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Central Asia, Anthropology of
Central Asia, Anthropology of Catherine Alexander, Durham University, GBR, Durham, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract Since the end of the Soviet Union and with improved access to the region, the anthropology (in the Western tradition) of Central Asia has taken off. Recently, there has been greater acknowledgment of local sources, archives, and scholars. Moving from a sense of Central Asia as an isolated area, a variety of approaches have begun to theorize the region as partly integrated with other regions and traditions: Islam, Turkic and nomadic peoples, Southwest Asia, and postsocialist and postcolonial areas. An emphasis on past and current migrations and trading networks to, from, and within the area further stretch the idea of Central Asia and reveal the complex lived experience of ethnic groups – often at odds with nation-state ethnoterritories. Debates continue as to the extent to which clan organization informs current elite politics and pre-Soviet traditions are reemerging intact, in hybrid forms, or were wiped out. The main focus of studies has been on religion, politics, and ethnicity. Further research is needed on new economic and other inequalities, industry, labor, and the environment.
Central Asia is arguably one of the oldest ingénues on the world stage: repeatedly discovered by various scholarly communities, commercial or state powers bent on opening up new ethnographic regions, seeking new resources and reconfiguring geopolitical alliances. Newton (2001) suggested the image of the loose fish to evoke the scramble to discover and make various claims in, and about, Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as though the area were a blank spot on the map. Arguably, this sense prevails in conceptualizing the anthropology of the region as catch-up (Liu, 2011) for Anglophone or Western style scholarship. The recognition that a wealth of other work exists, however, by pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet local scholars has begun to reshape the contours of the anthropology of Central Asia through new translations and critical engagements with historical accounts (e.g., Levi and Sela, 2009), Soviet-era ethnography (Mühlfried and Sokolovskiy, 2012) scholars from the region (Masanov, 1996; Naumova, 1991) and archives (Jacquesson, 2010), following what Stoler (2009) christened the archival turn.
Elastic Area Definitions While geographical definitions of Central Asia are notoriously variable, overlapping with other categorizations such as Russian Turkestan, which covered the Turkic lands, the author adopts the current convention of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang (although an argument could be made for including the post-Soviet Caucasus region). It is worth being reminded of the differences of each country plus the specificity of Central Asia and elements it shares with other regions and histories. Indeed, as discussed below, the region often seems to appear and disappear in the same stroke. A few characteristics will serve to frame the remainder of the article. Unlike the steppe, nomadic past of the other states, Uzbekistan has a long history of urban settlement; indeed Tashkent was the main city of Soviet Central Asia in terms of population size and cultural purchase; a point that is, perhaps obviously, contested by other cities of the region. Despite the aridity of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, much of this land was turned over to cotton monoculture in the last century,
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which in turn necessitated huge irrigation projects, in part responsible for the Aral Sea’s desiccation and environmental catastrophe from which many fled. The mountainous terrain of Tajikistan and Xinjiang, sometimes known as Chinese Turkestan, means only a small area is available for habitation and cultivation. Xinjiang is home to many ethnic groups from the rest of Central Asia, particularly the Uyghurs, a Turkic people with no titular state (Bellér-Hann et al., 2007). As Roy (2000) observed, Central Asian polities, particularly the Ferghana valley borders between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, appear to have been devised by Stalin with an eye to the necessity for an overarching political entity to keep the peace. Sure enough, with the end of the Soviet Union, civil war broke out in Tajikistan and there have been conflicts in the region since. Border violence following independence has echoes in many other postcolonial settings. Again as Kandiyoti (2002a) noted, Central Asia was distinct economically and politically from other Soviet republics. In eastern European states, such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia, economy and political control were roughly coterminous with the polity and managed locally, whereas the Central Asian states were largely extractive economies or agricultural monocultures (cotton and wheat) effectively controlled by Moscow, via all-Union ministries and local cadres who also directed resources across Soviet space. Technical and professional work was typically dominated by Slavs, presenting an acute shortage of such expertise when many migrated West after 1991. One further point is the Soviet-era energy network that weaves the Central Asian states together into a curious cat’s cradle of interdependency. One indication that Central Asia is now recognized globally to be as vital an ethnographic region as any other, not just a curious relic shuffling back into life, is the recent overviews in mainstream anthropology journals and handbooks (RasulyPaleczak, 2005; Liu, 2011; Marsden, 2013). Ironically then, even as Central Asia has emerged as an ethnographic region, it has largely been through revealing the essential plurality and fluidity of the area, challenging macrolevel accounts, both emic and etic, of nation-state building enterprises on four counts. First, the region is often theorized as an extension of other regions and traditions – often being treated as though
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remarkably plastic to the impress of theories cultivated elsewhere. Second, past and present migrations for economic, political, and environmental reasons extend the reach of the region’s peoples globally – and certainly challenge anthropological accounts to take such diasporas into account. Third, the coexistence of stateless groups such as the Uyghur and other ethnic groups within nation-state boundaries query the monocultural productions of elites and, fourth, films and the built environment are increasingly being analyzed as a way of engaging with an imagined global audience. Thus, Liu (2011) suggests following Chari and Verdery’s (2009) linking of postsocialist (typically the Soviet Union and eastern bloc) and postcolonial areas, although Kandiyoti points to the limitations, as well as the potential, of extending postcolonial (2002b) and postsocialist (2002a) analyses to Central Asia. Rasuly-Paleczek (2005) shows the advantages of drawing on other Turkic analyses of relationships between tribe and state; Marsden (2012) suggests comparison and integration with southwest Asia and broader imagined Muslim communities. An increasing emphasis on tracking historic and contemporary migrant flows, the changing positions of different ethnic groups within and beyond each country, and the palimpsests of ethnic groups and social practices within cities present sharply different views of ethnoterritories from that presented by nation-state elites, more akin to Appadurai’s (1990) notion of ethnoscapes. Finally, a recent interest in political performativity (Cummings, 2010; Beyer et al., 2013) and spectacle, whether events (Adams, 2010), the built environment (Laszczkowski, 2011; Alexander et al., 2007), or films made by or about (Yessenova, 2011; Norris, 2012; Slavic Review, 2008) Central Asian states, suggests another avenue for extending the region as government elites seek to brand the nation through monopolizing notions of national culture and tradition speaking both to their own populations and to an imagined global stage. Lane’s (1981) classic account of the rites of rulers appears to be holding its own, albeit in a nominally different context. In the remainder of this article, the author touches on and extends the main themes (covered by these excellent overviews, economics, politics, and religion) ending with topics largely omitted, for want of space, by these essays: migration, gender, industry, labor, the current economic crisis, and environmental challenges. However, the author starts with a brief overview of the historiography and institutional framing of the region.
polity. The phenomenal resource wealth of Central Asia has long attracted careful mappings of resources: lands, people, flora, and fauna. Shoqan Walikhanov (1835–65) is one of the best known Kazakh scholars of the region, although as a fully signed up member of the Russian imperial army his adoption as one of Kazakhstan’s national heroes is perhaps a little strained. Access to Soviet space by Western scholars was restricted, with Central Asian encounters particularly sparse. Lubin’s (1985) account of labor relations in a factory in Andijan in 1979 is almost unique as both an ethnography and going beyond religion, politics, and kinship, three topics that continue to dominate studies. Piirainen’s (1996) ethnography is a fairly unique and excellent description of a one-company industrial town in Kazakhstan breaking down after 1991. Otherwise, studies of Central Asia by Western scholars were largely limited to macrolevel analyses based on secondary data such as official statistics and archives, as it was in the earlier days of the 1990s, when state formation was of central interest (Smith et al., 1998).
Non-Western Accounts of Central Asia
Property Regime Change
Levi and Sela’s (2009) anthology of historical sources on Central Asia from the seventh century on shows a sequence of Arabic, Muslim, Turkic, and Mongol encounters via trade and conquest and accounts of the area. The Uzbek dynasties, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most famously chronicled by Babur, were also described by English merchants, explorers sponsored by Catherine the Great and, later, by players of the first ‘great game.’ Paksoy suggests that these early forays into linking Turkic Central Asia with Turcology, such as the sixteenth-century Dede Korkut epics translated by Barthold (1894–1936) in the 1930s were suppressed by Stalin in the 1950s as indicative of a potential pan-Turkic
Most accounts of economic change in the 1990s can be aligned with broader postsocialist narratives across the former Soviet region, which focused on immediate economic survival in the aftermath of the abrupt contraction of the state and, with it, the disappearance of support for health, education, basic welfare, and state enterprises. Alongside this, mass unemployment appeared as industry, collective farms, and services were privatized, restructured, or simply ceased to function. Although property regime change is sometimes glossed as the privatization of state assets and services, state disinvestment did not necessarily result in complete transfer of property objects to private control since assets, such as the social infrastructure
Institutional Framing for Areas and Topics For anthropologists, institutional and national support concentrated fieldwork in some countries and on certain topics, although not exclusively. Thus, research programs at the MaxPlanck Institute for Anthropology have covered property changes (Hann, 2003) and civil religion (Hann, 2006) in Central Asia. The establishment in 1992 of the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, enabled several French scholars to undertake research in Uzbekistan. Elsewhere access continues to be difficult. Tajikistan’s civil war 1992–97 and continued devastation has attracted few anthropologists (pace Harris, 2004), although several PhD dissertations are based on the country and Marsden (2012) provides wonderful accounts of Afghan traders in Tajikistan; Turkmenistan is more forbidding yet (see, however, Peyrouse, 2012). So, however much one wants to quibble over the geographical extent of Central Asia, most of the anthropology, in the Western tradition, whether from the East Pacific, United States, or Europe, has concentrated on Kazakhstan, Kygryzstan, and Uzbekistan. Xinjiang, interestingly, has variously attracted scholars of China, Islam, postsocialism, and Turkic peoples and languages.
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belonging to industrial and rural enterprises, were often seen simply as capital draining liabilities. The landscape was therefore one of unclear ownership of property objects just left to rot alongside privatized state enterprises, land, and housing (Alexander, 2004b). To an extent, these concerns were shared with studies elsewhere of other postsocialist states. Unemployment took many forms from ‘unpaid leave’ to below-subsistence wage levels, delayed wages, payment in kind, and, finally, complete loss of jobs. When not sold off in toto, the nominal transfer of urban and rural enterprises to their workers via shares, often resulted in the rapid consolidation of control by a few, usually previous directors, as shares were exchanged for immediate cash needs or the small patches of land allocated to individuals or families were unable to support a household, especially where seeds, fertilizer, fuel, and markets were no longer provided. Trevisani (2010) also shows how control was kept by the same people, despite reforms, in Uzbekistan’s cotton farms. Corruption and embezzlement were widespread (Khazanov, 2012). Nazpary (2001) proposed a theory of systematically created chaos to obfuscate the deliberate dispossession of people who ended up losing out in Almaty in the 1990s. Although casting emic confusions about what was going on as an account of systematic change, it is nevertheless a powerful narrative of the experiences of those who ended up with nothing. Explanations of changing economic conditions often spun on elites; Rasanyagam (2011) proposed the idea of the state continuing to be the fount of resources to be manipulated by emerging elites as part of the informal economy. The effects of the abrupt cessation of much industry and associated farms and infrastructure were manifold. More highly valued male jobs were also often those that collapsed first, often seeing a shift in women’s roles to primary breadwinner as they went to work in bazaars (Yessenova, 2006; Spector, 2008). Kaiser (2005) tracked the chelnoki (suitcase traders), initially often women (Werner, 2004) who spread across the newly fixed and newly permeable borders from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, or from neighboring countries to trade in Central Asia (Marsden, 2012). The move to previously devalued business and trade represented a profound moral shift; a once peripheral, often illegal, activity, suddenly appeared to be everywhere and championed by elites. Whether or not the recent economic crisis has caused another bout of moral doubt, or has had other effects, has not yet been fully documented; Petric’s (2013) recent volume on the longer term effects of destroying livestock in Kyrgyzstan, Yessenova (2010, 2011) on the solidification of property rights, and Bissenova’s (unpub) account of Astana’s housing boom and bust are exceptions. Okada (unpub) provides an imaginative analysis of how the labor theory of value was aligned with a gendered Soviet aesthetics in Tashkent. Thus, the most highly valued paintings were on heroic scales and subjects, in oil, hung in public places and created by men; the slightness of watercolors was reserved for women and domestic spaces. With the collapse of state commissioning and the introduction of alternative systems of valuation via foreign markets, watercolors and sketches increased in value and female artists’ economic position improved rapidly. Rural poverty as a result of decollectivization, privatization, and unemployment has been relatively less studied, particularly
recently. Shreeves (2002) and Kandiyoti (2003, 2004) consider gender and rural household economies in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, respectively. Just as cities were dotted with discarded buildings, many farms were not so much privatized as abandoned to subsistence; men feeling emasculated by the inability to provide and reliance on women (Shreeves, 2002). In a sense, both urban and rural privatizations showed the continued use of standard neoliberal development paradigms and definitions – and their failure to understand how things worked on the ground and therefore to be efficacious in alleviating new forms of poverty. Understanding rural households and economic units in terms of nuclear families, for example, did not relate to collective, multigenerational labor and property regimes (Kandiyoti, 1999). Werner (1998, 1999) also showed that exchanging lavish gifts and feasts continued to be both a major expense and a source of social/ financial stability for rural Kazakh families. Since Khazanov’s (1984) foundational work on steppe nomadism, Kerven’s (2003) and particularly Khazanov’s (2012) studies have provided a trenchant account of changing pastoral property regimes in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Now it is rarely possible to survive through pastoralism alone after the rapid disinvestment of state support and continued policy neglect of rural areas, which often led to stock being sold off for immediate needs. Cartels of distributors fix prices and make survival problematic for small-scale wool, dairy, and meat producers. Khazanov states that this way of life has been irreparably broken: economic and social differentiation is growing in rural areas and pastoralism even less mobile than in the Soviet period. As the initial shock of unfettered market processes faded or became more familiar, anthropological studies have tended to shift away from a focus on property and value to questions of representation, power inequalities, and identity, often expressed through contested notions of ethnicity, religious diversity, and their entailments. In this sense, trends may be seen as mirroring a more general turn in Western left politics from a politics of allocation to a politics of recognition and identity.
Performing Politics: Identity, Clans, and Fluid Ethnicities The creation and securitization of new nation-states on the basis of Soviet borders is a continuing concern particularly shared by geographers and anthropologists. What ethnography adds is accounts of how ethnic fluidity in the region, arrested by the Soviet emphasis on ethnoterritoriality, resulted in multiethnic areas, or pockets of ethnic concentrations, that sit uneasily with a renewed emphasis on the nation-state as the political container of legitimate power and identity. At a macrolevel of analysis, Roy (2000) and Smith et al. (1998) provided early accounts of the solidification of Soviet boundaries noting the difficulties with assuming that a nation-state model had any practical salience for understanding either the ethnic composition of each state or the distribution of each titular group. Kazakhstan’s titular group, for example, was less than 50% in 1991 with Russian population concentrations in the north. Many of Uzbekistan’s
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cities were predominantly Tajik speaking, but with different ethnic concentrations within cities. The plurality and coexistence of ethnic groups within countries and cities in particular (Liu, 2012) as well as border regions (Megoran, 2007) emphasize the need for a historical context to understand the different causes and effects of successive migrations to and from the region before, during, and after the Soviet Union. Thus, the descendants of mass deportations of Koreans, Meshketian Turks, Germans, Tatars, Germans, and Chechyns, to name but some (Oka et al., 2002), to Central Asia in the 1930s and 1940s have taken different paths after 1991. Kazakhs, for example, who left as a result of environmental devastation or Stalinist repressions have been nominally welcomed back as repatriates, but have faced huge economic and bureaucratic obstacles to reintegration, alongside a sense that the motherland is no longer a place and people with whom they can easily identify (Diener, 2009; Werner and Barcus, 2009). The fact that many of Kazakhstan’s cities are primarily Russophone (Davé, 2007) adds to the sense of estrangement. While ethnic consolidation has certainly taken place, the notion of ‘return’ is far from straightforward, equally so for Russians who have either gone to their own alien motherland (Flynn, 2004) or remained in Central Asia as a newly disempowered minority (Laruelle and Peyrouse, 2004; Kaiser, 1998). In contradistinction to many official proclamations that titular ethnic groups have once again come into their kingdom, the prevalence of so many different groups, together with various generational affiliations within such groups, complicates the reception of such pronouncements and how they are enacted. One result is new ethnically based economic and power inequalities alongside the sheer creativity with which people manipulate and move in and out of classifications (Allès, 2005; Finke, 2006; Tishkov, 1995; Finke and Sancak, 2012). Studies of power relations in the region are largely analyses of how and to whom power was transferred. Alexander (2007a) and Jones Luong’s edited volume (2003) discuss the variety of mechanisms used from central to regional and city-level administrations; there are few such microstudies of the institutional and bureaucratic reforms that enabled the control of resources to shift hands (or stay in the same hands) so fast, simply because access to this kind of material is hard to obtain. Rather debates have centered on the extent to which kinship, in the form of clans, and state power is imbricated. In brief, Rasuly-Paleczak (2005) notes that the historical oscillation, and contemporary imbrication, of power between tribes and state forms is characteristic of Turkic polities and therefore a useful heuristic for analyzing Central Asian politics; Schatz (2004) provides the most detailed account of how this has been operationalized in Kazakhstan, suggesting that clan solidarity simply went underground during the Soviet period only to resurface in sufficiently ambiguous form also to be used as an accusation of corruption. Gullette (2010) draws on Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution to note not only how frequently ‘clan politics’ is used as an emic term of disapprobation, but also how this obscures alternative political modalities. Schatz’s argument also traces another continuing debate: the extent to which current social forms are new; a return to preSoviet structures as a kind of retraditionalization (e.g., Bazin,
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2008); a continuation of Soviet organization, which effectively eradicated earlier systems (Trevisani, 2010); and/or a range of hybrid forms depending on the actors and events (Kandiyoti, 1999) – returning once again to the complex fluidity characterizing Central Asia. Three examples illustrate this debate well: national cultural production; the mahalle (neighborhood organization); and Soviet territorial borders, which the newly independent states embraced and sought to make more rigid. It is worth noting that first, cities are often the stage where these affirmations and contestations of power and belonging play out, continuing the Soviet emphasis on cities as the engines of progress (Alexander and Buchli, 2007) and, second, that such debates range from elite policies to everyday encounters. Typically, national legitimation by elites has been enacted in spectacular form through the mass orchestration of celebrations, recalling similar Soviet extravaganzas, such as Adams (2010) describes in Uzbekistan and through recasting the built environment to signal and enact particular political ideologies (Laszczkowski, 2011). Both Uzbekistan’s and Kazakhstan’s governments encourage a carefully curated version of Uzbek and Kazakh histories, respectively, using a familiar folkloric lexicon (Alexander, 2004a), effectively performing its rights to the land through blood, where the Soviet period was merely an aberrant blip (see Grant, 2001 for a similar discussion of Moscow’s new monuments). Kazakhstan’s elites endeavor to keep one foot in a romanticized nomadic past, the other in a hi-tec, global/ Eurasian future (Laszczkowski, 2011). Liu’s (2011) point is important that the Uzbek government has often practiced a foreign policy sympathetic to the interests of its allies but injurious to the Uzbek people, even as it leads celebrations of Uzbek national culture. The mahalle is both a neighborhood and a form of community organization typical of Turkic cities; in Central Asia it is particularly associated with Uzbekistan. Its reemergence in urban politics has been interpreted as a traditional structure that has been co-opted by the new municipal administrations (Trevisani and Massicard, 2003; Rasanyagam, 2009), and an instance of how concentrations of different forms of sociality continue to coexist within one city, Osh, home to Uzbeks excluded from both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (Liu, 2012). The rush of the newly independent states to secure and cement territorial borders (Reeves, 2011; Megoran, 2007) points not just to the state work of manning and creating such borders as material artifacts but the everyday work of living with and imagining such borders, particular in the Ferghana valley region where Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan meet. The effects and affects of such borders are manifold.
Religion As Liu (2011: p. 120) notes, Islam has been privileged in studies of the region. In part, this is down to grand narratives from the Soviet period onward according it a monolithic role that more nuanced ethnographic accounts have been able to tease apart. Thus, in Massell’s (1974) persuasive account of the early Soviet period, veiled women took the place of the missing proletariat, as symbolic objects of all that was oppressive,
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patriarchal, and backward about Central Asia, even though veiling was limited to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There are, at least, three reasons for academic interest in Islam rising again from the 1990s onward: (1) there was a huge burst of building mosques (alongside Protestant missionary activity), many of which were funded by external sources; (2) the notion that allowing Islamic practice would allow the resurgence of related suppressed traditions; and (3) the apparent growth of Islam together with links to Muslim ‘states of concern’ via funding neatly replaced north American fears of communism with fears of militant Islam. On this point, Hetherington and Heathershaw and Megoran (2011) highlight the recurrent orientalist discourse of danger and violence in Central Asia that continues to affect and distort both policy and much scholarship. For all the Soviets rejected Freudianism as linked to false bourgeois consciousness, there is a curious consistency in how Islamic practice is first seen as repressing gender equality and then in turn as being both repressed and a container of all other traditions similarly disparaged or outlawed during the Soviet Union. The problem with this archaeological, or layered, approach to a national consciousness, even if not so termed, is the temptation to act as though one need only scratch the surface for a particular social organization to be restored. Once again, there are several views on the relationship between contemporary and earlier forms of Islam in Central Asia, as well to other lost practices and indeed, to widen the frame, to Islamic states elsewhere. Khalid (2007) suggests that the Soviet evisceration of religion was so effective, that after 1991 there was little sense of what Islam was, beyond a loose recognition that certain ethnic affiliations and religious confessions once had an affinity: to be Kazakh, was thus ipso facto to be Muslim, irrespective of practice, knowledge, or belief. The efflorescence of different ways of practicing Islam created new anxieties over what was or was not ‘correct’ or might be seen as extremist (McBrien, 2009) and who had authority to make such pronouncements (Waite, 2006). Arguably (McBrien and Pelkmans, 2008), there are parallels between the ideology of a competitive neoliberal market and the range of new religions on offer, echoing Ruthven (1991). Again, where some shrines had once been ignored, and thus covertly allowed a variety of practices, a new openness also brought out attempts to control and circumscribe observances (Alexander, 2004a; Kehl-Bodrogi, 2006). Similarly perhaps, since the domestic realm was not immediately in the public eye, it became an important conduit for continuing and passing on religious and other rituals and traditions (Kandiyoti and Azimova, 2004; Fathi, 2006). Clark (2009) notes that homes and domestic networks of families and friends are typically the means through which Protestant Christianity is also taking a strong hold in Almaty. State responses to religion throw up the contradictions of nominally embracing liberalism while also trying to control the national ideology. Kazakhstan’s president may be seen on television almost running from Eid celebrations one minute to attend Easter Mass the next. The lack of open religious debate in Uzbekistan on the other hand, suggests that, once again, it is in the less observed everyday arenas that a variety of religious and healing practices are to be found.
Conclusion Many topics remain unstudied or scarcely covered. Energy and water politics seem to be largely the province of politics and international relations, with little sense of how energy and water shortages locally or giant pipelines using productive land are affecting people’s everyday lives. Just as Central Asia received waves of settlers hungry for land after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, political prisoners, volunteers for new enterprises, and deportations of entire populations so too was it subject to extreme Soviet agricultural, military, and other experiments, often with long-lasting, devastating environmental consequences. Three examples give an indication. Cotton monoculture in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan required high irrigation that drained the Aral Sea; the central steppe’s thin soil was plowed up; northeast Kazakhstan was turned over to nuclear tests. The legacy of these interventions is extreme; so far, there have been few anthropological engagements with what they mean (Werner and Purvis-Roberts, 2006, 2007 are the exceptions here). Labor migration continues apace, between farm and city, between impoverished countryside and the West. Marat (2009) aside, there have been few studies of the effects of the economic crisis. Next to nothing has been written on industrial relations in these resource-rich countries (where strikes appear to be increasing) and on emerging forms of inequality within, as well as between, ethnic groups. It would be good to see the concern with the politics of performance and representation matched by the politics of resource allocation as the growing gap between rich and poor that marks neoliberal regimes also takes hold. Certainly, the increasing distance between rich and poor, urban and rural areas often outweighs ethnic affiliation. In returning to the movement, fluidity and far-reaching imaginations that have always characterized this region, ethnography is a vital means of countering stereotypes encountered both externally and in self-exegeses – whether demonstrating transformative, traditional or hybrid, syncretic patterns of social life. If early accounts emphasized top-down nation-state building, ethnography shows the inadequacy of the nation-state concept in suggesting the lived plurality of lives in Central Asia. Fully capturing the far-flung networks of ethnic groups that variously live (often choosing to live) in diasporic conditions, in mobile trading relationships, and in their titular state has yet to happen. Equally, a move to consider Central Asia as part of global processes of accumulation by dispossession in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries would enable a stronger sense of its commonality and specificity juxtaposed with global economies of which it is now irrevocably part.
See also: Ethnic Identity and Ethnicity in Archaeology; Ethnicity and Migration in Europe; Ethnicity: Anthropological Aspects; International Migration by Ethnic South and Southeast Asians; Islam: Asia; Migration History; Migration, Theory of; Migration: Anthropological Perspectives; Migration: Cultural Aspects; Migrations, Colonizations, and Diasporas in Archaeology; Nations and Nation-States in History; Tradition, Anthropology of.
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Newton, S., 2001. Conflicting Interests: The “Great Game” Replayed? Conference Presentation, Royal Society of Asian Affairs Conference, SOAS. Norris, S., 2012. Nomadic nationhood: cinema, nationhood, and remembrance in postSoviet Kazakhstan. Ab Imperio 2, 378–402. Oka, N., Masanov, N., Karin, E., Chebotarev, A., 2002. The Nationalities Question in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Institute of Developing Economies, Chiba. Okada, K. Re-legitimising Painting in Tashkent Uzbekistan after Fall of the Soviet Union (1991–2004) (Ph.D. dissertation), University of London, Goldsmiths, unpub. Petric, B., 2013. On a Mange nos Moutons: le Kighizstan, du Berger au Biznesman. Belin, Paris. Peyrouse, S., 2012. Turkmenistan: Strategies of Power, Dilemmas of Development. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY. Piirainen, T., 1996. The Death of the Iron Mother: Transition to Market Economy in an Industrial Town in Kazakhstan, EU-TACIS, Social Impacts of Privatisation and Economic Restructuring I Kazakhstan with a Focus on Aktyubinsk Oblast. TACIS Publications, Almaty. European Commission: Brussels. Rasanayagam, J., 2009. Morality, self and power: the idea of the mahalla in Uzbekistan. In: Heintz, M. (Ed.), The Anthropology of Moralities. Berghahn Books, Oxford, pp. 102–117. Rasanyagam, J., 2011. Informal economy, informal state: the case of Uzbekistan. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 31 (11–12), 681–696. Rasuly-Paleczak, G., 2005. Comparative perspectives on Central Asia and the Middle East in social anthropology and the social sciences. Central Eurasian Studies Review Publication of the Central Eurasian Studies Society 4 (2), 2–17. Reeves, M., 2011. Fixing the border: on the affective life of the state in southern Kyrgyzstan. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (5), 905–923. Roy, O., 2000. The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. New York University Press, New York. Ruthven, M., 1991. The Divine Supermarket: Shopping for God in America. Vintage, London. Schatz, E., 2004. Modern Clan Politics: The Power of ‘Blood’ in Kazakhstan and Beyond. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA. Shreeves, R., 2002. Gender and development in rural Kazakhstan. In: Mandel, R., Humphrey, C. (Eds.), Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Berg, Oxford. Smith, G., Law, V., Wilson, A., Bohr, A., Allworth, E., 1998. Nation-Building in the PostSoviet Borderlands. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Spector, R., 2008. Bazaar politics: the fate of the market place in Kazakhstan. Problems of Post-communism 55 (6), 42–53.
Stoler, A., 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Tishkov, V., 1995. Don’t kill me, I’m a Kyrgyz! An anthropological analysis of violence in the Osh ethnic conflict. Journal of Peace Research 32 (2), 133–149. Trevisani, T., 2010. Land and Power in Khorezm: Farmers, Communities and the State in Uzbekistan’s Decollectivisation, Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, vol. 23. LIT Verlag, Berlin. Trevisani, T., Massicard, E., 2003. The Uzbek Mahalla: between state and society. In: Everett-Heath, T. (Ed.), Central Asia. Aspects of Transition. Routledge/Curzon, London, New York. Waite, E., 2006. The impact of the State on Islam amongst the Uyghurs: religious knowledge and authority in the Kashgar Oasis. Central Asian Survey 25 (3), 251–265. Werner, C., 1998. Household networks and the security of mutual indebtedness in rural Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey 17 (4), 597–612. Werner, C., 1999. The dynamics of feasting and gift exchange in rural Kazakhstan. In: Svanberg, I. (Ed.), Contemporary Kazaks: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Curzon Press, London, pp. 47–72. Werner, C., 2004. Feminizing the new Silk Road: women traders in rural Kazakhstan. In: Nechemias, C., Kuehnast, K. (Eds.), Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 105–126. Werner, C.A., Purvis-Roberts, K.L., 2006. After the cold war: international politics, domestic policy, and the nuclear legacy in Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey 25, 461. Werner, C., Purvis-Roberts, K., 2007. Unravelling the secrets of the past: contested versions of nuclear testing in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. In: Johnson, B. (Ed.), Half-lives and Half Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacy of the Cold War. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Yessenova, S., 2006. Hawkers and containers in Zarya Vostoka: how ‘bizarre’ is the post-Soviet bazaar? In: Dannhaeuser, N., Werner, C. (Eds.), Markets and Market Liberalisation: Ethnographic Reflections, Research in Economic Anthropology. Texas A&M University, pp. 37–59. Yessenova, S., 2010. Borrowed places: eviction wars and property rights formalization in Kazakhstan. Research in Economic Anthropology 30, 11–45. Yessenova, S., 2011. Nomad for export, not for domestic consumption: Kazakhstan’s arrested endeavour to ‘put the country on the map’. Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema 5 (2), 181–203.
Abstract Since the end of the Soviet Union and with improved access to the region, the anthropology (in the Western tradition) of Central Asia has taken off. Recently, there has been greater acknowledgment of local sources, archives, and scholars. Moving from a sense of Central Asia as an isolated area, a variety of approaches have begun to theorize the region as partly integrated with other regions and traditions: Islam, Turkic and nomadic peoples, Southwest Asia, and postsocialist and postcolonial areas. An emphasis on past and current migrations and trading networks to, from, and within the area further stretch the idea of Central Asia and reveal the complex lived experience of ethnic groups – often at odds with nation-state ethnoterritories. Debates continue as to the extent to which clan organization informs current elite politics and pre-Soviet traditions are reemerging intact, in hybrid forms, or were wiped out. The main focus of studies has been on religion, politics, and ethnicity. Further research is needed on new economic and other inequalities, industry, labor, and the environment.
Central Asia is arguably one of the oldest ingénues on the world stage: repeatedly discovered by various scholarly communities, commercial or state powers bent on opening up new ethnographic regions, seeking new resources and reconfiguring geopolitical alliances. Newton (2001) suggested the image of the loose fish to evoke the scramble to discover and make various claims in, and about, Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as though the area were a blank spot on the map. Arguably, this sense prevails in conceptualizing the anthropology of the region as catch-up (Liu, 2011) for Anglophone or Western style scholarship. The recognition that a wealth of other work exists, however, by pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet local scholars has begun to reshape the contours of the anthropology of Central Asia through new translations and critical engagements with historical accounts (e.g., Levi and Sela, 2009), Soviet-era ethnography (Mühlfried and Sokolovskiy, 2012) scholars from the region (Masanov, 1996; Naumova, 1991) and archives (Jacquesson, 2010), following what Stoler (2009) christened the archival turn.
Elastic Area Definitions While geographical definitions of Central Asia are notoriously variable, overlapping with other categorizations such as Russian Turkestan, which covered the Turkic lands, the author adopts the current convention of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang (although an argument could be made for including the post-Soviet Caucasus region). It is worth being reminded of the differences of each country plus the specificity of Central Asia and elements it shares with other regions and histories. Indeed, as discussed below, the region often seems to appear and disappear in the same stroke. A few characteristics will serve to frame the remainder of the article. Unlike the steppe, nomadic past of the other states, Uzbekistan has a long history of urban settlement; indeed Tashkent was the main city of Soviet Central Asia in terms of population size and cultural purchase; a point that is, perhaps obviously, contested by other cities of the region. Despite the aridity of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, much of this land was turned over to cotton monoculture in the last century,
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which in turn necessitated huge irrigation projects, in part responsible for the Aral Sea’s desiccation and environmental catastrophe from which many fled. The mountainous terrain of Tajikistan and Xinjiang, sometimes known as Chinese Turkestan, means only a small area is available for habitation and cultivation. Xinjiang is home to many ethnic groups from the rest of Central Asia, particularly the Uyghurs, a Turkic people with no titular state (Bellér-Hann et al., 2007). As Roy (2000) observed, Central Asian polities, particularly the Ferghana valley borders between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, appear to have been devised by Stalin with an eye to the necessity for an overarching political entity to keep the peace. Sure enough, with the end of the Soviet Union, civil war broke out in Tajikistan and there have been conflicts in the region since. Border violence following independence has echoes in many other postcolonial settings. Again as Kandiyoti (2002a) noted, Central Asia was distinct economically and politically from other Soviet republics. In eastern European states, such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia, economy and political control were roughly coterminous with the polity and managed locally, whereas the Central Asian states were largely extractive economies or agricultural monocultures (cotton and wheat) effectively controlled by Moscow, via all-Union ministries and local cadres who also directed resources across Soviet space. Technical and professional work was typically dominated by Slavs, presenting an acute shortage of such expertise when many migrated West after 1991. One further point is the Soviet-era energy network that weaves the Central Asian states together into a curious cat’s cradle of interdependency. One indication that Central Asia is now recognized globally to be as vital an ethnographic region as any other, not just a curious relic shuffling back into life, is the recent overviews in mainstream anthropology journals and handbooks (RasulyPaleczak, 2005; Liu, 2011; Marsden, 2013). Ironically then, even as Central Asia has emerged as an ethnographic region, it has largely been through revealing the essential plurality and fluidity of the area, challenging macrolevel accounts, both emic and etic, of nation-state building enterprises on four counts. First, the region is often theorized as an extension of other regions and traditions – often being treated as though
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remarkably plastic to the impress of theories cultivated elsewhere. Second, past and present migrations for economic, political, and environmental reasons extend the reach of the region’s peoples globally – and certainly challenge anthropological accounts to take such diasporas into account. Third, the coexistence of stateless groups such as the Uyghur and other ethnic groups within nation-state boundaries query the monocultural productions of elites and, fourth, films and the built environment are increasingly being analyzed as a way of engaging with an imagined global audience. Thus, Liu (2011) suggests following Chari and Verdery’s (2009) linking of postsocialist (typically the Soviet Union and eastern bloc) and postcolonial areas, although Kandiyoti points to the limitations, as well as the potential, of extending postcolonial (2002b) and postsocialist (2002a) analyses to Central Asia. Rasuly-Paleczek (2005) shows the advantages of drawing on other Turkic analyses of relationships between tribe and state; Marsden (2012) suggests comparison and integration with southwest Asia and broader imagined Muslim communities. An increasing emphasis on tracking historic and contemporary migrant flows, the changing positions of different ethnic groups within and beyond each country, and the palimpsests of ethnic groups and social practices within cities present sharply different views of ethnoterritories from that presented by nation-state elites, more akin to Appadurai’s (1990) notion of ethnoscapes. Finally, a recent interest in political performativity (Cummings, 2010; Beyer et al., 2013) and spectacle, whether events (Adams, 2010), the built environment (Laszczkowski, 2011; Alexander et al., 2007), or films made by or about (Yessenova, 2011; Norris, 2012; Slavic Review, 2008) Central Asian states, suggests another avenue for extending the region as government elites seek to brand the nation through monopolizing notions of national culture and tradition speaking both to their own populations and to an imagined global stage. Lane’s (1981) classic account of the rites of rulers appears to be holding its own, albeit in a nominally different context. In the remainder of this article, the author touches on and extends the main themes (covered by these excellent overviews, economics, politics, and religion) ending with topics largely omitted, for want of space, by these essays: migration, gender, industry, labor, the current economic crisis, and environmental challenges. However, the author starts with a brief overview of the historiography and institutional framing of the region.
polity. The phenomenal resource wealth of Central Asia has long attracted careful mappings of resources: lands, people, flora, and fauna. Shoqan Walikhanov (1835–65) is one of the best known Kazakh scholars of the region, although as a fully signed up member of the Russian imperial army his adoption as one of Kazakhstan’s national heroes is perhaps a little strained. Access to Soviet space by Western scholars was restricted, with Central Asian encounters particularly sparse. Lubin’s (1985) account of labor relations in a factory in Andijan in 1979 is almost unique as both an ethnography and going beyond religion, politics, and kinship, three topics that continue to dominate studies. Piirainen’s (1996) ethnography is a fairly unique and excellent description of a one-company industrial town in Kazakhstan breaking down after 1991. Otherwise, studies of Central Asia by Western scholars were largely limited to macrolevel analyses based on secondary data such as official statistics and archives, as it was in the earlier days of the 1990s, when state formation was of central interest (Smith et al., 1998).
Non-Western Accounts of Central Asia
Property Regime Change
Levi and Sela’s (2009) anthology of historical sources on Central Asia from the seventh century on shows a sequence of Arabic, Muslim, Turkic, and Mongol encounters via trade and conquest and accounts of the area. The Uzbek dynasties, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most famously chronicled by Babur, were also described by English merchants, explorers sponsored by Catherine the Great and, later, by players of the first ‘great game.’ Paksoy suggests that these early forays into linking Turkic Central Asia with Turcology, such as the sixteenth-century Dede Korkut epics translated by Barthold (1894–1936) in the 1930s were suppressed by Stalin in the 1950s as indicative of a potential pan-Turkic
Most accounts of economic change in the 1990s can be aligned with broader postsocialist narratives across the former Soviet region, which focused on immediate economic survival in the aftermath of the abrupt contraction of the state and, with it, the disappearance of support for health, education, basic welfare, and state enterprises. Alongside this, mass unemployment appeared as industry, collective farms, and services were privatized, restructured, or simply ceased to function. Although property regime change is sometimes glossed as the privatization of state assets and services, state disinvestment did not necessarily result in complete transfer of property objects to private control since assets, such as the social infrastructure
Institutional Framing for Areas and Topics For anthropologists, institutional and national support concentrated fieldwork in some countries and on certain topics, although not exclusively. Thus, research programs at the MaxPlanck Institute for Anthropology have covered property changes (Hann, 2003) and civil religion (Hann, 2006) in Central Asia. The establishment in 1992 of the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, enabled several French scholars to undertake research in Uzbekistan. Elsewhere access continues to be difficult. Tajikistan’s civil war 1992–97 and continued devastation has attracted few anthropologists (pace Harris, 2004), although several PhD dissertations are based on the country and Marsden (2012) provides wonderful accounts of Afghan traders in Tajikistan; Turkmenistan is more forbidding yet (see, however, Peyrouse, 2012). So, however much one wants to quibble over the geographical extent of Central Asia, most of the anthropology, in the Western tradition, whether from the East Pacific, United States, or Europe, has concentrated on Kazakhstan, Kygryzstan, and Uzbekistan. Xinjiang, interestingly, has variously attracted scholars of China, Islam, postsocialism, and Turkic peoples and languages.
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belonging to industrial and rural enterprises, were often seen simply as capital draining liabilities. The landscape was therefore one of unclear ownership of property objects just left to rot alongside privatized state enterprises, land, and housing (Alexander, 2004b). To an extent, these concerns were shared with studies elsewhere of other postsocialist states. Unemployment took many forms from ‘unpaid leave’ to below-subsistence wage levels, delayed wages, payment in kind, and, finally, complete loss of jobs. When not sold off in toto, the nominal transfer of urban and rural enterprises to their workers via shares, often resulted in the rapid consolidation of control by a few, usually previous directors, as shares were exchanged for immediate cash needs or the small patches of land allocated to individuals or families were unable to support a household, especially where seeds, fertilizer, fuel, and markets were no longer provided. Trevisani (2010) also shows how control was kept by the same people, despite reforms, in Uzbekistan’s cotton farms. Corruption and embezzlement were widespread (Khazanov, 2012). Nazpary (2001) proposed a theory of systematically created chaos to obfuscate the deliberate dispossession of people who ended up losing out in Almaty in the 1990s. Although casting emic confusions about what was going on as an account of systematic change, it is nevertheless a powerful narrative of the experiences of those who ended up with nothing. Explanations of changing economic conditions often spun on elites; Rasanyagam (2011) proposed the idea of the state continuing to be the fount of resources to be manipulated by emerging elites as part of the informal economy. The effects of the abrupt cessation of much industry and associated farms and infrastructure were manifold. More highly valued male jobs were also often those that collapsed first, often seeing a shift in women’s roles to primary breadwinner as they went to work in bazaars (Yessenova, 2006; Spector, 2008). Kaiser (2005) tracked the chelnoki (suitcase traders), initially often women (Werner, 2004) who spread across the newly fixed and newly permeable borders from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, or from neighboring countries to trade in Central Asia (Marsden, 2012). The move to previously devalued business and trade represented a profound moral shift; a once peripheral, often illegal, activity, suddenly appeared to be everywhere and championed by elites. Whether or not the recent economic crisis has caused another bout of moral doubt, or has had other effects, has not yet been fully documented; Petric’s (2013) recent volume on the longer term effects of destroying livestock in Kyrgyzstan, Yessenova (2010, 2011) on the solidification of property rights, and Bissenova’s (unpub) account of Astana’s housing boom and bust are exceptions. Okada (unpub) provides an imaginative analysis of how the labor theory of value was aligned with a gendered Soviet aesthetics in Tashkent. Thus, the most highly valued paintings were on heroic scales and subjects, in oil, hung in public places and created by men; the slightness of watercolors was reserved for women and domestic spaces. With the collapse of state commissioning and the introduction of alternative systems of valuation via foreign markets, watercolors and sketches increased in value and female artists’ economic position improved rapidly. Rural poverty as a result of decollectivization, privatization, and unemployment has been relatively less studied, particularly
recently. Shreeves (2002) and Kandiyoti (2003, 2004) consider gender and rural household economies in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, respectively. Just as cities were dotted with discarded buildings, many farms were not so much privatized as abandoned to subsistence; men feeling emasculated by the inability to provide and reliance on women (Shreeves, 2002). In a sense, both urban and rural privatizations showed the continued use of standard neoliberal development paradigms and definitions – and their failure to understand how things worked on the ground and therefore to be efficacious in alleviating new forms of poverty. Understanding rural households and economic units in terms of nuclear families, for example, did not relate to collective, multigenerational labor and property regimes (Kandiyoti, 1999). Werner (1998, 1999) also showed that exchanging lavish gifts and feasts continued to be both a major expense and a source of social/ financial stability for rural Kazakh families. Since Khazanov’s (1984) foundational work on steppe nomadism, Kerven’s (2003) and particularly Khazanov’s (2012) studies have provided a trenchant account of changing pastoral property regimes in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Now it is rarely possible to survive through pastoralism alone after the rapid disinvestment of state support and continued policy neglect of rural areas, which often led to stock being sold off for immediate needs. Cartels of distributors fix prices and make survival problematic for small-scale wool, dairy, and meat producers. Khazanov states that this way of life has been irreparably broken: economic and social differentiation is growing in rural areas and pastoralism even less mobile than in the Soviet period. As the initial shock of unfettered market processes faded or became more familiar, anthropological studies have tended to shift away from a focus on property and value to questions of representation, power inequalities, and identity, often expressed through contested notions of ethnicity, religious diversity, and their entailments. In this sense, trends may be seen as mirroring a more general turn in Western left politics from a politics of allocation to a politics of recognition and identity.
Performing Politics: Identity, Clans, and Fluid Ethnicities The creation and securitization of new nation-states on the basis of Soviet borders is a continuing concern particularly shared by geographers and anthropologists. What ethnography adds is accounts of how ethnic fluidity in the region, arrested by the Soviet emphasis on ethnoterritoriality, resulted in multiethnic areas, or pockets of ethnic concentrations, that sit uneasily with a renewed emphasis on the nation-state as the political container of legitimate power and identity. At a macrolevel of analysis, Roy (2000) and Smith et al. (1998) provided early accounts of the solidification of Soviet boundaries noting the difficulties with assuming that a nation-state model had any practical salience for understanding either the ethnic composition of each state or the distribution of each titular group. Kazakhstan’s titular group, for example, was less than 50% in 1991 with Russian population concentrations in the north. Many of Uzbekistan’s
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cities were predominantly Tajik speaking, but with different ethnic concentrations within cities. The plurality and coexistence of ethnic groups within countries and cities in particular (Liu, 2012) as well as border regions (Megoran, 2007) emphasize the need for a historical context to understand the different causes and effects of successive migrations to and from the region before, during, and after the Soviet Union. Thus, the descendants of mass deportations of Koreans, Meshketian Turks, Germans, Tatars, Germans, and Chechyns, to name but some (Oka et al., 2002), to Central Asia in the 1930s and 1940s have taken different paths after 1991. Kazakhs, for example, who left as a result of environmental devastation or Stalinist repressions have been nominally welcomed back as repatriates, but have faced huge economic and bureaucratic obstacles to reintegration, alongside a sense that the motherland is no longer a place and people with whom they can easily identify (Diener, 2009; Werner and Barcus, 2009). The fact that many of Kazakhstan’s cities are primarily Russophone (Davé, 2007) adds to the sense of estrangement. While ethnic consolidation has certainly taken place, the notion of ‘return’ is far from straightforward, equally so for Russians who have either gone to their own alien motherland (Flynn, 2004) or remained in Central Asia as a newly disempowered minority (Laruelle and Peyrouse, 2004; Kaiser, 1998). In contradistinction to many official proclamations that titular ethnic groups have once again come into their kingdom, the prevalence of so many different groups, together with various generational affiliations within such groups, complicates the reception of such pronouncements and how they are enacted. One result is new ethnically based economic and power inequalities alongside the sheer creativity with which people manipulate and move in and out of classifications (Allès, 2005; Finke, 2006; Tishkov, 1995; Finke and Sancak, 2012). Studies of power relations in the region are largely analyses of how and to whom power was transferred. Alexander (2007a) and Jones Luong’s edited volume (2003) discuss the variety of mechanisms used from central to regional and city-level administrations; there are few such microstudies of the institutional and bureaucratic reforms that enabled the control of resources to shift hands (or stay in the same hands) so fast, simply because access to this kind of material is hard to obtain. Rather debates have centered on the extent to which kinship, in the form of clans, and state power is imbricated. In brief, Rasuly-Paleczak (2005) notes that the historical oscillation, and contemporary imbrication, of power between tribes and state forms is characteristic of Turkic polities and therefore a useful heuristic for analyzing Central Asian politics; Schatz (2004) provides the most detailed account of how this has been operationalized in Kazakhstan, suggesting that clan solidarity simply went underground during the Soviet period only to resurface in sufficiently ambiguous form also to be used as an accusation of corruption. Gullette (2010) draws on Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution to note not only how frequently ‘clan politics’ is used as an emic term of disapprobation, but also how this obscures alternative political modalities. Schatz’s argument also traces another continuing debate: the extent to which current social forms are new; a return to preSoviet structures as a kind of retraditionalization (e.g., Bazin,
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2008); a continuation of Soviet organization, which effectively eradicated earlier systems (Trevisani, 2010); and/or a range of hybrid forms depending on the actors and events (Kandiyoti, 1999) – returning once again to the complex fluidity characterizing Central Asia. Three examples illustrate this debate well: national cultural production; the mahalle (neighborhood organization); and Soviet territorial borders, which the newly independent states embraced and sought to make more rigid. It is worth noting that first, cities are often the stage where these affirmations and contestations of power and belonging play out, continuing the Soviet emphasis on cities as the engines of progress (Alexander and Buchli, 2007) and, second, that such debates range from elite policies to everyday encounters. Typically, national legitimation by elites has been enacted in spectacular form through the mass orchestration of celebrations, recalling similar Soviet extravaganzas, such as Adams (2010) describes in Uzbekistan and through recasting the built environment to signal and enact particular political ideologies (Laszczkowski, 2011). Both Uzbekistan’s and Kazakhstan’s governments encourage a carefully curated version of Uzbek and Kazakh histories, respectively, using a familiar folkloric lexicon (Alexander, 2004a), effectively performing its rights to the land through blood, where the Soviet period was merely an aberrant blip (see Grant, 2001 for a similar discussion of Moscow’s new monuments). Kazakhstan’s elites endeavor to keep one foot in a romanticized nomadic past, the other in a hi-tec, global/ Eurasian future (Laszczkowski, 2011). Liu’s (2011) point is important that the Uzbek government has often practiced a foreign policy sympathetic to the interests of its allies but injurious to the Uzbek people, even as it leads celebrations of Uzbek national culture. The mahalle is both a neighborhood and a form of community organization typical of Turkic cities; in Central Asia it is particularly associated with Uzbekistan. Its reemergence in urban politics has been interpreted as a traditional structure that has been co-opted by the new municipal administrations (Trevisani and Massicard, 2003; Rasanyagam, 2009), and an instance of how concentrations of different forms of sociality continue to coexist within one city, Osh, home to Uzbeks excluded from both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (Liu, 2012). The rush of the newly independent states to secure and cement territorial borders (Reeves, 2011; Megoran, 2007) points not just to the state work of manning and creating such borders as material artifacts but the everyday work of living with and imagining such borders, particular in the Ferghana valley region where Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan meet. The effects and affects of such borders are manifold.
Religion As Liu (2011: p. 120) notes, Islam has been privileged in studies of the region. In part, this is down to grand narratives from the Soviet period onward according it a monolithic role that more nuanced ethnographic accounts have been able to tease apart. Thus, in Massell’s (1974) persuasive account of the early Soviet period, veiled women took the place of the missing proletariat, as symbolic objects of all that was oppressive,
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patriarchal, and backward about Central Asia, even though veiling was limited to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There are, at least, three reasons for academic interest in Islam rising again from the 1990s onward: (1) there was a huge burst of building mosques (alongside Protestant missionary activity), many of which were funded by external sources; (2) the notion that allowing Islamic practice would allow the resurgence of related suppressed traditions; and (3) the apparent growth of Islam together with links to Muslim ‘states of concern’ via funding neatly replaced north American fears of communism with fears of militant Islam. On this point, Hetherington and Heathershaw and Megoran (2011) highlight the recurrent orientalist discourse of danger and violence in Central Asia that continues to affect and distort both policy and much scholarship. For all the Soviets rejected Freudianism as linked to false bourgeois consciousness, there is a curious consistency in how Islamic practice is first seen as repressing gender equality and then in turn as being both repressed and a container of all other traditions similarly disparaged or outlawed during the Soviet Union. The problem with this archaeological, or layered, approach to a national consciousness, even if not so termed, is the temptation to act as though one need only scratch the surface for a particular social organization to be restored. Once again, there are several views on the relationship between contemporary and earlier forms of Islam in Central Asia, as well to other lost practices and indeed, to widen the frame, to Islamic states elsewhere. Khalid (2007) suggests that the Soviet evisceration of religion was so effective, that after 1991 there was little sense of what Islam was, beyond a loose recognition that certain ethnic affiliations and religious confessions once had an affinity: to be Kazakh, was thus ipso facto to be Muslim, irrespective of practice, knowledge, or belief. The efflorescence of different ways of practicing Islam created new anxieties over what was or was not ‘correct’ or might be seen as extremist (McBrien, 2009) and who had authority to make such pronouncements (Waite, 2006). Arguably (McBrien and Pelkmans, 2008), there are parallels between the ideology of a competitive neoliberal market and the range of new religions on offer, echoing Ruthven (1991). Again, where some shrines had once been ignored, and thus covertly allowed a variety of practices, a new openness also brought out attempts to control and circumscribe observances (Alexander, 2004a; Kehl-Bodrogi, 2006). Similarly perhaps, since the domestic realm was not immediately in the public eye, it became an important conduit for continuing and passing on religious and other rituals and traditions (Kandiyoti and Azimova, 2004; Fathi, 2006). Clark (2009) notes that homes and domestic networks of families and friends are typically the means through which Protestant Christianity is also taking a strong hold in Almaty. State responses to religion throw up the contradictions of nominally embracing liberalism while also trying to control the national ideology. Kazakhstan’s president may be seen on television almost running from Eid celebrations one minute to attend Easter Mass the next. The lack of open religious debate in Uzbekistan on the other hand, suggests that, once again, it is in the less observed everyday arenas that a variety of religious and healing practices are to be found.
Conclusion Many topics remain unstudied or scarcely covered. Energy and water politics seem to be largely the province of politics and international relations, with little sense of how energy and water shortages locally or giant pipelines using productive land are affecting people’s everyday lives. Just as Central Asia received waves of settlers hungry for land after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, political prisoners, volunteers for new enterprises, and deportations of entire populations so too was it subject to extreme Soviet agricultural, military, and other experiments, often with long-lasting, devastating environmental consequences. Three examples give an indication. Cotton monoculture in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan required high irrigation that drained the Aral Sea; the central steppe’s thin soil was plowed up; northeast Kazakhstan was turned over to nuclear tests. The legacy of these interventions is extreme; so far, there have been few anthropological engagements with what they mean (Werner and Purvis-Roberts, 2006, 2007 are the exceptions here). Labor migration continues apace, between farm and city, between impoverished countryside and the West. Marat (2009) aside, there have been few studies of the effects of the economic crisis. Next to nothing has been written on industrial relations in these resource-rich countries (where strikes appear to be increasing) and on emerging forms of inequality within, as well as between, ethnic groups. It would be good to see the concern with the politics of performance and representation matched by the politics of resource allocation as the growing gap between rich and poor that marks neoliberal regimes also takes hold. Certainly, the increasing distance between rich and poor, urban and rural areas often outweighs ethnic affiliation. In returning to the movement, fluidity and far-reaching imaginations that have always characterized this region, ethnography is a vital means of countering stereotypes encountered both externally and in self-exegeses – whether demonstrating transformative, traditional or hybrid, syncretic patterns of social life. If early accounts emphasized top-down nation-state building, ethnography shows the inadequacy of the nation-state concept in suggesting the lived plurality of lives in Central Asia. Fully capturing the far-flung networks of ethnic groups that variously live (often choosing to live) in diasporic conditions, in mobile trading relationships, and in their titular state has yet to happen. Equally, a move to consider Central Asia as part of global processes of accumulation by dispossession in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries would enable a stronger sense of its commonality and specificity juxtaposed with global economies of which it is now irrevocably part.
See also: Ethnic Identity and Ethnicity in Archaeology; Ethnicity and Migration in Europe; Ethnicity: Anthropological Aspects; International Migration by Ethnic South and Southeast Asians; Islam: Asia; Migration History; Migration, Theory of; Migration: Anthropological Perspectives; Migration: Cultural Aspects; Migrations, Colonizations, and Diasporas in Archaeology; Nations and Nation-States in History; Tradition, Anthropology of.
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