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Methodology Chapter Locating Persons: an ethnography of personhood and place in rural Kyrgyzstan Rebecca Jane Reynolds Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Central and East European Studies School of Social and Political Sciences University of Glasgow September 2012 Abstract This thesis is an anthropological investigation of the interconnections between personhood and place in rural northern Kyrgyzstan. It studies the way people negotiate and experience relations with others and with the places in which they live and work. It is based on 18 months of fieldwork carried out in Kochkor raion between June 2006 and August 2008. I look at how the interplay between conceptual forms and everyday practices constitute personhood. I show how both formal ways of reckoning kinship, such as recounting genealogies and tracing back seven generations of male ancestors, and everyday forms of socialising are both integral in what it means to be a person, and are flexible in their designation of persons of the same kind and persons that are different. I go on to show how place holds particular significance for the attribution and negotiation of personhood, but that this meaning is emergent and processual. Providing an historical overview of the linking of persons to places by successive bureaucratic structures, I highlight how understanding places as “cultured” or “pure” have important consequences for how people understand themselves and others as more or less “Kyrgyz”, more or less “modern”. I show how recent reworkings of the meaning of “lineage places” following privatisation and village resettlement have led to changing forms of personhood, shifting from state farm worker to independent farmer. Other kinds of places are also meaningful for personhood. I highlight how the home and the objects it contains are active in the negotiation of a daughter-in-law’s personhood. I examine everyday practices of caring for the home, as well as more unusual practices of building new kinds of homes. These practices are integral to varied personhoods such as being a village daughter-in-law, or seeing oneself as “modern”. These personhoods and relationships with place are subject to ongoing negotiation, and death and grief disrupt these connections. A focus on emotion both within ritual practice and during grief lived everyday enables a better understanding of how personhood emerges from intersubjective processes which involve negotiation, rejection and incorporation of social and political processes. A focus on the co-production of place and personhood allows us to see both as becoming meaningful through these interactions. Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................. 7 NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION ................................................................................................... 9 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION...................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 11 Locating the field ............................................................................................................. 14 Theoretical concerns ........................................................................................................ 18 Anthropological approaches to the study of personhood ................................................ 19 Socialist and post-socialist persons ................................................................................. 25 The meanings of place ..................................................................................................... 31 Implications for the study of Central Asia ...................................................................... 36 Place and personhood in Central Asia ............................................................................. 38 Structure of the thesis ...................................................................................................... 42 CHAPTER 2 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ................................................................ 44 Fieldwork beginnings ...................................................................................................... 44 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 48 Reflexive research practice ............................................................................................. 49 Observing and participating ............................................................................................ 51 Intersubjectivity, friendship and ethical research practice .............................................. 54 Interviewing ..................................................................................................................... 59 An ethnographic record ................................................................................................... 63 On representing the other, and the self ............................................................................ 65 CHAPTER 3 KINSHIP AND PERSONHOOD IN KYRGYZSTAN ..................................................... 68 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 69 The significance of kinship in the study of Central Asia ................................................ 72 Recounting the uruu ........................................................................................................ 76 Sanjyrachy ....................................................................................................................... 76 The history teacher .......................................................................................................... 78 “We socialise with our relatives” .................................................................................... 80 The village head .............................................................................................................. 80 Daughter of Ak-Too ........................................................................................................ 83 An alternative approach to “lineage societies” ................................................................ 84 Perizat’s choice ................................................................................................................ 86 Personhood beyond kinship ............................................................................................. 89 Upbringing and the moral person .................................................................................... 89 “A man must make something of his life” ...................................................................... 92 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 96 CHAPTER 4 CONNECTING PERSONS AND PLACES .................................................................. 98 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 101 Places of relatedness ...................................................................................................... 103 Historical process and the linking of persons and places .............................................. 107 The Khanate of Kokand and Tsarist Central Asia ......................................................... 108 Integration into the Soviet Union .................................................................................. 110 Collectivisation .............................................................................................................. 113 The local impact of Soviet spatial policies .................................................................... 115 The changing shape of Kyzyl Suu ................................................................................. 116 The creation of a new village ........................................................................................ 119 Post Soviet reconfigurations .......................................................................................... 122 Privatisation of land in Ak-Too aiyl ökmötü ................................................................. 124 The resettling of Kyzyl Suu ........................................................................................... 127 Sociality and the nature of relations with tuulgan jer ................................................... 131 Changing livelihoods and the transformation of persons and places ............................ 134 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 138 CHAPTER 5 MAKING DOMESTICITY AND RELATEDNESS....................................................... 142 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 142 The meaning of the house ............................................................................................. 143 Why look at houses to understand Kyrgyz personhood? .............................................
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