A fundamental problem for governing populations concerns how to sustain the trust that underlies economic and sociopolitical relations. State laws and institutional structures routinize trust, but they are at best a partial solution, because official rules and bureaucratic procedure are never totalizing practices in any society. Informal and personal relations of trust also enable exchange and decision-making. The question is how informal practices articulate and work with official norms. For a region like post-Soviet Central Asia, research is urgently needed to uncover how economic and political order—both the official and unofficial aspects—are in fact being enacted.
Aksana Ismailbekova presents a needed close-up view of such an instance in rural Kyrgyzstan, where one man succeeded in a short span of time in becoming a successful businessman and elected politician, who was greatly esteemed and influential locally and beyond, and then abruptly lost all of it. The spectacular rise and fall of a political entrepreneur reveals essential elements of how political and economic order was being produced in President Kurmanbek Bakiev’s Kyrgyzstan of the latter 2000s. Ismailbekova offers a rare, on-the-ground account of patronage practices co-opting kinship and other cultural idioms to construct circles of trust that structured a local economy and impacted national politics. The author’s analysis rightly avoids construing patronage as necessarily pathological to the democratic workings of state, but instead shows how informal practices can be constitutive of its function. For better and for worse, post-socialist socio-economic conditions and circulating tropes of Kyrgyz tradition provide the ground upon which a skilled entrepreneur can mobilize a powerful patronage network.
Conceptually, the book studies the relation of patronage relations to kinship relations, and the impact of informal networks on the economy and politics. It argues that patronage and kinship form interwoven institutions in Kyrgyzstan today, and are simultaneously new (emerging from post-Soviet crises and opportunities) and old (invoking the rhetoric of kin obligations and traditional values). Kin ties do not in fact map one-to-one with political alliances, so that prevalent characterizations of modern Kyrgyz or Kazakh “tribalism” or “clan politics” are misleading, Ismailbekova finds. Rather, claims of blood or affinal relationship work as rhetorical idioms of alliance making and obligation management. Kinship is instrumental and manipulable for a patron who seeks to build a network of clients.
The book’s core follows the dramatic career of “Rahim,” a Bishkek doctor who returned to the rural Kyrgyzstani region of his origins to establish a power base in the 2000s. He bought a former collective farm and restructured the labor force so that the key personnel became dependent on him personally. Rahim’s talent was to create an economic realm of stability and predicability, abating conflict, and structuring incentives to keep goods and services flowing through his network. He deftly solved the “problem of agency”—getting clients to consistently do what the principal wants, even though they have differing interests and intentions. Securing cliental compliance was quite a feat, given the difficult life conditions that the farm workers were subjected to: meager and unpaid salaries (often for months), inadequate housing, restrictions on mobility, hard work, and being at Rahim’s beck and call for supplemental duties (often for his personal benefit).
So why would anyone want to work for him? Ismailbekova’s answer captures a core dynamic of how patronage works. Being a client secured benefits beyond a salary: access to non-cash resources on the farm (use of company machinery for private fields, spare parts) and the assurance of Rahim’s help during times of family crisis (money, conflict resolution, dealing with the government, etc.). The personal patron-client relationship, multiplied over much of the farm and town into an extensive network, and enacted an ordering that exerts a structuring effect on the local economy and politics. Locals called Rahim’s realm his “circle of trust,” although the metaphor of circle, with its symmetry, lack of hierarchy, and closure, captures the network less well than an inverted tree configuration (or even a rhizome, that opens the possibility of shifting and variable participation with multiple patrons).
The book’s analysis assumes basically rational actors—clients, even paying a high cost through their daily work for the patron, tapped into collective goods and hedged against risk. Ismailbekova, however, also adds a performative, symbolic dimension to this relation, drawing on anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s notion of “social poetics.” Rahim was convincing as the man in which to put their trust, she argues, partly because the skillful rhetoric of his persuasion through speech and action. He drew on culturally resonant themes of nativist values and imagery, casting himself as a “native son” of the land, who had come back to promote the prosperity of the village. Ismailbemova shows instances where Rahim’s eloquence in a local public gathering steered collective sentiment, for example, regarding the location of a new mosque, so that he was able to cast his private interests as the communal good. While a “patron cannot do without poetics,” the author treats Rahim’s use of social poetics more like a tool, in addition to structuring economic incentives, for a patron to get what he wants (186). Social poetics, in this book, spread a performative layer on an essentially rational-choice analysis of patronage; culture only adds punch to an economic argument.
An alternative frame would regard meanings as always inseparably conjuncture of power and unfold the analysis at every step as the intricate conjuncture of “culture” with interests about resources and security. Rahim’s brilliance as a political entrepreneur lay in his ability to create his own indispensability to the local community, which required mastery over both meeting needs and creating them through his “marketing” steeped in Kyrgyz heritage themes. “Needs,” in other words, are both economically-based and culturally-constructed. When Rahim evoked Kyrgyz tradition, he was partaking in Kyrgyz nationalist discourses being circulated nationally by the post-Soviet state as part of its tactics of rule—a connection between scales that this monograph does not pursue. Indeed, the analysis seems to treat popularly-resonant tropes like “native son” or “traditional values” as conscious strategies of elites, rather than as less-individuated, more-dispersed hegemonic figures of thought and practice circulating among a population (as from a more Gramscian or Foucauldian approach to power). People loved Rahim not just for the material benefits but also for the sense of native pride and significance that participation in his leadership conveyed, amidst great hardship and uncertainty. Patronage is best understood as a socially resonant configuration that mobilizes multiple domains of human motivation.
While the monograph does make brief connections with other studies and a few theoretical discussions, it is fundamentally an extended exposition of a single case, the career of Rahim. The ethnographic details of Kyrgyz farm activity and Rahim’s patronage practices, for example, are interesting and valuable as on-the-ground accounts of how economic life and socio-political order is being lived out in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. The book’s ethnography would have been better organized, however, around conceptual problems of patronage: official-informal articulations, personalist-institutionalist tensions, the performativity of interests, and the agency problem of trust, in order to speak directly to scholarship outside of Central Asia.
