkek: GTZ. Dubashev, B., 2012. Kut ilimi II (Kut science II). Bishkek: Abykeev. Dubuisson, E., and Genina, A. 2012. Claiming an ancestral homeland: Kazakh pilgrimage and migration in Inner Asia. In: M. Reeves, ed., Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond. Contested trajectories. London and New York: Routledge. Féaux de la Croix. J., 2017. Iconic Places in Central Asia. The Moral Geography of Dams, Pastures and Holy Sites. Germany: Transcript Verlag. Foucault. M., 2006. Drugiye prostranstva (Other spaces). In: M. Foucault, Intellektual’nyye i vlast’: Izbrannyye politicheskiye stat’i, vystupleniya i interv’yu. Moskva: Praksis. Foucault. M., 2011, Bezopasnost’, Territoriya. Naseleniye (Security, Territory. Population). Cank-​Peterburg: Nauka. Gorshunova, O., 2008. Svyashchennyye derev’ya Khodzhi-​Barora (Fitolatriya i kul’tu zhenskogo bozhestva v Sredney Azii). Etnograficheskoye obozreniye, 1. Henig, D., 2012. “This is our little hajj”: Muslim holy sites and reappropriation of the sacred landscape in contemporary Bosnia. American Ethnologist 39(4). Ibraeva, G., 2018. An unfinished story: Nation building in Kyrgyzstan. In: D. Dean, ed., A Companion to Public History, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Isaev, K., 2004. Sacredness of the Kyrgyz. In: C.Dyikanova, T. Dyikanov, J. Samanchina, eds., Sacred Sites of Kyrgyzstan. Bishkek: Forum of Society and Business. Jaanbaev, E., 2014. Berekelüü Burana-​Apa (Blessed Burana-​Apa). In: In G. Aitpaeva and A. Samakov, eds., The Value of Naryn: Spirited Sites and Blessing Knowledge. Bishkek: St. Art Ltd., pp.154–​155. Kamolov, X., 2005. Istoriya mazarov Severnogo Tadzhikistana (History of Mazars in Northern Tajikistan. Dushanbe: Devashtich. Kehl-​Bodgori, K., 2008. Religion Is Not So Strong Here. Muslim Religious Life in Khorezm after Socialism. New Brunswick and London. Kojobekova, A., 2019. Monuments to Heroes or Construction of Memory About the April Uprising of 2010 in the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan). Memory, Identity, and Nationalism in European Regions. IGI Global. Koretskaya, M., 2014. Ambivalentnost’ sakral’nogo i ambivalentnost’ vlasti: Ot antropologicheskoy problemy k filosofskoy kontseptsii (The ambivalence of the sacred and the ambivalence of power: From an anthropological problem to a philosophical concept). Available at: https://​cyber​leni​nka.ru/​arti​cle/​n/​amb​ival​entn​ost-​sak​raln​ogo-​i-​amb​ival​ entn​ost-​vla​sti-​ot-​ant​ropo​logi​ches​koy-​kont​sept​sii-​k-​filo​sofs​koy-​probl​eme (accessed 15 December 2020). Louw, M., 2007, Everyday Islam in Post-​Soviet Central Asia, London and New York: Routledge. Malikov, A., 2017. Svyatyye mesta Turkestanskogo regiona: osobennosti istorii i sovremennost’. In: Lokal’nyye religioznyye verovaniya v Tsentral’noy Azii. Materialy mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo seminara (Local Religious Beliefs in Central Asia. Materials of the international scientific seminar). Almaty: Izdatel’skiy dom “Mir”. Mamyev, D., 2009. The concept of a sacred place on the example of the Karakol (ethno) natural park “Uch Enmek” of the Altai Republic, Russia. In: G. Aitpaeva and A. Egemberdieva, eds., Sacred Sites of Isyk-​Kol: Spiritual Power, Pilgrimage, and Art. Bishkek: Maxprint. 729

—​​​​ G u l n a r a A i t p a e v a —​​​​ Medeuova, K. and Sandybaeva, U. 2018. Sakral’naya geografiya v Kazakhstane: kommemorativnaya politika gosudarstva i lokal’nyye praktiki v publichnykh prostranstvakh (Sacred geography in Kazakhstan: commemorative policy of the state and local practices in public spaces). In: Mir Bol’shogo Altaya. Miloslavsky, G., Petrosyan U., Piotrovsky M., Prozorov S. eds., 1991, Islam Enciklopediceskiiy slovar. Moskva: Nauka, 1991. Moldobaev, I., 1995, “Manas” –​istoriko-​kul’turnyy pamyatnik kyrgyzov. Bishkek: Kyrgyzstan. Montgomery, D., 2016. Practicing Islam, Knowledge, Experience, and social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Muminov, A., 1996. Svyatyye mesta v Tsentral’noy Azii (Vzaimodeystviye obshcheislamskikh i mestnykh elementov), World of the East 1(2). Muminov, A., 2006. Arslan bap. In: Prozorov, S., ed. Islam na territorii byvshey rossiyskoy imperii. Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar’ (Islam in the territories of the former Russian Empire. Encyclopaedic lexicon).Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences. Muzaffar, M., 2005. Sacred places of Tajikistan. Dushanbe: Optima. Nabiev, T., 2004. Kasiettuu Cafetbulan. Bishkek: Uchkun. Ogudin, V., 2003. Prirodnyye mesta pokloneniya v religioznykh predstavleniyakh sovremennogo naseleniya Fergany. Moskva: Nauka. Orozbekova, Zh., 2013. Mesta pogrebeniy kak ob“yekt pokloneniya Kyrgyzov v Alayskoy doline Kyrgyzstana (na primere Mazara Kurtuk-​Ata). Available at: https://​cyber​leni​nka.ru/​ arti​cle/​n/​mesta-​pog​rebe​niy-​kak-​obekt-​pokl​onen​iya-​kyrgy​zov-​v-​alays​koy-​dol​ine-​kyrg​yzst​ ana-​na-​prim​ere-​maz​ara-​kur​tuk-​ata (accessed 14 December 2020). Privratsky, B., 2001. Muslim Turkistan. Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Ranasayagam J., 2006. Healing with spirits and the formation of Muslim selfhood in post-​ Soviet Uzbekistan. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S), 12. Reeves, M., 2013. Migration, masculinity and transformations of social space in the Sokh valley, Uzbekistan. In: M. Laruelle, ed., Migration and Social Upheaval as the Face of Globalization in Central Asia. Leiden: Brill. Samakov, A., and Berkes, F. 2017. Spiritual commons: sacred sites as core of community-​ conserved areas in Kyrgyzstan. International Journal of the Commons, 11(1). Schaaf, T. and Lee, K., 2006. Conserving Cultural and Biological Diversity: The Role of Sacred Natural Sites and Cultural Landscapes. Paris: UNESCO. Shubel, V., Islam’s diverse paths: Seeking the “real Islam” in Central Asia. In: G.Aitpaeva and A. Egemberdieva, eds., Sacred Sites of Isyk-​Kol: Spiritual Power, Pilgrimage, and Art. Bishkek: Maxprint. Snesarev G., 1969. Relikty domusul’manskikh obryadov i verovaniy u uzbekov Khorezma, Moskva: Nauka. Sukhareva, O., 1960. Islam v Uzbekistane Islam in Uzbekistan, Tashkent: Academy of Sciences. Tezekbaev, K., 2004. Teŋirge sıyınuu (Worship the Lord). Bishkek: Biiktik. Tezekbaev, K., 2014. Tügöl-​Ata mazarı ötö sırduu mazar. In: In G. Aitpaeva and A. Samakov, eds., Narındın narkı: janduu jaylar jana barktuu bilim. Bishkek: St. Art Ltd. Tlostanova, M., 2016. Postkolonial’noye sostoyaniye i dekolonial’nyy vybor: esteticheskiye aspekty dekolonial’noy mysli. Available at: www.rad​iobl​ago.ru/​vremya​kult​ury/​lekc​iya-​mad​ iny-​tlos​tano​voj (accessed 12 January 2021). Toktogulova, M., 2007. Syncretism of beliefs (Kyrgyzchylyk and Musulmanchylyk). In: G.Aitpaeva, M.Toktogulova, and A. Egemberdieva, eds., Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas, Bishkek: Maxprint. Tursunov B., 2007. Iz istorii svyatyni Fernagskoy doliny (na materialakh mazara Khodzha takrovut) (From the history of the sanitary of the Kanibadas oasis, based on materials from

730

— ​​​​ S a c r e d s i t e s i n Ky r g y z s t a n a s a p h e n o m e n o n o f p o w e r —​​​​ the Khoja takrovu mazar). Available at: http://​tsu​lbp-​jour​nal.narod.ru/​jur​nal/​mat​n_​3/​tursu​ nov_​b_​r.html (accessed 9 December 2020). Van der Heide, N., 2008. Spirited Performance: The Manas Epic and Society in Kyrgyzstan. pp.267–​290. Rosenberg. Verschuuren, B., Wild, R., McNeely, J. and Oviedo, G., eds. 2010. Sacred Natural Sites: Conserving Nature and Culture. London: Routledge. Vitebsky, P., 2012. Wild Tungus and the spirits of places, Ab Imperio, 2. Webster J. 2015. Toward a Sacred Topography of Central Asia: Shrines, Pilgrimage, and Gender in Kyrgyzstan. Diss. University of Washington. Werner, C., 2009. Bride abduction in post-​Soviet Central Asia: Marking a shift towards patriarchy through local discourses of shame and tradition, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(2). Zarcone, T., 2012. Pilgrimage to the “Second Meccas” and “Ka’bas” of Central Asia. In: A.Papas, T. Weldors, and T. Zarcone, T., eds., Central Asian Pilgrims. Hajj Routes and Pious Visits between Central Asia and the Hijaz. Germany: J2P Berlin.

731

CHAPTER FORTY-​E IGHT

UYGHUR ISLAM, EMBODIED LISTENING, AND NEW PUBLICS Rachel Harris

HEARING THE QUR’AN IN ARZU STYLE RESTAURANT We were having lunch at the Arzu Style restaurant, a high-​end Uyghur-​owned restaurant on Togolok Moldo Street in central Bishkek. Outside, a thick pall of smoke and the smell of kebab greeted guests. Inside, the large dining room was fitted with air conditioning, comfortable banquettes, and a long bar along one wall. Russian pop videos played on TV screens hanging from the ceiling. Suddenly, a resonant voice cut through the chatter and bustle of the restaurant. ‘Audhu billahi min ash-​shaytan ir-​rajeem’ (I take refuge from Satan in Allah). A Kyrgyz imam was eating at the restaurant and, still seated with his party, had taken it upon himself to recite from the Qur’an at the time for noon prayers. An immediate hush fell over the restaurant, and his voice filled the large room for ten minutes, the mellifluous Arabic words of the Qur’an followed eventually by a barked Kyrgyz language prayer. Everyone in the restaurant stopped their activity, and sat motionless, heads bowed and hands cupped in prayer, until he had finished. The waiters too ceased to serve their customers and stood still, heads bowed and hands cupped. The pop music had been hastily silenced, but the videos continued to play incongruously, their scantily clad dancers still gyrating, suddenly an affront to the new ethical soundscape created by the voice of the imam (fieldnotes, Bishkek, August 2016). This 2016 encounter captures something of the ways in which sounded practices can reshape the urban environment and the ways in which people inhabit them. Charles Hirschkind (2006) describes how playing recordings of the Qur’an or sermon tapes in taxis and cafes in 1990s Cairo reshaped the moral architecture of such places by re-​animating dormant layers of embodied and affective experience in the people who occupied them. The performance of Qur’anic recitation in a public place calls forth mimetically the sensory elements of the tradition of ethical listening in Islam. The sound of the recited Qur’an acts on bodies; Muslims listening to its sound may unconsciously adjust their headscarves or shape their lips in the words of the prayer, adapting themselves to its sonic and moral demands. As several authors have argued, the sacred nature of the recited Qur’an has the capacity to determine the boundaries and characteristics of public space. For this reason, it plays a powerful role when mobilised and sent forth to resound in public spaces normally marked as secular. Its sound marks certain styles of speech or comportment 732

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-58

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​

as inappropriate in that space, and likely to draw censure. By recruiting a set of bodily practices and ethical norms, the sound of the recited Qur’an has the capacity to transform secular spaces into places belonging to an emergent Muslim public (Eisenberg 2013). Hirschkind’s (2006) study explores how new Islamic media forms, principally the cassette sermon, transformed the political geography of the Middle East and played a pivotal role in an expanding arena of Islamic argumentation and debate which he dubbed the Islamic counterpublic. Listening to such media has become an essential part of Islamic revival movements; a daily practice for millions of Muslims, part of a complex ethical and political project which promotes social responsibility, pious deportment and devotional practice. Listening to the recited Qur’an sounding out in a Bishkek restaurant, we can understand how it has played an instrumental role in creating new Muslim counterpublics across China and Central Asia. In this chapter, I consider how performances of the recited Qur’an –​resounding in public spaces, circulating in the form of digital media, and embodied in daily practice –​helped to constitute new Uyghur Muslim publics in Central Asia, across the former Soviet states and in Chinese Xinjiang. In order to understand these processes, I pose a series of interlinked questions. To what extent, and in what ways, were these new publics linked in their listening practices and ethical formation to other religious revivals in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to what extent were they driven and shaped by the particularities of regional history, the sensibilities of local people, and the scope for the emergence of such publics in the political environment of the time?

LISTENING TO RELIGIOUS REVIVAL IN CENTRAL ASIA Following the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, a powerful religious revival occurred within Uyghur communities in the Central Asian states and across the border in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. For many, this was a question of reconnecting with family roots, but there was also a significant transnational element to the revival. New religious ideologies arrived via the Internet and social media, and also through increased travel and migration by merchants, intellectuals, people taking the hajj, or studying in religious colleges abroad. Having acquired new first-​hand knowledge of Islam abroad, these individuals returned to their communities with increased prestige and authority. Wealthier individuals cemented their status by building new mosques or opening religious schools. These returnees compared local Islam with the kinds practised in Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, and they began to demand that Uyghur religious traditions should be cleansed from local custom and superstition. Some argued that new forms of pious practice were necessary to save the nation from social problems such as alcoholism and drugs. These developments among Uyghur communities mirrored and intersected with developments among different Muslim communities across Central Asia and China (Harris et al. 2020; Montgomery 2016; Mostowlansky 2017; Rasanayagam 2011; Schrode 2008). My research is based on fieldwork across borders, working with Uyghur communities in Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan between 2009 and 2016. The question of Islam in Xinjiang is deeply embroiled in the massive campaigns to –​as Chinese state media puts it –​‘tackle religious extremism and terrorism’, which have 733

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​

involved the intense securitisation of the whole region since 2014, invasive forms of surveillance and social control and, since 2017, the incarceration of over 1.5 million of the region’s Muslim citizens (Smith Finley 2019; see also Byler, this volume). Daily prayer, fasting, possessing a Qur’an, sharing religious media have all been flagged as ‘signs of extremism’ which might condemn Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities to indefinite detention in a re-​education camp. In a discourse which in many ways echoes Western narratives around radicalisation (Kundnani 2012), Chinese officials have depicted Islam as a dangerous virus which must be cured before those infected embark on the road towards extremist violence. Within this discourse, one of the key sources of ‘infection’ was the practice of listening to religious media which penetrated the boundaries of state territory from the ‘sensitive regions’ of the Middle East (see Figure 48.1). This chapter aims to counter these narratives of terrorism and violence through alternative ways of reading the circulation and consumption of religious sounds in this region. I argue that new ways of listening to and reciting the Qur’an were instrumental in introducing a new set of dispositions –​embodied responses to sound, and processes of subject-​formation –​which underpinned the creation of a new Uyghur Islamic counterpublic, and it was this broad-​based challenge rather than any serious threat of extremist violence which proved so alarming to the Chinese state. Between 2009 and 2012, I worked with a small rural community in southern Xinjiang. Access to the field became increasingly difficult and potentially dangerous for my local associates after 2012, and I began to work instead with Uyghur communities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Here, the relationship between the state and religious revival was less oppositional; it was easier to attend religious gatherings and conduct interviews which revealed a spectrum of views and often sharp debates within

Figure 48.1  Propaganda image from a 2014 ‘peasant art’ competition, depicting the dangers of mediated listening, Xinhuanet, 2014. 734

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​

the Uyghur community concerning new religious practices and ideologies. Rashidem Hajim, a retired doctor living in Bishkek, offered an even-​handed assessment: Now we are more religious than before. It’s good. People don’t follow bad ways. Our young people don’t drink or smoke. On the other hand, there are Wahhabis. They preach sharia in a different way. They say that after a death you shouldn’t give the [ritual for the] seven days, you shouldn’t give the forty days. They say, ‘This isn’t right, that isn’t right.’ They want to get rid of everything. (Rashidem, interview, Bishkek, August 2016) How might a focus on sound and embodiment help to throw light on this situation of rapid social and ideological change and conflict? My interest in the burgeoning sound studies literature was inspired by experiences working with Uyghur village women in southern Xinjiang between 2009 and 2012. I attended their meetings, which involved reciting the Qur’an and the practice of zikr [Ar. dhikr]: the rhythmic repetition of Arabic-​language religious formulae in order to achieve a closer relationship with God through emotional catharsis (Shannon 2004). I found that a focus on sound and soundscapes helped me to think through questions related to the expression and embodiment of Islamic faith and ideology, and the links between embodied practice and place. I came to realise that many of the debates and conflicts around Uyghur Islam were centred around embodied and sounded practice: should you have music and dancing at weddings; should you pray aloud at the grave of the recently deceased; should the recited Qur’an sound like singing? In the eastern Kyrgyz town of Karakol, an Uyghur businessman called Bekhtiyar (see Figure 48.2) described his recent move towards a more pious lifestyle in terms of a call, and an act of listening: One evening at dusk, an idea came into my head … it was like a strange, mysterious voice spoke in my heart, and it said I should face maghrib [sunset; the evening prayer]. I felt like someone was calling me to pray. I didn’t tell anyone about this feeling, not even my family, but I went to pray. Then I felt deep happiness in my soul. (Bekhtiyar, interview, Karakol, July 2016) The notion of ‘sonic imaginations’ (Sterne 2012) may help us to think through the many competing knowledges of sound in the world, each of which has its own politics, historicity and cultural domain. Sonic imaginations offer the possibility of reworking culture through the development of new narratives, new histories, and new technologies of listening. This is important work in the fraught sphere of the discourse surrounding Islamic revivals, where dominant narratives privilege the visual in ways that routinely stereotype or demonise Muslim subjects (Abu Lughod 2002), and find new ways of thinking about Islam as it is individually experienced and expressed. Why did Bekhtiyar hear this voice calling him to prayer? What personal transformations did it provoke? Why did listening to its command to perform the daily actions of prayer bring him such a sense of spiritual relief, impel him to travel to Mecca, and fund the building of a new mosque in the town bazaar? What were the wider impacts of these new sensibilities on the local community? Attending to the politics of voice 735

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​

Figure 48.2  Bekhtiyar, an Uyghur businessman from Karakol, Kyrgyzstan in 2016, holding a family photo taken before they adopted a pious lifestyle.

and place may help us to cut through the highly polarised political debates about Islam, and create new narratives about the nature of Islamic practice and ideology. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (2015: 1) have argued that ways of understanding sound –​metaphors for sound –​both construct the perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories of sound in social life in a ‘feedback loop of materiality and metaphor’. When we explore how the apparently separate fields of perception and discourse are entwined, we can understand the ways in which communities of listening attribute meaning to sonic environments, and the ways in which listening technologies emerge within particular cultural contexts. It is an approach that takes particular account of agency and positionality: listening practices are social markers, indexes of knowledge, taste and social distinction (Feld 2015). Various significant terms are used to refer to sounded practices in contemporary Uyghur Islam. Qur’anic recitation (qira’at) is an important term for religious professionals, invoked in debates around the ‘correct’ way to voice the Qur’an. The Uyghur term ‘musiqa’ is sometimes invoked in debates around permissibility: the ethics of listening to certain kinds of sounds as part of a good Muslim life. Rashidem noted how these debates created fault lines within families: Once, we were sitting drinking tea, and there was a Hindi film on TV with singing, and my grandson said, ‘Grandmother please turn that off, it’s not allowed.’ I asked my son, ‘Did you teach your children that music is haram?’ I said to him, ‘There’s nothing wrong with listening to music, I want to listen to it’, and that shut him up. I know he told his son that music was haram … If someone has a good heart, and believes in Allah truly, and they listen to music with good 736

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​

intentions, then there is nothing wrong with that … Music is a kind of medicine for spiritual illness, it’s essential to life. Beautiful songs are good for the soul. (Rashidem, interview, Bishkek, August 2016) Rashidem drew on a discourse rooted in Sufi traditions of sama’ (listening) to support her desire to listen to Hindi film songs: a debate that has echoed in Central Asia for at least five hundred years (Papas 2015). Another, more salient term in these contemporary debates might be ‘song and dance’ (naxsha-​usul), a more specific notion referring to folkloric types of public performance central to the representations of minority peoples in both the former Soviet Union and China. All of these categories may be heard differently by different actors in this region as sacred sound, as an essential expression of identity, or as dangerous noise. Discourses around noise reveal much about identities and values; noise often denotes the sounds of the racialised or marginalised Other: black noise, or low-​class noise. Noise is also subversion: the sounds of punk or street protest. It raises ‘essential questions about the staging of human expression, socialisation, individual subjectivity, and political control’ (Novak & Sakakeeny 2015). In contemporary Xinjiang, as in certain sectors of Europe and the US, the resurgence of the sacred sounds of Islam was heard by many non-​Muslims and state officials as Muslim noise: backward and oppositional, a challenge to state projects of modernisation and development. This conflict in sonic imaginations was also a conflict over territory (Harris 2017). Recent decades have seen new publics arising across the Islamic world. Turkey saw a progressive Islamisation of the public sphere in the mid-​1990s, as Islamist political gains and media deregulation allowed new forms of pious popular culture to flourish. Martin Stokes has described the role of another form of Islamic sound production in the formation of a new public in Turkey. Popular religious songs became ubiquitous in the Turkish media and online platforms, and subsequently achieved mainstream status with the rise to power of Erdogan’s AK Party, becoming an essential part of municipal events. Stokes notes how the cultural managers of the Islamist movement in Turkey actively fashioned habits of listening through the verbal pedagogy accompanying music recordings and online. This top-​ down instruction elaborated the proper emotional and aesthetic states for listening to this kind of music, and in this way helped to constitute the new public (Stokes 2013).

LISTENING TO THE RECITED QUR’AN We are waiting for Halmud outside a mosque on the potholed main street of Karakol. He eventually pulls up in his tiny, beat-​up old Lada, and laboriously extracts himself from the driver’s seat. Halmud is a big man with a military bearing, a retired fire fighter. He has recently rediscovered his Islamic faith and now works as doorman for the local mosque. It is Friday morning and a recording of Qur’anic recitation by Mishari Rashid booms out of his car. It matches Halmud’s prayer cap and suit of pure white clothes, which give him a rather saintly air. He is preparing himself spiritually for Friday prayers (fieldnotes, Karakol, July 2016). In the early years of the twenty-​first century, Uyghurs in communities across Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, avidly consumed, listened to and imitated recordings of the recited Qur’an, which they purchased as cassettes or VCDs or downloaded digital 737

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​

files onto their mobile phones. Uyghur women in Bishkek organised regular religious tea parties (din chay) to discuss ways of following a religious life, and young men in Ürümchi met in private rooms above restaurants to listen to recorded sermons and discuss their contents. Many people sent their children to new religious schools, legal or otherwise, to learn to recite their prayers and a few surah of the Qur’an, and older people organised community recitation classes for themselves: to attend to their immortal souls before it was too late, as I was often told (see Figure 48.3). Many people were aware of leading reciters from Egypt and elsewhere, and had a keen appreciation of the aesthetic beauty and emotional power of their recitation. The act of listening is crucial to any discussion of sound, and the singing (or reciting) voice possesses great potency because it forges powerful experiences of religion. In Islamic traditions, the voice is generally regarded as morally neutral; what matters is the intent of the listener. What is the effect of a particular sound on the pious ear? What are the ethical intentions involved in the act of listening? For the many Muslims who can neither speak nor read Arabic, the experience of the Qur’an is primarily through its sound, not as text, and the act of listening to the recited Qur’an is central to ethical and therapeutic practices in Islam. One ritual specialist in rural southern Xinjiang, who I will call Aynisem, invoked a pious sensorium when she explained the importance of reciting the Qur’an: ‘They say if you can recite the Qur’an well, according to the rules of tajwid, then you are like a lemon tree, always fresh and sweet and fragrant … If you have intention to learn, then you are like a tree

Figure 48.3  Women at a Qur’an class in the Pokrovka neighbourhood of Bishkek, 2016. 738

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​

in bud, but if you aren’t interested, then you are like a poisonous plant and you smell bad’ (interview, Yantaq village, August 2012). Over the final decade of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-​first centuries, new ways of listening permeated Uyghur communities across Xinjiang and the diaspora. Not only did the sound of the recited Qur’an permeate the soundscape, making sonic claims over new territories, as we saw with the imam’s intervention in the Bishkek restaurant, but many debates took place over the ‘correct’ way in which the Qur’an should be recited. These debates echoed the developments of the 1980s in the Middle East and elsewhere (Gade 2004; Rasmussen 2010), but they also took on resonances particular to these new contexts. In the mid-​to late-​ twentieth century, particular styles of Qur’anic recitation achieved global hegemony through systems of technology and political patronage, and they became linked to particular religious ideologies. In the 1960s and 1970s, developments in recording technology permitted the global spread of what is now regarded as the classical Egyptian style, as Egypt’s state-​owned recording company SonoCairo produced a series of star reciters, among them Abdul Basit ‘Abd us-​Samad, for worldwide export (Frishkopf 2009). Renowned for their artistry, their recitation style featured dramatic melodic ornamentation and ecstatic techniques of repetition and modulation. In the audio recordings of their live performances –​which are still massively popular on YouTube and other media platforms –​murmurs, sighs and shouts of appreciation from the audience are often audible. In the 1980s, a new style of recitation began to compete with this established style in the Middle East via a new media form. Saudi forms of revivalist Islam were widely promoted at this time through cassette recordings of sermons and recitations. In contrast to the ornate Egyptian style, the Saudi style eschewed melodic elaboration, and was typically more rapid, simple and direct. The heavy reverb used in its recordings indexed the acoustics of its most common live venues –​the huge mosques at Mecca and Medina –​and it was particularly associated with the nightly recitation of the Qur’an held in those mosques during Ramadan. Michael Frishkopf (2009) has argued that this Saudi style of Qur’anic recitation was used in Egypt to sonically promote reformist-​revivalist Islamic ideology. To play a recording of the Saudi style in Egypt in the 1990s was to make a public political statement about one’s approach to Islam. The Saudi style of recitation expressed a direct relationship to God, one affectively coloured by fear, awe, and repentance, and linked to Salafi ideology. It opposed the traditional Sufi-​influenced mystical-​aesthetic values of Egyptian Islamic practice, which were represented by the classical Egyptian style. What happened when these different Middle Eastern recitation styles filtered into Uyghur practices of Qur’anic listening and recitation? Did the ideological attachments they signalled in Egypt remain true for Uyghur listeners? Can the links between style and meaning proposed by Frishkopf be applied to the ways in which Qur’anic recitation is listened to, interpreted and reproduced in Uyghur society, or did new meanings accrue, suited to the new contexts in which they now resounded?

ABDUL BASIT COMES TO AQSU During a visit to Xinjiang in 2012, I discussed the changing styles of Qur’anic recitation with Damolla, a young imam in southern Xinjiang who had studied in the 739

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​

Xinjiang Islamic Institute and had once travelled to Egypt to take part in a Qur’anic recitation competition. In the 1980s, China’s Islamic Association began to re-​establish relations with Islamic centres of learning in the Middle East. Up to this time, according to Damolla, the style or ‘voice’ (awaz) of Uyghur recitation was local, but beginning in the 1980s new styles –​or the ‘Arab voice’, as he put it –​started to be introduced: In our local area, my father’s teacher was the first to introduce the Arab recitation style from Saudi Arabia. He studied for seven years in Mecca. Now the local style has gone. Everyone uses the Arab style. Why? It’s better we lose our old style. The Arab style is good. The whole Muslim world is using it. The only reason we didn’t adopt it earlier was because links were weaker, we didn’t have so many opportunities to travel. (Damolla, interview, Aqsu, 2012) Damolla’s words provide a clear statement of the common devaluing of local practice and the sense of a need to conform to ‘correct’ style. Damolla marked ‘correctness’ here as a specifically Arab phenomenon, perhaps a straightforward connection made with the Arabic language of the holy text, or perhaps due to his personal relationship with individuals who had travelled to Saudi Arabia. Yet Saudi Arabia was not the only source for Uyghur reciters to access ‘Arab styles’. Damolla also waxed lyrical about the Egyptian classical style of Abdul Basit: We are all following Abdul Basit: Muslims in China, and across the whole Islamic world. It’s fashionable to copy his style [qira’ät], his intonation [tajwid], his voice [awaz]. No one has yet been born to take his place … When he reads a verse, every word is in its proper place. His voice and breath last a long time. I don’t know anyone better than him … I’m also trying to follow his style at the moment. When I recite in his style, and I make my voice sound like his, people value it more; it strengthens my reputation. (Damolla, interview, Aqsu, 2012) As Damolla’s words suggest, a range of Middle Eastern styles were popular amongst Uyghur reciters in Xinjiang at this time; they were highly valued, and were fast supplanting local styles of recitation, and trained reciters like the Damolla possessed detailed knowledge of specific styles and individual reciters. This question of style goes deep into questions of embodiment and vocal timbre: Damolla must literally inhabit the voice of Abdul Basit to cement his reputation has a reciter. It was not only professional reciters and imams who embraced this phenomenon. Between 2009 and 2012, I also spent some time in a village in southern Xinjiang with a group of rural women known as büwi –​female ritual specialists who served the community by reciting at women’s funerals and commemorations, and washing the bodies of the dead. Families also frequently called on them to intercede in cases of illness or disaster. Their gatherings and ritual practice are closely related to the Sufi orders active in Xinjiang, especially those of the Naqshbandi. They involve the rhythmic collective chanting of Arab language prayers (zikr) and listening to longer solo sections of Qur’anic recitation, and they are emotionally intense (Anwar 2013; Harris 2013). In summer 2009, I attended a khätmä ritual, a three hour-​long 740

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​

gathering of some forty women to mark the festival of Barat (held on the 15th night of the month of Sha’ban). At this gathering, the assembled women recited a series of rhythmic collective prayers and phrases from the Qur’an. Their recitation gradually increased in intensity until many of them were weeping and some fell into a state of trance. At the end of the zikr, Aynisem began to recite Surah Al-​Rahman. Her recitation was beautifully voiced and unusually faithful to standard Qur’anic Arabic pronunciation and the rules of tajwid which govern Qur’anic recitation. She was also recognisably following the classical twentieth-​century Egyptian style as exemplified by Abdul Basit. As she recited, the assembled women answered her phrases with sobs and gasps. Aynisem took great pleasure in listening to and imitating recordings of top reciters from the Middle East. She told me: I learned the melody (ahang) from recordings (dai; from the Chinese). I bought them in the bazaar in Ürümchi. I just listened to them a couple of times. I like imitating people, so I pick it up easily. I am illiterate, I never went to school, but I studied the Qur’an for twelve years, so I can copy a voice when I hear it … I learned this one from a recording of Sadiq Ali. He was a top student of Abdul Basit. (Aynisem, Yantaq Village, August 2012) Many such recordings were imported into Xinjiang by Pakistani traders during the 1990s and openly sold in town bazaars. Aynisem had learned her recitation of Surah Al-​Rahman from a recording of the Pakistani reciter Sadaqat Ali, who is admired for being one of the few Asian reciters able to perfectly reproduce the classical Egyptian style. In this remote Uyghur village, I found a situation in which new styles of recitation, digitally transmitted from the Middle East, were entering local religious practice. Aynisem’s mimetic performance of the Egyptian style fitted comfortably into the ritual, and produced a strong emotional response from the gathered women.

SALAFI SOUNDS IN A SUFI RITUAL? When I met with Aynisem again, we talked about recitation styles, and the difference between Egyptian and Saudi reciters. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘You mean Abdurahman Sudais. I’ve learned him too. I’ll recite some for you at our next ritual.’ This gathering, led by Aynisem in August 2012, was performed to help a village woman who was recovering from an operation. At its conclusion, Aynisem cleared her throat and recited Surah Al-​Fatiha in a slow, portentous manner, clearly imitating the Saudi style of recitation. The model for this performance, Abd ar-​Rahman al-​Sudais, was born in 1960 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca until his death in 2016, and a well-​known reciter. He was also known as an ultra-​conservative preacher who promoted the orthodox doctrine of Wahhabism in the global arena, and caused widespread controversy over his public statements on women, Jews and Shia Muslims. Aynisem inserted into her ritual practice the sounds of both Abdul Basit and al-​ Sudais. If we follow Frishkopf’s arguments about style and meaning we might think it natural that the Egyptian style –​with its links to mystic, Sufi-​influenced modes of 741

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​

Islam –​should be brought into the context of this ritual which also draws upon Sufi traditions of zikr. The inclusion of al-​Sudais, on the other hand, may strike us as bizarre. Here is a style linked to strongly, even violently, anti-​Sufi ideology. This is a form of Islam that preaches, above all, a direct relationship with God, and as such is strongly opposed to the kind of ritual intercession in which these women were engaged. The ritual practices of the büwi, along with other ‘traditional’ practices, were frequently criticised by the Uyghur revivalists I encountered in Xinjiang, Kyrgyzstan and across the Uyghur diaspora. They argued that there was no Qur’anic basis for rituals such as these; they were un-​Islamic innovations (bidät), local forms of ‘superstitious’ (khurapatliq) practice, from which Islam should be purified. Why would Aynisem –​a self-​declared follower of the tärikät yol (the Sufi path) –​draw upon the Saudi style if it retained its semiotic associations with a school of Islam that directly preached against her practice? Surely this was a case of radical semantic and affective drift, a disjuncture of sounds and meanings. Such forms of disjuncture are central to discussions of the transnational flows of sounds and meanings and their role in the production of global modernity. Veit Erlmann (1999) has argued that aesthetic regimes and systems of meaning produced in a globalised age emerge from encounters between different systems of knowledge, morality and aesthetics. The global culture produced through these encounters is constituted by a series of shifts in the relationship between subject, knowledge and lived experience, as people shift the contexts of their knowledge and endow phenomena with significance beyond the immediate realm of their personal experience. Erlmann is primarily concerned with musical encounters between Africa and the West, but I argue that similar processes are apparent in the sounded encounters between the Islamic heartlands and those who perceive themselves to be on its periphery. As the disembodied sounds of Qur’anic recitation circulate around the globe with increasing ease and rapidity, their semiotic meanings are similarly detached and their sounds are re-​signified. The arrival of these Middle Eastern recitation styles in rural Xinjiang demonstrates how wider trends in Islam were audibly penetrating remote villages on the fringes of the Islamic world, and how the ways in which they were interpreted were strongly localised. Aynisem was mimetic in her practice, and in many ways she too was a reformist and revivalist. She absorbed and re-​sounded these foreign styles in order to strengthen her religious practice, internalising and bodying forth the power of this Other Islam. For her, Egyptian and Saudi styles, far from indexing opposing ideologies as Frishkopf demonstrates in Egypt, were interchangeable, and what they both indexed was a form of religious practice which was powerfully modern, and linked directly to a technologised self. Aynisem told me: ‘Now our rituals are even stronger than before … the government doesn’t like big gatherings of women so there are restrictions, but now we understand better than before. Our heads are like computers, more developed’ (Aynisem, Yantaq village, August 2009). Aynisem’s comments responded directly to local realities. They were in part a reaction to state policies, as religious practitioners sought to strengthen themselves morally and spiritually in the face of the increasing marginalisation and criminalisation that they faced at the hands of the Xinjiang authorities, even before the extremities of the current campaigns. But her comments also drew directly on prevalent state 742

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​

discourses of development and modernity, even as she deployed the sounds of religious practice that the state certainly heard as ‘backward’ and detrimental to progress. Many observers of the Islamic world have pitted supposedly tolerant and hybrid forms of local Islam against the purifying practices of reformist individuals and groups (Soares and Osella 2009), but it is difficult to make a clear-​cut distinction between ‘orthodox’ Islam and Sufi-​influenced Islam in Xinjiang (Brophy 2018; Thum 2014). The Sufi orders have historically been closely tied to political power ever since their arrival in the region centuries earlier, and in modern Xinjiang, senior religious leaders in mosques and madrassahs have been known to undertake leading roles within Sufi orders. Local ritual traditions derived from these Sufi orders provided just one strand within a broad spectrum of religious modalities that individuals could draw upon, and they have, historically and today, moved between and even combined these different strands of thought and practice with pragmatic flexibility. The ritual practices of rural Uyghur women in the first decade of the twenty-​first century were highly adaptable and responsive to social change, as their practitioners –​ even within their remote and impoverished villages –​confronted and engaged with the complexities of a globalised society, but they engaged with global Islam on their own terms. For them, mimicking the sounds of Salafism did not necessarily denote an adoption of Salafi ideology. For Aynisem, as for other reciters, rather than indexing rival ideologies, what both the Egyptian and Saudi styles indexed was modernity. ‘Our level is very low,’ said Damolla of Uyghur Qur’anic recitation, echoing prevalent Chinese discourses of development and progress. This sense of a ‘low’ level of civilisation, and being ‘backward’ is something that has been strongly internalised by China’s ‘minority peoples’ (see also Joniak-​Lüthi, this volume). Such phrases form a constant and uncomfortable refrain in encounters with ethnographers. As Louisa Schein (2000:164) notes, ‘In China the desirability of the modern –​trumpeted as universally accessible –​has become so hegemonic that it is sought after even by those constrained by the role of signifying its opposite.’ In China’s Muslim communities, the thirst for modernity is inescapably linked to a sense of exclusion or marginalisation from the modernising agenda of the state. Muslims in China have consistently been portrayed as stubbornly and unreasonably resistant to state development projects, as incapable of being modernised. Globally circulating revivalist forms of Islam offered them alternative pathways to civilised status –​pathways to which they had privileged access. Studies of changing patterns of religious faith amongst Hui Muslim Chinese communities have also emphasised the links between tropes of modernisation and the adoption of new forms of Islam (Boyd Gillette 2000; Hillman 2004). Although revivalists may use the language of authenticity, asserting a desire to return to the ‘original’ Islam, the oil-​rich countries of the Middle East provide powerful models of different kinds of modernity, and an alternative ideological scale on which to evaluate themselves in terms of development and ‘spiritual civilisation’ (jingshen wenming). Revivalist narratives of Islam offered the enticing possibility of throwing off backward minority status, and they provided a new vision of community and a new set of relationships through which to define themselves in relation to other ethnic groups, to the state and the wider Islamic world. Aynisem was subject to the same set of pressures and possibilities. She too felt the need to make herself strong and to make herself modern, in part in response to pressure from state religious policies, in part in 743

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​

response to criticism of her own practice by Uyghur reformists. Cyborg-​like, magpie-​ like, she mimetically absorbed and deployed foreign styles of recitation within a very local form of ritual, using them to resist backward status and to lay claim to alternative styles of modernity.

SOUND AND TERRITORY Aynisem’s sonic explorations reveal the complexity of the interactions between local systems of meaning and experience and global forms of religious transformation. Where listening practices are so powerfully implicated in embodied ways of being, it is not surprising that they became a site of contestation. When new ways of reciting the Qur’an displaced local styles, they challenged embodied norms. They served not simply as aesthetic symbols of the new religious norms, they also ushered in a new set of dispositions –​embodied responses to sound, and processes of subject-​formation –​which underpinned the creation of the new Uyghur counterpublic. As I have argued in this chapter, embodied practices and soundscapes are intimately linked. The new Islamic soundscapes recruit new forms of bodily practice through which Muslims transform the public spaces of their neighbourhoods into private community space. The religious revival produced a resurgence of religious sounds in the private spaces of Uyghur homes, creating a resonant Islamic soundscape that served to promote and strengthen the changing bodily habitus, changing the ways in which Uyghurs inhabited the landscape. We can read the Uyghur Islamic revival in Xinjiang, at least in part, as a set of sounded and embodied practices that reframed the landscape in ways that were deeply antithetical to state projects of modernisation and development, and hence a contesting of state power. Even as Uyghurs harnessed these new forms of religious practice in pursuit of an alternative set of modernities, they were heard by state actors as Muslim noise: backward and oppositional, marked by violence, and a fundamental challenge to state-​sponsored modernity. In response, the state unleashed its own massive violence against the Muslim citizens of Xinjiang, in the huge and ongoing project of cultural erasure and social transformation.

REFERENCES Abu Lughod, Lila. 2002. ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist 104(3), 783–​790. Anwar, Aynur [Ainiwa’er, Ayinu’er]. 2013. Shache xian dangdai weiwu’erzu sufei zhuyi jiaotuan nvxintu (buwei) dike’er yishide renleixue diaocha yanjiu [The zikir activities of female sufis in Yarkand county: an anthropological enquiry]. Masters Dissertation: Xinjiang Normal University. Boyd Gillette, Maris. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption Among urban Chinese Muslims. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brophy, David. 2018. ‘Confusing Black and White: Naqshbandi Sufi Affiliations and the Transition to Qing Rule in the Tarim Basin’, Late Imperial China 39(1): 29–​65. Clark, William & Ablet Kamalov. 2004. Uighur Migration Across Central Asian Frontiers’, Central Asian Survey 23(2), 167–​82. 744

— ​​​​ U y g h u r I s l a m , e m b o d i e d l i s t e n i n g , a n d n e w p u b l i c s —​​​​ Eisenberg, Andrew. 2013. ‘Islam, Sound and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast’, in Georgina Born (ed.), Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 186–​202. Erlmann, Veit. 1999. Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frishkopf, Michael. 2009. ‘Mediated Qur’anic Recitation and the Contestation of Islam in Contemporary Egypt’, in Laudan Nooshin (ed.), Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Farnham: Ashgate, 75–​114. Gade, Anna. 2004. Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, emotion, and the recited Qur’ān in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Harris, Rachel. 2012. ‘Tracks: Temporal Shifts and Transnational Networks of Sentiment in Uyghur Song’, Ethnomusicology, 56(3), 450–​475. —​—​—​. 2013. ‘Doing Satan’s Business: Negotiating Gendered Concepts of Music and Ritual in Rural Xinjiang’, in Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease and Shzr Ee Tan (eds.), Gender in Chinese Music. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 229–​246. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. ‘The New Battleground: Song-​ and-​ dance in China’s Muslim borderlands’. World of Music, 6(2), 35–​56. Harris, Rachel, Guangtian Ha & Maria Jaschok (eds.). 2020. Ethnographies of Islam in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Hillman, Ben. 2004. ‘The Rise of the Community in Rural China: Village Politics, Cultural Identity and Religious Revival in a Hui Hamlet’, The China Journal 51: 53–​73. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Kundnani, Arun. 2012. ‘Radicalisation: The Journey of a Concept’, Race & Class 54(2): 3–​25. Montgomery, David W. 2016. Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mostowlansky, Till. 2017. Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Novak, David & Matthew Sakakeeny (eds.). 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Papas, Alexandre. 2015. ‘Creating a Sufi Soundscape: Recitation (dhikr) and Spiritual Audition (samā‘) according to Ahmad Kāsānī Dahbidī (d. 1542)’, Performing Islam, 3(1-​ 2), 23–​41. Rasanayagam, Johan. 2011. Islam in Post-​Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rasmussen, Anne. 2010. Women’s Voices, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Musical Arts in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sakakeeny, Matthew. 2010. ‘“Under the Bridge”: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans’, Ethnomusicology, 54(1), 1–​27. Schein, Louisa. 2000. Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schrode, Paula. 2008. ‘The Dynamics of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Uyghur Religious Practice’, Die Welt des Islams, 48, 394–​433. Shannon, Jonathan. 2004. ‘The Aesthetics of Spiritual Practice and the Creation of Moral and Musical Subjectivities in Aleppo, Syria’, Ethnology, 43(4), 381–​391. Smith Finley, Joanne. 2019. ‘Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-​Terrorism Evolved into State Terror?’ Central Asian Survey 38(1): 1–​26. Soares, Benjamin and Filippo Osella. 2009. ‘Islam, Politics, Anthropology.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(s1): s1–​s23. 745

—​​​​ R a c h e l H a r r i s —​​​​ Sterne, Jonathan. 2018. ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in Jonathan Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1–​18. Stokes, Martin. 2013. ‘New Islamist Popular Culture in Turkey.’ In Kamal Salhi (ed.), Music, Culture and Identity in the Muslim World: Performance, Politics and Piety. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 15–​35. Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

746

CHAPTER FORTY-​N INE

MOSQUE LIVES Yanti M. Hölzchen

INTRODUCTION 1 I am standing outside the grounds of the mosque of Kyzyl-​Too,2 a village of three hundred households not far from the Kazakh border in Kyrgyzstan’s north-​eastern Yssykköl region. I admire the large, well-​tended garden, the mosque’s beautifully decorated metal roof glistening in the sun, with a dome in the centre and a small tower on each of the four corners of the building, and the delicately painted contours of the mosque’s windows and entrance. On the lamppost just next to the entrance gate in the wooden fence, a printout has the word sünnöt in bold letters (see Figure 49.1), advertising circumcisions at the local mosque, in the Kyrgyz language.3 I am familiar with this printout; I have seen it at mosques throughout the Yssykköl region, informing people about the services provided by mobile doctors who conduct these circumcisions with a modern laser technique in order not to cause the boys any pain. In this chapter, I draw attention to the role that mosques assume in the everyday life of villages in Kyrgyzstan’s north-​east. This was widely considered to be the most ‘Russified’ part of Kyrgyzstan during the twentieth century, a fact popularly associated both with atheism and with the widespread use of alcohol in daily life. Since the turn of the millennium, however, the number of mosques has rapidly increased here, and they are central locations of religious activity and learning. Beyond this strictly religious realm, mosques –​as elsewhere in the world –​also feature significantly in the social and communal life of Kyrgyz villages, as the printout above indicates. While academic accounts of mosques in post-​Socialist Kazakhstan (Bissenova 2016), Xinjiang (Hann 2013) and Southern Kyrgyzstan (McBrien 2017) are available, such accounts are relatively rare within the literature on contemporary Islam in Central Asia. During twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2014–​15 in Bishkek and Yssykköl,4 I investigated processes of mosque construction and the role that these, as well as other Muslim institutions (e.g., Islamic funds, madrasas) and actors (e.g., imams), play in people’s everyday lives. In the rural areas of Yssykköl, mosques emerge as central locations for acquiring religious knowledge (Kyrg.: ilim, Arab.: ‘ilm) grounded in the Qur’an and hadith (cf. Hölzchen 2018). This is especially true for men, who come to the mosque for prayer, to listen to the imam’s sermons, or to join in with the activities of the so-​called davatchy, members of the transnational DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-59

747

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​

Figure 49.1  This printout announces the date and time of circumcisions organised at the mosque and offered to villagers by mobile doctors (name of village and doctor’s mobile numbers pixelated; photo by the author).

Tablighi Jamaat movement. In post-​Soviet Kyrgyzstan, mosques are, for many, spaces where they can learn to embody the sequences of prayer or to recite important surahs from the Qur’an (see Figure 49.2). Mosques, thus, constitute spaces in which people engage with ‘Islam as cultivation of ideal human beings according to a divine model’ (Liu 2018). In addition to being central to those in pursuit of leading a religious life, mosques are very important in social life in general. In Yssykköl, they are usually located in the centre of a village, close to important institutions and administrative buildings such as the village administration, school, medical base or hospital, and usually also near statues of local heroes and monuments commemorating the village’s fallen soldiers during the Second World War and the Afghan War. Besides circumcisions, Muslim members of a respective village community usually come to mosques and seek the services of imams for important life-​cycle rituals (e.g., wedding ceremonies, funerary prayers). While the majority of mosques in Yssykköl are constructed through funding from countries of the Arabian Peninsula, some mosques, such as the one in Kyzyl-​Too mentioned above, are built by communal effort (ashar). In these cases, each village household contributes by donating a minimum amount of money (around 120–​200 Kyrgyz Som), providing building materials, or by offering manual labour, preparing food for the workers, and so on. 748

—​​​​ M o s q u e l i v e s —​​​​

Figure 49.2  Posters in the prayer hall of Kyzyl-​Too mosque. In the centre, the poster entitled ‘The sequences of ritual prayer (namaz)’ displays 17 separate images of a man wearing a Muslim-​style cap (doppi), a long-​sleeved white shirt and black trousers moving through the standardised routine of ritual prayer. The poster to the right lists the ‘Al-​ Fatiha’, the first surah of the Qur’an; the poster to the left is entitled ‘Zikir and duba prayers after namaz’ –​that is, prayers of supplication (Arab.: duʿāʾ). The posters to the right and left each spell out the texts both in Arab script and Cyrillic transliteration (photo by the author).

In my interviews, mosques were widely perceived positively, including many of those who didn’t actually go to mosques or conduct ritual prayer. Many of my interlocutors accredited not only a heightened engagement with Islam to the growing numbers of mosques, but also positive changes in social conduct: people were said to refrain from or drink less alcohol, resulting in fewer fights, peaceful festivities (toi) and more harmony (yntymak) in general. As such, mosques were often alluded to as symbols of morality, and of doing good.5 For some, mosques also represented the reconnection to a pre-​Soviet past (see also McBrien 2017; Hölzchen 2022), and the lives of one’s ancestors, untouched by the destructive force of Soviet atheism. While many also seemed indifferent to mosques, for others, however, these represented the influence of foreign forms of Islam and thus the destruction of Kyrgyz traditions. Still others complained about the economic investments in mosques rather than much-​ needed schools, kindergartens, or water pipes.

749

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​

However varied the opinions about mosques may be, the above instances demonstrate that mosques are important features of Yssykköl village life and its vibrancy. This is not only the case for those who diligently engage in religious practice, but for a wide variety of villagers for various reasons. In the following section, I draw attention to activities which embed mosques in the everyday lives of Yssykköl’s villages: the opening ceremony of a locally funded mosque, and women-​only religious meetings, or taalim. These accounts demonstrate how processes of individual and collective identity formation are connected to mosques, while at the same time they extend beyond the confined physical space of the mosque into both the public and private realms of village life. With these examples, I highlight mosques as locally embedded institutions –​something that is often called into question given the foreign funding involved in construction (see below) –​and show how mosques are central not only to the making of Muslim selves, but are (trans-​)formative of village everyday life, identities and relationships. The title of this chapter, ‘Mosque Lives’, thus alludes both to life at the mosques, and also to the lives that mosques shape and, with that, specific notions of community and belonging. In doing so, my material resonates with observations that Julie McBrien (2017) offers for a Friday mosque in the south of Kyrgyzstan, which she describes as similarly expressing collective identities. However, I extend her insights by introducing novel material on recently emerging modes of local mosque funding, and further demonstrate how notions of Muslimness as ‘a category of belief’ (McBrien 2017, p.8) entail new orientations of belonging.

HISTORY OF ISLAM AND MOSQUES IN CENTRAL ASIA Muslims in present-​day Kyrgyzstan mainly adhere to the Hanafi interpretation in Sunni Islam. The latter spread into today’s territory of present day Uzbekistan between the eighth and twelfth centuries, forming important centres of Islamic teaching. From there, Islam expanded further, and was broadly accepted among the nomadic Kyrgyz tribes by the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, creating a unique mix of religious practices and beliefs. The nomadic lifestyle probably contributed to the fact that the construction of mosques into the eighteenth century was concentrated mostly in areas where a sedentary lifestyle featured prominently. Thus, historic accounts of mosques and mosque construction are available for Uzbekistan and the Caucasus (cf. Bobrovnikov 2006; Khalid 2007; Bobrovnikov et al. 2010; Kemper et al. 2010a;), but less so for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.6 In the Yssykköl region, several historic mosques built at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are found in and around the city of Karakol, known for its population of ethnic Dungans, Tatars and Kalmyks. In Karakol, for instance, the historic building of the Dungan mosque dates back to the early twentieth century. Today, it serves as central mosque and imam khatib (see below), and is one of Karakol’s popular tourist attractions. Another historic mosque in Karakol, the Tatar mosque, traces its history to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A plaque giving an overview of the building’s history reports that it was built by Tatar families. These had been dispatched to the shores of Lake Yssykköl and other Central Asian regions by the Muslim Spiritual Administration in Kazan (Tatarstan) in the 1880s, tasked with constructing mosques and teaching the Qur’an to the local population. 750

—​​​​ M o s q u e l i v e s —​​​​

With the persecution of religious authorities and the repression of any public religious activity under Soviet rule during the first half of the twentieth century, however, existing mosques were either destroyed or transformed into public institutions such as schools (cf. Hölzchen 2022). As a result, formal religious knowledge was largely ‘lost’, as imams told me in our conversations, and spiritual practice was mostly relegated to the sphere of private homes. This changed during the 1940s, when the Soviet government introduced more open and lax regulations, with the aim of gaining the Muslim population’s approval and support for the Soviet war effort. A centralised institution for the administration of mosques and religious activities throughout the Central Asian republics –​the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan –​was established in Tashkent,7 allowing only limited and highly regulated public religious activities (Khalid 2007; Kemper et al. 2010b; Tasar 2017). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the regional division of the Spiritual Administration was turned into Kyrgyzstan’s own spiritual administration, the Muftiat in Bishkek. While not de jure a governmental institution, through its cooperation with the central secular government the Muftiat de facto operates as a quasi-​governmental body. As such, it keeps records of all mosques and madrasas in the country,8 and administers and regulates activities related to Islam through the issuing of fatwas9 pronounced by the mufti. The mufti represents the Muftiat at the national level; at the regional level, this institution is divided into separate, hierarchically structured administrative units corresponding with state administrative divisions. At the most fundamental level –​the village (aiyl) –​imams are appointed by the village communities, but are officially confirmed by the Muftiat. At district (raion) level, an imam khatib oversees all Islam-​related activities, while the term designates both the administrative unit as well as its head. The imam khatib reports to the kazy of a region (oblast), who heads the regional kazyiat which is directly subordinated to the Muftiat in Bishkek. In effect, the Muftiat extends its influence all the way down to the villages via these positions. Conversely, any kind of issue at the local or regional level is brought to the headquarters via the respective divisions. Among such issues are the hajj pilgrimage, as well as seeking assistance for the construction of a mosque.

MOSQUES IN THE YSSYKKÖL REGION Of the roughly 2,300 mosques in Kyrgyzstan, about 160 were located in the Yssykköl region around the time of my research in 2014–​15. Two-​thirds of these were sponsored by Islamic funding based in Arab countries, mainly the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (mostly known by the name of its then acting representative, Said Bayumi), Assanabil and the Qatar fund. At the time of my research, none of the mosques in the Yssykköl region were funded by Turkish organisations. This is noteworthy, as Kyrgyzstan’s most expensive mosque, the new Central mosque in Bishkek, was sponsored by Turkey’s state Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), and its architecture is based on the Kocatepe mosque in Ankara. While such foreign funding has become prominent since the 2000s, the first wave of mosque construction in the 1990s was locally initiated, with mosques being built through communal efforts (ashar). While a low level of such historically rooted ashar funding continues today, another form of local sponsorship is resurfacing under a new guise: generous donations by individuals successful in the economic sector. 751

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​

A MOSQUE COMES TO LIFE With the following example of a mosque opening in the Yssykköl region, I offer insights into this increasingly common form of locally initiated mosque construction, as compared to foreign mosque sponsorship. Secondly, this example demonstrates how such initiatives are not solely tied to religious incentives, but often also (or particularly) involve social, moral and political motivations. In late August 2016, I was introduced to Tokubek Azhe,10 the imam khatib of Yssyk-​Suu district on the southern shores of Lake Yssykköl. I was impressed by the information he provided on the district’s number of mosques, their sponsors and opening dates solely from memory (other imams usually consulted printed forms compiled for the Muftiat). He told me about the official opening of a new mosque in one of the district’s villages that was scheduled to take place in a few days. The sponsor, a local resident, had donated US$100,000 for the construction, and Tokubek Azhe invited me to attend the ceremony. If we were lucky, he said with a wink, even the Kyrgyz head mufti from Bishkek might be present. Ten days later, Tokubek Azhe, two members of his mosque community and I were on our way to Ak-​Tash village. Upon our arrival, several cars were already blocking the main village road. When we got out of the car, village representatives immediately rushed toward Tokubek Azhe, welcomed him, and happily informed him that indeed, the head mufti was present. On the street in front of the mosque, approximately 150 villagers of all ages were gathered in a large, loosely dispersed crowd, obviously curious to see what would happen next. The mosque itself was built with visibly good-​quality materials: it had a solid foundation neatly painted in light green, a metal roof in green, with a small dome and small minaret, and its windows were made of plastic, popular in local construction. Its exterior compound was paved and enclosed by a green metal fence, decorated with emblems of the tündük, the central wooden cross of a yurt and the symbol of the Kyrgyz people and their nomadic traditions. In the backyard, two women and a man stood over two large cauldrons, steaming with mutton being boiled for the ceremonial meal, besh barmak. Just outside the mosque entrance, on the main road, two cameramen had positioned themselves with their video cameras and tripods, and were checking the sound system and microphone set up close by. To the left of the entrance gate, a large banner attached to the fence portrayed the sponsor, Bakyt Kubatov, along with a long list of his previous donations to his home village: he had not only invested in the construction of the mosque, for which –​as some people assured me –​he would certainly receive a lot of divine merit (soop).11 He had previously also provided the village with pipelines for sufficient distribution of drinking water, had donated computers to the village school, contributed to the construction of a medical base (medpunkt) and offered other numerous charitable services. I was told that Bakyt Kubatov had been born and raised in Ak-​Tash, but had left the village to pursue higher education and had subsequently built a career as a successful businessman with connections abroad. Nevertheless, those I spoke with stressed, he remained strongly connected to his home village (zher; literally ‘ground’, ‘land’) which was evident from the poster listing his deeds. When the representatives of the Muftiat and of the local and regional state authorities approached the mosque in two rows from across the main road, the crowd’s 752

—​​​​ M o s q u e l i v e s —​​​​

lively murmur hushed in anticipation of the beginning of the ceremony. The mayor of Ak-​Tash was the first to speak, greeting everyone present, specifically addressing the village elders, the mufti, representatives of the district and the Muftiat, followed by an invitation to the Muftiat’s regional representative (kazy) to lead the joint prayer, which he recited in Arabic. This was followed by the personal address of the head mufti, who not only praised the deeds of the sponsor and all the helpers involved in the construction, but also used his speech to remind people of the importance of mosques as houses of God, and emphasised their importance for the development of ethical behaviour and moral communities through cultivating religious knowledge and practice. Next were speeches given by a village elder (ak sakal), by Tokubek Azhe and other speakers whose positions I could not identify. It struck me that the speakers present differed in their outfits: while they all wore the kalpak –​the male traditional Kyrgyz felt hat, the religious authorities were all clad in white trousers and white, long-​sleeved and knee-​length coats, whereas the local and state representatives wore grey-​coloured business suits. After the speeches had all been given, the mufti was invited to symbolically cut the ribbon at the mosque entrance. The waiting crowd rushed to enter through the gate, some of the men carrying rolled up carpets on their shoulders, eagerly trying to approach the new mosque’s imam and Bakyt Kubatov, and to present them the carpets as a donation –​and most probably in hope of receiving divine merits (soop) in return. Those eager to enter were mostly men; apart from myself, I spotted only a few elderly women and young girls. Moving into the mosque, the crowd slowly eased and everyone admired the building’s elaborate interior, highlighted by a blue-​and-​white plastic-​lined ceiling, illuminated by ceiling lights and a chandelier. Subsequently, everyone present was separated into smaller groups of up to 15 men and women, and then assigned to a private household, where we went to enjoy the besh barmak and leisurely conversations. This example of the opening of a locally funded mosque demonstrates the complex interplay of economic, social, religious and political interests. While it is clearly staged as a religious act, as an economic investment it also demonstrates and affirms the sponsor’s economic status and social standing within the village. This is evident in the banner publicly listing Bakyt Kubatov’s services to the community and by him engaging his own film crew to document the entire event. Furthermore, via his donation, he confirms and reinforces his connections to his home village community. He has done so continuously in the past, as the banner openly honours. His deeds are embedded in the Kyrgyz concept of zher, referring to one’s place of birth, which makes the link to one’s relatives and the community to which one belongs, and with whom one shares relationships of trust and solidarity in all life situations. It is to the zher that one’s corpse is usually returned after death to be buried. Given the fact that many people nowadays leave their villages in pursuit of economic success, marriage, or education, it seems even more important to cultivate and maintain relations with one’s home community, despite personal absence. Thus, as a sign of solidarity and belonging in absence, wealthier village members commonly invest in the public infrastructure and community activities of their home villages, as demonstrated by the case of Bakyt Kubatov as the mosque’s sponsor. At the same time, by investing in a mosque, he publicly identifies himself as someone who takes religion seriously. His sponsorship contributes to his own moral status and spiritual well-​being, while he 753

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​

invests in the moral well-​being of the village as a whole, by providing his village with a mosque associated with promoting moral behaviour. His investment, however, was also a political move. Tokubek Azhe’s casual remark on our way back to Yssyk-​Suu is especially telling of this: he mentioned that Bakyt Kubatov had chosen a good time to open the mosque, only a few weeks before local elections. Thus, at the same time, the mosque opening served as a political act and a demonstration by the village, state and Muslim authorities alike. On the part of religious authorities, mosque openings such as this are used to consolidate both their authority and the position of Islam as an inherent part of present-​day Kyrgyzstani society, and simultaneously to convey moral principles of ethical behaviour and models of Muslim Kyrgyzstani community life.

MOSQUE LIFE –​ ‘WHERE THERE IS DAVAT, ISLAM GROWS’ The second ethnographic account relates to the activities of the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) movement in Kyrgyzstan, which is today a strongly ‘localised’ movement (cf. Toktogulova 2014) commonly referred to simply as ‘davatchy’.12 This term derives from one of its prominent activities, the ‘davat’ (Arab.: daʿwa; literally ‘invitation’), referring mainly to groups of up to 10 or 15 men travelling for several days, weeks, or months.13 While on tour, they lodge at mosques, invite village and town people to join in prayers and to generally turn to the ‘right path’ (tuura zhol) in Islam. In different villages, my interlocutors agreed that davatchy first made an appearance in the early 1990s. At that time, they usually stayed in abandoned houses or hay barns during their davat tours, due to the absence of mosques, and they mainly came from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Since the turn of the millennium, this has changed, and presently the members are almost exclusively from Kyrgyzstan. Davatchy active in their own villages often make up a large portion of the local mosque community (zhama’at), and besides prayer assemblies at mosques, they also organise weekly meetings and religious instruction. While male davatchy networks have been explored by several scholars (Mostowlansky 2007; Nasritdinov and Ismailbekova 2012; Pelkmans 2017; Nasritdinov 2018, this volume), the female side of davat-​practice in Kyrgyzstan remains comparatively unresearched.14 So far, only Toktogulova (2014) explicitly addresses female activities and women’s ‘key role in networking processes of the Tablighi Jamaat in Kyrgyzstan, where female preachers contribute greatly to bringing Islam to society by preaching to women, children and families’ (ibid., p.3–​4). She demonstrates this by describing the regular taalim meetings, which are an inherent part of both male and female practice. However, while the male taalim take place in the mosque up to several times a week, women congregate once a week in private households. The following account thus illustrates how TJ practices, on the one hand, extend beyond the mosque as a confined space while, on the other hand, these activities reify gendered relationships and spaces within the village. In the villages of the Yssykköl region, female taalim occur weekly on Sundays starting at 11 a.m. and usually last for about an hour. In 2015, I attended several such meetings in three different villages. In Chong Suu, my ‘fieldwork base’, I joined Gulzat eje at several taalim in her neighbourhood. Gulzat eje is the wife of the Friday 754

—​​​​ M o s q u e l i v e s —​​​​

mosque’s caretaker (sopu). She had started practising regular ritual prayer (namaz) in 2011, after being convinced of the need to change her life following two deaths within her close family. Shortly after, she persuaded her husband to do namaz, too. Via the mosque’s zhama’at, he found out about the taalim meetings for women and encouraged his wife to join in. She happily did, as until then she had studied Islam on her own, with books her husband brought, and via the knowledge he transmitted to her from what he learned at the mosque. By the spring of 2015, she had been attending the taalim meetings for two years. We usually met at her place, and from there walked to the household organising the meeting. Contrary to the TJ prescription of approaching such meetings in silence and spiritual contemplation, we would usually engage in conversation about Islam in Kyrgyzstan, Gulzat eje’s own life trajectory and casual chat. Gulzat eje informed me that a different household was appointed to host the meetings every two to four months and had to be large enough to hold up to 15 or 20 women in a separate room. Once we approached the household, we would end our conversation and solemnly enter the house, where several pairs of shoes at the entrance indicated that other women had already arrived. The number of participants depended on the size of a village or neighbourhood. The taalim I attended hosted at least five and at most up to 20 women and young girls of all ages, ranging from six years (usually accompanying their mothers), the majority between 20 and 50, and some elderly women of around 60 or 70 years old. The women generally seemed to be of Kyrgyz ethnic background; in Chong-​Suu, however, a Russian convert wearing a hijab joined regularly, accompanied by her infant, toddler, and 5-​year-​old daughter. All women, without exception, covered their hair with a headscarf, usually tied as zhooluk (tying the scarf behind one’s ears, leaving the neck visible), though some of them wore it as hijab (tying the scarf below one’s chin, covering all hair, neck and neckline). This was also the case for the young and teenage girls, who mostly tied their scarf as hijab, which was new to me, as women in the villages usually wore zhooluk, and then only after marriage. Upon entering, we greeted each other with the Muslim greeting ‘as-​salām ʻalaykum’ (peace be upon you) in Arabic, sometimes while hugging, and sat down to form a circle. The meetings themselves follow a strict order of three principal sequences, each with a fixed time slot and led by a different woman appointed at the beginning of the meeting. Each section builds on a specific rhetorical pattern, such as reading out specified text passages three times, with only minimal changes in the wording. This certainly facilitates memorisation by the audience, and it struck me how often I recognised rhetorical patterns from the taalim in everyday conversation with both male and female TJ members. The first sequence is dedicated to the reading from the ‘Faza’il-​ e ‘Amal’, a collection of hadith specific to the Tablighi Jamaat. The particular passages to be read are chosen by the male zhama’at and deal with different themes, such as the necessity and meaning of prayer (namaz), the role of women in the family and in Islam, or the giving of alms (zakat). During the second section, the movement’s ‘six principles’ (alty syfat)15 are cited. These lie at the heart of TJ teaching and practice, and convey the sunna (prophet Muhammad’s deeds), constituting the ideal model of behaviour for Muslims worldwide. Women leading this second part often included their own experiences of enacting these principles, which could occasionally be a very 755

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​

emotional account, sometimes accompanied by tears, and with other women nodding in agreement while listening. Once a month, this section is replaced by a sermon (bayan) given by an experienced male davatchy, who either sits in a neighbouring room or an area sectioned off with shawls, in order not to be seen by the women and vice versa. The concluding section is reserved for the discussion of the narrated passages, either in plenary, or in groups of four to five women. A short prayer (Arab.: duʿāʾ) ends the taalim, after which the women stream outside and usually return home directly, as it is prescribed to take the taalim’s ‘light’ (Kyrg./​Arab.: nur) home without being distracted by worldly things along the way. After the taalim sessions I joined in Chong-​Suu, however, a few women would sometimes linger and engage in conversation with me and with each other. During these discussions, the influence of specific ways of ‘davatchy talk’ became apparent: constant references to prophet Muhammad’s deeds (often by reciting hadiths heard during taalim), indicating what this implied for daily actions as Muslims and how much godly merits (soop) this would entail. Such patterns converged with conversations I had with male davatchy. Women more than men, however, pointed out the healing benefits they experienced from practising namaz, typically referring to a hadith, as is apparent in this woman’s statement: When I have a toothache, it stops once I do namaz and recite the fatiha-​surah. If you keep reading the fatiha, it will heal you. You should believe it sincerely in your heart. There’s a hadith … The hand of a disciple of Prophet Muhammad, ṣallá Allāh ‘alayhi wa-​sallam [abbrev.: SAW; ‘May Allāh send blessings and peace upon him’], fell off, and the Prophet, SAW, reattached it by reciting the fatiha-​ surah. The disciple asked which surah he had recited, to which the Prophet, SAW, replied: ‘It was the fatiha-​surah.’ Astonished, the disciple asked, ‘Only the fatiha?’, then his hand fell off again. So, you see, you must believe it in your heart. If you say, ‘Only the fatiha?’, it will not help. A further contrast to my conversations with men was evident in how women opened up to me and each other personally and emotionally, especially when discussing challenges they faced as in the following conversation between two women: Woman A:  In the beginning, my heart didn’t want to do namaz, but Allah gave me divine guidance (hidayat). […] Meanwhile, I do namaz, but my husband doesn’t anymore. […] He wants to, but … Woman B:  But in the past he prayed? A:  Yes, that’s how it is … It’s difficult for me. I don’t know whom I can turn to. B: We had the same situation. […] Both my husband and I had times when we stopped namaz. You should pray to God, make zikr, and at night recite the tahajjud prayer and ask Allah: ‘Allah, help me, for no one but Thee will help me!’ We should seek help from Allah. Because what can we do? There is nothing we can do. We cannot force our husbands to pray. It is only Allah’s will and help. Yes, we have also experienced this. But if someone were to tell me I had to stop namaz, I’d rather die!

756

—​​​​ M o s q u e l i v e s —​​​​

For women in particular, then, the taalim sessions serve as an important space for acquiring and deepening their knowledge of Islam. The meetings also provide women with a forum for discussing their knowledge, exchanging their experiences and seeking advice on religious and personal matters. Including personal experiences in the narratives –​both during the formal taalim session as well as in informal everyday encounters –​resonates with the listeners, as it frames these activities in a way other people can relate to, including on an emotional level. This is important for the purpose of davat activity, since the taalim sessions are not exclusively for people experienced in davat and formal Muslim practice, but also attract those who do not (yet) practice formally, but who are interested and have the intention (niet) of doing so. The taalim, as well as the women’s statements outlined above, are representative of social and cultural transformations currently taking place in Kyrgyzstan: how people change their speech and vocabulary, how they change their daily practices, and how they do so in pursuit of self-​transformation, seeking to correct past failures, deepen their individual faith (yiman) and their own well-​being in both this world and the afterlife.16 Such changes in individual practices of faith also involve changes in relationships and identity: for both women and men, taalim meetings engender everyday relationships. They also foster the formation of new groups and collective identities, which can be independent of the usual group-​forming factors such as kinship, neighbourhood, or friendship. Rather, these groups form and identify themselves primarily through their interest in Islam based on the authoritative sources, and their obligations to God. As in many Muslim countries around the world, such a collective identity is reinforced by forming a fictive kinship on this basis, addressing each other as ‘sisters’, ‘brothers’, or ‘relatives’.

CONCLUSION This chapter has focused on mosques and activities connected to these in Kyrgyzstan’s north-​eastern Yssykköl region, drawing out the complex duality of mosque life as continuous with village life in all its density and complexity, including forms of social exclusion and hierarchies. I have shown how a community emerges from common experiences of adversities and challenges in following a spiritual path. This has wider implications for the anthropological study of Muslim lives and spaces in Central Asia. In her recent ethnography of Islam and secularism in Kyrgyzstan, Julie McBrien (2017, see also this volume) argues that Kyrgyz society is currently witnessing a shift from belonging to belief –​that is, a shift from established notions of Muslimness as ‘matter of collective, ethno-​ religious belonging [to] primarily, if not exclusively, a category of belief’ (McBrien 2017: p.8) under the influence of newer discourses of Muslim practice and identity, along with more theologically oriented notions of Islam. I agree with McBrien’s sharp, ethnographically grounded analysis, and do not assume that her argument positions belief in opposition to senses of belonging. However, my own ethnographic material encourages a further elaboration of notions of belonging as part of an active fostering of belief. In other words, I argue that a shift to belief simultaneously generates shifting forms of collective action and moral imagination, and thus new notions and orientations of belonging.

757

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​

I have shown how in Yssykköl, as elsewhere in the country, mosques emerge as specific and vital features of village life: for example, they are sites of religious activity and are central for those aiming to acquire religious knowledge as part of ethical projects of Muslim self-​fashioning. The two accounts outlined in this chapter demonstrate how mosques also assume importance in the everyday lives of a village and its people beyond that, and therefore offer a more nuanced understanding of mosque construction and usage in Yssykköl than an account would assume which sees them solely as manifestations of foreign influence. The opening ceremony of a locally funded mosque highlighted it as a project of economic and political, but also social, investment. The latter featured in the notion of investing in ‘zher’, thus adhering to and affirming social obligations and ties. As well as demonstrating economic status and seeking political support, the construction of the mosque also features as an act of doing good; for one’s own spiritual sake, but also for the sake of the community. The mosque thus emerges not only as a symbol of Islam, but also as symbol of ‘collective action’ (cf. McBrien 2017, p.140) and of communal identity. While the second example of female taalim meetings clearly refers to acts of Muslim self-​fashioning as they are promoted in and via mosques, this account also illustrates how the impact of mosques extends beyond their physical space, into private homes. This, in turn, shows how mosques and activities connected to them facilitate and reify gendered spaces in village life –​which was also manifest in the mosque opening ceremony. Along with these, gendered practices take hold in everyday life, fostering new relationships and collective identities. These identities are not based on notions of communal belonging, understood in terms of kinship, neighbourhood, or origin, but rather form around a common interest in following the ‘true path’ of Islam, grounded in the Qur’an, and embodied in prophet Muhammad’s deeds. Indeed, the taalim meetings reveal how mosques are not only formative of lives and identities, but also transformative of them.

NOTES 1 I am indebted to the interlocutors mentioned in this paper for letting me take part in their activities and for setting apart time for me and my questions. I thank Gulniza Taalaibekova and Aibek Samakov for aiding me with translations. I am grateful to the editors and Sebile Yapici for their insightful comments and constructive feedback on this contribution, and I would also like to thank Sinead O’Sullivan who helped me with its final polishing. 2 Names of villages and persons mentioned have been changed by the author. 3 Literally, sünnöt derives from the Arabic term sunna, the deeds of prophet Muhammad. 4 This was part of my PhD project ‘Kyrgyzstan’s New Mosques: Religious Knowledge Ilim as a Resource in Northeastern Kyrgyzstan’ within the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1070 ‘ResourceCultures’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). 5 See also McBrien 2017 and Stephan 2010 for accounts of how Islam and religious education are associated with notions of morality and doing good. 6 Eren Tasar (2011; 2017) deals with archival material from Kyrgyzstan, and how Soviet Islamic institutions extended their influence, among others, via (registered) mosques during the twentieth century. However, his account focuses strongly on the Southern Ferghana valley. He furthermore points out the difficulties that exist even today in publicly accessing officially generated archival material, and emphasises that ‘alternative’ materials (e.g., religious poetry, biographies) most often remain privately owned (Tasar 2011; 2017, pp.12–​13). 758

—​​​​ M o s q u e l i v e s —​​​​ 7 This emerged from the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, first established under Catherine II in Imperial Russia in the late eighteenth century (Kemper et al. 2010b). 8 Additionally, mosques have to be registered with the state Committee for Religious Affairs. My data, however, shows that the numbers vary considerably, with the Muftiat listing a higher number of mosques than the state Committee. 9 A kind of nonbinding legal opinion on a point of Islamic law given by an Islamic authority, often trained in Islamic jurisprudence. 10 Azhe is an honorific term used to address a male who has been to Mecca on hajj pilgrimage. 11 During my research, I was told that the construction of mosques, or also just contributing to construction, promised the most amount of soop (Arab.: thawāb). Soop is given in turn to any kind of good deed –​for example, helping the poor, reciting the Qur’an or teaching a fellow Muslim the Arabic alphabet. See Mittermaier 2013 for a detailed account of this merit system in Islam. 12 The Kyrgyz term davatchy refers to a single person. While the plural term would grammatically be davatchylar, in interviews my interlocutors most commonly used davatchy as plural designation. 13 Women may also go on davat travels, which are then called masturat. However, they must be accompanied by a male family member with whom marriage is prohibited (mahram), and are accommodated separately from men, usually in private homes. 14 Indeed, when speaking of davatchy or Tablighi Jamaat, accounts actually automatically refer to men and male activities rather than to women and their participation in the movement. Metcalf (2000) argues that this also relates to the movement’s own masculine representation and ‘silence […] on women and gender’ (ibid., p. 46). An exceptional account of women in the TJ movement, in addition to Toktogulova 2014 and Metcalf 2000, is Marloes Janson’s monograph on the TJ in the Gambia (Janson 2014). 15 This term combines the Kyrgyz word for six (alty) and the Urdu term for principle (syfat; sypat in Kyrgyz). These six principles are: 1) correct understanding of the Muslim creed (shahada); 2) correct execution of ritual prayers; 3) remembrance of God in prayer and the constant appropriation and expansion of religious knowledge; 4) respect for other Muslims; 5) sincere faith, and 6) da’wa (Kyrg. davat) (cf. Toktogulova 2014, p. 4). 16 Nasritdinov (2018) describes similar transformations through a discussion of a group of men from Bishkek’s former Botanika district.

REFERENCES Bissenova, A. 2016. Building a Muslim Nation: The Role of the Central Mosque of Astana, pp.211–​228 in Laruelle, M. (ed.) Kazakhstan in the Making: Legitimacy, Symbols, and Social Changes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bobrovnikov, V. 2006. ‘Traditionalist’ Versus ‘Islamist’ Identities in a Dagestani Collective Farm. Central Asian Survey 25 (3): 287–​302. Bobrovnikov, V., Navruzov, A. and Shikhaliev, S. 2010. Islamic Education in Soviet and Post-​ Soviet Daghestan, pp.107–​167 in Kemper, M., Motika, R. and Reichmuth, S. (eds.) Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States. Central Asian Studies Series 18. London: Routledge. Hann, C. 2013. The Universal and the Particular in Rural Xinjiang: Ritual Commensality and the Mosque Community, pp.171–​191 in Marsden, M. and Retsikas. K. (eds.) Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds. Muslims in Global Societies Series 6. Dordrecht: Springer. Hölzchen, Y. M. 2017. Religious Education and Cultural Change: the Case of Madrasas in Northern Kyrgyzstan, pp.105–​ 134 in Hardenberg, R. (ed.) Approaching Ritual 759

—​​​​ Y a n t i M . H ö l z c h e n —​​​​ Economy: Socio-​Cosmic Fields in Globalized Contexts. SFB 1070 Publication Series 4. Tübingen: Tübingen University Press. Hölzchen, Y. M. 2018. Neue Moscheen braucht das Land: Religiöses Wissen ilim als religiöse Ressource in Nordost-​Kirgistan. PhD Thesis, Goethe-​University, Frankfurt am Main. Hölzchen, Y. M. 2022. Mosques as Religious Infrastructure: Muslim Selfhood, Moral Imaginaries and Everyday Sociality. Central Asian Survey 41 (2): 368–​384. Janson, M. 2014. Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jamaʻat. The International African Library 45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemper, M., Reichmuth, S. and Motika, R. (eds.) 2010a. Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States, Central Asian Studies Series 18. London: Routledge. Kemper, M., Reichmuth, S. and Motika, R. 2010b. Introduction, pp.1–​20 in Kemper, M., Reichmuth, S. and Motika, R. (eds.). Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States. Central Asian Studies Series 18. London: Routledge. Khalid, A. 2007. Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liu, M. 2018. On ‘Uzbekness’ and Social Justice. https://​voic​eson​cent​rala​sia.org/​mor​gan-​liu-​ on-​uzbekn​ess-​and-​soc​ial-​just​ice/​. Accessed 25 October 2020. McBrien, J. 2017. From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. Central Eurasia in Context Series. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Metcalf, B. 2000. Tablighi Jama’at and Women, pp.44–​58 in Masud, M.K. (ed.) Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablīghī Jamāʿat as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal. Social, Economic and Political studies of the Middle East and Asia 69. Leiden: Brill. Mittermaier, A. 2013. Trading with God: Islam, Calculation, Excess, pp.274–​293 in Boddy, J. P. and Lambek, M. (eds.) A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Blackwell Companions to Anthropology 25. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Mostowlansky, T. 2007. Islam und Kirgisen on Tour: Die Rezeption ‘nomadischer Religion’ und ihre Wirkung. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Nasritdinov, E. 2018. Translocality and the Folding of Post-​Soviet Urban Space in Bishkek: Hijrah from ‘Botanika’ to ‘Botanicheskii Jamaat’, pp.319–​ 347 in Stephan-​ Emmrich, M. and Schröder, P. (eds.). Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas. Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Nasritdinov, E., and Ismailbekova, A. 2012. Transnational Religious Networks in Central Asia: Structure, Travel, and Culture of Kyrgyz Tablighi Jama’at. Transnational Social Review: A Social Work Journal 2 (2): 177–​195. Pelkmans, M. 2017. Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stephan, M. 2010. Education, Youth and Islam: the Growing Popularity of Private Religious Lessons in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Central Asian Survey 29 (4): 469–​483. Tasar, E. 2011. Islamically Informed Soviet Patriotism in Postwar Kyrgyzstan. Cahiers du monde russe 52 (2–​3): 387–​404. Tasar, E. 2017. Soviet and Muslim. The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia. New York: Oxford University Press. Toktogulova, M. 2014. The Localisation of the Transnational Tablighi Jama’at in Kyrgyzstan: Structures, Concepts, Practices and Metaphors. Crossroads Asia Working Paper Series (17): 1–​22.

760

POLYPHONIC AFTERWORD Anthropology for Central Asian Worlds

This edited collection took shape just as the Covid pandemic unfolded across the globe. As editors, we tracked with concern how many of the colleagues in our collective became ill, or scrambled to look after their loved ones. As this book goes to press, Central Asians face violence spiralling on all sides of this region: an old arena of warfare declining further into humanitarian crises in Afghanistan; the ongoing violent suppression and incarceration of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; escalating violence on the Kyrgyzstan-​Tajikistan border, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. These conflicts severely disrupt the livelihoods of so many Central Asians. The political repercussions of these conflicts, such as many scholars turning refugees, embargoes on collaborating with Russian institutions, or prohibitions on attending regional conferences have also dug at the possibilities of maintaining already disrupted collegial networks. Since these multiple crises have given so very little opportunity for scholarly exchange since 2020, we have attempted to compensate a little by creating an afterword format that gives a degree of space for collective dialogue. As editors, we see this book’s fifty-​odd kollektiv of authors as a unique group, featuring very different biographies, interests and scholarly trajectories. Anthropology of Central Asia as a specialism can look so different in different contexts: we consider it important to explicitly share this diversity and wealth of experience with our readership. We therefore asked our colleagues for brief written responses on their own experiences, struggles, ambitions and hopes for the field of anthropology in and of Central Asia. Our colleagues were incredibly generous with their time in their responses, easily generating a full-​scale article discussion, a wealth which sadly we cannot feature fully here. What we have orchestrated out of this diversity is a kind of operatic stage, with colleagues entering the stage from different angles, and voicing their experience in different timbres –​conversational or scholarly. In the following, the reader will first encounter reflections on how the anthropology of Central Asia has evolved, and a frank assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Second, authors discuss the current challenges in the field, particularly in relation to institutional contexts and teaching on the region. Finally, we turn to our silences and blind spots, our ambitions and hopes for the future of the field. What emerges through this conversation-​ at-​ a-​ distance are, to us, fascinating divergences in assessing the status of this anthropological world. One important facet 761

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

of these differences are questions around the value and ongoing scholarly relevance of Soviet-​era anthropology. The discussion of this point also raises more general questions about the process of learning and forgetting in the social sciences, the validation of particular forms of knowledge, and the consequences of political ruptures. With our colleagues below, we eagerly engage with the tense and highly promising emergence of a strong decolonising impetus, and a vibrant generation of Central Asian anthropologists of the Central Asian World.

1.HOW DO YOU SEE THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CENTRAL ASIA EVOLVING? WHERE DO YOU SEE THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY IN AND OF THE REGION? Several colleagues reflected explicitly on the relationship with earlier schools of anthropology that had engaged with the region before 1991. As with so many of the issues raised in this afterword, these comments can only represent threads of the beginning, rather than the full unfolding of a conversation.

Aisalkyn Botoeva: I will speak with social sciences in mind, as I answer this question. They say that journalists write the first draft of history. I feel that the role of making the first and sometimes the only draft of history in modern Central Asia had fallen on social scientists in the early 1990s, as political scientists, sociologists, historians and anthropologists rushed to study what was inaccessible before. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, access to the region became possible and social scientists were able to examine some of the most important transformations, such as economic reforms, political systems and intra-​elite struggles, the resurgence of religious movements and piety, migration and its effects on the local economies and people’s everyday lives. Over time, anthropological and sociological perspectives added a more granular, nuanced understanding of issues at hand; more Central Asians joined the ranks of scholars studying the region.

Stephanie Bunn: From the 1940s to early 1990s, it was very difficult for Europeans or Americans to do any anthropological research in this region, because of difficulties gaining visas and entry permits. This meant that most European and American anthropology of Central Asia until 1990 suffered from being both very exclusive and at a premium –​ just because of access –​and also that it tended to be rather ahistorical and ‘authoritative’. The great exception was Caroline Humphrey’s work on Buryatia and Mongolia, which I still hold as an example of the best research –​pre-​and post-​independence –​of this region. Personally, I think it is valuable to consider these regions alongside and interconnected with Central Asia, because it gives some perspective. It is also a great pity that many senior scholars from this region lost their posts following independence, and those that did not generally had to fit in with European 762

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

and American approaches in order for their work to become accessible. This is a great pity because a lot of really interesting material was documented in the 1940s, ’50s and later, which is still not widely available. I don’t think that more recent anthropological approaches have really managed to free themselves from the context of ‘post-​socialism’, and most anthropology of this region still takes a strong political or economic perspective, while not really coming to grips with the Soviet period. So, there is still a kind of gap between the anthropology/​ethnography of the Soviet period and anthropology of post-​socialism. I find that it is rare that much Soviet ethnography is incorporated into contemporary writing, which is a great pity, since this is a region, par excellence, where [ethno-​] history matters.

Sergey Abashin: The peculiarity of Russian Central Asian Studies is that they were once a monopoly in the field and had a huge academic base, but today they have almost completely disappeared, Russia has ceased to be an important player in shaping the image of the region. One of the consequences, which I see as a problem, is the exclusion from global knowledge of the huge stock of distinctive and even unique data and thinking about the region that was accumulated about Central Asia in the twentieth century.

Juliette Cleuziou: I find fascinating also the division between two generations of Central Asian scholars, one citing only (or mostly) Soviet literature, the other acting (as many scholars in Europe and the US do) as if Soviet literature did not have any value at all … I guess balancing is still in process. In general, colleagues in their responses saw clear strengths in the depth of empirical studies conducted throughout the region. Colleagues like David Montgomery also remarked that anthropology ‘here’ has long been particularly open and productively interdisciplinary in outlook. It certainly has left a strong mark on Central Asian Studies as a whole. But that field itself struggles from different kinds of marginalisation (a point also raised in response to question 3). Some colleagues were much more optimistic about the growing recognition of work on this area, than others.

Yanti Hölzchen: I find it striking how little Central Asia as a region and especially scholarly focus within anthropology and neighbouring diciplines seems to be known, beyond the group of scholars working on the region itself –​unfortunately! While studies on Islam or knowledge especially in African countries, for instance, are so prominently used and referenced, comparably little attention lies on the fascinating and ground-​ breaking work that shapes the anthropology of Central Asia.

763

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

One colleague described a dismissive approach to the region through the example of a particular hiring situation.

Anon.: There was a recent job description in my department; one faculty member wanted to add a specific interest in someone with expertise in the post-​Soviet world, by which [they] really meant ‘Russia’. I pushed back at the faculty meeting, asking if the department would indeed be open to someone with expertise in Central Asia, the Caucasus, or anywhere other than Russia, and the response was ‘No, but we would be interested in China.’

Ildikó Bellér-​Hann: Given the size of the region it sounds ludicrous, but Central Asia is often treated as a ‘small’, marginal area and may get treated accordingly (i.e., threatened with closure). A lot depends on the political situation in Central Asia. Political instability may mean more interest and more money available, but it may also mean a focus on ‘catastrophe/​crisis research’ at the expense of the everyday and the mundane.

Till Mostowlansky: Having myself moved towards and worked in a South Asian/​inter-​Asian context since around 2012, and having held positions on different continents, I have noticed that interest in things Central Asian has gone up in unexpected places over the past decade. While working in Singapore –​a country politically and economically far removed from Central Asia –​scholars, students and Singaporeans outside the university became increasingly interested in the region for research and travel. I observed similar processes during my employment in Hong Kong. China’s engagement with Central Asian countries has a role to play in this –​as has the buzz around the Maritime Silk Road –​but this does not explain everything. Anthropologists of Central Asia have also become part of much wider academic networks in recent years and participate in many theory-​driven events that are not specifically dedicated to Central Asia. We are not there yet, but standing out not because of obscure regional expertise, but based on the recognition of our scholarship is hopefully within reach.

2.WHAT ARE THE CURRENT CHALLENGES FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CENTRAL ASIA? IN THE PARTICULAR ACADEMIC SYSTEM IN WHICH YOU WORK, HOW AND WHERE IS THIS FIELD TAUGHT? WHAT OBSTACLES AND OPPORTUNITIES ARE THERE TO TEACHING AND RESEARCHING ON THE REGION? Respondents brought up a wide range of challenges in relation to their field of research and teaching; some of these are shared by social sciences and humanities more widely, while others seem a particular challenge. Intriguingly, the picture of Central Asian anthropology which emerges is of a field that survives –​and frequently 764

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

also thrives –​precisely at the interstices of currently more powerful knowledge-​ making frameworks and disciplines. One might venture the thesis that it is perhaps precisely this quality –​a field owing much to somewhat isolated, highly dedicated and rather stubborn scholars –​that has made Central Asian anthropology perhaps engage in less mutual put-​downs and vitriolic scholarly conflicts than elsewhere. Possibly we have not only suffered, but also benefited, from the solidarity generated among (relative) ‘underdogs’ or ‘eccentrics’, as well as the comparative lack of gate-​ keeping senior scholars?

Judith Beyer: Challenges for the field are similar to overall challenges we are facing in academia in general: precarity, lack of funds, lack of time for carrying out long-​term research and writing, especially little time for reading and writing, I would say.

Ildikó Bellér-​Hann: I think that in many ways the anthropology of Central Asia is facing the same challenges as anthropology itself (ethical, self-​definition, etc.). Having said that, in my view, the best studies are those which move closer to an interdisciplinary approach and are open to augmenting (or even replacing, if necessary) traditional fieldwork methods (textual methods, cyberanthropology, etc., as the situation in Xinjiang demonstrates). In the academic environment, the discipline is facing the same challenges/​threats as humanities do in general.

Tommaso Trevisani: My sense is that the anthropology of Central Asia lives the paradox of being a growing field with many more PhDs, postdocs, a wider range of research topics and publications, a new cohort of vocal anthropologists-​cum-​activists, more presence in elite universities in the region and in the world than a decade ago. At the same time, I see the anthropology of Central Asia as being beset with new difficulties, in part resulting from its own recent transformation (see: the ‘crisis of anthropology’ literature) and the rise of new geopolitical divides between East and West, reminiscent of a new ‘cold war’, not to speak of Central Asia’s own ‘homemade’ catastrophes and challenges (environmental, political, and so on). Colleagues from a really wide variety of academic environments pointed to the institutional weakness of Central Asian Studies (with the perhaps surprising exceptions of Japan), and the impact this has on their teaching. They also discussed the impact of volatile political situations and consequent funding contexts.

Sergey Abashin: The main problem I see is that the study of Central Asia does not yet fit well into global research projects. This is partly due to the fact that the region exists as a ‘subordinate’ within different institutional frameworks (Russian/​Slavic/​Eurasian Studies on the one hand, and Islamic/​Middle Eastern/​Iranian studies on the other), which 765

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

marginalises Central Asia in either case, does not attract many new researchers, makes Central Asianist voices less prominent in their directions and in global historiography. Perhaps, however, this marginalisation or double ‘subordination’ will allow for bolder experimentation in the conceptual sphere, for a search for theories that might incorporate ideas from different research strands.

Haruka Kikuta: I think Central Asian anthropology is one of the three pillars of Central Asian Studies in Japan. The other two pillars are first, history: many Japanese historians are strong in the history of Central Asia because they can use materials in Russian, Chinese, English, and local languages. However, many of them may not be good at presenting at international conferences in English. Second, international politics is an important field: Japan was a major donor in Central Asia, until China and South Korea significantly increased their investment in Central Asia in the last decade.

Juliette Cleuziou: In France, Central Asia is still considered a peripheral region to Iranian, Russian (post-​Soviet), Chinese, or Turkish Studies. Consequently, researchers are recruited according to their research questions/​themes rather than their regional speciality. The lack of visibility is also due to objective criteria such as the low number of specialists on (and from) the region, since our institutions do not seek to foster this regional field. In addition, as each researcher has his or her own speciality –​they may sometimes be more willing to share their thematic interests with colleagues from the same discipline rather than collaborate with colleagues working on Central Asia. This tendency is supported by the French scientific tradition, which tends to favour disciplinary division rather than regional collaboration.

Julie McBrien: I never teach on Central Asia! Well, I did teach a regional course on the former socialist world a couple years ago and that went well. I think there would be a lot of interest on a course like that now, given the war in Ukraine, though that feels awful to say and consider. I think one of the obstacles of working on the region is that even in anthropology, the region is seen as so niche, or ‘exotic’ that people don’t consider it really being able to speak to wider debates. Making connections with broader discussions in anthropology has always been my goal and I feel like every time I can do that in a classroom, at a conference, in an article, or in a lecture, I am reaffirmed at how valuable thinking from Central Asia is for bigger debates in the field.

Philipp Schröder: Oftentimes, so it seems, colleagues who attain permanent positions at universities or research institutes did so, not because they work on Central Asia, but despite it. In a strongly hierarchical academic system such as the German one, institutional 766

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

under-​representation at the top translates directly into fewer opportunities at the postdoctoral and PhD levels, and even earlier, into fewer students becoming enthusiastic about Central Asia.

Tommaso Trevisani: At my university I can teach anthropology of Central Asia, which is a rare position in Italy and in Europe. This makes me feel privileged, but, on the other side of the coin, this uniqueness comes with a relative marginality in the broader academic landscape and at my university. My teaching is neither part of an anthropology programme, nor of an established Central Asia area studies profile. Societies and cultures of Central Asia is a facultative course that mostly attracts oriental language and/​or international relations students with no background in anthropology or in Central Asian Studies. Every semester I face the situation of having to start from scratch with the students, who often lament a lack of basic knowledge about the region. In the classroom and in departmental meetings, or when competing for funding and publication space, the struggle often is to ensure attention and recognition for a discipline and a region that falls in between different categories, while the challenge is to connect, collaborate and contribute to broader audiences and gain more visibility. Next to the institutional marginality of Central Asia as a topic, colleagues remarked on two facets they considered a specific challenge in supporting students to engage with the region. First, the volatile fieldwork access, for example, recently increasingly restricted in Tajikistan, and near-​ impossible in Turkmenistan. The linguistic complexity of the region was also highlighted, along with the lack of opportunities for studying Central Asian languages in depth outside the region. This combination of factors has implications for access to funding, studentships and research affiliations, which often follow former imperial ties (in the shape, for instance, of ‘Commonwealth studentships’). This raises the intriguing question of whether we are in some sense witnessing a kind of ‘long arm’ of Central Asia ‘lacking’ an Anglo/​Franco/​Hispanic language world generated by empire to connect to, while Russophone research institutions do little to support anything but political and macro-​economic analyses of the region.

Baktygul Shabdan: One of the obstacles for our students to come to Central Asia for fieldwork is language. For example, Central Asian languages are not widely offered. Learning Russian is not always a helpful option, if a person wants to do research in remote villages, where local languages are used.

Philipp Schröder: When looking across Central Asia in time and space, the opportunities to conduct long-​term ethnographic fieldwork on freely selected topics of academic interest have been unequally distributed between the nation-​states of the region. For example, while Uzbekistan might nowadays be more accessible for fieldwork than some years ago, in Tajikistan new constraints have recently emerged for anthropologists. In my view, this unbalanced accessibility critically limits the potential to reach a comparative 767

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

perspective that would allow us to move beyond nation-​ state frameworks and towards a more integrative Anthropology of Central Asia.

3.WHAT ARE YOUR AMBITIONS OR HOPES FOR THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD? WHAT ARE PERHAPS THE SILENCES OR BLIND SPOTS THAT ANTHROPOLOGISTS OF CENTRAL ASIA SHOULD BE ADDRESSING IN THEIR RESEARCH? Our colleagues brought up all kinds of exciting ideas on recently emerging and potential research areas in Central Asia, such as new approaches to gender and LGBTQ+​ movements as well as social media (Julie McBrien). Class (Aisalkyn Botoeva), resource extraction, environmental issues, or an emerging anthropology of geopolitics (Till Mostowlansky) also represent key arenas that are not broadly established yet. An anthropology of business practices, or the effect of migration on commemoration practices were also suggested (Juliette Cleuziou), alongside health and demography (Danuta Penkala-​Gawęcka) as stimulating areas.

Kerstin Klenke: Judging from my own scholarly background, the anthropology of music in its Western European and North American traditions, I see the Soviet era as a blind spot, in two regards: on the one hand, a lack of academic interest in the cultural forms that were created in that period and the people who cherish them up to today; on the other, a widespread ignorance, if not conscious rejection, of Soviet-​era research and data collected in that period. Both of these I often encounter as a paternalistic attitude of apparently knowing better: what are valuable cultural expressions, and what is good –​or presumably non-​ideological –​scholarly work. So much has not been read, acknowledged, understood and discussed. I really hope for less prejudice, more respect and more curiosity here –​in addition to a more nuanced understanding of different manifestations of the Soviet Union over the time of its existence. This would be an essential step away from prevalent Eurocentric forms of knowledge production and towards multi-​perspectivity in scholarly collaborations. Féaux de la Croix and Reeves: Lastly, as a suitably interstitional subject for an apparently interstitial discipline, an anthropology of ‘life-​goes-​on’, of navigating ever-​recurring crises and chaos with tenacity and youthfulness was put forward (Trevisani). The main development that all the discussants greeted with enthusiasm, is a push for more equitable forms of collaboration, linked to the thrust and energy coming from scholars in Central Asia itself.

Aksana Ismailbekova: It would be great if there were many joint articles, edited volumes and books between scholars of/​from Central Asia. Another aspect is to strengthen South-​South 768

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

interaction of anthropologists and the exchange of theoretical ideas. Moreover, it would be fruitful to pay a lot of attention to theories from Central Asia and engage more with the ideas of de-​coloniality.

Aisalkyn Botoeva: In my own experience, how we studied Central Asia in the early 2000s and how we study the region 20 years later is different –​with scholars of the region calling to recognise and critically interrogate Eurocentric knowledge systems, paradigms and standards of inquiry that have been historically imposed on Central Asia and beyond. In the last several years in particular, I have seen more scholars trying to decolonise the way research is done, by recognising how knowledge gets created and pushing to shift research approaches to more participatory models. Yet, these efforts to decolonise social studies in Central Asia are also subverted, since streams of funding to study the region still primarily come from abroad and more importantly, there is still a prevalence of Eurocentric views of what is considered rigorous, systematic and high-​ quality research and writing. Most ‘high-​ quality’ studies get published primarily in English and are not translated to local languages, or are not accessible to the broader public because of their use of ‘academese’. This will potentially change as more effort is spent on not only translating important texts from English into Kyrgyz, Kazakh and other local languages, but also as more people use these languages to produce content. … Scholars should aim to not only impress their peers or those that they highly regard in the profession, by publishing work that is unreadable and inaccessible to those who haven’t mastered academese. I would also hope to see more actual collaborative work between anthropologists and sociologists of Central Asia with representatives of other professions, specialists in the arts, education, public health, government and public policy, and many others. I don’t think many of us realise that we have very valuable tools in our hands –​understanding social theories, paradigms and conceptualisations of the world that can help tackle racism, ethno-​centrism, classicism, sexism, extractive capitalism and many other -​isms. Social sciences should pursue the goal of helping the broader public in making sense of the past, present and future. Our colleagues suggested several ways to achieve some of these goals, including creating a broad open access front for research on Central Asia (Cleuziou), and organising joint training programmes between departments (Trevisani). Colleagues pointed to some real infrastructural and competitive challenges, in striving for greater equity in knowledge-​ production: ‘Collaboration outside the established circles and patterns is very time-​and energy-​consuming and there is no reward for it in the logic of the academic assessment regimes’ (Trevisani). A challenge raised from quite a different direction than the one of valuing Soviet-​era anthropology comes from the risk of wall-​ building around (post-​ Soviet) definitions of Central Asia. As a scholar of Afghanistan in our collection put it: ‘Let’s move beyond defining this field as five countries by colonial boundaries –​let’s be central Eurasian!’ (Jennifer Murtazashvilli). As editors we have certainly experienced the gravitational forces of established modes of scholarship, as we, in some modest ways, tried to follow Aisalkyn Botoeva’s recommendation in ‘trying to decolonise the way research is done by recognising 769

—​​​​ A n t h r o p o l o g y f o r C e n t r a l A s i a n W o r l d s —​​​​

how knowledge gets created and pushing to shift research approaches to more participatory models’. Part of that conundrum are of course our own European personal biographies, as editors and decision-​makers in this project. Distance and proximity, personal and geographic commitments, are most certainly also mirrored in the range of scholars who found time to engage with our afterword project. They are also mirrored in who, of the many diverse scholars we approached to contribute to this project, came all the way with us in the long-​term construction of this book. In how far we have collectively succeeded to power forward the anthropology of Central Asian Worlds, will be for our our readers to judge.

770

INDEX

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 64n13 refers to note 13 on page 64. Page locators in bold and italics represents tables and figures, respectively. Abashin, Sergey 17, 21, 763, 765–​6 academic: academician 24, Akaev, Askar 725, Kamalov, S. K. 24, 30, Kozybaev, Manash 93; assessment regimes 769; conceptual language, in Moscow 34; inequalities 82; blind spots 768; language 35; social-​academic mobility 5; in Tashkent 27 Academy of Sciences 6, 22, 24–​6, 30, 43, 83, 93, 725; Russian Academy of Sciences 6; Uzbek Academy of Sciences 26, 30; Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan 646 accountability 113, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 226, 305, 500, 505–​7 activist/​activism 99–​101, 108, 139, 145, 146, 152, 155, 188, 197–​9, 344, 466, 667; Central Asia 8, 97; labor 344; political 145–​6; poor people’s rights, defenders of 153; religious tolerance 198; social 139, 667 affirmative action, policy of 26 Afghanistan: Afghan-​American professionals 550; deteriorating situation 547; diaspora 549, 556; governance architecture 160–​5; formal/​informal gap 169–​70; global family, transnational family 549–​50; governance gaps 159; hospitality 427; informal local governance 166–​9; moral and ethical ambition 427; restaurants 428; public finance 169; refugees 423; state 160, 169; traders 423, 428, 539; transnational family, overview of 547–​8 Afghan War 456, 748 Aga Khan Foundation 597, 598, 601 Aga Khan III, Shah 595, 596 agency 2, 3, 8, 39, 70, 97, 113, 152–​5, 336, 337, 345, 371, 384, 392–​404, 492, 523, 539, 546, 578, 582–​8, 612, 630, 736; see also healers

age of discovery 86 agriculture: agricultural disputes 413; Central Asia’s ‘cotton oases’ 476–​7; Chinese, fertilizers 273; commercially organized 61; cotton 466; crop subsidies 469; in economy 466; foreign corporations 474; future of 476–​7; irrigation-​based agriculture 465; land quality 468; market trade 583; neoliberal privatisation 146; post-​socialist 465; rational development of 42; revenue 475; seasonal 84; intensification 485; see also farms, land, pastoralism Ahlu-​Sunnah mosque, Kazakhstan 534 Aini, Sadriddin 41 Aitieva, M. D. 246 aitys 116–​26; as cultural carrier 121; foster solidarity/​friction 119–​24; oral traditions 116; performance of 118; Xinjiang and oral traditions 116 Akaev, Askar 725 Akhun, Ömär 688, 689 Akhun, Turdi 689–​90, 692, 694–​5 aksakal 17, 411–​12; custom 413; see also elder albars/​albarsty 349, 358–​60, 395; attacks 358–​60; female demon 349 alcohol consumption 380 alcoholism 222, 733; Alkash/​Alkashka 227, 230–​3; see also drunk Ali, Khazrati 636 Alisher Navoiy National Park, folk fair for Independence Day 307 al-​Kashgari, Mahmud 676 Allah 437 Almaty 117–​19, 519 altruism 174–​7, 472 ambitions/​hopes, in Central Asia 768–​70

771

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ ambivalence, ambiguous, ambiguity 60, 61, 154, 181, 218, 222–​34, 253, 256, 261, 349, 379, 380, 386–​9, 455–​8, 483, 528, 561, 675, 703 Amu Darya 23 ancestor(s): 29; care of 356–​8; spirits 318, 356–​8, 360, 393, 394, 400, 721 animal(s): animal–​human relations 18, 382–​4; husbandry techniques 490; trappings 630 see also bird, camel, sheep anthropologists 3, 72, 75–​7; Central Asian 6; foreign 4 anthropology 1–​12, 219–​20, 423–​4, 762–​4; Central Asia as focus of 219–​20, 423–​4, 762–​4; of childhood xxiii; hospitality 423–​4, 427; Anthropology of Islam 7, 10, 18, 68–​70, 74, 75, 78, 709–​11; neighbourhood 219–​20; place of fieldwork 6–​8, 89; postcolonial critiques of 10, 82, 83; publishing on 7; in Soviet Union 6, 21, 25, 72; of the state of socialism 3, 7, 562; teaching of 1, 3, 83, 764–​8; theory in 5; Uzbeks, in southern Kyrgyzstan 175–​7; see also ethnography/​ethnographic anti-​debt movement 151, 152, 155 anti-​government militia groups 425 Antipina, K. 624 anti-​religious propaganda 613 ‘anti-​sodomy’ laws 98 anxieties 18, 71, 154–​5, 244, 262, 320, 330, 358, 469, 613; in employer 262; moral/​social 423; of Muslims 72 apprentice/​apprenticeship 125, 397, 399, 400, 605, 622–​8, 633–​5, 638, 639, 644–​6, 648–​9, 654, 708; theory 625 Arab 46; Arabic-​language religious formulae 735; prayers 740 Aral Sea 27, 28, 466 ArcelorMittal Temirtau (AMT) 449, 452, 453, 456, 457 architecture 32, 213, 674–​5, 751 area studies 4, 7, 8, 22, 97–​9, 108, 767 Arendt, Hannah 336 Argonauts of the Western Pacific 89 artisans 633, 639, 642, 647 artisanal miners 508–​10; see also mines artistic councils 305 Artist of Contemporary China 122 Arts Industries 623 Asad, Talal 18, 68, 69, 71, 73–​7, 650; Islam, centrality of practice 74–​5 ashar (voluntary work for community) 134, 212, 748, 751; see also hashar Ashkhabad bazaar 626 ‘Asia as Method’ approach 99 Asian Development Bank (ADB) 226 Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 87

Astana (Kazkahstan) 133, 135, 139, 140, 267; see also Nur-​Sultan Ata-​Beeit site 725, 726 Ata, Kudaibergen 414 Atambayev, Almazbek 199 ‘Atameken’ Complex, multicultural surroundings of 125 Atamuratov, Tatlymurat 24 AT-​Mineralz company 507 authenticity 108, 537, 606, 642–​56, 653, 655, 687, 743 authority: 94; artistic 649, 696; older women 153–​4; politial 159–​161, 163–​4, 168–​9; 330; mother’s 374; male 379, 384, 388–​9, 562; local court 415, 417; national 501; bazaar owners 514, 519; religious 417, 529, 537; Soviet 519; state 409, 417, 424, 426, 427 Avtorynok car market 438–​41 Azhe, Tokubek 752 ‘backward’/​‘backwardness’: economic activity 343; Central Asia 33; cultural practices 98 Badakhshan 426, 591, 597, 598, 600 Bahovadinova, Malika 318, 545 bakhshy (also bubu) healer 396, 397, 400 Bakhtin, Mikhail 412 Bakiev, Kurmanbek 660 Barakholka market 520 Barat, Qurban 690 Bartang Valley 594 Basbau 124 bazaar 463, 464, 518; Ashkhabad bazaar 62, 626; Bishkek’s Dordoi 516, 520, 522; Central Asia 430, 436, 437, 463, 514–​519, 521, 522; container 515, 517; economy 520; entrepreneurship 518; global circuits of accumulation 514; globalization, transnational markets 521–​4; Kara-​Suu 517, 519, 520, 524; market binary 515; multi-​ethnic demographics of 516; outskirts of 517; ownership 520; skilful learning 633–​5; Tablighi 439; trading activity 436, 437, 522; transformations 514; vibrant bazaar/​chaotic carnival 338; see also Barakholka, Avtorynok Beg, Qudratullah 595 Beijing’s assimilationist policies 672 ‘Being There’/​‘Being Here’ 84–​6 Bellér-​Hann, Ildikó 764, 765 belonging 39, 68–​77, 114–​19, 121, 122, 126, 131, 134, 135, 137, 213, 223, 232, 233, 239, 240, 272, 296, 340, 358, 530, 552, 632, 664, 710, 733, 750, 753, 758 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 269, 271 Benda-​Beckmann, Franz von 412 Bernshtam, A. N. 624 Beyer, Judith 409, 722, 765

772

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ bias 703, 704, 709, 711–​13 biomedicine/​folk healing 365; biomedicine vs. traditional medicine 369; see also healers, knowledge bird: 379; pottery 653; risk-​laden subjugation of 383; in Tajikistan 385; hunt 381, 385, 386; see also human-​animal relations Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) 113, 190, 359; anti-​ debt movement 151; Avtorynok car market 438–​41; Central Mosque 436; cityscape 136; Dordoi bazaar 516, 520; ethnic Kyrgyz in new settlements 136–​7; feminist campaigns 144; international organisation in 394; Iug-​ 2 neighbourhood130–​1; Kyrgyz Tablighis in 435; people’s health-​seeking strategies 393; Protestant missionaries 194; School of Theory and Activism Bishkek (STAB) 96, 100; spaces of possibility 360–​1; urban sociabilities in 140; Bissenova, Alima 17 blacklisted workers 318 ‘blacks’ (cherniye), in Russia 326 blessing (barakat) 42, 393, 398–​400, 403, 438, 507, 570, 605, 630, 638, 756 Bloch, M. 447, 452, 459 body 105, 530–​3, 627, 720 Bonn Process 161 Borbieva, Noor O’Neill 188 borders 6, 438; ‘borderland’ identities 108; borderland region 285; China 272; communities across border 346; cross-​border trade 436, 438; family across borders 238; fieldwork with Uyghur communities 733; geographic and social complexity 114; Himalayas 592; infrastructure and representational projects 267; Kazakhstan 336, 340; in Kyrgyzstan 182, 747; Kyrgyzstan-​ Kazakhstan border 523; Kyrgyzstan-​Tajikistan 761; natural resources, and tensions 198; Orenburg Border Commission 86, 87; Pakistan, crossings with 426; political borders 719; Russia and Ukraine 28; ‘social life’ of 545; Tablighis 438; Turkey 257; in Uzbekistan 175, 182, 487 Botoeva, Aisalkyn 762, 769–​70 Botoeva, Gulzat 463 breed, breeding 41, 46–​49, 489–​490, 505, 511 bribe 222, 225, 239, 457, 475, 532, 538, 539, 563, 577, 581, 583, 585 bride kidnapping 33, bride abduction 98 bride price, 33, 98, bride wealth 182; see also kalym Britain: anthropology 86; British northern frontier 595 Bromley, Yulian 29 Broz, L. 492 Bukhara 40, 42, 528, 642, 692; Amir of 635; colonial legacies 41; cotton production 42;

film studio 610; guild system 634; Muslims of 7; Natures-​Cultures entanglements of 49; negotiation of Muslimness 70; oasis of 39–​40, 45; patron saint 355; People’s Soviet Republic 40; Qarakul fleeces 47; Russian annexation of 634; shrine of Sayfiddin Buxoriy in 354; State Museum 637; weaving guild 634 Bukharan Republic (BNRS) 610 Bulgakov, Zhandarbek 120 Bunn, Stephanie 622, 762–​3 bureaucracy: of estrada music 306; Soviet 225; migrant management 329 burial rights 198 büwi, female ritual specialists 740 Byler, Darren 334 camel 123, 485, 490, camel dung 653 campaign time 337–​9; see also ‘reeducation’ time capitalist: economy 39–​41; labour market 257; market reform 136; pressure, Central Asia on agricultural 41; production 499; system 99, 101, 600; transformation 223; values 407 caravanserai 429, 430, 677 care 173–​84, 365–​74, 552–​4, 556, 557, 579; ancestor spirits 356–​8; bargaining 237–​49; challenges 259; children’s health 365–​75; circulation of 249; drunkenness, between animal/​human 379; elders 579; female labour force 579; force of 318–​22; health care system, in Kochkor 366–​9; and interdependence 10; and intimacy 238–​9; gender norms/​remote jealousy 243–​5; parent-​child relationships 245–​6; mazars 718; migrant worker 318–​22; outsourcing 253; remittances materialise 552–​4; Tajikistani families 238–​9; transnational 237–​8; Turkmen migrant woman workers 253; Uzbekistan, for daughters 173; work 248; Zabota Care 105 carpet 630, 634; see also shyrdak censorship 315, 607, 608, 610, 674 Central Asia: definitions of 9; post-​Soviet; see post-​Soviet Central Asia Central Asian community 595 Central Asian pastoralists 492, 493; diversity of 486; paradoxes of 493; shifting pastoral mobility of 484–​5; see also pastoralism Central Asian society 31, 32; socialist direction 31; ‘survivals’ [perezhitki] 32, 33; USSR, collapse of 33; see also Soviet Union Central Asian World 4 centralization 159–​62, 165, 166, 169, 170, 687 chaikhanas (teahouses) 528 Chairman of Tajikistan’s State Committee for Land Use 61 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 99 checkpoint 341–​2

773

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ child/​children: apprenticeship theory 625; childcare 145, 148, 149; deaths of 372; education 148, 452; grandchild 476; healing rituals 374; health 366, 368, 369; health care 369, 370; household finances 148; labour 44; market violence 147; miners 454, 457; Muslim 531, 532; one-​child policy 176; rational self-​ interest 176; in Russia 240; securing material resources 184; siblings 179; single mothers 153; sisters 180; skills 626; vaccinations 371; welfare 175; WhatsApp messenger group 501; womans 180; in Xinjiang 118 children’s health care 369; in Kochkor 368; in rural Kyrgyzstan 365–​6 Chimeras of Z-​City 107 China: Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 267; China Road and Bridge Corporation 269, 270; citizens 344; Cultural Revolution 733; East–​West assistance programme 273; ‘heritage turn’ 673; Hui 566; language tuition 569; Muslim communities 743; see also Beijing’s assimilationist policies, Yiwu, Uighur, Xinjiang Chinese Hui 743 Chitral 424, 425, 529 Christians 195–​6; becoming Christian 189–​93; Christian Baptist 537; Christian Protestant 358; see also church; Orthodox Christianity Chubak aji Jalilov 534, 535 Church/​religious freedom agenda, in Kyrgyzstan 188; hostility to 194–​7; religious freedom, as political project 197–​9; sense of community 193; Soviet era, to independence 188–​9; see also faith-​based organization Cinema 608–​610; see also film-​making citizen/​citizenship 122–​123, 318; citizen participation 169, 343; citizens in-​between legalities 256–​8; ‘convenient citizen cards’ 271; language choices 292; state-​citizen relations 215, 597 cityscape 136 ‘civilising’ mission 612 civil service exam/​training process 165 civil war, of 1990s in Tajikistan 18, 56, 62–​3, 288, 295, 322, 325, 597, 600 clan 28, 32, 606; as heritage community 658; clan-​based institutions 667; as kinship 226; clan conventions 661; clan councils 661–​2 class: class consciousness 613–​614; income-​based urban divisions 137; inequalities 144, 156; see also resistance Cleuziou, Juliette 763, 766 coal 446, 449, 451, 453, 454, 456, 457; coal-​ processing plant worker 451, 453, 454, 457 CO detection systems 450 cohort/​peers 6, 88, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140, 198, 212, 213, 341, 572, 624, 765, 769

collaboration 8, 26, 403, 613, 766, 768, 769 collectives: collective labour agreement (CLA) 452, 453; farmer’s, 1990s ‘privatization’ of 60; farms 31, 32, 60, 211, 217, 218, 228, 379, 468–​72, 486, 487; see also kolkhoz (collective farm) collectivisation 18, 31, 486–​7; community support 248; pastoral history of 486–​7; Soviet government 644 colonial/​colonialism: Anglo-​Egyptian colonial administration 84; anti-​colonial struggle 99; boundaries 769; British colonial machine 84; colonial knowledge formations 428; colonization, internal 83; custome/​customary law 411; handmaiden of 82, 83; of knowledge production 7; nationalist cinema 612–​15; non-​normative gender 98; pre-​colonial identities 596; colonial legacies 41 commerce 436; international 562–​3; see also globalization; trade Committee for Protection of the Borrowers’ Rights in Kyrgyzstan 152 commodity(ies) 9, 18, 29, 39, 40, 42, 45, 48, 49, 61, 101, 133, 149, 150, 215, 281, 319, 326, 338, 422, 429, 491, 492, 499, 521–​3, 525, 537, 560, 569, 646, 649, 658, 659, 667 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries 289 communal identity 674; communal solidarity 219; see also community communication/​communicate 40, 83, 88, 91, 107, 113, 120, 206, 213, 237–​49, 280, 284, 285, 290, 291, 293, 295–​7, 315, 353, 356, 381, 392, 394, 412, 548, 567, 582, 586, 600, 609, 623, 624, 676, 711, 720, 727; infrastructures 40; interethnic communication 290 Communist; atheist propaganda 438; Communist Party 55, 597, 613; Communist Part of Tajikistan (CPT) 57; in Karakalpakstan 30; Women’s Division 228; Communist Youth League (Komsomol) 520, 598; Communist Party of China 692, 695; in Tajikistan 56, 57; queer communism 100, 104, 107, 108 community 114, 222, 511; Community Development Councils (CDCs) 166; and diaspora 116; death in 222–​4; importance of 246; in Russia 247; law 167; transnational families 246–​8; urban 131; community-​making 138–​9, international donor community 162, 166, 169; see also church, mosque, family, clan, communal companionship 192, 394, 567, 569, 570 compensation 158; fair compensation, money/​ reproduction of society 452–​5 complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) 393; see also health, healer

774

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ conflict 6, 21, 22, 62–​4, 133, 166, 168, 169, 174, 175, 195, 197, 198, 215, 228, 229, 275, 556, 594, 599, 600, 735, 737, 761, 765; ethnic conflict, in Osh 177, 183, 292; internal company 499, 511; intra-​community 506; tensions, around gold-​mining site 501–​3; see also civil war Constitution of Republic of Tajikistan 60 Contemporary Ethnic Processes in the USSR (Zhdanko, T.) 30 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) 673 cooperatives 60; farms 472; artisanal cooperatives 623 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) 500, 505–​7 cosmopolitanism 560, 566–​8; and language 297; cosmopolitan lives 560, 572 cotton 41–​4, 41–​5; agricultural production 465, 477; American 42; Bukhara 42; Central Asia 40, 41, 466–​8; cloth 49; cultivation of 40, 41, 43, 45; economy, in Central Asia 40; farmer 476; farming, southern Central Asia 465–​7; land degradation 466–​8; markets 42, 46; oases 476–​7; ‘Old World’ cotton species 42; plants, on salinised soil 470; Russian markets, demand 45; seed 43; Soviet Union 466; taxation on land 43 Council of Ulema in Kyrgyzstan 534 court 17, 46, 139, 150–​2, 188, 309, 313, 324, 409, 412–​15, 443, 451, 452, 463, 595, 596, 634, 689, 692 courtyard (dvor) 130–​133, 230 cousin marriages 177–​9, 181, 185 COVID-​19 pandemic, social support networks 248 craft 627, 633, skills 628; see also guilds, textiles, pottery Craftsmen’s Association 647–​50 creative group 646 Creolex Zentre 106 crime/​criminal/​criminalize 33, 58, 106, 132, 192, 435, 463, 499, 500, 509, 511, 547, 553, 672, 692, 696, 742 crop(s): crop-​rotation 471; see also agriculture cultural heritage 672–​3, 695; see also heritage cultural intimacy 673, 686 Cultural Revolution 610, 675, 677, 679, 681, 690, 733 culture: of hospitality 423; and nature 40, 492; Islamic culture 518; ethnic/​national culture 6, 31, 647, 668, 672; culture donors 691; pious popular culture 737; ‘cultured man’ 296; culturedness 296; see also material culture, House of Culture, Uyghur, heritage custom(s) 41, 407, 666; people’s customs and traditions 413; and Islam 69, 71, 416–​18

customary law: in Afghanistan 166–​167; in Kyrgyzstan 409–​411, 416 Customs Union 519 cyberspace 105 Cyrillic script 291 dacha (kitchen garden, allotment) 19, 59–​62, 239, 458 daughter(s) 173, 181, 182, 184, 355 davat/​davatchy (Muslim mission/​missionary) 435, 754–​7 death 222–​4, 227; exclusion 229; see also compensation debt 2, 49, 113, 114, 145, 147, 151, 152, 155, 463, 464, 500, 508, 511; see also neoliberal, poverty/​poor decollectivisation 465, 472, 473, 482, 487–​9 Decolonising Narratives 97 decolonising sexualities 96–​108 Deleuze, G. 483 demography 134–​6, 768 development: Chinese policy 268–​9, 273–​4, 339, 743; Communist theory of 303; of estrada music genre 304, 309; INGO programmes 323, 367, 371, 596; child development 365–​7; spiritual development 399; mineral extraction 499, 502, 510; models of 517, 596; Ismaili organizations 600; cultural development 686, 695 diaspora 98, 116, 117, 248, 268, 407, 423, 546, 556, 571, 591–​602, 739, 742; see also refugee, migration Dillon, Sarah 102 din (religion) 434–​6, 444 disability 215, 551 diversity, in Central Asia 3, 10, 423, 486, 761; in families 238; of language practices 286, 594; of pastoralism 486; of cosmopolitanism 561–​3, 568, 572; of identity discourses 678; of religious experience 69, 701, 709, 713; of anthropologies 3–​4, 761 domestic care 259, 579; outsourcing 253 Dordoi 440, 516, 517, 519–​20; bazaar 516, 520 dowry 182–​3, 625 dreams: to hopes/​fears/​regrets 352; interpretation 352, 353; social riddles 360; dream visions 353 Drieu, Cloé 605 drug user, drug abuse 192, 222, 230, 234 drunk, drunkenness 227, 232, 354, 379–​90, 399, 534, 536, 614, 635, 694; see also alcohol, mast Dubuisson, E. M. 356, 393, 394 Dungans 750 Dushanbe 18, 55–​60, 62, 239, 241, 243, 244, 318, 320, 322, 325, 560, 563, 566–​9, 571, 573, 591, 595, 598, 600 dvor (courtyard) 130–​1, 133, 211

775

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ earthquake 55, 56, 59, 62; Bartang Valley 593; of perestroika 59; Sharora 55; Tajikistan 56 East Turkistan 689, 694 economic anthropology 447; see also economy; land; property rights economy 59–​62; agricultural sector 504; agriculture 466; bazaar 520; cash/​electronic payments 520; in Central Asia 517; Central Asian cotton 40; cotton/​sheep 39; crises 240; dependence of 507; development, “take-​off” stage of 518; divergent economic livelihood strategies 501; environmental justice 477; funding 6; global 499, 514; global neoliberal 524–​5; growth of 518; micro-​economies 518; mine 502; multiple resource 40; oasis 49; political economy 449–​51; post-​Soviet market-​ driven 225; programme 225; reforms 762; short-​term 468; socio-​economic 465; see also moral economy, shadow economy Edgar, Iain 352 education 146, 217, 323, 532, 534, 540, 752, 753: religious education 72, 77, 417, 532, 601; People’s Commissariat for Education 610; Soviet education 224, 288; education in Xinjiang 279, language of education 289–​292; ideological education 309–​310 Egypt 9, 84, 570, 571, 701, 733, 738–​43; see also Middle East Egyptian Quran recitation 9, 732–​3 Eickelman, Dale 1 elder(s): ancestor spirits 356; Aqsu, Uyghur woman 278; ‘AT-​Mineralz’ company 507; caring 33; community 506; converts to Christianity 194, 195; court 409; in Denmark 555; domestic care 579; domestic worker/​ caretaker 253; family expenditures 552; feelings/​emotions 402; indigenous residents 133; migrants 584; relationships 178; religious authorities 417; remittances 555; respect 33; rituals at home 189; role of 663; Russian women 133; shariat, imams’ knowledge of 417; Soviet Army 295; speeches, by village elders 753; Uyghur, role of 396; women/​young girls 92, 368, 753, 755; see also aksakal, resistance, mother Election(s) 163; corruption 163; for district councils and mayors 161; Independent Elections Committee 163; in Kyrgyzstan 153; local 754; policymakers 161; Shavkat Mirziyoyev 585; to Supreme Soviet 57 electricity 136, 148, 217, 453, 515, 610 Emirate of Bukhara: see Bukhara Stephan Emmrich, Manja 430 empire 27, 39, 40, 591–​601; see also colonialism employment 59, 84, 118, 145, 146, 174, 219, 224, 231, 232, 254, 255, 258–​60, 262, 279,

294, 323, 339, 436, 468, 471, 477, 519; contract 583; formal 587; in Hong Kong 764; informal 577, 579, 580, 585–​7; see also work; worker(s), labour emshi (Kazakh: healer)/​emchi (Kyrgyz) 395; see also healer; medicine entrepreneur: 147, 530, 532, 537–​540; entrepreneurialism 132, 561 environmental justice 477 environmental sustainability 465 environment/​environmental 6, 12, 18, 22, 24, 32, 33, 39, 41, 48, 49, 56, 84, 89, 98, 106, 107, 117, 119, 125, 130, 133, 134, 184, 199, 233, 239, 275, 277, 323, 329, 338, 369, 381, 401, 410, 465–​8, 477, 484, 500, 504, 511, 545, 564, 566, 568, 569, 572, 580, 582, 585, 588, 628, 630, 679, 711, 713, 720, 725, 726, 732, 733, 736, 765, 768; legal environment 582, 588, mazar environment 720, 725 epic: Kyrgyz national epic 353, 400; ‘Manas’ 353, 664, 723, 725; mazars 724; oral-​formulaic techniques 689; poem/​poetry 639; sung, renewal of 631 Eraliev, Sherzod 577 Erofeeva, Irina 88 Estrada 304: impact/​responses 310–​14; nationalist realism 309–​10 ethic(s): 205, 219, 423, 537, 540, 710, 732–​3, 736, 539; heritage 529; homeland 124; work ethic 44, 456; ethical repertoires 11, 407–​8 ethnic groups 6, 27–​9, 35, 164, 168, 174, 177, 184, 194, 199, 285, 287, 592, 594, 595, 675, 680, 686, 743; Kyrgyz 174, 180, 725; in new settlements 136; ethnic ‘minorities’ 117; ethnic tensions 174; ethnic traditions 211 ethnogenesis 5, 17, 21–​35; Central Asia 27–​31; Kyrgyz People 5; Soviet ethnographers 31 ethnogenesis/​nation building, Central Asia 27–​31 ethnographers 24, 26, 33; see also ethnography/​ ethnographic ethnographic consultants 613 ethnography/​ethnographic 1, 2, 4–​12, 17–​18, 21–​34, 83–​93, 97, 113, 116, 130, 134, 145, 168, 173, 174, 176, 182, 189, 194, 197, 210, 216, 233, 267, 268, 271, 286, 336, 349, 350, 366, 382, 395, 414, 418, 423, 434, 447, 448, 482, 483, 488, 492, 546, 548, 561, 578, 598, 601, 607, 613, 622, 624, 625, 645, 658, 674, 678, 679, 686, 692, 710, 711, 713, 714, 743, 747, 754, 757, 763, 767; Central Asia 22–​6; ethnographic genres 92–​3 ethnographic institutions 25; ethnographic literature, non-​exhaustive survey of 482; Russia 86, 395; Soviet 22–​6; Soviet Union 21, 29, 395; Tsarist-​era Russian 17 Europe, European religion 3, 7, 46, 49, 73

776

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ Evans-​Pritchard, Edward 84 exchange 22, 25, 35, 42, 49, 107, 130–​3, 137–​8, 140, 174, 175, 178, 196–​8, 205, 210, 212, 233, 238, 277, 322, 330, 379, 427–​9, 447–​9, 452, 454, 456, 458, 459, 518, 522, 525, 539, 553, 556, 568–​70, 572, 573, 623, 642, 666, 687, 711, 761, 769; see also value, economy, kinship exogamy 32 experience 117–​18, 703–​14 Facebook 259; see also social media factory, factory workers 145, 146, 150, 645; see also coal-​processing workers fair, fairness 91, 307, 414, 415, 446–​59, 724 faith-​based organizations (FBOs) 198 family 547, 548, 552, 556, 557; Afghan 545, 547–​58; “becoming family” 340; ‘big family’ 126; bonding 238–​9; chain reaction 583; Christian 196; economic models 175; education 122; family-​community relations 248; family planning/​immunization charts 367; girl’s chastity 134; global 549–​50; husbands 182; in Islam 755; Kyrgyz family 136, 196; labour, domestication of 260–​2; language 135; maritime trading networks 600; miners 453; money demand 556; money transfers 246; Muslim Kyrgyz 199; NGO-​run treatment centre 230; nuclear 31, 225; obligations 441; people attack 194; prestige, honour and dignity 33; Qazaq family 116; remittance 556; Russia 206, 246–​8, 325; sanatoria and medical institutions 452; Soviet 228; Tajikistan 246–​8; Tajikistani families 238; Tatar-​Uzbek Russophone family 284; textiles 632; transnational 550–​1; in Ukraine 22; Uyghur family 334, 344; Uzbek language 303; welfare and unity 237; wives 183; woman’s character 178; women 181, 563; in Xinjiang 118; see also children, kinship, transnational family, care famine 45, 486, 597 farmer, farmers’ knowledge 470 farms 468–​9; see also small farms fatwa 416, 535–​6 Féaux de la Croix, Jeanne 1, 72, 185, 456, 504, 726 felt 622–​631, 639, 753 female traders 560; see also woman feminisation: of migration 254–​6 feminist campaigns 144; feminist Marxists 228 feminist/​queer science fiction 101–​7 feudal 623; pre-​Soviet ‘feudal’ policies 594; and tribal system 160 Fieldwork, field 4, 6–​8, 31, 40, 72, 85–​7, 89, 117, 130, 140, 159, 196, 210, 217, 224, 234, 268, 271, 281, 306, 351, 354, 393, 407, 409, 412, 423, 425, 426, 448, 449, 463, 518, 520, 524,

534, 555, 564, 571, 581, 588, 598, 623, 643, 658, 674, 709, 733, 747, 754, 765, 767 filial piety 233 film-​making 605, 609–​10 finance/​financial industry/​financial institutions 45, 147, 148, 152, 169, 324, 416, 449, 473, 504, 508, 523, 537, 551, 554, 556, 607, 634; financial system 45, 147, 148, 151, 152, 169, 324, 416, 473, 508, 523, 537, 551, 554, 556, 607, 633 folklore 116, 680, 725 folklorization 659, 667, 676, 680, 737 foreign: anthropologists 4; ideologies 660; mosque sponsorship 752; religious workers 195; traders 560 former Soviet Union (fSU) 189; see also post-​Soviet; Soviet Union; USSR Foucault, Michel 102, 717, 726 Friedman, Eli 339 From Under the Vaults of the Mosque (K. Gertel 1927) 612 funding 5–​6, 8, mosque funding 748, 750, academic funding 23, 767, 769, NGO funding 198 fund transfer system (hawala) 553 Geertz, Clifford 83–​5, 518 gender/​gendering: gender representations 77, 98, 107, 245; masculine/​masculinity 98, 350, 423, 562, 723 genealogy/​ies 38, 123, 237, 658–​664; genealogical charts 663–​8 gentrification 136–​8 geography 2, 83, 91, 126, 209, 599, 701, 717–​24, 726, 733 global commodity chains 40; see also economy; trade global economy 514 globalization 514, 521–​4; global neoliberal economy 524–​5; production and consumption 525; transnational markets 521–​4; types of 593; see also economy, trade, migration gold embroiderers 638, 605 gold mining 463, 499, 501–​3, 510; see also mine Goody, Jack 175 Gorbachev, Mikhail 55, 57; perestroika reforms 56, 63; see also perestroika gornye tadzhiki, see Mountain Tajiks governance: formal/​informal 169–​70; gaps 159; informal local 166–​9 guardian (Kyrgyz: shaiyk) 354, 566, 567, 678, 719–​21, 723 Guattari, F. 483 guest 423–​6, 429 guilds 632–​5; gold-​embroiderers in Central Asia 606, 635; and sacred 636–​8; Uzbek cinema, on

777

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ early Soviet state 607–​16; weaving 634; see also craftsmen, pottery, textiles habitus 105, 242, 247, 529, 539, 744 Hadith 69, 441, 747, 755, 756 halal economy 530; see also economy halal food 528, 530–​3 Hamiev, Didar 120 Han Chinese 343–​5 haram food 530–​3 Hartog, François 672 hashar (voluntary work for community) 134, 212, 748, 751; see also ashar hawala 553; see also fund transfer system healers/​healing: ‘black’ healers 400; in Central Asia 392; at mazars 401; healing agency, in Kazakhstan/​Kyrgyzstan: animism literature 392; complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) 393; healers vs. spirits 399–​403; living with spirits 393–​5; overview of 392; response, to spirit calling 396–​9; spiritual healing 392; see also bakhshy health: ill health, cultural notion of 368; rituals 373–​4; see also children’s health Heathershaw, John 97 Hegel, G. W. F. 383–​4 heritage 658–​68, 673–​4, 695–​6; identities 659 heritage communities, in Kyrgyzstan 659, 668; clans 658–​9, 662–​7; genealogy books, as heritage 661–​2; see also clan; genealogy Herzfeld, Michael 423–​4, 686, 691 heterotopy 726 hierarchy 22, 24, 26, 132, 137, 168, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 237, 238, 242, 248, 256, 261, 290–​2, 424, 471, 472, 474, 493, 588, 600, 614, 719, 721; hierarchical academic system 766; see also academic Hirschkind, Charles 733 historicity 672 history 21, 96, 98, 174, 313, 321, 449–​51, 485–​9, 673–​5, 691–​2, 750–​1 Ho, Engseng 592, 595 holy sites, maintenance and pilgrimage 12; see also mazar; sacred site Hölzchen, Yanti 763–​4 home 155, 228, 231; for Qazaqs 115–​116; marital 181–​182; inspection time 340; see also domestic care, migration homeland 30, 121–​126, 304–​310, 548, 557, 595, 600 hospitality: Afghan 423; anthropology of 423–​4; commercialisation of 429–​31; nineteenth-​ century travellers 422 House of Culture 287, 287–​8, 288, 666 houses 32; 210-​215, 289; ownership of 146

housing 2, 10, 31, 32, 114, 130, 133, 136, 144–​6, 149–​51, 216, 217, 239, 257, 293, 452, 508; debt, burden of 2; women’s campaign 151 Hui Muslim Chinese communities 743 human-​animal relations 380; domains of 380; dynamic/​intersubjective qualities of 382; on hunt 382–​4; see also animal; animal-​human relations; multispecies humanitarian institutions 592, 595–​8, 600 human-​like beings 392 human rights 106, 194, 197, 198, 201, 257, 315, 320, 321, 324, 327, 328, 330, 409, 411, 580, 672; activists 327, 409; see also protest human terrain system 428 Humphrey, Caroline 56, 130 Hungry Steppe 468; see also Mirza Cho’l ICTs see information communication system identity/​identities 30, 34, 72, 77, 90, 91, 93, 94, 98, 99, 138, 456, 568, 595, 750; ‘borderland’ 108; change of 91; clan 661; colonial/​ colonialism 596; communal 674, 680; national 305, 612; politics 99–​100; ethnic 30, 35, 117; heritage 659; see also ethnic; gender; queer; religious ideology 305; and migration 328–​9; anti-​Sufi 742; Bolshevik regime 607; Communist Party, in Karakalpakstan 30; foreign ideologies 660; Han cultural values 336; Islam as ideology 70, 72, 735, 739; Kyrgyzstan 724–​5; Marxism 28, 61; Marxism-​Leninism 309; Uzbekistan, national independence 303–​4, 308, 310, 313, 314; patriotisation policies 303–​4; Pelkmans’ discussion of 72; Salafi ideology 739; Soviet 31, 60; Tajikistan, national ideology 6; workers, transformation/​education of 309; see also Marx, Islam, language Ili region 685, 689 imaginaries 209, 612, 660; bifurcated imaginary 135 imam197, 398, 416, 417, 439, 534, 595–​601, 613, 710, 732, 739–​41, 747, 748, 750–​3 see also mullah(s) imperial networks 592, 595–​8; see also empire independence 194, 196; for former Central Asian Soviet Republics 623; gendered differences 212; global economy 499; global market 647–​9; Ivan’s independence 233; Kyrgyzstan’s independence 135, 174; national 303–​4; national independence ideology 303–​5, 308, 314; neighbourhood-​based moral discourse 219; post-​independence study, of Islam 709; post-​soviet independence 724; pre-​and post-​ independence research 762; religious resurgence 189; Rishton pottery 655; Soviet era 188–​9; Tajikistani 292; Uzbekistan 30, 647

778

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ Indian Ocean 592, 596, 601 industry: industrial economics 31; see also economy inequality 21, 108, 114, 280, 383, 488; class 144, 156; economic 144, 275, 488, 707; housing 146, 150; socio-​economic 488; women’ s resistance to 144 informality 320, 577–​88; see also governance information communication system (ICTs) 237–​48 infrastructure(s) 274–​80; communication 40; overview of 269–​72; representational projects 267; transport infrastructure 272–​3; Xinjiang, ethnicisation of 275–​80 injustice: colonial 99, 337, 339; epistemic 8; neoliberalism 145, 154; see also colonialism, human rights, protest innovation 305, 368, 473, 591, 636, 645, 651, 652, 655, 660, 685, 742; ‘un-​Islamic innovations’ 742; see also artisan, Islam, learning, skill, tradition Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences 22, 26 intangible cultural heritage 664, 676 interdependence/​interdependency 10, 11, 205, 207, 209–​20; criss-​crossing relations of 212; social life 211 interdisciplinarity 7, 763 International Crisis Group 44, 713 international division of labour, bureaucracy 329 international donor community 144, 162, 169 see also non-​governmental organization International Labour Organization 44, 254 international organisations 394, 711 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 254, 322 intimacy 137, 238–​9, 241–​2, 686; challenge, by local norms/​values 241–​2; social and family relationships 242 irrigation 39, 42, 45, 48, 167, 212, 463, 465, 467–​9, 471, 477, 506, 594, 674 Islam 70–​5, 189, 706; academics 70, 74; in analysis of Talal Asad 74, 75; anthropology of 7, 10, 18, 68–​70, 74, 75; Asad’s Islam, centrality of practice 74–​5; Asad’s notion of 73; in Central Asia 68, 69, 72, 75–​7, 709–​11, 750–​1; centrality of practice 74–​5; conceptualisation of 18; context of experience 709–​11; discursive tradition 68; “foreign” movements of 215 (see also foreign); history of 750–​1; Idea of Anthropology of Islam 68; in India 708; Khalid, Adeeb 71–​3, 613, 709; Kyrgyz 356; perception as threat 711–​13; prayer 568; religious life, in Soviet Central Asia 75–​7; revival of 368; studies of 18, 68, 763; tenets of 528; theorizing, in Central Asia 70–​4; transformation of 709–​11; in Uzbekistan

70; varieties of 400, 529, 680, 713; see also religion, mosque, mullah, sacred site, Tablighi Jamaat, Ismaili Islamic radicalism 712 Islamic Renaissance Party in Tajikistan (IRPT) 58, 712 Islamic scholars 352 Island of Civilization, An (Mätsäydi Mätqasim) 678–​9 Ismailbekova, Aksana 173, 768–​9 Ismaili Islam: Ismaili institutions 592; religious identity 591; Ismaili networks 11, 546, 591, 602 Ismaili Pamiris 600 isolation 21, 35, 126, 247, 327, 342, 664, 679 Istanbul 253–​6; Kumkapi neighbourhood 577; migrant workers 545; Uzbek migrant workers 581–​8 Iug-​2 neighbourhood 130–​1; Bishkek 130, 132–​4, 136, 140; see also Bishkek, neighbourhood, urban Jackals of Ravat, The by K. Gertel 613 Jacquesson, Svetlana 606 Jadid, Jadidism (Muslim reformists, Turkestan) 607, 613 Jalal Abad 151, 210, 211, 219, 664, 666, 719, 724 jamaat: see Tablighi Jamaat James, William 703 Japarov, Sadyr 413 jealousy 243–​4 Jeltoqsan Incident (the December Incident, 1986) 122 justice: colonialism 99; economic 448; environmental sustainability 465, 477; ethical framework 108; failure 150; ongoing search 727; social justice 150, 606, 676, 680, 681; solidarities/​demands 114; Tablighi 407; see also ethics, fairness, injustice, moral economy Kadyrbekov, Nurjigit 532–​3, 538 Kalmyk 750 kalpaks (Kyrgyz traditional male hat) 154 kalym 33, 98 Kamalov, Sabyr 24, 26, 30 Kamp, Marianne 144 Karakalpak(s) 28; Karakalpak Autonomous Region 27; Karakalpakistan: kolkhoz workers 30; Utemisov, A. 25; Zhdanko, T. 25, 30, 32 Karakol 750 Kara-​Suu bazaar 517, 519–​20, 524 Karimov, Islam 303, 524 Karutz, Richard 44 Karzai, Hamid 162, 170 Kashgar 92, 272, 276, 279, 622, 635, 674–​6, 680–​1, 685, 688–​90, 694

779

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ kasiet 719–​21, 726 Kazakh/​Qazaq activists 102, 107 Kazakhstan/​Qazaqstan 17, 29, 117–​18, 121; bazaars 520; demonology 395; farming 463; healing 356, 393, 405; Islam in 710, 722; miner 446; mines 9; oil boom 468; pastoralism 487–​8; territory, in ‘Hungry Steppe’ 468; livestock 88; teaching anthropology in 83; Almaty 117; ethnic minority 116; exclusion, belonging/​experiences of 117–​18; identity 122; Qazaqification 117; Qazaqstani environment, multicultural 125; social and cultural alienation 118; Xinjiang, migrants 115, 116, 124, 126, 336; cityscapes 139; Uyghurs in 733: see also border, space Kazemi, Said Reza 545 Kenjaev, Safarali 56 Kesküla, Eeva 446 Khiva/​Khivan Khanate 23, 27, 43, 437, 622, 642, 648 Khojamyarov, Quddus 689 Khorezm: architecture 17; expedition 32; regional dialects 307 Kichine-​Too village: activists 503–​5; miners 509–​510; labor activism 344 Kikuta, Haruka 605, 606, 766 kinship: anthropology of 174–​7, 237; ‘dominant’ idioms of 173; ethnic kinship discourse 264; manager’s rhetoric of 472; Osh Uzbek kinship practice 113; post-​Soviet Central Asia 225; Tajik norms and practices 238; tribal-​kinship system 120; Turkic kinship 206, 256; see also family, clan, mother, marriage kirene, illness 368, 373 Kirghiz Soviet Republic 726; see also Kyrgyzstan Kleinman, A. 366, 369, 370, 370 Klenke, Kerstin 768 knowledge 76, 219; knowledge production on Central Asia 1, 3, 5–​8, 17, 83–​4, 97, 763, 770; coloniality of 7; of craft 622, 625; of Islam 71–​2, 76, 417, 561, 572; of kin 173; ‘lack of legal’ 318–​322; medical 373; musical 689, 691, 736, 742; networks 262; pastoralism and agriculture 49, 470, 489; of religion 532, 703, 708, 751, 753; of sacred sites 720; of Tajik 291; see also academic, colonialism, tradition Kokand 40 kolkhoz (collective farm) 23, 136, 470–​4, 486–​8, 518, 519; see also farm, agriculture, pastoralism Komsomol 113, 152, 520, 598 Kuan-​Hsing, Chen 99 Kudaibergenova, D. 4, 8 Kum-​Bel mine 500–​4, 502, 507 Kumkapi 577, 586 Kurak (textile artform) 632

Kurultai (Kyrgyz: people’s council) 409, 411, 413, 418 Kymys (fermented mare’s milk) 533–​7 Kyrgyz: 5, 89, 91, 174, 216, 228; clans 660; proverbs 630, 722; values 154; kyrgyzchylyk (kyrgyzness) 353, 373; see also ancestors, ethnic, ethno-​national, identity, Manas, kinship, courts Kyrgyzstan: anti-​debt movement 113; gold mining communities 499; identity 661; independence 135, 725; Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (KSSR) 224, 230, 533; Kyrgyzstani Christians 193; Kyrgyzstani transnational families 248; neoliberal intervention 144; non-​governmental organization (NGO) 195; ‘post-​socialist’ logic 234; religious authorities 528, 750; rurality 135; shyrdak 628; Spiritual Administration of Muslims 534; State Commission for Religious Affairs (SCRA) 190; Tablighi Jamaat community 407, 434 labour: activism 344; calculation 44; domestication 260–​2; exploitation 40, 587; female labour 579; neoliberal commodification 146; see also work, worker labour market: domestic 258 labour migration 178; patterns of 595; from Turkmenistan to Turkey 254 Lake Yssykköl 750, 752 land 42, 43, 45, 60–​2, 135, 150, 151, 381, 466–​8, 470, 477, 503, 752; neoliberal privatisation of 146; see also agriculture, homeland, pastoralism, overgrazing, salinity/​salinization Land Code, for Tajik SSR 60 land degradation 11, 466; agricultural systems/​ rural livelihoods 465; Central Asia 466–​8; see also overgrazing, salinization, soil land ownership 465; private 477; southern Central Asia 465; state’s ‘exclusive’ right 60; taxation 473; see also land degradation, property rights languages 3, 7; roots 29; Arabic language 570; Arabic-​language religious formulae 735; Central Asian 767; Chinese language 277, 280, 569; conceptual 27, 34, 85; English language 323, 532; English-​language anthropology studies 11; gendering 292–​5; hierarchy of 290–​2; languages, in Tajikistan 284–​98; Law on Language 290; overview of 284–​7; Pamir languages 591, 594; Persian-​language scholars 9; Qazaq traditions 121; Russian 295–​6, 322, 324, 568; Russian-​language television 372; social and cultural contexts of 120; Tajik-​ language categories 330; Turkic languages 492, 676; Uyghur language 680; Uzbek language 303, 581, 643; see also ideology of language, Arabic, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik

780

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ laws: anti-​monopoly law 318; ‘anti-​sodomy’ laws 98; bankruptcy 152; codification of 411; customary law 411; customization of 413–​16 (see also custom); failure of, Kyrgyzstani law 194; on formal political organization 159; immigration law 319, 579, 580; Islamic Law 167, 409, 412, 416; Kyrgyzstan, religious law 409; labour protection, Kyrgyzstani law 451; ‘lack of knowledge’ 318; Law on Foreigners and International Protection 257; Law on Language 286, 290; Law on Religion 199; Mahalla Law (1993) 216; migrant workers 323, 328; migration law 319, 320; private property 150; on provincial councils 163; Qur’anic law 167; religious law 168; Russian language 321, 327; Turkish employment 258; Turko-​Mongolian laws 417; village organizations, in rural Afghanistan 166; see also legal pluralism learning 74, 75, 198, 291, 328, 509, 531, 562, 569, 571, 572, 588, 605, 622–​39, 645, 648, 649, 706, 740, 762, 767; textile skills, Central Asia 622; theory 624; see also knowledge legal anthropology 411, 413 legal pluralism, in Central Asia 410, 412, 417; Kyrgyz Aksakal courts, customization of 413–​16; shariat, customization of 416–​18; state customization/​religious law, in Kyrgyzstan 409; see also aksakal, elder lessons 209 Levin, Theodore 687 Levshin, Aleksei 83, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93 LGBTQ\+​ movements 96, 97, 102, 768; see also activists; human rights; queer liberalization 56 Lindholm, Charles 422, 423 literature 3, 25, 26, 33, 70, 74, 75, 97, 119, 144, 173, 175, 176, 194, 199, 237, 239, 369, 392, 396, 410, 422, 423, 427, 436, 482, 499, 500, 525, 532, 537, 538, 550, 556, 561, 562, 606, 608, 612, 614, 685–​96, 725, 735, 747, 763, 765; on Central Asia 144; in Russian 436 livestock 18, 88, 148, 473, 482–​93, 501, 503–​5, 510, 529, 531; breeding 505, 511; see also human-​animal relations, sheep Louw, Maria 351 Loya Jirga 160, 162, 164 madrassahs/​madrasas 41, 437, 533, 610, 743, 747, 751 mahalla (residential neighbourhood) 11, 39, 124, 134–​36, 140, 177–​78, 184, 205–​206, 209–​219; committee 134, 209, 354, 311 Maktaaral district (Kazakhstan) 465–​9, 472–​8 male socialization 131–​4, 214–​216, 350, 434, 622; see also men, masculine/​masculinity

male traders 429, 561–​65, 568–​69, 573; see also traders malik (customary village leader, Afghanistan) 167, 168 malnutrition 375 Manas: epic 664, 723–​4, 725; hero 400, 664, 723; programme of health reform 367; sacred site 724, 726 manaschy (performer of the epic Manas) 353 Manifesto of Queer Communism 96, 100 marginalization 3, 8, 94, 116, 117, 140, 147, 155, 205, 223, 226, 232, 234–​35, 244, 264, 591, 592, 673, 737, 742, 743 marginality, of Central Asia in anthropological scholarship 1, 3, 8, 763–​64, 765, 766, 767 margins 1, 3, 8, 9, 46, 97, 223, 225, 614, 764, 767 market: see bazaar, economy marriage: as strategy of security 173–​185; customs 32, 33, 75, 77, 190, 199, 214, 230, 237, 285, 399, 547, 552, 628, 753; forced 98, 243, 427, 755, 759; frequency of 184; in Uzbekistan 182; symbols for 353; without kalyng (bride wealth) 183 Marr, Nikolai 27, 28, 29, 20, 35, 37 Marsden, Magnus 407, 422, 428, 523, 529, 539 Martens, Christine 632, 637 Marxism, 61, 88, 228, 325; in Soviet ideology 21, 28, 61 Marxism-​Leninism 303, 304, 309 Marx, Karl 325, 326, 338 masculine/​masculinity 98, 350, 423, 562, 723; see also male socialization, men mast (drunk) 350, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386–​7, 389–​390; see also drunk master-​slave dialectic 383–​6 material assistance/​compensation of moral damages 11, 408, 439, 446–​59, 471 material culture 11, 17, 30, 83, 605–​6, 622–​639, 642–​656, 680 Mauss, Marcel 608, 616, 629 mazars (sacred sites/​mausoleums) 90, 394, 396, 398, 399, 401, 404, 632, 701, 718–​721, 723–​27; McBrien, Julie 10, 18, 73, 288, 296, 566, 701, 710, 747, 749, 750, 757, 766 medical 350, 360, 365–​6, 369–​70; anthropology 350; insurance 318–​21; knowledge 373; pluralism 350, 366, 369–​71, 375; see also health; medicine/​ biomedicine medicine/​ biomedicine 149, 294, 365, 368, 369, 372, 373, 375, 393, 442, 737 Megoran, Nick 97, 174 mehman (guest) 551; see also guest; hospitality Meirkhan, Zhaina 10, 114, 115

781

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ memory 55, 63, 72, 102, 287, 354, 393, 474, 493, 551, 632, 662, 664, 672, 719, 752 men 3, 73, 96, 113, 131–​134, 147, 154, 156, 167, 168, 180, 184, 212, 214–​216, 239, 244–​46, 248, 338, 350, 379, 382, 385, 387, 419, 507, 549, 561, 622–​23, 627, 630, 721, 747; see also male socialization mental illness 399, 342, 375, 394, 398–​99, 552, 554 Meta-​heritage see heritage methodological nationalism 98, 99, 238 methodology 27, 35, 86, 99, 320, 573, 607 microfinance institutions (MFIs) 147, 151, 152, 155, 156 Middle East/​Middle Eastern 1, 3, 77, 211, 423, 430, 437, 553, 562, 564, 569–​71, 689, 691, 733, 734, 739–​43, 765 migrant workers 319, 320, 324, 327, 329; idea of 319; ICT-​based communication and 237–​249; in labour market 325–​9; making of 322–​5; representation of 326; to Russia 321; seasonal 284, 323; Turkish police and 585; Turkmen female 256; Uzbek 579, 583 migration 9–​11, 27, 28, 46, 77, 88, 98, 107, 114, 117–​19, 124, 131, 135, 175, 178, 181, 238, 240, 241, 245, 246, 248, 249, 254–​8, 260, 264, 268, 272, 279, 285, 288, 289, 293, 295, 318–​31, 338, 339, 422, 472, 475, 488, 523, 545, 550, 551, 555, 578–​88, 591–​600, 733, 768; bureaucracy 319; Central Asia, feminisation of 254–​6; from Tajikistan to Russia 238, 318–​331; industry 319; management of 319; of Qazaqs from Xinjiang 114, 115–​126 migration policy 118, 240, 260, 264, 268, 321 miners: artisanal 407, 463, 464, 500–​511; compensation for death of 447–​9, 455–​8; moral economy of 447–​9; working life of 408, 446–​459 mines 500–​4, 502, 507; Kazakhstan 9; worker 451, 453, 454, 457 mining: companies 503–​5; conflicts 511; industrial accidents 446; sites 509; small-​scale 500 mirob (water manager) system 48 Mirzacho’l steppe (Hungry Steppe) 468 Mittermaier, Amira 351–​353, 360, 759 mobile pastoralism 484, 486, 488–​9, 545; see also pastoral nomadism mobility 2, 5, 8, 11, 44, 56, 88, 113, 133, 135, 136, 144, 145, 149–​53, 181, 212–​14, 219, 238–​41, 244, 245, 255, 256, 258–​60, 269–​82, 286, 287, 290, 319, 323, 330, 422, 429, 430, 434–​45, 482–​6, 488–​91, 502, 508, 523, 548, 549, 568, 569, 572, 580, 584, 585, 591–​6, 607, 609, 612, 688, 717, 724, 732, 738, 747, 748 modernization 5, 69, 218, 593, 678, 687; ‘import-​ export’ logic of 98; in Xinjiang 274–​5; of

mining equipment 449, 451; Soviet project of 287, 296, 466, 607, 608, 613, 659 money 8, 29, 88, 131, 138, 144, 168, 181, 198, 237–​49, 261, 289, 308, 315, 318, 325, 329, 388, 389, 401, 416, 429, 438, 447, 448, 452–​5, 458–​9, 475, 508–​11, 521–​3, 538, 547–​57, 563, 572, 583, 708, 764; fair compensation, money/​reproduction of society 452–​5; for free 429; Money and the morality of exchange 447; neoliberal commodification 146; polluting potential of 458; transfers 239–​41 Mongolia 10, 127, 273, 350, 417, 447, 458, 459, 629, 630, 631, 710, 762 Montgomery, David W. 5, 394, 701, 703 moral damages 455; dead miners and 458; wages of living workers 458 moral economy(ies) 11, 439, 446–​9, 463–​4, 474 morality 72, 209, 229, 309, 423, 447, 457, 537, 560, 562, 568, 573, 711, 742, 749; see also ethics; moral economy more-​than-​human relations 11, 349, 350, 392–​403; see animal; human-​animal relations Moscow 5, 22, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33–​5, 50, 57, 60, 63, 546, 595; Central Asian migrants in 213, 325, 575, 581–​9, 599, 607–​8, 610, 611, 646 Moskovskoe obespechenie (‘Moscow provisioning’) 287–​8, 467 mosques 747–​50, 752–​4; construction 750; davat and 754–​7; religious leaders 743; sponsorship 12; worship 693; Yssykköl region 751 Mostowlansky, Till 10–​11, 290, 296, 546, 593, 764, 768 mother(s)/​mothering 107, 113, 120, 173, 176–​83, 239, 242, 308, 342–​3, 355, 357, 371–​3, 533; as activists 152–​156; as healers 11, 350, 365–​368, 373–​4; moral authority of 222–​229, 277, 325, 625–​6, 628 Mountain Tajiks 594–​5 Muftiat 464, 528, 535, 536, 540, 751–​3, 759 Mullah(s) 87, 166–​9, 350, 355, 359, 368, 370, 387, 395, 397, 398, 400, 401, 721; see also imam multilingual: ethnically diverse community 286; House of Culture 287 multi-​species ethnography 382; see also animal; human-​animal relations muqam: Äjäm 693; Bayat and Iraq 693; Chäbbiyat 693–​4; cultural models and modernization of 687–​8; heritage fever and heritage suppression 695–​6; Ili tradition 689; making history of 691–​2; meaning of 606; melodies 685; modernizing performers of 688–​9; muqamchi (muqam musicians) 685, 688; Muqam Ensemble 686, 694; Muqam Research Office 685, 688, 690; Qumul 677,

782

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ 686; Rak and Pänjigah muqam 693; traditions 686 (see also tradition); Turdi Akhun 690; Twelve Muqam (On ikki muqam) 675, 685–​8, 690, 693; Ushshaq 693; Uyghur Muqam of Xinjiang 695; Uyghur music 11, 685 Murghab 591–​5, 601 Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick 113, 164–​5, 267 music 11, 118, 139, 190, 191, 193, 268, 302–​315, 330, 387, 571, 606, 608, 674, 685–​9, 691–​5, 732, 735–​7, 768; among Uyghurs in Xinjiang 685–​696; as source of contention 735–​7; performers 268, 302, 313, 315, 606, 685–​691, 693–​6; popular music (estrada) in Uzbekistan 302–​15 Muslim 18, 72, 74, 188, 195–​6; anthropologists 3, 72, 75–​7; being Muslim 72; in Central Asia 68, 74, 75, 712; clothes, in Yiwu 570; cosmopolitanism 560–​2; daily prayers 189; Egyptian woman 570; identity 563; institutions 747; Islamic tradition 75; Jews/​Shia 741; Kyrgyz family 199; oral histories 75; population 751; reformist literary heritage 614; religious and cultural life of 339; revolts in Arab 607; Soviet Central Asian Muslim 75–​7; Soviet Period 73; Turkic 339; in Uzbekistan 354; Western literatures 173; women’s apparel 536; see also Islam; Islamic law; prayer Muslimness 18, 68, 70–​1, 73, 75, 374, 750, 757; in Central Asia 72, 78; Kyrgyzstani 536; see also Islam Muslim traders: in Asia 562; male 565; in Middle East 562; women working 561, 563 Nader, Laura 413 Nasritdinov, Emil 11, 72, 407, 445, 710, 759 national identity 34, 72, 77, 98, 198, 285, 296, 297, 305, 612; see also ethno-​nationalism nationality/​nationalities policy 29, 30, 32, 255, 269, 271, 426, 571, 594, 608, 612, 613, 687, 710 nationalization 64n13, 175 nation-​building 17, 21–​2, 27–​31, 98, 121, 174, 285, 296, 608, 668n1, 724–​7 Natures-​Cultures 40, 48–​9 neighbourhood(s) 113, 130–​134, 136–​139, 178, 180, 184, 205, 209–​220, 285, 396, 567, 577, 581, 634, 668n2, 677, 738, 744, 757–​8; anthropology of 219–​20; as locus of moral discourse 218–​19, 242, 245; Uzbek-​majority 210, 235n8; see also mahalla neoliberalism/​neoliberal/​neoliberalization 99, 131, 133, 144–​7, 149, 150, 225, 463, 464, 500, 511, 515, 524–​5, 593, 659 network(s) 11, 22, 24, 25, 35, 82, 113–​4, 145, 174, 182, 196–​7, 209, 213, 225–​6, 244, 248, 255–​6, 262–​4, 422, 428, 437, 440, 473, 516,

537, 546, 552, 57–​584, 588, 591–​602, 659, 701, 710, 721, 754, 761, 764 ‘New Kinship’ studies 237 ‘New Silk Road’ programme 339 1990s 4, 6, 11, 17, 18, 22, 56, 60, 62, 63, 70, 115, 117, 131–​4, 137, 138, 140, 146, 147, 149, 197, 212, 216, 219, 238, 246, 253–​5, 258, 269, 323, 325, 360, 413, 425, 426, 438, 487, 491, 492, 499, 500, 510, 517, 519, 524, 530, 545, 548, 549, 553, 557, 562, 563, 568, 599, 609, 623, 625, 642, 643, 647, 652, 655, 673, 680, 688, 694, 706, 720, 732, 737, 741, 751, 754, 762 nomadic pastoralism 46, 482–​4, 488; see also pastoralism nomadism 11, 51n12, 482, 483–​6, 494n9 non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) 84, 165, 198, 200n11, 201n12, 206, 248, 268, 319–​321, 330, 623, 724 norms/​normative 17, 98, 104, 108, 113, 123, 144, 147, 148, 154–​6, 165, 167, 206, 215, 223, 232, 237, 238, 241–​2, 244, 245, 247–​9, 255, 257, 277, 321, 365, 388, 410, 413, 448, 515, 529, 554, 556, 561, 563, 582, 584, 585, 587, 703, 708, 722, 733, 744; religious, social 245 novostroiki (semi/​illegal settlements) 136, 137, 140, 210–​11, 213, 216 nuclear family 248, 548, 552; see also family Nur-​Sultan (Kazakhstan) 118, 119, 121; see also Astana oases 18, 39–​41, 45–​9, 477, 308, 676–​8, 680, 682n6, 685, 693 “Open Up the West” programme 269, 273, 339, 344 oral history 31, 40, 75, 104, 721 Orenburg 45, 48, 85–​8, 104 Orthodox Christianity 73, 189, 190, 196, 200n9, 435 OSCE 58, 60 Osh 3, 113, 114, 134–​6, 140, 146, 149, 150, 151, 174, 177–​80, 183, 184, 194, 206, 210–​12, 214, 216, 217, 219, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 231, 292, 518, 524, 530, 531, 666, 706, 707, 724, 725 overgrazing 18, 505 O’zbekkonsert 302, 304, 308, 314–​15 Pamiri population/​diaspora 546, 592–​8, 600–​1 Parry, Jonathan 447, 452, 459 partridge-​hunting 11, 381–​2, 390 passing-​out ceremony (kamar baste) 633, 638 pastoralism 10, 17, 18, 40, 45–​6, 51n12, 84, 467, 482–​9, 545; see also nomadic pastoralism paternalism 268, 274, 334–​46, 371 patriotism 303, 304, 312

783

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ patronage 35, 121, 145, 164, 689, 739 Pedersen, Morten Axel 350, 390, 483, 492 Pelkmans, Mathijs 72, 358, 396, 710 People’s Republic of China (PRC) see China perestroika 6, 18, 55–​64, 519, 645, 717–​9 perezhitki (‘holdovers’/​‘survivals’) 5, 22, 31–​33, 392 performance 11, 75, 76, 118–​24, 165, 191, 281, 288, 302, 305, 306, 314, 315, 319, 384, 452, 547, 605, 606, 666, 685–​96, 701, 732, 733, 737, 739, 741; licence 305 performer 31, 119, 268, 302, 313, 315, 606, 685, 688–​91, 693–​5 person/​personhood 134, 175, 177, 192, 193, 197, 231, 271, 297, 303, 310, 313, 315, 320, 321, 349, 379, 392, 393, 395, 397, 400, 402, 417, 566, 599, 678, 757 Peshkova, Svetlana 710 Piety (toqua) 78, 338, 529, 532, 539, 561–​3, 566–​8, 573, 710, 762 pilgrimage 12, 39, 213, 379, 400, 717–​22, 724–​7, 751 pir (Sufi master or saint) 596, 636 pluralism 56, 135, 349, 350, 366, 369–​71, 409–​18, 599, 676 Polanyi, Karl 144, 149, 521 Poliakov, Sergei 5, 33, 70 police 154, 231, 234, 271, 293, 321, 325, 335, 339, 342, 344, 424, 425, 469, 472, 475, 476, 523, 561, 577, 580, 581, 583–​5, 711, 712 policy: affirmative action 22, 26; agricultural policy 463, 466, 477n3; centralization of 162–​3, 165; of Corporate Social Responsibility 504–​7; financial policy 151; foreign policy 3; language policy 286, 292, 296; migration policy 257, 319–​321, 330; one-​child policy 176; policy framework 267; public policy 769; security 704, 712–​3; social policy 216, 253; Soviet economic 435; Soviet nationalities 27, 32, 608, 612, 615, 616n5, 647 political agency 144–​5, 152–​5, 156, 424; see also protest political revolution 336–​7 politics 2, 7, 10, 18, 19, 56–​8, 68–​78, 96, 99, 100, 139, 144, 145, 182, 209, 210, 219, 274, 285, 303, 304, 309, 311–​12, 314, 315, 338, 350, 389, 424, 425, 428, 528, 529, 571, 606, 658, 689–​90, 704, 707, 709, 712, 735, 766 pollution 10, 448 post-​socialism/​postsocialism 100, 390; as subject of anthropology 763; traumatic experience of 193 post-​Soviet 3, 8, 18, 19, 23, 30, 35, 39, 63, 68–​71, 73, 75–​7, 83, 90, 93, 96, 97, 133, 136, 137, 144, 146, 149, 188, 215, 218, 219, 223, 225, 229, 232, 255, 256, 368, 371, 392,

435, 436, 438, 443, 446, 447, 465, 466, 468, 472, 491, 499, 514, 515, 518, 563, 579, 592, 599, 606, 658, 659, 661, 719, 723, 725, 748, 764, 766, 769; Central Asia 68–​70, 223, 225, 466, 514; Central Asian bazaars 514; ownership regime 465; privatization, of housing market 133 pottery 642–​656 poverty/​poor 18, 27, 41, 45, 137, 145, 148, 153, 216, 219, 226, 245, 254, 339, 355, 389, 441, 499, 507–​8, 511, 580, 679 power, disciplinary mechanism of 23, 98, 152–​5, 161, 162, 164, 168, 170, 305, 310–​12, 384, 387–​90, 717–​27 prayer 76, 189, 193, 196, 278, 350, 354–​5, 386–​7, 389, 394, 396–​7, 403, 436–​7, 440, 444, 561, 566, 568, 584, 597, 599, 636–​7, 638–​9, 708, 732, 734–​5, 737–​8, 740, 741, 747, 749, 753–​6, 759n15; see also religious practices precarity 206, 225, 226, 253, 254, 257, 258, 261, 268, 525, 765 privatisation 60–​63, 64n13, 118, 133, 146, 147–​150, 188, 255, 414, 466, 471–​3, 474, 477, 487–​8, 491–​2, 519, 623, 648 property rights 59; neoliberal regime of 150; Soviet ‘restructuring’ 19; see also collectivization; privatization Prophet 193, 355, 416, 436, 437, 441, 443, 562, 566, 594, 721, 755, 756, 758 protection 26, 32, 44, 113, 114, 116, 122, 126, 132, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154, 165, 175, 177, 181, 184, 194, 197, 206, 211, 230, 231, 233, 234, 245, 256, 257, 259, 261, 293, 320, 321, 323, 324, 355, 381, 395, 399, 400, 437, 451, 471, 511, 521, 523, 525, 577, 583, 584, 632, 634–​5, 649, 660, 673, 675, 679, 692, 721 protection racket 583, 584 protest 63, 150–​2, 154–​5, 339, 344, 345, 357, 451, 458, 466, 474, 499, 500–​3, 508, 511; see also resistance, riots Protestant missionaries 194 public services 228, 487 public space 530, 583, 608, 732 publishing: of genealogies 661–​4; of Uyghur histories 672, 680–​1, 682n7; on Central Asia 7, 12, 769 Qarakul: breeding 48; grazing habits 46; market, in Bukhara 46, 47; trade 46 Qazaqs: see Kazakhs Qazaqstan 117–​18, 121; Almaty 117; ethnic minority 116; exclusion, belonging/​experiences of 117–​18; identity 122; Qazaqification 117; Qazaqstani environment, multicultural 125; social and cultural alienation 118; Xinjiang,

784

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ migrants 115, 116, 124, 126; see also Kazakhstan Qudratullah Beg 595 queer 96, 97, 99, 100, 108; Central Asia 96–​108; communism 96, 100, 108; decolonial politics 99–​101; kvir, in Russian 96; regions 99; theory 96–​7, 99, 101, 108 Qumul 606, 674, 676–​8, 681, 686 Quran/​Qur’an 69, 167, 371, 394, 393, 532, 534, 637, 737, 739, 742, 747–​8, 750; bank loans 534; Egyptian Quran recitation 9; fasting 196; see also missionary, prayer Qur’anic law 167; see also Islamic law Qur’anic recitation 737, 739, 742 racism/​racist 98, 274, 321, 327, 329, 335, 337, 343, 344, 451, 769 radicalism 712, radicalization 329, radical equality 101, radical political Islam 309, 711 railway/​railroad 48, 269–​80 Ramadan 302, 308, 358, 561, 569, 739 Rasanayagam, Johan 71, 710 reciprocal, reciprocity 178, 212, 237, 242, 313, 448, 463, 492, 552, 556, 718, 727 redistribution 61, 150, 463, 474 reeducation 228 ‘reeducation’ campaign 117, 334–​9; ‘reeducation time’ 342–​5 Reeves, Madeleine 1–​12, 136, 148, 244, 287, 319 reform(s), perestroika 56, 63; health care reforms 336–​7, land reform 462, 475, 488, reform socialism /​reform era 672, 680; political reform 162, 170 refugee 257, 322, 549, 550, 552, 555, 578, 579, 685, 761; from Afghanistan 423–​5; Uyghur 685 rehabilitation centres 226, 232 religion: Central Asia, security, and anthropology 703; conceptualizations of 73; cultural ‘holdovers’ 5; definition of 73; in Europe/​North America 73; marketplace 188, 199; religious actors 73; religious conflict 199; see also conflict, Christianity, healers, holy sites, Islam, law religious practice 18, 76–​77, 189, 444, 560, 565, 693–​5, 721, 735 religious revival 7, 296, 368, 371, 733–​4, 744; religious tolerance 188, 198–​9, 303; see also activism remittance(s): 226, 238, 242, 246, 289, 472, 475, 579, disputes 554–​6; elder(s) 555; family 556; flows 551–​2; materialise 552–​4 reproduction 153, 205, 227, 228, 249, 338, 447, 448, 452–​5, 457, 459; of livestock 490, 491 Republic of Tajikistan, see Tajikistan

resistance 57, 75, 144, 314, 345, 466, 503, 508, 555, 600, 675, 677, 719, 744; see also activist/​ activism; social movements, protest respect 33, 131–​2, 147, 176, 196, 205, 285, 293, 358, 401, 415, 426, 448, 452–​5, 464, 490, 585, 612, 638, 646, 667, 679, 768 reverberations: natures-​cultures in Bukharan oasis 48–​9; reverberating legacies 10; see also colonialism, Soviet Union riot(s) 57, 210, 448; see also protest Rishton ceramics 647; diversification of 643; factory 649; see also pottery, crafts risk 41, 48, 225, 247, 258, 276, 290, 382, 458, 711, 769; risk economy 438 ritual(s) 10, 49, 74, 196, 199, 261, 343, 353, 374, 383, 387, 389, 393, 492, 600, 658, 661, 664, 674, 721, 724, 726, 735, 738, 740–​4, 749, 755; life-​cycle rituals 375 ritual offerings 189, 393 road(s): 56, 59, 91–​2, 414–​5, 476; Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 269–​70; in Xinjiang 270–​4; roadblocks 270–​4, 511, 752; see also railroad, Silk Road Rogoff, Barbara 625 Roy, Olivier 166, 168 rural: 39, 615, 715, 757, courts 414; economies, in Bukharan oasis 18 (see also economy); healthcare 365; rural Xinjiang 678, 743; migration 131, 135, 210, 258, 289; mobility 281; ruralization of cities 136; see also agriculture, community, pastoralism, farms, village, livelihoods, poverty Russia: 2–​3, 30, 763–​4; ‘blacks’ (cherniye) 326; cosmopolitan aspirations 296; ‘entry-​ ban’ legislation 577 (see also migration law); ethnography 86; human rights in 321, 324; industry 42, 63; language attitudes 295; migration to 146, 178–​181, 216, 231, 236–​49; 255, 268, 285, 289, 297, 321, 323, 577, 582, 712; migration management/​illegalities 319; migration policies 240; migration regimes 578–​82; pre-​revolutionary 83; trade 40, 42, 45, 438, 521, 523, 563, 569 Russian Central Asian Studies 763; cinematography 60, 614; ethnicity/​nationality 245: ethnography 83, 86, 395; Federal Migration Service (FMS) 318; Geographical Society 86, 93; Russian language 3, 294, 324; online platforms 533; teachers, distributing lessons 294; television channels 372 Russian Turkestan 44–​5; see also Turkestan sacred sites see mazars SADUM see Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Kyrgyzstan Sahlins, Marshall 176, 237

785

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ salinity/​salinisation 46, 465, 467–​73, 474n4 salt (custom/​customary law) 409, 412, 416–​18, 722; see also tradition sanjïra (genealogy) 658–​61, 663, 665 Satybaldieva, Elmira 2, 10, 113, 149, 151, 508 Saudi Arabia 255, 567, 578, 733, 740, 741 Scarborough, Isaac McKean 18, 55, 267, 288 Schneider, David M. 176 school/​ schooling 118, 267, 292, 294, 444, 472, 476, 532, 624 626, 748 (see also education) ‘school of the street’ 132 Schröder, Philipp 211, 220n1, 523, 766–​7 science fiction 101–​7 secularism 7, 31, 72–​3, 75–​7, 78n4, n6, 188, 198, 532, 710, 757 security 39, 147, 164, 173–​5, 179, 183–​4, 225, 293, 582, 642, 703–​4, 708, 711–​13, 714n4; see also precarity securityscape 140 security services/​security officials 57, 63, 180, 407, 426, 582, 600 sedentarism 484 Sekerbaeva, Zhanar 105, 107 self-​help 147, 149, 371 sermon (bayan) 193, 441, 530, 533, 534, 538, 701, 706, 732, 733, 738, 739, 747, 756 sex 584, 587, 711 sexuality 91, 96–​108 sexual minorities 205, 215 sex worker 222, 234, 584, 587 shadow economy 225, 578–​9, 583, 588 Shakhtinsk (Kazakhstan) 446, 448–​452, 454, 456 shame (Kyrgyz: uyat) 145, 147, 154–​155, 179, 195, 196, 215, 244, 295, 344, 359, 562 sharia/​ shariat (Islamic law) 407, 409, 411, 412, 416–​18, 735 Sharora (Tajikistan) 55, 64n2 Shatalova, Oksana 100–​1, 103, 105–​107, 108n1 sheep 18, 39, 41, 45–​8, 50n1, 367, 379, 466, 484, 487, 488–​93, 533, 626–​7; breeding 41, 489–​490; sheep-​fat tail (kuiruk mai) 367, 375n6, 376n21 Shia Muslims 546, 546, 549, 591, 594, 741 shuttle trade/​traders 219, 255, 517, 522, 545, 562, 563, 568, 572, 577, 579, 581 shyrdak (felt carpet) 623, 628, 630, 631, 638 silk 50n1, 228, 623, 634–​5 Silk Road 92, 429, 437–​8, 682n6, 764; see also ‘New Silk Road’ skill: craft/​textile 2, 622–​39; healing 398; pottery 643, 645, 647, 652 small farms: cooperative 474–​6; on large plots 469–​71 smartphones 138, 241, 341, 555, 581–​2, 584 socalism/​socialist 9, 17, 21–​35, 121, 130, 135, 188, 226, 228, 229, 338, 407, 465, 593,

614, 679, 766; modernity 21, 35, 281, 658; villages 273 social etiquette 124, 126, 134, 138, 214, 302; see also morality; socialization socialization 131–​2, 138, 139, 140, 211 social media 205, 209, 213, 302, 308, 315, 346, 557, 571, 578, 581, 583–​5, 662, 733, 768; see also smartphones; WhatsApp social movements 99, 139, 144, 146, 155, 156; see also activist/​ activism social sciences 482, 488, 515, 518, 525, 612, 615, 762, 764, 769 social support 248, 507, 658; see also self-​help soil 42, 46, 48, 50n10, 463, 465–​477, 478n4; see also salinisation solidarity 10, 39, 113–​16, 119, 121, 122, 133, 134, 145, 166, 173, 184, 216, 219, 226, 240, 448, 472, 546, 578, 584, 588, 595, 614, 666, 679, 701, 753, 765 Solton-​Sary (Kyrgyzstan) 501, 502, 503, 509, 511 song 104, 191–​2, 306–​8, 311, 312, 687, 689, 667, 685–​688, 694, 737; see also soundscape sonic statecrafting 302–​3, 304–​5, 306–​9; see also Estrada sorghum 40–​1 sound 210, 278, 291, 312–​14, 359, 360, 381, 477, 493, 533, 554, 615, 694, 732–​44, 752, 764 soundscape 303, 312, 701, 732, 735, 739, 744 Soviet: academic structures 93; ethnography 22–​6; films 607; imperial state structure, formation of 608–​12; Soviet Central Asian Muslim 75–​7; transformation 31–​4 Soviet Central Asia 22–​6, 30, 31, 33, 34, 55–​7, 59–​63, 288, 338, 471, 487, 490, 565, 609, 610, 615 Soviet Union: agro-​pastoral implementations 49; census of 1989 134; Central Asia, transformation 31–​4; cotton farming 466; economy 56; empire definition 609n7; ethnographers 22, 29, 31; ethnography 21, 29, 395; film market 611; funding system 6; gradual dissolution of 255; housing 130; imperial state structure, formation of 608–​12); knowledge 22; modernity 33; Muslim 75–​7; propaganda, woman 228; reforms 18; ‘restructuring’ 19; revolutionary law 411; scholarly frames 68; socialism, legacies of 3; Socialist Realism, stereotypes of 614 space 85, 97–​9, 101, 104, 106, 107, 121, 124, 132, 137, 139, 140, 205, 209–​19, 239, 244, 245, 261, 263, 277, 279, 337, 338, 345, 349, 410, 483, 514, 515, 519, 530, 548, 578, 581, 583, 592, 595, 608, 675, 710, 719, 723, 724, 726, 754, 761, 767; socio-​spatial rhythms 130; spaces of possibility 360–​1

786

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Kyrgyzstan (SADUM) 188, 534–​5, 751 Spivak, Gayatri 325 Stalin, Stalinism 28, 32, 607–​10, 613, 615 state 55, 58–​63, 161–​6, 169–​70, 210, 215–​18, 302–​6, 308–​14, 409–​18, 577, 578, 594, 597, 598, 600–​2, 606 state farm (sovkhoz) 471, 487 state paternalism 274, 337, 339, 346 Steinberg, Joshua 592, 593, 596 steppe 18, 39, 45, 47, 50, 87, 88, 90, 122, 142, 454, 468, 482–​4 stigma 137, 199, 223, 245, 341, 355, 388, 562, 612, 658 stockbreeding 483, 486–​93 subjectivity/​subjectivities 90, 92, 98, 99, 210, 237, 248, 383, 384, 386, 592, 737 Sufi/​Sufism 349, 353, 361n3, 675, 692, 694, 710, 737, 743; see also Islam; pir; zikr Sukhareva, Olga 624, 636, 637 Sultanalieva, Syinat 8, 104, 106–​7 Sunni Muslims 352, 591, 594, 750 surveillance 134, 243, 255, 268, 335, 342, 345, 407, 424–​7, 430–​1, 599, 608, 695–​6, 734 Suyarkulova, Mohira 8, 9, 10, 19, 96 Swat Pashtuns 423 Syr Daria/​Syr Darya 28, 466, 468, 482 taalim (Islamic study circle) 750, 754–​758 Tablighi Jamaat 73, 407, 434–​6, 442–​3, 444n1, 530, 701 Tajiks 6, 244, 293, 298n10, 381, 382, 383, 386, 388, 389, 594, 710 Tajik Aluminium Company (TALCO) 62, 65n13 Tajik Civil War 58, 63, 246, 288, 295, 296, 322, 597, 600, 601, 609 Tajikistan: Aga Khan Foundation 598; anthropological research on 6, 591; economic assets 61; education system in 292; families, care 238–​9; hunting 381; Ismailis 597; language of 290, 291, 560; migration from 322, 323, 591–​600; Republic of Tajikistan 57; Russia, collective caregiving 246–​8; women 567; see also Pamir, migration Taklamakan Desert 272, 678 Taliban/​Taleban 166, 170, 310, 424–​6, 549, 550 Tarim basin 679, 691, 693 Tashkent: 12, 40, 43, 285, 417, 519, 642, 687, 758 Tatars 86, 214, 223, 287, 750 taxi driver 276, 582, 583, 585, 628, 704–​8 tax/​taxation 42, 43, 45, 314, 473 taza/​ tazalyk (Kyrgyz and Kazakh: clean/​pure) 70, 341, 504, 528, 540, 722 teaching, Central Asia 1–​4, 398, 605, 650, 750, 764, 767; see also learning, knowledge

tea, teahouse 90, 151, 209, 217, 357, 358, 373, 449, 453, 528, 736; see also chaikhana temporality 100, 268, 336, 337, 344, 345; see also time territory 9, 23, 25, 27–​30, 35, 42, 47, 59, 61, 88, 132, 150, 210, 211, 286, 322, 381, 598–​600, 744; in ‘Hungry Steppe’ 468; Uyghur Islam 744; see also border; space textiles 146, 622–​39 Thompson, E. P. 338, 448 time 8, 35, 44, 56, 74–​7, 82, 90–​2, 97, 107, 126, 197, 334–​46, 485–​6, 766, 767 Tlostanova, Madina 7 Tolstov, Sergei 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35 tomb 90, 446, 662, 664, 674, 688, 717, 719 tourism 429, 545, 643 trade 39, 40, 46, 48, 151, 152, 183, 212, 218, 219, 225, 231, 238, 255, 428–​30, 436–​40, 444, 446, 448, 449, 451, 452, 457, 458, 518–​24, 545, 560–​4, 566, 568, 569, 571, 572, 577, 579, 583, 633, 638, 649; see also bazaar; commerce; globalization; market trader(s) 180, 241–​2, 545, 560–​2, 568, 570, 572; see also shuttle-​trade/​ trader Trade Union 152, 448, 451, 457–​8 tradition(s): discursive 68; ethnic 211; Ili muqam 689; Islamic 75; Kyrgyz traditional male hats 154; muqam 686; national 650; oral 116; orthodox/​scripturalist 70; people’s customs 413; Qazaq 121; religious muqam songs 688; Rishton pottery 645; society/​societies 515; Sufi/​ Sufism 737; see also salt, crafts training/​mentorship 5, 7–​8, 26, 50, 113, 132, 165, 243, 291, 316n7, 322, 327, 339, 385, 417, 531, 633, 645, 649, 654, 769; see also learning, apprenticeship transhumance 18, 46, 484–​9; see also nomadism; pastoralism transnational care 237–​8, 240 transnational family 206, 237–​9, 245–​9, 521–​4, 550–​1, 552 transparency, CSR policy 500, 505–​7 transport infrastructure 45, 271–​2, 275–​80 travel: costs 6; expedition 89–​92; long-​distance buses 276; to Mecca 735; missionary 189; to Saudi Arabia 740; Tablighi Jamaat 710; Tajikistan to Russia 330; and transport 272–​3 Trevisani, Tommaso 460n1, 463, 465, 765, 767, 768–​9 tribe 28, 29, 120, 168, 175, 226, 428, 429, 535, 659, 677, 724, 750 trust 92, 163, 165, 360, 407, 418, 428, 440, 473, 500, 532, 556, 578, 588, 669n12, 753 Turkestan General Governorate 27, 42 Turkistan district (Kazakhstan) 127n10, 395, 397

787

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ Turkey: labour capacity 258; migrant domestic work in 258–​60; non-​democratic rule 580; Turkmen experience in 257–​60 Uzbek shuttle traders 579 Turkic kinship 206, 256 Turkic Muslims 281, 336, 338, 339, 341 Turkish: employers 587; homes 260; labour market 579; lyceum 284; migration regime 578–​82 Turkmen: carpet-​making 623; community 426; domestic workers 262–​3; labour mobility 262; migrants 253, 261, 263 Turkmenistan 2, 4, 12, 206, 253, 254, 256, 767 TV: coverage of genealogy on 662; Russian-​ language 231, 372; stations, in Uzbekistan 306; Tajik-​language 290 Twelve Muqam (On ikki muqam) 675, 685–​696

309; music politics 302; patriotisation 304; popular music 302; Rishton pottery 649; see also Bukhara, Khorezm, cotton

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 660, 664, 668, 673, 677, 681, 695 United States: dollars 137, 521–​2, 551, 553, 556; embassy protests 152; military intervention in Afghanistan 159, 160, 162, 169–​70, 424, 549; US Agency for International Development (USAID) 61, 152, 329, 367 United Tajik Opposition (UTO) 58, 600 UN refugee agency (UNHCR) 549 urban: guilds 605, 606, 622, 623, 633–​6; livelihoods 49, 113–​114, 130–​140, 209–​211, 273, 280, 476, 515; urbanization 273, 288, 676; see also Almaty; Bishkek; neighbourhood; Osh; Shakhtinsk Urinboyev, Rustamjon 212, 246, 546, 577 usta/​ustoz (master of a craft) 633, 644, 645 Utterly Other (Sovsem Drugie) 19, 97, 101–​107 Uyghur(s): businessman 736; civilization 676, 678, 679; cultural development 686; cultural heritage 672, 673; history 674–​5; interlocutors 275, 277; Islam 674; listening practices 737–​9; muqam 681, 692; racialization of 344; religious revival 733–​7 Uzbek(s): communities 134, 140, 173–​185, 216, 298n10, 546, 577, 580; dowry/​support, for sons-​in-​law 182–​3; film industry 613; food 577; in Turkey 479–​581; kinship173–​7; marriage patterns 114, 173, 177, 183–​4; migrants 577–​9, 580, 581, 583; minority 140, 292, 293; music 307, 308; pottery 642–​56; public/​political discourse 302; socio-​political background 174–​5; textiles 587, 605 Uzbek (language) 292, 287, 303, 581, 643 Uzbek cinema 607–​16 Uzbekistan: Fergana Valley of 582; film 314, 606, 609, 612, 613; marriage preferences 179; migrants 578 (see also Uzbek migrants); music

Valikhanov, Chokan 83, 87–​89, 90–​93 value(s) 33, 49, 88, 113, 115, 121–​4, 184, 185, 195, 201, 293, 303, 446, 483, 492, 504, 537, 558, 629, 672; economic 46, 48, 147, 156; of industrial workers’ lives 407, 446–​459; of migrant labour 325–​9; spiritual 303–​306; traditional 154, 415, 536; see also moral economy Verdery, Katherine 61 victim(s)/​victimhood 326, 395, 448, 452, 454, 456, 459, 539, 675, 681, 688, 726 violence 12, 55, 58, 63, 68, 70, 106, 335, 336, 337, 339–​40, 344, 346–​7, 413, 425, 464, 744, 761; domestic 249n8; epistemic 320, 329; gender-​based 258; intercommunal 114, 174, 347, 524; linked to Islam 712, 734; physical 154, 335; psychological/​symbolic 238, 615; sexual 340; social and cultural dimensions of 335, 336; state 154, 271, 338–​9, 344, 744, 761 violent paternalism 335, 336, 343–​5; “reeducation” campaign 334–​6; see also state paternalism; Xinjiang Visa 8, 195, 256, 257, 264, 298, 762 vision(s) 26, 62, 103, 105, 122, 162, 169, 191, 214, 274, 280, 324, 349, 351–​4, 353, 393, 396, 398, 546, 561, 609, 629, 743 Wakhan 426, 591 war in Afghanistan see Afghan War water 18, 39, 43, 46, 48, 55, 64n2, 133, 134, 196, 274, 354, 355, 395, 466, 469, 471, 472, 492, 502, 503, 505–​7, 510, 511, 529, 531, 532, 626, 632, 719, 749, 752 welfare 144–​9, 156, 188, 206, 216, 223–​9, 233–​4, 287, 475, 477, 597; privatisation of state 147–​9 Western academic scholarship on Central Asia 8, 82, 89–​94, 98–​99, 173 Western-​derived theoretical frameworks 97–​100, 107, 173, 200n9, 411, 447, 492–​496, 709–​10, 734 WhatsApp 263, 341, 501, 583; see also social media women: anti-​debt campaigners 144–​156; in arranged marriages 177–​185; jealousy among 243–​244; leaders 145–​6; religious classes for 750–​758; Soviet campaign for ‘emancipation’ of 31, 228, 613; migrants 245, 254, 579, 587; textile skills 623, 629–​33; traders 560–​566; vulnerable groups of 224 work 24, 33, 40, 41, 42, 44, 48–​9, 131, 133–​4, 139, 146, 148, 163, 177, 180–​1, 190, 205, 211, 216–​9, 325–​31, 335, 338, 408, 429,

788

—​​​​ I n d e x —​​​​ 434, 472–​4, 477, 529, 537, 554–​8, 560–​566, 579–​584, 587; absence of 146, 291, 436, 550, 579, 585, 614, 625, 627; booklet (trudovaia knizhka) 231; collective (kollektiv) 31 96, 232, 387, 452, 456, 645, 650, 705; domestic 206, 211, 228, 255–​264, 563, 587; permit 206, 231, 254n, 257, 258, 263, 577, 580, 581; see also fieldwork; labour; migrant workers workers 218, 253, 318–​22, 451; blacklisted 318; compensation 448; Turkmen migrant 259; ‘unprepared’/​‘unskilled’ 319 working-​class 144–​56, 254, 447, 456, 523 World Bank 152, 166, 322, 249n4, 499–​501; labour migration project 322 World Health Organization (WHO) 367 World Trade Organization 225

115–​126; social life, securitisation of 2; study of 2–​4; Uyghur history-​writing 606

xenophobia 107, 264n3, 580, 586 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 269, 339, 685, 733; aqyn 125; cultural heritage of 696; infrastructure, ethnicisation of 269–​282; Islamic Institute 740; minerals for Chinese national economy 272; Muslim inhabitants of 271; “reeducation” campaign 334–​346; Qazaqs in

Yakyn Inkar group 435, 441–​445 Yiwu 430, 560–​576; Muslim female traders 560; Muslim male-​centered trading hub 564–​5; see also China; globalization; trade youth 89, 114, 131, 132, 134, 138, 139, 152, 190, 212, 214, 228, 231, 285, 288, 295, 307, 335, 470, 476, 520, 532, 538, 751; Bishkek youth 131, 138; Communist Youth League 520; gendered differences 212; global language 285; Muslim Youth 751; organisations 152; in Russia 294; socialization 132; street culture 132 YouTube 115, 180, 667, 693, 739; see also social media yurt 86, 91, 123, 124, 197, 306, 483, 486, 666, 726, 752 Zande witchcraft 83–​5, 88 Zhdanko, Tatyana. 17, 22–​6, 28–​35 zikr (remembrance of God) 441, 693, 735, 740–​2, 756; see also Sufi/​Sufism

789