CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review

Publication of the Central Eurasian Studies Society

ISSN 1538-5043 (Print)
ISSN 1543-7817 (Electronic)

Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2003

Editors - CESR Vol. 2 No. 2

Editor-in-Chief: Virginia Martin (Huntsville, Ala., USA)
Section Editors:
Perspectives: Robert M. Cutler (Ottawa/Montreal, Canada), Edward Walker (Berkeley, Calif., USA)
Research Reports and Briefs: Laura Adams (Boston, Mass., USA), Jamilya Ukudeeva (Riverside, Calif., USA)
Reviews and Abstracts: Shoshana Keller (Clinton, N.Y., USA), Resul Yalcin (London, England)
Conferences and Lecture Series: Peter Finke (Halle, Germany), Cengiz Surucu (Bloomington, Ind., USA)
Educational Resources and Developments: Daniel C. Waugh (Seattle, Wash., USA), Philippe Fort (Zurich, Switzerland)
Production Editor: John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)
Web Editor: John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)
Copy Editor: Michael Davis (Kirksville, Mo., USA)

[Contents]

Perspectives

Detours from Utopia on the Silk Road: Ethical Dilemmas of Neoliberal Triumphalism[1]

Morgan Y. Liu, Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA, mliufas.harvard.edu

Neoliberalism - that family of ideas, policies, institutions, and practices explicitly promoting what is called "developed capitalism," along with its assumed sociopolitical concomitants such as civil liberties and democratic institutions - has been the governing framework for Western assistance to the "developing" world since the 1980s. Since the dissolution of the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991, neoliberal policies have been deployed in Central Eurasia with a particular vigor, indeed triumphalism. The scholarly literature about contemporary Central Eurasia does not question this neoliberal framework or its suitability for Central Eurasian societies. Rather, it takes for granted the neoliberal goals of economic and political reform as neoliberalism defines them. All phenomena in the region today, it seems, are understood according to the grand narrative of the "transition" to free markets or representative democracy, while all current problems are ascribed simply to the transition's incompleteness. The purpose of this Perspectives article is to provide evidence urging us to think differently about neoliberalism and how it applies to Central Eurasia today. Using a series of suggestive cases in point, I will argue for the importance of looking at what actually happens on the ground, of recognizing how people fashion new economic and social arrangements in practice, and of taking seriously the ethical dimensions of the region's dramatic transformations. In conclusion, I synthesize these insights into a critical evaluation of neoliberalism in Central Eurasia.

The Big Importance of the Small Scale

Scholars of contemporary Central Eurasia fail to question the nature and applicability of neoliberalism to the region in part because they tend to confine their analyses to large-scale, top-level issues of national economies and political elites. Such analyses tend to miss the complexities of how those issues actually play out on the scale of communities and individuals. When they do consider the small scale, they often assume it to be a straightforward instantiation of the macrotrends. There is little theorization about unintended consequences and newly emergent phenomena that arise from the play of forces at local levels, where political and cultural contestation can occur over ways of interpreting economic situations and imagining alternative possibilities (Burawoy and Verdery 1999a). This is a significant gap in our knowledge of the region, because human actors come up with the most innovative and unexpected practices for coping under conditions of dramatic, disruptive state transformation (see Greenhouse 2002). Considering the everyday lifeworlds of people and communities is important not only for knowing how people are actually being affected by the tremendous structural changes in Central Eurasia today. Analyses of the "spatial and temporal rhythms of the routines of daily life" (Burawoy 1999: 301) also provide, moreover, unique leverage on grasping the big picture itself. Attending to the complexities and ambiguities on the ground may reveal the non-deterministic, creative aspects of everyday practice that can influence macro outcomes (Burawoy and Verdery 1999a: 7). The actual processes of how new institutions or values like citizen initiative or entrepreneurship might take root (or fail to do so) take place at the level of mundane life (1999a: 6). Sensitivity to the small scale could greatly benefit the study of Central Eurasia at any scale and from any disciplinary perspective, because it can reveal the inaccuracies and qualifications of the currently dominant grand narratives of the region's marketization or democratization.

Awareness of these potential complexities entails a certain caution in employing notions such as "the market," "the state," "civil society," etc. While these concepts certainly have their proper uses, we must realize that the phenomena on the ground that they are asserted to describe are radically inchoate, fragmented, contested, and inflected by local meaning (Ries 2002). Describing the Russian economy during the 1990s, for example, Caroline Humphrey (2002d: xx) writes,

The market is there, and yet somehow it does not operate as theory predicts, and the same is true of "electoral democracy" and other such categories developed to explain Euro-American actualities. Yet it would be a mistake to take the line that the standard concepts are fine in the abstract but they do not work in Russia, having simply run foul of something called "Russian culture."

Indeed, such a line of argument treats specific cultures as obstacles to processes that are assumed to be universal in applicability. As famously expressed in Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis (Huntington 1996), culture is seen as a pre-given independent variable, considered important in determining economic and political outcomes only in non-Western contexts. However, institutional practices such as market relations or civic participation are as embedded in and as dependent on cultural frameworks in the West as they are anywhere in the world, as originally noted by Weber in his classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1958 [1920]). Western analysts tend to miss this because they tend to be blind to their own cultural assumptions. Given the power relations between "the West" and "the rest," and given their own place in the reproduction of those power relations, little compels them to question this blindness. We need to acknowledge that culture is an integral aspect of any economic or political order rather than an entity standing in opposition to them. Instead of scapegoating culture in order to preserve the integrity of grand theories, we should allow intellectual integrity to compel us to acknowledge that human reality is far too complex to be fully captured by any general scheme of explanation. This does not mean abandoning the search for systematic trends and underlying causes, but only tempering and qualifying them with the "messiness" one almost invariably finds on the ground (Mertz 2002). When we abandon the compulsion of parsimony at all costs, "untidy" details cease to sully the big picture and instead enhance it.

To illustrate how attention to the small scale illuminates the large, let us take the issue of civil society, which is of particular importance to Central Eurasia today. Civil society - today defined as that realm of public life held to be separate from the state and the market - is asserted to be what "totalitarianism" negated and what postsocialist liberalizations are supposed to develop along with the creation of the new states and markets (however, see Hann 2002a: 9 for a critical appraisal). Citizen-initiated activity manifesting in a robust layer of independent organizations would, the theory goes, help create the conditions for democratization of political institutions and marketization of economies. "In strengthening grassroots citizen organizations, such programs strengthen principles of citizen participation and activism, of government accountability to citizen concerns, and of civil rights - including the basic right of citizens to organize in order to press for more rights" (Ruffin 1999: 4). The larger goal is to "affect a nation's political culture, help mitigate authoritarian, xenophobic, or insular attitudes ... and diminish the constituencies of extremist leaders and movements" (1999: 5).

Individuals' responses to structural constraints and opportunities on the ground, however, can have unintended consequences that subvert those goals. For example, because international donors often cannot locate truly self-initiated and self-run organizations in post-Soviet Central Asia, they recruit promising individuals (often Soviet-era elites) to start them. These resulting so-called DONGOs (donor organized NGOs) are in reality subservient to donor agendas. "[They] do not have the same grassroots, civic character as the classical NGO. Their activities necessarily express goals and values of those in control of the budgets they depend upon" (Ruffin 1999: 12). When Ruth Mandel undertook a study of locally hired employees of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Kazakhstan from 1994-2000 (Mandel 2002), she found that those whom the NGOs hired locally learned quickly that their success depended on the extent to which they could master the language of "NGO-speak" and "parse the world," according to the rubrics predefined by USAID (pigeonholing complex problems as simply a "women's issue" or a "democratic transition issue").

In consequence, rather than a sui generis class of local development workers, [these individuals] represent the local stratum of the larger class of international development professionals" (Mandel 2002: 287). Moreover, these people's very socialization into Western professional practices produces their failure to become influential models for the rest of Kazakhstani society. They instead become increasingly alienated from it, continue in careers connected with the international community, and may emigrate (sometimes by marrying Western aid workers). A talented young Kazakh employee of an USAID office that Mandel interviewed went on to work for the local Coca-Cola office. She turned down a prestigious job with President Nazarbayev's transition team in the new capital of Astana not only because the pay was half of Coke's, but also because, "I'm not sure I would want to work in that type of organization [i.e., the Kazakhstani state] - I wouldn't have the freedom I have in my job now" (2002: 288). Other interviewees, who had experienced USAID training in modern professional practice, also expressed an unwillingness to return to local work environments because of their strict hierarchy, clientelism, and stifling of individual initiative. And so, the personal disincentives for these new internationalized elites to work within their societies militate against the possibility of these foreign-directed NGOs influencing the general culture of the recipient country.

Yet another factor visible on the small scale can subvert the goals of those who promote the development of civil society in Central Eurasia: attempts to encourage "grassroots" initiative may end up reinforcing such illiberal institutions as patriarchy and clientelism. For example, post-Soviet Uzbekistan has embarked on a campaign for "national renewal" by farming out social welfare functions to mahalla committees - neighborhood-based councils supposedly representing "native" community organization (even though they had been co-opted and reconstituted by Soviet authority) (Jalilov 1995). As a result, women are being subjected to the paternalism and favoritism of local male elders, with attendant threats to their welfare (Kamp 2003). Kamp's insights into such dynamics are possible only because she has spent much time living in mahallas and interviewing women extensively.

Research focused on the small scale is valuable even when studying global issues. This is so because globally circulating ideas and values intersect with local needs and sensibilities in diverse ways through small, concrete encounters in the everyday lives of those born and living in the region. For example, regular direct air connections to cities such as Dubai, Mecca, Istanbul, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Beijing promote a bustling flow of people, goods, and money that results in the presence of an explosive variety of merchandise available in the newly constructed stalls, kiosks, and bazaars. This has led to the development of classes of consumer tastes and preferences that characteristically accompany identity formation in capitalist systems. Not only do Central Eurasian male youth who watch foreign movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan receive ideas about being masculine and modern: such media are usually their only window onto the world. An entire generation is forming its attitudes towards the U.S., the West, and the "outside" world under the influence - sometimes the exclusive influence - of how these are depicted by Hollywood, Hong Kong, and other centers of media concentration in the developed and developing worlds.

Their attitudes are likewise formed by the implicit lifestyle messages carried by such commodities as Coca-Cola, Kodak, or the infamously low-quality Chinese products that flood the region's bazaars. Meanwhile, Central Eurasian Muslims are being trained as clerics and returning from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey; Islamic books printed in the Middle East, Kazan, or Moscow find their way onto vendor tables outside mosques refurbished with Saudi money. How Islam is presented and taught through these channels affects how these Muslims understand morality, community, the state, and the world. Those basic understandings influence, in turn, their attitudinal predispositions concerning domestic policies, interethnic relations, and foreign affairs. It is impossible to construct an accurate understanding of how globally circulating ideas and practices are worked into the life of Central Eurasian societies without a keen awareness of all these specific elements - from material commodities to Islamic knowledge - contribute to the larger picture.

Innovative Responses on the Ground

Small-scale views on the ground reveal the variety and creativity of the responses of people on the ground in Central Asia as they live through the region's seismic economic and political shifts. A focus on the small scale emphasizes agency, i.e., the capacity of individuals or collectivities to make choices and act in ways that are not all determined by circumstances, habits, or "traditions" (Berdahl 2000: 4-5). There is a prevailing assumption inside and outside of academia that "traditional societies" are locked into reproducing unchanging norms and practices unless an external modernity imposes change. Yet numerous anthropological studies worldwide provide irrefutable grounds for radical criticism of such a view. These studies reveal how social agents create alternative avenues of thought and action in the most straitjacketed of circumstances, and even under severe macroeconomic constraint. Under postsocialism, traditions become resources of familiar language and themes that are not deterministic templates for social action but instead form "repertoires of imagination" (Humphrey 2002d: xxi).

Repeatedly, we find that what may appear as "restorations" of patterns familiar from socialism are something quite different: direct responses to the new market initiatives, produced by them, rather than remnants of an older mentality. In other words, we find that what looks familiar has causes that are fairly novel.... Action employs symbols and words that...develop using the forms already known, even if with new senses and to new ends (Burawoy and Verdery 1999a: 1-2).

Not only does Central Eurasian reality not resemble either a neoliberal economy or a liberal polity, but also it does not even constitute a "socialist regression" from those ideal-types. As such, what is happening on the ground - "life itself" - calls into question the doctrinal assumption that current events represent any kind of a "transition" - even if a misdirected one - to either capitalism or democracy.

Precisely this phenomenon - the reconfiguration of markets and consumption - has been a prolific area of research since the collapse of state-organized distribution. This research reveals a tremendous variety of new arrangements in trade, finance, transport, and selling, as well as the innovation of new meanings entailed in the creation of commodities and in their consumption. These shifts involve newly relevant segments of the population (e.g., women, the elderly, children, certain ethnic groups, academics), indeed in general a much larger proportion of the population than previously, all of whom become directly involved in economic activity that had been entirely foreign to them during the socialist period.[2] This activity has meant increased mobility among those involved in shuttle trade or seasonal work, and the regularization of "social contacts" between groups that did not have such relations before. The unprecedented participation in shifting economies has had a tremendous impact on every aspect of life: family, gender roles, education, religious practice, community cohesion, crime, civic life, intellectual production, interethnic relations, local politics, and state institutions. We are only beginning to study this kind of impact. What happens on these local fronts is far from irrelevant to the course of the large-scale economic and political liberalization that continues to receive, by contrast, an exclusive overemphasis.

Consider, for example, the burgeoning of petty trade. This issue appeared to be on everyone's mind across the postsocialist world, particularly in the early 1990s, at which time almost all new economic activity was channeled into commerce because few opportunities lay in production so soon after the Soviet state imploded. Yet trade liberalization in these economies has not produced the "inevitable" transition to modern capitalist modes of exchange. An important reason for this lies in how the people actually conducting the commerce saw, experienced, and responded to the constraints and opportunities that confronted them.

For example, Caroline Humphrey identifies a complex of circumstances that conditioned how trade developed through the mid-1990s in provincial Russia. She cites an example of a trader who had a license to have her truck on the road, but not to enter the neighboring province (Humphrey 2002c: 76). The erratic regulation regime reflects not only the inexperience of administrations regarding this sector, but also an ambiguous attitude of the state toward free trade, an ambiguity reflecting the general Russian public's dubious regard of such trade. It is difficult for individuals actually living in such a situation to grasp the multi-level totality of all shifting, intersecting, and even mutually contradictory laws governing trade, much less obey them all. As a result, traders widely flout laws concerning finance and distribution, preferring instead networks built upon personal trust.

Humphrey distinguishes a number of new categories of traders operating in the Russian provinces during the 1990s, each employing different arrangements and strategies. For example, "resellers" [perekupshchiki] were small-time traders dealing with mostly locally-produced goods and working limited routes (often within a city), buying at one place, and reselling at a higher price elsewhere. They were often pensioners or children, with little capital or mobility. "Shuttlers" [chelnoki] also did their buying and selling personally but, by contrast to the resellers, they trafficked on longer circuits that crossed regions and international borders. Shuttling therefore required not only knowing friendly (bribable) customs officials and paying off appropriate racketeers for "protection," but also a deeper overall familiarity with authorities, local demand, travel conditions, and risks. "Entrepreneurs" [predprinimateli] dealt on a still larger and international scale than shuttlers: they were endowed with more capital, sometimes provided by foreign partners. They had access to fast travel and communication, which they used in order to take quick advantage of evolving local tastes for selected foreign commodities. Those who had the means to do so moved into the potentially more lucrative wholesale arena, which required a still greater level of networking, coordination, and appeasement of authorities. These examples point out how differently positioned individuals exploit opportunities in local demand in different ways, creating distinctive niches for themselves in an emerging commercial sphere. The poverty of a linear socialism-to-capitalism transition scheme fails to capture the diversity of such micro-arrangements, because the emerging commercial sphere is too variegated and its paths of development too multidirectional.

In yet another work, Humphrey (2002b: 17) focuses on post-Soviet practices of bribery. Rather than stipulate a priori that bribery is simply and universally "corruption," she considers how bribery is actually practiced in different contexts and its relations to other forms of extralegal activity. While the term "bribe" [vziatka] applies strictly only to payments made to public state officials and is, as a practice, morally condemned in everyday Russian life, it exists within a more amorphous arena of unorthodox payments in the newly developing private commercial sphere - payments variously called "additional fees," "tariffs," or "gratuities" (Humphrey 2002b: 127). How such payments are regarded depends on economic status: the disadvantaged abhor them but participate in them out of necessity, while elites practice them as ethically neutral costs of doing business. In some circumstances bribes can even be presented as a moral good. For example, payments to school officials or teachers for placement in the institution have been regarded by the payers as justifiable "in this commercial world," where state support for education has dwindled and teachers remain unpaid for long periods (Humphrey 2002b: 142). An analogous argument has been made concerning the subtle practices of payment for medical services in post-Soviet Russia (Rivkin-Fish 2003). Bribing practices have thus diversified and adapted to the new conditions of state withdrawal and commercialization of public life. It is therefore erroneous to see them as Soviet-era holdovers; rather, they reveal fault-lines in the tectonic shifts of the unstable socio-economic order.

Ethical Dilemmas

The ethical dilemmas of postsocialist transformation are sine qua non for understanding economic or political "transition," which as an abstract template projected into the region, necessarily confronts particular and particularistic practices and moral discourses about class, ethnicity, and nationhood. What are these ethical dilemmas? With the contraction of previously taken-for-granted state institutions, people interpret and act upon the severe constraints on their lives not as neutral facts "out there," but according to strongly held notions about how things ought to be. State socialism irrefutably socialized its citizenry into attitudes and practices reflecting a well-defined moral sense about justice in social arrangements on issues ranging from wealth distribution to gender equality. This sense of how society should be organized ran deep, regardless of the state's actual practice or failure to implement fully the stated ideals. Since then, "the everyday moral communities of socialism have been undermined but not replaced" (Hann 2002a: 10, italics in original). Analytic attention to small-scale complexities on the ground, and to the variety of human creativity acting in the real world, leads to the recognition that the very tangible material crises of postsocialist transformation are frequently apprehended and acted upon as ethical dilemmas and choices. Many of those who advocate liberal reforms in Central Eurasia are themselves motivated by an ethical imperative to elevate the material welfare, human rights, and dignity of others. To attempt to do so, however, while ignoring the distinct ethical sensibilities of those affected by the changes would be disingenuous and paternalistic.

Under socialism people lived with certain expectations about the active role of the state in overseeing society and economy. "Socialism's basic social contract" held that the state would collect the total social product, and in return provide, however imperfectly, lifetime employment, medical care, pensions, and consumer goods, as well as an overall sense of stability and predictability (Verdery 1996: 25). The subsequent disintegration of these "social protections" is widely regarded throughout Central Eurasia as a breach, even a betrayal, of the state's duty. It is bad enough that rampant unemployment and unprecedented inflation have disrupted family livelihoods in general: but specific facts about the new economic order have provoked moral indignation. The variation of prices across different stores or seasons, for example, leads Central Eurasians to see much of the new economic activity as criminal. The above discussion about petty trade illustrates the point.

Harsh economic realities can load the identities ascribed to "others" with weighted moral value: "they" are all thieves, or "they" are all immoral, since "they" are all engaged in swindling, drug trafficking, prostitution, or sedition. Any and every kind of outsider - from whatever other region, country, ethnicity, or religion - is threatened with such stigmatization.[3] Tensions arising from incipient class or ethnic relations are thus cast as ethical judgments. Recognizing the ethical dimension of these tensions helps to explain the uncompromising absoluteness that accompanies group conflict, in a manner that "rational choice" analyses cannot adequately capture. Studies of identity formation and interethnic conflict in Central Eurasia must pay serious attention to the moral convictions that motivate individuals and groups to act and speak as they do. However, it would be a reductionist error of the first order either to collapse ethics into economics or politics on one hand, or, on the other hand, to treat it as a cultural "residue" representing "traditional mentality." The subjects whom we study are sentient beings as complex and fully human as ourselves, and whose moral sensibilities implicate political logics and economic rationalities in multilayered and complex ways.

Anyone who doubts the significance of the ethical dimension to understanding important macro-scale phenomena should consider the appeal of Islam and attraction of authoritarianism in post-Soviet Central Asia. These very phenomena are not, for Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan for example, simply resurgences of a pre-Soviet or Soviet past. They are instead novel responses to post-Soviet conditions, based upon moral sensibilities about authority that were originally produced within local Soviet Central Asian contexts (Liu 2002). These Uzbeks value Islam because it cultivates virtuous individuals and peaceful, productive communities by establishing, among other things, proper relations of authority between people (Liu 2000). These Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan advocate a ruthless but benevolent rule that exercises discipline over or training of the people [tarbiya], the supposed purpose of which is to prepare them for political and economic liberalization (Liu 2003). In their political imagination President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan is seen as a paternalistic figure with a moral charge to oversee the development of the land and its people. To be sure, this khan-like image of a post-Soviet Central Asian president - notably cultivated by Karimov's astute self-identification with Timur (Tamerlane) - can be a cynical strategy of power (Manz 2002). To be sure, some in the region use Islam as a way to speak to the economic disenfranchisement that others experience. Yet even those behaviors tap into deep convictions about the ethical nature of political authority. The value of a "fatherly steward" that is ascribed to the ruler and the value of a "community-builder" that is ascribed to Islam are central to the significance and potency of authoritarianism and Muslim identity as social forces in Central Asia today.

Critical Awareness of Neoliberalism

The accumulated findings of contemporary field research discussed above - which represent but a sample of all the work available - illustrate how the ethical dimension of social thought and action is revealed at the detailed level of the small scale, where people create unexpected responses to the pressing circumstances of everyday life.[4] Although this argument represents a decidedly anthropological perspective on the state of Central Eurasian studies today, I would hardly seek to make anthropologists out of scholars with other disciplinary backgrounds (whether in the social sciences or in the humanities), and still less out of policy-makers or their advisors. I would instead offer the above examples as evidence for the value of grounding our views of the region in small-scale, actually occurring social contexts, even if this means foregoing clean-cut, all-explaining answers. This research in postsocialist societies has already made indispensable contributions to both methodology and actual research findings by showing it is possible to discern important regularities without losing sight of complications on the ground. Cooperative interdisciplinary dialogue will allow the profitable integration of these advantages into other modes of analysis.

A concluding insight emerging from the examples presented here is the need for a critical awareness of neoliberalism, and specifically in the Central Eurasian context. If disincentives felt on the ground are subverting the development of civil society; if liberal intentions end up reinforcing illiberal patriarchy in the mahalla; if trade liberalization has resulted not in modern capitalist modes of distribution but instead in a panoply of unforeseen economic arrangements; if people yearn for authoritarian rule because they believe it is for their own good; or if the results of Westernized policy interventions are consistently falling short of predictions by grand theory: then we must question whether something is happening other than an "incomplete transition" to neoliberal outcomes. Will "freeing" a society from socialism and dictatorship inevitably set it on a course toward capitalism and democracy as we recognize them? Can we not concede that the multi-dimensional complexity of possibility means we cannot predict how these societies will actually develop? Neoliberalism - like every other "-ism" that claims to inaugurate a utopian epoch of human civilization if not "the end of history" (Fukuyama 1992) - is but a collection of concepts and institutional practices, the development and deployment of which are themselves historically contingent and path-dependent (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1999; Paley 2002).

The field of Central Eurasian studies contains the exciting possibility of criticizing and modulating the self-assured triumphalism of strident neoliberal doctrine applied to the region. Research attentive to the reality on the ground can sensitize neoliberal projects to the particular complexities of the region's everyday life. Those who believe in the liberalization of Central Eurasia and consciously work towards that goal must ask hard questions about the unintended effects of their policies. They must, if need be, have the courage radically to rethink cherished neoliberal preconceptions about social development and political change. Only unflinching engagement with these realities and only genuine collaboration with Central Eurasians as equals will yield contextually effective approaches to transforming the region's societies and economies. The alternative is to become a perhaps unwitting accomplice in yet another utopian project promising prosperity and security to the whole of humankind, blind to the detours that emerge from closer scrutiny and attention to context.

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1958 (1920) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribners Sons.

Notes

[1] My grateful acknowledgement goes to Robert Cutler for his eloquent and insightful editing of this article.

[2] Humphrey (2002c: 73) cites an amazing figure: an estimated 49% of the population of Irkutsk was taking part in trade in 1992, although that figure quickly dropped in the ensuing years.

[3] A stigmatized outsider can come from a nearby region (Humphrey 2002a). Roma ("Gypsies") are a most notable ethnic outsider group throughout Central Eurasia (Lemon 2000: 56-79). Regarding religious outsiders in Central Eurasia today, there are local converts to Protestant Christianity and to Islamist movements, so-called "Wahhabis," a word employed throughout the region to index their foreignness and militancy at least as much as any particular doctrinal orientation (Knysh 2002).

[4] Many more such case studies can be found in the cited edited volumes (Berdahl, Bunzl and Lampland 2000; Burawoy and Verdery 1999b; Hann 2002b; Humphrey 2002d); in the new book series Culture and Society after Socialism from Cornell University Press, edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries; in the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review (whose purview overlaps with the Central Eurasian region), and at the annual conferences of Soyuz: the Network of Post-Communist Cultural Studies, which is an interest group within the American Anthropological Association.

[Contents]

Research Reports and Briefs

Comparative Perceptions of Risk From Nuclear Testing in Kazakhstan: Preliminary Results and Proposed Research

Cynthia Werner, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, Texas, USA, wernerneo.tamu.edu; Kathleen Purvis, Assistant Professor, Joint Science Department, Claremont Colleges, California, USA, kpurvisjsd.claremont.edu; and Nurlan Ibraev, Director of the "Densaulq" State Agency for Health Care, East-Kazakhstan Province, Kazakhstan, baklanovaustk.kz

Between 1949 and 1989, approximately 470 nuclear tests were conducted at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan. At least one million people were exposed to significant doses of radiation as a result. The test site, also known as the Polygon, is a 19,000 square kilometer tract of land situated about 150 km west of Semipalatinsk, a city of approximately 400,000 residents. A number of smaller towns and villages are situated even closer to the test site. Studies comparing the health problems experienced by populations living near the Polygon with those experienced by control populations indicate that the populations near the test site have experienced higher rates of cancers (including leukemia), benign thyroid abnormalities, psychological problems and birth abnormalities (Gusev 1998; Peterson 1998). Despite new information about the nuclear tests and the dangers of radiation, many individuals have continued to live in areas near the former test site where they are exposed to chronic low dose radiation, and some individuals engage in high-risk activities, such as mining copper from the former test site.

Our collaborative research project compares the ways that four social groups (Kazakh villagers, Russian villagers, local research scientists, and local health care workers) perceive the risk from radiation exposure. This study also identifies the factors that influence each group's risk perceptions and suggests how different perceptions of risk can affect individual decision-making. This research report provides background information on our research team and on the research site and a brief summary of our preliminary findings in Kazakhstan.

Background

This is an international collaborative research project that involves the combined efforts of a cultural anthropologist (Werner), an environmental chemist (Purvis), and an oncologist (Ibraev). Preliminary research for this project was conducted in Kazakhstan during the summers of 2000 and 2001. Further research will be conducted during the summers of 2003 and 2004, with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

Information about the Soviet nuclear testing program was highly classified until the glasnost years in the late 1980s. Thus, villagers who lived as close as 40 kilometers from the test site and occasionally herded their animals on the test site were never informed of the risks associated with the tests. Before each test, the Soviet military consistently warned the local citizens that there would be an "explosion," yet they only evacuated local residents for temporary periods during the largest atmospheric tests. Today, the villagers talk about how they never knew that the atmospheric explosions that many enjoyed watching, almost like a firework display, were poisoning their bodies and endangering their health. Not knowing the risks, villagers occasionally entered the irradiated Polygon territory to herd their sheep, to sneak into the closed city of Kurchatov, and to steal objects that the Soviet military left behind.

Soviet leaders knew that the tests had harmful effects on human health but the Soviet government silenced medical doctors who were responsible for gathering and reporting statistics on illnesses and causes of death. Cancer diagnoses were seriously underreported because they could only be made by doctors in Almaty or Moscow. Soviet leaders also used villagers as guinea pigs to monitor the effects of radiation on human subjects. Beginning in 1961 many of the villagers were treated in a "secret clinic" in Semipalatinsk, known as Brucellosis Dispensary Number Four. Signs on the building described the clinic as a center for treating animal-borne diseases, yet those who worked inside knew that the clinic was a highly classified research clinic for studying the impact of radiation exposure on human bodies. Military personnel would routinely visit the villages, and offer rides to any villagers who sought medical care. At the time the villagers felt privileged to have this opportunity, because they felt the clinic offered exceptional care. In exchange for this care, they unknowingly became the subjects of scientific research on the effects of radiation. One of the former directors of the dispensary today admits that "the role of the facility was not to assist radiation victims, but to observe them and write reports for Moscow." It is difficult to assess the actual quality of care because most of the research data collected by Dispensary Number Four was either destroyed or taken away to Russia.

The villagers' trust in the government was shattered in the late 1980s. Inspired by glasnost policies, the Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov founded the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement in 1989. Although the closing of the test site in 1991 was a great victory for the people who live near the test site, the Cold War has not really ended for these people. They still live in an area that is contaminated by radioactive fallout and their bodies are still suffering from years of chronic, low-dose radiation. Many scientists believe that the current levels of radiation exposure still present health risks to individuals living near the test site. In the post-Soviet period poverty and poor nutrition complicate the wellbeing and health care of these villagers.

Preliminary findings in context

Studies of risk perception demonstrate that specialists and non-specialists do not always agree on the risks associated with certain hazards and technologies (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1979) and show that risk perceptions are heightened among laypersons when a particular technology or hazard is perceived to be involuntary, uncontrollable, dreaded, unknown, and potentially catastrophic (Slovic 2001).

Existing studies of risk in other cultures clearly demonstrate that economic and technological risk is socially and culturally constructed (Bujra 2000; Cashdan 1990; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Weber and Hsee 1999). Studies of risk in non-Western cultures suggest that the very concept of risk is more developed in "modern" societies, where scientific rather than religious or superstitious explanations are used to explain unfortunate or unplanned events (Beck 1992; Beck 1999; Giddens 1998; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Although cultural differences have been acknowledged as a significant factor in shaping risk perception (Renn and Rohrmann 2000), there is a significant need to fill the gap in the literature when it comes to risk perception regarding nuclear energy and radiation exposure. Do the theories about risk perception in Western societies apply to a non-Western setting where traditional healing practices combined with Islamic (and Russian Orthodox) religious beliefs might play an important role in shaping local attitudes towards health and risk?

Rural Kazakhs and rural Russians are both literate and educated, yet their worldview is different from the respondents in previous risk studies. Shaped by personal experience and information from the popular press, Kazakh and Russian villagers who live near the test site have constructed their own perception of how nuclear testing has affected their health and environment. Based on preliminary interviews we know that perceptions of risk towards radiation vary within the villages. On the one hand, some of the villagers we spoke to claim that they are not at all worried about radiation exposure from the water they drink or the food they consume. They believe that the harmful effects of radiation do not exist anymore, since the last nuclear test was conducted over a decade ago. Some villagers even pursue "risky" behaviors, such as mining copper cables from the former test site. On the other hand, we spoke to several villagers who are very concerned that they are still being exposed to harmful levels of radiation. These villagers express a general sense of hopelessness and despair. Due to economic conditions they simply cannot afford to move to another region or to buy "safe" water and food. We do not yet know why villagers have varying perceptions of risk. Our survey research will examine whether ethnicity, gender, education or age can help explain the variation.

Previous studies argue that non-specialists perceive greater risks than "experts" because they do not fully understand the science of nuclear energy. The risk literature also suggests that expert views vary depending on their scientific field. Our study considers two groups of experts: local research scientists (including those who work at the former test site and the former secret laboratory) and health care workers (including doctors, nurses and hospital administrators) who treat the "victims" of nuclear testing. Our survey research will demonstrate whether a similar dichotomy between experts' perceptions and laypersons' perceptions exists in Kazakhstan. Based on preliminary interviews we expect this to be the case. For instance, in one interview, a nuclear scientist working in Kurchatov mentioned that he and his colleagues were exposed to radiation throughout the testing period, but do not think of themselves as victims. He believes that diet, rather than radiation exposure, plays the greater role in explaining the poor health of villagers. Although his views are shared by other nuclear scientists, they are not shared by health care workers. All of the health care workers we interviewed have a fairly high perception of risk from radiation exposure. They are certain that the high rate of cancer in the villages surrounding the Polygon can be explained by radiation exposure. Unlike the villagers, however, they realize that radiation exposure is not the only factor that affects the health of villagers.

In addition to testing hypotheses based on findings in risk studies, we plan to analyze existing environmental data collected by the Kazakhstan Research Institute of Radiation Ecology and Medicine both during and after the nuclear testing period. We also plan to analyze health statistics on the incidence of cancer and heart disease in the two test villages as well as one control village (Zharbulak). This research will add a longitudinal component to a previous study (conducted by Ibraev) on the incidences of cancer and heart disease in Semipalatinsk province. Both data sets will be useful for putting the perceptions of risk in perspective.

A final objective of this study is to examine the ways in which risk perceptions affect choices made by individual villagers. These choices involve certain activities and behaviors that could limit exposure to radiation and/or improve individual and family health. The study assumes that there will be some variation among villagers regarding the perception of risk from radiation exposure. Additional survey questions and qualitative interviews will be used to get at these questions.

References

Beck, Ulrich

1992 [1986] Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.

1999 World Risk Society. New York: Blackwell Publishers.

Bujra, Janet

2000 "Risk and trust: Unsafe sex, gender and AIDS in Tanzania." In: Risk Revisited. Pat Caplan, ed., pp. 59-84. London: Pluto Press.

Carlsen, Tina, Leif Petersen, Brant Ulsh, Cynthia Werner, Kathleen Purvis, and Anna Sharber

2001 "Radionuclide contamination at Kazakhstan's Semipalatinsk test site: Implications on human and ecological health," Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 7(4): 943-955.

Cashdan, Elizabeth, ed.

1990 Risk and Uncertainty in Tribal and Peasant Economies. Boulder: Westview Press.

Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky

1982 Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Environmental and Technological Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Giddens, Anthony

1998 Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gusev, B., R. Rosenson, and Zh. Abylkassimova

1998 "The Semipalatinsk nuclear test site: a first analysis of solid cancer incidence (selected sites) due to test-related radiation," Radiation and Environmental Biophysics, 37: 209-214.

Peterson, Leif, Zhaksibay Zhumadilov, Sunil Kripalani, Yuri Progulo, Thomas Wheeler, Boris Gusev, Ridha Arem, Sergei Yonov, and Armin Weinberg

1998 "Diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid disease in the East Kazakhstan Region of the Republic of Kazakhstan: A case review of pathological findings for 2525 patients," Cancer Research Therapy and Control, 5: 307-312.

Renn, Ortwin, and Bernd Rohrmann

2000 "Cross-cultural risk perception research: state and challenges," In: Cross-Cultural Risk Perception: A Survey of Empirical Studies. Ortwin Renn and Bernd Rohrmann, eds., pp. 211-233. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Slovic, Paul

2001 Introduction and overview, In: The Perception of Risk. Paul Slovic, ed., pp. xxi-xxxvii. London: Earthscan Publications.

Slovic, Paul, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein

1979 Rating the risks, Environment, 21(3): 14-20, 36-39.

Weber, Elke, and Christopher Hsee

1999 "Models and mosaics: Investigating cross-cultural differences in risk perception and risk preference," Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 6(4): 611-617.

[Contents]

Interviewing NGO Leaders in Bishkek

Sada Aksartova, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., USA, sadaprinceton.edu

I have recently returned from a research trip for my dissertation comparing US civil society assistance in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. My field work was supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), as well as the MacArthur Foundation and Princeton University's Center for International Studies. The dissertation, titled "Civil Society from Abroad: Western Donors in the Former Soviet Union," examines cultural and organizational dimensions of the interaction between US donors and recipient NGOs in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. A significant portion of my empirical evidence comes from in-depth interviews with representatives of donor and recipient organizations. To conduct the interviews I spent 4.5 months in Moscow and one month in Bishkek. In this report I will discuss some of the problems I confronted doing this kind of research in Bishkek and their broader implications.

At first I found it far easier to work in Bishkek than in Moscow. For one thing, Bishkek is a much smaller city. Although the donor presence is large relative to the size of the city and of the country, it is not too big numerically and I quickly understood what key organizations and people I should contact. People were for the most part very open to my inquiries and could usually find a time to meet with me the same or next day when I called to introduce myself and request a meeting (which almost never happened in Moscow). That said, in Bishkek I observed a pattern that had not manifested itself to the same degree in Moscow: local NGO leaders were far more apprehensive about meeting with me than were representatives of the donor community, who were mostly but not exclusively Westerners.

Several prominent activists repeatedly declined my requests for interviews, usually citing hectic schedules and pressing deadlines. I initially took these explanations at face value and began to wonder if these were in fact the real reasons only after I had heard them several times. Like anyone else in my position, I accepted that some people I wanted to interview were not interested in meeting and speaking with a researcher. At the same time, I began asking myself whether this unwillingness represented something that I, as a researcher, needed to understand. Just at the moment when these thoughts started taking shape in my mind I had a fortuitous encounter with a respondent who was willing to address these issues head-on and without my asking. It had taken several phone calls to arrange the meeting, and when we met the respondent opened the conversation by informing me that she (most NGO leaders are women) had no interest whatsoever in talking to me; that the meeting took place only because of my doggedness; that she had talked to many a researcher in the previous ten years and nothing useful for her work ever came out of those conversations; and that she was no longer willing to pour her heart out to visitors and spend hours explaining to them the basic facts about Kyrgyzstan's political life and society. Surprising as it may sound, after this opening salvo we actually had a very interesting and informative conversation about Kyrgyzstan's NGOs and politics.

I feel immensely grateful to this person for putting these issues on the table. The conversation opened my eyes to a certain perception of Western researchers that exists in Kyrgyzstan's NGO community and helped me formulate questions that I could pursue in subsequent interviews. When I raised this subject with other respondents, several were ready to discuss it. Their very readiness and thoughtful arguments were, in my view, a strong indication that this issue is a "social fact" of which Western researchers need to be cognizant.

According to my interlocutors, there is a fairly common concern among local NGO leaders that Western researchers come to interview them with the purpose of purloining their ideas, which they then use to produce publications and advance their careers. In part this attitude is related to the fact that researchers in the post-Soviet context are less respected than they are in the West. However, there are several other dimensions that are specific to Western involvement in Kyrgyzstan. One is what I would call interview fatigue caused by the feeling of being exploited by foreign researchers. The stream of Western researchers passing through Bishkek over the last ten years has been large relative to the size of the local NGO community, so that NGO leaders - especially because they are more likely to speak English than, say, academics or politicians - are approached again and again with similar inquiries but rarely see the outcome. As a result, they feel that Westerners come to pick their brains and then leave, never getting back in touch to share the product of their research. There was an undercurrent of the same attitude toward Western researchers in Moscow, but it became far more obvious and explicit in Bishkek because researchers' presence looms larger in this much smaller city.

This attitude about exploitative Western researchers is reinforced by the way international organizations conduct their research on Kyrgyzstan. In the words of a respondent with firsthand experience of the procedures of the European Union and the UN for gathering data, international organizations use local social scientists as "plantation slaves" for the most basic tasks of data collection and entry and almost never involve them in analysis and writing which usually take place outside of Kyrgyzstan. According to this person, this arrangement compromises the quality of information in the resulting studies. Local researchers, having no stake in the final product, do not have a strong incentive to be responsible and meticulous about their work and do on occasion falsify data, for example, by filling out questionnaires themselves.

A related concern, which I heard several times in Bishkek, is that knowledge about Kyrgyzstan is predominantly produced in the West, that what is produced is rarely brought back, and that so far there has been very little, if any, development of the capacity for local knowledge production. This concern was also recently voiced here in the United States: in her presentation at the SSRC-sponsored thematic conversation on the Caucasus and Central Asia at the November 2002 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Cynthia Buckley discussed the pervasive lack of access by Central Asian researchers to "public access" data produced by international organizations, which "can both diminish the participation of regional scholars in policy debates and encourage researchers to repeat, often at significant costs, data collection efforts."

My motivation in writing this report for CESR has been two-fold. First, my research experience suggests that Western scholars (including Central Asians, like myself, who are now working in the West) should be aware of the broader context in which their individual research projects take place and that each of us contributes to shaping that broader local context during our field work. Secondly, the Central Eurasian Studies Society is an ideal forum for discussing how to forge stronger links between scholarship here and in Central Asia and to foster the development of knowledge production capacity inside the region.

[Contents]

Bayani's Shajara-ye khorezmshahi and the Russian Conquest of Khiva: An Essay on Historical Production¹

Ron Sela, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., USA, rselaindiana.edu

The1 Russian conquest of Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century drew considerable attention from numerous eyewitnesses (Russians, French, Germans, English) and a great deal of scrutiny from scholars in Russia and elsewhere. Unfortunately, descriptions of the conquest in Central Asian sources were for the most part left out of scholarly inquiry, perhaps because too many of them are still in manuscript form, sometimes difficult to trace and hard to access.

One such source is the Shajara-ye khorezmshahi (Genealogy of the Khorezmian Kings), completed in 1914 by Muhammad Yusuf Bek, known by his poetic pseudonym [takhallus] "Bayani." The work, a history of Khiva written in Chaghatay (the language of Khivan historiography), survived in a single manuscript (preserved in Tashkent at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan) and was never edited nor published in its entirety. In fact, the number of scholars who have actually used it can be counted on one hand.2 In this report I will draw readers' attention to a part of this source that indicates the author's reliance on multiple sources with very different perspectives on the Russian conquest of Khiva. This research is part of an ongoing project concerning Central Asian historiography, relying in part on the extensive and rare materials kept at the RIFIAS (Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies), Indiana University, Bloomington.

Our information on Bayani is limited. We know that he was a poet (he was a member of a poetic circle in Khiva where the khan made him read twice a week from his own works), a writer, and an administrative official. He was the son of Babajan Bek, also a writer and an official at the Khivan court, and the great-grandson of Eltuzer, Khan of Khiva at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Russian ethnographer Samoilovich, who visited Khiva in 1908, listed Bayani as a poet, musician and divanbegi (an official in charge of the treasury). He also mentioned that Bayani was a captain in the service of the Russians (the Russians often gave Central Asians honorary ranks with no real authority), and what is more important for our purpose, knew Russian well and regularly received Russian newspapers and journals.

On the circumstances of the writing of the work, Bayani relates that on 22 Jumadi al-Awwal, 1329 (May 21, 1911) he received instructions from Isfandiyar, Khan of Khiva, to write down the history of the latter's "noble and sublime dynasty" in simple language that common people would find intelligible, "avoiding metaphors and similes" (in contrast with previous historical works, all written in a very ornate style). Therefore, we can entertain the notion that this work was an attempt at producing a Khivan national history.

Bayani based his account on earlier works by Munis and Agahi, the most noted historians of Khiva in the nineteenth century. However, unable to find all of Agahi's chronicles, he had to write the history from 1846-1856 and from 1864 onward himself. These parts are Bayani's original contribution, based on information that he had collected himself. He also explains that this was the reason why it took him three years (1911-1914) to finish the work.

The part of the work I would like to highlight here deals with events surrounding the Russian conquest of Khiva and the bloody expedition against the Yomut tribe of the Turkmens which followed.3 On May 29, 1873, General von Kaufman, Governor of Turkestan and commander of the campaign against Khorezm, triumphantly entered Muhammad Rahim Khan's palace in Khiva. The conquest of Khiva, "Russia's most troublesome Central Asian neighbor," was the peak of the Russian advance into Central Asia at the time, following the subjugation of the other two khanates of the region, Bukhara and Qoqand. Approximately six weeks after Kaufman entered Khiva, he sent General Golovachev to annihilate the Turkmen tribe of the Yomuts in the most brutal expedition of the Khivan campaign. Here is a peek into Bayani's description of the massacre:

The mounted Cossacks dispersed to all sides and set fire to the Yomuts' crops, to their huts and tents. The flames reached the sky from every direction and the smoke could be seen everywhere so that the meaning of [the Qur'anic verse] "Wait for the day when the heavens bring forth visible smoke, enveloping mankind," [Qur'an, 44:10: a reference to the Sura of the Smoke, the Day of Judgment] became clear. The Cossacks fired at everyone they saw. They stabbed the old and the women and children with their sabers and impaled infants who were still suckling their mother's milk on their lances and tossed them into the burning fire. And they carried on plundering the Yomuts' possessions (Bayani, ff. 468a-469a).

As I was reading Bayani's account, I had the distinct feeling that I had read a similar description before, in a report in English on the Russian conquest of Khiva, written approximately 40 years before Bayani started his work. J. A. MacGahan, a correspondent for the American newspaper The New York Herald, was sent by his paper to cover the Russian advance into Central Asia (MacGahan 1970). MacGahan joined General Kaufman's column, attacking Khiva from the East, and later he got Kaufman's permission to accompany him on the operation against the Turkmens, riding alongside Prince Eugene, a commander of one of the Cossack divisions.

Reading both testimonies, it became clear that Bayani may have based parts of his narrative on MacGahan's account, using the same language as MacGahan's report, zooming in on similar scenes, and offering information that otherwise would not have been available to Bayani. My guess is that Bayani had access to MacGahan's account, not in its original English of course, but in a Russian translation of MacGahan's work completed in Moscow a year after the original publication (Mak-Gakhan 1875).

This is not to say that Bayani's description of the conquest isn't useful. On the contrary, his work provides insights into the Khivans' perception of the approaching Russians, into the organization of the Khivan administration and the movements of the Khivan troops, and into the relationship between Uzbeks and Turkmens in Khiva. (We should also bear in mind that the description of the Russian conquest is only a small part of the Shajara-ye khorezmshahi).

More significantly, if indeed Bayani consulted MacGahan's account, this may mark a turning point in historical production in Khiva. It means that the Khivans began to utilize external sources of information that had nothing to do with the organic body of materials that they would normally use to write down their history (such as older court chronicles, "classical" reference works from Central Asia and Iran, documents, stories, popular knowledge, and local eyewitnesses). Naturally, in order to accommodate a new body of materials to Khivan reality, Bayani needed to modify not only some of the contents, but also the style of presentation. Accordingly Bayani would occasionally quote from the Qur'an, provide a domestic perspective on people and locales, and give more credit to the Khivan military than they deserved. Nevertheless, the move to rely on more diverse sources of information in Central Asian historiography would have caused the Khivans to unknowingly rely on a New York journalist as the storyteller of their most depressing hour.

References

Banii, Muhammad Iusuf

1994 Shazharaii Khorazmshohii, Toshkent: Ghafur Ghulom.

Bayani, Muhammad Yusuf Bek

M.S. Shajara-i khorezmshahi, Tashkent, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, Manuscript no. 9596.

Bregel, Yuri

1961 "Sochinenie Baiani 'Shadzhara-i khorezmshakhi' kak istochnik po istorii Turkmen [The work of Bayani "Shadzhara-i khorezmshakhi' as a source of Turkmen history]," Kratkie soobshcheniia Instituta narodov Azii Akademii nauk SSSR, vol. XLIV, pp. 125-157. Moskva.

MacGahan, J. A.

1970 [1874] Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva. New York: Arno Press.

Mak-Gakhan [J. A. MacGahan]

1875 Voennye deistviia na Oksuse i padenie Khivy [Military campaigns on the Oxus and the fall of Khiva]. Moskva.

Notes

[1] The following is a concise version of a paper read at the Third Annual Conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, October 17-20, 2002, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[2] See Bayani, Shajara-i khorezmshahi (M.S.). For an overview of the work and its history see Bregel (1961).

[3] Recently this part of Bayani's account was transcribed from the Arabic script into Cyrillic (see Banii 1994). The editor accommodated the text for her Uzbek readers by occasionally providing synonyms in modern Uzbek to the original Chaghatay words. The transcription is generally good although this is not a scholarly edition of the text (there is a short introduction but no commentary or analysis).

[Contents]

Typology of Traditional Culture of the Mongol-Speaking Peoples

Tatyana D. Skrynnikova, Chair of the Culture and Art Studies Department, Institute of Mongolian, Buryat, and Tibetan Studies, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia, Russian Federation, tscrynnimbitsrv.bsc.buryatia.ru

The project "Traditional Buryat Culture" is being conducted by a group of researchers from two institutions: the Culture and Art Studies Department of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Ethnology and Folklore Department of the Eastern Siberian Academy of Culture and Art. Some of our findings have been published in a series titled "Siberia: ethnos and cultures," and in a monograph, "Rites in the Buryat traditional culture" (Skrynnikova 2002). The results presented in this report are preliminary findings drawn from one of the research stages that has not been published before. In this report I offer a new conceptual schema for understanding the typology of traditional culture.

This study is part of a larger project that extends until the year 2006, and is financed by an "Integration" grant, a program of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. The grant is financing our publication of monographs on the symbolic aspects of the Buryat traditional culture and the Mongol-speaking community. The goal of the research is to accumulate and generalize specific empirical material on Buryat rites; to reconstruct the traditional world view; to identify the leading cultural paradigms of today's traditional culture; and to identify maintenance mechanisms for the sustainable development of traditional society.

The project discussed here focuses on the study of the world view, pantheon and customs in the traditional culture of the Mongolian peoples, as well as the role and features of shamanism. The work has been conducted in the context of cultural anthropology that combines research on ethnocultural phenomena with semiotics, linguistics, sociology, history, ethnology, and archaeology. The data were collected during field trips to the Buryat Republic, the Ust-Orda National Region of Irkutsk Province, and the Aga National Region of Chita Province. As for the data on Mongolia, it was collected from the published materials of our Mongolian colleagues. We also relied on data collected by scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Mongols, Buryats and other Mongol-speaking ethnic groups recognize their unity and cohesion and scholars are aware of their common ethnogenetic identity. However, recent research provides more evidence for the differentiation of two different cultural types existing within the traditional culture of the Mongolian peoples. These differences developed and co-existed from the third century B.C.E. onward. I have identified the foundation of the differences and defined the two types as the East Asian, associated with the Mongoloids, and the South-West Asian type, associated with the Turkic- and Mongol-speaking Caucasoids.

The boundary between the two cultural types runs through Western Mongolia and was clear as early as the Bronze Age. We distinguish between the two types by examining archaeological artifacts: stones with depictions of deer, kereksur,1 and burial mounds are widely spread throughout South Siberia and Central Asia, while slab graves predominate in the east. The foundation for these differences in artifacts comes from the dissimilarity of the pantheon. In the west, the influence of Indo-European tradition meant that a sun god occupied the focal place and was accompanied by two divinities: left/right and good/evil. However, the heaven-earth duality maintained its existence in the east, with the Cult of Heaven emerging only at the turn of the third-second centuries B.C., and the Cult of Earth predominating for a longer period.

The most representative trait of the slab graves is their rectangular or square shape (Skrynnikova 2002: 120-124) symbolizing Earth. Their square or rectangular shape suggests that slab graves were left behind by the tribes that worshiped Earth, and not Heaven. In contrast, the structures identified by E. A. Novgorodova (1989) as sacrificial altars and kereksurs feature circles, which symbolize the sun. The circle can be an actual depiction of the sun, a Segner wheel,2 the motif of the Celestial Hunter who is accompanied by images of the sun in petroglyphs, and so on. These symbols are also related to socially important traditional solar rituals that involve men of the community, including the celebration of vernal and autumnal equinoxes and winter and summer solstices. Moreover, various terms describing the central attributes of the ritual are semantically uniform, e.g., kerek-sur, zagal-mai, khoshoo chuluu/kochai chalu (Skrynnikova 2002: 133-140). These terms also represent the receptacle for the sacred substance of the solar nature of an ancestor who is revived during the Axis Mundi ritual, through which the ritual participants communicate their wishes and accept gifts.

The difference between the western and eastern traditions on the territory of the Altaic linguistic family is found in the Turkic kaganates as well. In most of the ancient Turkic monuments in Mongolia (in the eastern part of the ancient Turkic world) Heaven and Earth-Water (Tengri and Yer-sub) are identified as a divine duality. Umai (the third component of the supreme pantheon) is common among Western Turks. In the early stages the theonym Umai indicated a female sun deity, which goes back to the South-West Asian (Indo-Iranian) tradition.

I argue that the meaning of Umai has been preserved in the Western Buryat tradition, and is reflected in wedding folklore, including ekhn altan umai (golden mother's womb), and esegn mungen serge (father's silver post), whose union leads to the emergence of the people. The color code clearly indicates celestial symbolism: golden = sun and silver = moon. The action code doubles this effect. Ekhn altan umai moves towards the sun, while esegn mungen serge moves in the opposite direction, towards the moon. We can also talk about the horns of the moon in folklore. The moon's horns are phallic symbols, which correlate with its name esegn mungen serge, where serge (tethering post) also represents the phallus. Finally, in the Buryat numeric code, even numbers signify female and odd numbers signify male. We conclude that in the early archetype the Buryats perceived the sun as female and the moon as male because they called them "eight-legged Mother-Sun, and nine-legged Father-Moon."3

Evidence for the two Mongolian cultural types can also be found within the personage code of the traditional culture. The divinities triad (center-right-left) in the western part of Southern Siberia and Central Asia coincides with the Indo-Iranian tradition and can be identified as South-West Asian. The dual (Heaven-Earth) organization of the pantheon in the east can be identified as an East Asian tradition, originating in China. The same principle is preserved in the social organization of the society: the dyad (leader-community members) in the east, the triad (leader-priest-community members) in the west. In the East Asian tradition rites are performed by a secular leader - the head of a tribe, kin, or elder, and in later times by a prince or emperor. This role was determined by his status as a son of Heaven and coincided with the Heaven-Earth duality. The Southwest Asian tradition is characterized by the division of ritual and administrative functions, and by the existence of a priest (white shaman). This is related to the division of the celestial divinities into right/good and left/evil, where the main central deity (Sun) is closer to the good.

The complexity of studying traditional culture, a subject to which modern anthropology devotes substantial resources, comes from the fact that the boundaries separating such terms as culture, traditional culture, and shamanism are not clearly delineated. I have identified these two different types of traditional culture among Mongol-speaking peoples by analyzing different "codes of culture," only some of which I have discussed here. In the personage code the focus is on the pantheon of divinities for whom the rituals are performed; in the agency code we observe those who perform the ritual; using the action code we analyze actions; through the locative code we can discern the direction or territory central to the ritual; in the subjective code we examine the subjects used in the ritual; and with the temporal code the focus is on the timing of the ritual (Vinogradova and Tolstaia 1995: 166-167). This system allows observation of the heterogeneity of culture even within the boundaries of the same ethnos.

The suggested typology is typical for the majority of peoples of Southern Siberia and Central Asia, and possibly, for Eurasia as a whole. The debatable character of the assumptions of the suggested hypothesis comes from the lack of detailed descriptive studies of traditional culture, so I hope my work will lead to further discussion.

References

Novgorodova, E. A.

1989 Drevniaia Mongoliia. Moskva: Vostochnaia literatura.

Skrynnikova, T. D., D. B. Batoeva, G. R. Galdanova, and D. A. Nikolaeva

2002 Obriady v traditsionnoi kul'ture Buryat. Moskva: Vostochnaia literatura.

Toporov, V. N.

1981 "Dve zametki ob iranskom vliianii v mifologii narodov Sibiri," Uchenye zapiski Tarturskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. 558. Iazyki i kultura narodov Vostoka i ikh retseptsiia v Estonii, pp. 36-65. Tartu: Izdatel'stvo Tarturskogo universiteta.

Vinogradova, L. N., and S. M. Tolstaia

1995 Ritual'nye priglasheniia mifologicheskikh personazhei na uzhin: formula i ritual. Malye formy folklora. Moskva: Vostochnaia literatura.

Notes

[1] Round-shaped stone relic of the Bronze Age interpreted by the majority of scholars as an altar used for annual sacrificial customs related to the Cult of the Sun.

[2] A symbol of the sun. An image in the shape of a cross with the ends folded to the right (sun-wise). In some cases the image of the Segner wheel has four horse (or griffon) heads attached to each rotating end.

[3] It is important to pay attention to the meaning of Sun in the Iranian languages: "...khotan-saks urmaysde...'sun'; possibly also vakhan (y)ir sun, as well as the dard yor 'sun'" (Toporov 1981, p. 45). Khotan-saks urmaysde might have influenced the theonym Umai, while the other Iranian name for Sun, yir/yor, could have influenced its meaning in Central Asia: Yar in the name of the Tibetan dynasty of Yarlung (the country of Sun), which is consistent with the Slavic Yar (yaryi, Yarila), or Yuur in Ekhe-Yuuren (Mother-Sun), the Goddess of the Western Buryat pantheon.

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Reviews and Abstracts

Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii+ 369 pp. ISBN: 0521651697 (hardback), $70.00; 0521657040 (paper), $26.00.

Reviewed by: Alex Marshall, CEP Visiting Faculty Fellow, Buryat State University, Ulan-Ude, Buryatia, Russian Federation, veniukovyahoo.co.uk, alex.marshall3btopenworld.com

For a variety of reasons Central Asia appears to be a region of increasing strategic importance in the world today. The rise and fall of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, the search by external powers for new energy markets in the region, and the growing Western fear of and fascination towards Islamic countries in general have all played a part in Central Asia's recent rise to international prominence. In this regard a sweeping historical guide to "Inner Asia," which Svat Soucek defines as "seven countries: the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan; the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region...and the Republic of Mongolia" (p. x.) is obviously both scientifically relevant and a timely marketing exercise. Soucek takes the reader across a vast historical landscape, from the time of the Kk Trk dynasties of the 6th-8th centuries to the rise of the independent Central Asian republics after 1991. In doing so he covers in overview whole epochs to which individual scholars have, of course, devoted the work of their entire lifetimes. Therefore it goes almost without saying that the book is, at the very least, a masterpiece of concision. Soucek, in his knowledge of local languages and cultures, also displays an impressive level of erudition. From the sources used in this work it is evident that he is fluent in, at the very least, Uzbek, English, German, French and Russian. At times however the sheer depth of knowledge on display here becomes an obstacle to the pleasure of the general reading experience.

Soucek is a bibliographer, and therefore it is natural that the origins of terms and place names is for him a particular field of expertise. If you have ever wanted to know the meaning of yurt (p. 42), qaghan (p. 43), agyz or bir (p. 305) or a host of other Turkic words and expressions you will find the answers here. We are even given a superfluous explanation of the origins of the name Stalin, and a treatise on the spelling of the Soviet ruler's original Georgian name (p. 282). However, at times such attention to every linguistic detail hampers the narrative flow of the work. In addition the detailed and useful geographical overview of the region given by Soucek at the start of his work (pp. 1-45) is almost incomprehensible without access to an adequate map. The maps provided in the book are shoddy in this regard, and although Soucek to his credit points readers in the direction of better and more detailed maps elsewhere, they may be left feeling rather short-changed by a chapter that they cannot use effectively without access to external materials.

This book is a demanding read, and as of necessity the chapters are not always chronological, the narrative jumps are sometimes jarring. For example, having completed a chapter on Central Asia in the 1990s, the reader may be thrown by Soucek beginning his next chapter with a study of events in Xinjiang since 1758 (pp. 262-3). The book covers a great deal of cultural ground, again reflecting Soucek's literary background, and poets, scholars, and artists as diverse as Ibn Sina (or Avicenna, 980-1037), Mir Ali Shir (or Nava'i, 1441-1501) and Sadriddin Ayni (1878-1954) each receive a detailed biography that, again, interrupts the narrative flow. On the other hand the book is extremely weak as military and diplomatic history for while the conquests of the Arabs, Mongols, Timurids and Russians each receive fleeting attention, no coverage is given, for example, as to why nomadic military organization was for so many centuries superior to that of its sedentary counterparts. One is told what a succession of conquerors did but there is no impression given as to how or sometimes even why they acted as they did. This can leave the reader with a bland impression of a long succession of military dynasties, each almost indistinguishable from the next.

There is also a more serious underlying question as to the intended audience for this book. As it stands, I feel strongly that the book, despite many admirable qualities, falls between two camps and satisfies neither. As a general guide and introduction it is unlikely to attract the ordinary reader or tourist to the region, being both too dense and too scholarly for most tastes and lacking illustrations or photographs. Yet as a work of reference for the academic it is also flawed, mainly by the very small number of footnotes used and by the "select," i.e., criminally short, bibliography with which either Soucek or his publisher chose to end the work. In addition, the works cited in the footnotes cannot invariably be correlated to the bibliography, always a source of intense irritation to the academic reader. As a work of reference for the academic, the work comes across as rather disorganized - is this a genealogical history, a cultural history, or a lexicon of the Turkic languages? At times it comes across as a diluted blend of all three and more.

Soucek's judgment is also less certain with regard to contemporary events, and a Russophobic tone creeps into parts of the work. In treating the notoriously corrupt and egoistic President Niyazov of Turkmenistan, Soucek notes Niyazov's adulation of Kemal Ataturk and comments, without irony, that if he [Niyazov] "...sincerely emulate[s] his Turkish hero, he will secure himself an honourable position in Turkmen and world history" (p. 282). This is both to take Niyazov's own pretensions far too seriously and to assume that Kemal Ataturk himself was an admirable figure wholly worthy of emulation, something more than a few scholars and commentators would be willing to question. Economic corruption is also treated as a product of the Soviet Union rather than as perhaps an endemic part of Central Asia's hierarchical society, and Russian loan words are described as "tongue-twisting" for Central Asians (p. 233) compared to Turkic and Iranian ones, evidence again of a subdued Pan-Turkic tone in the work. Overall, however, it is the organizational flaws and the sense of a book being trapped between trying to capture two audiences that most detract from what one feels could otherwise have been a major landmark in the field, but which is, in its existing form, an intellectually dazzling but rather unfocused curate's egg.

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Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. viii + 533 pp., bibliography, index. ISBN: 0195136187 (cloth), $49.95; 0195165438 (paper), $30.00.

Reviewed by: Gerard J. Libaridian, Visiting Professor of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., USA, glibaridumich.edu

The Politicization of Islam is a monumental work by one of the most respected scholars of the Ottoman Empire. In this volume Kemal H. Karpat explores delicate changes and intricate relations in the perception of empire, state, religion and identity within Islamic communities in places as varied and as far as the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Africa. In so doing, the volume also traces the evolution of the search for political legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire, from the dynastic to the nationalist, while exploring the role of religion in the process.

The volume has two main arguments. First, that Islam was politicized not as a response to colonialism, but primarily because of a grass roots movement that found in religion a source of inspiration for regeneration, self-renewal, and progress. By using religion in that fashion the faithful changed religion itself. Although by the end of the book he recognizes the critical role of the challenge the West represented to Islamic societies, Karpat ascribes a central role to the rise of middle classes and spread of capitalism as well as of intellectuals in the fluid progress toward the idea of nation-state. The second argument is that Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the main actor of this work, also thought of Islam as a religion based on tradition as well as freedom of thought, a religion capable of inspiring regeneration, and thus promoted it as a basis of Ottoman legitimacy and a vehicle for Ottoman policies. In essence, though, there is one story line: the role played by religion in the transformation of Ottoman power into Turkish power.

The author makes important distinctions in the process. He argues, for example, that while in the Ottoman Empire Islamism was used by the state in search of new bases of legitimacy, in Russia Muslims did not see themselves as part of the state and their exploration of religion served the purpose of changing society. Most importantly, he refuses to separate in real life what in intellectual terms can be and have been defined as distinct directions: Ottomanism, Islamism, Westernism, and Turkishness. Thus he is able to identify the different stages in the development of Turkish nationalism from 1865 to 1936 without forcing a purist model. Islamism, he argues, provided a psychological content to Ottomanism which, in turn, failed to provide an answer to the fundamental problem of the survival of the empire. Hence the recourse to Turkishness.

Karpat weaves his facts and interpretations with the eye of a master, and if occasionally he must stretch them to see the larger pattern, by and large his design is provocative and has validity. This is the kind of work which, even if not completely successful or always accurate in its details, is still valuable since it has a system of thinking to offer and challenges many notions held by social scientists on Islam and the Ottoman Empire. Given the current issues in the international arena, the book should also interest policy makers still trying to decide what to make of Islam.

The work has a number of problems. On a technical level, the documentation is not consistent. Some sections are footnoted in detail, while whole segments roll by without a single reference. Apparently written over a long period of time, the work is also an uneven one. While in the first parts Karpat provides almost a full picture of the interaction between ideas and events, in the latter part, beginning with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, he resorts to a more limited intellectual history.

Secondly, the work is replete with imprecise and confusing terminology. The author's repeated characterization of Abdul Hamid's state as "modern" - many totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century also qualify as "modern" in many ways - and use of terms such as "globalization" and "counterterrorism" may be intended to evoke sympathy for his interpretation today, but only at the cost of intellectual integrity, historical accuracy, and conceptual precision.

This leads us to another problem which at first might seem marginal but is, in fact, integral to the argument. As is the case in his previous works and that of others of his generation, Karpat is unable to come to terms with the question of the relations between the Ottoman state and non-Muslims and non-Turks. He prefers the simple model that counterpoises the inherent legitimacy and security needs of a state to the "nationalism" and pro-Western sympathies of minorities. If the purpose of Islamism was the survival of the empire, how could non-Muslims feel at home, so to speak, in the new empire? If, at the end of the day, the grievances of the non-Muslims were seen solely as a problem created by Western imperialist powers and the repressive machine of the state, whether under Abdul Hamid II or the Young Turks, what can we make of the "modernity" of the Ottoman state? Karpat often crosses the line between understanding state policy and defending it. In his zeal to reconcile his overall argument with the behavior of the Ottoman state before and during World War I, for example, the author recognizes values such as "dignity and aspirations" when characterizing the actions of Muslim groups who are seeking change in Russia, but only "revolt" and threats to national security when it is Christians or Armenians who are seeking change in the Ottoman Empire. Would it be possible to write a volume on the Soviet Union without referring to the Gulag, on South Africa without apartheid, and of Nazi Germany without the Holocaust? Coming to terms with Ottoman policies toward the various non-Muslim and non-Turkish segments of Ottoman society on the basis of a historical analysis of all aspects of their relations will result in a far better Ottoman and Turkish history.

The author has made a valuable effort and contribution in understanding the process of politicization of Islam. He has certainly proven that Islam was not the dead-end and locked religion many Western writers have made it out to be. Yet it is not all that obvious that the politicization of Islam is the same as the Islamization of politics, not at the end of the Ottoman period, anyway. That is the question that this volume raises.

<hr>Sechin Jagchid, The Last Mongol Prince: The Life and Times of Demchugdongrob, 1902-1966. Bellingham: Centre for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 1999. xxvii + 480 pp., map, bibliography, index. ISBN 0914584219 (paper), $50.00.

Reviewed by: David Sneath, Director, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit; University Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, ds114cam.ac.uk

Prof. Jagchid's long-anticipated biography of the Inner Mongolian leader, Prince De (Demchugdongrob), is an exhaustive personal account by one of the Prince's inner circle.

The Last Mongol Prince charts the turbulent and ultimately tragic political career of Prince De, who emerged from the slow disintegration of local princely power following the collapse of the Qing dynasty to lead the Mongolian Autonomy Movement and head the administrative body for Inner Mongolian self-rule - the Mongolian Political Council of 1934-36. The Council disintegrated in the face of internal division and Japanese military advances, some elements to fight the Japanese, and others such as Prince De, to seek an accommodation with them. At that time it still seemed possible that a viable Inner Mongolian political entity could emerge, albeit at the price of some Japanese influence. But with the establishment of Mengjiang, the Japanese protectorate in Eastern Inner Mongolia, it became increasingly clear that despite the various reformulations of the government he headed, Prince De and his Mongolian administration had little real autonomy.

Prof. Jagchid is at some pains to defend Prince De from charges that he was a willing puppet of the Japanese, taking every available opportunity to illustrate the distance between the prince and his erstwhile allies. He emphasizes, for example, the Prince's rift with Kanai Shoji, the first Japanese Supreme Advisor, his disdain of the Japanese-sponsored term Moko or Mengjiang, and the secret negotiations he sought to open with Chiang Kai-Shek in 1940.

Although in retrospect the impossibility of real autonomy from Japanese control appears starkly obvious to us, Jagchid shows that at the time this was not clear. For a moment, with the establishment of the Mongolian Autonomous State (1941-45) and the replacement of Kanai Shoji with a less disagreeable Supreme Advisor, it seemed as if Prince De could actually win a measure of genuine autonomy from the Japanese. But the Soviet advance into the Japanese satellite states in 1945 shattered Prince De's administration, and he found himself forced back into an alliance with the Chinese Guomindang against the Communists. Despite rounds of desperate diplomacy, by 1949 the Prince ended up in western Inner Mongolia under the protection of the Ma family warlords. But the anti-Communist alliance that the Prince had established fragmented, and he fled to the Mongolian People's Republic, where the pro-Soviet authorities soon arrested him and sent him to China as a war criminal. The final chapter sees Prince De disappear into the obscurity of the Chinese penal system until his release in 1963 and his death three years later.

Prof. Jagchid, son of a senior princely official, was one of the first generation of Mongolian intellectuals to be university-educated, and he joined Prince De's staff in the late 1930s. As an eyewitness to many of the events he describes, Jagchid is the perfect guide to the twists and turns of the political history of the time.

In 17 chapters and 480 pages Jagchid details the maneuverings of the Prince and other players in the political arena: the succession of councils, committees, and governments; their declarations, treaties, and speeches. Despite its forensic detail, the book's style is accessible and each chapter is divided into a number of clearly titled subsections so that the reader can quickly locate events and persons in the text. It draws upon Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian sources, as well as the author's own documents and recollections, although often it is not clear which of these is being referenced at any given time. There are inconsistencies in the spellings of some names, but these are usually resolved in the index, and this allows the volume to be used as something of a political who's who of the period.

The story has many villains, such as Kanai Shoji, the scheming Japanese Supreme Advisor, Fu Zuoyi, the Han chauvinist warlord, and Li Shouxin, the opportunist Tumet Mongol, a former bandit leader who became a senior figure under the Japanese. For all his faults Prince De is presented as an authentic, if ultimately tragic, Inner Mongolian hero - proud to the point of obstinacy, but by the same token resolute and unbowed in the face of the storms that rocked and eventually wrecked the various political platforms he struggled to construct.

This biography is also, in part, Sechin Jagchid's own political memoir. The reader is drawn into his strongly colored personal memories of the characters, many of whom we see staring at us in the few, but revealing, photographs at the beginning of the book. Through this biography Jagchid presents the wider history of what he sees as the tragic failure of the Inner Mongolian self-determination movement, and his analysis contains persistent echoes of the rousing political rhetoric of the struggle itself. This is a rich and indispensable source for students of the history of the region. Its value lies in both the unparalleled detail with which it documents the life of a fascinating figure at a crossroads in Inner Mongolian history, and in the way that it so well represents a particular political perspective on the history of Inner Mongolia.

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Erika Weinthal, State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic and International Politics in Central Asia. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. ix + 274 pp., map. ISBN: 0262232200 (cloth), $60.00; 0262731460 (paper), $25.00.

Reviewed by: Peter C. Bloch, Land Tenure Center and Department of Forest Ecology and Management, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., USA, pcblochfacstaff.wisc.edu

The five former Soviet Central Asian countries have a difficult geography: they are landlocked; their continental climate tends to extreme temperatures and low rainfall; and the bulk of their land area is composed of desert, mountains, or windswept steppe. The principal source of sustenance of the sedentary population for over two millennia has been the rivers flowing through the region, the Syr Darya, the Amu Darya, the Zarafshan, and a few others. The first two are the principal tributaries of the Aral Sea, whose ecological crisis is the centerpiece of Erika Weinthal's book. Weinthal, who teaches Political Science at Tel Aviv University, shows how the new governments opted for cooperation rather than conflict over how to mitigate the desiccation of the Aral Sea, how they reached out to international partners to assist them both strategically and financially, and how the process assisted them in constituting viable independent states in a relatively short time.

The first chapter describes the Aral Sea crisis and introduces the fundamental propositions of the book: internationalization of the crisis played a major role in determining the nature of the emerging states, and also enabled the resolution of potential disputes over the allocation of water among uses and countries via cooperation rather than conflict. Chapter 2 is an overview of "international riparian politics." It puts the Aral Sea basin into global context by comparing other major international river basins in terms of the relative interests and strengths of upstream and downstream states and predicts the types of cooperation implied by these characteristics. Her hypothesis is that upstream and downstream nations in the Aral Sea basin have "offsetting asymmetries" (as do the Indus and lower Mekong basins) and therefore require third-party intercession to induce cooperation.

Weinthal presents the theory of state-making via environmental cooperation in Chapter 3, and then illustrates how it has worked in the case of the Aral Sea basin in Chapters 4-7. Her primary method was in-person interviews, with about 150 key informants with expertise in water management, agriculture, and energy. These included both nationals and foreigners in non-government organizations (NGOs), governments, and donor agencies.

Chapter 4 demonstrates how agriculture has contributed both to the catastrophic drop in water quality and quantity in the Aral Sea basin and to the political priorities of the new states. Specifically, the cotton monoculture of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan imposed by the Soviet Union and maintained after independence both as a major earner of foreign exchange and as a means of social control, is singled out as the principal culprit in the ecological crisis. Chapters 5 and 6 are the core of the book, describing in detail the processes by which inexperienced governments, donors, NGOs, and researchers developed agreements on water-sharing, international decision-making, and the "side payments" which Weinthal argues were essential lubricants in the negotiations process.

Chapter 7 takes the story to the present, demonstrating that the early agreements - which had essentially been thrust on the governments by necessity (and the World Bank) - were not sustainable, and that a new set of negotiations would be required to perpetuate the peaceful and rational management of the Aral Sea basin. Weinthal identifies three "negotiation sets": 1) water management per se; 2) tradeoffs between downstream water and upstream hydroelectric energy; and 3) water, energy, and agriculture, highlighting the importance of water-intensive cotton to the downstream states of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Chapter 8 presents the conclusion that international actors including NGOs, the World Bank and other international agencies, and bilateral donors, played a crucial role in preventing interstate conflict over water resources. Yet Weinthal does not argue, as an anti-globalization advocate might, that these organizations compromised the sovereignty of the five emerging nations. Rather, she sees them as valuable partners in building the capacity of new states to deal with resource management issues.

It is unfortunate that the book makes for somewhat difficult reading. It is quite repetitive, using the same phrases several times in a paragraph and tens of times in a chapter. The writing is also awkward at times; for example: "Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as upstream riparians...did not behave similar to Slovakia in East-Central Europe that unilaterally diverted water from the Danube" (p. 123) or "the Central Asian governments, in their unsettling physical and political situation..." The book would have benefited from a stronger edit by such a prestigious publisher.

In spite of its editorial flaws, this is an important book, contributing both to the emerging social science of Central Asia and to the international understanding of how nations and outside actors can work together to solve resource-management problems if there is a modicum of good will on most sides. In the past there have been few violent international conflicts whose primary or explicit cause was water resources. In the world's thirstier future there may be many, unless some of the negotiating approaches identified by Weinthal in the Aral Sea basin story are applied to them before it is too late.

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Mar'iam Iandieva and Adam Mal'sagov, eds. Ingushetiia i Ingushi, Vol I. Nazran': Memorial and Moskva: Zerkalo, 1999. 496 pp., 16 illus. ISBN: 5888790230. Mariam Iandieva and Bersnak Gazikov, eds. Ingushetiia i Ingushi, Vol II. Moskva: Novaia Planeta, 2002. 686 pp., 18 illus. ISBN: 589776008x.

Reviewed by: Wolfgang Schlott, Professor of Cultural and Literary History of Slavic Languages University of Bremen, Research Institute for Eastern Europe, Bremen, Germany, schlottosteuropa.uni-bremen.de

It is part of the sorrowful heritage of the Soviet regime that small ethnic and national minorities have had hardly any possibility to bring forth autonomous historical research. However, a group of Ingush scholars within the Moscow society "Memorial" have published two volumes of scholarly work dealing with more than a thousand years of Ingush history. Motivated by the fact that a missing written historiography has to be assembled from various sources (history of literature, history of culture, political history, ethnological texts), the editors justify their methodology, pointing to the "permanent danger of extermination to which Ingush people are being exposed by deportation, genocide and by division and shift of territory" (vol. I: 3). The first volume covers over 1,000 years, ending in 1917. It consists of five chapters introduced by a survey on the ancient and medieval history of the Ingush and their relationship to the Chechens in the north of the Caucasus. It is striking that most of the introductory sections concern essential information on general items like origins, ethnological facts and population statistics from different sources, thus demonstrating how the research was carried out. Among the most interesting questions is when the Ingush population, together with the Chechens, was converted to Islam (8th-9th centuries; vol. I: 254-264).

The second chapter deals with the history of the conquest of the Ingush territory by the Russian Empire. It describes in six chronological steps the formal acceptance of Russian citizenship (1744), punitive expeditions against Ingush rebels, attempts to Christianize the local population, colonization by the Cossacks, the Revolt of Nazran (1858) and national commemoration of the conquest by Russia. It is a striking feature of Ingush history that most of the people (roughly 270,000 as of 1980) living in the region suffered from malnutrition due to having too little arable land, owing to permanent expulsion from their homeland. This continuing battle for survival is the subject of the fourth chapter.

Volume II is completely devoted to a rather restricted, but nevertheless decisive, period of Ingush history. It extends from the revolutionary events in 1917 to the middle of the 1930s, thus describing the ups and downs of post-revolutionary developments. This was the period in which the first "Mountain Republic" (Gornaia respublika) and the Civil War combined with the sovietization of Ingushetia to contribute to the annihilation of national identity and the beginning of the Stalinist terror. The editors divided this volume into four extensive chapters: the first two discuss the historical processes from 1917 to 1935, and the remaining two explain the delicate theme of Ingush autonomy as well as the activities of the Ingush in exile. Among the carefully compiled materials from different sources (periodicals, memoirs, letters, cultural magazines) the development of the events leading to the constitutional meetings of the North Caucasian Republic deserves attention, as the facts demonstrate the determination of the small ethnic groups to gain independence from the Russian empire after 1917. This evidence does not exclude that part of the Ingush population that supported the Soviets, a thesis which clearly unfolds in the chapter "The Ingush fighting for the Soviets in the Caucasus" (vol. II: 101-204). One document in particular, an article written by General Anton Denikin, in which the Ingush fighters were called "lanquenets of the Soviet regime," may attract the special attention of historians. What proved to be more cruel was the fate of the Ingush population under the Soviets from 1924 onwards, a period in which the territory was reduced (part of the eastern territory was taken over by the Ossetians, a people living east and south of Ingushetia), and the Soviet administration took decisive steps to suppress the North Caucasian peoples together with neighboring Chechnya.

A very extensive section (200 pages) is devoted to discussion of Ingush emigration in the late twenties when - owing to the increasingly harsh suppression under the Stalinist regime - a small proportion of the population succeeded in fleeing to Turkey or to Western European countries. One of the most astonishing escapes was successfully carried out by a group of prisoners on infamous Solovki Island in the northwest of the Soviet Union. Among them was the Ingush citizen Soserko Malsagov, who published his experiences in this extermination camp and his flight to Finland in An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North (London 1925). This book was the first authentic documentation of the Gulag in the western hemisphere, where only suspicion and skepticism greeted those witnesses of the terror under the Communist regime.

Both volumes serve as an introduction to a historical process, which is presented with different sorts of texts and illustrated with a few photographs that have documentary value. This method seems excusable, since the editors did not have broad choice of scholarly elaborations of Ingush history. They deserve high praise for their different insights into various fields of social, political and cultural development. Some chapters can be used as guides to the history of a small Caucasian people whose intellectual elite is now reflecting - with the assistance of books like these - upon the reasons for their extremely difficult economic and social situation at the beginning of the 21st century, to which the neighboring Chechen-Russian war also contributes. Other parts of this publication may take over the function of an introduction to the contemporary epoch, when the Soviet regime controlled scholarly research by preventing Ingush scholars from working on their own history.

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J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies, Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. 352 pp., 44 maps, 17 tables, 146 illustrations (including 13 in color), 2 appendices, bibliography, index. ISBN: 0500-051011 (cloth), US $50.00, Canada $75.00.

Reviewed by: Colin Mackerras, Foundation Professor, School of International Business and Asian Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, c.mackerrasmailbox.gu.edu.au

In 1994 the Tarim mummies "stalked into the world's pressrooms" (p. 7). What this meant was that extremely well preserved corpses dating from as early as 2000 BC came to light in the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang in the far northwest of China and were given extensive publicity throughout the world. These mummies had features that were quite Western; certainly not Chinese, and some appeared to have had blond hair. A whole host of questions emerged about who these people were, what languages they spoke, and what their livelihood and technology was like. In particular, the question why Indo-Europeans should have lived in the Tarim Basin so long ago raised very large questions about cultural and ethnic diffusion across the great Eurasian continent.

Many speculated that the Chinese were angry about the discoveries, because they seemed to show that Europeans had been in this part of the world long before the Chinese themselves. The cultural and ethnic influences appeared to have come not from China but from the west of the Eurasian continent. It is well known that such archaeological issues do indeed impinge on contemporary nationalisms. However, despite some obstacles Victor Mair did gain a great deal of cooperation from scholars of the region, and he is particularly enthusiastic about the Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua. He also received help from Uyghur research associates.

The Uyghurs are the main Turkic people of Xinjiang. In recent times their relations with the Chinese have been distinctly unstable, and sometimes downright hostile. I visited the Xinjiang capital Urumchi in 1999 and saw a small selection of these mummies in the museum there. My impression was that both Chinese and Uyghur specialists regarded them as a matter of immense pride, not of suspicion, because this city and museum were home to such important archaeological remains. The fact is that it is the dryness of the climate there, and not the expert techniques found in such places as Egypt, that has preserved these corpses so well and for so long. As for the mummies in the museum themselves, my reactions were similar to those of others: absolute astonishment at the features and clothes of the corpses, plus amazement that they could last so well over so many centuries. Unfortunately, my experience was limited to the museum in Urumchi and I was not able to visit the sites much further east in Hami described so well in this book.

Specialists and scholars are one side of the story and they get high marks from the authors of this book. Unfortunately, these mummies have indeed become a source of rival cultural nationalisms, including those between the Chinese and the Uyghurs. One of the most famous of them has been called the "Beauty of Krorn" (p. 181). She was discovered north of Lake Lopnur, which is in Xinjiang not far to the east of Urumchi, and has been described by some Uyghurs as "the mother of our nation" (p. 182). Mair has quite a bit to say about the way some Chinese have mistreated the mummies, probably out of pique for the message they appear to carry. However, he is also quite critical of "misguided" Uyghur nationalists who seize on the mummies "to demonstrate a more ancient claim to their territory than history allows" (p. 180).

The study concludes from the archaeological evidence, including that of the mummies, that the earliest culture of the region was at "the eastern linguistic periphery of the Indo-European continuum of languages whose centre of expansion lay much further to the west, north of the Black and Caspian seas" (p. 317). In other words, the corpses are indeed of people whose ancestors had come from further west, though not necessarily from as far as Europe.

The concern of this book is the diffusion of culture, language and technologies across the Eurasian continent. In this context of course China remains a paramount civilization. There are many references to technologies that originated in China, not further west. The book calls China the world's oldest surviving civilization, which is well known, and quite rightly adds that its contribution to world culture is "massive" (p. 33).

On the other hand, what the Tarim mummies show is that the prehistoric West did indeed make significant contributions to the ancient East. In the final page of text (apart from appendices, index, etc.), the authors sum up "the meaning of the mummies" as follows:

The Tarim Basin has been the arena for contacts between the East and West for some 4,000 years. Not only silk passed along its trade routes but also many of the inventions and ideas of the East. But it was not a one-way road and it also provided a conduit for plants, animals, technology and ideas to the East. Its earliest farmers brought the domestic sheep and wheat into the world of ancient China (p. 332).

What such a formulation does is to allocate immense significance to these mummies. It shows them as the earliest diffusers of the great cultures that contributed so much to shaping the world. Perhaps we have known about the significance of the region before. However, what this book does is establish through the finding and examination of so many mummies that they came from the West to the region, bringing with them such important aspects of livelihood as their textile traditions, languages and livestock. The cultural impact of the Chinese was no doubt enormous, but it shared influence with other civilizations to an extent a Chinese nationalist might shrink from admitting.

This splendid volume combines the best features of a book aimed at the general reader and a highly academic contribution to scholarship. It is accompanied by magnificent pictures, some of them in color, and maps. Everything is signposted to make it easy for the reader to follow. Many of the chapters are written in conversational language easy for the "general" reader to follow. Though the thick documentation familiar in scholarly books and articles is missing, there is an extensive bibliography and it is quite obvious that both the authors have read widely on their subject. What is perhaps most important is that the second of the authors has undertaken so much field research on the Tarim mummies that the inside jacket of this volume calls him the "instigator of much of the recent research on the Tarim burials."

The book is concerned not only with archaeology and ancient history, but also gives fascinating accounts of medieval history. One such case is that of Khotan, to the southeast of Qashghar. This city was the center of a politically powerful Buddhist culture for many centuries. The great Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Faxian visited Khotan in about 400 C.E. and noted its magnificent monasteries, one housing some 3,000 monks (p. 79). The people were "mild by nature and respectful" and lovers of literature (p. 80). Unfortunately, in the tenth century there was a major series of wars that simply wiped out this civilization. The victors were the Muslims, and the city remains strongly Islamic to this day, despite the onslaught of twentieth-century secular ideologies. I visited Khotan in 1999. Where the Buddhist culture once flourished there is now virtually nothing but desert. Several people expressed to me the hope that some day either international or Chinese government agencies will give the region enough money to carry out an archaeological excavation on a scale large enough to find the ancient Buddhist civilization. Perhaps they will even find the remains of the enormous monastery that so impressed Faxian.

Another feature of this book is the occasional "boxed" snapshot. These are both interesting and good summaries of a particular aspect of history. One among many of them concerns the great and famous medieval traveler Marco Polo. Many specialists have cast serious doubt on whether Marco Polo ever actually went to China and the book rehearses the arguments but comes to no definite conclusion. It does say that Marco Polo's book has much to tell us about Asian history whether he reached China or not, and that seems a sensible verdict to me.

Both from the point of view of scholarship and of production I find it very difficult to fault this book. It is a joy to look at and read, and to hold in the hand. And it certainly concerns a matter of great moment for the history of humanity. Despite the political sensitivities involved in this subject, the text is fair and balanced and the conclusion argued so effectively that it seems difficult to challenge. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the cultural and linguistic origins of Eurasian peoples, whether the reader be an academic, student or "general reader."

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Sigrid Kleinmichel, Halpa in Choresm (H^wārazm) und Ātin Āyi im Ferghanatal: Zur Geschichte des Lesens in Usbekistan im 20. Jahrhundert, I-II. ANOR 4. Berlin: Das arabische Buch, 2000. 2 vols., 363 pp. ISBN: 3860933019, € 24.60.

Reviewed by: Ildik Bellr-Hann, Orientwissenschaftliches Zentrum, Martin-Luther-Universitt, Halle/Wittenberg, Germany, beller-hannowz.uni-halle.de

The title of the book promises to introduce us to the figures of ātin āyi in the Ferghana Valley and the halpa in Khorezm, professional women who recite texts recorded in the Arabic script on ritual occasions, and thereby to allow us an insight into the history of reading in Uzbekistan in the twentieth century. The book more than fulfills its promise. The author, a turkologist with a primary interest in the literary output of the Turkic-speaking world, seeks answers to the following questions: What is the role of the ritualized recital of texts in contemporary Uzbekistan? What are its antecedents? What relationships exist between texts, their readers, and their audience? The starting point reflects the author's literary interests, inasmuch as it focuses on the texts and their reception. However, her research methods go beyond the conventional methods of literary scholars. Dr. Kleinmichel has spent extended periods in Uzbekistan and employs methods borrowed from the social sciences, including participant observation, interviews, the collection of life histories, and the recording and photographing of texts.

The two-volume work is divided into six main chapters. The first five chapters present the results of the fieldwork, while the sixth, which is almost as long as the previous five together, gives a detailed description of all the texts used by halpa and ātin āyi in modern Uzbekistan.

The difficult research conditions are described in the Introduction, which continues with a discussion of basic terminology and the comparative perspective. Although there is a great deal of overlap between the activities of halpa and ātin āyi, Kleinmichel is careful to tease out the many differences, which she attributes to different local traditions. The nomadic tradition of Khorezm stands in sharp contrast to the sedentary tradition of the Ferghana Valley. The texts in question and the activities of the women were ignored both by folklorists and literary scholars during the Soviet period, when there was an official ban on the ritualized public recital of these texts (often referred to as halpachilik). Texts in the Arabic script started to circulate openly again following Uzbekistan's independence.

Chapter 1 gives a description of how women can become halpa/ātin āyi. The typical elements of this process in Khorezm include a major illness (a characteristic feature of Central Asian shamanism), pilgrimages to holy places, spending the night in a cemetery, and initiation dreams. For women in the Ferghana Valley, an ability to read the Arabic script is perceived as sufficient qualification to become an ātin āyi. Chapter 2 analyzes the functions of the halpa/ātin āyi in daily life, of which the most important seems to be the recital of texts at commemorative ceremonies for the dead. But the "reciting women" are also invited to other life-cycle rituals (cradle rituals, weddings) and religious ceremonies connected or unconnected to the Islamic calendar. Some also acquire additional functions as healers or fortunetellers. Although both halpa and ātin āyi recite a wide range of religious texts, the recitation of the Qur'an occupies such a central place in the activities of the ātin āyi, that they often organize reading circles for local women with the aim to teach them to read the Holy Book. Chapter 3 looks at the relationship of the halpa/ātin āyi to the texts which they recite, exploring details such as (un)awareness of authorship and the copying, preserving, and disguising of books during times of repression. Chapter 4 considers the nature of the performance, how exactly "reading" is understood, defined, and realized in different regions by individual women, and the sacred as well as literary value that they themselves attribute to the texts. In Chapter 5 the focus is on the social context of halpachilik in contemporary Uzbekistan; the chapter attempts to reconstruct its history, and considers when women are most likely to turn to the professional recital of sacred texts, the reactions of husbands, and the relationship of the "reading women" to the local representatives of the state. The chapter concludes with the presentation of the life histories of four halpa and three ātin āyi. Chapter 6 finally introduces the texts one by one. A brief description of the contents of each text, the various titles under which it is known, local knowledge of the author, and a listing of the occasions when it is typically recited, is augmented by references to the work in the scholarly literature, the existence of manuscript versions in various library holdings, and lithograph editions.

Although the book deals primarily with contemporary Uzbekistan, there are numerous references to Soviet and occasionally pre-Soviet practice. The temporal embeddedness of the various practices, developed through numerous small vignettes, makes the book particularly interesting. The author concludes that, in spite of the official ban and repeated campaigns against religious literature, the tradition of women reciting texts recorded and transmitted in the Arabic script has never been completely broken. Local interpretations and realization of the ban varied in time and space. In contemporary Uzbekistan, old Chaghatay texts, which in the Soviet period were preserved and transmitted privately, are being reprinted and halpachilik in general enjoys considerable public recognition. But the author is careful not to present this tradition as monolithic or unchanging. She emphasizes the emergence of new elements such as the introduction of new poetry to the old text corpus as well as changes in the regional distribution of sacred texts caused by the out-marriage of some bearers of the tradition.

The book also deals with many aspects of Uzbek social life and their transformation over time, including notions of sacred and profane, pollution and ritual purity, the meanings of religious and life cycle rituals, magic, healing, and the informal transmission of knowledge. Although much of the book reveals the world of women, since the texts are recited by women for women, Kleinmichel pays due attention to the influence of the male world and patriarchal values. She is thus able to reveal important details about women's social rights and obligations. By placing reading within a wider social context she also affords us insight into local social worlds and their political and economic determinants. In presenting a wealth of material the author carefully identifies trends while also noting departures from the rule. She distinguishes normative expectations from lived practice and, by skillfully integrating the temporal and spatial dimensions, brings a comprehensive and deeply humanistic perspective to the study of modern Uzbek women.

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Levon Abrahamian and Nancy Sweezy, eds., Armenia: Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity. Photography edited by Sam Sweezy. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001. xi + 312 pp., illustrations, map. ISBN 0253337046 (cloth), $49.95.

Reviewed by: Robert L. Whiting, Graduate Assistant, Russian and East European Center, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Ill., USA, whitinguiuc.edu

This book is an interesting and enlightening self-reflection on Armenian identity by a large number of Armenian scholars. The general theme is clear from the title: Armenian identity is a complex and unique reality built on the interaction of many deeply rooted ancient elements that are still present in the life of modern Armenian society. The image that is presented is one of a culture building cumulatively over time, from prehistory to the present, creating a sense of continuity in heritage for the Armenian nation. The basic structure of the book re-enforces this theme, with each of its six sections building a picture of the interaction of people, place, and culture.

The first section is "Origins," which tells the story of the inhabitants starting from the point of early human habitation and continuing through to the early 20th century. From there, the book progresses to "Symbols of Armenian Identity," which lays out those basic elements of thought that form the basis of a historical Armenian culture and their physical representations in the world. From this point, the book moves to physical representations of Armenian culture, but still keeping the people close to the subjects covered. "Settlements," "Dwellings," and "Inhabitants" discuss how the physical architecture of Armenians reflects their worldview, and how they interact with that architecture. The next two chapters cover "Crafts" and how they interact with the population. "Artifacts and Artisans" is further broken down by medium, with each chapter discussing in turn, first the physical, "Wood," "Clay," "Copper," then displaying forms, "Carpets" and "Needle Arts." Each of these chapters discusses the meaning of the medium and how it is produced, as well as the customs of the artisans that produce it. The next chapter deals with "Personal Adornment," and focuses on two main elements, "Costume" and "Jewelry." The final chapter, "Fight, Feast, and Festival," as its title indicates, deals with culture, both old and new, and connects modern cultural expressions to ancient traditions.

The book is physically larger than a standard textbook, but this allows a lot of space for pictures, and the work is lavishly illustrated with pictures on almost every page. These pictures provide clear and very striking examples of all the various issues addressed in the text. They are not only used to provide examples of the artistic or cultural elements described, but are also often presented to show the connections between ancient forms and modern Armenian culture. Unfortunately, some of the most impressive items are pictured in black and white, and some of the highly intricate pieces are presented in frames too small for the fine detail to be appreciated, but this is a minor issue given the effectiveness of the pictures to support the text.

Overall, the book is a well written and presented work that seeks to explain the Armenian view of the interrelationship between the topics presented. Each of the subjects discussed is clearly presented by Armenian experts in the field of concern, and when coupled with the photographs the book makes a strong impression. In addition to the main text, the book also provides a glossary of Armenian terms and an extensive bibliography of over 200 sources (mostly in Armenian, but many in English) on the subjects discussed in the work. This work should be of interest to anyone who wants to look at how Armenians in general, and the Armenian academic community in particular, view the issues of history, culture, and identity in the present, and how deeply historical consciousness permeates all aspects of the issue of culture for modern Armenia.

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Conferences and Lecture Series

New Games in Central Asia, Great and Small

A Panel Session during the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, November 23, 2002

Reported by: Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek, Asst. Prof. Mag., Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria, gabriele.rasulyunivie.ac.at

This panel session was jointly organized by Robert L. Canfield (Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., USA) and Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek (Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria). The central focus was to examine the relationship of local political activities to regional and global processes in Central Asia. To this end a number of scholars from both the USA and Europe were invited to present papers that approached issues such as local developments, contests over critical resources, access to sources of power, disputes informed by religious or ethnic differences, conflicts over political representation within the state and its agencies, and strategies evoked by the people coming to terms with their particular situation by creating or recreating various kinds of networks and alliances.

Thomas Barfield (Department of Anthropology, Boston University, Boston, Mass., USA) gave a paper entitled "Rebuilding Afghanistan." In the first half of his paper he outlined the alterations in the political structure of the country. Decades of warfare led to a breakdown of the prevailing Pashtun-biased ethnic hierarchy and to an increased military and political importance of the formerly subordinated ethnic groups. Some observers have suggested that this will lead to a division of the country along ethnic lines, make forming a central government impossible, and even provoke the dissolution of Afghanistan itself as a unitary state. Barfield, however, did not agree with these pessimistic scenarios. In his presentation he pointed out that concepts of nationalism and ethnic identity do not fit Afghanistan's cultural and political history well. To stress this argument he referred to the current political disputes. Even though ethnic and regional cleavages have become sharper over the past ten years, no faction in Afghanistan has proposed either a division of the country along ethnic lines into ever tinier parts nor threatened to join with co-ethnics in neighboring states. He also argued that an examination of ethnicity in Central Asia reveals a pattern in which groups strive for dominance but not exclusivity. Afghan factions understand that the resources of the international community can only be effectively tapped if there is a national government to deal with the outside world, even if only to cash the checks and redistribute the money. Hence patterns of competition that seem irreconcilable at the local level create few obstacles to cooperation at the national level.

The paper of Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek (Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria) on "Opting Out of the Afghan State or Opting In? The Uzbeks of North East Afghanistan" referred to the growing politicization and self-awareness of Afghan minority groups. Focusing on the Uzbeks of northeastern Afghanistan, a group representing the dominant political stratum until it was finally superseded by the Afghan state in the late 19th century, she described the alterations of Uzbek identity and self-representation and the changes in the political relations of the Uzbeks at the local level (that is, their relations to other ethno-linguistic and religious groups in northeastern Afghanistan) as well as at the national level since the late 1970s. Rasuly-Paleczek demonstrated that in contrast to the past, when the Uzbeks of northeastern Afghanistan had pursued a policy of trying to evade the Afghan state and had underestimated their ethno-linguistic identity (e.g., by representing themselves not as Uzbeks but as "people from the North"), Uzbek ethnicity now gained momentum and people started to demand their fair share in the newly emerging power structure of the Afghan state.

Robert Canfield talked about "Nationalistic Trajectories among Afghanistan's Hazaras." This paper examined social trends among the Hazaras as a case of rising nationalistic consciousness. Canfield pointed out that the wars in Afghanistan brought the Hazara peoples into closer contact with each other, with their Afghan neighbors, and with the wider world, and fostered a nationalism that will be more in evidence as the future Afghan state structure emerges. Referring in particular to developments since the early 1980s (e.g., the crucial role of the Hazaras and their main settlement area, the Hazarajat, during the years of anti-communist resistance in the country and the persecution of the Hazaras by the Taliban regime from the mid-1990s to its downfall in 2001), Canfield showed that despite loss of life and many hardships, the Hazaras have gained much. Here he stressed the Hazaras' emphasis on education of their youth and the rise of a strong Hazara identity. He concluded his presentation with a note on the contradictions and mitigating influences now appearing on the scene.

Alessandro Monsutti (Graduate Institute for Development, Geneva, Switzerland) also gave a paper on the Hazara. His presentation, "Towards a Transnational Community: Migration and Remittances among the Hazaras," focused on the effects of migratory movements, which since the end of the 19th century have played a crucial role in the society of the Hazaras, especially during the last two decades. Monsutti showed how the various patterns of migrant labor have not only contributed to sustaining family members in the Hazarajat, but have also led to the emergence of a new social and economic structure. Here he argued that the last twenty years of war and spatial mobility have enabled the Hazaras to use existing cultural resources to open new horizons. These included the emergence of very effective transnational migratory and trade networks linking the local and global as well as the development of strong political claims of the Hazaras in Afghanistan.

Peter Finke (Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, USA, and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Salle, Germany) presented a paper entitled "Central Asian Attitudes towards Afghanistan: Perceptions of the Afghan War in Uzbekistan." Using empirical data from Uzbekistan, his paper described the way in which current events as well as the basic patterns of society in Afghanistan are perceived. Another topic of his presentation referred to the question of why the expected fraternization did not occur. Finke argued that identity among the Uzbeks (and other groups in Central Asia) is based on different criteria than usually assumed. Islam does not have the strong impact we are inclined to think it has, nor is "Pan-Uzbekism" a significant factor. Concluding his paper Finke pointed out that the Soviet past has resulted in a conceptualization of Uzbekness, which includes an idea of European-style "civilization," and sharply contrasts with the image of Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern societies.

Boris Petric (Laboratoire d'anthropologie et des institutions des organisations sociales and Maison des sciences de l'Homme, Paris, France) gave a paper on "Political Games at the Local Level in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan." Petric argued that the oft-employed focus on democratization in most political analyses of the region has a number of shortcomings and does not help to fully understand Central Asian societies and their political systems. He suggested another approach. Using the key role various forms of gift exchange play during many social events in the private as well as in the public domain as a starting point of his analysis, he revealed the close relationship between the system of gift exchange and the political game at the local level. On these occasions local leaders spend tremendous wealth in order to build a network of political supporters. According to their perception it is socially more profitable to spend wealth instead of accumulating it. Each Uzbek family keeps a record of gifts received and given. These records, Petric emphasized, allow for the drawing of a map of social networks and for analyzing the characteristics of social solidarity. However, as the building of a network of supporters implies constant participation in the system of gift exchange, in which the receiver of a gift is obliged to respond with an even greater gift, the incapacity of a leader to give back more than he has received in this gift exchange system eventually leads to shifts in the socio-political networks and their leadership. Consequently, Petric argued, power does not remain in the hands of the same families. In Uzbek society a constant circulation of power exists. Everybody can participate in this social game except people who are not considered as Uzbek. The system of gift exchange is thus also a tool to determine citizenship in this post-Soviet society.

Emphasizing that the interpretations and implementations of religious beliefs and practices do not take place in a political vacuum, the paper by Nazif Shahrani (Departments of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., USA), "From Reclaiming Islam to Muslim Militancy in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan," focused on the link between the religious and political domain and its alterations in the course of time. With European colonial hegemony in the Muslim Orient, Shahrani argued, the long-standing relationship of mutual authorization between traditional political institutions and Muslim religious establishments faced serious challenges. For the most part, colonial and the emergent post-colonial/post-Soviet nation-states in the Muslim world have adopted policies and practices to undermine the legitimating role of Islam in national politics. Shahrani then examined the effects of the policies of the Soviet Union, and especially of the post-Soviet successor state in Uzbekistan, on the emergence of Muslim militancy. Using extensive firsthand ethnographic data (since 1992), he explored how a peaceful educational process of reclaiming Islamic knowledge, practices and institutions during the early 1990s was transformed into the rise of radical Muslim militant movements.

Morgan Y. Liu (Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA) gave a paper on "Post-Soviet Muslims at the Intersection of Competing Modernities: Islamic Study Groups in Osh, Kyrgyzstan." According to Liu post-Soviet Central Asia presents an opportune nexus in which to think about the intersection of competing modernist discourses. Soviet-era expectations about state stewardship of society collide, he pointed out, with neoliberal promises of economic prosperity and global connections, and articulate with Islamic models of communal renewal. Liu then demonstrated how these issues, in particular the question of what kind of influence Islam should have in a post-Socialist society, play out within Islamic study groups [ziyofat], which were regular, self-run gatherings in the Uzbek neighborhoods of urban Osh in the 1990s. These groups, Liu stated, are key loci where Islamic knowledge is transmitted and discussed among Uzbeks in Osh, who openly admit their relative ignorance of Islam. Liu then illustrated that their understanding of Islam is strongly framed by both Soviet socialist conceptions of society and the desire to engage the post-Cold War world stage via neoliberal idioms of progress. Their discourses also reveal a spatial dimension that situates the various competing discursive streams into a coherent political imagination, which maps out a desired communal trajectory amid the uncertain circumstances of economic stagnation and political instability in Central Asia today.

Ildik Bellr-Hann (Orientwissenschaftliches Zentrum, Martin-Luther Universitt, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) presented a paper entitled "Localism and Identity among the Uyghur of Xinjiang," which dealt with the current situation of the Uyghurs, an officially recognized minority of the People's Republic of China. Focusing on the reform period, which has often been described by analysts in terms of the retreat of the state, e.g., from controlling land use, space and mobility, Bellr-Hann showed that while controls have indeed been relaxed in some fields the grip of the state remained as strong as ever in others. Her paper then looked more closely at the ways recent policies have affected notions of locality and attachment among Uyghur peasants. Bellr-Hann also focused on how traditional social practices and understandings of customary law may be mobilized to reinforce a sense of belonging and to subvert state control.

Another presentation devoted to the Uyghurs of Xinjiang was "Whose Business is Islam in Xinjiang?" by Gardner Bovingdon (Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri). Bovington's contribution explored the role and the fate of Muslim Uyghurs under increased international, national, and local scrutiny. According to him the Western community has begun to view Uyghur religiosity with concern, fearing the emergence of a Taliban-like movement among the Uyghurs. The Chinese party-state, on the other hand, has for years surveyed resurgent religious practice with growing apprehension, suspecting Uyghur mosques to be hotbeds of separatism. Among Uyghur Muslims themselves, Bovingdon pointed out, no uniform stance vis--vis the role of Islam exists. The largely secular Uyghur urban elite views politicized Islam with suspicion. Intellectuals and professionals all consider themselves Muslims yet do not wish to return to an era in which religious elites dominate social life. Within the Uyghur religious community itself there is tension. Since renewed crackdowns on religious practice began in 1990, some religious Uyghurs have begrudgingly accepted the narrow definition of acceptable Islam mandated by the state, while others have demanded greater freedoms.

A final session of the panel was devoted to comments and discussion. Following commentary by the session's discussants, who were Dru Gladney (Departments of Asian Studies and Anthropology, University of Hawai'i, Manoa, USA), David B. Edwards (Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., USA), Anatoly Khazanov (Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., USA) and Margaret Mills (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA), a lively discussion took place. The organizers of the panel session now plan to publish the papers and comments of the panel.

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Eighth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS VIII), September 25-28, 2002, Bordeaux, France

Reported by: Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek, Asst. Prof. Mag., Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria, gabriele.rasulyunivie.ac.at

The Eighth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS VIII) took place from September 25th to 28th, 2002 in Bordeaux, France. It was organized by Prof. Vincent Fourniau, Prof. Cathrine Poujol, Prof. Pasquet and Dr. Franoise Rollan and hosted by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine and by the Maison des Sueds (University of Bordeaux). The conference attracted a large regional and international audience. Most notable was the large number of scholars from Central Asia, above all from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The general theme of the conference, around which five panel sessions were organized, was "Central Asia in Transition: Models, Disruptions, Centrality." This report will briefly describe the plenary session papers and a few selected papers from among the five panel sessions. The full program of the conference can be viewed on the ESCAS website at http://www.let.uu.nl/~escas/
ESCAS%20VIII,%20Bordeaux%20(2002).htm.

The plenary session highlighted some of the crucial topics that formed a common link to all panel sessions. In a paper entitled "Post-Soviet Historiography: Who Speaks for the 'Central Asian' Past?" Prof. Turaj Atabaki criticized the dominant current approaches to the historiography of post-Soviet Central Asia as highly nationalistic and called for a new approach. Similarly, Prof. Meruert Abuseitova (Institute of Oriental Studies, Almaty, Kazakhstan) criticized the ideological nature of the established approaches in her paper, "New Approaches in Central Asian Research." She underlined the importance of evolving new concepts on such topics as the role of nomadic civilizations in the history of Kazakhstan. In line with Abuseitova's critical remarks Prof. Dilorom Alimova (Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) called for a more open-minded and multi-dimensional approach when studying Islam in Central Asia in her paper, entitled "Studying Islam and the Soviet Model of 'Militant' Atheism in Uzbekistan (based on materials from the 1920s-1930s)." Prof. Franoise Rolland (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France) rounded off the plenary session with a paper on "Central Asia and its Borders." She looked into the history and socio-political consequences of delineating the borders between Central Asian states and the reappearance of border issues after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In particular Prof. Rolland highlighted the problems of constructing borders in a region where the population is highly mixed and local majorities do not always correspond to national majorities, as is the case in the Ferghana Valley.

In the panel sessions there were numerous fascinating presentations. I will only describe a few of them. In line with current efforts of Central Asian scholars to rewrite the history of the region and to develop new perspectives in evaluating their history, Dr. Elyor Karimov (Young Scientists Association, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) presented an analysis of documents in the manuscript collection of the Ishan-Qala in Khiva in a paper entitled "Patterns of Development in Central Asia: Khorezm, 18th c.-beginning of the 20th c. (Rethinking the Khiva Khans' Yarliks)." These documents, according to Karimov, not only allow us to draw a detailed picture of the peculiar history of Khorezm, which has been only marginally studied, but also provide ample material to reject the contention of Soviet historians that the period of the 18th and 19th centuries was a time of stagnation and decline in Central Asia. On the contrary, the manuscripts Dr. Karimov analyzed point to rapid and manifold changes in the administrative domain, the tax system, terms of landownership and many other aspects of society and politics in Khorezm.

In her paper "The Thaw in Soviet Uzbekistan: Procedures of Rehabilitation of Individuals," Dr. Cline Behr (University of Paris I, Sorbonne, France) examined aspects of de-Stalinization in the Khrushchev era, especially the rehabilitation of former political opponents. Drawing on the memoirs (published in Tashkent in 1994) of Nuriddin Muhitdinov, one of the prominent Muslims in the Soviet hierarchy, and on a lengthy interview with Naim Karimov, the president of the Rehabilitation Commission established in Uzbekistan after independence, Behr explained the important role that rehabilitation activities in the Uzbek SSR played as Khrushchev sought support for his policies.

A number of presentations were devoted to reflections on the rich cultural heritage of Central Asia and the problems of its preservation. For example, scholars from the University of Bordeaux and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris (among them Claire Pacheco, A. Ben Amara, C. Barras, C. Ney, O. Bobin and M. Schvoerer) outlined their attempts to preserve and restore glazed ceramics and monuments from the pre-Timurid and Timurid eras. They reported on the results of the PACT TIMOUR Program, scheduled for 2002-04, which has as its goal to preserve and enhance the Timurid architectural heritage of Samarkand.

Anthropologists and other social scientists were well represented at the conference. Dr. Olga Gorshunova (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation) presented a paper on "Female Shamanism in Central Asia," which focused on the revival of traditional spiritual practices and archaic cults in today's Central Asia. Based on field research carried out in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan between 1991 and 2001 she examined the revival of women's rituals and practices. While emphasizing the important role of women in the restoration of ancient cults, her research also drew attention to the shamanistic practices among men.

Dr. Cynthia Werner (Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Tex., USA) spoke on "Women, Marriage and the Nation-State: The Rise of Non-Consensual Bride Kidnapping in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan." Werner's paper dealt with the discrepancy between state laws aiming to regulate certain aspects of family life (e.g., marriage and divorce) and social practices that do not always coincide with state laws, especially when the laws are not strongly enforced. This is the case in South Kazakhstan Province, where non-consensual bride kidnapping occurs frequently, despite its illegality. There, approximately sixty percent of all marriages involved bride kidnapping in the 1990s and of those nearly twenty percent involved minimal consent of the bride. Based on almost one hundred interviews conducted in South Kazakhstan Province in 1994, 1995, and 2000, Werner analyzed the reasons for the sharp increase in non-consensual bride kidnappings in the post-Soviet period. She argued that it can be explained by a social environment where unemployment rates and limited opportunities make it difficult for young men to offer a bright future to potential marriage partners. Additionally, two factors allow young Kazakh men to get away with their crime: first, the young men and their parents appeal to the Kazakh "custom" that obligates young women to stay with their kidnappers in order to avoid societal shame; and second, the men realize that the post-Soviet state is unlikely to interfere in these cases because it is less concerned than the Soviet state had been with issues of gender equality. Werner argued that in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, the state's reluctance to condemn non-consensual bride kidnapping reflects a broader process of nation-building where gender equality is no longer a state priority.

Dr. Kamoludin Abdullaev (Visiting Fellow, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., USA) focused on contemporary politics in Tajikistan in "Including Islamists in Legal Politics." His paper tackled the question of how to deal with the emerging Islamic political activism in the political domain in Central Asia, a question important both for the political leadership in Central Asia itself and among players in the international political arena. Dr. Abdullaev criticized the "political sterilization" of Islam in contemporary Central Asian politics, that is, depriving Islamists from playing an official role and relegating Islam to a non-political status. He argued, however, that political sterilization appeared to be ineffective: Islam has become politicized and violence in society and politics has increased. In this situation, governments have adopted three different approaches to an Islamic challenge: to combat and control (such as in Uzbekistan), to control strictly (as in Turkmenistan), and to control but with some cooperation with emerging Islamic political activists (as in Tajikistan). Following a discussion of the pros and cons of these three options Dr. Abdullaev drew the attention to the case of Tajikistan, where after a civil war that took the lives of almost 50,000 people, the activists of political Islam were integrated into the new political setup, implemented according to the UN-sponsored General Peace Accord between 1997 and 2000. Evaluating the Tajik case he stressed that drawing them into the political game is much more profitable than excluding them. Furthermore, in light of the growing importance of Islam in the daily lives of the people of Central Asia, a political climate should be established which helps the Central Asians to discuss and make conscious choices in their attitude towards Islam and Islamism. Forcible imposition of "preferred" models of governance and support of "secular and democratic" regimes in their repressive actions under the guise of "uprooting weeds of terrorism," is not a good answer to the emerging Islamic political activism, argued Dr. Abdullaev.

During the ESCAS VIII Conference a general assembly took place. After reports on the activities of ESCAS since the last meeting in Vienna in 2000 by Prof. Turaj Atabaki (the acting ESCAS president), a new ESCAS board was elected and future ESCAS activities were discussed. The following individuals were unanimously elected by the General Assembly: President: Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek (Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vienna University, Austria); Vice President: Cathrine Poujol (INALCO, Paris/ France); General Secretary: Giorgio Rota (Naples University, Italy); Board Members: Vincent Fourniau (EHESS, Paris/ France) and Jadwiga Pstrusinska, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

Last but not least, the General Assembly expressed its sorrow that the long active president and founding member of ESCAS, "the very soul of the organization," Prof. Turaj Atabaki, resigned as ESCAS president. Prof. Atabaki will continue to work for ESCAS, for the time being as the organization's treasurer and as coordinator of the ESCAS homepage (http://www.let.uu.nl/~escas/). Utrecht University will remain the permanent address of ESCAS.

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Educational Resources and Developments

Teaching Central Asian History in Japan: Some Practice and Experience

Komatsu Hisao, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, Japan, komatsul.u-tokyo.ac.jp

This essay will provide an overview of my approach to teaching Central Asian history to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Tokyo. Most of the students are studying in the Department of Oriental History, Faculty of Letters, and in the program on West Asian History and Civilization, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology.

My two-semester lecture course for undergraduates offers an overview of Central Asian history focusing principally on the period from the mid-sixteenth century (beginning with the Russian conquest of the Kazan Khanate) to the beginning of the twentieth century.1 Important topics include the Tatar diasporas and their later resurrection in the economic and cultural spheres, Russian migration into Central Asia, the resurgence of Islam under Tsarist rule in Turkistan as seen in the Andijan Uprising of 1898, and Jadid reformist movements. The final segment of the course examines trends in the modern history of Central Asia since the latter half of the 1980s and sometimes includes lectures on the legacy of Soviet civilization in contemporary Central Asia. These topics seem to interest not only students in the Department of Oriental History, but also those in other programs who wish a comparative perspective. The lecture course introduces students to possible topics for their future research and provides essential historical background for understanding modern Central Asia. For example, the ideas and activities of the famous Tatar Pan-Islamist Abdurreshid Ibrahim (1857-1944), who stayed many years in Tokyo, can be exciting for students who are majoring in the modern history of Japan.

The teaching of general courses on the history of Central Asia in Japan is supported by a number of recent texts and reference books in Japanese:

Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, ed.

1988-89 Nihonniokeru Chūōajia kankei kenkyū bunken mokuroku, 1879-1987 nen 3 gatsu, Sakuin/Seigo [Bibliography of Central Asian Studies in Japan, 1879-March 1987 and Index and Errata]. Tokyo: The Center for East Asian Cultural Studies.

Egami, Namio, ed.

1987 Chūōajia shi (Sekai kakkoku shi 16) [A History of Central Asia (History of World Countries, vol. 16)]. Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha.

Komatsu, Hisao, ed.

2000 Chūōyūrasia shi (Shinban sekai kakkoku shi 4) [A History of Central Eurasia (History of World Countries, New Edition vol. 4)]. Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha.

Mano, Eiji

1977 Chūōajiano rekishi [A History of Central Asia]. Tokyo: Kodansha.

Mano, Eiji, ed.

1999 Chūōajia shi (Ajiano rekishito bunka 8) [A History of Central Asia (History and Culture of Asia, vol. 8)]. Tokyo: Dohosha-Kadokawa Shoten.

Umesao, Tadao, ed.

1995 Sekai minzoku mondai jiten [Encyclopedia of Nations and Ethnic Relations]. Tokyo: Heibonsha.

Uyama, Tomohiko

2000 Chūōajiano rekishito genzai [Past and Present of Central Asia]. Tokyo: Toyo Shoten.

The second type of undergraduate seminar involves reading important articles or books regarding Central Asian history, published in Japanese as well as English, over a range of topics that will broaden the students' perspectives. Every week one student reports on a work selected by him/her or sometimes by me, which then serves as the focus for class discussion. One of the most stimulating works discussed in this seminar has been R. D. McChesney's Central Asia: Foundations of Change (1996). The goal of the seminar is to learn methodologies used in Central Asian studies, recent research trends, and how to prepare a thesis, as well as how to make a presentation. Students who are preparing their graduation theses under my guidance are required to make interim reports in this seminar; these reports by the more advanced students contribute to the instruction of those just beginning in the field.

In my graduate seminar most of the students are interested in the modern history of Central Asia from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, as well as in the modern history of the Ottoman Empire. The students read a wide range of material, including in alternate weeks Turkic-language sources. Last year, for example, we read selections from a mid-nineteenth century Khivan chronicle, Kazakh newspaper articles from Qazaq, and the treatise of Ismail Bey Gaspralı (1851-1914) on the Muslim Congress project. By itself this seminar is not sufficient to train the students in reading original sources; however voluntary seminars organized by students belonging to several colleges are very effective in deepening the training. In addition to reading original sources in my seminar we discuss recent works dedicated to the modern history of Central Eurasia. I believe that it is very important, especially for graduate students, to situate their own work in the best current historiography and to elaborate an effective methodology through critical evaluation of essential works published in Japan as well as abroad. During the past year, for example, we discussed recent works by Kemper (2002), Dudoignon (2001), and Khalid (1999). Finally, every candidate for the M.A. degree is required to make a rather detailed presentation regarding his/her future M.A. thesis in my seminar, which thus provides an opportunity to refine the conception and methodology.

In recent years most of the candidates for the Ph.D. study abroad, some of them in Central Asian countries, in order to use archival and manuscript resources. Since research conditions for modern Central Eurasian studies have improved substantially in the last two decades, we expect to see the publication of many monographs by this new generation of specialists in the near future.

References

Dudoignon, Stphane A.

2001 "Status, strategies and discourses of a Muslim 'clergy' under a Christian law: Polemics about the collection of the zakt in late Imperial Russia," In: Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries), S. A. Dudoignon and Komatsu H., eds., pp. 43-73. London-New York-Bahrain: Kegan Paul.

Kemper, Michael

2002 "Khālidiyya networks in Daghestan and the question of jihād," Die Welt des Islams, 42/1 (2002), pp. 41-71.

Khalid, Adeeb

1999 "The emergence of a modern Central Asian historical consciousness," In: Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, T. Sanders, ed., pp. 433-452. Armonk, N.Y.-London: M. E. Sharpe.

McChesney, Robert D.

1996 Central Asia: Foundations of Change Princeton: The Darwin Press.

Notes

[1] The syllabus may be found at: http://cesww.fas.harvard.edu/syll/ Komatsu_Hisao_2002_A_Modern_History_of_Central_Asia.pdf

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Uzbek Language Instruction: A New Textbook

Andras Bodrogligeti, Modern Literary Uzbek: A Manual for Intensive Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Courses. Mnchen: Lincom Europa, 2002. 718 pp., 2 vols. ISBN: 3895866954 (paper), $66.00.

Reviewed by: William Dirks, Independent Scholar, San Antonio, Tex., USA, anazahqaanyahoo.com

Modern Literary Uzbek offers a compact, thorough presentation of modern literary Uzbek in two volumes comprising a total of 30 units. Part I begins with a short introduction to the Uzbek language followed by a presentation of the Cyrillic alphabet and an extensive presentation of the phonetics of modern Uzbek, including a section on stress. Units 1-21 make up the remainder of Part I. Part II contains units 22-30, ending with a bibliography, index of topics covered, and an index of Uzbek morphemes.

Each of the 30 units begins with a short proverb, followed by a box listing the main topics of the unit, and an Uzbek passage with translation. The actual learning material begins with a list of 60-90 vocabulary words, followed by a list of 10-20 phrases and idioms, which is in turn followed by a list of five or so proverbs. All of this material is provided with glosses in English, and interspersed with (more) proverbs. Often the author inserts additional lists of cultural relevance, such as "The Mandatory Elements of Prayer" or "Things to See in Bukhara."

Following this lexical material comes a section on grammar describing verb conjugations, noun declensions, particles, and the like, using illustrative examples and charts. The grammar sections also present grammatical structures pertaining to various notions such as necessity, possibility, time, etc. The grammar section is followed by a short reading section with a glossary of new words that occur in the reading. After the reading, each chapter has three sections for language practice: 15 Uzbek sentences to "Copy and Translate," 10 English sentences to "Translate into Uzbek", and a "Directed Composition" where the learner is supposed to write a paragraph using very detailed prompts in English along with a list of words that are required for this task. Each unit finishes with a section labeled "Conversation," consisting of a list of phrases related to a function such as cursing, asking questions, etc.

I found this work helpful as a reference grammar, especially since it is so well indexed and full of illustrative examples. Its size (15 by 21 cm) is also a plus, considering how much material it contains. However, as a textbook it fails on several counts. I would like to go into greater detail of its shortcomings, as these are typical of most textbooks published for learning Central Asian languages.

Modern Literary Uzbek's primary failing is that it lacks objectives and an effective methodological basis. The author does not provide any guidance as to how the text is to be used other than to say it was "prepared for classroom use." Users are not told what the learning objectives or anticipated proficiency levels of the lessons are, nor even which lessons pertain to the three learning levels mentioned in the title. The organization of the chapters indicates that the grammar/translation method is to be followed: decontextualized vocabulary, then grammar, followed by texts to translate. The publication of a textbook based on the deductive grammar/translation method in 2002 is surprising since this method has been widely criticized in the language teaching field and alternatives have been around for decades.

On a similar note, I found the organization of the content counterintuitive as well. Seldom-used, exclusively literary, and even some truly Chaghatay forms are often presented before or to the exclusion of more commonly used structures. For example, -yotirman, used only in literary Uzbek, is presented before the much more widely used -yapman form. Similarly, Unit 25 presents the verbal form -g'umdir, rarely seen in modern Uzbek, whereas idiomatic uses of compound verbs such as -ib ketdi, one of the biggest challenges for learners, are given only brief coverage, and that mostly in the form of lists. It is even more perplexing that, despite being organized entirely around grammatical structure, the text nowhere spells out the most critical structure necessary for the learner, that of the syntax of a basic sentence, nor does it take the student beyond the individual sentence level of grammar. Conjunctions are not presented until Units 24 and 25.

I also think the manual would be difficult for a student to use. First of all, not all of the 60-90 words at the head of each unit necessarily appear in the following grammar and translation sections. As with many other textbooks of this genre, the combination of new grammar and new vocabulary must render the grammar explanations and reading texts largely incomprehensible to a learner. Bodrogligeti's translation exercises (for which no key is provided) become increasingly difficult as one progresses through the units, and would be a challenge for most instructors. Students would also be confused or misled by the many errors in spelling and translation for both vocabulary and grammatical forms. For example, the abovementioned present progressive yozayotirman and yozyapman conjugations are translated as "I write" instead of "I am writing." Similarly, latta is translated as "sponge," not "rag."

Given the methodological and organizational shortcomings of this material combined with the number of spelling and translation errors, it is difficult to see how Modern Literary Uzbek can be used as an effective language textbook. Many scholars may find the work handy as a reference grammar, and the manual would also serve well as a source for advanced-level translation practice.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening up of China, learners of Central Asian languages have had the opportunity and desire to learn these languages for communicative purposes. It is time that the learning materials produced for this field go beyond descriptions of language structure and incorporate modern, more effective, and practical language teaching methodology.

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A Story of European Hammers and Central Asian Boulders: How a Swiss Museum Exhibits "High Asia"

Reported by: Philippe Fort, Swiss National Science Foundation, Institute of Cartography, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, pforetbluewin.ch

A unique exhibition on the mountains and deserts of Central Asia is on display at the Geological Museum of Lausanne, Switzerland, until July 27, 2003: "High Asia as They Saw It: Explorers and Geologists, from 1820 to 1940" ("La Haute-Asie telle qu'ils l'ont vue. Explorateurs et gologues, de 1820 1940"). The venue is Espace Arlaud, a palace located at Place de la Riponne in downtown Lausanne, which is open from Wednesday to Sunday. Information on the schedule of guided tours and lectures may be found at http://www-sst.unil.ch/musee or by writing the Museum director, Prof. Aymon Baud, at aymon.baudsst.unil.ch.

The aim of the exhibition is to present the history, techniques, methodology, and results of the surveying of "High Asia." European scholars and travelers explored the ill-defined areas of the Himalayan kingdoms, Tibet, Xinjiang and Western China beginning in the Victorian era and continuing until World War II. National prestige was one of several goals in the scientific conquest of the heart of Asia. The systematic collecting of rock samples and fossils in the Pamirs, Himalayas and Taklamakan helped to change dramatically the understanding of our planet's geology and paleontology, and the discovery of the Silk Road civilizations has made us all aware of the significance of transcontinental exchange in Eurasia. Although this was not its original intent, the exhibition complements the French National Museum of Natural History's "Himalaya-Tibet: Clash of Continents" which will last until August 4 in Paris (for information, visit the flashy website http://www.mnhn.fr/expo/himalaya/), and the German Alpine Association's recent "Fascination Himalaya: Stories from Researchers, Alpinists and Adventurers," that just ended in Munich.

This challenging topic is approached through an emphasis on the human aspects of scholarship instead of a more abstract institutional history. In order to avoid personality cults and nationalistic glorification of science, the scientific results have been placed within the context of contemporary scholarship over a wide range of disciplines from archaeology to geology, as represented in the work of scholars from the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. The exhibition combines biographical descriptions with personal descriptions of fieldwork. Victor Jacquemont, the Schlagintweit brothers, Aurel Stein and Francis Younghusband may not need introductions. While the controversial Swedish geographer Sven Hedin is well known from his autobiography, the exhibit displays his meticulous maps and gorgeous drawings. The exhibit also includes less familiar figures such as the Swiss geologist Rudolf Wyss, the French diplomat Fernand Grenard, and the Italian medical doctor Filippo de Filippi.

The general mission of the Geological Museum of Lausanne is to disseminate information about scientific culture. The educational objective of "La Haute Asie telle qu'ils l'ont vue" is to make better known the nature of science during the age of European colonialism. The rich variety of documentation includes maps, watercolors, lavish publications, rock samples and art items, all of which provide an appreciation of the climate of intellectual collaboration and political rivalry Europe knew at the time. The products of the field work are extremely varied: travel books and diaries, sketches and landscape paintings, and a large number of photographs. Two series of photographs taken by Walther Bosshard and Jules-Jacot Guillarmod are especially interesting for what they show about the daily life of caravans. The exhibition organizers have drawn upon the resources of the canton and university libraries of Lausanne, Geneva, and Neuchtel. Contributions from institutions in Paris, Munich, and Stockholm include material objects and maps.

The emphasis of the exhibit is on the place of High Asia in the European history of science prior to World War II. The exhibit does not attempt a "post-colonial" reexamination of the eurocentric interpretation of Central Asia, even though such an emphasis is to be found in Indian, Turkish and Chinese scholarship today. "La Haute Asie telle qu'ils l'ont vue" provides an appreciation of the physical dangers and intellectual challenges met during the exploration of High Asia. Scientists in all fields of the human and natural sciences risked their lives in order to increase our knowledge and understanding of Tibet and Central Asia's environment and cultures.

A well-illustrated exhibition book (in French) with some rare or previously unpublished pictures is available: A. Baud, Ph. Fort and S. Gorshenina, La Haute-Asie telle qu'ils l'ont vue. Explorateurs et scientifiques de 1820 1940. Geneva: Editions Olizane, 2003. 144 pp., 17 color plates, 102 photographs. ISBN: 288086299X, € 29.00. The book can be ordered through http://www.olizane.ch or http://www.amazon.fr.

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Issues of CESR

Vol. 8, No. 1
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Vol. 4, No. 2
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Vol. 3, No. 2
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CESR Central Eurasian Studies Review

Perspectives

Research Reports and Briefs

Reviews and Abstracts

Conferences and Lecture Series

Educational Resources and Developments

Editors - CESR Vol. 2 No. 2

Perspectives

Detours from Utopia on the Silk Road: Ethical Dilemmas of Neoliberal Triumphalism[1]

The Big Importance of the Small Scale

Innovative Responses on the Ground

Ethical Dilemmas

Critical Awareness of Neoliberalism

References

Notes

Research Reports and Briefs

Comparative Perceptions of Risk From Nuclear Testing in Kazakhstan: Preliminary Results and Proposed Research

Background

Preliminary findings in context

References

Interviewing NGO Leaders in Bishkek

Bayani's Shajara-ye khorezmshahi and the Russian Conquest of Khiva: An Essay on Historical Production1

References

Notes

Typology of Traditional Culture of the Mongol-Speaking Peoples

References

Notes

Reviews and Abstracts

Conferences and Lecture Series

New Games in Central Asia, Great and Small

Eighth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS VIII), September 25-28, 2002, Bordeaux, France

Educational Resources and Developments

Teaching Central Asian History in Japan: Some Practice and Experience

References

Notes

Uzbek Language Instruction: A New Textbook

A Story of European Hammers and Central Asian Boulders: How a Swiss Museum Exhibits "High Asia"

Issues of CESR

CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review

Bayani's Shajara-ye khorezmshahi and the Russian Conquest of Khiva: An Essay on Historical Production¹