Under Solomon's Throne

Under Solomon’s Throne Central Eurasia in Context Douglas Northrop, Editor Under Solomon’s Throne

Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

MORGAN Y. LIU

University of Pittsburgh Press Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2012, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Liu, Morgan Y. Under Solomon’s throne : Uzbek visions of renewal in Osh / Morgan Y. Liu. p. cm. — (Central Eurasia in context) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8229-6177-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Uzbeks—Kyrgyzstan—Osh—Social conditions. 2. Uzbeks—Kyrgyzstan—Osh—Eco- nomic conditions. 3. Uzbeks—Kyrgyzstan—Osh—Government relations. 4. Post- communism—Kyrgyzstan—Osh. 5. Nativistic movements—Kyrgyzstan—Osh. 6. Osh (Kyrgyzstan)—Ethnic relations. 7. Osh (Kyrgyzstan)—Politics and government. I. Title. DK917.15.U93L58 2012 305.89’432505843—dc23 2011048871

Small portions of chapter 1 appeared in earlier form in “A Central Asian Tale of Two Cit- ies: Locating Lives and Aspirations in a Shifting Post-Soviet Cityscape,” in Everyday Life in Central Asia, Past and Present, edited by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca (Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press, 2007), 78–98.

Small portions of chapter 6 appeared in earlier form in “Post-Soviet Paternalism and Personhood: Why Culture Matters to Democratization in Central Asia,” in Prospects of Democracy in Central Asia, edited by Birgit Schlyter (Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2005), 225–38. Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix Notes on Interviews, Translations, and Transliteration xi

Introduction: A City for Thought 1 Chapter 1. Bazaar and Mediation 20 Chapter 2. Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 43 Chapter 3. Divided City and Relating to the State 74 Chapter 4. Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons 105 Chapter 5. House and Dwelling in the World 125 Chapter 6. Republic and Virtuous Leadership 148 Conclusion: Central Asian Visions of Societal Renewal 185

Notes 201 References 243 Index 269

Illustrations

Figure 1. Women on a mahalla street 4 Figure 2. Solomon Mountain and mausoleum 21 Figure 3. The Stone Monument, commemorating the Osh riots of 4 June 1990 23 Figure 4. Bazaar tables 26 Figure 5. Goods piled at the bazaar 27 Figure 6. A Kyrgyz man (right) selling wool to an Uzbek man at the bazaar 29 Figure 7. Youth at Imom Buhori Friday Mosque 41 Figure 8. The bustle to board buses to Tashkent 46 Figure 9. Fergana Valley topographic map 50 Figure 10. Article in Mezon headlined, “Why is the Osh-Andijan border closed to mass transit?” 61 Figure 11. Lenin statue in front of Osh provincial government complex 71 Figure 12. Panorama of Osh’s “New City” 78 Figure 13. Apartment buildings and street in Oshskii micro-district 90 viii Illustrations

Figure 14. Street scene in mahalla near Solomon Mountain 128 Figure 15. Uzbek house courtyards 137 Figure 16. Wearing an undershirt and being at ease in one’s own courtyard 138 Figure 17. Schematic diagram of an Uzbek house 139 Acknowledgments

Many interlocutors made possible my work and life in Kyrgyzstan, and they were generous in sharing their thoughts, homes, and tea. Particularly key to enabling and enriching my fieldwork were my colleagues Ertabyldy Sulai- manov, Tamara Nuridinova, Shavkat Atakhanov, Alisher Ilkhamov, Thomas Hale III, Kent Mathieson, Alisher Khamidov, Duishon Shamatov, Bakyt Beshimov, Tashbolot Joraev, Anara Jamasheva, Turgunbek Niyazov, and Svet- lana Gugulovna Pashenko. Contributing most crucially to the intellectual development and exposition of this book were Nick Megoran, Ed Schatz, Laura Adams, Adrienne Ed- gar, Joel Wainwright, John Schoeberlein, Madeleine Reeves, Jeff Maskovsky, Scott Levi, Dorry Noyes, Barry Shank, Marianne Kamp, Nazif Shahrani, Bruce Grant, Brian Silverstein, Engseng Ho, Eric McGlinchey, David Abramson, Uli Schamiloglu, David Gullette, Russell Zanca, Jeff Sahadeo, Dru Gladney, Cyn- thia Werner, and Jennifer Patico. Brinkley Messick opened the possibility of original intellectual spaces and exemplifies the kind of scholar I most admire. Jane Burbank showed me how to tease meaning out of sources and to imagine differently. Katherine Verdery inspired the reach for the highest standards of rigor and integrity. Erik Mueggler revealed a vision of the bold and brilliant.

ix x Acknowledgements

Stefan Senders creatively expanded my boundaries of ethnographic writing. Norma Diamond inculcated the love for Asia and anthropology. Val Daniel indexed what anthropology could become. Several institutions have supported my fieldwork and writing. My sin- cerest thanks go to the Social Science Research Council (especially Seteney Shami, Anthony Koliha, and Holly Danzeisen) and the International Research Exchange Board, as well as to the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad program (especially to Joanna Kukielka-Blaser) and the American Collegiate Consortium. I am also grateful to the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic; Kyrgyz State National University, Bishkek; Osh State University; Kyrgyz-Uzbek University, Osh; at the University of Michigan, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the Institute for Hu- manities; as well as the Harvard University Society of Fellows (especially Nur Yalman, Diana Morse, and Amy Parker) and the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences (especially Dick Davis, Sabra Webber, and Seb Knowles). To the University of Pittsburgh Press I express deep appreciation for the comments of peer reviewers and for the generous spirit of Peter Kracht and Doug Northrop during the editing process. I would also like to thank special friends, including Don and Elizabeth Stahl, Norm and Jacque Friberg, Linda Mathieson, Becky Hale, Willem and Karolien den Blanken, Tracy Moffet, Richbek and Lyn Pierce, and Ron and Londa Taylor. We will not forget how Londa gave her life, and then gave it up, in service to the people of Osh. My greatest human gratitude goes to my family, for many years of unceasing support, both in Kyrgyzstan and at home: my wife Swan Bee, son Declan, daughter Deirdre, and my parents, Molly and Rory Liu. Notes on Fieldwork, Interviews, Translations, and Transliteration

Fieldwork was conducted in Kyrgyzstan on eleven trips lasting one month to one year in duration from 1993 through 2011. The names given for all interviewees, usually first name only, are pseudonyms. Real names are used for well-known public figures and in a few instances for scholarly colleagues. Di- rect quotations are either verbatim from recorded conversation, or close to verbatim, as reconstructed by notes and memory of unrecorded comments. All interviews and conversations with Uzbeks were held in the Uzbek language, unless otherwise noted; in Kyrgyz language with Kyrgyz speakers; in Russian with Russians and others resident in Central Asia; and in Mandarin with a few Chinese businessmen. All translations from Uzbek, Russian, and Kyrgyz are by the author. Rus- sian words are transliterated according to the Library of Congress system. Uzbek words are spelled according to Uzbekistan’s official 1996 Uzbek Latin alphabet. Kyrgyz word transliterations follow the 1979 romanization of Kyr- gyz promulgated by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (BGN/PCGN). Exceptions occur for proper names with widely accepted standard English spellings (e.g., Yeltsin, Moscow, Uzbek, Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Bukhara, An-

xi xii Notes on Fieldwork dijan, Uzgen, and Akaev, rather than Ieltsin, Moskva, O’zbek, O’zbekiston, Toshkent, Buxoro, Andijon, Özgön, and Akayev). Out of personal preference I use the Kyrgyz and Russian form of Fergana rather than Ferghana, Far- gana, or Farg’ona. Place names in Kyrgyzstan are rendered with their official post-Soviet Kyrgyz designations (Osh, Jalalabat, Kara-Suu, rather than O’sh, Jalal-Abad, Qorasuv), with the exception of the Osh-Andijan border crossing, which I call Do’stlik (in Uzbek) rather than Dostuk (in Kyrgyz), and Uzbek- majority urban districts (To’qqiz Adir rather than Toguz Adyr). As for Russian loan words in Uzbek or, as is commonly done, outright Russian words inserted in an Uzbek sentence and inflected with Uzbek grammar (Uzbek, as an agglu- tinating language, adds its own affixes to the Russian word), I have chosen to transliterate according to the Uzbek rather than Russian system. Under Solomon’s Throne to to BishkekBishkek

KAZAKHSTANKAZAKHSTAN KYRGYZSTANKYRGYZSTAN

yn yn N N ar ar N N

TashkentTashkent

UZBEKISTANUZBEKISTAN NamanganNamangan JalalabatJalalabat

r D ry Da ya Kara-SuKara-Su UzgenUzgen S y Sayr ar AndijanAndijan L E LYE Y OshOsh S S V A VL A L yr yr A A D D N N a a G AG A ry ry R R a a E E F F TAJIKISTANTAJIKISTAN KokandKokand FerganaFergana

KhojentKhojent

BatkenBatken

KYRGYZSTANKYRGYZSTAN ElevationElevation 200–500200–500 meters meters 500–1000500–1000 1000–20001000–2000 CHINACHINA 2000–30002000–3000 0 0 2010 2010 3030 40 4050 mi50 mi 3000–40003000–4000 0 0 20 20 4040 60 60 80 km80 km 4000–50004000–5000 TAJIKISTANTAJIKISTAN 5000–60005000–6000

Fergana Valley topographic map, showing roads from Osh to Jalalabat and Bishkek. Map by Bill Nelson.

xiv to Bishkek

KAZAKHSTAN KYRGYZSTAN

yn N ar N

Tashkent

UZBEKISTAN Namangan Jalalabat r D ya Kara-Su Uzgen Sy ar Andijan L E Y Osh S V A L yr A D N a G A ry R a E F TAJIKISTAN Kokand Fergana

Khojent

Batken

KYRGYZSTAN Elevation 200–500 meters 500–1000 1000–2000 CHINA 2000–3000 0 2010 30 40 50 mi 3000–4000 0 20 40 60 80 km 4000–5000 TAJIKISTAN 5000–6000

Introduction: A City for Thought

The tale of one city can tell a story about a society, a region, and a historical moment. The story told here is about how an urban community responded to a political dilemma for two decades and how the community’s response offers broader insight on Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, ethnic Uzbeks in the city of Osh have lived as citizens of independent Kyrgyzstan, the post-Soviet republic dominated by ethnic Kyrgyz in both numbers and power. The political predicament that Osh Uzbeks have faced is linked to the following questions: What kind of city is Osh to be? Could it become a more cosmopolitan city, where the many ethnicities, most notably the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks, would coexist productively and share a flourishing of the city? Or would it disintegrate irretrievably into a place of barely mutual tolerance between ethnic groups and cyclical confrontation amid the dreadful economic conditions and recurring moments of political instability in the country? The record is not promising. Osh has become infamous for two citywide incidents of armed violence and property destruction between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that together have claimed hundreds of lives. The first occurred in June 1990, triggered by a land dispute on the eve of the Soviet collapse, and

1 2 Introduction the second in June 2010, exactly twenty years later, during a political crisis that ousted Kyrgyzstan’s president. The future of the city is acutely uncertain and is likely to remain so for a long time because the damage done in the second deadly eruption of violence was far worse in terms of lives, homes, and trust. What may come as a surprise, then, is the spectrum of attitudes and responses that Osh Uzbeks entertained during the two decades between those two ca- lamitous events. In the context of tight constraints regarding what they could achieve politically in a Kyrgyz-dominated republic, Uzbeks in Osh never ceased to yearn for a good life in urban society, and many worked to build a viable place for Uzbeks in independent Kyrgyzstan. This book gives an account of the ways in which Osh Uzbeks made sense of the post-Soviet Central Asian order and their place in it during the initial two decades of independence. The stakes of this study involve the very future of Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia, because the issues that have been playing out in Osh—massive unemployment, social injustice, Islamic revival, strident nationalism, ethnic misunderstanding—go to the heart of trends that affect the stability and prosperity of the entire region. The intent is to render a portrait of this city that would then shed more light on Central Asia.

Touring a Realm of Distinct Manners Yo’lbuvi was one of my first Uzbek acquaintances in Osh when I arrived at Osh State University in the spring of 1994. A highly educated woman in her fifties, Yo’lbuvi spoke to me in Russian, as I knew no Uzbek at the time. She was immediately aware that I had no contact with the Uzbek community in Osh, because I had come to Kyrgyzstan through Kyrgyz institutions, with Kyrgyz government permission, studying the Kyrgyz language, and associat- ing mostly with Kyrgyz academics and students. I spent all of my time in the multiethnic parts of the city: the university, dormitories, provincial library, bazaar, theater, apartment complexes, and the main streets. My experience of Osh worried Yo’lbuvi. Osh had come under sovereign Kyrgyz rule little more than two years previously, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and following the traumatic 1990 riots between Osh’s ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents. She did not want me to learn the city from a Kyrgyz point of view. Knowing my intention to study “culture,” Yo’lbuvi talked to me about the contrast between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the area of manners. She told me of the Uzbeks’ civilized, refined, town-settled past by describing the elaborate steps that Uzbeks use in food preparation and presentation.1 By contrast, the Kyr- gyz, who she said had led a rough, nomadic existence, had an “uncultured” cuisine; for a meal, they just plunked down a hunk of meat in front of you. “Nomads do not know culture,” she explained. “Throughout history, they have only known how to destroy culture. You should know this yourself. You’re Chinese. You built the Great Wall! What was the Great Wall for, after all? To Introduction 3 keep out the barbarians, the nomads!”2 She went on to characterize the Chi- nese and Uzbeks as two great ancient civilizations who were trading partners on the Silk Road. Yo’lbuvi’s attempt to cement our relationship and peel me away from my Kyrgyz colleagues with this discussion did not escape me. She took it upon herself to be my guide to Uzbek civilization and the “real” Osh because I was an anthropologist (a researcher of culture), because I was Chinese (a representative of a “great ancient civilization”), because I was American (a consequential outside observer), and because I needed to understand that Osh was “actually an Uzbek city.” The only way I could understand the city and culture, she insisted, was to spend time in a distinctive kind of Uzbek-majority urban neighborhood called a mahalla. Mahallas occupied half of the city’s land area, housed most of its ethnic majority Uzbek population, and were the places where many of its residents spent most of their time.3 They were dense spaces of intense social interaction that would reveal much about what it meant to be Uzbek in Osh. Yo’lbuvi was by no means the first to suggest this notion of Uzbek neighborhoods to me. While I was studying at Kyrgyz State University in Bishkek (the capital of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan) during the fall of 1993, one of my teachers was a Russian woman who had grown up in an Osh mahalla during the 1950s. One of the few Russians I have met anywhere in Central Asia who could speak a Central Asian language to any degree, she described her mahalla as a place of garrulous sociality and meticulous hospitality, where manners mat- tered to an extent not found in Kyrgyz or Russian households, or even among Uzbeks living outside of mahallas. She said, for example, that Uzbek hosts entertained their guests by pouring water from a brass decanter (obdasta) onto the guests’ hands, held over an exquisitely crafted catch basin chilopchin( or dashsha), then carefully slicing fruit, arranging foods and tea on the low tables (khontakhta), and serving the guests. Trays of prearranged candies and nuts would be taken out and later put back into cabinets, as these were not for the family’s own consumption. After I transferred to Osh State University in 1994, Uzbeks in Osh waxed eloquent to me about the cultured way of life of Uzbeks in the city’s mahallas, underscoring what they called the great ancient culture of the Uzbek people, who have lived in Central Asian cities like Osh for many centuries. They described to me their house courtyards as veritable gardens, adorned with magnificent carved wooden panels and grapevines. It was as if Uzbeks lived in their own separate city within the city. Yo’lbuvi herself took me on my first tour of this purported realm of distinct manners, an experience that inspired my subsequent research focus on Osh’s mahallas. Her desire to influence me proved successful after all. The mahalla that we visited was located literally across the street from the university dormitory where I was living in 1994, yet it seemed a world away. 4 Introduction

Figure 1. Women on a mahalla street. Photograph by the author, 2003.

Large social distances can be spanned within small geometric distances in an urban landscape, as a city dweller anywhere could attest. My dormitory was at the foot of Solomon Mountain, near the intersection of two main thoroughfares, Navoi and Kurmanjan Datka, but as busy as these streets were, they carved out a number of old, quiet Uzbek residential neighborhoods on Osh’s northeast flank. Yo’lbuvi and I crossed to the north side of Navoi Street from my dormitory and worked our way behind the Avtotrans building (its Soviet institutional name, still in use today). The moment we turned onto the mahalla’s narrow street, the visual, audio, tactile, and olfactory cues of the built environment shifted. I had the sense of entering a microcosm, even though the main street was just behind us and around the corner (fig. 1).4 Unlike the rational, deliberate look of the rectilinear Soviet sector streets, the mahalla’s narrow and sometimes unpaved and winding streets (ko’cha) had an improvised, lived-in look. Leading from the thoroughfares, they were internally connected, though there were dead ends in older streets not restructured by Soviet-era city planning. Uzbek houses (uy) showed little of themselves to the street; windows were kept barred and draped, if they were present at all on the plain exterior walls of mud or factory brick. Metal gates (eshik) of various designs and colors along the street front the passage into each house, which actually consists of an integrated ensemble of separate structures arranged around an outdoor central courtyard. Each house is inhabited by one multigenerational household, different generations usually living in different struc- Introduction 5 tures that all open to the courtyard, which acts as a common area for domestic activities. The single-story courtyard house (yer uy or yer maydoni uy) is what made mahallas distinctive compared to other kinds of residential zones in Osh and other former Soviet Central Asian cities. As Yo’lbuvi and I walked by some gates that lay tantalizingly open, I wanted to have a look at a house. It was a hot midday, when street activity was usually low, so there was no one in sight to ask.5 An elderly woman happened to emerge from a gate as we passed. Although Yo’lbuvi did not know this woman, she introduced me to her and explained that I was a foreign ethnographer interested in Uzbek ways of life. The woman warmly invited us into her house. We walked through the gate and a short, covered passage and emerged in the still deeper microcosm of a small courtyard called a hovli. In contrast to the dusty street and rough, blind walls behind me, the hovli seemed blooming with life and human connection. Fruit trees provided shade and coolness and flowers, the colors and scent. In the cool shadow of the tree canopy lay a so’ri, a low wooden platform used for sitting and eating. Three goats tied to a post filled the air around us with their sound and smell. Surrounding the hovli on three sides were the intricately carved wooden faces of the connected structures that housed the various living spaces, their windows and doors all facing the courtyard. Yo’lbuvi proudly explained each of these elements to me, making sure that I took note of the artistry and refinement. The variegated -ir regularities of hovli space seemed to make possible a variety of simultaneous activities, all taking place side by side—a compact world of involved activity. Edward Hall (1966) noted that walking in a Japanese garden gave one a sense of the space being larger than it was, because irregularly spaced stepping stones exaggerated one’s kinesthetic involvement. Similarly, a mahalla house, like the police box of Dr. Who in the science fiction TV series, seemed larger on the inside than when viewed from the outside. I was smitten with “topophilia,” a hyper-aestheticization of place (Tuan 1990). It was not only the beauty of individual elements but also the ensemble effect that created the entire atmosphere or sense of place. Tony Hiss (1990, 20) wrote elegantly about human experience of place via “simultaneous perception,” a continuous awareness of surroundings via all senses that pays “equal attention to everything at once, omitting nothing and at the same time emphasizing nothing” and that includes not just sights and sounds but smells, temperature, humidity, ground textures, and kinesthesia (the sense of one’s own bodily movement). The gestalt of the multichannel experience through simultaneous awareness produces the distinctive, emergent “look and feel” of a place. When Yo’lbuvi and I finally said our thanks to our serendipitous hostess, she handed me a bag of candies and peanuts as a parting gift. “See how hospitable we Uzbeks are,” Yo’lbuvi proclaimed with glee, never missing a chance to impress me with the excellence of Uzbek national character. 6 Introduction

Ethnic Territories in a City Why do I begin with this vignette of the spontaneous invitation to an Uz- bek home? It recounts how I got started in researching the city of Osh and how its residents initially related to me as a Chinese American anthropologist, and it injects a measure of what the discipline calls reflexivity, the awareness of the researcher’s position in fieldwork. The account preserves the xenophilic enthusiasm of a rookie ethnographer who, imbibing the tour guide’s constant spin, finds the “real” Central Asia after months in Kyrgyzstan’s very Soviet- style capital city. Such an account also provides a first taste of a very prevalent and potent narrative that conjoins people, place, and culture. During my 1994 stay in Osh, mahalla residents and outsiders talked to me about these neighborhoods as the primary site of “traditional Uzbek culture,” the only place where one could live properly according to “Uzbek ways of life” (O’zbek turmush tarzi or, in Russian, Uzbekskii obraz zhizni), which encompassed practices from child rearing and fruit cultivation to wedding celebrations and mutual aid (hashar).6 Both the distinct look and feel that emerge from the style of houses and configurations of the streets indexed for the mahalla residents a particular, ethnically marked mentality—intensely community oriented, conservative, and religious. The mahalla was Uzbek ethnic authenticity made concrete. Narratives of authenticity, however, are always circulated within specific social contexts, political coordinates, and tactical agendas. The politics implicit in my encounter with Yo’lbuvi is another reason for beginning with the mahalla tour. Yo’lbuvi’s evangelistic posture toward me emerged from a conjuncture of her Soviet education (with its notions of reified civilizations and ahistorical ethnicities), the new post-Soviet moment (with its exuberant nationalisms and heady fragrance of possibility after Russian and Soviet rule), and the political predicament of Uzbeks in Osh (with me as a Western witness to its felt injustice). I was for her a particularly enticing tabula rasa, knowing nothing but eager to learn. I represented a consequential observer, coming from the United States, from a prestigious academic institution, and preparing to write books about Central Asia. To be sure, my Uzbek contacts in Osh assumed a less didactic posture toward me after I returned to the city in 1997, no longer an ignorant outsider who needed lecturing but one who could now speak the Uzbek language and who had research experience in Uzbekistan.7 They nonetheless continued to characterize the mahalla as the site of “Uzbek traditions.” Their persistence in this tack grew more urgent whenever they perceived that the mahalla was under some threat, such as during the two major episodes of interethnic conflict within the city; the postwar reconstruction boom, when mahalla residents were displaced as factories and apartment blocks rose on the razed ruins of mahallas; or the Kyrgyzstani government’s Introduction 7 gerrymandering of the city’s limits to increase the percentage of Kyrgyz counted. In such moments, the mahalla was treated as a manifestation of Uzbek territoriality. Those moments foregrounded the sentiment that those neighborhoods collectively belonged to the city’s Uzbeks but were also subject to a Russian-Soviet or Kyrgyz state. Although a small but sizable number of Rus- sians and other ethnicities (Kyrgyz, Meskhetian Turks, Tajiks, Azeris, Roma, and in periods past, Jews and Chechens) had lived in Osh’s newer mahallas (built after World War II), most vacated their homes and left for Russia or elsewhere in the early 1990s.8 And Kyrgyz, whose minimal numbers in Osh started to grow only in the postwar period, mostly resided in Soviet-built apartment complexes to which rural Kyrgyz migrants flocked after independence in 1991.9 Today one rarely finds a non-Uzbek on most of Osh’s mahalla streets, and thus the mahalla is excluded from the urban experience of the city’s more than one hundred thousand Kyrgyz (both lifelong residents and recent rural migrants), Russians, and others (including expatriates)—a sizable portion of the city’s population.10 This is why it took an Uzbek guide like Yo’lbuvi to bring me into a mahalla in 1994. Frankly, I had found them intimidating. Urban places are never socially neutral; they carry tacit understandings about who belongs, when, and why. My Kyrgyz friends warned me, “Don’t wander into a mahalla, especially in the evenings. You may be mistaken for a Kyrgyz and get into trouble,” referring to my East Asian facial features that resemble Kyrgyz ones. Years later, when I presented a paper about mahalla life at an Osh State University conference, one Kyrgyz man remarked that, despite more than a decade of residency in Osh, he had never actually set foot in a mahalla beyond a major street like Kalinin (where car repair shops line the street and a bus line runs).11 One Kyr- gyz teenager recounted the tensions he felt when, in the mid-1990s, he visited an Uzbek friend one evening in Uzgen, a nearby Kyrgyzstani city that also had an Uzbek majority.12 “At night, no Kyrgyz are to be found in town,” he said, because Kyrgyz live outside the Uzbek core of Uzgen. “If a Kyrgyz is caught walking, he is accosted and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’” This teenager also described how groups of male Uzbek youth routinely picked fights with Kyrgyz youth (unless they are outnumbered) in the Oshskii micro-district, the multiethnic neighborhood of Soviet-built apartment blocks bordering Osh’s oldest mahallas. In the male teenage world of toughness and turf, apartment neighborhoods were considered more contestable ground, while mahallas were clearly Uzbek territory.13 Two explosive events in the city’s recent history escalated the idea of Uzbek territoriality into the literal armed defense of barricaded streets. The massive Kyrgyz-Uzbek killings of June 2010 in the key cities of southern Kyrgyzstan, Osh and Jalalabat, followed the political crisis that erupted when President 8 Introduction

Kurmanbek Bakiev was ousted from power. It led to the targeted burning of mahalla houses and Uzbek businesses, 120,000 displaced across southern Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbek men stationed behind jackknifed buses and debris to block off entrances to their mahallas.14 The multiple forces at work in the interethnic violence are not entirely clear at the time of this writing.15 Such events in Central Asia today are always shrouded with a generosity of rumor and paucity of fact, which can be adjudicated only by a rigorous independent inquiry, something not forthcoming in Kyrgyzstan’s current political climate. It is certain, though, that once triggered and enabled, the undercurrent of resentment and misunderstandings that flows beneath everyday urban life in Osh rapidly found destructive expression, especially among the numerous unemployed youth, who were highly susceptible to rumor and rhetoric. This kind of event, unfortunately, was not Osh’s first. Twenty years before the 2010 outbreak, to the month, the Osh riots of June 1990 began as a land dispute between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks and quickly escalated into armed interethnic violence throughout the city and nearby region. More than three hundred persons may have died in the violence. The sense of foreboding was palpable in Osh during the early 1990s. People of all ethnicities with whom I talked at that time would drop their voices to hushed tones when talking about the horror of the riots, the rift in the city’s social fabric, and the uneasy peace settling over the city. Showing me scars on his arm, one man of mixed Kyrgyz-Uzbek parentage told me how families like his huddled in their homes, wishing only for the violence on both sides to stop. When armed youth gangs of one ethnicity raged through the street, knocking on every door and killing those of the other group, the mixed families would send the Kyrgyz parent to answer the door if Kyrgyz were knocking and the Uzbek parent, if Uzbeks were knocking.16 Then, too, Uzbeks posted themselves along barricades at the entrances to their mahallas, literally defending their territory.17 Kyrgyz occupied certain locations in the apartment complexes, major streets, and squares. For those days in June 1990 and June 2010, the ethnicized territoriality of Osh and other predominantly Uzbek areas in southern Kyrgyzstan became a shifting tactical battlefield, and that “military geography” became horribly layered onto the cityscape after each incident, inscribed in the painful memories, scarring, and bodily routines of its residents, such as which places they would choose to walk or try to avoid. In light of what was to happen in 2010, it is a pity to note that, despite lingering mutual misunderstandings and general lack of deep social relations between ethnicities, public life in Osh was calm and workable in the later 1990s and as the twenty-first century began. The immediacy of the animosity from the 1990 riots had mostly waned by the 2000s, and new routines of normal life got woven in the urban fabric, helping to mend it for two decades. Wealth accumulated for some Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in southern Kyrgyzstan, and with Introduction 9 repressions happening next door in Uzbekistan (culminating in a massacre in 2005), many Osh Uzbeks had begun to value being citizens of Kyrgyzstan and worked to build a viable future within its framework (Liu unpublished). The 2010 events ended what had promised to be a sustainable trajectory of peaceful coexistence. Yet that promise was perhaps always illusory in the long term, given the continuing poor economy, the seemingly periodic overturning of national governments, the interests of the powerful business–politics–crime triumvirate in southern Kyrgyzstan, and the lack of intercommunal discourse about the proper place of non-Kyrgyz in a Kyrgyz-centered republic. This is a bleak picture. This book, however, offers a rather positive -por trait. It shows how Osh Uzbeks saw and coped with their difficult political dilemma during the first twenty years of independence with a deeply rooted optimism. While it is not clear how the trauma of 2010 will affect their enduring attitudes, this study does reveal something about the resilience and creativity of Kyrgyzstani Uzbek communities in envisioning and laboring for a constructive niche under great political constraint, for a while at least. The fact that, in retrospect, two major riots form the bookends to this project does not diminish the import of what the Uzbek communities attempted to achieve in the period between 1990 and 2010. Yo’lbuvi’s tour of the Uzbek neighborhood provided some hints, for example, opening a window into the high value that Uzbeks invested in their mahallas because these neighborhoods somehow distilled the essence of what it meant to be Uzbek in this Kyrgyzstani city. Ur- ban place was central to Uzbeks’ conceptions of who they are and where they fit in an often contradictory and troubled post-Soviet political order. However, the mahalla was not merely about ethnic territory or cultural authenticity in contrast to a Kyrgyz other (or, earlier, to a Soviet other). One important lesson expounded in these pages is that, riots notwithstanding, the significance of the city to Osh Uzbeks does not primarily concern ethnicized claims to land. They came to see the mahalla as a key to making a society marked by human flourishing rather than recurrent crises. The mahalla became a figure of thought implicated in how they made sense of what Soviet rule in Central Asia was about and what post-Soviet Central Asian society ought to be like. Urban place was something to think with.

Thinking with a City A city is good not just for living but for pondering. Sometimes it takes an outsider to recognize the interpretive potential of a city, as the late Tony Judt (2005, 2) does concerning Vienna in 1989, which he describes as “a good place from which to ‘think’ [postwar] Europe,” because by the time that the Ber- lin Wall fell, it was a “palimpsest of Europe’s complicated, overlapping pasts,” which he reads in the city’s built environment. In other times, it is the city dwellers themselves who look at the urban transformations that they are expe- 10 Introduction riencing as indexing the spirit of the times. Urban inhabitants can treat their city as an interpretive frame with which to think about the world. They can take its spaces, material conditions, characteristic lifestyles, historical reputation, or imputed ideals as a lived site through which to understand the times, because the city somehow captures or plays out a crucial dilemma. This book tells the story of one city in today’s Central Asia, whose streets, bazaars, landmarks, and neighborhoods tell a broader story. It is an urban ethnography that uses detailed, on-the-ground accounts of city life to illuminate critical questions about post-Soviet Central Asian realities: the effects of marketization, intense economic hardships, mounting inequalities, desire for Soviet-era stability and state control, the “revival” of ethnic traditions, and the Islamization of social life. The city of Osh since 1991 is a felicitous place from which to think post-Soviet Central Asia.18 Located today inside the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Osh is an ancient Silk Road city with a population of more than a quarter million, and it has harbored a majority ethnic Uzbek population for centuries (Galitskii and Ploskikh 1987; Sulaimanov and Liu 1997).19 After the dissolution of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics in 1991, Uzbeks living in Osh became citizens of an independent Kyrgyzstan, where political power is held predominantly by ethnic Kyrgyz. Osh is Kyrgyzstan’s second- largest city, a provincial capital in the country’s populous south, and it was declared in 2000 to be the republic’s “second capital.” Yet the city is located on the border with Uzbekistan, and, because of its location on the edge of the Fergana Valley, it is geographically and historically more connected to population centers that lie within the valley in independent Uzbekistan. The position of the city and its large Uzbek population at the nexus between these two post-Soviet states is what makes it a particularly productive site for pondering. Osh is good to think with because it exemplifies the postcolonial contradictions within Central Asian nation-states today. The “nation-state” concept is a poor fit for Osh Uzbeks, who look to Uzbekistan for their ethnic identification and to Kyrgyzstan for their citizenship. The predicament of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan is that they are caught between these two republics yet excluded from meaningfully belonging to either. This is a predicament that began with the early Soviet creation of the ethnoterritorial republics that put Osh under the newly created Kyrgyz territorial jurisdiction and then grew even more complicated under a nationalities policy that advanced Kyrgyz into leadership positions with Russians, since the Soviet Union was the world’s first “affirmative action empire,” one that politically promoted the “titular nationality” (the ethnic group for which the territory is named) within the erstwhile Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic.20 The Osh Uzbek predicament deepened with Osh’s postwar industrialization and the resulting massive Kyrgyz rural migration into the city, and it intensified when the Soviet ethnic territories became sovereign nation-states. The post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani government’s stated com- Introduction 11 mitment to building a common future for all its ethnicities notwithstanding (notably for its economically significant Uzbeks and Russians), it has clearly promoted Kyrgyz in most positions of power.21 Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are disempowered because they live in a state that, since independence, has been nationalizing around ideas of Kyrgyz distinctiveness and the fact of Kyrgyz dominance in most positions of influence. What is Kyrgyzstan today but the fulfillment of the Kyrgyz people’s historical destiny in sovereign self-rule and collective material/cultural development according to a proud Kyrgyz heritage? Though debated in its particulars among Kyrgyz politicians and intellectuals, this basic premise of the national ideology locates ethnic minorities as structurally secondary to the core purpose of the republic. On the other hand, because Osh Uzbeks are Kyrgyzstani citizens, they are shut out of the “land of the Uzbeks” (the meaning of Uzbekistan) by the adjacent international border that became progressively impassable due to the post-Soviet Uzbekistani state’s obsession with security and control. The notion of ethnic affinity has done nothing to alter Uzbekistan’s priorities regarding the Uzbek “diaspora” just beyond its state borders. This problematic situation of Osh Uzbeks exemplifies one dilemma characterizing post-Soviet Central Asia more broadly. Because ethnoterritorial notions inherited from Soviet ideology, policy, and institutions constitute the very raison d’être of these successor states, the question is how far minority communities can advance their collective interests if state power is founda- tionally premised on promoting the welfare of the titular nationality. The Osh Uzbek situation, however, is not adequately captured by the usual notion of ethnic minority, with its implied assumptions about the naturalness of the nation-state’s compact, bounded territory. “Don’t call us a minority!” one Osh Uzbek told me once. “We are a majority in Osh, and in cities like Jalal-Abad and Uzgen. Don’t call us a diaspora, either. Diaspora means separation from an original homeland. We’ve been here in these cities for centuries! It is the Kyrgyz who came recently.”22 But despite Osh Uzbeks’ claims of the originary “Uzbek” character of Osh and the political fantasy of many during the 1990s, sotto voce, that the city should be annexed to Uzbekistan, their troubled post- Soviet position is ultimately not a matter of the border falling in the “wrong” place, any more than interethnic troubles in Bosnia after Yugoslavia’s dissolution could be solved with “smart maps” that sought to partition relatively mono-ethnic enclaves within enclaves.23 Rather, it points to the conceit of modern political imaginaries that state borders could ever partition conceptually coherent “nations” out of premodern cultural-linguistic hybridities and coexisting diversities that were never previously understood in modern ethnic or national-territorial terms. Differences in culture, language, and ecological adaptation were of course recognized between Central Asian peoples before Soviet rule, but they were 12 Introduction not seen according to the package of concepts involving fixed sets of characteristics that are now so widely asserted and taken for granted. That set of notions came to Central Asia with a Soviet nationalities policy that defined and affirmed the social reality and political value of “nationality” and a hierarchy of ethnic categories.24 Ethnicities, though not invented out of thin air, were standardized by state ethnographers in the 1920s and 1930s: formerly fluid hybridities and contextual identifications were stabilized, naturalized, and set into a particular mold that gave each group a definitive history, physiognomy, mentality, material culture, customs, language, and territory. These definitions were then institutionalized into ethnically coded territorial-administrative structures (the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union) and routinized into -ev eryday life over seven decades. It is in that sense that Central Asian ethnicities are (recent) sociopolitical constructions and that the categories of “Uzbek” and “Kyrgyz” (and others), as they are currently assumed to exist, were invented by the Soviet state.25 Because those labels do designate relatively coherent and stable groups of people today, I employ them without scare quotation marks, but it should be kept in mind that they do not necessarily entail the entire set of imputed characteristics that the people themselves tend to assume. In particular, Kyrgyz or Uzbek claims about the naturalness of connections between ethnic group and territory, whether on the scale of republic or neighborhood, need to be viewed instead as political stances in particular circumstances. The Osh Uzbeks’ predicament of double exclusion points straight to the inherent contradictions in the package of concepts that constitute the postcolonial nation-state, which are painfully familiar elsewhere in the world record. This study is partly about how Osh Uzbeks responded during the first two decades of independence to the political constraints set by this particular postcolonial order. The tragic incidents of interethnic killings in 1990 and 2010 remind us of the human stakes involved in this corner of the world when nation and state are constituted in exclusionary terms and the resulting contradictions are left unresolved. Osh is also “good to think” because the city presents a unique vantage point from which to think comparative postsocialisms. It sits at a juncture deeply affected by both Kyrgyzstan’s relatively liberal reforms and Uzbeki- stan’s rigid state paternalism, which continues much of the Soviet-style control over society and the economy. Consider how Osh Uzbeks conceive of good government after state socialism, when they are confronted daily with two contrasting models of post-Soviet reform. This is a profound question for them, one intimately bound up with their predicament of exclusion from Uz- bekistan. Uzbekistan’s draconian economic policies and obsession with security have meant it has enforced strict border security. Though Osh lies at the border with Uzbekistan and the city’s Uzbeks have since the Soviet period Introduction 13

(when the border was mostly formal) many ties across it, controls have made it increasingly difficult to cross. Living at the troubled border has made Osh Uzbeks confront weighty questions about what constitutes viable community and society in Central Asia today and whether there is a specifically Central Asian model for the postsocialist state amid the assertive claims of neoliberalism and Islamism that have been bearing down on the region. Osh thus serves as a site in which to disclose local ways of envisioning a viable place for Central Asia in the post–cold war, post-9/11 global order. One must ask how multiple histories are layered into the present as Central Asians mobilize and reiterate “ethnic traditions,” Soviet assumptions, Inner Asian sensibilities, and Islamic knowledge in the service of transforming society toward stability and prosperity, toward even globally circulating ideals of “democracy” and “capitalism.” The results reveal vernacular idioms of understanding— decidedly Central Asian ways of looking at the world today. Because thinking with Osh yields a spectrum of insights about Central Asia today, this book seeks to leverage the city as much as possible. Outside observers can use the city to help explain a complex geographical region and fluid historical moment. But residents of Osh themselves leverage the city. Uz- beks living in Osh treat urban places as frameworks for making sense of the world and potentially for acting on it. They think with their city in certain moments to make sense of their perplexing post-Soviet situation, characterized by their uncertain place in the world. They interpret their predicament through the concrete spaces of everyday urban life. They also see certain city places as instrumental to a solution, because those places are believed to create the conditions of possibility for societal renewal. Thinking with a city, the city as an interpretive frame: what these notions concern at heart is the significance of place in how people conceive of the world. The assumptions, conceptions, attitudes, and sensibilities about a sociopolitical situation—which I will collectively call an imaginary—can be intimately rooted in everyday urban life. What may be surprising about the connection is that the very spatial characteristics of bodily activity in the city can condition the qualities of imaginaries, as will be discussed later. In other words, how we dwell in space matters in how we conceive of the world. Since the discussion has turned conceptual, the term imaginary, as used in this sense, must be defined.

Imaginaries and Idioms By an imaginary, I do not mean something fictitious or fanciful but, rather, tacitly held models of the social and political world. In Charles Taylor’s (2004, 23) formulation, the term refers to “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper norma- 14 Introduction tive notions and images that underlie these expectations.”26 A sociopolitical imaginary is the grasp people have of the conventional actors, groups, actions, places, contexts, times, meanings, and interests involved in their collective life and how all those are expected to work within an open-ended yet graded scale of possibility.27 An imaginary encompasses not only explicit ideologies about society but also embodied social practice and the “fluid middle ground” between them (Gaonkar 2002, 11). It includes what philosophers since Witt- genstein in his later years as well as the early phenomenologists have called the background, that is, the “largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have” (Taylor 2004, 25). Imaginaries thus make social existence possible and make discourse-practice meaningful within their frames. The sociopolitical imaginaries articulated in the post-Soviet Osh Uzbek community, as I will show, are condensed around several identifiable idioms connected variously with urban places of Osh. By idiom I mean a vernacular configuration of ideas, practices, sentiments, and dispositions that are circulated in a discursive community at a certain period with a power to organize thought, experience, talk, and action. An idiom is a particular conjuncture of ways of thinking, saying, and doing that are influential in the social life of a collectivity for a time. An idiom can be thought of as a point in the space of an imaginary. These analytical constructions are useful in illuminating how Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet situations in a way that acknowledges inertias from the past but avoids the essentialisms of ethnicized mentalities. When an Uzbek man advocates “authoritarian” state rule or patriarchal social relations, it is not because of his “traditional Uzbek mindset,” “Islamic ways of thinking,” or even simply because of “Soviet nostalgia,” despite the ubiquity of such essentialist claims. More complex and more dynamic conjunctions of factors are at play, factors that come together in recognizable configurations—idioms—that are manifest in narrative and everyday life practice. The concepts of imaginary and idiom provide purchase on the problem of interpreting post-Soviet Central Asia because they place discourse and practice on a unified analytical field. This placement enables creative- ex plorations of the sometimes surprising connections between them, potentially divulging aspects of subjectivities that may otherwise be missed.28 One intriguing idiom organizing Osh Uzbeks’ urban experience is one I will call Osh as an idiom of exchange.29 By this I mean that Osh is treated as a city characterized by exchanges of various kinds: economic, social, cultural, political, and conceptual. The idiom refers not merely to the city’s historical role in Eurasian land trade (commonly, though misleadingly, called the Silk Road) or to the explosive post-Soviet growth of its vast bazaar.30 The term ultimately refers to Osh as encapsulating, in our subjects’ conceptions, a particu- Introduction 15 lar configuration of mediation between differences. The city exemplifies the negotiated contact between mountain and valley, nomad and town dweller, Kyrgyz and Uzbek; between Central Asian, Russian-Soviet, and newly available global connections; between order and chaos, the control of the state and possibilities of the market; between the so-called good “Islam of our forefathers” and the extremist Islam of foreigners. Taken together, such moments of contact form a multifaceted modality of urban experience in which the city’s sites of convergence and juxtaposition serve as the literal home ground upon which to cope and live with the array of pressures that Osh Uzbeks face. Thus, by seeing the give and take of exchange as embedded in the very nature of Osh, its Uzbek inhabitants have in their city a paradigm that naturalizes or tames the presence of apparent contradiction, enabling them to potentially find points of accommodation and to confront better the dilemmas of their Soviet and post-Soviet existence. While rooted in locality, Osh as an idiom of exchange resonates with wider Central Asian moves to employ the Silk Road as a metaphor of premodern Eur- asian continental connectivity for post-Soviet political, economic, or cultural projects.31 The idiom rallies a proud ancient history into the service of helping Osh Uzbeks contend with powerful and disruptive global and regional pulls— the inflation, unemployment, labor emigration, interstate tensions, drugs, and corruption. It makes a virtue out of necessity and potential agents out of those who would otherwise be victims of grand forces. It promises a means for Osh Uzbeks to reach, on their own terms and from a putatively great historic past, beyond Soviet connections toward the daunting new world after the cold war. This idiom of exchange thus includes seeds of manageable change. Mediation enables the hope of transformation. Osh Uzbeks “think with their city” to make sense of their post-Soviet dilemma of exclusion and uncertainty and to imagine ways out of that dilemma. This is the central argument of the book. They treat the city itself as anexplan - atory framework with which to interpret Soviet and post-Soviet life and as an emancipatory framework with which to create conditions that would amelio- rate their predicament. They regard Osh through various idioms that capture their understandings of problems and solutions. The book’s chapters are expo- sitions of how these idioms—figures of thought and practice—organize what Osh Uzbeks think and do. Because the idioms are anchored in actual urban space, the book is structured with respect to specific places of the city that are paired with an issue or idea being pondered through that site. The chapters approach the city’s places and idioms in a way that is similar to Yo’lbuvi’s opening tour of a mahalla. This kind of approach is not only a mode of ethnographic exposition that lends local flavor, but it is also an analytic approach that insists on the indispensability of the “ground-level” view in fully understanding important social, economic, and political trends. This 16 Introduction approach constitutes a critical response to the kinds of analysis prevalent in scholarship about post-Soviet Central Asia. Indeed, this book has a conceptual agenda within Central Asian studies.

Rethinking Central Asia Central Asia is a curiously overdetermined yet understudied region of the world. Located at the heart of the Eurasian continental landmass at the in- terstice between the more scrutinized Middle East, China, Russia, and South Asia, Central Asia has been a neglected hole in the map. When the region is written about at all, it tends to be treated in terms of something other than itself—as an Islamic periphery to be compared against the Middle Eastern heartland; as a subject of Soviet, Russian, or Chinese imperial projects; as a geopolitical chessboard for the European Great Powers; as a promising, underdeveloped source of hydrocarbons for the post–cold war global economy; as a needy recipient of neoliberal assistance in loans, technocratic expertise, and democratic practices; and as a strategic battleground in what the George W. Bush administration considered its worldwide “war on terror.” Central Asia has indeed been each of these things.32 But it is much more than what outside interests would make it. When scholarly writing, policy briefing papers, organizational reports, or the news media view post-Soviet Central Asia, they often collapse the region’s multiplicity into tidy one-dimensional representations in an evolutionary frame with Western ideals as the endpoint, such as “the transition to democracy and free markets,” “the growth of civil society,” or “the integration into the world economy.”33 Post-Soviet developments in Central Asian societies, politics, and economies that instead betray a diversity of alternative directions and processes are cast as aberrant regressions on the canonical timeline, such as a so-called slide back to authoritarianism (or tribalism or ethnic particularism) or as a resurgence of Islam. To be sure, many analyses framed in this way have yielded valuable insights that support well-intentioned and desperately needed assistance to the region. But what is underrepresented in the literature is consideration of how the various consequences of post-Soviet transformation will actually play out amid local contingencies and what those consequences may mean to Central Asians themselves according to their vernacular frames of reference.34 The challenge is to study Central Asians without seeing them as being deluded rational actors or repressed liberal subjects at their core, that is, to acknowledge that culture really does matter in how people make sense of and act in the world.35 The issue is thus the underdeveloped state of post-Soviet Central Asian studies as a whole. This book represents an appeal for more creative inquiry and theoretical reflection on this part of the contemporary world. It marks one attempt to divulge more of the rhapsodic richness of a place that has sat for centuries at the Introduction 17 confluence of Turko-Mongol, Arab, Islamo-Persian, Indian, Chinese, Russian, Soviet socialist, and now global neoliberal and transnational Islamic currents. While nearly every spot on the globe can be shown to have fascinating histories of cultural confluence and hybridity, there is something particularly noteworthy about the continental reach, “civilizational” diversity, time depth, and density of Central Asia’s layered histories in how they manifest themselves today to constitute a complex present. Anthropology’s task, some have recently argued, is to divulge the “history of the present”—the legacies of the past as they are now embedded in all sorts of ethnographically available sites: rituals and mundane existence, documents and novels, dress and architecture, maps and museums, all variously revealing stratified archaeologies of knowledges, dispositions, comportments, and sentiments. This approach acknowledges that multiple pasts are always somehow present in how people understand their current situations, imagine their possibilities, and make claims for their futures.36 It treats history as a nonlinear presence in social imaginaries and social action because specific legacies can articulate in surprisingly nondeter- ministic ways, here partially erasing each another, there coexisting in tension, here mutually reinforcing, and there reinterpreting one other. Anthropology needs to reckon with a history as thickly sedimented and widely connected as Central Asia’s in attempting to describe the region ethnographically. This book by no means claims to be an authoritative statement on the anthropology of Central Asia, nor a fulfillment of the tall order for the field outlined here. Rather, it aspires to be one opening move that is suggestive of new possibilities in approaching this corner of the world. This work approaches Central Asia’s sedimented complexity by applying analytic attention to social imaginaries and spatiality. Imaginaries are layered by a rich variety of discourses and practices with enduring and reiterated circulations—an interplay of the old, the new, and the recycled. Urban spaces are layered with histories of production and appropriation and corporeal histories of habitual comportment and sen- sation—an interplay of state, neighborhood, and body. In order to divulge this layered complexity, the book sometimes presents its materials and reflections by moving through Osh’s urban landscape, divulging the thick groundedness of local inhabited worlds and revealing the city’s mediation of contrasts. The expository strategy of spatially guiding read- ers through the city comes from the great amount of time I spent treading the often winding and hidden paths of the city, mapping out spatial relations and their connections to conjunctures of power, wealth, sociality, and ideas. This strategy involves not so much “reading” the cityscape as an abstract text but sounding it out as a living, engaged field of lifeworlds.37 What is lost in systematicity would be compensated by valuable glimpses of how forces and trends intersect with lives and subjectivities. This ground-level engagement with the cityscape works from an ethnographic “aesthetic of excess”—the re- 18 Introduction alization that no attempt to represent the social can capture its fullness, that there always exists an irreducible remainder not neatly taken into account by any given analytic scheme.38 This is not to eschew analysis and its necessary generalizations but rather to situate the analysis with respect to a never fully tamable reality. This approach operates as a sensibility in that it informs a kind of writing that, while striving for leveraged understanding and summarizing commentary, is not embarrassed by divulging ethnographic details that may appear not to contribute to the arguments at hand (to a measured degree— herein lie the aesthetics), if only to show that there is always more to these human lives than our analyses of them.39 The people depicted here have to live. Being willing to step into the “excessive” plenitude of local worlds, even in the token manner of scholarly analysis, can serve to acknowledge more fully the humanity of our subjects. Structuring the exposition as a spatial tour highlights in particular the multiple dependencies between the micro scale of situated social worlds and the macro levels of national and transnational orders (to use the convenient but problematic language of scale).40 “Local knowledge,” observes John Pe- ters (1997, 81), “is constantly discredited as a guide to living in the modern world for being too concrete, too mired in immediacy.” Peters writes that, “in its beginnings, ethnography focused on local worlds that were seen . . . as dangerously delicate in contrast to the scale and power of engulfing cosmopolitan orders” (1997, 80). He argues that, nevertheless, “localities . . . still govern the lives of most humans, even the rapidly increasing numbers with access to global, regional, national, and local media” (1997, 91). On the other hand, “the apparently immediate experience of community is in fact inevitably constituted by a wider set of social and spatial relations” (Gupta and Fer- guson 1997b, 7). Because a dialectic synthesis is needed, Peters argues for a “bifocal” approach to place that dialectically combines attention to large-scale structures on one hand and small-scale interpretive activity on the other. The grounded expository approach of this book adopts a bifocal vision by bringing out crucial post-Soviet Central Asian economic, political, and social trends as they are experienced on a daily basis by the residents of Osh. When it comes to analyses of post-Soviet Central Asia, however, the scholarly approaches apparent in the literature are decidedly biased toward the macro scale. They have tended to interpret the complex postsocialist transformations through a grand narrative of transition toward democracy and the free market.41 Such analyses tend to miss the actual processes of change playing out on the small scales of communities and individuals. There is little the- orization about the unintended consequences and emergent phenomena that can arise from contestations over ways of interpreting political and economic situations and imagining alternative possibilities (Berdahl 2000; Burawoy and Verdery 1999, 6–7). The lack of analytic attention to the small scale can have a Introduction 19 bearing on understanding the large scale. How democratic or capitalistic ideas and practices might actually take hold (or fail to do so) in post-Soviet Cen- tral Asian societies occurs in the sphere of everyday life, not national politics. Research investigating these ideas and practices must therefore be sited not only at the commanding heights of political and economic elites or the “fric- tionless” realm of ideal models but also on the messy ground where ordinary people live (Liu 2003).42 Wittgenstein (1972, §107) issued a famous warning about the limitations of ideal analytical models: “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” Literally grounding our analysis is particularly crucial in understanding the city, as Michel de Certeau has shown, because situated pedestrian views of a city offer insights into the urban condition missed in abstracted eagle- eye perspectives from above (Certeau 1980/1984). This book directs our steps back to Wittgenstein’s rough ground, where city dwellers encounter the macro issues that affect them during their daily routines in the city. Attention to the spaces of urban activity provides unique access into lived Central Asian realities. 1 Bazaar and Mediation

Osh may fail to stand out as a beautiful city in the eyes of the average West- ern tourist. Beyond the imposing Solomon Mountain (fig. 2) at its center, the cityscape offers few striking elements. Yet the city is fascinating for the dense social worlds that it assembles, juxtaposes, and tucks away within its urban configuration. Italo Calvino (1974, 15), in his fanciful work Invisible Cities, imagines a city called Zora that distills this impression of Osh:

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. Osh is an engaging city because it manifests patterns of convergence and contrast that tell a broader story about Central Asia as it is today and as it was under Soviet rule; however, we are not attempting to “read” the city ab-

20 Bazaar and Mediation 21

Figure 2. Solomon Mountain and mausoleum. Photograph by the author, 1997. stractly like a code, text, or musical score. The patterns sought here involve plummeting worlds of human activity so that Osh can be seen as a lived idiom of exchange. The mundane prevalence of urban exchange has led Osh Uzbeks to think about their post-Soviet condition through their city as a metaphor of mediation in general. Osh is more than a metaphor, though, for the subjects of this book; it is what one might call an idiom—something that brings together ideas and routine activity into a coherent whole. Osh is an idiom of exchange because the city is being treated as a kind of mediator between disparate tendencies in the tumultuous post-Soviet moment. This chapter seeks to divulge how mediation is lived out in the city. It gathers glimpses of daily urban activity that reveal various kinds of regular exchange involving things, money, people, ideas, and aspirations. Strolling the central bazaar, one witnesses the hawking of local and global commodities; the conversion of foreign currencies; the jostling of different ethnicities, languages, lifestyles, and professions; the juxtaposition of new affluence and widespread poverty; the precarious balance between the opportunities of innovative enterprise and the nostalgic yearning for state paternalism. An important stop is the monument to Osh’s infamous interethnic riots of 1990, rooted in the city’s chronic land shortage. That critical dearth has necessitated decades of politically fraught trade-offs in land use, with emphasis shifting between old Uzbek neighborhoods, new housing for Kyrgyz rural migrants, space for industry, and areas for agriculture—competing demands that together influence what kind of city Osh is to become. Visiting Solomon Moun- 22 Bazaar and Mediation tain, the Friday mosque, and the Russian consulate affords broader views of the forces rapidly reshaping urban life since independence. Emergent forms of public piety coexist and compete with both Soviet and “fundamentalist” ways of being Muslim. The tremendous exodus of migrant labor to more prosperous countries reflects the tension between the necessity of being scattered abroad for work and remittances and the desire to invest effort into local communal life. This chapter thus aims to sound out the city’s significant economic, political, and social issues at the pedestrian level. It takes literally Wittgenstein’s call to get “back to the rough ground.” In fact, this effort begins with a rock.

Stone Monument A stone about the height of a person sits unobtrusively at the edge of a vast agricultural field on the north side of Osh. The stone is a monument to an event for which the city of Osh is most notoriously known, even though most residents of the city are unaware of the monument’s existence or location. The inscriptions on plaques attached to the stone simply read, Pamiati“ zhertvam tragicheskikh sobytii 4 iunia 1990 goda” in Russian, and “In memory of cityzens the tragic events of Jyne 4 1990 [sic]” in English, and a similar text in old Turkic (fig. 3).1 The stone marks where groups of Kyrgyz and Uz- beks clashed violently on that date over a bitter land dispute, and the clash quickly escalated into days of chaos and mass interethnic killings on both sides throughout the city (Asankanov 1996; Elebayeva 1992; Tishkov 1995). The conflict spread to nearby areas where Uzbeks and Kyrgyz lived together, and by the time Soviet troops had quelled the unrest, hundreds had lost their lives. Although the death toll was far lower than that from the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, which occurred exactly one year before, the sense of trauma that the riots inflicted on the city and the Central Asian region was perhaps no less for a time. The first decade of Osh’s post-Soviet independence was haunted by the anxiety, ever present beneath the veneer of public peace and political stability, that another incident could again trigger massive interethnic conflict. After those fears did not materialize in the 1990s, the second decade of independence saw a subsiding of everyday tensions between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, until Kyrgyzstan’s national political crisis triggered them anew, unleashing a greater eruption of violence in June 2010. During those twenty years of working peace, basic grievances and sus- picions on both sides were not addressed. Most notably, the fundamental problem of Osh’s chronic land shortage remains unabated and inadequately addressed. The land dispute leading to the 1990 Osh riots was symptomatic of a wider problem that is literally grounded in the city’s geographical situation. Nestled in a river valley with the topography rapidly rising to the city’s south and surrounded otherwise by collective farms and state farms, Osh has no room to grow. The land under dispute in June 1990 was the very field by which Bazaar and Mediation 23

Figure 3. The Stone Monument, which commemorates the Osh riots of 4 June 1990. Note the disputed field behind, and the apartment neighborhood. Photograph by the author, 1997. the Stone Monument sits, which was part of the Lenin Kolkhoz, a vast Uzbek- majority collective farm bordering Osh on the north. During the postwar decades, as a growing number of Kyrgyz moved into the city from rural areas in southern Kyrgyzstan to take up industrial jobs, a housing shortage ensued. A group of these new Kyrgyz residents pressed the city government to convert the agricultural field to housing land, but the farmers objected. A rally was organized on both sides, and their angry standoff on that field was the incident that triggered the Osh riots. Today the field remains farmland, devoid of housing development. Its plain and unobtrusive appearance belies the animosity vented, the blood spilled, and the city cloven on that fourth day of June. For the foreseeable future, the very name Osh will be welded to the idea of Cen- tral Asian ethnic conflict and the harmful structural conditions Soviet rule produced: the invention and promotion of a Soviet notion of ethnicity (called “nationality”), the delimitation of borders, the political promotion of so-called “titular nationals” (in this case, the Kyrgyz), and the resulting demographic shifts (e.g., massive postwar Kyrgyz urban migration) that exacerbated and ethnicized competition for the finite resource of land. Osh here displays the encounter of zero-sum interests, a woeful take on the idiom of exchange. This tragic site is significant for another reason as well. The Stone Monu- ment happens to mark a critical junction in the cityscape because it sits at the convergence of three distinct zones of the city. The field of former contention lies to its north and exemplifies how agricultural production uses nearly every 24 Bazaar and Mediation available square meter, right up to the residential zones around Osh and, for that matter, throughout the Fergana Valley. Bordering the field to the monument’s immediate south is a dense Uzbek urban neighborhood, a mahalla, with its winding dirt streets and mud-brick walls. This mahalla and others, forming a continuous zone all the way to the city center, are among the city’s oldest residential areas for its majority Uzbek population. Nearby, to the east of the monument, lies a large apartment neighborhood, sprawling along the field and southward toward the city center. Called the Osh micro-district (Os- hskii raion), it was built during the 1960s for the multiethnic labor force of the giant facility known simply as the Textile Plant, located just to the north. The Textile Plant, employing more than eleven thousand people divided among three shifts at its busiest, was Osh’s largest employer, its main economic engine, and the prime motor driving the city’s dramatic changes in the postwar period. The inputs were supplied from the massive cotton sector that Soviet planners developed across the Fergana Valley, particularly in the Uzbekistani part, with ginning factories located throughout the valley. The Textile Plant, the juggernaut and principal icon of Osh’s postwar industrial progress, exemplified the Osh economy’s full integration with Soviet central planning and utter dependence on it. That situation quickly changed after 1991. The dissolution of the Soviet Union meant the collapse of the regional and union-wide networks that enabled the Textile Plant’s huge yield and then distributed its products. Raw cotton and ginning were suddenly located on the other side of new sovereign borders that also represented new national state priorities. Uzbekistan now sells its cotton on world markets for hard currency and restricts the shipping of Kyrgyzstani cotton across its borders for processing. Roads between major cities in southern Kyrgyzstan traverse stretches of Uzbekistan—the result of the Fergana Valley’s contradictory political and physical geographies, discussed later. Moreover, the end of state-controlled agriculture and the privatization of lands in Kyrgyzstan have meant that local farmers are growing tobacco or foodstuffs instead of cotton. The Textile Plant’s work came to a standstill, and its great labor force became unemployed, as did those who worked in ancillary services throughout the city. Among the latter were numerous bus drivers, mechanics, cooks, barbers, construction workers, and kindergarten teachers, some of whose jobs the Textile Plant’s budget had funded directly, since the plant was organized as a mini-city (gorodok in Russian) with self-contained functions for its workers. Most of the older Uzbek men and women I knew in the city’s mahallas had been employed in services connected directly or indirectly with the Textile Plant or another industry in Osh, such as the Silk Plant, Pump Factory, Building Construction Plant, Milk Plant, and so on.2 Thus, the Stone Monument sits at a triple junction where collective farm, Uzbek mahalla, and Soviet city converge. Its siting points to the ongoing back- Bazaar and Mediation 25 ground tensions between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh and elsewhere—and to what is sometimes seen as the precariousness of post-Soviet interethnic relations more broadly—since the infamous riots that have marred the city’s recent history. The monument also gestures to the tense trade-offs between agriculture, industry, and housing in the city’s postwar land use that is severely constrained by Osh’s physical geography. The Stone Monument, in short, marks a spot that summarizes what Osh has become, both during and after Soviet rule, indexing the dense packing of state agendas and lived social worlds that characterize its cityscape. To walk the rough ground of Osh is thus no idle tourist excursion, and we are no mere flaneurs.3 Viewed from the streets, Osh presents a complex social, political, economic, and religious reality. It shows that issues of wide import, such as the trajectories of postsocialist economies, the effects of state power, the nuances of interethnic relations, or the new public presence of Islam need to be examined through the details of everyday lives within actual urban places. If the Textile Plant points to the gross collapse of Osh’s Soviet economy, for contrast we can turn to the site that has flourished the most since independence: the bazaar. The explosive post-Soviet growth of Osh’s bazaars, indeed, results from the demise of its former industry. As one Uzbek man put it, “Because these things [working factories] are not there, everyone is at the bazaar, everyone! Every day of the week, the bazaar!”

Bazaar Nexus Osh’s main bazaar became the boisterously vibrant economic nexus of the city, where all sorts of people would converge, converse, and conduct business.4 Early every morning, busloads of mostly Kyrgyz women from surrounding rural areas arrived at the Old Bus Station by the bazaar on Navoi Street, hauling huge cloth bundles of fresh produce or canisters of milk products. With daylight barely breaking, they would quickly file into their stations in the vast market, joined by the Uzbek sellers who dominated this scene. The bazaar’s “front” entrance, if one can call it that, opening from Navoi Street and anchored by large restaurants that host Kyrgyz and Uzbek wedding ban- quets, was occupied by purveyors of Kyrgyz handicraft products, such as the kalpak, the distinctively shaped national hat, and shirdak, the brightly colored felt rugs. The bazaar stretched away from the entrance gates along a long pedestrian street, which, after Kyrgyzstan’s independence, would be crowded from dawn to dusk every day (figs. 4 and 5). Strolling down the bazaar’s parallel aisles of open-air stalls and rows of enclosed shops on the sides, one would be met with a great variety of sundry personal items—soap, cosmetics, pens, notebooks, batteries, small toys, calculators, watches, and so forth—most of them manufactured in China. The products offered from one stall to the next would not vary significantly: if one seller carried Colgate toothpaste or Comet cleanser, so did all her neighbors, given that they often used the same supplier. 26 Bazaar and Mediation

Figure 4. Bazaar tables. Photograph by the author, 1993. The bazaar being a place to haggle, there might be small differences in opening price and willingness to come down, especially if you build a personal relationship by frequenting a vendor. The carnivalesque character of the bazaar confirmed Osh’s centuries-old reputation as a center of regional and long- distance trade: between the sedentary urban dwellers and the nomadic herd- ers of the Fergana Valley in which Osh is situated; and as a place to stop before pushing on to Kashgar, China, across the mountain range along one route of the so-called Silk Road. While Central Asian bazaars tend to be squarish in layout, Osh’s major bazaar was rather unique in being elongated, as it followed the contours of the Ak-Buura, the river that bisects the city. The entire city, in fact, lies nestled in the Ak-Buura’s steep river valley, its neighborhoods and zones defined by the river’s straight axis running south to north and the rising topography on both flanks. Osh’s main bazaar, like any other sizable Central Asian market, was spatially differentiated by product and specialty. Off the bazaar’s main axis, several large outdoor areas with concrete tables and permanent overhead roofing were divided into sections where fruits and vegetables, meat, rice, spices, rai- sins, and nuts were sold until the 2010 burning of the bazaar. Along a short segment of the main axis, moneychangers operated from enclosed shops on both sides of the street. Opening after independence, they featured signs dis- playing current exchange rates for the rather stable Kyrgyzstani unit of currency, the som, against the U.S. dollar, the euro, the yen, the Uzbekistani so’m, Kazakhstani tenga, and Chinese yuan, indicating the relevant foreign connec- Bazaar and Mediation 27

Figure 5. Goods piled at the bazaar. Photograph by the author, 2005. tions for Osh’s traders and currency speculators. The U.S. dollar has been the currency of preference for cross-border business because it carries stable and compact value.5 The moneychangers’ windows overlooked the vendors of the wheel-shaped staple of all Central Asian diets, nan (flatbread). Those (mostly Uzbek) vendors would stand in rows on the street with their fragrant product piled in cloth-covered wheelbarrows, the bread baked in tandirs (clay ovens) in mahalla houses or small shops elsewhere. A few book tables dotted the scene, including one selling only Islamic books teaching formerly Soviet Cen- tral Asian Muslims the foundations of the faith, such as conducting prayers, pronouncing Arabic phrases, and understanding basic doctrine.6 Egg sellers occupied the narrow footbridges that spanned the Ak-Buura toward the bazaar. Another group of shops near the Shahid-Tepa Friday Mosque sold house building and renovation materials after the mid-1990s, and in front of them, other traders hawked precious used-car engine parts and scraps. Tea, flour, sugar, dishes, and housewares found another sector in which to reside. Having walked away from Navoi Street, one would arrive at the flea market section of the bazaar selling mostly clothing (yoyma bozor), a section that grew during the 1990s to take over an entirely new parcel of land between the Oshskii and Zainabetdinova apartment districts. The neighborhoods themselves had booming economic activity, with shops and stalls serving Osh’s most densely populated residential zone, supplying it with furniture, electronics, photo pro- 28 Bazaar and Mediation cessing, Internet, music, video, liquor, and so forth. Bazaars are, of course, intensely social places. Buyers can establish relations with particular sellers, and ties among sellers can be strong. For example, in 1998, I spent time in one corner of the cloth section, where eight Uzbek men in their late teens minded neighboring stalls every day. They constantly joked with each other and covered for each other when one left temporarily, even quoting the going prices on behalf of their “market competitor.” Pushing through the throngs of people in the bazaar, one could see the ethnic diversity of the city. Besides Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Russians, Osh is home to smaller populations of Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Ko- reans, Roma, and others.7 Until as late as the 1960s, there were few ethnic Kyrgyz living in Osh. Kyrgyz, who led a nomadic pastoral life in the mountainous areas before Soviet rule, were forced into permanent settlements and collectivized by the state during the 1930s, and Kyrgyz villages dominate the rural areas of Kyrgyzstan to this day, which is why Kyrgyz form the majority population of Osh province as a whole. But because, in 1924, Osh was placed into a newly created Kyrgyz territorial unit, which became a Soviet socialist republic (a full member of the Soviet Union) in 1936, Soviet nationalities policy pushed for ethnic Kyrgyz, the “titular nationality,” to be actively promoted to be alongside Europeans in leadership positions. The demographic majority of the city itself, however, has been Uzbek.8 Osh has harbored a sedentary population engaged in trade and craft production for centuries—a population that came to be known as “Uzbek” here when the Soviet state created a system of national identities. Osh’s ethnic mix is also evident in the languages spoken in public spaces such as the bazaar. When a Kyrgyz and an Uzbek converse, the Kyrgyz speaks in Kyrgyz and the Uzbek speaks in Uzbek, and they understand each other well. This is not only because the two Turkic languages are related but also because Osh residents of either ethnicity grow up hearing both. Kyrgyz and Uzbeks from monolingual rural backgrounds could not talk nearly as well to each other, because the two languages do have important differences.9 Russian, still the regional lingua franca, is spoken between Russians, other non-natives (who together comprise the so-called “Russian-speaking population”), and Central Asians, the latter speaking Russian with their own accent, even those educated in Russian-language schools.10 Most non-natives do not speak Central Asian languages, although a few do if they grew up living and playing in Uzbek and Kyrgyz neighborhoods, and since independence, Kyrgyz-language classes are compulsory for all schoolchildren regardless of ethnicity. Osh’s independent television station, OshTV, established after independence, broadcasted its news trilingually (until the station’s takeover by Kyrgyz management in 2010). In one segment, a news anchor could be reading in Kyrgyz, in the next, a correspondent reported in Uzbek, and then an Bazaar and Mediation 29

Figure 6. A Kyrgyz man (right) selling wool to an Uzbek man at the bazaar. Photograph by the author, 1994. interview may proceed in Russian, all occurring seamlessly without subtitles or interpretation. Meanwhile, in noisy bazaar soundscapes, announcers incessantly broadcasted personal advertisements (usually apartments or cars for sale) over loudspeakers in all three languages. Uzbeks conduct a majority, though an increasingly smaller proportion, of the total market selling, almost all the service labor (hair cutting, restaurant cooking, key making, audio/video duplicating, money changing, automobile repair), and much of the craft labor (blacksmithing, furniture making, metal gate welding, small-scale construction and house repair, and so forth). In 30 Bazaar and Mediation other words, they run most of the small-scale, day-by-day economic activities of the city, which are associated with their history as sedentary farmers, craftsmen, and traders.11 Kyrgyz sell commodities associated with their pastoral past: milk products (including kymyz, or fermented mare’s milk, in the spring—sour and smelling like strong cheese and quite refreshing), wool, and felt rugs and hats, but after independence they increasingly have been selling agricultural and manufactured products as well (fig. 6). Russians have tended to sell items or services for more specialized tastes, including European furniture, lighting fixtures, pets, Russian books, collectible stamps, or computer repair; other groups have been moving into these markets, however. There is always the pitiful sight of Russian babushki (elderly women) sitting by bed- sheets strewn with family possessions for sale (dishes, samovars, old books, postcards, pins) to supplement their meager, if not unpaid, pensions. Unlike the many Russian families who left for Russia in the early 1990s (about 34.2 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s total Russian population in 1991 had gone by 1999 [Mansoor, Quillin, and World Bank 2006]), these elderly sellers tended to be too old or poor to leave.12 The few local Korean sellers offered pickled vegeta- ble delicacies, whose flavor contrasts sharply with the blander Central Asian foods, although the few South Koreans living in Osh complained that the local kimchi was not quite right. When the city’s factories began closing or significantly cutting labor and production, great numbers of the unemployed moved into selling and shuttle trade (Humphrey 2002b, 69–98), including more and more Kyrgyz. Ethnic specialization in the marketplace thus began to blur after Kyrgyzstan’s independence, and after the 2010 interethnic violence, Kyrgyz established sudden dominance in many economic niches. Because a bazaar is a place of intense sociality, it can be seen as a site of daily mediation between varieties of social groups that otherwise tend to have minimal personal contact, except in a few other public places in the city. Men and women, young and old, poor and wealthy, blacksmith and teacher, and individuals of all ethnicities engage in the pragmatic rituals of haggling and information exchange, which, though superficial and narrow in context, nonetheless regularize the experience of difference in everyday lives. Osh does exhibit in its public spaces an appearance of greater ethnic diversity than do most other Central Asian cities and towns outside of the capitals.13 Uzbeki- stani cities in the Fergana Valley, such as Andijan, forty kilometers from Osh, have a relatively mono-ethnic Uzbek presence in the bazaars and streets. Dur- ing the first two decades of Kyrgyzstan’s independence, the make-up of Osh’s mundane public life in the bazaar exhibited a picture of pragmatic interethnic coexistence. It was not to last, however. The June 2010 events torched the bazaar and razed this site of everyday social mediation. One may look wistfully on the heyday of Osh’s main bazaar as a portrait of the kind of urban society that Osh could have remained and may never rebuild in the same way. Bazaar and Mediation 31

Thinking with the Bazaar There is something about a bazaar—perhaps its hard edge, its ruthless un- predictability, its high stakes, or its pandering to human desire—that seems to invite people to regard it as a kind of moral indicator of post-Soviet Central Asian society as a whole. Many Osh residents of all ethnicities used the city’s bazaar to illustrate the upheavals or opportunities of today’s Kyrgyzstan. They saw in the bazaar’s appearance and activities an epitome of the moral dilemmas of the postsocialist market, where emerging affluence literally sat casually amid the preponderance of poverty and struggle. For the great numbers of Osh residents, manual laborers and academic scholars alike, who lost jobs or pensions after 1991 and had to become sellers to make ends meet, the bazaar represented shattered lives and despair. It pointed to the loss of, or at least severe diminution of, entire sectors of the former economy in industrial production and government function, and in endeavors in science, arts, sports, and other areas. The bazaar appeared as an alarming tumor that burgeoned even as the rest of the societal body atrophied, at least in its Soviet incarnation. Educated Osh residents, particularly among Russians and others, mentioned that they missed the cultural life available then in the form of the Russian theater, art, novels, and literature. Performances of Chekhov, Shakespeare, Tchai- kovsky, or Beethoven on the city’s stages during the Soviet period gave way to Kyrgyz variety shows or Uzbek comedy. Hollywood flicks and foreign soap operas became the dominant television fare. “People just want to watch serials on television,” one young educated Kyrgyz woman said to me in 1993, referring to the rage at the time for a Mexican telenovela, locally known as Prosto Maria.14 “I can’t get a copy of Literaturnaia Gazeta anymore,” she lamented, referring to the Soviet literary newspaper. “All people think about today is money,” others would repeatedly say. Such comments revealed a continuing affinity toward Soviet-Russian intellectual life and alienation from what was seen as the philistinism of Western consumer capitalism. To them, society had lost its civilized sensibilities, becoming as crass as the bazaar itself. The flourishing of the bazaar paralleled the unmaking of Soviet life.15 The crammed place points to an absence. Yet, for entrepreneurs able to capitalize on new opportunities in the market economy, the bazaar was the source of wealth and great expectations. Such individuals saw the postsocialist market as rewarding hard work and business acumen, providing in-demand consumer commodities previously unavailable and making possible the type of consumer lifestyle one could only fantasize about in the past. Osh’s new rich, Kyrgyz and Uzbek alike, have derived wealth mostly from trade, legal and illegal. An increasing number of Osh’s youth of all ethnicities have been seeking to learn Western business practices, computer skills, English, and other “world languages” at university or independent 32 Bazaar and Mediation tuition schools (such as the Osh Institute for Western Education, founded by humanitarian aid worker Ron Taylor in the early 1990s). The more successful individuals, usually having a Russian-language elementary school education (as opposed to the Uzbek or Kyrgyz schools of the city) and most comfortable speaking Russian, often landed jobs in the many small foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or United Nations agencies in Osh, though those employers represented only a negligible portion of the city’s economy. Narratives of the bazaar during this time span were often plotted against a timeline that periodized the moral character of the entire society. Some elder Osh Uzbeks claimed that in pre- and early Soviet times, sellers could leave their goods unattended overnight without fear of theft. Soviet rule eroded the communal sensibility of honesty, they said, and, in their view, it had greatly worsened after independence. Their references to a supposedly ethical past stood as an indictment against what they considered to be the dishonest profi- teering that had become prevalent. They commended Soviet-era buying and selling for its stability and orderliness. Throughout that period, Osh’s bazaar was small, confined to a short stretch from the Navoi Street entrance. It operated only once or twice per week and sold mostly produce brought in by farmers from surrounding areas. Older residents wistfully remembered the predictability and security of life under state socialism, when people bought manufactured goods from the state-run stores throughout the city, at fixed, unvarying prices set by the state, and the products were made elsewhere in the Soviet Union, or occasionally in Eastern Europe (East German goods being particularly prized). Unlike today, people claimed, prices did not vary from seller to seller, day to day, or season to season. “All things were sufficient then,” recalled one elderly man. “Local products were enough for us. I could support my family on one salary with no difficulties.” Memories are selective, of course, and conditioned by the circumstances and conversational contexts of their telling, chronic shortages (even after the extreme deprivations of the wartime 1940s) and lack of consumer choice were not mentioned in such reminiscences.16 Still, though availability and quality of goods had often been minimally adequate, if that, the sentiment of many older people was that the Soviet state could be said to have been meeting its assumed responsibility to provide. In such a social contract, which Katherine Verdery calls “socialist paternalism,” the state “acted like a father who gives handouts to the children as he sees fit” (Verdery 1996, 25). In the eyes of those used to the predictability of state socialism, the inflation and fluctuations in price in the postindependence bazaar indexed a lapse in the state’s moral charge to provide for its populace and maintain economic order, permitting the rise of exploitative criminality.17 The disruptions to livelihoods and social life have been unprecedented in living memory, but more is at stake than the material hardships that most Bazaar and Mediation 33 people endure. Even the privations and sacrifices during World War II, which left bitter memories in Osh for those old enough to remember, did not lead to the disintegration of the underlying terms of communal life. In fact, Central Asians shared in what they saw as a just struggle against a common wartime enemy, and, as a result, they came to see themselves as participating in the Soviet project to an extent unknown to the earlier, prewar generation.18 The jarring changes and the continuing hardships for most Central Asians during the 1990s and 2000s, however, have been a trial of a different order. Inde- pendence for the Central Asian republics entailed a reconstitution of political and economic organization and their modes of public legitimation. There was for most not only daily battles for subsistence but also a pervasive sense that societal order had disarticulated and progress had ceased—that life itself had been thoroughly unmade.19 The enemy seemed to have become amorphous and ubiquitous (i.e., the enemy became the market, “wild capitalism,” and bad government), rather than clearly defined, as it had been with the “fascists.” Particularly for those forty or more years of age during the 1990s, massive unemployment and inflation signaled a failing state for a generation accustomed to near full employment, stable prices, social services, and a sense of contin- ual societal improvements (even if illusory). The market was chaotic, lawless, criminal, and exploitative, and the post-independence surge of activity and crowds in the bazaar, the literal urban market, exacerbated this perception.20 The promise of overall price stability and abundant goods to be supplied by capitalism’s “invisible hand” rang hollow to those used to the predictability of state socialism’s “hypervisible hand.”21 Unemployed youth meant idle youth more prone to involvement in crime or ethnic conflict. The loss of factory and office jobs meant more hands involved in trade rather than production or skilled services, a shift carrying a great negative moral weight for the generations raised on Soviet economic values, which privileged industrial and agricultural production as the true core of economic activity and disparaged as criminal any profit from distribution or selling activities. Osh Uzbeks incessantly talked about these issues in my interviews with them (especially during the 1990s) in reference to the rapid changes in the bazaar. After independence, the bazaar burgeoned in size, crowding, and volume of business, and it began operating from dawn to evening every day of the week—total “chaos” in the view of the older generation. The main bazaar progressively took over areas of the city center previously used for state institutional, residential, or industrial purposes. The most telling sign of the change was on Navoi Street, where the former Pump Factory was once a proud, productive employer at the city center; left idle in the 1990s, it was converted into an indoor bazaar around 2000 and a mall a decade later. The industrial-scale empty shell with its influx of sellers of cookies and ice cream 34 Bazaar and Mediation fittingly represents the new economy operating on the literal ruins of the old. State stores, such as Osh’s GUM on Navoi Street, closed down and were converted to the increasingly numerous small private shops, each occupying a section of the former store’s retail departments. New stores emerged in and around the main bazaar and along major thoroughfares and began selling in- demand consumer items (clothes, shoes, baby strollers, imported foods, furniture, even cars). Some of the new stores were juxtaposed jarringly against the gray concrete backdrop. Osh’s old bookstores, selling arid tomes until the early 1990s, became trendy shops; one was remodeled into an Italian pharmacy with a modish contoured exterior. After 2000, Internet cafés began to spread throughout the city for users of action games, email, and social media. The computer cafés eventually displaced the billiard rooms that had blos- somed in the 1990s as the entertainment of choice for male youth. At night, restaurants form islands of intense, glitzy light and noise along the otherwise dark streets, even in the center of town. The only other lighting comes from car headlights, small kiosks, and apartment windows. “You see? The city lacks the money even to turn on the street lights,” remarked an Uzbek man, pointing to the Soviet-era streetlamps that used to illuminate the nights. “And Osh is supposed to be Kyrgyzstan’s southern capital!” Private lighting has effectively taken the place of public lighting, another indicator of the economic shifts readable in the cityscape of the night. Indeed, during the 1990s, restaurants, including those with specialized cuisine (Uyghur, Russian, Chinese, or American), mushroomed along the main avenues of the city. A few discos and casinos also opened. Catering mainly to groups of men, young dating couples, and large wedding parties, these places trumpeted themselves as the new venues of commercial activity and nighttime social life for Osh. Near the wide bridge spanning the Ak-Buura River, concentrations of young women driven to prostitution await their clientele in the late evenings.22 Narcotics are quite available for those who seek them, because now Osh is a hub for trafficking from Afghanistan via Tajikistan to Russia and Europe—the dark side of its legacy as trade city extraordinaire (see Huetlin 1998; Madi 2004; Specter 1995; UNODC 2010).23 After independence, the wider world rushed in with consumer commodities and expressive culture. At the bazaar’s rows of stalls, shampoo, pasta, and other sundry items arrived from Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Western Europe, and the United States, but the overwhelming majority of goods came from China. Chinese goods have the reputation of being extremely low quality, though affordable, and usually the only choice available. Also arriving in the bazaar were icons of global popular culture, mostly for male youth, in the form of posters and stickers of Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his Conan-Terminator days), Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Aishwarya Rai and other Indian film stars.24 Plastic Bazaar and Mediation 35 shopping bags, which must be bought from the vendors, started to showcase name-brand logos or pictures of Euro-American and Chinese models. For reasons not at all clear, yellow bags emblazoned with “Glasgow Pet Shop” were briefly prevalent in the late 1990s.25 Music was dominated by Uzbekistani stars such as Yulduz Usmanova and Sherali Juraev, purveying their powerful mix of nation and sentiment, and it was often blasted from the kiosks.26 Music vendors who sold cassettes in the early 1990s, (pirated) compact discs by the late 1990s, MP3s by the 2000s, and DVDs by the mid-2000s featured an as- sortment of Russian, West European, and American artists, from ABBA to Ace of Base, from Beatles to techno and trance. Such is the result of the recent globalization of Osh and of Central Asia as seen from the bazaar. In the final analysis, the preponderance of foreign commodities has only served to remind Osh residents what Kyrgyzstan’s industries have not been producing. The bazaar pointed to the powerless posture of a national economy subject to forces beyond its control, but it is not the only urban site telling this story. If one leaves the central bazaar by Osh’s trolley along Kyrgyzstan Street (the main north-south thoroughfare along the Ak-Buura’s east bank), the next point of interest is at the International Bridge, which spans the river to reach the city’s west side. Sitting near that corner where the bridge meets the street is a handsome brick building erected in the early 2000s that houses the Russian consulate. The building signals the renewed presence of a Russia interested again in Central Asian affairs (after the relative hiatus of the Yeltsin years), manifest also in its military air base in northern Kyrgyzstan and its participation in the intergovernmental Shanghai Cooperation Organization.27 The consulate is instrumental in the noticeableabsence of vast numbers of Osh residents (and Kyrgyzstanis in general) who have gone abroad to work in Russia, Kazakhstan, China, South Korea, the Persian Gulf emirates, and elsewhere, since its main purpose is to process Russian work visas for southern Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan sent far more migrant laborers to the Russian Federa- tion than to any other destination, a total of 326,500 between 1989 and 2003 (Mansoor, Quillin, and World Bank 2006). The absence of so many is felt in every mahalla and apartment complex in Osh, among people of all ethnicities, as most extended families have at least one if not several members away for months at a time. Osh Uzbeks told me that their mahallas seem empty and quiet these days but that this is better than having unemployed people idling around neighborhood corners or bazaars. What profound effects that such a scale of absence have on the social fabric of mahalla and city remains to be studied, but certainly, as Engseng Ho notes in another context, “the absent continue to be present in their effects, for good or for ill” (Ho 2006, 19).28 The remittances that migrant workers send home, meanwhile, sustain Osh’s (and Kyrgyzstan’s) economy, ultimately enabling the main bazaar to sell what it does and the night restaurants to keep their lights and music blaring.29 36 Bazaar and Mediation

Mountain within the City Standing outdoors almost anywhere in Osh, one can look up and see Solo- mon Mountain. Once known as the “Throne of Solomon,” no other feature of the environment so centrally defines the image of the city as this small, compact mountain fully integrated into the Osh cityscape on the west bank of the Ak-Buura River near the urban center.30 Long in proportion (1500 meters long by 120 wide), its distinct humps are laid out in an east-west line perpendicular to the northerly axis of the river. It resembles a four-humped camel bent over for a drink. It rises rather steeply, up to 160 meters above the streets, buildings, and mahallas that closely surround it.31 The mountain is supposedly the burial site of the Qur’anic prophet Sulayman or biblical king Solomon, who, the local claim goes, had journeyed to Central Asia late in his life. Part of its southern face is covered with a Muslim graveyard rising above the city, with crescent-and-star devices topping the graves and a large Friday mosque under construction since 2010. Farther west along that face is the city’s historical- cultural museum, built into a cave in 1977, with a remarkable modern shell- shaped, glass-paneled entrance. A vehicular road winds up to the museum, with a landing that allows well-to-do youth to drive up in the evenings with friends or dates, buy ice cream from the pushcart vendors, and take in the cityscape. At the foot of Solomon Mountain, next to the Osh Provincial Mu- seum of History and Local Lore (Oshskii oblastnoi istoriko-kraevedcheskii muzei), a nearly defunct Soviet institution to which no resident pays attention, sits Ravat-Abdullakhan, an active Friday mosque. Dating from the sixteenth century, the mosque was an “architectural monument” during the Soviet period, when its impressive brick arches were restored (Oruzbaeva 1987; Zakharova 1997).32 Behind the mosque, a narrow mahalla hugs the base of the mountain’s rounded eastern side, some houses overlooking their neighbors as they rise with the slope. The neighborhood is subtended on the other sides by Osh’s major streets—Kurmanjan Datka (formerly Lenin Street) and Gapar Aitiev (formerly Pioneer Street). Its own main street is called Alabastrova, a reference to the mahalla’s possible former craft specialization in alabaster work. Older Osh residents speak of some pre-Soviet mahallas as nurturing fine leather workers, or masons, or blacksmiths, although they were not able to identify exactly where in the city these skills were localized. Traces of this past are evident today in some street names that the city soviet had decided to adopt and in the stretches of the bazaar housing small skilled-labor shops. Early in his career, Finnish explorer C. G. Mannerheim (who later became a war hero and Finland’s sixth president) conducted an extensive geographical and ethnological survey of Central Asia (Turkestan, as it was known then) while he was serving as an intelligence officer on behalf of the Russian imperial government.33 Passing through Osh as he traveled from Samarqand en Bazaar and Mediation 37 route to Beijing, he wrote on 30 July 1906, “The native town reminds me of the ‘old’ towns of Tashkent and Samarqand, the same little crooked lanes, roaring aryks [canals], small mud houses, motley bazaars full of life and movement. Osh, however, is much more beautifully situated at the foot of a mountain, where, as the Sarts and Kirghiz assert, King Solomon administered the law in olden times, a law that has since been replaced by Russian justice. At the top of the mountain there is a small Muslim temple visited by thousands of faithful pilgrims” (Mannerheim and Sandberg 1990, 24).34 Mannerheim was referring to Solomon Mountain’s most prominent built feature: the Babur House, a small stone structure at the highest peak on the eastern tip overlooking the entire city. Babur, named after the illustrious founder of the Mughal Empire though born in nearby Andijan in 1483, is claimed to have grown up in Osh.35 The present structure is a late Soviet period reconstruction of a mosque that Babur himself was said to have built in 1510. In a state visit in 1993, Pakistan’s prime minister Benazir Bhutto was brought to the Babur House by her Kyrgyz hosts, who wished to put the newly independent Kyrgyzstan on Pakistan’s map by advancing their connection to the founder of Muslim south Asia. After becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 and being promoted as a tourist destination (especially in connection with the Osh 3000 campaign in 2000), the structure has been a notable focus of regional and local pilgrimages.36 On most days when the sun is not at its full fury, one can spot groups of pilgrims, tourists, and schoolchildren scaling the slopes of the mountain. Through a variety of rituals at certain locations along the slope and at the Babur House, the mainly women pilgrims seek divine blessing, fertility, or cures. During the Soviet period, when foreign travel was severely restricted, Muslims from throughout Central Asia treated Solomon Mountain as a per- missible substitute in fulfilling the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest site, in Mecca, which every Muslim is required to perform, if possible, at least once. It is said that three visits to Osh counted as one to Mecca. With the religious freedoms after independence, the city witnessed a surge of travel to the real Mecca. One spring morning in 1998, I stumbled upon a huge crowd gathered among parked cars and two large buses outside the Friday mosque at the foot of Solomon Mountain. These buses were preparing to take passengers to Saudi Arabia for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Relatives of the pilgrims—all Uzbek— were pressing cloth-wrapped bundles of food and provisions for, I was told, the week-long land trek across perhaps nine countries. A local foundation supported by wealthy benefactors in Osh, and facilitated by the city’s committee of mahalla heads, whose office was nearby up the slope of Solomon Mountain, had arranged for the bus trip. The foundation was also providing financial assistance for the poorer pilgrims. The bus was the low-cost option that was available until the trips were stopped in the late 2000s; the wealthier pilgrims 38 Bazaar and Mediation flew. Notices had been posted in the city advertising charter flights from Osh directly to Mecca, and four such flights were filled that year. Clearly, many Osh Uzbeks were performing the Hajj during the initial decade of post-Soviet independence. One Uzbek man claimed that by the end of the 1990s, 85 percent of all Osh residents who desired to go and were able to had done so. Interestingly, many of the cars parked around the buses that morning had Uzbekistani license plates (from the nearby Andijan and Fergana provinces). Many bus passengers were from this republic next door because religious expression was severely restricted there.37 Uzbekistan enforced annual quotas on the numbers of its citizens permitted to travel for the pilgrimage, which, though higher than the trickle permitted by the Soviet state previously, continued to reflect Soviet practices of state control over religion. Uzbek authorities also administered examinations for those applying for permission, testing applicants’ Islamic knowledge before approving their request to travel. Uz- bekistan’s restrictions on Islamic practices have since become progressively worse, especially with incursions by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) at the end of the 1990s and the Andijan massacre of 2005. Uzbekstanis performing the Hajj in Osh were in a sense recapitulating Osh’s function as a regional pilgrimage center. And they were initiating it at the foot of Solomon Mountain, no less, Central Asia’s own Soviet-era “Mecca.” Osh’s iconic centerpiece thus continued to gather its pilgrims, whether those seeking a scenic bluff or a spiritual blessing.

Friday Mosque Near the central bazaar on Kyrgyzstan Street is a city landmark that represents another important trend evident in Osh’s public spaces. The Imom Buhori Mosque is Osh’s main Friday mosque, where observant Muslims from throughout the city gather every Friday afternoon to pray and listen to the khutba, or sermon. Accessible by foot from many of the city’s old mahallas, it is located near the main bazaar at the busy intersection of two major avenues, Kyrgyzstan Street and Zainabetdinova Street, and across from shops, restaurants, a bank, and the one-time editorial office for the Uzbek newspaper Mezon. Across from the mosque stands a tall building that during the 1990s was plastered with a giant poster of a local hero, the Uzbek cosmonaut Sal- izhan Sharipov, from nearby Uzgen, Kyrgyzstan, who trained in Russia and served as flight engineer on the International Space Station in 2004–2005. This intersection is particularly busy because every bus line in the city turns here to serve the bazaar and the populous apartment neighborhoods. Immediately behind the mosque and street-side commercial frontage lies the large Zaina- betdinova apartment complex, a pleasant pedestrian zone with many four- or five-story buildings, shady trees, open spaces, and multiple footpaths. Imom Buhori was one of the few mosques that operated during the postwar Soviet Bazaar and Mediation 39 period in Osh, all mahalla mosques and most other Friday mosques having been destroyed or converted to other uses starting in the 1920s. With independence in 1991, attendance climbed at Imom Buhori, while other Friday mosques were built or rebuilt in other regions of Osh and numerous mahalla mosques appeared in the Uzbek neighborhoods. From the early 1990s until the late 2000s, the mosque was in a perpetual state of reconstruction (breaches in the pale bricks of its outer wall revealing its courtyard), financed by monies, I was told, from Saudi Arabia. A table where Islamic pamphlets and books were sold, similar to the one or two tables in the bazaar, stood all day on the street by an open gate of the mosque. In 2005, there was noticeably more activity at the mosque throughout the day. Several kiosks on the street by the main gate were selling a wide variety of religious literature and articles—prayer beads, prayer rugs, wall carpets depicting the black, cu- bical Kaaba of Mecca, medallions with Qur’anic inscriptions, and so forth. On Fridays after service, the place was crowded mostly with Uzbek men of all ages (often with a few Kyrgyz also), jostling, talking, and buying religious books and articles at the several specialized kiosks on the street outside the mosque’s gates. The crowds bespoke the importance of the mosque as a regular social gathering. My Uzbek male acquaintances would occasionally mention seeing such-and-such person the previous Friday at the mosque. Retired men, who might stay within their mahallas for most of the week, looked forward to Friday service to talk to friends afterward, and small groups of them could always be seen leaving together. The weekly sermon was delivered in Uzbek, and the prayer asked for God’s protection on “our Kyrgyzstan” and “our president,” continuing the long-standing Islamic practice of reciting the name of the ruler for blessing near the end of the khutba.38 Being a key Osh institution with a mainly Uzbek constituency and independent of direct state control, the mosque situated itself squarely in public as a Kyrgyzstani institution. The Uzbek character of Osh’s main mosque continued until soon after the 2010 events, when the imam was replaced by a Kyrgyz; ever since, the mosque has been attended mostly by Kyrgyz. The increased activity at Imom Buhori in the mid-2000s, even compared with the earlier independence years, illustrated a new rise in the public visibility of Islamic piety among Osh’s Uzbeks and some Kyrgyz of all generations and both genders. One noticed a pronounced increase in the prevalence of “Islamic dress” and coiffure by 2005 in comparison with the earlier years of Kyrgyzstan’s independence. It was especially evident among boys from about eight years of age through young men in their twenties, who grew up with some form of Islamic education after the end of the Soviet Union. More individuals wore white skullcaps, rather than the Soviet-era ethnic marker, the do’ppi, and more kept neatly groomed beards (fig. 7). Analogous to recent grass-roots trends in Muslim-majority societies elsewhere, notably in Egypt 40 Bazaar and Mediation and Turkey during the late twentieth century, more Uzbek women were wearing so-called “Islamic” headcoverings, in this case, a scarf looped over the entire head, rather than tied behind the back of the head, as was customary for married women during the Soviet period.39 Faculty and students at universities followed similar trends. In 2005, an Uzbek colleague of mine at the Kyrgyz-Uzbek University was wearing a headscarf for the first time since I first met her in 1994; wearing the headscarf was part of her public persona as a department head. To my surprise, my former Kyrgyz-language teacher in 1994 at Osh State University, previously not particularly religious, was keeping the fast during Ramadan in October 2005, and there seemed to be peer pressure among university students, both Kyrgyz and Uzbek, to do likewise. Until then, this type of public religiosity had been almost totally unseen among urban Kyrgyz. In 2005, many if not most Osh Uzbeks were fasting (ro’za tutish), even those who did not read namaz, the prayer offered five times a day. Eateries and food sellers in the mahallas were closed down during the fasting month, and the large restaurants in the center of town, while open, had slow business. In the evenings, the local television stations carried various kinds of Islamic programming: lectures by local clerics on the virtues of keeping the fast, foreign movies about the life of the Prophet (in Arabic or Turkish, and with a voice-over in Uzbek), theological programs explaining Hadith (reports of the Prophet’s example), and documentaries on the harmony of Islam and modern science.40 A few mosques were holding nightly recitations of the Qur’an after the last namaz of the day during Ramadan. These long services, broadcast over loudspeakers into the neighborhood, were packed with men until after ten o’clock in the evening. Meanwhile, the women in each household were busy preparing the meal for the next morning, which had to be finished before the first namaz at sunrise. Observance was also discernible in personal habits. I found youth in the mahalla listening to cassette sermons while working and families watching videos of interviews with local clerics or programs explicating religious topics.41 People use the siwak, the “Islamic toothbrush” made from a twig, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammed as a mark of pious hygienic sensibility, and they employ more Arabic religious words in conversation, most notably insha’Allah (God willing) in addition to the Uzbek version, khodo hokhlasa.42 As it is with observant Muslims elsewhere, omitting “insha’Allah” when talking about any claim or plans for the future has come to mean impious presumption on the part of the speaker. Often the omission is abruptly corrected by another speaker inserting the obligatory “God willing” to properly complete the sentence, to which the original speaker quickly repeats the word, as if to say, “Of course I meant to say that!”43 Not all Osh Uzbeks are becoming more religious, but the peer pressure to put on a good Islamic face has increased since the beginning of independence, which triggered the initial post-Soviet “resurgence” of Islam. Not all observant Bazaar and Mediation 41

Figure 7. Youth at the Imom Buhori Friday Mosque. Photograph by the author, 2005.

Osh Uzbeks are necessarily adopting the same models of bodily conduct, lifestyles, and consumption of Islamic commodities in their cultivation of piety. Some pursue the stylizations of Middle Eastern versions of Islam, particularly regarding women’s headcovering, as the gold standard, while others seek a return to a pure “Islam of our forefathers,” eschewing foreign influences. A broader question is how the multiple meanings of being Muslim are inflected by Kyrgyzstan’s particular mix that includes its relative religious freedoms, the sociopolitical dynamics of its Uzbek “minority” communities, and the emer- 42 Bazaar and Mediation gence of a newly wealthy class of pious Uzbeks with their own economic and political interests. A key question in Kyrgyzstan today concerns how prosperity (and freedoms) will influence piety rather than the dominant question in Uzbekistan, which asks how poverty (and repressions) will influence piety. The particularities of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’s political and economic context lead one to expect understandings of Islam among its Uzbeks to be diverging from those of Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and Muslims elsewhere in Central Asia. These questions require more ethnographically grounded study (addressed later in this work) concerning the “proxemics of piety” in the mahallas and early articulations of Islam as an idiom of societal transformation.44 What remains noteworthy for now is that Osh’s urban spaces have become sites where differing visions of Islamic piety, or nonobservance, contend for recognition as legitimate ways of being Muslim in public in this Central Asian city today. A walk through Osh reveals the uncertain juxtapositions and creative ac- commodations that characterize post-Soviet Central Asian urban life. The Stone Monument commemorating the 1990 Osh riots marked not only the persistent interethnic tensions and competition for scarce useful land but also the coexistence of contrasting lifestyles and life activities (apartments, mahalla neighborhoods, industry, and agriculture) packed densely into the cityscape. During its peak years, the bustling main bazaar iconified Osh’s long-standing reputation as a city of exchange, mediating global and regional commodities, as well as differentiated socioeconomic categories of people. The bazaar was the site of disparate, routine encounter for goods, languages, and aspirations that bespoke Osh’s exceedingly cosmopolitan character within a Central Asia reference. Often treated as a moral indicator of post-Soviet society, it simultaneously indexed the novel possibilities of private initiative and wealth accumulation, as well as the loss of daily predictability, state provision, and Soviet civilization. The bazaar was a space of unease and hope, of outrage and anticipation, even while the Friday mosque concentrated shifting forms of public religiosity that promise the positive transformation of society. Both spaces also display the decisive consolidation of Osh’s Kyrgyz character after the 2010 interethnic conflict, as traces of other ethnicities in faces, signage, and music vanished from public spaces. The streets of Osh suggest the urban context of being Uzbek in Kyrgyz- stan, as well as some essential features of the region and the times more generally. However, that context cannot be apprehended merely by walking Osh’s streets. There is a proverbial elephant in the room, the presence of a powerful neighbor, one that boasts of itself as the modern fulfillment of a great Uzbek civilization. Uzbekistan is literally a walk away, a few kilometers from Osh’s center, but most take the bus. The border crossing is called Do’stlik (Friend- ship), but the troubled post-Soviet history of that border would stretch and contort Osh Uzbeks’ notion of that term to extraordinary limits. Border and 2 Post-Soviet Predicament

Being Uzbek in post-Soviet Osh means living between contradictions. The lives of Osh Uzbeks are caught between overlapping pairs of oppositions that define their post-Soviet predicament. They are doubly excluded by the two nation-states with which they are most connected, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbeki- stan, one for being of the wrong nation and one for being in the wrong state, as it were. As “ethnic minorities,” they experience discrimination in an increasingly Kyrgyz-centered “ethnocratic” state.1 As citizens of independent Kyrgyz- stan, they are cut off from the stridently nationalistic Uzbekistani state that tantalizingly attracts many of them. The problem of where the Osh Uzbeks really belong is further complicated because the city sits between two kinds of boundaries, one political and one topographic. Osh’s location in the Fergana Valley’s piedmont means it is pressed on one side by an uninhabitable alpine terrain and on the other by an increasingly rigid political border with an independent Uzbekistan ruthlessly pursuing its own unilateralist policies. The city is caught between a rock and a harsh place. The double boundary represents their double exclusion from each republic. Osh’s vulnerable geographical position has inhibited the post- Soviet economic development of the city, but it also exemplifies wider prob-

43 44 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament lems of internal connectivity for the mountainous and landlocked republic of Kyrgyzstan, left to fend for itself in the post-Soviet international arena. The Osh Uzbek predicament highlights the vexations of the territorial nation-state model for Central Asia. Osh Uzbeks are also poised between two visions of the future after Soviet state socialism, one problematically liberal and one stubbornly paternalistic. The everyday struggles of earning a living have occasioned reflection and debate concerning the region’s economic direction and how it ought to proceed. Being situated at a geographical juncture between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan affords a particular bifocal view of two very different postsocialist paths. Kyr- gyzstan’s rapid post-Soviet liberalizations, though initially touted by outside observers as exemplary, quickly became problematic and uneven. Those reforms have yielded inflation, unemployment, inequalities, criminality, corruption, and tremendous hardship for most Kyrgyzstanis, which led to two popular uprisings resulting in presidential ousters. Osh Uzbeks see bleak prospects for mountainous, landlocked Kyrgyzstan, which possesses few natural resources, an underdeveloped industry, and a decaying infrastructure. On the other hand, Uzbekistan’s neo-Soviet state paternalism seemed to provide a well-managed, state-controlled course of gradual reform that avoided the shocks of sudden liberalization, buttressed by that republic’s greater wealth in cotton and oil. Osh Uzbeks overwhelmingly approved of the Uzbekistani model during the 1990s, but as Kyrgyzstan’s market economy yielded more widespread prosperity for Osh in the 2000s and particularly after the so-called Andijan massacre in 2005, Osh Uzbeks became increasingly critical of Uz- bekistani president Islam Karimov’s authoritarian path. Many are now deeply cynical about the postsocialist models of both republics. The point here is that their effectively marginal position with regard to both Kyrgyzstan and Uz- bekistan affords Osh Uzbeks a close, visceral view of the divergent economic and political reform trajectories of these two republics. Their status of being caught in the middle gives them distinct perspectives that can reveal contradictions in political orders that may otherwise appear coherent and inevitable. Liminality deconstructs power.2 It is in this predicament of being caught between borders, nation-states, and postsocialist alternatives that Osh as an idiom of mediation becomes appealing. The Osh Uzbeks’ position of powerless marginality becomes reimag- ined as centrality, as the idea of Osh as mediator of contradictions connects with their geopolitical dilemma. Thus, it is important to explore the ways that Osh Uzbeks narrate their city as central to various kinds of post-Soviet regional flows. Yet, being central has its downside. Osh has become a hub for drug trafficking, refugees, and, it is alleged, foreign-supported extremist Islamist movements. Instead of “bridging great civilizations” across the Eur- asian continent in its former capacity as a Silk Road entrepôt, Osh now seems Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 45 to lie at the juncture of malevolent forces at work in the post–cold war world, effectively inverting its reputation as a great trading city. This chapter conveys the perplexity of living in the state of “betwixt and between” by presenting the post-Soviet predicament of Osh Uzbeks in its geographic, political, and economic context within the Fergana Valley. Two decades of various troubles with the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan contrariety have forced Osh Uzbeks to think about their dilemmas through the prism of the border, as a space that concretizes their marginal status in both republics. A 1999 border incident introduces this wider story.

What a Border Closing Reveals Several large buses were parked on a wide dirt road that led from the Os- hskii micro-region’s clothing bazaar through an old Uzbek neighborhood. A bustling crowd gathered every afternoon on this street between the bazaar’s last row of covered stalls of clothes and sundries and the mud-walled houses of the neighborhood. Ethnic Uzbeks all, these people were dressed in their travel clothes—older women in colorful, loose-fitting layers, their heads wrapped in white scarves; younger women in multicolored, patterned atlas cloth and headscarves tied back behind their heads; older men in heavy black robes and do’ppi (the square Uzbek hat); and younger men in short-sleeve shirts and dark pants. Many carried cloth-wrapped parcels of food or gifts as they made their way to the buses and bid farewell to their relatives. They were traveling for various reasons: to see relatives, attend weddings, conduct business, buy goods, study at university, and so forth. During the 1990s, buses departed daily for Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan and Central Asia’s largest city (fig. 8). The entire bus operation had the air of the necessity-driven improvisation characteristic of post-Soviet economic arrangements. In contrast to the old state-run buses that used to depart during the Soviet period from a bus station at the city limits (now barely used), the new, sleek, foreign-made, and privately run buses were parked on that dirt street at the bazaar’s edge. The twelve-hour trip westward across the Fergana Valley’s length and then north to Tashkent cost each traveler 100 som.3 A briefer, eight-hour trip via the Angren mountain pass was available for 150 som on new Daewoo minivans, which waited next to the buses and left whenever all its seven seats were filled—another local enterprise that arose to fill people’s need to maintain close connections with Tashkent. From the Soviet period through the 1990s, Osh’s Uzbek communities maintained their closest ties to points in Uzbekistan (or places best reached by crossing through it) rather than to Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, in the north.4 Before independence, the borders between the Soviet socialist republics had little effect on daily routines, and mass transportation from Osh to multiple destinations was cheap and frequent. Those pro forma boundaries suddenly became international borders after 1991, and much of the former state sys- 46 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

Figure 8. The bustle to board the buses to Tashkent. Photograph by the author, 1998. tem of transportation, which spanned the republican boundaries, collapsed. Small-scale private enterprises rose up to meet the demand for transportation. The scale and bustle of the scene with the buses on this Osh street underscores the importance of Tashkent and Uzbekistan to the Osh Uzbek community. But something suddenly happened that brought this activity to an abrupt halt. Without warning or explanation, Uzbekistani authorities closed the border crossing at Osh to bus traffic on January 27, 1999. To the time of this writing, only passenger cars and trucks may seek to pass the strict controls of Uzbekistani customs at this crossing, called Do’stlik (in Uzbek) or Dostuk (in Kyrgyz), a moniker referencing the Soviet ideal of the “friendship of peoples.” The situation was anything but friendly. The stringent border restrictions have been extremely disruptive to the social and economic life of Osh, because the city is difficult to reach by any land route except through Uzbekistan. Buses offered the cheapest, most convenient means of transportation from Osh to Tashkent and other destinations in Uzbekistan. When I returned to Osh in the summer of 1999, a half-year after Uzbekistan had imposed this restriction, the buses and minivans to Tashkent on that bazaar-side dirt road were replaced by local transportation that went only a few kilometers to Do’stlik. Passengers had to disembark, clear the increasingly troublesome customs on foot, and find buses or taxis waiting on the Uzbekistani side. Do’stlik itself is really just a neighborhood street with unremarkable Uz- bek houses on either side. Uzbek houses are bounded by adjoining exterior walls (enclosing interior courtyards), which on this street form a straight narrow corridor between the two republics. Do’stlik has become a bustling con- Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 47 tact zone between the two republics, with a constant and heavy flow of foot traffic, as well as some private car traffic, moving in both directions during the day. On the Kyrgyzstani side, one finds parked minivans, food sellers, eating places, currency exchange, and a small group of border police checking documents and letting many apparent regulars go by without stopping. Once one passes to the Uzbekistani side, however, it is an entirely different matter. Mul- tiple fronts of official posts, housed in imposing permanent structures that became more extensive starting in the mid-1990s, regulate incoming traffic. I usually had to show my passport several times to different personnel before advancing to the next layer of security. I had to sit down in an office for an interview regarding the purpose of my entry and my destinations within Uzbekistan, which were recorded in a logbook. Several times, my belongings went through airport-type screenings on new equipment in another building, or they were hand inspected. When I crossed into Uzbekistan at Do’stlik amid heightened security a few days after the armed incursions of the IMU elsewhere in the Fergana Valley in 1999, the Uzbekistani guards went through every book that I was carrying, looking no doubt for subversive Islamist literature. One book, O’zbek isimlari, was nothing more than a list of Uzbek personal names used for parents to consult when naming newborn babies, and it was clearly marked as having been published in Tashkent. The customs official still carefully leafed through this most innocuous of books, page by page.5 During the global panic about severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) infection spreading from international travelers in the summer of 2003, the border authorities actually used a digital thermometer to turn away any foreigner with a body temperature above 37.5°C, which could be easily achieved by a healthy but dehydrated tourist on those scorching days.6 Uzbekistan had quickly adopted a post-Soviet posture of paranoia toward its “foreign outside,” which it was defining as dangerous with each obsessive border measure.7 Uzbekistan’s unilateral action forbidding the crossing of buses in 1999 prompted unheeded protests from the Kyrgyzstani government and criticism in the independent Kyrgyz-language press (Megoran 2004, 2007).8 Osh’s independent Uzbek-language newspaper, Mezon, treaded very carefully, expressing consternation shy of criticism about Uzbekistan, revealing the delicate balance it maintained as an Uzbek institution in Kyrgyzstan: “We were discreet, calling it a ‘temporary interstate misunderstanding’ and saying that two friendly countries do not raise a fuss between themselves. The days passed and became weeks. But the situation is not changing. The Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border at ‘Do’stlik’ remains completely closed to mass transportation. While the border situation has not changed, the situation of the city and the feelings of Osh Uzbeks are changing. Uzbeks are in a panic, saying, ‘It looks as if we still cannot go to Uzbekistan to be with our relatives’” (O. Karimov 1999, 1). When I talked to Osh Uzbeks in July 1999, a shift in attitude had taken 48 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament place. Instead of the reported confusion and frustration of early 1999, I found fervent, unanimous support for the January border closing. My friend Qa- lam, a canny thirty-something history instructor, advocated Uzbekistan’s tight border control for the sake of its security. Though speaking as a citizen of Kyrgyzstan, he praised President Karimov’s intolerance of criminality within Uzbekistan’s borders:

I am for the closing of the border. I am happy about it. The Uzbekistan border has to be closed. Because otherwise, . . . much crime would invade. . . . Wahhabis [Islamic fundamentalists] still pose a threat to the peace of Uzbeki- stan. In order to punish crime, Uzbekistan needs a border. . . . But the bad side is, . . . when I, being an Uzbek, go to Uzbekistan tomorrow, it will be difficult. I’ve got relatives. . . . I can’t go freely. . . . Now look at this! My relatives are one kilometer away, but I’ll have to get a visa from the embassy in Bishkek.

Although the visa regimen for Kyrgyzstani citizens was not in place at the time, Qalam played up the irony of going to the Kyrgyzstani capital— reachable from Osh by treacherous alpine roads or sometimes erratic flights— in order to visit relatives literally a short walk from where he lived (Qalam resided on a former collective farm bordering Uzbekistan).9 By doing so, he belittled it as a mere inconvenience, the importance of which was eclipsed by Uzbekistan’s security imperatives. But Qalam’s curious posture raises the question of how he was defining his interests and how he saw the Osh Uzbek community positioned with respect to the two states in this politically delicate affair. Qalam’s attitude toward the January 1999 border closing found strong resonance and almost complete unanimity among the many Osh Uzbek men with whom I spoke in July 1999. No one was willing to criticize the action, and people offered different explanations about why they thought President Kari- mov did it. Their explanation always began with the Tashkent bombings on February 16, 1999, when explosions were set off near governmental buildings at the center of the Uzbekistani capital. Karimov had to seal the borders for state security, they said, when “Wahhabi terrorists” attacked the very heart of the country.10 I always replied that the Do’stlik border closing in fact happened before the Tashkent bombings—January 27 being before February 16—and would cite the Mezon article from 13 February 1999. My contacts were usually left confused with that and would sometimes debate among themselves about the order of events. When they accepted the facts, they would then offer various alternative explanations: the border closing was to stop the importation of drugs, or arms, or “Wahhabi” literature, for all of which Osh was infamous as a distribution center. Others cited economic reasons: the closing was to prevent Kyrgyzstanis from coming in to take advantage of cheaper gasoline and food Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 49 in Uzbekistan, because prices for basic commodities were still state-supported there. One fellow pointed to the dangers that the civil war in Tajikistan posed to a bus, because a bus moving from Osh to Tashkent would have to pass through Tajikistan, so that Uzbekistani authorities, for some reason, prohibited buses from even starting their journey from Osh. Given the chronic lack of reliable information in the media, speculation surrounding sensitive political events was rather typical. Much debate within the Osh Uzbek community about the border closing and bombings must have taken place in the intervening months, when various interpretations were circulated, and many other views were no doubt silenced and forgotten so that I was met with a high degree of unanimity a half year later. What I found noteworthy was that every explanation fit a meta-narrative of a decisive Karimov taking necessary measures to deal with crisis situations. The specific threat did not seem to matter to my interlocutors—there were -al ways plenty to choose from—as much as the idea that Karimov took swift and efficacious action in defense of Uzbekistan.11 To be sure, there were grounds for the sense of pervasive crisis at that time. The Uzbekistani authorities possibly closed their borders before the bombings in response to intelligence about the plot (though they subsequently failed to stop it), so that the sequence of events may be consistent with the Do’stlik bus restriction resulting from an imminent threat.12 Whatever Karimov’s actual intentions at the time, the narration of these events by Osh Uzbeks as an emergency situation was crucial to their construction of Karimov’s efficacious executive authority and, obversely, of Kyrgyzstani president Akaev’s impotence in the face of real crisis. One might ask why Osh Uzbeks were so concerned about the welfare of a neighboring state as to be “happy” about sacrificing their own “convenience.” Why in the world were they advocating something that clearly hurt their own “rational interests”? What were Osh Uzbek interests in this matter, anyway? Was this simply a case of ethnic Uzbeks lavishing approval on an Uzbek leader of a nationalizing Uzbek state next door? What happened when “ethnic sentiment” ran against “economic interest”? The stakes of these questions were actually higher than they may now appear, because the widespread Osh Uzbek approbation of Karimov came at a steep price. The Do’stlik border closing hurt them deeply.

Between a Rock and a Harsh Place As Uzbekistan progressively tightened its border during the 1990s, of which the January 1999 bus embargo was only one, albeit drastic, step, Osh became increasingly isolated because the city is difficult to reach by any land route except through Uzbekistan. Its location in the piedmont of the Alai mountain range, which forms the southern side of the Fergana Valley, means that passage through Uzbekistan is the only way between Osh and anywhere outside 50 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

to Bishkek

KAZAKHSTAN KYRGYZSTAN

yn N ar N

Tashkent

UZBEKISTAN Namangan Jalalabat

r D ya Kara-Su Uzgen Sy ar Andijan L E Y Osh S V A L yr A D N a G A ry R a E F TAJIKISTAN Kokand Fergana

Khojent

Batken

KYRGYZSTAN Elevation 200–500 meters 500–1000 1000–2000 CHINA 2000–3000 0 2010 30 40 50 mi 3000–4000 0 20 40 60 80 km 4000–5000 TAJIKISTAN 5000–6000

Figure 9. Fergana Valley topographic map, showing roads from Osh to Jalalabat and Bishkek. Map by Bill Nelson. the valley, except via difficult alpine passes.13 Osh is nestled at the southeast- ern corner of the Fergana Valley’s flat heartland, which extends about three hundred kilometers west to east and a maximum of seventy kilometers north to south. The Fergana Valley, called simply “the Valley” (Vodiy) by locals, is surrounded by high mountains on all sides except for a narrow opening on the west, at the opposite end of the valley from Osh.14 Soviet administration took the Valley’s territory, which had formed the core of the Kokand Khanate that had given Russian imperial authorities regular trouble in the late nineteenth century, and partitioned it among the Uzbek, Tajik, and Kirgiz soviet socialist republics in 1924–1930 as the state organized its presence in Central Asia.15 As a result, the Uzbek SSR received most of the Valley’s fertile flatlands, the Tajik SSR took part of the western side, and the Kirgiz SSR held the Valley’s rim and most of the surrounding mountains. Osh was included in the Kirgiz SSR despite its Uzbek majority, because the mountainous republic needed an urban center to anchor its southern economic zone.16 The parity commission set up in 1926 to settle territorial disputes between these new administrative units rejected Uzbekistan’s claims to Osh, writing on 20 March that: “(a) the town is the only trade and administrative center for south Ferghana, which was ceded to Kirgizstan, (b) in terms of irrigation, it was tightly bound with Kirgiz territories, (c) it is a primary center leading to Kirgiz areas of the south part of the uiezd [regional administrative unit of the Russian Empire] with the same name and Alai Valley, (d) secession of it to Uzbekistan would deprive the Kirgiz people of their only organizing center, (e) the lands of Osh volost [local- Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 51 level administrative unit, smaller than the uiezd, that surrounds the town] were inevitably bound with the town’s territory.”17 The borders drawn then have largely been inherited, with some minor adjustments, by the respective post-Soviet states. And so, cradled by swiftly rising mountains to the south and abutting the border with Uzbekistan to the northwest, Osh is caught in a “conspiracy” between physical topography and political borders (fig. 9). As a result of its siting, perennial questions about land use lurked in the city’s Soviet-era development. Urban expansion has been severely constrained between mountains and border since Osh’s industrial and population boom, which began in the late 1950s. Allocating lands for housing, farming, and industry increasingly became a zero-sum game that drove drastic changes in the city’s form and demography in the late twentieth century. Old Uzbek mahallas at the city center were demolished in the 1960s in favor of multistory apartment building neighborhoods for new factory workers from rural areas, mostly Kyrgyz. Former state and collective farms adjacent to Osh were incorporated into the city grid. Ethnically charged competition for scarce land led to the Osh riots of 1990 sparked by a land dispute between newly urbanized Kyrgyz workers and Uzbek collective farmers. The need for sufficient housing stock to address overcrowding in Uzbek neighborhoods and the ethnicized political overtones of any demand for residential land continue to be problems for the post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani administration in Osh. These trends reveal the heavy influence of physical geography on the city’s development during the 1900s. But Osh’s geographical predicament is embedded in the wider quandary of the post-Soviet Central Asian states, whose internal connectivity is likewise pinched by the conspiracy of topography and politics. The mountains that define the Valley’s north and east sides also bisect Kyrgyzstan into north and south, the all-important division of the republic. Political power resides in northern Kyrgyzstan, where the capital city of Bishkek (formerly Frunze) and the homelands (Naryn, Talas, and Karakol provinces) of most national government elites are located. Southern Kyrgyzstan holds most of the republic’s arable land, its densest and most ethnically diverse population, and its second-largest city and provincial capital, Osh. The difficult six-hundred-kilometer mountain road between Bishkek and Osh was poorly maintained and open only in the warmer months during the 1990s, though it was improved in the mid-2000s. Within the Fergana Valley, the forty-kilometer trip between the two largest cities of southern Kyrgyzstan, Osh and Jalalabat (Jalal-Abad in Uzbek), both provincial capitals, required passing through a short stretch of Uzbekistan. Since the mid-1990s, Uzbekistan has fortified that area with a battalion station and stringent border checks.18 The only passage within Kyr- gyzstani territory was a rocky and steep mountain road that was finally paved 52 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament in 2006, but the way is still longer and more difficult than the direct, level route through Khonabod (formerly Sovietabad), Uzbekistan (see fig. 9). The great difficulty in moving within southern Kyrgyzstan adversely affected the country’s regional economy because the “internal” transport route between the Osh and Jalalabat provinces now either crossed into Uzbekistan or passed over mountains. Our interlocutor Qalam gave an example in the same conversation above about the Do’stlik border closing:

Now, for example, in Jalal-Abad there is a cotton-processing factory. If cotton processing is expensive for someone in Kara-Suu [the rural region surrounding Osh], I need to go to Jalal-Abad for cheaper service. But, do you see, Uzbeki- stan does not give permission [to pass]. And so the Kara-Suu factory has a monopoly [here]. . . . In Jalal-Abad province there is a village. [Qalam draws on paper.] It has a road, a street. Over here, there’s a wall, the “Madaniat Battalion,” which is part of Uzbekistan. The road is divided! [Laughs.] Now how is a border to be laid down? Tell me! One village. One road. Houses along [both sides]. One road. So, what, put a soldier at the middle of the road? . . . [Qalam draws the bubble zones in the southern Fergana Valley.] Here is land that is part of Uzbekistan. Around it, the land is part of Kyrgyzstan. [Laughs.] What to do with those?

The Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border sometimes bisected villages or formed detached “bubbles” entirely surrounded by the other republic. Having seen these enclaves from an airplane, I realized that their boundaries are not arbitrary but followed ecological zones carved out by the topography.19 The enclaves were fertile green depressions set against the brown slopes, watered by mountain runoff. The southern wall of the Fergana Valley—starkly brown and barren—rises abruptly from the green flatlands. Every square meter of arable land really was being put to use. Because access to these enclaves is from the valley’s flatlands rather than laterally across the mountains, it does make sense to put them under Uzbekistani rather than Kyrgyzstani jurisdiction. Uzbeki- stan unilaterally began to construct fences in the Fergana Valley during the 1990s, sometimes making claims to disputed land, to the consternation and useless protests of the residents directly affected (for example, some properties straddled the new demarcation and access to local places was sometimes blocked) and with the Kyrgyzstani authorities making counterclaims. The internal connectivity of Uzbekistan’s territory is no less problematic. Its portion of the Fergana Valley represents the republic’s most productive agricultural and industrial region; it is, most notably, the heart of Uzbekistan’s cotton production. Though occupying 4.3 percent of the republic’s total land area, the Valley harbors 26.9 percent of its population.20 The Fergana Valley was actually the most densely populated rural region in the former Soviet Union. Buses from the Valley have to travel along its east-west length and exit Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 53 at the western end before cutting north and east to the capital, Tashkent. The more direct mountain pass (pereval in Russian) between Tashkent and the Uz- bekistani part of the Valley is always closed to large buses because the road is steep and especially treacherous in winter.21 Bus routes out of the Valley must all traverse Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. After the independence of the republics, delays and complications could arise for travelers at any of these borders.22 The mountain pass between Tashkent and the Valley through Angren is long and tortuous and cannot take heavy commercial and passenger traffic. It does give the government easy control, however, of passenger and freight traffic between the two places, because, unlike the long borders through fields and towns in the Valley, mountain pass checkpoints are unavoidable.23 Tajikistan similarly suffers from a great internal rupture because the populous and fertile Khojent (formerly Leninabad) area in the Valley is cut off from the rest of the republic to the south, including the capital, Dushanbe. The vulnerability of Uzbekistan’s economic and political integration to the vicissitudes of its neighboring republics has certainly motivated Uzbekistan’s increasingly proactive border security since 1992 and, no doubt, the specific closing at Do’stlik starting in January 1999. President Karimov pressed hard to make Uzbekistan economically self-sufficient via restriction of foreign goods and import substitution and articulated these principles in his writings.24 The task is very difficult, even for this relatively resource-rich republic, because economic flows of productive inputs and outputs during the Soviet period worked for “all-Union interests . . . [that] ignored or relegated to secondary importance the interests of the individual republics [so that] not one former Soviet republic has an economy which is able to function autonomously. The economic structure in each individual republic was not linked together internally; none had its own nucleus” (United Nations Development Programme 1996). With independence thrust upon them, the Central Asian republics have each scrambled in their own ways to pull together viable “national” economies, but they are not helped by the juxtaposition of physical and political geographies. The Fergana Valley in particular is a tangle of post-Soviet border problems that have negatively impacted the economic development and political stability of all three republics sharing its land.25 The connectivity problems are not solved by air routes. Both the Kyr- gyzstani and Uzbekistani states have neglected the obvious high demand for regular transportation between Osh and Tashkent, and this neglect is telling. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the former Aeroflot airline devolved into state-run air companies of the individual republics. Their new mandate was to strengthen internal ties within their own republics, so that Kyrgyz Airways (Kyrgyz Aba-Joldoru) served the Bishkek-Osh route, while Uzbek Airways (O’zbek Hava Yo’llari) ran flights between Tashkent and Andi- jan, the important Uzbekistani city forty kilometers from Osh in the Fergana 54 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

Valley. No airline was offering the Osh-Tashkent run that existed in the Soviet period, because neither post-Soviet state was willing to foster the Osh-Tash- kent connection that would cross-cut “national” integration, especially when the historical weight of this connection contradicted the deliberate amnesia of both new nation-states.26 Acknowledging the Uzbek character of a city in a “Kyrgyz” republic was inconvenient for both national projects, particularly in the double shadow of the 1990 Osh riots and the 2010 violence pitting Uzbeks against Kyrgyz, episodes that both states would prefer to forget. But the lack of an Osh-Tashkent flight exemplifies a broader, more disturbing facet of that precarious position between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan: Osh Uzbeks enjoy little regard from either state.

Between Nation and State In principle, Osh Uzbeks might have enjoyed a double benefit from connection by citizenship with one state and connection by ethnicity and family with the other, as many diasporas do. After the Kyrgyz, Uzbeks form the most numerous and most economically influential ethnic group in Kyrgyzstan, concentrated in the republic’s southern cities, of which Osh is the largest. But despite post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’s stated commitment to fairness in a multiethnic state, notably captured in President Akaev’s slogan that appeared on posters, billboards, and ads in the 1990s, “Kyrgyzstan is our common home” (Kyrgyzstan—bizdin bardyk üy, in Kyrgyz, or, in Russian, Kyrgyzstan—nash obschii dom), Osh Uzbeks knew that the positions of power in government, major industry, and education, once held by Russians and others, would overwhelmingly remain with ethnic Kyrgyz. Despite the fact that all experienced Kyrgyz leaders and bureaucrats spoke better Russian than Kyrgyz (having risen through elite Soviet education and political ranks), the status of Kyr- gyz as the official language of government solidified the ethnic exclusivity of political power.27 Osh Uzbeks often complained that they were underrepresented in parliament, the Jogorku Kenesh, relative to their numbers in southern Kyrgyzstan, although a few powerful Uzbek politicians, such as Kadyrjan Batyrov in Jalalabat and Alisher Sabirov and Muhammedjon Mamasaidov in Osh, emerged on the regional stage. The fact that the city administration was also Kyrgyz-run meant that municipal resources such as water, gas, electricity, sewers, and land—always in short supply—went first to the Kyrgyz-majority neighborhoods, rather than to the Uzbek-majority mahalla neighborhoods. While Uzbeks still dominate certain parts of the economy, notably in trade, retail, and craft, Kyrgyz have moved into these roles as well in great numbers after independence, particularly after the 2010 conflicts, and hold the top positions of most large private and state enterprises. In higher education, there has been a proliferation of private universities and Kyrgyzstani affiliates of foreign colleges in the republic’s cities. The lion’s share of state resources go Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 55 to the state university system, whose units have mostly Kyrgyz faculty, staff, and students who teach and work in Kyrgyz (except for courses in Russian or Uzbek literature).28 Until the establishment in 1997 of the Kyrgyz-Uzbek University in Osh, Osh Uzbeks complained that there was no opportunity for them to receive higher education in Uzbek, since institutions in Uzbekistan were becoming increasingly inaccessible to them. Osh Kyrgyz, on the other hand, generally believed that the city’s Uzbeks did not have much to complain about: they had economic freedom to improve themselves (and a new class of Uzbek families have become quite wealthy), freedom to develop Uzbek culture, their own institutions (a drama theater, newspapers, television stations, cultural centers, and so forth, at least until the 2010 events), and their own representatives in government. Osh Kyrgyz often claimed that Uzbeks were treated better in Kyrgyzstan than were Uzbekistan’s Kyrgyz, who had to contend with stern Uzbek nationalist policies. The perceptual disparity between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents of Osh is perhaps unsurprising, a familiar theme in countless other interethnic contexts worldwide.29 The relation of Osh Uzbeks to post-Soviet Uzbekistan, on the other hand, turns out to be more complex. One might expect an Uzbek president of a proud, nationalizing Uzbek state to advocate the interests of Uzbek minorities elsewhere, especially those so close by in Osh. This expectation would seem to follow from Rogers Brubaker’s (1995, 1996, 6) influential framework theorizing the “triadic relational interplay between national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands,” in which a state setting itself up as a patron protecting the welfare of co-ethnics outside its borders would be bol- stering its project of nationalism within its borders.30 Instead, independent Uzbekistan has consistently disregarded the needs and sentiments of ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan (and elsewhere). The January 1999 border closing to buses poignantly exemplified this disregard, but it was by no means the first time that President Karimov showed an entrenched commitment to the solidity of the border with Kyrgyzstan. Since independence, Karimov has consistently indicated, as the progressively tightening border security underscores, that he would conduct his policies with no particular regard for the Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan. Karimov, in fact, has consistently refrained from advocating the various interests of Osh Uzbeks to the Kyrgyzstani government on a wide range of issues.31 At the twilight of Soviet rule, the question of Osh’s submission to Kyrgyz rule came to center stage during the 1990 Osh riots. An unofficial Osh Uzbek organization named Adolat (Justice) had emerged and made demands for Osh’s autonomy within the Kirgiz SSR. Some even advocated outright annexation to the Uzbek SSR. Islam Karimov, then the first party secretary of Soviet Uzbekistan, traveled to Osh with Chingiz Aitmatov, the renowned and respected Kyrgyz novelist, and appealed to the Osh Uzbek community to stop the interethnic killings and to 56 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament end demands for secession. Matteo Fumagalli (2007a, 105–6) writes, “State- building has constituted a higher priority for the ruling elites [of Uzbekistan] than establishing and/or developing links with co-ethnics abroad. This meant that links between Uzbekistan and Uzbeks abroad have been progressively sidelined and no diaspora . . . policy has been conceived by Uzbekistan. In fact, if anything, Uzbekistan has played a stabilising role in this sense, by refraining from playing the ‘ethnic card’ in regional politics.” During the 2000s, especially with responses to the Andijan events of 2005 by Uzbeks on both sides of the border, it became apparent that Karimov found Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan too politically active and unpredictable, given that they lacked direct tutelage under Uzbekistan’s educational and propaganda systems. The Uzbekistani press often vilified Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan during the 2000s, seeing them as complicit with or at least acquiescent about extremist Islamist organizations. I heard one Uzbek leader in Jalalabat declare during a meeting in 2009, “Uzbekistan treats us as enemies [dushman]! We’re on our own!” Likewise, as the political crisis unfolded in southern Kyrgyzstan in May 2010, Karimov opposed the call by Kyrgyzstani Uzbek leaders for official recognition of the Uzbek language in Kyrgyzstan, took measures to ensure that no volunteers in Uzbekistan went to help Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan during the interethnic violence in June, and only grudgingly permitted international agencies to set up refugee camps near the border for a short time (International Crisis Group 2010). Karimov’s policies affecting neighboring states have not been loosened by considerations of “ethnic affinity” beyond his state’s boundary. Nonetheless, Osh Uzbeks in the late 1990s actually praised Karimov for his firm opposition to annexation, even though some in the Osh autonomy movements had hoped for Uzbekistan’s support at the time. Those praising Karimov said his handling of the incident showed his leadership initiative, his willingness to stand above the fray of momentary passions and fractious interests, and his wisdom in promoting the “real” interest of all concerned, that is, regional stability. The autonomy movement was dispersed with the quashing of the riots by Soviet troops and has shown no signs of recoalescing since. After independence in 1991, the leadership in the Osh Uzbek community avoided raising such issues and instead sought incremental improvements for Uzbeks under the Kyrgyz-dominated government. I asked one elderly Uzbek man, Tolib, about President Karimov’s relation to Uzbeks in Osh. Re- vealing a pragmatism characteristic of the community, Tolib replied, “Karim [sic] is saying [to Osh Uzbeks], ‘Do not abandon [tashlama] Osh, Jalal-Abad, Uzgen.’”

ML: Why is he saying, do not abandon?

Tolib: Work. Stay here. Do not give it up. If you leave the place, do you think Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 57

the Kyrgyz will cry about it? If I leave [Osh] with my children, would it not be left to the Kyrgyz? So [Karimov] is saying, do not go. Work, don’t fight, just work.32

Some confided to me during the 1990s that most Uzbeks in Osh probably preferred the city to be under the Uzbekistani regime, if that were politically possible. But almost all spoke of actual organization or agitation toward that end as dangerous extremism, the issue being too sensitive to be entertained within the community. The secession question faded still further as Osh Uz- beks later began to value their status as Kyrgyzstani citizens and to recognize Karimov’s Uzbekistan as repressive and impoverished, a phenomenal shift in attitude starting in the early 2000s. Even while Karimov was proceeding according to a state logic that disregarded ethnic ties outside its borders, he instigated an aggressive nationalist campaign that inverted Soviet-era vilifications of Central Asian pasts and narrated independent Uzbekistan as the glorious fulfillment of Uzbek civilization and historical destiny. After all, Uzbekistan means “land of the Uzbeks.” A key part of Karimov’s nation-building project was the rewriting of a national history free of Soviet bias but one that, nonetheless, used Soviet epistemological categories and tropes. Uzbeks were presented as an ancient civilization on par with the Silk Route trading partners—China, India, Persia, and Greece. Central Asian literary and scientific figures such as Beruni, Nava’i, and Ibn Sina were claimed as exclusively Uzbek. Streets and shops were renamed after these nationalized heroes, their statues appearing in public spaces. The central icon of the Uzbek nation-building campaign was the fourteenth-century Turkic conqueror Amir Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane. Uzbekistan witnessed much public fanfare surrounding Timur for his 660th anniversary or “jubilee” in October 1996. Timur’s imposing equestrian statue dominated a park in the center of Tashkent, displacing the visage of Karl Marx, and ten other monuments were erected throughout Uzbekistan. Timur iconography was ubiquitous, appearing on buses, billboards, and shopping bags. Posters of Timur were sold everywhere. Scores of new books on Timur and “Uzbek” history, many of them written by nonhistorians, were published, and bookstores maintained all-Timur sections (just as they offered all-Karimov sections). The jubilee itself was celebrated with high-profile concerts and new, Timur-themed plays and an opera, which were synchronized with the opening of the new Amir Timur Museum. The omnipresent slogan “O’zbekiston kelajagi buyuk davlat!” (Uzbekistan is a state with a great future) announced the resumption of the Uzbek nation’s great Timurid past, leaving little room for the republic’s non-Uzbeks, except possibly as conquered subjects. Presi- dent Karimov, by posing himself next to Timur in the public imagination, 58 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament has discreetly identified himself as Timur’s modern spiritual heir (Bohr 1998; Kangas 2002; Manz 2002). “Uzbek” history is constructed as a single thread whereby “the battles of Islam Karimov are essentially the same ones fought by Amir Temur” (March 2002, 375), and they were undertaken not only to “validate his substantive claims but so that the entire project seems pre-determined, nature, pre-destined; in a word: hegemonic” (March 2002, 374).33 The ideology projects this reconstructed past forward with the slogan “O’zbekiston kelajagi buyuk davlat!” (Uzbekistan, a state with a great future). With the Rus- sian or Soviet “interruption” inserted into its epical history, then, Uzbekistan remained the once and future great state. Osh Uzbeks received this new national history largely via Uzbekistani state-run television, which they watched more than they did Kyrgyzstani stations from Bishkek. While the Uzbekistani state promulgated this nationalism into its own citizens through a variety of media (newspapers, books, billboards, building banners, bus advertisements, speeches), it was mostly through Uz- bekistani state-run television that Osh Uzbeks received representations of what was going on in Uzbekistan (Human Rights Watch 1997). In my visits to and stays with Uzbek families throughout the years in Osh, the television was often on. I never saw them tuned to KTR, the Kyrgyzstani government-owned station from Bishkek that aired mostly Kyrgyz-language programs, unless it was showing a Russian movie or a foreign film dubbed in Russian. Other KTR programming—news throughout Kyrgyzstan, spots on Kyrgyz culture, performances of Kyrgyz music or epic poetry—did not interest Osh Uzbeks, though they could fully understand the Kyrgyz language. Most of the television that families watched was transmitted from Uzbekistan. Depending on time of day, programming came from Tashkent, Andijan, Fergana, or Naman- gan (the latter three being Uzbekistan’s major cities in the Fergana Valley). The Uzbekistani news constantly reported industrial, scientific, and cultural accomplishments throughout the republic. There were regular comparisons with prestigious industrialized nations, such as the United States, Germany, or Japan. The camera frequently focused on factories humming along and products being shipped out. One story featured a new minibus manufacturing plant in Samarqand and the dormitory for its young workers, seen in their clean rooms that even had access to hot water. When I was watching this segment in the late 1990s with my Osh host family, the Mansurovs, the mother, Oyzoda, commented wistfully, “See? They are always opening new factories over there.” Another day’s news showed a solar energy station near Namangan that was built with French partners. The reporter talked about Uzbekistan’s great heritage in astronomy, gesturing to the Timurid emperor Ulughbek’s famous observatory in Samarqand, and said that there were only two such solar energy stations in the world, the other being in France. At that, the father, Sa- Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 59 briddin Mansurov, echoed the reporter’s words: “How about that? Only two in the world, and they are in France and Uzbekistan!” The wistful tone of Oyzoda and Sabriddin bespoke their acute awareness that these sorts of things were not happening in Kyrgyzstan. Television thus mediated another aspect of Osh Uzbeks’ peculiar position between the two states. They were close enough to Uzbekistan to receive its programming but watched its representations of a glorious state and effective leader without being able to participate in the life of the nation. Of course, Uzbekistanis themselves were mostly unable to participate in the depicted post-Soviet paradise, as lived realities fell well short of state representations, but Osh Uzbeks became widely aware of that fact only in the 2000s. For Osh Uzbeks who imbibed the propaganda (that is, a majority of them in the 1990s and a shrinking but entrenched proportion of them since), their attraction to the republic only underscored their exclusion from it. Osh Uzbek families also watched local Uzbek-language stations during the first two decades of Kyrgyzstani independence: OshTV and MezonTV. Founded in 1993, the independent OshTV touted itself as Central Asia’s oldest private television station. Its staff and programming were mostly Uzbek, and it stood as one of the most influential and visible Uzbek institutions in Osh until its transfer (forcibly, by Uzbek accounts) into Kyrgyz hands after the 2010 events. In its heyday in the 1990s and 2000s, OshTV broadcast in the evenings, starting with Uzbek music videos (mostly from Uzbekistan, but some locally produced), Uzbek comedy sketches, local advertisements and announcements, and then the local news. The on-site reporting and interviews had a rough quality and covered local happenings such as city government meetings, visits by dignitaries, and cultural events. The news was read in a different language on each night: in Uzbek, Russian, or Kyrgyz. All native Central Asians in Osh can understand all three, but the alternation was a deliberate attempt to position OshTV as the station for all Osh dwellers. The nightly movie followed, which, depending on the day of week, rotated between bad American films, Hong Kong action flicks, Russian comedies and dramas, Indian Bollywood musicals, and Soviet-era Uzbek-language cinema.34 Osh’s capacity as an idiom of exchange was thus exemplified before 2010 by its television programming. The fact that local Uzbek-language broadcasts have been mostly replaced by Kyrgyz ones since 2010 exemplifies the new public invisibility of Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbek population. When they were operational pre-2010, Osh Uzbek institutions attempted to maintain a delicate position within the geopolitical nexus that defines Osh. As with the pragmatic self-restraint concerning the secession question, they were careful to avoid any appearance of Uzbek nationalism or ethnic grievance. The balancing act of expressing and advocating Osh Uzbek interests on one hand and staying in the good graces of the Kyrgyzstani authorities 60 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament through self-censorship on the other hand was evident in Osh’s only independent Uzbek-language newspaper, Mezon.35 The newspaper was thus true to its name, Mezon, which means “balance scale” in Uzbek, and, when the printer had red ink, the image of a red scale would appear on the cover page. The semi- weekly newspaper waited more than two weeks before mentioning the closing of the Uzbekistan border to bus traffic and then ran only one short article, by Osh’s preeminent Uzbek journalist at the time, O’ktambek Karimov, on the front page of the issue, under the headline “Why is the Osh-Andijan border closed to mass transit?” (fig. 10).36 The article’s restrained tone and perplexed point of view reveal both the author’s and the Osh Uzbek community’s awkward position in this affair:

Beginning on January 27 of this year, Uzbekistani administrators have stopped allowing passenger mass transportation to pass from the Uzbekistan border to Osh and from Osh to Uzbekistan. It has been two weeks since those coming from Andijan to Osh get off at the border and cross over on foot. Those going from Andijan walk on foot up to the border. Only light-load cars can move from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan and from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan. All right, what can be said about this? We did not try to answer this question in the initial days that mass transportation stopped. We were discreet [andishaga bordik], calling it a “temporary interstate misunderstanding” [davlatlararo waqtinchalik anglashilmovchilik] and saying that two friendly countries [qadrdon mamlakat] do not raise a fuss [shov-shuv ko’tarmaylik] between themselves. The days passed and became weeks. But the situation is not changing. The Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border at “Do’stlik” remains completely closed to mass transportation. While the border situation has not changed, the situation of the city and the feelings [kayfiyat] of Osh Uzbeks are changing. Uzbeks are in a panic [vahima], saying, “It looks as if we still cannot go to Uzbekistan to be with our relatives.” And so, what is going on? We have been looking for an answer to this question since yesterday. We made our way to the former director of Osh City’s central bus station. (O. Karimov 1999, 1) O’ktambek Karimov interviewed Kyrgyzstani officials who had undertaken a mad scramble to find out why the border restriction was in place. The Kyr- gyzstanis met with clueless transportation officials in Andijan (the adjacent province of Uzbekistan), who apparently had had their local and sectoral authority overridden by the powerful Ministry of Internal Affairs in Tashkent. No one could offer an explanation for the closing. Karimov captured the sense of frustration and powerlessness against Uzbekistan’s opaque hierarchies and Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 61

Figure 10. An article headlined, "Why is the Osh-Andijan border closed to mass transit?" from Mezon, 13 February 1999. sectoral fiefdoms, which are familiar to anyone who has tried to do business in that country. His account resonates with any who have dealt with (post-) Soviet bureaucracies: the repeated trips and endless waiting for officials with ambiguous and competing authority: 62 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

We heard the phrase “do not know” [bilmas ekan] often during our reporting for this article. My interviewee Shekerbek Moldobaev, the head of Osh’s central bus station, appeared before the governor of Osh Province on January 27, and as soon as he reported on the situation, [he] went to Andijan Province’s bus administration. The management of Andijan’s bus administration apparently did not know why buses were not being admitted to Osh. Not being able to find the head of the DAN [Davlat Avtomobil’ Nazorati, that is, State Automobile Inspection or the traffic police], my interviewee returned to Andijan the next day. The head of the provincial DAN came to work in the evening and received the Osh-native Sh. Moldobaev. It turned out he also did not know what this was about. An order was apparently received from the management [rahbar] in Tashkent concerning not allowing the passage of buses from and to Osh. And whomever the head of Osh’s bus station met in Andijan and Fergana, no one knew anything. Everyone’s reply was, “Tashkent knows” [Toshkent biladi]. When I left the bus station, I went to the Osh province state administration. There I met with one of the provincial leaders rahbar[ ]. The Osh province administration has apparently been occupied with the bus problem since January 27. The Republic of Uzbekistan’s Vice–Prime Minister Yusupov, who recently came and left Osh in order to sign the treaty concerning problems of the Tashkent-Andijan-Osh-Ergashtom road, also apparently saw the border situation with his own eyes. What is most interesting is that Mr. Yusupov was also apparently without news about the border being closed to buses. My interviewee appealed to the Minister of Transportation of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. The minister himself, in turn, left to see the transport minister of Uzbekistan. Neither those at the ministry nor even Mister Ahmedov, the assistant who minds the transportation of the Republic of Uzbekistan, knew why the border was closed. Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, Botirali Sidiqov, is also involved in this incident. According to our ambassador’s inquiries, the order about mass transportation to Uzbekistan was reportedly given by the Republic of Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. My interviewee says that as soon as he receives an answer from the ambassador tomorrow, he is ready to divulge its full contents. Now time will reveal this matter. (O. Karimov 1999, 1, 6)

The reporter, O’ktambek Karimov, stopped short of demanding an explanation from the Uzbekistani government, much less criticizing it, even though the thrust of his account was virtually screaming for an answer. He instead described an initial period of “patience” and “discretion” that sought to give Uzbekistan the benefit of doubt, during which the newspaper did not run coverage in order to avoid stirring up friction between the two states. As the bus closing lengthened to more than two weeks without change or explanation, Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 63

Karimov described the shift in Osh Uzbek sentiment as “panic” rather than anger. Why did Karimov not address the thoughts and fears of his readership more directly? The Osh Uzbek community clearly exerted no leverage whatsoever with Uzbekistani authorities in a crisis profoundly affecting them. The difference in power between the players in this account was evident in the mad but futile scrambling of Kyrgyzstani officials and journalist Karimov, in contrast to the stonewalling of Uzbekistani officials. Behind those who were themselves truly clueless was the evident hand of the other Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan. But Islam Karimov is not mentioned in O’ktambek Kari- mov’s piece, nor is there any speculation about the larger security or economic contexts that would motivate such a drastic move by Tashkent. In short, the article pedaled softly with regard to Uzbekistan, taking great pains to avoid antagonizing the powerful neighbor. If Tashkent was hurting Osh Uzbeks when it was supposedly their “friend,” what would it do if they were an enemy? Fear, indeed, added another layer to the admiration that some Osh Uzbeks felt with regard to Uzbekistan and President Karimov in their very complex relationship. Journalist Karimov’s article also reveals the precarious balance that the newspaper maintained—as a prominent Uzbek institution in Osh particularly and as a voice of the Osh Uzbek community with respect to both Kyrgyz- stan and Uzbekistan more generally. Mezon took pains to maintain a public standing as a Kyrgyzstani institution. Its editors told me that they were acutely aware of their community’s concerns on one hand, but, on the other, they were always wary of being accused by Kyrgyz authorities of promoting that greatest of political sins for them short of insurrection: “nationalism” (millatchilik). The article was rather peculiar forMezon in the degree of disorientation that the writer exhibited, in contrast to the poise and charisma that this seasoned journalist usually showed in print and on television. O’ktambek Karimov drew the reader into the frustration of the Kyrgyz officials. Given that Me- zon’s readership consisted of Osh Uzbeks, he was discursively positioning the community as being in the same predicament as its government in this matter, suggesting that the border was an issue for all Kyrgyzstanis.37 A political platform for the Osh Uzbek patron Davron Sobirov, Mezon also affirmed its institutional identity as a “good citizen” of Kyrgyzstan in subtler ways. Its news coverage and human-interest stories were mostly confined to Osh and southern Kyrgyzstan.38 Notably absent from Mezon’s coverage was Uzbeki- stan, even those places in the Fergana Valley to which Osh was closely linked. Uzbekistani newspapers were not available in Osh, and as Uzbekistan continues its phased conversion to Latin script, it will eventually become difficult for Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan to read them.39 In short, the geographical categories of the newspaper’s columns reproduced official administrative categories: city, province, republic, near abroad, world. By contrast, the geographical concerns 64 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament of Osh Uzbeks cut across these territorial hierarchies, radiating from Osh into the Uzbekistani parts of the Fergana Valley, to Tashkent, Bishkek, Almaty, and to places like Kashgar, Urumqi, Dubai, Mecca, Moscow, or Seoul. OshTV and MezonTV covered news according to the same Kyrgyzstan-centered geographic categories, even though much of their entertainment programming (movies, music videos, stage performances, cultural shows) was sourced from Uzbekistan and outside countries. Despite the article’s lack of any truly illuminating facts and its promise at the end to furnish updates as soon as the newspaper learned anything new, Mezon never ran another article on this border closing up until the newspaper stopped regular publication in 2000 for financial reasons (and subsequently issued only sporadic and low-circulation print runs). Mezon’s posture of caution and deference to both Kyrgyzstani and Uzbekistani authorities was perhaps understandable, given its institutional position of powerlessness with respect to either republic, though it remains a bit curious in light of the general disregard for Osh Uzbeks by both states. Just how Osh Uzbeks ought to position themselves in this political configuration has indeed been the tricky tactical issue for its various community leaders. The underlying issue raised by Osh Uzbeks’ problematic relation to both post-Soviet nation-states is not merely that, as many claim, the Soviets had drawn the borders of the Central Asian republics “incorrectly.” Rather, it concerns the consequences of the Soviet nationality concept in restricting the terms of belonging to republics that were constructed as ethnic homelands and that are now inheriting the full trappings of modern nation-states. The debate about whether Osh should have been included in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic belies the deeper issue—that ethnoterritorial states had never existed in Central Asia in the first place and that its inhabitants never aspired to achieving state status—until Soviet rule had created and configured them by fiat in the 1920s and 1930s. The ancestors of modern Kyrgyz and Uzbeks (among others) lived for centuries exploiting a range of the region’s ecological zones in various trading relationships entailing complex linguistic and cultural exchange on a very different nomadic-sedentary geography that knew no homogenous, compact, bounded territories. They did not think of themselves as “Kyrgyz” or “Uzbek” or by any such kind of category, for the conceptual package of rigid essentialist notions constituting Soviet nationality—what Western scholarship would call ethnicity—was defined and reified by decades of policy implementation and daily practice of Soviet citizens. Even though Central Asians and their governments treat nationality and national states today as a given, there are moments when the apparent coherence and inevitability of these notions break down. Osh Uzbeks’ predicament of double exclusion provides such moments, because they fall between the cracks of the post-Soviet nation-state grid. Their experience is inadequately captured Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 65 by standard analytic categories of “ethnic minority” or “diaspora,” which are predicated on the concept of national cohesion and ethnic solidarity within the taken-for-granted nation-state political imaginary. In fact, the post-Soviet political order of things has produced for populations living on the Fergana Valley’s immediate borderlands a “particular kind of border subjectivity” characterized by “the simultaneity of familiarity and threat, of movement and constraint, incorporation and exclusion,” according to Madeleine Reeves (2007, 297). The everyday experience of these literally marginal inhabitants, in other words, folds in both the distinguishing logic of the nation-state (with each encounter with a border guard, for example) and the family life routines that span the border. Life at the border reminds us, then, that Central Asian subjectivities need to be seen not as straightforward productions of national place and history but as layered with possibly conflicting geographies and temporalities. The post-Soviet Osh Uzbek predicament is thus that, with regard to Uz- bekistan, they are tantalized by its alluring discourse of nation but shut out by the exigencies of state, as exemplified by the border crossing restrictions. Their status within Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, stands as a sort of perverse mirror image. They are included de jure as Kyrgyzstani citizens but excluded de facto from meaningful representation and participation in the political and macroeconomic arenas of the republic. They have been caught in the contradictory and conflated logic of nation-state familiar to people in other parts of the postcolonial world. The post-Soviet border thus delineates for Osh Uzbeks a predicament of double exclusion: they do not fully belong to either post- Soviet republic but sit precariously at a liminal zone between.

The Problem of Nomads Seated in Power Osh Uzbeks see their problems within Kyrgyzstan as driven ultimately by deficiencies in Kyrgyz rulership—competence in statecraft is an ethnicized capacity. Even though the harshly difficult economic conditions have affected everyone in Kyrgyzstan, the country’s Kyrgyz and Uzbeks have generally understood their post-Soviet situation in different terms. Kyrgyz know that the republic that bears their ethnic name is a weak player in the Central Asia region and an even weaker player on the global scene. They acknowledge that their success as a newly independent nation-state depends heavily on their integration in international orders and on the material aid some governments and organizations give to those who learn to “speak neoliberal.” While older citizens of all ethnicities often yearn for the stability of the Soviet system, many Kyrgyz, particularly in urban areas, have advocated Kyrgyzstan’s overall course of liberalization. They believe that the market economy, political freedoms, and massive foreign aid and technical assistance resulting from posing 66 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament as a model post-Soviet republic will lead to long-term improvements. It was this posture of eager compliance that drove the Akaev administration’s initial burst of liberalizations in the early 1990s and its continued relative openness to neoliberal prescriptions for the republic’s politics, economy, and society. During those euphoric initial years after independence, Kyrgyz intellectuals sought to link the sudden change in ideology to the distant Kyrgyz past, pondering questions about the “Kyrgyz mentality” in new Kyrgyz-language newspapers, such as Kyrgyz Rukhu (Kyrgyz Spirit). Several intellectuals told me in 1993 that the Kyrgyz people’s formerly nomadic existence, which demanded constant responsiveness to the environment, formed in them an adaptable and nimble mindset that now served as a resource in the rapid shift to capitalism and democracy. The Kyrgyz would not be mired in the bad Soviet legacy because, they claimed, ideologies from sedentary civilizations never “stuck” well with them. After Islam arrived, the Kyrgyz never became devout Muslims; after the Soviets came, the Kyrgyz never became commit- ted communists. Unlike historically sedentary Central Asians such as Uzbeks and Tajiks, whose conservative mindsets allowed them to become (over time) fervent Muslims, then communists, and now bad democrats, the “Teflon mentality” (my term) of the Kyrgyz would facilitate their swift embrace of democracy, free markets, open societies, and all the other features that marked good standing in the post–cold war global order. By lionizing the plasticity of nomadic nature, these intellectuals made a virtue out of necessity in the drastic changes precipitated from outside. It was an innovative way to define terms of engagement with the post-Soviet world that endowed the Kyrgyz people with the agency, rooted in a deep national past, to choose their form of society, even if inertias in thinking and practice turned out not to be so easily changed in actuality.40 Indeed, the democratic ideals apparently did not last long with President Akaev, who began his “minimalist authoritarianism” in the mid-1990s.41 The Kyrgyzstani state asserted its legitimacy on its inherited territory through historical discourse. From the beginning of independence, school and university curricula have included coursework on the history of Kyr- gyzstan that reaches back to the Neolithic period.42 The territory, with its post-Soviet boundaries, is unproblematically projected backward in time as a meaningful geographical entity within which to talk about developments in nature, population, economy, and culture (the typical categories of any Soviet encyclopedia on a place) across thousands of years. While most of these histories claim that the Kyrgyz arrived on their present eponymous territory at the Tian Shan Mountains from the Yenisei River region in Siberia beginning in the thirteenth century, the very geographical framing of the history embeds a teleological inevitability to the current Kyrgyzstani state as the culmination of a universal ethnohistorical process.43 During the late 1990s, there was wide- Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 67 spread promotion of the Osh 3000 campaign to celebrate the supposed third millennium of the city. President Akaev issued a decree declaring 2000 to be the year of the “all-nationality celebration of the 3000th year of Osh,” because “Osh connected the peoples of all Central Asia within the orbit of the Great Silk Road.”44 Clearly, Akaev wanted to redefine the city’s long history, which was problematically too “Uzbek,” into an exemplar of multiethnic contact and long-standing coexistence. Osh Uzbeks saw the Osh 3000 campaign for the post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani administration as attempted political positioning, and it drew either yawns or chortling at its mention. The campaign widely mobilized media and academia and included official events, television programs, newspaper articles, books, “scientific-historical” conferences, merchandise insignia, and billboards.45 Similarly, a campaign during the early 2000s celebrated “twenty-two hundred years of Kyrgyz statehood” (mamleketchilik, in Kyrgyz; gosudarstvenost’, in Russian), that claimed an unbroken, if morphing, lineage of Kyrgyz states from nomadic political organization to post-Soviet nation-state. This campaign proved to be even less relevant to Kyrgyzstani citizens of any ethnicity.46 Several Osh Uzbeks said that these campaigns were a Kyrgyz attempt to identify with the ancientness of the city in order to cover up the relative newness of their rule. Among Uzbeks in Osh, there was a pervasive sense that something was systemically wrong with the almost exclusively ethnic Kyrgyz leadership of the republic. Simply put, they considered Kyrgyz to be inherently bad manag- ers.47 Osh Uzbeks, to be sure, did approve of certain policies or stated intentions of Kyrgyz politicians, such as President Akaev’s merely muted Kyrgyz nationalism or, later, President Kurmanbek Bakiev’s initial promises to rebuild local industry when he first came to power. But Uzbeks dismissed as imitative and opportunistic the rapid post-Soviet move of Kyrgyz into administration and commerce. Comments to this effect were regularly expressed to me, sotto voce, regarding various aspects of their lives under Kyrgyz domination. One mahalla rais (leader) named Mamur, for example, scoffed at the way in which privatization was being implemented in Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s. He contrasted what he described as the working, growing, state-driven economy in Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan’s stagnant economy. The Kyrgyzstani state reneged on its responsibility to oversee the economy and sold its assets to who-knows-whom (presumably, to Kyrgyz personally connected to power), so that the country’s productivity was evaporating. Mamur spoke as if economic activity outside of the state’s direct supervision did not count, describing privatized enterprises and land as having “disappeared.”48 I also asked a retired schoolteacher, Bahtiyor, what was most needed to secure a good future for Osh. He replied, “Get the factories here working again. That gives work and wealth to the city.” I asked, “But how should that process be started?” Bahtiyor motioned me to turn off my tape recorder, leaned over, and gravely intoned, 68 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

“What we need is strong leadership who does not tolerate crime or corruption, like Karimov. These days, international aid money is going into people’s pock- ets. Strong leadership is needed to get factories working again. The Qur’an says that if a people [millat] takes up trade [tijorat], they will end up badly. We do not need trade but skilled craft hunarmand[ ].”49 The mantra that Osh Uzbeks were repeating was that the republic’s economy should be based on production rather than trade and should not rely so heavily on foreign aid, of which Kyrgyzstan was receiving the greatest amount per capita among the former Soviet republics during the 1990s, aid that was being siphoned off by corrupt officials.50 This view was reinforced by pronouncements from President Karimov, who spoke and wrote in similar fashion about labor, which Osh Uzbeks internalized via Uzbekistani media: “Some young people search for ways of living involving trading in bazaars, bringing into town goods in order to sell them and using other forms of primitive market relations, instead of seeking, learning, and obtaining high professional skills” (I. Karimov 1998).51 A few of my interlocutors also condemned trade as un-Islamic, which is bit peculiar given that a great amount of trade occurs as pilgrims participate in the annual Hajj and that trade itself may have played a crucial role in the early consolidation and spread of Islam on the Arabian peninsula.52 Comments like Bahtiyor’s unspecific Qur’anic reference reveal a typical discursive convergence among older Uzbek men: Soviet understandings (here of economy) framed explicitly in terms of an Islam for which there is low actual knowledge. Islam lent moral heft to a largely Soviet worldview. Tribalism often served as an explanatory paradigm for Osh Uzbeks when they talked about corruption in the Kyrgyz-dominated government and society.53 Osh Uzbeks sometimes talked disparagingly of “tribalism” (using both the Russian term traibalizm and the Uzbek, urug’chilik) operating in the politics of Kyrgyz and Kazakh as a “lower mentality” (past ong) from an earlier historical period.54 The primitivism that Osh Uzbeks ascribed to their Kyrgyz rulers partook of Soviet ethnographic discourses that placed pastoralists such as the Kyrgyz in a primitive historical stage that Soviet policy sought to bring into modernity.55 The influence of this mentality, the claim goes, has left -Kyr gyz leaders with no stake in the commonweal but concern only with one’s own family, clan, ethnic group, or clients. Many held that the rapidity and the extent to which the government, economy, and society were criminalized were rooted in the Kyrgyz people’s “tribalistic nature.” The Kyrgyz themselves have expressed this interpretation to me. Indeed, it was the Kyrgyz who mobilized the “Tulip Revolution” of March 2005 out of moral indignation against the increasingly flagrant abuses of the Akaev government. In contrast to the self-critical reflection of some Kyrgyz, Osh Uzbeks largely deny the presence of any “tribalism” in Uzbekistani politics, with one person claiming that their sedentary history has made them forget their distant Turko-Mongol tribal Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 69 affiliations. The refusal to acknowledge the well-attested centrality of “clan” patronage in Uzbekistani politics was reflected in the so-called “khan idiom,” which idealized President Karimov as an impartial ruler who was above par- tisan interests.56 And so, Osh Uzbeks’ negative assessment of Kyrgyz political or economic management was founded on their view of Kyrgyz ethnic mentality: Kyrgyz, with their long history of pastoral nomadism, had no head for affairs of state, agriculture, industry, or trade. Inverting the Kyrgyz people’s self-representation of an adapting, plastic nature, Uzbeks saw former nomads as being ill suited to run the sedentary business of a modern republic. The chaos of independent Kyrgyzstan has resulted because nomads are seated in power, an almost oxy- moronic notion to the Osh Uzbek view of the situation. Erstwhile ecological adaptation, essentialized into nationality by Soviet rule and subsequently lion- ized by some Kyrgyz, was for Uzbeks a dubious legacy for statecraft.

Between Liberalism and “Lenin” Osh is caught not only between two state ethnonationalisms but also between two very different visions of economic and political development after state socialism. In this area too, the liminal position of Osh Uzbeks between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan provides them a unique view. Uzbekistan has barely begun substantive reform since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. What was essentially the same Communist Party leadership in Uzbekistan that reluctantly accepted the dissolution of the Soviet Union was in the 1990s presenting itself as the champion of a restored Uzbek nation. Islam Karimov, then first party secretary of Uzbekistan, was glaringly silent during the August 1991 coup in Moscow, but he quickly switched to a nationalist posture when it became clear that the end of the union was inevitable (Kangas 2002).57 Post- Soviet Uzbekistan has seen no true opposition parties, no independent media (there is still de facto state censorship), severely restricted civil and religious freedoms, stifled market development, and, until the mid-2000s, unconvert- ible currency.58 The country’s appreciable income from cotton, oil, and gas, extracted by mandate from producers at below world market prices and sold externally, goes directly to the state’s budget, funding its propaganda, pag- eants, and police. Poverty is severe and widespread, particularly in rural areas.59 Because of such policies, Uzbekistan is headed toward both long-term economic underdevelopment and the radicalization of political dissent increasingly channeled toward violent Islamist forms, because no other outlet remains viable.60 The 2005 Andijan events, Karimov’s violent response to his most feared scenario (the convergence of popular discontent and Islamic piety) pushed his rule even more decisively in this direction.61 Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, has steered decisively toward political and economic liberalization in the region and has maintained the most in- 70 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament dependent press and viable opposition parties, prompting enchanted outside observers initially to call it Central Asia’s “island of democracy.” Askar Akaev, a former physicist and president of the Kirgiz Academy of Sciences, became in 1991 the only Central Asian president who was not a former Communist Party leader. Overall, post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan has indeed maintained the most independent press and rigorous opposition parties of the region. Those developments had begun to erode by the late 1990s, however, with some opposition newspapers silenced and rival figures politically neutralized.62 Kyrgyzstan became the first former Soviet republic to curb hyperinflation and the first -Cen tral Asian republic to leave the ruble zone, launching its convertible currency, the som, in 1993, which remained quite stable relative to neighboring currencies because of massive foreign aid.63 In 1998, it was the first Soviet successor state to join the World Trade Organization, which led to further economic reforms, such as abolishing the Soviet price structure that, for example, charged foreigners higher domestic airfare than citizens. Political conditions in the “island of democracy” became increasingly problematic after the mid-1990s until the blatantly rigged parliamentary elections of 2005, which led to the Tulip Revolution in March of that year.64 However, President Bakiev, during his rule in 2005–2010, became a great disappointment to most Kyrgyzstanis, as he did not deliver on the economic development, constitutional reforms, and eradication of corruption that he had promised. These two varieties of postsocialism were encapsulated in an aphorism offered by a farmer named Zarif:

In Uzbekistan, the state is rich, the people poor. In Kyrgyzstan, it’s the other way around. In Kyrgyzstan, they’ve done away with Lenin in practice but kept his statues. In Uzbekistan, it’s the other way around.

Zarif spoke this self-coined saying with a grin and a twinkle in his eye when I visited his village workshop in 1999 at the former Lenin Kolkhoz just north of Osh.65 The farm having been decollectivized, he supplemented his main work as a pesticide specialist by privately growing tobacco. He talked about the new economic opportunities he had in Kyrgyzstan that his friends across the border did not. It was now possible for some to get richer on his farm by individual initiatives such as his, but the infrastructure of his village was in hopeless disrepair. On the other hand, life was very difficult for farmers in Uzbekistan, who had been officially decollectivized into agricultural “associations” (shirkat) but continued to work basically as collective farms fulfilling state quotas for cotton (Ilkhamov 1998; Thurman 1999).66 But Uzbekistan’s roads and other public works were being relatively well maintained during that period, the differential road conditions being palpable to anyone driv- Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 71

Figure 11. Lenin statue in the square in front of the Osh provincial government complex. ing between Osh and Uzbekistan’s Andijan province. Zarif’s aphorism sar- donically captured the economic and political trade-offs these two states have made in response to the crises and opportunities created by independence.

Lenin in Bronze and in Practice As Zarif’s aphorism also noted, Kyrgyzstan’s liberal course, troubled as it may have been, contrasted with the relatively persistent presence of Soviet iconography in its cities during the first two decades of independence. For example, the Osh provincial administration complex is a very Soviet-style monumental space, with a broad parade boulevard, giant flagstaffs, and a towering Lenin statue overlooking the river below (fig. 11). The broad street running in front was actually renamed Lenin Street after independence. The majority of statues of Soviet-era heroes stood well into the first decade of independence in the public squares of Kyrgyzstan, including in Osh and the capital, Bishkek. The spacious Lenin Square at the very center of Bishkek, although renamed Ala-Too Square in 1991, kept its imposing three-story statue of Lenin until 2003, the statue having survived parliamentary discussion in the early 1990s to take it down because it was seen as a valuable historical landmark. Giant Lenin was not destroyed, as countless such statues were elsewhere after 1989, but moved nearby to stand behind the State Historical Museum (the former Lenin Museum) and replaced in 1999 with a statue called Erkindik (Freedom).67 Ala-Too Square, incidentally, continues its Soviet-designed function as the site for mass political and cultural activity, mostly staged by the state, such as national holiday celebrations, but also some that citizens orga- 72 Border and Post-Soviet Predicament nized, such as the bloodless March 2005 overthrow of President Akaev. In Osh, a smaller statue of Lenin in front of the former GUM (state department store) was finally replaced in 1998 with a mounted figure of the illustrious late- nineteenth-century female Kyrgyz leader, Kurmanjan Datka. Urban public space thus lagged behind state ideology in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, which may strike some observers as a bit odd for this part of the world. Monumental statues of political figures in pre-1989 Eastern Europe played a role in stabilizing the spatial-temporal orders particular to state socialisms, as Katherine Verdery (1999) has remarked. The ceremonial dismantling of those statues that often accompanied the revolutions not only removed their presence from the physical and political landscape but also debunked their once allegedly sacred status, such as when Lenin’s immense figure with up- lifted hand was hauled away inGood Bye, Lenin!, the politically comic film set in the former East Germany (Becker et al. 2003). Independent Uzbekistan quickly and thoroughly pushed ahead with post-Soviet nationalist ideology and replaced its Soviet public iconography with imagery referring to a glo- rified Uzbek past (Liu 1997). But as Zarif noted in his aphorism, there was a twist: the redirection of forms and symbols covered for a de facto reten- tion of former practices, a sort of shell game. Western analysts have criticized Uzbekistan’s lack of true opposition parties, civil and religious freedoms, independent media, free markets, and convertible currency—Zarif’s “Lenin in practice.” Zarif’s assessment was not only negative, however. “Lenin in practice,” after all, also meant political order and state provision of societal needs. It was precisely the double-edged nature of these alternatives that gave Zarif’s aphorism its bite. But the Kyrgyzstani leadership of the 1990s did not feel the urgency to deploy Kyrgyz nationalist symbols in public spaces. Why was Kyrgyzstan’s semiotic landscape configured differently from the rest of the postsocialist sphere, with its apparent insouciant de-Leninization of public space even while economy and governance were “de-Leninized”? While several factors (e.g., the need to avoid antagonizing the important Russian minority, Kyr- gyzstan’s weak geopolitical position that perhaps dampened strident nationalism, a lack of funds, and so forth), did play a role in this lackadaisical attitude toward removing Lenin from public spaces, public iconography in general seemed to pack less force for the Kyrgyz in sustaining political order. It may be that Lenin’s statues never meant much to the Kyrgyz during the Soviet period and that there was thus little compelling need to get rid of them after Lenin was “abolished in practice.” There was something about the political imaginaries of Kyrgyz that did not obsess about monumental symbols in their initial push toward fundamental reform. The Soviet architectonic language perhaps remained relatively “foreign” to a postnomadic sensibility that perhaps prefers to invest power in other kinds of representations surrounding, Border and Post-Soviet Predicament 73 for example, persons via narrative (e.g., Manas or Kurmanjan Datka) or natural landscapes (Ala-Too mountains, Issyk Kul lake, springs, the vast “natural beauty” or “ecology” of Kyrgyzstan in the abstract, and so forth), although the new Kyrgyz nationalism of the 2010s appears to seek expression in typical So- viet vehicles, such as the moves in 2011 to erect a Manas monument in central Bishkek, to rename Bishkek as “Manas,” and to make “Manasology” a subject of study in universities. Be that as it may, Zarif captured in his pithy aphorism the contrast that Osh Uzbeks were observing from their perch at the nexus of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. They saw contrast in the principles of postsocialist governance (empower the state or empower the people) and in the public semiotics of state power (obsessive concern or relative insouciance about control of ideology). The postures of the two states toward their respective citizenries were being played out in city spaces and keenly watched by Osh Uzbeks, whether by firsthand experience or by mediated (and therefore controlled) experience via Uz- bekistani television. These juxtaposed views of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as polar opposites capture a particular configuration of thought and sentiment among Osh Uzbeks concerning their initial post-Soviet moment. It is a contrast, however, that may lose its relevance after the 2010 trauma that appears to have left them with no real place of belonging. Osh Uzbeks are thus continually positioning themselves variously with respect to the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, because the terms of their belonging to either are problematic and unstable. This chapter has captured this political and geographical dilemma by showing how Osh Uzbeks think about their predicament of double exclusion with the border. But when it comes to other sets of vexing issues, Osh Uzbeks consider their city through different spatial idioms. When they deal with the state that rules over them, whether the Soviet state or, later, the Kyrgyzstani state, the cityscape itself becomes a concrete idiom of a troubled political relation. Yet Osh’s cityscape also tells the story of how Central Asians became modern citizens under Soviet urban administration. Divided City and 3 Relating to the State

Osh appears to tell a tale of two cities. It is often seen as a city divided into two distinct halves: an ancient Central Asian core (mahalla neighborhoods, hand-built houses, narrow streets, bazaars) and a modern Soviet city (boulevards, shops, government buildings, institutions, parks, Lenin statues). Indeed, a walk through the city reveals the decisive shift in architecture, street life, and sensorial qualities as one moves between the “old” city and the “new” city. Osh residents of every ethnicity, whether living in mahalla houses or apartments, talk about the mahalla as a special kind of place, one that is physically, socially, culturally distinct from the rest of the city. They also treat mahallas differently than the rest of the city in everyday practice: as home, where a resident has a special set of obligations within the mahalla, or as an alien, possibly threatening place, one that many non-Uzbek outsiders avoid. Thought, talk, and action are thus predicated on Osh being divided in this manner. The division might appear to simply reflect the city’s duality: a basically conservative society with a modern veneer or (from another point of view) a mostly Soviet society with faint vestiges of tradition. The narrative of the dual city is in that sense the tale of what Central Asia became under Soviet rule, a way to schematize the

74 Divided City and Relating to the State 75

Soviet–Central Asian encounter using the city as a kind of metaphor in concrete. Using the cityscape to think about Osh’s Soviet experience may yield insight, but we need to be careful. There is a need to question the direct correspondence between people, culture, and place that many readily assume. We must be wary of claims that sociocultural characteristics and mentalities map onto urban districts and that “traditional” and “modern” form oppositional categories of analysis.1 The problem here is not merely that Osh’s population is in part spatially mixed within the city (with some Uzbeks living in apartments and some non-Uzbeks, in mahallas). The issue is more fundamental, because if we take as natural Osh’s bifurcation into traditional city and modern city, we perpetuate the concealment of the processes that maintain that split. One objective of this chapter is to uncover those political and social processes that have to do with how the Soviet and Kyrgyzstani states administered their urban populations and how the Uzbek communities have responded. Because Osh’s duality has made its way into the everyday thinking and activity of its inhabitants, we identify this phenomenon as an idiom, a configuration of ideas and practices organized around a theme. Osh as a divided city becomes an idiom through which the state and citizen encounter each other. It frames or helps set the terms of their mutual relation. From the side of the state, cities were central to the strategic goals of the Bolshevik Revolution, and leaders saw them as “epitomes of progress” and “bulwarks for the existing order” (Kotkin 1995, 18).2 Particularly in a region like Central Asia, the Soviet state invested great resources to develop the cities of what had been a mainly agrarian and nomadic-pastoralist region, thus enabling its integration into the Soviet Union’s urban-centered economic networks, hierarchies of administration, and sociocultural production.3 Osh held great importance as the key urban anchor and administrative capital in southern Kirgizia, and the rapid twentieth-century development of its infrastructure and institutions stand as materializations of a Soviet vision of progress. State urban planning resulted in the encirclement or replacement of mahallas as part of the effort to develop industry, cultivate a labor force, and make the population more visible to the state’s administrative apparatus. Colonial cities were generally divided cities. The division itself was a technique of rule, an effective way of both organizing administration and display- ing power. Colonial elites lived in and administered their own districts, either commandeered from the former rulers or built anew.4 The social separation and power differential between the governing and governed were built mani- festly into the urban fabric. When the Russian Empire expanded into Central Asia in the late nineteenth century, it built its own administrative centers in or adjacent to the existing cities, just as the French were erecting their villes 76 Divided City and Relating to the State nouvelles by the Arab medinas of North Africa.5 The division of Osh into an indigenous city and a Russian city is attested to in the imperial period by foreign travelers, one of whom described the main street of the New City in 1892 as lined with “houses of the officers, barracks of Russian soldiers, a prison, and other public venues—post office, telegraph, various civilian and military institutions. Here also were a few shops, located on one side under poplar trees.”6 As late as the interwar period, recalled a seventy-year-old mahalla resident, “There was a single stone road—the road has since gone. It was with this stone road that we went to the New City [yangi shahar].” The solitary path that spanned the distance from one “city” to another emphasized the separation between Osh’s mahallas and the early Soviet districts, rather than their connectedness. It evoked an alienated urban geography that bespoke the intru- sive, inorganic presence of colonizer among natives. Osh Uzbeks, in turn, have used the idiom of the divided city to articulate for themselves a position of cultural and moral distinctness (superiority) under Soviet or Kyrgyzstani administration, as part of the way that they cope with what they see as unjust rule. Life in the dual city captured Osh Uzbek ambivalence toward their governments: it meant both desirable societal progress and destructive encroachment on an Uzbek way of life. In the end, Soviet administration resulted in more than just constructing municipal infrastructure, increasing economic capacities, or consolidating political control; it resulted in the actual making of the modern Central Asian person. New subjectivities were being produced along with the cityscape, and these new ways of being Central Asian reflected a Soviet form of modernity that also solidified the strong, coherent sense of tradition that fieldwork in Osh reveals. This chapter reveals the process by which Osh’s Uzbek population became more modern in a Soviet way as the city was being repeatedly transformed in the twentieth century. Osh’s built environment changed under Soviet rule, and new life options were available to Central Asians as a result of the city’s rapid industrial growth—a whole span of careers, roles, leisure, skills, knowledge, and lifestyles never imagined before. Soviet urban culture came to be progressively woven into personal histories and aspirations, and the social reality of the “two cities” and their mutual relation was being produced, deliberately or otherwise. These changes would constitute good topics for any historian, but the account here does not deliver a typical history of a colonial city, because it offers neither a detailed analysis of urban policy nor a single chronology.7 Rather, I foreground aspects of the city’s past that resonate powerfully with its Uzbek inhabitants today. The connections between accounts of the Soviet era, oral and written, and those from the independence period stand out, because my interlocutors were themselves making these associations between past and present. There are spatial and thematic connections between these texts and my fieldwork on post-Soviet situations, and thus the historical narrative can Divided City and Relating to the State 77 suddenly give way to ethnographic vignette, or vice versa. These moments are not digressive but instead suggestive of how past practice partially constitutes a complex present. And so we now continue traversing Osh, both spatially and temporally, across its Soviet-era development and recent post-Soviet trends, interweaving histories and geographies within lives, and revealing diachronic sites of encounter between citizen and state.

Soviet Administration as Seen from the Street Osh’s “Soviet sector” straddles the banks of the Ak-Buura River, the city’s central axis, and is defined by the main thoroughfares that run parallel to the river. In walking southward from the main bazaar entrance through an underpass beneath Navoi Street, one would emerge at the entrance to Navoi Park, a pleasant recreational area where Osh residents of every age, gender, and ethnicity could be found.8 The park is a geographical mirror image of the bazaar, because both are long, narrow, and run along the Ak-Buura. Navoi Park is also a figurative mirror image of the bazaar with regard to its atmosphere: its pace is leisurely and relaxed, and its tree-shaded lanes offer ref- uge from the incessant heat and sunlight of the dry Central Asian summer. Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Russian nuclear families, for whom there exist few public venues in Central Asia to spend time as units, stroll together in the park.9 Children buy ice cream or line up for creaky Soviet-era amusement park rides that run seasonally. Old Uzbek men in traditional garb sit in front of a choi- hona (teahouse) talking or playing chess on the park benches. Young couples dressed fashionably walk hand in hand. Small groups of friends—almost always single sex and ethnicity—laugh and stride in lockstep, the women often linked by hooked arms. A crowd of men presses around a circle to witness a wrestling match. Turning westward, one starts up a wide set of stone stairs toward a public plaza overlooking the park, as the land quickly rises from the riverbanks. At the plaza, one is confronted with a life-size mockup of a Yak-40 airplane, the tiny stalwart of the Soviet Aeroflot fleet, which houses a video -sa lon where teenagers meet and flirt. Part of the plaza space became a restaurant during the 1990s, and around the plaza are buildings with the prim, official Soviet architecture, such as Osh State University, the Uzbek Drama Theater, the central telephone station, and, farther down, the grand plaza of provincial administration buildings, still complete with giant Lenin statue and state parade grounds. Most buildings in Osh are under five or six stories tall, since it lies in an earthquake zone. These buildings housed the key institutions of Soviet rule and life (fig. 12). Osh, the second-largest city in Soviet Kyrgyzstan and today’s successor state, has been a provincial capital and economic anchor of the republic’s south. The agenda of Soviet rule generally focused on bringing a progressive socialist civilization to what was seen by Russians as a backward, tradition-bound 78 Divided City and Relating to the State

Figure 12. Panorama of Osh’s “New City.” Photograph, taken from Solomon Mountain, by the author, 1994. population. Not only was the Soviet city to provide the infrastructure for the material conditions of modern life, it was also to “raise” the cultural and intellectual level of the populace. The appearance and functions of this urban sector reveal even today how the Soviet state sought to transform and administer Central Asian society. Cars and buses pass by provincial and city administration buildings, performance centers, the city hospital, newspaper offices, post office, wedding registry, schools, the university, archaeological museums, the public library, the GUM (state department store), the Dom Byta (a building housing things like a barbershop, laundry, and so forth), movie theater, restaurants, small shops, hotels, apartment buildings, public parks, swimming pool, stadium, and the Lenin statuary. Each institution represents a piece of what was an elaborately theorized and centrally planned urban design whose goal was to regulate and channel the everyday lives of the Soviet citizenry. The state specified where people were to live, work, be educated, shop, obtain services, deal with government agencies, and even where they were to have fun, all toward the goal of molding the Soviet person (progressive, hard-working, selfless, and healthy) as much as for efficiency.10 The keystone of the Soviet state’s agenda for governing a city like Osh was, however, the development of industry. Industry figured centrally in the state’s overall planning for the Soviet Union, not only to fulfill goals for material, technological, and military advancement but also to demonstrate to the world that Soviet socialism was the superior system, particularly in its ability Divided City and Relating to the State 79 to improve “backward” regions such as Central Asia. This grand scheme had a profound impact on life in the city. Along the Ak-Buura River, away from the urban center, lie the industrial zones that house Osh’s Textile Plant, Silk Plant, Construction Materials Plant, bus servicing depots, and production facilities for milk, meat, and vodka (which some residents saw as a deliberate Russian affront to their Islamic sensibilities). It was Osh’s industry that employed most of its residents and fueled its tremendous growth in the postwar period. In- tracity mass transit, including Osh’s trolley line, and a vast regional transit network were set up to bus workers in daily. Entire agricultural villages on the outskirts of Osh were absorbed into its urban grid as new neighborhoods, their winding dirt streets made into straight paved ones and then connected by regular bus service to the central bazaar. Many Russians and Ukrainians came to Osh after World War II for skilled-labor jobs, joining both Germans who had been forcibly relocated from the western portions of the Soviet Union during the war and Koreans from the east. It was mostly Europeans who served as the directors, rectors, editors, doctors, and engineers of the city’s political, economic, cultural, and educational institutions, although some Kyrgyz were promoted to high posts as the republic’s “titular nationality” under the Soviet nationalities policy.11 Pre-revolutionary Osh had a few small-scale cottage industries: blacksmithing, gristmilling, cotton ginning, beer brewing, a small electric station built in 1913 at the New City on the Ak-Kalik arik (water channel), and another, built in 1914, in the Old City on the Ak-Buura River (Oruzbaeva 1987). During the 1920s, industrial construction in Osh mostly concerned agricultural processing, agricultural machinery repair, and the production of consumer goods.12 The push for industrial development came with Soviet power, starting specifically with the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan, which began

Table 1. Population of the city of Osh, 1880–1996

Year Population Year Population 1880 3,307 1939 33,315* 1882 7,766 1959 68,309 1883 12,976 1979 168,136 1884 13,583 1989 211,045 1885 15,000 (approx.) 1996 243,310 1926 29,538 *Osh became a provincial center at this time. Sources: For 1880–1885, Galitskii and Ploskikh (1987, 113); for 1926 and 1979–1996, Sulaimanov and Liu (1997, 3, citing the all-union censuses); and for 1939 and 1959, Statisticheskoe upravlenie Oshskoi oblasti (1963). The figures from these sources do not all agree; I have attempted to give a plausible set. 80 Divided City and Relating to the State to be implemented at the end of the 1920s. Osh then witnessed an upswing in industrial construction, such as the establishment of a cotton-ginning factory, a brick-lime factory, a meat plant, and a bread plant. The electrical system was nationalized, and it primarily served the Silk-Spinning Factory after it was built in 1928. The Vodka Factory—that direct affront to Islamic sensibilities—was built in 1941 between the main bazaar and a mahalla, and the major Osh Silk Plant in the Iugovostok district opened in 1942, having incorporated the earlier thread-spinning factory in order to produce a full line of silk products.13 During World War II, Osh’s productive output was directed toward the needs of the front, and the Garment Factory was built to supply soldiers’ uniforms (Oruzbaeva 1987).14 In concert with this industrial growth, Osh’s population expanded rapidly, a growth spurt that had actually begun soon after Russian imperial rule began (table 1). Roziman, an elderly mahalla resident in the Shahid-Tepa (Martyr Heights) area, recounted that, in the 1920s, there were no names for the smaller streets and no numbers for the houses in his mahalla. One found a house by asking. Even when postal addresses were later implemented, it was still difficult at first to locate residences. When Roziman’s house was built in 1942, the neighborhood was sparsely populated. The area was put under a succession of rural administrative divisions until it became part of the city proper in the mid- 1960s, when many people displaced due to major urban reconstruction at the city center moved in. Roziman described the changes through the eyes of a soldier writing home:

I entered army service 1950 to 1953. Soviet army service was three and a half years. In that time, [my family] used to write me letters. [The return address was,] “Kirgizstan SSR, Osh Province, Tuleyken Region, Yangi Kermon Street,” which was over there, at the Heights [tepa]. This street isn’t there anymore. Then Tuleyken Region disappeared and was added to Osh Region. Osh Region disappeared, and Kara-Suu Region took its place. So the Heights are now in Kara-Suu Region. One region. Osh was being broadened step by step. Lands passed into the city. The shifting organization of administrative regions became incorporated into the family’s practices through the addressing of letters. Yet Yangi Kermon Street lay a distance from his house, and the letters found their way home through intermediaries within the mahalla. As late as the 1950s, then, locating people was mediated by local knowledge, even while the Soviet state was seeking to increase its “legibility” of its citizens. After the war, the city administration connected Roziman’s neighborhood progressively to its municipal infrastructure, though the implementation sometimes depended on mahalla- level initiative. Roziman stated that Divided City and Relating to the State 81

the development of this mahalla after the 1950s was good, especially in the 1960s. For example, electricity was brought to our streets in the 1960s. There had been no electricity. Only at the Vodka Factory [four blocks away, on Lenin Street] was there electricity. The mahalla committee brought in the electricity. The committee brought the electricity. The man [who lived] behind us stood on a bus and [connected the electricity to our houses]. Then, we got a television. We were the second TV in the entire mahalla. There had been no electricity for the TV. . . . The electricity was so low! [He laughed.] We bought the thing that boosts the electricity from the store. Then in 1964, it must have been, the state brought in its own electricity. . . . Gas came at the end of the 1980s. . . . And we also brought in plumbing ourselves [cold water taps on mahalla streets for shared use]. The people made the effort themselves, saving the money, and brought it in. Comparable accounts from other mahallas also tell about the coming of paved roads, straight roads, names for roads, address numbers for houses, and mass- produced housing materials. One contact humorously described mahalla houses before the prefabricated roofing sheets were introduced in the 1950s (and are used to this day). “After it rained, we each had to go up on our roofs to patch the leaks with mud, and step on it,” he said as he demonstrated with his feet. “We’d wave over to our neighbors doing the same: ‘Eh, assalomu aleykum, yahshimisiz?’” I had the peculiar image of the entire mahalla on their rooftops in muddy bare feet, shuffling and waving to each other, like the roof- top dance of the chimney sweeps in the children’s film Mary Poppins. Postwar Osh was a period of rapid industrial development in southern Kirgizia (the common name for the Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic), and further Five-Year Plans led to more factories, including the Pump Factory, built in 1959 near the main bazaar.15 But the crown jewel of Osh’s late Soviet economy was the Textile Plant. The city’s single largest employer, the plant consisted of a sprawling complex located at the city’s north end (near the Stone Monument). Formally named the Cotton Plant (Khlopno-Bumazhnyi Kombinat), it is col- loquially known as Tekstil’nyi Kombinat or by its initials, pronounced “Khe- BeKa.”16 Construction began in 1961, and, in 1967, it started producing cotton cloth, sheets, wadding, and other fabric materials.17 The latter year was also when the centuries-old Uzbek residential neighborhoods at Osh’s urban core began to undergo massive demolition, making way for multistory apartment blocks to house the new labor force. The full textile complex was completed in 1975, and, by 1986, it had grown to comprise fifty-three main and ancillary workshops. As with any Soviet industrial endeavor of this scale, it ran as a virtual mini-city within the city (a so-called gorodok), including its own club, library, classrooms for its evening technical school for light industry, Museum of Labor Glory, housing stock, preschool kindergarten, and Pioneer 82 Divided City and Relating to the State camp. More than eleven thousand employees working around the clock in three shifts were directly involved in production at its height, including thir- teen hundred Communist “shock laborers” (Oruzbaeva 1987). The city’s only trolleybus line started in 1976, running from the Textile Plant and, on the east side of the city, down to the Iugovostok district, thus also servicing the Silk Plant and all of the apartments and mahallas along the way. The fabric that the Textile Plant produced was the pride of the city, once winning an international prize in Mexico, according to a former bus driver who shuttled workers daily to the plant from throughout the Fergana Valley, at distances of up to sixty kilometers.18 By 1985, Osh had become the textile center of the republic, with the Textile Plant, Silk Plant, and Garment Factory forming the industrial triumvirate that were at the forefront of the city’s total of twenty-four enterprises. Goods produced in Osh were sent to every republic of the Soviet Union and to fifteen foreign countries (Oruzbaeva 1987).19 And so it is understandable that the post-Soviet collapse of the Textile Plant ultimately played a central role in how Osh Uzbeks thought about the state and what it should be doing in the economy after independence. The heady industrial growth of the 1970s also brought key institutions and services into the New City.20 The Osh Kirgiz Drama Theater, the city’s largest indoor performance space, was built in 1972 in a Soviet modernist style embellished with Kyrgyz decorative motifs. Established to promote Kyrgyz as the titular culture (at the crucial time when Kyrgyz had begun to establish themselves in greater numbers in Osh) and socialist progressivism via links to Moscow artistic institutions, its first staged performance was the play, Voskhod Solntsa (Sunrise), by the Kyrgyz writer A. Tokombaev, later followed by productions of works by Aitmatov, Shakespeare, Gogol, and Soviet playwrights, in either Russian or Kyrgyz (Oruzbaeva 1987). The theater still operates today, but its calendar is less active and tends to be filled with popular Kyrgyz spectacles, like pop singers, folk groups, comedy, regional school competitions, and an occasional recitation of the heroic Manas epic, rather than a Russian-language repertoire. Uzbek culture, as it were, received its own smaller theater in 1979, the S. M. Kirov Osh Uzbek Music-Drama Theater. Its Soviet-era repertoire included Uzbek shows and Uzbek translations of Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tajik, Kazakh, and pre-revolutionary Russian plays (Oruzbaeva 1987). This theater, renamed for the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Ba- bur, presented Uzbek pop culture and community events, at least until the 2010 events.21 During the 1990s and 2000s, Kyrgyz liked to point to the Uzbek theater as evidence that Uzbeks had received cultural rights in Osh—on the Soviet cultural model, having a major institution dedicated to one’s culture confers the state’s benign recognition of one’s nationality. To an extent, Osh’s two theaters were distinguished during the Soviet era not only by being Kyr- gyz or Uzbek but also according to whether they staged works of “universal” Divided City and Relating to the State 83 merit (according to the Soviet artistic pantheon) or those of narrower, Central Asian interest. Like the mahalla of the Old City, the Uzbek theater was more firmly marked by its particular culture, while the Kyrgyz theater was intended to transcend its culture, like the new Soviet city in which it sits. Osh’s urban landscape itself confirms that, consistent with Soviet nationality policies in general, the titular nationality received the prime state focus and resources for the people’s transformation into modern Soviet persons.

Making the City Legible All of this industrial and institutional development came at a cost to the residents of the city’s mahallas. As early as the 1940s, after Osh became a provincial capital in 1939, mahallas at the city center began to be demolished to make room for the main boulevards and buildings of the New City (table 2).22 Osh also expanded as surrounding farming villages were absorbed into the urban fabric. An insightful case illustrating the impact of these citywide changes on mahalla life comes from a contact named Bahtiyor, the physical education schoolteacher whose mahalla on Osh’s western highlands had started as a kolkhoz (collective farm) village, Yoq Qoboq, in the 1930s. He described the process by which his mahalla was progressively integrated into the city and how its streets and house plots were reconfigured to receive residents driven out of neighborhoods overtaken and replaced by the Pump Factory, Hotel Alai, and Osh Pedagogical Institute dormitories (all on what is now Navoi Street).23 Formerly winding streets became a grid of rectilinear streets, what Bahtiyor called a “chessboard system,” imprinting a modern rationality onto the mahalla that was formerly illegible to the state. According to Bahtiyor,

In the forties, they executed a new plan. Before the streets were like the way they were in the former period . . . whatever they were in the Nikolai period [i.e., the period of imperial Russian rule], that’s the way it was: old streets, old walls, old houses. In the forties, they executed a new plan, and new streets appeared. . . . There’s a street [pointing out the window to Shkol’naia Street]. It’s straight, came out in the ’forties. And Ferganskii Street came out in the forties. Kalinin Street [the major thoroughfare at the edge of this mahalla] came out in the forties. They executed the new plan, and the straight streets appeared. A chessboard system. On the chessboard system, they carved out individual plots out of twenty-five sotok.24 Bahtiyor continued:

Then, the kolkhozes turned into sovkhozes [state farms]. . . . If the kolkhoz could not operate by itself, it became a sovkhoz. After the kolkhoz turned into a sovkhoz, the kolkhozniks became workers [i.e., they were no longer required 84 Divided City and Relating to the State

to be farmers to live there]. Then, the city expanded, and they gave lands to the people of the city from this place. . . . Before, this was a village. . . . Then, the state, the government, that is, the Central Committee, came out with a decision: each person [probably head of household] was given four sotok of land. . . . This was around 1960. . . . Then, our land of twenty-five sotok was divided, divided to people into four-sotok plots. OK, you get four sotok, I get four sotok, my younger brother gets four sotok, and to my father, my mother, four sotok remained. And over there, they made a store [across from Bahtiyor’s house; the store is now closed and boarded up]. . . . We were a village before the 1960s. Then, we became [a part of] the city. . . . And so, after 1960, [the village] passed into the city, and the city executed its own GenPlan [General Plan]. . . . Between Kalinin and Ferganskii Streets, small streets appeared. So they did that: divided, divided, divided the lands into four sotok for the people. They laid down their houses, and the mahalla became dense.

The impact of these new residents on Bahtiyor’s mahalla was profound. Not only were housing plots much more crowded and the streets more numerous, but the longtime residents, who had formed close social units from family ties and from working in the same farm brigades (which were organized by street), were now interspersed with strangers not involved in agriculture. But even before the arrival of those strangers, from the time the mahalla changed from being a collective farm to a state farm, members of the younger generation were beginning to enter nonfarming occupations. Bahtiyor nicely described how citywide demographic shifts could be read within his mahalla:

Oh, most of the people of the city were of professions [other than farming]. They came. . . . Slowly, slowly, such people increased in the mahalla. . . . Then, there were the bus stations [for regional transport], and many drivers appeared [in this mahalla]. . . . Then, the city enlarged, the canteens grew numerous in the city. After the canteens grew numerous, the cooks grew numerous. The older children from families were taught [these new skills], and they increased. Then, the shops increased within the city. . . . And with that, shopkeepers studied in tekhnikums [technical schools] and increased. And so that’s what happened, they increased. As for us, . . . before the fifties, we did kolkhoz work—cotton. After the fifties, after finishing the tenth class, we left for studies. We entered studies, the [Pedagogical] Institute, and became teachers. In ’57, we finished the Institute, and since ’57 we have been working. This narrative captured the process by which lives based on agriculture became interleaved with urban life centered on service, and later industrial, professions within a mahalla. To an observer unaware of their history, newer mahallas such as those of Bahtiyor and Roziman appear unquestionably a part Divided City and Relating to the State 85

Table 2. Highlights of Soviet and post-Soviet Osh

Year Event 1924 National delimitation in Central Asia; Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Province (oblast) created, subordinate to Russian Federation; in October, formation of Kirgiz Autonomous Province Osh becomes center of Osh okrug (a territorial category like “region”) 1926 Osh becomes center of Osh kanton (a territorial category) 1936 Republic receives formal title, Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic 1939 Osh becomes center of Osh province, which occupied the republic’s entire southern region around the Fergana Valley

1990 Osh Riots 1991 Kyrgyzstan declared an independent republic; Askar Akaev becomes first president; earlier in the year, Osh province is divided in two, forming Jalal-Abad province in the north, with Osh remaining in Osh province 1995 Country’s name is officially changed to the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyz Respublikasy) 1999 Osh province is again divided in two, forming Batken province in the west, as a result of militant incursions in 1998 and 1999; Osh remains in Osh province 2000 Osh declared the Kyrgyz Republic’s “Second Capital”; the “three-thousand-year anniversary” of the city is celebrated 2005 “Tulip Revolution” deposes Akaev and installs Kurmanbek Bakiev as president; Uzbekistan security forces battle protesters in Andijan, forty kilometers away, sending some refugees into Osh 2010 President Bakiev deposed; political crisis becomes ethnicized, leading to killings and destruction in Osh and Jalalabat of Osh today, given the unbroken contiguity of buildings, bus connections, and the location, merely walking distance to the city center. Their narratives provide diachronic layerings of built and social environment, revealing the progressive actions of the state and the activity of the inhabitants in producing the mahalla as it is today. The older geographies still exist in the available repertoire of the elderly, who, when they meet, use the old names in specifying where they are from. 86 Divided City and Relating to the State

These narratives of mahalla change point to the ways in which the So- viet state was reconfiguring urban place and population to make them more “legible” to the administrative apparatus.25 It took decades to progressively and fully implement this reconfiguration in Osh, and finally, individuals and households became locatable so they could be counted, controlled, conscripted, and cared for by the state.26 This process is also evident in the partitioning of the old residential neighborhoods into official mahallaskvartaly, ( or quarters, in Russian) with precise boundaries, individual number designations, governance by a mahalla committee known as the mahalkom (a Soviet-created bureaucratic instrument), and leadership held by the “elected” rais (head). The structure and activities of mahalla committees represented the penetration of the Soviet state into the social life of the urban population, with specialized subcommittees dealing with neighborhood affairs of women, veterans, families, or celebrations.27 The mahalkom was attached to a Communist Party cell, organized ideological lectures, and had to report its activities to a district executive committee, and so the Soviet-era mahalla was the state’s co-optation of a traditional form as a technique of rule (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998a). Mahalla residents in Osh, however, thought that mahalla committees did not do much of consequence, especially after independence, beyond issuing documents (spravki, in Russian) or official stamps or state food aid for the poorest families.28 Few residents knew the actual boundaries or the number of their official neighborhood quarter (just as U.S. citizens tend not to care about the boundaries or the number of their congressional district). The only time I saw a mahalla’s number within the mahalla was a sign outside a building reading “Club—Quarter #5” (in Russian) designating a venue for neighborhood recreational activities, used by older men for socializing (at least until construction elsewhere in the city made their quiet mahalla street into a busy bypass road for a time in 2011). Osh mahallas have no official names today. When I asked residents their mahalla’s name, some elderly individuals recalled the names of the farming villages that preceded the neighborhoods, before they were absorbed into the city grid during Osh’s postwar expansion. Others would reckon their neighborhood relationally to landmarks of local significance. Still others would give the name of the main neighborhood street, because “mahalla” can also mean street. This apparent ambiguity in meaning would be problematic only if one were looking at the mahalla from a bird’s-eye or map view, which would present a neighborhood as a contiguous cluster of houses and a network of streets. But from a pedestrian point of view, a neighborhood is perceived as the house fronts along a street. Given that most Uzbek houses, with their blind exterior walls, form back-to-back rows that open to different streets, an experiential definition of mahalla partitions a neighborhood differently in terms of bodily access rather than clustering. Incidentally, Osh used to be divided into several neighborhood wards (daha). One elderly Divided City and Relating to the State 87 man mentioned “the Margilan ward, the Andijan ward. These gates darboza[ ] were destroyed during the time of the [Bolshevik] Revolution. . . . Yes, Osh was divided into wards. Caravan roads from every place came into Osh,” he said, using the words for “ward” and “gates to the ward” interchangeably. This practice exists because the identity of a quarter was defined by its main gates, which were named for the roads to other cities (Andijan and Margilan being not far away in today’s Uzbekistan), attesting to Osh’s role as a city of exchange.29 This older geography has left little trace in today’s cityscape. At any rate, the significance of the mahalla for its residents has little to do with official designations of number and boundary but instead lies in concerns of a different order, as we will see. Despite these measures to render old neighborhoods more legible to the state, many mahallas remained hard to navigate for the relatively few nonresidents who would walk in them. The mahalla was not easily “imageable” to outsiders, in the sense that it was relatively difficult to form a mental map of the area (Lynch 1960). When I started living in Osh, I tried to orient myself according to the major street grid of the “Soviet city” and the streets’ post- independence names, which were the ones on the street signs. I quickly found that residents used the Soviet-era street names, when they used names at all, or the names of important Soviet institutions (all in Russian: GorBol’nitsa, Autotrans, Gostinitsa Alai, KheBeKa, Nasosnyi Zavod, Kirpichnyi Zavod, and so on), even when those buildings were no longer functioning in their former capacities. They employed local landmarks and relational orientations, that is, the perspective of an embodied walker with actual engagements rather than an aloof map reader. When I asked residents about how to get to certain places within the mahalla, they would structure the directions according to local landmarks such as the mahalla mosque or houses of people they knew that I knew. Street names (or street address numbers) were never used for orientation within the mahallas, although large streets and institutions might be—for example, “Go until you can see the Kyrgyz Drama Theater across the river.” Nonresidents do come to some mahalla houses that run services, like metal work, plumbing, or TV repair. Such home businesses are not marked by commercial signage, except perhaps hand-painted words on the front gate (e.g., “oil change,” “repairman,” or “shoe repair”), and the outward appearance of a house where such a business operates is otherwise indistinguishable from that of its neighbors. Customers know about them by word of mouth. In a city archive located in a mahalla, the clerks expressed their mystification as to why the facility was sited there. The archive’s visitors or clients, who come from all parts of the city to access their employment records and to claim pensions and other benefits, often complain about their difficulty in finding it. Paper maps of Osh are hard to find, very few residents have seen one, and, in any case, the maps leave out all details about mahallas, having been produced 88 Divided City and Relating to the State only for tourists.30 Most Osh residents are unaware that there are such maps, which would be utterly irrelevant for those orienting themselves using their own practical pedestrian geographies of the city.31 Mahallas do require much local knowledge to navigate and can appear opaque to outsiders, which adds to their mystique as forbidding “Uzbek territory.” They appear illegible to the state and outsiders because their configurations are produced according to local epistemologies of space via local practices of domestic space making rather than state logics of standardized and nationalized spaces. Osh’s need for more residential space reached crisis levels after the Textile Plant and other industries went into production, bringing in a massive labor force from rural areas and from outside the region (particularly skilled labor from Russia and other areas of Europe). Osh’s population nearly doubled during the 1960s, from 68,000 in 1959 to 120,000 in 1970, which necessitated drastic reconstruction of the urban core to increase the housing stock (Oru- zbaeva 1987).32 It was not sufficient to raze some old mahallas and displace the residents to newer mahallas like Bahtiyor’s, nor to build two- or three- story apartment buildings in multiethnic neighborhoods like Cheremushkaia, erected in the 1960s on the city’s west side. Much higher residential densities were required at the city’s center. Postwar urban planners envisioned a kind of apartment block community called the mikroraion (micro-district) as the best solution to the housing stock shortage throughout the Soviet Union at the time, because it provided residential space and utilities on a large, economical scale (Andrusz 1984). The micro-district was a planned pedestrian-oriented zone of multistory residential buildings integrated with a variety of essential services within a short walking distance, such as a nursery, school, medical clinic, barbershop, library, social club, and shops. Services were distributed spatially so as to minimize the time that a resident needed to spend outside the region except for work or visiting citywide cultural venues, making it a relatively self-contained and concentrated social unit in principle. The apartments were often quite crowded, with three generations of residents, given that young couples resided with parents for years until a new flat could be allocated to them. But because the micro-district was organized around the family unit, it represented a much more modest vision of Soviet social engineering compared with the dom kommuna of the 1920s, which was a dormitory-like residential building where cooking, eating, laundry, and child care was supposed to take place in common areas, when the goal had been the complete transformation of domestic life toward socialist collectivization.33 However, for the city’s Uzbeks, the micro-district apartments were quite radical enough, as the planning paradigm literally hit home. Starting in 1955, mahallas near Osh’s main bazaar at the city center were razed to create the Osh district across from the Textile Plant, and, starting in 1961, more were cleared to make way for the Zainabetdinova district. Located Divided City and Relating to the State 89 next to the main bazaar, these two micro-districts now form the most densely populated, ethnically diverse, and active parts of the city. The common spaces in these neighborhoods, such as the courtyards and alleys between buildings, are socially saturated. There the children play, women do some of their housework, such as carpet beating, and groups of people meet and chat in the warm months. At some pedestrian intersections, sellers of candy, cigarettes, and sunflower seeds sit on small, improvised tables. Music is often heard blaring into the evenings, especially when there is a Kyrgyz wedding, which takes over the courtyard in front of an apartment building with rented yurts set up, food being cooked, and sometimes even the slaughter of a horse for the feast. Even if most neighbors of the host family are not invited (and other parts of the wedding happen in a restaurant for invited guests only), these festivities have a communal aspect because they take place literally at the center of the community. While residents do not know most of their neighbors well in these apartment complexes, especially with the greater residential mobility since the 1990s compared with the Soviet era, people are quite aware of each others’ personal situations. Gossip does travel pervasively in these neighborhoods, much more so than in typical apartment buildings in the West, although not as quickly as in Osh’s mahalla neighborhoods. A vast complex of factories went up to mass produce modular housing units (the so-called “rigid-panel” [krupno-panel’nyi] technique). In 1970, the factories consolidated as the Housing Construction Plant (Domostroitel’nyi Kombinat or DoSKo), located across from the residential Osh district on the northeast road to the bazaar town of Kara-Suu.34 Apartments built with this technique are the shoddy, drab, monotonous, hot-in-summer, cold-in-winter types infamous throughout the Soviet Union and elsewhere (fig. 13). They were, however, cheap and quick to manufacture and assemble modularly (almost like Lego blocks), and they helped meet the Soviet Union’s huge demand for housing stock in the postwar decades. In Osh, the densely populated, Kyrgyz-majority residential micro-districts of Tuleyken, Anar, and Zapadnyi on the city’s western boundary were built by DoSKo in the 1970s, allowing the massive resettling of rural Kyrgyz into the city for the first time. These micro- districts, Uzbeks are quick to point out, are farther west of the city center than the Uzbek mahallas along Kalinin Street in the surrounding Kara-Suu region but are still considered part of the city. The bazaars in Zapadnyi and Anar experienced a spurt of growth in 2010–2011, in response to the burning of the main bazaar during the interethnic unrest. The 2010 events accentuated a trend already under way. Commercial activity, once concentrated in Uzbek hands at the city center, decisively shifted to diverse sites in mostly Kyrgyz hands. DoSKo itself was abandoned after independence, and, on some of its land, restaurants emerged after the mid-1990s. The location is quite suitable, 90 Divided City and Relating to the State

Figure 13. Apartment buildings and street in the Oshskii micro-district, the appearance of which differs sharply from that of the mahalla streets. Photograph by the author, 1999. because it is close to a residential zone and has an arik (water canal), which provides pleasant aqueous sounds, coolness, humidity, and the smell of fresh water, all of which makes for a more pleasant environment for eating and socializing in a hot, arid climate. Restaurant seats and tables are actually metal frame so’ris, the freestanding square platforms where Uzbeks have their meals in house courtyards. They are another example of an Uzbek “traditional” item made from Soviet mass-produced materials. The so’ris were welded to metal grating walkways across the ariks, so that one literally sits cross-legged above rushing water. These establishments have become popular night spots, where groups of young men (Kyrgyz only or Uzbek only) hang out for hours, eat, play cards, and flirt with the waitresses. Osh’s first Chinese restaurant was also opened nearby by an entrepreneur from China.35 Locating an eating or entertainment establishment at an arik is convenient, because the waterway is traditionally where one would toss trash and food leftovers and where one would wash dishes, just as would be done in Uzbek house courtyards. These restaurants form a vignette of the city’s postsocialist shifts: waters formerly used for industrial purposes are now being used for the new leisure economy. The restaurants also exemplify how social life is organized and reorganized over time around the waterway network and reveal the enduring centrality of the arik watershed in the life of a Central Asian city.36 Divided City and Relating to the State 91

The View from Solomon Mountain While many have ascended Solomon Mountain seeking fertility or heal- ing, I climbed it seeking research data, if not insight, Solomonic or otherwise. A young Uzbek acquaintance and I once surveyed Osh from its heights. “Look at all those mahallas,” he said, pointing southeastward at the single-story house neighborhoods around Kalinin Street, which starts at the foot of the mountain. “Those Uzbek mahallas are considered outside of Osh. But beyond them in the open fields lie the Kyrgyz regions Aktilek and Japalak, which are inside Osh.” Likewise, northwest of the mountain beyond the central bazaar lie some of the city’s oldest mahallas, along streets such as Kizil Askar, but the northern boundary of Osh cuts through those neighborhoods, leaving some of them outside the city administrative limits. Although during the Soviet period many of those mahallas’ residents were involved in farming on the vast Lenin Kolkhoz north of Osh, they resentfully remarked that the city limit runs along a narrow street buried deep in the mahallas. One had told me, “I live in Osh, but my neighbor across the street lives in the [Kara-Suu] region!” Yet the Kyrgyz-majority Oshskii micro-district extending northward to the Textile Plant—farther away from the city center than these out-of-Osh mahallas—is again considered to be within Osh. And so walking roughly northward from the bazaar to the Stone Monument to the apartments of the micro-district, one would pass out of and back into Osh. “What kind of map is this?” my friend exclaimed on the mountaintop; “Osh has holes in it!” and all the holes happen to be Uzbek-majority neighborhoods. As we peered across the cityscape, the Uzbek mahallas left out were indeed contiguous with and visually indistinguishable from the rest of the city, but they belong administratively to the rural Kara-Suu region that surrounds Osh. From the heights we saw Osh’s ethnically gerrymandered map, and the city’s troubled geographical accommodation of its population surge, which was driven first by Soviet postwar industry and now by post-Soviet rural poverty. It is a view of how Osh absorbed into its urban body the Soviet state’s economic agendas and the Kyrgyzstani state’s post-riot demographic balancing act. Investigating this process requires descending back to the rough ground.

City’s End At the foot of Solomon Mountain sits a major bus junction. The bus stop is located across from the Aravanskii district, where I once lived for a year with my family. The district surrounds a pretty wooded park with a running stream (with a restaurant on an island in the water), shops, flower sellers, ice cream carts, an Internet salon (after 2001), an updated Soviet-era pharmacy, and multiethnic apartment buildings (which house the city’s wedding and civil registry on the first floor). Taking the number marshrutka5 (fixed-route 92 Divided City and Relating to the State minibus) from there, we climbed upward to the western highlands of Osh’s longitudinal river valley and had a striking view of Solomon Mountain’s broad face, with the Muslim cemetery on the right. We soon turned left, away from the mountain, to enter a mahalla along Kalinin Street, the one my mountaintop companion had pointed to. Even though the street is now officially renamed Amir Temir—a decisive de-Russification of the city’s namespace, everyone still uses the Soviet name, when they use street names at all. Paved and straight, Kalinin serves as the major passage through a number of mahallas on this eastern flank of the city, and some enterprising families have converted their house fronts on the street into automobile repair shops. As my friend said, these mahallas, spatially contiguous with Aravanskii and the city’s main axes, are subject to the administration of the rural Kara-Suu region that surrounds the city. What is interesting about a ride on the number 5 bus is that, when it leaves the main bazaar (the route’s starting point), the cramped passengers are a mix of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks. As we traverse Kalinin Street, only Uzbek riders get off, and by the time the bus turns westward again onto Naukatskii Street and stops at the bazaars that sell cars and auto parts, all of the Uzbeks have gone.37 Only Kyrgyz remain as the bus continues westward past the Brick Factory, beyond which the city appears to end abruptly at a vast expanse of agricultural fields. But these broad fields do not mark the city limits of Osh. Across the fields, almost a kilometer ahead, is a sprawl of houses that forms a new settlement called Aktilek, and a few kilometers beyond that, across more fields, is the long-established Kyrgyz-majority agricultural village, Japalak. Aktilek was developed as a residential district from the surrounding state farm lands soon after the 1990 Osh riots in direct response to Kyrgyz demands for housing land. Totaling about five hundred hectares, Aktilek quickly became the largest individual-unit housing area with a predominantly Kyrgyz population, comprising mostly rural migrants from throughout southern Kyrgyzstan, especially the Nookat, Batken, and Soviet regions.38 In the early 1990s, Aktilek and Japalak were officially incorporated into the city of Osh, a move that meant the two settlements gained access to municipal services. Even by the late 1990s and early 2000s, water, electricity, and gas connections were somewhat sparse and not reliable in Aktilek, even though new houses continued to be built. One young Kyrgyz family whose wedding I had attended built a house there, and the wife was not at all pleased with the physical conditions or social isolation, preferring to spend time in her father’s established apartment neighborhood. But a Kyrgyz family wanting their own house has no choice but to locate on newly opened housing land like Aktilek. The lack of alternatives, indeed, was the spark igniting the Osh riots. Still, some appear to be making a good life there. The satellite dishes on some of the large two-story houses reveal signs Divided City and Relating to the State 93 of new Kyrgyz wealth, mirroring similarly showy houses in Uzbek mahallas that reveal new Uzbek wealth in the city, mostly from legal and illegal trading. Japalak was a rural settlement established during the 1930s as part of a state farm that grew cotton and tobacco. By the late Soviet period, it was under the Dyykan-Kyshtak (Farmer Village, in Kyrgyz) administration in the Kara- Suu region (Oruzbaeva 1987; resident interviews). The population is mostly Kyrgyz, as is true of all other rural settlements on Osh’s western flank. Japalak was incorporated into Osh around 1994 to improve its material conditions and integrate its population into the life of the city, according to its residents, although its life rhythms are still very much agricultural. It had electricity and a few paved roads, but no plumbing (water was obtained from the arik or streams), no sewage system, and no gas service in place when I visited in 1997. Japalak’s population consists mostly of lifelong residents. As in other rural settlements around Osh, many work in the city, especially with the shifting post-Soviet economy that shed agricultural labor. The modest grid consists of three or four streets on either side of the central road. A school and a few small shops mark the village center. Next to the expanse of fields on the west side stands a small Friday mosque erected in 1991. Many new houses were built during the 1990s, including a few fine brick houses with modern windows— more evidence of post-Soviet wealth. Walking through Aktilek and Japalak, without even considering the faces of the inhabitants, one can immediately recognize the fact that these are not Uzbek settlements. Street and house spaces are less tightly organized, less intensely tended, conveying a freer feel than do Uzbek neighborhoods, whether rural or urban. Rural Uzbek houses, such as in the sixteen-some villages of the former Lenin Kolkhoz, follow the organizational paradigm of urban mahallas, though with larger plots, a less closed-in feel, and more porous boundaries relative to the surroundings (e.g., lower courtyard walls with occasional open- ings to the fields). Aktilek’s plot boundaries are sparsely staked out with flimsy chicken-wire or low wooden-post fences—often with gaps—in front of houses with outward-facing windows. This scheme inverts the plan of Uzbek houses, which are bordered with high mud or brick walls or windowless inward-facing structures that define an interior courtyard. The rooms of the rural Kyrgyz house also appear to have less functional differentiation than rural Uzbek houses, which maintain stricter designation of a guest-receiving room (qab- ulkhona) and often stricter separation between generations in the household. The back walls of these Kyrgyz houses are often open to the neighbor’s plots or to the surrounding fields, as opposed to the clearly defined back walls of Uzbek houses, even in rural areas. Both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks remark how the contrast in spatial organization of their houses reflects their particular ethnic lifestyles and “mentalities.” 94 Divided City and Relating to the State

All of these residential developments were opened to help relieve the housing stock pressures that triggered the Osh riots in 1990. While the Aktilek development was under way during the 1990s, other former collective farm lands between the New Bus Station at the northern boundary of Osh and the Do’stlik crossing into Uzbekistan were being developed into new Uzbek- majority mahallas. The post-riot solution was conceived in terms of ethnically segregated housing, despite the fact that, for decades, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks had lived in mixed neighborhoods in smaller towns and rural settlements of the region, such as Aravan, Otuz-Adir, and Mady. Residents in those places claimed that neighborly relations across ethnicities have always been good, despite the period of tensions during the months following the 1990 riots. By touring the city from Solomon Mountain onward, one can observe how politically loaded the city’s borders are, because where they lie directly affects the official ethnic population counts of the city and, more to the point, the percentages of those populations. What proportion of Osh is Uzbek is not an easy question to settle. I have encountered claims that range from 89 percent down to less than 50 percent. The figures are also in a state of flux, of course; significant Kyrgyz rural migration to the city began the 1960s and has increased greatly since the 1990s. During an interview, the leader of a mahalla and his adult son were talking about the settlement patterns of Osh’s mahallas when I mentioned this demographic question in passing. The two descended into disagreement. The son was advocating a higher figure, and, becoming progressively vehement, he started to talk about the Uzbek-majority mahallas beyond the New Bus Station that were not counted as part of Osh. At this point, the mahalla leader shushed him abruptly, pointing to my tape recorder. The very mention of Osh’s city limits was too sensitive to be on record.

Exile to the Hills Osh’s micro-districts offered Soviet-style modern apartment living, access to municipal services such as sewers, plumbing, electricity, gas, and garbage collection that were unavailable (or unreliably available) in mahallas, but most Uzbek families displaced by the urban reconstruction of the 1970s wanted nothing to do with the apartment blocks. Displaced families had the choice of being assigned a new apartment or establishing mahallas from scratch in the adir, the city’s inhospitable hilly borderland, which had previously been uninhabited and untilled. Most chose the latter option, finding both the social and the spatial qualities of the apartment complex severely wanting. Recall that Osh is sited longitudinally in the valley of a river that runs south to north and in the transition zone where the Kichik-Alay mountain range in the immediate south gives way to the Fergana Valley’s fertile flatlands surrounding the northern part of the city. South from the city center, the terrain quickly becomes mountainous on either side of the Ak-Buura River—those areas are the Divided City and Relating to the State 95 adirs. Bir Adir (First Adir) and To’qqiz Adir (Ninth Adir) lie on Osh’s south- western flank, while O’n Adir (Tenth Adir) is farther away, to the city’s southeast. O’n Adir was opened for settlement in the early 1970s and quickly grew to be a large Uzbek-majority settlement, since young families had few other choices if they wanted their own mahalla house. Officially named Amir Timur Shaharchasi (Amir Timur Township), but always called by its adir name, the settlement is in a rather remote location, more than a half hour from the main bazaar. It is, of course, not considered a part of Osh, but it is woven into the social life, economy, and kinship relations of the city: adir residents work and have extensive kin networks throughout Osh. A virtual visit to O’n Adir offers a sense of its connectedness to the city. From the main bazaar, one can take the number 10 marshrutka, which, when it finally comes, is always packed to the gills with passengers carrying their bulky loads of purchases. Boys, the lowest in the social pecking order, are shooed out of seats for elders and forced to sit on strangers’ laps; young women sit on top of each other, and others half-squat, half-stand in the tight aisle under the low roof. When someone finally manages to shut the door, the marshrutka crawls through the traffic, dodging other vehicles scattered across the laneless street width, stopping for passengers who hail the marshrutka. Leaving the bazaar, the bus passes the Imom Buhori Friday Mosque and turns onto Kyrgyzstan Street, the main north-south thoroughfare running along Osh’s east side and parallel to the Ak-Buura River. Passing a stretch of shops, institutions, and low-rise apartment buildings along the wide boulevard, the van then turns eastward and up the incline of the river valley. One block from Kyrgyzstan Street and after crossing Gagarin Street (named for the famous Soviet cosmonaut), the van is already in the midst of a mahalla, as the slope of the street continues to increase. After many blocks, the van turns southward again as the ground levels off and reaches the crest of the long eastern hill that overlooks Osh in the valley below. The land is dry, and vegetation is sparse. Houses are visible ahead in the distance: this is O’n Adir, the mahallas created for those exiled to the hills in search of homes. As the marshrutka bounces forward on the uneven road, the half-squatting passengers lower their heads to avoid concussions from the van’s bare metal roof as the vehicle hits the potholes. The adir land is quite extensive, and the minibus labors forward for some time, passing at one point near the bluff edge overlooking the Ak-Buura River valley far below. There is a steep footpath connecting the adir with the multiethnic Iugovostok district lying below. Adir residents attending what was then the Kyrgyz-Uzbek University could walk directly to its building, located in Iugovostok, or catch the trolleybus line to the city center and avoid the horrendous ride on the number 10 marshrutka. The number 10 passes one of O’n Adir’s new Friday mosques, built in the early 1990s and well attended. Passengers gradually get off, and finally the marshrutka arrives at the end of 96 Divided City and Relating to the State the line, located at what passes for a town center—a dusty open area with a few shops. On my excursion on the number 10, I catch a fragment of a conversation between two women who were evidently strangers. “Adirlikmisiz?” asked one, meaning, “Are you an adirlik [adir resident]?”39 Being an adirlik has become a kind of sociogeographic identity in its own right. Why was the prospect of mahalla life on mountainous terrain, initially with no water or electricity, far from jobs, the central bazaar, and other urban services, more appealing to most Uzbeks than apartments at the city center? “Mahalla life is the only proper way to be an Uzbek” was the unanimous claim I heard in my conversations with families displaced by the construction of the 1970s. One interlocutor accused the Soviet government of hiding within its rhetoric of ameliorating living standards a real agenda to “kill Uzbek culture” in Osh, given its earlier zeal in destroying the city’s Islamic institutions. Most others said that the razing of neighborhoods showed the Soviet government’s consistent disregard for the city’s Uzbek communities, a posture that the current Kyrgyz government continues, they say, because the desirable flat lands taken from agriculture have been allocated for new Kyrgyz neighborhoods (like Aktilek). One Uzbek acquaintance of mine, however, put a very positive spin on his move. Sherali was among the charter families who established O’n Adir. His perspective was that of a pro-development industrialist; he had served successively as the general director of both the Textile Plant and the Silk Plant, whose very presence in Osh, indeed, drove the reconstruction of the city center and establishment of the adirs. Sherali described measures that he and the rest of the leadership in O’n Adir had undertaken to improve its infrastructure. He deflected the issue of fairness, asserting that as long as a community had land and water, it could live, because Uzbeks were by nature hard working (mehnatkash). Sherali’s relatives spoke of him glowingly as a hard-working, resourceful man who used his wealth and influence for the general benefit of the Osh Uzbek community and the adir as a whole and, on a personal level, offered individuals employment in his home-based businesses. When Osh Uzbeks talked positively about local leaders, they often used a similar description, one of a selfless, industrious man working for the communal good, qualities imputed by many to President Karimov of Uzbekistan. I bluntly asked Sherali in 1998 if the people whose mahallas were demolished in the 1970s were resentful of their “exile” to the adirs. He replied,

No, they were not offended, because, let me explain. This is an interesting, historical question. We Uzbeks have many children. Four sons, five daughters, or five sons, three daughters. According to our customs, let’s say I have three daughters and one son, for example. My three daughters get married. All right, they’re gone. . . . [But] I must build a house for my son, of course. . . . I have to marry him off. It’s my duty. . . . It’s [a father’s] main duty. And so, for example, Divided City and Relating to the State 97

say one man had eight sons. These eight sons lived together in this one house. When the house was destroyed, land was given to the eight sons [at the adirs]. Individually [i.e., one parcel for each son]. From that perspective, the Uzbek people won out. And so they were happy, those who had their houses destroyed. . . . The Kyrgyz are not this way. The Russians are not this way. When Russians grow up, they leave . . . and live in . . . apartments. We Uzbek people do not live in apartments. We do not live in apartments, not us! We of course build ground houses [yer uy, the traditional single-story courtyard house]. And so, at that time when the houses were destroyed, this land was very difficult. . . . There was no water. This was land that no one had walked on. For that reason, our people were hard working, and so we were satisfied. For example, if I had four children, four chets [coupons] were given to make a place. And so we were happy.

Sherali’s own hovli (courtyard) was huge, larger than even those of most of his neighbors. It was really a double-hovli house, the two large courtyards being separated by a large structure containing the kitchen and sitting rooms. Sherali had received extra land for being at the very edge of a cliff, considered an opasnaia zona (hazardous zone, in Russian). He put every bit of it to maximal use, building a greenhouse in which to grow tomatoes in the winter and a structure facing the street for a shop, and adding a billiard room before I returned in 1999 and a bath before I returned in 2011. Sherali saw that the development of the adirs was the only solution to the housing land problem in Osh. He even considered the adir development advantageous for Uzbeks, whose large extended families were able settle next to each other in separate houses at the founding of O’n Adir, a situation that is generally rare within the city. By the mid-2000s, his double courtyard had been divided in half by a brick wall with a door, giving his married son a place of his own, which was still huge by the standards of houses within Osh. If Sherali, a politically influential, pro-development industrialist, was making a virtue out of necessity, other Osh Uzbeks were not so sanguine about being forced to live on the adirs. Nonetheless, everyone is resigned to the reality of Osh’s political geography where, in words that I repeatedly heard, “The Kyrgyz get all the good flat lands around the city, while we Uzbeks have to live in the hills.” The complaint is not completely true, as new mahallas were opened in the mid-1990s on former agricultural lands near the Do’stlik border crossing into Uzbekistan. Those mahallas are, however, under rural Kara-Suu region administration and not a part of Osh. Osh’s shortage of housing land has affected not only families displaced by the great demolition but also every mahalla family; as a group, the mahalla population has faced a half-century of increasingly cramped conditions 98 Divided City and Relating to the State as sons grow up, get married, and seek to establish their own households. Because Uzbeks prefer to observe ultimogeniture, the youngest son and his nuclear family are supposed to stay with his parents until their deaths, when he inherits the house. In practice, however, starting in the postwar period, families have had to delay the move-out of sons for years after their marriage and the birth of grandchildren. An Uzbek home could house several nuclear families: brothers, their wives, and children all trying to get along, a situation comically portrayed in the Uzbek film set in Tashkent’s Old City,Kelin - lar Qo’zg’oloni (Revolt of the Daughters-in-Law) (Abzalov 1984). The film is a very Uzbek situation comedy in its view of crowded, multigenerational life in the hovli (ruled by a stern matriarch named Farmonbibi, whose name means “imperial edict”), yet it is very Soviet in its resolution—everybody getting apartments from the city government at the end. In the words of the youngest daughter-in-law, a modern Uzbek woman (and gymnast to boot), when she instigated the “revolt” against the household’s traditionalist authority, “Biz alohida yashashimiz kerak” (we need to live separately). Tashkent had also undergone urban restructuring similar to that of Osh, including the leveling of mahallas near the famous Chorsu Bazaar in the Old City in favor of apartment neighborhoods. The theme of this contrast pervades the film, which begins with aerial shots of Tashkent, first showing the mahallas of the Old City and then, upon showing the iconic Chorsu Hotel as the transition point, cutting to the modern buildings of the new city. In the end, Farmonbibi relents and applies to the city administration for separate apartments on behalf of her sons’ nuclear families. The entire family rejoices in the prospect of modern apartments and continues to respect their matriarch—a very Soviet and very Uzbek happy ending. My interlocutor Bahtiyor’s household consisted of sixteen people from three generations living on a four-sotok (four-hundred-square meter) plot. There was little room in his hovli because he had devoted much of the courtyard to grape cultivation. I asked him why the government was not giving new lands for housing during the postwar period.

Bahtiyor: Because the land ran out. Sown lands ran out, so they did not give. For example, Kyrgyzstan had to produce 210,000 tons of cotton [per annum]. They said, you will give 210,000 tons of cotton to Moscow, whether you want to or not. . . . And so, each meter of land was counted. . . .

ML: After someone’s son gets married, if he applied to . . . the Gorispolkom [City Executive Committee], if he had an application from his workplace, from his profsoiuz [work union], did they give new land?

Bahtiyor: They gave it on the adir. Starting from ’58, one writes an application to the Gorispolkom. Then, one gets a note either from the sel’soviet [village Divided City and Relating to the State 99

council] or from the Domkom [Housing Committee] saying, “There is no house,” you can’t get one now at this time. Then, one obtains a note from the place where one is working, . . . the profsoiuz’s decision. With these applica- tions, you went to the Gorispolkom, but they gave [land] from To’qqiz Adir [a hilly mahalla district], if you were working. . . .

ML: This seems to me to be a very serious problem.

Bahtiyor: Serious! The problem of land and houses was constantly a very serious problem. Now, a three-sotok, two-sotok, four-sotok house was very crowded! If you go down to today’s bazaar, do you see the people? Crowded like that!

The shortage of housing land has meant not only the crowding of hovlis but also the dispersion of extended families. For those in mahallas within Osh, married sons who relocated mostly lived outside their natal mahallas, on the adirs. One finds relatives living close together only in Osh’s oldest mahallas (pre-Soviet) or in the newest (such as the adirs, initially settled in the 1960s and 1970s). In the oldest, wealthy families had land holdings that were large enough (twenty-five sotok or more) to sustain three or four generations of successive partitioning to sons. In the newest, extended families moved and settled together on empty land. The vast majority who are in neither situation have witnessed a shift in family relations in the late twentieth century as departing sons can no longer participate as closely in the life of the extended household. Some mahalla residents moralistically claimed that “Uzbek children never abandon their parents,” even if they live some distance away. This seems to be the case for many families. For example, one of Bahtiyor’s sons built a house in 1997 near Bir Adir but came often to work in his father’s house. The pressure for daughters to aid their parents is much lower than for sons, but they do occasionally do so (coordinating with their husband’s familial obligations), especially for weddings or ziyofats (large social gatherings). Roziman’s eldest son had moved out to neighboring Andijan province, Uzbekistan, in 1989 but came to visit his parents and brothers every few weeks during the 1990s.40 Roziman’s middle son finally got an apartment in the city after crowding for years with his wife and children in Roziman’s hovli. Roziman’s youngest son remained with his father.

ML: Do you think it’s good for your sons to live near you or far?

Roziman: If the houses are many, if the land is big, it’s possible to live together. But it’s difficult for brothers to live under one roof. There’d be quarrels. The children will fight with each other. And so it’s good for everyone to live separately. 100 Divided City and Relating to the State

ML: Separately, but nearby. [Roziman makes quick assenting noise.]

ML: Did you get to choose which land you get, or did the government decide, generally?

Roziman: Generally, I don’t choose. One submits an application, then in time the government sees it. . . . They have to be selective, but they give.

ML: For example, if your son is given land in the adir, but says, “I don’t want to live there, so far from my father.”

Roziman: He cannot say that.

ML: No choice.

Roziman: No choice. Have they given land? At the adir? On a mountain? One takes it, and establishes his place. One does not say such a thing.

Tolib, his brothers, and male cousins all lived in contiguous houses, some carved quite irregularly, because of three generations of partitioning in the twentieth century. Their sons’ and grandsons’ generations, however, were beginning to move out.

Tolib: Now, 20 percent [from this street] have left for the adir. . . . For example, two of my sons left. . . . They left for the adir and are living there now. . .

ML: But in your opinion, is this good? Because your son would be living far from you.

Tolib: He can’t help out [with family affairs].

ML: Right.

Tolib: It’s like this. When it comes to helping, he comes every week and helps out. As long as one lives peacefully, that’s enough, one can live. . . . One [son] helps out, the other does not; he lives by himself [i.e., with only his nuclear family]. So what can one do? Just say, “Right. Fine. May he not get into trouble. May he not fall sick.” He lives by himself. . . . If there’s water, one can live. . . . Tend cattle, sheep, and one can live. If you’re lazy, there’s no way. One must live. People in China call us a hard-working people. . . . Hard working. If one labors . . . one can live.

The dispersal of married sons to the adirs left extended families weakened compared with earlier generations that kept sons within the mahalla.41 Tolib claimed that he accepted his son’s separate life from him, but he spoke with resignation. His old mahalla maintained a particularly close community that differed from that of other mahallas in Osh. It was evident in the active street Divided City and Relating to the State 101 life, regular ziyofats, well-attended mahalla mosque, joyous weddings, and hashar (collaborative work that neighbors engaged in), such as clearing sediment from the arik each spring. On the adirs, however, as someone once remarked, families have “lost some of their Uzbek traditions,” particularly the practice of hashar. Residents of old mahallas thus ranked themselves as more fully Uzbek in their practices and sense of communal responsibility than residents of the newer neighborhoods.42 Since independence, new lands claimed from farms no longer responsible for Moscow’s production quotas have indeed been opened for housing, in direct response to the violent demands during the Osh riots of 1990. The housing stock has been marketized, ending the state-controlled system that left the applicant with no choice of location. Since 1994, loudspeakers in the main bazaar incessantly broadcast advertisements in Russian and Kyrgyz for apartments or houses being sold. OshTV ran a nightly spot in which mahalla houses for sale were advertised (in Uzbek). It is now the market, and not government planners, that is “counting every meter of land,” in Bahtiyor’s words. But while a marketized housing stock means one no longer needs to apply to the governmental bureaucracy through one’s workplace, the shutdown of Soviet industry means that people now do not have the income to support buying a house on the market. The prospect of moving to an apartment is still an undesirable option for Uzbek families who live in the multiethnic neighborhoods in relatively small numbers. One Uzbek woman in the Zapadnyi micro-district told me that her family had moved to Osh from a smaller town for job reasons more than ten years earlier. Only apartments were available then, but she was saving money in hope of buying a house someday, probably in the adirs. Apartment life was a necessary evil for those who had no family connections to an Osh mahalla. In the long run, the desire for more housing land will mean the city’s increasing encroachment on mountainous terrain or farms. Because Osh is located at the corner of a valley and constrained by the new international border with Uzbekistan, the finitude of real estate will eventually hit home. But despite the fact that Osh’s severe land shortage of the past half-century has meant crowding, relocation, and dispersion of extended families, Uzbeks still have continued to prefer mahalla housing to other forms. This situation presents a politically sensitive challenge to the Kyrgyz administrators of the city, who are acutely aware of the problem and, no doubt, of the specter of interethnic riots repeating yet again, but they appear to have no long-term solution. The So- viet micro-district paradigm and the prefabricated, block-based construction technology used (krupnopanel’noe stroitel’stvo, Russian) are no longer in favor among Kyrgyz architects and urban planners. State planning is looking into newer technologies providing better quality but affordable mass housing, the 102 Divided City and Relating to the State demand for which will only increase. Some form of apartment development model is the only long-term solution for housing in Osh, they told me, even though the administrators are aware of the general Uzbek distaste for apartments. In 1997, when I asked a director of a current development project tact- fully (or so I thought) about how this disparity between the city’s development needs and the Uzbeks’ housing preferences should be resolved, he smiled and answered, “It will be resolved,” and my interview was abruptly ended. It was not clear at that time how the conflicting needs would be resolved. The Uzbek population of Osh was growing from high birth rates and post-independence Kyrgyz rural migration was climbing, and Uzbeks were increasingly pushing against the harsh mountains that border the city as they developed mahallas on the adirs. While in pre-Soviet nomadic-sedentary relations, as some of my Uzbek interlocutors recounted to me, the nomads descended from the mountains at the Fergana Valley to trade with the townsfolk, this situation has now been reversed: it is now the Uzbeks coming down from the mountains to do business in a city run by Kyrgyz. Be that as it may, the pressure on Osh’s housing situation has received some unexpected relief. Starting from about the mid-2000s, the number of Osh residents of every ethnicity who have left to work abroad increased so dramatically that the city’s mahallas and apartments have become noticeably less crowded than before. Osh has received a temporary reprieve from its land shortage crisis, thanks to its deepening employment crisis.

Debriefing the Divided City A virtual tour of the “divided city” takes one through the streets of the “New City,” up to the mountaintop, and to its ends, giving glimpses of the postwar demolition of mahallas, “exile” to the hilly adirs, chronic overcrowding of houses, shifting demography, and the ethnic gerrymandering of the city. Consider now how the idiom of the divided city tells a wider story about the nature of Soviet rule in Central Asia, one where the relation between state and citizen is far more complex than an opposition between modernization and traditionalism. Despite the prevalent sense of Osh’s division, “Old City” and “New City” are in fact not as disjointed as one is led to believe. During decades of Soviet administration, the two became interpenetrated at all levels, even as the lives of its Central Asian population became far more inextricably Soviet in character than either the residents themselves or Soviet authorities tended to think. Though never a Moscow, Magnitogorsk, or even Frunze (Soviet-era Bishkek) in the extent of its Soviet character, Osh was nonetheless transformed thoroughly in appearance and urban lifestyles. Mahallas appear to be relatively untouched by the state, but they are incorporated into the city administration Divided City and Relating to the State 103 via mahalla committees, street names, and postal boxes. Social and political regulation exerted through institutions was extended gradually throughout the twentieth century, initially adjacent but separate from the pre-Soviet city, then expanding, incorporating, reorganizing, displacing, and renovating the entire cityscape increasingly integrated by infrastructure, uniform street grids, mass transit, mass education, youth organizations, industrial work, public leisure venues, and Soviet urban culture. These features of the city were folded into individual life experiences through the routine walking circuits of the inhabitants as they worked, commuted, shopped, played, or socialized, and they are now taken for granted.43 The simple dualism of “Soviet city versus mahalla” reflects political-cultural categories and rhetorical posture more than grounded reality. While there is something architecturally and socially real about the mahalla–Soviet city distinction, its discursive force derives from how the dual-city paradigm works in the realm of the social imaginary. Osh is not so much a tale of two cities but a tale of a mediating cityscape, where the city serves as a site for the evolving relations between the Soviet and the Central Asian, between state and subjects, to be constantly worked out.44 The “paradox” of Soviet rule in Central Asia was that it made the population more Soviet and more distinctively Central Asian at the same time. On one hand, decades of administration resulted in the populace taking for granted all manner of Soviet institutions, material conditions, and domains of knowledge, from science, to ethnicity, to public squares, to Communist youth camps, to ballet. On the other hand, Central Asians came to think of themselves according to Soviet categories of ethnicity, called “nationality,” which consolidated and standardized sociocultural traits into a particular package that included language, history, dance, dress, cuisine, customs, mentality, and so forth. Whereas pre-Soviet Central Asia was marked more by fluid hybridity and contextual identifications, difference in Soviet society came to be reckoned according to unambiguous labels and definitive lists of typical characteristics. “Ethnic identity” made social difference clean cut, despite the fact that being a modern Central Asian meant being a new kind of hybrid that blended Soviet society with Soviet notions of ethnic tradition. This is a paradox only if we assume modernity and tradition to be oppositional qualities. And so, Uzbeks in Osh were made simultaneously more modern and more definitively ethnic because similarity and difference were both being produced by the Soviet state through its administration of the city. The image of the city divided between an aggressive modernizing state and a resisting Central Asian traditional community, one that compartmentalizes the Soviet city and mahalla, thus fails to capture the productive nature of Soviet rule and the resulting mixed nature of the people and the place. Nonetheless, Osh Uzbeks interpret their Soviet experience today by em- 104 Divided City and Relating to the State phasizing their distinctive ethnicized character, social practice, and moral orientation centered in the mahalla.45 The mahalla provides Osh Uzbeks a ready figure of thought with which to spatialize difference by locating themselves as Uzbeks in an always non-Uzbek state, whether Soviet/Russian or Kyrgyz. It represents one way they have come to terms with state power and their status of subjugation. Neighborhood and 4 Making Proper Persons

A neighborhood is more than a place to live. Inhabited places are always saturated with a wide range of human concern, whether through narrative about them or engagement in everyday acts of dwelling in them (Casey 1997). Places gather material things, experiences, thoughts, dispositions, habits, concerns, and their histories into particular local configurations that can become deeply meaningful.1 In particular, “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind,” writes Gas- ton Bachelard (1964/1994, 6). Osh’s Uzbek-majority neighborhoods have been heavily invested with the thoughts, memories, and dreams of its residents. The mahalla is central to what it means to be Uzbek in Osh. This chapter is about how Osh Uzbeks talk about the mahalla and how they make sense of their entire post-Soviet situation through their conception of it. Narratives reveal the mahalla as an idiom by which residents think about and try to live out moral community. There will be much talk about the pre- Soviet mahalla as the site of pristine Uzbek culture and how Soviet rule eroded traditional values. Residents remarked that social relations in the mahalla today lack the sense of respect for elders, concern for the communal good, propriety of behavior among women, honesty, and industriousness compared to

105 106 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons what they understand mahalla life to have been like before Soviet rule. On the other hand, the mahalla is also narrated as a bulwark against Soviet attempts to “destroy Uzbek culture” by razing mahallas and building micro-districts during the postwar urban reconstruction of Osh, as noted previously. Ma- hallas were a key site where local Soviet social projects touched ground and drastically changed the communities’ physical and social composition. It was precisely the mahalla’s value as “the only place where one could properly be Uzbek,” as one person put it to me, that led most of the displaced to choose the harsh life in new mahallas on the hilly adirs rather than take apartments. And so, the Soviet-era mahalla could paradoxically index either the loss of Uzbek traditions or their preservation. The mahalla was for Osh Uzbeks a deep cultural reservoir that was drained by Soviet efforts but still retained some of its essence. It was their Aral Sea. The mahalla is also central to the post-Soviet project of restoring this conceptual reservoir to its alleged former high-water mark through the revival of “national traditions” and Islam. It is the place where moral persons are cultivated, and it is ultimately a key to building a successful society. Osh Uzbeks are, in other words, thinking with the mahalla about critical questions concerning personhood, community, and post-Soviet futures. The mahalla operates as a figure of thought and practice—an idiom—that makes a claim about what Uzbek collective existence ought to look like. This chapter progressively discloses that idiom, examining how Osh Uzbeks treat the mahalla as a cultural reservoir and as a site for the formation of good persons. There is, however, a dominant assumption that, for Osh Uzbeks, mahalla is always primarily about ethnic territoriality. If one reduces the meaning of mahalla to be only about turf, one misses the other significances of these neighborhoods to their residents. In order to make room for unfurling the mahalla idiom, it is first necessary to dispel the assumption that ethnic territoriality has fundamental importance regardless of context.

Moving beyond Territoriality Ethnic territoriality refers to an ethnic group’s claim that a place is properly under its control, a claim they are often ready to defend, and this appears to be precisely how Osh Uzbeks see the city’s mahallas.2 The 1990 Osh riots erupted as the result of a land dispute over whether newly urbanized Kyr- gyz should settle on land that Uzbeks saw as theirs. The 2010 events quickly devolved into interethnic tit-for-tat attacks that ended up destroying mostly mahalla houses, Uzbek institutions, and Uzbek-run businesses. Both incidents involved barricades on mahalla streets and the literal tactics of defending one’s neighborhood against encroachment. The sense of territoriality will undoubtedly continue in the very long aftermath of the violence, as hundreds of Uzbeks remain displaced, their property and place in Kyrgyzstani society Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 107 lost, and perceptions of continuing unjust treatment persist. The posture of ethnic claim to land can also be activated in mundane moments of life, such as discussions about incidents of preferential treatment of Kyrgyz for new construction, the independence-era ethnic gerrymandering of Osh’s boundaries, or the Soviet-era expulsion of old mahalla residents to make way for apartment construction. However, all of these instances need to be contextualized as responses to particular pressures, rather than seen as summarizing a fundamental, context-independent Osh Uzbek posture toward neighborhood. This is because territoriality represents only one mode of relation to inhabited space. Places actually have multiple meanings and mappings. They are conceived of, talked about, and engaged through the body in different, shifting ways that are dependent on the practical activity and social context of a given moment. This is all the more true in a site as sociopolitically dense and overdetermined as the mahalla. Community life involves a broad host of meanings and ways of relating to neighborhood that are not all reducible to territoriality. The sense of mahallas being Uzbek turf is not always the result of explicit or intentional acts of claim making. Mahallas tend to be opaque and unorient- able to outsiders, and those spatial qualities contribute strongly to their being seen as unwelcoming or even dangerous. The way that mahallas are built and lived in results in the perception that they are a different kind of place, one intimately linked to the lives of its residents.3 Many mahallas have narrow, winding streets and cul-de-sacs. A pedestrian without prior experience there can get easily confused, because reference points that residents use to orient themselves in their neighborhoods may be unknown or invisible to nonresidents.4 The mahalla is not readily “imageable” to outsiders, in the parlance of urban planning theorist Kevin Lynch, in that they cannot easily form a practical schematic image of its “nodes” (point references in the cityscape) and the paths between them with which to get around.5 The sense of hostility imputed to the mahalla thus reflects not so much the territoriality of its residents but its opaqueness to outsiders. What all this means is that, despite the aroused passions, erected barricades, spilled blood, and everyday resentments, ethnic identifications with territory are not the inevitable, fundamental order of things. Instead, “whatever associations of place and culture may exist must be taken as problems for anthropological research rather than the given ground that one takes as a point of departure; cultural territorializations (like ethnic and national ones) must be understood as complex and contingent results of ongoing historical and political processes” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a, 4). Each place has its own history and politics, which need to be unpacked in order to understand why they have become invested with such fury or hope. Osh Uzbeks think with the mahalla in many ways in order to make sense of their social realities. A useful 108 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons point to begin unpacking this complex of issues is the notion of the mahalla as a cultural reservoir that guards essential Uzbek values.

Mahalla as a Cultural Reservoir When Osh Uzbeks talk about what a moral community ought to look like, they refer to mahalla not just as a place but also as a time. Put in another way, the mahalla spatializes and periodizes their imaginary of good community. Their accounts of pre-Soviet mahallas, not firsthand of course, provide a window onto how they see the more recent Soviet past and the present, which in turn reveals how they wish to face the future. When I asked older Osh Uzbeks about the history of the city, they spoke of almost mythic places imbued with a certain configuration of qualities. I spoke with Yo’lbuvi several years after our first mahalla tour. She described mahalla life before the October Revolu- tion as a time of great communal virtue, when people’s actions were widely guided by lived knowledge of the Qur’an and unwritten codes of morality.6 In those early years of the twentieth century, she indicated, clear class distinctions marked social life, with profession and wealth determining “who a family was” in the neighborhood hierarchy of respect. Yet the rich, motivated by a desire to further their own spiritual development, “protected the poor” and rendered material aid. The mahalla’s rais, or head, monitored whether residents drank, read namaz (prayed), went to mosque, or were caring for their children. So strong was the sense of public ethics that, as Yo’lbuvi specifically recalled, her grandmother avoided eating the apples growing in her neighbor’s yard. Bazaar sellers would leave their produce in their stalls at night, without fear of theft. Those caught stealing would be tied to a tree, and the mahalla residents would come out to gaze at and lecture the offender. Women caught in adultery, Yo’lbuvi said, would be put to death by being bricked into a wall. This communal order was conscientiously taught to the young. Boys and girls were educated separately in maktabs (religious schools) or by otinchas (women religious teachers), so that they could learn the Qur’an, Arabic, reading, and morals.7 Yo’lbuvi also learned proper behavior and moral principles through stories that her grandparents told in the evenings. Children’s moral upbringing actually began even earlier, with the mother’s lullaby (alla) to her infants. But now, after the end of Soviet rule, women no longer know the traditional lullaby. “Socialist literature, radio, and television” replaced story time with one’s elders. While Soviet schooling had a proper role in impart- ing modern knowledge, Yo’lbuvi pointed out, it had an ideological agenda of replacing Islamic moral training. Yo’lbuvi indicated her belief that the current post-Soviet generation of youth was facing a crisis of “hooliganism” (a catch-all Soviet category of social recidivism) because pre-Soviet methods of child rearing were lost and because the mahalla leader was no longer ensur- ing that people behaved properly. Transformed into mostly a civil function- Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 109 ary under the city administration, the nominally elected rais (or elliqboshi, literally meaning “head of fifty,” in this case, fifty households) was usually not regarded as a moral authority but merely a processor of official documents (spravki, in Russian) for school or military service. As I cultivated relationships over several years with individual elder Uzbek men from the late 1990s onward, I found clearly articulated social imaginaries of a lost moral community animating their narratives. Amid talk about tremendous physical and social change across the twentieth century, certain stable themes concerning self-sufficiency, honesty, hard work, accountability, stewardship, and deference to authority permeated the mahallas evoked in their narratives. A notable example comes from Tolib, the former collective farm worker who was seventy-four when I first spent time with him in 1997. He was the oldest man in a large extended family living in a row of contiguous houses in one of Osh’s oldest mahallas. When I asked Tolib how this land had passed into the possession of his ancestors, he began his account in an indefi- nite pre-Soviet past:

There was a powerful man. . . . This man was a total champion. Rich, broad [i.e., muscular], beautiful, . . . a man who knew everything. . . . He could find horses. And he tamed sheep, and oxen, and rabbits. . . . They evidently knew [the location of] the land that was being occupied, and said, “We can live in the [empty] places.” That’s how it came about. Not sold, not given to anyone. They only came with horses. Remember the three heroes I mentioned before? . . . The three champions had as much strength as one hundred people did. . . . If there were one hundred people, you would be able to just claim a place. . . . Strength was what worked. That’s how it was. That’s how it was. . . . One neither bought with money, nor asked [permission from] the government. One came oneself, and found a place. Afterwards the fences came, after one, two, three, four fathers [generations] had passed, they learned to lay down walls and make [individual] places . . . and [then] there were the documents—these came. That’s right. Tolib was talking about the very land we were sitting on during this conversation in his hovli (courtyard), but he was evoking a different geography. It was a place with no fences, no walls, no deeds of sale, and no government mediation. Large tracts of land lay ready to be claimed by heroic pioneer figures, as his ancestors did “seven generations ago,” he once claimed formulaically. Time was left vague in Tolib’s pre-Soviet accounts, as he mused at one point, “No, no, we don’t know the years. Who wrote that down, . . . if there was no literacy, . . . no dates, no pencils?” At one point he called the period “Nikolai times” (Niko- lai wakti), referring to Tsar Nicholas II, the last monarch of imperial Russia. Time was reckoned not by calendar but by an internally meaningful temporal frame defined by vivid qualities: when places were wild and the men strong, 110 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons good-looking, and above average. The most important quality for success was neither brains nor brawn, however, but virtue. Honesty, hard labor, and self- sufficiency were what distinguished these men of old:

The most honest of honest [people] existed. There were people who could not do anything false. There were such people! They did not ask one for money, and didn’t ask for bread. They did their own labor, found [what they needed] themselves, and were sufficient to themselves in every aspect. . . . The government did not call on us or ask of us [did not interfere]. And we did not violate the government. We are peaceful folk. Not poor, not rich. Middle. Middle. So, my father himself worked on the kolkhoz [collective farm], and my younger brother, everyone themselves worked. Why am I saying this? Everyone was, in Russian, chesnyi [honest], in Uz- bek, to’ghri [upright, honest]. . . . If one is honest, one can go on living [peacefully] under the state. . . . If you are honest, nothing will happen [to you]! That’s being honest. . . . If one is honest, one does not bother another. An honest man will never become hungry and will never be hurt. And never be shamed, never be ashamed. . . . That’s how one should live. . . . Here’s what it boils down to, no other words fit, only “honesty.” The central importance of these virtues carried over to Tolib’s accounts of Soviet-era mahallas as well. During Soviet times, amid the government documents and walls between crowded house plots that Tolib spoke of, a mahalla was where one could live successfully and with a degree of independence from the state. Fixated on virtues such as honesty and hard work, Tolib situated a concern for a nonstate moral order into the places of the mahalla. Yet Tolib was also a consummate Soviet Uzbek and was in this sense a typical Central Asian working man of his generation. Although championing the value of Uz- bek traditions and Islam, he knew rather little about them and practiced Islam in the 1990s only selectively (he attended Friday mosque and fasted during Ramadan but not much else). Uzbek culture and religion were for him essentially a matter of personal virtue—honesty and hard work—resembling the Soviet ideal for the worker.8 Tolib’s mahalla of the distant past, emphasizing the continuities of moral community regardless of the state, was basically Uz- bek in form, Soviet in content. Other narrators emphasized the traumatic discontinuities that Osh experienced under early Soviet rule, particularly regarding religion. Curiously, though, there was never any mention about the forced unveiling campaigns of women in the 1920s, known as the hujum or “attack.” The unveiling campaign reached Osh in 1927, but no one even recognized the term “hujum” when I mentioned it.9 This particular centerpiece of Soviet efforts to root out “Islamic traditionalism” and patriarchy among sedentary Central Asians was not spe- Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 111 cifically retained in Osh Uzbek collective memory, which did retain the closing of mosques and liquidation of religious elites. One older man, Odilbek, speaking to me at his bazaar stall in 1998, recounted what he understood So- viet administration had done to his city. The following narrative tells the story of progressive Soviet religious restrictions in Osh.

Odilbek: At the bazaar was a mosque, torn down in 1945, located where flour is sold now, near the bus stop [on today’s Zainabetdinova Street]. And a medressa [Islamic seminary] was there, torn down in the 1940s. There was a Uyghur chaikhona [teahouse] by the bus station [on Navoi Street]. There was another medressa there. The movie theater “Rodina” was built there. And going up the hill [on Navoi Street] is the “Kosmos” movie theater [since closed down], and there was another medressa. At the Hotel Alai was another big medressa. [Before the Revolution,] there were one hundred working medressas in Osh.10 The population of Osh was thirty thousand or forty thousand. Only Uzbeks [sic]. Nearly three hundred mahalla mosques. The medressas were closed after the Revolution [and later torn down]. The mosque and medressa at the Hotel Alai were very beautiful—we saw it ourselves. Like the medressas of Samarqand and Bukhara. This was recently [when I saw them], in the 1950s. In each of the one hundred medressas, a minimum of fifty to a hundred were studying [before the Soviets].

ML: What happened to them in the Soviet period?

Odilbek: All shot. . . . Our [mahalla] mosque was first closed down, then made into a warehouse, then divided and part of it made into a school for grades one to four. Then a small store selling cookies and sugar. Then in 1990, it became a mosque again. The money [to restore it] came from hashar [voluntary communal aid] from the mahalla, no money from outside.

ML: During the Soviet period, did people read namaz in their homes?

Odilbek: They read it secretly bekitda[ ] at home. Only the old men went to mosque. As for the youth, if you went to mosque, the Komsomol would come and ask, “Why do you go to mosque? Don’t go.” As for hayit [an Islamic feast], in 1985, ’86, during the hayit days, the buses and taxis would not run until lunch. So that men would not go to mosque or cemeteries in the morning. It was a godless time. From 1965, 1970 onward, old men could go to mosque on Friday. Permis- sion was granted for three [Friday] mosques to operate in Osh. Those were closed in the 1940s, during the war, but after Stalin, opened again. The state opened them for us because of the [Central Asian] men who had defended the motherland [during the war]. The three were: Shahid-Tepa, Yomgholi [on Ale- 112 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons

bastrova Street at the foot of Solomon Mountain], and the one on Kyrgyzstan Street [Imom Buhori]. Then, with the beginning of perestroika, mosques were permitted to be opened in all the mahallas. And Friday mosques also. Now, there are fifteen to twenty big mosques. . . . In these democratic conditions, everyone can set aside a place for their own mosque. In Kyrgyzstan today, we have democracy more or less. Our government, being a democratic state, gives permission for . . . [our own initiatives].11 At last we have good conditions. We can freely go to the mosques with our children, read namaz; we have private shops, businesses.

ML: Who are the imams today? Where did they get their training?

Odilbek: During the Soviet period, they studied at home. The imams of Shahid-Tepa Mosque, “Imam Buhoriy” Mosque, the Friday “Allah” Mosque got their training in Bukhara medressas. Five or six [of the imams practicing in Osh] went to medressa there. The rest studied by themselves at home. . . .

ML: How do ordinary people learn about Islam after independence?

Odilbek: There are domlas [teachers] teaching children in the mosques that opened in every mahalla after independence. Boys. Girls are separately educated by women at the mahalla mosques. . . . Now the children being raised in Islam know Islam very well. They start at seven, eight, nine [years of age]; most start at ten years old. So if they go to school in the morning, they go to religious school in afternoon, so they don’t sit idle in the streets. . . . All the children are interested. . . . There are none who do not study.

Others of my interlocutors also mentioned that Soviet authorities slightly relaxed religious restrictions in the city from the time of World War II, but only small numbers of old men attended this mosque. “They monitored who went in the mosque, the government. If a young man were to go in, he’d be reported to his workplace or professional union and could lose his job,” recalled one older Uzbek man. While Odilbek’s dates and figures were approximate, and some claims exaggerated, he clearly evoked a religious geography of magnificent mosques and medressas that was layered beneath today’s cityscape of bus stops, hotels, and theaters. It is notable that Osh Uzbek accounts of early Soviet anti-Islam efforts focused on what the campaigns themselves focused on: religious buildings, religious teachers, and religious texts. Absent in their collective memories and concerns was everything else about Islam in its pre-Soviet context: the thick institutional matrix that implicated “religion” into the daily socioeconomic and political-legal workings of local society, from religious endowments (waqf) and their control by Khoja (a local Sufi lineage) or sheikh dynasties, to dispute settlement by qazi (judges), to redistributions of wealth via zakat Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 113

(obligatory alms), to the role of ulema (religious scholars) and other notables in networks of patronage. Working now from a taken-for-granted institutional context established by Soviet rule, this “revival” of post-Soviet Islam is selective in what it seeks to revive.12 Rather, the meta-narrative of religious suppression and now restoration to a new post-Soviet generation is plotted against only a general moral timeline. According to some of my interlocutors, the early Soviet liquidation of former religious and economic elites and the campaigns against “backward patriarchal relations” in the mahalla that involved absorbing its authority structures into the city administrations, as well as the arresting of imams, shuttering of mosques, and propagation of So- viet ideologies in schools and the Komsomol to fashion a post-Islamic Uzbek youth, succeeded in eroding the mahalla’s social fabric.

The Formation of Personhood When Osh Uzbeks recounted an idealized pre-Soviet past or a traumatic Soviet experience, they were actually talking about the future. The mahalla’s past was the standard by which to envision a new society restored to its former potential. What enables the mahalla to accomplish this is its alleged capacity to form the right kind of persons needed to build an exemplary society. There is something about these neighborhoods that is believed to provide a context in which people are properly cultivated. The following narrative passages convey how a few eloquent Osh Uzbeks think about the connection between mahalla and making persons. One aspect has to do with the spatial characteristics of the mahalla and the kinds of social life that these characteristics make possible. The connection between spatiality and sociality, indeed, is the focus of the next chapter. Another point of the narratives below is to convey the moral tenor of Osh Uzbek imaginaries of the pre-Soviet past and therefore of the post-Soviet future. A key concept here is tarbiya, an Uzbek word from Arabic that refers to a person’s upbringing, training, and discipline and that has a moral and religious connotation. Walimat, a bus mechanic in his forties, made particularly cogent connections between the social, the moral, the environmental, and the spatial in the mahalla and the republic, plotted against the periodization of Soviet decline and post-Soviet revival. He once talked about his especially close and connected mahalla, one of Osh’s oldest, its age being evident in the narrow streets, nonrectilinear layout, and the clustering of kin. His accounts evoked a neighborhood space of constant mutual presencing and embodied authority overseeing moral community.

Before, in our mahallas, people neither moved in nor moved out. . . . For example, the gates [eshik] [of our street went this way]: Otaev Abduqayum, Otaev Abdumavlon [Walimat’s father], Otaev Abduzafar, Otaev Abduraz- 114 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons

zoq—we lived at my father’s gates.13 . . . Among us, one does not sell a house [joy]. This is considered a sin. One should not sell one’s father’s place. Let the car be sold. But a house is not sold. And in the mahalla, if a house were sold, it is understood that an outside person may not move in. They’d say, sell to your neighbor, give it to this person or that one. But the requirement was not to sell to just anyone. . . . And so, if people know each other, the mahalla lives well. There will be no thieves. In our mahalla, God willing [hudo khohlasa] there will be no thieves, no such things. There used to be no drug addicts here. Then they appeared [during the Soviet period]. Before there were no drunks. Now things have turned for the better. Now everyone has been to mosque. Even if there are drunks, the drunks are few. If you take a look at our streets, there are the little shops. Not one person sells vodka [araq]. They don’t sell vodka. If you asked, “Why aren’t you selling it?” there would be shame. The elders of the mahalla would say, “Take it away.” Before, the elders [aqsaqallar, qarilar] governed the mahalla all the time. . . . All of them were educated, knew many things, and had good heads on their shoulders. If there was a wedding, alcohol could not appear there. If there were a quarrel among a married couple, the elders would investigate. They’d say, “Let these children live with the father, and these with the mother.” Such words were law [zakon, Russian]. Because the elders never made an unjust decision [nepravil’nyi reshenie, Russian, with grammatical error]. They always resolved the matter well. And so everyone listened to the elders. The elders did not err [adashmagan]. . . . Even if someone in the mahalla had a fight, the elders reconciled them [yarashtirip qo’ygan].

Walimat described the efficacy of elder authority in shaping mahalla life and having the power to enforce who was allowed to live there, because it indicated the state of communal morality.14 As with Yo’lbuvi’s account, there was an element of shock value here. Describing a past when elders really had a say in what shops sold or in the “internal” affairs of households served as a chastising contrast to the imperfect respect rendered to elder authority today, and as a model to which one might aspire, now that “things have turned for the better.” In another conversation, when Walimat and I were discussing agriculture in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, Walimat suddenly seemed to go off topic. At one moment he was talking about land use throughout the republic, at the next he turned to the informal policing of behavior on mahalla streets. But Walimat was not digressing; he was asserting that the mahalla’s proper socialization of its residents and the state’s stewardship of its land were actually closely linked imperatives. Note in the following excerpt how he makes the transition from republic to mahalla: Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 115

We haven’t been using our lands well [in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan]. . . . We Mus- lims have the Shariat [Islamic law]. It is God who gives the land. Land must be well preserved. . . . If one uses the land well, then the land is not only mine, but it will remain for my children, and [my son] Bektan’s children. In other countries, in America, the environment [ekologia, Russian] is very good. But the environment is not good with us. Before, the environment used to be good. Everyone used to drink from the arik [streetside canals]. It was most clean, oh, the water from the mountains was good! . . . But now . . . all bad water flows into the ariks, coming from the baths, the bazaar. . . so the ariks are spoiled. It used to be considered a sin [gunoh]. Before, if one spat into an arik, threw something into one, . . . when an elder passed by [he would say], “Eh, by the Shariat, eh! Whose child are you?” Oh, oh! There’d be shame! . . . That’s how things were. The imam was powerful. Saying such a thing was required. Today, if one said that, [the offender would reply,] “It’s not your business, go away.” . . . Now if I sit in the street, a kid can just pass by smoking a cigarette. But before when the elders were sitting and someone passed by, . . . he would go up to them and say, “Assalomu aleykum” [the Islamic greeting]. All of the mahalla raises my son. A child does not have one father. The entire mahalla oversees the upbringing [tarbiya]. Today, they say, “It’s not your business, it’s mine.” Before, the mahallas were good. And now after independence, such things are returning, [though] to a lesser degree now. It’s happening to a lesser degree.

The mahalla is conceived as a site of moral formation, where “it takes a mahalla” to properly raise a child.15 Walimat used the word tarbiya, which concerns proper upbringing, but what was noteworthy in this narrative was how Walimat made connections between ideals at different scales of collective life. Even as Islam teaches that humanity is God’s vice-regent on earth and that land is divinely granted for human stewardship, according to Walimat, a society’s moral condition could be literally read from the land’s condition.16 Osh’s ecological damage became iconic of the Soviet authority’s moral bank- ruptcy. With that in mind, Walimat abruptly shifted his attention to mahalla streets as a locus that enacted the same relation between authority, morality, and space. Here, he read the effects of state social policy in the actual comportment of people in street spaces. Polluting the ariks ought to be considered a sin, and elders ought to teach that on the streets. But youth now embodied an attitudinal orientation toward elders and imams that had been instilled by Soviet rule. To Walimat, the image of a young man passing in front of an elder while smoking a cigarette was deeply disrespectful, for the youth does not interrupt his gait and cross over to the seated elder to greet him.17 Bodily 116 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons comportment in mahalla social life was to be indicative of the effectiveness of the tarbiya or social training exercised within the community, because respect for elders by youth is a constant performative achievement and not a given.18 And so, how the mahalla street was dynamically inhabited by embodied, spatially positioned social actors was integral to Walimat’s account of how elder authority and state power operated in the mahalla. Walimat launched into his entire discourse about the proper care for the neighborhood streets and the proper instruction of the neighborhood youth in order to expand on his point about the state’s stewardship of the republic’s lands. For him, the state’s moral charge over the country was like the elders’ charge over the mahalla. Elders or imams were required to inculcate proper attitudes and behavior in the neighborhood. In similar fashion, the state was responsible for preparing the people to live in a post-Soviet political and economic environment by directing the course of the country and creating the right conditions for the new system to flourish. The notion of tarbiya thus characterizes for him the kind of authority under which people are supposed to live at every scale of Uzbek social life. The “scalability” of the principles of good community will make it possible to argue that some Osh Uzbeks see the state as a kind of mahalla writ large. This passage gives insight into just why mahalla is said to have the capacity to form persons. Walimat was suggesting that mahalla spaces themselves contribute to enabling and enhancing tarbiya. Their scale, configuration, and other qualities can engender face-to-face accountability, deference to authority, and moral sensibilities of shame. He gave another example: the hundreds of restored small mosques that serve as regular gathering places for (mostly older) men of the mahalla. Although socializing in the mosque itself is supposedly forbidden, conversations on the streets are inevitable as the men walk the short distances between their houses and the neighborhood mosque. Walimat remarked that regular mosque attendance discouraged the outbreak and intensification of neighborly disputes.

The advantage of the mosques is, for example, . . . this evening a fight breaks out between me and my neighbor, and when we go out to the mosque in the morning, . . . and after fifteen minutes of standing together there in namaz [we’d say,] “Did you sleep well? Did you rise well?”—we’ll see each other! And if there was a fight in the evening, how will we see each other? . . . Even if people fight, they’ll say [to themselves], “I will still go out to the mosque and see him, so I won’t let myself get into a fight. Because tomorrow I have to go to mosque and see him.” He’ll be shamed. And so people don’t fight. That’s what good about the mosque. The kind of face-to-face accountability described here is made possible by the small rooms within the mosque, the surrounding narrow streets, and Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 117 the integration of the mahalla mosque into the neighborhood itself. The small scale of the mahalla and mosque was connected to a self-regulating peace. Even though the practice may fall short, Walimat articulated the intriguing idea of social cohesion being, as it were, built into neighborhood space. A similar notion has been developed by Western urban theorists and planners since Jane Jacobs. Mahallas would, in fact, rate rather well by Jacobs’s criteria of a successful urban neighborhood. She talks about vibrant sidewalk activity providing security via “eyes on the street” and about maintaining a balance between privacy and “simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from people around. This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted” (Jacobs 1961, 59). Walimat’s thoughts show how social imaginaries about ideal community can emerge from interpretations of lived social practice. His example also draws attention to the tactical spatial aspects of the post-Soviet Islamic revival among Uzbeks, namely, the importance of mutual proximity and presencing in religious practice. It is not just that one needs to pray, study, or fast but that one generally has to be seen doing so and be known in this way. One needs to attend to the “proxemics” of piety—attention to the social implications of physically close, face-to-face collective life regarding religious practice.

The Proxemics of Piety Mahalla is often associated with religiosity, by residents and nonresidents, Uzbeks and non-Uzbeks alike. Islam is seen as central to the formation of persons within the mahalla, for good or for ill. Many credited the resurgence of Islam after independence for the gradual undoing of the Soviet “godless times,” while others have seen Islamic revival as mere trendiness at best, and as oppression or extremism at worst. Islamic piety, whatever its spiritual value might be, has a social dynamic related to prestige and reputation that plays a role in promoting the conformity that can be interpreted as the mahalla’s tarbiya. While the narrators here have so far emphasized the mosque as the indicator of post-Soviet piety, Osh Uzbeks were also acquiring religious knowledge in a truly grass-roots effort based in people’s homes during the 1990s and 2000s. In many mahallas, stable peer groups of about fifteen members held regular gatherings called ziyofat (an Uzbek word meaning feast).19 Meet- ing weekly, biweekly, or monthly and hosted successively by each member on a rotating basis, ziyofats were occasions of much conviviality, eating, money exchange, chatting, and group discussion.20 This kind of gathering has a long history in Central Asia, but after falling off in popularity before the 1950s, it was enjoying a remarkable revival in urban centers by the early 1970s. That decade saw new social functions in networking and women’s groups appear- 118 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons ing for the first time (Khalid 2007; Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998b).21 Some operated as literary or artistic circles. After the Sovietglasnost (policy of openness) of the late 1980s, and especially after independence in 1991, many of these groups in Osh became focused on the study of Islamic practice, doctrine, and Arabic.22 They were led by a member recognized as possessing superior religious knowledge, whether through self-study, mentoring from “masters” since glasnost (and a few mentored surreptitiously throughout the Soviet period), or formal study at a medressa. Although the imam of a local mosque may lead one, most such groups were taught by nonclerics. The city’s official clerical administration was aware of and condoned these self-initiated, self- run groups but said it did not organize, direct, or monitor them. A leader of a Friday mosque told me that he was confident that ziyofats in Osh mahallas were teaching correct doctrine, because Osh Uzbeks desired to learn “the Is- lam of our forefathers” and would not tolerate “Wahhabi” ways, as any foreign fundamentalism is contemptuously termed. While ziyofats were all the rage in Osh mahallas during the late 1990s and early 2000s, they had petered out by 2011, when I last checked. Uzbek families had too many members absent for work abroad and too many financial struggles for the mahallas to sustain most of the ziyofat groups. People are left to study on their own with books and videos or in classes at mosques. The sense of communal fervor and initiative regarding the study of Islam is gone. In the heyday of Osh’s ziyofats, however, the father and mother in my host family, the Mansurovs, were each actively involved in their respective ziyofats, organized as gender and age-set cohorts that were socially tight and enduring. As part of Osh’s newly wealthy Uzbek families, they were careful to cultivate a reputation of piety among their peers (who in their case were from various mahallas) and their mahalla neighbors. Hosting ziyofats provided a ready venue to display a “public” persona of generosity, authenticity, and virtue. Both Mansurov parents, Sabriddin Hoji and Oyzoda, were respected for their Islamic knowledge, gained through private study with various locally known “masters” and also self-study. They also boasted of having made the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca (hence Sabriddin’s title “Hoji,” which even his wife uses in addressing him), twice by the late 1990s, a relatively unusual feat for a former Soviet Central Asian Muslim. Oyzoda led her elder women’s ziyofat, which, when I was attending it during the spring of 1998, was memorizing the Arabic letters and the ninety-nine Qur’anic names of God, working from Islamic booklets sold at the main bazaar and at Friday mosques. Sabriddin Hoji’s ziyofat of elder men, which actually began meeting in the late 1980s during perestroika, just before the post-independence boom in this local institution, was studying from a reprint of a difficult pre-Soviet Turkic text explicating doctrine. The Mansurov daughters, most of whom were married into other households (some in Osh, one in Tashkent) although one was Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 119 divorced (she returned to living with her natal family in the working role of kelin or daughter-in-law), did not have ziyofats, laden as they were with housework from dawn to after dusk every day in the courtyard and kitchen. I never heard of any ziyofats for younger women. Although there were ziyofats for younger men, the Mansurov sons did not attend, as the younger son, Saidjon, was working very long days selling cloth in Kara-Suu and Rahmon was busy with either shuttle trade travel or socializing with his jo’ra, or cohort of close friends. Even though his mother would sometimes scold him for not praying enough, Rahmon was not unreligious. Like many Osh Uzbeks whose Islamic practice was not consistent, Rahmon affirmed, sincerely, I believe, the importance of Islam for himself and the community. He cited his own “conversion” experience when, in the early 1990s, he finally assented to studying Arabic with a local teacher, after earlier disinterest in religion as a boy. Reading Ara- bic letters, Rahmon said, had a curative power on a chronic illness that he had been suffering from, and ever since he had acknowledged the importance of being a good Muslim, although his practice has been sporadic. In 1998, I was attending a young men’s ziyofat in which the local imam, himself a resident of that mahalla, was patiently teaching the motions and words of namaz, the obligatory Muslim prayer conducted verbally and bodily five times a day. This was truly Islam 101. The imam was also particularly exhorting the youth to rise every morning for the first call to prayer, which occurs at dawn. O’rmonjon, one of the members, spoke up, urging his peers to recite namaz faithfully, because they must set a positive example for their future children (these men were unmarried at the time but were fast approaching the age of arranged marriages). I asked O’rmonjon on another occasion why there seemed to be so much interest in Islam among the young men of his mahalla. He replied, “You are asking the wrong question. It is not a matter of interest. We must practice Islam, or else there will be shame to our families. It is a matter of shame, not interest!” For O’rmonjon, piety concerned proxemics, perception, and prestige. This sensibility carried over to even the least observant resident of this mahalla, a man in his forties who was known as an alcoholic (and indeed looked that way). From the way others in the mahalla talked about him, sometimes in whispered breaths, it was clear that Najot was a neighborhood pariah. Yet his elementary school–aged son, outfitted habitually in prim “Islamic dress” and white skullcap, was a paragon of piety who studied after school in a boy’s class at the local mosque with the same imam who ran the young men’s ziyofat. When I went to talk to Najot in his courtyard, he proudly called his son over to recite for me Qur’anic passages from his lessons. I asked Najot how much Islam he himself practiced, to which he answered, “I am of the socialist generation. But my son is of the next generation, the Islamic generation. He must learn and practice Islam.” Was the son compensation for a father condemned 120 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons by the mahalla as wayward? This inverted the Soviet-era religious division of labor in Central Asian societies, whereby the communal burden of being devout fell more to women and older men (Khalid 2007; Privratsky 2004).23 When I asked about Najot years later in the mid-2000s, I found out that he was alone in “Leningrad,” that is, St. Petersburg, Russia, working so that he could send money back to his family. On the other hand, some Osh Uzbeks were cynical about the social prestige of appearing pious. In the Shahid-Tepa area of the city, I knew a family whose elderly mother happened to have worked with Sabriddin Hoji many years earlier when they were clerks in the state department store (one of many examples of my separately made contacts turning out to know each other—Osh sometimes felt like a small town). When I described to her the Mansurovs’ new wealthy lifestyle as traders and their activity in ziyofats, she responded that of course they could afford the time and money to be religious, whereas ordinary people like her were too busy trying to survive. It seemed that this Shahid- Tepa family had faced struggle ever since the eldest son’s wedding, which was unfortunately interrupted by the Soviet army’s pacification of the Osh riots in 1990, when a military helicopter flew over their mahalla and bellowed for the celebration held in the open courtyard of the house to disperse. There might have been a touch of jealousy in this woman’s reaction to the Mansurovs’ post- Soviet success, but she also revealed a sense that she resented at least some of the pressures for social conformity in the mahalla.

Mahalla as Oppression Seeing the mahalla as the space of communal harmony, stewardship, and tarbiya is a predominantly, though by no means exclusively, elder male view. Certainly all in the neighborhood would not share that view. For differently positioned individuals, and at different moments, the mahalla can seem either a space of monitoring, accountability, and control or a space of mutual assistance, care, and training. Some mahalla inhabitants, among them women, young men, the destitute, the divorced, and Russian-educated, socially progressive individuals chafe under what they sometimes described as the oppressive atmosphere of the mahalla. People are always obliged to meet their neighborhood’s rigid expectations for every life decision, they would say, such as how to organize the next wedding. In those moments, the mahalla appears as a space of sinister panoptic power, where one’s every action is seen, reported, and judged by others. Some mahalla residents feel they need to get away from the literal spaces of their neighborhoods in order to be able to behave or think differently. Even though the mahalla tends to be the primary social site for most residents (especially for retired elders, young married women, and children), social venues outside the mahalla play important roles as well.24 A mahalla Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 121 resident could never be assured of total anonymity in such places because he or she could reasonably expect to encounter an acquaintance sooner or later. In fact, several commented that, despite its population of a quarter million, Osh behaved like a small town when it came to rumors and gossip.25 The city’s public spaces nevertheless afford a measure of freedom from mahalla surveillance.26 For example, Uzbek young men frequented the numerous billiard rooms (bil’iardnaia, Russian) throughout the city, before computer video game parlors began proliferating in the early 2000s. The eighteen-year-old son of my host family, Rahmon Mansurov, went to them whenever he could, against his father’s express command. The Mansurovs ran a family cloth-selling business, occupying an open-air stall in the main bazaar and necessitating buying trips to Bishkek, Kara-Suu (nearby on the border with Uzbekistan), Dubai, and Mecca.27 The father, Sabriddin Mansurov, conducted the selling in 1997 (when I first met them), but by 1999, he had turned it over to his two sons, Saidjon and Rahmon, who were both unmarried. The younger brother, Saidjon, would later take over the business, having stopped his schooling, while Rahmon was bound for university, working only when classes were out. The other cloth sellers in neighboring stalls also were young Uzbek men, and they were close friends, constantly chatting during the workday.28 When one left his post for an errand, the others would cover for him, often knowing the prices, even though each was an independent seller. Rahmon would sometimes take advantage of his friends and shoot pool nearby when business was slow. When his father, Sabriddin Hoji, came looking, the other cloth sellers would lie on his behalf, claiming he went to the barbershop or the bathroom. On several occasions Sabriddin Hoji looked for Rahmon at the bazaar, even going to a barbershop once to locate him when haircutting was the excuse for not working. Rahmon would silently receive stern lectures from his father about working and playing. Sabriddin Hoji would send us on various errands, such as bringing food to workers remodeling a first-floor apartment they had bought to convert into a store or staying overnight there to ward off thieves. Even though Rahmon was never entirely free of his father’s surveillance, billiard rooms and the bazaar afforded him spaces of partial evasion from the close watch of the mahalla. By the time I returned to stay with the Mansurovs in 2003, Rahmon’s fellow cloth sellers had decided to form a jo’ra, a close-knit and stable cohort of peers. Now in his early twenties and much more independent, Rahmon hung out with them every day outside of work. The Mansurovs had become quite wealthy by moving into the more lucrative shuttle trade business, expanding their business ties first to Urumqi, China, then Seoul, Korea. They gave up their stall at Osh’s main bazaar, and now Saidjon was commuting to Kara-Suu every morning to run a cloth stall in that fast-moving, highly lucrative market that catered to Uzbekistanis coming across the border at the town. Rahmon 122 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons now had considerable free time, because his duties were mainly overseas business travel once every month or two, and he spent most of his days outside of his house. With much of his jo’ra doing the same, they had spent their free time together cruising around town in their imported cars, eating at restaurants, playing cards, going to the barbershop, and touting their feature-loaded mobile phones and other gadgets bought overseas. They were now at the age when their families were arranging marriages for them, and that summer we were attending one large wedding after another. After marriage, these men seemed to spend just as much time together as they did when they were single, their new wives (kelin) being mostly confined at the husband’s parents’ house with the chores and, soon, with the babies. Now, Rahmon’s father would not know where he was most of the time. Sabriddin Hoji would occasionally order him to perform for the family certain tasks, about which they might argue, but Rahmon was mostly left to his socializing when not overseas on business. His jo’ra companions were among Osh’s young Uzbek nouveaux riches, small in number but emerging, and their new wealth gave them mobility and a social circle beyond the tarbiya of the mahalla, affording them freedoms unimagi- nable a few years before. The presence in Osh of foreigners from outside the former Soviet Union, the numbers of which greatly increased during the 1990s but still remained small compared to their numbers in Central Asian capitals, also provides some mahalla residents with spaces outside of mahalla authority. NGOs and United Nations agencies provided jobs, which in turn provided skills, foreign contact, and new paradigms about work to a tiny segment of Osh’s population—those with some knowledge of English, computers, or Western practices of business, law, or journalism. Although many young Uzbeks studying these things were not necessarily trying to escape mahalla life, some regarded a Western education as their ticket out of the economic and intellectual limitations of mahalla life. Ostona was born in a rural mahalla in a nearby village, where her extended family still lived, but has lived in an Osh apartment with her immediate family since she was eight, as her father taught at Osh State University. The more diverse and cosmopolitan environment of Osh’s newer neighborhoods made her see her village upbringing as too narrow. After Ostona started at Osh State University, she added a second major in English to the physics-math major that her father wanted her to pursue. In the mid-1990s, she befriended an American Peace Corps worker, who influenced her ideas about independence from her family, and then worked briefly on a rural project for the United Na- tions Development Programme. Ostona resented the control her father sought to exert on her movements, for he kept track of the time she should take to travel between home and classes and demanded an accounting if she should tarry anywhere. She often stayed after the Uzbek-language lessons that she Neighborhood and Making proper Persons 123 was giving my wife to talk about personal issues, but Ostona’s father would send her younger brother to fetch her. Ostona resented having a brother seven years her junior acting as her monitor. As an unmarried daughter (and in a household with no daughter-in-law), she was expected to cook and keep house at her parents’ apartment in addition to doing her coursework—something that did not change no matter where an Uzbek family lived. Spending time with a foreigner still provided her with a little distance from the reach of her father’s authority. A twenty-four-year-old woman, Kenja, was perhaps the most marginal person living in a mahalla whom I met by chance. I was walking down a narrow, secluded street in a mahalla when Kenja saw me from her house gate and said to me in Russian, “You’re an American, aren’t you?” I was taken aback, because no other Central Asian had ever been able to tell that I was from the United States, usually thinking I was from South Korea, Japan, China, or Tur- key (since I spoke Turkic languages).29 “How do you know?” I asked, quite intrigued. “I can tell from your appearance. I’ve spent much time with Ameri- cans,” she replied. Kenja described herself as a contemporary, self-motivated woman and was marginal in the mahalla for several reasons. She was a young widow, her husband having died the previous year, and she was living with her parents and two small children. Her father eked out a living for their household of seven (including her young siblings) trading carpets and curtains from Tajikistan. Her family was quite socially isolated, having relatives in the Osh area but seldom seeing them. Then there were her unusual (for mahalla residents) contacts with Americans. At one point Kenja worked for an American tobacco company that had bought a huge house in the mahalla in 1993 for ten thousand som—a fortune. I had noticed that building; one could not miss it. It was a two-story house, unusual for mahalla houses in Osh, capped by a showy satellite dish. Kenja had also run into some American evangelical missionaries passing through Osh (apparently unrelated to the tobacco company) and had become a Christian, she said. Most evangelical Christians in post-Soviet Kyr- gyzstan are Kyrgyz, Russian, and Korean, and Kenja was the only Osh Uzbek I have met in a mahalla who professed religious conversion.30 No one else in the mahalla outside of her family knew of her faith change, which would of course lead to ostracism or exile from the mahalla and possibly death threats. Not surprisingly, Kenja expressed the most critical view of mahalla life of any of my interlocutors: “This mahalla is poor, very poor. One out of twenty families is rich. The rich ones build big, two-story houses. From narco-business money. I don’t like living here. I don’t like Uzbeks, even though I am myself Uzbek. Uzbeks are dull and stupid [tupye, Russian]. And they are gossipy [spletnich- nye, Russian].”31 Kenja had adopted a posture of guarded defiance against the seeing and controlling atmosphere of her mahalla. She had to seek places 124 Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons outside the mahalla, however, in order to be a “self-motivated, contemporary woman,” whether at a tobacco company office or evangelical Christian meetings, which met in Osh’s “Soviet city.” These brief vignettes reveal discipline’s discontents, that the social project of societal renewal through the mahalla has its dissenters, that the mostly elder male perspective was not the final word on mahalla. The vignettes represent moments—no doubt occurring continually and in far more multitudinous ways—when the tarbiya of the mahalla is experienced as oppressive and the desire to evade mahalla norms drives some to step outside the neighborhood regularly or to dodge social pressures in more subtle ways within it. This examination of Osh Uzbek views about the mahalla took us far beyond the confines of ethnic territoriality to consider how these subjects articulate imaginaries of moral community. The strong link narrators made between the mahalla and the cultivation of good persons was notably premised on the spatial qualities of the neighborhoods that somehow enabled this form of social life. The narrow, intimate qualities of the streets made for constant proximity and mutual involvement that promoted the enforcement of communal standards of behavior and sentiment, whether regarded as good or oppressive. This social and spatial dynamic undergirds the continuous social training of persons in the mahalla. There is a mutual dependence of the mahalla’s spatial and social characteristics. Focusing on that mutuality offers new insights about how mahalla produces subjectivity, so the next chapter gives analytic attention to the sensorial qualities and positioning of embodied subjects within specific social and spatial contexts of the mahalla. In other words, body and space in everyday mahalla life illuminate why dwelling in the mahalla results in certain ways of being in the world. House and Dwelling 5 in the World

The mahalla is a potent idiom of virtuous character and moral community. The idiom allows Osh Uzbeks to ponder and attempt to practice the kind of collective life that they believe is key to renewing society for a better future. Understanding this view allows us to appreciate why so many Osh Uzbeks have desired a “traditional” courtyard house and resisted apartment neighborhoods in the “Soviet city,” even at the cost of living in the adirs, harsh hilly lands surrounding the city, as long as mahallas could be built. But what is it about mahallas that generates the kind of community life so strongly idealized or so intensely despised, as the case may be? Is the capacity to make good persons and societies really locatable within the mahalla? Conceptions about social propriety, hierarchy, and authority emerge from everyday life activity within mahalla spaces. The links between ideas and practices are neither causal nor one-to-one, but habitual activity conditions expectations about what is socially real in the mahalla, and this entire process is then interpreted as the inculcation of ethnic values in a person. Put more technically, embodied, spatially indexed social practice in the mahalla produces particular ways of being, which are glossed as essentialized traditions and mentalities. The ethnographic exposition here will proceed spatially, like

125 126 House and Dwelling in the World in previous chapters, moving from mahalla streets to house gates, the house courtyards, and finally the inner rooms of the house. This exploration con- cludes with theoretical reflections on how mahalla produces a set of conceptual and bodily expectations about the social world, constituting an entire way of dwelling in the world generally. This way of dwelling includes sensibilities of what proper social power and efficacious agency “feel like” and affects how many Osh Uzbeks conceive of the state.

Street Mahalla streets are not only interstices between places but also significant places in themselves. Osh’s mahalla streets are densely social places, some of them teeming with activity in the mornings and again from late afternoon to after dark in the warmer months. But street space is never socially innocent. It is not neutral to the meanings and stakes implicit in where and how people choose to walk, linger, play, work, or chat. Merely standing at a spot on a mahalla street suggests a relationship to its residents or at least an assumed right to be seen there for a purpose (compare Gilsenan 1982). Some places seem to invite lingering, while others appear unwelcoming or undesirable. Places engage the kinesthetic faculty—the sense of one’s own bodily movement— exerting almost palpable directional resistances or attractions for those present.1 Outsiders, particularly Kyrgyz, are rarely found on the inner streets of mahallas. But mahallas impose definite constraints on activity even for their Uzbek residents, indeed, especially for them. Uzbek neighborhood life is laden with strong communal expectations about everything from conduct and comportment to conversation and conviviality. This is what waits to be explored now: what it means to inhabit a mahalla. Mahalla space is inhabited as if the space itself were complicit in the contextual assigning of social meanings and dispositions. The mahalla forms a sociospatial field charged with tacit expectations about what normally happens there, when things happen, with whom they happen, and what those happenings conventionally mean.2 These expectations are open textured, that is, always subject to surprise, expansion, or partial revision, and they operate with a sliding scale of assumed probabilities.3 Judgments about likelihoods are made moment by moment and normally without conscious reflection against a background of tacit understandings about the sociospatial world. They are made by embodied actors whose positioned engagement with inhabited space operates across the human senses in the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and kinesthetic realms. They are informed by tactical senses of efficiency,- el egance, timing, flow, appropriateness, politeness, and morality, all of which constitute “etiquette” (adab).4 These senses are variously shared (overlapping greatly for many but not for all), socially indexed (dependent on position or identity in the mahalla’s social landscape), and temporally indexed (dependent House and Dwelling in the World 127 on such things as time of day or season of life).5 What I have just described applies generally to human inhabitation from a phenomenological viewpoint. “Lived space,” writes anthropologist Brenda Farnell (1999, 353), “is not a given physical reality but an achieved structuring, simultaneously physical, conceptual, moral, and ethical.”6 However, there is something particular about the densely complex social and spatial world of the mahalla that lends itself to be divulged by this type of analysis. My intention is to show that this approach to an ethnography of mahalla will reveal aspects of its significance that other approaches would fail to capture. The street as a spatial gradient of expectations, far from being a static property of the mahalla, is an emergent quality that shifts in the flow of life -ac tivity. The body in habitual action is a skilled, active agent that flows in coordi- nated movement with other bodies in what geographer David Seamon calls a “place-ballet.” The dynamism of a place, he writes, is “largely in proportion to the number of people who share in . . . its tempo and vitality” through shared habitual routines (Seamon 1980, 161). For example, Tony Hiss describes the experience of walking the vast main concourse of New York City’s Grand Cen- tral Terminal, where hundreds cross simultaneously in apparent coordination (Hiss 1990, 3–9), and New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay writes about the “fluid human dance that is Grand Central” (Macaulay 2011, C1). Architects think about how the built environment can encourage and channel certain kinds of movement through spaces and how buildings enter into active dialogue with bodies by the visual-visceral power of their form, rhythm, and balance (Rasmussen 1964; Yudell 1977). Macaulay appears to agree concerning the “complicity” of space in shaping human dispositions when he views Grand Central as a kind of site-specific dance performance: “I sense that these same visitors would not carry themselves in quite the same way at Penn Sta- tion or the Port Authority” (Macaulay 2011, C5). The mahalla street reveals its own style of “place-ballet.” Consider the clear segregation according to gender and age-set of people socializing or working on mahalla streets. For example, tight cohorts of unmarried young men often occupy street intersections, squatting in a circle over a card game or seated in a line. Individuals join or depart the group over the course of hours, and no peer passes them without coming over to shake hands with each man one by one in a sort of greeting-in-passing ritual. Women and children, unless they are close relatives, are ignored, and older men are occasionally greeted. And so, the gathering of the young men forms a surrounding “proxemic space” with specific social effects as long as the men remain there.7 Likewise, older men sit on a bench outside their mahalla mosque before the call to prayer is issued from its loudspeakers. Passersby above a certain age are expected to greet them, although in practice whether or not this greeting takes place depends on how well they know each other and how wide the street is—with enough width, 128 House and Dwelling in the World

Figure 14. Street scene in mahalla near Solomon Mountain. Photograph by the author, 1998. one can perhaps get away with ignoring them. The men stroll home in small groups after reading namaz together, avoiding the boys in white skullcaps, who enter the mosque in the evenings between namaz so that they can attend Qur’an classes. The women and children occupy their own temporary areas of the street, zones in which men will not linger. Young women with infants chat by an open house gate. Preteen girls chat as they line up at the public tap to fetch water for cooking. A young woman throws bucketfuls of water from the street water canal onto the dusty street near her gate and then bends over to sweep the area clean. The girl working at a table as a street vendor calls to peers to hang out while driving away children pawing for free candy. A street- facing house window converted into mini-shop display features detergent and sour yogurt balls. The smell of baking nan (flatbread) wafts from someone’s courtyard tandir (oven). An inviting open doorway reveals weighing scales on a blue table and a sign advertising, “Halva, 23 som a kilo.” Some boys lead their goats to graze in the schoolyard, where other boys playing soccer reveal their senses of age hierarchy in the ways they play with each other. Groups of children sometimes dally in one area, sometimes race quickly throughout the neighborhood, but always occupy shifting envelopes of street space as they stay clear of passing cars, elders, and other groups of children (fig. 14). It is through this kind of dynamic use of space that a person apprehends and reproduces the instantaneous boundaries regarding what takes priority where and when in the mahalla. This knowledge operates at the tactical level, embodied by reflexes concerning how and with whom one is expected to in- House and Dwelling in the World 129 teract or to ignore. This skill requires “somatic modes of attention,” to use Thomas Csordas’s term, and these modes are “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” (Csordas 1993, 138, emphasis added). The manner in which one pays attention to bodily form, movement, and space and what one senses (or misses) are “neither arbitrary nor biologically determined, but are culturally constituted” (Csordas 1993, 140).8 In this way, both bodily experience and intersubjective meaning are patterned by particular histories of communal practice. Through work and play in mahalla spaces, one understands what the relevant categories of people are, how they form hierarchies of precedence or respect, how to relate to each of them, and how to read the nuances in various situations. Spatially indexed embodied practice thus produces a morally ramified social ontology of the mahalla and the elastic boundaries of one’s concern and activity within particular social, spatial, and temporal contexts. One knows what is appropriate or what one is expected to do (or not to do) with whom, where, and when. Spatially indexed tactical knowledge about the social world is essential to collective human life anywhere, but it is particularly important in Uzbek neighborhoods, which are known for their intense mutual involvement and accountability. With rapid circulation of people, things, money, and talk, Uzbek neighborhoods define a dense social nexus of closely overlapping life worlds where most residents have known each other for all of their lives, especially in the older neighborhoods.9 News and gossip flow quickly within mahallas. People know who is getting married, who passed away, who recently returned from the Hajj, how much a son is sending in remittances from work in Russia, or who is applying to study in America. The knowledge sharing can operate in real time, revealing who is doing what at a given moment in the neighborhood. The children who fill the streets with their noisy play during after-school hours always seem to know the current whereabouts of everyone in the neighborhood. In a mahalla that I began visiting, word spread quickly through a cohort of boys about an Uzbek-speaking Chinese American. I began to encounter residents who knew me before I met them. One time when I approached a house to interview someone, the children playing outside told me my contact was not at home, so I decided to visit a nearby house. The moment that I came out, the children reported that my first contact was now home and expecting me, for they had taken it upon themselves to inform him. Amid their street play, the children acted as the real-time message board of the neighborhood. The particular sensorial geographies of the mahalla—its scale, configuration, material qualities of streets and houses—provide close lines of sight and spheres of audition, enabling it to carve out spaces of mutual visibility, audibility, and knowledge.10 Mutual involvement in the mahalla finds paradigmatic expression in the 130 House and Dwelling in the World practice of hashar, as Uzbeks themselves often indicate. Hashar refers to neighborly assistance or monetarily uncompensated communal labor, which typically involves house construction, tree planting, or the maintenance of street waterworks.11 House construction or renovation, which was always going on somewhere in each mahalla during the 1990s and 2000s (especially in the newer ones at the city’s edge), involved a labor-intensive process that included mixing mud and then forming, sunning, and laying the mud bricks. In an old Osh mahalla, several neighbors decided to construct a communal latrine (hojatkhona) on the narrow dirt street because people passing through on the way to the bazaar could use it. Over a couple of months, they constructed a hand-made mud-walled structure on a prefabricated concrete slab with a deep hole. Years later, in the same neighborhood, residents dug up the street and put in rubber hoses for municipal water to be channeled into houses, because the mahalla had had water only from communal taps on the street and from the ariks, the open water channels running along many residential streets in the city. Mahallas also mobilize hashar every spring to clean out the streets’ ariks. The channels are about two feet wide and have V-shaped cement bases in some segments, bare earth or stone in others. At house gates where people and cars enter and exit, ariks are bridged by concrete slabs, metal plates, or sections of prefabricated concrete culverts—whatever the house owner could procure, as is true for building materials in general in the mahalla. Dry in the winter months, they can carry rapidly flowing water in the spring and summer. They function as both gutter and water supply for certain uses, such as washing the ground, dishes, or cars. Groups of boys can be found playing in them. Ariks have occupied a similar place in local social life for some time, as attested by the travelogue of the Finnish explorer C. G. Mannerheim, who journeyed through Russian Turkestan in 1906. On 20 July in Tashkent, he wrote that

in the old town, . . . the canals or “aryks,” as they are called, intersect each other in all directions. You often see several large aryks rushing in a parallel direction at different levels of the same slight slope and working mills, etc. at intervals of a few yards from each other. The main aryks are often quite deep, as much as 6½ feet, but the majority are of no great depth. The water contains a lot of clay and is quite turbid. If you let it stand in a glass, the mud settles very quickly and the water becomes drinkable and has no by-flavor. Innumer- able small ponds enable the population to find relief from the scorching sun in bathing. Being good Muslims, they avail themselves of this benefit to the full. The children, in particular, tumble about in the water from morning till night, always in a pair of cotton drawers which the boys often inflate before jumping into the water, producing a very amusing effect. (Mannerheim and Sandberg 1990, 20) House and Dwelling in the World 131

The arik turned out to reveal another aspect of the mahalla’s sensibility of communal responsibility beyond hashar. One summer evening in 1999, when I decided to take a stroll in the mahalla where I was living, I encountered Bek- tan, a canny student at Osh’s Kyrgyz-Uzbek University. Bent over an arik, he muttered, “Something’s wrong with the water.” Bektan was checking for clogs. The arik was clear, but he knew there should be more water at this time of day. The water, which rushed madly other evenings, did appear low to me. Ulti- mately fed by mountain sources from the south of Osh, the Ak-Buura River and the arik network carry the water through the city and northward.12 But these ariks run through mahalla streets, through some hovlis (like my host family’s), and, in the Soviet sectors of the city, along the paved main boulevards, through apartment complexes and parks. Since most mahalla houses have no plumbing, families in the neighborhood use arik water in many ways: spraying the dusty hovli ground, washing cars, washing dishes, watering plants in the hovli, swimming and playing (for boys), and throwing out or- ganic waste. Drinking, cooking, and bathing water comes from public taps on the streets, to which young girls are sent daily to fetch water in buckets or metal milk containers. The tap water comes from the municipal waterworks, the same water provided to apartments. These spigots are often left running, with the water spilling into the arik. “I bet someone’s diverted the water for their own fields and didn’t give it back,” said Bektan, rising. “Come on, let’s go find out.” He led me down the street, past a house in mourning for a recent death (with lines of old men sitting on benches covered with embroidered cushions by the house gate), tracing the arik upstream. We wound through various narrow passageways in the mahalla, checking the water level at various choke points. I realized that the arik was always branching and that families used small metal plates, roofing tile, or plastic sheets as valves to divert water into their own courtyards. Bektan explained that people use these according to their needs at particular times of day, since the water source ebbs and increases in a daily (and seasonal) cycle. Because water is a zero-sum resource, there are communal understandings about how much water a household can legitimately use at any given time. “Sometimes people divert a lot of water for growing things during the day,” Bektan said. But it was evening, and the neighborhood needed it released back. As Bektan traced the arik backward, he adjusted the valves to clear the main branches until we reached the back of a hospital at the edge of the mahalla and an apartment complex neighborhood. It was already dark, but on the streets there were groups of people here and there. By the time we had retraced our steps forward and returned to Bektan’s street, we saw that the water flow had indeed increased. Following the arik reveals another layer of the mahalla’s multiple, overlapping geographies. Even though I had done several years of fieldwork in Central 132 House and Dwelling in the World

Asian urban contexts, this was the first time I had really taken notice of the arik (a mistake on my part, given the historical importance of waterways in this semiarid part of the world). Our attention to the low water levels led us to traverse the neighborhood differently than in normal routines, revealing to me an unexpected topology of connections. The waterway linked households with a dynamic rhythm and interdependence. The network’s configurations were constantly being tweaked, adapted to the hour-to-hour and seasonal needs of the mahalla inhabitants. Bektan’s initiative in restoring the water levels revealed his sense of responsibility in maintaining a shared good. The working of the arik gave a picture of collective coping, a hallmark of Soviet and post-Soviet adaptations to shortages. It was a study in local knowledge, improvisational practice, and communal sensibilities. A mahalla’s communal sensibilities include not only mutual involvement but also maintaining privacy. An inhabitant must recognize how different spaces are charged with different social expectations and how those expectations partition mahalla space into hierarchies of privacy or intimacy. Par- ticularly revealing are social practices at the boundaries between spaces of differential expectations, such as the interface between street and house: the gate (eshik).

Gate The lights suddenly went out, and we were engulfed in darkness. I was having dinner with my host family in their hovli, the outdoor courtyard of the house, one night in the summer of 1999. Power outages had become common in Osh since Kyrgyzstan’s independence, and one never knew how long an episode would last. Able to make out only shadowy outlines under a blue-black sky, we continued our dinner and conversation undeterred. The blinding of the visual field, however, had the effect of directing my attention to the thick sonic matrix of the neighborhood. People were chattering beyond the walls of our hovli in all directions. The rush of water in the arik seemed almost loud. The sound of engines would wax and wane every so often as a car passed by, its headlights providing a moment of indirect illumination from the narrow street. Animals penned in nearby hovli were incessantly barking, baaing, and clucking. The suddenly foregrounded matrix of busy sound conveyed the thickness of neighborhood social life. It made me consider how the spatial and sensorial characteristics of the mahalla were constitutive of, rather than incidental to, the social life of its inhabitants. For while the walls and gates of Uzbek houses guarded visual privacy from the street, the open courtyards in the center of each house allowed for an auditory co-presence of neighbors. Did this not convey to the inhabitants the sense, even if below the threshold of awareness, of House and Dwelling in the World 133 being in the midst of a bustling community, of always being somehow implicated in a wide matrix of relations even while you are involved in activity within your own house? The constant, background presence of neighborhood in domestic life would serve as an active reminder of the mutual monitoring and obligations families have toward one another, forming part of what made the mahalla socially real to its inhabitants. As the mahalla’s sounds receded into the background of my attention, a loud voice broke through the darkness. “Saidjon! Saidjon!” called a young man. The youngest son in my host family, Saidjon, responded, “Eh!” and found his way through the hovli to its entrance, where his friend was waiting outside the gate. A house gate stands between the hovli and the street and is the only way in and out of the entire house compound. Gates are usually left unlocked or ajar to the street during waking hours, but they mark a boundary that cannot be casually crossed. Visitors, including close friends, cannot casually walk into another’s courtyard, nor do they knock. They instead stand outside the gate, or venture at most a few steps in, and call for a particular person with a long, exaggerated rising pitch and crescendo. The summoned person would call back, as Saidjon did, and answer the door. If Saidjon were not home, another family member would yell, “Saidjon yo’q!” (Saidjon is not here). It is often thekelin (daughter-in-law) who gives these answers, because she is typically the only one home, with the small children, during the day. The visitor would then leave without entering.13 Unlike a knock, which might not be heard deep inside the house or distinguished from the ambient noise, a vocal call simultaneously identifies both the visitor and the resident. Because the caller is looking for someone in particular, the act of calling requires prior knowledge of the household and indexes an ongoing relation of visitor to household. The practice also reproduces social ontologies within the mahalla, because it regularizes implicit assumptions of who can call on whom, of who is supposed to have “legitimate” reasons to as- sociate with whom. Those who call on each other are precisely those who are seen to hang out together in mahalla streets and elsewhere. Calling carries the authority to summon someone, but a given person cannot be called out by just anyone. I once went looking for an elderly man who had neither met me nor was expecting me. Outside his house gate I ran into a teenage relative of his, Durjon, who lived nearby. I knew Durjon rather well, but when I asked him to introduce me to his relative, he squirmed awkwardly, “I can’t call him.” I asked, “Because you’re young and he is an elder?” Durjon nodded. Whenever I heard a visitor call on a house, it was always to see someone from one’s own age and gender cohort—one’s tenglar (equals). An exception would be when a young son is sent out to a neighbor to get or deliver something, but in that case he would be calling as a surrogate of the parent. Durjon did not have the au- 134 House and Dwelling in the World thority by himself (nor by me) to summon his father’s older cousin. We waited at the gate until an older male relative came by and brought me in, leaving Durjon outside. The practice of calling at the gate reveals that the visitor’s relation to the resident is always embedded in the wider field of relationship with the entire household. The visitor’s call is a broadcast heard by all present in the household and may be answered by others if the person called is absent or be relayed to that person in an interior room. The appropriateness of the call must hold in the ears of all who could hear, and so every occasion of calling contributes to defining the social reality of cohorts. In other words, calling is one practice that helps produce cohort-hood in the mahalla. Because neighbors become aware of who is visiting whom and how often, calling also enables the enforcement of communal standards regarding what constitutes “legitimate business” between people. No “freedom of association” is recognized within the mahalla. This was sometimes apparent when I would ask for the whereabouts of a contact in a new mahalla: I, in turn, would be interrogated in detail as to my business with this person.14 Once when I was visiting a Tatar friend at his house in a mahalla at the foot of Solomon Mountain, the neighbor (a Russian woman) panicked, believing I was a foreigner trying to buy the house. Residents have ways of circumventing these pressures. In an illuminating episode, Rahmon Mansurov, the teenage son of my host family, was interested in a girl living nearby and got me involved in a little scheme so that he could see her. I went with him to the girl’s house and called on her older brother (whom I knew) with the ruse of wanting to talk with him. Rahmon and I were both invited in and sat with the brother and mother in their courtyard while the girl came out from the kitchen every so often to serve us tea. While I made conversation with my hosts, Rahmon stole glances at the girl and talked so that she would overhear him. They could not talk to each other in those circumstances. The daughter or daughter-in-law is usually not expected to converse with the male or older guests she serves. (When young women visit each other, which happens less frequently, the protocol works with much less formality.) But Rahmon’s ruse was pitifully indirect. After we left, I complained that surely there must be a better way of seeing her. I had thought they would have sufficient warrant to meet because, in fact, the two of them were informally betrothed, with the wedding two years away. Rahmon’s mother had been pressuring him to get to know the girl in the meantime, but her suggestions were equally indirect. She wanted Rahmon to help in the preparation of the coming wedding of the girl’s brother so that he could spend time at their house (weddings occur in the houses of both the bride’s and groom’s families). In any case, Rahmon’s status as a potential son-in-law did not provide sufficient warrant to call at her house. Why could Rahmon not have called on the brother himself? That would have probably resulted in only the two of them House and Dwelling in the World 135 going out or in Rahmon being entertained by the brother in a smaller room inside the house. Recall the structure of the Uzbek house, which partitioned different family members’ activities from each other, especially for a house with a large hovli. Once when I spent the night at an acquaintance’s house in the nearby village of Aravan, my host, his friends, and I ate, talked, and slept all in one set of connected rooms, removed from the rest of the host’s family. I did not meet the parents until the next day, when I was leaving and passing through their spacious hovli. Rahmon therefore needed to sit in the central hovli to be seen by his fiancée and thus needed an excuse to talk with the family as a whole, which was why my role as a special guest was required. In short, Rahmon had to engineer the proper social conditions for being somewhere to see someone. Any impropriety regarding his relation with his fiancée would affect his relations with her family and potentially the entire neighborhood. The issue that I raise in all of this is not merely about household territoriality and the literal “gatekeeping” of the house. The highly regularized practice of calling reveals how social expectations are implicated in a dialectic of speech, body, and space. The courtyard gate acts as a threshold between two spaces charged with different sets of social expectations about who belongs and how to conduct oneself, so that any person crossing that threshold is im- pelled to register the transition in body and speech. Even returning residents among some Osh families announce their presence as they enter their homes by calling out “Assalomu aleykum,” the Islamic greeting, in a nonconversa- tional tone of voice. This call is not necessarily directed toward anyone in particular but is made more out of reflex as the proper way to enter a house. It also identifies the person by voice. Calling practices—and I refer to both the visiting and the vocalizing—reveal tacit, spatially indexed understandings of the mahalla’s social ontologies of cohort and hierarchy. They are spatially indexed because the practice is triggered by embodied social actors arriving at conventionally recognized positions within configurations of street, gate, and courtyard, with their particular visual occlusions and acoustic access. They show that social relations are not merely “played out” in space but also partly constituted by it in a fundamental sense. The terms, occasions, and nature of social interaction are inescapably contoured by the space’s configurations and sensorial properties. Spatially indexed, embodied practice in the mahalla makes cohort-hood and hierarchy a social reality to its residents more so than the occasional words of an instructing elder. Dwelling in the mahalla is not reducible to abstract relations between people, because space and embodied presencing cannot be factored out of its working.

Courtyard The practice of calling at the gate clearly reveals that mahalla inhabitants treat the hovli space within differently from the street space without. This rec- 136 House and Dwelling in the World ognition is evident not only at the gate boundary but also in social practices within the spaces themselves. Courtyard houses throughout the history of the Near East and China have demarcated places of intensified human relations, the locus of family intimacy and strife (Tuan 1977). The sensitivity about family privacy in Muslim societies, which is encoded in Islamic law, is manifest in the inward orientation of domestic space in Islamic residential neighborhoods: daylight coming from an inner court, the placement of windows and doors, the heights of adjacent buildings and of walls, iron grilles and curtains on street-facing windows, and so forth (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod 1987; English 1973; C. Geertz 1989; von Grunebaum 1961). An asymmetrical arrangement of space within and between houses allows women to see men but not vice versa, so that men can move freely in their habitual circuits without interfer- ing with the activity of women. The issue is not so much the bodily seques- tering of women from men but guarding their visual privacy by occlusions controlling line-of-sight distance from male-dominated spaces (Abu-Lughod 1987).15 The pre-revolutionary Central Asian hovli also maintained a gendered division of inner (ichkari) versus outer (tashqari) that allowed women to work away from the gaze of visiting men (Jabborov 1994).16 By the mid-Soviet period, the general expectation for Uzbek women to remain invisible to men within the mahalla waned, as Soviet efforts succeeded in getting increasing numbers of women into the urban labor force outside the mahalla.17 In the mid-1990s, when I noted groups of women socializing on mahalla streets, one Osh Uzbek man commented, “Women should really do their talking in their houses. This is a bad legacy of Soviet rule.” The hovli is the site of endless work by the kelin of the household head. The daughter-in-law is expected to rise at dawn, stay home most of the day, and continue working until everyone goes to sleep at night. Before regular gatherings of peer groups, the ziyofats, she may have to spend all night preparing, often with help from sisters or kelins of other households. Sweeping the ever-dusty hovli and the street area outside the gate is a daily (or twice-daily) task. She fills a bucket with arik water, tosses out wide and even sprays of water (quite an impressive skill), and bends over to sweep with a short flax-straw broom. Dishes are stacked on the ground in the hovli for washing in the hovli arik or water basins. Food is often prepared in the hovli, especially meat chopping or washing and drying vegetables. Dumplings and noodles are rolled and set in various places in the courtyard. Laundry is either hand scrubbed or put through a Soviet-era washing machine—small, simple churning cylinders. Clothes are hung throughout the hovli, off lines strung across posts or trees. Kelins themselves dress in practical yet colorful working clothes, including the headscarf signifying marriage. They stay in those clothes when working or chatting on the mahalla streets. Women “going out to town [sic]” (shaharga House and Dwelling in the World 137

Figure 15. Sampling of Uzbek house courtyards (hovli). Clockwise from left: concrete hovli with water channel (arik); the same hovli, with its small earth plot; an earthen hovli. Photo- graphs by the author, 1997–1998. chiqish) dress more formally. (Note how the “public” areas of Osh are treated with respect to the mahalla, here in speech and dress.) This more public ward- robe is worn by professional women working in city jobs, the mother-in-law going on errands or social calls outside, or the kelin occasionally going out for recreation. The hovli is also the site of much activity for other family members. Toddlers wander about under the kelin’s watchful eye. Young children play and ride bicycles. Depending on the family, boys are charged with some cleaning up and sweeping. Men fix roofs, tend fruit trees, plow hovli soil, repair cars, and slaughter animals. Families may also run businesses out of their hovlis, including bread baking, auto maintenance, gate making, reselling imported goods, or making various kinds of special foods (fig. 15). An Uzbek house’s hierarchies of interiority and gendered notions of do- mesticity are maintained not only by its visual seclusion from the rest of the mahalla but also by how it is treated in everyday life. The schoolteacher named Bahtiyor described his courtyard as a sort of “inside outside”—an outdoor space where you can dress and behave at ease, because you are within your house.18 “So you’re stepping out with an undershirt?” Bahtiyor asked rhetori- cally. That was okay because “it’s your own hovli. You’re watching the kids? Yelling at the kids? It’s your own hovli. Now, in the apartment building, two apartments may be next to each other, but you live by yourself. . . . On your 138 House and Dwelling in the World

Figure 16. Wearing an undershirt and being at ease in one's own courtyard (hovli). Photo- graph by the author, 1994. own land, you live under your own conditions, in your own hovli—a free life” (fig. 16). Paradoxically, apartment life is crowded yet alienating at the same time, while hovli life is neighborly yet private at the same time. The coexistence of community and freedom in the mahalla, if one agrees with Bahtiyor’s view, is enabled by the way space is partitioned into hierarchies of intimacy: from room to hovli to the mahalla’s narrow lanes to its key streets to the city’s thoroughfares. These spatial hierarchies organize everyday activities and socialization into graded domains of intimacy or formality. It is interesting that Soviet urban planners (and now their Kyrgyz successors) have considered the mahalla a space-inefficient form of housing. Although a mahalla cannot achieve the residential densities of a micro-district apartment complex, the mahalla embodies a rather ingenious scheme of spatial partitioning that enables the co-presence of wide-ranging activities on a small scale. With the remark about “living under your own conditions,” Bahtiyor was claiming that hovlis were valued because the space was malleable for uses according to the family’s particular needs and means. He said that when there was no hot water, heating, or gas in the apartments in the winter, one would be at the mercy of city utilities. In a hovli, one could burn wood or coal instead, so it was suited to the improvisations needed to survive an era of shortages. The spaces of a courtyard are shaped and maintained by routine life activities and become iconic of local practice and knowledge, what James Scott has termed metis.19 By contrast, the alienating spaces of apartment neighborhoods reflect the inflexible regimes of House and Dwelling in the World 139

Figure 17. Schematic diagram of an Uzbek house. Drawing by Rory Liu. state-standardized living space. Therefore, Bahtiyor claimed that Uzbeks valued their hovlis because their spatial form was closely interlocked with their mode of livelihood, a good fit that he described as a “free life.”20 Uzbek domestic spaces are malleable because of the flexible and modular way in which they are configured. Unlike a modern Kyrgyz or Russian do- micile, an Uzbek house (uy) is an integrated ensemble of separate structures arranged around the hovli (fig. 17). The structures comprise sleeping rooms, sitting areas, a kitchen, a bathing room, a latrine (there is no plumbing), storage shacks, and animal pens. Because of the house’s modular nature, there is much flexibility in grouping or separating different household functions. A married son and his immediate family can live in a separate structure from 140 House and Dwelling in the World the parents and their unmarried children, if there is enough room. Access to the entire house ensemble from the street is through a metal or wooden gate leading to a passageway that connects to the hovli. The gate can have a smaller door built into it for people to pass, or it can be swung completely open for cars. The passageway is usually sheltered by an extension of roofing that covers the adjacent room and is where a car would be kept, if the family has one. The windows and doors of the house’s component structures open to the central courtyard. Although rooms along the exterior wall may have windows to the street, they are almost always kept barred and draped. Having doors to the hovli means that most movements within the house require traversing the courtyard, though some rooms built together in one structure may connect to each other. Going to the latrine from one’s bed, or the kitchen to the eating area, for example, usually entails crossing the hovli. The courtyard itself reveals most patently the flexible, practical, and -im provisational nature of Uzbek domestic space. Varying in size and sometimes in shape, most hovlis are maintained to some extent as a garden but can vary greatly in look and feel: from an earthy and loosely kept appearance, to a well- crafted, assiduously kept one.21 The ground can either be all concrete pave- ment, all earth, or some of both. Courtyards are graced with trees (poking through small plots of earth in the well-paved ones) and other plants, yield- ing apples, pears, cherries, peaches, figs, persimmons, pomegranates, or mint. Enterprising types build cellophane greenhouses in which to grow tomatoes or flowers for sale in the winter. Many have cultivated grapevines that climb on metal scaffolding to reach extensive lattices overhead, providing shade in parts of the hovli. That shaded area is where families would place the so’ri, the low platform used for sitting, eating meals, drinking tea, entertaining guests, and doing some types of housework. Sitting on a so’ri, one takes in the sometimes-exquisite wood carvings on the house posts and panels. A few hovlis have ariks flowing through them, with either concrete or earthen bases. Chickens are sometimes cooped in the hovli or tied to a post. Sheep and cattle are occasionally in stalls (called qo’ykhona and molkhona, respectively) along the courtyard. The interior rooms of the house also tend to have multiple functions depending on time and need. Most have little furniture and can thus serve equally as a bedroom at night (with a stack of mats [to’shak] on the floor that can be stashed in a niche in the wall during the day); as a workroom during the day for ironing, cutting vegetables, or doing homework; as a place for eating meals and watching television; or as a space for entertaining guests. Wealthy families with ample space keep several large rooms empty, with only to’shak, to seat large parties of guests, such as for to’ys (weddings and other celebrations), ziyofats, or funerals. Bahtiyor’s remarks about the hovli also reveal spatial distinctions indexed by language, forming a hierarchy of interiority. He uses the verb chiqmoq (to House and Dwelling in the World 141 go out, exit) when he says, “So you’re stepping out [chiqasanmi]?” referring to motion from a room (enclosed) to the hovli (outdoors). Talking about “inside” and “outside” of the uy (house) requires explanation. Passing from the street through the gate, one “comes into” the hovli (hovliga kiradi), though one remains outdoors. But leaving a room, one “goes out” to the hovli (hovliga chiqadi), though the hovli is the most central place in the house. The most “interior” places of the house, as evidenced by how those spaces are treated, are the rooms most removed from the hovli, which are the most peripheral areas along the exterior wall. The language used for motion in a house reveals a distinction between being inside the house (uy ichida), meaning in a room, versus being in the hovli, which is outdoors but also at home (uyda) from the standpoint of someone standing completely outside, such as a gate or telephone caller. Finally, as noted above, the entire mahalla is considered “inside” compared with the Soviet portions of the city, to which one “goes out” (shaharga chiqadi). The Uzbek house thus inverts interiority relative to modern Kyrgyz and Russian houses.22 The latter, like many houses worldwide, are centered structures with windows facing outward and surrounded by fenced yards.23 The appearance of Kyrgyz urban neighborhoods contrasts starkly with Uzbek ones because of this difference in house organization.24 A few Kyrgyz intellectuals remarked to me that the inward orientation of Uzbek houses schematically reflects their inward-looking, conservative mentality, whereas the Kyrgyz yurt (the roof of which has a hole open to the sky) reflects the Kyrgyz’s outward-looking posture of connection and responsiveness to surroundings. They further used this “nomadic mentality” of nimble adaptability to explain Kyrgyzstan’s rapid move toward democratic and market reforms among the Central Asian republics, in contrast to Uzbekistan’s cautiously slow pace of liberalization. Given that I am arguing in this book that, for Osh Uzbeks, the state is a mahalla writ large, then for Kyrgyz, the state is a yurt writ large. Do- mestic space bears a homology to the ethnically marked republic. The spatial organization of interiority is also a matter of organizing the auditory spheres of concern. Just as I was forced to pay attention to the soundscape when the lights went out at dinnertime one night, a second revelatory moment of interruption came when I was flat on my back with a stomach ail- ment while living in the Mansurovs’ hovli.25 My bedroom was a windowless interior room connected to a larger room that connected to the courtyard. From my blind vantage point, I began to perceive how daily activities of the household were partitioned by domains of relative audibility. The sonic contours of household space organized activity as much as its visual occlusions. Because a soundscape manifested itself in degrees of intensity, the kinds of space it organized were characterized by degrees of participation or ignorabil- ity. If the telephone at one edge of the courtyard rang, who should answer it? 142 House and Dwelling in the World

The task fell on someone in the courtyard or outer room sooner than on those in inner rooms, even if those inside were closer, because the outer space was in the immediate acoustic sphere of the telephone. Likewise, those in the courtyard relayed vocal calls at the gate into inner rooms, revealing the house’s contour of acoustic depth and connectivity through relay nodes. Dwelling in a mahalla meant being at home with its soundscape, which required local practical knowledge to interpret what belonged to one’s sphere of concern. As an acoustic stranger to mahalla life, I once heard Saidjon’s name being called rather faintly and relayed the call to Saidjon in his room. The daughter told me, no, the call was for a neighbor—another Saidjon, apparently. All these examples show how a verbal command crossed sonically defined thresholds that partitioned the courtyard house into different levels of insideness. The auditory organization of the Uzbek house enabled coordination of activity in the household by organizing hierarchies of relevance to embodied, spatially positioned social actors. This case underscores the importance of looking at actual body and space, here regarding position-dependent audibility, in understanding how household space undergirds the organization of household life. Thus, the hovli forms a field of tacit expectations about normality, produced by various mutually reinforcing practices (behavior, speech, dress, and so forth) and ways of maintaining the space (with certain visual and acoustic qualities, the “look and feel”) that are organized according to a hierarchy of interiority. Mahalla houses, organized as they are around the hovli, help reproduce taken-for-granted meanings of “everyday domestic life,” which, in turn, are thematized by discourse as reified “Uzbek tradition.”

Mahalla as a Way of Dwelling in the World The mahalla is a potent idiom for Osh Uzbeks because it is both a place for dwelling and an ideal for pondering. Both aspects of this idiom are evident in the narratives about mahalla and the virtual tour of its streets, gates, courtyards, and rooms presented here. Osh Uzbeks value their mahallas as places to live, despite their “primitive” conditions (e.g., no plumbing or sewage systems and perennially sporadic utilities), partly because they offer malleable spaces that facilitate improvised adaptations to the uncertainties of post-Soviet life. The mahalla is also valued because its houses and streets are configured in such a way as to permit mutual presencing, involvement, and accountability by organizing hierarchies of privacy through visual and auditory cues. Its spatiality grounds the modes of sociality prevalent in it. Because of such sociospatial qualities, the mahalla is idealized as a model for moral community and for inculcating values of honesty, hard work, peace, submission, communal concern, and stewardship for environment. The mahalla is good to think as Osh Uzbeks consider what reconstructive efforts their society needs to take in the post-Soviet era. House and Dwelling in the World 143

Because the mahalla idiom shapes Osh Uzbek life from unconscious routines to focused aspirations, the mahalla also partly sets the terms of Osh Uzbeks’ interactions with the world at large. Living in a mahalla conditions a certain expectation about the way the world should be. Unlike explicit ideals about proper behavior, for example, the expectation in a mahalla is tacit, embodied, and “pre-objective” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 92, 281). As noted previously, mahalla living entails a corporeal experience of being amid a sociospatial field, the gradient of social expectations that exert palpable pulls and pushes, as it were, on one’s conduct, speech, and thoughts. The term field is meant to have a double meaning, extending the social meaning used by certain theorists in a spatial direction, because the social and the spatial mutually articulate to frame everyday neighborhood activity. The usage here takes its cues from philosopher Thomas Wartenberg’s understanding of social power as a “field effect,” in which one’s exercise of power over another always -im plicates a broad spectrum of other agents, actual and potential (Wartenberg 1990). Any superordinate-subordinate relation is caught up in a wider background of connections to actors who, though not necessarily present at the time, are nonetheless constitutive of the power’s efficacy. For example, the power of a college professor to assign grades to a student is constituted by not only their relation but also the professor’s position in the institution and profession, as well as the student’s position with respect to parents, peers, future employers, or potential graduate admissions committees, and so forth (Wartenberg 1992). Power thus operates across a potentially vast network or field of relations, rather than a simple hierarchy of dyadic relations, as some theories of power would have it.26 This optic highlights what was previously noted regarding mahalla social life—that one’s speech or actions are always implicated in what others may witness or hear, whether directly, across the neighborhood’s spheres of audition and lines of sight, or indirectly, through the constant, rapid circulations of knowledge. These quickly spreading reports in turn have potential consequences for the reputations or relations of one’s entire family to others. When the imam of a mahalla mosque, for example, urges the male youth of his neighborhood to pray or join his Qur’an class, he does so from a social position implicated with wider relations with respect to the boys’ families and neighbors, as well as with the prospect of his mahalla enhancing its citywide reputation of piety. A signature challenge of living in a mahalla is realizing that one’s every word and deed are always potentially caught up with intricate interdependencies within a wide and dense sociospatial field. This quality defines mahalla life more than any other and explains why it is simultaneously so intensely valued and despised. Tarbiya, then, is how one feels compelled to comport oneself within this kind of sociospatial field. This ideal, promoted mostly by older males, involves much more than the overt acts of elders—ordering, admonishing, teaching, 144 House and Dwelling in the World praising, or punishing their juniors—but rather myriad small, moment-to- moment acts situated in a specific, communal way of being. As shown earlier, different neighborhood spaces held different tacit expectations about dress, speech, and comportment, so that the mahalla forms a spatially graded field that is experienced as pressing socially consequential contours onto the judgments, words, and actions of embodied and positioned actors. To dwell in a mahalla means to engage in life activity with a “pre-objective” grasp of the social situation, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s sense, rather than with a reified notion of Uzbek culture.27 In other words, conventional social practice in the mahalla appears to follow Uzbek traditions, but this observation does not im- ply that the inhabitants are enacting mental rules of a culture that exists like an entity in the realm of ideas.28 Rather, everyday social practice is conducted with respect to the background of unthematic understandings about the social world that operates prior to any objectification of “culture.” But contrary to prevalent misconceptions, as Csordas emphasizes, the pre-objective grasp of the world is fully constituted culturally and historically, rather than existing as a universal “biological substrate” of human experience (Csordas 1994). It merely focuses on the initial moment of human perception, always already culturally patterned, before the thematizing of culture or history as objects of reflection. Of course, such objectifications do exist and are socially real, especially when the state elaborates and propagates them in museums, festivals, and passports, which the Soviet and post-Soviet states have actively promoted. Cultural objectifications, indeed, are at the heart of Osh Uzbeks’ treating mahalla as an idiom of communal formation or, as will be seen in chapter 6, the khan figure as an idiom of virtuous leadership. But relating to “culture” as an objectified tradition is not the posture by which one engages the world most of the time. A basic insight of phenomenology is that everyday dwelling (being-in-the-world), occurring in the flow of moment-by-moment acts of engagement with one’s sociospatial environment, normally happens without reference to such objectifications.29 When one rejects identifying mahalla with an essentialized “Uzbek culture,” one opens up a more flexible investigation into how social roles and expectations are asserted, challenged, redirected, reinterpreted, and otherwise subject to change through actual performance. Social ontologies—what the conventional categories of persons are and how one relates to them—are not executions of cultural “rules” but are dynamically maintained and stabilized through habitual activity, and the details of bodily position in specific spaces are consequential to this production. For example, as noted previously, the street is a site where relations of closeness or ignoring, respect or contempt, currying favor, or building camaraderie emerge and are enforced in the “place-ballet” of interwoven activity, with their shifting envelopes of proxemic space and sliding scales of momentary judgments about relative propriety or House and Dwelling in the World 145 other social meanings in real time. Inertias are real, but so is the ever-present possibility of change. The interviewees commenting on the mahalla as cultural reservoir assumed as much, because the socio-moral qualities of mahalla life were said to have declined during and as a result of Soviet rule and are now said to be in a process of restoration. But while these narrators of mahalla life periodized it schematically by macro-politics, we analyze it performatively by the micro-politics of social interaction that Osh Uzbeks were then able to link discursively with the wider scale. The analytical emphasis here on performa- tivity takes its cues from Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “social field,” which he developed for theorizing literary production and reception and which Wil- liam Hanks extended to think about communicative practice more broadly (Bourdieu 1983; Hanks 1996). Social field carries the metaphorical sense of an emergent space of positions and position takings within a horizon of practice, where “it is a matter of practical mastery how each actor occupies these positions, how far they push their respective rights and responsibilities, how close they tread to prohibited forms of practice” (Hanks 1996, 241).30 A performative approach to mahalla social practice, more importantly, allows us to dispel any claim that all inhabitants are pressed to follow a single set of expectations or that each needs to respond in the same way to a given sociospatial situation in a mahalla. Intersubjective relations are always open textured, approximate, revisable, and, as it were, without guarantees, as Al- fred Schutz (1967, 38–44, 97–136) noted, even though they usually fall into expected, conventional patterns. Practice always contains indeterminacy.31 A “sliding scale of potential within limits” (Hanks 1996, 231) governs a social actor’s practical sense of what is relevant, urgent, necessary, decorous, ingra- tiating, humorous, insulting, and so forth, at any given moment of interaction. The “knack” for grasping the social situation, where errors in judgment are always possible, results from a partial, situated viewpoint that is “rarely entirely coherent and rarely entirely incoherent” (Bourdieu 1980/1990, 12).32 And so the mahalla as a sociospatial field gives room for the mahalla as an elder “traditionalist” idiom of tarbiya and the mahalla as oppressive conformity; for a full spectrum of advocacy, compliance, hypocrisies, evasions, and rebellion; and for numerous other subject positions among inhabitants, as well as for shifting, contradictory positions within single individuals. The mahalla is thus inhabited and interpreted in various, sometimes divergent, ways by differently positioned subjects in its sociospatial field. Paying attention to embodied practice opens a domain of inquiry in which to think about history and power, specifically about the way in which the So- viet or Kyrgyzstani state was present and enfolded into Osh Uzbek lives. The narratives of mahalla restructurings and development in the twentieth century—the rectilinear organization of streets, the advent of electricity, the use of waterproof roofing materials, the professional diversification of residents, 146 House and Dwelling in the World the chronic overcrowding of houses, to name a few—had concomitant effects on everyday practices of livelihood, instantiated in changed bodily routines and dispositions of mahalla inhabitants. History is present not only in words, documents, or monuments but also “in our neuromuscular patterning and kinaesthetic memories” (Farnell 1999, 353) and in the senses themselves, culturally patterned as they are.33 History is present in their very habitual postures and comportment, as Walimat remarked about the youth who today pass by their elders on the mahalla street smoking, without the social reflex to interrupt their gait to greet them, or, as another remarked disapprovingly, about the public visibility of women socializing on mahalla streets. The layering of attitudes and sensibilities into embodied activity is what allows Osh Uzbek communal guardians to claim that they could read the spirit of the times on the street and decry it. And it is through the altered contours of the mundane routine that Osh Uzbeks and Central Asians became Soviet, not only through explicit ideologies promulgated via education and propaganda. By locating inquiry at the “fluid middle ground” between ideologies and practices that comprises social imaginaries, we can begin to appreciate the “implications of actual bodily experience for imagining and acting upon the forces of history” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 72, as cited and discussed in Farnell 1999, 353), although this needs further investigation. Indeed, the mahalla as an idiom of tarbiya should be interpreted as an instance of bodily imagination, a mode of “carnal knowledge,” an embodied subject’s total engagement with the world that is both cognitive and corporeal.34 Imagination is emphatically not restricted to the “mental” or visual (Csordas 1993). The mahalla presented here represents not merely a place or a discursive trope but a vernacular way of being good persons and communities that has become an idiom of societal transformation from the individual and household onward. The discourses of mahalla as cultural reservoir in the first part of this chapter interpret, evalu- ate, moralize, periodize, objectify, and forecast about the vast totality of everyday mahalla life in the second part of the chapter. Everyday life is normally unreflective in the flow of dwelling but can become thematized (articulated into conscious interpretations) and circulated furiously at certain historical junctures, as in the current economic and identity crises. Tarbiya is thus a particular interpretation, promoted mainly by the elder generation, of the sociospatial dynamics of their neighborhoods. Being a site of tarbiya is not the only possible way to make sense of the mahalla, because social reality is always more vast and complex than any representation of it (i.e., anthropology’s “aesthetic of excess”), but it reflects what is currently circulating and compelling to Osh Uzbeks.35 This mahalla idiom objectifies and even mystifies the rigidi- ties and fluidities of their form of life toward aspired ideals answering their perceived post-Soviet exigencies. House and Dwelling in the World 147

Mahalla life thus produces in Osh Uzbeks both a way of seeing the world and a way of being in the world. Mundane acts of conformity and monitoring in the mahalla enable discourses about tarbiya and societal renewal, while those discourses, in turn, interpret daily mahalla life. Mahalla discourse and practice are intimately intertwined. That is why the mahalla is termed an idiom, because it is constituted by discourse, practice, and the “fluid middle ground in between.” This powerful idiom influences how Osh Uzbeks think about sociopolitical relations at different scales and domains of life—how they dwell in the mahalla conditions and how they dwell in the world more generally, including how they relate to the state. The mahalla idiom provides discursive “content” to Osh Uzbek imaginaries of the state, seen as a kind of moral community under the tarbiya of the president. The idiom also imbues the imaginary of the state with the spatial “form” of a field, where the moral qualities of political authority are treated as pervading the republic’s space much like social authority is seen as pervading the mahalla’s space. The argument here is that, both in tarbiya “content” and fieldlike “form,” Osh Uzbeks treated the state like a mahalla writ large. Republic and 6 Virtuous Leadership

At a Russian restaurant in Osh one summer day in 1999, a young Uzbek man eloquently summarized for me why the republic of Uzbekistan was so much on the minds of Uzbeks in Osh at the time. Nurolim stood out as the most cosmopolitan individual of all my friends in the city. He spoke fluent, idiomatic American English, in addition to his Russian, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Turkish, and he was one of the few from Osh who had studied in the United States. Nurolim expressed a sense of alienation from “traditional Uzbek culture” and described mahalla life as oppressive, filled as it was with what he called “Is- lamic ways of thinking,” and leading many younger residents to resentment and evasion of strict norms. Elders in the mahalla where he used to live, for example, insisted that weddings be done musulmancha: without loud music, dancing, mixing of the sexes, or alcohol. Nurolim distastefully recounted a time when an unmarried woman moved into his mahalla. When she had occasional male visitors to her house, the elders assembled one evening and delivered an ultimatum: she was to stop receiving men, get married, or move out. Nurolim himself moved out of his mahalla as soon as he was financially able and was working at the time for a nongovernmental organization promoting

148 Republic and Virtuous Leadership 149 independent media. Nurolim was, simply put, the most Western-minded Uz- bek person whom I knew in Osh. Over pel’meni dumplings and borshch soup, our lunch conversation turned to politics in the neighboring republic of Uzbekistan. Nurolim commented that although President Karimov ruled Uzbekistan with a Soviet-style iron fist, he astutely created a self-image of being the benefactor of the Uzbekistani people. But Nurolim took me by total surprise with the following comments:

I’ve spent years criticizing Karimov’s authoritarianism. But I now recognize that Karimov’s ways are not all bad. Things like a quasi-command economy, state-run media, relentless crackdowns on political dissidents and Islamic militants are perhaps necessary for the time being in Uzbekistan, because the alternative would be chaos. There is an Uzbek proverb that captures this. Do you know it? Shoh ko’rgan, khon ko’rgan halqmiz. “We are a people who have seen the shahs, seen the khans.” This means, Uzbeks have witnessed only dictatorial rule in all of their history. Why should we expect them to understand democracy in the short years after independence?1

Enter the Khan This comment shocked me because it came from an active democracy and civil society promoter in Central Asia, one who had just finished telling me how much he resented the paternalism of social life in the mahallas. Nurolim was offering his advocacy, provisional as it was, of President Karimov as a kind of modern khan figure—an enlightened despot whose harsh ways worked for what was presumed to be long-term good. Despite his personal distaste for “traditional Uzbek authority” and his promotion of Western societal models, Nurolim grudgingly assented to the need for this kind of political leader in Central Asia at this time. In his view, only through the political and economic stability that a dictatorial state provides can a people who are used to such rule be educated in the ways of liberal states. Authoritarianism was the path to liberalism. Although Nurolim was an exceptional Osh Uzbek, his advocacy of Presi- dent Karimov’s approach to post-Soviet rule was widespread and fervent in the late 1990s among Uzbek men and women in Osh of various education levels, professions, and ages. During my fieldwork in that period, I found that Osh Uzbek men in particular harbored a collective obsession about the Uz- bekistani president and state. When talking about all sorts of topics, in casual conversation and formal interview alike, these men revealed a fixation on the idea of President Karimov’s effective leadership. I initially found this talk a distraction from my prepared research questions on historical change in the 150 Republic and Virtuous Leadership mahalla, but my interlocutors kept changing the subject on me. An account of wartime hardships in Osh of the 1940s would wander into comparisons with post-Soviet hardships, and then into anti-Akaev, pro-Karimov tirades. Talk about pre-Soviet mahallas would digress to whether traditional sensibilities are returning in the post-Soviet moment. Taxi drivers would offer unsolicited commentaries on comparative developments in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. It was as if they needed a foreigner to bear witness to an unfolding morality tale of heroic greatness versus corrupt ineptitude. Osh Uzbeks cited Uz- bekistan’s supposedly productive factories, new roads, well-equipped schools, scientific research, developed natural resources, independence from foreign imports or aid, and suppression of crime, corruption, and terrorism. They ex- tolled his ruthlessly unilateralist approach to policy, crediting him for maintaining what they saw as Uzbekistan’s exemplary political order and economic development in a region rife with collapse, corruption, and conflict since the end of Soviet rule. Uzbeks in Osh saw in their republic only an inflationary “wild capitalism,” idle factories, unemployed youth, disintegrating social services, dilapidated infrastructure, governmental corruption, and unchecked “Wahhabism,” the vague, pejorative term roughly equivalent to the Western media’s use of “Islamic fundamentalism.” Of course, these sentiments precisely echoed President Karimov’s own characterizations of what he was doing, as broadcast through his state-run media, which Osh Uzbeks watched extensively. Karimov declared that he would conduct post-Soviet reforms according to a gradual, centrally controlled “Uzbek model” of transition: “Free Uzbekistan has chosen its own road of reforming society and has elaborated its own model for transition to a democratic society and free market economy. . . . We need to . . . educate people on laws . . . encourage tolerance . . . and most importantly, change the mentality of the people, their frame of mind engendered by the command-administrative and totalitarian-distributive system which we have lived with for the last 75 years” (I. Karimov 1993, 15–16; emphases added). What this meant in practice was that Karimov ran Uzbekistan much as he had during the late Soviet period while holding up his supposedly liberal goals in order to deflect criticism, which was an important part of constructing his legitimacy in front of domestic and foreign audiences, at least until the Andijan events of 2005. I came to realize that the Osh Uzbeks’ collective obsession with Karimov and Uzbekistan during the 1990s concerned not merely “ethnic sentiment” or Soviet nostalgia for stability, provision, and global status. To be sure, these factors were very apparent in Osh Uzbek reactions to the events of the day, because their position as Uzbeks in a troubled Kyrgyz state located next to an Uzbek state that appeared peaceful, prosperous, and proud conditioned their sentiments. However, what was at stake for them extended beyond ethnicity/ nationality or Soviet expectations alone. They were struggling as a discursive Republic and Virtuous Leadership 151 community to reckon with the new uncertainties of their position “between a rock and a harsh place,” between two nationalizing states with which they had problematic connections, and between two visions of postsocialism. Jarring instability and traumatic change tend in general to be productive of sociopolitical imaginaries that inform coping strategies for the new socioeconomic situations. Even though such coping strategies involve novel adaptations and improvisations, they often reveal complex layers of enduring and recapitulated frames of interpretation (Greenhouse, Mertz, and Warren 2002). In this case, Osh Uzbeks employed a wide repertoire of cultural and historical references that included but exceeded “Uzbek traditions” and Soviet sensibilities. As the exposition here will show, Osh Uzbek men were wrestling with basic questions about state, leadership, personhood, agency, productivity, land, and people in their talk about the post-Soviet situations they experienced during the late 1990s. Touching on topics such as agricultural reform, land use, industrial production, foreign imports, trade imbalances, world markets, currencies, and corruption, they were thinking deeply about the connections between disparate phenomena that they were experiencing. Their narratives reveal that certain powerful concerns were circulating in the Osh Uzbek community beneath the harsh daily struggles for livelihoods. Their concerns can be seen as having, to use convenient labels, both postsocialist and postcolonial aspects. Postsocialist questions revolve around economic and political reform after the end of state socialism. For example, what role should the state play in the republic’s economic affairs? To what extent should the state manage the country’s complex socioeconomic dynamics and new connections with the world market? The intention here is not to engage economists’ assessments about Central Asia’s “transition” to free markets but rather to determine and analyze what ordinary Osh Uzbeks were thinking about socioeconomic change.2 The idea of Karimov as a khan figure was seductive because he appeared to them as efficaciously addressing these problems. In addition, postcolonial questions revolve around Osh Uzbeks’ new place in the world today and in global history after Russian-Soviet domination. What grand narrative (and whose grand narrative) is to guide the future trajectory of those societies, in light of the stated disavowal of the Soviet project by the independent Central Asian states? What stature does Central Asia now have on the world stage? Karimov as khan was seen as conferring dignity to Uzbek civilization and nation. The idea that only the khan could properly prepare his people for democracy and capitalism revealed a desire to engage global ideologies and markets on terms that are seen to be of Uz- beks’ own choosing. The khan would make history as he pleases, an appealing alternative to victimhood by neoliberal restructuring. Finally, a deeper question underlies these two overlapping sets of concerns: by what conceptual paradigm and practical mechanism should post-Soviet Central Asian society 152 Republic and Virtuous Leadership be transformed? Osh Uzbeks were desperately seeking an effective idiom of transformation. For many of them, the idiom of the khan provided just that, because he exercised a kind of agency that created the right conditions within independent Uzbekistan for peace and prosperity to be sustained. The state of the khan had a context-creating magicality, which possessed a distinct spatiality that in some ways resembled that of a mahalla. Although this chapter focuses on the initial post-independence decade, during which the khan-centered idiom held the greatest sway in the Osh Uzbek community, especially among men, Osh Uzbek conceptions and sentiments dominant in the 1990s continue to have their staunch advocates, particularly among those over age thirty-five in the 2000s. These views persist despite -in creasing disappointment and disgust with Karimov after the Andijan events, resulting in a more diverse landscape of Osh Uzbek social imaginaries since the mid-2000s (Liu unpublished). The idea of the khan and the need for such an authority figure, even if Karimov may now fail to embody it, still holds the discursive hegemonic center, at the moment anyway, against which other conceptions need to contend, even as the number of fervent adherents to this idea diminish with time. The khan imaginary, in any case, reveals the ways in which Soviet rule and other frames of interpretation deeply contoured the landscape of sociopolitical assumptions upon which Osh Uzbeks imagine their futures via an appeal to the ideal (male) Uzbek character and agency. It is this moralized, ethnicized, and masculine landscape of social imagination to which we now turn. The discussion here centers on extended narrative excerpts from three men who were particularly articulate but whose views were echoed by many other men and women with whom I spoke in the late 1990s. The analysis of their talk clarifies not only what they are saying but how they express themselves, which unpacks cultural logics and illuminates wider aspects of their worldview. This is why moderately lengthy passages are included. The next sections explore the two duties that the khan figure is imagined to have: caretaking and transforming the people and land.

Attending to the Complex The khan is charged with taking care of the country. Osh Uzbeks talked about the state leader as a kind of steward over the productive capacities of the land and people. The state leader was supposed to work proactively, decisively intervening to ensure political order and economic productivity in the republic. His executive decisions were understood to have consequences for every level of societal function. This view of the state manifested itself in numerous issues discussed in my interviews with Osh Uzbek men about post-Soviet life in the late 1990s. Several of my interlocutors characterized the leader’s charge as boqmoq, meaning to look after the needs of someone or something, such as children, animals, or gardens. Boqmoq required understanding the character Republic and Virtuous Leadership 153 of the times and engaging the complexities of socioeconomic mechanisms. It involved exercising a high level of agency that set the structural conditions that, in turn, would unleash a virtuous cycle of beneficial effects throughout society. Their basic diagnosis of Kyrgyzstan’s severe hardships of the 1990s was the moral failure of its leadership to tend to the country in this way. Boq- moq requires personal character, not mere technical competence. Some particularly revealing narrative excerpts will help unpack these conceptions. For Walimat, the educated bus mechanic in his forties, Kyrgyzstan’s rapid reforms in the 1990s were disastrous because the leadership failed to grasp the “mechanisms of production,” the chain of causes and effects within the postsocialist economy. He compared the immediate post-independence situation with the early Soviet period, because both periods featured the state’s imposition of a new economic system on a society that, by Marx’s own historical analysis, was ready for neither socialism then nor capitalism now. Exem- plifying his Soviet education, he turned received historical categories into a critique of the Soviet and Kyrgyz states: upheaval ensued because the leaders in both cases failed to properly read the times.3

The [early Soviet] reforms did not go well. . . . They said, we have passed from capitalism to socialism, and socialism is better. . . . [But] don’t we need to proceed in steps? Feudalism, capitalism, and then socialism, they said. But we plunged into socialism without having seen feudalism. We had never seen capitalism. And now capitalism has been started. The [post-Soviet] reforms should have been done slowly. Slowly, gradually. But with us it was done suddenly, . . . and on every street the unemployed gathered more and more. But before collective farm lands were divided up [i.e., privatized], what was needed was the mechanism of production. . . . The water had not yet been divided. That was needed for planting. And the planted cotton was for the Textile Plant to process . . . where ten thousand people used to work. After the cotton was not being delivered, the Textile Plant was left idle. . . . Without thinking about such things, they divided up the lands without having thought through the mechanism. Then everything stopped working. Things don’t just happen from out of the blue! . . . In order for people to be fed, in order to provide agricultural products, the government must support agriculture. I’ve told you this before: if you look after the land, then the land will look after the people [yerni boqsangiz, yer elni boqadi]. For one hundred, two hundred years on this land, our ancestors, all of us, have been well fed. And even now this land must be looked after. To look after the land, it must be [properly] worked. . . . If the land is worked well, if you treat it well, you will reap goodness from the land. In Kyrgyzstan there is much land. It must be worked. To work it, money is 154 Republic and Virtuous Leadership

needed. There’s land, but water must be provided. There is empty land, much of it. In the fall, they [the lands] remain unsown with wheat. The lands that were sown before under socialism are remaining unsown. . . . If little wheat is sown, where is the government to get dollars from? . . . Another country then sells its wheat for dollars. Right? They sell it for hard currency. To earn hard currency, exports are necessary! But the products we produce—the products of our lands— are not sufficient for ourselves! How are we going to eat if we sell our wheat for dollars? Meaning, we have to work our own lands. There is no industry. . . . We need to produce good products. For that, we need to change the technology. If the technology is good, then good products will come out. But where is technology brought from? To bring in technology, hard currency, again, is needed.

Central to Walimat’s thinking was the idea that the state had the charge to “look after the land” (yerni boqmoq) for productive and sustainable use. If cared for, the land would reciprocate by looking after the people. Walimat claimed in another conversation that the Kyrgyzstani state had failed to do that and had instead ruined the land with pesticides and mismanagement, resulting in low yields. Underutilized lands meant insufficiency in both domestic food and exportable products, which meant few prospects for earning the hard currency needed to break this vicious cycle. The entire cascade of effects reflected the state’s bad stewardship of the republic. Walimat instead believed the state should mitigate the raw market forces acting on the Kyrgyz- stani farmer by instituting subsidies, price supports, and favorable credit rates. Revealing keen knowledge of the world outside, he argued that if agriculture received governmental support even in the United States, which proclaimed capitalism, Kyrgyzstan should have done likewise, instead of leaving its farmers unprotected. Care for the land was thus simultaneously a technical and moral imperative. Walimat saw the situation in Uzbekistan as a stark contrast, with wise use of land and sufficient production. To him, this result meant that the Uzbeki- stani state was fulfilling its role in feeding its people, producing exports, and avoiding dependence. The key to Uzbekistan’s success was its well-managed gradualism:

Uzbekistan is conducting good reforms, proceeding slowly. The collective farms remain working and are delivering cotton to every plant. With sufficient cotton, the plants keep working. Wheat is being planted. There are twenty-five million people [in Uzbekistan], right? Wheat enough for twenty-five million is being planted. Why do we [in Kyrgyzstan] say, “Sell our cotton for hard currency and import wheat”? There is [in Uzbekistan] sufficiency both in cotton and in wheat. . . . They are conducting the reforms slowly [in Uzbekistan]. They have this Republic and Virtuous Leadership 155

saying, “I have an old house. I will build another house for myself.” If I destroy the old house, where will I live? Karimov said, “Do not destroy the old house.” He said, “Let us build the new house.” He said, “After building it, I will destroy [the old one].” But with us, we have destroyed the old house, and haven’t yet built the new one. . . . And so it has become difficult for us. This is what’s happening. [Emphases added]

Walimat’s concern about economic independence resonated with Presi- dent Karimov’s own pronouncements concerning import substitution as a priority for post-Soviet Uzbekistan.4 What is interesting here is how the notion of the personal stewardship of a house captured Walimat’s ideals for state leadership. The house metaphor cast President Karimov of Uzbekistan as the prudent master of a household, effectively casting, almost like a biblical parable, the Kyrgyzstani leadership as foolish masters who ruined their own house. This idea was particularly poignant in light of President Akaev’s ubiquitous slogan on posters and billboards at that time: “Kyrgyzstan is our common home” (literally, house, which is üy in Kyrgyz and dom in Russian). While Akaev used his house metaphor to exhort all citizens of multiethnic Kyrgyzstan to share in a common future, Karimov had used his house metaphor to justify a gradualist approach to reforms. Walimat himself employed Karimov’s metaphor to talk about wise stewardship of a republic and how the lack of such care resulted in Kyrgyzstan’s morass of difficulties. The steward was a male figure who carried the authority of a family patriarch prudently instigating drastic changes to his household. Good stewardship resulted from wise leadership that could read the times and understand the “mechanisms” of both society and the economy. This was a sociopolitical imaginary articulat- ing a state paternalism whereby the people, lands, and capacities fall under the guidance of a state that knows what is good for them, reserving for itself the exclusive prerogative of directing the economic, political, and social course of a country. Mastering the mechanisms of society and the economy was the focus of stewardship discussions among those who thought that Kyrgyzstan’s basic problem was its piecemeal approach. In other words, they believed that the Kyrgyzstani state’s governance consisted in instigating reforms here and there without regard to their interdependence. The state was blind to both the systemic impediments that obstructed the implementation of good intentions and to the full cascade of effects that its policies triggered. The result was caus- ing not only material hardships but also lacerating the moral fabric of society. The young university history lecturer, Qalam, depicted Kyrgyzstan’s problems as a tangled web of interdependencies that the state had to engage, a process he called “attending to the complex” (kompleksni qarash, literally, “looking at,” here closely related in meaning to boqmoq). Qalam introduced this analy- 156 Republic and Virtuous Leadership sis by explaining why post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’s agricultural land reform had failed to achieve productivity in private hands. When Akaev officially inaugu- rated the privatization of collective and state farms by presidential decree in 1992–1993, he did not properly work out how formerly shared resources, such as water, seed, fertilizer, pesticides, tractors, machine parts, technical servicing, and storage would be divided or continue to be obtained. As a result, cotton, intensively produced in the Fergana Valley during the Soviet period and demanding great inputs of water and fertilizer, was no longer being planted on the farmlands of Qalam’s village.5 Qalam laid the responsibility for this agricultural dormancy on the state, which, he believed, should be proactively anticipating and attending to farmers’ needs:

A presidential decree [farmon] was issued, a referendum was passed, land was declared to be private, but this process has had little effect on us. It’s in the laws. It’s on paper. . . . dividing up this kolkhoz [collective farm], that sovkhoz [state farm] to everyone according to length of service. . . . Every rural family has a right [to a share.] . . . But we still haven’t seen it. Everything remains the same. The cattle pens remain, the tractors remain [undivided]. . . . The president is issuing decrees, but in practice . . .—well, this is how they take care of agriculture in our Kyrgyzstan. . . . I think for agriculture to develop well in Kyrgyzstan, then, for example, let’s say I am growing cotton. [The state] comes to me, saying, “OK, what are your difficulties? Fertilizer? Here is fertilizer for you. Now what are your difficulties? Here is machinery, machinery for you,” and they bring it. Qalam used an interesting fictive dialogue between the farmer and the state to illustrate the proper relationship between the two, a rhetorical device that other interlocutors used with me as well. The state in these imagined exchanges was depicted as personal, paternalistic, solicitous, and involved at the important junctures of the farmer’s productive activity. Qalam was not advocating a return to state central planning but a managed exit from collectivized agriculture that left the farmer with the means to be independently viable. This meant creating the new mechanisms of sustainable inputs to farming, that is, “taking care of agriculture,” using the word boqmoq. The Kyrgyzstani state had failed to do that, according to Qalam, when they suddenly left the farmer at the mercy of raw market forces. The result was disastrous because market mechanisms in Kyrgyzstan were insufficiently mature at the time. The larger problem was, as Walimat had also indicated, that the state failed to recognize the nature of the historical moment after the end of state socialism:

Qalam: We still have a wild law of capitalism [dikii zakon kapitalizma, a Russian phrase]. Yes, still wild. We have not yet seen full capitalism [biz hali Republic and Virtuous Leadership 157

kapitalizm to’liq ko’rganimiz yo’q]. And so they [cotton traders] swindle. And so people are not planting cotton. Cotton is hard to sell. People are growing tomatoes cheaper. But tomatoes, potatoes are not for export. To get out to foreign lands, we need silk, or cotton, or tobacco. The other things don’t make it outside. . . . If there is cotton, Textile Plant would work, employ sixteen thousand people, and pay taxes to the city, which could pay its teachers and pensioners. The city’s teachers, in turn, would get their salaries, and the city’s pensioners, in turn, would get their pensions. Do you see? [It all depends on] if textiles work. For the textiles to work, it has to get cotton from us. If it gets cotton from us, they have to give us [profitable] prices.

ML: You’ve come full circle.

Qalam: Yes, this complex has to be attended to [kompleksni qarash kerak]. . . . Uzbekistan is selling its cotton to foreign lands for dollars, for high prices. . . . With us, well you know, there is corruption [korruptsiia], bribes [pora]. When the Textile [Plant] director brings in money, . . . he has to give bribes to the top [i.e., to government officials]. . . . We don’t have the [right] conditions, the mechanisms. The result is, cotton is not grown. . . . As a result, rural development is stunted. As a result, the standard of living of the people is not being raised. That’s the way things are, Morgan. We must attend to the complex in Kyrgyzstan; so there must be mechanisms; so there must be order [tartib-intizom] with us. There must be material, economic, political order of the state. Order [poriadok, Russian], discipline [distsiplina, Russian]. Everyone working in his own place, doing his own work. And, going back to what we were saying, no corruption. If the mechanisms work in this way, people can no longer engage in corruption. . . . Otherwise, for example, let’s say I’m smart and this other guy isn’t. But he pays two thousand dollars to get a doctor’s diploma. I’m smart, but I can’t pass. So he gets a job at a hospital as a doctor. But he operates on a person, who then dies. Today, we are going through this kind of process. Our society still does not understand this fully. We have a wild capitalism. Just like your capitalism of the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries. We are two hundred years behind America. [Emphases added]

The expression “wild law of capitalism” was widely used throughout the former Soviet Union to express the perceived predatory lawlessness of new market relations. Qalam’s argument was that if the state would only recognize the times, it would know that the market was not to be trusted to work alone. The state needed to monitor the economy,understand its complex workings, and be ready to intervene at various levels, whether in setting strategic pri- 158 Republic and Virtuous Leadership orities in national production or helping individual farmers. In Kyrgyzstan, however, the state was allowing structural conditions to drive farmers to grow products that did not earn hard currency for the republic, because farmers lacked channels and supports to get exportable products like cotton onto the world market. A shortage of domestic cotton had a negative impact on local industry, notably Osh’s flagship Textile Plant, which resulted in a cascade of harmful effects on local lives. Worse yet, the state turned a blind eye to its own corruption that stunted industrial development. Qalam contrasted this situation to that of Uzbekistan, where he claimed the right decisions were being made to produce cotton for export. The Kyrgyzstani state, in short, failed to provide the right “mechanisms” that would allow the activity of individuals (acting in their presumed self- interest) to result in the economic good of the republic. Capitalism’s ghostly “invisible hand” needed to be conjured. While the prevalence of so-called swindlers in the post-Soviet economy was bad enough, Qalam was suggesting that the greater evil lay in the failure to change the entire complex. The state had the potential and duty to exercise a greater level of agency to alter the structural conditions that, in turn, shaped the decisions of individual actors. If the big picture were rectified, individuals would no longer be able to engage in the lesser misdeeds. Therefore, the real responsibility rested with the leaders of the republic. Their inability to recognize the nature of the times and establish the prerequisites for a functioning country revealed the most serious lapse of state authority. The capacity to grasp a society’s true condition—to see the complex—was a moral faculty, not merely an intellectual one. Other Osh Uzbeks, as we will see later, attributed the vision of state leaders in economic and political matters to personal rectitude—courage, honesty, and purity—as much as to intelligence. And so, Qalam argued that the Kyrgyzstani leadership should have recognized that the republic’s rapid reforms in the early 1990s had unleashed a “wild law of capitalism” under which individual pursuit of self-interest did not add up to societal benefit, as reformers were promising it would, but to gross exploitation and inequality instead. “Attending to the complex” may involve making decisions that entail short-term difficulties for society, and therefore criticism, but that would yield long-term benefits. “Attending to the complex” thus requires both the vision to discern the way out of a deleterious spiral and the courage to push forward with this course despite opposition, because things might have to get worse before they get better. Indeed, executive paralysis, such as that characterizing the Kyrgyzstani leadership, resulted from the inability to think or act beyond the self-serving, immediate interests of political actors that constituted the structural impediments to the common good embedded firmly in the “complex.” It was the moral duty of the top state leader, the khan figure, to recognize, in Qalam’s words, the entrenched “bureaucratism” and corruption rooted in Republic and Virtuous Leadership 159 the “lower mentalities” (past ong) of “tribalism” (ulutchilik, traibalizm) and to resolutely ensure the full implementation of his policies.6 Qalam’s statement pointed to a key characteristic of this Osh Uzbek conception of effective state leadership: the courage to work against the interests of particular groups for the larger societal good.

Order before Development Almost every Osh Uzbek I spoke to during the 1990s considered security and political order to be a critical foundation for any viable future. Imbibing Karimov’s characterizations, they saw the paternalistic state of Uzbekistan as the defender of order, the prime mover in the republic’s progress, and its guide on the state-set path. Maintaining order meant stringently policing the borders with the other Central Asian republics, a measure they saw as imperative for Uzbekistan’s postsocialist path. Central state control of various aspects of economic functioning and reform required, they believed, controlling the flows of goods and currency over the republic’s boundaries. Uzbekistan was to be a single-cell organism resisting the osmotic pressures of global capital and liberal or Islamist ideologies (unspun by state ideological apparatus) impinging on its enveloping membrane. The border security regimen thus delineated— both materially and discursively—a distinct domain of governance and mode of political agency that claims strict control over what happens inside. Uzbeki- stani ideology employed this device to articulate the state’s exceptionalism in the regional context: Uzbekistan was the ever-vigilant bulwark of civilized order amid reckless chaos. The perceived lawlessness of unfettered markets, the Islamist activity, and outright criminality were the raw post-Soviet Central Asian material out of which Uzbekistan would carve its greatness. The crisis triggered by President Karimov’s closing of the border to bus traffic at the Do’stlik crossing in January 1999 forced Osh Uzbeks to consider how they really positioned themselves with respect to Uzbekistan’s national project next door. The intense communal debates that resulted became one discursive site where social imaginaries of Karimov as khan were articulated and elaborated. Qalam himself voiced his support of the border closing, despite its negative impact on Osh and the city’s Uzbeks, because Uzbekistan’s own security was of prime importance to him as a resident of Kyrgyzstan. Qa- lam raised the stakes of this apparent paradox by discussing the progressively restrictive security measures that Uzbekistan put in place during the 1990s at the border where the fifty-eight-kilometer Soviet-era road between southern Kyrgyzstan’s two major cities, Osh and Jalalabat, traversed Uzbekistan unless one took a difficult mountain pass (an easier road within Kyrgyzstan was later built). Because there is no land access to Osh province from any point without crossing either mountains or Uzbekistan, passing through a stretch of Uzbeki- stan was the only viable way from Osh to Jalalabat province and to the capital 160 Republic and Virtuous Leadership

Bishkek, until the completion of the paved mountain road within Kyrgyzstan in 2006 (which doubles the distance; see fig. 9). Qalam described how Uz- bekistan’s heightened restrictions on this road have impeded cotton deliveries from Osh-area farms to a cotton-processing factory in Jalalabat, leading to higher prices. Uzbekistan’s strict border controls were even affecting Kyrgyz- stan’s internal economic flows. When Qalam defended these border restrictions, my “research objectivity” evaporated. How could an intelligent fellow like Qalam be defending such an outrageous policy? In exasperation I abandoned my interviewer persona and started to debate him as a neoliberal advocate.

ML: Controls against crime are of course needed. But, this kind of lawful, economic activity needs to be free. If Uzbekistan does not give permission, it hinders the development of Kyrgyzstan.

Qalam: It does hinder.

ML: But how does this benefit Uzbekistan?

Qalam: Look, it does not benefit Uzbekistan in any way. . . . There are no other cotton factories in the province. It’s a monopoly. . . . If there were many factories, . . . and there’d be competition. It would be cheap, high quality. . . . But there is no competition among cotton factories. It hinders [development]. . . .

ML: And so, this kind of tough controls, in my opinion, is harmful to all.

Qalam: Right. But we are considering the economic aspect. From the political aspect, if the borders were not controlled, the Wahhabis would run through. . . . If there were fighting in Uzbekistan, we Uzbeks have a saying, “When your neighbor is at peace, you are at peace.” When there is conflict at my neighbor’s, it will influence me. . . .

ML: And so in your view, is the political aspect more important than the economic?

Qalam: I think that the political aspect, peace and stability [tinchlik va barqa- rorlik], is what we need as the number one priority. If there is peace and stability, everything would fall into place. If there is peace, you can plant cotton, open new factories, whatever.

ML: I agree. But the reverse is also true.

Qalam: Yes, of course. [You mean] if the economy does not develop well, if the factories are not being opened, if there is unemployment, there would be social unrest. This is correct. But what I am saying is, with the border closed, the economic mechanism is to be built up. Republic and Virtuous Leadership 161

The economic and political demands of the Uzbekistani state were, for Qalam, conflicting yet interdependent. The exigency of Uzbekistan’s security, however, trumped all other considerations. Qalam was willing to have Osh’s own economy pay the price of stunted development in the short run. He believed that everyone in the region would ultimately benefit from Uzbekistan’s unilateral border security regimen, based on a sort of “trickle over” theory— what was good for Uzbekistan was good for its neighbors. But by claiming this, he implicitly infantilized the Kyrgyzstani state and assigned exclusively to the Uzbekistani state the proper authority and efficacious agency for maintaining peace. He thought that Kyrgyzstani law enforcement was undisciplined, underfinanced, corrupt, and ineffective in maintaining order within its own borders, giving “Wahhabis” relatively free rein.7 When it came to regional security, Kyrgyzstan was assumed to be in a virtual state of receivership, one in which it had forfeited its right to be an equal partner in working out key problems across Central Asia. This was what justified, in his eyes, Uzbekistan’s flagrant unilateralism that so infuriated its neighbors and Western observers (until the Andijan massacre provided something far more blatant about which to be outraged). Balancing near and far term, the economic and the political, Qalam understood the causal circularity that if security brought prosperity, then prosperity also secured, but he insisted on prioritizing the first direction of causality. Visionary leadership was marked by the ability to see the proper way to unravel what was otherwise a vicious cycle of impotence, but it required making difficult decisions that seemed to contravene the popular good. Kari- mov, in his wisdom, was choosing short-term hardship to generate long-term prosperity. Indeed, Qalam also argued that Karimov’s border policies imposed a necessary discipline on the population within Uzbekistan for “building up the economic mechanism.” Cotton was still being produced in Uzbekistan by large farms that, though renamed shirkat (business association), have not decollectivized or left state control in practice, because cotton remained Uzbeki- stan’s premier cash crop.8 According to Qalam,

If Karimov were to open the border tomorrow, the people of Uzbekistan could sell cotton to the traders. . . . There would be no cotton left in Uzbekistan. It’d all be sold. There’d be no money being given to the state budget, and if Uzbekistan did that, it could not pave flat roads. It could not maintain its army. This is all interconnected kompleks,[ Russian]. . . . Uzbekistan’s state budget comes from four million tons of cotton [per year]. . . . From that, it established joint-venture enterprises, banks, factories, schools, colleges. If cotton were sold [privately], how could these happen? In Uzbekistan, as you know, the standard of living is low, but the state is rich. Why? Because this is temporary [waqtinchli]. He is not giving out lands 162 Republic and Virtuous Leadership

as private property like in Kyrgyzstan. Karimov is holding onto his collective farms. Why is he doing this? Karimov needs the collective farms. The cotton is sold to the Karimov state . . . and of the money generated [from the sale of cotton] . . . very little is given to the people. . . . After [enough factories] have been built, then Karimov will say, “All right, now, . . . go ahead and divide it up [i.e., privatize].” But [state ownership] is necessary now. . . . I think Karimov is doing exactly the right thing [juda to’ghri ish qilyapti]. Though the population’s standard of living is low. But these things are temporary. After the factories are [kept] working, people are busy with work. Right? You’ve seen it, in Uzbekistan they are selling Nexia, Tico.9 They are earning hard currency in Uzbekistan. But what are they selling in Kyrgyzstan? Right? Karimov is doing the right thing here. Look how many thousands are working. Look how many youth are working. Look how much hard currency they are making. With this hard currency they will build new factories tomorrow. What’s happening in Kyrgyzstan? Foreign investors do not trust Kyrgyz- stan. No one is establishing businesses [here], because . . . the mafia is strong, bribes are taken, so that [investors] come one day and leave the next. There was a joint-venture business that opened in Osh. There are trade firms. Stores. But factories are not being built! Do you see? . . . Why do joint-venture factories not exist here, whereas they do in Uzbekistan? [Emphases added]

According to Qalam, Uzbekistan’s poverty and lack of private property were the “temporary” sacrifice enabling the resourceful Uzbekistani state to work for the eventual good of its citizens. He assigned to the state the primary responsibility for building the country’s infrastructure and industry at this time, implying that the people were not ready to assume a more active role in driving the nation’s economy. Using President Karimov’s name as a met- onym of the Uzbekistani state (Karim davlati), Qalam personified the state as a disciplining father who caused the short-term suffering of his people for their long-term good. Karimov was harsh but unquestionably wise, because he alone would decide when the country’s economic infrastructure was sufficiently built up and would declare when it was time to privatize. Were Kari- mov to liberalize without managing the state’s careful self-withdrawal from the economy, he would be reneging on his personal stewardship of his country. It would result in the “wild capitalism” of Kyrgyzstan, rife with unscrupulous opportunists and governmental corruption so pervasive that, as Qalam put it, “foreign investors do not trust Kyrgyzstan.” Kyrgyzstan was ever the anti- model of these narratives, in which the authorities did everything improp- erly. Its open borders meant illicit trafficking; its lack of industrial investment meant import of foreign goods without export, which meant hemorrhag- ing economic outflows. Kyrgyzstan’s poor economic health was inextricably Republic and Virtuous Leadership 163 linked to the character of the state leadership that lacked the wisdom, courage, or moral rectitude to see this “complex” of effects and take effective action. What made Karimov a compelling figure for Qalam was the glaring absence of a strong moral authority in Kyrgyzstan who would make the hard choices necessary for the country’s future, sacrificing short-term economic growth for itself and its neighbor as the only way out of stagnation and chaos. Karimov was subjecting Uzbekistan to the necessary collective preparation that would shape the land and its people into readiness for capitalism, a process that others would call tarbiya. This was a part of his “Uzbek model,” which included the “formation of a new economic mentality and world-view among the people” (Dosumov 1996).10

Training the People If the January 1999 border closing to buses constituted a loyalty test for Osh Uzbeks, another test became even more personal to them a month later, when Karimov made an off-the-cuff remark at the Tashkent airport while en route to a regional presidential summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. This comment appeared to denigrate Osh Uzbeks directly:

We became an independent state, all of us, in 1991 [Karimov chuckles]. Along with us our neighbors are also independent. They are very good at boasting about this when it is in their favor. They would say: We are independent! We are sovereign! We are this and we are that. All right, you are an independent state. We are also an independent state. The links between independent states should abide by quite different rules. That means the borders should be clear, there should be no unnecessary trips back and forth, unnecessary bus trips taking our Uzbek goods out. For example, every day five thousand people travel from Osh to Andijan by bus. Now calculate yourself, five thousand people travel by bus every day from Osh to Andijan. Apart from this there also fixed-route taxis marshrutki[ ]. Currently, Kyrgyz leaders are asking us why we have canceled certain buses. So let us calculate, if five thousand people each take two loaves of bread [out of Uzbekistan], then how much that will be? And that is only the bread, I am not talking about the rest! Why are you bothering us so much? You have your own president! You have your own leader! You are building a democratic island, aren’t you? If you want to build a democratic island, first feed your own people and then start boasting! Am I right? We are trying to feed ourselves using our own potential, our own resources, and, above all, using our people’s hard work.11

Karimov “explained” the January border closing to buses at Do’stlik as protecting his own economy from being siphoned off by neighbors taking un- fair advantage of Uzbekistan’s cheaper state-supported consumer prices. He 164 Republic and Virtuous Leadership derided Kyrgyzstan’s “democratic island” liberalizations as being unable to provide for its own people, turning the idea of sovereign independence into the obligation of economic self-sufficiency and a boast about Uzbekistan’s superior economic system. The independent Kyrgyzstani press found this remark offensive, coming as it did before a summit, but it brought the ambiguous position of Osh Uzbeks into the spotlight, as they were largely the ones who ventured into Uzbekistan to shop. As discussed previously, most Osh Uz- beks at the time envied Uzbekistan’s controlled economic path and deplored Kyrgyzstan’s inflationary “wild capitalism” to the point of making statements like Karimov’s comment above about self-sufficiency. Yet, ironically, Karimov appeared to chastise them for acting as if they were Kyrgyzstanis, under the constraints of Kyrgyzstan’s economic crisis. Once again, the Osh Uzbeks’ admired khan viewed them in terms of the logic of state, rather than of ethnicity or loyalty, undermining the very basis of their post-Soviet subject position. However, when I asked Osh Uzbeks in July 1999 about Karimov’s remark, all of them vehemently refused to interpret his words as being directed against them in criticism. One sixty-something former collective farm worker, Tolib, emphatically defended Karimov and portrayed him as a wise, pure-hearted ruler who spoke the truth boldly to instruct his people about having compassion for their less fortunate neighbors. Tolib’s construal of the controversy surrounding Kari- mov’s bread comment as a personal attack on Karimov, whose intentions and mettle demanded a defense, was typical of the Osh Uzbek male sentiment at the time:

ML: Karimov said something against Osh people.

Tolib: No! He never said such a thing!

ML: “If every Osh resident took one loaf of bread from Andijan. . . .”

Tolib: No, you don’t understand. He was speaking as an example in parliament this year, that five thousand people enter and leave [Uzbekistan] from Osh every day, that if each took one loaf of bread, then five thousand loaves would be gone. . . .

ML: So Karimov never said anything against Osh people?

Tolib: No, no, he didn’t and does not even now. He is himself is a child of Samarqand [Samarqandlik bola]. At his side there is a person from Osh, whose name is Primkul Qodirov . . . working as a secretary. . . . I’ll tell you the truth, Karimov never says a critical thing [against Osh people] [hech kanday teskari gapirmaydi] but speaks accurately. He was speaking hypothetically, that if everyone took a loaf of bread, then five thousand loaves Republic and Virtuous Leadership 165

would be taken away [from Uzbekistan per day]. Not just bread, but kerosene, gasoline, materials, tea. He was speaking as an example. There was no critical word at all. . . . Osh people were just an example. . . . The rest [of those who go into Uzbekistan] come from Kazakhstan, Karakalpakistan [Turkmenistan], Tajikistan. [Karimov] is saying, “Think about this o’ylanglar[ ].” He’s saying, “Think about this [podumaite, Russian]!” He was speaking an example in parliament. We have to understand him.

ML: So he was saying, “Think.” What was his purpose? What did he intend to say?

Tolib: “Because of the abundance of what we have, [look at] how many countries are taking away the things that we made.” . . . He means, they are taking things made in Uzbekistan, so Uzbekistan should take pity [rahimlik qiladi], and let them have them. . . . “See how [well] we are working,” is his meaning. He has a good head on his shoulders [Kallasi ishlaydi, uning]! . . . Karimov has only pure words [chisto gap, mixed Russian/Uzbek]. . . . One must speak what is right [To’ghri gaparish kerak]. Have you seen the bazaar? Of all the things [yuk] there, there is nothing of their [Kyrgyzstan’s] own. They come from other countries. Where are they brought from? From Karimov, most of it. And so bad men are saying critical things [that Karimov spoke against them]. One must speak what is right. Karimov never said any such thing. He is sufficient to himself in every aspectO’zida [ yetarli munday hamma yoq]. He fears neither any words, nor anyone, nor any state. Strong . . . a pure [chisto, Russian] Samarqandlik [Samarqand native]. There were no such words. They were saying those words at the mosque [claiming that Karimov had spoken against them]. I said, “Don’t you have any brains [kallang bormi]?” [These were] important men [claiming that Karimov said bad things]. “It was just an example,” I said.

Tolib reacted forcefully when I brought up Karimov’s bread comment. In- terrupting me immediately when I began quoting it, he had evidently argued this issue thoroughly with others and ardently defended Karimov against suggestions of offensive intentions. Tolib mentioned reprimanding others at the mosque, a dense site of rumor circulation, for misinterpreting Karimov. Tolib had felt the duty to ensure that only the “correct” interpretation remained in communal memory, and he, along with like-minded others, appeared to have largely succeeded. As in the reinterpretation of the events around the border closing for buses, the politics of communal memory making apparently solidified within a few months; by July, I could not find a single dissenting opinion.12 166 Republic and Virtuous Leadership

Osh Uzbeks’ self-fashioned allegiance to Karimov was manifesting itself in their felt need to suppress among themselves feelings of dissent against the Uzbekistani president. Tolib’s first argument was that the comment, though it specifically cited Osh people as being responsible, did not really single them out, because the issue also applied to other republics. By spreading the target of Karimov’s comment across a wider area, he imputed to Karimov a kind of wisdom as state leader to see the big picture beyond local interests. Tolib said, “He has a good head on his shoulders,” because Karimov assumed a didactic role in instructing members of parliament and his country about the real significance of this illegal market activity. Karimov was teaching his people to take pride in their productivity and take pity on their less fortunate neighbors. For Tolib, the question of proper perspective was tied to the question of moral character. Tolib’s second argument was that Karimov demonstrated a purity of heart in his comment about the bread. A leader recognized things as they really were by virtue of his virtue. Karimov verbalized recognition of his country’s good in honest, pure words that were uninflected by the desire to appease or the fear of opposition. He spoke, in short, a truth beyond politics. Evil men, on the other hand, obscured the truth in the ways they saw or spoke, because they were somehow caught up in their petty, fractious interests, which did not work for the general good. Karimov’s bread comment also showed he had the guts to speak the truth. Tolib admired Karimov’s independent fearlessness in saying something that brought considerable criticism from those on other sides of the issue. Tolib’s references to Karimov as “a pure Samarqandlik [Samarqand native]” were important. His attention to the president’s origins may be an oblique reference to Amir Timur, the fourteenth-century Central Asian conqueror who made his imperial capital in Samarqand. As previously noted, Timur loomed large in the public iconography of post-Soviet Uzbekistan, and state propaganda promoted the Turkic ruler as the premier embodiment of the great Uzbek nation, while subtly posing President Karimov next to Timur as his modern spiritual heir. Qalam also trod close to imperial allusions in his commentaries on the divergent economic courses that Kyrgyzstan and Uz- bekistan have been pursuing since independence. Karimov’s tight control of Uzbekistan’s economy was necessary, because “we Central Asian people are used to living by decree [farmon],” Qalam explained, using the current term farmon, originally meaning imperial edicts, and clearly intending the double meaning. We have come full circle to Nurolim’s Uzbek proverb at the opening of this chapter: “We are a people who have seen the shahs, seen the khans.” Al- though Timur could not call himself a khan, the term being reserved for male- line descendants of Chinggiz (Genghis Khan), the distinction between khans and emirs is lost to the average post-Soviet layperson, and what counts in the Republic and Virtuous Leadership 167 conflated imagery of popular imagination is the aura of past Inner Asian imperial power.13 The Timur reconstituted by Uzbekistani national ideology lent a patina and fixity to the image of Karimov as a strong, fearless, wise, pure-hearted, and infallible leader. The Timurid glow in Karimov pleased Osh Uzbeks not only because it enhanced ethno-civilizational pride but also because it satisfied their desire for ferocious independence in leadership, seen as necessary to negotiate post–cold war global forces. Many praised Karimov for standing up to foreign critics who denounced him for his record on human rights or economic reform. Even though most Osh Uzbeks said that they advocated eventual democratic and market reforms, they considered an accession to outsider terms and timetables to be a cowardly surrender of sovereignty. Kyrgyzstan, by contrast, revealed its lack of masculinity in trying to be, as one Osh Uzbek put it, the darling of the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Or- ganization, the United Nations, and the United States during the 1990s. The figure of the khan was in this respect a response to neoliberal penetration into Central Asia. It was the khan who could say no. The khan would do more than that, though. Following Timur, he would put Uzbeks back on the world map.

Global Positioning After more than a century of incorporation into Russian/Soviet geographic and historical narratives, Uzbeks wanted to locate themselves in world geography and in world history on their own terms. There are problems, however, with Central Asian representations of their independence as the culmination of an inevitable national development. First, Central Asian political elites did not even desire independence from Moscow when it was thrust upon them. They were initially taken by surprise by the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 but quickly reconstituted themselves as pro-independence nationalist leaders when it became clear that the union’s dissolution was unavoidable (Dunlop 1993). Soviet rule in Central Asia was experienced paradoxically; it lasted, to use Alexei Yurchak’s incisive phrase, “forever until it was no more” (Yurchak 2006). It had been regarded as permanent, yet its end was surprisingly unsurprising: the previously unexpected became quickly “recognized” after the fact as inevitable. Second, Central Asian nations existed only because they were Soviet constructions; these national constructions informed policy and were modified by bureaucratic practice, woven into Soviet life, and taken for granted by the end of Soviet rule. Nevertheless, post-Soviet nationalisms have elaborated histories that naturalize the nations made what they now are by Soviet rule, and these histories extend this constructed national coherence backward into the distant past. Colonial categories of thought persist even amid efforts to throw off that past. It was specifically the strident nationalism promoted in post-Soviet Uz- 168 Republic and Virtuous Leadership bekistan through its state-controlled television that gave much content to the sociopolitical imaginaries of Osh Uzbeks in the 1990s. As noted previously, Osh Uzbeks watched Uzbekistani television more than they did Kyrgyzstani stations (except possibly the local Uzbek-language channels in Osh), and many accepted at face value the utopian representations of Uzbekistan’s industrial and cultural progress, at least until the outbreak of the Andijan events in 2005. For Tolib, the former collective farm worker, Karimov’s Uzbekistan was positioning itself handsomely on the global stage. The nationalist ideology propagated by Uzbekistani television resonated so strongly with Tolib that he would cite facts to me quoted directly from news stories heard:

Tolib: In Uzbekistan there are twenty-three million people. Its factories and plants are many. A lot of wheat, cotton, silkworms, aluminum, copper, iron, coal, gold, building stones. They are brought out into the world as export. [Interruption.] All right, it has achieved fifth place.

ML: What is in fifth place?

Tolib: The country mamlakat[ ].

ML: Uzbekistan?

Tolib: Yes, yes. Did I say fourth place? It’s in fifth place.

ML: In the world?

Tolib: In the world. Fifth place.

ML: With regard to what?

Tolib: With regard to the state [davlat], that you asked about.

ML: What about the state?

Tolib: The state’s people inson[ ], money [pul], activities [harakat], rule [podsholik]—it is in fifth place.

ML: Who said this?

Tolib: Who said it? The television said it.

ML: Uzbekistani television?

Tolib: Yes, yes. Now, let’s see, Japan, Italy, France. If Japan is first; Korea, maybe, second; France, third; fourth, Italy; the fifth is Karim. . . . All right, [Karimov] went to France. When they asked him, “You, Kari- mov, what work are you doing? Why are you laboring?” “I am laboring for my people,” [he replied]. “How are your people living?” “I create jobs as first priority. Second priority, I am not letting blood flow; I am stopping bloodshed. Third priority, I will not abandon our children. If they want water, I will give Republic and Virtuous Leadership 169

water; if they want gas, I will give gas; if they want electricity, I will give electricity. It’s that way with us, the law to look after the children of all nationalities [millat]. Whatever nationality you are, I will consider you a person [odam].” . . . “You are indeed a true man [haqiqiy muzhchina siz ekansiz, mixed Uzbek/ Russian],” the king [sic] of France said, “You are one smart, courageous man!” [Muzhestvennyi kallangiz yahshi ishlaydi, mixed Uzbek/Russian, literally, “Your manly head is working well.”] . . . [Karimov replied,] “I labor for my people, for my people.” . . . Now, they held a council [majlis] recently in Afghanistan. . . . “Why are you fighting?” [the representatives from Uzbekistan] said. “Please stop . . . if you become a state that can keep its own peace, after you have delivered peace, I will offer help—won’t you please! Great help. Do not wage war, do not fight. If you say, we have stopped, I will give help: materials, clothes, flour, everything! They will be sent in fifty Kamaz [Soviet trucks]. . . . I will build good ties, please. Look, the roads are open, they are open, whatever you need, I will bring it.” “All right,” they said, “All right.”

ML: Meaning, Uzbekistan is now working for the benefit of the countries surrounding it.

Tolib: Working for their benefit. If there is peace.

The last exchange about Afghanistan expresses a view typical among Osh Uzbeks during the 1990s; they saw Uzbekistan as a benevolent, paternalistic force in the regional theater. Tolib recast the news report he had seen into a personal dialogue between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, treating them as socially positioned individuals, with Uzbekistan as the solicitous elder brother.14 Indeed, rather than representing a pristine pre-Soviet culture, as some have suggested, Afghanistan functioned as Central Asia’s “savage slot,” the anti- modern counterspace of endemic poverty, ignorance, and war. 15 A historian at the Uzbek Academy of Sciences once remarked to me, “We didn’t like the Russians and were glad to get rid of them. But to be honest, if it weren’t for the Russians, we’d be like Afghanistan today.” In other words, there wouldn’t be an Uzbek Academy of Sciences, and he would probably not be a historian, among many other things. The first news piece Tolib cited probably claimed Uzbekistan as fifth in the world regarding some specific accomplishment, the sort of claim I had seen often on Uzbekistani television. This kind of “report- age” resonated with Tolib because it simultaneously helped produce and meet his expectations about what a successful state ought to be—prominent on the world stage and admired and feared by other states, with France here standing for the approving gaze of prestigious nations. In the second news item Tolib cited, it is interesting that, in his inexact knowledge of the contemporary world, he identified the French leader as the 170 Republic and Virtuous Leadership

“king” of France. The company of a royal figure in this account established Karimov as an admired peer among the great leaders of the world. Karimov then spoke with a sense of paternal stewardship to work hard providing, as if personally, for all the needs of “his” people. The “king’s” compliment marked the gendering of Karimov’s effective rule, making Karimov out to be an ideal male, to which Karimov humbly demurs. Tolib emphasized Karimov’s man- liness by inserting the Russian words muzhchina (man) and muzhestvennyi (manly, courageous) into his Uzbek-language account.16 Osh Uzbek men’s image of an ideal leader was strongly marked by masculinity. They talked about Karimov as strong, decisive, courageous, heroic in his struggle against evil and chaos.17 He embodied an ideal agentive male, the “real man” of Tolib’s words, who took efficacious action in the world. Osh Uzbeks feminized Kyrgyzstani president Akaev as impotent and submissive, a leader whose only diplomatic skill was, as one put it, smiling and bowing.18 As we have seen, Karimov’s masculine image pervaded the interpretation of his harsh economic measures as “disciplining” his country, even though Karimov has not promoted himself as the “father of the nation” as explicitly as in other nationalisms.19 The apparent obsession about gaining recognition by the “great nations” of the world, reflected in both Tolib’s account and (no doubt) the state television piece that he cited, although by no means unique in the broader post- colony, reveals a particularly post-Soviet angst. Decades of state policy and everyday practices articulated and inculcated the very notion of Soviet nationality—that specific package of cultural, linguistic, psychological, historical, territorial, and political notions of group identity—and placed them on a hierarchical arc of variation for synoptic display of colorful costumes, customs, and cuisine. Soviet schoolchildren saw the fifteen titular nationalities in textbooks and wall murals and were supposed to be able to recognize them from their paradigmatic attributes. Even though the Central Asians were un- equal to their Russian or European counterparts, they stood in a definite place in the discursive field of nationalities. With the dismantling of that broad field, Central Asians now sought to locate themselves on the broader world- historical canvas. Imbibing post–cold war discourses of global development, Central Asians saw the leading industrial nations, whether the United States, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Turkey, or others, as the important yard- sticks against which to compare themselves. Kyrgyz, like Osh Uzbeks, have also been concerned about achieving a good standing and reputation in the world’s eyes. Two Peace Corps teachers commented to me in 1994, for example, that their students had an inflated view of Kyrgyzstan’s reputation outside the former Soviet Union. The students claimed such things as, “everyone knows this mountain is the most beautiful in the world,” or “this hydroelectric dam is the largest in the world.” In my own interactions with Kyrgyz uni- Republic and Virtuous Leadership 171 versity students, I found that they were surprised that most foreigners could not locate Kyrgyzstan on a map and have never heard of Chingiz Aitmatov, the celebrated novelist and arguably the most famous Kyrgyz person in the world (and the post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani ambassador to Luxembourg and the European Union, until his death in 2008). There was also great pride in the Kyrgyz “national” epic poem Manas, with the country celebrating 1995 as the one-thousandth anniversary of the epic, as well as in its receipt of UNESCO recognition. President Akaev penned his own reflections on “Kyrgyz” history from the “ancient centuries” to the “common home” of “the country of human rights,” centered on the “seven lessons of Manas” (unity, interethnic friendship, patriotism, hard work, humanism, harmony with nature, and strengthening Kyrgyz statehood) for the Kyrgyz people and state today (Akaev 2002). My Kyrgyz-language teacher placed the oral epic in the company of the world’s great literatures and remarked how it was longer than the Iliad, Odyssey, and Mahabharata put together.20 The desire to locate national landmarks, cultural artifacts, events, or accomplishments on a world-historical tableau appears to be a widespread post-Soviet phenomenon, as evidenced by the preponderance of successor state-sponsored jubilees and other cultural projects during the 1990s. These events promulgate for celebration supposedly deep historical (read: pre-Soviet) roots and past greatness waiting to be reclaimed. My Kyr- gyz and Uzbek interlocutors seemed to feel the need to place these “national” accomplishments next to certain “world civilizations” as standards: China, Japan, France, or, as above, classical Greece and India. It would be fruitful to think about why particular reference points are chosen and not others (and how choices may reflect political relations today), what criteria for civilizational “greatness” are assumed (and their pedigree in Soviet conceptions of world history), and the implications of the fact that “civilizations” are conceived in terms of their eponymous modern nation-state successors. At the same time, the Karimov persona described by Tolib reflected the Soviet ideal of transcending nationality (or ethnicity, in Uzbek, millat), because he treated Uzbekistanis not as Uzbeks, Russians, Tajiks, Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Koreans, or Jews, but as persons (odam).21 Other Osh Uzbeks repeatedly cited to me Karimov’s supposed fairness in dealing with “his” ethnic minorities, notably the Kyrgyz living across the border in Andijan province (a claim flatly disputed by my Kyrgyz friends), in contrast to the prejudice Osh Uzbeks faced within Kyrgyzstan. When Osh Uzbeks thought about ethnic diversity during the 1990s and 2000s, the specter of the 1990 interethnic riots (and the possibility of ethnic conflict being reignited in Osh or elsewhere in Central Asia) always lurked about. Although many Osh Uzbeks recognized that President Akaev promoted a relatively moderate Kyrgyz nationalism (compared with other Kyrgyz political figures) until his ouster, they derided 172 Republic and Virtuous Leadership as empty his slogan for multiethnic participation: “Kyrgyzstan is our common home.”22 True ethnic impartiality in a state leader was a compelling notion, and they saw in Karimov its only authentic exemplar. Yet there was an inherent tension in this social imaginary concerning nationality. Osh Uzbeks were sensitive to the dangers of Kyrgyz nationalism yet were stirred by an Uzbekistani nationalist ideology trumpeting a reborn Uz- bek civilization. The khan figure and his state were to be supranational and very Uzbek at the same time. Even though talk about good governance did not invoke Uzbekness as such, the Uzbekistan of this imaginary was in a basic sense a model Uzbek state and Karimov, a model Uzbek (male) person. The independent Uzbekistani state was imagined to be a re-instantiation of the great “Uzbek” empire of the Timurids, whose future greatness would be ensured by the modern khan and his hard-working (Uzbek) people, with other ethnicities being like passengers privileged to share the ride. The attributes of personal virtue that made Karimov an effective leader—honesty, industriousness, and selflessness—were precisely the character that the mahalla was supposed to cultivate in its inhabitants.23 Person, mahalla, and state: these all were to be cut from the same Uzbek-patterned cloth to form ideal communities at every scale. In sum, the aura of historical greatness surrounding Karimov as khan lent purchase to the idea that he was leading post-Soviet Uzbekistan into, in the words of its ubiquitous maxim, “a future great state.” His charge to transform the people and land would involve not merely exiting economic crisis—what we earlier called the “postsocialist question”—but achieving world recognition as a consequential independent nation—the “postcolonial question.” The khan idiom thus offered answers to both sets of concerns, giving Uzbekistan prosperity and global position.

Unpacking the Khan The khan-centered idiom of state transformation reveals its thoroughly postsocialist character in that it envisioned an economic and political order beyond Soviet state socialism but with solidly Soviet assumptions about the active role of the state. The narratives by Osh Uzbek men about what they wanted in their independent republic were thoroughly marked by this Soviet “language of state” (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Their talk was undergirded by Soviet modernist teleologies—conceptions about the ultimate purpose of society—that valued societal progress as measured in production, technology, high culture, and material conditions. Moreover, the state, as the enabler of growth and guardian of stability, was assumed to have the first responsibility for the republic’s economic and social issues and to have the exclusive ability to effect change. It was supposed to act through consumer price controls, agricultural supports, technology provision, foreign investment courting, and Republic and Virtuous Leadership 173 mandated currency exchange rates. It was to develop the human capital necessary for a modern state through education, “craft” skills, science, and culture. Most of all, the state was to rigorously enforce security within its borders at almost any cost. Osh Uzbek men employed a Soviet language of state more implicitly when their talk about socioeconomic issues took for granted state institutions as the background matrix of daily life. In their discussions about post-Soviet life, they often talked about the schools, kindergartens (which acted as child care facilities), Pioneer camps, universities, medical clinics, hospitals, pensions, airports, buses, telecommunications, print and television media, administrative hierarchies, farm organization, and so forth. These were all institutions and services inherited from the Soviet state and reflect the thorough penetration of Soviet practices and epistemologies into everyday life. Overall, the Soviet state’s discourses about its own role in society were sometimes framed as vospitania, a Russian word whose primary meaning is the upbringing of children.24 This imaginary’s unmistakably modernist Soviet pedigree should come as no surprise, given Osh’s twentieth-century urban experience of Soviet rule, with an educational system providing little real knowledge about their own pre-Soviet past. It is also unsurprising that this imaginary would take shape around the person of President Islam Karimov. The promotion of Uzbek nationalism just across the border gave Osh Uzbeks the sense of the world-historical importance of Uzbek civilization and the post-Soviet Uzbekistani state as its new vehicle. What made Karimov a compelling figure was that, by running what appeared to be an exemplary state, he was gaining for Uzbeks the recognition on the world stage that was their due as a once-great ancient civilization, for which Timur’s empire was the emblem. The sense of pride that Osh Uzbeks had in Karimov was evident as they saw on Uzbekistani television images of the president standing shoulder to shoulder with world leaders. The image of Uzbekistan’s importance on the post–cold war global stage was juxtaposed in their minds with the idea of Kyrgyzstan as an insignificant, poor country of high mountains and former nomads—that is, with neither a history of civilization nor a future with any prospects. The Osh Uzbek vision of Karimov’s world stature also included his ability to set the terms by which Uzbekistan was to engage the world. With Western diplomats urging liberalization, with strict conditions of international financial institutions, and with nongovernmental organizations and missionaries actively at work in the country, it is apparent that external actors seek to steer Uzbekistan away from Karimov’s own “Uzbek path.” Osh Uzbeks thus approved, mostly before the Andijan events of 2005, of the state managing its negotiation with the post–cold war world through its heavy policing of the borders and territory within them. The post-Soviet Uzbekistani state produced in many Osh Uzbek men sentiments of fervent admiration and pride in what they saw there, and they 174 Republic and Virtuous Leadership viewed the neighboring state through the lenses of Uzbekistani television and disenchantment with the harsh realities of life in Kyrgyzstan. Narratives that made sense of their post-Soviet lives revealed aspects of a social imaginary in which the Uzbek leader ran an exemplary state, one that had wise paternalistic control within its borders and international status in which one could take pride. Rich in natural resources, productive in agriculture and industry, independent in economy, and decisive in regional crises, the Uzbekistan of these imaginaries instantiated an ideal state risen from the Soviet ashes. Narrated by nationalist ideology as having a glorious imperial past and bright neoliberal future, Uzbekistan was the once-and-future great state (Cooper 2005). Unlike Kyrgyzstan, it was beholden to neither foreign timetables for restructuring nor the new geopolitical “Great Games” of big powers.25 The image of the historical ruler, Amir Timur, powerfully captured these aspirations; as an authority figure, Timur is conquering, not groveling; absolute, not frustrated; benevolent, not corrupt. Timur was the enlightened despot who brought culture, industry, and world-historical greatness to his people in the midst of chaos and stagnation. He embodied the ideal agentive male, the “real man,” according to Tolib, who took efficacious action in the world. President Islam Karimov was narrated as Timur’s worthy successor on all these counts, a modern khan shaping post-Soviet Uzbekistan just as he wisely intended. Presi- dent Karimov was the modern Tamerlane figure, the ruthless and benevolent despot overseeing his republic as faithful steward and transforming it for the brave new world. The Osh Uzbeks’ moral allegiance to the khan and admiration for Uzbekistan affirmed a self-proclaimed connection to a “reactivated” world-historical greatness: the political and cultural accomplishments of “Uz- bek civilization” exemplified by Timur, and, after a long period of occlusion by Russian and Soviet colonialism, overdue recognition by the world at large. Simultaneously shaped by Uzbekistani state ideology and actively co-opting it, Osh Uzbeks yearned for identification with a national greatness that would bypass their post-Soviet predicament of exclusion in a Kyrgyzstan that, at any rate, appeared to possess unpromising prospects. The tarbiya idiom of transformation reveals the terms by which these particular Central Asians located themselves in the post–cold war world. Osh Uzbek men thought about their place in the current global order via this imaginary about an ideal postsocialist state that would impose tarbiya on the populace. Even though it diverges from Western liberal notions, this imaginary revealed a mode of engagement with modernity, not a traditionalist withdrawal from it. It assumed the inevitability, indeed, the desirability of liberal destinations (even if it kept those goals vague), but it framed that universalistic desire in terms of an Uzbek particularism that declared Uzbekistan a special “decelerated” zone in the postsocialist bloc where even Russia was rushing to liberalize in the 1990s. Karimov’s “Uzbek” path exemplified the proper terms Republic and Virtuous Leadership 175 of global engagement, with reforms being instituted not according to the timetables of foreign governments or NGOs but by a paternalistic state seeking to mold the attitudes and habits of the populace. Economic and political reform needed to begin not with new freedoms, capital, or entrepreneurial knowledge but with, in the words of some Uzbeks, a transformation of heart and mentality. This process needed no political negotiation or popular debate; it was solely in the competent hands of the wise and virtuous leader. At the same time, my interlocutors who articulated a khan-centered imaginary consistently characterized the proactive, paternalistic role of the state as “temporary” (waqtincha). Even as President Karimov declared his intention of seeing democracy and a market economy implemented in his republic by his “unique path,” Osh Uzbeks affirmed Uzbekistan’s “neoliberal destinations” as an indefinitely postponed goal. There was nothing in my conversations with Osh Uzbeks, despite my probing, that hinted at any understanding about what democracy or a market economy would actually mean in a Cen- tral Asian context. They used the term democracy to denote vaguely defined freedoms from state control in an entrepreneurial or cultural context, such as the ability to make money, celebrate Nawruz (the Iranian/Central Asian new year), or practice Islam. While the younger generation had a better grasp of the mechanisms and potential reform prospects of procedural democracy, among all Uzbeks very few held out much hope for democratic reforms, especially after they, as well as Kyrgyz, grew increasingly disappointed with the Bakiev administration by the late 2000s, before his ouster in 2010. Understanding of the economics of a market-based system is likewise minimal. While an emerging wealthy class is developing sophisticated strategies for operating in the new economic conditions, most people alluding to free markets emphasized what was seen as their chaotic, predatory, and immoral tendencies, as various interlocutors demonstrated above and according to countless attestations across the postsocialist sphere. If these interlocutors were pressed to spell out how Karimov’s heavy hand of guidance would actually yield, eventually, more political freedoms and economic development, they would impatiently wave off the question. Details are not for us to understand; the khan knows what he is doing—a decidedly undemocratic subject position in the name of “democracy.” And so, discussions about societal issues animated by a khan-centered imaginary were framed within the allegedly interim nature of khan rule that betrayed little of what a “post-temporary” state would look like. For all the talk of Uzbekistan’s “great future,” the imaginary was caught in arrested time.

The Khan and the Problem of the Nation-State One interesting feature of this analysis is that it does not reduce the khan idiom to conventional modes of explanation involving a “Soviet mindset” or “Uzbek mentality.” Osh Uzbek orientations do not express merely “nostalgia” 176 Republic and Virtuous Leadership for the stability of state socialism and Communist Party rule, nor do they express simply the “ethnic identity” of a repressed Uzbek minority in Kyrgyzstan sympathetic to an Uzbek Karimov and an Uzbek state. Paternal state, stability, and exalted Uzbekness were indeed integral to the khan idiom, but the exposition of views here also revealed, more interestingly, deeply held assumptions regarding society, personhood, authority, and agency that reverberated with recapitulated Inner Asian notions on one hand and embodied mahalla life on another. The glaring yet unstated problem with this imaginary was, of course, that Karimov was not the Osh Uzbeks’ actual president, as the border closings and restrictions kept rudely reminding them. Here, indeed, was the rub. The very maintenance of what they perceived as Uzbekistan’s economic development and political stability required that Osh Uzbeks, as Kyrgyzstanis, be excluded from it. Yet, in the 1990s, they overwhelmingly voiced their apparently self- effacing support for being left out, because it allowed them to enunciate a position of speaking as a kind of insider, a friend of Uzbekistan’s interests and of Karimov’s paternal authority. The narratives discursively located the speakers standing as if under Karimov’s authority. Osh Uzbeks were producing for themselves positions as loyal subjects to the khan, even when that figure did not acknowledge them or work for their interests. One may venture that the absence of such an authority in their lives was productive of an imagination wherein ideal authority would be admired from a distance. The marginal position of Osh Uzbeks between the post-Soviet national projects of both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan has afforded them a unique perspective on the very notion of the nation-state, as noted earlier. The khan idiom reflected their ambivalence concerning the coherence of the nation-state idea, even though they simultaneously affirmed their pride in being Uzbek and complied with the post-Soviet state order regarding such things as borders and citizenship. Yet the idiom may nevertheless betray an echo of an older political imaginary. In narrating Karimov as a benevolent khan, Osh Uzbeks framed their otherwise pointless post-Soviet suffering in what can be seen as a kind of imperial imaginary that seemed to resolve the contradictions of the nation-state logic in which they were trapped—their predicament of double exclusion as Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks. Even while Karimov’s harsh enforcement of his borders was explicitly seen as exhibiting his good authority, their allegiance to him as khan crossed this boundary. This imaginary defined a space of allegiance that, unlike Uzbekistan itself, lacked the bounded, compact spatiality of the nation-state but bore the configuration of distant imperial rule. Imperial relations between localities and central authority in pre-Soviet Inner Asia (and elsewhere) tended to be characterized by strong moral allegiance but rather weak administrative control. By the sixteenth century in Central Asia, during the Shaybanid period, for Republic and Virtuous Leadership 177 example, the reigning khan was formally recognized as the supreme authority within the empire but often held little effective power beyond his court. Lo- cal authorities (village leaders, tribal elders, or institutional officials) had considerable and often decisive power over local matters.26 The post-Soviet Osh Uzbeks had aspirations with a similar contour: they were working hard locally to make mahalla into a viable community (through material, cultural, and religious endeavors) even while they gave allegiance to an unavailable khan. This aspect of Osh Uzbek imaginaries may well disclose a pre-Soviet layer in their tacit expectations about political authority, even though very few knew much at all about the historical Central Asian khanates. Beatrice Manz once informally remarked that the dissolution of the Soviet Union came as an almost unwelcome surprise to Central Asians, possibly because they had been accustomed to rule by foreign, distant powers for much of their history.27 Osh Uzbeks’ fundamental objection to Soviet and Kyrgyz rule may not have been because it was distant, autocratic, or even “foreign.” This is not to say that they were without serious grievances against Russian rule or without ethnicized anti-Russian (or anti-Kyrgyz) sentiment. Russianness as such, however, was never the true issue for Osh Uzbeks (and possibly Central Asians in general); the real issue was how the Soviet government sought to undermine local arrangements of communal moral order. Hardship was not the prime issue either, because the Osh Uzbeks had shown considerable patience and self- sacrifice when suffering was convincingly connected to a purpose. It may be more insightful to think about Osh Uzbek aspirations in terms of an imperial set of local-distant relations that bypassed the bounded spatiality of a nation-state political imaginary. Because the annexation of Osh into Uzbekistan was not a real political option, their political imaginaries posited an arrangement whereby Osh Uzbeks enjoyed a large measure of local self- definition under Kyrgyz authority, set under a benevolent distant authority that would eventually provide political security and economic prosperity to all in the region (by the supposed cross-border “spill-over” effect that the narrators herein referenced). This pragmatic arrangement would locate the Osh Uzbek community within a wider, imperial-like spatial frame of belonging. If this scheme captures Osh Uzbek aspirations, it adds to the growing scholarly awareness of how locality is never only about the here and now but is always inextricably implicated with wider translocal connections whose valences can span stretches of time as well as of space. With this imaginary having been presented on its own terms, one may wonder if it will actually work. Can a benevolent despot really impose tarbiya on submissive subjects to propel a transformation of society toward collective good, however that good is envisioned? To the extent it can be done at all, there is at least the following necessary condition. “Transforming power” is what Thomas Wartenberg calls the relation in which a dominant agent exercises 178 Republic and Virtuous Leadership power for the benefit of the subordinate agent, such as between parent and child, or teacher and student (Wartenberg 1990, 1992).28 According to Wart- enberg, paternalism works to constructive ends only if the paternal figure views the subordinate as a developing creature whose maturation is enhanced by the relationship. The goal of transforming power is to make the power relation itself obsolete, after the subordinate has internalized the discipline, as when the child grows up or the student graduates. Transforming power thus empowers subjects; it does not subjugate them or condemn them to perpetual dependence. Islamic theorists of state have claimed that this is precisely the goal of Muslim states throughout history: to shape their people, forcibly when necessary, into an active community of virtuous believers.29 However, many observers are pessimistic in particular about modern Arab states’ capability in exercising this kind of power. Hisham Sharabi calls them “neopatriarchies,” that is, paternalistic “sultanates” with modern state apparatuses characterized by personalized power, repressive force, passive subjects, and a state involved in all functions of society. Basing this argument on Piaget’s child development studies, Sharabi (1988) argues that neopatriarchies foster a posture of heteronomy in its citizenry: unquestioning obedience, unilateral deference, and fear. They fail to encourage the development of autonomy, which happens when the relation of state and populace is characterized by justice rather than blind obedience, mutual respect rather than fear, and consensus rather than arbitrariness. Sharabi’s study highlights how difficult it is for a modern paternalistic state, in imposing tarbiya, to propel citizens toward any civic ideal, whether Islamic or liberal, and the 2011 “Arab Spring” can be seen as partly a bitter rejection of any such hope. Whether a khan state can work remains a relevant question, even though many Osh Uzbeks ceased to regard Karimov as a khan figure, especially in the aftermath of the Andijan events of 2005 (Liu unpublished). Even if Karimov was not the khan, there are those who believe that some other khan is still necessary to bring Central Asia out of its mire. The imaginary, in other words, outlives its prime exemplar of the 1990s. The most interesting aspect of the khan idiom, however, may be how it claims to render “magical” efficacy to the herculean task of transforming an entire society.

Societal Agency as Magical The realm of the khan (that is, Uzbekistan as it was seen through this Osh Uzbek imaginary) was what anthropologists would call a magical state. It was magical in the sense that any modern state appears as a “transcendent and unifying agent of the nation” (Coronil 1997, 4) that results from a “magical performance . . . rendering invisible the artifice of its production” and “induc- ing a condition or state of being receptive to its illusions” (Coronil 1997, 3, 5). A state’s appearance of unity, transcendence, intentionality, and agency emerges Republic and Virtuous Leadership 179 from myriad everyday governing practices and lived ideologies, which reify the “languages of stateness” of political leaders who claim to speak for the state (Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 9; Mitchell 1991). But in the khan imaginary, the state was also magical in a more specific sense. It had the power to create the large-scale contexts that condition the capacities and choices of individuals, enabling them to act morally and productively (in the case of Uzbekistan supposedly) or else triggering a vicious cycle of criminality and idleness (in the case of Kyrgyzstan). I call this capacity “societal agency”—the ability to act upon society as a whole so as to influence its pervasive trends. In narratives such as those reviewed above, places, events, and things were presented as being caught up in webs of interdependencies—what Qa- lam called the “complex”—that worked for either ill or good, depending on the basic conditions set by the state’s vigilant interventions at various points in economy and society. Osh’s crowded bazaar indexed the massive unemployment resulting from factory closings, which signaled the country’s lack of industrial production, which was reflected in the Kyrgyzstani som’s exchange rates against the dollar in the bazaar. Gatherings of unemployed youth on street corners indexed the ineptly paced reforms instituted in the 1990s by the Akaev administration, which showed a disregard for society’s historical stages of development, which resulted in the implementation of reforms without the necessary infrastructural mechanisms. The rapid rise in the price of flour at the bazaar revealed the state’s lack of price supports for agriculture, an aspect of its general lack of land stewardship. In Uzbekistan, meanwhile, the state ensured that cotton and wheat were being grown, industrial plants were working, and oil was being produced, so that the country was economically independent and thus in a position of strength with respect to the world. The state had to strongly restrict its borders, or else farmers would individually sell the cotton and thus leave the state without its main source of income, which would mean that it could not develop the country’s infrastructure. Karimov’s hold on his collective farms meant hardship for his people but also new factories jointly owned with foreign companies, youth working at jobs, and hard currency being earned. In Kyrgyzstan, corruption was rampant, foreign investment was low, and factories were not being built. Uzbekistan’s tough border controls hindered Kyrgyzstan’s economic development but kept Uzbekistan secure from “Wahhabis,” thus stabilizing the entire region and allowing economies to be built. Throughout these chains of cascading effects, the role of the state was explicitly or implicitly held to be determinative in enabling them. While these effects acquired a momentum of their own once set in motion, the state leader was responsible for keeping them headed in a positive direction. But for all the rationalistic words about mechanisms and interdependencies from narrators here, there was an element of magicality in how Karimov 180 Republic and Virtuous Leadership as khan would accomplish these feats. Absent from these narratives was any consideration of the actual politics at whatever level in Uzbekistan—the min- istries, the regionalism, the factions, the entrenched interests—that would very much determine the success of Karimov’s planned efforts. Osh Uzbeks dodged these considerations, in part because most of these residents of Kyr- gyzstan were ignorant of how politics worked in Uzbekistan and also because their imaginary posited the sufficiency of the khan’s character in making good things happen for Uzbekistani society, despite any “bureaucratic hindrances.” Therein lies the magic. According to the narrators’ implied imaginaries, the khan figure was intelligent and farsighted and understood the complexity of the country’s problems and priorities. He had the courage to stay the course on unpopular policies, because criticism against him represented evil intentions. He was decisive, acting swiftly, especially in responding to or preventing crises. The khan was often treated as metonymic of the state itself, in that interpretations of his policies were understood as commentaries on his individual motivations or character, and the effectiveness of his rule was seen as emanat- ing principally from his moral constitution. The khan imaginary articulated an idiom of societal agency whose effects were seen to be magically pervasive in a wide array of phenomena in the republic. This magicality was predicated on a certain spatiality evoked from the narratives: the khan could impose his discipline, or tarbiya, on his people because he was treated as being located above society. The people and land were regarded as the domain under the khan’s personal, paternal charge. The khan was discursively positioned as if he were gazing over his realm from a high vantage point from which he saw the complex whole of the country’s problems that our narrators passionately described. The implicit spatiality of authority operating here conferred on the leader the responsibility to see panoptically, involving equally both his intelligence and moral purity.30 While the idea that the state exists as an entity that is separate from society and somehow “hovers over” it tends to be a general effect of modern state power, here the imaginary specifically sets up a moral and spatial relation in which society and political process remain beneath the khan (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). The khan was aloof from politics in that he moved with a universalistic benevolence and unimpeded efficacy that levitated above the petty politics of particularism. Bad leaders fail because they fail to rise above the interests of their own clan or clients in order take a nationwide perspective. Osh Uzbek men envisioned President Karimov as being a cut above the rest, believing that he was both exceptional in character and aloof from the fray. Karimov’s origins as an orphan (he was raised in an orphanage in Samarqand and supposedly lacked extended kin networks) may have added to his aura of impartiality.31 From his commanding height, the benevolent khan of the imaginary managed the country’s priorities, which involved making wise trade-offs and short-term Republic and Virtuous Leadership 181 sacrifices; executed his plans boldly, regardless of difficulty or criticism; acted ruthlessly and decisively against evil, whether official corruption or religious extremism; and steered his country toward self-sufficiency, security, prosperity, and greatness. The simultaneously moral and spatial relation of ruler to realm has historical resonance in medieval Islamic thought.32 The king’s authority was seen as deriving from his categorical position above the bustle of politics and society, rather than merely at the top of the political hierarchy. He acted primarily as a grand arbiter between particular interests, one often brought in from the outside by local elites to serve as their king, so that he would have no personal stake in the interests that he was supposed to balance impartially. This position was necessary because medieval Islamic political discourses were premised on what Aziz Al-Azmeh calls a “pessimistic anthropology” that assumed a Hobbesian human nature inherently inimical to peaceful collective life.33 Hu- man community had to be imposed by coercive political power and could be maintained only by the unrelenting activity of a vigilant ruler. The king was a manifestation of divine absolute power, marked by his unilateral activity, in contrast to the utter passivity of his subjects—a mirror of the relation between God and humanity in classical Islamic thinking. Any independent activity of subjects as a social force was construed as pathological, as “rabble,” because commoners were seen as an irrational, destructive force with the natural pro- pensity to resist the royal order. And so subjects had to be treated as children or animals, with carrot and stick, that is, with enticement and threat, granting and withholding, promoting and demoting, distancing and holding near. In fact, the Arabic word usually glossed as “politics,” siyasa, originally connoted the husbandry of animals, similar to the Osh Uzbek narrators’ use of the word boqmoq (to care for, tend) regarding the state’s role relative to the people (Al- Azmeh 1997).34 This is not to advance a causal link between medieval Islamic and post-Soviet Uzbek political imaginaries, much less an atavistic “Muslim mentality.” Rather, I suggest that we need to be aware of the wider geographic and longer historical contexts layered into the Central Asian present, because historically familiar conceptions, sensibilities, dispositions, and practices can be reiterated and recontextualized in nonlinear ways within a given sociopolitical configuration. The awareness of possible reiterated conceptions spanning time is inspired by a growing body of “post-development” scholarship criticizing neoliberalism’s insistence on putting societies on a linear, evolutionist scale, with Western-style economies and societies as the only desired outcome for development (Escobar 1995, 2008; Li 2007; Wainwright 2008). We must recognize that global modernities are characterized by a rich panoply of coexisting sociocultural alternatives, what James Ferguson (adapting from biologist Stephen J. Gould) has termed a “full house” of variations that should not be shoehorned 182 Republic and Virtuous Leadership into a teleological sequence of typical forms (Ferguson 1999; Gould 1996). Today, people everywhere live by mastering a complex repertoire of variants rather than by adhering to a unitary set of so-called “modern” sociocultural forms, because modernity has always been multiple (Graubard 2000). It is diverse enough to encompass reiterations of historically familiar themes, practices, and patterns that come into play in improvised, nonlinear ways. The idea of the state imposing tarbiya or paternal discipline on its population is just such a theme, recycled first by the Uzbekistani state in the service of its nation- building agendas and then reappropriated by Osh Uzbeks in their attempts to negotiate their post-Soviet predicament. This imaginary represents a vision of societal improvement that responds to conditions of global modernity in its own way. The conception of President Karimov’s state as exerting transforma- tive power over its citizens forms a very modern political imagination, rather than merely being a regressive yearning for old forms of authority. To be sure, claiming that a leader’s moral constitution is sufficient for -ef fective political rule represents a decidedly illiberal conception. Comparisons with often taken-for-granted Western political assumptions may, at the risk of being facile, usefully help situate this Osh Uzbek imaginary. The notion that locates the source of law in the state rather than the ruler and posits a legal and constitutional order distinct from the person of the ruler, whose charge was to maintain that independent order, evolved with the idea of the nation-state between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries in northwestern Europe (Gledhill 2000; Kantorowicz 1997; Strayer 2005). Modern theories of the liberal state locate the possibility of good governance or jurisprudence in the state’s very procedures, as in John Rawls’s classic formulation of “justice as fairness,” rather than in intentions or outcomes (Rawls 1971). What a liberal democracy offers in theory is a fair framework that permits productive dispute rather than forces any singular vision of the collective good.35 Dissent would be, as it were, a regular player on the field, not a mob erupting from the stands or sheer “evil-heartedness,” as Tolib suggested. Accordingly, promoters of democratization in the postsocialist and Islamic worlds (and elsewhere) empha- size formal institutions and technocratic procedure: “rule of law,” institutional checks and balances, “transparent” government, independent judiciaries, “free and fair” elections, opposition parties, nongovernmental organizations, independent media, and so forth. However, when a political imaginary posits that good government depends primarily on the moral rectitude of its leader rather than the structural characteristics of the state, it reveals an altogether different moral-legal orientation, one toward embodied exemplars rather than abstract rules. This veers closer to, for example, Caroline Humphrey’s analysis of Inner Mongolian sensibilities, in which moral judgments are made against the examples of specific model persons, so that morality references dyadic relationships rather than Republic and Virtuous Leadership 183 depersonalized principles (Humphrey 1997). This orientation, not surprisingly, has antecedents in the long history of Turko-Mongol political ideals in Inner Asia. Chingizid khans, even though their actual power varied after the thirteenth century, were generally acknowledged to carry a personal moral authority to periodically unite clans for common (usually military) goals. Clan heads pledged allegiance to the reigning khan himself, rather than to his office. When he passed away, rival claimants to succession would jockey for preemi- nence, until another khan would emerge through consensus and command loyalty to his person.36 Authority was vested in the person to the degree that the imperial capital was in some periods understood to be wherever the khan happened to be at the moment—a patently nomadic notion that lay in perennial tension across the centuries, with sedentary imaginaries that localized the aura of ruling power in cities like Bukhara and Samarqand (McChesney 1991). Medieval Islamic political discourses contained the idea that the character of the ruler had a direct effect on the realm. Ubiquitous maxims proclaimed that the well-being of the subjects was the unmediated result of the rectitude of the king, that the sound judgment of the king was more beneficial to the land than fertility and prosperity, and even that a just ruler produced good weather (Al- Azmeh 1997, 122). Even if intended as hyperbole, this political imaginary held that the person of the caliph had quasi-magical qualities affecting the proper functioning of the seasons, irrigation, cattle reproduction, and trade, while his injustice brought about drought, infertility, and famine (Al-Azmeh 1997, 157). Osh Uzbeks’ focus on the character of leaders when they talked about the effectiveness of policies in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan revealed imaginaries that assigned magical importance to personhood. The khan was that leader who could make good outcomes happen by dint of his virtuous character. This is why we call this belief an idiom of societal agency, because it presents a model of what or who can effect fundamental change in society. A character- centered imaginary among Osh Uzbeks explains why so many are pessimistic about the prospects of success for institutional or legal reforms as the primary engine for positive societal change—the thrust of Western expert advice to this region and the world. Because good government stems only from righ- teous leaders in this imaginary, no amount of structural tinkering will rid society of corruption and stagnation as long as those at the top are “evil-hearted” leaders. In the effort to effect consequential change in society, this mismatch in cultural conceptions between Central Asians and Western agents of neoliberalism (who come in using largely preformed approaches with which to help implement democracy, civil society, and market economies) could go a long way in explaining the overall mutual disappointment in the encounter over the first two post-Soviet decades. It is for such reasons that my Western-educated, progressive-thinking Osh Uzbek friend Nurolim suggested that Central Asians, people who have “seen 184 Republic and Virtuous Leadership the shahs, seen the khans,” need autocracy rather than neoliberal technocracy or democracy for now. This chapter has shown that, whatever one’s assessment of it, the khan idiom of societal agency is a powerfully compelling figure of thought. However, it needs to be contextualized in the wider field of Osh Uz- beks’ evolving responses to their predicament since independence. In particular, it is important to address how conflicts such as the Andijan events of 2005 or the 2010 interethnic crisis affect their political postures and interpretation of the urban idioms expounded here. Conclusion: Central Asian Visions of Societal Renewal

Osh Uzbeks have responded in a particular way to their political predicament since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991. They make sense of their dilemmas and conceive of solutions to them by “thinking with” their city through idioms that are rooted in the actual spaces of Osh and its surroundings. These idioms also capture something vital about post-Soviet Central Asia. Osh Uzbek idioms are a truly Central Asian product because they fold the multiple histories and disparate trends of the region into coherent figures of thought and practice. These idioms reveal distinctly Central Asian visions of renewal, not because they necessarily represent typical views across the region (establishing that would require more empirical research) but because they are assembled from key trends that characterize it now. Other Central Asian assemblages configuring different discourses and practices circulating in Central Asia are possible. This book’s task has been to unbundle the layers of the Osh Uzbek present. When Osh Uzbeks ponder about negotiating the contradictions of the post-Soviet order, their fraught history with state rule, cultivating moral persons and communities, or effective government, they reveal ways of being in the world that illuminate their context in particular and Central Asia more broadly. Their idioms merit closer scrutiny.

185 186 Conclusion

Let us start with the idioms of Osh as a divided city and with the mahalla as a realm of ethnic distinctiveness. Considering Osh as cleanly bifurcated between a Soviet city representing modernity and the mahalla representing tradition decisively locates people, culture, and power in a clear schematic configuration. Despite actual mixing and crossover on the ground, Uzbeks can think of themselves as the people of the mahalla, adhering to ethnic traditions and cultivating a certain moral character and mentality. Despite actual state penetration into the mahalla in various ways, Uzbeks see state power as located completely outside, in the buildings of the new city, from which the Soviets then and the Kyrgyz now rule over the mahallas. Divided city and mahalla together become a schema with which to deal with their subjugated status. Subjection to state power, which has promoted ethnic Kyrgyz into leading positions under both Soviet and Kyrgyzstani governments, can be turned around and conceived in terms of cultivating the mahalla as a morally superior sphere detached in principle from the field of city politics. The mahalla as an idiom of personal formation marks an inward turn, recalling the talk about courtyard-centered Uzbek houses being “inwardly oriented.” It expresses a hope that intensive cultivation of face-to-face community through Islamic values would somehow result in improvements for society at large. The khan idiom represents another kind of answer, premised on a Soviet-inherited expectation of a proactive state taking care of the people and land. The source of the khan’s effectiveness as leader lay in his virtuous character, revealing a concern shared with the mahalla idiom about the societal consequences of moral personhood. Osh Uzbeks think with and live by these figures of thought and practice also because the idioms hold out the promise of addressing the roots of their post-Soviet predicament as ethnic Uzbek citizens within a nationalistic Kyr- gyzstani state. Most analyses of discriminated ethnic minorities focus on concrete issues—equal opportunity for jobs, education, economic activity, peace, justice, and political participation—and rightly so. These are indeed important for Osh Uzbeks in particular. But the approach here uncovers something more. We see that under this minority’s concrete needs lies a deeper yearning for a means of fundamental societal change that yields structural rather than pal- liative remedies. The khan and mahalla idioms are compelling to Osh Uzbeks because they claim to answer this profound need for an effective mechanism to reform society, a capacity that I term societal agency. Both idioms embed claims for the efficacious transformation of social, political, and economic relations in the republic toward some outcome of prosperity, stability, and morality. The khan was supposed to exercise societal agency “from above,” the virtuous state leader exerting a magical influence over his realm. The mahalla was to have a kind of societal agency by transforming society “from below,” Conclusion 187 cultivating moral individuals and communities whose character and actions would effect a fundamental, positive change in the economy and society. These two approaches to transforming societies may actually have a deeper connection: they share a similar sensibility about what proper authority “looks and feels like.” The earlier ethnographic discussion of mahalla spaces noted that mahalla produces an entire set of expectations about authority, and these expectations together constitute a way of dwelling in the world generally. It is time to make the link between those expectations at the scales of neighborhood and state. Examining the spatial characteristics of the khan idiom yields a conception of societal agency that bears an intriguing resemblance to the operation of mahalla social life.

The State as a Quasi-Mahalla Space The khan figure was treated as dispersing the effects of his character into society. Here was a khan whose intentions and very character were projected onto the Uzbekistani state and land, setting the tone for all activity on its territory. The khan was so metonymic of Uzbekistan that Osh Uzbeks believed they could “read” his character by looking at the concrete social and economic phenomena that occurred across the country. The republic was treated as a spatial extension of his personhood. The khan was recognized by his domain. Because socioeconomic life was radically interconnected and determined by the nature of the regnant authority, the khan could potentially be recognized everywhere within the space, in almost anything. His authority was treated as being dispersed through the space of his domain in the sense that its effects were recognizable throughout the area. The republic was a hyperindexical space, where everything seemed to point ultimately to him. I have called this spatial characteristic of pervasive dispersion of recognized effects a “field,” premised on the phenomenological insight that human spatiality is always occupied with concern and intention (Casey 1996). Narratives evoking various spatial domains—republic, city, mahalla, house—were filled with concern and aspirations about stewardship, productivity, fairness, propriety, and morality. The spatially dispersed manner in which this idiom presented itself in everyday contexts—as socially real and urgently compelling—may be the most intriguing aspect of this idiom. The khan-centered model of societal transformation framed how current events in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan were interpreted. When Osh Uzbeks who operated with this idiom considered their lives under the independent Kyrgyzstani state, they saw themselves literally surrounded by indicators of economic stagnation: closed factories, jobless youth on the streets, illegal traders on bicycles, rising prices at the bazaar, the market flooded with imported goods, unfavorable exchange rates at the moneychangers’ booths, municipal utilities faltering, and so on. Osh Uzbeks read these 188 Conclusion signs as ultimately pointing to what they described as the ineptitude and corruption of the Kyrgyzstani leadership. On the other hand, when they looked at the situation across the border in Uzbekistan (largely via Uzbekistani television), they saw a place apparently filled with the indicators of an exemplary postsocialist state: busy factories, new joint ventures with foreign firms, construction booms, public works projects, technological advances, cultural development, civil order, and global prestige. When Osh Uzbeks considered their surrounding conditions, they recognized the khan in the evidence of his authority in neighboring Uzbekistan, and in his egregious absence in Osh. Osh Uzbeks in both cases read the nature of the authority by the effects found in space. Beneficial phenomena indexed wise or virtuous authority, while deleterious ones indexed incompetent or corrupt authority. The postsocialist state of the khan imaginary is in this sense treated like a quasi-mahalla space, because both assume that the effects of authority pervade a space. The khan was understood to oversee his state with the same sense of personal stewardship as elders were supposed to oversee the neighborhood.1 One interlocutor, Walimat, even made explicit analogies between the need for stewardship of the republic’s lands and the need to care for mahalla streets and instruct residents about proper behavior in them: neglect- ing tarbiya at both levels meant environmental and moral decay; exercising tarbiya for both promised development in the economy and community. More importantly, however, the effects of authority figures enforcing their vision of collective good were assumed to be dispersed in the spaces at both levels. In the mahalla, a seemingly ubiquitous gradient of social expectations connected with ideals of proper community inhered in embodied, spatially indexed comportment, dispositions, speech, and activity. Because practice in the mahalla is modulated by power operating as a sociospatial field of dispositions and judgments, the inhabitant lives with a tacit expectation for power to literally encompass the body, in Merleau-Ponty’s manner of the body transacting with its surrounding space in habitual “dialogue.” This corporeal sensibility of social power’s spatiality carries over to how some Osh Uzbeks imagine the state as an authority whose moral character and material effects pervade the space within the republic’s borders, because the intentions of the leader exercising societal agency are seen to determine the conditions of life there. The spatiality of everyday, face-to-face social life forms a compelling set of expectations about authority, agency, and moral community at other scales. The state was thus treated like a mahalla writ large in both “content” (paternal oversight) and “form” (spatial characteristics). Social life had a similar “look and feel” on both scales. Dwelling in the mahalla entailed experiencing authority as ambient, ubiquitous, and consequential, which grounded tacit expectations of what efficacious authority should look and feel like at wider levels. Recognizing the khan resonated with being in the mahalla. The khan Conclusion 189 as an idiom of societal agency was therefore implicated with Osh’s residential neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks were thinking with the mahalla in order to think about a good post-Soviet state and good leadership. The idioms of societal agency show concern about the structural nature of the most intractable problems in society. Their conception exhibits felicitous parallels with the sociopolitical thinking of American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who in the early twentieth century called attention to the structural aspects of human evil. His famous epigram, “moral man, immoral society,” poses the question of why we understand our individual actions as being subject to some form of morality, while at the same time we act as col- lectivities (classes, nation-states, etc.) with unfettered self-interest and naked aggression. Niebuhr answers that a society’s intractable problems should be located less in the ill conduct or intentions of individuals (the focus of Chris- tian doctrines of sin) and more in the systemic arrangements that perpetuate states of injustice in which everybody is variously complicit (Niebuhr 1941, 1960). There is an illuminating thought-experiment that has to do with racism in the United States. Were all Americans to eliminate all racist thinking in themselves and relate to others in a truly race-blind fashion, racism as a social phenomenon would still not disappear, because it is deeply embedded in the large-scale relations in society: inequalities in income, education, political voice, economic opportunity, housing location, neighborhood infrastructure, environmental quality, and so forth. As one Osh Uzbek commented to me, race-marked structural inequalities in the United States were tragically laid bare after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. As is apparent years after this disaster, which sections of the city would have better levees or recovery could not be determined merely with a shift in individual attitudes and manners, even if the latter were possible. But attitudes and perceptions are treacherously elusive when it comes to change, of course, because they are produced by the vested interests of one’s position in the structures. Niebuhr’s problematic resonates with some Osh Uzbeks’ analysis of post-Soviet Kyrgyz- stan because they both affirm that the worst socioeconomic problems have emergent properties that are not reducible to individual agency but must be addressed as an entangled structural phenomenon. A societal state of affairs such as corruption, unemployment, or ethnic discrimination, in which complicity is diffuse and agency is difficult to localize, requires a means for exercising a higher level of agency to alter the system in toto. Many Osh Uzbeks have thus thought hard about these issues; they have chosen to think with mahalla and khan as compelling idioms that may make it possible to change these deleterious situations. We also talked about another urban idiom that Osh Uzbeks use to interpret their times: Osh as a city of exchange or mediation. They pondered spaces 190 Conclusion such as the bazaar, with all of its furious activity and jarring juxtapositions, and leveraged Osh’s history as a Silk Road trade settlement to cast the city as having the inherent capacity to control the wild convergence of global economic forces and perhaps even to channel those forces toward positive ends. It is within their predicament of being caught between two ethnonationalisms and two postsocialisms that Osh as an idiom of mediation has traction.2 The 1999 border closing at Do’stlik poignantly captured this dilemma: the Osh Uzbeks were struck out of the blue by an enigmatic exercise of power by Uz- bekistani authorities, and they scrambled to position themselves bravely in the awkward geopolitical position that the border closing put them as ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan. But what if their powerless marginality could be reappropriated into a strength? What if the city of Osh were seen as a nexus inte- grating and mastering disparate socioeconomic trends rather than as a hapless victim of external forces? If Osh’s mediation of difference could be positioned as centrality, one could take pride in the city as playing an important role in modulating and channeling the post-Soviet order. This theme is important in light of trends and events affecting Osh in the 2000s.

Solomon the Mediator In my conversations with Osh Uzbeks concerning various aspects of post- Soviet life, they repeatedly made reference to Osh’s past as an ancient trade city on the Silk Road or as a longtime pilgrimage center, with Solomon Moun- tain as the pilgrims’ goal. These references, usually made in passing or discussed at greater length by a few, were not merely statements of historical fact but were used as a rhetorical figure with which to talk about current trends. While Osh was indeed a political center during the Soviet period, claims of its regional centrality in earlier times, including some made by Soviet historians, exaggerate the city’s importance.3 Osh was not known even as a major city of the Fergana Valley before Soviet times.4 Andijan bests Osh even in regard to the latter’s most illustrious resident, Babur, who was born in Andijan in 1483 and merely grew up in Osh before proceeding to conquer northern India and found the Mughal Empire. The Soviet-constructed Babur Literary Museum is located in Andijan by its main bazaar, supposedly at the site where Babur had lived. When one Osh Uzbek served in the Soviet army in the Caucasus during the 1950s, he used to tell others that he was from Andijan, since the average Soviet citizen would not have heard of Osh, he said to me. What these examples suggest is that the idea of Osh’s historical centrality was a product of Soviet rule that reconfigured the Central Asian geography by elevating the city to the status of a provincial capital of a freshly created territory and then making this geography socially real through decades of bureaucratic and other practices. This importance was then projected backward in time and, during the tumult of the first two post-Soviet decades, used as a figure of thought Conclusion 191 with which to interpret the unsettling convergence of economic, political, and social trends folded into the city’s life. The idea of Osh being central can be seen as another aspect of the idiom of exchange, articulated in defiance of the post-Soviet reality of Osh’s marginality at the boundary of two new nation- state projects. The distinctive and highly visible profile of Solomon Mountain seemed to capture the city’s capacity to mediate contradictions. It was as if the throne of Solomon rose above the fray, overlooking the city’s dilemmas. The centrality of Osh became an important figure of thought during Kyr- gyzstan’s second decade of independence. A significant trend in the 2000s was a rapid shift in attitude for many Osh Uzbeks, who moved away from their position of fervent support of President Karimov’s post-Soviet path for Uzbeki- stan in the 1990s. This trend was under way even before the traumatic Andijan events of 2005. Osh Uzbeks, despite their continuing grievances with Kyrgyz rule and somewhat to their own surprise, found themselves becoming more comfortable with their status as Kyrgyzstani citizens as the second decade of independence advanced. There was a noticeable increase during this period in public evidence of economic prosperity in Kyrgyzstan’s main cities, especially in Bishkek and Osh. Buildings were being renovated, roads and sidewalks re- paved, sleek commercial fronts erected, shops selling assorted luxury items opened, and restaurants lit up the evenings with colorful lights and music. To be sure, urban inequalities mounted and rural regions languished, so that most could not afford the newly available amenities. Nevertheless, more than a decade of economic liberalization was producing tangible benefits for some, and this was changing the overall tenor of the Kyrgyzstani cityscapes where Uzbeks dwelt in significant numbers. Osh began to look good. As for the newly rich Uzbek families who benefited from Kyrgyzstan’s climate of relative economic freedom, they were fully aware that their wealth could not be made in Uzbekistan. Osh was improving, in other words, because it was resuming its proper status as a successful trade city. Meanwhile, it became increasingly clear to Osh Uzbeks that conditions were in fact considerably worse across the border, belying Uzbekistani TV’s utopian images that had had so much influence only a few years before. An oft- told saying was, “If you want to see heaven on earth, watch Uzbekistani TV. If you want to see hell on earth, live in Uzbekistan.” Some Osh Uzbeks identified the beginning of their doubts with the new trade regulations that Uzbekistan enacted in 2000; the new laws severely restricted the import of foreign products into that country.5 The laws also resulted in a crisis moment in Tash- kent, when the Hippodrome, a central trade site in the city, was closed. These events also affected Kyrgyzstanis, since most of the voluminous trade from China to Uzbekistan traveled through the Kara-Suu bazaar in Kyrgyzstan. In fact, much of Osh’s post-Soviet wealth came from trade at Kara-Suu, a small town twenty-two kilometers northeast of Osh and also on the border with 192 Conclusion

Uzbekistan. It is because of Kara-Suu that Osh ranks as the second-wealthiest city in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, after Bishkek. As a result, Uzbekistanis began to pour into Kara-Suu to buy cloth, clothes, small electronics, toiletries, and other items from China and elsewhere.6 When I spent time in 2003 at the dense, sprawling Kara-Suu bazaar with the Mansurovs, my Osh host family who owned two cloth stalls there, most of their buyers were from Uzbeki- stan. This was apparent because whenever someone inquired about prices, Saidjon asked back, “Kirg’iz pul mi, O’zbek pul mi?” (Kyrgyz money or Uzbek money?), and most buyers used the Uzbekistani so’m. The shoppers were from all over the Uzbekistani side of the Fergana Valley: Andijan, Namangan, and Fergana. They came in droves to Kara-Suu, despite the cost of buses and taxis (but crossing the footbridges into Kyrgyzstan on foot) and, no doubt, of bribes to Uzbekistani officials.7 In the words of one Osh Uzbek, the bare fact that Uzbekistanis were pouring into Kara-Suu every day to buy essentials showed that something was dreadfully wrong in Uzbekistan, in diametric opposition to the situation in 1997, when Karimov criticized Osh Uzbeks for buying up Uzbekistan’s bread. Indeed, when I took a road trip in 2003 from Osh across the Uzbekistani part of the Fergana Valley, the visual contrast in the bazaars on each side of the border was striking.8 While Osh was opening new restaurants and Internet cafés and finally paving its potholed main streets (maintenance work paid for, in part, by store owners), the Uzbekistani cities of Andijan, Namangan, and Qoqand had changed relatively little from the 1990s, except for some shiny new state buildings in the urban centers and attractive billboards with state slogans. While the comparatively lavish bazaars of Osh and Kara-Suu offered an increasingly wide variety of sleek, consumer-oriented goods, the often rather drab markets in the Uzbekistani cities were still selling primarily local and state-produced products with their unglossy, unmarketed look. In that same period, the Kara-Suu bazaar evolved from the open rows of sellers sitting on blankets that I first saw in 1994 to the ever-expanding bustling structures of permanent covered stalls in the 2000s. The aphorism of the farmer Zarif, “In Uzbekistan, the state is rich, the people poor; in Kyrgyzstan, it’s the other way around,” has become more true over time. Osh Uzbek awareness of poverty among the Uzbekistani people was highlighted after the Andijan incident, even among most of those who believed Islamic terrorists had played a role in mobilizing the demonstrations. Amid these shifting conditions and attitudes, the city of Osh was seen as taking up new roles of mediation. The trade activity in Osh, nearby Kara-Suu, and elsewhere in southern Kyrgyzstan was affecting Uzbekistan, particularly in the Fergana Valley, mollifying the harsh effects of the latter’s economic policy, which prevented many sought-after consumer goods from reaching its citizens. The Kyrgyzstani Uzbek-dominated trade mediated Uzbekistan’s un- Conclusion 193 official economic connections to producers in China and Korea, allowing the city or region to act as a safety valve to vent the pressures of living under the khan’s discipline. As Saidjon, the youngest son of the Mansurov trading family, who was working in Kara-Suu, asserted, the cross-border trade between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the 2000s benefited both sides. Because Kyr- gyzstan’s food production from agricultural regions such as Nawkat (Nookat in Kyrgyz) or Suzak does not suffice, it needs to buy produce from Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan needs the money from the food it sells and the consumer goods from China that the government forbids its people to buy. Advocating the free flow of commodities across borders, Saidjon remarked, “Small, private companies make products that are cheapest and best quality. Uzbekistan’s large state factories make things that are more expensive and low quality. The hy- podermic syringes made in Uzbekistan are not as good or cheap as the ones coming from China.”9 Osh Uzbek and other traders are playing the role of mediators not only in their conveyance of goods but also in their development of expertise about how to get things done in the economic conditions after state socialism.10 For example, the Mansurovs had an arrangement with some of the many Osh Uzbek families with members working as migrant laborers in Seoul, Korea. Rahmon or his mother would travel to Korea every several months, collect the remittances from those working Uzbeks, buy Korean goods with the cash, sell those goods back in Osh, distribute the remittance monies to the Osh families from the proceeds, and earn profit from the price difference. This ingenious scheme benefited all parties and solved the problem of how to efficiently move money back and forth overseas while avoiding currency conversion, banks, and electronic transfer services. When goods could not be sold in Osh or Kara-Suu, as happened on one occasion with empty natural gas cylinders (because gas was in short supply in southern Kyrgyzstan), Rahmon went selling in remote areas of Uzbekistan, paying the requisite bribes to travel (Uzbeki- stani visas are not expensive but take a month to get—what trader in this fast- moving business can wait that long?) and transport the goods. Rahmon was also importing used Daewoo cars from Korea, shipped by rail through China and Kazakhstan, because he could sell them cheaper, even with transportation costs, than new Daewoos from the Andijan plant (Uzbekistan’s flagship joint venture with Korea, Uz-Daewoo). There was a healthier demand for Daewoos than for European imports like Mercedes, he said, because spare parts were more easily available from Andijan. And so traders are devising and exploiting new strategies and networks for making transnational contacts, dealing with (or evading) multiple governmental controls, amassing capital, transferring and converting wealth, moving commodities, and making profits around the post-Soviet space. They have moved far beyond the posture of victimization by the “chaos” of a predatory 194 Conclusion

“wild capitalism” and have become comfortable with managing risk at the dynamic boundaries of chaos and regularity that characterize the market. In short, these traders mediate the operation of regional and global capitalism for inhabitants of both republics—a postsocialist recapitulation of a centuries-old role for Osh Uzbeks. The shift in attitude became increasingly evident in what Osh Uzbeks were saying during the 2000s. For the first time in 2003 I heard a few Osh Uzbeks make statements to the effect of, “Thank God I am a citizen of Kyrgyzstan.” An Uzbek from Kyrgyzstan, who was visiting Andijan when the violence broke out in 2005, commented similarly: “Now I am home, and have never been so happy to have been born in Kyrgyzstan” (quoted in Saparov 2005). One young Osh Uzbek man traveled to Tashkent in 2004 and met residents there who were eager to tell their stories of hardship to him, an outsider. A Tashkenter said he could not buy shoes or schoolbooks for his children, and another exclaimed, “At least you Oshliks [Osh residents] have Akaev, thank God, and economic freedom.” Saidjon Mansurov, who was dealing with Uzbekistanis daily at Kara-Suu, said that Uzbekistanis were envious of southern Kyrgyz- stan’s residents. Zairbek Ergeshov, a Kyrgyz historian at Osh State University, claimed that some of Osh’s Uzbek intelligentsia were registering their children as Kyrgyz on their birth certificates and passports and sending them to Kyrgyz-language school to improve their prospects for careers in government. Matteo Fumagalli’s fieldwork among Uzbek elites in southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan in the early 2000s also attests to this disenchantment with Uzbekistan, which was viewed more as a neighbor than as their homeland.11 It was the Andijan events of 2005 that sealed the conviction for most Osh Uzbeks that they could look neither to Uzbekistan as an exemplary post- Soviet state nor to Karimov as khan. Most realized that Karimov had fired upon unarmed citizens in Andijan’s central square, where people had gathered for peaceful protest, and killed possibly hundreds. And so in the few short years after the apparent public consensus of the 1990s, the gradualcrescendo of the trends that oriented Osh Uzbeks progressively toward Kyrgyzstan was suddenly punctuated by the sforzando of the Andijan events. The violence sent a sharp tremor through the Osh Uzbek community, as I found in fieldwork a few months after the fact; the Andijan events plunged into doubt the certitude of the khan-led state as the preferred means for post-Soviet societal transformation. This resulted in a fragmented, kaleidoscopic field of sentiments and positions that prompted both shifts in stance and entrenchments of former opinions.12 The influx of political refugees in the aftermath of the Andijan events- al lowed Osh to participate in yet another instance of mediation. Andijanis came to southern Kyrgyzstan for safety after the crisis in 2005, and efforts based in Osh, Bishkek, and international circles mediated the conflicting political pres- Conclusion 195 sures and worked out arrangements for refugee status and settlement. Sud- denly, Osh Uzbeks served as a consequential Uzbek interpretive community outside of Uzbekistan—“outside insiders” with unique insight into Uzbeki- stan. The consequences of Karimov’s “unique Uzbek path,” admired widely in the 1990s, were brought literally home to Osh Uzbeks in their ugliest and deadliest form through the portion of Andijani refugees that ended up in Osh that summer. The Soviet-style control of economy and dissent, the decisive ruthlessness against the nation’s evil enemies, the condition of “state rich, people poor,” the paternalism of “khan knows best what is good for the country,” the policy of “short-term hardship for long-term benefit,” the perpetual deferment of the “future great state” all came crashing at the gates of Osh. But tragedy shifted direction in the summer of 2010, when the interethnic fighting, which some would call pogroms, in Osh and Jalalabat resulted in Kyr- gyzstani Uzbeks themselves fleeing across the border, ending up for a while in UN-run refugee camps just inside Uzbekistan. Characteristically, President Karimov of Uzbekistan had no interest in substantively helping Uzbeks from Kyrgyzstan, further disillusioning those who had earlier idealized him as the benevolent khan. Meanwhile, prior to 2010, Osh was receiving “intellectual refugees” as well, as artists, academics, and students from Uzbekistan were coming to Osh to study and work in the 2000s.13 Educated, Internet-savvy youth in Kyrgyzstan critically thought about analysis and interpretation of current events and reli- ability of sources, unlike their elders. Some Osh Uzbeks alluded to the relative artistic freedom in Kyrgyzstan that allowed Uzbek culture—poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, music, essay writing—to flourish better in Osh than in Uz- bekistan, where heavy state controls over expressive content and form stifled creativity (Doi 2002). A painter who depicted Amir Timur in Uzbekistan, I was told as an example, had to render the ruler in mandated postures, with arm raised or sword pointed in certain ways that represented strength and justice. Art in Kyrgyzstan did not have to serve pro-state agendas (at least not nearly with the same level of state control). In another instance, a famous poet, Shavkat Rahmon (now deceased), had come from Osh but spent his artistic life in Tashkent. The fact that the 2005 celebration of the anniversary of his birth was held in Osh rather than Tashkent, according to an Osh Uzbek, was indicative of Osh’s new artistic importance. A number of people came from Tashkent to attend the commemoration, but “they had problems with their own border guards in trying to leave Uzbekistan. Their own guards! For a literary event in Osh! And after those Tashkenters finally arrived, they said that conditions were better in Osh.” With examples like these, a few Osh Uzbeks argued in the late 2000s that the center of Uzbek intellectual and artistic activity in all of Central Asia was shifting from Tashkent to Osh. Osh’s intellectual milieu had the potential of 196 Conclusion playing a mediating role in the education or creative endeavors of these Uz- bekistanis as they formulate an Uzbek subject position beyond a Karimov- brand nationalism. With Osh’s Uzbek communities now devastated, it is unclear if its intellectuals could still participate in the eventual post-Karimov reconstitution of Uzbekistan. This aspiration nonetheless revealed the conceit of Osh’s centrality, both justified and exaggerated, seen earlier in other guises. It signaled a decisive break from the earlier Osh Uzbek obsession with post- Soviet Uzbekistan as the font of all Uzbek greatness and the belief that Osh was a fragile ember separated from the mother hearth. Osh can be said to have finally come of age at that moment as the wise mediator of Uzbek culture and commerce. But the moment was not to last.

Under Solomon’s Throne Years ago, before I began my research in Central Asia, I told an anthropologist about my intention to study that region. “Great,” she said, “that’s one of the last places today you can do real anthropology. You don’t need a gim- mick.” This book has sought to think anew what an anthropology of Central Asia could look like, to open up the space of creative inquiry for this under- researched part of the world. The challenge has been to render more fully the rhapsodic complexity of Central Asia today, with its diversity of interdigitated connections, past and present, local and global, Soviet, Inner Asian, Islamic, and nativist. If Osh is all about exchange and mediation, the book has accordingly integrated a spectrum of disciplinary perspectives in its account of the richness of the city’s life. Scholarship about Central Asia needs useful and innovative theory that makes more comprehensible this fascinating corner of the world. The local and open-textured, yet constrained and patterned ways— the human ways—in which post-Soviet Central Asian realities are experienced, apprehended, and acted upon by its subjects very much have a bearing on the future development of the sociopolitical stability, security, democratization, marketization, economic survival, stratification, and globalization of Central Asia. Scholarship of all stripes needs to frame its questions and craft its methodologies on an expanded canvas. My anthropologist colleague was right: Central Asia does not need gimmicks. This study has aimed to render that layered Central Asian complexity in all its human messiness through an intense engagement with a local setting— through interviews, conversations, participant observation, walking surveys, documents, Soviet publications, newspapers, and television—and through a focus on space as an organizing principle in how people make sense of the world. Osh, Kyrgyzstan, has been a city for our thoughts about post-Soviet Central Asia. Places in and around the city served as sites revealing a delicate geopolitical situation at a critical historical moment. Conclusion 197

Osh has also been a city for the thoughts of its Uzbek residents. They face both postsocialist and postcolonial dilemmas in their situation since 1991. Jar- ring economic change has raised poignant questions about market reforms and their moral implications for society, the proper role of the state, and new opportunities to get wealthy—questions evaluating Central Asia’s trajectory after Soviet state socialism. The subjects interviewed thought about these issues through intense commentary on places such as the bazaar, the post- Soviet border, and the republic of Uzbekistan. Sudden political change and continuing uncertainty has also raised deep concerns about ethnic tradition and societal progress, about who Central Asians really are and how they are to fit into the post–cold war world order—concerns about positioning one’s identifications after Russian-Soviet domination. The narrators pondered these issues by talking about places like the “divided” cityscape, the mahalla, and the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. One result of this entire study is that it shows how human rootedness in place involves more than emotional at- tachment, narratives of identity, or ethnic territoriality; it shows that place can act as an epistemological frame with which to interpret the world and work out a dilemma literally on home ground. The analysis has revealed that Osh Uzbeks have responded to their vexed political situation in several ways during the first two decades of Kyrgyzstan’s independence. These are the “urban idioms” encountered in each chapter, the figures of thought and practice located in specific city places and organized around discernible themes. In response to the onslaught of economic “chaos,” the rise of criminality and inequality, and crises like the Andijan events, they interpreted Osh’s urban matrix of activity through an idiom of mediation. Osh is imputed with a Silk Road history of exchange that is assumed to set the precedent for the city to be able to mediate and productively channel the forces that now impinge on it. In response to their subjugation as lived out in the “divided” city under the Soviet and then Kyrgyzstani states, they live in and interpret their neighborhoods via an idiom of societal renewal. The mahalla is both talked about as a realm of moral community and inhabited according to definite practices that maintain senses of authority, both of which are understood to make possible the conditions for improving society as a whole. In response to their dominant perceptions of the 1990s (that reforms were going very well in Uzbekistan, in contrast to the economic crises in Kyrgyzstan), they used the neighboring republic to think about virtuous leadership in the figure of the benevolent despot, the khan. Uzbekistan’s President Karimov was supposed to exercise an efficacious agency to change societies by dint of his personal virtuous character. The entire analysis demonstrates that imaginaries are emphatically not about fantasizing or escaping political reality. They are about engaging politics 198 Conclusion on one’s own terms. Imaginaries configure and make meaningful cherished collective values and interests. The idioms explored in this book are compelling to the research subjects in part because they are thickly woven with ideas, assumptions, sensibilities, and practices circulating in the post-Soviet Central Asian context. They embed understandings of personhood, morality, authority, state, and community that echo Soviet, Islamic, and Inner Asian discourses. The idioms, in other words, represent a particular convergence and layering of those influences that define Central Asia today. What we have here is nothing less than a very Central Asian vision of societal renewal. Perhaps the iconic presence of Solomon Mountain at the heart of the cityscape captures these Osh ways of thinking and doing. Silent, majestic, and central, the mountain exemplifies Osh’s repeated capacity to mediate differences. Yet it also stands aloof from the myriad injustices of everyday life and gestures to the khanlike qualities of virtue and wisdom that the figure of Solomon represents. What hope is there that those living in the shadow of Solomon’s throne may dwell in a just societal order that enables the common flourishing of all? The massive interethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 seems to shatter any such hope. The events were a tragedy on multiple levels. The citywide loss of life and property was certainly tragic, but the greater loss was the utter collapse of trust between these two ethnic communities that is likely to continue for some time. Up until the summer of 2010, Kyrgyz and Uz- beks had achieved a stable state of pragmatic, peaceful coexistence that might have persisted indefinitely, even if amid continuing tensions and misunderstandings, were it not for powerful interests who could spark conflict. Kyrgyz- stani Uzbek leaders had been attempting to create conditions to enable their communities to thrive under the framework of the Kyrgyzstani state, developing a model of ethnic minority citizenship that involved building key local institutions (universities, presses, cultural centers) and encouraging Islamic piety (see Fumagalli 2007b). The purpose of these efforts was to serve Uzbek needs, yet leaders also claimed to be promoting the common good of all Kyr- gyzstanis. That model now lies in tatters; much of the violence targeted those same Uzbek institutions and neighborhoods. The explosive events of 2010 put into radical question the very viability of being Uzbek in the Kyrgyz Republic. The open question is, can Uzbek communities in Kyrgyzstan find a modus vivendi within a troubled post-Soviet order that appears to refuse them a legitimate place? However the vagaries of Osh and Kyrgyzstani politics develop, there is reason to expect certain deeply seated ideas to persist in some form. Basic sensibilities of good community, moral personhood, and the significance of urban place explored here should continue to frame collective imaginaries and action, even as those idioms may be reconfigured and adapted to Conclusion 199 drastically changed circumstances. Osh Uzbek visions of societal renewal ultimately express a prevailing optimism that viable collective existence is possible through great communal effort. A final lesson from this study is that, despite formidable circumstances, they do not give up trying.

Notes

Introduction: A City for Thought 1. Elaborate everyday food serving rituals in the rural Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan, their dense social meanings, and the palpable obligations imposed on guest and host alike are described in Zanca (2003). 2. Quotation is from memory and is thus not verbatim. 3. The 1986 General Plan for Osh lists residential land, of which mahallas took up a slim majority, as comprising 52.2 percent (470 hectares) of the city’s 900-hectare total land area (Gosudarstvennyi Proektnyi Institut 1986). 4. Elizabeth Fernea (1976) describes a similar microcosmic feel to the warren of small streets in Marrakech, Morocco. 5. I found out later that it is difficult for a stranger, especially with a peculiar request such as mine, to call at a house in the mahalla. As it turns out, the issue of house calls provides insight into social relations and spatial practices in the mahalla and is addressed in chapter 5. 6. Uzbek speakers sometimes used a Russian phrase, Uzbekskii obraz zhizni, for “way of life,” showing that the concept comes from Soviet education, which taught them to anthropologize themselves.

201 202 Notes to Pages 6–8

7. As part of a collaborative team under sociologist Alisher Ilkhamov, I helped conduct focus group interviews in Fergana, Bukhara, and Tashkent in 1996 as part of the project “Identity Formation and Social Problems in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan,” headed by Michael Kennedy and funded by the Ford Foundation. My contribution was published as Liu (2005a). 8. My Russian teacher in Bishkek grew up in the 1950s in an Osh mahalla, where Russian and Uzbek children intermingled without social or linguistic impediments, but ethnic polarization has been the rule since then. Such moments of narration, colored as they are by a nostalgia characteristic of older Russians in Central Asia, offer glimpses that the “friendship of peoples” druzhba( narodov) of Soviet ideology was at least a partially lived reality. 9. Kyrgyz do live in Uzbek-majority mahallas or in more evenly mixed neighborhoods in smaller towns and rural settlements near Osh, such as Aravan, Otuz-Adir, and Mady. Residents in these mixed mahallas claimed that cross-ethnic neighborly relations have always been good, despite the period of tensions during the months following the June 1990 riots in Osh and Uzgen. 10. To be sure, there are house-based businesses (preparing food, repairing diverse items, and handling construction, as well as various craft businesses), plus a few city institutions (a municipal archive, a polyclinic) located within mahallas to which the wider city population has access, but this foot traffic is low compared to the everyday presence and activity of the Uzbek-majority residents. 11. The paper I presented was later published in Liu and Sulaimanov (1998), the volume and conference being connected to the government’s Osh 3000 campaign to celebrate the city’s supposed three-millennium anniversary. 12. Uzgen was also caught up in the Kyrgyz-Uzbek interethnic violence of the Osh riots in 1990 (Tishkov 1995). 13. I have never encountered ethnicized hostility against me in mahallas. This was likely because I appear more foreign than I do Kyrgyz, I had learned the Uzbek language by the time I began my 1997 fieldwork, and I became personally known in many mahallas. 14. The majority of violent acts appeared to have been perpetrated against Uzbeks and Uzbek-owned property, in what a fair and well-researched account of the 2010 Osh events calls “pogroms” (International Crisis Group 2010). The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) has posted satellite photos showing massive damage to Osh’s mahallas and locations of barricades (UNITAR 2010). An independent international inquiry (Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Com- mission 2011), commissioned by Kyrgyzstan’s President Roza Otumbaeva, issued its findings in May 2011. President Otumbaeva and every Kyrgyz I spoke with in the summer of 2011 harshly criticized the commission and its report for their alleged pro-Uzbek bias. The government of Kyrgyzstan issued an official response (Government of Kyrgyzstan 2011), which won praise from Kyrgyz intellectuals for Notes to Pages 8–11 203 its objectivity and rigor. Every Osh Uzbek I spoke with cited these reports, so they were hotly discussed in the spring and summer of 2011. 15. Actors playing at least some enabling role in the violence likely include Bakiev loyalists, some local politicians, and organized crime (especially narcotics traffickers), who all stand to benefit from the chaos and resulting reconfigurations of power in southern Kyrgyzstan, according to the ICG report (International Crisis Group 2010). In the aftermath of the events, the one great loser, other than the people of Osh, is the central government in Bishkek, which has apparently lost all real control of the republic’s southern areas. 16. Ertabyldy Sulaimanov, an ethnographer then teaching at Osh State Uni- versity, has looked at (unpublished) data from Osh’s ZAGS, the city’s wedding and civil registry, and noted that the rate of Kyrgyz-Uzbek intermarriages had dropped precipitously since the 1990 riots. 17. The riots reveal that spatial sensitivities that exist before modern state territoriality can quickly establish themselves in moments of crisis. According to Janet Abu-Lughod (1987, 171), “Historically, in Arabo-Islamic cities, the neighborhood has been in dialectical process with the external society. When central power was strong and when the citywide hierarchical structure was working smoothly, agents of the central administration operated within the neighborhoods to provide information to the center and ensure conformance with central directives. . . . More often, however, the quarter played the opposite role, that of a defended neighborhood, particularly when chaos reigned.” 18. This is not to say that Osh is representative of Central Asia in its entirety. Issues salient elsewhere in the region, such as hydrocarbon industries and their at- tendant politics (notably in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), the immediate effects of massive environmental degradation (around the Aral Sea), the legacies of civil war (in Tajikistan), or ongoing armed conflict (in Afghanistan) do not impact Osh directly nor preoccupy the city’s collective day-by-day attention. 19. Since 1995, the country has been officially called the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyr- gyz Respublikasy), although Kyrgyzstan is widely used. Until 1991, the territory’s official name was the Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic. The informal Soviet-era name Kirgizia is out of use, except among older Russian speakers. I use the adjecti- val form “Kyrgyzstani” to refer to the state (as in citizenship) and “Kyrgyz” to refer to the ethnic group or language. 20. Terry Martin (2001) advances the “affirmative action empire” thesis as he analyzes the goals and effects of Soviet nationalities policies. 21. “Kyrgyzstan is our common home” was President Askar Akaevich Akaev’s political slogan during the 1990s, and Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan look back to that time as one when the government at least officially promoted the multiethnic ideal. President Bakiev’s administration (2005–2010) directed policies with a more overt Kyrgyz nationalist bent, a trend that intensified after his ouster in 2010. 204 Notes to Pages 11–14

22. While ethnic Uzbeks constitute about 15 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s total population, they are overwhelmingly concentrated in a few cities and rural areas in the south, and the mostly rural (though rapidly urbanizing) Kyrgyz outnumber them when the scale of consideration is provincial. The actual percentage of Osh’s Uzbek population is a matter of contention, since it depends on how one draws the boundaries of the city, as we will see later. Jalal-Abad is the Uzbek name for what is now officially Jalalabat in Kyrgyz, the second-largest city in southern Kyrgyzstan. Fumagalli (2006, fn 1) also notes that Uzbeks reject the “minority” label. 23. These quiet expressions of wishful thinking about annexation to Uzbeki- stan that I heard during the 1990s had completely died down by the 2000s. I found no evidence of desire for annexation or political autonomy among ordinary Uzbeks or their leaders by the end of the 2000s, and certainly not after the events of 2010. 24. Of the voluminous literature on the Soviet nationality concept and policy, Bromley and Kozlov (1989), Hirsch (2005), Kozlov (1980), T. Martin (2001), Shanin (1989), Slezkine (1991, 1994b), and Suny and Martin (2001) are particularly insightful in describing how “nationality” was constructed and became layered so unproblematically into the daily lives of most Soviet citizens and their interactions with the state. Also see Roy (2007) and Liu (2011, 118–19) for an introductory discussion. 25. Far from being a stable designation throughout history, the modern idea of “Uzbek” was carved from complex Turko-Iranian hybridities of the sedentary population (Allworth 1990; Fragner 1994; Ilkhamov 2002, 2004; Subtelny 1994). 26. See also Taylor (2002). Frederick Cooper (2005, 200) has framed his comparative inquiry into imperial formations from Roman, Mongolian, and American history in terms of political imagination, considering “what it meant for a polity to think like an empire . . . [which] was not the same as thinking like a nation-state.” Humphrey (2002a) is perhaps the first published attempt to apply the concept to the post-Soviet context. 27. According to C. Castoriadis (1975/1998, 146–47), “Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental questions: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? . . . What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking? Society must define its ‘identity,’ its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs and its desires. With- out the ‘answer’ to these ‘questions,’ . . . there can be no human world, no society, no culture—for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos. . . . These are not questions and answers posed explicitly. . . . The questions are not even raised prior to the answers. Society constitutes itself by producing a de facto answer to these questions in its life, in its activity. It is in the doing of each collectivity that the answer to these questions appears as an embodied meaning.” 28. The importance of spatiality (the spatial characteristics) of the imaginaries explored here exemplifies an insight that may have remained unnoticed were it not for fresh attention to practice-discourse linkages. Notes to Pages 14–17 205

29. My thanks go to architectural theorist Fernando Lara for suggesting this phrase for Osh. 30. The widespread characterization of Eurasian overland caravan routes as the Silk Road has led to misleading understandings that such routes were primarily a “premodern superhighway” shuttling luxury Chinese goods to Europe, rather than a “complex, ever-changing web of caravan routes connecting urban centers” (Levi 1999, 522), a network of regional networks moving all sorts of commodities south- north-south as well as east-west-east to meet the shifting needs of people across the continent. 31. The Silk Road became etched into the geographical imagination of post- Soviet Central Asians through state-sponsored projects such as those claimed to be founded on President Akaev’s so-called “Great Silk Road Doctrine” of 1998 (Megoran 2002). 32. No region fits better the blind man’s description of the elephant, according to Deniz Kandiyoti (2002, 252). 33. Central Asian studies as a field has yet to think critically about the neoliberal assumptions of development that frame much of the literature’s research questions (Liu 2003) and about neoliberalism not as the natural post-Soviet order of things but as a specific historical and institutional formation (Bockman 2007; Bockman and Eyal 2002). Central Asia needs to be reconceptualized in a manner similar to the groundbreaking approaches taken to address development in other parts of the world; see, for example, Escobar (1995); Ferguson (1999); Li (2007); and Wainwright (2008). A starting point is the satirical look at development discourse typically applied to Central Asia but now applied to Great Britain (Megoran 2005b), which begins in deadpan mimicry of typical policy-oriented reports. 34. A growing literature on the anthropology of Central Asia is beginning to address the consequences of post-Soviet transformation for Central Asians. For a review of that literature, see Liu (2011). However, much of that work has not yet connected the region with broader questions about the post–cold war world that the social sciences are beginning to ask with regard to other locations around the world (Chari and Verdery 2009). 35. As Saba Mahmood (2005, 14) puts it, “How do we analyze operations of power that construct different kinds of bodies, knowledges, and subjectivities whose trajectories do not follow the entelechy of liberatory politics?” I argue for the importance of culture in the democratization in Central Asia in Liu (2005b). 36. Scholars working at the encounter of anthropology and history, particularly concerning colonialism, have been developing the notion that genealogies of a longer period provide a more insightful history of the present (Stoler, McGrana- han, and Perdue 2007). 37. Classic anthropological “readings of cities,” in a semiological and structur- alist vein, are notably found in C. Geertz (1989) and Bourdieu (1970/1990), both set in North Africa. While my work does seek to discern social, political, and eco- 206 Notes to Pages 18–22 nomic realities from urban form, it does not treat the city as a set of symbols to be decoded or meanings as conceptually separated from the grit of actual urban life. 38. My thanks to Stefan Senders for suggesting this term. 39. Mol and Law (2002, 6) ask, “How might a text make room within for whatever it also necessarily leaves out, for what is not there, not made explicit? How might a simple text respect complexities?” My mode of exposition and its gesturing toward the uncaptured “excess” beyond is one device adopted here in the attempt to do justice to the complexity of human life. 40. Even though I retain the language of scale throughout the book, the multiple ways that scale is spanned and interpenetrated in social imaginaries move this study toward a “flat ontology” (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005) and the realization that locality should instead be conceived not as places within a certain size limit but “as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial” (Appadurai 1996, 178), as something that is socially produced continually through the logics of everyday practice in interaction with logics of the modern nation-state. 41. I avoid the term transition for postsocialist transformations because it im- plies a unidirectional movement toward a definite endpoint. This linear evolutionist assumption is highly problematic, given the complex, multiple ways in which these societies are actually changing (Berdahl 2000; Carothers 2001). See Kandiy- oti (1998) for one Central Asian case study illustrating the problems of this frame. 42. “It’s hard to be down when you’re up,” remarks Michel de Certeau (1980/1984, 92) concerning the seductive power of vision from heights, but being on the ground affords a very different kind of knowledge on the subject, that of “lovers in each other’s arms” (93). Megoran (2008) makes a similar appeal to the field.

Chapter 1. Bazaar and Mediation

1. The languages chosen for the Stone Monument merit some reflection: none is the native language of any of the riot participants. Russian was the widely understood official Soviet language. English, complete with mistakes in grammar and spelling, was possibly chosen to mark an even more universal scope of the event’s significance. Written in Arabic script, the Turkic inscription appears to be in a pre- Soviet form of the language (it is difficult to make out the faded letters), presumably to reach for common ground uniting Kyrgyz and Uzbek, even though most Osh residents today could not read it. But why write the inscription in old Turki instead of in both modern Kyrgyz and Uzbek? Perhaps the monument makers were striving for depth in august history to signal the solemnity of the remembrance. I was not able to find out about the debates or circumstances surrounding the design or erection of the monument. My thanks to Snjezana Buzov for making out as much of the Turki as could be done. Notes to Pages 24–28 207

2. For a Soviet survey of Osh’s industrial accomplishments, see Oruzbaeva (1987). 3. A similar concern about moving from mere voyeurism to gaining insight on social order and cultural logics motivates an ethnographic walk of reunified Berlin (Boyer 2001). 4. The descriptions here apply to the bazaar in its heyday, from its post-Soviet ascendance after 1991 to its abrupt end in 2010. The main bazaar suffered great damage during the 2010 events, and at the time of writing, most of its food-selling functions had shifted to other sites, such as Zainabetdinova Street, across the Ak- Buura River from the main bazaar. 5. Osh traders working in Xinjiang, China, told me they used U.S. dollars because that currency provided the most compact way of carrying high value. By contrast, the largest denomination in Uzbekistani currency during the 1990s, the one-hundred-so’m note, was worth about fifty U.S. cents. Buying a plane ticket in Uzbekistan thus meant hauling a shopping bag full of cash and taking more than ten or fifteen minutes to count out to the cashier the amount due. 6. The booklets had user-friendly titles such as Islom dini nima? (What Is the Islamic Religion?), Biz namoz o’qiymiz (Let’s Read Namaz), and Musulmonlik aso- slari (Principles of Being Muslim). Legally available since independence, Islamic books are mostly in the Uzbek language, revealing that most of the popular interest in Islam lies with the city’s Uzbeks, but some are also in Russian and Kyrgyz. These books were published after independence in places like Tashkent, Istanbul, Mos- cow, and Kazan. In Kazan, an Islamic bookstore in the city’s old quarter sold scores of similar pamphlets, including Liubov’ i seks v Islame (Love and Sex in Islam, in Russian). Many booklets are targeted to women’s moral education (Saktanber and Özataş-Baykal 2000). However, such post-Soviet publications follow Soviet Orien- talist scholarship in its approach to “classic” texts, and their intent is not “purely religious” but is focused on retrieving Islam as national heritage (Khalid 2007). 7. A survey of Osh’s demography was published in the local newspaper Ekho Osha (Sulaimanov and Liu 1997). Ethnic Germans and Koreans were moved to Central Asia en masse by the Soviet government before and during World War II. Roma in Osh speak Uzbek and are in most ways indistinguishable from Uzbeks, as noted by ethnographer and Osh native Shavkat Atakhanov, who has done fieldwork in a Rom (locally called “Luli”) mahalla in Osh; see Asankanov and Atakha- nov (2002). 8. Actual percentage figures are in great dispute, some claiming that Uzbeks are no longer the majority, because it depends on what areas are formally considered part of the city proper. Uzbeks accuse the Kyrgyz government of gerrymandering Osh’s boundaries during the 1990s to include Kyrgyz-majority areas “outside” the city and excluding mahallas that are “clearly inside” the city, as discussed in chapter 3. 208 Notes to Pages 28–32

9. Originating from different Turkic language branches, they have lexical, mor- phological, phonological, and syntactic divergences. Uzbek contains many Persian and Arabic words, while Kyrgyz shares some words with Mongolian (Yudakhin 1965). 10. The Russian-speaking population russkoiazichnye( naselenie) has become a significant term of identity in its own right in areas of the former Soviet Union outside of the Russian Federation (Laitin 1998). 11. Different economic niches were dominated by particular ethnicities in So- viet Central Asia, not only because they continued pre-revolutionary labor patterns but also because they were reinforced by ethnically indexed notions about what constitutes proper work for a male (Lubin 1984). 12. Russian out-migration had diminished by the late 1990s. I heard rumors of some Russians returning to Central Asia, having found life in Russia more difficult and unwelcoming than they had imagined. Russians who had lived all their lives in Central Asia were seen as partial foreigners by those living in Russia. 13. This is not to say that other Central Asian cities and towns lack ethnic diversity, but, for a middle-sized city, Osh’s diversity was particularly evident in its public spaces until the 2010 events, after which the city took on a more Kyrgyz character in people and signage. There are certainly villages with mixed populations throughout the region, but the scale and the public presence in those locations are much smaller than in pre-2010 Osh. 14. When I was in Bishkek and Osh in 1993–1994, it almost seemed the entire city would come to a standstill during broadcasts of this soap opera, called Simplemente Maria in the original Spanish. Mexican soaps became very popular in the former Soviet Union after perestroika began in the 1980s, and Uzbek dowries included bolts of sparkling cloth named after heroines of those programs (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998b). So influential were they that, in post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, USAID (the U.S. foreign aid program) and British agencies produced soaps with a social engineering message (neoliberal propaganda) to promote privatization and market economy principles (Mandel 1998). 15. A rural bazaar can also be seen as a kind of microcosm of post-Soviet life; see, for example, the description of a village near Namangan, Uzbekistan, in Zanca (2011, 127–30). 16. See Kamp (2001) for an interesting case of how an Uzbek woman’s remembered experiences are radically organized by the sociopolitical circumstances of the telling. 17. Across postsocialist contexts, “the market” exists as both an idea and lived experience that is intertwined with local understandings of morality, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and so forth. The ethnographic literature document- ing the complex articulations of postsocialist market and society is growing, but most notable are the books by Berdahl, Bunzl, and Lampland (2000); Burawoy and Verdery (1999); Humphrey (2002b); and Mandel and Humphrey (2002); and Notes to Pages 33–34 209 the article by Ries (2002). For Joma Nazpary, who has studied urban networks of the dispossessed in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the apparent chaos of the market is embedded in a broader phenomenon, one in which the post-Soviet state employs a “chaotic mode of domination” whereby the new elite appropriate state property into their private hands and dismantle the welfare state system (Nazpary 2002, 5). 18. Historians have yet to address this significant shift in the “sovietization” of Central Asians; the postwar period has received little research attention. Douglas Northrop does offer some tantalizing suggestions in the conclusion of his mono- graph on the forced unveiling campaigns of Stalinist Uzbekistan, arguing that “it was the direct and indirect consequences of . . . a hugely traumatic world war and slow, painful recovery that ultimately led to the veil’s gradual disappearance over the next two decades.” That overall process helps explain, he suggests, “why Cen- tral Asia remained so stable in the late Soviet period” (Northrop 2004, 349). 19. The Unmaking of Soviet Life, indeed, is the apt title of Caroline Humphrey’s brilliant analyses of everyday economic dislocation in post-Soviet Russia (Hum- phrey 2002b). 20. As in English and Russian, the Uzbek word for “market” in the abstract is the same as the physical arena for buying and selling—bozor, the bazaar. For example, “market economy” is rendered bozor iqtisodi. 21. The term “hypervisible hand” is adapted from Ann Anagnost’s (1994, 231) description of the Chinese communist state. The mechanisms of market price have been a mysterious process in other contexts as well. For example, the Iranian bazaar, the site of heated debate and occasional political agitation, is where “information about prices is, in fact, the quickening break that sustains the life of the bazaar, and the mechanisms by which these prices adjust to new information on supply and demand is so refined as to seem almost divine. ‘God sets prices’” (Mot- tahedeh 1985/2000, 34–35). The classic text exploring the social and informational density of the North African or Middle Eastern bazaar is C. Geertz (1979). 22. The number of sex workers in Kyrgyzstan has increased greatly since independence, particularly in Bishkek and Osh. According to a study by the Inter- national Organization for Migration (2000, cited in Heyat 2004), Kyrgyzstan had more prostitutes per capita than any other former Soviet country. 23. However, the prevalent assumption that Kyrgyzstan is “awash” with small arms, promoted by the Kyrgyzstani and Uzbekistani states as part of their security discourses, is exaggerated (MacFarlane and Torjesen 2005). The international perception of post-Soviet Central Asia as an “exporter of global security threats” results from a post-9/11 “rhetorical coupling . . . [and] ‘securitization’” of trafficking and terrorism (Jackson 2005, 39). 24. The popularity of Indian films among Uzbeks, often to the surprise of Indians (despite historical and cultural connections), is a legacy of Soviet-Indian relations that channeled thousands of films dubbed into Russian to Central Asia, although interest may be fading after independence (Hidalgo 1998). Zanca (2011, 210 Notes to Pages 35–36

79, 133) also notes the popularity of Indian films and the iconography of U.S. movie and music figures in a rural bazaar near Namangan, Uzbekistan. 25. These bags were widely used at that time not only in Osh but also elsewhere in Central Asia, prompting journalist Stephen Naysmith to ask “why a yellow plastic bag with a red parrot—stamped with the address of the Pollokshaws Road shop—was one of the most common sights from Kyrgyzstan to Henan, from the mosques of Uzbekistan to the Karakoram mountains” during the 1990s (Naysmith 2000). The pet shop owner in Glasgow had apparently ordered the bags from a supplier in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, who ran off possibly millions of misprinted copies to claim a Chinese government subsidy for defective manufacturing, and the supplier then of course proceeded to sell those misprinted bags. They were distributed to Central Asia via Uyghur traders in Bishkek. Naysmith (2000) remarks, “Forget Monty Python, this is the parrot sketch that won’t die”—another impon- derable of the global market. 26. Osh Uzbek views of Uzbekistan were in part shaped by portrayals in music videos from Uzbekistan, which ran constantly on the local Uzbek-language OshTV and MezonTV, and of course, on Uzbekistani television. Yulduz Usmanova and others prominently displayed scenes of the Uzbekistani countryside, cityscape (Tashkent usually), monuments, cultural events, and flags. In the late 1990s, Sher- ali Juraev had a popular video called “O’zbegim” in which he sang his “traditional” songs to the visuals of a genealogical tree showing the relationships between Turkic peoples (Soviet nationality categories, of course). The role of music and expressive culture generally in Central Asian nationalisms has been deftly studied for the post-Soviet period (Adams 1999, 2005, 2010; Doi 2002), as well as the early Soviet period (Rouland 2004, 2005). 27. Russia’s military air base near Kant was established by agreement with Kyrgyzstan in 2003, in answer to the U.S. air base set up at Manas Airport outside of Bishkek in December 2001 as part of the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, and it was Russia’s first new air base since 1991. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was founded in 2001 to coordinate security and economic policies in the Eurasian space. Its members are China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyz- stan, and Uzbekistan. 28. Ho describes the diasporic experience of Hadrami Arabs across the Indian Ocean as constituting an entire “society of the absent” (Ho 2006, chap. 1). 29. Remittances constituted about 8 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s gross domestic product and about 13 percent of total household expenses in 2004 (Mansoor, Quillin, and World Bank 2006). The GDP percentage figure places Kyrgyzstan in fourth-highest place among countries in the former Soviet Union, after Moldova, Tajikistan, and Armenia, and not far behind the leading twenty remittance-receiving countries of the world (Mansoor, Quillin, and World Bank 2006, 58). 30. Solomon Mountain is called Sulayman-too in Kyrgyz, Suleyman-tog’ in Uzbek, and Suleiman-gora in Russian and was once known locally by the Persian Notes to Pages 36–39 211 designation, Takht-i-Suleyman (Throne of Solomon). Its profile is often found on graphical representations of the city, such as the logo for the Osh 3000 campaign commemorating the supposed tri-millennial anniversary of the city’s founding. 31. Solomon Mountain’s elevation is 1,166.5 meters above sea level. All figures about the mountain are from Oruzbaeva (1987). Sites in the West Azerbaijan province of Iran and in Balochistan, Pakistan, also bear the name Takht-i-Suleyman and are the subject of local legends regarding the biblical Solomon’s visitations. 32. The mosque is named for the Shaybanid ruler, Abdullakhan II (1534–1598) (Zakharova 1997). 33. Russian imperial cartography in Central Asia, as with any other projects of empire, was a technique of conquest and rule through the extension of imperial knowledge/power, although there was struggle in the mid-nineteenth century within the Russian Geographical Society regarding its mission of service to the empire versus advancing universal science (Knight 1998). Brian Silverstein nonetheless argues that mapping constitutes “one thread of a history of the Central Asian present. . . . The deployment of a number of specific administrative apparatuses . . . [was] central to the nature of the power that conquered the region for the empire. . . . The question of contemporary differences, in the political culture in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for example, then becomes linked to . . . this particular constellation of knowledge and power” (Silverstein 2002, 91). Mannerheim’s and others’ expeditions, then, have had an indirect bearing on making Central Asia what it is now understood to be, including the current predicament of Osh Uzbeks, caught between what Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have become as a result of this colonial legacy. 34. Mannerheim’s photographs of Osh can be found in the catalog for the exhibition, “C.G. Mannerheim in Central Asia 1906–1908,” which I visited in 1999 at the Museum of Ethnography, Helsinki (Museovirasto 1999). My thanks to Jaana Terhune for translations from the Finnish text. 35. For a biography of Babur based on recently available sources and containing a fresh interpretation of his Timurid-Mughal state, see Dale (2004). 36. Tom Hale III (2004) conducted an ethnographic study of ritual practices surrounding holy sites at Solomon Mountain and other locations in southern Kyr- gyzstan. See also Bektasheva (1998). For a description of the thousands of pilgrims from all regions of Central Asia coming to the mountain in the late nineteenth century, see Zakharova (1997). 37. Among the numerous media accounts of Uzbekistan’s repressive religious climate, see Human Rights Watch (1998, 1999); International Crisis Group (2003); and frequent reports from the Oslo-based religious freedom monitoring organization, Forum 18, whose Web site (http://www.forum18.org) is searchable for Uzbekistan-related items. 38. It was customary in Friday services across most of the Muslim world to mention the ruling sovereign during the prayer on behalf of the faithful (dua al- 212 Notes to Pages 40–44 muminin) preceding the congregational prayer (Antoun 1989; McChesney 1991). In times of insurrection or interregnum throughout Islamic history, who was named or left out of the prayer carried political significance (Wensinck 2008a). Having the khutba was a key mode of legitimating political authority specifically in Inner Asia (Haider 1976; Sela 2003). However, along with the minting of coins with the ruler’s name and visage (sikka), this practice at times conveyed mere lip service or the “superficial trappings of power but not its actual substance” (Gaffney 1994, 122). The evocation of President Akaev or Bakiev’s name at Osh Friday mosques, no doubt, dwelt in that ambiguity. 39. Among the many studies on women, veiling, and Islamic movements in Egypt, see Abdo (2000) and Mahmood (2005); for such studies on Turkey, see Göle (1996) and White (2003). For a comparative assessment of Egypt’s grass-roots movements with respect to Iran’s top-down Islamic revolution, see Bayat (2007). 40. The hyper-pious atmosphere on Osh television during Ramadan ironically contrasts with the commercialized media environment of soap operas and serial dramas that air in the same period in Egypt, where Islam has undergone a different sort of revival (Armbrust 2002). 41. Listening to recorded sermons has become a form of ethical self-discipline, especially in Egypt, whereby listeners reconstruct their knowledge and sensibilities according to models of Islamic moral personhood (Hirschkind 2006). The implications here are that the circulation of Islamic media means the increase of not only religious “content” among Osh Uzbeks but also technologies of production for entire ways of being. 42. Made from the twigs of a tree sometimes called the salt bush or mustard tree (Salvadora persica), the siwak is also called miswak, and advocacy for its use for Muslims is found in certain Hadith (the traditions of the Prophet), though not in the Qur’an (Wensinck 2008b). 43. Journalist Michael Slackman (2008) describes the sometimes humorously excessive side of a similar phenomenon found in Egypt. 44. For a bibliography and discussion of recently published ethnographic work on Central Asian Islam, specifically in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and in the Fergana Valley, see Liu (2011, 120–23).

Chapter 2. Border and Post-Soviet Predicament

1. Ethnic Uzbeks made up 13.8 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s total 2004 population of 5,037,000, of which Kyrgyz made up 64.9 percent and Russians, 12.5 percent (percentage data from 1999–2002). Compared to the proportion of Kyrgyz in Kyrgyz- stan, Uzbeks in Uzbekistan form a greater proportion (77.8 percent of Uzbekistan’s total 2004 population of 25,707,000). All figures are from Mansoor, Quillin, and World Bank (2006). 2. Thinking about the productive capacity of being “betwixt and between” has been in the anthropological repertoire since Victor Turner’s essay on Arnold van Notes to Pages 45–49 213

Gennep’s rites de passage, in which Turner describes liminality as an “interstruc- tural situation,” which is a “stage of reflection” that will “paradoxically expose the basic building blocks of culture” (Turner 1967, 110). 3. The value of 100 Kyrgyzstani som was about US$2.50 in the late 1990s; for comparison, mass transit within the city cost about 1.5 or 2 som per ride at the time. 4. Osh Uzbeks traveled most often to nearby cities in the Fergana Valley and to Tashkent. The Osh Bureau of Travel and Excursions, for example, offered weekend trips in 1982 to Fergana Valley destinations such as Andijan, Jalal-Abad, Naman- gan, Fergana, Uzgen, Kokand, and Aslanbob (Kravtsov and Sulina 1982). 5. One Osh Uzbek, when I told him about this incident, rolled his eyes and remarked that Uzbekistani border guards tend not to be well educated and, at any rate, wanted to show diligence in screening foreigners or simply to assert his authority to detain travelers. I have had positive encounters with Uzbekistani border guards, too. When I crossed into Uzbekistan on foot at Kara-Suu in 2005, the guard marveled at my U.S. passport and called other guards over: “Look, an American passport!” (few foreigners cross at that point). 6. I was with an Australian who tried repeatedly to get into Uzbekistan with a valid visa. Despite trying to relax with cold soda in a small restaurant at Do’stlik, he could not get his body temperature low enough to enter. 7. For a broader analysis of discourses of danger circulating in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan at that the time, see Megoran (2004). My thanks to Nick Megoran for first directing me to the importance of these border closings during my 1997 fieldwork in Osh. 8. Excellent fieldwork-grounded and theoretically sophisticated analyses of the symbolic and material effects of the post-Soviet borders in the Fergana Valley, where Osh is located, are in Megoran (2006); Megoran, Raballand, and Bouyjou (2005); and Reeves (2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2009, forthcoming). 9. The tensions between the two countries regarding their borders and visa systems were finally taken down with Kyrgyzstani president Bakiev’s visit to Tashkent in October 2006, when he and Uzbekistan’s President Karimov agreed to move toward a visa-free system for their citizens (Sershen 2006). 10. Rather than necessarily denoting actual Saudi theological influence, “Wah- habi” is a rhetorical device used in Central Asia and the former Soviet Union to pejoratively label various Islamist movements, much like the similarly vague term “Islamic fundamentalist” is used in the Western media (Knysh 2004). The group responsible for the Tashkent bombings, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which advocates some form of “Islamic state” in Turkestan, has no connection with actual Wahhabis based in the Arabian peninsula (International Crisis Group 2001b). 11. Circulating discourses of mortal danger has indeed been a strategy of rule, particularly for post-Soviet Uzbekistan (Megoran 2005a; Reeves 2005a). 12. The so-called “Batken Crisis” of August 1999 began within a month after 214 Notes to Page 50 these conversations. The incident involved armed forces of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attempting to enter Uzbekistan via Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region (then a part of Osh province) from Tajikistan and taking Japanese hostages. The incursions were renewed in August 2000, when teenage American mountaineers were taken hostage (they later escaped). The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that began in October 2001 has reignited Uzbekistan’s resolve to eliminate both the IMU and the Taliban’s alleged sponsorship of such movements, leading Uzbekistan to allow the United States to stage military operations from its territory, the first such permission in post-Soviet space. 13. Even railroad transportation is difficult. Established during the Soviet era when republic borders were relatively meaningless, the only rail links to Osh (freight only—there is no passenger service) pass through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. 14. The Fergana Valley is Ferganskaia dolina in Russian, Farg’ona vodiysi in Uzbek, and Fergana ürönöö in Kyrgyz. Multiple language sources and differences in transcription explain why the Valley is inconsistently spelled (Fergana, Fer- ghana, Farghona) in the English-language literature. 15. Soviet authorities did not believe they could risk keeping the former khanate territory intact, although, contrary to prevalent analyses in the nationalist frame, Kokand’s restiveness after the Russian conquest was due more to the structures of khanate politics than protest against Russian rule per se (Manz 1987). Complex rationales informed negotiations among various commissions in Moscow, the Central Asian Bureau in Tashkent, and village leaders self-identified as Uzbek and Kyrgyz surrounding the territorial delimitation of the Fergana Valley into the newly created Soviet socialist republics (Hirsch 2005). Francine Hirsch notably argues against common assertions in the literature on Central Asia that Moscow had drawn these borders either willy-nilly or with sinister intent to “divide and rule,” for example, putting Osh in the Kirgiz SSR in order to stem unified Uzbek power threatening the Soviet Union. Hirsch instead argues that there were complex negotiations between Moscow, local elites, and ethnographic “experts.” Sengupta similarly rejects the divide et impera interpretation and the inevitability of the ethnolinguistically defined nation-state as the endpoint of Soviet Central Asian delimitation, also arguing for the “manipulative powers of local power politics” view (Sengupta 2000). 16. Uzbek complaints about being under the new Kirgiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic began soon after the 1924 delimitation of the Central Asian republics, although Osh Uzbeks today are unaware of that history. Leaders self- identified as Uzbeks near Jalal-Abad sent petitions and letters of protest, arguing that their agricultural villages would suffer economic hardship by remaining in a territory focused on pastoralism and that their survival as “Uzbeks” was threat- ened by “hostile acts” of imprisonment by the Kirgiz government (Hirsch 2005). Notes to Pages 51–53 215

Hirsch notes how quickly and adeptly the petitioners adopted the language of Soviet nationality in framing their grievances yet also signaled that this notion was fluid in their view: “Uzbeks” argued that the “Kyrgyz” around them have become “Uzbek” in language, customs, and economic livelihood. See Haugen (2003). 17. The commission report is quoted in Koichiev (2003) (with minor correc- tions in the translation, Americanization of spelling, and changing the current, anachronistic spelling “Kyrgyz” to the period spelling “Kirgiz”). 18. To give another reference point on the development policies of Uzbekistan’s border security, I traveled by this route with no Uzbekistani visa and no problem in 1994. I went with an Osh Uzbek man in his car, and we were stopped, but there were no checks for documents or cargo. My driver bought manufactured goods in the town of Khonabod, which is on the short stretch of the road in Uzbekistan, to sell in Osh. 19. The Tashkent-Andijan flight on Uzbek Airways affords a beautiful view of the entire Fergana Valley because the flight plan follows the length of the valley from its western end. An air traffic controller at Osh Airport explained to me that all planes must fly within that prescribed route, even though it is not the most direct path. 20. The land-population comparison for Kyrgyzstan looks less stark: the Fergana Valley comprises 42.2 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s land area and is home to 50.3 percent of its population, but because much of the area of its three provinces that include the Valley (Osh, Jalalabat, and Batken provinces) is mountainous, the population densities in the Valley are as high as in Uzbekistan, about 2,315 people per square kilometer (Lubin, Rubin, and Nunn 1999). 21. Nevertheless, I found the Kokand-Tashkent pass surprisingly well maintained by snowplows amid heavy snowfall in December 1997, when my family hired a car to Tashkent. The Osh-Bishkek road within Kyrgyzstan was poorly maintained at that time. 22. When I took a minibus from Fergana city, Uzbekistan (in the Valley) to Tashkent in August 1996, we crossed within a few hours from Uzbekistan, to Tajik- istan, to Kyrgyzstan, back to Tajikistan, and back into Uzbekistan, each time with border checks. At one Tajikistani checkpoint we had to pay a “tax” of one liter of gasoline, which was siphoned from the minivan. Gasoline was scarce in Tajikistan because of the civil war in its south at the time. One passenger wryly remarked that while Europe was becoming a single, borderless zone, we endured this hassle to get merely from Uzbekistan’s capital to its populous agricultural heartland. 23. Traveling from Kokand (in the Valley) in 2005, our car was stopped at six or seven checkpoints before arriving in Tashkent. The control points were at every segment of the pass and provincial or jurisdictional crossing. 24. See, for example, Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century (I. Karimov 1998), which was published in several foreign-language editions amid 216 Notes to Pages 53–55 great fanfare portraying Karimov as the country’s thinking leader and leading thinker (Bohr 1998). His writings are widely available in the press and bookstores in Uzbekistan. 25. Because of these problematic borders, the potential for conflict across the Fergana Valley has been noted by U.S. policy analysts and makers, who recom- mend the development of a regional framework of cross-border institutions, dialogue, and direct foreign investment (Lubin, Rubin, and Nunn 1999). However, these analyses are the product of a distinct Western vision of sociopolitical order connected to discourses of danger and conflict prevention (Bichsel 2005) that localize and fix danger as a knowable and measurable quantity. One consequence of “conflictology’s” technocratic epistemology is that it assumes that state territorial ambiguity is an inherent threat to stability, whereas Madeleine Reeves (2005a) finds that villagers living in the border area saw ambiguity as sharing, mutual access, and peace sustaining. The alarmism of Fergana Valley experts, indeed, is tied to Western strategic interests in the region (Megoran 2000). 26. Considering Osh’s accessibility by air and how it changed reveals the city’s economic ties beyond the capital Bishkek. Osh residents complained of the lack of air routes serving their city after independence. The Soviet airline had run regular and seasonal direct (and cheap) flights to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Novosibirsk, Yalta, and other important cities in the Soviet Union for about three hundred rubles (one way) for tourist packages (Kravtsov and Sulina 1982). I took an Osh- Moscow flight in 1994, landed at Domodedevo airport, and did not go through passport control. That route was then inactive for years until flights resumed in the 2000s. There was an Osh-Almaty flight running in the 1990s, but it was discontinued. 27. Other post-Soviet republics have made their titular national language official for government or business instead of or in addition to Russian, but those ethnic elites likewise function better in Russian. President Akaev had to be coached in Kyrgyz in the early 1990s to be able to make speeches in that language, though he usually spoke publicly in Russian. President Karimov likewise studied Uzbek after assuming the post-Soviet presidency. 28. Kyrgyz-Uzbek University (KUU) was renamed Osh State Social University in 2011, and the previous Uzbek rector was replaced by a Kyrgyz man after the violent events of 2010. In the early 2000s, most of the faculty and students were Uz- bek; their proportion has since decreased. But the university had already lost many Uzbek students from Uzbekistan around 2005 after the latter forbade its citizens to study in Kyrgyzstan. One KUU faculty member said that Uzbekistan did not want its youth being indoctrinated with ideas such as freedom of thought or democracy. 29. What may be surprising, however, is that Osh Uzbek sentiments evolved rather quickly in the second decade of independence so that, while they still saw themselves as suffering discrimination, they came to openly acknowledge the advantages of living in Kyrgyzstan. Notes to Pages 55–63 217

30. The Osh Uzbek case does not invalidate Brubaker’s framework for understanding nationalisms, which, as he pointed out when I discussed it with him, refers to tendencies of modern states, against which specific factors in the Osh Uzbek case countervail. It is precisely those factors that I am exploring here. 31. During the 1990s, Osh Uzbeks refrained from expressing disappointment to me that Karimov never directly promoted Osh Uzbek interests. But, in the early 2000s, Matteo Fumagalli heard vocal expressions of grievance about this disinterest: “Uzbek associations in Kyrgyzstan report the systematic refusal by Uzbekistani authorities to intensify contacts with them,” and Uzbekistan has refused to open a consular office in southern Kyrgyzstan (Russia has one in Osh). Of 136 Kyrgyz- stani Uzbek respondents, 69.5 percent said that Uzbekistan does not defend the interests of its co-ethnics in Kyrgyzstan, with only 13.4 percent saying that it does (Fumagalli 2007a). 32. For all interview excerpts, I indicate myself as interviewer and interlocutor with the label “ML.” 33. However, Uzbekistan’s nationalist ideology, as dominant a voice as it is in Uzbekistan’s channels of elite production and as influential as it was for Osh Uzbeks during the 1990s, should not be seen as all-encompassing in Uzbekistani social and political life, as Megoran’s analysis of the Andijan events suggests (Megoran 2008). 34. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan were cultural icons among the Central Asian male youth. Uzbek boys seemingly asked me about them without fail and were genuinely disappointed that I had not met these “American” movie stars. 35. The other Uzbek-language newspapers published in Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s were O’sh Sadosi, a state-run publication coedited with a Russian-language version, Ekho Osha, and Yo’ghdu, the only other independent Uzbek newspaper at the time, published in Jalalabat. Yo’ghdu evolved into Diydor, a platform for Kady- rjan Batyrov (sometimes transcribed as Qodirjon Botirov), the dominant Uzbek figure in Jalalabat, until the newspaper was abruptly closed down when the June 2010 riots targeted the editorial offices and sent Batyrov into foreign exile. 36. O’ktambek Karimov was also the director of OshTV at the time and a popular anchorman and reporter on OshTV’s nightly news. Later he went to work for www.ozodlik.org, the Uzbek service of the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He is not related to Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan. 37. Karimov’s reporting mobilized only Kyrgyzstan’s official channels, possibly because direct investigation in Andijan or Tashkent would not have produced any better insight. His credentials as an Osh reporter would have provided little purchase, especially in an Uzbekistani media environment, which discouraged proactive, independent journalistic activity through harassment and arrest of critical journalists (Shields and Human Rights Watch 2000). 218 Notes to Pages 63–67

38. Mezon’s coverage included a column summarizing news from the capital and elsewhere in the republic, excerpted and translated from the Russian- and Kyrgyz-language press in Bishkek. Another section offered similarly borrowed articles on world events. 39. In 1994, I did find the newspaper Khamroh (published in Marghilan, Uzbekistan) for sale in Osh, but, beginning in 1997, I found no Uzbekistani newspapers there at all. Textbooks and Islamic books from Tashkent, however, were available in Osh’s bazaar. Most newspapers in Uzbekistan still use the Cyrillic alphabet, but the government mandates eventual conversion to the Latin alphabet in the press as the next generation of schoolchildren emerges. Some Osh Uzbeks said that they favored Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan converting to the Latin alphabet to keep pace with Uzbekistan, and Davron Sobirov’s Mezon newspaper ran his own article advocating this position (Sobirov 1999), but aside from moves by some Kyrgyzstani Uzbek politicians to keep the issue alive, it has faded for now. The Kyrgyzstani government, meanwhile, decided to keep Cyrillic for the Kyrgyz language. 40. Interestingly, Kazakh intellectuals in the early twentieth century also revealed flexibility in shifting the meaning of their nomadic past for political purposes, reinterpreting it as a stage they passed through in order to settle and claim their steppe “homeland” during their forced resettlement under the Russian imperial administration (Rottier 2003). For a much broader study of Kazakh sociocultural history and judicial customs (adat) under nineteenth-century colonial rule, see V. Martin (2001). 41. The term “minimalist authoritarianism” is from Huskey (2002). 42. In fact, from the beginning of independence, history departments at state universities all have a division (kafedra, in Russian) called “history of Kyrgyzstan.” 43. The “ethnogenesis” of the modern Kyrgyz is understood to have taken place after the migration to the Tian Shan region in the period of the fifteenth and -six teenth centuries (Koychuyev, Mokrynin, and Ploskikh 1994). A minority of Kyrgyz historians dispute the migration theory and claim that modern Kyrgyz have lived more or less in their present location from ancient times (Ploskikh and Mokrynin 1992). Similar accounts are given in Kyrgyz-language school textbooks, such as Doronbekova, Mokrynin, and Ploskikh (1993), the title of which (Kyrgyzdardyn jana Kyrgyzstandyn tarykhy [The History of the Kyrgyz and Kyrgyzstan]) again offers of history of “Kyrgyzstan” from ancient times. 44. On 19 September 1996, the Osh provincial administration issued a resolution to initiate planning for the celebration (Gosudarstvennaia direktsiia “Osh-3000” 1998; Tekenov 1998). The archaeology supporting the three-thousand- year claim, which I have not seen confirmed by international scholars, was made available in a number of books and newspaper articles printed in the years leading up to the celebration in 2000. Excavations in caves at Solomon Mountain in 1956 revealed late Neolithic settlements, and road construction at the southern slopes of the mountain in 1976 uncovered evidence of terraced agriculture and the first Notes to Pages 67–68 219 settled population in Osh, which radiocarbon testing dated to approximately 1000 BCE (Zakharova 1997). The question is if the region was continuously settled since those times. In any case, the first written attestation of the city appeared in tracts and chronicles written by Arab geographers (Abdul-al-Kasim Khordadbekh, Ibn Khaukal, and Al Mukaddasi) in the ninth and tenth centuries (Zakharova 1997, 9). 45. Osh State University ethnographer Ertabyldy Sulaimanov wrote a series of articles for Ekho Osha, the local Russian-language newspaper, on the Osh 3000 theme (and even gave me second author credit for one of them, unearned) that presented Solomon Mountain as Osh’s literally central “text in stone” (Sulaimanov and Liu 1997; Sulaimanov and Nasirov 1997). My paper at a scholarly conference linked to this campaign was published in a collection funded by the Osh 3000 project (Liu and Sulaimanov 1998). 46. A couple of Kyrgyz scholars laughed at my scholarly interest in this campaign, which they took to be pure propaganda. To be sure, some Kyrgyz academics (especially older, established ones) participated in the intellectual production of these campaigns. Many, however, appeared to me as keeping their participation in them selective and rendering only lip service for political reasons within their departments. 47. Many of Kyrgyzstan’s state prerogatives and public services are in fact being ensured by foreign actors, including international organizations, NGOs, and a few states, especially Russia. Boris-Mathieu Pétric (2005) calls Kyrgyzstan today a “globalized protectorate.” 48. The United Nations Development Programme’s “Human Development Report: Kyrgyzstan 1996” echoes Mamur’s assessment: “Coupon privatization was advertised with much ado, but in reality it was not well thought out. This gave rise to a negative attitude and mistrust in the process of privatization among a certain portion of the population” (United Nations Development Programme 1996). 49. This passage was reconstructed from notes and memory and is nonverbatim. 50. Total international aid in grants and loans to Kyrgyzstan in 1992–2000 reached almost US$1.7 billion, or US$370 per inhabitant, a very high value by international standards (Mogilevsky and Hasanov 2004). 51. Karimov was himself trained in economics. 52. Proponents of this theory are many, notably Ibrahim (1990), Simon (1989), and Watt (1953), although Crone (1987) has harshly criticized it. 53. David Gullette studies the mutual narrative construction of “tribalism,” corruption, and Kyrgyz national identity in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, and its discursive denouement leading up to the Tulip Revolution (Gullette 2010), setting it apart from structural economic analyses of corruption in Kyrgyzstan that mention cultural factors only in passing (Çokgezen 2004), if at all. More generally, the perception that corruption is endemic particularly in certain kinds of societies “inevitably recalls colonial discourse about the ‘primitiveness’ of ‘savage society’” 220 Notes to Pages 68–69

(Shore and Haller 2005), a view of which Osh Uzbek discourse about post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan partakes via Soviet modernist views of societal progress. 54. Edward Schatz (2004) studies the persistent presence yet contested meanings of “tribalism” or “clannish behavior” in post-Soviet Kazakhstani politics. Do these contested meanings represent particularist interests or authentic culture? Are they a “problem” to overcome or an inevitable part of how things are done in Cen- tral Asia? Kathleen Collins (2006) argues more straightforwardly that the adaptations of Central Asian clan-based politics under Soviet rule have resulted in their increasingly negative influence on post-Soviet liberalizations. Both show that clans are not premodern relics but dynamic organizations and discourses that adapt to shifting sociopolitical circumstances. See Liu (2011, 123–24). 55. Of the many historical and ethnographic studies of the “civilizing mission” Soviets undertook relative to their “primitive” populations and their often unintended effects, two are particularly noteworthy for their insight and influence: Grant (1995) and Slezkine (1994a). 56. Alisher Ilkhamov, in fact, argues that “neopatrimonial” patronage formations around state offices were the very mechanism by which Karimov held on to power for so long (Ilkhamov 2007). The importance of clan allegiances in Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistani politics has been noted by a number of scholars, a list of which is found in Ilkhamov (2007, 82 fn 21, 22), and Vaisman (1995). 57. By contrast, Kazakhstani president Nursultan Nazarbaev held a more calculated posture leading up to Yeltsin’s August 1991 coup (Dunlop 1993). 58. For general surveys of Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet course, see Bohr (1998); Gleason (2003); and International Crisis Group (2003). For specific assessments on civil rights, see Dailey, Laber, and Helsinki Watch (1993) and Shields and Human Rights Watch (2000); on religious freedom, Human Rights Watch (1998,) and Pot- tenger (2004); on democratization, Fierman (1997); and on media, Allison (2006) and Human Rights Watch (1997). 59. There is a body of nuanced fieldwork-based studies about rural reform and conditions in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, including Ilkhamov (1998, 2001); Kandiyoti (1998, 2003); and Trevisani (2007a, 2007b, 2009, 2011). 60. See the report on Uzbekistan from the International Crisis Group (2001b). However, many economists argue that Uzbekistan has done surprisingly well in its gradualist reform, maintaining reasonable social stability with modest economic growth since the mid-1990s (Anderson and Pomfret 2003; Spechler et al. 2004) to the extent that this situation has been labeled the “Uzbek puzzle” (Ruziev, Ghosh, and Dow 2007). These analyses sometimes take Uzbekistan’s official figures and statements of intention without sufficient critique, and, in any case, the focus on macroeconomics may minimize the growing rural poverty and discontent (Ilkhamov 2001). 61. In the 2005 Andijan events, hundreds gathered in public protest were fired upon, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The incident made Uzbekistan into an in- Notes to Pages 70–75 221 ternational pariah and led to the expulsion of the country’s post-9/11 U.S. military presence. One result is that Karimov, after his initial posture of proud independence in the 1990s, has moved closer to Russia and China, who desire economic ties, gas pipelines, and political influence in Central Asia. 62. Despite post-Soviet media laws according some freedom of the press, the actual media climate has been determined in practice more by issues of station registration, frequency licensing, informal and outright censorship, access to information, libel/defamation suits, and taxes, and President Bakiev’s relationship with the Kyrgyzstani media did not appear to be substantively different from Akaev’s (Allison 2006). 63. State orders were eliminated from the economy in 1993, most prices liberalized by 1994, and annual inflation was brought below 50 percent in 1995 (Anderson and Pomfret 2003). The introduction of the Kyrgyzstani som opened the way for more international financial support and liberalization of the republic’s finances (Pomfret 1995). Concerning Kyrgyzstan’s foreign aid, see Mogilevsky and Hasanov (2004). 64. The increasing harassment, disqualification, and imprisonment on ques- tionable charges of political opposition figures and journalists starting in the mid- 1990s revealed this “island of democracy” designation to have been premature, made as it was before the independent republic’s first decade had ended (Anderson 1999; International Crisis Group 2001a). Huskey (2002) argues that President Akaev had shifted to a calculated strategy of “minimalist authoritarianism,” applying just enough of a strong-arm approach to stay in power amid various crises. Akaev horribly misread public sentiment and miscalculated the public’s ability to politically mobilize in 2005. 65. I thank Nick Megoran for introducing me to Zarif in 1997. 66. The conflicting priorities and interests surrounding Uzbekistan’s shirkats are described in an illuminating study (Kandiyoti 2002) of one located outside of Andijan. 67. The Freedom statue was, in turn, replaced in 2011 by a grand monument of Manas, the mythic figure of the Kyrgyz oral epic of that name. The latest replacement at the symbolic heart of the nation reflects the surge of nationalist sentiment among Kyrgyz people and politicians in the wake of the 2010 Osh events.

Chapter 3. Divided City and Relating to the State

1. Setting up a dichotomy between “public” acceptance of a “modern Soviet identity” while preserving Central Asian identities “in private” falls into this trap, as Colette Harris (2004) does in her otherwise good ethnography of gender relations in Tajikistan. 2. As a result, between 1926 and 1939, for example, the Soviet urban population surged from 26 million to 56 million (Kotkin 1995, 18). 3. The importance of cities as prime engines of Soviet modernization, espe- 222 Notes to Pages 75–80 cially outside the European heartland, actually makes them crucial sites in which to study postsocialist processes (Alexander, Buchli, and Humphrey 2007). 4. Among the many studies on the spatial form and operation of colonial cities, see King (1976) for a survey. 5. See these excellent studies on North African urban colonialism from the perspectives of history (Wright 1991), anthropology (Rabinow 1989), and sociology (Abu-Lughod 1980). 6. This account is from the English Earl of Dunmore’s expedition (Dunmore 1893, 277, cited in Galitskii and Ploskikh 1987, 105). 7. There are excellent Central Asian urban histories of colonial Tashkent (Sa- hadeo 2007) and Bukhara (Gangler, Gaube, and Petruccioli 2004; Sukhareva 1976). A full-fledged history of Osh is yet to be produced. 8. Navoi Park became noticeably more Kyrgyz in character after 2010, as with other public recreational and entertainment venues in the city. One way in which public space is ethnically marked is by the Kyrgyz traditional and pop music being played on loudspeakers in places like this park. 9. In fact, when I was living with an Uzbek family one summer in Osh, the only time that the unmarried adult daughter of the household left her mahalla, other than to visit relatives, was to stroll in Navoi Park with the entire family. 10. Arguing against a dominant view among historians (e.g., Fitzpatrick 1999; Kotkin 1995) that the Soviet state’s social engineering intentions, which were built into its urban infrastructure, had failed, Caroline Humphrey contends that the built environment indeed had an active effect on the “conceptual worlds of Soviet people,” “like a prism: gathering meanings and scattering them again, yet not ran- domly” (Humphrey 2005, 40, 55). 11. As one lifelong Osh resident remarked, often the top post of an institution was occupied by a figurehead Kyrgyz, with a Russian “assistant” actually supervis- ing. Uzbeks did run some institutions in Soviet Osh, especially cultural ones like the city’s (state-run) Uzbek-language newspaper and the Uzbek Drama Theater. Since independence, of course, Kyrgyz have moved into most of the leading posts in the state and private sectors. 12. For example, a grain-processing factory was built in 1927 and, in 1928, Osh’s first modern silk factory kokonomotal’naia( fabrika). See Oruzbaeva (1987). Daniiarov (1972) mentions the latter (also called the shelkomotal’naia fabrika) in a boastful list of Soviet accomplishments in Kirgizia for 1927–1928 that also includes the establishment of leather and brick factories in Osh, a cotton-ginning factory in Kara-Suu, a cloth (sukonnaia) factory in Frunze, three electric stations, three sawmills, and three beer breweries, as well as mines in Kyzyl-Kia, Suliukta, and Kok-Yangaka, all located in southern Kirgizia. 13. The Silk Plant’s official name was Shelkovyi Kombinat imeni VLKSM. 14. The Garment Factory’s official name was Shveinaia Fabrika imeni N.K. Krupskoi. Notes to Pages 81–83 223

15. Other new factories were for car and tractor repair, electronics, metal beds, aluminum dishes, and so forth (Oruzbaeva 1987). 16. KheBeKa was organized as the core of the Osh Cotton Industrial Associa- tion (Oshskoe Khlopchatobumazhnoe proizvodstvennoe ob”edinenie im. 50-let- niia Oktiabria), which also included ancillary concerns, and operated under the republic’s Ministry of Light Industry. 17. During the postwar period, cotton-related industries were carefully sited across the Fergana Valley according to Soviet industrial geography’s calculus of op- timizing space and time efficiencies, taking into account the harvest schedule, storage shelflife, transportation costs, and workforce availability, according to a siting study conducted during the time that Osh’s Textile Plant was being built (Shorin and Yerina 1970). It is the spatial dispersion of the cotton-processing infrastructure across the Soviet republics that has contributed greatly to the economic paralysis of post-Soviet Osh, now facing new international borders. 18. Sixty kilometers is long way on the bumpy roads of the Fergana Valley. This retired driver recalled, “We ran special charter buses from Eski-Nookat, Uzgen, Kurshab [in Uzgen region], Almalik, Aravan, Tepa-Kochgan, Marhamat Region [in Uzbekistan], Hokodod, Nayman [in Nookat region], Chekobod, etc. Thirty buses went out daily. And I had to drive them to Osh and back again. Two trips a day.” 19. The city produced in 1985 34.1 percent of all industrial output and 60 percent of the consumer goods of Osh province. Material production (industry, construction, transportation, communications, consumer goods, and food) employed 67 percent of the workers and service people of the city (Oruzbaeva 1987). 20. The Osh Airport opened in 1974. The largest feat of civil engineering in the area came to fruition in 1985 with opening of the New Bridge, which spanned the Ak-Buura River, connecting the east and west sides of the city and unifying the Soviet New City. 21. The Uzbek theater ceased operations after the 2010 events and still lay dormant in 2011. Although physical damage appeared minimal, I gathered from conversations that no one had the political will to restart the programming, given the Uzbek community’s larger problems of survival and political sensitivity at the time. 22. Osh’s major streets give a skeletal chronology of the New City’s progressive development. As for the north-south throughways on the city’s west side, Sverdlova Street (renamed Lenin Street after 1991) was built in the 1940s and Lenin Street (renamed Kurmanjan Datka Street), in the 1950s. Tel’man Street (renamed Navoi), which runs east-west and connects the two halves of the city, came in the 1960s; Kyrgyzstan Street, the major north-south route on the east side of the Ak-Buura River, came in the 1970s. 23. The Osh Pedagogical Institute (Oshskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut), founded in 1951 from the smaller Teachers Institute of 1939, stood as the first and for many years the only higher educational institution in southern Kyr- 224 Notes to Pages 83–87 gyzstan (Oruzbaeva 1987). It became Osh State University in 1992. The dormitories that Bahtiyor mentioned are the same ones in which I stayed and where I began my mahalla tour. 24. The Russian metric unit for land measure (the sotka) equals one one- hundredth of a hectare (sotka means “hundredth”), or one hundred square meters. A hectare is about two and a half acres. Longtime residents of other mahallas also report original family land plots of twenty-five sotok. By 2010, house plots tended to be four to five sotok within Osh but still as large as twenty-five sotok in rural villages. 25. The lack of legibility to the state (Scott 1998) was precisely what made colonial governors in the Middle East and North Africa either cut new streets across the formerly winding streets in order to increase surveillance and control (Mitchell 1988) or build the colonial city outside the “Old City.” In Central Asia, the Soviet state employed both strategies for cities such as Tashkent (Sahadeo 2007) and Bukhara (Gangler, Gaube, and Petruccioli 2004). 26. The bureaucratic production of knowledge about population and land is integral to modern state rule and legitimation according to the historical and anthropological literature. An early statement of this realization is found in Cohn and Dirks (1988), and some important collections in this stream of scholarship include Cooper and Stoler (1989); Hansen and Stepputat (2001, 2005); and Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue (2007). Concerning state knowledge of “its” population and the forms of relations that this knowledge produces, see especially Gupta (2001). 27. On the mahalla women’s committees, the role of women in the mahalla, and the nationalist redefinition of femininity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, see Sak- tanber and Özataş-Baykal (2000), and on women’s active participation in informal networks of various kinds and nongovernmental organizations after independence, see Berg (2004). 28. By contrast, beginning in 1992, the Uzbekistani state increased its penetration into urban neighborhood life there, using the mahalla as an instrument for crime control, military conscription, tax collection, and the distribution of welfare benefits (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998a), presenting a “novel, multi-functional administrative unit as though it were a pre-existing one” (Massicard and Trevisani 2003, 216). However, this tactic has not improved collection of fees, infrastructure, or poverty (Noori 2006), and in fact its reliance on the local control of mahalla committees to dispense aid has reinstated traditional patriarchies, to the detriment of many women and marginals of the neighborhood (Human Rights Watch 2003; Kamp 2004). 29. This situation and practice also obtained in Bukhara’s quarters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; see Sukhareva (1976) for a uniquely detailed study. When Tajikistan’s “national poet,” Sadriddin Aini, moved to Bukhara in 1889 at age eleven to continue his education, he described entering the city for Notes to Pages 88–99 225 the first time by Darvozayi Samarqand, the “Samarqand gate” (Aini, Perry, and Lehr 1998). 30. A Soviet tourist map was published in 1984 (Bezgodova 1984), and there is a small map included in Oruzbaeva (1987). A new map was printed for the Osh 3000 campaign in 2000, and I found it for sale in a Bishkek bookstore (Goskarto- grafiia 2000). All are schematic and include only the city’s central area. 31. Inhabitant pedestrians cover urban space without overview, without a map view of the city, as Michel de Certeau (1980/1984, 97) observes: “Pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ . . . It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths . . . [but] surveys of routes miss . . . the act itself of passing by.” 32. The postwar years witnessed vigorous housing construction throughout the Soviet Union. See Andrusz (1984). 33. In a wonderful account, Svetlana Boym highlights the banality of everyday life in the communal apartment, where inhabitants reinterpreted state utopianism (Boym 1994). For historical studies of housing as part of broader urban planning goals in specific Soviet cities, see Colton (1995), Ruble (1990, 1995, 2001), and Kotkin (1995). 34. DoSKo was an integral part of more than thirty construction and construction-repair organizations operating in Osh by 1985, which also included the trust Oshstroi, which was responsible for technical direction of this industry sector. A total of more than fifty thousand square meters of residential space was added to the housing stock in 1983 (Oruzbaeva 1987). 35. Another Chinese restaurant soon followed, in the Zapadnyi micro-district, though it was the nightclub, not the excellent Chinese food, that made it profitable for the owner. This owner, from Hunan province in China, grew his own Chinese vegetables locally from imported seeds, made his own tofu, and complained that Kyrgyz and Uzbeks were poor agriculturalists compared to the Chinese. In the early 2000s, this establishment became a karaoke bar run by an American, and it later acquired other management. 36. Many eating venues in Central Asia are located by running water, including several magnificent ones in Osh (notably at Aravanskii Park) and in Tashkent and Namangan, Uzbekistan. 37. One Osh Kyrgyz man, who had lived more than a decade in Osh, told me he had never set foot within an Uzbek mahalla beyond a major street like Kalinin. 38. The facts about Aktilek are from interviews of residents. 39. In Turkic languages, affixing -lik to a place name forms a label for a native or resident of that place. Osh residents are Oshlik, though an Uzbek would never use that term to refer to Kyrgyz living in the city. 40. Roziman’s eldest son worked on the Shavay Collective Farm because of his expertise in cotton farming and automatically became an Uzbekistani citizen after 226 Notes to Pages 100–107 independence in 1991. The difficulties in crossing the border must have affected the frequency of his visits. 41. However, in rural Uzbekistan at least, sons finally moving away may continue to live bir qozon, bir kassa (one cooking pot, one household budget) for some years, with the head of the main household making the major decisions (Rasanaya- gam 2002). 42. Regarding communal participation, the distinction between old and new mahallas may cover up the emerging distinction of wealth. In Samarqand, for example, “there are frequent complaints in the mahalla that the rich often ignore its activities—for instance, not attending funerals, always regarded as the essence of community life. In the case of communal works, like cleaning water canals, repairing tea-houses or building mosques, they [would] rather contribute money than help” (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998b, 591–92). 43. The virtual tour format, indeed, was constructed to simulate in miniature this pedestrian way of encountering the state from a situated rather than panoptic perspective (Certeau 1980/1984). 44. I wrote an article calling Osh a “tale of two cities” (Liu 2007). Even though I did talk about the interpenetration of the two sectors, the article somewhat simpli- fied the picture as a didactic device for the student readership that piece targeted. 45. Osh Uzbeks’ association of mahalla with national renewal is also probably influenced by Uzbekistan’s campaign since 1992 to use the mahalla in that effort, one that has spawned scholarly writing affirming the state’s glorification of mahalla as the essence of Uzbek tradition, examples being Jalilov (1995) and Orifk- honova (2002). In Uzbekistan, 2003 was proclaimed to be Mahalla Yili (Year of the Mahalla), and Osh Uzbeks watch much state-controlled television from Uzbekistan and are influenced by the nationalist propaganda from this neighboring state.

Chapter 4. Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons

1. From the viewpoint of human experience, a place does not simply amass things but presents a particular landscape, so that “being in a place is being in a configurative complex of things” (Casey 1996, 25), and it organizes and evokes embodied memories that may elude verbal memory (Farnell 1999). This insight provides another motivation for the street-level perspective used in much of the analysis of this book. 2. This discussion does not need to go into more rigorous definitions of territoriality, such as it being a “spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area” (Sack 1986, 1). 3. Urban sociologist and historian Janet Abu-Lughod (1987), in her work on North African medinas, the Islamic urban cores, talks about how visual markers and the informal monitoring of outsiders by residents socializing or working in the street make passersby feel uneasy. 4. When it comes to the complex orientations of the street grid, the narrow Notes to Pages 107–114 227 streets of Osh’s mahallas bear some resemblance to those of Arab medinas. Eliza- beth Fernea describes the medina in Marrakech, Morocco, as an “individualized, rather personal place” (Fernea 1976, 205) that had an intimate, microcosmic feel to it, despite the fact that it was “only a few steps from one of the busiest, noisiest squares in Marrakech, but in terms of the way it was arranged and entered, one might have been in a remote section of the deepest part of the medina” (Fernea 1976, 188). 5. Kevin Lynch (1960, 1991) argues that imageability is an important quality that makes any city livable and enjoyable to its residents. Appropriating Lynch, geographer Paul Wheatley (1976) argues that buildings in old Islamic cities tend to have low imageability, given Islamic sensibilities eschewing ostentatious display. 6. Representations of mahalla as sites of a timeless Uzbek traditionalism are also perpetuated in some scholarly works, such as Poliakov and Olcott (1992) and Shalinsky (1993), which accept such claims without sufficient critique or contextualization. 7. Concerning Central Asian Islamic education before the Russian conquest, see Khalid (1998); on the nature and circulation of Central Asian Islamic knowledge, see Dudoignon (2004) and Shahrani (1991), and for a personal account on Islamic education in late-nineteenth-century Bukhara, see Aini, Perry, and Lehr (1998). For studies on women religious teachers, otinchas, see Fathi (2004) and Kamp (2006). On the social and epistemological contrasts of “traditional” with modern Islamic education in the Middle East, see Eickelman (1992) and Messick (1993). 8. Tolib’s secular moral vision is consistent with Adeeb Khalid’s basic argument that Central Asian Islam became synonymous with national tradition under Soviet rule (Khalid 2003, 2007). 9. The Osh Kanton Zhenotdel (Women’s Division) reported that 649 women had been unveiled by 8 March 1927, followed by 94, then 100 to 120 in successive efforts, with a total of 2,000 paranjas seized in just several days. This resulted, as announced by this source, in drawing women to “socialist labor and the sociopolitical life of the country” from their former “isolation from society and dependence on household heads” (Oruzbaeva 1987, 425). The Soviet unveiling campaigns in Uzbekistan are meticulously documented and analyzed by Northrop (2004) and Kamp (2006). 10. Actually, Osh at the end of the nineteenth century had 154 mosques, 7 mazars (shrines), and 5 medressas at a time when the urban population was 47,149, living in 6,153 houses (Zakharova 1997). 11. “Democracy” to Odilbek means simply the freedom from state control for individual or communal initiatives, a typical understanding among Osh Uzbeks in the 1990s. 12. Some of this institutional context is mentioned briefly in Geiss (2001). 13. The four Otaev brothers listed here are the four sons of Otabergan, who had 228 Notes to Pages 114–118 divided his one-hectare parcel of land among them in the late nineteenth century. Those four plots were subdivided for the next generation, and today these adjacent houses (“gates”) still belong to this family. All the names have been changed to pro- tect anonymity, but this passage was included to convey the moral tenor of these narratives of pre-Soviet life. 14. According to Islamic legal practice, an owner planning to sell a house was required to first offer it for sale to neighbors, and in the Soviet period, it would then be offered to others in the mahalla, and then the mahalla committee had the right to approve a prospective outside buyer, thus controlling access to the community. While this customary practice worked well under the Soviet framework, after independence it collided with the private property principle that was in force, so that the mahalla’s real power in this area began to erode even as the mahalla is ironically being trumpeted in Uzbekistan (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998b). 15. According to a local proverb, “Each child has seven parents in the mahalla” (Saktanber and Özataş-Baykal 2000). 16. As with many Soviet Uzbek men of his generation, Walimat invoked Islamic law not from any knowledge of its particulars but rather in accordance his view that agricultural mismanagement carried moral significance. 17. Interestingly, Carol Delaney describes a very similar sensibility about smoking in front of one’s father in a rural Turkish village (Delaney 1991). 18. “Authority as accomplishment” is what Beyer (2010) argues for concerning Kyrgyz youth and elders in the small northern town of Talas, with this type of authority being evident in forms of address, seating, blessings, which part of animal one is offered to eat, and mediation powers. 19. The bulk of the ziyofat preparatory work—the shopping, chopping, cooking, staging, serving, dish washing, cleaning, and so forth—falls, of course, on the kelins (daughters-in-law), who may have to work much of the night before, although young sons may also help. Very similar mahalla-based meetings of peer groups are found across urban Eurasia, for example, gap (“conversation”) in Uz- bekistan, gashtak (“talking in turn”) among Tajiks, and olturash (“sitting”) among Uyghurs in northwest China (Dautcher 2009). 20. The ziyofat functions as a rotating credit system in which the host of each meeting receives a set sum of money (one hundred som in the groups I visited in 1998 and 1999) from all the other participants. This allows cash to be concentrated for large expenditures such as weddings or other major obligations. Such groups exist throughout Central Asia, including in Kashgar, China (Liu 2011, 117). Loans made within personal circles of trust are important in the post-Soviet business environment because the cash flows bypass banks (considered unreliable) and avoid state notice. Personal financial circles of trust formed one foundational aspect of the “Akromi” group at the center the 2005 Andijan events. 21. Victoria Koroteyeva and Ekaterina Makarova argue convincingly from collected oral histories in Samarqandi mahallas that the Uzbekistani gap was not so Notes to Pages 118–121 229 much revived as “reinvented and reinvigorated by pressures arising from the Soviet system.” Like Uzbek practices of reciprocity more generally, the gap became intertwined with Soviet structures of prestige, whereby “what might seem a traditional gift economy was in fact a modern dynamic system governed by the mechanisms of supply and demand . . . directed at the conscious maintenance, strengthening and extension of various networks, an investment made rational by the peculiari- ties of [Brezhnev-era] ‘mature socialism’” (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998b, 582). On mahalla gift economies, see also Pétric (2002). 22. In similar groups called mäshräp in Uyghur or mähälläs in Almaty, Kazakhstan, young male participants perform music, dance, poetry, riddles, and jokes, as well as hear lectures about Islam. They also conduct a theatrically inflected judgment session, the orda, in which they inform on each other’s moral transgressions and are “punished” in humorous ways within the group as a means of performing and teaching communal norms. The mäshräp has been experiencing a massive “revival,” according to Sean Roberts (1998), as part of the production of a deterritorialized Uyghur national culture that, analogous to the situation of Osh Uzbeks, straddles the border with China. 23. For a discussion on the tendency (and traps) of closely identifying Islamic practice with the feminine domestic sphere, see Liu (2011, 121). The notion of women as communal carriers of Islamic piety is linked in post-Soviet Uzbekistan to state-promoted images of the Uzbek woman as a Muslim, and thus national, woman (Saktanber and Özataş-Baykal 2000). 24. Workplaces, schools, shopping areas, and Friday mosques constitute social sites outside the mahalla. Uzbek men, occasionally with their families, use public recreation and entertainment venues frequented also by Kyrgyz and Russians; such venues include parks, swimming pools, concerts at the drama theater or stadium, restaurants, karaoke, and a small disco. Retired Uzbek men congregate at choyxo- nas (teahouses), located by the Ak-Buura River across from Navoi Park (where some play chess), in the bazaar, and on large thoroughfares like Kyrgyzstan Street. Navoi Park runs amusement park rides and carnival-like game booths in the summer. Young Uzbek women go out for recreation much less frequently. 25. “Eighty percent of people in Osh know each other” was the claim one woman made after we discovered an unexpected personal link between us. She probably meant among the Uzbeks of the city, because social contact across ethnic lines is not this common. 26. However, the gendering of urban public places may be shifting from Soviet patterns, among Uzbeks at least, to be an increasingly male social scene. It is becoming a common notion that girls should not be exposing themselves in public parks, at least in Samarqand (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998b). Soviet intentions for constructing a kind of urbanity through city planning are being reappropriated. 27. The cloth sellers occupied an end of the long parallel alleys of the part of the 230 Notes to Pages 121–126 bazaar called the Veshchevoy bazar (Russian) or Yoyma bozor (both meaning “flea market”), which opened in 1994 between the Zainabetdinova and Oshskii micro- district apartment complexes. 28. Until the 2010 events, Uzbeks in Osh dominated in selling cloth, carpets, bread, tea, meats, and, of course, Uzbek hats (do’ppi), and they also conducted most of the blacksmithing and moneychanging. All of these activities had their separate sectors in the main bazaar before the food-selling sections were destroyed in 2010. As noted earlier, since independence, Kyrgyz have moved in large numbers into selling positions at the bazaars, particularly in fruits and vegetables, small sundry items, stationery, candies, cigarettes, pasta, and soap. They had always commanded the markets for milk products and Kyrgyz hats (kalpak). After 2010, Kyrgyz quickly moved into many of the selling activities previously dominated by Uzbeks. 29. Uzbek and Turkish are both Turkic languages, but Turkey was considered foreign (and Western) enough to account for the strangeness of my dress and demeanor, apparently. Those who thought I was from China usually assumed I was Uyghur, whose language is also Turkic and very similar to Uzbek. 30. Although relatively small in numbers, Christian evangelical groups in the city have been growing since the early 1990s. Most are funded and guided by foreign missionaries but increasingly run by local believers. Their activities predominantly attract residents outside of mahallas. For ethnographic studies about religious conversion and foreign evangelical work in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, see Hilgers (2007), McBrien (2006a, 2006b), and Pelkmans (2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b). 31. Quote is from my notes and is nonverbatim.

Chapter 5. House and Dwelling in the World

1. Gaston Bachelard writes similarly about the kinesthetic attraction of certain paths or places: “And what a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness! . . . The path that leads to the house . . . is inviting . . . it always possesses certain kinesthetic features” (Bachelard 1964, 11, 73). Concerning house spaces he writes, “All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction. . . . In these conditions, topoanalysis [the study of place] bears the stamp of a topophilia [the aesthetic appreciation of place]” (Bachelard 1964, 12, emphasis added). 2. An inhabited place like a mahalla is a particular form of life-world (Leb- enswelt), as Edmund Husserl termed it, which is “a world interpreted, apperceived, and apprehended in a specific way; in a word, it is a cultural world . . . of a certain socio-historical group” (Gurwitsch 1970, 50). In this world, “things perceived present themselves as defined by the purpose they serve, the use that can be made of them, the manner in which they are to be handled, and so on, briefly as determined by schemes of apprehension” (Gurwitsch 1970, 50). This idea comes from Hei- degger’s notion of “equipment” and “readiness-to-hand” (Heidegger 1962), expli- Notes to Pages 126–129 231 cated clearly in Dreyfus (1991). These schemes belong to the “stock of knowledge at hand,” Alfred Schutz’s phrase for the vast tacit understandings of the social world that enable human inhabitation (Schutz 1967). 3. “Open texture” refers to meaning that is not vague per se but inexhaustive: it is always corrigible or amendable (Waissmann 1952, cited in Ackerman 1994). The idea comes from Wittgenstein’s seminal discussion about the inherent indeterminacy of rules and ordered human activity (such as language) as an open-ended “game” (Wittgenstein 1972). This means that, in this context, tactical expectations about how the mahalla social world works, which form a central part of Osh Uzbek social imaginaries, usually obtain but are always subject to revision. 4. Adab in its long history of usage in the Islamic world, including in Central Asia, has connoted not just etiquette but also moral conduct, urbane civility, and knowledge (Gabrieli 2008), and Osh Uzbeks are beginning to seek to orient their daily lives according to such models. But any codified system of conduct seeks to be “internalized” or, better yet, grounded in bodily skills that operate according to the aesthetic experience of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), which works from an embodied logic different from the logic of discourses on conduct. 5. Senses of place resemble a language in that linguistic knowledge and competence need to overlap sufficiently for communication to succeed most of the time but are not uniformly distributed throughout a linguistic community (Friedrich 1989; Hanks 1996). 6. Farnell cites Williams (1995) on this point. 7. Edward T. Hall’s (1969) pioneering analysis of proxemic space, a term he coined, tended to be static, whereas a dynamic extension of his concept is needed, as Farnell (1999) notes. In the case of young men on a mahalla street, the proxemics emerge from and last as long as the gathering lasts in the conventionally recognized space. 8. Constance Classen (1997) argues that because perception is a cultural as well as physical act, ethnography stands to gain much from examining the senses more fully, in particular by not privileging the visual. 9. Dense networks of social relations have been deemed a defining characteristic of old Middle Eastern neighborhoods. From his work in Boujad, Morocco, Dale Eickelman proposes defining what is known as the darb according to a general ethic of “closeness” or qraba—a contextual notion of personal ties between kin, allies, patron/clients, and neighbors. He regards darb as “the extension of qraba in contiguous physical space” (Eickelman 1974, 283). “‘Closeness’ is acting as if ties of obligation exist with another person which are so compelling that they are generally expressed in the idiom of kinship. . . . Most quarters have a cluster of households which claim relations to each other in this way” (Eickelman 1976, 96). Janet Abu-Lughod (1987), meanwhile, refers to her Cairo hara (neighborhood) as family writ large. Although Osh Uzbeks do not use family metaphors for their neighborhoods (not even where many kindred households actually live contiguously, as they 232 Notes to Pages 129–133 do in Osh’s oldest mahallas), Uzbeks nevertheless emphasized their close mutual accountability and dependence within the mahalla and contrasted this close connection to the kin-based and spatially dispersed relations of closeness among the Kyrgyz. Several Kyrgyz in Osh offered the same contrast about their social life as it exists in apartments, explaining it with reference to their formerly nomadic patterns of wide dispersal and intermittent congregation for clan-based celebrations or the seasonal transitions of migration. Concerning the dispersed spatiality of social relations among Inner Asian nomadic populations, see Humphrey and Sneath (1999). 10. The similarly narrow, winding, blind alleyways between houses in the medinas of Middle Eastern cities have been described as “semi-private space,” where women’s domestic work spills over into common areas that are not considered fully public (Abu-Lughod 1987). From her work in Marrakech, Morocco, Elizabeth Fer- nea describes the constant exchange of gossip, troubles, jokes, and recipes between neighboring women from open doorways, “always keeping one foot on the sill, so they could quickly step inside if a strange man appeared on the zanka [street]” (Fernea 1976, 157), and across rooftops, where they hang laundry, sort crops, dry grains, and rest. Hildred Geertz has also remarked on the extensive usage of rooftops, courtyards shared by two houses, and their adjoining rooms, especially if all houses around the courtyard belong to the same family, as many did in the derb (urban quarter) she was studying in Sefrou, Morocco. Everyone was well known to everyone else, and few activities and feelings were kept secret for long. “Decisions and choices, the acts whereby social roles are given their sharpest expression and definition, are, in these circumstances, products of multiple social appraisals and pressures, rather than individual” (H. Geertz 1979, 334). 11. “Apart from reliance on the personal assistance of neighbors, the family can count on the institutional support of the mahalla as a whole [providing, e.g., tables, benches, qozon cooking vessels, and cooks for family celebrations]. . . . In exchange . . . it demands complete loyalty on their part” (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998a, 138). The Soviet state used hashar to exact corvée labor for local public works. People earn respect by contributing to the community through such work, and it appears to operate more among those with close social relationships, at least in rural Uzbekistan today (Rasanayagam 2002). Incidentally, in Bukhara, unlike most other Central Asian cities, hashar was almost never practiced in the period before the Bolshevik Revolution (Sukhareva 1976). 12. Compared with other Central Asian cities, Osh has a relatively water-rich arik system. For example, see Sukhareva (1976) on regular water shortages in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bukhara. 13. In the Uzbek comic film set in Tashkent’s Old City in the 1980s, Kelinlar Qo’zg’oloni (Revolt of the Daughters-in-Law) (Abzalov 1984), a man goes to the house of a family whom he knows well, but he finds no response after calling at the gate. He steals a peek past the gate and enters the courtyard to investigate what Notes to Pages 134–140 233 appear to be invisible spirits moving objects. The “spirits” turn out to be a prank played by children. Just as the man scolds the children, the matron of the household returns. The visitor is visibly embarrassed at having entered the courtyard himself and gesticulates wildly about the unusual circumstances of the prank as his excuse. 14. I may have been seen as a Chinese businessman trying to pursue a deal. Osh Uzbeks generally have suspicion and contempt for the many Chinese from the People’s Republic who conduct business, mostly trade, in post-Soviet Central Asia. The contempt is mutual, as I discovered while acting as a translator between two Chinese entrepreneurs and their Uzbek contacts on one occasion in 2003. Each side confided to me that they viewed the other as dishonest, greedy, and unpleasant to deal with. 15. Because visual privacy was considered a premium in crowded precolonial North African cities, the houses of wealthier families tended to be located deeper “inside” neighborhood blocks. Impressive illustrations of these medinas as they developed through time can be found in Ayoub et al. (1994), a coffee table book about a fictitious but typical North African city. 16. This is supposedly true especially for Uzbek villages in the Fergana Valley (Alimova and Azimova 2000). 17. However, one historian (Vaisman 1995) claims that strict gender divisions of space applied in Uzbek homes as late as the 1960s but does not specify the region or whether he was describing rural or urban homes. 18. The difference in dress between hovli and interior room spaces became clear to me when living in a Tashkent mahalla in 1996. I slept in gym shorts in a room but was warned not to go out to the hovli so immodestly attired, because the kelin was working there. Anthropologist David Abramson, during his fieldwork in mahallas of Kokand, Uzbekistan, noticed the mother-in-law’s awkwardness in the early mornings when he was often left home alone with the family’s kelin. The mother-in-law would send the kelin and baby across the courtyard to be with another kelin (Abramson 1998). 19. James Scott (1998) refers to local practical skills and common sense (as a Geertzian “cultural system” [C. Geertz 1983]) as metis, and he contrasts this with the panoptic logic of top-down planning, discussing Soviet collectivization in particular. 20. Kyrgyz views of the mahalla’s livability differ. When my wife and infant son came with me to live in Osh for a year, some Kyrgyz friends advised us not to live in the mahallas. They were dirty, cold, and no place to raise a baby, they told us. “Conditions are better in an apartment,” they said. 21. Typical urban houses in Osh mahallas sit on four- to six-sotok land plots (i.e., forty to sixty square meters), and the open spaces of courtyards themselves take up more than half of that area—quite small for three generations to live on. Uzbek houses in rural areas follow roughly the same kinds of configuration, only 234 Notes to Pages 141–145 with much larger plot sizes (eight or more sotok), fewer walls, and fewer concrete floor areas in the hovli. 22. In 1986, the Moroccan government decreed that the city of Sefrou should have façades to make it look like a “proper Islamic city.” Clifford Geertz writes that whereas Sefrou had been marked by houses “turned radically inward” (similar to Uzbek ones), with the new architectural idiom, “they have turned the city house, semiotically, inside out” (C. Geertz 1989, 299). 23. Kyrgyz also use the cognate word üy to refer to Kyrgyz houses. In pre- Soviet usage, üy designated the yurt, the portable felt tent used by various Inner Asian nomads. When there is a need to distinguish between yurts and courtyard houses, Kyrgyz and Uzbek alike use the term boz üy (gray house) for the former and yer uy or yer maydoni uy (ground house, ground area house) for the latter. The term for a modern Kyrgyz and Russian house is still just üy or dom (Russian). 24. Since most Kyrgyz in Osh live in apartments today, Kyrgyz houses in Osh are found mainly in Aktilek, the western region formerly outside the city that was opened to housing in response to Kyrgyz demands for residential land in the aftermath of the Osh riots of 1990. Many more such houses are found in the Kyrgyz- stani capital of Bishkek and in Kyrgyz villages throughout the republic. 25. Regarding the significance of soundscapes in understanding the human experience of geographies, see Tuan (1993). 26. This literature is criticized in Wartenberg (1990). 27. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the pre-objective captures the moment in primary perception before it ends with treating the world in terms of objects, which is a product of ex post facto reflective thinking (Merleau-Ponty 1962). This concept is explicated in Csordas (1990) and Dillon (1997). 28. For a review of critiques about culture as a system of rules, see Douglas (1973), based on Wittgenstein’s (1972) problematization of the very notion of rule following. 29. In the language of Henri Lefebvre (1991), conceived “representations of space” (here, the schemata and ideologies of mahalla) may be salient and influential among inhabitants in certain focused moments, but they do not determine the far more vast “representational spaces” of daily lived practice. For a sophisticated phenomenological treatment of domestic space, see Mueggler (2001). 30. Bourdieu’s concept of field complements his classic notion of habitus by giving a greater place for judgment, choice, and contingency within a socially distributed field of constraints. His developing notion of habitus (Bourdieu 1972/1977, 1979/1984, 1980/1990) has often been criticized (and partially misunderstood) as a closed loop of formal replication of dispositions and practices—the mechanical reproduction of culture—that leaves little room for history and agency. Practice theory in anthropology has directly critiqued and sought to move beyond Bour- dieu in the direction of social change and agency (Ahearn 2001; Ortner 1984, 1989). Notes to Pages 145–159 235

31. The later writings of Bourdieu turned away from his earlier structuralism precisely for this reason. “Le sens practique” is Bourdieu’s term for ordering principles “orienting practices in a way that is at once unconscious and systematic” to be found in incorporated dispositions and bodily schemata (Bourdieu 1980/1990, 10). 32. Practice is predicated not on a priori rules but knowing one’s way around (Wittgenstein 1972, §123) or having what may be called a sense of the game whose meaning or dynamics may not be fully specified in advance. 33. Constance Classen (1997) and other anthropologists of the senses have argued that the senses are implicated in history and politics. See also Classen (1993, 2005); Classen, Howes, and Synnott (1994); and Stoller (1989, 1997). 34. The term “carnal knowledge” is taken from Loïc Wacquant’s innovative ethnography of boxing (Wacquant 2004). See also O’Connor (2005) on corporeal meanings in another domain of practical skill—glassblowing. 35. Anthropologist Michael Jackson concurs: “Bodily praxis cannot be reduced to a semiotic, [but] bodily practices are always open to interpretation” (Jackson 1983, 339).

Chapter 6. Republic and Virtuous Leadership

1. This passage from Nurolim is nonverbatim and reconstructed from notes and memory. 2. In addition to the many NGO reports on post-Soviet Central Asian economic change, the following scholarly assessments are useful surveys and studies, particularly about Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan: Abazov (1999); Anderson and Pomfret (2003); Ilkhamov (2001); Ofer and Pomfret (2004); Pomfret (1995, 2006); Rumer (2000); and Ruziev, Ghosh, and Dow (2007). 3. Walimat’s understanding of history reflects his Soviet upbringing and echoes a Soviet expectation about leadership quality. During the 1930s, for example, Stalin represented Lenin as “the ultimate great individual who correctly understood the correlation of historical forces” (Davies 2004, 31). 4. Here is a typical example on the subject from Karimov, himself trained as an economist: “We created a modern, technologically equipped base both for export oriented production and for filling our domestic market with home-made goods” (I. Karimov 1998, 117). 5. Qalam lived in a village north of Osh that was part of the former Lenin Kolkhoz. He claimed that Osh province once produced as much as 210,000 tons of cotton a year, with Kara-Suu region (where this farm was located) contributing 60,000 tons, whereas in the post-Soviet period output had fallen to less than 20,000 tons. On 5 August 1999, he gave a particularly cogent and thoughtful interview, excerpted here. 6. Osh Uzbeks who admired Karimov either denied that there was any bureaucratic corruption in post-Soviet Uzbekistan because Karimov would have been 236 Notes to Pages 161–167 ruthless in stemming it (something believable only by swallowing state media stories whole) or believed that any corruption was local but that Karimov was fighting against it. In fact, “bureaucratism” (biurokratizm, vedemstvennost’, in Russian) was the perennial bugbear in Soviet discourses, because the logic and practices of an administrative apparatus were seen as countervailing against the single- minded initiative of the leader. As part of the mystique of his power, for example, Stalin portrayed himself as “aloof from routine institutional work which inevitably involved struggles concerning legitimate departmental interests” and “largely owed his political career to portraying himself as a force in the Bolshevik struggle against ‘bureaucracy’” (Ennker 2004, 88–89). 7. Many other Osh Uzbeks expressed this assessment. A mysterious November 1998 bombing incident at an Osh department store was attributed to Wahhabis. There was rumor of Uzbekistani police operating in Osh without Kyrgyzstani authorization, for example, apprehending “Wahhabis” running a printing press in Osh for literature distribution in Uzbekistan. A fiasco involving Japanese hostages in August–November 1999 that was botched by Kyrgyzstani police confirmed such sentiments. 8. For a fieldwork-based analysis of a shirkat in Andijan province, see Kan- diyoti (2002). 9. Nexia and Tico are Daewoo car models, produced in Andijan by the Korean joint-venture company Uz-Daewoo, although after the 2005 massacre there, Uzbekistan’s increased border restrictions shut Kyrgyzstan off from access to the new cars made in Andijan. All new cars are now imported from South Korea and Europe. 10. Rustam Dosumov was a high-ranking figure at Tashkent State Technical University when he wrote the article from which the quote is taken; that article echoes and summarizes Karimov’s policies. 11. Uzbekistan’s TV1 (Birinchi Kanal) broadcast this segment on 19 February 1999. Karimov failed to note that, at the time, Uzbekistanis were surreptitiously crossing the border, some by bicycle, every morning with consumer goods to sell at the Osh bazaar. 12. There was no trace of debate regarding Karimov’s bread comment in the Osh Uzbek community or in the local press. This is unsurprising, given that neither independent nor state-run newspapers divulged the substance of communal debates, except indirectly on occasion. But most importantly, this event was politically sensitive, with the potential to exacerbate tensions with Uzbekistan. Osh Uzbeks had to swallow this one. 13. Emirs (or amirs) were military commanders who derived their power from their status within Turko-Mongol tribal organization but “whose political horizons were limited by the Chingizid dispensation, that is[,] that ultimate political authority was restricted to agnatic descendants of Chingiz Khan” (McChesney 1983, 34–35). For Timur, the fact that he was not a khan was a source of ongoing anxiety Notes to Pages 169–172 237 about his own legitimacy (Manz 1989). “For this purpose he formulated a broader myth showing himself as a restorer . . . of the whole world order established by Chinggis Khan . . . himself a second, equal, Chinggis Khan” (Manz 1988, 106, 107). President Karimov recapitulates this strategy of legitimation via manipulation and association of iconic Inner Asian power. 14. In 1993, a Kyrgyz woman used the same metaphor when commenting to me on international relations: “In the Soviet period, Russia was our big brother, Uzbekistan was middle brother, and we [Kyrgyzstan] were little brother. We’ve got- ten rid of Russia, but Turkey now wants to be big brother. Uzbekistan is still middle brother.” 15. Shalinsky (1993) depicts Uzbeks in Afghanistan in this way. The term “savage slot” comes from Trouillot (1991). 16. The use of Russian words in an Uzbek discourse can reveal emphasis or association of a concept with Russian-language or Soviet institutional sources. There are many words of Russian origin within standard modern Uzbek, of course, but in the case of “manly,” Tolib could have easily stayed in Uzbek. Also, it was possible that the original news broadcast was in Russian, as some Uzbekistani TV news was, but Tolib chose those particular words to be in Russian, and that is noteworthy. 17. Traits sought in an effective leader, in order of priority, are in descending order of importance, “Decisive, certain; Magnetic, unifying; Strong in character and body; Experienced, practical; Communicative, persuasive; Identified with the homeland; Intelligent, inventive; Patient, tolerant,” according to “The Hunger for Modern Leadership,” an updated chapter of Edward Allworth’s survey of Central Asia, but, curiously, he does not mention the nature of his sources (Allworth 1994, 598). 18. During the early 1990s, Kyrgyz also admitted to me that their president did not have an aggressive character, the way President Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan or Karimov did. Their admiration was directed at the Kazakhstani leader, because they identified more with Kazakhs as a kindred nationality. The widespread image of Akaev’s weakness may partially illuminate his strong-arm techniques (to use another gendered political metaphor) from the mid-1990s until his ouster in 2005. 19. The Turkic world does not lack “father of the nation” figures, such as Turk- menbashi in Turkmenistan and Atatürk in Turkey. See, for example, Segars (2003). 20. Concerning interethnic friendship, my teacher also noted that Manas’s closest friend and comrade-in-arms was Almambet, a Chinese warrior, and this fact boded well for my presence in Kyrgyzstan, although he said this in 1994, before Chinese businessmen became numerous and generally resented in the republic. 21. For a thorough, recent survey of the ethnic diversity of Uzbekistan, see Ilkhamov (2002). 22. After the Tulip Revolution in 2005, some Osh Uzbeks initially expressed 238 Notes to Pages 172–180 hope that President Bakiev would be more sensitive to the needs of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, because he was a southerner, from the parts of the republic with large Uzbek populations. Since the euphoria of Akaev’s ouster by popular uprising, such sentiments have given way to widespread disappointment in his inefficiency and corruption, sentiments shared by Kyrgyz as well. 23. As mentioned earlier, the mahalla is viewed as a site inculcating proper “etiquette” or adab. The link between moral conduct and political authority has also been found in South Asia, where there was an extensive history of adab literature proscribing behaviors for each social class, and such literary offerings included characterizations of an ideal ruler, such that “a bad king is a bad Muslim. . . . A good king is ascribed saintly qualities” (Metcalf 1984, 7). “Muslims have made moral exemplification a cornerstone of cultural continuity, particularly, it appears, in periods of perceived social and political dislocation” (Metcalf 1984, 20), which may partly explain the Osh Uzbek obsession with Karimov’s character in the first postsocialist decade. 24. Stalin’s project was to create the New Soviet Man, and, in Central Asia, this entailed de-Islamization (Ro’i 1984). 25. This image of Central Asia as being fundamentally a geopolitical chessboard became crystallized in Hopkirk (1992) and has been perpetuated in policy analyses of the region. 26. Central authority did not a create a “political vacuum” for local forces to fill but merely claimed authority that lay dormant most of the time, though such authority revived in ebbs and flows at various times according to mutual recognition of relative strength (McChesney 1991). 27. Manz made this remark during the discussion after her lecture, “Medieval Empires and the Formulation of Identity,” delivered 21 September 1999 at the Uni- versity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 28. I am grateful to Val Daniel for suggesting the relevance of Wartenberg’s idea to my argument. 29. For a discussion, see Al-Azmeh (1997), and, regarding the influential Ira- nian thinker Ali Shariati on this subject, see Fischer (1980/2003). 30. Soviet place hierarchies can become so deeply ensconced in the social imaginaries of Central Asians that they frame a wide range of thinking, including such matters as economic issues and social conditions, as I argue (Liu 2005a) regarding residents in three cities in Uzbekistan (Tashkent, Bukhara, and Fergana). Residents of Tashkent, for example, tended to see their problems from an aloof, panoptic view situated with respect to the entire country, whereas interviewees from Fergana or Bukhara saw their problems as local. These differences in situated ways of seeing reflected the differences in power in Uzbekistan’s hierarchy of urban place. 31. My thanks to Anatoly Khazanov for this suggestion. However, Karimov’s orphan background has not stopped perceptions that he in fact acts in the interests Notes to Pages 181–190 239 of the “Samarqandi clan.” His effort during the early 1990s to politically reha- bilitate the late Sharaf Rashidov, a member of the Samarqand-Bukhara elite and the former first secretary disgraced in the infamous Brezhnev-era “Uzbek cotton scandal,” was one sign of Karimov’s concession to the clan elites (Carlisle 1995). His promotion of the idea of Rashidov as an Uzbek patriot standing up to Russian hegemony was another (March 2002). 32. In this case, the notion resonates with an idea found in Iran and southern Iraq during the eleventh-century Buyid period. See Mottahedeh (1980). 33. This account of medieval political discourse is from Al-Azmeh (1997). Mot- tahedeh (1980) also discusses the assumption (in Iran during the Buyid period) that the yearning for independence would lead to anarchy and oppression if not checked by strong central authority. 34. Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati argues that siyasat (the Persian form of the word) should not be translated as “politics” in the Western sense, which, as Michael Fischer explains, “has the problematic of satisfying its citizens. . . . In contrast, the problematic of siyasat is one of education, reform, bringing perfec- tion into being. It involves leadership and force if necessary” (Fischer 1980/2003, 153–54). While merely identifying the presence of cognates across Arabic, Persian, and Uzbek does not constitute an investigation tracing variations of meaning over time and space, it does suggest that vernacular notions of “politics” in Central Asia have been implicated with the notion of tarbiya explored here. 35. Such a formulation of a deontological (rights-based) rather than teleological (based on a particular conception of good) theory of justice has been criticized in modern Western political philosophy from communitarian perspectives, which hold that basic notions of common good must undergird any rights-based framework. The latter view is eloquently argued in Sandel (1998). 36. As with any system of political practice, rival claimants operated with tacit and changeable understandings concerning the horizon of possible maneuvers, their meanings, and probable consequences (McChesney 1991; Sela 2003).

Conclusion: Central Asian Visions of Societal Renewal

1. This is not to claim a one-to-one homology between mahalla and republic. State rule involves processes with no neighborhood analogue. Also, Osh Uzbeks’ talk about how elders actually oversaw their mahallas was largely rhetorical, the elders’ role in the mahalla not being nearly as integral to the function of mahallas as a president’s role is in a state. Nonetheless, the rhetorical importance of elders and state leaders in the minds of these Osh Uzbeks sufficed to make this partial correspondence discursively powerful. 2. Maria Louw (2007, 125) makes a parallel kind of move in her argument that Bukharan Naqshibandis responded to a felt loss of agency by redirecting a certain negative quality (nafs) into an asset through engaging in a larger religious sphere where their agency counted. In my argument, the city of Osh forms a frame of 240 Notes to Pages 190–192 meaning for its Uzbeks, turning their predicament into a virtue and grounding the possibility for agency. 3. In her book on Osh, for example, historian Antonina Zakharova (1997) describes the city as one of the Islamic centers in Central Asia and as a trade center in the ancient and medieval caravan road system known as the Great Silk Road. This characterization is not false, but it needs to be periodized and contextualized with respect to other trade centers at any given time. Qualified perspective is missing in the literature on Osh, especially that surrounding the Osh 3000 campaign, under the auspices of which Zakharova’s book was published. One archaeologist writes that Osh was considered the third-greatest city in the Fergana Valley in the ninth to eleventh centuries (Nuridinova et al. 2004), although the sources (probably Arab geographers) are not given and there is no indication as to whether this was an explicit or reconstructed claim. 4. Large-scale period maps, for example, Silk Road maps, would more likely show, depending on period, Kokand, Andijan, and Namangan in the Fergana Valley than they would Osh. In Qing dynastic sources, traders from the Fergana region operating in what is now southern Xinjiang in China were “commonly referred to as Andijanis, even if they were in fact from the cities of Khoqand, Marghilan or elsewhere. Presumably, this practice had arisen because Andijan . . . was the old capital of the Ferghana region and had traditionally extensive relations with [southern Xinjiang]” (Newby 2005, 66n60). My thanks to Scott Levi for this reference. 5. One interlocutor said that the gradual shift may have begun with the Febru- ary 1997 bombings in Tashkent, mentioned earlier in relation to the closing of the border to buses. After those bombings, Osh Uzbeks began to hear about the sons of Uzbekistani families disappearing as the government cracked down on anything resembling dissent. 6. According to Zairbek Ergeshov, Uzbekistanis were spending the equivalent of eighty million Kyrgyzstani som per day at Kara-Suu (about two million U.S. dollars) by the mid-2000s, which seems too high. Radio Ozodlik once claimed that Kara-Suu bazaar saw five hundred thousand dollars in daily cash circulation, according to one informant. 7. There was a popular uprising lasting a few days on the Uzbekistani side of the dual town, Qorasuv (meaning “black water”), which started a day after the Andijan events. Hundreds stormed the mayor’s office and took the mayor hostage, and the footbridge to the Kyrgyzstani side of the town, which Uzbekistani authorities had destroyed two years previously, was rebuilt (Chivers 2005). This incident revealed the importance to Uzbekistanis of this trade town and the connections that it mediated with Kyrgyzstan and the outside world. 8. The other passengers in the intercity taxis that I took, all Uzbekistanis and strangers to each other, spent the trips spontaneously and openly complain- ing about the hard economic conditions that they faced, and some criticized the Notes to Pages 193–195 241 government. However, after the massive discontent displayed in the Andijan events of 2005, the Uzbekistani government spent huge sums to renovate cities in the Fergana Valley, particularly in Namangan. My thanks to Tommaso Trevisani for his firsthand account of this trend. 9. I saw the syringe factory, called Shifo, in Namangan while visiting the city’s industrial zone in 2003. In that zone were textile production facilities and a Coca-Cola bottling factory. Despite the presence of these “working factories,” as pro-Karimov Osh Uzbeks like to point out, the overall economy of the city appeared weak, with many abandoned industrial buildings and little sign of wealth anywhere on the main streets or in the neighborhoods. 10. Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan are not the only successful traders in the region, of course. Kyrgyz are increasingly involved, as are Han Chinese from all over the People’s Republic. Uyghur traders, who have the advantage of being able to speak Uyghur-Uzbek and Chinese, are also active in Central Asia, especially southern Kazakhstan. Male Uyghur traders from Xinjiang working in Osh often take a second wife in the city and maintain a childless household there in addition to a primary household across the border in China. 11. Fumagalli found that only 17 percent of Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks (in a sample of 136) held a positive view of Uzbekistan’s policy toward them, 37.8 percent said the policy made “no difference” to them, and 25 percent had a negative view. Consis- tent with my findings, the most openly critical comments came from the younger generation (Fumagalli 2007a). 12. I detail this analysis in Liu (unpublished), which also lists published references about the Andijan events. 13. Several commented on the low quality of Uzbekistan’s schools, particularly in higher education, outside of a few elite institutions in Tashkent. These comments contrasted with envious comments from pro-Karimov Osh Uzbeks, who repeated Uzbekistani television’s claims about the state’s investment in quality schools.

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aitmatov, Chingiz, 55–56, 171 Akaev, Askar (president of Kyrgyzstan), Abu-Lughod, Janet, 203n17, 226n3, 231n9 67–68, 70, 205n31, 216n27; commitment adab (etiquette, moral conduct), 126, 231n4, to fairness as multiethnic state, 54, 238n23 203n21; influence on media, 221n62; adir (hilly region), new mahallas on, 94–99, minimalist authoritarianism of, 66, 102, 106 221n64; moderate nationalism of, Adolat (Uzbekistani political organization), 171–72; Osh Uzbeks’ disdain for, 49, 150, 55–56 170, 237n18 Afghanistan: Uzbekistan and, 169–70; war Ak-Buura River, 26, 77, 79, 223n20 in, 210n27, 213n12 Aktilek (Kyrgyz region of Osh), 91–94, 96, agriculture, 79, 92; decline of, 193, 235n5; 234n24 idyllic image of Uzbekistan’s, 154–55; Andijan, Uzbekistan, 53–54, 56, 190, 236n9, ill-effects of reforms on, 24, 70, 153–54; 240n4 Kyrgyz selling products at bazaar, 25, Andijan events of 2005, 69, 220n61, 240n8; 30; in land use trade-offs, 23–24, 51, 93, disillusionment with Karimov following, 97–99, 101; mismanagement of as moral 44, 152, 191, 194; uprising following, 56, failure, 153–54, 156–58, 228n16; state’s 240n7 relations with farmers and, 33, 156; anthropology, role of, 17 urban life interwoven with, 83–85, 92 apartment neighborhoods, 7, 138, 234n24; air routes, 215n19, 223n20; lack of service to built from modular housing units, 89, 90; Osh, 48, 53–54, 216n26 economic activities in, 27–28;

269 270 Index apartment neighborhoods (continued), land borders, in Central Asia, 65, 225n40; effects for, 24, 51; need for high density of, on economic development, 53, 223n17; 81, 88–89, 101–2; Uzbeks rejecting, 94, inherited from Soviet socialist republics, 101–2, 106, 125 50–51, 223n17; lack of significance under appearance, of Osh, 20–21, 37 Soviets, 45–46; Soviet Union drawing, architecture, 77, 82, 101 64, 214n15; tangle of, 215nn22–23 ariks (water canals), 90, 130–32 boundaries, of Osh, 79; ethnic populations arms trafficking, 48, 209n23 affected by, 89, 91–94, 204n22 arts, 82, 194 Bourdieu, Pierre, 145, 234n30, 235n31 authoritarianism, 149, 166; Karimov’s, 44; Brick Factory, 92 Kyrgyzstan’s minimalist, 66, 221n64 Brubaker, Rogers, 55 autonomy, Osh’s, 55–56, 204n23 buses: Do’stlik border crossing closed to, 46–49; Mezon on, 60–64; to Tashkent, Babur (first Mughal emperor), 82, 190 45–46, 46; traveling through Fergana Babur House, on Solomon Mountain, 37 Valley, 53 Bachelard, Gaston, 105, 230n1 businesses, Osh Uzbeks’: destroyed in riots Bahtiyor (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 67, of 2010, 8, 106; in mahallas, 7, 87, 92, 83–84, 98–99, 137–39 202n10 Bakiev, Kurmanbeck (president of Kyrgyzstan), 67, 203n21, 213n9, 221n62, Calvino, Italo, 20 237n22; disappointment in, 70, 175, capitalism, 13, 18–19; Kyrgyzstan’s 237n22; riots erupting after ouster of, liberalization and, 65–66, 150, 153; 7–8 Kyrgyzstan’s “wild,” 156–59, 162, “Batken Crisis” (1999), 213n12 175,193-94; need to prepare for, 151, Batyrov, Kadyrjan (Botirov, Qodirjon), 54, 161–63; Osh Uzbeks’ caution about, 217n35 33, 150, 153, 159; Uzbekistan’s slow bazaars, 26–27, 29, 29, 32, 77, 101, 108, development of, 69, 72, 150 192; destroyed in riots, 30, 89, 207n4; caretaking/stewardship, 188; khan ethnic division of business at, 25, 29–30, responsible for, 152–53; Osh Uzbeks’ 230n28; growth of, 14, 25, 30–31, 33–34, praise for Karimov’s, 155–56, 162–63; 207n4; growth of Zapadnyi and Anar, state responsible for, 153–54, 181 89; at Kara-Suu, 191, 240n6; Mansurovs’ Castoriadis, Cornelius, 204n27 stalls at, 121–22; micro-districts built by, censorship, in Uzbekistan, 69 88–89; organization of, 26–27, 229n27; Central Asia, 15, 185, 203n18, 205n33, relations among sellers at, 25–26, 28; 208n12, 211n33, 227n8; effects of sources of goods in, 34–35; symbolizing borders and checkpoints in, 103, 160–61, idiom of exchange, 42; unemployment 209n18, 215nn22–23; global status of, spurring, 25, 30–31; Uzbekistanis visiting 65, 167; internal connectivity of, 51–54; Kyrgyzstan’s, 193, 236n11, 240n6 layers of history in, 16–17; Mannerheim’s Bektan (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 131–32 survey of, 36–37; nation-states in, 11–12, Bhutto, Benazir, 37 33, 64–65, 170; Russian Empire’s expan- billiard rooms, 34, 121 sion into, 75–76; Soviet division of, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 45, 51, 71; routes to 50–51, 64, 214n15; Soviet goals in, 75, Osh from, 48, 53–54, 159–60 77–79, 220n55; under Soviets, 53, 57, 74– border, Kyrgyzstan/Uzbekistan, 52, 213n9; 75, 170; used to being living by decree, busyness of crossings, 45–47, 191–93; 166, 177, 183–84; various descriptions of, difference between sides of, 46–47; 205n32, 238n25 effects of closing, 24, 236n9; lack of Central Asian studies, 15–16, 18–19, 195, significance under Soviets, 45–46; 205n33 Uzbekistani control of, 11–13, 46–49, 53, centrality, Osh’s, 44–45, 190–91, 194–95 55–59, 159, 213nn5–6, 215n18. See also China: goods imported from, 25, 34–35; Do’stlik border crossing Index 271

trade with, 26, 191, 240n4; Uzbekistan democracy, 13; in Kyrgyzstan, 66, 221n64; and, 191, 220n61 Osh Uzbeks’ understanding of, 175, Chinese, 241n10; Osh Uzbeks and, 2–3, 227n11; source of law in, 182–83; 233n14, 237n20 transition to, 18–19, 150, 151, 175 Christians, in Osh, 123–24, 230n30 dissent, Uzbekistan’s repression of, 8–9, 57, cities: colonial, 75–76; thinking with, 9–10, 69, 240n5 13, 15; traditional Central Asian vs. Do’stlik border crossing, 42, 97; busyness of, Soviet, 74–75 46–47; closed to buses, 46–49; Karimov’s citizenship, Kyrgyzstani, 8–10, 57, 191, 194, justification for closing, 163–66; Mezon 216n29 on closing of, 47–48, 60–64; Osh Uzbek city planning, 4, 24, 77–79, 88–89, 117, 138 response to closing of, 47–49, 159–60, clothing: for at home vs. going out, 136–37; 190 Islamic, 39–40; norms about courtyards drug trafficking, 34, 44, 48, 203n15 vs. interior rooms, 233n18; Uzbeks’ Durjon (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 133–34 ethnic, 45 Collins, Kathleen, 220n54 economic independence, Uzbekistan’s, Communist Party, 70, 86 154–55, 163–64 Construction Materials Plant, 79, 225n34 economy, 179, 183, 208n11, 209n21, 228n21; corruption: in Kyrgyzstan, 44, 68, 70, 150, Osh Uzbeks’ coping methods in, 193–94; 157–58, 162, 187–88, 219n53, 237n22; in state’s responsibility in, 67, 172–73, 177 Uzbekistan, 68, 220n56, 235n56 economy, of Kyrgyzstan, 54, 101, 221n63; cotton: effects of failure to coordinate effects of liberalization on, 65–66, reforms on, 156–58; processing and 156–58, 191; effects of Uzbekistan’s marketing network for, 52, 160, 223n16, border closing on, 160–61; foreign aid in, 223n17; production of, 24, 153, 235n5; 65–66, 70, 219n50; ill-effects of failure of for Textile Plant, 24, 81; Uzbekistan’s leadership in, 153–54, 156–58, 162–63, production of, 24, 44, 52–53, 161 187–88; informal, 228n20, 228n21; Osh crafts, 54 in, 24, 31, 35; remittances from workers criminality, 32, 159; Karimov praised for not abroad in, 35, 193, 210n29; strengths of, tolerating, 48, 68; in Kyrgyzstan, 44, 68, 70, 191; Uzbekistan’s compared to, 67, 203n15 70–71, 161–62, 179 Csordas, Thomas, 129, 144 economy, of Uzbekistan, 228n21, 235n3, culture: effect on worldview, 16; state’s 241n9; disillusionment with, 191–92,195; responsibility in, 172–73; vs. pre- in justifications for Do’stlik border objective patterns, 144 crossing, 48–49, 163–66; Kyrgyzstan’s culture, global, 34–35, 59 compared to, 70–71, 161–62, 179; Osh culture, Kyrgyz, 11, 58, 68–69, 82–83 Uzbeks’ praise for Karimov’s stewardship, culture, Russian, 31, 58 162–63; poverty in, 57, 240n8; state culture, Soviet, 31, 76, 82–83 control of, 24, 48–49, 53, 69, 155, 191; culture, Uzbek, 3, 59, 82–83, 110, 144; trade with Kyrgyzstan in, 193, 240n6; TV freedom to develop, 55, 194; mahallas as propaganda about, 162–63, 188 primary site of, 6, 9, 96, 100–101, 105; economy, under Soviets, 32–33, 53, 68, 70 mahallas as reservoirs of, 108–13, 145; education, 241n13; Islamic, 39–40, 111–13, Soviets accused of trying to kill, 96, 106 112, 117–19; Kyrgyz, 28, 54–55, 66, currency, 154, 207n5; Kyrgyzstan’s, 223n23; pre-Soviet, 108; Russian- 70, 213n3; used in bazaar, 26–27; language, 28, 32; Soviet, 6, 108, 153, Uzbekistan’s, 69, 72, 207n5 201n6; state’s responsibility in, 172–73; customs, Uzbekistan’s, 46–47 Western, 31–32, 122–23 Eickelman, Dale, 231n9 Datka, Kurmanjan (nineteenth-century electrical system, in Osh, 79–81 female Kyrgyz leader), 72 embodied experience, 126–29, 132–42, de Certeau, Michel, 19, 206n42, 225n31 144–46, 188 272 Index empire, vs. nation-states, 176–77, 204n26 First Five-Year Plan, industrialization in Osh entertainment: billiard rooms, 34, 121; under, 79–80 Internet cafés, 34; at neighborhood clubs, foreign aid, in Kyrgyz economy, 65–66, 68, 86; nightclubs, 225n35; popularity of 70, 219n50 Indian films, 209n24; popularity of foreigners, in Osh, 79, 122–23 Mexican soaps on TV, 208n14; popu- freedom: Kyrgyzstan’s increasing, 65–66; larity of Uzbekistani music videos, Uzbekistan’s lack of, 69, 72, 194 210n26; venues for, 77, 222n8, 229n24, free market. See capitalism 229n26; for young men, 90, 121–22 Fumagalli, Matteo, 56, 241n11 entrepreneurs, 31, 193–94 essentialism, essentialist analyses, 14, 64, 69, Garment Factory, 80, 82, 222n14 125, 144, 175–76 gates, of Uzbek houses (eshik), 4, 133–34, ethnic diversity: in Kyrgyzstan, 204n22, 140 212n1; in Osh, 6–7, 10–11, 28, 30, gates, to wards of Osh, 86–87 79, 204n22, 207nn7–8, 208n13; in gender- and age-groups, 121, 229n22; in Uzbekistan, 57, 212n1 public places, 39, 77, 229n26; segregation ethnic homelands, vs. nation-states, 64 by, 127, 135–36; visiting rituals and, ethnicity, 208n11; ideal leaders transcending, 133–35; ziyofats as, 117–19 171–72; Soviet-defined, 11–12, 23, 64, Germans, relocated to work in Osh, 79, 103, 201n6 207n7 ethnic mentality: avoiding essentialism of, gerrymandering boundaries, of Osh, 6–7, 89, 14, 144; Kyrgyz, 66, 69; reflected in house 91–94, 207n8 designs, 93, 141; Soviets promoting, 6 globalization, influences of, 34–35 ethnic minorities, 55; Osh Uzbeks as, 9, global status, 167–71 28, 43, 54, 59, 198, 207n8; Osh Uzbeks government, of Kyrgyzstan, 52–53, 203n15, rejecting label as, 11, 64–65, 204n22; 219nn47,53; on closing of Do’stlik border yearning for means of change, 186–87 crossing, 47, 60, 62–63; commitment to ethnography, 17–18 fairness as multiethnic state, 10–11, 54, ethnoterritorial states, 64, 106–8 203n21; criticism of reforms by, 153, evil, structural aspects of, 189 155–58; efforts to reduce tensions at exchange. See idiom of exchange border, 213n9; Kyrgyz holding positions of power in, 11, 54, 186, 222n11; lack of families, 88; dispersion of, 99–101, 225n40, solution for housing shortage, 101–2; 226n41; division of labor in, 99–100, liberal reforms of, 12, 44; minimalist 119, 123, 136–37, 228n19; land divided authoritarianism of, 70, 221nn62,64; not among, 99, 227n13; land for, 83–84, 97, replacing Soviet iconography, 71, 71–73; 109–10; life in mahallas, 113–14, 232n11; Osh Uzbeks’ criticisms of, 65–69, 161; living arrangements of, 96–98, 139–40 Osh Uzbeks’ relations with, 55, 59–60, Farnell, Brenda, 127, 231n7 76, 202n14; relations with Uzbekistan, Fergana Valley, 26, 214n14; cotton 42, 213n9, 237n14; using history to production and processing in, 24, establish legitimacy of, 66–67 223n17; influence on Central Asia’s “Great Silk Road Doctrine,” 205n31 internal connectivity, 51–52; Osh in, Gullette, David, 219n53 49–50, 190, 213n4, 240n3; population density of, 52–53; Soviet division of, 50– habitus concept, 234n30 51, 214n15; tangled borders in, 53, 65, Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), 118 216n26; topographic map of, 50; travel Hall, Edward, 5, 231n7 through, 49–50, 53, 215n19; Uzbekistan’s Hanks, William, 145 share of, 52–53, 240n8 hashar (neighborhood assistance), 130–31, Ferguson, James, 181–82 226n42, 232n11 Fernea, Elizabeth, 226n4, 232n10 Heidegger, Martin, 230n2 Hirsch, Francine, 214nn15–16 Index 273

Hiss, Tony, 5, 127 idioms, 185; definition of, 13–14; usefulness historical-cultural museum, on Solomon of, 197–98 Mountain, 36 Ilkhamov, Alisher, 220n56 history, 146, 167, 190; Kyrgyz, 171, imageablity, of cities, 87–88, 107, 227n5 218nn42–43; Kyrgyz establishing state imaginaries, 17, 152, 204n28; definition legitimacy through, 66–67; Kyrgyz of, 13–14; of ideal state, 117, 172–83; nomadic, 64, 66, 69, 141, 218n39; imperial, 176–77; khan-centered, tribalism in Kyrgyz, 68, 219n53, 220n54; 175, 188; of mahallas, 109–10, 231n3; Uzbek, 173, 204n25 sociopolitical, 14, 147, 151, 155, 181–83; Ho, Engseng, 35 tarbiya in, 113, 182; usefulness of, 198; of hospitality, Uzbek, 3, 5 Uzbekistan as magical state, 178–83 houses, 101, 228n14, 234nn22–23; as Imom Buhori Mosque, 38–39, 41 metaphor for state, 155–56 independence, praise for Karimov’s, 173–75 houses, Kyrgyz: in Aktilek, 92–93, 234n24; industry, 160; economic values privileging, Uzbek compared to, 93, 141 33, 68; Soviet focus on, 75, 78–80, houses, Uzbek, 81, 98, 106, 114, 233nn18,21; 222n12, 223n15; state’s responsibility flexibility of uses in, 139–40; language for, 162 distinctions about, 140–41; layout of, industry, in Kyrgyzstan, 51, 54, 223n19; in 4–5, 139; relation to street, 4, 86, 140; building materials, 89, 225n34; collapse visitors to, 5, 133–35, 142, 201n5 as failure of leadership, 150, 157–58; housing, 94; construction of, 225nn32,34; collapse of, 24, 31, 35, 150; effects of, 76, Kyrgyz demand for, 92, 94; in land use 79; effects of collapse of, 25, 30, 33, 101; trade-offs, 51, 88, 98–99, 101; modular efforts to rebuild, 67–68; in Kirgiz Soviet units for, 89, 101; shortage of, 23, 97–98, Socialist Republic, 81; migration to work 101–2 in, 10, 23, 79; postwar, 10, 79, 81; pre- Housing Construction Plant (DoSKo), Revolution, 79; underdeveloped, 44, 162 89–90 industry, in Uzbekistan, 162, 193, 241n9 hovli (courtyards, in Uzbek homes), 137–38; inequalities, in Kyrgyzstan, 44, 54–55, 96 differences among, 137, 140; language inflation, 221n63; in Kyrgyzstan, 44, 70, 164; distinctions about, 140–41; mahalla as sign of failed state, 33, 44 streets vs., 132–42; privacy in, 132–38, infrastructure, 162; Kyrgyzstan’s, 44, 70, 150; 232n13, 233n18; uses of, 5, 97, 136–40; in Osh, 80–81, 192; Uzbekistan’s, 70–71 Uzbek pride in, 3, 5 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 167 Humphrey, Caroline, 182–83, 222n10 Islam, 22, 136, 143, 228n14, 229n23, Husserl, Edmund, 230n2 238n23; in Central Asia, 13, 227n8; lack of influence on Kyrgyz mentality, idiom of exchange, 21, 23, 42, 44–45, 87, 66; literature and articles for, 27, 39, 189–91; Osh in, 14–15, 59, 192–94. See 207n6; Middle Eastern vs. traditional, also mediation 41, 118; pre-Soviet, 108, 112–13, 227n10; idiom of mahallas, 105–6, 142–44; as ideal proxemics of piety, 117–20; revival in communities, 125, 177; in societal Osh, 39–42, 106, 117, 207n6; ruler agency, 186–87 and realm in, 181, 183, 211n38; self- idiom of societal agency, 183–84, 188–90 education on, 112, 117, 212n41; Soviet idiom of the divided city, 75–76, 102–4, campaign against, 38–39, 110–13, 227n9, 186–87, 197 238n23; Uzbekistan’s repression of, 38; idiom of the khan, 175; Karimov as, 69, 149, Uzbeks’ limited knowledge and practice 151, 164, 166–67, 172, 174, 176; magical of, 68, 110, 228n16; Vodka Factory as state in, 178–83; societal agency in, affront to, 79–80 186–90 Islamic extremists, 44, 69, 118, 213n10; idiom of transformation, 152, 172; mahallas belief in need for security against, 48, in, 146–47; tarbiya and leadership in, 159, 236n7; in Kyrgyzstan, 56, 150; 174–75, 177–78 274 Index

Islamic extremists (continued), Uzbekistan’s 177, 183–84; idiom of, 151, 175–76, border closing as control of, 48, 160 178–83, 186–87; as idiom of societal Islam Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), 38, agency, 183–84, 188–90; Karimov as, 69, 47, 213nn10,12 151-52, 159–60, 164, 166–67, 172, 174; in a magical state, 179–80; qualities of, Jacobs, Jane, 117 158–59, 180, 183; responsibilities of, 151, Jalalabat, Kyrgyzstan, 11, 204n22; riots of 152–53, 175; state equated to, 180, 183, 2010 in, 7–8; routes to Osh from, 51–52, 187; Timur seen as, 174, 236n13 159–60 kinesthetics, 126, 146, 230n1 Japalak (Kyrgyz village and region of Osh), Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic, 10, 81; Osh 91–94 in, 50–51, 55–56, 75; Osh’s autonomy vs., jo’ra (cohort of peers), 121 55–56, 214n16 Judt, Tony, 9 Kokand Khanate, 50 Juraev, Sherali (Uzbekistani singer), 35, Kolkhozes (collective farms), absorbed by 210n26 Osh, 83–84, 91 justice, and source of law, 182–83 Korea, trade goods from, 30, 193 Koreans, relocated to work in Osh, 79, 207n7 Kara-Suu region: bazaars in, 121–22, Koroteyeva, Victoria, 228n21 192–94, 240n6; mahallas in, 91, 97; trade KTR (Kyrgyzstan’s government-owned through, 191–92 media station), 58 Karimov, Islam (president of Uzbekistan), Kyrgyz, 7, 28, 177, 241n10; holding positions 69, 215n24, 217nn36–37, 220n56; of power, 11, 54, 186, 222n11; mahallas Andijan events and, 44, 69, 220n61; and, 7, 202n9, 233n20; moving to Osh authoritarianism, 149–50, 161–62, 175; to work in factories, 7, 10, 23, 51, 92; borders and, 55–64, 159–60, 213n9; treatment in Uzbekistan, 55, 171–72 character imputed to, 155–56, 161, Kyrgyz Airways, 53–54 166; economy and, 53, 68, 155, 161–62, Kyrgyzstan, 77, 162–63, 203n19; compared 235n3, 236n11; impartiality imputed to Uzbekistan, 150, 179, 191–92; effects to, 69, 171–72, 180–81, 238n31; as khan of physical geography on, 44, 51–52; figure, 149, 164, 166–67, 172, 174, 176; ethnic diversity in, 204n22, 212n1; lack of regard for Osh Uzbeks, 11, 55- internal connectivity of, 24, 53–54; 59, 63, 159–60, 163–66, 194, 217n30, Osh Uzbeks’ citizenship in, 8–10, 57, 236n12; in a magical state, 179–80; 191, 194, 216n29; refugees in, 194–95; nationalism of, 57, 216n27; Osh Uzbeks’ relations with Uzbekistan, 24; status belief in character of, 159, 235n56, of, 167, 170–71, 174. See also border, 238n23; Osh Uzbeks’ disillusionment Kyrgyzstan/Uzbekistan; government, of with, 44, 152, 191, 194; Osh Uzbeks’ Kyrgyzstan loyalty to, 155–56, 163–66, 176; Osh Kyrgyz/Uzbek relations: effects of events of Uzbeks’ praise for, 68, 149–50, 162–63; as 2010 on, 198, 203n16; Kyrgyz feelings personification of Uzbekistan, 162, 169– on, 55, 82; in mixed neighborhoods, 70, 187; positioning self as Timur heir, 94, 202n9; in Osh, 6–9; pre-Soviet, 64; 57–58, 174, 236n13; security measures tensions in, 24–25; Uzbek feelings of by, 12-13, 48–49, 55–59; Uzbekistan’s unjustness in, 54–55, 106–7. See also global status and, 168–70; “Uzbek path” riots of, 150, 173–75, 195 Kyrgyz-Uzbek University (KUU), 216n28 Karimov, O’ktambek (Osh Uzbek journalist), 60–64 labor: coming into Osh from rural Kazakhstan, 35, 237n18 settlements, 93; in Soviet vision of Kelinlar Qo’zg’oloni (Revolt of the Daughters- development of cities, 75; for Textile in-Law) (Abzalov film), 98, 232n13 Plant, 24, 81–82; transit system for Kenja (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 123–24 workers, 79. See also migration khan: Central Asians used to living under, land: distributed to families, 83–84, 97; Index 275

divided among families, 99, 227n13; makeup of, 7, 84; ethnic territoriality family plots of, 109–10, 224n24, 233n21; and, 7–8, 106–8; expectations in, 142–47, state’s stewardship of, 114–15, 152–54, 145, 187; family continuity in, 113–14; 188. See also privatization forming expectations of society, 142–47; land use, 3, 51, 96, 210n3; for agriculture vs. as ideal communities, 109–10, 177, 186, housing, 98–99, 101; growth of bazaar’s, 230n2; as idiom, 105–6, 144, 146, 186– 33–34; in need for housing, 1–2, 88, 87; as idiom of societal agency, 186–90, 92; riots of 1990 stemming from, 1–2, 197; as idiom of societal transformation, 8, 21; trade-offs in, 21, 25; as zero-sum 142, 146–47, 186; imageablity of, 80, 83, exchange, 23, 51; zones of, 23–25 86–88, 107; as intimidating, 7, 88, 107, languages, 39, 207n6, 216n27, 234n23; 225n37; Kyrgyz and, 202n9, 233n20; comparison of Kyrgyz and Uzbek, 208n9, land use for, 24, 210n3, 233n21; moral 230n29; diversity in, 28–29, 59; Kyrgyz, values in, 108–10; as only way to be 54, 58, 66; media use of, 58–59; Russian, proper Uzbek, 6, 9, 96, 105, 113–17; as 28, 54, 208n10, 217n35, 237n16; on oppressive, 120–24, 148–49; privacy in, Stone Monument plaque, 22, 206n1; use 132–35, 232n10; sale of houses in, 101, of Latin alphabet, 63, 218n39; Uzbek, 60, 228n14; social density of, 35, 128–29, 217n35 133, 231n9; social expectations in, 42, law enforcement: Kyrgyzstan’s, 161, 236n7; 126–29, 132, 142, 232n11; social life Uzbekistan’s, 236n7 of, 100–101; Soviet influence on, 75, leadership, 174, 189; characteristics of, 102–3, 145–46; space efficiency of, 84, 153, 158–59, 161, 167, 175, 235n3, 97–98, 138, 233n21; state compared to, 237n17; effects of moral failure of, 187–90, 239n1; streets in, 92, 126–32, 153–55, 158, 162–63, 187–88; in idiom 128, 232n10; thinking with, 107–8, of transformation, 174–75; masculinity 189; threats to, 6–8; utilities in, 54, 94; in, 167, 170; moral character in, 153, 166, Uzbekistan’s use of, 224n28, 226n45; 180–83, 238n23; Osh Uzbeks’ evaluation work of, 226n42, 232n11. See also under of, 149–50; rationale for authoritarian, idioms 149, 161, 177–78; source of law in, 182– Makarova, Ekaterina, 228n21 83; within Uzbek communities, 96 Mamasaidov, Muhammedjon (Osh Uzbek Lefebvre, Henri, 234n29 leader), 54 Lenin, V. I., 235n3; statues of, 71, 71–73, 77 Mamur (mahalla leader), 67 Lenin Kolkhoz, 23, 70, 93, 235n5 Manas (Kyrgyz national epic), 171 liberal democracy, theories of, 174, 182; Manas, statue of, 221n67 Kyrgyzstan’s, 44, 69–70, 163–64, 191, Mannerheim, C. G. (Finnish explorer and 221n63. See also democracy president), 36–37, 130, 211n33 loudspeakers, 29, 101, 222n8 Mansurov family (Osh Uzbek interlocutors), Lynch, Kevin, 107, 227n5 120, 193; belief in Uzbekistan’s TV news, 58–59; involvement in ziyofats, 118–19; Macauley, Alastair, 127 Oyzoda, 118; Rahmon, 119, 121–22, magical state, 178–83 134–35, 193; Sabriddin Hoji, 118, 121– mahalla leaders, 108–9, 114, 148, 239n1 22; Saidjon, 119, 121, 193–94 mahallas, 2–5, 141, 226n4, 228n21, 231n3; Manz, Beatrice, 177 boundaries of Osh and, 36–37, 74–75, maps: of Osh, 87–88, 225n30; by Russian 83–85, 89, 91; building in adir lands, imperial cartographers, 211n33; vs. 94–99, 102; businesses in, 7, 87, 92, pedestrian views, 225n31, 226n43 202n10; cooperative use of ariks in, “the market,” connotations of, 208n17 130–32; as cultural reservoirs, 108–13, market economy, 31, 44, 175. See also 145, 238n23; demolition of, 51, 81, 83, capitalism 88–89, 106; development of new, 94, 97; marriages, arranged, 122 dispersion of families among, 99–101; masculinity, as ideal leadership distinctiveness of, 74–75, 186–87; ethnic characteristic, 167, 170 276 Index

Mecca, Hajj to, 37–38 nation-states: concept of, 10–11; difficulty of media, 63–64, 236n12. See also press. See model in Central Asia, 11–12, 44; empire also television vs., 176–77, 204n26; ethnic homelands media, in Kyrgyzstan, 49, 164; state influence vs., 64; Osh Uzbeks’ ambiguity in, 64–65, on, 39, 221n62 176. See also states; states, role of media, in Uzbekistan, 58, 218n39; influence natural resources, Kyrgyzstan’s lack of, 44 on Osh Uzbeks, 68, 150; repression of, Navoi Park, 77, 222n8 69, 217n37 Nazarbaev, Nursultan (president of mediation, 30, 103; downside of centrality Kazakhstan), 220n57, 237n18 in, 44–45; idiom of exchange and, 189– neoliberalism, 151, 181; applied to Central 91; issues of, 21–22; Osh’s new roles in, Asia, 13, 205n33; Kyrgyzstan and, 65–66, 192–95, 198. See also idiom of exchange 167 Megoran, Nick, 205n33, 213n7, 213n8, New City, of Osh, 78, 79, 223n20; 216n25, 217n33 development of, 83, 223n22; institutions Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 144, 188, 234n27 of, 77–78, 82; relation to Old City, 74–76, MezonTV, 64, 210n26 102–4 Mezon, 39, 218n38; on closing of Do’stlik Niebuhr, Reinhold, 189 border crossing, 47–48, 60–64; efforts to nomadism: Kazakh interpretations of, maintain delicate position, 59–60, 62–63 218n40; Kyrgyz history as, 64, 66, 69, micro-districts (mikroraion, apartment 141, 218n39 neighborhoods), 88–89, 94, 106 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), migration, 79, 88; of Kyrgyz coming to work 32, 122 in factories, 7, 10, 23, 51, 92; remittances Northrop, Douglas, 209n18 from workers abroad, 35, 193, 210n29; Nurolim (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 148–49, for work out of Kyrgyzstan, 22, 35, 102 183–84 mixed marriages (Uzbek/Kyrgyz), 8 modernity, 174; range of alternatives in, Odilbek (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 111–12 181–82; Soviet, 76, 172, 186, 221n3 oil, Uzbekistan’s, 44 monuments and monumental spaces, O’n Adir (Uzbek residential neighborhood), 221n67; Kyrgyzstan not replacing Soviet, 95–99 71; in Soviet development of Osh, 77; in O’rmonjon (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 118 Uzbekistan’s nation-building: Timur’s, 57 Osh Airport, 223n20 mosques, 39; role in social interactions, 116– Osh 3000 campaign, 37, 66–67, 210n30, 17; social interactions around, 127–28; 218n44, 219nn45–46, 240n3 on Solomon Mountain, 36–37; in Soviet Osh Institute for Western Education, 32 campaign against Islam, 110–13. See also Osh Kirgiz Drama Theater, 82 specific mosques Osh Pedagogical Institute, 223n23 Mughal Empire, Babur founding, 37 Osh province, Kyrgyz as majority in, 28 Muslims: pilgrimages by, 37–38. See also Osh Provincial Museum of History and Islam Local Lore, 36 Osh Riots of 2010. See under riots names: mahallas lacking, 80, 86; Soviet, 4, Oshskii micro-district, 7, 24, 27–28, 90, 91 71, 85, 87, 92 Osh State Social University, 216n28 nationalism, 167; Kyrgyz, 171–72, Osh State University, 77, 223n23 203n21, 221n67; Osh Uzbeks avoiding OshTV, 28–29, 59, 64, 101, 210n26, 217n36 expressions of, 59, 63; Osh Uzbeks’ Ostona (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 122–23 fear of Kyrgyz, 67–69, 172; Soviet Otumbaeva, Roza, 202n14 iconography and, 72–73; Uzbekistan’s, 55, 57, 172, 174, 217n33 peer pressure: for Islamic piety, 40–41, 118; nationality, 214n16; ideal leaders in mahallas, 120, 143–44 transcending, 171–72; Soviet-defined Peters, John, 18 ethnicity and, 82, 103, 170 Index 277 phenomenology of dwelling, 14, 105, 127, Ravat-Abdullakhan, 36 143–45, 187 Rawls, John, 182 physical geography: of Osh, 43, 49–54. See Reeves, Madeleine, 213n8, 216n25 also topography reflexivity, in fieldwork, 6 pilgrimages: to Mecca, 37–38; to Solomon reforms, 174, 183; gradual, 156, 220n60; Mountain, 37, 190 ill-effects of, 153–58; Kyrgyzstan’s, 12, 44, place, 9, 13, 15, 17, 231nn5,7, 234n29; 65–66, 69–70; Uzbekistan’s gradual, 44, associations with, 105, 107, 177, 226n1; 69, 150, 154–55, 173–75, 195 experience of, 5, 197; hierarchies of, 18, refugees, 44, 194 238n30; kinesthetics of, 126, 144–45, religion: freedom of, 41–42, 69; Soviet 230n1 campaign against, 110–13, 227n9; state place-ballets, 127, 144–45 control of, 37–39. See also Islam politics, 51, 180; siyasa vs., 181, 239n34 restaurants, 25, 34, 89–90, 192, 225nn35–36 politics, Kyrgyz, 54, 68, 70, 220n54 riots, in 1990, 1–2, 202n12; effects of, 8, 22; politics, Uzbekistani, 68–69, 72, 179–80 Kyrgyz demand for housing in, 92, 94; population, 215n20 land use dispute triggering, 8, 21, 51, population, of Osh, 10, 79, 102; ethnic 101; Stone Monument commemorating, makeup of, 6–7, 94, 204n22; growth of, 22–24, 23; Uzbekistan not defending co- 80, 88, 91, 102 ethnics in, 55–56 postcolonialism, 151, 167, 172, 174 riots, in 2010, 2, 56, 203nn15,17; destruction postsocialism, 12–13, 142, 151, 188-89; in, 30, 106, 207n4; effects of, 39, 195, 198, instability in, 32–33; Osh as idiom of 222n8, 223n21, 230n28; ethnic makeup mediation in, 190–91; Osh Uzbeks’ of, 6–7; inquiries into, 202n14; killings ways to manage in, 193–94; perceived in, 7–8; political crisis triggering, 22 transitions to free market and dem- roads: Kyrgyzstans’ going through ocratization, 18–19; transformations vs. Uzbekistan, 24, 159–60; maintenance of, transitions in, 206n41; two visions for, 70–71, 215n21; Osh’s accessibility and, 44, 69–73, 151; in Uzbekistan, 172–74 49–50; from Osh to Bishkek, 48, 51; from poverty, in Uzbekistan, 57, 161–62, 191–92, Osh to Jalalabat, 51–52; to Tashkent, 53 240n8, 241n9 Roziman (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 80–81, press, in Kyrgyzstan, 70; Kyrgyz-language, 99–100, 225n40 66; Uzbek-language, 60, 217n35, 222n11 Russia, 35, 177, 210n27, 216n26, 220n61, press, in Uzbekistan, 56, 63 237n14 privacy, 233n15; in mahallas, 132–38; in Russian consulate, 35 Uzbek homes, 132–38 Russian Empire, 75–76, 80 privatization: criticism of Kyrgyz, 67, Russians, 30; Central Asia and, 3, 208n12; 219n48; effects of Kyrgyzstan’s, 24, 153, Kyrgyz replacing in positions of power, 156–58; Karimov’s slow pace of, 162 54, 222n11; in Kyrgyzstan, 10, 72, 212n1; prostitution, 34, 209n22 in Osh, 7, 79, 202n8 Pump Factory, 33–34, 81 Sabirov, Alisher (Osh Uzbek leader, also Qalam (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 155–56, spelled Sobirov), 54 158; on border closing, 48, 159–60; on Schatz, Edward, 220n54 cotton processing and marketing, 52, Schutz, Alfred, 145, 230n2 235n5; on Uzbekistan and Karimov, Scott, James, 138, 233n19 162–63, 166 Seamon, David, 127 Qorasuv, Uzbekistan, 240n7 security, 209n23; multiplicity of borders and checkpoints for, 53, 215n22, 216n26; Rahmon, Shavkat, 194 Osh Uzbeks’ belief in need for, 48, rais. See mahalla leaders 159; state’s responsibility for, 173, 177; rational actors, 16 Uzbekistan’s concerns about, 12–13, 46–49, 213nn6,12 278 Index sensorial geographies, 4–5 under, 6, 10, 79, 171, 202n8; goals of, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 210n27 77–79, 202n8, 220n55, 222n10, 238n23; Sharabi, Hisham, 178 housing construction under, 98–99, Sharipov, Salizhan (Kyrgyzstani Uzbek 225n32; ill-effects of reforms as failure cosmonaut), 38 of leadership by, 153; industrialization Sherali (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 96–97 under, 78–80, 222n12, 223n15; influence Silk Plant, 79–80, 82, 222nn12–13 on mahallas, 145–46; influence on Silk Road, 14, 57; as metaphor, 15, 205n30; population, 66, 103, 222n10; Kyrgyz and, Osh’s role in, 26, 190, 240nn3–4 28, 66, 186; lack of effect of republics’ Silk-Spinning Factory, 80 borders under, 45–46; legacy of, 11–12, Silverstein, Brian, 211n33 44, 71, 71–73, 76–78, 87; “legibility” of Sobirov, Davron (Osh Uzbek leader, also citizens under, 80, 86–87; nostalgia for, spelled Sabirov),, 63 65, 175–76; Osh Uzbeks under, 56, 76, social fields, 145 145–46, 172–73, 177, 222n11, 235n3; social interactions: density of, 89, 126–32, urbanization under, 75, 221nn2–3 231n9; expectations in, 142, 145; spatiality, 187–88, 204n28; of authority, expectations in mahallas, 126–29, 132, 180–81; language and, 140–41; morality 142–47; in mahallas, 105–6, 114; on and, 114–16, 125; sociality and, 113, 124, mahalla streets, 126–32, 144, 231n7; sites 126–29, 132–42, 144–45, 231n9 for, 229nn24,26 Stalin, Joseph, 235nn3, 5–6, 238n23 socialism, 153; economy under, 32–33; state, 126, 145; control of religion by, industrialization to prove merit of, 37–39; houses as metaphor for, 155–56; 78–79; nostalgia for, 175–76 imaginaries of ideal, 172–83; khan socialist progressivism, 82 equated to, 162, 180, 183; magical, social life: of mahallas, 100–101; at 178–83; postures toward citizens, 73, 75, restaurants, 90 86–87, 224nn25–26; as quasi-mahalla social services, 150, 173 space, 187–90, 239n1; relations with societal agency, 178–80; ethnic minorities’ farmers, 156; signs of failure of, 33, 150, yearning for means of, 186–87; idiom of, 153–54, 156–58, 162–63, 187–88; Uzbek 183–84, 188–90 imaginaries of, 147, 172 societal renewal, 152, 183, 185; hope for state state, role of, 182; caretaking, 32, 114–15, transformation in, 172–74; mahallas as 181; in economy, 67, 161–62, 177, idiom of, 125, 142–47, 186, 197 221n63; moral charge, 115–16; societies, self-definition of, 204n27 postsocialism, 151, 157–58; temporary Solomon (biblical and Quranic king), 36–37 paternalism as, 12, 175 Solomon Mountain, 21, 35, 91, 198; Stone Monument, 22–24, 23, 24–25, 42, pilgrimages to, 37, 190; variety of names 206n1 for, 210n30, 211n31 streets, 86, 192, 234n22; courtyards vs., soundscapes: of bazaar, 29; of mahallas, 132–42; increasing legibility of citizens 132–34, 141–42 through, 79, 83, 224n25; in Kyrgyz Soviet Union, 22, 58, 190, 238n30; accused neighborhoods, 93; in mahallas, 4, 4, 80, of trying to kill Uzbek culture, 96, 106; 92, 126–32, 128, 144, 232n10; in Oshskii campaign against religion, 36, 38–39, micro-district, 90; in Soviet development 110–13, 227n9; Central Asian republics of Osh, 77, 83, 223n22; Soviet names for, under, 57, 170; culture under, 31, 76, 71, 92 82–83; development of Osh under, Sulaimanov, Ertabyldy, 203n16, 219n45 74–75, 77–79, 78, 83–84, 88–89, 102–4, Sulayman. See Solomon 223n22; dissolution of, 53, 69, 167, 177; drawing borders in Central Asia, 50–51, Tajikistan, 49, 53, 213n12, 214n13 64, 214n15; economic values of, 24, 33; tarbiya (upbringing, discipline), 124, 188; as erosion of traditional values under, 105– idiom of transformation, 174–75; khan 6, 114, 136, 145; ethnicity/nationality imposing, 180, 182; leaders imposing, Index 279

163, 177–78; mahallas forming persons 219n53, 220n54; Osh Uzbeks denying in through, 113–17, 143–47 Uzbekistan, 68–69 Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 213n4; bombings in, Tulip Revolution, 68, 70, 219n53 48–49, 213n10, 240n5; losing influence Turner, Victor, 212n2 to Osh, 194–95; transportation to, 45–46, 46, 53–54 Ukrainians, in Osh, 79 Taylor, Charles, 13–14 unemployment: effects of, 8, 31, 33, 102; as Taylor, Ron (American humanitarian in sign of failed state, 24, 33, 44, 150; youth, Osh), 32 8, 33 technical assistance, to Kyrgyzstan, 65–66 United Nations, 32, 122, 167, 219n48 television, 31, 208n14; Kyrgyzstan’s, 58 (See United States, 167, 210n27, 213n12, 220n61 also OshTV); Osh, 212n40; propaganda universities, 55, 216n28, 218n42, 223n23 on Uzbekistan’s, 58–59, 167–70, 174, 188, Usmanova, Yulduz (Uzbekistani singer), 35, 226n45 210n26 territoriality, 7–9, 12, 106–7, 226n2 utilities, 54, 80–81, 92–93, 94, 130, 132 Textile Plant, 79, 223n17; collapse of, 24, Uzbek Airways, 53–54 82; effects of failure to coordinate Uzbek Drama Theater (S. M. Kirov Osh reforms on, 153, 157–58; labor for, 24, Uzbek Music-Drama Theater), 77, 82, 88, 223n18; micro-districts built across 222n11, 223n21 from, 88–89; as mini-city, 81–82, 223n16 Uzbekistan, 35, 210n26, 224n28, 226n45, Timur, Amir (Tamerlane), 174, 236n13; 228n21; changing to Latin alphabet, Karimov linking self to, 57–58, 166–67; 63, 218n39; on closing of Do’stlik in Uzbekistan’s nation-building, 57, 194 border crossing, 60–64; compared to titular nationality, 23, 28, 216n27; Kyrgyz as, Kyrgyzstan, 179, 191–92; ethnic diversity 10–11, 79; receiving prime state focus, in, 30, 212n1; ethnic minorities in, 55, 79, 83; as Soviet legacy, 11–12, 170 171; global status of, 167–70, 172–73; Tolib (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 100, 237n16; idea of annexation of Osh into, 11, 177; defending Karimov, 56–57, 164–66; internal connectivity of, 52–54; Karimov on inheritance of land, 109–10; on as personification of, 162, 169–70, 187; Uzbekistan, 168–70 Kyrgyzstan’s relations with, 24, 42, topography, 92; Central Asia’s internal 213n9, 237n14; nationalism in, 55, 57, connectivity and, 51–52; effects on 174, 217n33; Osh’s accessibility through, Kyrgyzstan, 44, 51–52, 215n20; of 49–54, 214n13; Osh Uzbeks believing Fergana Valley, 49–50, 50; Kyrgyzstan’s idyllic image of, 68–69, 154–55, 167–70, internal connectivity and, 24, 159–60; 226n45, 235n56; Osh Uzbeks comparing limiting Osh’s ability to grow, 22–23, 26, Kyrgyzstan to, 150, 154–55, 161–62; Osh 43–44, 51, 94–95, 101; limiting Osh’s Uzbeks’ desire to be under, 57, 204n23; accessibility, 24, 46, 49–50 Osh Uzbek’s hopes for, 172–74; Osh topophilia, 5 Uzbeks’ relation to, 10–11, 45–46, 49, tourism, 37 55–59, 176, 241n11; propaganda of, 167– trade, 14, 33, 68; importance of Kara-Suu in, 70, 241n13; reality in vs. propaganda of, 191–92; Osh as center of, 26, 191; Osh 57, 59, 191, 241n9; refugees in after Osh Uzbeks’ methods postsocialism, 193–94; 2010 events, 194; repression in, 8–9, 38, participants in, 54, 233n14, 241n10; 57, 69, 194, 216n28, 240nn5,8; security wealth from, 31, 93 concerns of, 42, 46–49, 52, 213nn5,12, trades, skilled, 29–30, 36, 54 215n18; Soviets and, 50–51, 72; state transportation, 79; difficulty of reaching paternalism in, 12, 44, 149; use of Timur Osh, 46, 49, 214n13; marshrutkas ideology, 166–67; “Uzbek path” in (minibuses), 91–92, 95–96; for Textile reforms in, 69, 173–75, 195, 220n60. See Plant workers, 82, 223n18. See also buses also economy, of Uzbekistan; Karimov, tribalism: khans and, 158–59; Kyrgyz, 68, Islam 280 Index

Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty- weddings, 25, 89 First Century (Karimov), 215n24 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 14, 19, 231n3 Uz-Daewoo (South Korean-Uzbekistani world status, of Central Asian nations, automobile company), 193, 236n9 58–59, 65, 172–74 Uzgen, 7, 11, 202n12 World Trade Organization (WTO), 70, 167 World War II, 209n18; Germans relocated to Verdery, Katherine, 32, 72 Osh during, 79, 207n7; industrialization villages, absorbed by Osh, 79, 83–84, 86, 91 in Osh and, 79-81; shortages during, virtue, discourses of, 108–10, 172 32–33 Vodka Factory, 79–80 Yo’lbuvi (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 2–6, 108 Wahhabis (so-called Islamic fundamental- Yurchak, Alexei, 167 ists). See Islamic extremists Walimat (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), 113–17, Zainabetdinova apartment district, 27–28, 153, 188, 235n3 38; mahalla demolished to build, 88–89 Wartenberg, Thomas, 142, 177–78 Zakharova, Antonina, 240n3 wealth, 122, 226n42; desire for, 31–32; Zarif (Osh Uzbek interlocutor), aphorism on Islamic piety and, 41–42; Kyrgyz postsocialist paths by, 70, 72–73 accumulating, 8, 92–93; Mansurovs’, 118, ziyofats (regular social gatherings), 99, 120; trade bringing, 31, 191–92; Uzbeks 117–19, 228nn19–20 accumulating, 8, 55, 92–93, 191