The Burdens of Belonging: Living with Nationalism in Contemporary Kyrgyzstan
Writing at the end of April 2010 at a time of revolutionary upheaval in Kyrgyzstan, scholar and activist Nina Bagdasarova wrote poignantly of her sense of being overcome by the incitement to speak, act, and grieve as an ethnically-marked minority subject.Footnote 1 Three weeks earlier, on April 7, 2010, eighty-four demonstrators were killed outside Kyrgyzstan's White House in the worst act of state violence in the country's independent history. Within days, personal and spontaneous memorials by grieving relatives had given way to coordinated displays of collective, ethnically-marked loss through large printed banners taped to the White House gates. “The Dungans grieve for the dead of April 7th,” read one sign; “The Ingush express their solidarity for the heroes of the revolution,” read another. Even the Dargin and Avars, minorities numbering only a few thousand in Kyrgyzstan, had their own sign within a few days, expressing their solidarity “with all the peoples (so vsemi narodami) of our country.”
Bagadasarova wrote powerfully of her sense of loss and bewilderment at this moment of state violence and public mourning, but also of her discomfort at the sudden ethnicization of grief itself. “There are more than 80 ethnic groups in Kyrgyzstan; will there be 80 signs by next week?” Bagdasarova wrote, describing the proliferation of memorials in front of the White House. “Why can't I express sorrow simply as a citizen? Why can't I help collect money for families of the dead in private? … Suddenly, many of us are beginning to feel like minorities.”Footnote 2
How are we to make sense of this sudden awareness of national belonging as burdensome? Of no longer being able to grieve simply as a citizen? And how are we to trace the social, political, economic, and institutional shifts that lead to the gradual ethnicization of the public sphere over months and years? As with any complex social field, we can tell many stories about belonging and exclusion in contemporary Kyrgyzstan: stories of centuries-long co-existence and mundane cosmopolitanism; stories of urban stratification and the maintenance of socio-spatial boundaries; stories of hospitality and incorporation; stories of nationalism and xenophobia. The analytical challenge, as the three books reviewed here suggest, is to capture something of that social situation in its complex reality, attentive to its variability, its differentiation, its capacity to shift quite dramatically at moments of political upheaval. Such a task is timely in the case of Kyrgyzstan, where public and scholarly commentary often seems to be polarized between two broad interpretive models: Kyrgyzstan as a place of religious and ethnic tolerance on the one hand and Kyrgyzstan as a hotbed of nationalist violence on the other.
The three texts reviewed here provide contrasting ways to think through this complexity in historical and ethnographic terms. Julie McBrien's From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularism and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan is an evocative and nuanced ethnography of religious life that focuses on the shifting meanings of what it is to be Muslim in a small, ethnically-mixed border town in southern Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s. This was a time of unease for many of the town's residents, marked by a shift in “the broader, underlying notion of religion implicated in the new interpretations of Islam in town” (8). Philipp Schröder's Bishkek Boys: Neighbourhood Youth and Urban Change in Kyrgyzstan's Capital is a detailed micro-ethnography of integration and solidarity in a predominantly Russophone Bishkek neighborhood at a time when inter-neighborhood fights among young people born and raised in the city are giving way to a more generalized antipathy towards the city's growing population of peri-urban migrants. Nick Megoran's Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary extends the canvas, spatially and temporally, to explore how nationalism serves as a legitimating political discourse and mobilizing narrative in the eastern Ferghana valley. Of the three authors, he is the only one to address head on the topic of Kyrgyzstan's devastating inter-communal violence in June 2010.
Each of these books is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork during Kyrgyzstan's second decade of independence. Each is framed by a moment of historical change in contemporary Kyrgyzstan when questions of sovereignty, nationhood, and the place of Islam in public life were being debated with a new intensity, causing otherwise unmarked social relations to be shot through with a powerful awareness of religious, ethnic, and regional difference. Overlapping empirical foci aside, these are strikingly different kinds of book: in approach, in argumentation, in scope, and in analytic register. This difference, indeed, is what makes them interesting objects of comparison for the purpose of a critical review. “Nationalism,” Megoran's keyword for making sense of recent change in Kyrgyzstan, does not get so much as an index entry in McBrien's book, despite the geographical proximity of their fieldsites. “Islam” is a central topic of discussion among McBrien's young informants in Bazar-Korgon, yet is hardly mentioned by Schröder's urban interlocutors. And economic and demographic transformations, which are critical to understanding the reconfigurations of urban social relations in Schröder's analysis, figure as subordinate to the political traction of nationalism in Megoran's account.
Read together, these books remind the reader that generalizations, even about the experiences of young people in predominantly urban environments in Kyrgyzstan, need to be qualified in time and place. Kyrgyzstan is a highly differentiated society, culturally, religiously, and linguistically. Social change appears strikingly different in Uzbek-majority Bazar-Korgon, and in the Soviet-era courtyards of Bishkek; the dynamics of socio-spatial differentiation in Osh and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan's two largest cities, are dramatically different given the different geographical and architectural configurations of urban space. The contrasting analyses derive in part from these empirical differences between the authors’ respective fieldsites. But differences in authorial interpretation also derive from the way that they privilege different kinds of voice and source. Newspaper discourse, political speeches, evening courtyard banter, wedding-feast sermons, interviews, and focus groups bring different frames of analysis to the foreground and privilege different interpretive models. In this respect, I find the books’ difference complementary and productive, such that the three could be fruitfully discussed together with undergraduate or graduate students.
From Belonging to Belief
McBrien provides a vivid, nuanced, and ethnographically thick depiction of social life in Bazar-Korgon, a small town close to the border with Uzbekistan with a mixed Kyrgyz and Uzbek population. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, working first as a Peace Corps volunteer in the town and later as a doctoral researcher, McBrien encountered a social field where what it meant to be Muslim was being actively debated and discussed. Most people in the town, Kyrgyz and Uzbek alike, considered themselves to be Muslim. Historically this was a category of shared belonging that did not entail a great deal of reflexivity about the substance or content of one's belief and was seen as compatible with, say, the use of amulets and charms, participation in healing or divination rituals, and the appeal to protection from ancestors. For McBrien's older informants, to be Kyrgyz or Uzbek simply was to be Muslim by definition: religion, shaped by seven decades of Soviet socialism, was primarily a category of belonging. This approach to religion, McBrien argues, “fit within socialism's broader logics and modes of power and was consistent with the particularities of the Soviet modernizing regime” (27).
By the early 2000s, however, a shift had occurred, such that the answer to the question of what it meant to be Muslim was up for debate, particularly among the town's youth. In part, this was the result of the politicization of Islam and fears of extremist religious beliefs that percolated political discourse, particularly in the Uzbekistan of the early 2000s. But it was also the product of new materials and resources that shaped the possibilities for a variety of vernacular expressions of religious identity and debates about orthopraxy, from ritual innovation to new opportunities for prayer to shifts in practices of veiling. Missionary groups were arriving in town; books and pamphlets teaching the “correct” way to pray were becoming increasingly available, alongside cassette-recordings of sermons and wall-sized prints of the Kaaba. What was at stake in these innovations was not just the substance of particular religious beliefs (though debate about that was present too, as the subsequent ethnographic chapters illuminate). What was being discussed, more fundamentally, was the very nature and category of “religion” itself as a realm pertaining to individual belief and practice.
McBrien illustrates this with reference to the holding of explicitly sunnati or ibodati (of the prophet) wedding ceremonies that were purged of alcohol, dancing, mixing between the sexes and the public display of the bride. Some young people in town did away with the ZAGS, a term that in rural Central Asia denotes both the official registration of a marriage and the accompanying multi-vehicle cortege that parades the new bride and groom through town. Others did away with western-style wedding dresses or introduced a religious speaker to deliver a sermon in place of the traditional evening wedding party. McBrien is attentive, both to the excitement surrounding such weddings among a certain generation of young men and women, and to the ways in which such explicitly Islamic celebrations presented a threat to an older generation by openly challenging their sense of themselves as properly Muslim.
Here, and with other of her ethnographic examples, McBrien shows how these evaluations, while shaped by individual biographies and experiences of the Soviet past, were also mediated by a host of broader registers circulating in the town: discourses about the threat of “Wahhabis” or religious extremists percolating through evening news bulletins, but also by newly-circulating fashions and images, which allowed young women to appreciate such sunnati weddings as places of a certain kind of freedom, experimentation, and exploration.
These themes are picked up in the discussion of Islamic learning and the role of home-based study groups (Chapter 3), in public evaluations of new veiling practices in the town (Chapter 4), in the production of new religious public spaces through Mosque construction (Chapter 5), and in the vernacular discussion surrounding an exceptionally popular Brazilian soap opera, Clone, centered on an exoticized “Moroccan” family whose fetishized Muslimness was as much a backdrop to the plotline as the family's evident wealth. As McBrien explores, Clone’s capacity to incite discussion arose not because it was a religious object but because it served as a “metadevice providing the ground upon and language” (169) through which to think about the very category of religion. Ideas developed when discussing Clone “were used to help form boundaries around proper religion, improper religion, and the secular” (169). In this way, Clone was used to “do” religion by delineating anew the very boundaries of religion as a realm concerned with individual belief and ethical behavior (169).
Boundaries and Belonging in a Bishkek neighborhood
Overall, McBrien describes a field in which her interlocutors were “being challenged to move from a Soviet-era definition of religion (which was essentially about belonging) to a liberal one (in which belief was the necessary condition)” (10). This wasn't a uniform field: there was no singular interpretation of Islam in the town, and there was no hegemonic way of living Islam. It was “public, multivocal and variegated” (172). Indeed, it was precisely the heightened degree of interrogation about what a properly Muslim mode of life might be that characterized the religious sphere in Bazar-Korgon at the turn of the new millennium.
This situation of heightened religious commentary in small-town southern Kyrgyzstan contrasts dramatically with the social field depicted by Philipp Schröder in his account of friendship and neighborhood relations among male youth in the Bishkek micro-district of Iug-2, affectionately known by its residents as Shanghai. In the lives of the young men with whom he hung out on a Shanghai basketball court and in the yards (dvory) created from the configuration of Soviet-era apartment blocks, religion figured little, if at all. Here, according to Schröder, “‘being Muslim’ referred to a state of passive, nominal belonging” (129), rather akin to the register of Muslim-as-belonging that McBrien identifies as now being up for intense debate in Bazar-Korgon.
Instead, the world of the Shanghai yards is one where identities are forged through very particular identifications with place, first and foremost to the neighborhood itself, and within that to a particular yard and block. Schröder's focus is on “integration and identification” at this micro-level through exchanges (of respect, of favors, of goods) that are guided and informed by specific rules and conventions. The enclosed space of the yard, as a unit of analysis, provides a productive site for exploring this space of exchanges: not fully public and not fully private, the yard imposed particular expectations of presence and reciprocity. Schröder's own ethnographic immersion depended upon being there, turning up regularly and playing one's part in the impromptu basketball games that took place. The strength of the ethnography derives precisely from his awareness of the complex relations of kinship, friendship, and (fictive) older-to-younger brother (bratan/bratishka) dealings that structure the social life of the dvor.
Beginning from a central ethnographic incident—a fight with a group of neighborhood “outsiders” on the local basketball court after an escalating exchange of insults—Schröder illuminates why different actors behaved the way they did at the time of the fight, due to their positioning within the yards and their differential hierarchies of dependence and autonomy. He reveals the importance of age and generational cohort and the ways that kinship and year-group structures relations of dependence and hierarchy. He also explores with great subtlety the way that such relations of dependence are mediated by ethnicity: the perception among his Kyrgyz informants was that the ethnic Russians in the yard (who made up a sizeable minority of neighborhood residents) would never put themselves on the line for the sake of a Kyrgyz acquaintance, because their loyalties, ultimately, lay elsewhere.
Schröder explores how a local leader, Batyr, sustains his authority through a mixture of demonstrative displays of discipline, the demanding and bestowing of favors, the organization of training sessions for the yard's “little brothers,” and the expectation of help in times of inter-neighborhood fights. The ethnographic depiction here is reminiscent of studies of “total social institutions” such as the Russian army, prison, and boarding school, and Schröder's account could have benefitted from a fuller critical engagement with this broader comparative literature.Footnote 3 Importantly, he also explores why a history of inter-neighborhood score-settling, which dominated the urban landscape of 1990s Bishkek, has gradually given way to a rather more pacific urban situation.
In part, as Schröder's interlocutors explain, this is due to the fact that there is now simply more for the urban youth to do. If boredom formerly led to visits to other neighborhoods, which in turn led to the settling of scores through fights among groups of boys, today's Shanghaitsy are more likely to visit an internet café, or to play computer games indoors than they are to seek excitement chasing girls in a “rival” district across the tracks. But the decline in fights among residents of neighboring urban districts also seems to be shaped by the economic and demographic shifts occurring in the city over the last fifteen years. The Russian-speaking Shanghai youth, defined through their sense of urban habitus and “cultured” manners, now have a common “other” in the figure of the apparently uncultured, Kyrgyz-speaking population who have moved into the new peri-urban districts (novostroiki) at the city's edge. Pejoratively referred to as myrky, a term that denotes an uncultured, rural outsider, the city's growing population of first-generation urban-dwellers has changed the configuration of loyalties and tensions in the city. Many of those who came to own an apartment in Shanghai after the state-owned housing stock was privatized in the 1990s have rented out their apartments and moved to somewhere less expensive and less central, meaning that the demography of Shanghai is changing too.
These dynamics, Schröder suggests, have led to “an expansion of territorial focus beyond the neighborhood and out into the city” (217). It matters less, today, that one is from Shanghai as opposed to Zhiloi or Dzerzhinka (the “other” neighborhoods of the recent past) than that one identifies with the emphatically Russophone, non-nationalist inhabitants of old Bishkek. In this respect, Schröder's ethnography is an important illustration of the way that moments of heightened nationalism can be challenging precisely for those, like the Russian-speaking but Kyrgyz-identifying Bishkek youth, who do not fit the model of the authentic “national” subject celebrated in nationalist discourse.
Nationalism at the Edge of the Nation-state
Nationalism remains a background theme in Schröder's book. His interlocutors are more interested in talking basketball than in debating ethnic and regional difference. In Nick Megoran's text, nationalism, understood as a political ideology that holds that territorial and national units should be congruent, is analytically front and center. His book, framed in terms of a dichotomy between “elite” and “everyday” perspectives, proceeds from the question of how the events of 2010 could have happened; his aim is to “narrate the seemingly relentless march of the territorial logic of nationalism and its scarcely believable culmination in two different but terrible acts of violence in 2010” (7).
Central to Megoran's argument is the claim that nationalism was the only game in town for newly-independent states emerging from the Soviet federal structure in the 1990s. The first two chapters foreground statist perspectives on these processes, drawing heavily on interviews with officials and newspaper discourse. When, in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, socialism disappeared as a legitimating ideology, Megoran argues, nationalism became “the default organizing idea of the republic” (36), reproduced in everything from President Islam Karimov's multi-volume tracts on the “ideology of national independence” to monumental architecture, patriotic pop songs, and a ready supply of TV bulletins about threats from Uzbekistan's volatile neighbors. In Kyrgyzstan, the ideational resources that were drawn upon to support the new national discourse were rather different—here it was Manas, the epic hero who united the Kyrgyz tribes, who served as the primary symbolic resource for articulating a “postnomadic” political imaginary—but the nationalist logic was the same. “As independent Kyrgyzstan was ‘born’ into a world of nation-states,” Megoran argues, “nationalism is the inescapable ideological context for ordering politics in Kyrgyzstan. … It is the idiom in which all Kyrgyz politics takes place” (80, 133).
Given Kyrgyzstan's demographic situation, its geopolitical dependencies and the unilateral actions of its neighbor in closing a once-open international border, this was a Kyrgyz nationalism that was “insecure about issues of internal unity, geopolitics and language” (91) an argument Meogran illustrates by exploring the catalogue of territorial and economic threats documented by the opposition press in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The “border problem” was central to the opposition's narrative strategy, materially and symbolically: President Askar Akaev's apparent failure to protect Kyrgyzstan's territorial integrity by standing up to the country's neighbors came to stand for a much greater failure of statesmanship and the capacity to protect, secure, and lead the nation.
The second half of the book shifts register to the experience of those who have to navigate the newly-securitized international borders at the eastern end of the Ferghana valley (Chapter 3) and who had to contend with the violent ethnicization of everyday social relations during the violence in Osh (Chapter 4). In Chapter 3, Megoran captures the experience of being “caught in the middle” at the geographical margins of new states, and the sense of pain at being forced to declare a singular territorial and national allegiance in a region of historically dense trans-boundary kinship ties. He describes the multiple forms of violence—physical, economic, cultural, and existential—imposed by the closure of the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan boundary as obligations of respect and ritual visiting were undermined by the presence of new border controls. The demands of kinship, Megoran argues, “created a geographical imagination of the borderlands that had more resonance than the nation-state maps of nationalist politicians and experts in the center. Authentic Uzbekness and authentic Kyrgyzness were fundamentally threatened and affronted by these new border materializations” (159).
This dichotomous account—grounded in a stark distinction between “elite” versus “everyday” experiences of nationhood, mapped onto “capital” and “border” perspectives respectively—has a certain narrative coherence to it, but it is one that I find overdrawn. For the state authorities, Megoran asserts, “unchecked borders, enclaves and disputed zones were seen as problematic”; for locals, “quite the opposite is true—it is the attempt to check and control them that is problematic” (135). What this distinction and its accompanying binaries of power versus resistance, state versus society, central versus local perspectives miss, I suggest, is the way in which these categories blur and complicate on closer inspection. After all, not all political voices in contemporary Kyrgyzstan are nationalist voices: if Megoran had drawn upon the Russian-language as well as Kyrgyz-language press, he would have uncovered a much more diverse and differentiated set of “elite” discourses, including the kind of anti-nationalist perspective that Schröder identifies among his informants. Many of the opposition politicians referenced in earlier chapters themselves hail from border communities, and their discourses travel and have traction in those border communities too. Moreover, many of the “state figures” at the border are poorly-paid conscript soldiers who hail from equally impoverished rural communities as those “locals” who have to navigate the new boundaries, leading to compromises, negotiations, and a range of informal borderland “getting along.” More significantly, the analytical distinction between the state, which sees an open border as problematic, and locals who see border control as problematic, misses the fact that for many border dwellers, calls for “civilized,” regulated, “modern” borders have an ideational power that is equally as salient as for the city dwellers who rarely have to deal with a disputed border in practice. Indeed, it is precisely this ambivalence about the entailments of national statehood premised upon having coherent, non-disputed borders that makes the border itself such an impassioned object of discussion in Kyrgyzstan's border towns and villages.
In this respect, I believe that the insights that emerge from McBrien's much more fine-grained ethnography can add some nuance to Megoran's rather overdrawn distinctions between “elite” and “everyday” perspectives. What emerges from McBrien's exploration of Islam in Bazar-Korgon is a social world that is shot through with passionate debate and disagreement, with negotiation and uncertainty, with heterogeneous and diverse perspectives about the shape of a good life lived under the guidance of Islam. What McBrien also illuminates are the many ways in which discourses from outside get taken up within local discussions—in this case, about the meanings of Muslimness in contemporary Bazar-Korgon. The “local,” in other words, emerges as complexly intertwined with discourses and visions about the stakes of “belonging” that appear, in news bulletins and cassette sermons, in telenovelas and school textbooks, from a variety of national and international outsides. The “local” is intrinsically heterogeneous.
This insight is relevant for Megoran's case, because the implication of Chapter 3 is that the “nationalists” (read: elites), who hold that national and territorial units should be congruent, are portrayed as largely external to the border region itself. Yet part of the challenge in understanding the scale and spread of ethnically-marked violence in June 2010 is precisely to understand how and why nationalist discourse had a powerful traction in the realm of the everyday; how and why so many people, Kyrgyz and Uzbek alike, came to feel themselves to be ethnically “marked”; how and why local, placed-based pulls of loyalty, akin to those of Batyr described for Bishkek by Schröder, came to lead very quickly to the escalation of violence when lives and neighborhoods were felt to be under threat.
Megoran does a compelling job of unfolding the logic of territorial nationalism in Kyrgyzstan as it unfolded in nationalist scripts. But ultimately, his analysis leaves as many questions as it answers in our understanding of how such scripts came to be appropriated, debated, and sometimes rejected in the realm of the everyday.
