Rural Youth Within Changing Education, Formal Labour Market and Informal Economic Conditions During Postsocialist Transformation Period in the Kyrgyz Republic

Rakhat Zholdoshalieva

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Rural Youth within Changing Education, Formal Labour Market and Informal Economic Conditions during Post-Soviet Transformation Period in the Kyrgyz Republic

Doctor of Education 2016

Rakhat Zholdoshalieva

Department of Social Justice Education

University of Toronto Abstract

This qualitative case study examines the experiences, expectations and aspirations of education, employment, and future prospects of a group of rural youth growing up in the postsocialist era in southern Kyrgyzstan. Despite popular conceptions that youth are the authors of their life projects with an abundance of choice (Du Bois Reymond, 1995), the socially determining categories of social class, gender, ethnicity, and place still structure these choices and shape the life chances of contemporary youth (Roberts, 2010). This study shows how the postsocialist transformation has increased the burdens and uncertainties of young people and undermined the stability and security of their futures (DeYoung, 2010; Korzh, 2014; Roche, 2014; Walker, 2011). It identifies educational and social inequalities persisting from traditional Kyrgyz and Soviet society, as well as those emerging in the post-Soviet period, and analyzes the effects of these on the experiences and aspirations of rural Kyrgyz youth. Three types of rural Kyrgyz youth emerged from the data set of the study and three illustrative cases were: the trajectory of youth from the rural intelligentsia class with aspirations for a professional future; that of youth from the emerging successful stratum of kommersants (merchants) with aspirations for an entrepreneurial future, and that of youth from the former kolkhoz (Soviet collective farm) working class, who face the

ii precarious future of the migrant worker. These three social trajectories are explained, following

Bourdieu, as manifestations of the class and gendered habitus of the rural Kyrgyz youth and their families. The findings of the study reveal the ways that the social resources of kinship-oriented families, specifically their economic, cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital, determine rural youth experiences and future chances in postsocialist transformation in Kyrgyzstan.

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Acknowledgments

This thesis could not have been completed without the help and support of many people and institutions. First and foremost, I would like to extend my gratitude to the young people and their parents/guardians who participated in this research on which this thesis is based. These young people’s ambitions, imaginations, and wishes keep me hopeful about positive changes in their own and their families’ lives in the conditions of postsocialist transformation in rural Kyrgyzstan. I want to apologize if I have misrepresented them in any way. I also thank two rural schools, which opened their doors for me to recruit, inform and engage youth in the study.

My gratitude goes to the members of my thesis committee: Peter Sawchuk, Diane Farmer, and Alan DeYoung. Peter’s supportive guidance and continued questioning helped me engage with the data, raise questions and evaluate ideas critically. Throughout this program his teaching, guidance and support were enriching experiences to have. Diane taught me how to read and employ Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts more critically in my research project. Alan’s guidance extended from being a scholar who has been closely investigating changing post-Soviet Kyrgyz education towards one of a mentor in publishing collaborative scholarly works on rural Kyrgyzstan. I thank all of these and other professors, who engaged me in the critical analysis of postsocialist education and society, and hope that I would be able to demonstrate such professional and educational qualities they bring into the field of education and learning. I would like to thank my Pakistani academic mentor in particular, Dr. Bernadette Dean, whose educational activism and academic mentorship inspired me to pursue this doctoral degree in education for social equity and inclusionary citizenship.

I was able to complete my doctoral program with the generous financial support that these institutions have provided during my five years of the program: The Aga Khan Foundation (Switzerland), the University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan), the Aga Khan University-Institute for Educational Development (Pakistan), Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund (USA), the Open Society Institutes (USA), and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (Canada). I hope I continue to have strength to contribute my knowledge, skills, and expertise in the educational institutions of Central and South Asia and beyond.

I am specifically thankful for the members of the Koshmatova and Zholdoshaliev family who did not only provide financial and moral support in this lengthy program, but also extended their help with typing my handwritten interviews in Kyrgyz and escorting to the houses of the participants despite dark evenings, heavy rains and stormy winter days. I would like to thank both my parents – Koshmatova Ibadat and Zholdoshaliev Kapar - for reviewing my research questions to make them less academic more close to a southern rural Kyrgyz speech, and provide information about the historical context of this rural community and the schools. Their knowledge of the school histories along with the village helped me locate these rural youth’s experiences in larger historical, political, cultural and economic contexts. I also thank for their unconditional support throughout my life, as a child as well as an adult and value the knowledge that I received at home, in the kinship community, the village, and schools. I especially thank my sister, Umut and Toktayim, and my brother, Suiun, for typing the Kyrgyz interview transcripts and handling the research data professionally. Thanks are due to my partner, Shiv Kumar, who has not only been a constant emotional support, but also a critical reader of my earlier chapters.

Along this doctoral program my friends in Canada, Germany, Australia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, the US and around the world extended their support continuously. I thank especially Victorina Baxan, Kendra Ann-Pitt, and Stephen Bahry for not only being supportive friends but also reading my chapters and providing feedback on improving the earlier drafts. I am also thankful to all of the friends and colleagues for being there for me in this individualizing period of thesis project and having lengthy conversations on theories, concepts, experiences, research and life: Kat Schultz, Valerie Damasco, Philip Thaucher, Duishon Shamatov, Serhyi Kovalchuk, Farrukhsho Fraidonov, Sue Carter, Lars Albert, Jessica Schwittek, Farah Ali Akbar, Jia Luo, Christina Galego, Kristina Stoney, and Youssef Sawan. I would like to thank Tim Addis for his support in editing the later versions of the chapters.

I want to specifically thank two Canadian-Central Asian families who welcomed me as their sister with their warm hearts and hospitality: the family of Nouria Esengulova, Feriba and Karim Zargars, and Safar Khan Mohammad, and the family of Sayora Faromuz, Nilufar, Ali, Davlat, and Dadikhuda. I would like also to extend my gratitude to several people who were kind and supportive along this journey and made me feel welcome to their houses, families, parties, and conversations to ease the emotional labour of the doctoral program requirements: Lira Kydyralieva, Jill Sawchuk, Janet Teibo, Joe Curnow, Elmira Mamaeva, Syrga Salieva, Liza v

Rahmetova, Gulnara Kuramaeva, Nurgul and many others. All of these people made my life in Canada personally and professionally enriching and fulfilling. I cannot mention and thank all of the people and many others who have made substantial contribution to my wellbeing as well as to the completion of this research project.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents...... vii

Chapter 1 Young lives and new forms of rural inequalities in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan ...... 1

1.1. Introduction...... 1

1.2. Personal account: Growing up in a rural Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyz village ...... 1

1.3. The statement of the problem ...... 4

1.4. Research questions...... 10

1.5. The significance of the study ...... 11

1.6. The structure of the thesis...... 12

Chapter 2 Youth, education, and future: Social class, gender, and place ...... 16

2.1. Introduction...... 16

2.2. Debates on major functions of education in society: Review of western sociological theories of education ...... 17

2.3. Formal schooling in rural communities and youth aspirations: A review of western rural education literature ...... 25

2.4. Formal education and rural youth in developing societies: Connecting the dots ...... 32

2.5. Conclusion ...... 39

Chapter 3 Theoretical framework: Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice ...... 41

3.1. Introduction...... 41

3.2. Towards a total science: the Bourdieusian logic of social practice ...... 41

3.3. Social field: Logic and borders, reproduction and change ...... 47

3.4. Forms of capital and continuous configurations of capitals ...... 51

3.5. Habitus ...... 56

3.6. Conclusion ...... 66

Chapter 4 Research design and methodology...... 68

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4.1. Introduction...... 68

4.2. Distinctiveness of youth research ...... 69

4.3. Qualitative case study ...... 73

4.4. Participant selection and emergent sampling design ...... 75

4.4.1. Primary participants: youth aged 15 to 18 and in school...... 75

4.4.2. Secondary Participants: Parents and grandparents ...... 78

4.5. The methods and process of data collection ...... 80

4.6. Data management, analysis and interpretation ...... 87

4.7. Returning to one’s own community and place: Ethical considerations and dilemmas..... 90

4.8. Conclusion ...... 94

Chapter 5 Soviet and post-Soviet transformation of economy, formal education, culture and youth transitions in Kyrgyzstan ...... 96

5.1. Introduction...... 96

5.2. Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyz political and cultural changes ...... 97

5.3. Urban and rural economy in Soviet Kirgizia and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan...... 105

5.4. Formal education in Soviet Kirghizia and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan...... 114

5.5. Youth transition in Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan...... 122

5.6. Conclusion ...... 129

Chapter 6 Illustrative cases of post-Soviet rural youth trajectories in Kyrgyzstan: Darika, Kerim and Edil ...... 130

6.1. Introduction...... 130

6.2. Three illustrative cases into youth trajectories in post-Soviet rural Kyrgyzstan ...... 130

6.3. The rural intelligentsia habitus, accumulating cultural capital, and the professional future: The biography of Darika ...... 134

6.3.1. The rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia family, kulturnyi, and cultural reproductive strategies ...... 135

6.3.2. Darika as the only daughter: A sense of location and perception as a young woman...... 142

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6.3.3. Darika in school: The educational advantage and the intelligentsia habitus ...... 145

6.3.4. Darika: Imagining [an urban, gendered] professional future...... 148

6.3.5. Summary...... 156

6.4. Entrepreneurial habitus, the primacy of economic capital and the entrepreneurial future: The biography of Kerim...... 157

6.4.1. Kommersant family and economic reproductive strategies...... 157

6.4.2. Kerim as the youngest son: A sense of (social) location and the perception of a male heir...... 164

6.4.3. Kerim in school: The symbolic power of economic capital and strengthening social (school and communal/kinship) capital...... 165

6.4.4. Kerim: The entrepreneurial future ...... 170

6.4.5. Summary...... 173

6.5. The habitus of economic necessity with a migrant future trajectory: The biography of Edil...... 174

6.5.1. Rural Kyrgyz farmer-migrant family and the survival strategies ...... 176

6.5.2. Edil in the family: The eldest son of the farmer and migrant’s family...... 186

6.5.3. Edil in school: The habitus of kolkhozchu and educational disadvantage...... 190

6.5.4. Edil: The future of a migrant worker ...... 195

6.5.5. Summary...... 199

6.6. Conclusion ...... 199

Chapter 7 Persisting and emerging social inequalities in families and education: Post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz youth trajectories ...... 203

7.1. Introduction...... 203

7.2. Clusters of youth trajectories, sub-cluster variations, and social inequalities ...... 203

7.3. Intelligentsia habitus, conversion of cultural capital and professional futures...... 207

7.3.1. The rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia habitus and the changing meanings and values of kulturnyi...... 208

7.3.2. Conversion and conversion of cultural capital...... 212

7.3.3. Professional futures...... 215 ix

7.4. Entrepreneurial habitus, conversion of/from economic capital, and entrepreneurial futures...... 219

7.4.1. Entrepreneurial habitus - a new post-Soviet economic habitus...... 220

7.4.2. Conversion of/into economic and communal capital...... 222

7.4.3. Entrepreneurial futures...... 225

7.5. The habitus of necessity, ‘getting-by’ strategies of the capital-dispossessed and their precarious future...... 227

7.5.1. Habitus of dispossessed former Soviet collective farmers and precarious migrant workers ...... 228

7.5.2. Strategies of accumulating alternative capital: physical capital and migrant/kinship social capital ...... 233

7.5.3. Precarious futures or migrant futures...... 235

7.6. Conclusion ...... 237

Chapter 8 Conclusions and recommendations...... 243

8.1. Conclusions...... 243

8.2. Recommendations...... 253

References...... 257

Appendix 1: Information Letter for Participants (English)...... 302

Appendix 2: Information Letter for Participants (Kyrgyz)...... 307

Appendix 3: Protocol 1 for Youth Interview ...... 311

Appendix 4: Protocol 2 for Youth Interview ...... 312

Appendix 5: Protocol for Parent or Family Member Interview...... 314

Appendix 6: Illustrative Cases...... 316

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Chapter 1

Young lives and new forms of rural inequalities in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan 1.1. Introduction

In capitalist societies formal schooling has historically been criticized for failing to live up to its promise as a meritocratic institution for upward social mobility. Younger generations are encouraged to trust the meritocratic principles of the educational system and to participate in its educational process in order to position themselves for future adult roles in their societies. In this thesis I examine the changing nature of formal schooling in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan by focusing on the educational experiences, expectations and aspirations of young people and their families. In this research, I reinforce the argument that the social location of families and the place of residence are two significant factors of social inequalities for youth within postsocialist societies. This introductory chapter begins with a brief statement linking the central research topic to my personal trajectory, as a person born, grown up and schooled in a remote Kyrgyz village. It then places the key research questions within the global context of changing educational, employment and other opportunities for youth and the local context of growing up in the particular socio-historical period of post-Soviet economic and social transformation in rural Kyrgyzstan. Next, the chapter identifies the significance of this research in relation to fields in the sociology of education, specifically education in countries undergoing radical societal and ideological transformation and in the rural education in developing societies, as well as to issues in the global sociology of youth and the studies of youth in rural communities. Finally, this chapter outlines the structure of the thesis.

1.2. Personal account: Growing up in a rural Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyz village

The research question was constructed with the assumption that post-Soviet youth in rural regions encounter drastically different educational and employment opportunities from those experienced by youth growing up elsewhere, and notably from those of their parents’ generation. The questions investigated in this study stem from personal reflections on my own trajectory as

2 one who was born, raised, and schooled in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in a mountainous community in southern Kyrgyzstan.

I was born in the mid-1970s in a rural Kyrgyz settlement or a Soviet collective farm, which was founded in the late 1960s. As is typical of rural youth, I was raised in a multigenerational kinship setting. One part of my extended family, including my parents, several of my uncles and aunts and my maternal grandparents, had grown up in a Stalinist Kyrgyz collective farm community, which was founded in the late 1920s; who later settled in a larger collective farm on the valley in the 1960s during the Khrushchev era, and continue to live in the village today. Some of my relatives belonged to the rural Kyrgyz Soviet intelligentsia, who typically acquired their free post-secondary education in the cities of Jalalabad, Osh, or Frunze (now Bishkek) and later returned to pursue careers in Soviet rural state social institutions. My parents belonged to this group. Another part of my extended family, including my paternal grandparents, received high school education in the village and remained there to work in collective farms until the early 1990s. Some of my uncles and aunts worked in semi-professional occupations in the village after receiving their college education in agricultural occupations. Other uncles and aunts settled in cities like Osh and Ozgon after graduating from post-secondary education and worked as engineers or college instructors contributing to the urbanization of the southern regions in Kyrgyzstan. For my parents’ generation, post-secondary education was a means for social mobility, as their subsequent professional career and living standards were drastically improved as compared to those who had incomplete high school education only. The relationship between education and social mobility was quite positive in the case of my father, whose parents were collective farm labourers with incomplete high school education.

Until the mid-1980s my parents and our household enjoyed the privileges associated with the rural Soviet intelligentsia strata. Having had the experience of positive impact of free Soviet post-secondary education on their social status and economic standing, my parents explicitly expected us, the children, to excel academically at school and to project ourselves into professional futures. I became interested in becoming an accountant after my aunt shared about her positive educational experience in one of the financial colleges (Russian: technicum) in the capital city. However, the drastic post-Soviet restructuring of the rural economy in Kyrgyzstan forced everyone to revisit their aspirations and expectations as these became unrealistic dreams for many young people and their families to pursue in the future. Like many families in our

3 village we found ourselves experiencing a rapid decline in our standard of living. As was typical of many teachers’ economic circumstances at that time, our household needed to supplement its income by increasing the cattle on the farm and tilling the land to produce vegetables and grains for subsistence. However, the privatization of rural agriculture made it even more difficult for households to rent agricultural machinery, which resulted in increased demand for children’s labour. Post-Soviet generations of rural Kyrgyz youth found themselves struggling to meet the competing demands of multigenerational kinship families, household economies, and formal education. And my siblings and I and our family were no exception.

Social value of education remained high, however, many families started questioning the diminishing economic rate of schooling. My parents’ teacher salary could not cover the basic household expenses, let alone the medical and educational expenses. Despite these economic hardships, which we experienced, my parents remained consistent in their emphasis on our post- secondary education so that we could get professional work in the future. They ensured that they pulled and coordinated family resources for our post-secondary education.

The changes in the field of post-secondary education were especially drastic. With these changes, the strategies of families for their children’s education had to undergo adjustment. The funding to universities and colleges was drastically cut resulting in universities charging tuition fees. Such transformation of the higher education in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan did widen the access of university education to everyone on principle; however, this greater access to and choice for university education was coupled with an increase of financial burden of higher education on families. As long as families were willing to pay for the education of their children, the system did not necessarily object more students with or without adequate academic training. The state cut its funding of higher education drastically and introduced one of the highly controversial policies and practices of government scholarship.

As early stated the university admission policies changed drastically. Unlike Soviet generations, for example, whose admission to university programs was based on oral interviews and cumulative academic scores and their contribution in school komsomol organization, the post-Soviet generation of Kyrgyz applicants, starting from 1992, had to take multiple-choice tests for the process and content of which they were never prepared in their high school curriculum. In this regard, as a university applicant, I lived through these changes myself. At the

4 end of Grade 10, my uncle, who was a college instructor in Osh, introduced me to a professor of English at one of the prestigious universities in southern Kyrgyzstan. My parents and uncles requested this professor to assess my academic ability, as well as habits of study, to pursue post- secondary education in English. After receiving her feedback, my parents hired tutors privately to improve my proficiency in English and Russian and to instill the habits of study necessary for higher education. Until the end of Grade 11 I got time and support to prepare for the university admission in 1993.

As my own example above highlights, the strategies that support post-secondary education were based on the social position of my parents: my parents’ social (both professional and kinship) and economic resources greatly influenced my post-secondary educational opportunities. One of such resources was my parents’ occupational position, which enabled them to access information about changes in the education system much faster than other parents. For many rural youth, educational futures remained unfulfilled dreams and hopes, as they needed to earn money for family and individual survival. A few of my classmates and their households migrated to Osh and Bishkek to engage in informal mercantile trading, locally known as kommertsia, while others remained in the village to attend to their family farm holdings. By reflecting on these diverse trajectories and life chances among my generation of rural youth, I became interested in the relationship between social inequality, family origins, and formal educational and employment opportunities of rural youth in the period of radical postsocialist transformation in rural Kyrgyzstan.

1.3. The statement of the problem

The sociology of youth addresses the challenges faced by young people despite or because of their increased access to university education and greater opportunities for connectivity, and the social and spatial mobility that is shrinking the world into a global village (Beck & Beck- Gernsheim, 2002). While some argue that youth have more than ever become the authors of their own life projects, experiencing unprecedented choice and responsibility (Bauman, 2001; Du Bois Reymond, 1995), others point out that social determinants, including social class, gender, and place of residence, continue to structure these choices and decisions (Atkinson, 2010; Ball, Macrae, & Maguire, 1999; Furlong & Cartmeal, 1997/2007; Roberts, 2010). In western societies, it is argued, low-income, racialized and immigrant youth are systematically denied desirable

5 positions in the existing social hierarchy. Unlike their parents’ generation, these youth find that their college or university degrees can no longer guarantee fulfilling and stable employment (Giroux, 2012; Standing, 2011). Many argue that the contemporary generation of youth in western industrialized societies find themselves depending more on their families for their livelihoods and the transition to adulthood. Wyn (2011) in particular observes that urban youth in Canada and Australia increasingly rely on their families financially. Wyn (2001) argues that more and more Canadian and Australian youth are staying with their parents to decrease their debts from post-secondary education or to get assistance with co-financing their accommodation after graduation. Wyn (2001) reasserts that families and family-based resources in particular, fundamentally shape youth experiences in the 21st century. This assertion is quite relevant to the case of postsocialist Kyrgyzstan, in the absence of the welfare state youth turn to their families to finance their post-secondary education and to serve as mediators to access better jobs.

More and more the futures of contemporary youth are characterized by uncertainty and insecurity, as they accumulate debts for their college education and find at best insecure, part- time, and poorly paid jobs (Giroux, 2012). Standing (2011) categorizes such youth as the “precariat”, an emerging global class that lives under permanent conditions of insecurity and ambivalence as to their place in society. Some go further to argue that the endemic uncertainty about the future is mostly expressed by those whose experiences of the present are already uncertain and insecure (Bourdieu, 2000; Wieranga, 2011). The imagined futures and social horizons of the contemporary youth in urban centers in particular are predominantly influenced by the current class positions of their families and themselves (Atkinson, 2013; Ball, Macrae & Maguire, 1999). Therefore, one's temporal consciousness or the capacity to have some hold of the present and the ability to project oneself in the future, or for that matter, to change it for desirable future, according to one's dreams and hopes, are shaped by social class, gender, place of residence, as well as age (Atkinson, 2013; Ball et al., 1999, 2000). For rural youth, the challenges of growing up - pursuing post-secondary education and decent employment - and embarking on their futures have always been distinct from those of their metropolitan counterparts. With the expansion of global capitalism, rural education in the global North sets itself the task of enabling and encouraging youth to project themselves into a future of mobility and to envision life projects outside their rural communities, that is in global urban educational, employment and economic centers. Some, including Sher and Sher (1994),

6 citing the case of the Australian rural education two decades ago, go even further to state that rural educators are increasingly expected to prepare rural youth to act bi-culturally so that they can lead productive lives in both rural and urban environments. Corbett (2007), in particular, using the case of Canadian rural youth's mobility decisions in the Atlantic region, observes that academic success is imperative for migration from rural to urban centers, which in turn, is necessary for upward social mobility especially in the context of shrinking job prospects in local youth labour markets. According to Corbett (2007), the distribution of this mobility capital, or a set of resources for geographic mobility is unequal, as social class and gender backgrounds play greater role. Corbett’s (2007) findings reveal that more rural women from richer families than low-income men in Atlantic Canada achieved higher educational credentials in urban areas. Similarly, in her study of aspirations of high school students in rural Canada, Cairns (2011) shows how through a career-education program Grade 7 and 8 students are prepared to project themselves into the future of a neoliberal economy. Growing up in a community with declining industrial agricultural economy, aging population, and a lack of employment opportunities, the perceptions of these adolescent youth of their future incorporated the indicators of adult success - to have a good education, life, home and job - that are located outside their rural community. Their education program instilled a perception of their future elsewhere and prepared them outward and upward spatial mobility so that they lead successful future lives. For Cairns (2011), these dominant neoliberal discourses of youth and adult success also produced the understanding that youth bare individual responsibility for their success as well as failures. In the case of these adolescents they will be blamed for their economic marginalization if they do not embrace the opportunities for spatial mobility.

The literature on rural youth in developing countries in the global South paints an even more complex picture, as their education and employment opportunities are still more uncertain and precarious than those of youth growing up in the global North. In addition to extreme poverty, poor educational resources, a lack of programs that address the issues of youth, and the growing challenges of these emerging states to develop into socially cohesive and peaceful societies and establish the rule of law in these states, rural youth often find themselves in desperate situations in which out-migration - with or without formal training – or the geographic mobility is one of the few available coping strategies (Proctor & Lucchesi, 2012; Tafere & Woldehanna, 2012; Stark & Levhari, 1982). Thus, the mission of rural education in the global

South becomes even more difficult, as it needs to prepare youth to become workers in the global capitalist economy and develop identities in increasingly radical nationalist politics as well as succeed multi-culturally (to borrow and extend Sher and Sher's (1994) earlier assertion) to lead productive lives in different countries, economies, and cultures, that is their rural/local, national, and international economic, cultural (including linguistic) and social contexts.

One could identify two major categories of rural youth in the global South in relation to geographic mobility, as this issue dominates the scholarship of youth and rural education globally. One of these categories of youth in rural regions in the global South who move out of their rural communities to enter local, national, and international labour markers without any occupational training and higher education. This category of youth must not only be prepared to project themselves into a future with uncertain citizenship and legal conditions and fewer economic, social, cultural, and educational (including linguistic) resources, but they should also be willing to work for less and less often and remaining at the margins of economic prosperity or decline in migrant-receiving urban centers of their own and other countries and resilient enough to survive dangerous work and life conditions locally as well as outside their communities and nations.

Simultaneous to such form of mobility is the migration of educated rural youth to urban centers for salaried employment or the second category of rural youth in the global South. Their pathways to post-secondary education and towards the social upward mobility can be comparable to the experience of those rural youth living in societies in the global North (Corbett, 2007). This category of youth aspires for geographic and international mobility, however, with the goal of obtaining quality education and professional work experience abroad. For these youth the mobility with the help of higher educational attainment and economic resources is a crucial marker of social privilege. Therefore, it is important to recognize by now that there are different motivators and forms of rural youth mobility, ranging from the mobility as a marker of privilege to the mobility as a necessity for survival. This locates the central issue that I am interested in examining in the case of a group of rural youth in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan.

My research examines the experience of growing up and the imagined futures of a group of youth in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan, which has undergone massive material, economic, and cultural changes since the early 1990s. These youth grew up in places where the issues of

8 economic decline, poor educational provision, stagnation in the national labour market, and an increase in international labour migration have become their realities in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan. We will see that the current conditions of growing up and decision making for these youth are qualitatively different from those experienced by youth elsewhere. More importantly, the interpretations of their experience and their imagined futures of these youth are starkly different from those youth who grew up in the Soviet era, when the transition to adulthood was characterized by greater social stability, free post-secondary education and job security guaranteed by extensive state regulations (Walker, 2011). In contrast, post-Soviet youth struggle to find any type of work or employment in competitive labour markets of postsocialist economies, which appear to discriminate against their age, work experience, marketable skills, and quality training backgrounds (Walker, 2011). Postsocialist economic restructuring, as expressed in radical changes in the labour market and the process of marginalization, has major implications for youth and has fundamentally changed the relationship between the postsocialist nation state and its youth. An emerging body of literature argues that social backgrounds, including place of residence, citizenship, social class and gender, more than ever mediate access to education and employment opportunities of the postsocialist states (Bhat, 2013; DeYoung, 2010; Kirmse, 2010; Korzh, 2013; Kovacheva, 2000; Pilkington, 2002; Roberts, 2010; Rose, 2001; Walker, 2011). Youth and their families often require personal networks, including urban- based extended family members and relatives, to access quality education and better paying jobs (Roberts, Kamruzzaman & Tholen, 2009).

The destruction of the former Soviet industrial and collectivist agriculture has resulted in ‘new economic wastelands’ in rural regions (Roberts, 2012), further worsening the transition of rural youth in terms of getting quality training and finding waged employment locally (Tarkhnishvili, Voskanyan, Tholen & Roberts, 2005; Tholen, Khachatryan, Pollock, Roberts, & Velidze, 2012). The main form of postsocialist rural economy has become the subsistence agriculture, which means that small family farms do not generate surplus so that to improve individual or household life. The deindustrialization of agriculture resulted in the out-migration of rural agricultural technical workers and negatively impacted educational and career aspirations of rural youth in relation to agriculture and rural work life. These economic realities then accelerate the rate and motivation of emigration among postsocialist rural youth (Tholen et al., 2012).

With particular reference to Kyrgyzstan, Vinokurov (2013) notes that there is a consistently high rate of internal and international migration among rural Kyrgyz youth, as they encounter poverty of opportunity in their local labour markets resulting from uneven regional development and stagnant labour market in their country. Migrant rural youth of Kyrgyzstan often have efficient kinship networks abroad, especially in Russia and Kazakhstan, which serve, to a great extent, as a facilitating factor for the decision to emigrate. It is the mobilization of their kinship social capital that supports those youth whose economic resources are limited and enable them to find employment in informal labour markets in Russia and Kazakhstan. A higher percentage of these migrants have high school diploma, and in some cases even college and post- secondary education; however, education and qualifications obtained in Kyrgyzstan are in any case rarely sufficient to find work in one’s area of specialization abroad, especially in Russia (Vinokurov, 2013). In other words, informal labour markets in Russia do not necessarily favor those workers with higher educational attainment, as available jobs require limited education. This explains the reasons of youth from poorer backgrounds enter informal labour markets in Russia and Kazakhstan after attaining compulsory school education and without investing or requiring family investment in their post-secondary education.

With their changing educational and employment opportunities, postsocialist youth grow up with a set of aspirations drastically different from those of previous generations (Walker, 2011). With higher wages in the private sector, the social prestige of professions in education, healthcare, and law and order has diminished (DeYoung, 2010; Roberts, 2010; Walker, 2011). Higher education has been transformed by a huge increase in demand for its product, which has been met by greater supply, since the early 1990s. The number of higher education institutions mushroomed from nine in 1991 to 55 in 2014 (Kyrgyz Statistics Office, 2015), resulting in an increase in the percentage of people with higher education qualifications from 9.4% in 1989 to 13.2% in 2006 (OECD, 2010). Despite greater higher educational opportunities, however, the employment rate among highly educated youth is lower (56%) than the national level of employment, which is 60% (Oliver and Akins, 2010). As the 65% of total population in Kyrgyzstan live in the rural areas, such statistics definitely involves the rural youth making up the higher percentage of those in the universities. The above figures themselves indicate that many rural youth aspire to pursue post-secondary education as a ticket to escape structurally

10 imposed poverty, de-industrialized agriculture, and poorly developed labour markets in their local rural regions.

In conclusion I argue that a focused examination of the effects of the postsocialist transformation on individual and family life chances, particularly their educational and occupational aspirations, is required in order to develop effective youth policies and to facilitate a more successful transition from education to stable and meaningful decent employment in this resource-poor Central Asian state. A study of rural youth experiences at the margins of the postsocialist transformation and capitalist transformation is a promising approach to an understanding of the processes of exclusion and disadvantage in education, the rural communities, the labour market, and Kyrgyz society in general. A qualitative study of youth from the southern rural Kyrgyz regions, who are statistically the most disadvantaged in the current conditions of postsocialist transformation of economy and education, would be particularly useful in this regard.

1.4. Research questions

The following two research questions were formulated: How do rural Kyrgyz youth (and their families) perceive and experience learning, education, work and life in the changing conditions of post-Soviet economy, culture and education? How does their experience of changing social and economic conditions shape their aspirations for the future?

These questions help to examine the relationship of individual agency and social structure within the particular historical context of transformation in post-Soviet rural education and economy. Although the principal research question was conceptualized broadly, my intention was to further examine whether the perceptions and experiences of rural Kyrgyz youth reveal divergent social trajectories and, if so, what factors influence these variations in trajectories. A working hypothesis was that differences in the Soviet and post-Soviet socioeconomic, educational, and gendered backgrounds shape these young people’s experiences and perceptions of education, economy and culture. This study examines whether or not this assumption is consistent with the lived experience of actual research participants. To the extent that it is, this study attempts to offer a comprehensive account of the social as well as the individual factors responsible for diverging youth experiences of the changing conditions of post-Soviet education, economy, culture and society in rural Kyrgyzstan.

1.5. The significance of the study

First and foremost, the current study contributes to an emerging body of literature on formal schooling and youth transitions in the changing social and economic landscape of rural communities around the world (Azaola, 2012; Corbett, 2007; Crivello, 2015; 2011; Cuervo & Wyn, 2011; Howley & Howley, 2010; Jeffrey, Jeffery & Jeffery, 2005; Morrow, 2013; ). This study presents the experiences of rural youth growing up in a rural society, which has undergone a rapid and radical transformation from a Soviet socialist command economy towards a liberal market economy. More importantly, the study findings contribute to better understanding of youth transitions in rural Kyrgyz communities, in which the moral economy of kinship, including their motivation to return the gratitude to parents and siblings, is intricately connected to their future aspirations to become adults. Whether, these traditional kinship values still shape their aspirations in the conditions of the expansion of individualistic values of neoliberal ideology and the lives of kinship-oriented rural Kyrgyz youth is the further contribution to the emerging studies in the sociology of childhood and youth (Morrow, 2013). Moreover, the findings also respond to the question whether the assertions of rural education scholars in the global North and in the global South speak to the lived experiences of postsocialist rural Kyrgyz youth.

Secondly, this research further extends discussion on the contradictions of post-Soviet education, economy, and social equality in Kyrgyzstan (DeYoung, 2011). Until the 1990s, almost all young people in Soviet rural regions attended general secondary education, with a few subsequently moving on to college or university and most of them remaining in the village to work at the Soviet collective and state farms with stable income and other state subsidies. However, the post-Soviet generation of youth has experienced fundamentally different educational and employment conditions than the generation of their parents. The experiences of postsocialist youth of learning and schooling are located within conditions of massive cuts in educational expenditure, impoverished school conditions, aging teaching staff, the privatization of education, the rampant corruption, and the introduction of standardized testing of learning outcomes, all of which have increased the effects of socioeconomic background on the educational experiences and aspirations as well as the employment prospects of youth, and accelerated the process of social stratification in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan. Unlike youth in developing societies without socialist histories, post-Soviet youth grow up in societies that still

12 mobilize the dominant Soviet ideology of equality of opportunity in education and the right to work and employment. Yet the realities they encounter after their schooling, in the form of employment and job prospects, are quite at odds with that ideology.

Thirdly, this research contributes to the growing sociological literature on Central Asian education, which examines the effects of the postsocialist transformation on schooling and the well-being of educators and children (DeYoung, Reeves &Valyayeva, 2006; DeYoung, 2011; Heyneman & DeYoung, 2004; Joldoshalieva, 2007; Shamatov, 2005; Niyozov, 2001; Silova & Khamsi, 2008; Silova, 2011; Teleshaliyev, 2013). Unlike most of the existing research on postsocialist education, however, this study focuses on rural youth and their families and their life experiences and interpretations of changes in the opportunity structures of a postsocialist society and considers the effects of family-based resources and geographical location on their educational, work, and future life projects. The findings will help to understand the complex issues of learning, education, and life of rural youth in postsocialist conditions, a group that is often neglected by both researchers and policy makers.

Lastly, the biographies of individuals and families presented in this study raise questions about the dominant conception of rural youth as a homogeneous social group. While this study accepts that postsocialist rural young people share the general experiences of their generation across postsocialist states, it argues that they still have diverging educational and learning trajectories, which are shaped by their individual characteristics (age, birth-order, personality) as well as by their social circumstances (region of residence, social class, gender, and ethnicity). The continued conception of rural youth as a homogeneous group reflects ignorance of the unique challenges of growing up in rural societies that remain resilient towards, even as they increasingly become an integral part of, global capitalism (Cairns, 2011; Corbett, 2007; Cuervo and Wyn, 2011; Funnell, 2008).

1.6. The structure of the thesis

The first chapter situates the study within the larger context of scholarship on the sociology of education, particularly post-Soviet education. It then presents the research problem by reviewing the historical and contemporary contexts of education, schooling, and economy in rural Kyrgyzstan. It elaborates the principal research questions and clarifies the assumptions of these

13 questions for further exploration. Finally, it explains the conceptual, contextual, historical and methodological significance of the study.

Chapter Two, which consists of a review of the literature, begins by presenting the key contributions of two major sociological theories to our understanding of the relationship of education to society, the persistence of social inequalities through and in education, and the historical tensions between rural communities and formal education. Then it briefly reviews studies on the aspirations of rural youth with regard to post-secondary education and future employment. Finally, it argues that, although this literature helps us to understand the historical relationship between schooling and social reproduction under capitalist economic conditions, it fails to fully capture the changing relations of formal education and the postsocialist economy as reflected in and through the perceptions and practices of those growing up and living in societies undergoing those changes.

Chapter Three introduces the conceptual framework that informs the data analysis of this research. This chapter details the key thinking tools of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu - particularly the concepts of habitus, capitals, and social fields - which will help us to examine how learning, schooling, and work produce as well as reproduce social inequalities in post- Soviet rural society, where the effects of the expansion of global capitalism have already been felt at the levels of individual, family and community.

Chapter Four describes the research methodology of this study, which consists of interviewing, oral story telling session, and observation methods. This chapter explains how a grounded, theory-informed and inductive, data analytical approach has been employed to analyze a large set of research data. I briefly describe my own background as a researcher whose position has shaped the process of conceptualization, collection, examination, and presentation of the research data in particular ways. Lastly, this chapter recognizes and outlines the limitations of the study.

Chapter Five provides a critical examination of the literature on changes that occurred in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in, what is now called, Kyrgyzstan. Firstly, this chapter briefly describes the Soviet political and economic developments, particularly as they affected the culture of the previously nomadic and tribal Kyrgyz communities, and it overviews the transformation since national independence in 1991. With particular reference to the changing

14 conditions of the rural economy and rural employment, this chapter identifies the contradictions of the postsocialist economy, including the failure of the current labour market to meet higher educational aspirations, which has resulted in mass unemployment among graduates. This chapter attempts to explain the shifting relationship between education and labour market conditions in contemporary Kyrgyzstan and to identify the distinctive state policies that have directly and indirectly channeled youth transitions in both Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Chapter Six presents three comparatively distinct individual biographical case studies, those of Edil, Darika and Kerim, to enable a closer analysis of the relationship between individual agency and social structures. These cases illustrate, by this I do not mean representativeness of the youth trajectories, the social conditions and the dispositions of youth in three distinctive youth trajectories. These individual cases illustrate several key themes emerging from this research, including how rural Kyrgyz youth perceive and experience life, learning and education under post-Soviet conditions. Each case description starts with the general economic and educational background and life experiences of their family, followed by their parents’ educational ideologies, expectations and strategies. This section is followed by one, on the activation of family capital - cultural and symbolic - by each individual case, as a prelude to early speculations about the type and characteristics of their primary class and gendered habitus. Each young person’s own educational aspirations, beliefs, decisions, and practices are considered in order to examine whether and how the forms of capital transmitted at home and in the extended family are activated when he or she confronts the ‘rules of the game’ at school. Ensuing from this complex interaction of two social fields—the family and the school via the habitus of the individual student—the last section of each case attempts to explain the decisions made by Darika, Kerim and Edil about their future. This chapter concludes by comparing the three indicative cases in order to strengthen the base for further discussion on the divergent social trajectories of rural Kyrgyz youth.

Chapter Seven expands the central themes of Chapter Six to include another thirty-three cases of youth who are assigned to three distinct and analytically explanatory trajectories. The 3 trajectories are presented separately with particular reference to 4 aspects: (1) general themes of a particular cluster or a trajectory; (2) the dominant/shared habitus of the cluster; (3) the conversion of and into specific forms of capital, and 4) the type of future that they associate themselves with. These aspects are examined in respect to each trajectory separately to

15 demonstrate case variations within a particular cluster. The chapter ends with a short summary of its findings.

Finally, Chapter Eight attends to key themes generated in Chapters Six and Seven and links these findings to the literature. At the same time, this chapter challenges and extends the literature in the light of the current research findings, and then presents the implications of these findings for youth policies, rural education, teacher education, and educational research in the context of postsocialist transformation in Kyrgyzstan.

Chapter 2

Youth, education, and future: Social class, gender, and place

2.1. Introduction

This chapter presents a conceptual, theoretical and empirical discussion of the factors influencing the study of young people and their aspirations during the period of postsocialist transformation in rural Kyrgyzstan. My examination of young lives in the context of radical social transformation builds on existing theoretical and empirical works informed by the critical theory of education and the sociology of youth in general, as well as by studies of rural education in particular. I combine these approaches in order to understand how rural youth and their families have made sense of the changing nature of the economy, education, and society since the 1990s and how these changes and their experiences shape their aspirations for and expectations of the future.

This chapter starts with a review of the literature on the relationship between education and society with particular reference to the conceptualizations that have been put forward by structural functionalist, conflict theory and symbolic interactionism. It then addresses the issue of social and cultural reproduction through schooling, focusing on the ways in which class, gender and place of residence uniquely determine youth experiences of education and subsequent life chances. Furthermore, this section presents the key arguments on the historical tensions between rural communities and formal schooling developed by critical studies of western rural education. This section further outlines central themes from a review of the literature on the nature of the interplay between the experiences and social conditions that shape the aspirations of rural youth that are distinctive from youth in metropolitan regions. The next section reviews the impact of larger historical forces of colonialism, nation-state building, and the expansion of capitalist economy on the institutionalization of formal schooling in rural communities in countries in the global South. I end with a summary of the key points raised in the course of the chapter and its implications for examining the context of postsocialist rural Kyrgyz youth and their experiences and aspiration.

2.2. Debates on major functions of education in society: Review of western sociological theories of education

Theories of society and education conceptualize the function of formal education to help society reproduce itself over time. Three major social theories of education are reviewed here to understand the reproductive function of education in society. The first of these is the structural functionalist theory, which generally assumes that standard and mass public formal education helps to preserve social cohesion among different groups and individuals. This function of education is seen as central to the survival and continuity of society. In addition, schools are expected to develop intellectual skills, political attitudes (including patriotism, voting, and observing the social order), economic competences (productive workers and committed consumers), and other central values of society (Dreeben, 1968; Durkheim, 1922; Merton, 1967; Parsons, 1959).

For structural functionalists, social cohesion among individuals and groups is preserved through the school’s selection process. Barton and Walker (1978) outline the position of Parsons, one of the key theorists in this tradition: The function of education, vis-à-vis the school, is to select and to allocate pupils for their roles in adult society. This process involves competition between pupils on what Parsons calls the “axiom of achievement”, which, more importantly, involves the preparation of individuals at both the cognitive and the attitudinal level to function adequately in the adult world. (p. 271)

Accordingly, the education system provides equality of educational opportunity for all individuals to fulfill different roles in society according to their talent and the capabilities that they acquire in educational institutions. The education system is, then, expected to help students not only to develop their particular competences, but also to adopt the appropriate attitudes and values to fit into existing social systems. In this process, structural functionalists hold, the ascribed social origins of children do not determine the process and outcome of their later distribution into these social roles. For Parsons and others, this process of selection is purely competitive, objective and meritocratic; it is a healthy mechanism for identifying talent and selecting the best among all others to fill the appropriate social roles and positions. Individuals

18 are obliged to trust the capacity of the social institution of education to sort them into predetermined functions and roles in society (Demarrais & LeCompte, 1999; Dreeben, 1968; Durkheim, 1961; Merton, 1967; Parsons, 1951).

Feinberg and Soltis (1985) note that the education system is controlled by the state to ensure that the younger generation is provided with the standard knowledge and unified citizenship values needed to adapt to the existing social system. They go on to argue that the nation state is selective in what and how it teaches through its approved curriculum. By standardizing the system for everyone, the state maintains strong boundaries between learning that accrues less formally in families, local communities, and regions, and formal learning outside these communities, which is strictly codified and ideologically conceptualized. For Feinberg and Soltis (1985), then, schools act as ideological institutions of the state which are expected to transform the knowledge and skills that young children obtain from their homes and local communities so that those children can function as adults in modern complex economic, social, and political systems. Feinberg and Soltis (1985) draw attention to the fact that many educational reforms in the past as well as in the present have been based on structural functionalist perspectives of education. For example, the reforms assume that education must constantly develop to meet the changing needs of political elites, the economy, and society.

The second theory that analyzes the relationship between education and society is the conflict theory, which points to the function of education in reproducing the social, economic and cultural inequalities and disadvantages of some groups while maintaining the status quo for those who already occupy privileged positions and hold power over others (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). Conflict theory identifies a correspondence between the capitalist economy and formal education: in their seminal work, Schooling in Capitalist America, Bowles and Gintis (1976) observe a “correspondence between modern forms of capitalism, the functional requirements of the division of labour and modern forms of schooling.” Bowles and Gintis note that in the context of the US in the mid-1970s,

The educational system helps integrate youth into the economic system… through a structural correspondence between its social relations and those of production. The structure of social relations in education not only insures the student to the discipline of the work place, but develops the types of personal demeanor, modes of self-presentation,

self-image, and social class identification which are the crucial ingredients of job adequacy. (p. 131)

This correspondence is realized, according to Bowles and Gintis (2001), through the structure, form and content of education, as well as through its rewards and sanctions. They argue further that “[s]chools socialize students to accept beliefs, values and forms of behaviour on the basis of authority rather than the students’ own critical judgement of their interests” (p. 17). The correspondence theory of Bowles and Gintis (2001) further strengthens the idea that knowledge is structured into disciplines and that such structure reflects the division of labour in the larger society. Moreover, the widely held assumption of the importance of cognitive skills in educational outcomes has been criticized by conflict theorists on the grounds that test scores alone have been shown to be poor predictors of labour market success. Rather, there is evidence that other behavioural and motivational traits are at play in successfully obtaining prestigious jobs. Such traits include perseverance, discipline, and leadership as well as inclusion in and maintenance of cultural and social networks. Bowles and Gintis (2001) argue that “[t]he reward structure underlying the workings of the correspondence theory includes the close association between the personality and behavioural traits associated with getting good grades in school and the traits associated with garnering high supervisor rankings at work.” (p. 19) More importantly, family socialization plays a distinctive role in reproducing such relations between education and the economy, which further strengthens the socially reproductive relationship of correspondence between them.

Some conflict theorists argue that since the formation of the modern nation-states, educational systems have played an important role in maintaining dominant political ideologies (Aronowitz & Giroux, 2003; Cohen, 1970, Green, 1990). Apple (1979) notes that the state shapes the content of formal education, controlling what knowledge is taught in the schools. In this way, the official structure and content of education promotes existing state ideologies and suppresses other forms of knowledge that critique them directly or indirectly. Both these and other functions of education in capitalist societies are succinctly summarized by Giroux (1981),

First, schools provided different classes and social groups with the knowledge and skills they needed to occupy their respective places in a labour force stratified by class, race and gender. Second, schools were seen as reproductive in the cultural sense, functioning

in part to distribute and legitimate forms of knowledge, values, language, and modes of style that constitute the dominant culture and its interests. Third, schools were viewed as part of a state apparatus that produced and legitimated the economic and ideological imperatives that underlie the state’s political power. (p. 258)

Based on their analysis of the relationship between education, family, and social class in French public education, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) emphasize that schools play a central role in social exclusion and reproduction by promoting the values of the dominant class and penalizing others for ‘lacking’ these values to begin with. Children of socially disadvantaged groups come to schools with values, attitudes, and competences that are incompatible with the dominant educational frames, cultural habits and moral behavior. The transmission of family- based dis/advantages is then arbitrarily assessed against the elitist standards by which upper and middle-class children are rewarded for upholding and demonstrating these standards in their behavior and attitudes.

The third social theoretical camp is that of symbolic interactionism, mostly influenced by the Chicago School, rooted in the works of John Dewey, George Herbert, Mead and Herbert Blumer. The symbolic interactionism goes beyond the structural analysis of education to document the lived experiences of schooling and actual working lives in schools. The most of the studies that emerged from this tradition were influenced by, not limited to, Howard Becker's (1963) influential theory of labeling, self-fulfilling prophecy, sub-cultures, and the educational careers of the ideal client, which later generated the application of these ideas on the study of teachers' interactions with students (Gillborn, 1990; Keddie, 1973; Hargreaves, 1967; Rist, 1977; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Woods, 1979, 1983). Symbolic interactionists observe how teachers’ expectations influence the learning identities of students, and their performance and attitudes towards learning and schooling. Hargreaves (1967) argues that labeling and streaming in schools produce subcultures among students who are categorized as troublemakers. Such students then form their own groups, in which the non-conforming actions of members are highly valued. Those members who violate school rules and expectations by missing classes, acting loudly and disruptively in classrooms, or talking back to teachers enjoy higher status in such groups. In this regard, Woods (1983) also notes that students’ behavior and attitudes in school depend on whether they conform to or reject the dominant values of academic success and moral behavior held by educational institutions and educators. However, by trivializing the

21 effects of structural forces on the divergent school experiences of students arising from their race/ethnicity, class, and gender, symbolic interactionism fails to recognize links between the external forces and the academic performance of students in schools.

For the working class and other socially and culturally marginalized student groups, schools are not simply sites of cultural and economic reproduction in which individuals passively submit to cultural dominance and power. These marginalized students resist schooling that is biased towards their working-class, racialized, and gendered backgrounds. From their perspective, schools are both sites of active cultural production and social reproduction where alternative forms of social prestige, cultural resources and values are generated and employed to subvert the dominant ideology of schooling. Drawing on the central conceptual elements of both conflict and symbolic interactionist theories, the ethnographic work of Willis (1977), Learning to Labour, shows how working class boys develop their counter-school culture and how they resist the imposition of abstract bourgeois forms of school knowledge and mental work supremacy, or middle-class hegemony. Willis argues that the urban working class does not passively internalize the values of the dominant class, but actively and creatively rejects education through participating in sub-cultural activities within the context of the education system. The ‘lads’, whom Willis calls his group of British white working-class male students, are not victims of the capitalist system and education. Willis (1977) notes,

Social agents are not passive bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation and partial penetration of those structures. Quite apart from a particular society’s structural characteristics, it is the type of this contested settlement, which helps to give in its special nature. A society, for instance, is deeply marked by the specific forms in which its labour power is prepared. (p. 175)

Through his case study of these ‘lads’, Willis (1977) presents the complex lived experiences of working-class students in the social institution of education. He is able to demonstrate how the counter-school culture of these lads is directly linked to their explicit rejection of mental work in favour of manual labour. Willis (1977) asserts,

In the sense, therefore, that I argue that it is their [the lads’] own culture which most effectively prepares some working-class lads for the manual giving of their labour power

we may say that there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism. However, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance. (p. 3)

Willis (1977) examines the lads’ counter-school subculture to demonstrate localized resistance to schooling, especially to the teaching paradigm practiced in public schools, as well as the role of human agency in the reproduction of the social inequalities of society, through the resistance or incomplete conformity of the lads to the system. Moreover, for Willis (1977), the cultural production of the subordinate group, in this case the working-class lads, is an integral and dynamic part of the social reproduction process. Willis’s lads resisted external restrictions on their freedom, including pedagogical authority and the disciplinary imperative of modern public education. However, as Willis points out, these lads failed to recognize the internal laws of behaviour within their own subcultures. They rejected mental labour in favor of manual labour as an expression of their masculinity and ethnic superiority and as a source of their autonomy in contrast to those who conformed to the education by fully engaging with it. The latter group accepted the superiority of mental work over hands-on skills and every day and contextual knowledge (Gordon, 1984; Willis, 1977).

Some work is produced to refute the central arguments of Willis (1977), and which studies state that not all white working-class male youth reject school success. One of these arguments was made by Reay (2002), who examines the experiences of working-class male students, who succeeded academically or what she terms ‘class crossovers’. Through case studies of these class crossovers based in low-income inner school communities in the UK, Reay (2002) documents how conventional arguments about the relationship between class, gender and schooling ignore more intricate processes of academic performance as well as the emotional labour of these working-class male students who must incur enormous psychological and emotional costs to meet academic labour demands, and simultaneously, to maintain their standing within male peer groups. By working continuously towards reconciling tensions between the optimism of educational hope and the negative realism of their social class positions, Reay (2002) suggests, male working class students make use of their feminine qualities when dealing with academic requirements, and draw on their masculine traits when maintaining their peer group connections.

The achievement gap between different social groups in schools has historically been linked to racial differences in the attitudes and practices of families towards schooling. Ogbu (1978) argues that the descendants of those Americans who found themselves in the States, whom he categorizes as ‘involuntary’ or ‘caste-like’ minorities, often form an oppositional culture to the dominant white middle class American education system. Often Native Americans and blacks reject dominant white American cultural norms of upward social mobility because of their fear of ‘acting white’ and negating their own cultures shaped by the generational experiences as involuntary racial minorities throughout the history of colonialism in the US (Fordham & Orbu, 1986). The youth from these involuntary minorities exhibit attitudes, behavior and speech styles that are stigmatized by the dominant white American groups. Thus, the cultural attitudes of students from involuntary minority groups, conceptualized as cultural problems by Ogbu, often hinder their academic success in modern formal education and limit their success in the modern American labour market.

Carter (2005) further complicates this discussion of racial disparities in education. For Carter (2005), class, gender, and race/ethnicity take on far more complex roles where the schooling experiences and expectations of minority students are concerned. In her study, “Keepin’ it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White,” Carter (2005) argues that educational achievement should be examined beyond the issues of race and ethnicity. She documents different motivations and practices in urban poor African American and Latino neighbourhood schools. Although they all adhered to the dominant educational ideology of opportunity and social mobility, their educational strategies and practices distinctively divided them into three archetypes of urban black and Latino students: cultural mainstreamers, cultural straddlers, and non-compliants. Cultural mainstreamers, according to Carter (2005), take on middle-class dominant cultural values, whereas cultural straddlers navigate simultaneously the culture of the dominant middle class as well as their racial and low-income group cultures. Contrary to cultural mainstreamers or the straddlers, non-compliant students hold on to their social identities strongly and refuse to adopt or act according to the frames of reference of the dominant white middle class culture. The students in this third category encounter social conflicts with schools, perform poorly in standard examinations, and exhibit academic disengagement, all of which, Carter (2005) suggests, are characteristic of an oppositional culture that celebrates a hard posture, mental and physical toughness, and emotional impermeability.

In the context of the French education system, Sirota (1988, as cited in Reed-Danahay, 1996), argues, similarly to Carter (2005), that not all working-class or low-income students act in similar ways. Sirota identifies an attitude of active conformism among some working-class students in French elementary schools. She finds that such students mostly submit to school rules, neither challenging nor resisting the dominant cultural frames. Passive conformism, in contrast, is typically observed among students who belong to professional family backgrounds. Sirota observes that these students often behave respectfully towards school rules and structures. She argues that is easier for passive conformists to appear naturally respectful since rewards and punishments originate from their values of work, life and social behavior. Sirota (1988), as Reed- Danahay refers to, emphasizes that different degrees of effort are required for students from different social class backgrounds to achieve the level of behavior and attitudes, which the schools expect, and which help these students succeed academically in the educational system.

Discussion of the effects of social class on the education of children requires an analysis of the relationship between children’s schooling and parental engagement. Mounting literature suggests that parental attitudes and involvement exert significant influence on children’s academic achievement and can influence the quality of schools. It is safe to conclude that children’s positive attitudes towards education and high academic achievement are primarily shaped by their families’ views on formal schooling and academic success. Arguing against the significance of race and ethnicity for the nature of parenting styles in relation to children’s schooling, Lareau (1989) associates educational achievement with class-based child rearing ideologies and practices. Primarily based on interviews and observations of formal teacher- parent interactions, Lareau (2003) finds that parenting styles reinforce class differences in the cultural attitudes, habits, preferences, and academic skills of their children. Working-class parents of various racial backgrounds provide resources for their children’s basic needs and expect them to learn and grow naturally (natural growth), whereas middle or upper middle-class parents make concerted efforts to inculcate cultural habits, knowledge, and skills (concerted cultivation) that reinforce and promote school expectations. Thus, the parental relation to the school institution differs along social class lines, rather than along those of racial difference, as working-class parents generally experience a sense of powerlessness in schools and articulate their dependence on teachers, whereas middle class parents tend to express their criticism of schools and teachers, and also to intervene directly in the school activities of their children.

These discussions fail, however, to account for the spatial context of schooling on students’ academic performance and success, or the community’s overall relations to education, especially when the question of formal schooling in rural communities is concerned. In the following section, I present a review of the literature on rural schooling that will contribute to our understanding of the relations between formal schooling, rural communities, and families in western industrialized societies. The literature on rural schooling in developing societies will be dealt at the end of this chapter.

2.3. Formal schooling in rural communities and youth aspirations: A review of western rural education literature

The literature on rural education in industrialized western societies—mainly in the US, Canada, and Australia—or the global North shows that public education has historically been based on a metrocentric model, in which the norms of modern urban middle class culture and the capitalist economy dictate the curriculum, instructional techniques, and educational behavior and goals of younger generations (Ching & Creed, 1997; Corbett, 2007; Green & Letts, 2007; Fuller, 1991; Reed-Danahay, 1996; Reid, 1989; Schaft & Jackson, 2010). This metrocentric model of formal education has been challenged where the reproduction and production of rural cultures and communities are concerned.

Historical analysis of the expansion of public education in rural communities reveals that education is a tool for nation building. Analyzing schooling and the educational views of families in a remote community in the Auvergne, Reed-Danahay (2004) suggests that parents and their children subvert and resist the ideology of the French public education system. Historically, peasant families demanded education primarily for developing basic literacy skills; however, they did not necessarily desire the institution of schooling that embedded the mechanisms of social control within its structures, content and practices. Despite multiple assertions that French mass schooling was not imposed on reluctant farmers, and that these farmers voluntarily demanded schools to be established in their communities, Reed-Danahay (2004) argues that peasants still did not want to acquire middle class morality and a unified, secular ‘French’ culture. The meaning of education is therefore historically and deeply embedded in the local context. Even though rural schools are often located within their

26 communities, the children of peasants, farmers and workers still encounter cultural and social distance from the formal educational ideology of the state and middle-class moral codes that ignore the particularity of place in the experience of peasant children.

Reed-Danahay (1996) maintains that formal schooling competes with family economy with respect to children’s time and interests. Unlike arguments around the collective and subgroup-based resistance of working-class children towards the dominant values of education, many studies of rural family economy in western societies maintain that peasant resistance towards economic and political capitalist hegemony is produced in daily struggles and strategies, rather than collectively and radically as in the case of urban working-class and minority groups (Scott, 1985). Maynes (1985), cited by Reed-Danahay (1996), links family economic strategies to decisions about the education of their children in which the family’s need for children’s labour is of paramount importance for its survival under conditions of the economic marginalization and globalization of rural communities. Tilly (1980), as cited by Reed-Danahay (1996), in his extensive work on strategies of the French peasant proletariat, argues that “the household, not the individual or the society as a whole, acts as the unit of decision making” (p. 203). The families make strategic decision in supporting children’s education, as not all the children are encouraged to value farm work, and not everyone is expected to leave the farm. As Henri Mendras (1970), cited by Reed-Danahay (1996), clarifies,

[T]he survival and continuity of the family depend on those of the farm, and vice versa. Thus, the father who knows that that one of his children will take over the farm manages his enterprise differently than the one who has set up all his children in other occupations; and the father who wants to keep one son at home does his best to tempt him, when he comes of age, to remain and see that the ‘house’ – the family and farm – survives. (p. 83)

Despite highly gendered educational and farm expectations, farm families typically socialize some of their sons to reject farm labour in favour of off-farm jobs, if the farm economy is not a viable economic option for the household. Such family strategies refute the conventional discourse whereby all children of disadvantaged groups and communities are socialized into similar value systems. At any rate, several studies on rural families, education, and work are highly critical of such universalist interpretations. For these studies, the educational failures of

27 working-class and rural farm families should be understood in the context of complex family strategies and ideologies (Reed-Danahay, 2004).

Through his extensive research in fishing communities in Atlantic Canada, Corbett (2004, 2005, 2007) examines the ways in which rural youth adhere to or oppose the dominant ideology of the modern educational system. There are several tensions that rural youth experience in the contemporary Atlantic Canada. First and foremost, for rural youth, their communities are places that offer security, as compared to the outside world, which is perceived as risky and uncertain. Secondly, their secure rural communities, however, are not places that promise decent work and employment to sustain them in adult working life. Thirdly, they need to look for jobs in the outside risky world, and for that they need education. However, these three ideas were not equally perceived as true.

Corbett’s findings (2005) reveal that rural youth differentially respond to the mobility imperative of education and demonstrate differential values and a sense of place and community. The first group of youth resists formal education outside as well as within the institution of the school. Their resistance is reflected in the high rates of male youth who drop out of school to work as apprentices in local fishing industries. Such resistance is enacted against the mission to ‘disembed’ them from their local contexts and make them mobile individuals of the globalized world, a mission that promotes out-migration among rural young people. Corbett argues that those who resist metropolitan-oriented academic success opt out of such a pathway by valuing local forms of knowledge and work. These learning opportunities are connected to the practical mastery of skills, attitudes and knowledge through observing more experienced adults at work, through trial and error attempts in their own experiences, and through familial and community socialization processes. In other words, such skills and knowledge are accrued in informal education practices in the rural community (Corbett, 2007). Corbett (2007) argues that rural local communities and schools are

[C]ompeting spaces standing in resistance to one another, each [creating] its own criteria of intelligence and legitimate (real) work and each [setting] up its ‘own’ as the people who have the ‘natural gifts’ to do the work that is done by ‘people like us,’ because each is considered to be ‘naturally’ suited to a particular habitat. (p. 48)

The second group of youth Corbett (2007) surveyed are those who embrace the mobility ideology of formal education, as the marker of social prestige and as a mechanism for upward social mobility in the global context of expanded capitalism. They pursue the educational success as 'tickets' out of their local communities, have floating sense of socio-spatial identities, and demonstrate a sense of detachment from one's own community and have a relative open sense of space and place. Corbett (2007) identifies this group of rural youth as 'floaters' who can float the socially constructed and culturally arbitrary boundaries of the rural and the urban, and the concrete and the abstract, and the virtual and the real. For this group of youth, the outside world is not a place of danger and risk, but of opportunity and success. They show the ability to abstract themselves out of their immediate rural locale and Corbett (2007) argues that these youth are those who have fair amount of cultural, economic and social capital, and are often the children of richer families in the fishing industry. Through such family-based forms of capital and in the social conditions of prestige and opportunities, these floaters accumulate the mobility capital. According to Corbett (2007), the mobility capital includes “.., the ability to abstract oneself outside a particular locale” (p. 783). The examples of these two groups of rural youth demonstrate the unequal distribution of mobility capital that shapes the life chances of rural youth substantially different from one another.

Further extending on the mobility imperative of rural education, the literature is engaged in understanding the ways through which formal education carries out the 'urbanization of the mind' of rural children and youth (Ching & Creed, 1997; Corbett, 2009). Corbett (2009) argues that the urbanization of the rural mind is achieved through the standardization and centralization of school curriculum across the national educational system. The first and foremost it is reflected in the language of instruction of school curriculum, presented to rural families and their children. In this regard, Corbett (2010) notes that formal education generalizes and universalizes knowledge and imposes the standard language form as the language of modernity and social prestige. At the same time, rural communities also expect children to learn the linguistic style, form, and dialect of their particular locality. Examining his own experience of teaching in a rural school in Nova Scotia, Corbett (2010) further argues that rural schools establish a distinction between the language of the community (the particularizing discourse of locality) and the language of communities elsewhere (the generalizing discourse of formal education), the latter generally reflecting the standard English language. In rural communities the

29 place of language (speech styles, dialects, economy, culture, and local specificity) becomes an acute issue when rural families and children have to distinguish the borders of linguistic territories in relation to formal education (Corbett, 2010). Rural schools, as the sites of ‘official’ and ‘standard’ linguistic and national political ideologies, promote the style and form of the standard language that exerts power, and in a rural community context this power is physically and culturally external, in competition with local forms of authority and locally available social identities. In their daily social and linguistic interactions, rural communities use the form of language that contains specificity of local economies, culture, and the peculiar class structure of their locality. Historically, rural students and their families resisted the promotion of the language of schooling on the one hand, and on the other hand they attempted to become competent in the standard form of the English language if they aspired to social and geographic mobility (Corbett, 2010). Code switching helps students to cross multiple physical, social, and class boundaries; yet these code-switching practices are not wholeheartedly promoted within hierarchical official social structures. Social institutions, and schools in particular, are ambivalent and ambiguous linguistic sites in which multiple meanings of social reality are constructed (Corbett, 2010). The class backgrounds further inform who is successful in mastering the code switching and for what purposes.

The mission of rural schools has always been distinct from that in the metropolitan regions of any country (Sher &Sher, 1994). However, with the expansion of global capitalism it has become even more important for rural educators to ensure that rural youth are prepared for productive lives in both rural and urban environments. Sher and Sher (1994) argue that since many rural students eventually migrate to urban regions due to limited employment as well as entertainment opportunities, rural educators understand the necessity of preparing their students to succeed according to metropolitan terms. Yet these educators also know that their students must be equipped with competences to be successful in local cultural terms in case some return to or remain in their rural communities. Therefore, rural schools are expected to prepare their students to function well bi-culturally; that is to be capable of living in rural as well as in urban cultural contexts. By contrast, there is no expectation placed upon urban schools to prepare their students for anything beyond metro-centric life (Sher & Sher, 1994).

If formal education and academic success in rural communities are associated with the mobility of rural youth, the questions related to the nature, reasons, and consequences of rural

30 youth aspirations are important to explore and examine. Research on rural youth aspirations has a rich tradition, which has resulted in multiple frameworks explaining the nature, form, and issues of examining the aspirations of young people for the future. Howley (2006) identifies two schools of thought—known as ‘the rural deficit’ and ‘attachment to place’ schools—that offer distinct explanations for the nature of aspirations of rural youth as compared to non-rural young people in America (Cobb, McIntire & Pratt, 1989; Haller & Vickler, 1993; Hansen & McIntire, 1989; Sarigiani, Wilson, Petersen & Vicary, 1990). The rural deficit tradition links the lower aspirations of rural young people to the economic, resource, and cultural deficiency of rural regions (Cobb et al., 1989; Reid, 1989). According to this paradigm, rural youth who grow up in economically depressed regions have lower self-esteem, less supportive parents and educators, and resource-strained schools, and they perceive a limited connection between educational attainment and an occupational future in their local regions. Their achievements in examinations are therefore significantly lower than those of urban youth As the rural economy rests mostly on agriculture, it has been argued that rural youth value farm work and their local community highly, which results in lesser commitment to the formal schooling, academic success and social mobility available outside local communities.

Contrary to the rural deficit paradigm, the ‘attachment to place’ tradition explains that young people growing up in rural regions do not necessarily have lower educational and mobility aspirations due to their cultural and economic deficiencies (Howley, 2006). Rural youth remain committed to such schooling as is locally available and instrumental to their aspired trades and work in the future. However, their sense of and commitment to place significantly shape their desire to pursue post-secondary education and non-rural occupations elsewhere. Unlike their metropolitan counterparts, young people in rural regions have always had to negotiate and resolve tensions between social mobility through education and migration and a strong sense of geographic rootedness or commitments to land, community, and family (Burnell, 2003; Howley, Harmon & Leopold, 1996; Ley, Nelson & Beltyukova, 1996; MacBrayne, 1987; Hektner, 1995). Thus, young people’s decisions to remain in their local communities should not be understood simply as reflecting lower aspirations for the future.

Youth aspirations for the future - whether these involve post-secondary education, employment, residence and/or family - are also based on their subjective analysis of such resources as the energy, time and financial assets that are personally or communally owned, and

31 their intentions towards or actual mobilization of these resources (Sherwood, 1989). By conceptualizing individuals as rational agents, Sherwood (1989) understands their aspirations as goals that are rooted in present conditions and realistic evaluations of their resources to pursue and achieve these goals in the future. This implies that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between the present experiences of social and individual circumstances and the future aspirations of youth. Social class has long been considered one of the key determinants of the aspirations of youth (Furlong & Biggart, 1999; Kenkel & Gage, 1983). Gender also plays a central role in mediating aspirations through social norms and opportunities (Blackhurst & Auger, 2008; Riley, 1981).

The question of the link between educational achievement and migration has been extensively studied (Corbett, 2007). Academically successful youth typically leave their rural communities to pursue better economic, social, and cultural opportunities. Corbett (2007) argues that “there is an implicit connection between formal education and migration” (p. 17). The youth, surveyed by Corbett, believed that migration was necessary for upward social mobility. As many post-secondary educational institutions are located in urban centers, these youth were obliged to leave their communities to pursue post-secondary education. The lack of occupational opportunities arising from the decline of rural economies remains one of the push factors for rural out-migration. To fulfill their aspirations, rural youth often feel that they must seek education and quality professional employment outside their communities (Jones, 2004; Looker & Dwyer, 1998; Sage & Sherman, 2014).

Research on rural youth migration identifies different motivators for educational migration between young men and women in industrialized western societies (Corbett, 2005; Davis, 2003; Rye, 2011; Thissen, Fortuijn, Strijker & Haartsen, 2010; Walsh, 2014). Young women are more likely to leave for cities to pursue post-secondary education because the occupational, recreational and patriarchal climate of rural communities favors men. In his study of out-migration and education in Atlantic Canada, Corbett (2005) found that young women are significantly more successful in formal schooling and that they leave their rural communities at a high rate. Corbett (2005) links this higher rate of out-migration among young women to the gendered structure of opportunity within the fishing industry, which was the key employment sector from the 1960s to the 1990s. The male dominated labour market in the fisheries provided young men with more access to employment, licenses and gear, whereas women were often left

32 with poorly paid processing work in the fish plants, employment in the service industry, or unpaid domestic labour. Corbett’s (2005) analysis reveals that historical changes in the relationship of the educational system to the local economy shaped the gendered characteristic of migration and educational attainment. While the economic boom of the industrial fisheries attracted more young men to work without much formal education, for women this period seemed to provide more educational opportunities. In other words, Corbett’s (2005) analysis shows that for the majority of young men who remained in the fisheries, formal education offered limited utility, whereas for young women education provided more options, as they could return to their local areas after acquiring educational credentials to find employment in the public sector, as well as to fulfill their traditional, gendered family roles. Corbett’s (2005; 2007) findings are consistent with other research, which concludes that that migration is strongly associated with the post-secondary educational aspirations of young women (Davis, 1995; 2003; Jones, 2004; Walsh, 2014).

2.4. Formal education and rural youth in developing societies: Connecting the dots

In developing countries with colonial histories, the centralized educational system in rural regions runs parallel with larger national economic development policies on the production of labour power to resolve issues of underdevelopment and the distribution of status and power (Bock, 1982; Fagerlind & Saga, 1989). By expanding formal education, newly emerging nation- states promise to establish new mechanisms of social mobility outside the local hierarchies of prestige, honor and power. Rural students are socialized into modern forms of work and division of labour. By instituting schools with their promise to prepare for modern wage-sector employment, educational policies compete with local forms of division of labour. This creates a two-tier pathway; one tier is unwaged labour in rural subsistence farms and the other is the wage sector of the economy. In many occasions, formal schooling historically stood in opposition to the local forms of knowledge, authority, cultural beliefs, and traditional gender norms (Bock, 1982; Deng, 1986; Fuller, 1991; Lerner, 1958; Llewellyn, 1966; Reichel-Dolmatoff & Reichel- Dolmatoff, 1972; Wolcott & Kileff, 1975).

The expansion of formal education and the slow growth in the modern forms of employment in the global South has received a critical attention of those scholars who examine

33 the link between these two social institutions in the emerging economies and traditional rural communities. In addition to the continued discussions on the economic returns of education and the social uses of education in the context of economic development and the universalization of the western model of formal school system across the globe, the studies also report the diverging community attitudes and strategies (Blakemore, 1975; Demerath, 1999; Dore, 1976; Dube, 1998; Oni, 1988; Stambach, 1998). The findings of these studies become even more relevant when examining the expansion of education as linked to the recent international pressure on the countries in the global South, including the Education for All (UNESCO, 2000), and the expansion of global capitalism through different financial aid packages.

The expansion of the western model of formal education has been critically examined in the context of the expansion of the global capitalism. Currently, the governments in the global South are encouraged to move from agricultural and subsistence economies towards more of a type that is consumption-based, service sector-oriented economy. As these countries are encouraged to educate their populations, and, parallel to this, credentialize their societies, to compete in the global market, their efforts are often supported financially and technically by the development agencies, international organizations, financial institutions, and the governments in the global North. The main proponents of these educational expansion policies, often economists, without any failure, associate the higher rate of the educated human capital with the national economic growth (Becker, 1962; Mincer, 1958; Rostow, 1960). In this context the educated youth are prompted to move out of their agricultural rural communities, to join in the service sector that are located in the urban regions1. Although these youth quickly confront with the poor job prospects in the urban centers of their countries, they show little interest and willingness to return to their communities to engage in rural farm jobs. The literature on such dynamic development of formal education in the global South reports about the failure of the above-discussed globalizing discourses around the economic and social values of education to simultaneously engage with the discourses of changing the economy, including creating more meaningful, decent, and sustainable employment in local and national labour markets.

1 The phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration has extensively been discussed in the migration studies. I will not discuss this issue extensively here.

The expansion of formal education in the global South has not been without contradictions (Anderson-Levitt, 2003; Crivello, 2011; Jeffrey et al., 2005). Despite the globalizing educational agenda, and especially the recent claims over the gradual convergence ‘… toward an international model of education’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; p. 3), the divergence in the local forms and meanings of formal education has been widely examined and reported. Speaking from the perspectives of Peruvian parents, youth, and children in the context of recent expansion of formal education in this South American country, Crivello (2011) notes that the contemporary youth demonstrate relatively higher educational aspirations than their parents, as they embrace and display more optimism in the expansion of educational opportunities for their generation. Like their children, Peruvian parents also believe that education is a resource to break the intergenerational transfer of poverty, a mechanism for geographic mobility and a ticket for upward social mobility. However, these optimisms, as Crivello (2011) also maintains, of parents and their children do not materialize into greater employment opportunities. In this regard, the rhetoric of the globalizing discourse of the value of education is not matched with the reality of the historical structurally unequal distribution of opportunities in education, training, and labour market in Peru. Such studies highlight the lower economic returns of education especially when economically and politically marginalized communities are forced to pay for the schooling of their children.

Formal schooling of the marginalized communities, however, is not always considered from the economic perspectives. In their study of the local perceptions of schooling in the case of the educated Chamar (the Dalit) men – the lowest caste - in Uttar Pradesh in India, Jeffrey et al. (2005) in particular reveal that the historically and socially disadvantaged community of the Chamar maintains the higher social value of education even though they experience lower returns of education in the context of structural underemployment, unemployment, and historically caste-based intergenerational poverty. The access to education in the case of the Chamar parents is definitely welcomed, as these parents often equate the formal schooling with the cultural marker of prestige and social honor. These parents believe that educated people are more civilized and modern, compared to the illiterates who, according to these parents, are the ‘beasts’, ‘savages’, and ‘not properly human’. Although such negative associations of the functional illiteracy, of these parents, who are not educated, not only denigrate their own social positions, but they also reaffirm their support towards schooling of their children. Despite the

35 popular higher social and symbolic values associated with schooling, a large number of the educated Chamar youth confront the failure of the modern education to materialize their dreams to get white-collar employment in the public sector and to become socially mobile.

Jeffrey et al. (2005) reveal a rather complex context of the local perspectives on formal schooling of these historically marginalized Chamar communities. The youth surveyed in their study have diverging educational trajectories. If the Chamar young men complete their formal education against all odds, they report the challenges to get salaried jobs in the government because of their poor economic resources and lack of social connections. Their subsequent strategies diverge their pathways into two groups. The first group of the educated Chamar youth constructs alternative identities and uses their education to become local community and political leaders, who play an active role in organizing the low-caste movement on the ground. The second group of these youth who Jeffrey et al. (2005) also surveyed find themselves trapped with their educated status and reported that they often experience the feeling of being ‘useless’ to their communities. The second group of youth often uses the discourse of social dislocation and uselessness as a result of their education to describe their experience of becoming culturally misfit to their Chamar communities, who are neither willing to return to manual jobs nor successful in locating white-collar employment. Against these odds, these educated Chamar young men still favor their educated status, as they feel that they are equipped with the knowledge and manners to challenge the caste-based social exclusion in contemporary India. Both the examples from Peru and India demonstrate that mixed meanings and contradictory consequences of the expansion of formal schooling in the global South can be observed, resulting in the difficulty to summarize the outcomes of the global educational expansion neatly. Formal education of the historically marginalized communities cannot be simply examined from the perspective of their resistance towards modernization, global capitalism, and towards the local forms of social exclusion or as their voluntary accommodation of these external educational ideologies and models of schooling without challenging their hegemonic power over their culture, worldviews and traditions. What such studies, however, raise are the issues around the historical and local contexts of formal education, the forms of economy, and the changes in the opportunity structures for these marginalized communities and the continued social inequalities in these societies.

The contexts and experiences of youth in the global South can be examined in parallel with the social conditions of youth in more industrialized societies to some extent (Grant & Furstenberg, 2007), however, a few important conceptual and culturally-specific distinctions should still be made when applying the dominant interpretations of the sociology of youth to examine the experiences of those in the global South. The work of Del Franco (2012) on rural Bangladeshi youth, for instance, shows how the aspirations of these youth are shaped by their demonstration of the commitments toward their family as well as other complex social networks. Unlike the dominant view of youth as autonomous individuals or individuated beings in western youth studies, Del Franco (2012) calls for conceptualizing the youth and their aspirations, as exercising their agency and selfhood in complex ways as socially embedded individuals within their cultural contexts. The understanding of youth as socially embedded life and thoughts of individuals provides a relevant background when analyzing the rural youth living in the global South, who experience social pressure to continue their traditions and resist the ‘modernizing’ school education as well as become economically successful to provide means for their households. Socially embedded youth are required to accommodate, adapt to, resist or counteract the effects of financial crises, wars and conflicts, the rise of radical religious extremism, access to technology and communications, and the shifting roles of women in societies, all of which change the determinants of the aspirations of young people, their perceptions of the barriers and opportunities awaiting them (Azaola, 2012; Crivello, 2011; Horvath, 2008; Sage & Sherman, 2014; Tafere & Woldehanna, 2012;).

Mounting evidence demonstrates that rural youth across the globe increasingly aspire to and seek opportunities outside the agricultural economy available in their local regions; this trend is especially alarming among rural youth in the emerging economies in the global South. There is a range of factors that explain this dynamic. The limited literature on agriculture and youth aspirations argues that rural youth show little interest in working in smallholder farming, which they regard as ‘dirty work’ (Bennell, 2007; Juma, 2007; Kritzinger, 2002; Leavy &Smith, 2010; Nwagwu, 1976; Perry, 2009). The meaning of ‘farming as dirty work’ in the rural regions of developing economies is socially constructed, and is largely associated with economic and technological factors, including the lack of sophisticated agricultural technologies and greater need for physical labour and hand-operated tools, as well as such cultural factors as little or no formal training and norms of land ownership, and physical and environmental factors including

37 the degradation of land and the paucity of land available for agriculture (Leavy & Smith, 2010). In addition, as a result of expanded globalization, access to information technology, and the greater rate of migration from rural to urban regions, rural agricultural youth increasingly aspire to an urban style of life despite or because of their socioeconomic family circumstances and the cultural conditions of rural life.

Both cultural and economic factors at play when examining the link between the agricultural economy and youth aspirations. Agricultural economy is often characterized as consisting of family farm holdings with limited commercial output. For the most part, such farms are owned by extended families and oriented towards individual production and subsistence. Since rural culture is patriarchal, kinship and extended family-based, rural youth are often subjected to the authority of elders and do not always exercise control over decisions pertaining to their lives and work. Although they work for their family farms they do not enjoy economic independence from their families, but remain largely dependent on their parents for their livelihood needs, including their post-secondary education, decisions on selecting a life partner and starting a family, and social activities. While young men may acquire more independence with age, this is rarely the case for young women in rural households. Another reason for rural youth out-migration, some argue, is the predominant structure of single-farm smallholdings with larger sized households owning smaller land plots for farming, for not every child of the household can be employed when farming is subsistence-level, unable to yield enough produce or cash for survival. In this context, migration becomes one of the few available coping strategies for families (Proctor & Lucchesi, 2012; Stark & Levhari, 1982; Tafere & Woldehanna, 2012).

Given that concerns are growing around food security in developing economies, this turning away from agriculture may prove to be disastrous to many rural communities (Bennell, 2007; Proctor & Lucchesi, 2012). The status of the agricultural sector and rural life in developing economies has been downgraded due to chronic shortages of infrastructure, ambiguous land and inheritance laws, and the deskilling processes of labour (White, 2012). Juma (2007), for instance, reports that for many Tanzanians youth farming has become a last resort because of the deindustrialized and subsistence, family-based nature of this sector. In South Africa, similarly, female teenagers tend to relate farm work to low status, abuse, and social isolation (Kritzinger, 2002). For the majority of rural youth in developing societies, waged professional employment

38 often appears to be at the top of the hierarchy of occupational prestige, which prompts migration out of agricultural and rural communities.

The literature outlined above dwells on the issues and motivators for internal labour migration. Studies on internal migration from agricultural regions to industrial centers in China reveal that young people’s migration decisions are based on both economic and non-economic incentives. There is strong agreement that the internal labour migration of Chinese rural youth is closely connected with the transition to a market economy, in that youth are motivated to migrate to cities to increase their earnings and so to be able to support their families back in rural regions (Fan, 1999). However, there are also non-economic motivations for migration such as personal development, consumption and leisure. Young migrant women, in particular, have often demonstrated their desire to migrate for the purposes of pursuing an urban cultural lifestyle, gaining individual freedom, and obtaining new knowledge (Jacka, 2006; Ma & Jacobs, 2010; Mills, 1997; Wong & He, 2008; Zhang, 1999). Some young men are also motivated to migrate to cities from their rural regions in order to pursue personal development (Chiang, Hannum & Kao, 2013). Thus, rural youth migration in the emerging economies in the global South should not be narrowly linked to economic incentives.

A relatively large number of rural youth in developing countries migrate internationally. The literature on rural-to-urban migration of western rural youth argues that, despite regional specificity, more educated youth are less likely to remain in their rural communities, and that the more rooted in and attached they are to place, local community and family, the less likely they are to migrate to cities (Audas & McDonald, 2004; Corbett, 2007; Schaffer & Seyfrit, 2000; Sinclair, 2002). The literature on rural youth in developing economies in the global South does not support such an assertion, however. It suggests rather that rural youth migrate in search of jobs and income whether they finish school or not. In a study of Mexican youth whose parents had migrated temporarily as laborers to the US, Kandel and Kao (2006) found that parental remittance was positively associated with better educational performance; however, better educational attainment did not reduce the migration aspirations of these children. These children grow up aspiring for international mobility in search of better life conditions than contributing to the economies of their countries. Moreover, even if a young person from developing country emigrates, her/his migration is rarely an individual decision, but it is often a family strategy (Lauby & Stark, 1988).

Lately, the rate of migration of unskilled rural youth, both internally and internationally, has been accelerating. The motivators most often cited for the emigration of these youth are economic factors of their regions, including depressed rural economies, limited opportunities for waged employment in local labour markets, and ineffective government policies on youth employment and education. However, the subjective aspirations of youth are also central to the understanding of the complex interplay between agency and choice, and the structural forces of migration. Some claim that contemporary rural youth in emerging economies in the global South have higher aspirations and are more likely than previous generations to migrate to fulfill them outside their local communities (Azaola, 2012; Crivello, 2011; Kandel & Kao, 2006; Tafere & Woldehanna, 2012). To sum up, then, decisions about both types of migration, international and internal, appear to be linked to the desire of youth and their families to integrate into the mainstream values of modern global capitalist society, including the influence of the economic and socio-cultural motivators (Horvath, 2008; Azaola, 2012).

2.5. Conclusion

This chapter has reviewed the literature on education and society in order to examine links between formal education and formal economy in advanced capitalist societies such as the USA, France, the UK and Canada, as well as in countries with western colonial histories, and postsocialist societies, like China. In fact, the literature on rural youth and transition reveals that youth mobility is a phenomenon on a global scale. Although the literature provides rich interpretations of education in times of transition, often from the contexts in which the formal education was used to modernize the traditional societies, it contributes little to the examination of changing relations between formal education and post-Soviet, transitioning rural societies, with the history of the near-to-universal access to formal schooling, and the zero unemployment policies, but lately situated at the margins of global capitalism and influenced by those policies that advance the western cultural imperialism. It fails, for example, to recognize the complex and unique historical, economic, and cultural impact of Soviet socialism on the contemporary rural Kyrgyz communities.

My research in a Central Asian country sets to explore the experiences of growing up and entering adulthood in rural Kyrgyz communities in order to understand whether the relations between education, economy and society have been fundamentally changed by the conditions of

40 postsocialist transformation, and particularly to reflect on whether conventional explanations of the relations of capitalist economic structures to formal educational systems remain valid. To examine these questions empirically I study the experiences and perspectives of a group of rural young people born in or after the 1990s, as well as those of their family members, who can provide further insights into the lived experience of post-Soviet economic restructuring into a market economy, especially in the context of an unskilled labour flow to the oil-based, expanding economies of Russia and Kazakhstan. Before this analysis of the lived experiences of post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz youth of schooling and life, in Chapter Three I present and justify the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, as a useful analytical corpus, which helps to examine the dynamic of changing rural society, social practices of different generations, emerging social inequalities, and individual subjective experiences of learning, education, and work in times of rapid and radical social change in rural Kyrgyzstan.

Chapter 3

Theoretical framework: Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice 3.1. Introduction Chapter Two reviewed the sociological literature on education and society in order to examine links between formal education, the economy and social structure in advanced capitalist societies such as the USA, France, the UK and Canada and in countries with western colonial histories. The literature review also considered a few studies on rural-to-urban migration in postsocialist societies such as China. The review provided a useful interpretive lens for analyzing the relations between education and society in rural Kyrgyzstan, particularly those between formal schooling and rural communities and the ways in which a rural physical, economic, and sociocultural context shapes the aspirations of young people. This chapter develops that interpretive lens by means of Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of social practice. Bourdieu’s work is particularly helpful because it conceptualizes human agency without losing sight of the structuring effects of larger social forces that constrain as well as facilitate human thought and action. His framework will help us to examine the ways in which rural Kyrgyz youth and their families make sense of and participate in the changing conditions of a society in which the established social structure, the patterns of both reproduction and transformation of social order, have been disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet state. This chapter begins with a general explanation of Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, elaborating his concepts of social field and forms of capital. It then discusses the notion of habitus in some depth, emphasizing its complex, multidimensional nature and its relevance to education. The chapter concludes by relating Bourdieu’s interpretive framework to an examination of the lives of rural youth growing up in the postsocialist transformation in Kyrgyzstan.

3.2. Towards a total science: the Bourdieusian logic of social practice For Wacquant (1992), Bourdieu’s sociology is an attempt to respond to the continued polarization of two modes of sociological knowledge that dominated the social sciences in the 1960s. In order to reconcile these approaches to social theory—on the one hand, social physics and on the other, social phenomenology—Bourdieu develops a theoretical corpus that draws on

42 the strengths of both, relying particularly on the insights of philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, 2 Husserl, Wittgenstein and many others . Bourdieu argues that these two camps of social theory - and the discipline of sociology in particular - have produced analytical and methodological dichotomies that distort the understanding of social reality rather than offering a comprehensive methodology by which to analyze the complexities of the social world.

One of these scholastic extremes attempts to explain social reality by means of objectivism. The objectivist mode of knowledge - or what Bourdieu refers to as ‘social 3 physics’ - claims to construct a social reality that is methodologically measurable and observable irrespective of agents’ representations of that reality. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) recognizes,

The strength of this objectivist or ‘structuralist’ point of view … is to uncover the ‘determinate relations’ within which men and women necessarily enter to produce their social existence. (p. 8)

Where Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) depart from social physics is over its inability to explain how social patterns are produced at the first place. The danger of this mode of knowledge, he points out, is that it creates a scholastic approach, which abstracts general principles and concepts from the actual practical logic of socially situated agents within those situations. Positive objectivism creates the false assumption that ‘structures’ have the capacity to produce and reproduce themselves, a logic that results in passive individuals or groups mechanically following the logic of structures without their own autonomous sense (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) also criticizes the other extreme scholastic position,

2 For example, Bourdieu’s concepts of domination, symbolic systems, and social orders are adapted from Max Weber. His conceptualization of society as a web of social relations is influenced by Karl Marx. Structural functionalists such as Durkheim, Mauss and Levi-Strauss helped Bourdieu to highlight the reproduction of social structures, though he challenges the self-reproductive capacity of structures by centralizing the role of human agency in their reproduction. Bourdieu makes use of arguments made by Merleau-Ponty and Husserl in particular to argue the centrality of body in the formation and effects of dispositions (Wacquant, 1992; Brubaker, 1985). 2Bourdieu often refers to Sausserian linguistics, Levi-Straussian structuralism, and Althusserian Marxism in his critique of social physics theories (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). 3 Bourdieu often refers to Sausserian linguistics, Levi-Straussian structuralism, and Althusserian Marxism in his critique of social physics theories (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

4 social phenomenology . This mode of knowledge maintains that an understanding social reality must account for the conscious interpretations of actors. For phenomenologists, reality is constructed by social actors, without whom it is not comprehensible. Social reality is both continuously constructed anew and reproduced by the everyday practices, choices, decisions, and social interactions of actors. Bourdieu highlights that social phenomenology provides methodological and conceptual ideas to unveil the ways through which agents actively participate in the construction of the social world:

Its value lies in recognizing the part that mundane knowledge, subjective meaning, and practical competency play in the continual production of society; it gives pride of place to agency and to the “socially approved system of typifications and relevances” through which persons endow their “life-world” with sense (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 9).

For Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), the limitation of social phenomenology lies in its false assumption that structures are a ‘…mere aggregate of individual strategies and acts of classification’ (p. 9). Because of this assumption, the paradigm of social phenomenology cannot develop a satisfactory conception of the continuing process of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1980, 1990; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

Bourdieu (1992) notes that these two social theories falsely separate structure and agency, the material and the symbolic, the micro and the macro; and by doing so, they are misguidedly understood as irreconcilably opposing poles. Bourdieu argues that these false dichotomies are basically “[a] double reality of the social world” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 11). To develop a holistic explanation of the social world by reconciling these polarized paradigms of social theory, Bourdieu proposes a sociological method, or what Wacquant refers to as social praxeology (structuralist constructivist), in which he incorporates the two forms of social analysis. The Bourdieusian method sets out, firstly, to explore objective structures. These structures are coterminous with the spaces or positions in which agents are located due to specific mechanisms through which socially valued resources are classified, appropriated, and distributed. Secondly, Bourdieu (1992) attempts to examine how schemes of classifications are embodied as mental (bodily) dispositions that act as facilitating and constraining principles of the

4 Culturalist ethnomethodology and rational-choice theory are referred to as examples of this mode of knowledge (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

44 agent’s practices, as well as how such embodied mental structures in effect reproduce social structures (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In other words, Bourdieusian view brings agency to the center of analysis in such a way that existing material structures are integrated into the body of the agent as internal mental structures guiding human practices. Wacquant (1992) notes that, although both these moments of analysis are necessary steps in Bourdieu’s method, the Durkheimian principle of analysis is employed, firstly, to examine particular social phenomena objectively; and only then is it followed by an analysis of the agent’s interpretations or constructions (experiences) of those phenomena. This approach suggests that agents’ understanding of phenomena will be varied since their experiences are dependent on the social positions that they occupy in the field (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

Bourdieu’s methodology, as outlined in Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), should be considered holistic and his philosophy monist, as

It refuses to establish sharp demarcations between the external and the internal, the conscious and the unconscious, the bodily and the discursive. It seeks to capture the intentionality without intention, the knowledge without cognitive intent, the prereflective, infraconscious mastery that agents acquire of their social world by way of durable immersion within it …which defines properly human social practice. (pp. 19-20)

Refusing all kinds of demarcations, Bourdieu calls for a ‘total science’ that weaves together structural objectivism and social constructivism to allow for a complex understanding of social reality, one that lies within social relations, neither completely in individuals nor fully in social structures. Such a science will be conducted with the aid of both empirical research and theorization, which are not two separate activities but a holistic method of understanding and 5 explaining social reality (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) .

It is important to highlight that Bourdieu’s theory of practice is conceptualized as a dialectical relationship between the social field and the dispositions of social agents, as he believes that human practice is produced by the unconscious thought and behavior of agents in everyday social contexts and interactions. It is this epistemological approach to explaining

5 Wacquant argues that “[a]n adequate science of society must encompass both objective regularities and the process of internalization of objectivity whereby the transindividual, unconscious principles of (di)vision that agents engage in their practice are constituted” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 13).

45 human practice that distinguishes Bourdieu from other sociologists (Jenkins, 1992; Wade, 2006). Bourdieu (1984) presents the following formula to explain his conception of human practice:

[(Habitus) (Capital)] + Field = Practice (p. 101)

Although this formulaic presentation of human practice is often misinterpreted as a mechanistic and deterministic explanation, these concepts represent an attempt to reach a complex relational understanding of practice. For Bourdieu (1984), practice is mediated by individuals’ dispositions (habitus), their interest in participating to compete for valuable social goods with the available resources (forms of capital) at hand, and their adherence to the logic of a particular social field. These elements—habitus, capital and field—simultaneously change and structure one another to produce human action.

Bourdieu (1977) argues that human practice is produced by an agent’s habitus in relation to a specific social field. He defines habitus as a set of embodied mental and motivational strategy-generating principles, or as ‘schemes of perception, appreciation and action’ (Bourdieu, 1977). These principles enable social agents to produce fluid, effortless and unconscious practices, which then reproduce existing social structures and relations. This is true in cases where practices are exhibited intuitively and automatically in the context of an alignment between the embodied dispositions of agents and the social field(s) in which practices are carried out. Such fluidity and competence of practices are the result of agents internalizing existing such objective structures as they encounter on a daily basis.

Agents internalize objective structures both unconsciously and consciously. However, this internalization is often not recalled by agents and, in spite of their explicit intention to learn, it becomes simply a taken-for granted aspect of their existence or life. Bourdieu (1977, 2008) refers to this process as one’s practical mastery, practical sense or practical logic. He explains that

Pactical logic – practical in both senses of the word – is able to organize the totality of an agent’s thoughts, perceptions, and actions by means of a few generative principles, themselves reducible in the last analysis to a fundamental dichotomy, only because its whole economy, which is based on the principle of the economy of logic, presupposes a loss of rigour for the sake of greater simplicity and generality and because it finds in ‘polythesis’ the conditions required for the correct use of polesemy (Bourdieu, 1977,

2008; p. 110).

For Bourdieu (2008), practices occur within a specific social location, which he refers to as a social field. He defines a social field as an arena or network of objective relations among social agents who occupy various social positions. These social positions are determined by the volume and composition of valuable social resources possessed by agents. The agents' social positions then produce certain types of practices that align with the logic of particular social fields.

Bourdieu argues that the practices of agents are based on specific forms of interest6 within specific social fields (Bourdieu, 1971, 1987). These field-specific forms of interest are unconsciously internalized by agents in the form of practical logic; and it is this logic that orients their practices accordingly. Bourdieu highlights that “[t]o be interested is to accord a given social game that what happens in it matters, that its stakes are important... and worth pursuing” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; p. 116). Moreover, in his attempt to challenge the binaries produced by economism and psychoanalysis, he argues that these interests cannot be understood as strictly material or symbolic, but rather as representing an attempt to conceptualize a unified, 7 complex explanation of social practice .

Bourdieu’s agents are permanently engaged in a struggle to increase or retain the value of their resources so as to maintain or improve their socially objectified positions. Their struggle is also over schemes of classification (Bourdieu, 1990; Grenfell, 2011). Bourdieu links the understanding of struggle with his concept of strategy to explain improvisatory practices, which are neither fully determined nor wholly free principles of action. He conceptualizes the notion of a strategy, as

Practical mastery of the logic or immanent necessity of a game, which is gained through

6Bourdieu often refers to ‘interest’ as illusion or libido (Bourdieu, 1971, 1987). The concept of interest has generated the criticism that Bourdieu introduces economism in his analysis of cultural practices. 7 Bourdieu criticizes writers and scholars who contribute to the production and reproduction of analytical categories. He argues that "[e]conomism knows no other interest than that which capitalism has produced, through a sort of concrete application of abstraction, by establishing a universe of relations between man and man based, as Marx says, on ‘callous cash payment’. Thus, it can find no place in its analyses, still less in its calculations, for the strictly symbolic interest which is occasionally recognized …only to be reduced to the irrationality of feeling or passion” (Bourdieu, 1977; p. 177). An extensive explanation of the criticisms of Bourdieu’s concept of interest as economistic determinism is provided in Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) on pages 115 -120.

experience of the game, and which functions this side of consciousness and discourse (like the techniques of the body, for example) (Lamaison & Bourdieu, 1986; p. 111).

Lane (2000) demonstrates Bourdieu’s relational understanding of the concepts of strategy, habitus, and fields in the following way:

The concept of strategy was, therefore, clearly intended to provide an account of social practice as the dynamic or dialectical interaction between habitus and social structure, internalized disposition and an objectively and historically determined set of possible alternatives. (p. 106)

Such an understanding of human practice illustrates how social fields are continuously constructed, and thereby changed, by the strategies of agents as well as by the social struggles in which they are permanently involved. In the next several pages I elaborate on each concept – the field, capital, and habitus – to later apply these concepts as explanatory framework when examining the persistent and emerging social inequalities in postsocialist, post-Soviet Kyrgyz rural regions in Kyrgyzstan. In the next section I start with the Bourdieusian concept of social fields.

3.3. Social field: Logic and borders, reproduction and change Bourdieu’s concept of field is relational in that it can be comprehended only along with the 8 concepts of habitus and capital . Firstly, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) highlights that Bourdieu conceptualizes a field elaborately and analytically through his empirical investigations and defines a social field, as

A network, or configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective

8 Bourdieu argues that separating these concepts from one another cannot provide a full understanding of his central arguments. Moreover, he recognizes that each of his core concepts, including the social field, has not been equally developed by himself or other scholars, and he stipulates that they should be tested through empirical work.

relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.). p. 97)

Here, it is worth mentioning that Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) imagines a social field metaphorically as the field of a game (often referring to a soccer game as an example). By 9 linking a field to a game, Bourdieu explains that each field has certain rules, stakes and players . And it is competitive in the sense that players participate in this game with an interest in competing or pursuing field-specific desirable social resources to assert and maintain their power and domination. Playing a game is explained by this interest of agents, or their ‘willingness to participate in the struggle for social resources and improvement of their positions’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). For its part, a social field can be considered functioning only if agents agree to ‘play the game’ according to this logic.

Bourdieu warns that this process of ‘playing the game’ occurs without the full consciousness of agents as their habitus naturally acts in accordance with the logic of the field. A field’s logic or ‘immanent laws’ are perpetuated with the help of doxa. A simple explanation of doxa is that it is the pre-reflexive, practical view of the social world adopted by an agent (Deer, 2011). Bourdieu (1977) articulates doxa more complexly in the following way,

The adherence expressed in the doxic relation to the social world is the absolute form of recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness, since it is unaware of the very question of legitimacy, which arises from competition for legitimacy, and hence from conflict between groups claiming to possess it. (p. 168)

A Bourdieusian field is not only a physical space. He also uses the concept of a social field as a metaphor to portray an arena in which social relations are located (Webb, Schirato & Danaher, 2002). Thus, social relations can be understood as the spaces or positions of agents that partly structure a particular field. It is important to note that agents occupy differing social positions, depending on the composition and volume of resources that they possess in that particular field (Thompson, 2011). These resources produce not only diverse social positions but also dominant and dominated ones. Bourdieu therefore conceives the objective social relations

9 Bourdieu refers to agents as people as well as institutions (Bourdieu, 1993). If agents are conceptualized as institutions, then the struggle is not just between differentially positioned individuals but also institutions. This conception allows us to include struggles between different schools within a larger field of formal school education. Rural schools, in particular, can then be positioned in dominated roles as their value is not at par with prestigious private education in major cities.

49 between agents in a field as a struggle or as antagonistic. He explains the complex relations in a social field in the following way,

Social agents are not “particles” that are mechanically pushed and pulled about by external forces. They are, rather, bearers of capitals and, depending on their trajectory and on the position they occupy in the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and structure) in capital, they have the propensity to orient themselves actively either toward the preservation of the distribution of capital or toward the subversion of this distribution. (Bourdieu, 1992; pp. 108-109)

Here Bourdieu also outlines the way that a particular social field not only functions but also is structured. The structure of a social field depends on ‘…the structure of the distribution of the specific forms of capital that are active in it […]” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 108). For Bourdieu, each field has its own boundaries; however, field boundaries should be conceptualized as ‘fuzzy and contested’ and not sharply distinguishable (Thompson, 2011; p. 78). The borders of a field can be understood only from an empirical perspective; specifically, “[t]he limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the field cease” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 100). Once again, the boundaries of a field are relational to the capital that is valued by and competed for among differentially positioned agents.

Social fields are divided into sub-fields (Thompson, 2011).For example, the field of education can be categorized into rural and urban, private and public, or each school can even be viewed as an operating field of its own kind. However, each subfield is linked to meta-field(s) that dictate and shape the conditions and properties of its satellite fields. Agents can occupy and participate in different fields and sub-fields, which suggests that there will be inter-field or inter- sub-field relations. For instance, Bourdieu (1984) observes that people’s ‘tastes’ in art and food are consistent, which provides him with an organizing principle by which to outline correspondence across different fields and class habitus and to coordinate different sub-fields. Bourdieu acknowledges that the question of inter-field connections is complicated, for there are a growing number of examples where fields are not completely autonomous. More and more, the state (or political field) or the economy (the field of market) act as meta-fields that directly structure or indirectly affect the properties and autonomy of other fields (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Webb, Schirato & Danaher, 2002; Thompson, 2011). In the context of the educational field, in particular, the meta-fields of the state and the economy have always played influential

50 roles. For example, formal education was established by the Soviet communist party (the state) in Kirghizia to socialize citizens into the ideology of Soviet socialism, and thereby into participating in the Soviet type of economy and politics. Similar points could be made in the case of the formal education system in western capitalist societies (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).

Webb, Schirato, and Danaher (2002) refer to Bourdieu’s identification of two antagonistic poles, autonomous and heteronymous, within each social field. The autonomous pole of a field “…tends to be isolated and removed from the rest of society,” whereas its heteronymous pole “…is bound up very closely in relations with the rest of society” (Webb et al., 2002; p. 107). This distinction can be applied to the field of formal education in the following way: the autonomous pole of the field of education values education as a process of “learning for its own sake” and as “a space for nurturing the spiritual and intellectual growth of the child within a supportive environment” (Webb et al., 2002; p. 107), while the heteronymous pole values education as a commodity that has an economic utility. This latter pole establishes a hierarchical structure in which academic disciplines, languages of instruction, students, schools and the knowledge produced by them (credentials in particular) are ranked. Bourdieu proposes a more advanced way of thinking about the double and antagonistic nature of values shaping the function and structures of fields and the dispositions of agents involved in those fields.

Bourdieu emphasizes that social fields are always in a process of change. One way to illustrate this is in relation to agents: a field is transformed as a result of the permanent competition of antagonistically positioned agents (Thompson, 2011). However, Bourdieu cautions that transformation or change cannot necessarily be understood as revolutionary since the improvisatory practices of agents always reproduce elements of the past. Another way of conceptualizing field changes is in relation to external crises, which can subject fields to radical internal and inter-field transformations. Such an understanding of social fields is useful in the case of this study as it can help to account for transformation as well as reproduction in the social fields of formal education and the family in rural societies, in relations among different fields (e.g. between the family, formal education, and the rural economy), and in the dispositions of young people viewed as agents in those fields.

3.4. Forms of capital and continuous configurations of capitals The Bourdieusian concept of capital is relational to his understanding of social field(s) as well as to habitus. The concept helps to identify the social location of agents within a particular field. Bourdieu (1991) explains that “The active properties that are chosen as principles of construction of the social space are the different kinds of power or capital that are current in the different fields” (p. 230). Capital is then understood as any resource which is rare and worthy in a given social field and which enables an agent to appropriate the specific profits arising out of 10 participation and contest in that field . Moreover, each field has its own distinguishable types or species of capital and its own unique logic of distributing, legitimizing, and converting capitals.

11 In his empirical works, Bourdieu differentiates four types of capital : economic, cultural, social, and symbolic. Bourdieusian economic capital is defined as resources that are “… immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights” (Bourdieu, 1997; p. 47). Economic capital is usually associated with material wealth and is often a readily convertible resource. Social capital refers to the networks and affiliations of agents within groups that help them to access, acquire, and maintain cultural and economic capital. These networks and ties are evaluated on the basis of the volume of capital that the agents’ networks possess and whether they can be converted into economic or other forms of capital. Cultural capital includes educational, aesthetic and intellectual resources that define agents’ membership in a particular social class. The fourth form, symbolic capital, combines all the other forms to provide the social legitimacy and symbolic domination of the capital holders. Any form of capital that is dominant in a specific social field can simultaneously act as symbolic capital too (Bourdieu, 1986). These forms of capital function as resources and mechanisms of power and domination, and all non-economic capital forms can be converted into economic capital in addition to their role of establishing and defining domination and power.

10 Capital is only valued in relation to a specific field. Agents are engaged in the field to compete for that the specific combination or form of capital (Wacquant & Bourdieu, 1992). 11 Dufour (2010) argues that Bourdieu provides ‘[an] exponential taxonomy of capital,’ while Calhoun (1993) shows that “different forms of capital… point out descriptively the existence of different resources of power, differently produced” (p. 68).

For Bourdieu, capital exists in different forms: objectified, incorporated, and institutionalized. Bourdieu (1997) associates these three forms with cultural capital in particular. He states:

Capital, which can exist in the objectified form – in the form of material properties, or, in case of cultural capital, in an incorporated form, one which can be legally guaranteed, represents power over a field (at a given moment) and, more precisely, over the accumulated product of past labour (and in particular over the set of instruments of production) and thereby over the mechanisms which tend to ensure the production of a particular category of goods and thus over a set of revenues and profits (p. 230).

By the concept of the embodied form of cultural capital, Bourdieu (1992) elaborates on how the acquisition and accumulation of cultural capital cost effort and sacrifice. In the following statement, Bourdieu (1992) equates habitus with the embodied form of cultural capital. By expressing the relationship between them in this way he challenges the simple economist monetary process of conversion from one form of capital into another,

This embodied capital, external wealth converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus, cannot be transmitted instantaneously (unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility) by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange. (Bourdieu, 1992; p. 48)

The possession of high cultural capital can be expressed through language. Language competence or linguistic capital is defined by Bourdieu, as the capacity to produce expressions for a specific market: as he argues, “…all speech is produced for and through the market, to which it owes its existence and its most specific properties” (Bourdieu, 1992; p. 76). Each speaker within a specific context possesses a certain quantity of linguistic capital. Depending on their volume of linguistic capital, as well as the composition of their other forms of capital, the way the speaker communicates can determine his or her social location within the hierarchical linguistic structure of that field and whether the speaker has sufficient linguistic capital to exert symbolic power. This symbolic power, according to Bourdieu (1992), is invisible, as it can be exercised only if agents are complacent to it and subject their own will to its reproduction. According to Bourdieu (1992), the educational system plays a central role in legitimizing and imposing a standard form of language: the popular expressions of students are devalued and dismissed by teachers as vernacular or slang, and regional forms of speech are dismissed as non- standard linguistic variants.

Bourdieu notes that, by introducing educational qualifications, the educational and linguistic markets are unified and that this unification further unifies the value of certain linguistic variants within the field of professional employment. In the field of education, as Bourdieu and Boltanski (1977) note, better education generally means the ability to speak the standard dialect of a national/state language as well as a foreign language. The possession of educational cultural capital enables the agent to convert it into economic capital by being employed in a field that values such capital. The agent’s ease or embarrassment in public speech situations establishes her/his relation to the linguistic market, legitimizing the value of one form of linguistic capital over others. Therefore, all linguistic exchanges, according to Bourdieu (1992), express the relations of power between the speakers. In Chapter Two I reviewed Michael Corbett’s (2010) paper on the politics of forms of language in rural education in Nova Scotia, Canada. To recapitulate Corbett’s argument, rural community is torn between promoting the standard linguistic form of the school and the community’s language of particularity, the latter containing the specificity of local economies, culture, as well as ethnic and class structure.

Bourdieu (1997) further elaborates the issue of the conversion of capitals to include the observation that economic capital is not always at the center of these conversions. This conception of the principle of convertibility helps to explain how, in some contexts, it is not economic capital but social capital (expressed as honor and virtue) or cultural capital that serves as the valuable resource determining power and domination and facilitating one’s success within that context (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). However, Bourdieu (1997) warns,

The real logic of the functioning of capital, the conversions from one type to another, and the law of conversion which governs them cannot be understood unless two opposing but equally partial views are superseded. (p. 54)

Here, Bourdieu refers firstly to economism, which centralizes economic capital as ultimately superior to other types of capital, and secondly to semiologism “… [which] reduces social exchanges to phenomena of communication and ignores the brutal fact of universal reducibility to economics” (Bourdieu, 1997; p. 54). According to Bourdieu, this dichotomy can be resolved only if labour-time is included in these two opposing ideas. In both cases, it is time and labour which are invested into the accumulation as well as the conversion of the capital, and which will therefore require further investigation.

The distribution and re-distribution of capital is again relational to active social struggle

54 among different agents. As Bourdieu (1986) notes,

Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, that is the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices. (p. 241)

The concept of cultural capital dominates in English-language educational studies. Different variables have been used to determine cultural capital so as to establish its link with school success: parents’ educational level and their participation in cultural activities with their children, and students’ attendance at cultural activities and participation in high culture activities (DiMaggio, 1985; Dumais, 2002).

A growing number of studies on the relationship between cultural capital, social origins and school success outside western educational contexts apply the same criteria and claim similar results. Empirical studies in Japan and South Korea, for example, reveal the differential effects of embodied and objectified cultural capital on educational performance (Byun, Schofer & Kim, 2012; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010). Using the PISA 2000 survey of Eastern European students (from Albania, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, and Romania), studies such as Bodovski, Jeon and Byun (2013) investigate the impact of family socioeconomic status and gender on the objectified cultural capital of parents and the embodied cultural capital of students, along with the effects of these on academic track placement and reading achievement. Like the western studies, however, Bodovski et al. (2013) argue that SES and gender have significant effects on the acquisition of cultural capital and educational outcomes. Therefore, these studies hardly raise the issue of the limits of Bourdieu’s concepts when applied to the former socialist educational systems; they not only fail to highlight the distinctive features of the former socialist social structures and the ideological claim of classlessness but also to recognize the effects of different types of families, rural communities and ethnic culture on the valuation process of this or that type of cultural capital. Here I can only refer to the work of Mateju and Strakova (2005), who establish a close relationship between social capital

(connections), political capital, and educational attainment (cultural capital) in postsocialist societies in Europe.

The concept of habitus has hardly enjoyed the same kind of popularity, as did the concept of cultural capital, in examining the persistent educational inequalities in different societies. A few of the recent literature on educational inequality and habitus reinforce Bourdieu’s early assertions on class-specific habitus and educational success. For instance, Bodovski (2014) combines the sociological analysis of class habitus and the psychological notions of self-concept, locus of control, and expectations to test the relationships between the early practices and expectations of parents and the subsequent adolescents’ dispositions (or the habitus) in the context of the American education system. In addition to positive correlation between social class origins and educational outcomes, Bodovski reports the relationship of gender, ethnicity and educational or studied outcomes and concludes that adolescents’ dispositions are shaped by social class, gender, race, and ethnicity.

Examining dominant interpretations of cultural capital of North American educational research, Lareau and Weininger (2003) observe two prevailing assumptions: (1) cultural capital as defined from the perspective of one’s appreciation of and taste for highbrow culture; and (2) distinguishing cultural capital from other forms of knowledge, ability and competence. In relation to the first interpretation of cultural capital, Lareau and Weininger suggest that cultural capital in the North American societies is not simply about highbrow culture, but it also includes adaptive cultural and social competencies such as the familiarity with institutional norms, requirements, having intellectual and social skills (field/institution-specific vocabulary, field- specific cultural knowledge). Regarding the second interpretation, Lareau and Weininger refer to Bourdieu’s own explanation, as Bourdieu (1998) states, “… dominants always tend to impose the skills they have mastered as necessary and legitimate and to include in their definition of excellence the practices at which they excel” (p. 119). For Lareau and Weininger (2003), cultural capital also incorporates “… micro-interactional processes whereby individual’s strategic use of knowledge, skills, and competence comes into contact with institutionalized standards of evaluation. These specialized skills are transmissible across generations, are subject to monopoly, and may yield advantages or ‘profits’ (p. 569). As the context of this empirical research is a postsocialist, post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz community, which does not have a bourgeoisie or highbrow cultural history like France, I rely on a richer conception of cultural

56 capital suggested by Edgerton and Roberts (2014) who refer to Farkas (2003). Edgerton and Roberts contend that cultural capital is not simply “an arbitrary set of elitist aesthetic and social hallmarks, but rather adaptive set of cognitive skills – such as verbal, reading, writing, mathematics, and analytical reasoning skills – and behavioral skills – such as achievement motivation, self-regulation, and delay of gratification – that are associated with academic and, subsequently, occupational success.” (p. 197).

3.5. Habitus Bourdieu’s habitus, which can be defined as the manifestation of socially constrained human agency, is a heuristic tool (Jenkins, 1992; Lizardo, 2004; Reay, 2004) used to understand how agents act in and orient to the social world in general. Habitus is a complex thinking tool with multiple dimensions and aspects; despite these dimensions and aspects, however, habitus should 12 be conceived as an interwoven whole rather than as a multilayered entity .

In the next several pages I attempt to explore diverse aspects (cognitive, sensory- motor/bodily and emotional) and dimensions (classed, gendered, ethnic) of the habitus. I carry out this conceptual exercise in order to grasp how habitus in its complexity produces certain practices, is produced by certain social conditions, and changes itself as a result of the way that it interacts with forms of capital and social fields. Such a conceptual exercise will be useful in exploring the ways in which the complexly interwoven aspects and dimensions of habitus guide the responses, adaptations, and actions of in the context of radical structural change in a post- Soviet society. Bourdieu describes the concept of habitus as a set of

Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively `regulated' and `regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without

12 As Burawoy (2012) puts it, “[w]e can think of habitus as layered, with the deepest and more profound layers acquired early on in life” (p. 4). Its multilayered nature can paralyze the researcher who seeks to understand how habitus affects social reality with all its aspects, dimensions and elements.

being the product of the organizing action of a conductor (Bourdieu, 1990; p. 53).

Bourdieu conceives the concept of habitus as having functions both of serving as structured structures and of structuring structures. This understanding of the concept of habitus can help to examine the complexity of social reality that combines agency and structure, reproduction and change, the individual and the collective, and the past and the present in order to attempt to foresee its future (Reay, 2004).

13 Habitus is a set of dispositions with which social agents are endowed as a result of their existence in a particular location within a social field. These dispositions reflect the conditions of their existence and their experience of those conditions. The embodied dispositions of habitus produce practice that is consistent with the logic of social conditions, and thus serve as the guiding principles of the practice of agents. Habitus reflects our experience of the social conditions of our existence, such as class and gender, and it therefore produces class and/or gender-specific practices.

According to Bourdieu (1984), the dispositions and actions of agents reflect the objective 14 conditions of their class existence ; they originate from agents’ experiences of particular class conditions. As Bourdieu argues,

Each class condition is defined, simultaneously, by its intrinsic properties and by the

13 As Jenkins (1992) puts it, “[t]he word ‘disposition’, he [Bourdieu] says, encompasses three distinct meanings: (a) ‘the result of an organizing action’, a set of outcomes which he describes as approximating to ‘structure’; (b) a ‘way of being’ or a ‘habitual state’; and (c) a ‘tendency’, ‘propensity’ or ‘inclination’” (p. 76). 14 Bourdieu’s approach to social class as a primary unit of analysis is based on his appropriation of Marx. However, Brubaker (1985) argues that Bourdieu’s general theoretical foundation should be seen as an eclectic use of diverse social theories across disciplinary boundaries. It is obvious that Bourdieu appropriated Durkheim as well as Marx, and Brubaker links Bourdieu’s concepts to Max Weber’s key concepts such as the social functions of symbolic goods and symbolic practices, lifestyles, attributions of honor or dishonor, charisma and legitimacy, ideal goods and ideal interests, as well as the ‘economy of symbolic goods’ and its relation to the material economy. Bourdieu combines both the material (that is, the economic) and the symbolic dimensions of class and status group analysis as his response to the rival theories of Weber’s status groups and Marx’s social class. Weininger (2005) further notes that Bourdieu’s approach to class analysis is more empirically-based than theoretically-initiated: thus, Bourdieu calls for an analysis of the distinct lifestyles of different class groups by means of identifying them in their social practices, rather than by way of pre-determined analytical categories. Weininger (2005) succinctly summarizes Bourdieu’s unique approach to class as follows: “…Bourdieu’s understanding of class … include[s] … class structure as a multidimensional social space; … [an] emphasis on consumption, viewed as an arena of social life in which the possession of economic and cultural capital can be ‘theatrically’ displayed; … [and a] focus on the symbolic dimension of practices, identified as the indispensable bridge between structural proximity, on the one hand, and co-membership in a social class (or fraction), on the other” (p. 152).

relational properties which it derives from its position in the system of class conditions, which is also a system of differences, differential positions, that is by everything which distinguishes it from what it is not and especially from everything it is opposed to; social identity is defined and asserted through difference. (Bourdieu, 1984; p. 172)

Differentially positioned agents share a collective, class-specific habitus. Bourdieu explains class habitus in the following way:

Biological individuals who, being the product of the same objective conditions, are endowed with the same habitus: social class (in itself) is inseparably a class of identical or similar conditions of existence and conditionings and a class of biological individuals endowed with the same habitus, understood as a system of dispositions shared by all individuals who are products of the same conditionings (Bourdieu, 1980, 1990; p. 59).

Like class-specific strategy-generating dispositions, the habitus of agents is highly gendered. Gender acts in ‘…the paradigmatic form of symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; p. 170). Bourdieu (2001) argues that gendered/sexual structures exhibit 15 autonomy as much as economic structures in a social space . The durability and persistence of gender stratification is partly linked with the taken-for-granted naturalness of gendered worldview and practice:16

It is an arbitrary construction of the male and female body of its uses and functions, especially in biological reproduction, which gives an apparently natural foundation to the androcentric view of the division of sexual labour…The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is

15 Bourdieu (2001) makes an argument about the relationship between gender and social class: “…whatever their position in social space, women have in common the fact that they are separated from men by a negative symbolic coefficient which, like skin color for blacks, or any other sign of membership in a stigmatized group, negatively affects everything that they are and do, and which is the source of a systematic set of homologous differences: despite the vast distance between them, there is something in common between a woman managing director… and the woman production line worker” (p. 93). 16As Weininger (2005) summarizes the point, ‘…gender is highly distinct from class: built around a dualist opposition, it has attained rigidity and permanence unmatched by any other classificatory principle. This is largely because gender amounts to a symbolic system that has rooted itself in ‘certain indisputable natural properties,’ and therefore ‘naturalized’ itself more effectively than any other – that is, legitimated itself via the constitution of a seemingly natural ground” (p. 157; Bourdieu, 2001, pp. 13; 23).

itself a naturalized social construction. (Bourdieu, 2001; p. 23)

Bourdieu (2001) argues that sexual divisions are reflected in both material and mental structures: they exist in discourse (language), in objects, and in the bodies of agents. For him,

The division between the sexes appears to be ‘in the order of things’… it is present both – in the objectified state – in things (in the house, for example, every part of which is ‘sexed’), in the whole social world and, - in the embodied state – in the habitus of the agents, functioning as systems of schemes of perception, thought and action. (Bourdieu, 2001; p. 8)

As Bourdieu (2001) notes here, embodied gendered mental structures can explain how gendered reproduction is carried out through a circular logic whereby the material turns into the symbolic, and the symbolic, in turn, structures the material through practical operations (McNay, 1999).

As in the case of class habitus, gender-specific habitus embodies existing social divisions, especially divisions of sexual and gendered labour, between men and women. Socially differential gendered positions convert themselves into a durable personal form of social identity that has a lasting effect on a person’s life trajectory (Krais, 2006). Bourdieu notes that gender and class are not divisible. As he puts it metaphorically, gender and class are as indivisible as “…the yellowness of a lemon is from its acidity” (Bourdieu, 1984). The class and gendered positions of individual agents shape their habitus in distinctive ways:

A class is defined in an essential respect by the place and value it gives to the two sexes and to their socially constituted dispositions. This is why there are as many ways of realizing femininity as there are classes and class fractions, and the division of labour between the sexes takes quite different forms, both in practices and in representations, in the different social classes. So the nature of a class or class fraction is expressed in its distribution by sex or age, and perhaps even more, since its future is then at stake, by the trend of this distribution over time (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 107-108).

Habitus, as a generative scheme or structuring structure, produces thought and actions; however, these are not the product of the agents’ rational calculation and/or deep conscious analysis of the objectives and consequences of their actions. Rather, agents unconsciously produce ‘reasonable’ or ‘sensible’ actions as generative schemes that originate from objective structures so that they can ‘read’ the expectations of the field without conscious engagement.

Even though habitus is embodied by individual agents, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) argue, and it can be conceived in terms of personal or subjective principles, it is, in fact, a ‘socialized subjectivity’ (p. 126). What we observe in the individual—her principles, thoughts, perceptions, and actions—are themselves social as they are constructed through the history of the collective in which she is situated. Bourdieu states, “The individual is always, whether he [she] likes it or not, trapped … ‘within the limits of his [her] brain’… that is, within the limits of the system of categories he [she] owes to his upbringing and training” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 126). Thus, one’s sense of (social) place can be conceived as a subjective form of the social.

Bourdieu’s relational thinking recovers the subjective habitus. The key to the unique variance of the habitus is produced by “…the singularity of their [the agents’] social trajectories, to which there correspond series of chronologically ordered determinations that are mutually irreducible to one another” (p. 60). Thus, habitus is not an individual system of mental structures; rather it is a subjective variation from the past objective conditions of a collective.

Because different conditions of existence produce different habitus – systems of generative schemes applicable, by simple transfer, to the most varied areas of practice – the practice engendered by the different habitus appear as systematic configurations of properties expressing the differences objectively inscribed in conditions of existence in the form of systems of differential deviations which, when perceived by agents endowed with the schemes of perception and appreciation necessary in order to identify, interpret and evaluate their pertinent features, function as lifestyles. (Bourdieu, 1984; p. 170)

17 This system of generative schemes or schemes of thought, perception, and action naturalizes itself as a set of durable and transposable principles as it is internalized by individual agents and becomes an integral part of their own body. This internalization or embodiment is represented in the form of cognitive (mental), bodily (walking, talking), and emotional (appreciation) structures, which act as an interwoven whole. Thus, these durable and transposable dispositions are embodied as mental, bodily motor, and emotional principles of perception, appreciation, and action. As such, all these expressions act simultaneously to produce

17 Bourdieu’s attempt to explain the origin or genesis of schemes of thought, perception, appreciation and action reflects the influence of Durkheim, particularly of Durkheim’s genetic sociology of symbolic forms. See Brubaker (1985; pp. 747-748).

‘intelligible’, ‘reasonable’ and, more importantly, fluid actions. Bourdieu emphasizes the 18 centrality of body in conceptualizing his concept of habitus .

Bourdieu (1993) notes, “body is a fundamental dim of the habitus…what is learned by the body is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be burnished, but something that one is” (pp. 72-73). Thus, one’s social existence turns itself into embodied conditions of that 19 existence. It is through the body that social agents develop their visions of the world . Jenkins (1992) argues that, in its simplest meaning, habitus exists “inside one’s head” as well as “inside other parts of one’s body.” For Waterson (2002), the agent’s body ‘reads’ the principles of classification that help to produce practices consistent with these principles.

Bourdieu’s (1993) agent acquires dispositions unconsciously—through a series of attempts at actions—and without any explicit discourse about them. For instance, as Bourdieu argues, a child learns the schemes of classification of their social and symbolic world through silent observation, followed by efforts to enact them in her behavior several times; and also through metaphors—education or training that is not explicit—and games.

Bourdieu often refers to mental schemata to highlight the cognitive aspect of embodied social structures. As earlier stated, the generation of mental schemata is not fully conscious by the individual, but at the same time it is not entirely unconscious. In exploring Bourdieu’s set of dispositions further, Jenkins (1992) outlines diverse interpretations of habitus as “a spectrum of cognitive and affective factors (thinking and feeling)” (p.76). Here Jenkins (1992) proposes that importance should be assigned to deliberation or consciousness in the process of assimilating and generating dispositions. However, this is not consistent with Bourdieu’s understanding of intentionality in one’s practice or thought. Bourdieu (1993) challenges the pro-active and conscious capacity with skepticism:

Each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of

18 Reckwitz (2002) explains that “ …bodily performances are necessarily connected with certain know-how, particular ways of interpretation (of the other player’s behaviour, for example), certain aims (most of all, of course, to win the game) and emotional levels (a particular tension) which agents, as carriers of the practice, make use of, and which are routinized as well” (p. 252). 19 The body is also understood as not just an instrument for action: “A social practice is the product of training the body in certain way: when we learn a practice, we learn to be bodies in a certain way (and this means more than to ‘use our bodies’)” (Reckwitz, 2002; p. 251).

objective meaning… It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know. (p. 35)

Having dismissed intentionality in this way, Bourdieu (1993) cautions that his articulation of habitus should not produce an understanding of the agent as a cog in a machine that is operated without flexibility and freedom on her part. Bourdieu (1993) argues that even the primary habitus of agents—as the foundation of other habituses—is developmental and subject to change as it confronts new situations and conditions that are constantly changing in social fields. Thus, habitus is malleable, but within limits.

Bourdieu (1990) further extends the expression of habitus beyond its cognitive aspects: for example, habitus is enacted in bodily movements such as “standing, speaking, walking, eating, and shaking.” Bourdieu (2004) explicitly describes some bodily motor expressions of habitus in his analysis of the behaviour of Béarnais bachelor farmers at a small country ball. In this analysis, he quotes an elderly villager who provides an historical context to the development of peasant bodily motor techniques: “peasants in the olden days always walked with their legs bowed as if they were knock-kneed, with their arms bent” (p. 582). In this regard, Bourdieu (2004) argues,

The townsman’s spontaneous ethnography grasps the techniques of the body as one element in a system and implicitly postulates the existence of a correlation at the level of meaning, between the heaviness of the gait, the poor cut of the clothes, and the clumsiness of the expression; and on the other hand, it suggests that it is no doubt at the level of rhythms that one would find the unifying principle (confusedly grasped by intuition) of the system of corporeal attitudes characteristic of the peasant. (pp. 583-584)

‘Clumsy’ and ‘ill-attired’, then, Bourdieu's (2004) peasant bachelor becomes an unmarriageable person for the women whose benchmark of marriageability is the urban man. The way the physical body is ‘read’ by others becomes marked with “[a] social stamp… bearing the trace of the attitudes and activities associated with peasant life” (p. 585). This physical expression of rural male habitus is not only the origin but also the effect of gendered and class-related classification schemes in that particular social space.

Bourdieu (1977) links the bodily habitus with the space in which the agent is located. For him,

Inhabited space is the principal locus for the objectification of the generative schemes; and through the intermediary of the divisions and hierarchies it sets up between things, persons, and practices, this tangible classifying system continuously inculcates and reinforces the taxonomic principles underlying all the arbitrary provisions of this culture. (p. 89)

Bourdieu (1977) argues that bodily-motor dispositions are acquired not only through interactions between the body and tools but also by socially meaningful symbolic structures and values in a particular space. According to Bourdieu (2008),

Bodily hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values: in all societies, children are particularly attentive to the gestures and postures which, in their eyes, express everything that goes to make an accomplished adult – a way of talking, a tilt of the head, facial expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements, always associated with a tone of voice, a style of speech, and (how could it be otherwise?) a certain subjective experience (p. 87).

Bourdieu further stretches the corporeality of the dispositions to recognize how they are related to the sentiments and emotions (for instance, the sense of embarrassment and shyness experienced by male Béarnais peasants when talking to women). Reed-Danahay (2005) rightly emphasizes,

Bourdieu articulated a view of culture in which there is no distinction between cognition and affect, and in which social agents operate (and compete) within fields of symbolic power in ways that are structured by the thoughts and feelings that are part of their dispositions. (p. 101)

Reed-Danahay (2005) discusses emotion and habitus in many writings of Bourdieu, highlighting the significance of emotion in his conceptual work and especially in his articulation of habitus in relation to the field, or his concept of a ‘feel for the game’. It is important to note that Bourdieu (2001) delves into distinctions between emotions and other sentiments:

The practical acts of knowledge and recognition of the magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated that are triggered by the magic of symbolic power and

through which the dominated, often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting the limits imposed, often take the form of bodily emotions – shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guilt – or passions and sentiments – love, admiration, respect. (pp. 38-39)

Emotion as an integral part of habitus should not, therefore, be analyzed purely through the individual’s perspective—as the discipline of psychology would do—but as an instance of the social integrated into an individual body. Thus, the emotive aspect of habitus is social itself in nature (Probyn, 2004). As Bourdieu (2000) argues,

With a Heideggerian play on words, one might say that we are disposed because we are exposed. It is because the body is (to unequal degrees) exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death, and therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and nothing is more serious than emotion, which touches depths of our organic being) that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of which they are the incorporated form. (pp. 140-141)

It is, then, through emotion that the body ‘experiences’ and ‘reads’ the world. Examining the affective aspect of embodiment in particular, Probyn (2004) notes that habitus enacts ‘a feeling body’. Along the lines of Bourdieu, who associates emotion with the ‘enactment of the past’ in the future, Probyn (2004) continues: “[l]istening carefully to the sequence of events described, the body feels, enacts an emotion, and then brings into being the past. It is therefore the feeling body which has the consequence of summoning the past – a spectral past as future” (p. 232). Similarly, Reay (2004) points to the centrality of emotion in understanding habitus. Drawing upon the concept, developed by Nowothy (1981) and Allat (1993), of gendered emotional strategizing in relation to education, Reay (2004) analyzes the engagement of middle class mothers in their children’s education, an arena in which emotional capital—not the affective and emotive aspects of habitus in the ways Probyn that explains above—is an integral part of the mothers’ cultural capital. As Reay (2004) argues,

The gendered practices, which make up involvement in schooling, are exemplified in the complex contradictions of ‘a capital’ which is all about investment in others rather than self – the one capital that is used up in interaction with others and is for the benefit of those others. (p. 71)

The above established complex process of embodiment and enactment of habitus as cognitive, motor and emotive principles, as well as its class and gendered dimensions, can help us to understand how human practice is produced; how it might change and/or be transformed under conditions of radical societal transformation or crisis, such as those currently experienced by post-Soviet societies, communities, and individuals; and how these experiences are embodied as well as enacted in the form of the emotions and actions of those individuals and social groups.

Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus has often been criticized as a deterministic framework that limits the agency of social agents, by placing the agent into a straightjacket: as Bourdieu notes that structures produce dispositions; dispositions produce practices; practices produce structures (Edgerton & Roberts, 2014). The key problem is in ignoring Bourdieu’s argument on the degree of habitus and field correspondence. Moreover, according to Bourdieu, these strategies or actions are socially constrained. As earlier stated, practice is smooth only if there is an alignment between the subjective dispositions of individuals and the objective conditions of the field. If the existing principles of an individual agent misalign with those objective conditions, for instance because the conditions are new to the individual or rapidly changing, the fluidity of practice is suspended. Bourdieu (1977, 2008) explains this social condition as follows:

The hysteresis of habitus, which is inherent in the social conditions of the reproduction of the structures in habitus, is doubtless one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them which is the cause of missed opportunities and, in particular, of the frequently observed incapacity to think historical crises in categories of perception and thought other than those of the past, albeit a revolutionary past. (p. 83)

Social conditions provide possibilities for an increase in the reflexive ability of agents to question their taken-for-granted beliefs and practices, thus producing a rupture from earlier reproduction mechanisms. Reinforcing Bourdieu’s position on the heightened reflexivity of social agents, Mezny (2002) argues that in the current era the sens pratique (practical sense) of agents is no longer considered to be a ‘placid ignorance’; rather their actual social conditions assist agents to develop more reflexive attitudes. One such current social condition is access to universal education (Bourdieu, 1977).

Similarly, Atkinson (2010) argues that the concept of habitus should also be understood as a multilayered and multidimensional function of human agency. Atkinson (2010) notes that

66 the consciousness and knowledge of social agents confront increasingly different social fields and circumstances. An agent under such conditions, according to Edgerton and Roberts (2014), can employ a wide range of habitus manifested through a continuum of actions. These actions can range from more mechanical and pre-reflexive one to more deliberative reflexive actions. Nevertheless, for Bourdieu (1977), “… conditioned and unconditional freedom is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditions”. (p. 95)

Nash (2002) applies Bourdieu’s conception of the ‘educated habitus’ to elaborate beyond the instrumental views on education, which includes one’s desire to be educated, to identify other and be identified by others as such, high aspirations, positive academic self-concept, and positive perceptions of school and teachers. However, in addition to these non-cognitive dispositions, which greatly impact one’s academic attainment and success, cognitive skills and attitudes – information processing, problem solving, concept formation, advanced numerical processing and so on – are also not evenly developed in children from different socioeconomic family backgrounds. Nash contends that these unevenly developed intellectual capabilities and competencies, which are fundamental in academic performance of students in most of the contemporary educational systems actually manifest themselves in the production of social inequalities in educational achievement, academic success and have greater impact on the life chances of children and youth of socially disadvantaged backgrounds. In this study, I adopt a more complex understanding of habitus, including Nash’s (2002) contention on habitus as the cognitive intellectual abilities, when analyzing rural Kyrgyz young people and their parents’ subjective evaluation of one’s capabilities, their attitudes towards school, teachers, and education, and their desire to be educated and to be identified as such.

3.6. Conclusion In this chapter I have reviewed Bourdieu’s framework of social practice for the purpose of later employing it in an analysis of the ways that rural Kyrgyz youth and their families make sense of and participate in the changing conditions of a society in which the former established patterns of both reproduction and transformation of social order have been disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet state. Through Bourdieu’s relational concepts of habitus, capitals, and fields, we can conceptualize human agency without losing sight of social structures which have constraining as well as facilitating effects on human thought and action, and which therefore reproduce and

67 transform the positions of agents within their societies. These heuristic tools will help to conceptualize and examine the ways in which post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz youth draw on available forms of resources (capital), develop certain dispositions (habitus), and orient themselves towards uniquely individual types of futures (fields of actions).

Chapter 4

Research design and methodology

4.1. Introduction

This study examined the educational and life experiences of a group of young people in a remote village in southern Kyrgyzstan. The purpose of the study was to understand the changing nature of education and the rural economy in the postsocialist transformation period along with their effects on the livelihoods and future life chances of younger generations. It also examined one of the less explored aspects of the postsocialist transformation, namely the effects of emerging inequalities, along with social class and gender, on the schooling, life experiences, and future aspirations of rural young people. As we saw in Chapter One, the educational experiences of rural youth are generally understudied, and there is little, if any, available research on the experiences, expectations and aspirations of youth growing up in rural post-Soviet Central Asia. While an emerging body of literature on post-Soviet youth has contributed to global discussion on the transition of youth to adulthood (Bhat, 2013; DeYoung, 2010; Korzh, 2013; Roberts, 2010; Roche, 2014; Walker, 2011), it has not yet addressed the particular experiences of rural youth in post-Soviet regions. This study adopted a case study methodology within a qualitative research paradigm to present and explore radical social change in the former Soviet area of Central Asia from the perspectives of rural youth located at the margins of the postsocialist transformation.

This chapter explains the methodology of the study in four sections. Firstly, it introduces to the key issues of youth research, then the general research design and the associated methods of data collection. Secondly, it outlines and justifies the process of selection of research participants. Thirdly, it describes the process of data-collection, and fourthly, the techniques of data analysis. Lastly, the chapter considers the critical challenges and strengths arising from the researcher’s identity as an insider to the research context, and it ends with a presentation of the limitations of the methodology employed in the study.

4.2. Distinctiveness of youth research This study examined the experiences and aspirations of a group of youth in a rural village in Kyrgyzstan and from the start of this research, methodological and ethical concerns of youth research were identified and addressed, especially when taking into account that the primary participants were young people between the ages of 15 to 18. At the time of this research all the participants lived with their extended families and in their closely-knit rural community and were all enrolled in school.

Prior to describing the methodology of this study, I present a working definition of the category of youth. The category of youth was established by psychobiological conceptions of adolescence of the development psychology, within the dominant socio-functionalist understanding of social systems, and it was also produced as a category from a socio- demographic group perspective on policy making (Bourdieu, 1994). In the cause of this research I was often uncomfortably reminded of what Wyn and White (1997) noted, “age is socially constructed, institutionalized and controlled in historically and culturally specific ways” (pp. 10- 11). I recognized the trap of uncritical use of dominant conceptions in the western academic research and social policy contexts in analyzing the experiences, lives, and aspirations of rural Kyrgyz youth growing up postsocialist conditions of their society. Since youth is a contested category, selection and sampling of participants for this study could have been a difficult task. With the purpose of operationalizing the category, I not only grounded the definition in the research participants’ self-identification as members of a certain age and social group, I also kept in mind the socio-cultural dimensions of the research context. In this study, youth are taken to be those who are aged between 15 and 18 and who consider themselves too grown up to be children and yet still too young to be independent adults. The self-identification of research participants as youth was consistent with the official law of the Kyrgyz Republic on youth policy (2009), which defines youth as those between the ages of 14 and 28.

Researchers from different disciplines have always directly or indirectly studied different aspects of young lives (Bennett, Cieslik & Miles, 2003; Heath, Brooks, Cleaver & Ireland, 2009; Schelbe, Chanmugam, Moses, Saltzburg & Williams; 2015). Heath et al. (2009) noted that when studying youth as participants of their studies researchers should take into considerations several distinct characteristics of youth research. Firstly, the nature of youth research, according to Heath

70 et al., is as such that young people are segregated according to their ages into different institutional and spatial contexts, whether it is schools, college, sports clubs, pubs and nightclubs or young offenders’ institutions. Youth are often under the direct supervision of adults in these institutions. This increases the importance of understanding gatekeepers’ power over the decision of youth participation in research studies, therefore, the need for better understanding about how to follow the ethical protocols and principles including getting informed consent, avoiding harm and risk, and guaranteeing confidentiality and anonymity of youth participants. Secondly, social policies differentiate youth as a separate demographic category, justifying the need for greater state regulation and control, especially in the case of adolescents, and assuming this life stage as a make or break period. Bennett et al. (2003) rightly noted that quite often youth research, especially the ones, which focused on young sub-cultural groups and their practices, perpetuated the popular representation of youth as either ‘in trouble’ or ‘causing trouble’. The findings of such studies predominantly were used by policy makers to increase surveillance, policing, and disciplining the bodies of young people. In other words, Heath et al. (2009) noted that researchers also become complicit, knowingly or unknowingly, in the perpetuation of interventions and surveillance over youth. Therefore, youth researchers are expected to evaluate the consequences of their study on young people’s lives and have a better understanding and techniques of youth representation and voice in the research and after it. Lastly, youth have often been assumed to be relatively powerless in the research conditions to make their own informed decisions on the participation in the research and voice their concerns on the issues pertaining their lives and well-beings. However, the emerging literature argues that youth should be understood as human beings, ‘not human becomings’, who are capable of making their own decisions and clearly expressing their ideas, feelings, and emotions. In this regard, Schelbe et al. (2015) noted, “Researchers increasing value children’s perspectives, seeing children as active agents in constructing and communicating their own realities” (p. 505). In other words, researchers acknowledge that young people have both agency and competency in participating in research studies (Heath et al., 2009). Youth are active in making sense of the social world and are competent to communicate their perceptions of their world. This brings us to one of the pertinent questions of the type and extent of youth participation in research studies. Recently universal human rights discussions have extended the discussions on the rights of children and youth in relevant policies, social services, and research. The result of such

71 discussions is the realization of policy makers and practitioners that young people are citizens with rights and responsibilities; therefore, most nations, especially in the global North includes citizenship education as a required subject in school curriculum to prepare youth for their rights and responsibilities to actively participate in changing and improving their societies (Heath et al., 2009). Despite such concerted efforts and shifting conceptions, many issues still persist for advancing child rights and responsibilities in many countries and these issues help understand the positions of societies on childhood, youth, and their associated rights and responsibilities, including the right to freedom of speech and being heard. Moreover, the task also includes that policy makers, practitioners and researchers should carefully analyze the claims over the universality of such concepts, especially when the contexts of the universalization have been advanced through neo-imperial and neoliberal mechanisms. Therefore, I conceptualize the category of youth as not simply individual citizens of nation-states, but they are also members of their kinships and rural communities, which provide the protection of and guarantee their rights and which are also concerned about the present well-being and the future of their young generation, in addition to promoting their situated responsibilities specific to specific issues of sustainability of their physical and social environments. There are a variety of ways of conceptualizing the types and extent of youth participation in research studies (Best, 2007; Heath et al., 2009). Although, currently youth researchers are encouraged to design more radical methodologies to allow greater decision making and participation of young people in their research studies, often such research studies aim to change youth marginalized positions and acknowledge their agency to change existing power structures of their societies (Heath et al., 2009). However, in this research, I aimed at generating data and improving our own understanding of and knowledge about Kyrgyz young people’s rural lives and future aspirations in the conditions of postsocialist transformation, as little is known about the lives and their perspectives of rural youth in Kyrgyzstan. This decision enabled me to observe and understand the contexts, risks and opportunities for involving young people in the research process in the context, in which little is understood about these lives to being with. It is my hope that the findings of this study will help me inform relevant stakeholders and institutions and work closely with them in involving youth and their communities in the improvement of their livelihoods and opportunities in the future. Youth research requires researchers, as earlier argued, to inform themselves about different ethical issues. As any ethical practitioners, youth researchers require to follow the

72 governing principles of informed consent, minimizing the risk and the harm, and guaranteeing confidentiality and anonymity (Heath et al., 2009). This doctoral research followed the university ethical procedure and was evaluated by the relevant ethics board at the University of Toronto. Some ethical dilemmas required judgments that responded to the specificity of the cultural context of the fieldwork. The standard requirement of informed consent, for example, is that researchers are expected to inform participants about the study objectives, the use of the data and knowledge dissemination. It also requires researchers having a protocol with signature of both researcher and research participant to ensure that both parties understand their rights and responsibilities. In this research, participants, especially the youth from intelligentsia backgrounds did not mind to sign the consent forms. However, still a few parents did not officially sign the documents but they provided oral permission for using their information in the study. These participants stated that they trusted me as a researcher as well as a fellow villager. Their trust was strongly linked with my insider position in this research. Throughout my study I upheld this trust of this community as the highest ethical principle and to my best ability I ensured that their voices and lives were represented fairly and just. It is also known that age differences between youth participants and adult researchers shape the process and outcome of the study (Heath et al., 2009). Adult researchers occupy the position of privilege, which is relatively distant from those who participate in their research (Raby, 2007). According to Heath et al. (2009), the shared experience of being youth and the memory of this experience is not enough to bridge the age differences because the temporal specificity of the experience of youth is always distinct. Acknowledging this dilemma, in Chapter One I described and reflected on my own experiences of growing up in a rural village in Kyrgyzstan but in the late Soviet perestroika and later in independent Kyrgyzstan. Despite my insider status, my memories and experiences of growing up in a relatively similar cultural context are constructed through my classed, gendered and predominantly Soviet childhood backgrounds. In this regard, Hey (1997), reflecting on the tension between distance and empathy that she experienced with one of her participants, Carol, noted the following, My intention in claiming resonances between an ethnographic text and aspects of my biography is not to stake a privileged claim on truth. Rather it is to recognize the significant (if immeasurable) effects of personal history … In getting to know Carol and other schoolgirls I have been continually reminded of resonances from my own girlhood.

At a deeper level it is, however, ‘difference’ that constructs our relation and relationship and my rendition of it (p. 89). In the latter section of this chapter I will further elaborate on the specific issues related to the age, social class, and gender differences between me, as a researcher, and my youth participants. Having reviewed the distinctive nature of youth research and having acquired a better understanding of the issues and techniques, I sought to understand and include the first-person experiences directly from youth by locating their experiences at the centre of this research but situating their biographies and aspirations within their family contexts and familial livelihood trajectories in times of rapid societal transformation in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan. Below I embed and discuss the pertinent issues of youth research within each section.

4.3. Qualitative case study

This study was conceived as a case study research project within the tradition of qualitative research. A qualitative methodological design was selected for several reasons. Firstly, a qualitative design is interpretative: it helps the researcher to examine the phenomena under investigation through the experience and the accounts of the participants (Denzin & Lincoln, 2006; Creswell, 2007). As Schelbe et al. (2015) put it rightly, “Qualitative research, which seeks to understand and represent lived experiences and perceptions, is the ideal approach for understanding child and youth experiences” (p. 505). It is constructionist and reflexive in that it enables the researcher to construct and interpret the data without assuming that there is a ‘right’ answer. This design of inquiry seemed to be the most suitable as I sought to explore and examine how youth growing up in rural regions make sense of the radical social change that postsocialist Kyrgyzstan has undergone since the 1990s.

Secondly, qualitative research enables the researcher to make sense of meanings in their specific settings or contexts (Maxwell, 2005). A qualitative design was selected for this study because it investigates youth experiences of life and schooling, and their aspirations for the future, in relation to their specific rural context. The context is crucial, as we have noted, because the relationship between the economy, education, and labour markets has changed substantially in the postsocialist transformation, and diverse trajectories of the rural economy have emerged in the process of this transition, often depending on physical location, resource availability, and distance from the economic, cultural and political centers of Kyrgyzstan.

Thirdly, qualitative research enables the researcher to establish and advance the perspectives and political agenda of those who are marginalized from mainstream research studies and knowledge (Creswell, 2007). As a person from a rural background myself, I wanted to advance both my own political and social justice agenda and the perspectives of socially, economically and politically marginalized groups of rural Kyrgyz youth who have often been ignored in mainstream empirical studies as well as in policy-making. This study was conceived in the belief that the agenda of youth-centered research can contribute to the existing literature on post-Soviet youth and their transitions to adulthood in specific and to the literature on education and transformation in postsocialist societies.

The qualitative research approach enabled me to explore the diverse ways in which young people experience school education, informal learning in the household and beyond, their family’s stance on education, and the hopes and aspirations these youth and their parents have about the future , particularly in regards to education, occupation and livelihood. The qualitative approach also helped to explore the ways in which rural Kyrgyz school-going youth negotiate between their individual aspirations and the social realities of growing up in a rural community in times of radical postsocialist social transformation.

Within the qualitative research paradigm, I selected a case study as the most suitable approach, as it enables the researcher to investigate a phenomenon without divorcing it from its context. Yin (2003) notes that case study methodology “investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident” (p. 13). As established in earlier chapters, the contextual conditions and the changing relations of education and the economy in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan are pertinent factors that dramatically shape the lives, educational experiences, and future aspirations of rural youth. Moreover, a case study methodology is especially useful when empirically sound knowledge of a phenomenon, such as the experiences and aspirations of rural youth in a transitioning society like Kyrgyzstan, is not available. Marshall and Rossman (2006) observe that a case study methodology within a qualitative paradigm enables the researcher to develop a detailed and in-depth understanding of an issue under investigation by employing various methods of data collection to produce a better representation of that issue in its proper context. The research design selected for this study helped, then, to achieve insight into the current experiences and aspirations of school-aged youth in rural Kyrgyzstan under the

75 conditions of postsocialist transformation.

4.4. Participant selection and emergent sampling design

This study employed a combination of purposive and opportunistic sampling strategies to examine rural youth experiences of schooling and to arrive at a rich interpretation of their life conditions, the trajectories of their families, and their aspirations for the future. The first stage of the sampling was to develop a purposive sampling strategy based on the focus of this study, which was the experience of youth attending rural high schools and their aspirations for the future. High school students were selected in order to understand how the differential and ongoing experiences of schooling informed by their social class and gender backgrounds influence their perceptions and aspirations. I excluded those whose age fell between 15 and 18 years old but who were not enrolled in schools at the time of this research, as I was interested in examining educational experience of rural youth who continued their schooling against all odds and issues of this public system. The sampling was also purposive in that I included both female and male school youth so that I could explore the gendered dimensions of their experiences, expectations and aspirations.

The second stage of the sampling reflected the attributes of the opportunistic sampling strategy, as I recruited those who fell into the category of school youth aged between 15 and 18 and enrolled in Grades 9, 10, and 11. I also used the opportunistic sampling strategy to recruit members of the families of the youth who participated in this study to understand the conditions of the families in which these young participants grew up and develop their worldviews.

4.4.1. Primary participants: youth aged 15 to 18 and in school

The study explored the everyday experiences of the changing conditions of school, life and work among school-aged youth in a postsocialist rural community in southern Kyrgyzstan. Initially, I approached six students—three female and three male, and two students in each grade level—to participate in the first round of interviews. After the first round of sample selection process, I identified another dimension of the experience of these youth, which was the socioeconomic background of the families to which they belonged. I observed that the keenest

76 participants in this study were those who belonged to families in which the parents had held professional or semi-professional jobs in the Soviet period. I expanded the recruitment of participants to include youth who belonged to former kolkhoz farmers’ and administrative workers' households, which at the time of this research relied on a mixture of income sources such as subsistence farming, small-scale commercial farming, migrant remittances, profits made from kommertsia, government child care and disability allowances, pensions, and salaries and wages from administrative semi-professional jobs, or a combination of a few or all of these (See Appendix A). Although social class and gender significantly shape the schooling, learning, and life experiences of youth growing up in a postsocialist Kyrgyz village community, these categories were problematic to apply when the income levels of the population in this village were not accessible. Therefore, I widened the criteria of recruitment to include youth who were in grades 9, 10 and 11, female and male, and who expressed both willingness and availability to participate in two to three interviews during the course of the study (see Table 1).

Grade School Data Sources

Gender Gr9 Gr10 Gr11 School A School B Int. 1 Int. 2

Female 7 9 6 9 13 22 16

Male 3 6 5 6 8 14 10

Total 10 15 11 15 21 36 26

Table 1: Primary Research Participants

In the first round of interviews, thirty-six students from grades 9, 10, and 11 were recruited to participate in the study. The grade 9 students were between the ages of 15 and 16, and had reached the end of their compulsory education. These students had several options: to continue their high school education or not; to further their education at the college level; to remain on the family farm, or to work in the formal or informal employment sectors for wages.

The grade 10 students were those aged 16 or 17, who had decided to continue their secondary education, and who continued to live with their parents and support their family farms and households in the village. The third group consisted of students attending grade 11, aged between 17 and 18, who were at the end of their high school education and about to decide between 1) furthering their education in colleges or universities across the country or abroad; 2) emigrating to other countries for study or work; and 3) remaining in the village to continue to manage the family farm and/or to carry out other economic, social, and cultural roles. In the second round of interviews, 10 of the 36 research participants were not interviewed for various reasons: some had migrated to the cities or to mountain villages; some declined further interviews without providing reason, and some could not find time for interviews within the schedule of the study.

I recruited the young participants from two high schools (see Appendix 1 and 2). Both of these schools were located in the administrative capital of the selected municipality. There were six schools in total under the administration of this village: one was a comprehensive school, offering general secondary curriculum, but located at the banks of the river and separated from the valley, whereas other two incomplete schools, offering school curriculum until Grade 9, and these were based in the new settlements in the mountains, and the fourth school, also offering Grade 9 curriculum, was located in this village and was mainly attended by students from one tribe. As was typical with many mountainous villages, all these schools were funded by the government and were under the responsibility of the local administration. At the time of this research there was not any private school in this village. Except these two schools, all other four schools were essentially serving one tribe (Zholdoshalieva et al., 2014).

One of the two schools, from which I recruited my participants, was the school, which was first opened its doors to students in the late 1960s. The school was built for the children of those who were relocated from their smaller tribal and mountainous collective farm to settle in the valley and become workers of a large, multi-clan and collectivized farm with the purpose of not only consolidating smaller collective farm units into a larger industrial agricultural production but also ensuring that the smaller tribal-based Stalinist collective farms extended their allegiance to the Soviet state and as a result to develop a unified socialist identity of these tribal citizens (Zholdoshalieva et al., 2014). As the population of the collective farm grew and school attendance was compulsory for all children during these periods, the second school was

78 constructed at the end of 1980s and was opened in the early 1990s. With the second school, school enrolment was restricted to the place of residence or based on neighbourhoods, however, as I highlighted elsewhere, these residential neighbourhoods were based on tribal affinities as a result of Soviet relocation policies of collective farms in the late 1960s (Zholdoshalieva et al., 2014). This meant that a catchment area approach to school enrolment further sharpened tribal divisions within this village as neigbourhoods were essentially based on major clans. The first school enrolled students from three major clans, whereas the second school recruited students from two of these clans and another major clan. As I did not primarily looked at the manifestation of tribal divisions and identities through schooling, by recruiting students from both of these schools enabled me to not only respond to the question on the economic diversity of student populations, but also identify, if at all, the manifestations of tribal identity and tribe- based distribution of resources in this village. Both of these schools had students from the local intelligentsia, merchants, and farm backgrounds.

4.4.2. Secondary Participants: Parents and grandparents

For this study I recruited secondary participants among the family members of the youth who took part in the research. The decision to include family members in the study of rural youth experiences, expectations and aspirations was taken to reflect the cultural and social realities of growing up in a rural Kyrgyz community. The discussion of the Kyrgyz context in Chapter Five will permit a more detailed understanding the culture of rural Kyrgyz communities, and particularly the importance of family background.

First of all, the experiences of Kyrgyz rural youth should be understood within the cultural, social, and political environment of their villages, as these youth are socially embedded individuals within their communities and kinship groups and should not be considered as individuals whose lives exist outside these contexts. In Chapter Two, we saw that this approach was proposed by studies of developing countries, in which young people and their aspirations were analyzed in the cultural and social contexts of their family, kinship groups, and local communities (Del Franco, 2012).

Secondly, as a rural person myself, I was well aware of the traditional practices of the Kyrgyz family, including the household-oriented culture and the context of family decision making. It is quite common for rural Kyrgyz youth to live in multigenerational households with

79 strong kinship relationships, where life and schooling decisions and practices are shaped by the members of their extended family, as well as by their parents and other kins. Although this social norm pertains to the traditional tribal and kinship culture of the Kyrgyz people in general, in recent years there has been an even greater tendency for youth to grow up in multigenerational family contexts because of mass emigration among working age rural people in reaction to the conditions of unemployment and poverty, especially among former Soviet state farm and professional workers. The likelihood of young children residing with grandparents, uncles, and aunts is quite high. In such households, the influence of parents and other members of the extended family are far greater than that of members of formal social institutions or local professionals in rural Kyrgyz communities. It was for this reason that I decided to include one of the adult family members, provided that they were available and willing to participate in the research: their expectations and aspirations for their children would shed light on the experiences of the young people who were the primary focus of the study. I categorized these adult family members as secondary research participants because, while they were not the focus of this study, they held perspectives that could help me better understand the particular family circumstances, therefore the contexts, events, histories and aspirations of the youth in the study. Twenty-seven parents or guardians in total were interviewed for the study among who I had 15 mothers, 8 fathers, 2 grandmothers and 2 grandfathers. The other nine parents and grandparents could not find time to participate in the research.

I interviewed more mothers than fathers as my secondary research participants. This discrepancy in itself had implications for the significance of the role and influence of mothers in the decisions and lives of young people; however, I did not focus on this aspect of rural Kyrgyz culture in this study. I realized that I could have reached out more pro-actively to fathers to participate in this study. I recognized that pursuing these and other questions, particularly in regards to the effects of my gender on the participants and prospective participants, could have enriched further analysis on the gendered dimensions and challenges of conducting research in rural communities in Central Asia. However, this experience further revealed that child rearing and schooling remained the responsibility of mothers in rural Kyrgyzstan. Such division of labour in the domestic space and between the parents remained strong in postsocialist rural communities and greatly influenced the gendered experiences and perceptions of youth participants in this study.

Out of a total of twenty-seven family members, four grandparents - two grandmothers and two grandfathers - participated in this research. These grandparents were among those who acted as surrogate parents for youth whose parents lived outside the borders of this region at the time of this research. The parents of four youth whose grandparents were selected for interviews were migrant workers in Russia. Although I assumed that these grandparents were the guardians of these young people, in the cases of three participants it became apparent that it was these young people who provided care for them. These young people acted both as surrogate parents towards their siblings and as adult heads of the households attending the elderly and the young. However, this arrangement was also excluded from further analysis and I did not explore whether such households and their decision-making processes and division of labour and roles, or any other features of the households, impacted the personality and outlook of these youth or their experiences and aspirations in general.

4.5. The methods and process of data collection

This study employed the qualitative data collection methods of semi-structured or qualitative interviewing and ethnographic observation, as well as a story-telling approach whenever it was appropriate, in order to provide rich accounts of how rural young people understand their lives, schooling, and aspirations under the changing conditions of informal learning and formal education, the informal economy and the formal labour market.

Qualitative methods of data collection, including interviews and observations, describe human experience richly and enable an understanding of how people create meanings in their social world and envision themselves in the future (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Marshall & Rossman, 1999). The combination of ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, and unstructured stories serves to describe and examine the relationship between the biographical particularity of the selected participants and the general culture of the rural community (Warren, 2002). These methods were used selectively in this study, depending on the situations, events, and emerging elements of the research, to complement and enrich the data and to paint a more complete picture of the complex systems of interactions, linkages and contradictions between formal education and traditional Kyrgyz knowledge, formal employment and the informal economy, and the diverse meanings and interpretations of work.

The selected methods of data collection enabled me to enrich the data rather than to

81 achieve a complete, objective representation of the social world, as is often claimed by the techniques of ‘data triangulation’. Atkinson and Coffey (2002) argue that methodological triangulation has historically treated the relationship between methods, and the very methods themselves, as unproblematic. As they note, “[t]here are systematic relationships between methods and representations, but they cannot be washed out or eliminated through simpleminded aggregation. Rather, we have to address what methods do construct and what sense we can make of those constructions” (pp. 807-808). Atkinson and Coffey (2002) further suggest that

We can fruitfully begin to think of what we observe (and the work of observing) and the contents of interviews (and the work of interviewing) as incorporating social actions of different kinds and yielding data of different forms. We can thus be released from trying to combine them to produce information from them about something else and concentrate more on the performance of the social actions themselves. (p. 809)

For this study, I highlighted the “distinctive and intrinsic attributes of particular methods” (Atkinson & Coffey, 2002; p. 808), demonstrated a commitment to the selected methods, and carried out the rigorous process of data analysis. By combining methods in this way, I was able to develop a holistic approach to the process of data collection and to generate an extensive understanding and explanation of rural young lives at a time of radical social change in Kyrgyzstan.

It was important to locate and describe the contexts of the interviews as a prelude to examining youth perspectives on the complex conditions of rural everyday life. Research on young people (Eder & Fingerson, 2002; Mason, 1990) highlights the need to start entry to the field by gaining access to the participants’ pool of peer and social networks through ethnographic observation. Eder and Fingerson (2002) note that ethnographic observation helps the researcher to gain an understanding of the peculiarities of the communicative norms and culture of young people, so that the questions, locations, and overriding themes of the interviews can further inform the researcher about the discourse and behavioural patterns of youth in their communities. In ethnographic observation, as Robson (1993) puts it, “…the primary data are the interpretations of the observer of what is going on around her. The observer is the research instrument…” (p. 195). The effects of the observer on the situations and the behaviour of people

82 in these situations, as well as on what are recorded as observations, are significant and should be critically examined. To address this issue, Atkinson and Coffey (2002) suggest,

Through reflexivity we should recognize that we are part of the social events and processes we observe and help to narrate… [since] to overemphasize our potential to change things artificially swells our own importance. To deny our being ‘there’ misunderstands the inherent qualities of both methods - in terms of documenting and making sense of social worlds of which we are a part. (p. 812)

The data from observation was recorded in the form of field notes (Marshall & Rossman, 1999). These notes were mostly descriptive of the settings, the people in these settings, and the events that occurred. I observed, recorded my observations, and later decided the relevance of my notes to the phenomenon under investigation (Robson, 1993). I began to ‘fill in’ the field notes soon after I wrote my observations of the events. The experience of filling in the notes played a pertinent role in the initial phases of the analysis, improving my understanding of the events I had witnessed and aiding me later in my interpretation of the data (Robson, 1993).

Ethnographic observation was initially conducted in educational settings, in classrooms, during recess, and in canteens, in order to identify prospective research participants. Later in the process I recorded descriptions of the activities of the young people in the contexts of their homes and neighborhoods: conversations around the drinking water pipeline in the evenings, playing or cheering on volleyball and soccer games in school yards, or working in kitchen gardens. These observations also included, but were not limited to, the participation of the youth in cultural celebrations (Kyrgyz: Nooruz, the Zoroastrian celebration of the New Year), school- wide performances (Russian: Klub Vessyolykh I Nakhodchivykh, or KVN), inter-school competitions (Kyrgyz: Dilgir kyz – The Smart Girl), and evening karate classes.

In this research semi-structured interviews explored the interpretations of youth of their experiences of learning, education, and work, and the aspirations that they had for their futures. The meanings of their experiences of learning, education, and work were not simply ‘extracted’ from the ‘existing vessels of answers’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). As Hammersley (2003) and Smith (1995) suggest, interviews are best considered as sites of negotiation and co-construction of meaning between the participants and the researcher. The research phenomenon unfolds from how the social agents frame it and from how the researcher shapes this process of framing.

Atkinson and Coffey (2002) argue,

We need to treat interviews as generating accounts and performances that have their own properties and ought to be analyzed in accordance with such characteristics…[and] to appreciate that interviews are occasions in which are enacted particular kinds of narratives and in which ‘informants’ construct themselves and others as particular kinds of moral agents (p. 808).

Therefore, interviews with participants were treated as a form of social action rather than as “a repository of ‘inner’ feelings and intensely personal recollection”. (Atkinson & Coffey, 2002; p. 811)

Interviews provided understandings, meanings and patterns of behavior, which were collective in their nature, which were shared among members of the rural community, including its young people, and which formed a set of collective or social histories. The interview data was treated as having distinctive properties to give coherent and plausible meanings within the accounts of each individual participant or group. All of the interviews were conducted in Kyrgyz language, that is, in our mother tongue, which definitely eased the process. Moreover, most of these youth participants appreciated that they were given this chance to discuss their concerns and hopes.

The issues can arise from the epistemological status of the interview data. Despite that interviews are often considered as ‘conversations with a purpose’ (Burgess, 1984, p. 102 cited in Heath et al., 2009), they also generate data that are the products of a specific social interaction, a manufactured interaction (Heath et al., 2009). The common concerns around the validity and reliability that characterize the quality of research should not be the focus of examination and evaluation of narrative interview data, as the narratives, accounts or representations of research participants in qualitative research studies should be considered as situated knowledges or subjective understandings. Heath et al. (2009) note that the forms of interviews and techniques - not the accuracy of the facts - should help researchers understand how participants make sense of their social worlds. In this research, I was interested in the ways young participants made sense of their changing social, economic, cultural, and employment conditions of postsocialist rural lives and developed their hopes and fears about their future.

I conducted the initial interviews with the selected school-aged youth in their schools. The time of these interviews were previously negotiated with the participants who called me on my personal cell phones after my presentations at their schools. The locations of the interviews were identified with the help of teachers, principals, and deputy principals. Although interviewing youth in their institutional contexts would pose the issues of security, safety, and sensitivity (Heath et al., 2009), most of the initial interviews were conducted within the school premises (separate classrooms, school canteens, or school yards). A few of these interviews were conducted at my place in the yard if participants requested meeting me separately and after their classes were over. To ensure their safety and security, I left the doors half-open. Moreover, I ensured that their interview data would not be shared with any of their teachers, principals, their peers, and their parents and would strictly be used for the purpose of this research.

The first interviews (see Appendix 3) consisted of general, unstructured, and open-ended questions about the background of the participants and their interpretations of their typical days in different seasons of the year to help me to make notes on the preliminary themes on the aspects of their lives and to develop further questions for semi-structured interviews. Moreover, unstructured and open-ended questions allowed these young people to bring up their concerns in the modes of discourse that were most familiar to them (Eder & Fingerson, 2002). The time use or typical day descriptors provided in the interviews helped me to chart the seasonal aspects of their work and community life and their roles in that work and life as the dominant or subordinate members of their community and households. The interviews were extended to incorporate and explore other aspects of informal economic and educational activities in which these selected participants were involved, as well as their interpretations of their engagement and participation. Such interviews allowed me to go beyond a surface knowledge of rural life, informal work, and formal schooling and to improve my understanding of the interests, strategies, and motives of the participants by connecting subjective meanings to the objective conditions of the rural economy and community life.

Subsequent interviews (see Appendix 4) with the youth were focused on their views of rural life, their relationships with their peers and family members, their educational experiences at school, their perceptions of the educational strategies of their families, their evaluations of school knowledge and everyday learning outside their schools, their career and educational aspirations and personal goals for the future, and their attitudes towards farming and migration

85 as strategies for youth livelihood and transition. These lines of inquiry were selected to widen the exploration and understanding of the life experiences of the youth within this particular rural area, but also to go beyond that context to explore the effects of larger social forces, such as the postsocialist economy, urbanization, migration and globalization, on their daily experiences and aspirations.

These second interviews were long, but were conducted in a more relaxed, conversational form, as some familiarity and rapport with the participants had been developed and trust was established since the first interviews. These interviews predominantly took place in the homes of the young people, at times convenient to them and in everyday situations of these youth. Heath et al. (2009) noted that despite that conducting interviews in their homes could maximize the control of the situation by the participants, often some participants might find these interview topics too sensitive to discuss in the presence of their family members. In addition, family members also might chip into discussions or their mere presence might influence young people’s talks. Being aware of these challenges, I explained the process of interviews to their parents and other family members before these interviews and requested for their cooperation to ensure that their children had adequate time and safe space to share their views on their lives and experiences. Parents and guardians found this practice interesting and unique and they often joked whether their children would share negative views about their parenthood and family strategies. I often found myself explaining the importance of allowing youth and children to share their views on the matters of their wellbeing.

In addition, the interviewing youth while they were engaged in household work also presented the possibility for a radical departure from the usual practice of excluding mundane human practices and lives. They were conducted while the youth were involved in various activities: while preparing family dinner or lunch, attending to younger siblings or helping grandparents who needed to be fed with a spoon, doing the laundry, sweeping the yard, baking bread, feeding the cattle in the barns, shearing sheep, in between their volleyball practice with friends, and so on. Most of these activities reflected the active role that these youth played within their households, their communities, and the rural life in general. Such approach helped me to situate these youth, along with their interpretations of their experiences and aspirations, within the context of their everyday lives in order to capture the nature and flow of rural Kyrgyz life.

Story telling is one of the natural means of constructing knowledge about each other and our social world. For centuries, Kyrgyz people transmitted their traditions through oral histories in the form of epics, fairy tales, proverbs, and sayings. Story-telling sessions with the adult family members of selected research participants were conducted to link the adults’ stories to the young people’s views, practices and experiences of learning, education, and work, and their future aspirations. Because of the oral cultural norms of village life and due to official mode of communication of formal interviews, I opted out of a semi-structured set of interviews, initiating instead more open-ended story telling sessions, which included all the grandparents and parents. Our conversations, without any exception, would start over food or tea in the presence of their children and other family members. As I grew up in this village and my parents still living there, my interviews with adult participants naturally started with stories about our family members, our own wellbeing, mutual acquaintances and important village events. These conversations contained detailed and richer information about my research participants. In this mode of communication, the formality of the setting and the importance of objectivity of the data could have added difficulty to gain trust of these people and strengthen our relationships in the research process.

Despite that the stories provided rich data into young lives and families, I still retained the line of inquiry of the study consistently across these story-telling sessions (see Appendix 5). The themes of these sessions, which helped to paint a richer portrait of the lives that the young people experienced, were constructed on the basis of a preliminary analysis of the interviews with the youth. The stories that were told covered a wide range of topics, including the families’ economic, cultural and social standing within the village, their experiences of the changing socio-cultural and political context of a post-Soviet village, and their interpretations of changes in the occupational and economic activities of the villagers, and in the reproduction or transformation of family social positions. In regards to their children, the stories told of their memories of schooling and work in the village, their aspirations and hopes for their children’s education, career, work and life, their attitudes towards migration, their interpretations of rural Kyrgyz kinship practices and the effects of these practices on decisions regarding education and the migration of younger members of the families. More specifically, the adults used stories to convey their subjective evaluation of current school practices and the teachers’ work, their interpretations of the educational strategies of family members at home, and their views on

87 educational reforms and improvements.

4.6. Data management, analysis and interpretation

All the interviews as well as the story-telling sessions were recorded on audiotape. In Central Asian communities, the experience of participating in empirical research using structured questionnaires or semi-structured interviews is rather limited. Moreover, their experience of receiving and sharing knowledge is dominated by oral culture and their relationships are established through mutually meaningful social trust which, in the case of this study, involved their knowledge of me as a member of a local family, a professional, and a person with good intentions. This trust is not simply assumed and established after introductions and the verbalization of intentions, but it is rather based on continuous negotiation and questioning. For many participants in this study, having their interviews tape-recorded was a new experience. At the initial stages of the data collection, I was often asked whether I was a journalist. When asked, I explained the purpose of recording the sessions. These questions and clarifications did not seem to reflect any fear or concern for their privacy and safety on the part of the interviewees; rather, they demonstrated curiosity about the process of the study.

Although the participants initially felt conscious of being recorded, which may have affected what they had to say and how they said it (Warren, 2002), as time passed, the tape recording device provided me with an opportunity to concentrate on the participants’ stories and to develop the interactional and social contexts and content of the conversations. After the interviews, I noted down the key aspects of what each participant had shared to help me to revisit topics in subsequent interviews for further clarification and elaboration as well as to reflect on these aspects while analyzing the data. As Patton points out, such notes contribute to subsequent analysis by providing an opportunity to perceive contextual clues for interpreting the interview data (Patton, 1980). Although transcribing interviews was a time-consuming activity, it aided in the summary and analysis of the data. I transcribed the first round of interviews prior to conducting the second round so that I could revise the questions as well as start an initial analysis of the data. The second set of interviews with youth and parents was transcribed later. The data from the observations and interviews was sorted according to the source of the data and the participant. I not only maintained separate files for each participant but created separate files for themes across the interviews and observational notes. I kept copies of all files in e-

88 folders as well as paper files.

I conducted several rounds of reading and interpreting the data to enrich my understanding of the general line of inquiry into the lives and aspirations of rural youth. The interview data was analyzed for its own properties such as narrative structures and functions (Riessman, 2002), while the observation notes were analyzed to explore how the ‘events’ or ‘behavioural patterns’ were performed, how their meaning and significance were narrated, and whether the research participants and I, the researcher, narrated particular events similarly or differently (Atkinson & Coffey, 2002). Analysis of the data started as soon as it was collected to identify the initial as well as the emergent categories and patterns, and to verify, build and/or disconfirm the codes and categories from the preliminary data sources. The inductive approach to data analysis and the construction of analytical categories and codes helped to refine and strengthen the subsequent data collection process and analysis so that themes could be linked to the overarching conceptual framework of this study. As Thomas (2006) elucidates this approach, “inductive analysis refers to approaches that primarily use detailed readings of raw data to derive concepts, themes, or a model through interpretations made from the raw data by an evaluator or researcher” (p. 238).

The data was later analyzed in order to identify links and relations between major themes across the participants and the data from both ethnographic observations and in-depth interviewing. I conducted the data analysis according to the following stages, which did not constitute a linear and structured activity, but were rather cyclical and iterative: 1. Reading through and making notes on the margins of transcripts and underlining key statements and ideas; 2. Identifying key themes within a data set for an individual case and themes across these cases; 3. Comparing themes and concepts that were common across different cases; 4. Identifying commonalities as well as differences among these themes and cases; 5. Developing an initial one-page summary on the key lines of narratives of each individual case: a. Personal data (grade level/age; gender; birth order in the family); b. Social backgrounds (parental educational and occupational history); c. Family economic status (family income sources, assets, and expenses);

d. Stated purpose of education (of the youth and their parents); e. Educational experiences (of the youth); f. Career aspirations (of the youth and their parents); g. Family educational investment (the youth’s as well as parental perspectives); h. Household or other work experiences (the youth’s as well as parental perspectives); 6. Expanding the profiles of each case and creating a mind-map for key themes/concepts; 7. Importing the data into Nvivo and running auto-coding in Nvivo according to key themes for each case; separating the segments of data in the cases and grouping them according to social backgrounds and gender; 8. Carrying out focused coding; identifying the relationships between cases; 9. Generating analytical explanations and analyzing the cases at a conceptual level: Identifying influences of the relationship between social class and gender on rural educational and on the work practices and future aspirations of the youth in the larger context of post-Soviet social transformations.

I categorized the substantial quantity of texts, themes, and categories into manageable groups or clusters. These clusters, which consisted of analytical groups or types of youth within the entire data-set, were constructed on the basis of two attributes: 1) all the members of the group were significantly similar to each other, and 2) the groups differed significantly from each other. However, I did not expect the borders between the clusters or groups to be always clear, as they were established only conceptually and analytically, and made sense only when specific questions were asked of the data set that they represented. The groups of youth participants could easily have been clustered differently. To resolve the issue of the stability of the clustered categories, I identified their seeds or defining cases on the basis of the similarities and dissimilarities between their educational and life trajectories and future aspirations. The cases and corresponding clusters were also closely associated with the social class structure in this rural community. The concept of social class is loosely defined here to refer to the social positions of the families based on their possessions, their practices of reconfiguring forms of capital, as well as the perceptions and aspirations of their younger members. After studying the seed participants - or the central, defining members of the group types - I formed the clusters on the basis of their common features.

In the course of analyzing the entire data set, three distinct clusters or types of youth trajectory emerged. Cluster 1 consisted of youth whose cultural capital was higher than those of the other two types, with stable economic capital, and a combination of strong professional social capital and kinship capital. This cluster will be introduced in Chapter Six by the case of Darika. Cluster 2 included those youth with high economic capital but slightly lower cultural capital and expanding social capital including business-related and community-focused social capital. This cluster will be illustrated in Chapter Six by the case of Kerim. The third cluster was comprised of youth who had lower economic and cultural capital than those in Clusters 1 and 2, but relatively high kinship-focused social capital. This trajectory will be represented in Chapter Six by the case of Edil. These three illustrative cases (see Appendix 6) were chosen as they incorporated most of the attributes of their groups or clusters in relation to social class and class- specific gendered perceptions of the world and themselves in that world and the ways they projected themselves into the future. In Chapter Seven I refer to their variations within clusters, but I maintain the focus on the differences between these clusters and not within each cluster.

4.7. Returning to one’s own community and place: Ethical considerations and dilemmas

An important factor of this study is that the research was conducted in the rural community in which I was born, attended school and grew up. Most of my extended family members, including my parents, still live in the community. One of the schools in which I recruited some of my participants was the one at which my parents worked for more than thirty years, from the mid-1970s until the 2010s, and the one where I received my basic education. I was aware that there were several ethical and methodological advantages, as well as limitations, to my position as an insider-villager and a native researcher. Below I present the challenges as well as the strengths of conducting research under these conditions.

I selected the research site for the purpose of my personal security, the security of my participants, and the relative distance of the village from the urban centers in southern regions at the time of this research. This research was conducted after five months of ethnic conflict between Uzbek and Kyrgyz communities in June 2010. The timing of this research posed different issues and degrees of uncertainties that fell upon communities within urban centers of the southern regions. Firstly, there was a great concern regarding the participation of rural

Kyrgyz youth in this bloody conflict. I had to be sensitive to gain trust of my young participants and their families in the study, as I could have easily been identified as person conducting government surveillance over them. Secondly, the security situation in many communities across southern regions was quite volatile due to the uprising that ousted the president Bakiev and new government was still trying to establish its legitimacy. Therefore, at the time of this research it was essential for me to select a community, in which I already had personal connections and networks and in which my participants and I felt some degree of stability, personal security and extending our mutual trust.

In my role as an insider to this community, a native of the village, and a former student of the school, I had a distinct advantage in accessing the research context and constructing knowledge of the community; certainly these would have been more challenging for an outsider (Labaree, 2002). As Merton (1972) notes, insider researchers have the advantage of possessing an exclusive knowledge of community, one that other researchers cannot attain. As a ‘homecoming’ villager (Van Ginkel, 1994), I understood the ways and mechanisms through which information was collected, analyzed, stored, and circulated or distributed in the community, and was able to identify as well as interpret cues in the interviews (Haniff, 1985).

This knowledge was available to me not simply from my previous intimate association with this village community, but also through interactions with my parents and family members, who were still members of the community. Labaree (2002) warns that the insider-researcher position should be examined critically and continuously to acknowledge and account for such privileges as arise from the researcher being from the community under investigation. Bulmer (1982) likewise stresses the need to actively and critically question one’s own insider knowledge and familiarity with the community. As a rural child, my experiences of engaging in the informal economy and formal education in the village resonated, to some extent, with the experiences of the young people. This knowledge was an important resource for the study, affecting my data collection, analysis, and presentation in positive ways, just as my engagement in household economic and cultural activities also became a source of information and interpretation. The challenge for me, then, was how to scrutinize my member knowledge on a continuous basis, so that I did not take it for granted (Johnson, 2002): for instance. I tried to avoid taking certain events and ideas to be a ‘natural state of affairs,’ thus overlooking their significant effects on the experiences and behaviour of the young people and my interpretation

92 of them. My position was different from that of the ‘complete’ outsider-researcher (Labaree, 2002), although I was cognizant of the dangers of dichotomizing the role of the researcher. According to Dwyer and Buckle (2009),

As qualitative researchers, we have an appreciation of fluidity and multilayered complexity of human experience. Holding membership does not denote complete sameness within that group. Likewise, not being a member of a group does not denote complete difference. It seems paradoxical, then, that we endorse binary alternatives that unduly narrow the range of understandings and experience (p. 60).

My prior experience of living in this village, and the presence of my family in it, at times created tensions, dilemmas and possibilities to which I had to be open in the text, and which had effects on my interpretation of the data that I had to continuously re-evaluate. For Deutsch (1981), researchers should treat insiderness as ‘a process of achievement rather than [a quality] simply ascribed or bestowed upon the investigator” (p. 101). My insiderness did not guarantee access to the informants or research participants, which was achieved by a process of ‘ongoing negotiation’ (De Andrade, 2000). If my prior and current familiarity with the community helped me to enter the setting and gain access to the participants, it did not ensure my knowledge of the participants and their families. Fay (1996), as cited by Dwyer and Buckle (2009), argues that “knowing an experience requires more than simply having it. Knowing often implies being about to identify, describe and explain” (p. 20). Thus, I did not have complete knowledge of how to identify, describe and explain the activities undertaken by the young people of the village.

My limited knowledge of these rural young people was not only a matter of my irregular and sporadic participation in rural life since 1993, when I left the village to pursue higher education in the city and later abroad. It was also linked to the larger issue of studying young people and their experiences, which requires careful ethical consideration in the research process (Eder & Fingerson, 2002). The power dynamics that are created between the researcher and the researched reflect those between young people and adults in that the researcher has control over the research process to a great extent. Being cognizant of these issues, I negotiated the time and location of interviews in consultation with my research participants and largely conducted the interviews, which were not highly structured or formal in nature, avoiding the jargons of the

93 school. I was aware that both my participants and myself as a researcher were classed and gendered, which had an effect on the research relationship, data analysis, and presentation (Fine, 1994, as cited in Eder and Fingerson, 2002).

The existing gendered social norms and practices in this rural community impacted the process of negotiating with potential participants. For instance, gendered perceptions and practices appeared to influence decisions to participate in the research, as more female than male students and parents agreed to be interviewed, the males often citing the requirements of farm work. Even among the male participants, I often observed that they were more reluctant to be interviewed, especially on school premises or at other locations where their peers were present. I documented the occasions on which the male participants were teased by their peers. I also observed that the male youth tended to confine themselves to few words, were hesitant to elaborate, and rarely initiated stories about their schooling and life experiences. However, in the later part of this research I encountered groups of male youth who openly confided in me about their romantic engagements with schoolmates or others living outside their rural community. Such revelations and stories from male youth in this study signaled to me that I had been able to develop relationships with them and to earn their trust to the extent of sharing taboo topics not easily accessible to their families or school-based communities. Generally, however, I found female youth more readily carried on conversations with me telling elaborate stories related to the research questions and revealing their happiness as well as distress on a diverse ranges of issues.

I did not adopt the clear-cut definition of the status of a parent, as the traditional Kyrgyz family structure in rural regions would not simply fit into the dominant academic classification of families. I had several grandparents in my research who were primary caregivers of the students in the research, because they had adopted them either at an early age or as temporary guardians while the parents were labour migrants in Moscow or elsewhere. These grandparents provided me with information related to the education of children during the Soviet period, when formal education was highly regarded and valued, emphasizing the contrast to their current experiences of schooling children. From the elders and the parents I gathered information related to the history of schooling in the rural community, and also reconstructed the people’s memories of the history of Soviet state schooling in their communities before they were relocated to this village in the valley in the 1960s and 1970s.

In my interviews I noted that the young people and their families maintained strong kinship social networks outside this village community. These kinfolk often lived in other villages, cities, or even countries, but remained in close contact with their relatives in the village, and their participation in the social, communal and kinship activities further reinforced their sense of belonging and kinship traditions. In accordance with these traditions, I spent the first two weeks of my stay in the village paying respects to those among my close and distant relatives who had become ill or passed away, or who had married and started families.

In conclusion, I wish to highlight that the researcher’s own ethnographic details, the unstructured conversations, story-telling sessions, and insider perspectives on this village community, its history, and the trajectories of its families and its youth, enriched my understanding of the ways that young people in this Kyrgyz village make sense of the changing conditions of postsocialist education, learning, work, and life, and the ways that they project themselves into distinctive futures.

4.8. Conclusion

This chapter started off with attending to distinctive aspects of youth research and explained how the political and ethical implications of such research were critical to reflect upon. It then presented and justified a qualitative case study design as the most suitable method of studying the experiences and aspirations of rural youth in a remote village in southern Kyrgyzstan. The design will help us to understand the changing nature of the relations and contexts of post-Soviet education and rural economy and the effects of the radical social change on younger generations. This chapter also described the methods of data collection appropriate to a qualitative design, namely ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, and storytelling sessions, which will further assist the process of constructing the knowledge and structuring the narrative of the key line of inquiry. This chapter then outlined the sampling strategy and process—a combination of purposive and opportunistic sampling—and elaborated on the importance of the criteria for selection when generating knowledge about the experiences and aspirations of a group of youth. This strategy and process will help to validate and add credibility to the findings presented in the later chapters of this thesis. Next, this chapter presented and discussed the process of data analysis. As noted, the large quantities of text posed a challenge to structuring a meaningful narrative. I met this challenge by devising a plan for

95 rigorous analysis, which included the generation of a case profile for each participant on the basis of seed cases representing three distinct typologies of youth trajectories in rural Kyrgyzstan. Lastly, this chapter described the advantages and disadvantages of my position as an insider or native researcher and it considered the impact that these might have on the ways that the findings of this study were conducted, interpreted, and presented.

Chapter 5

Soviet and post-Soviet transformation20 of economy, formal education, culture and youth transitions in Kyrgyzstan

5.1. Introduction It is important to locate young people’s lives in a particular socio-historical context, as context distinctively shapes the worldviews of individuals as well as communities, their mundane practices and their aspirations for the future. This chapter therefore presents the background of economic, demographic, and educational changes in Soviet and post-Soviet rural Kyrgyzstan. The chapter consists of four major sections. The first section presents the political economy of rural Kyrgyzstan by describing the former Soviet and contemporary Kyrgyz policies that have shaped ethnic, gender, religious, and cultural changes and distinguishing them from the policies of other postsocialist and Central Asian nations. In this section I also briefly discuss the gendered and nationalist dimensions of the postsocialist transformation, in addition to the expansion of religious freedom and its role in young people’s lives. The second section of this chapter illustrates, firstly, Soviet economic policies and their consequences and, secondly, the economic restructuring since the 1990s, or the context of the postsocialist transformation to a market economy. This section highlights the impact of Soviet modernization and post-Soviet, the

20 Steimann (2011) provides a good summary as well as critique on the dominant neoliberal paradigm and policy of postsocialist changes, which resulted in the lack of critical and independent research and alternative conceptions and explanations. According to Steimann, critical sociologists of postsocialist changes in the economy and politics demonstrated a rather complex conception and interpretation. The differences in transformation processes in postsocialist space, according to Muller (2001) cited by Steimann (2011), are the results of intersections of economy, politics, social structure and culture. Instead of using the dominant and normative neoliberal conception of ‘postsocialist transition’, which presumes a linear, directed, and destined process of moving away from socialism to capitalism, the changes in the formerly socialist Kyrgyzstan and especially at the level of individual and community could be better captured by the concept of transformation. Altvater (1998) cited by Steimann (2011) suggested moving away from neoliberal assumptions associated with the concept of transition to rather embrace the use of the concept of transformation with the understanding of “… a complex and articulated transformation of social political, and economic forms, not to mention changes of individual habits, social culture and the social relation to nature” (p. 594). Stark (1992) cited by Steimann (2011) also argued that the conception of transformation highlights the processes of adaptation and reconfiguration, whereas the concept of transition assumes ‘the’ destination. I continue using the category of postsocialism, despite that I emphasize the continuum of changes in the history of Kyrgyzstan. I use the notion of post-socialism, especially, when the parent and youth participants used socialism and Sovietism as important points of reference (Humphrey; 2002; Steimann, 2011).

Washington-type consensus, reforms in the agricultural sector of Kyrgyzstan, which have resulted in uneven rural development, unequal income and wealth distribution, and underdeveloped rural markets. As we will see, these have had colossal consequences at the levels of individual, family and community.

The third section of this chapter outlines the complex historical relationship between school and community in the rural Kyrgyz Republic. It presents the historical context of formal education, imposed on pastoralist and nomadic Kyrgyz communities by the direct intervention of the Soviet regime, which fundamentally changed the previous mechanisms of social mobility. This section also introduces current issues of post-Soviet schooling and demonstrates how they impact rural young people’s experiences of schooling, learning and work, and orient their futures in particular ways. The concluding section summarizes the key changes identified in the first three sections—mainly political, economic, and cultural, as well as educational— in order to explore the changes in youth transitions and explore the conditions of rural inequalities that have persisted since the Soviet period and accelerated during the postsocialist transformation period. This section also sheds lights on the complex social forces impacting the lives of young people under the turbulent conditions of post-Soviet economic and political changes. These broader conditions have influenced the daily lives of rural youth and shaped their fears and hopes for the future in ways that will become apparent in this chapter. The chapter concludes with a short summary of the main themes of each section and briefly introduces the next chapter.

5.2. Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyz political and cultural changes Kyrgyzstan, also officially known as the Kyrgyz Republic, is a relatively small Central Asian country with a population of more than 5.5 million (Kyrgyz Statistics, 2011). It is a landlocked country of approximately 199,951 square kilometers with a highly mountainous terrain of which only 6.5% is arable land. The Kyrgyz Republic was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, known officially as the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic and unofficially as Kirghizia. In 1991 Kyrgyzstan became an independent state after the disintegration of the USSR. With its liberal president Askar Akayev, a former scientist and academic, Kyrgyzstan launched a massive restructuring of its economy and political establishment (Akaev, 1993). Since then the Kyrgyz Republic has become known to the world as a new political entity and a peripheral state within the context of the expansion of global capitalism into the former socialist regions.

Prior to the Soviet period, Kyrgyzstan did not exist as a nation-state, in the conventional sense of that term as used in political science, for its pastoral and nomadic social organization was quite distinct from the political and administrative organization of western societies. Pre- Soviet Kyrgyz people generally made distinctions among themselves along their patrilineal clanic and subclanic affiliations, often pledging their loyalty to local powerful leaders known as byi and manap.21 The Soviet rule in Central Asia was officially established in 1918, by default, as the area had been a colony of the Russian Tsarist regime. Kyrgyzstan was incorporated into the administrative regions of the Russian Federation as the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast in 1924, renamed the Kirghiz Autonomous Republic in 1926, and in 1936 secured full status as one of the fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet rule re-organized Central Asian communities into modern hierarchical administrative structures (Republic, Oblast, Rayon, and local collective and state farms) and divided the territories into cities and villages. The Soviet-imposed, top- down political governance drastically altered the ways in which local communities carried out their everyday activities and secured a livelihood. Previously interdependent nomadic and sedentary communities were transformed into administrative and industrial territories, which experienced radical changes in their landscapes, economic activities, and social relations. The nomadic Kyrgyz clans were all sedentarized and collectivized by the 1930s, with the result that they became bound to the land instead of to migratory patterns of pastoralism and demonstrated allegiance to the Soviet state rather than to tribal hierarchical structure.

At the policy level, the Soviet state forced communities and individuals to renounce past beliefs, practices, and affiliations, and demanded loyalty to the newly formed administrative territories and the Soviet communist ideology. DeYoung, Reeves and Valyayeva (2006) succinctly describe the theoretical underpinnings of Soviet politics in the Central Asian region:

In socialist theory, dedication to the extended family was supposed to yield to dedication to the state and Communist Party, and deference due to age and clan leadership was to

21Gullette (2006) presents diverse interpretations of traditional social structure among pre-Tsarist Kyrgyz nomadic society in which manap, byi, and baatyrs (warrior) had been problematically defined and the variations unresolved. Manap – Kyrgyz: “a wealthy leader” of the tribe; bii or by’I – Kyrgyz: “judges or judiciaries who settled disputes by customary law among” tribes (Gullette, 2006, p. 68). Kul – Kyrgyz: a slave, a poor person with no wealth (such as livestock, land) or freedom. Mostly this person worked for the wealthy leader and was considered to be the property of the rich. Gullette (2006) also talks about “malai,” which can be synonymously used for kul: “[a]malai is a Kyrgyz word which refers to a farm labourer or a hired worker, and often connotes a person who is a domestic servant” (Abramzon, 1971, p. 160; Yudakhin, 1999, p. 513, cited by Gullette, 2006, p. 860).

give way to respect for scientific expertise, party membership and equal worker participation in collective decision making. Religion and the weight of tradition was also to yield the new-found certainty of scientific socialism and industrial technology; gender inequality was to be replaced by equal opportunity and reproductive freedom; and inequality of any sort was to be replaced by the true equality only socialism could bring to cure the fundamental flaws of social life found in pre-socialist social relations of production (e.g., nomadism). (p. 146)

Despite the celebrated achievements of Soviet modernization projects in the Kyrgyz Republic, the past practices and beliefs of Kyrgyz communities continued to thrive. For instance, despite state policies, which aimed to undermine clan affiliations, the early kolkhozs were organized to a great extent along the lines of clanic relationships. In other words, families and communities were not completely intermingled in the course of settlement into collective farms and villages (Collins, 1999; DeYoung et al., 2013; Jacquesson, 2007; Gullette, 2006; Yoshida, 2005). Further, the early stages of settlement of nomadic groups served to produce unique sub- clan identities in ways that had not previously occurred due to the nomadic lifestyle (Abazov, 1999). The Soviet intervention not only reinforced clan identities but also was responsible for new expressions or articulations of relationships within and between clans in the political arena at the local, inter-regional, national and transnational levels (Collins, 1993).

Although collectivization in the early Soviet era was not entirely clan-based, it could be argued that sedentarization and collectivization at the national level tended to reflect pre-Soviet meta-level clan confederations, which later produced political, economic and cultural divisions between the southern and northern regions. Moreover, the previous meso-level tribal divisions influenced the process of sedentarization and collectivization to a large extent. At the micro, sub- clan (Kyrgyz: uruk) level, collectivization and sedentarization included families and communities that belonged to different sub-clans and retained the form of their smaller neighbourhoods within the larger collective farm enterprises. In the second wave of collectivization, re-settlement, and specifically the organization of residential quarters, was shaped by the strong orientation of families towards patrilineal kinship. In the later stages of collectivization, neighbourhoods, especially new residential quarters, were mixed, but the loyalties of the rural Kyrgyz remained at the level of extended kinship rather than at those of the larger clan or sub-clan (Beyer 2011; Jacquesson, 2007; Yoshida, 2005).

100

The Soviet cultural modernization of the Kyrgyz nomads into sedentarized Soviet citizens in the rural villages and simultaneously advancing the urbanization policies has also resulted in the rural-urban structural and cultural contradictions. From the cultural perspectives, the rurality in general has been viewed as an obstacle for Soviet style modernity and socialist development, the yardstick of modern was of life was equivalent to urban Russian cultural lifestyle with an international socialist mind. In the famous novel of Chingiz Aitmatov (1973), White Steamship, this dynamic between rural and urban cultures is vividly presented by highlighting the cultural superiority of the modern Soviet urban life as opposed to the one of the traditional mountain Kyrgyz community life, rooted in the collective memories of folklore, one’s tribal lineage and the Kyrgyz language (Haber, 2003). Aitmatov’s (1973) character Orozkul, a corrupt and miserable manager in the remote Soviet village laments this dynamic in the following way:

Rural teachers are in the cities. The schools are made entirely from glass. The teachers wear ties. Ah, in the city… what cars they have! And it’s as if the city people don’t even ever notice those cars; they’re always hurrying, running somewhere. Ah, in the city that’s where life is at! … There they know how to respect a man according to his position. One it is prescribed then it means it must be respected. A high-ranking post receives greater respect. Cultured people! … I would have married to a city woman. Why not? …. And before you know it, children would be born. My son would study to be a lawyer and my little girl would learn to play the piano. The city children are distinguishable- they are smart. They speak Russian at home – well, why should they bother with simple rural vocabulary? (Haber, 2003; Aitmatov, 1973).

The early stages of Kyrgyz national independence were marked by a number of events: the election of its first president, Askar Akaev, the adoption of a new constitution, the introduction of a new currency, successful applications to key international organizations (e.g. the World Trade Organization, the United Nations), and the ratification of international laws and conventions (Akaev, 1993). The ambitious reforms of President Akaev earned fame in the West due to his initially liberal, reform-oriented governance, which was explained by his academic background rather than by his history of devoted membership in the former Communist Party. A few years into his presidency, Akaev started to use various metaphors to highlight the Kyrgyz Republic’s strategic geopolitical position between Europe and Asia. The Republic became

101 known as ‘an island of democracy in Central Asia’ or ‘the Switzerland of Central Asia’ (Akaev, 1993).

The aspirations of the post-Soviet Kyrgyz Republic to build a nation-state faced historical contextual realities that added to the complexity of developing a socially inclusive national identity in this ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse society. The postsocialist transformation has been noted for breeding nationalism and violence against ethnic minorities. According to the latest statistical data on the ethnic composition of the country, the Kyrgyz make up 72% of the total population, with the Uzbek, at 14%, recognized as the second largest ethnic population, and the Russians, at 7%, the third largest (Kyrgyz Statistics, 2011). The exclusively nationalist discourses of the transitional period resulted in denying minority ethnic community members the capacity to fully enjoy their citizenship rights (Liu, 2012). The double-edged official discourses on the relationship between the minorities and the core nationality and the state, were framed during President Akaev’s regime as a response to a massive out-migration of Russian, German, Tatar, Belarusian, Jewish, Ukrainian and other ethnic groups in the mid-1990s. However, Akaev’s later political compromises and, later, President Bakiev’s faulty regionalist politics exacerbated already fragile inter-ethnic relations, resulting in deadly conflict in the southern region. Rural Kyrgyz youth were reported to be active participants in this conflict and the public moral panic framed them as intolerant and reactive nationalists. In June 2010, ethnic nationalism, regional political power struggles, and economic stagnation fueled ethnic clashes in the two southern regions of Osh and Jalalabad. Approximately 400,000 Uzbek people were displaced and a large refugee camp was created along the boundaries of Uzbekistan and the Kyrgyz Republic. Reeves (2011) argues that the removal of President Kurmanbek Bakiev, who was affiliated with southern political groups, created a political vacuum in which Kyrgyz nationalist and regionalist rhetoric was mobilized against the Uzbek political leadership, which sought to promote Uzbek rights to equal participation in national politics.

The postsocialist transformation has also been described as a highly gendered process (Handrahan, 2001). Despite the glorified official discourse of Soviet rule in Central Asian societies, in which women emancipation was presented as one of the great achievements of Soviet socialism, the everyday experiences of gender reflected unchallenged social norms at the grassroots level (Kamp, 2007; Northrop, 2007). In fact, Ishkanian (2003) argues gender has always been an ideological site for both Soviet and post-Soviet regimes, substantially shaping

102 individual experiences of economic and political transitions. Gendered inequality and prejudice was re-affirmed after the collapse of the USSR when the nation-state building process centralized ethno-nationalist ideology. Although the Kyrgyz Republic’s gender representation in parliament (20 out of 112 are female) and the appointment of Roza Otunbaeva as the first female president provided a positive image of gender equality, the political establishment and culture remain highly patriarchal. Kyrgyz women and girls generally experience constant pressure to conform to patriarchal ethnic and religious social norms, yet simultaneously they are expected to assume economic responsibility for household financial and economic well-being (Tabyshalieva, 2006). Additionally, growing up in rural communities distinctively shapes the aspirations of youth according to the traditional gender social norms. Moreover, gender has been an integral part of the ethnicization of the national identity construction process. Nationalist ideology and rhetoric affirms or produces a romanticized perception of Kyrgyz cultural practices in which women and men have sharply distinguished gender norms and roles. This ideology of sexual and gender roles attempts to impose morality parameters on gender practices and beliefs which are often conflicted with the everyday realities of gender relations (Corcoran-Nantes, 2005).

Asian Development Bank report (2005) on assessing Kyrgyzstan’s transition from gender perspective note that poverty has gendered dimension as there are decreased economic opportunities for women, growing insecurity and disempowerment among women. The report notes, “Considerable vertical segregation in the labour market is a key factor: few women occupy senior positions, even in sectors in which they dominate the workforce such as education, health care and social services.” (p. xi-xii) The number of women working in informal labour market is increasing where the working conditions are worse and illegal and economic and social protection is not guaranteed. Women work mostly as shuttle traders, street, market vendors, paid caregivers in which long hours of work, little pay; difficult conditions and real risk to personal security are harsh realities of these women. The land reforms did not consider the gender element as a result the participation of women in agriculture has decreased and unemployment and poverty has become widespread especially among them. Earlier law on land ownership was discriminatory towards women in which transfer and inheritance of land and ownership are on the patriarchal lineage. The report also makes a note of stereotypes, which contribute to the disempowerment among women. It argues, “Following independence, many of the newly independent states, including the Kyrgyz Republic, failed to address gender equality in the home,

103 reinforcing the perception of women as mothers and family caretakers, rather than as individuals and independent actors in the public sphere.” (p.14) The market economy expansion further exacerbated the unequal opportunities for women in which more women are employed in low ranks and low paid jobs whereas more “men have dominated in better paid occupations in fields such as industry, transport, and public governance. Women are also more likely than men to be engaged in ‘non-standard’ work (that is part time, temporary, home-based) and are less likely than men to have access to productive assets such as credit and property” (ADB, 2005; p. 24).

The combination of multiple social forces, such as nationalist ideology, globalization, market economy, technology, transnational migration, and global civil society movements, has exacerbated the problems of gender inequality and injustice even more. The emasculation of rural farmers and working class men, faced with such harsh realities as the destruction of their former workplaces, poverty, and transnational migration, appears to have affected an increase in gender-based violence in the migrant diasporic communities in Russia. Post-Soviet moral decline and crisis are often formulated around women and girls, thus justifying the violence towards them.

Postsocialist transformation has also been marked by freedom of religious beliefs and practice. The Kyrgyz Republic is now a religiously diverse society. After national independence religious affairs were deregulated, laws on religious expression were relaxed, and missionaries felt that they could promote their religious beliefs with impunity (Pelkmans, 2006). The Kyrgyz Republic officially separates religion and the state, and continues to declare itself a secular society in which government does not interfere with or monitor religious affairs. However, one should be skeptical when analyzing the extent of religious practices and beliefs as seven decades of Soviet atheist moral teachings strongly structured the religiosity of the people (McBrien and Pelkmans, 2008). Some argue that the current religious landscape of the Kyrgyz Republic is highly regional, differentiating between ‘the Christianization of the North and the Islamization in the South’22 (Tabyshalieva, 2000; Murzakhalilov, 2004; Pelkmans, 2006). Unlike other Central Asian states, in which political Islam has emerged as an oppositional force to such secular authoritarian regimes as those of Karimov in Uzbekistan and Rakhmonov in Tajikistan, Islam

22It will be a mistake to assume that northern Kyrgyz regions are predominantly of Christian backgrounds, as Islam is also widely practiced among Kyrgyz and other Persian, Turkic and Dungan-speaking ethnic groups.

104 and other religious groups have not made any explicit attempt to bring religion into the Kyrgyz political arena. Having said this, however, religion does play a significant role in the post- independence politics and identity construction in the Kyrgyz Republic. Its political leaders treat religion with great caution when conceptualizing its contribution to, and its role as an alternative form of, national identity construction. Nevertheless, during Bakiev’s rule the state secretary Dastan Sarygulov had the responsibility of developing a national ideology. As a long time proponent of Tengirism, he proposed it as a main characteristic of being Kyrgyz spirituality, partly as a nationalist response to the former Soviet and the contemporary Russian political dominance, and partly as a reaction to the rapid re-Islamization of the region. Moreover, by promoting the worship of nature, the Tengrist ideology of Sarygulov sought to develop an anti- capitalist lifestyle in this post-Soviet society (Laruelle, 2006; Marat, 2006). However, Sarygulov’s unpopular Tengrist national ideology continues to compete with the effects of transnational Islamic religious movement in the Kyrgyz Republic. At the same time, Islam remains incapable of providing a strong and unifying post-Soviet national identity in the Republic. In this regard the Kyrgyz Republic is not an exception among contemporary Central Asian states, for the Soviet ethnic categories of identification still largely prevail over traditional religious affiliations in the region (Biard, 2010; Laurelle, 2006).23

The contemporary Kyrgyz society is further divided along the rural and urban cultural backgrounds, in addition to regional, ethnic, religious and linguistic lines. As earlier noted,the rural and urban disparity is structurally produced by the modernization policies ofthe former Soviet socialist state. In the conditions of the post-Soviet transformation of economy in general and rural-to-urban migration in particular these geographic distinctions between urban and rural Kyrgyz people became more pronounced and manifested in the form of cultural distinctions. The dominant culture is of the urban community, which is believed to be Russian speaking, highly educated, culturally sophisticated, and technologically savvy. Kirmse (2009) reports that urban

23Roi and Wainer’s (2009) study reveals that religion played an important role in the identities of Central Asian communities. They argue: “Islam, or Muslimness, is unquestionably a part of ethnic culture and tradition. Manifestly, too, it is often a component of the public or collective morality, as well as that of the individual. Perhaps, in fact, it is in some ways more appealing to them than their formal ethnic affiliation, as the heir, as it were, of the supra-ethnic Soviet identity, or the Soviet-imposed national identity, which the intelligentsia at least shared prior to independence. This makes Islam a potential competitor to the national ethos that is at the centre of the regimes’ nation-building endeavours.” (p. 318).

105 youth “sees himself first and foremost as being ‘urban’ [gorodskoi] and more specifically, as being ‘from osh’ [oshskii] (city). These urban Osh youth believes the rural or country people are uncivilized in their walk. They are even different from these urbanites by the way they walk (aping). Kirmse (2009) reports that the rural-urban division is also exacerbated by the uneven economic development of the regions, internal migration, and ethnic divisions within the Kyrgyz society. Similarly, DeYoung (2006) reports that rural teachers believe that the residents of Bishkek looked down upon people from the village. One of the teachers DeYoung surveyed succinctly summarizes these urban stereotypes of the rural Kyrgyz as follows, “Our Kyrgyz mentality suggests that if you live in the village, you are not modern enough, you are old fashioned. After being at the university, I do not believe that. Naryn is all mountains everywhere; and we are wandering between and among them. Bishkek inhabitants, all of them, think about us that way.” (p.15)

The youth grow up in such complex historical, cultural, gendered and religious times embodying the central contradictions in their perceptions and practices.

5.3. Urban and rural economy in Soviet Kirgizia and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan The contemporary Kyrgyz Republic inherited from the former Soviet state a diversified and modernized economy with a complex division of labour serviced by its comprehensive educational system. The current economic difficulties and earlier stagnant labour market conditions of the post-Soviet Republic are deeply rooted in their peculiar Soviet economic historical development (Henley & Assaf, 1996). Similar to what Verdery (2003) and Humphrey (2002) argue in the cases of provincial Russia and Romania, the post-Soviet Kyrgyz economy was placed in a peripheral location and position within the capitalist economic and political world order.

The Soviet Kyrgyz economy underwent several stages of economic modernization and re-structuring (Abazov, 1999). The first wave of modernization and industrialization occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when the nomadic, tribal, and pastoralist Kyrgyz economies were transformed by Soviet collective (kolkhoz) and state farm (sovkhoz) industrial units in rural regions. By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet state had developed an expanded economy of scale

106 of agricultural units even in the remote regions of the mountainous Kyrgyz Republic. The general agricultural workers were employed across sub-divisions - sheep, horse, yak, cow or poultry breeding, or crop, vegetable, and fruit cultivation - depending on the state economic plan (Abazov, 1999; Loring, 2008).

The complex specialization of labour within the Soviet agricultural units required a specialized workforce, which altered the traditional divisions of labour, gender, age, family, and kinship. The former nomadic Kyrgyz herders had to acquire the skills of agricultural cultivation and livestock relying on modern scientific knowledge, and they became collective farm workers (Kyrgyz: kolkhozchu; Russian: kolkhozniki) as opposed to their previous traditional identities as nomads (Kyrgyz: kochmon). Specialization into different types of labour and formal educational levels produced a new social structure in the rural Soviet Kirghiz kolkhozs (DeYoung et al., 2013). As Humphrey (2001) notes, the Soviet kolkhoz structure was based not on economic classes, but on status groups. There were four principal status groups: management, the specialists, the intelligentsia, and the workers; however, each group was further sub-divided (Humphrey, 2002). The Soviet kolkhoz developed a strong community identity even though non- Soviet forms of social relations remained intact in official Soviet institutions (Humphrey, 2001; Humphrey, 1983).

The second wave of industrial development in the mid-1940s and 1950s was closely linked to the destruction and reconstruction of the European parts of the USSR after the Second World War. During this war, several industrial plants and factories were relocated to Central Asia, and particularly to the Kyrgyz Republic. With the relocated post-war industries, a forced and voluntary in-migration of non-Central Asian ethnic groups and communities was carried out. Although, the official Soviet ideology often encouraged the native population to celebrate the enriched cultural diversity of the region, such political and economic decisions created an ethnic- based occupational structure in the Soviet Kirghizia. Moreover, the modern occupations were located in the cities and the more developed northern regions in Soviet Kirghizia, discouraging these specialists to relocate themselves into southern rural and livestock farms (Abazov, 1999).24

24Abazov (1999) links the issue of ethnic skill distribution in the Soviet Kyrgyz economy with the first wave of out-

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The third wave of Soviet economic modernization in the 1960s took the form of large financial investments by the Soviet State Central Planning in the construction of several hydroelectric power stations dedicated to mining and metallurgy. The state’s economic decisions then required sets of skills that the traditional Central Asian communities did not currently possess. Such labour demands again prompted a relocation of other ethnic groups and individuals by the Soviet state (Abazov, 1999).

As was the case with all the Soviet republics, the Kyrgyz Republic could not develop external trade relations, which resulted in internal trade exchanges. Still predominantly agricultural, the Kyrgyz economy served as one of the Central Asian economies that supplied raw material to the more industrialized regions of the former USSR. The Kyrgyz Republic adopted the role of ‘an agricultural basket supplier,’ sending produce—meat, vegetables, fruits and cotton—to Russian cities (Abazov, 1999). Henley and Assaf (1996) observe that “[t]he industrial structure of the region reflects the fact that industry was developed to serve the needs of the Moscow-controlled command economy and, to a large degree, the market of the FSU.” (p. 112). The Soviet Kyrgyz economy relied on trading inwardly and intimately linking its industries to the central Soviet economy. All the firms and industries of the region relied on supplies and technical assistance from other republics, and its population grew dependent on consumer goods (Pomfret, 2007; Henley and Assaf, 1996). In this regard, as Clarke (1992) notes,

The Soviet enterprise is almost as different from the capitalist enterprise as was a feudal estate from a capitalist farm. Like the feudal estate, the Soviet enterprise is not simply an economic institution but is the primary unit of Soviet society, and the ultimate base of social and political power. The basis of the Soviet enterprise was not capital, but the productive activity of the labour collective. The public measure of its success was not its profit, but the size of its labour force and the numbers of tons they produced, the houses it had built, the number of places for children in its kindergartens and in summer camps, the sporting, medical, and cultural facilities it provided, the number of pensioners it supported… This was not just rhetoric; it was an ideological expression of the social

migration of the skilled workforce of European ethnic groups such as Russian, Ukrainians, Germans, etc.

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relations of production and forms of surplus appropriation on which the Soviet system was based. (p. 7)

The formal Soviet command economy created conditions for a parallel economy to emerge, as the official Soviet political and economic players, such as the state, the collective and the household, interacted intimately with unofficial social structures based on kinship, patronage, and the black market (Humphrey, 2001). In the 1960s, the Stalinist economic policies were relaxed, and the economy underwent liberalization throughout the Soviet Union. As part of the Soviet state, the Kyrgyz agricultural economy was also transformed by the creation of a parallel sector of agriculture that was characterized as non-state and semi-legal. This parallel economy generally suited the traditional cultural economy of the Kyrgyz communities. It allowed those communities to produce goods and services that the Soviet formal economy failed to provide. This parallel economy enabled rural households to earn additional income, to raise their living standards, and more importantly, to reinforce traditional kinship and family economic and social relations.25

The official Soviet state tolerated the parallel economy in general as it responded to its own internal structural deficiencies—the command economy relied on the long process of economic needs analysis—and promoted the Soviet state’s official political advances. In the case of the Central Asian republics, Moscow’s tolerance towards the thriving parallel economy of the communities was politically rather strategic. Ronsign (2006) argues that the Central Asian parallel economy to the official Soviet one was tolerated because as Ronsign (2006) highlights that the Soviet Communist Party did not want dissatisfied Muslim population if they limited or banned this form of economic practices. The Central Asian industries, including those in Kyrgyzstan, generally reflected an absence of small to medium size firms and a predominance of large-scale enterprises (Henley and Assaf, 1996). These industries subscribed to the culture of Soviet communist ideology-driven principles of industrial relationships. Most Soviet firms and enterprises, including the kolkhoz and sovkhoz, practised the ‘cradle-to-the grave’ social welfare employment principles (Henley and Assaf, 1996). This peculiar industrial relations culture

25Humphrey (2001) observed that despite that the Soviet reorganization of the Buriyats of the USSR into into the economic production unit and the socialist political structure of collective farms, the Buriyats continued to maintain collective identities both as a Buriyat and a Soviet.

109 encouraged young Soviet citizens to aspire to a lifetime job and to consider their workplaces as their ‘second home’ (Clarke, 1999).

Although underemployment was a common characteristic of the Soviet command economy, the official unemployment rates in the former Soviet Union remained at zero. The official records highlighted the active participation of Central Asian women in the rural economy, but the number and length of their actual working days were lower than those of the men (Rahman Khan and Ghai, 1979). Some argue that the official records hid labour hoarding issues (or hidden unemployment) because of the Soviet doctrine of full employment (Commander, Dhar and Yemtsov, 1996; Hanson, 1986). The Soviet state, and education in particular, promoted the ideology of socially productive labour not only as an ultimate right but also as the principal duty of every Soviet citizen (Brown, 1957).

With the diversification of the Soviet Kyrgyz economy, the demand for skilled workers also increased. However, the Kyrgyz Soviet socialist labour paradox remained unresolved. The rural population grew dramatically, resulting in surplus labour in the villages, while the urban industries experienced acute labour shortages. Internal migration among most of the Central Asian communities remained low. The unwillingness of Kyrgyz rural young people to migrate to the cities can be explained by the persistence of traditional patrilineal tribal and family traditions (Abazov, 1999; Rumer, 1989). The welfare-oriented Soviet socialist ideology did not recognize the need for economic incentives to migrate to the urban areas. Moreover, the parallel economy in the villages partly employed the surplus labour of rural youth as well as women, which created a substitute for formal employment opportunities. The agricultural farmers’ geographic movement outside the kolkhoz was restricted by the imposition of official registration or ‘propiska’ policies of the Soviet state, which bound the villagers to their local communities (Humphrey, 2002).

Post-Soviet Kyrgyz macroeconomic conditions largely shaped the current conditions of the economy and labour market. With the collapse of the integral Soviet economy, the production output of the former import-dependent Soviet Kyrgyz heavy industries stood still, and agricultural productivity declined drastically. Inter-republic trade, supply, and payment links were disrupted, leaving the post-Soviet Kyrgyz economy almost paralyzed and forcing the new government to adopt timely and radically different liberal systemic changes in the economy (Abazov, 1999; Henley & Assaf, 1996; Pomfret, 2007). The Kyrgyz Republic, headed by the

110 first president Askar Akaev, was one of the first post-Soviet states to liberalize the economy and re-orient it to the western market system of operations (Abazov, 1999; Henley & Affas, 1996). In the context of a lack of natural resources, supply-dependent industries and the heavy financial investment of the Moscow-controlled central economy, the post-Soviet Kyrgyz economy was re- structured through the liberalization of markets and prices, the development of new economic legal codes, and the massive privatization of land and resources.

The post-Soviet Kyrgyz economy has not demonstrated radical growth since its independence in 1990s. Economists identify multiple impediments to its growth, including its small size, hostile geographic location, lack of rich cash-earning natural resources, and high reliance on external aid (Mogilevsky & Hasanov, 2004). The main industries today are small machinery, textiles, food processing, cement, shoes, sawn logs, steel, refrigerators, furniture, electric motors, gold and rare earth metals (Oskarsson & Muschedeit, 1996). Most firms are located in the capital city, Bishkek, where they serve as one of the pull factors for increased internal migration.

The Kyrgyz Republic’s population is rural (65%), and largely young (40%) or working age (50%) (Mogilevsky, 2005). The initial shock of the postsocialist transformation resulted in high unemployment, underemployment, increased informal employment, and an expansion of rural subsistence and the informal economy at the expense of the urban industrial sector (Bernabe & Kolev, 2005; Babetskii et al., 2003; Esenaliev & Steiner, 2011). The first wave of privatization and the de-collectivization26 of agriculture, in particular, resulted in individualizing agricultural production, so that the predominant form has become small, household-based private agricultural farms. This transformation of the economy of scale in rural regions has substantially altered the local occupational and social structure. In the early 1990s the Kyrgyz government was advised to deregulate the agricultural production and since then it dismantled the former collective industrial farms into private family farms. The former collective organization of production was transformed into the individual agricultural production. The new model of

26Pryor (1992) defines de-collectivization as ‘the conversion of state and collective farms into either private (corporate or individual) farms, or tenant farms with long-term leases, or genuine producer cooperatives” (p. 265; cited by Verdery, 2003; p. 13). Verdery (2003) argues that de-collectivization was carried out a) to unmake the socialist property and collectivist forms of social relationships, and b) to accomplish land reform by altering the organizational forms of agricultural enterprise and the status of land as an object of social relations.

111 agriculture in the emerging postsocialist (liberal) economy was characterized by individual or family farm owners, who had to take responsibility in their hands, not the state, for the survival of their families. Structural issues such as the scarcity of arable land in mountainous regions and the steady population growth added to the complexity of postsocialist agricultural transformation, which was rigged by the unequal distribution of land, livestock, and infrastructure (Steimann, 2011). The change from industrial agriculture into subsistence-oriented farming also meant that formerly employed farm workers could only rely on their small land plots. The reorganization of agriculture and employment opportunities within it intensified the labour demands for household members, obliging them to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for new types of economic exchanges (Humphrey, 2001). The former illegal and immoral activities of the Soviet era became more common, indeed standard, in post-Soviet economic conditions. The household labour organization has been widely questioned for its potential for exploitation and self-exploitation (Humphrey, 2001).

The dismantling of the Soviet kolkhoz not only reorganized the rural economy, but also directly affected the culture of the community. The kolkhoz community spirit was shattered and former sources of identities were disrupted (Alanen, Nikula, & Ruutsoo, 2001; Humphrey, 2002).27 New categories of economically dispossessed and symbolically dislocated people emerged as a result of the post-Soviet privatization process in rural regions (Humphrey, 2002).

The disintegration of Soviet industries and firms forced households to develop new livelihood strategies. One such strategy was shuttle trading or commerce, locally known as kommertsia (also as Kyrgyz: alip-satuu; Russian: chelnochestvo), which involved individual traders accessing international markets for goods and transporting them to urban markets for higher prices (Humphrey, 2002). The expansion of small-scale trade was yet another key characteristic of the post-Soviet transformation of the economy (Humphrey, 2002). Although merchant capitalism became widespread among all the post-Soviet countries (Burawoy & Krotov, 1993), the Kyrgyz merchant traders not only became traders in their countries, but also

27Similar observations are emerging from other former Soviet republics. Alanen, Nikula, and Ruutsoo (2001) argue that de-collectivization in southern Estonia resulted in increased abject poverty among the rural population. The predominance of unmechanized small farms has been identified as a trap leading to a vicious cycle of poverty. The social cost of de-collectivization and the unsuccessful reorganization of the countryside has been a state of normlessness, in part because the response of successive Estonian governments to this crisis has been guided by the Darwinistic principle of “survival of the fittest”.

112 crossed national borders in mass numbers to work in the urban markets of Russia and Kazakhstan (Abazov, 1999; Thieme, 2012).

As a key characteristic of the postsocialist transformation societies, the informal economy, originating in the former Soviet parallel economy, has emerged as a sizable economic sector. The share of the informal economy in the GDP is 53% (as reported in 2006), and the official employment rate is 24.5% (Mogilevsky, 2008). The Kyrgyz Republic has a labour force of 2.3 million with a participation rate of 65.5% in 2007 and 64.2% in 2010 (Kyrgyz Statistical Committee Report, 2011). The largest economic sectors in the Kyrgyz Republic are agriculture (29% of GDP), trade (18%) and industry (13%) (Mogilevsky, 2008). According to Oskarsson and Mushedeit (1996), employment in 1996 was distributed by sectors as follows: trade, transport and services (39%), agriculture and forestry (34%), and industry and construction (27%). The World Bank (2007) estimates that in 2003 more than half of all workers in the rural Kyrgyz Republic, and approximately 39% in the urban areas, were informally employed. The needs of the labour market are specific to sectors and types of industries. The newly emerging sectors—tourism, trade, financial services, and real estate, which are mostly in private sector— and the reorganized older sectors—agriculture, food processing, and construction—have experienced the greatest labour shortages (Mogilevsky, 2008).

More than half of the unemployed Kyrgyz workforce have general secondary education, and 39% have higher or college education (Oskarsson & Muschedeit, 1996). The sectors with the largest share of employed workers with higher education are education (69. 7%), the state administration (50.2%), real estate, the service industries (58.4%), financial activities (57.1%), and the production and distribution of electrical energy, gas and water (33.7%). Those with secondary professional education are mainly employed in health protection and the provision of social services (49.5%), financial activities (57.1%), and the production and distribution of electrical energy, gas and water (33.7%) whereas those with elementary professional education work mostly in the mineral resource industry (37.6%), transport and communications (21.9%) and the processing industry (18.9%). Workers with basic education are usually employed in agriculture and hunting (78.3%), construction (67.3%), hotels and restaurants (61.9%) and household service provision (68.5%). The official government response to high unemployment has been the passive one of ‘letting people help themselves’. The extent of involvement by Kyrgyz governments has been promises to provide macro-structural stability, protective

113 legislation for workers, and the provision of special care to highly vulnerable groups and individuals (Mogilevsky, 2008).

The post-Soviet Kyrgyz economy is also characterized by expanded subsistence and barter economies in the rural areas. Both informal and subsistence economies have flourished, especially in the context of the de-collectivization of agriculture, the total shutdown of key regional and local industries and firms, and the disruption of former trans-republic trade relations (Michalev & Heinrich, 1999; Rosign, 2006). In both types of economies, the demand for family members’ labour has increased to the point of fundamentally altering the previous mechanisms of economy and education links. Both the informal and subsistence economies are considered to be “natural survival” mechanisms, especially for those who are structurally excluded from the formal economy. They serve as a safety net for households that rely on social assistance. Unlike its predecessor, the post-Soviet Kyrgyz state has withdrawn from its role of providing welfare to individuals and families and has adopted instead the macroeconomic role of stabilizing the political and economic environment (Mogilevsky, 2008; Ronsign, 2006).

The anthropological and sociological studies on postsocialist economic transition, employment, poverty, migration, and rural culture reveal that the meanings and values that the people of the former Soviet ‘worker’s’ state associated with labour, work, occupations, migrant labour, and the moral economy of work, have experienced drastic change as well as have retained some elements of the interpretations of the past ideals (Burawoy, 1985; Croix, 2014; Humphrey, 1998; Isabaeva, 2011; Hann, 2003; Pilkington, 1998; Reeves, 2007; Sangera and Ilyasov, 2008). In regard with the changing meaning and value of work in the postsocialist rural Kyrgyz community in particular, Croix’s (2014) reveals that Kyrgyz villagers’ competing as well as converging frames of postsocialist labour and work28 (Kyrgyz: ish; jumush; emgek29) are largely influenced by their specific economic and social, including gender and social class backgrounds. These competing values and meanings of labour or work, expressed by Croix’s (2014) three participants – the woman pastoralist, an agricultural entrepreneur, and a Muslim

28 Like Croix (2014), I am aware of the distinct conceptualizations of the sociological labour (often understood as waged, industrial, productive), including socialist and capitalist notions of labour, and feminist theorization around productive and reproductive labour, and the anthropological work (often associated with all activities that may not be earned as cash still having the productive characteristics). 29 In Kyrgyz, the terms such as ish, jumush, and emgek have distinct meanings, but all of which incorporates the characteristics of activities one is engaged with the intention to produce and/or reproduce.

114 cleric – are the characteristic of the transitioning society in which the formally distinct and conflicting ideologies of socialist and capitalist concepts of labour, the Kyrgyz traditional service to kin, and the Islamic ideology of service to the religious community, come to co-exist in rural communities. Despite that all her participants used the Soviet past to contrast, compare, and evaluate the changes in the meaning and value of work, the moral value of hard work (of all kinds) was emphasized by all. As Croix (2014) argues that irrespective of their competing meanings and values, these rural Kyrgyz people valued the activities such as ish, jumush or emgek. Therefore, the work was an integral of one’s personhood. Such understandings of the postsocialist interpretations of labour and work among rural Kyrgyz people help to understand the context in which young people develop their values and orientations and aspirations of occupation, work, and duty/service.

Some argue that the postsocialist transformation became characterized by the rise of uncertainty and destabilization of these societies, often related to the collapse of social institutions, including free and quality healthcare and education as well as guaranteed employment The haphazard privatization of state property redefined social relations around property rights over resources and created anxieties around financial and legal uncertainties. The competition over resources resulted in reviving the past grievances and created new forms of conflicts (Kandiyoti, 2002; Steimann, 2011). Postsocialist people continue to experience multiple types of uncertainties, including economic, political, and knowledge. Although the former two were well described in the early and current sections, the knowledge-related uncertainties may require some explanation here. Steimann (2011), citing Mehta (2001) elaborated that knowledge uncertainties meant that knowledge was always partial, situated and contested. Then, the knowledge of school system, higher education, healthcare, and labour markets and social behaviour in times of rapid social transformation in the former socialist space remained contested and plural, resulting in a greater inequality among people. The level of uncertainties experienced by people became closely associated with one’s socioeconomic background, gender, health status, political membership, and place of residence (Steimann, 2011).

5.4. Formal education in Soviet Kirghizia and post- Soviet Kyrgyzstan Despite the celebrated achievements of the former Soviet state in the field of formal education, the Soviet educational system by and large symbolized abstract, urban and scientific Soviet

115 socialist values. As a result of this, the nomadic livelihoods, indigenous histories, and the local knowledge forms of the Kyrgyz nomadic pastoralist people were suppressed and devalued. In the following pages the complex historical relationship between education, economy and society in the Kyrgyz Republic is explained.

The settled communities in Western Turkestan were able to receive some form of Islamic education in maktaps and madrassahs and later from modernized Jadidist educational programs during the Tsarist Russian regime. However, the literacy rate among the nomadic pastoralist Kyrgyz remained as low as one to two percent in 1897 (Pennar, Bakalo & Bereday, 1971) and 11.6% for men and 0.38% for women according to the 1926 census (Loring, 2008). Their pastoralist knowledge and kinship-based community moral codes were passed on to the younger generation at home and in the community through oral literature such as proverbs, sayings, epics and fairy tales (DeYoung, Zholdoshalieva, and Zholdoshalieva, 2013).

Soviet rule was confronted with the issue of illiteracy and extreme poverty in the formerly Western Turkestan region of the Tsarist Russia (the Soviet Central Asia). As part of the expansion of the Soviet socialist state and bringing the revolution to the countryside to align the Kyrgyz with Soviet cultural values, the Moscow-based Communist Party had to undertake radical political, cultural and economic reforms to staff the local and national administration with the native population (Pennar, Bakalo and Bereday, 1971; Loring, 2008). Educational policies were centrally designed and monitored by the Party, but the Kyrgyz Republic’s Ministry of Education ensured implementation of its policies and monitored educational practices (Kreusler, 1976; Tomiak, 1972). As part of larger nationality policies, alphabet reforms first replaced the Arabic with the Latin in 1927-1930 (Pennar, Bakalo & Bereday, 1971), and from 1940 completely codified the Kyrgyz language in the Cyrillic.30

As part of the USSR, the Soviet Kyrgyz educational system was based on Marxist- Leninist ideology. DeYoung, Reeves and Valyayeva (2006) summarize the Soviet educational philosophy as follows,

Marxist-Leninist theory rejected the argument that the economic and political elite were

30 Pennar, Bakalo and Bereday (1971) argue that due to the constant, politically motivated alphabet changes, intergenerational communication issues emerged as three different generations were schooled in three different alphabets: Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic.

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genetically superior as self-serving and only in the ideological interest of capital. In a truly equal society, all children could and would benefit from a primarily academic curriculum. Not all children, on the other hand, might want to attend school for decades until the end of the university. For the young less inclined to study, alternative educational opportunities in vocational or trade schools would be made available in the USSR. Since socialism promised approximately equal salaries for those who went to college as it did for those who chose to go into agriculture or industry, demand for university training would be more natural under socialism, and only those truly interested in higher learning would want to attend. (p. 16)

Soviet education was conceptualized as prevailing over traditional patriarchal, tribal, religious, and ethnic beliefs and practices. It was instead set to develop a Soviet man who was committed to contributing to international proletarianism, the secular state, and a socially equal society (DeYoung et al, 2006; Gleason, 1997; Rywkin, 1990; Zajda, 1980). The nature and process of education was based on polytechnic principles, as Soviet policy-makers criticized the ‘bourgeois,’ academic nature of learning found in many capitalist societies, and in these Soviet schools, rural Kyrgyz young children learned the meaning and value of socially productive labour (Holmes, Read & Voskresenskaya, 1995). Both the formal academic curriculum and informal learning experiences of students promoted collective labour as a means of building the modern Soviet socialist society. Students were responsible for maintaining plants in school gardens, and cleaning their classrooms and schoolyards as part of this educational philosophy. In their home economics classes, male students repaired and fixed broken chairs and desks (DeYoung et al, 2006; Zajda, 1980).

As in the other Soviet republics, the former nomadic Kyrgyz communities were exposed to mass literacy programs (Russian: Doloi gramatnosti) and were provided with opportunities for further schooling (DeYoung et al, 2006). The early Soviet state - like many modernizing industrial states during that period - had to resolve the issues of training and allocating the labour force required by a socialist economy. Across the Soviet Union, the communist party leadership appealed to citizens about the need for ‘a proletarian intelligentsia’ from the lower classes to be able to run the public offices (Fitzpatrick, 1979). In Soviet Kirghizia this meant the development of a national cadre of policy makers, professionals, and workers. As a result of such political principles and the ideological mechanism that established radically distinctive upward social

117 mobility through schools and membership in local and national Communist Party branches, the young Kyrgyz from peasant backgrounds were schooled to join the Soviet ‘intelligentsia’ and political leadership ranks and join in the membership and rank of the Soviet collective/state farm and factory workers (DeYoung et al, 2013).

Despite celebrated achievements in educational equality among Soviet citizens, who received school education irrespective of their backgrounds, discrepancies were reported. Jacoby (1974) argues that three main factors impeded parity of educational opportunities: social class, geography, and national or ethnic origins. A sharp distinction between rural and urban children and families has been noted, and this impacted their respective economic wellbeing. Among all socio-occupational categories, collective farm labourers and urban industrial workers comprised the largest and the poorest group, considerably less privileged than the bureaucrats, white-collar and skilled blue-collar workers of the Soviet state. Collective farm labourers and urban workers generally lacked even a seventh grade education (Humphrey, 1983; Jacoby, 1974). This stood in contrast to the socialist ideal of the worker, which was based on the factory worker model, in which the Soviet socialist peasants and herders, were supposed to be ‘cultured’ rural workers who had knowledge and skills to operate advanced agricultural machinery (Croix, 2014). Moreover, the Kyrgyz people lived mostly in rural collective and state farms whereas those of European national origins tended to reside in the cities, enjoying greater educational and economic opportunities. These ethnicity-based educational achievements were not widely and openly recognized as the mechanisms of social and cultural inequality in the former so-called socialist state, but these differences were often reported and served as basis for subsequent Soviet policies (Lubin, 1984).

Educational equality among non-Russians was also curtailed by the medium of instruction, for the Russian language was elevated to the status of a second native tongue (Korth, 2004; Kreusler, 1976). While Russian culture expanded in the urban Kyrgyz areas by means of various cultural and social institutions, it also penetrated into rural regions through media outlets and formal education. The industrialization of the Kyrgyz economy strengthened the position of Russians since the specialized workforce was mainly of Russian or Russian-speaking origin, and the specialized and higher education institutions uniformly trained through the Russian language. With the intensive Russification and Russian cultural expansion, local nationalism emerged as a resistant force, promoting the preservation of national traditions, languages, and culture

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(Kreusler, 1976). Such tensions were most apparent in the rural schools, which provided education in Kyrgyz and other national languages, whereas most of the urban schools used Russian as their medium of instruction (Korth, 2005).

The transition from the Soviet socialist system to a market-oriented and democratic state- building society has radically affected the role of formal education in Kyrgyzstan. It is often argued that the formal educational system has failed to respond in a timely way to the needs of the changing economy. Silova (2011) argues that the postsocialist education system was one of the first institutions that had to be ‘manufactured’ into the conditions of ‘nearing crisis’ so that to align it with the western model of schooling, or with the capitalist ideology of cultural change. Silova notes that

Since the early 1990s, education sector reviews rushed to point out the alarming indicators of crisis, including falling expenditures, declining literacy rates, decreasing enrollment, rising student dropout, deteriorating capital infrastructure, outdated textbooks, stagnated curricula, and a lack of qualified teachers. ... What the emerging rhetoric of crisis suggests is that Central Asia’s education systems need to be normalized – redefined, recuperated, and reformed – usually (but not exclusively) against the prevailing Western models. (pp. 8-9)

In the early years of transition a high rate of school dropouts was documented (UNICEF, 2007), giving early signals of the problems of the educational institutions and of a shift in the former education/labour markets relations. The dropout rates prompted an investigation into the economic returns to formal schooling. Birth order, gender, and class backgrounds were found to affect the decision to discontinue formal schooling. Tiuiundieva (2006) comments that “[t]his may be due to the influence of the traditional view that the man is supposed to be the family breadwinner and ought to work rather than [sic] school.” (p. 77) Rural parents are believed to be the least willing to invest in the schooling of their children, especially when their futures are connected only with subsistence farming, urban trading and menial jobs, for which they need no formal education (Bobekova, 2007; Tiuiundieva, 2006). As DeYoung et al. (2006) note,

The continuation or re-emergence of cattle breeding and more traditional rural Kyrgyz values stands in contrast to some of the ‘modern’ values and aspirations taught by the school. Several teachers underscore the cultural and social contradictions of formal education in rural Kyrgyzstan that was mostly inherited from Soviet days (p. 158).

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Several factors influence qualitative educational participation, quality learning of young people and the effective functioning of the formal education system in Kyrgyzstan. The decline in the quality of education in post-Soviet countries is directly affected, for example, by underfunding and dramatic cuts in state expenditure on educational systems (Chapman et al, 2005; DeYoung et al, 2006; Mertaugh, 2004; Tiuiuindieva, 2006). The Kyrgyz government failed to continue the Soviet policy of educational financing due partly to its tight budget but also to its preference for liberal market economic deliberations. The partial withdrawal of the state from educational financing created an opportunity for private education systems to emerge as legitimate players in the educational market. The bifurcation of education into private and public has had consequences for the quality of educational provision and outcomes, as well as for the affordability and accessibility of schooling. The UNICEF (2007) reports,

Governments increasingly pass the funding burden to local communities and families. As a result, compulsory education is not free but is essentially a ‘traded service’, requiring families to pay not only for writing paper and pencils but for admissions, exams, textbooks, heating and even for teaching—officially, in the form of so-called ‘gratitude payments’ or paid tutoring. (p. 12)

In the contemporary Kyrgyz economy and society formal education has become a private good. And this fundamental change in the value of education has greatly impacted the discourse around academic quality and educational achievement.

The traditionally high social status of teachers before and during the Soviet period has altered dramatically. During the transition, teachers’ salaries were low in absolute and relative terms, and the payment of salaries was often delayed. Low and delayed salaries forced teachers to engage in supplementary economic activities in order to support their families (DeYoung, Reeves & Valyeyva, 2006; Niyozov & Shamatov, 2006). As DeYoung et al. (2006) observe, teachers’ salaries are often not the primary source of household income but a supplement to it. Teachers actively participate in the agricultural economy both after school and in summer. Their professional development has become irregular, their teaching criticized, their morale shattered and their social status ridiculed. Consequently, schools have experienced an exodus of qualified teaching staff and the recruitment of a poorly prepared generation of teachers (Joldoshalieva, 2007; Shamatov, 2005). Despite these issues, teaching remains one of the few formal professions available in rural communities (Joldoshalieva & Shamatov, 2005).

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The teaching and instructional skills of post-Soviet teachers are also influenced by the dominant educational narrative of crisis and decline. Silova (2011) refers to Perry (2009) who notes that in academic reviews of postsocialist Eastern European educational systems the teachers in these societies are portrayed as focusing,

Too much on memorization and facts and not enough on application, problem-solving, reasoning, analysis, and ‘critical thinking’; teachers are too controlling and authoritative, classrooms should be centered more around the student than the teacher; and teachers are passive, inflexible, and unable to adapt or take initiative. (p. 178)

The real or imagined exodus of highly professional teachers and the decline in the educational levels of the current teaching staff affect the commitment of parents to their children’s education. As the International Crisis Group (2003) succinctly puts it,

Left with fewer and less qualified teachers, rural parents see little benefit in education and believe it makes more sense to keep children busy at home, where they can be fed, and taught life skills, such as sewing, working in the fields and taking care of cattle. So at best, rural children are sent irregularly to school, in periods of low activity, such as the cold months. (p. 7)

The quality of education in rural schools is therefore linked to the participation of the school-age children of many rural households in seasonal agricultural labour so that they can make their contribution to the survival of the household (World Bank report, 2004).

The decline of the social demand for education is also due in part to the outdated national curriculum of formal public education. The curriculum development remains highly centralized in post-Soviet school education. The national curriculum, often criticized as outdated, overloaded, irrelevant and abstract, has replaced the former Soviet ideology with a nationalist one. Those who strongly supported the indigenization of the school curriculum often have referred to the brutal suppression of Kyrgyz cultural memory, history, and indigenous notions of morality in the Soviet periods. The works of Kyrgyz writers are made as the foundations of the characteristics of the post-Soviet cultural revival. One of these influencing works is of Chingiz Aitmatov. Aitmatov’s Mankurt has entered into popular terms used to critically examine the Soviet cultural modernization of the smaller communities that left deep wounds and moral holes. In his novel, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, Aitmatov (1980) depicts the brutal

121 suppression of indigenous forms of knowledge, culture and history of Central Asian nationalities in the Soviet periods. Through the Turkic people’s fable of Mankurt, Aitmatov describes the cultural tragedy of those who in the captivity of the enemy can suffer a complete loss of memory and experience a complete loss of ‘I’, and as a consequence become loyal and submissive slave of their captors (Mozur, 1987). Aitmatov’s Mankurt has also been popularly associated with the urban, intellectual people of Kyrgyz origin, who did not speak in their mother tongue, and could not associate themselves to their historical origins.

Other studies present the consequences of indigenization of national curriculum of post- Soviet Kyrgyz school education. Ismailova (2004) argues that indigenization of curriculum content, in which Kyrgyz ethnicity and history have emerged as the dominant discourse, marginalizes other ethnic minorities, including Russified Kyrgyz individuals and groups, and undermines social and national cohesion. Moreover, the previous Soviet practice of providing free grade textbooks remains at the core of current public debate. There are not enough textbooks for all the students, who are obliged to share textbooks with each other. The dire shortage of textbooks often encourages teachers to adopt a more teacher-directed form of instruction such as the dictation of textbook content, question-answer sessions, and checking homework exercises (DeYoung et al, 2006; de la Sablonniere, Taylor, & Sadykova, 2009). Despite the politically charged status of the Kyrgyz Republic as ‘an island of democracy’, surrounded by more authoritarian political regimes in Central Asia, Kyrgyz schools continue to practice an authoritarian instructional and pedagogical philosophy (de la Sablonniere, Taylor, & Sadykova, 2009).

The former Soviet youth organizations and co-curricular activities within and outside schools have lost their function of preparing youth for civic participation. The social upbringing (vospitanie) function of Soviet education was replaced by the study of ethics (Kyrgyz: yiman, adep); however, its nationalist content and ideology does not capture the interest of the increasingly global-oriented younger generation.

The quality of learning of students from the peripheral republics and especially their rural communities during the Soviet period may be debated, but some argue that it has declined during the transition period. The poor quality of learning has been suggested, for example, by comparative international testing of students’ knowledge (Shamatov & Sainazarov, 2010) and by national testing in different regions within the country (Drummond & DeYoung and, 2004).

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Although the test results do not necessarily affect the decision to give urban students more chances to obtain government scholarships for undergraduate study programs, they do reveal a gap between rural and urban students (Chapman, Weidman, Cohen & Mercer, 2005; Drummond & DeYoung and, 2004; Shamatov & Sainazarov, 2010). The introduction of standardized testing further dismantled the Soviet socialist educational philosophy, which established education as a social good and discouraged assessment for social selection through education as part of the capitalist ideology of class reproduction.

Higher education in the Kyrgyz Republic has changed greatly in regards to its quality, access and affordability, as its philosophy and status shifted somewhat during the transition period. Higher education is no longer free, despite universities are predominantly public. With an exception of a small percentage of applicants who secure the highest test scores at the National Scholarship Testing, most students have to pay tuition fees (DeYoung, 2010). Some studies reveal that during this period a higher proportion of school leavers enrolled in higher education despite persistent and growing unemployment and underemployment among university graduates as a result of local and national labour market stagnation and increased out-migration to Russia and Kazakhstan among the working age youth of Kyrgyzstan (DeYoung, 2010; DeYoung, 2008). This is explained by DeYoung (2008) as a legacy of Soviet society, which “…emphasized becoming a cultured person (Russian: kul’turnyi chelovek) irrespective of one’s profession or occupation.” (p. 644) However, Michalev and Heinrich (1999) previously offered a somewhat different perspective on higher levels of education during the transition period in Kyrgyzstan. They found that “[w]hile in 1993 high levels of education appeared to be a hindrance rather than an asset in providing social status to the bearer, the transition process appears to have significantly contributed to the valorization of human capital” (p. 20).

5.5. Youth transition in Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan has emerged from a highly structured and comparatively stable system of youth transition that was regulated and restricted by the central Soviet state (DeYoung, 2011; Tomiak, 1983). Young people were expected to become part of ‘the Soviet people’ through a variety of social institutions (Kozlov, 2012). They were socialized into the communist political system as much through extracurricular youth organizations (Russian: Oktiabriat, Pioner, and Komsomol) as through the formal educational curricula of career guidance (Russian: professional’naya

123 orientatsiia) (Pilkington, 1994). Their transition from school to work was also mediated differentially according to their level of education. For a certain segment of Soviet youth, the transition to work started at a younger age, when they completed their secondary education. After undergoing a form of the polytechnic education model of secondary education, they were employed by their local collectives or state farms or factories. For other segments of youth, vocational education was followed by employment in factories and plants through quota systems. Meanwhile, young graduates of higher education institutions were compelled to take up assignments through the system of distribution (Russian: raspredelenie) and to complete at least three years (Russian: otrabotyvat’) in those assignments, even if these were not personally desired (De Witt, 1961; Murzaeva, 2013; Zaslavsky, 1982). In addition to these regulations, mandatory residence permit system (Russian: propiska) restricted labour mobility and population movements in the Soviet Union (Zaslavsky, 1982).

The Soviet ‘strong model of youth integration’ was far from being perfect in terms of social mobility among different occupational, ethnic, linguistic, and regional populations. This had major implications on youth transitions in the Soviet context. Soviet socialist society had a distinctive three-tier class structure, which was comprised of the Soviet nomenclatura, intelligentsia and workers and peasants. In such a class-cum-status structure, occupational status and political power were the main sources of the reproduction of persistent inequalities in prestige and reward (Zajda, 1980; Yanowitch, 1977). Attempts to ‘proletarianize’ all the Soviet social strata to bridge these gaps based on the distribution of cultural capital was one of the central projects of the educational system and the economy (Yanowitch, 1977).

In Soviet society, private ownership and capital were dismantled, but access to the higher levels of education and family socialization into occupational groups still determined the reproduction of the existing social structure. This issue was openly discussed in the policy documents of the Soviet state. As Yanowitch (1977) noted, “[t]he critical link is the family unit and its position in the hierarchy of classes and strata. Young people are socialized in families which differ in incomes, consumption patterns, cultural levels, and physical surroundings, as well as in the values and expectations they transmit to children” (p. 59). Similarly, Tomiak (1983) admits, “the real contradictions inherent in the movement of Soviet society towards complete social homogeneity ...In practice …education varied considerably in quality, between for example, the urban and rural areas or the day and evening courses. These contradictions

124 continually reproduced the dialectical interaction of two contrary tendencies, he obliteration and the reproduction of social differences, even though the former tended to dominate the latter. (p. 251). Such analyses are partly congruent with key contributions of cultural reproduction theory in the west, in which family background and cultural capital have been recognized as important aspects of the process of reproduction of capitalist social relations (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).

The inherent tensions between Soviet education and the Soviet economy produced a substantial discrepancy between youth aspirations and subsequent educational, occupational and life realizations (Shubkin, 1969; Tomiak, 1983; Zaija, 1980). Soviet economists and sociologists proposed policies that increased commitment to the value of manual labour, to socializing children from their early ages into physical labour through the core curriculum, and to youth organizations. These policies had two purposes: they were intended to achieve, on the one hand, ‘the intellectualization of manual labour”31, and on the other hand, ‘the technicalization of…brain work’ (Tomiak, 1983; p. 248). The social engineering of youth into reproducing Soviet society was expected to fulfill the needs of Soviet economy rather than the individual aspirations and talents of younger generations (Matthews, 1975; Tomiak, 1983). The consequences of the social integration of the youth of non-European Soviet republics into the Soviet ideology, economy and schooling, are yet to be analyzed. There is a need to understand how spatial location, traditional cultural upbringing, and type of schooling impacted youth transitions, and those of rural youth in particular, in Soviet Central Asian societies. Despite all the above- mentioned inadequacies and many others of the Soviet state in relation to its youth, Kuenhnast (2000) highlights the following,

The Soviet system of social supports prevented extreme deprivation and promoted the physical, intellectual, and social development of children through the comprehensive provision of education and health services, preschool and afterschool care, youth groups, and the guarantee of lifetime employment. In spite of the many inadequacies of the Soviet system, health and education indicators for child development in Central Asia were high, especially when compared to other developing countries in the world. (p. 187)

There is no doubt that, unlike their parents’ generation, young people in contemporary

31 Croix (2014) provides a good summary on the defining ideals of the socialist work or labour and the ways the rural Kyrgyz interpreted these ideals in their postsocialist lives.

125 western societies have experienced changes in the educational, employment, and other domains of their lives. The experiences of youth in postsocialist societies in particular should be studied to understand the effects of unprecedented social, economic, and political changes on the process of growing up and being a young person, especially in peripheral rural contexts (Bhat, 2013; DeYoung, 2010; Kirmse, 2010, 2009; Korzh, 2013; Pilkington, 2002; Roberts, 2010; Roche, 2014; Rose, 2001; Walker, 2011). Being a young person in a postsocialist transformationing society is far more complex than growing up in the former Soviet Union or in contemporary western European and North American societies (DeYoung, 2011; Korzh, 2013; Roberts, 2010; Roche, 2014; Walker, 2011). While growing up has never been an easy process in itself, the postsocialist transformation increased the burdens and ambiguities of young people. These youth experienced their world turned upside down. Kuenhnast (2000) accurately observes the impact of such a dramatic global political and economic event on the younger generation of the former Soviet Central Asian societies.

The younger generation that is coming of age in Central Asia today is a group that finds itself worlds apart from its Soviet-raised parents, and it bears the stamp of this unique and difficult transition. In less than a decade, the countries have politically, economically, and socially reconstituted themselves. Although remnants of Soviet-era values remain entrenched among their parents’ generation, the younger cohort is caught, in many ways, between two worlds. These young people know little about the once-highly centralized and socialized economy, and they have even less comprehension of how their newly decentralized governments and often corrupted new economies can offer any sort of future security for them. Yet they do recognize their own vulnerability and the vulnerability of their Central Asian states (Kuehnast, 2000, p. 198).

The youth of post-Soviet societies encounter the challenges of highly unpredictable and severely insecure forms of employment minus the effective infrastructure of labour market intermediaries. Their previous ‘privileged’ positions have been replaced by the complex workings of social origins in shaping the pathways of youth to adulthood (DeYoung, 2010; Korzh, 2013; Kovacheva, 2001; Roberts, 2010; Walker, 2011). The majority of youth in post- Soviet societies struggle to find any type of employment due to competitive labour market conditions in new economies, which discriminate against work experience, marketable skills, and quality training (Walker, 2011). Moreover, in the absence of intermediary institutions, social

126 determinants, including spatial location, citizenship, language, ethnicity, social class and gender, impede the process of young people’s participation in labour markets and their success in accessing formal and salaried employment (Monousova, 1998; Walker, 2011). On the other hand, post-Soviet youth are often unwilling to remain on the job due to poor wages and the unappealing prospects currently available to them (Donova Il’ina, Il’chenko, & Metalina, 1997; Walker, 2010).

To make their experiences even worse, the collapse of the Soviet economic infrastructure produced ‘new economic wastelands’ in the rural regions and disposable young lives (Tarkhnishvili et al., 2005; Tholen et al., 2012). As compared to urban youth, young people who grow up in rural regions confront the collapse of formal employment and limited educational opportunities. More importantly, the nature of the previous formal employment and economy has changed in rural Kyrgyz communities. Croix (2014) notes that the extended family serves as an alternative collective towards which rural residents demonstrate their allegiance and service in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan. This is fundamentally different from the Soviet periods, in which these rural young people were expected to serve both the kinship and the Soviet state. On the one hand, their work was expected to the service of their kolkhoz brigade, the kolkhoz, the Soviet state, and the [socialist] humanity, on the other hand, they required demonstrating allegiance to their kinship and [often tribal] neighborhoods.

Caught between traditionalism, a strong sense of local communities and of kinship and family, and the expansion of opportunities for post-Soviet freedom of geographic mobility and consumption, post-Soviet rural youth encounter the prospect of working under the denigrated conditions of manual labour that resulted from “the reversal of Soviet hierarchies of prestige and devaluing of traditional forms of manual labour” (Walker, 2011; p. 47)32. They also experience constant pressure to get any type of job or work (in the sense of making a living or earning cash) to make the transition to the phase of adulthood, or to search elsewhere for opportunities to become independent adults and to leave so that others can remain in the village (Isabaeva, 2011). Both of these factors have stimulated out-migration among rural youth in pursuit of opportunities

32 Croix (2014) refers to Lubin (1984) to highlight the hierarchy of labour in the socialist Kyrgyzstan, in which the Soviet policy of ‘indigenization’ (Russian: korenizatsiia) enabled the republican governments to actively recruit ethnic highly skilled professionals with Russian language proficiency and with strong allegiance to the Communist Party. These included economists, engineers, doctors, teachers and workers in cultural institutions.

127 elsewhere.

The rate of migration among post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz youth is far greater than that of earlier generations in the Soviet era; in fact, migration has become a defining characteristic of the post-Soviet Kyrgyz economy in transition. Currently, approximately half a million Kyrgyz citizens are in Kazakhstan and Russia, where they are employed predominantly in retail, service, and construction (Vinokurov, 2013). The average age of migrants is 29 years. Migration among rural youth from southern Kyrgyz regions is steadier, as they encounter the poverty of opportunity in their local labour markets resulting from uneven development in the former Soviet Kirgizia (Vinokurov, 2013). The migrating rural youth often have efficient kinship networks abroad, which, to a great extent, serves as a facilitating factor for the desire to emigrate and earn money to improve their own or their families’ living conditions back in Kyrgyzstan. A high percentage of migrants have at least some post-secondary education, for qualifications obtained within the Kyrgyz educational field rarely provide opportunities to get the jobs for which students are trained (Vinokurov, 2013).

The transition from the Soviet command economy to a market-oriented economy enabled the private sector to emerge and to offer employment opportunities to youth in the service, trade, communications, and construction sectors of the economy. However, most of these industries are located in the cities, thus adding to the reasons for youth to migrate out of rural regions. Moreover, contemporary, postsocialist youth grow up with a drastically different set of aspirations (such as a law, business, computer programming or interpreting) from previous generations, who mostly wished to become doctors, engineers, or teachers. This shift in youth aspirations is itself revolutionary, and post-Soviet youth have often been characterized as materialistic and individualistic in popular discourse, especially by older generations (Magun, 1999; Walker, 2011). With higher wages in the private sector, the social prestige of professions in education, healthcare, and law and order has diminished (DeYoung, 2010; Roberts, 2010; Wallace, 2002; Walker, 2011). New industries require skilled labour to work under new forms of work ethics geared towards producing surplus value for owners, while hiring in the public sector is often characterized by the acquisition of jobs through personal networks (Oliver and Akins,

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2010; Roberts, et al, 2009)33.

Changes in the higher education field have rendered it drastically different from the Soviet period. Both the demand for and the supply of higher education have increased since the 1990s. The percentage of people with higher education qualifications in Kyrgyzstan rose from 9.4% in 1989 to 13.2% in 2006 (OECD, 2010). The number of higher education institutions has mushroomed from nine in 1991 to 55 in 2014 (Kyrgyz Statistics Office, 2015). Despite these greater opportunities to obtain higher education and qualifications, the employment rate among highly educated youth is lower (56%) than the national level of employment (60%) (Oliver & Akins, 2010). Moreover, the effects of spatial location, gender, and social class on access to higher education and on the transition from education to the workplace have accelerated in the period of the postsocialist transformation (Baumann, Jansova & Saar, 2014; DeYoung, 2010; Oliver and Akins, 2010; Roberts 2010). Despite their clear efforts to get more schooling, the conditions of employment structures, or the larger economic field, for those who are most vulnerable economically culturally, particularly socially deprived families and young people, have been pushed into even worse socioeconomic positions than they occupied before (Oliver & Akins, 2010).

Although statistics can reveal the most socially, culturally, and economically disadvantaged segments of Kyrgyz youth (those from the rural regions of the southern oblasts), a qualitative examination of their lives from their perspectives, and particularly of their strategies in dealing with schooling and work and their future aspirations, could provide a more nuanced understanding of the impact of the postsocialist transformation on individual and family life chances. Such studies are especially important so that future youth policies in this resource-poor Central Asian country can further the education of the least protected and most vulnerable groups of youth in Kyrgyzstan and facilitate their transition from school to work.

Drastic changes to the economy, politics, and society imposed by the postsocialist transformation process have forced the Central Asian people to reshape their expectations, habits, and ways of life. In the next two chapters I examine the lived experiences of a group of

33 Croix (2014) notes that social ties or personal connections mediated the access and circulation of goods or services that were not easily accessible during the Soviet period. However, in the post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz community the access to information on land rights and laws provided more economic opportunities and returns to those who worked in the former Soviet collective and state farms.

129 rural youth and their families who cope with these changes and construct their future educational and employment trajectories.

5.6. Conclusion This chapter presented the background of economic, demographic, and educational changes both in Soviet and post-Soviet rural Kyrgyzstan. It drew attention to the fact that, less than a century ago, the Kyrgyz people lived in a kinship cultural and tribal economy, working as nomadic herders, and it explained how in that context the transition to adulthood was not sharply distinguished by modern social institutions such as the school and labour market. The chapter went on to illustrate how complex social forces impact the lives of Kyrgyz young people growing up under new conditions of politics, economics, and education. This helped us to understand how these broader historical conditions influence the daily lives of rural youth and shape their future fears and hopes in multiple different ways. I now turn into the story of three young people – Darika, Kerim, and Edil – to represent three distinctive experiences of clusters of youth in postsocialist transformation, rural economic decline, and impoverished educational conditions.

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Chapter 6

Illustrative cases of post-Soviet rural youth trajectories in Kyrgyzstan: Darika, Kerim and Edil

6.1. Introduction This chapter presents three cases indicative of several key themes in the life strategies and future trajectories of rural youth in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. In the first section, I identify and explain these three trajectories and the illustrative cases, by revisiting the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu. I then present the case of Darika, followed by the cases of Kerim and Edil. Lastly, I compare and summarize these illustrative cases to develop a stronger case for the persisting and emerging inequalities in the lives and aspirations of rural Kyrgyz youth.

6.2. Three illustrative cases into youth trajectories in post-Soviet rural Kyrgyzstan Before detailing these cases, I re-introduce the notions of habitus, strategy and trajectory to help understand how the biographies contained within the cases are framed and presented and to connect them to the larger data set of other youth in this study. The consciousness and sense of themselves that these youth possess, as well as their interaction with members of their families and schools, are mediated by deeply embedded cognitive, behavioral and bodily dispositions that were acquired under post-Soviet social conditions of existence (Bourdieu, 1980). These dispositions are not simply embodied by these social agents and manifested in their ways of feeling, thinking, talking, and walking, but they have also become durable and transposable mediating mechanisms that structure their practices in different social contexts (Bourdieu, 1980). As Bourdieu (1980) argues, our human actions are not completely rational and conscious, but are oriented and mediated by our sense of being in the world. The strategies of the youth in this study, therefore, are not simply conscious or unconscious decisions and actions; they are, “…the active deployment of objectively oriented ‘lines of action’ that obey regularities and form coherent and socially intelligible patterns, even though they do not follow conscious rules or aim at the premeditated goals of a strategist” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; p. 25).

Although presented as individual cases, Darika, Kerim, and Edil are indicative of the

131 distinctive social trajectories of three collectives of youth in this study; these young people share similar dispositions, employ similar strategies, and appear to embark on similar future trajectories within these collectives. Their divergent trajectories are oriented largely by their particular habituses, which are generated in turn from their experiences of different social conditions of existence. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) argue that

Social agents are not particles that are mechanically pushed and pulled about by external forces. They are bearers of capitals, and depending on their trajectories and on the position they occupy in the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and structure) in capital, they have a propensity to orient themselves actively either toward the preservation of the distribution of capital or toward the subversion of this distribution (pp. 108-109).

In other words, the strategies that youth employ in the fields of education, family and economy are guided by a set of dispositions that they have developed through their experience of occupying specific locations within the existing structure of their society. The social positions of these youth and their families result from the volume and composition of the economic, social, and cultural capital that they possess. The strategies of these youth and their families often reflect their past, though they are produced in the present and will always be oriented towards the future (Bourdieu, 1980; Reay, 2004). From this analytic perspective, the notions of habitus, strategy and trajectory necessarily include both description and prediction; they are relational, as they mediate each other (Jenkins, 1992).

Dense, individual-oriented sketches of these three young people and their families in this chapter will allow a focused treatment of the dynamic subjective dimensions of social life in the socio-cultural, political, and historical context of post-Soviet rural Kyrgyzstan. This approach will also provide an opportunity to understand that these individual histories are far from being autonomous; that they are rather located within a wider social context of constant change as well as reproductive mechanisms (Bourdieu, 2007). For example, on the one hand these youth share a common post-Soviet generational location and experience. On the other hand, their experience of this generational location is not identical, for it depends largely on their families’ and their own social positions and the resources they possess (Furlong et al., 2011; Mannheim, 1952). This chapter presents three cases that testify to the intra-generational differences of rural Kyrgyz youth in order to further the understanding that the post-Soviet generation does not possess a

132 homogeneous set of values and experiences. In fact, one of the hypotheses of this chapter is that over the course of the rapid and radical economic and political transitions of post-Soviet Kyrgyz society, heterogeneity may be both significant and intense.

The three cases in this chapter are based on the lives of Darika, Kerim and Edil. Detailed attention to their data, I claim, will generate an appreciation of three distinct habituses, defined as the intelligentsia’s educated habitus, the entrepreneurial habitus, and the habitus of the dispossessed and necessity. These habituses employ divergent strategies, including cultural capital accumulation, economic capital accumulation, and getting-by in the relational fields of family and school, which orient them towards distinct futures, such as the professional future, the entrepreneurial future, and the precarious future. These distinct and potentially divergent strategies and future trajectories are shaped, to a large extent, by the following factors. First, the educational level of the parents plays a major role in the transfer of cultural capital to the young person, which in turn enables success in the post-Soviet educational field. The embodied cultural dispositions of these youth produce, in particular, different educational views and strategies in the school. Second, the changing material conditions of these families in the post-Soviet period - that is, the family’s stock of economic capital, and especially the size of their potentially enriching social networks (Kyrgyz: taanysh-bilish) - have differentiating effects on the young people’s post-secondary educational and occupational orientations. Through these cases we will explore continuity and change in the social positioning of these young people as a group, a family, and/or as individuals; that is, the continuity of some aspects of their lives as well as the changes in other.

It is important to note at this point that the entire data set was initially reviewed to select three cases that were indicative of the divergent educational and life strategies that inform the trajectories of rural Kyrgyz youth. We begin this chapter with the case of Darika to illustrate those youth who actively employ all possible strategies for cultural capital accumulation and who are also oriented towards the professional future trajectory. Darika’s case generally illustrates all the key attributes of the other sixteen young people in this collective or cluster, although this is not to say that there was no variation within any of the three case types discussed (see Chapter 7). In Darika’s story we explore how the successful intergenerational transfer of cultural capital by the rural Kyrgyz post-Soviet intelligentsia is reflected in the educated habitus of this young person. Darika’s school-specific habitus is generated at home at a young age,

133 despite a wide gap between her immediate rural farm lifestyle and the values of the educational field, which are predominantly, linked to Russian linguistic and urban Kyrgyz cultural contexts. She could employ the dispositions of these cultural contexts, without conscious reflection, when dealing with the school and outlining her aspirations. What is more, Darika’s case succinctly captures how the relative stability of rural Kyrgyz professional families produces a stability of thought and orients strategies by pooling the many forms of capital, including those arising from their social networks, which are available to such households to reproduce their status as the rural intelligentsia in post-Soviet Kyrgyz villages.

As an indicative case of another post-Soviet group of youth, which actively pursues strategies for economic capital accumulation and is oriented towards the entrepreneurial future, Kerim’s case was selected from a set of three young people’s interviews. In Kerim’s case we observe how the successful intergenerational transfer of economic capital relates distinctively to his dispositions such as risk taking, profit making and leadership as a manifestation of his entrepreneurial habitus. The values encompassed by this habitus structure Kerim’s educational views and future orientations specific to the expansion of the family’s economic capital and the strengthening of their symbolic privilege in the village and beyond. The accumulation of educational cultural capital serves as another strategy to provide the necessary cultural and social resources to navigate this trajectory successfully. The consistent improvement in the economic positions of their families produces certain stability in the particular forms of the aspirations of their youth. Despite variations in their parents’ occupational goals for them and in their own aspirations, Kerim’s case quite vividly illuminates the intention of all three cases to return to the village to pursue an entrepreneurial rural future. In Kerim’s case this vision of the future is well captured: he ‘sees’ the ‘opportunities’ in the rural economic structure, which the youth of the rural migrant trajectory typically evaluate as one of deprivation, poverty, and unemployment, devoid of opportunities save for subsistence farming.

Finally, I present the case of Edil. He was selected to illustrate the trajectory of another seventeen rural young people, whose sense of the world and the future has been shaped by economic precariousness, political uncertainty, and material necessity. These conditions of the postsocialist transformation have produced the habitus of the necessity and dispossessed, whose current strategies of getting-by in the fields of education and employment orient them almost exclusively towards the necessity of international labour migration. This case is presented last as

134 it is the most complex; the cases of Darika and Kerim are introduced earlier in order to provide resources to explain the complexity of Edil’s experiences. Edil’s case epitomizes how, among former Soviet kolkhoz workers, the combination of low educational levels and wage-dependent economic capital with limited access to socio-political elite networks has resulted in material and social positions in which rural subsistence farming, urban petty-trading, and international labour migration are often the only resorts. In addition, their families’ economic, social, and cultural trajectories structure rather unstable thoughts, displaying elusive and under-articulated postsecondary educational and semi-professional occupational goals. Edil’s case clearly depicts how the limited cultural capital of former kolkhoz working families structures young people’s disinterest in academic learning and schooling, orienting their daily actions towards farm labour and hired manual labour, and molding their future orientations towards transnational migration, petty trading and subsistence farming. With the understanding that these cases are indicative of broader themes, we can now look at each one in detail.

6.3. The rural intelligentsia habitus, accumulating cultural capital, and the professional future: The biography of Darika During this research period, Darika was an 18-year-old female student studying in grade 11 at one of the two high schools in her village. Darika’s linguistic capital—her capacity to produce academic and literary expressions for this research—revealed her class to be the rural intelligentsia. Her confident bodily and verbal expressions indicated that she was familiar with speaking in a formal public space. She maintained a consistently identical tone and sat as though she was being interviewed for an office job. Darika positioned herself as a member of the rural intelligentsia and a cultured family [Russian: kul’turnaya semia]. Her educational practices and dispositions were fundamentally influenced by her family’s intelligentsia position within the rural social structure, which closely aligned her distinctive educated habitus with the values and norms of the educational field. Through her case, I illustrate the changing rural professional occupational structure, the continued struggle for symbolic prestige, the reproduction of schooling doxa, and the effects of the expansion of higher education on the former intelligentsia’s survival and prestige. Darika’s current practices of education, learning and life further structured her future life projections. Like many youth in this study, Darika aspired to pursue post-secondary education in journalism. However, unlike the youth in other types of

135 trajectories, Darika belonged to a family in which the parents had successfully transmitted cultural values and behavior that made her stand out among other aspiring students and enabled her to feel like ‘a fish in the water’ in the educational field.

6.3.1. The rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia family, kulturnyi, and cultural reproductive strategies As we will see, Darika belonged to a family from the former Soviet intelligentsia (mother) and the former administrative staff of a kolkhoz. Although the financial capital of this household was modest—consisting primarily of a teacher’s salary and livestock sales—what differentiated the economic condition of Darika’s family from those of other two types of households, illustrated by the cases of Edil and Kerim, was not only the volume of financial stocks generated during the Soviet period, but also their sense of income security in post-Soviet conditions. Darika’s parents belonged to a different generation, one that had enjoyed state support and full employment for more than 20 years before the collapse of the USSR. Thus, her parents belonged to those village households that could be considered established [Kyrgyz: kuralip kalgan ookat]. Their income security and accumulated financial assets, which included ownership of their house and farm, continued to greatly influence the family’s life as well as Darika’s educational trajectories under the uncertain conditions of the postsocialist transformation. Darika’s mother continued to work in the public sector as the post-Soviet rural occupational structure underwent radical changes that had a significant impact on the family’s overall well-being. The mother’s institutional cultural capital, in the form of post-secondary degrees in teaching and the father’s degree in accounting in particular, continued to carry social value even when the correlation between level of education and financial well-being became minimal in the early post-Soviet era.

Darika possessed a significant volume of cultural capital at home. Her parents, who had received their academic degrees in the mid-1970s, were the first generation in their families to complete high school, and among the few villagers to pursue post-secondary education. Darika’s late father graduated from a prestigious financial institute or technicum in Frunze (now Bishkek) with a degree in accounting. On returning to the village, he worked as a chief accountant in the local Soviet kolkhoz for several years. The mother recalled the father’s job as one of the most ‘prestigious’ and ‘well-respected’ in the Soviet rural occupational structure. His kolkhoz employment was not only the source of a good salary, but it also guaranteed access to political

136 social capital in the local Communist Party, which dominated the power structure of that society. The mother’s occupation as a teacher, meanwhile, provided professional educational social capital beyond the school in the form of timely access to information on policy changes.

It is important to highlight here that in this form of analysis, these narratives primarily provide opportunities for tracing the relations between intelligentsia habitus, cultural capital, and the educational field. According to Darika’s family, their success in post-secondary education was due to their perseverance and hard work in school. As we will see, Darika’s mother echoed the doxic beliefs of the rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia and professional families, which became a dominant family doxa. This doxic belief reflected a sense of stability and confidence with regard to the changing relations of education, work, and economic security. The mother outlined her career:

I studied in the village school in Ak Kya until grade eight. Then I entered Jalalabad pedagogical college for 4 years. When I graduated from this college I applied to the Kyrgyz Pedagogical Institute for Women in Frunze. Since then I have been working in educational institutions. I have worked for the last 36 years. I worked as a principal, vice- principal, and inspector, and a classroom teacher. My husband worked as an accountant until he passed away (Darika’s mother, Interview).

Teaching in rural regions during the Soviet period was regarded, without question, as a ‘highly respectable job,’ for the Soviet state believed that teachers would act as the extended hands of the regime, promoting a type of education that was in line with its socialist ideology. As noted above, both of Darika’s parents became professionals - members of the former rural Soviet intelligentsia and administration - via higher educational attainments, with the support of the Soviet state, and not due to their family origin. It was their cultural capital, combined with their regular income from teaching that located them in a relatively high social position of symbolic prestige and status in the Soviet rural social structure. With the changes in the post-Soviet rural occupational structure, Darika’s parents witnessed a transformation of their social position from a more privileged into comparatively lesser one. These changes had a detrimental effect on the household’s well-being, though they may or may not have similarly influenced others’ subjective sense of their social situation. Despite these changes and experiences, however, Darika’s parents strongly believed in the real possibility of school-assisted geographic and social mobility in post- Soviet society. And this belief oriented their strategies of child rearing and schooling.

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Despite the dissolution of the Soviet kolkhoz system, both of Darika’s parents remained (unlike Edil’s and Kerim’s parents) fully employed; however, their real wages declined, which pushed their household down to the category of the working poor in the post-Soviet economy. It was clear from the interview data that Darika’s parents’ wages became irregular during the early period of national independence, which was especially burdensome in light of the post-Soviet financial hyperinflation. To sustain their previous lifestyle, or at least a family livelihood, and such aspirations for their children’s futures as were integral parts of their intelligentsia social expectations, Darika’s parents concentrated their resources to retain their cattle farm, while they continued working at the school and the village council despite their meager salaries. Although their social status had declined, the parents continued to enjoy occupational security in the post- Soviet period, and the family remained in their social location as an intelligentsia group.

Our household’s main income is generated from a cattle farm. Our farm is not that big, just enough for our household. The main animals are sheep and cows. I also get a salary from teaching. It is between 5,000-6,000 soms. We do not have any other assets or capital anywhere else. I pay tuition fees for my two sons and their living expenses in the city (Darika’s mother, Interview).

In the new economy, it was the family’s economic capital - financial assets - and the post-Soviet form of political social capital - political connections, and family members in influential political and administrative positions - that determined social position. In this economy, the value of cultural capital remained symbolically prestigious; yet the social hierarchy within the rural social structure was linked mainly to the household’s financial capital stocks, with only secondary value being placed on its volume of cultural capital.

The financial condition of Darika’s family deteriorated when the father died in a car accident. Unlike Kerim’s family, which also experienced the crisis of losing its breadwinner, Darika’s family dealt with this loss by strategically pooling all its economic resources and converting them into the cultural capital of the children. Darika’s parents attempted to ensure that their children received educational degrees from relatively prestigious institutions. In addition, they financially supported their children to acquire employable skills such as computer literacy and foreign language proficiency. In the current context of expanded higher education, these rural intelligentsia parents also had to engage in the process of redefining the categories of value and prestige. Specifically, these parents sought to increase the value of the cultural capital

138 of their children among those masses of students who might also hold university degrees. I suggest that these particular cultural capital accumulation strategies of the intelligentsia families help us to distinguish Darika’s trajectory from those of Edil and Kerim.

Darika’s mother emphasized her identity and her family’s daily behavior and values as being those of cultured people [Russian: kul’turnyi; Kyrgyz: madaniattuu]. The social markers of kul’turnyi contributed to her sense of being distinct from former kolkhoz workers [farmers] and administrative stratum in this rural community. The criteria of being cultured, which included good manners, personal hygiene, and dressing professionally, as well as attaining a high educational level, had been introduced as central to a distinctive Soviet identity during the early years of Sovietization. For Kyrgyz nomadic communities, this Soviet social and cultural policy established new forms of social distinction within their society. Moreover, as a valuable resource subject to an analysis of the dynamics of field/capital, culturedness was not equally or fairly distributed among the rural Kyrgyz people. Rather, it was introduced as a means of penetrating into existing traditional Kyrgyz social divisions in order to create new forms of distinction between Kyrgyz farmers and the new social group of the Soviet intelligentsia.

Being socialized into the Soviet doxic norms of these social divisions, Darika’s mother believed that the cultured person required more than basic literacy skills; for her it was the level of education - specifically of higher education – as well as cultured manners that defined cultured-ness. By believing in such distinctions, she reproduced and maintained her family’s social and cultural position as being among the highly educated strata of the local rural intelligentsia. This sense of distinction had been mobilized into the socialization of her children to aspire for further education and to behave differently from those who do not succeed academically and who cannot demonstrate the embodiment of cultured manners. It had become the dominant family doxa that shaped their relationship to other members of their village community, the school, and the communities beyond.

I always emphasize to my children to study and work hard. I tell them that they should study hard. Only then can I do my best to support them in their education. I give my own example. I tell them that because my parents educated me I did not encounter harsh economic conditions even after the collapse of the USSR. I was able to support my family financially as well as to participate in the community’s social activities. The educated persons are always higher than the common people. Educated people are

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educated people, you know? (Darika’s mother, Interview)

The mother’s culturally distinct values were clearly reproduced in her children’s behavior and preferences. At school, Darika and her brothers were considered ‘exemplary’ students and both brothers were noted for their academic achievements and active student leadership contributions. Although the two brothers were offered state scholarships to pursue degrees at public universities, they both declined them in favour of obtaining law degrees at a relatively prestigious private university. The mother was proud that her children continued to value education and worked hard to achieve academic success.

In the deteriorating post-Soviet economic conditions, the family’s financial situation, which relied largely on the mother’s income from her full-time teaching job, was worsened by the death of the father. The psychological as well as financial challenges that followed this tragedy made it impossible for the mother to support the higher educational opportunities of her children.

I could not really provide good educational conditions for my children. As I am a single mother and my husband passed away early, my children had to work in the cattle farm and help with household chores at their young age (Darika’s mother, Interview).

In this interview, the mother revealed that her family’s economic condition was not untypical of the general status of salaried professionals in the village.

As Darika’s mother suggested, the children’s labour in the family farm was necessary in order to allow the possibility of envisioning post-secondary education in the future. The children affirmed that their farm labour did not discourage them from pursuing learning. The mother proudly referred to the case of her second son in an interview:

My second son studied at school so hard; he was a school student council president, and won a government scholarship to pursue higher education in the history department. But he refused to study there and gave up his scholarship to apply to the law academy in Osh. He always worked hard on the cattle farm too. I was used to just giving orders to him. He often disappeared for an hour or so. I was pretty upset, scolded him in his absence and then I would start doing the work myself. Later I realized that he was going up to the attic to read newspapers there. As a teacher I subscribed to a lot of newspapers. Instead of throwing them away, we collected them and archived them in the attic. So, I think if a

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child has a desire for learning, he or she will learn in any conditions (Darika’s mother, Interview: emphasis added).

Similarly, Darika recognized that her farm work and household chores were too taxing, leaving her with limited energy to engage in academic work. However, she proudly mentioned that she still managed to find time in between her household chores to do her schoolwork or stayed back after her classes to prepare her homework. Her habits of learning, which she had acquired in her family, allowed her to quickly master curricular materials and to respond to teachers’ questions in the classroom. In her accounts of her school life, Darika’s habitus of intelligentsia was apparent as she continued to invest her energy, time, and resources into accumulating school/educational cultural capital.

The death of the father in Darika’s family was definitely an unpredictable and unstructured event, but such events nevertheless take on analytical significance to the extent that their effects are subject to the structure a particular position in the field, which is based largely on accumulated capital and the habitus. In general, we can observe how Darika’s mother ‘naturalized’ the family’s socioeconomic dynamic of cultural capital and the educational field by arguing that if the children had the desire to study, the family’s material conditions would not limit their opportunities to do so. Their disposition to appreciate school learning and their capacity for hard work clearly indicated this family’s successful transmission of parental cultural capital to the next generation, where it was embodied as individual aptitudes, and often mistaken as expressing the ‘naturalness’ of these aptitudes. Darika and her brothers’ success lay in acquiring the school-related habitus at home, through socialization by the parents, and embodying the cultural capital of the school quite early. The successful transfer cultural capital of the family and especially parents was concealed the habitus of Darika and her brothers who demonstrated the dominant cultural capital of the educational field, converting it into their individual educational advantage.

The results of capital/field/habitus in this case were not, however, solely developmental achievements vis-à-vis parent-child interaction within the home. This professional family maintained and mobilized social networks beyond their local community and kinship. According to Darika, her paternal relatives worked in administrative and professional activities in the village, two of them being employed in prestigious jobs in the village employment structure: accounting and consulting in a development and investment agency. Two of her maternal uncles

141 also served in the army in administrative positions. Kinship was an important resource, and Darika’s family kin were mobilized when the family required support with physical labour, especially during the seasons of haymaking and hay transportation. In exchange for their support, Darika and her brothers helped, in similar ways, with harvesting sunflower seeds and organizing community activities. Thus, the kinship group’s economic transactions were based on the need for physical labour, and not on accumulating and advancing economic capital.

However, it was Darika’s mother’s professional social capital that was their most resourceful network outside their kinship social capital. The mother had worked in the district education department [Russian: rayono] for several years. Relatively expansive social connections were made because of the parents’ professional jobs and their post-secondary education in Frunze during the Soviet period. The mother knew people from the schools, the district, and the oblast educational departments. Such social capital helped the family to keep abreast with information pertaining to Darika’s and her brothers’ prospects for higher education and future employment. Darika’s brothers were active in educational activities in the city. They participated in student cultural events, studied in learning centers in the evenings, and took part in popular provincial student TV shows. Darika drew on the experience of her brothers in the city when thinking about her future life, education, and work.

An important additional indicator in the analysis here is Darika’s insistence that she did not want to have friends who could not relate to her academic aspirations. Due to her student leadership role at school, Darika had many classmates whom she considered ‘friendly’ to her. However, she mentioned only one female student with whom she had a close relationship at home as well as at school. This friend and Darika talked about politics, current events, their academic challenges, and their future plans. Although she called on this friend when there was a need for extra hands around the house, Darika constantly and explicitly framed this friendship as being based on the academic aspect of schooling and their future plans for education and work.

In summing up the initial portion of this case study, we can see that in this professional family, Darika’s academic-oriented habitus and educational aspirations were interconnected with her strategies of accessing, mobilizing, using, and continuing her and her family’s social networks in the search for opportunities to reproduce their professional class position within and beyond their village community.

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6.3.2. Darika as the only daughter: A sense of location and perception as a young woman Darika’s experiences of education, household labour, and life and her aspirations for the future were highly gendered. Her gendered sense of location in the family, household economy, and schooling were evident throughout our conversations. Analysis of the interviews with Darika and her mother reveals that she had acquired a sense of unique social location in the age and gender- specific social hierarchy of her family. Despite her rural habitus, Darika was, however, able to draw on her intelligentsia linguistic capital to note that the habits of rural work and life were not ‘natural’ but rather ‘acquired’ through repetitive everyday practices.

One cannot imagine life without a cattle farm in the village. We have a farm to be able to pay bills, invest in our education and live a life. The difficulties of village life are not usually recognized as soon as one learns how to do things around here. But, for the outsiders, the work may be very visible. The work takes up the most part of our lives from morning until late at night (Darika, Interview, 1).

Darika highlighted that rural people invested most of their daily energy in farm and household work. She acknowledged that the daily work activities of rural people generally became invisible to them, as they had grown up in such a context and were unable to recognize its structuring effects on their perceptions of life and work. However, Darika exhibited her ability to break through this taken-for-granted nature of her rural culture by using her reflexive ability: she observed, for example, that a rural lifestyle could be drastically different from the perspectives of non-rural outsiders. In such realizations we note a demonstration of Darika’s cultural capital, which encompassed urban cultural values and standards.

Darika described rural life as unstructured and free-flowing. In contrast, she perceived a typical urban day as being regimented and orderly. Her intelligentsia habitus, which is the incorporated cultural capital, also revealed displayed the characteristics of urban professional cultural norms when her description of a typical day in the village:

I wake up at 6:30 a.m. daily. The first thing I do is pray. Because my brothers are away from home, in the city, I do the morning cattle care. I feed them with hay. I then go to school. There I participate in different school activities, including my academic classes.

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At around 1 p.m. I return home. I again feed the animals, clean the barn and stay busy with cattle related work until 4 p.m. After such work, I do household chores. My mother and I prepare our dinner. Around 9 p.m. I sit down to do my homework until 10 p.m. After this, I watch TV. I do a lot of work at home. But if you know how to manage time effectively, this will not have any negative effect on your education. I do not cancel any one job because of another. I try to manage both tasks. Even if it is late, I always make sure I attend to or participate in different things. I do household chores and cattle farm work because even if you don’t do these things, the time will still pass. Work is helpful for strengthening my own health and helping out my family. It is good for my future. I need to learn cattle farming and household chores so I will not suffer later from not knowing how to do these things. My mother mostly demands me to do the household work. She also helps me out with household chores. (Darika, Interview, 2)

Darika spent most of her day working on the farm and at household chores, in addition to her busy school activities. When asked how she managed these multiple responsibilities, she referred to her “effective time management skills.”

As is typical of young rural Kyrgyz women, Darika had been involved in household work activities from a very early age. She learned how to do chores by shadowing her mother and trying out the work on her own. As she recalled,

I learned to do household chores since childhood. I used to follow my mother around the house, observing her doing chores and repeating them after her. All of the things that I learned about household work; I learned by living with my family. When my mother used to cook, I would attentively observe and then cooked by myself. And when my brothers left for the city for universities while I was in grade nine, I had to learn to attend to cattle by myself. Before that time, I did not look after the cattle at all. But as they say, “When there is a need one learns all the skills” [Kyrgyz: Bashka kelse baital jorgo bolot]. There is not any work that comes easy; people should learn and do the work anyway. Everyone should strive and make an effort to work. (Darika, Interview, 1)

The following excerpt from the mother’s interview alludes to the origins of Darika’s acceptance of family norms in regards to household work and the necessities of life:

I think that life educates the person without me telling her to do this or that. It is because

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of necessity that she was forced to learn. Even if I were a housewife and stayed at home, she would still do these chores. She needs to learn how to do these chores herself. She attends to cattle, again, because of a need. If she does not do it, there is no livelihood. Maybe if we had a daughter-in-law, Darika would not do these tasks.

Darika carried out two sets of activities that were traditionally separated in the village community between male (outside farming) and female (chores inside the house) members. In the absence of male siblings and her father, Darika and her mother managed the farm and household. Darika’s attitude to gendered home space was more practical, as her family situation required her to be engaged both on the cattle farm and inside the household. However, Darika’s mother explained how the necessity of family conditions ‘forced’ Darika to carry out both tasks:

Darika started to look after cattle when she was 14 years old. When my sons were in the village at home, Darika was not involved in male work activities [spaces], but she did help my younger son. She learned to do household chores when she was 12 years old. Now she does both kinds of work. Firstly, we need to teach the female child, but most importantly, it is about monitoring how she does this or that work. Secondly, she also needs to develop skills. She needs to make an effort and learn. She will learn gradually. (Darika’s mother, Interview)

Darika’s mother acknowledged that her daughter had exceptional traits of character and behavior:

Unlike my elder sons, Darika has contributed to our household enormously. She has taken on both male and female-related work, including her schoolwork. She has managed to lead in all these three activities [Kyrgyz: Uch ishtin teng at tizginin berbei alip kele jatat]. (Darika’s mother, Interview)

The mother highlighted that Darika demonstrated excellence in many spheres of work and life. This in itself contributed to Darika’s growing up with a sense of exceptionality and high self-esteem, which in turn led her to achieve excellence in everything she did, as well as to take responsibilities seriously. Her mother’s expectations were distinctively framed in the family discourse, which further structured Darika’s choices, preferences and actions. Darika fully embraced familial and cultural expectations to learn to manage a rural household. Her knowledge and vision of life and the future had to negotiate between household duties and her aspirations to

145 academic advancement. Both Darika and her mother believed that the necessity of the family circumstances had forced them to transgress gender boundaries of labour and work.

Darika clearly expressed her distinctive relationship to work, learning, and life. She attended to both her household work and school responsibilities in a deliberate manner, a characteristic that was not noticeably displayed by other young people outside this case type. The economic and social conditions of Darika’s family required them to become multi-skilled and multi-tasking and to exhibit different cultural values and behaviors in multiple contexts and spaces, specifically the home and the school, the village and the town. Darika and her family, including the brothers, recognized that their sole resource for financing their education was their cattle farm. The family economy was specifically structured in such a way that their cattle farm was subordinated to their educational and professional activities and aspirations. In other words, the cattle farm was the means to achieve the educational and professional aspirations of the young people in this household.

6.3.3. Darika in school: The educational advantage and the intelligentsia habitus In this section, Darika’s case illustrates how her family’s social conditions, such as the stable economic capital of the family, the higher educational cultural capital of the mother and her elder brothers, and the norms and values of school and professional culture, generated the habitus of an educated person. The alignment between the educational cultural capital of the school and the intelligentsia family’s values combined to produce the clarity, rhythm and confidence of Darika’s educational views and practices. Her actual academic experiences of schooling and the higher educational expectations of her family oriented her projection of herself into a future that included post-secondary education.

Darika embodied all the characteristics of the so-called best students: talented in sports and/or arts, serving in student leadership positions, and excelling in academic learning. She showed great enthusiasm and interest in achieving success in all academic subjects and in most of the cultural and social activities at school. That said, she did have preferences for certain subjects, such as Kyrgyz literature, history and geography. These preferences were not completely and randomly chosen; rather her ‘likes’ were structured by her parental professional backgrounds, particularly her mother’s specialization in Kyrgyz language and literature and her brothers’ university programs. Like her interest in literature, the subject of geography appealed

146 to her because of her mother’s and her own aspirations to find an opportunity to travel abroad for further education and professional work. Moreover, her emphasis on the need for acquiring particular linguistic style of oratory—articulate, rich in vocabulary, proverbial and sharp—was consistent with her future career preference for journalism.

Darika held one of the highest student leadership positions at school: she was the vice- president of her school’s student council. In this role, Darika encountered several opportunities to represent the school in regional tournaments and competitions. She described her recent activities as vice-president of the student council in the following way:

We participated in the oblast competition for schools on Defence Day (February 23rd). It was organized in one of the Osh school gymnasiums. We also participated in discussions on improving the quality of school education. These days we are organizing activities for students. We will be electing our council soon.

Through these participation opportunities Darika travelled to the cities and led educational discussions and debates with new information regarding educational reforms and ideas. She continued to develop intimate knowledge of, and to keep abreast with, changes within the educational field. Darika’s leadership position further enabled her accumulation of the scholastic cultural capital.

Darika employed a distinct language style in our conversations, one that was highly valued at school and in public professional spaces. She used Kyrgyz academic and literary language fluently, eloquently and assuredly in conversational contexts. Her sentences were elaborate and she stated her arguments clearly and confidently. Darika’s predilection for proverbs in particular reflected her mother’s professional linguistic capital. She linked proverbs to strengthen her arguments and exhibited her ability to communicate her perspectives professionally and succinctly to an interlocutor.

Darika acknowledged that she needed to learn foreign languages, in addition to her Kyrgyz, if she wished to pursue post-secondary education and to obtain professional employment in an urban centre. She and her mother particularly expressed a desire to develop proficiency in the Russian language. In our conversations, Darika attempted to insert Russian phrases to show her ability to do so. Her elder brothers reported that their poor Russian language proficiency impeded them from further academic opportunities, especially since their university

147 classes and courses were mostly delivered in Russian. At the time of this research, Darika’s brothers were enrolled in Russian courses at language learning centers in Osh, while Darika was also attending afternoon Russian language sessions at her school. It was an extra-curricular program, organized by an enthusiastic teacher for a small fee, and it was discontinued after few classes. Darika disappointedly referred to her school’s inability to provide quality language instruction or after-school sessions. Both she and her brothers acknowledged that poor Russian language proficiency marginalized their positions in the university educational field, limited their full participation in cultural and social activities, and obstructed their access to wider social networks. Their limited opportunities in the rural educational field would bar their future chances if Darika and her brothers did not consciously invest their time, energy, and economic capital into accumulating Russian and other foreign language capital. Thus, Darika and her family developed alternative strategies to avail themselves of opportunities to learn languages in order to increase their future labour market advantages as well as to maintain their status as an intelligentsia family.

Darika’s educated habitus enabled her to raise her educational expectations. She hoped to obtain a globally competitive education irrespective of the actual location of her school. Unlike her colleagues, Darika strongly associated quality education with individual students’ own (naturalized) abilities to learn and enrich their knowledge. She stated that

Quality education is what I seek when I think that what I learn at school is not enough. It is when I research further to enrich my knowledge and learn those things that I do not know. When students say there are not enough textbooks or they don’t have textbooks, I think these are just excuses. Learning has never been tied to the availability of textbooks (Darika, Interview 2)

According to Darika, mere attendance at school did not ensure academic excellence or the acquisition of educated cultural behavior and values. In her view, students’ family origin likewise did not play a significant role in success; instead, valuing inquiry, hard work and perseverance were identified as the qualities necessary for a young person who wanted to learn. These qualities in actuality described Darika’s own dispositions and behavior, however, they originated in the conditions of her intelligentsia family. Thus, the value markers of her intelligentsia family culture were strongly manifested in Darika’s educated habitus and practices, where these cultural markers expressed a particular set of relations that unfolded more broadly

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6.3.4. Darika: Imagining [an urban, gendered] professional future During our discussions, Darika demonstrated a sense of coherence and consistency in articulating her future educational and professional goals. This family’s culturally prescribed aspirations and socially structured pathways through life were realized through their internalization and pursuit of intelligentsia values, norms and interests. The comparative stability and security of a teaching occupational trajectory, particularly given the economic condition of this household, positively shaped Darika’s persistent attitude toward projecting herself into a professional future. It was this continuity between the configuration of the forms of cultural capital and the educational field that allowed a margin of opportunity to organize scarce resources, and permitted a certain stability of thought and aspirations. The outcome of these underlying social mechanisms was that Darika was highly determined to succeed in life and to utilize all her opportunities to do so in a particular way. The family’s values were respected and decisions were jointly made; yet Darika took every opportunity to examine these values and decisions in light of the experiences and stories of others. Her confrontations with different social situations resulted in a constant re-evaluation of her values, actions and aspirations. The experience of Darika’s eldest brother with his first specialization and university, which altered the family’s attitude towards occupational preferences and decisions, seemed to provide a reflective moment for the family as a whole.

Darika was not interested in becoming just any kind of a journalist; she planned rather to go into investigative journalism. This passion was guided by her strongly held perception about the Kyrgyz legal system in which many people, especially the poor, found themselves unfairly treated.

Q: What profession do you want to have in the future?

D: Since my childhood I have aspired to become a journalist, and I will do my best to achieve my goal. I dream about being a journalist. I plan to study in Osh. I want to be an anchorperson.

Q: But why?

D: Many things remain unjust in the legal system. I want to inform and educate the public about them. I want to investigate about them. People who do not have money mostly

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experience torture and unfair legal processes. I want to investigate such incidents and bring out these happenings to the public through the media.

Although Darika did not identify a clear distinction between an anchorperson and an investigative journalist, her civic conviction was unquestionably based on her concerns for social justice. Her emphasis on educating the public and fighting for the rights of the poor echoed the mission of Soviet teachers—a typical expectation and experience of her mother as a village schoolteacher. This aspiration also spoke to the type of inherited cultural capital that had guided her towards becoming a legitimate public voice speaking for others. Despite such overall similarities in their professional convictions, Darika’s mother still preferred her to take up an occupation in teaching or medicine. The mother had the following to say:

I: What profession do you wish Darika to choose?

M: I want Darika to become a teacher or a doctor in the future.

I: What about Darika? What is she interested in? What is she choosing herself?

M: I think teaching and medicine-related professions are relevant for women because these are the only two occupations that have remained stable. And they are also relevant for the village context. However, my daughter wants to become a journalist. I told her that she should choose a Russian language journalism program rather than one where the medium of instruction is the Kyrgyz language. I am a Kyrgyz language teacher, she can master Kyrgyz journalism work easily. She should learn Russian and foreign languages because her fate depends on it. God help her, she may become a really well educated female person. She may travel to other countries. She may get further education in other countries. I guarantee that my daughter will succeed in anything she takes up.

Darika’s mother’s preferences for her daughter’s future should not be analyzed simply as gendered occupational aspirations, although that would be a possible interpretation. Such an analysis would risk reducing the complexity of the multiple structural constraints that affect the thinking and decisions of families, especially parents, about future occupational labour market prospects. Darika’s and her mother’s ‘preferences’ for occupations attested to tensions between generations, a close reading of labour market realities and individual aspirations, and the kinds of accommodation that parents and children are expected to make in their efforts to pursue ‘the best option’.

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A closer analysis of accommodation and tension between Darika and her mother’s occupational ‘preferences’ reveals a better understanding of the higher educational and occupational pathways of young people from professional family backgrounds. Firstly, Darika’s mother’s ‘labour market’ judgment about teaching and medical jobs was informed by the structural constraints brought about by post-Soviet realities of occupational conditions in the villages, as well as in urban centers, for these two occupations remained among the few in which young people could find full-time and permanent employment opportunities. Moreover, the mother attested to this reality with her own experience as a teacher in the village due to which the family was able to send the elder sons away for higher education, thus ‘saving’ the young members of the family from the harsh realities of precarious, often cruel employment and life experiences in the transnational labour migration and mercantile trading contexts.

Secondly, Darika was more critical than her mother of teaching and other available professional occupations, as they enjoyed comparatively low social status under post-Soviet conditions due to irregular and meager pay structure and poor working conditions. In the post- Soviet period, language proficiency became a valuable social resource for employment, higher education, and travelling. Darika did not reject her mother’s views openly, yet she did not embrace the same understanding and belief as her mother and the family. Thirdly, Darika still had to negotiate with her mother as to her higher educational and occupational choices since parental authority is generally unchallenged in the traditional Kyrgyz family, especially in professional families, and more importantly in this case, because Darika was dependent on her mother’s financial support for her further education. Similarly, Darika’s mother explored the possibility of imagining Darika pursuing her professional aspiration in journalism even though the mother considered teaching and medicine to provide more ‘female-friendly’ workplaces. This compromise or negotiation was partly informed and formulated by the mother’s experience of dealing with Darika’s eldest brother, who had twice switched schools. On this matter, Darika’s mother had the following to say:

When it comes to occupational choices, I also told my children that they should choose those professions that they have passion about. If they really love it they won’t leave it in the middle. Actually, I forced my eldest son to enter the ecology department because his test scores were low and he could not enter the funded cohort of the history department. I thought that as we live in the village, the profession of forestry specialist would be

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perfectly suitable, especially for a man. The ecology department was a new one that had opened that year and the admission process was relaxed. He could have worked as a geography teacher if he wanted to. The department’s admission officers got me interested in it as they said their program included a lot of field trips around the Kyrgyz Republic. Although my son kept refusing to study there, I forced him into it. When he was in his second year, he stopped studying there. He told that he did not want to continue. As fate would have it, that department was closed down. When I asked him the department of his choice, he still said it was the history department. He did not tell and I also do not know why he wanted to study in that department. For example, my youngest son has always wanted to become a lawyer. He is interested in politics too. He entered the law academy. My eldest son again switched his specialization, now into law academy. Because of these switches, my eldest son is in his fourth-year; he could have graduated by now. I just wish that they will love the occupations that they choose. (Darika’s mother, Interview)

Darika’s family, and her mother in particular, had to make decisions that were informed not just by future employment prospects, but also by the household’s current financial and social conditions. In the above quotation, the mother and son had to negotiate and settle on an educational departmental ‘choice’ due to his lower test scores in national scholarship exams that had still provided him with a government scholarship to study in the ecology department. His later decision to switch to a private law academy resulted in his losing this privilege and adding a financial burden to the household. This showed the two generations’ distinct attitudes towards higher education, occupation, and labour markets. In particular, we see these attitudes informed by the mother’s generational experience, which had featured comparatively few opportunities to switch from one program to another due to the existence of state structured youth educational and occupational pathways. Unlike the mother’s generation, her children were born into a generation that experienced high uncertainties and contradictions in educational as well as labour market conditions. Although the state no longer controlled youth pathways, there were still other structural factors that constrained the choices and preferences of post-Soviet youth. In all these situations, the systemic ambiguities of post-Soviet conditions imposed on individuals and families the need for greater flexibility and more continuous reassessment of and adaptation to these conditions.

At the surface level, Darika’s aspiration to become a journalist demonstrated a deviation

152 from her mother’s preference for a teaching profession, but a closer look at their occupational aspirations and preferences highlights their constant assessment of their opportunities within the limited range of what was ‘real’ and ‘realistic’ among those that were not even ‘possible’ options. Among these impossible or improbable ‘options’ were transnational labour migration and engaging in kommertsia. Darika not only excluded labour migration and kommertsia as possible options; her position on these two pathways again demonstrated her professional family habitus towards those young people who had chosen them. Darika elaborated her concern in the following conversation:

D: Well, many people think that there are not enough jobs or that salaries are low. They want to be businessmen and get wealthy quickly. I think behind every big thing there is always a small step. I get upset when I see those people leaving their jobs in the village or the city because they have low pay. I get upset because I think they should make at least a small contribution to our own society. In our family my brothers discuss young girls going to work in other countries. They demand that girls and women should not go to other countries to earn for living.

Q: Did they see anything wrong with that? Did they do petty trading or go elsewhere as labour migrants?

D: No, they do not go anywhere. But they cite my uncle’s daughters as examples. They give example of girls and women most of the time.

Q: What about male villagers? What do they think about men leaving as labour migrants?

D: Girls are usually naïve. They trust others easily. That’s why they are choosing a wrong path and fate [Kyrgyz: Oz tagdyryna balta chaap]. More girls are becoming ill-behaved. (Darika, Interview 2)

This conversation further revealed that the option of ‘labour migration’ was ‘screened out’ from Darika’s possibilities as ‘an unreasonable future.’ Their educated cultural capital and professional occupational culture led Darika’s family to critically examine the precarious working conditions of labour migrants and kommersants. More importantly, the mother’s strong belief in the ‘temporary nature’ of transnational labour migration and petty trading affected her strong willingness to invest in the educational cultural capital of her children. The family perceived migration negatively, particularly in relation to gender and age. The family’s concerns

153 about the migration of rural female youth reflected growing public concerns around morality, family relations and the future of the nation. In Darika’s family such public concerns were mobilized to shape particular types of future aspirations among the children by the negative associations of competing possibilities. The ingrained cultural doxa of family honour found in the Kyrgyz rural community was extended to the external employment chances of young women from this village, whose choice to pursue labour migration apparently posed a threat to the conventional and dominant forms of female professional employment in the village and in the city. Moreover, Darika’s interpretation of migration as a threat to local community values and especially to the family structure within the village attested to changes occurring in the mobility of villagers during the postsocialist transformation. Included in Darika’s comments is a moral dimension, that is another form and instance of the naturalization process that speaks to the intra- structural relations of habitus/capital/field. In a way, the social structure of this post-Soviet village had undergone significant changes and within it so had the position of Darika’s family.

Darika’s professional family invested in the conversion of several different types of capital stocks (economic, social, cultural) into their children’s cultural capital (all forms and dimensions of it). It was this process of converting their financial capital into an intangible resource that distinguished the family from other types of families. Although the family had comparatively decent income sources in their cattle farm and the mother’s salary, they sought to convert all these ‘possible’ household financial capitals into higher educational cultural capital. Under conditions of economic scarcity the family developed a strategy to pool all their available resources into a single type of capital, educational cultural capital, which itself produced many complex choices and practices.

The mother paid 40,000 Kyrgyz soms annually (approximately $800) for her sons’ tuition fees in addition to their rent, food, clothing and transportation expenses. The following excerpt from an interview with Darika’s mother explained her decision:

I: When supporting and sending your children to school and university, what do you hope to achieve?

DM: As I was also a student at a young age, I think that education is an endless wealth. It is an endless gift that a parent can bestow on her children. If you give another type of gift it has an end, as it either wears off or runs out. If we parents educate them, our children will contribute to our society, and become human beings. Not every person deserves to be

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a human being. My sole aim and dream is for my children to educate them to deserve to be a human. I always prioritized education over other things. Even if work [household chores] should be done, I want my children to study and get an education.

Darika and her family members valued school education as an intangible ‘wealth’, which was not only an embodied social resource but also one convertible into profitable financial capital later, should the possibilities and conditions be aligned:

I think that education has always been and will remain so important for me. Many people think that now we do not need education. They think and say that people with two or three diplomas work as traders in the market or are unemployed. I don’t think so! One day, education will be considered a valued resource. Everything will fall into its own place. Kommertsia is a temporary condition. I think that education should reclaim its value and importance in society. Without education we, as a society, cannot move anywhere.

Darika’s mother insisted on the value of being educated in the context of the current labour market in which many young people could not find secure, stable and relevant jobs (that is matched properly to their skills) with acceptable wages and working conditions. She continuously emphasized that higher education was not just about earning more money, but was about being ‘cultured’ or ‘educated.’ Social distinctions are made, in the context of this case type and rural post-Soviet society, by an emphasis on higher education as a principal criterion of classification.

Darika and her family could emphasize being highly educated despite the limited range of educational possibilities in this village community as they possessed relatively stable household economic resources as compared to many other families in the village. Darika’s mother’s work history as a professional with generous Soviet salaries had helped to construct a stable financial foundation for the family, including a house, cattle barns, and a decent-sized cattle farm. Moreover, both parents belonged to a generation of professionals who had availed of their educational and occupational opportunities under Soviet economic conditions. Both of them had completed five-year post-secondary training programs at specialized and prestigious institutes during the Soviet period.

Darika’s mother was trained as a Kyrgyz language and literature teacher in the republic’s

155 only women’s pedagogical institute in Frunze (presently Bishkek), the capital of the former Soviet Socialist Kirghiz Republic. Since graduating, she had worked at different positions in the village and district educational institutions during her thirty-six-year career. These positions included teacher, methodology specialist in the district education department, and principal of a secondary school, and she was now working as a classroom teacher again. Darika’s father graduated from the only economics and finance institute in the capital city. He worked as a kolkhoz and later as a village administration accountant until his tragic death in a car accident in 2001. Thus, both parents had established their status through higher education and stable professional occupations in the village during the Soviet era. The mother had this to say:

Q: Many young people in this village are migrating to Moscow without going to college or university education. Why haven’t your children become petty traders or labour migrants?

M: Firstly, I do not need extra money. We have decent living expenses and income [Kyrgyz: El katary jeteerlik ookat bar]. If we did not have an economic base and needed money to survive, my children might have left for Moscow or elsewhere to earn an income. I still encourage the children to aspire for an education. I want them to study. Secondly, my children also showed their desire to hard work in their schools. If my sons told me, “Mom, let me do this, and later study,” I would have been happy and would have taken care of the cattle on my own. However, my sons have shown an interest in taking entrance exams, which pushed me to support them in pursuing their higher education. I don’t know why but I value education more than anything. [Hmm] I think we always need money. We need wealth. But I believe that they can earn or make money later with their own education or with their own business. I am not interested in kommertsia.

During these and other conversations with Darika and her mother, I realized that the family’s attitudes towards changes in occupational and labour market conditions in the post- Soviet era demonstrated a generational and cultural mismatch. Darika’s mother in particular often rejected the notion that there had been changes in the value of higher education and professional occupations in the new economic, cultural, and educational order. Instead, she often talked about how recent economic, political and social changes had disoriented people’s values from education to material wealth and immoral ways of making money. She hoped for further

156 changes in the new economic and political conditions by which educated professional status would once again be elevated to a high social status. With their own strategy of attempting to acquire educational capital through university education and aspiring to professional jobs, this family actively contributed to the production of this type of education-to-work youth trajectory.

6.3.5. Summary To conclude the case of Darika, I suggest that despite her family’s inability to reproduce its previous social position in the rural Soviet intelligentsia, the children, including Darika, were socialized into a particular sense of cultural distinction based on ‘naturally scholastic aptitude,’ exemplary leadership, and highly moral behavior. The tradition of cattle farming allowed both survival and creative options in this time of social change, but in some cases it also served to preserve strategies that no longer fitted existing fields in the post-Soviet era. Moreover, within professionally constrained preferences, generational mismatches between the children and the mother were observed. This mismatch of occupational preferences, arising from their particular sense of employment prospects, contributed to the children’s independence and freedom to take full responsibility for the consequences of their choices and decisions. As members of a previous generation, parents often apply principles and standards of educational and occupational success that reflect earlier conditions.

This section detailed the case of Darika to provide an introduction to key elements constructing the trajectory of rural Kyrgyz youth into post-secondary education and professional jobs. We learned that the successful intergenerational transfer of parental cultural capital was manifested in the habitus of Darika, further structuring her practices, which aligned closely with the values and norms of the educational field. Despite the culture of farm economy and Darika’s substantial labour in maintaining the household and the farm, her orientation remained towards accumulating educational cultural capital and securing an intelligentsia class position in the new economic and employment order within as well as outside her village. She attempted to achieve this goal by employing strategies to convert her available economic capital into cultural capital, and by investing in marketable skills, including foreign language and computer skills, in order to enrich her existing cultural habits and resources.

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6.4. Entrepreneurial habitus, the primacy of economic capital and the entrepreneurial future: The biography of Kerim At the time of this research, Kerim was an eighteen-year old, male grade 11 student and the youngest son among five siblings. Like Darika, Kerim demonstrated a sense of confidence and high self-esteem. His posture throughout our conversations expressed businesslike behavior: formal dress code and an impersonal speech style. Kerim’s case illuminates the transformation from the Soviet trajectory of mixed educational and socio-occupational backgrounds of his parents into the post-Soviet trajectory of successful entrepreneurs of the postsocialist neoliberal transition, which was not typical of the pathways of the families surveyed for this study. Initially as ‘kommersants,’ then as small business-owners, Kerim’s older brothers and sisters continued to accumulate substantial economic capital, with which they expanded their social capital in Bishkek, in Russian cities, and in the village. Kerim believed in education as a resource that helps to maintain the high social position of well-to-do entrepreneurial families. Stable growth in the family’s economic capital and expanded social networks produced stability in Kerim’s aspirations for his future. The case of Kerim outlines a trajectory of a young person who, unlike youth in the trajectories of the rural migrants and rural academics, envisions a personal future as a rural entrepreneur. His case encompasses the experience of those rural Kyrgyz young people whose sense of the world, social position, and accumulation and maintenance of a specific combination of forms of capital, especially economic capital, are all positively linked with the emerging new economic, political and cultural ideologies in the post-Soviet era: “work for oneself” and “rely on oneself”.

6.4.1. Kommersant family and economic reproductive strategies Kerim was a son and brother of a family, which had accumulated substantial financial capital after the collapse of the Soviet system. Unlike the case of Darika, Kerim’s family enjoyed a financial security that few villagers were destined to experience. Their accumulation of financial capital was, for the most part, not associated with the parents’ earlier occupational and social positions.

Unlike Darika’s parents, Kerim’s parents did not have university education. While his father was educated in a technicum (college) in Frunze and received his degree in accounting, the mother did not have a similar level of education.

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My husband studied at a financial technicum in Frunze. He worked as an accountant and cashier at our kolkhoz for several years. He worked in good positions. (Parental Interview, p. 1)

After a two-year tailoring program at one of the Osh trade schools, Kerim’s mother worked as a tailor in the small-scale textile industry, which was state-run during the Soviet period and then private. The mother stated:

I studied in the trade school in Osh and specialized in tailoring. When I graduated from the trade school, I began my work here in this village at the factory. When the kolkhoz disintegrated I was unemployed. But then I worked at the district private textile factory. In total I have 15 years of work experience in tailoring. (Kerim’s mother, Interview, p. 1)

She worked at this private garment factory until the early 2000s. Both parents’ own family members had college, university, or trade school education. The mother belonged to the family of a primary school teacher and a kolkhoz worker, and her mother’s educational level and occupational position had helped her siblings and herself to obtain post-secondary education.

Like Darika’s family, Kerim’s family provides an example of the conversion and reconversion of different forms of capital. In the case of Kerim’s family, we see an instance of the conversion of cultural capital into economic and symbolic (socio-occupational) capital in particular. Although his parents’ educational and occupational histories did not necessarily match in conventional socioeconomic or social class terms, his father’s college education in accounting and his work as a kolkhoz accountant, along with his perceived status position, clearly seemed to have shaped the family’s values and strategies in particular ways. As the mother related, her husband had held a locally valued, influential position in the formal kolkhoz community as well as within the informal tribal community. The family had secured an established livelihood in the Soviet period with a house, a cattle farm and a comparatively ‘ordinary-sized’ land plot, but the death of her husband placed them economically and socially in a very fragile position.

Kerim’s mother described how the household’s financial circumstances changed greatly as they experienced both personal loss and structural economic re-arrangement after the collapse of the Soviet system. While the mother was pregnant with Kerim, the family experienced a tragedy, as the father passed away from a chronic illness:

Kerim didn't know his father, unfortunately. He died at the age of 37 when my eldest son

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was in grade 7, my second son in grade 5, and my daughters in 3 and 1. He died of illness. So I raised my children, I gave them education, and married them. There was no job for me. I had to stay at home to take care of the household while my young sons joined my relatives in kommertsia. (Kerim’s mother, Interview)

Once again, as in the case of Darika, we observe how the family experienced a crisis and how its members re-evaluated their strategies; however we can note that this reevaluation always takes place in the context of the particularities of the relations between habitus/capital/field within (and often beyond) the home.

The financial hardship experienced after Kerim’s father’s death forced the eldest sons to join their maternal relatives in kommertsia, or trading from one country to another based on price differentials between the city and the country. Alongside their kommertsia, these brothers also obtained their high school certificates, even though they did not regularly attend school. As a result of a successful accumulation of financial capital from commercial trading, the eldest brother was able to set up a private construction materials sales company, trading between Russia and the Kyrgyz Republic. In addition, the same brother bought a commercial farm in Chui province, close to the capital city of Bishkek, to make profits based on the growing demand for agricultural produce. The farm was a cottage industry producing dairy products, leather and meat. Kerim’s family, and his eldest brother in particular, were among those who successfully managed the transition to a private market economy. This family then converted their financial capital into cultural capital for Kerim, not for the sake converting economic into cultural capital, but for the symbolic status of privilege and difference.

Despite obtaining higher and college educational degrees for professional occupations, Kerim’s brothers and sisters remained actively engaged in kommertsia and business. The second brother was in the mercantile business in Moscow, while the sister lived in with her own family in Samara, Russia, where she and her husband worked as petty traders. The younger sister also spent approximately two years in Saratov, Russia with their elder sister to make and save money, later purchasing an apartment in Osh. She returned to Osh to transfer from a part-time to a full- time undergraduate history program. In this family’s case, educational cultural capital in the form of university and college degrees played a symbolic rather than an economic function in terms of the necessity for having a profession and pursuing employment.

Kerim’s family owned three big houses with standard, factory-made bricks—houses

160 distinguished from those of other villagers, which were mostly made of clay brick. Their main house, with a plot of 3,000 square meters, was financed by the eldest son. The purchase of a property of this size was itself a reflection of their improved financial status. Moreover, its purchase from owners with generational political, social and economic privilege and an honorable family social position demonstrated Kerim’s family’s attempt to aspire to such a symbolic social position within this village community. To maintain their farm, the family hired young neighbours for cash. As a main adult male in the family, Kerim acted as their employer, overseeing and monitoring their labour on the farm. The major income sources of the household were cattle farm sales and the cash sent by the eldest brother, in addition to a small amount of Kerim’s child allowance and his mother’s retirement allowance.

Kerim’s case demonstrated a collective-family story and the expression of a traditional Kyrgyz clanic, tribal and communal strategy that was funded by the financial capital from the eldest brother in Bishkek. Kerim’s and his family’s strategies revealed deeper internal interactions within the family that were often expressed in very coherent ways. Kerim’s trajectory was, thus, distinct from those of families and youths who simply hoped to eventually secure a functional economic base, jobs and education. As noted, Kerim’s parents had different levels of education. The mother completed trade school to become a tailor, while the father attended a prestigious financial institute in the capital city to obtain a degree in accounting. The mother recognized quite explicitly that their Soviet generational experience of education-to- employment was different from that of post-Soviet generations. This recognition was based on the family’s own social transformation from semi-professional status to that of a well-to-do kommersant family. In other words, the mother did not directly connect their success in kommertsia with the father’s occupation as an accountant; the upward social mobility of the family was associated instead with the informal economy and unconventional employment structures of the post-Soviet era.

Kerim’s mother spoke of her awareness of the post-Soviet realities of education and employment structures, observing that the new rural economy was dominated by small-scale or subsistence-based farming. She pointed out that, since these farms were owned by families and the labour required for their upkeep was unwaged, young people did not really require any education. Moreover, she emphasized that, unlike in the former Soviet era, not everyone could make a living along the pathway of post-secondary education and waged labour. Under post-

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Soviet conditions, it was kommertsia that served as a viable strategy for the accumulation of economic capital and a mechanism for upward social mobility.

All of my children studied well at school. Aida, Turgunay and Kerim were student council presidents. They were all among the best students in their grade levels. I tell them that if they study well, it is beneficial to them. If they are educated, their future is in their own hands. Getting an education is a good thing in general. My children get education to be able to earn their living and support their family. I cannot support everyone, you know. They should take care of me now. School education is enough for those who want to remain in the village as one can live by cattle farming. Some young people can make good money in commerce. They also lead good lives. Some people are getting education, but they cannot make money. My children got education and degrees but they made money through commerce.

Unlike Darika’s brothers, who were fully supported by their parents to pursue post- secondary education, Kerim’s elder brothers had to pay their own tuition and living expenses. They could afford to enroll only part-time and, when they observed that their occupational training lacked financial viability, they dropped out of their programs. Ultimately, both of Kerim’s brothers completed five-year programs part-time, while the elder sister pursued her college education in nursing full-time. At the time of this research, none of the three elder siblings worked in the occupational fields of their training, but rather were successfully making profits in their kommertsia and from their own business companies. Kerim’s youngest sister was studying full-time at university to become a history teacher, although the first two years she was enrolled only part-time and worked as a kommersant with her elder sister. Generally, this kommersant family oriented their energy towards acquiring educational cultural capital in the form of degrees, but, to be clear, this form of capital functioned principally to provide further recognition of their newly acquired social status as a well-to-do family. That said, the family’s primary goal was still to strategize around a multi-kinship transfer, as well as to further accumulate economic capital and expand their networks, which could yield financial as well as political benefits in the future.

Unlike the case of Darika, who developed the habitus of the rural intelligentsia, Kerim’s family orientation towards education and learning was culturally distinct:

When my children are going to school I ask them whether they completed their

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homework. I check their school diaries and sign them. I check their grades. Kerim enjoys all the conditions for learning. He has time. We have hired two boys to help out with the cattle farm. He has a computer. I believe that if a person is interested to study they will find time in between their household chores and cattle farming. They will study at nights or in the daytime. But if the person is not interested, they will find excuses. Even if you pour knowledge into them they will not study. Neither my older children nor I purchased any novels. Even if we bring books Kerim would not read them. We didn’t purchase any books for my daughter either. They got their textbooks from their school library. To tell the truth, I really did not get any textbook for my children. Whatever we had at home, they read these books. I never go to libraries for children’s books. (Kerim’s mother, Interview)

Unlike many families in this study, the financial capital of Kerim’s family provided cultural resources that were modern and relevant for the current context. Kerim had a personal computer at home. Moreover, their financial well-being allowed the family to hire workers for their farm, which freed up time for Kerim and allowed him to study if and when he wished. Despite these resources and opportunities, there is clear evidence that the family instilled a sense of profit-making and risk-taking as the ultimate values for Kerim to acquire. In other words, Kerim and his family’s educational expectations were not simply to study for the sake of studying and learning, but rather to learn to make financial profits in a shorter period of time. And this belief was well founded in the family’s own financial trajectory in the post-Soviet context.

Kerim and his family’s social capital included their extended family members, their larger tribal community in the village, and the brothers’ business networks in Bishkek and Russian cities. Like the family’s continued participation in the gift economy as a mechanism to invest in and maintain their kinship networks, the family also ensured that they made financial contributions to the larger networks in this village community. Kerim’s eldest brother made a monetary donation to the construction of a new primary school, which was being built on the ancestral land of their larger tribe. The mother reported that this school would be named after the late father of the family. Social investments in public institutions and community events were consciously carried out to establish a stronger foundation for their newly acquired social status and symbolic power in this village and beyond.

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The death of the father weakened the family’s social standing within the patrilineal kinship structure. The traditional Kyrgyz cultural norm was that the male head of the family nurtured and maintained the relationship of the family with the larger kinship group and the community. In such a family context, the matrilineal kinship group acted as a bridge to broader community relations and, more importantly, they provided a viable mechanism to accumulate economic capital via kommertsia. When the father passed away, the maternal relatives were the first to provide financial support as well as to offer informal lessons in commercial trading, as some of them had already started their trading by then. Within this unique context of kinship social relations in general and the successful transfer of the emerging knowledge about commercial trading in the early stages of the post-Soviet economic transition, Kerim’s family seemed to have succeeded in making the transition from semi-professional, unstable and poorly paid occupational positions to a post-Soviet household of private business and commercial trading, thus aligning themselves with the changing economic policies and conditions of the newly independent states in this region. In short, then, the economic and social aspects of the kinship network were important, if not essential characteristics of this type of trajectory, as they provided alternative knowledge systems to education and the accumulation of economic capital.

As compared to Darika, Kerim maintained an extensive and diverse network of friends and peers. He maintained close relationships with female as well as male schoolmates, and also with friends he met during his vacations in the city, many of whom he communicated with online using chat rooms and social media. Most of his friends belonged to professional families. When describing the nature of his friendships, he often referred to his leadership role in organizing cultural and social events, rather than about the need for their labour on the farm. Kerim’s relations with his peer groups reflected his family’s strategy of maintaining cultural and social networks to expand their circle of influence. Kerim’s broad network relations allowed him to further practice his leadership skills and to enrich his cultural capital in general.

To sum up the analytic points raised in this section, this kommersant family and their business-oriented habitus and aspirations for further expanding their economic capital were strongly influenced by the values of their maternal relatives. Their family lineage was not purely symbolic, as it enabled the family to harvest economic benefits from their participation in kinship transactions. Furthermore, their entrepreneurial habitus oriented their financial contributions to the social institutions of the community while keeping in mind the current as

164 well as future profits from such investments.

6.4.2. Kerim as the youngest son: A sense of (social) location and the perception of a male heir At the time of this research Kerim lived with his mother on their relatively large estate in the village. As a son at home, albeit the youngest, Kerim was expected to act as the head of the household. According to the traditional rural Kyrgyz culture, the youngest son is the heir. Kerim was groomed to resume his social and familial role of the heir in this household. All his older siblings—two brothers, two sisters, and their families—lived outside the village and each owned their own house. Despite their home ownership outside the village, two of his brothers continued to influence the family household in the village. Kerim’s eldest brother in particular held the main decision-making power in the household’s affairs. This power was essentially linked to his economic capital and his continued financial contributions to the household. For instance, the eldest brother had bought this large estate, along with its livestock, and he hired labour to maintain the daily upkeep of the farm. A deeper analysis of the family as a site of social and cultural reproduction allows us to see that relations within the family and the household were complex, including not only manifestations of symbolic non-economic obligations of family members to each other, but also economic acts such as kinship transactions and exchanges that yielded current economic gains or future prospects of various forms of capital. Kerim, as the youngest son, helped to link all social relations within the family. His current experiences as well as future trajectory were essentially bound to the logic of this kommersant family.

Kerim, as the youngest son and the heir, gained from traditional dominant familial norms by invoking the elder siblings’ responsibility towards his well-being and the future of his household:

My brothers and sisters support me financially and emotionally. They ensure that I have clothes. They support me financially in everything. Well, because our father died early, my brothers will pay for my wedding. They have already bought a car for me. (Kerim, Interview 2)

The expectations of the mother, older brothers, and Kerim, however, were subtler than they may appear, as Kerim did not really associate his older brothers’ ‘gifts’ with an economic exchange. He did not explicitly link all the economic contributions of his brothers with his ‘choice’ to

165 remain in the village and to maintain a domestic unit along with the status of his family’s name and social position within the larger kinship and village community.

In the absence of his father and elder brothers, as the youngest son of a widow, Kerim managed the family cattle farm in the village. It is notable that this role and responsibility situated Kerim in a distinctly gendered position within his family, and that the family’s new lifestyle influenced his decision to hire labour to help him manage the farm and the household:

All the work in the village is my responsibility. My brothers trust me for this role. They come from time to time to control my household and farm management. I usually wake up at 8:30 a.m., go to school and come back from school at 1 p.m. If my helpers give water to the animals, I feed them. So, I am usually busy with cattle farm chores until late evening. In spring, the work is related to farming potatoes, onion, and tomatoes. I also manage construction and do repairs at home. In summer, it is the season of haymaking and transportation; I am busy with managing that. (Kerim, Interview 2)

Although Kerim’s daily schedule did not drastically distinguish him from other young male people in this study, his family’s financial capital as well as their preferences related to their status painted a different picture.

As the youngest son of the family, Kerim had been socialized into a familial obligation to remain in the village, to be responsible for the upkeep of the parents and the household, and to exclude other possibilities in the future. Although there were cases where the youngest sons or the family could negotiate around such social norms, in the case of Kerim and his family the norm was considered a significant, even a sacred obligation. Despite the improved financial status of this family and the urban businesses of his brothers, the family upheld the customary norms of Kyrgyz culture, and as the youngest son, socialized into the values or ‘laws’ of the family, Kerim had to reconcile his individual choice or aspiration for post-secondary education to the customary Kyrgyz tradition. Moreover, the financial capital of the extended family as a collective fully supported this logic as the family aspired to expand and maintain its social position within the larger village community.

6.4.3. Kerim in school: The symbolic power of economic capital and strengthening social (school and communal/kinship) capital Kerim’s case illustrates how the values of the kommersant family aligned with the changing

166 values of post-Soviet society in which economic capital came to play a dominant role in the distribution of power and privilege. This alignment between the family’s economic capital and the field of the economy structured Kerim’s dispositions and actions in the educational field in distinctive ways.

Kerim embodied the characteristics of a leader. In fact, at the time of this research, he held the position of president of the student council, and his description of his school experiences focused predominantly on his contribution to the cultural and social activities of the school. Kerim also referred to his fellow students’ achievements in various competitions; however, this recognition was actually framed as indirectly associated with his personal achievement as a student leader:

I am the student president of the council. This was a really good year for me. Before we had just groups, now we have a parliamentary system of student leadership. We have ministers, and each has their tasks. For instance, the minister of culture organizes competitions, cultural events, and disco. We also have education, sports ministers. … Our students have won prize positions in different competitions. For instance, one of the students from our class got second prize in the national karate competition. Many students participate in different academic competitions (Kerim, Interviews 1, 2).

The combination of his family’s economic capital, which ensured symbolic prestige in the context of this school, and his success as a student leader, enabled Kerim to enter a process of negotiation with school authority figures such as teachers and a vice-principal about changing school rules. In the following excerpt, Kerim describes one of his initiatives in which he attempted to negotiate ‘the rules of the game’ of the school:

We had a cultural competition event, “TamaShow” (Kyrgyz; parody show). We had to have school-wide competition to be able to send selected students to represent us in the district. I organized a group of students and prepared a program with them. We came up with creative ideas without copying any existing ideas in such competitions. We had anecdotes from our everyday lives. But the school selected different students to enter a joint group into this competition, and I was selected among them. I refused to participate, as my friends were not included. I would not be able to work with other students as I worked well with my team. I told the teacher that if I went I would do so with my team only, and that I could not join others. But the teacher did not want that. So we are still

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arguing now. She thinks that other students will disagree and there will be arguments. So, we will have another competition at school to decide whether teams can be selected. I heard that other teams are getting ready for the last competition in a month; I have not even started it. (Kerim, Interview 2)

Despite the fact that student leadership positions required a demonstration of a student’s ability to deliver public speeches, the popular support of his schoolmates allowed Kerim to delegate tasks to other students if and when he realized his limitations. Kerim referred to one of such incidents when he passed that role over to his vice-president at one of the district student leaders’ meetings:

I attended the district student leaders’ meeting, but because I am not good at public speaking, I told our vice-president to introduce herself as the president and participate in the discussions. (Kerim, Interview 2)

This excerpt reveals that the criteria for the candidate to become a student president at this school did not necessarily include a demonstration of public speaking skills. However, the leadership position was connected with Kerim’s ability to exert control over and discipline (Kyrgyz: tartipke chakiruu; bashkaruu) other students at his school. The capacity to persuade others in small groups is a form of linguistic capital, even if it does not extend to the particular ability to speak in public to larger groups. More importantly, the relatively higher economic capital of his family (Kyrgyz: kolunda bar) enables him to speak from the position of power and authority. In addition, Kerim’s access to resources further enabled him to maintain his position as a student leader, a position that was arbitrarily assigned in the context of this particular field of education.

We currently have a seminar at our school. A few students from our class are assigned to monitor students at school so we do not have discipline problem during the seminar. I did not attend three lessons today. If you noticed, there were not any students in the corridors except teachers and us, student-monitors. I attended my first classes of mathematics and Adep [Kyrgyz: Moral education], but I cannot participate in physical education classes because I am not physically well. Instead, I did what my teacher assigned me to do. She asked me to help with organizing the lunch for the teachers at the seminar. So I arranged the seating room (Kyrgyz: korpo-toshok) for that event.

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Kerim played key leadership roles in maintaining order in his school by controlling the mobility of students during lessons. He was often observed in the corridors ensuring discipline and control over junior students. Unlike Darika, who pursued all-round excellence at school, Kerim was not heavily invested in the academic aspects of schooling. His casual attitude towards academic excellence and achievement was documented in his nonchalant references to missing Olympiads and classes. However, Kerim’s roles as a household head of his family in the village and as a student council president at school were perfectly matched.

Economic capital, or one’s power, is also expressed or encapsulated in the physical body of agents. Kerim’s posture, speech, tone, and pace of conversations demonstrated great confidence and high self-esteem. He first waited for questions and then talked directly to the issues. His speech behavior seemed to suggest a certain authority in the situation. He articulated his ideas clearly, although at times he explicitly mentioned his unfamiliarity with certain expressions or words. Although his Russian language proficiency was not highly developed, he attempted to overcome his linguistic difficulties by explicitly recognizing his poor proficiency and stating his intention to learn Russian in the future:

I need to learn mathematics, the Kyrgyz language and literature, and computers. All these things help you, but I want to learn the chores at home as I plan to remain in the village and take charge of the household management. But there is no need to know subjects related to household and farm management, because everyone in the village knows how to look after cattle. I think we can learn many things practically in a short period of time. If I am learning Russian here for many years I still cannot speak it fluently. But if I live among Russians for two months I think I will be fluent. Similar to this, the home teaches you practically how to manage a cattle farm. (Kerim, Interview 2)

Kerim’s case echoed the experiences of many other youth in this study who attended school to become functionally literate but not necessarily to fit into the local economy. The context of the rural village economy educated the youth to learn and master rural farm life by leading that life in practice rather than by means of education at school. Thus, farm capital was gained within the household setting rather that in the institution of the school. For Kerim, the school carried out a mission distinct from conveying the cultural knowledge of rural farm life.

Unlike the cases of Darika and Edil, Kerim’s behavior largely reflected the lifestyles and aspirations of urban youth. His access to cultural resources such as the Internet via mobile

169 technologies because of his family’s financial capital and his cultural lifestyle preferences helped him to associate with urban youth cultures.

Quality learning is when you learn independently and more deeply, beyond the teacher’s explanation. One should have concentration to learn. We can also learn by reading textbooks or search from the net. For instance, if teachers tell us 35%, we can read the rest from textbooks or the Internet. In the evenings, I usually go to MailRu Agent (Russian language social media) on my phone. Though I am not fluent in Russian or English, I have to learn to communicate in these languages when I get online. I still think that the knowledge I gain from my school helps me to use MailRu Agent (Kerim, Interview 2).

The financial capital of Kerim’s family allowed him to access cultural and technological resources, which were usually expensive and could not be accessed easily by many youth in this study. Owning a personal computer was rare and somewhat remarkable in the context of this village. However, having a computer did not necessarily testify to any particular cultural habits. In Kerim’s case, he spoke to the need to spend energy and time to acquire the habits and skills needed to make the most of such resources:

My brothers bought me a computer three years back. I did not know how to use it. So, I kept pressing everything and destroyed it in the end. But I also learnt how to play games and edit photos. I learnt how to use the internet very recently, and mostly how to use MailRu Agent. I communicate with my relatives on chat. I also found relatives who I had never met in my life. I talk to them on chat too. These days I do not have time to use Agent. Before I used to be connected on chat all the time, even when I was in the street hanging out with my friends or when I was doing chores. (Kerim, Interview 2)

Although Kerim’s access to technology, his familiarity with social media, and his specific leisure preferences distinguished him from other rural youth, the dominant rural habitus still shaped his behavior and action within fields that are predominantly defined by urban cultural value systems. For example, Kerim acknowledged that when chatting with others on social media, which was mostly conducted in Russian or other foreign languages, he realized that his language and computer literacies were too limited for meaningful and active involvement. And he was cognizant of these limitations. He argued that these skills and knowledge were structured by his rural living conditions and that the technological and Russian linguistic cultural contexts

170 were spatially, socially and culturally distant from his realities within the monolingual Kyrgyz farm community. According to Kerim, his knowledge and learning were local and contextual. His social environment, including its linguistic, cultural and economic aspects, affected his mastery of knowledge, language and behavior.

Kerim strongly valued his ethnic heritage as a Kyrgyz and rural young man. The nationalist sentiments of Kerim were linked with the Kyrgyzification of the school curriculum during the last 20 years of national independence. His ethnic and nationalist values were also spoke to the extent and degree of his internalization and manifestation of familial as well as Kyrgyz cultural values as the youngest son. The youngest male member in the family has a special significance in rural Kyrgyz culture. The dominant Kyrgyz cultural doxa imposes the belief that the youngest son inherits the property of the family and is responsible for providing for the parents in their old age. Kerim ‘learned’ to appreciate the prospect of living in his village and being head of the household as his ‘most probable’ option. He aspired to appropriate elements of urban culture selectively as part of a strategy for a specifically rural and entrepreneurial form of distinction.

6.4.4. Kerim: The entrepreneurial future There was a close association between the family’s success in the transfer of economic capital and Kerim’s future aspirations. Kerim’s attitude to village economic and social life was rather positive. In the following excerpt, like many rural youth, Kerim distinguishes rural economic life, subsistent and self-sufficient, from monetary-oriented, urban economic life:

In the village life requires a lot of physical labour. It is difficult to live without a cattle farm and growing agricultural produce. You can survive without money, unlike the city, and you can borrow and lend money. You can grow food in your garden for consumption. You have an orchard for fruits. You get milk and meat from your cattle farm. (Kerim, Interview 2, p. 1)

Although the different logic of rural economic practices attracted Kerim, he also believed that rural communities brought up young people who were knowledgeable, talented, and successful in their lives:

I like to live in the village because it is good not to be Russified in your behavior but to uphold your Kyrgyzness and continue the Kyrgyz tradition. I think many successful men

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come from the village. Very recently, I participated in a knowledge competition, “Knowledgeable” (Kyrgyz: Bilerman). Most of the competitors were young men from the village. They are knowledgeable about life both in the city and in the village. They know about how cattle are attended, the Kyrgyz traditions and all the things that you need to know only if you live in the village. (Kerim, Interview 2)

In this excerpt Kerim reflects a particular version of economic nationalism. He recognizes that, unlike urbanized youth, rural Kyrgyz youth hold an advantage in both rural and urban cultures. Kerim’s ethnic identity strongly influenced his perspectives on the distinction between urban and rural. However, according to him, rural life did limit the potential of youth, especially in cultural and social activities:

There are not any spaces for youth in the village where we can have recreational activities. We do not have gyms or clubs; so we end up organizing activities on our own in the schools. And most young men hang out in the streets, as there isn’t any place to go and rest. I wish we had kindergartens, markets, and gas stations. Wish we had car workshops, restaurants and eateries. We don’t have any of these things. (Kerim, Interview 1)

Kerim’s most prominent concerns were collective in nature as opposed to simply wanting his own house, farm or family. This again distinguishes the case type illustrated by Kerim from those of other youth. Moreover, Kerim’s opinions above highlighted his aspirations and preferences for urban-oriented social institutions and infrastructure but within rural physical and social settings. Services such as kindergartens and restaurants were formerly present in many rural villages. Kerim’s wishes were not completely alien to the past history of his village, as community members had access to places to eat and kindergartens in the Soviet kolkhoz, just as in urban centers. Thus, Kerim drew his ideas from the historical cultural and social context and from community narratives, as well as from his exposure to urban centers.

Kerim outlined three options for his future education and career, elaborating them as follows:

I want to pursue higher education when I graduate grade 11. If the family conditions are good, I would like to study full-time, if not I will study part-time. I have three options. My first option is the law department. Secondly, traffic police. And third, finance

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department. I think these occupations are suitable for the village, though not the lawyer. It is good to have education in finance and to know how to use a computer to open a bank branch here. If I enter the traffic police department, I will become a policeman here. I need to study economics to study at the finance department, or introduction to military training if I go into the police department (Kerim, Essay).

On the other hand, Kerim’s mother wished him to become a teacher. She was of the view that teaching was a convenient career for someone who wished to carry out both responsibilities in the village: a family farm and professional, waged employment.

Kerim will remain in the village. If it were my decision I would have wanted Kerim to become a teacher. I think it is best suited to the village life. I observe it among teachers in the village. He can go to school and teach, come home and do household chores and farm work. But Kerim is choosing other professions, though we still have two months to make a decision (Kerim’s mother interview)

In this excerpt we observe how Kerim’s career aspirations are particularly coherent and confident, and that his aspirations are linked closely to his familial role as the youngest son in his household. Moreover, Kerim’s choices favour occupations that are not only highly gendered but also presumed to be ‘prestigious,’ unlike those of teaching (in the post-soviet context) or farming. In the above excerpt from Kerim’s mother’s interview, we also note the intergenerational mismatch of expectations between Kerim and his mother over occupational preferences. A similar discussion was recorded in the case of Darika and her mother in the earlier part of this chapter. Kerim’s preferences reflected the changing context and assumptions around occupational prestige in the post-Soviet labour market, whereas his mother approached occupational preferences pragmatically, observing that teaching can be prestigious and stable, as well as suitable for rural life. The mother noted that waged employment in teaching provides social status, while the income generated from the farm was adequate to a rural economic livelihood, enabling the household to remain self-sufficient and resilient, to some extent, to the vagaries of the market and the state. (This importance of these criteria should be apparent from Chapter Five above, where the politics of the parallel economy of the former Soviet Central Asian rural communities and the role of the Soviet state were discussed).

Generally, rural parental aspirations and hopes for their children’s occupations are based on their belief about future change in their society. However, strong financial and social capital,

173 and some degree of cultural capital, can help parents and their children to subscribe to more coherent and elaborated beliefs about the nature of that change. The beliefs of Kerim’s mother can be seen in the following:

My eldest daughter graduated from nursing college. The profession of a nurse is a good one. It is useful all the time. My second son has a university degree too. My second daughter is also studying at the university. But see what happened to our lives and society. I really hope that they are able to work with their degrees. But this time period is not good for degreed people. Good times will arrive; God willing (Kyrgyz: kuda kaalasa). It is not a bad period either, but I wish my children could work in their professions.

Unlike the cases of Darika and her family, who believed that good jobs were accessible if one accumulated ‘right’ cultural capital in the form of quality education and credentials, Kerim demonstrated skepticism about credentials and subsequent employment, even while recognizing that there were jobs but not people with the required qualifications.

If one remains in the village after school, there are no jobs for you. But there are jobs for teachers, doctors, dentists, veterinary doctors, electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. We have few vets; there is nobody to fix our electricity. There aren’t any banks or markets to buy milk if we need some. Our rural young people need to study to become carpenters and plumbers. They would have learned how to earn money with these skills. (Kerim, Interview 2).

Kerim confidently refuted the popular image of the village economy as poor and devoid of job prospects for rural youth. He believed that rural youth aspired to professions and jobs that were well paid and situated in urban economies. He was of the opinion that the village economy required a renewed labour force to fill vacancies in teaching, energy supply, and veterinary. He thought that a further push factor for rural youth outmigration was the chronic absence of youth leisure events in their village.

6.4.5. Summary To conclude the case of Kerim I suggest that a new socioeconomic group has emerged as a result of the post-Soviet economic transition in rural regions. In place of the relationship between state farm employment and formal education, a new relationship, one between informal education and

174 unregulated, informal commercial trading, has filled the gap. Kerim’s case vividly demonstrates that his family’s improved financial status enabled them to expand their social capital and to further reproduce the symbolic power of economic capital in this rural village, while allowing Kerim access to educational cultural resources.

As in the case of Darika, there was a generational difference in parental and youth occupational aspirations and future expectations in the case of Kerim. The mother’s expectation for Kerim’s future occupation was a clear manifestation of her Soviet occupational habitus, which supplied the benchmark of ‘compatibility of teaching to family farm management.’ Kerim’s preferences reflected the changing context and assumptions around occupational prestige in the post-Soviet labour market, whereas his mother approached occupational preferences pragmatically, noting that teaching can be prestigious and stable, as well as convenient for rural life. Kerim’s intentions should also be understood from the standpoint of his family’s strategy for his future trajectory, which was shaped by the social position of the family in the village community and his habitus as the youngest son and household farm manager. That is, his intentions should be understood in the context of the relations of the family and the community, which is also the field in which the forms of capital are not equally distributed among its members.

Although Kerim’s geographic mobility after his graduation of the high school was planned on the assumption that he would pursue post-secondary education but through correspondence or part-time programs, the cultural expectations for the youngest son and the individual’s submission to family norms led both him and his family to imagine his future in the village. However, that future was not just the usual pathway of a rural Kyrgyz youth reproducing the social position of the youngest son; it was a future that included small-scale entrepreneurial business and the further conversion of economic capital into political social capital, which would serve as a future resource for maintaining power and privilege. Kerim’s case spoke to the shift of postsocialist rural societal and moral economy and value of work, personhood, and life, which incorporated the celebration of entrepreneurship and wealth.

6.5. The habitus of economic necessity with a migrant future trajectory: The biography of Edil To begin with, I note that the case of Edil and Edil-type youth in this study was difficult to

175 articulate and depict clearly. Edil’s strategy, therefore his agency, is defined by an ever- diminishing field of agency (e.g. sports) surrounded by an ever-enlarging array of closed fields (fields in which Edil exhibits highly limited protension since he has little or no capital with which to achieve anything other than passive reproduction) in this post-Soviet economic context. Not only does Edil clearly lack the capacities with which to establish an identifiable life ‘project,’ but even his capacities for ‘protension’ are themselves increasingly narrowed.

During this research period Edil was an 18-year old, grade 11 male student. Throughout our conversations I observed Edil to be a non-talkative person as compared to Darika and Kerim. His behavior—an awkward physical posture and nervousness—manifested a lack of familiarity with the formal context of interviews. His speech was dominated by incomplete sentences, fragmented and clustered ideas, and constant difficulty in understanding the academic or educational vocabulary of the interviews. Edil frequently stated that he had ‘forgotten’ the ‘answer,’ as though his story could be found in the formal language of a book that he was required to ‘remember’ and ‘tell.’ I often noted his attempts at academic vocabulary as he elaborated on his school experiences and future aspirations. Forgetfulness and restricted academic vocabulary as manifestations of Kyrgyz farmer class linguistic capital are indicative of the youth illustrated in the case of Edil in this chapter.

In Edil’s biography the shift from his parents’ secure Soviet kolkhoz work into the post- Soviet context of uncertain employment and livelihood was a dominant explanatory story line; one expressed in the inability of many youth to plan for a future that was anything other than a repetition of their current experiences. In other words, the former social position of Edil’s parents as Soviet farm workers and the worsened material conditions of the family in the postsocialist transformation placed them in the position of occasional farmers and migrants. The precarious class position of his family played an important role in dissuading him from taking an interest in the academic aspect of schooling, and instead oriented him almost exclusively towards physical labour and the least valued areas of the educational field. Through the case of Edil, I illustrate the limited cultural capital of the former Soviet farm workers and the effects of their material suffering on their children’s educational participation and prospects in the postsocialist transformation. These social conditions of families, as well as the subjective dispositions and actions of young people, shaped the future projections of many youth towards transnational migration.

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6.5.1. Rural Kyrgyz farmer-migrant family and the survival strategies Broadly speaking, Edil’s case belongs to the category of educationally and economically underprivileged families in his village. His family’s economic status would classify them as poor [Kyrgyz: kolunda jok] or as the characteristic of the post-Soviet version of Guy Standing’s (2011) global ‘precariat’ class. The mother and father had worked as labourers on the Soviet kolkhoz’s tobacco farm. As well as being a farmer, Edil’s father was also a foreman over other farmers. In addition to their jobs as kolkhozniki, Edil’s parents were able to supplement their income with the produce from a private farm of the extended family. Edil’s mother, like many Soviet women, had worked in the kolkhoz during the day, and attended to household chores and contributed to the management of her in-laws’ or kinship farm in the evening as a typical Kyrgyz rural daughter-in-law (Kyrgyz: kelin).

The dissolution of their kolkhoz into independent family farms and privatized land, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in general, resulted in the loss of stable family income and a sharp decline in the living standards for families such as Edil’s. In my interviews with Edil and his mother, it was clear that even if many agricultural workers were given land and livestock, they would still lack the necessary economic capital, including agricultural equipment, to exploit these resources. It was also clear that due to a lack of social capital - for they had occupied the lower socioeconomic and status positions within the kolkhoz structure - these households did not seem to have been granted good quality land. This family’s case speaks to the experience and circumstance of many rural kolkhoz workers, whose lower socioeconomic positions are directly resulted from both the Soviet and post-Soviet context of unequal distribution of forms of capital (capacities, resources, knowledge, as well as social contacts). In addition, they lacked the ability to shift from a collectivist welfare culture to the emerging cultural norms of commercial trading and market relations based on the volume of economic and social capital.

Edil’s was one of these families and, as a young household, which lacked economic capital from the period of the 1990s onwards, Edil’s parents had to resort to precarious forms of employment and were subjected to living in poverty. Edil’s father had been temporarily employed as an electrician, even though he was not formally trained for this job, while his mother had become unemployed and stayed at home to provide childcare and to work on their kinship farm. When his income as an electrician became too small and/or unstable to sustain his family, the father left for Bishkek, the capital city, to start a small business in metal trading. He

177 was later joined by his wife in the city.

My husband went to Bishkek to become a kommersant in 1998. And I stayed in the village taking care of our young children. When he did not return home after a long time, I decided to join him in Bishkek. I found it difficult to stay at home with kids without regular income and he was also not sending us enough money. I left my two older children with my husband’s family, and took the two young ones with me to the city. (Edil’s mother, Interview)

From the 1990s onwards, kommertsia or informal trading in urban markets became one of the dominant economic strategies of many rural Kyrgyz households that needed to temporarily supplement family income from private household farms, and at times it became a primary source of livelihoods in rural Kyrgyzstan. In the case of Edil’s parents, kommertsia provided them with the hope of accumulating financial capital to construct a house in the village and raising their living standards to their previous level.

Edil’s parents’ kommertsia involved purchasing scrap metal at cheap rates and later selling it to bigger clients or often to Chinese manufacturers in bulk. For Kyrgyz farmers like Edil’s parents, kommertsia was a new economic activity with its own logic involving high risks of bankruptcy in the absence of legal economic regulations protecting fragile family businesses. Edil’s parents had to learn on their own—without access to skills, knowledge or relevant forms of cultural or social capital—how to manage their small-scale mercantile business. Although often disoriented under the ever-changing economic and political conditions expanding throughout the former Soviet Union, Edil’s parents’ re-orientation of values and practices also brought changes in their aspirations and lifestyles. Edil’s mother referred to one such change in the following brief comment:

We started making good profit from our metal trading. But my husband started gambling with this profit. So, we lost everything that we made from our business and had to take out loans [Kyrgyz: karyzga batyp kettik]. We returned to the village with almost nothing. (Edil’s mother, Interview)

Although Edil’s mother did not elaborate on her husband’s gambling, it is unlikely that their misfortune in kommertsia was entirely explained by the father’s moral failure. Their bankruptcy was linked with the difficulty of former farmers in resorting to an emerging

178 economic system, changing rules of business, and the harsh realities of business management in the complete absence of legal regulations. The economic values of individual profit making, price speculation, and urban commerce were not only ‘alien’ to their rural communitarian economic cultural norms, but were also the very values that had been condemned by the Soviet socialist economic ideology.

The parents’ return to the village from Bishkek did not restore this family’s economic stability. The construction of their house was put on hold due to lack of resources and the young household with four children was subjected to even poorer living conditions. At that point Edil’s father decided to leave for Moscow to work on construction sites. A booming economy fueled by the export of oil had at this time made Russia a popular destination for cheap labour migrants from post-Soviet Central Asian states. Edil’s mother described her family’s economic circumstances and the father’s decision about migration as follows:

When this Moscow trouble [Kyrgyz: balee] arose, my husband left for Moscow and I remained in the village with the five children. Well, this house was not properly finished at that time. We did not have a floor or ceiling, as we did not have the money to build them. We were crammed into an old house of my in-laws. We decided that his money [remittances] from Moscow could help us to complete the construction of this house so we could move in with our children. (Edil’s mother, Interview)

As mentioned above, the postsocialist transformation, which often included massive internal and international migration, was not viewed positively from the standpoint of rural Kyrgyz families. Edil’s mother associated the postsocialist transnational labour mobility with trouble [Kyrgyz: balee], which gives a sense of the negative consequences of migration for the well-being and social cohesion of rural Kyrgyz households and communities across this country.

The migration of Edil’s father to Russia actually brought further misfortune to this family. The family experienced a great loss when the father died of the consequences of high blood pressure on his way home from Moscow; a few hours before he was due to reunite with his family in the village. He left behind a widow with five young children and a household without any stable source of income. This family crisis, within the context of Kyrgyzstan’s economic stagnation, resulted in the family’s continued struggle for a decent standard of living as the poorest of the rural poor. The father’s death had further negative consequences for the socioeconomic trajectory of this household. After completing her high school education, Edil’s

179 eldest sister joined her aunt’s kommertsia in Russia, despite her good academic standing and aspirations to post-secondary education in nursing. Edil’s mother provided childcare for the two- year old daughter of Edil’s uncle when child allowance was insufficient to feed even one member of the family. Edil and his brother worked as urban market vendors, buying and re- selling cheap goods. At the time of this research, the household still worked for their relative’s farm, producing grain and potatoes for sale. The low economic capital of this household directly affected Edil and his siblings’ accumulation of education cultural capital and limited their access to economically viable social capital.

The precarious economic livelihood of Edil’s family depicts a common pathway of many former Soviet kolkhoz workers who had to continuously acquire new sets of skills and knowledge to survive within the logic of changing and new economic conditions. It also illustrates how many failed to develop attitudes consistent with the realities of the emerging economy. The experiences of Edil’s parents reflected the long-term effects of the former Soviet command economy, which organized labour in a structured way. The structured socialist labour seemed to have removed workers’ sense of agency and ownership, and making farmers vulnerable to the consequences of unstable and precarious employment in a new economy. Their previous work conditions had been more organized due to the presence of middle management, rigid work schedules and concrete sets of regulations with specific reward and punishment systems. However, the post-Soviet economy forced individual farmers to develop their own work schedules under unregulated and seemingly chaotic conditions. In the absence of the previously re-distributive role of the Soviet state, former kolkhoz workers like Edil’s parents blamed themselves—and not the newly imposed liberal economic ideology—for their failure to survive financially or at least regain their previous living standards.

The narrative of Edil’s mother spoke to her experience of being a collective farm worker [Kyrgyz: kolkhozchu] and a rural Kyrgyz daughter/sister-in-law (Kyrgyz: kelin), which incorporated both the household work (Kyrgyz: ish) in the family economy and collective farm labour (Kyrgyz: emgek) in the formal state economy. The farmers’ low social position within the Soviet social structure in the village was maintained by their lower educational levels and limited exposure to urban cultural activities. Unlike Darika’s parents, for example, who upgraded their social backgrounds as collective farm workers’ children through higher education, Edil’s parents reproduced the lower social position of their parents who worked as manual workers in the

180 collective farm. His parents belonged to a multi-generational family of kolkhoz workers. Edil’s kin or kinship networks did not experience upward social mobility through higher education even during the Soviet period. The educational experiences of Edil’s parents and their relatives were confined to minimal achievements in their rural schools. Nobody in the family experienced the cultural contexts of any urban school or university, which would have exposed them to more opportunities and perhaps given rise to aspirations to higher education. Instead, they directed all their energy into strengthening their local kinship and community capital and continued to lead a farm and traditional extended family lifestyle. The Soviet state provided a stable income to these kolkhoz workers irrespective of their low educational cultural capital. Thus, the case of Edil’s parents not only illustrates the hidden aspects and mechanisms of economic and social reproduction in the Soviet period, but it also clearly shows how previous low social status was transferred to the post-Soviet period, where it had more severe implications for the material conditions of families. Nevertheless, the mother stressed the importance of formal education as a critical resource with higher economic as well as social value in the post-Soviet context:

In this day and age, children need to have education. Where will they go without education? What will they do without education? I regret that I did not pursue education. Look at me now! I am suffering [from not pursuing education] in my life now. There is always a need for education. Why do we need education? Why shouldn’t we have education? Schooled children will have a wider worldview and intellect. And even if they go and work somewhere else [Kyrgyz: talaa], they still need education. Edil needs education, but because of our life conditions [Kyrgyz: turmushka bailanishtuu], and because he is the eldest son in the family, I need to send him to Moscow to work and earn money for us in the village. But personally, I think that education will never be a useless pursuit. If not today, one day, people will need their diplomas. I think that the times will definitely change. If you have a diploma, it is always possible to get a job. Educated persons will always have more options. That’s one of the reasons why I am not against children’s education. I always tell my children to pursue education (Edil’s mother, Interview).

In the context of her entire interview, we can observe how Edil’s mother held a strong belief in the correspondence between institutionalized education and stable employment. Such taken-for-granted beliefs about education were further crystallized when she linked her

181 immediate conditions of material impoverishment and unemployment to her lack of higher education. The mother was of the view that had she been educated at institutes or colleges, her life would definitely have been better; that education would have paved the way for a different trajectory. Through continued faith in the tight correspondence between education, employment, and financial security, the doxa of the former Soviet period was reproduced and oriented this mother towards regurgitating those beliefs in the changing context of the postsocialist transformation. Thus, the current conditions of the deflation of the value of university education and unemployment or poor wages among educated youth did not seem to have convinced this mother that those with credentials did not always enjoy better life chances and economic prosperity.

Growing up in the post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz context automatically meant that Edil and his siblings worked on their family farm during their schooling. However, unlike the cases of Darika and Kerim, the dire economic condition of Edil’s household resulted in an inability to sustain the family members through subsistence farming alone. In addition to producing vegetables for sale, this household required its children to work and earn cash in seasonal kommertsia in the cities and as construction workers in the village. This resulted in the interruption of the children’s schooling, their poor educational participation, and ultimately in lower academic achievement. However, her children’s gender influenced the mother’s differential expectations for them. Her educational expectations for her daughters were higher than those that she entertained for her sons. She noted that if the future remittances of her sons allowed, she wished to support her daughters to pursue post-secondary education in nursing and teaching. Despite her general expectations of children’s education, the mother’s educational views and strategies towards her sons’ education were predominantly framed as ensuring a specific type of moral socialization. During our conversations, Edil’s mother emphasized her concern about the behavior and tartip (Kyrgyz; the discipline) of her sons at home, in the school, and outside the community.

As soon as my children are at the doorsteps of a school building they learn to walk along a good path. Their school provides them an opportunity to develop into good people. It is all about the upbringing of our children, you know. My children, in my view, [hmm], well, at least I have not heard until now that [hmm], they are learning something good. I think they are doing well (Kyrgyz: tartiptuu). Who knows? [Laughing loudly abruptly] I have not heard any disapproval [Kyrgyz: naalat]…. Edil goes to the mosque on Fridays.

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He started going there since his father died. He recites the Quran. I think, he needs to learn our religion as he is born a Muslim (Edil’s mother, Interview).

This excerpt spoke to several parental strategies encountered in the course of this study, especially in cases where the household was headed by the mother. In the dominantly communitarian and kinship-oriented Kyrgyz culture, naalat or verbal disapproval towards individuals and their families was generally forthcoming if they behaved outside established norms and practices. Such sanctioning practices were associated with the reproduction of the community’s moral norms of shame and honor, and they carried negative implications for the social location of rural families in their community. As a social institution integral to the rural community, schools could carry out both of the roles that determined a family’s location in the moral hierarchy: they could issue naalat and condemn families for their children’s misbehaviour as well as ensuring that children acquired the moral virtues of their community by reproducing socially cohesive patterns of behavior and virtues. Edil’s mother was content that the teachers and a vice-principal ‘kept an eye’ on Edil and her sons in the school. She cited an incident at school when the vice-principal called upon Edil and told him to be more concerned about his ‘mischievous’ behavior and to stop hanging around a ‘wrong’ group of boys.

Although wrapped in generic references to becoming a good human being or a good Muslim and praying for the soul of his deceased father, the possibilities of alternative youth subcultures in the village were revealed by the case study of Edil. Edil was part of, and influenced by, tribal conflicts among male youth in the area. Both he and his mother unwillingly and briefly cited an incident in which the district police had detained Edil for two nights when one such conflict grew physically violent. Competing with the traditional tribal and kinship-oriented doxa of the family and academic and metropolitan model of schools, local religious institutions provided alternative doxic assumptions about the world and moral education, thus to some extent creating a rupture in the stability of the established doxa of school education and families in particular. In such contexts, the mother as well as Edil seemed unwillingly to recognize the limits of their total submission to the institutions of the school and the family. Edil’s mother’s heightened control over her children’s behavior (Kyrgyz: jurush-turush), especially that of her sons at home, could be explained through a close examination of the changing conditions of the postsocialist transformation in rural Kyrgyz communities, in which the previously dominant doxic values were being questioned in the light of these economic and cultural transformations.

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Edil’s mother had the following to say:

I didn’t want my children to have a lot of money or to actually earn money on their own. I think if children are made to take adult responsibility and have an opportunity to make and spend money independently, they will certainly lose their respect towards parents and the family. They will not know the value of parents, their family and relatives. Nowadays young people dream about money and wealth. You never know how they are earning and what they are spending it on. They are living independently in the cities. But I want my children to stay here with me in the village until they complete their grade 11 (Edil’s mother, Interview).

Increased out-migration among rural Kyrgyz youth between the ages of 15 and 18 threatened the maintenance of social cohesion in the community and the reproduction of traditional Kyrgyz family norms and practices such as a sense of respect for older members and submission to the authority of parents and other kin. It was fundamentally important for rural Kyrgyz parents to keep their children in schools well beyond compulsory education, even though few of them could pursue post-secondary education. This parental strategy, adopted by Edil’s mother, seemed to have originated from current conditions of rural impoverishment, youth unemployment, and the disintegration of traditional moral norms. Yet, Edil had to leave to Moscow as a migrant worker to earn cash and to support the family back in the village.

Edil’s mother was engaged in her children’s learning at home. In addition to the Kyrgyz traditional norms and values of kinship, the tribal community, and pastoralism, through her educational practices she ensured that her children were socialized into such school values as completing homework by checking their school diaries and emphasizing the importance of schooling and discipline.

I control my children’s homework at home quite strictly. I ask them to open their bags [Smiling]. Although I cannot get desk and chairs for them ... hmm they study the way we used to do in the past. They lay on the floor to write or read. I do monitor their homework. I tell them to wake up early in the morning and order them to go to school on time. I tell them not to run away from their classes. I try my best to help my children to study. I give them time to do their homework. Well, I don’t make them work hard in the farm throughout the day [Kyrgyz: Ondoy ele shilkildatip ishtetpeim]. Don’t tell them to leave their homework and do household chores. I don’t tell them that their learning is not

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important [Kyrgyz: Sabagingardy ui jeit bele]. I check their school diaries [Kyrgyz: dnevnik]. I sign their diaries. I check their grades. I also attend parental meetings at school. (Edil’s mother, Interview)

However, despite policing the routine educational practices of her children, the mother revealed how formal education was often considered irrelevant to the farm economy and culture of the rural community. For example, she cited the Kyrgyz expression ‘sabagingardy ui jeit bele’ (literally translated as “will your education feed the cows?”). Post-secondary education in particular was often linked by rural people to the out-migration of youth and the development of anti-local community values and practices such as higher aspirations among rural youth for urban lifestyles and stronger associations with national citizenship ideals as opposed to the values of kinship traditions and the service to the extended family and kinship that these young people learn through their family and tribal community events. The interview excerpt cited above touched upon the tensions between rural farm community values and practices and those of formal school education, a tension that was especially pronounced in the perspectives of the parents in this cluster (See Chapter 7).

Due to the farm and kinship culture of this rural Kyrgyz community, social capital composed of kinship networks and relationships with maternal and paternal relatives remained a key form of capital due to the weak links between formal education, employment, and social mobility. In the case of Edil, his kinship capital was a source not simply of emotional support, but also of physical labour, which was required to manage the farms in the context of a lack of mechanized agriculture. In each of these three cases, we can explore how the families invested in their kinship network relations but their rationales differed. More importantly, the case of Edil and his family demonstrates the ways they exchange their service and goods (less cash more in kind support) in the kinship-oriented economy.

Unlike Darika and Kerim’s social capital, which included parents’ and siblings’ networks that were external to the kinship and their community, Edil and his family’s social capital was restricted to his schoolmates, neighbours, and kin. Their kinship social capital was not extensive either. This restricted social capital was due to the relatives’ limited educational attainments and their kolkhoz employment, which excluded them from resourceful social connections [Kyrgyz: taanish-bilish [1]] that could allow them access to socially valuable resources. Edil’s relatives had mostly worked in the Soviet kolkhoz as herders, shepherds and agricultural workers. Like

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Edil’s parents, they too lost their full-time farm jobs in 1991 and survived with small incomes from their private farms or became involved in kommertsia in urban markets in Karasu, Osh, or Bishkek (Kyrgyz Republic), or in Samara (Russia). Some of Edil’s relatives also migrated to Russia where male relatives worked in construction sites and female relatives attended tables in restaurants. In this family trajectory the effects of the kinship migrant network were manifestly noted, as Edil drew heavily on his kin for resources, which were often obtained outside formal educational and employment structures. Edil’s relatives not only gave monetary support, but they also provided learning opportunities outside the formal educational system. Edil’s eldest sister, for example, was ‘mentored’ in mercantile trading in Samara by his aunt while Edil and his younger brother learned how to trade in urban markets.

My father’s relatives live in Bishkek and Moscow. Only Aunt Aida has completed university, I think. I actually don’t know. Nobody has a job, but most of them are in kommertsia. My mother’s relatives are in Moscow. They say that Uncle Altynbek was good at studying. But because he fought with boys at school, he could not finish school with good grades. Our family has good relations with my mother’s brothers. My aunts and uncles help us with money, food, and clothes. For instance, they send us clothes for the new school year. My aunt helps me get stuff to resell in the market. My elder sister works with my aunt in Samara. My aunt has been teaching my sister to do kommertsia (Edil’s Interview, 2).

During the early years of the postsocialist transformation, rational economic logic was suspended in rural Kyrgyzstan and certain kinship exchanges were carried out according to non- economic norms. For instance, the farm of the youngest uncle and his grandmother has been sustaining Edil’s household, in exchange for which Edil’s mother provided childcare to the uncle’s two-year old daughter. In this example we observe the heightening of social transactions in the kinship context. Kinship social capital re-emerged as an alternative way to access socially valuable resources in the emerging economic and social order of the postsocialist transformation, especially when formal welfare and employment structures were not clear-cut.

As in the case of Kerim and Darika, Edil’s peer group network constituted a particular type of social capital. However, unlike Kerim’s peer social network, Edil had mostly male classmates in his circle. They shared similar interests in sports and most of them came from kolkhoz backgrounds. Unlike Darika, who preferred to have mates with similar professional

186 goals, Edil relied on his peers’ support as a form of communal collective labour [Kyrgyz: ashar] to manage the heavy demand for physical labour during the summers. As his peers had similar family economic conditions, their labour was bartered.

My friends help in each other’s households. We help each other’s family to host community events and work. In summer we get together for ashar to make hay. In winter we gather wood for heating (Edil’s Interview, 2).

So, as the above and later excerpts indicate, when rural Kyrgyz youth from farming and migrant backgrounds were restricted from pursuing formal education opportunities, they relied on kinship and local community social networks to gain alternative forms of cultural and social capital. In the following section we explore the agency of youth from farming families in regards to the social conditions of rural poverty in the context of the postsocialist transformation in Kyrgyzstan.

6.5.2. Edil in the family: The eldest son of the farmer and migrant’s family Within the family of five children, Edil was the second born and the eldest male sibling. His birth order and gendered position in his family, combined with the family’s poor economic capital and low educational capital, structured his orientation towards future labour migration. At the time of this research Edil’s elder sister was in kommertsia with her aunt in Russia. The mother reported that her daughter’s income from kommertsia was not sent to the household as remittance; rather she rather saved that money towards pursuing a college degree in nursing. Edil’s two younger brothers were studying in grades five and seven.

As was typical of many rural Kyrgyz young people in this research, including Darika and Kerim, Edil acquired the knowledge and skills necessary for farming from a young age—as young as four years old—under the supervision of his mother and uncle. Like Darika, Edil still felt that it was natural for him to learn to attend to livestock. His gradual acquisition of these knowledge and skills had turned into an embodied aspect of his being. Edil was cognizant of the difficulties of agricultural farming, which required perseverance and manual labour with heavy reliance on physical strength under the conditions of unmechanized agriculture. In our interviews he acknowledged his learning and did not take it for granted:

It is difficult to look after cattle. It requires a lot of work and energy. … It is difficult to prepare hay for the animals. Hay making season is particularly physically demanding. You get up very early in the morning, and cut the grass the whole day, sleep, wake up

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and cut again. Sometimes it lasts 15 days, sometimes one month (Edil, Interview 2).

We observed above in regards to the accumulation of types of cultural capital, how Edil’s rural habitus was gendered and strongly linked to the family’s dominant gendered discourse. Edil’s mother had socialized her children into gendered social norms. By doing so, she contradicted what she herself had taught Edil about farming; meanwhile she assured me that such tasks should be taught by male family members, generally the fathers. She argued that “fathers should teach sons things they need to do outside the home, and mothers teach daughters work inside the home.” (Edil’s mother, Interview)

The doxic Kyrgyz cultural socialization into separate domains of female and male aspects of domestic work was circulated and internalized despite experiences that revealed the problematic interpretations of such gendered social norms. Further questioning revealed that Edil still highlighted the need to learn to do the work that was traditionally expected of a female child:

If I were a female child in the family I would have helped my mother in the house, sweeping the floor and cooking. If I were a female child but didn’t have any male sibling, I would have also attended to the cattle. My elder sister used to attend the cattle when we were small. At the moment I do not cook dishes, bake bread and clean around house. But sometimes when my mother asks me to help her or orders me to do this or that chore, I do it. I cook simple dishes like rice soup, rice porridge, and fried potatoes... I cannot prepare difficult dishes like dumpling. My mother taught me how to cook while she prepared food for us. Well, I think that even if you are a male, you should make an effort to learn these things. This is not just a girl’s responsibility… One should make an effort, right? (Edil, Interview 2)

Similarly to the case of Darika, Edil also felt that the traditional Kyrgyz gender roles and norms were not completely followed, because of the family circumstances (Kyrgyz: turmush- shartka bailanishtuu). Edil was the eldest child in the family with other younger brothers and a small sister. His family circumstance was related to the absence of another older sister who could ‘naturally’ help their mother with the domestic chores. According to Edil, the family circumstance necessitated him, despite being a man in the household, to help the mother with cooking. The gendered boundaries of domestic labour were traditionally and symbolically set— as the ideal or norm rather than as the practical and material household conditions of labour—but

188 had to be practically approached,

As we noted, his father’s untimely death further subjected Edil to the position of a male adult and breadwinner in the family. Edil categorically rejected his mother’s intention to migrate to Russia or to Bishkek to earn money to support the family. This would have meant leaving the children behind in the village. However, as the first son and the main male head of this household, Edil took it as his responsibility to financially support the family through kommertsia and construction jobs. The mother had the following to say about this:

My children are against me migrating and leaving them here in the village. They say, “How will these young ones be if you leave them unattended? They need discipline and upbringing.” Who would really care about my children? [Kyrgyz: kimge kar bolsun bular?] I only have an old mother-in-law in this village. Unlike children of other families, my sons had to start working at a very young age because their father died so early. Because of their father’s death, they have matured earlier than their age [Kyrgyz: baldarim tuishukchul bolup kaldi]. They think about life at this young age. They go to Karasu or Bishkek and work with their uncles and aunts to earn cash. They usually re-sell footwear or other goods. At times they go before the New Year, so I have to ask permission from school for my sons to work in the market. I tell the teachers that my sons are forced to work because of our household economic difficulties. Even the youngest son who is in grade five went to the city to work in the market. He brought home cash and gave it to me to run this household.

In the post-Soviet rural employment context, the former Soviet kolkhoz workers were mostly confined to subsistence farming. Some of these families did not even own any farm and livestock to begin with. In order to make ends meet, they earned cash as seasonal labourers in haymaking, construction, and the daily upkeep of farms belonging to kin or other families. As we learned above, Edil’s family did not own a farm or livestock of their own and they did not receive any remittances. Edil and his brothers found themselves working, for example on their uncle’s farm, to earn cash to support their household. Through such precarious employment opportunities, Edil and his brothers were gradually socialized into future masculine, farm and construction jobs. In the absence of his father, who would have socialized him into masculine roles, Edil acquired the skills necessary for construction by helping out a builder who worked on their cottage house.

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At first, my young brothers and I made bricks [of mud/clay]. And then we requested our neighbor to build the house. We then helped them out in building the cottage house. That’s when you learn many things as you pay more attention. I learned how to stack bricks properly, and how to do some woodwork there, by helping and working this or that way (demonstrating with his hands). And this neighbor who is a builder started taking me along to his other clients’ work to help him out. I used to hold the flat wood material, to help him out when he was doing the ceiling. I used to spend a lot of time in such work. So, I learned a lot of things there. (Edil, Interview 2)

Unlike Kerim, who learned to manage people on the farm, Edil had to carry out all his tasks at home and outside the household just as a worker would do—by selling his labour for cash.

According to Edil, his key responsibilities in the household’s cattle economy, including the division of work among siblings, and overseeing the work of his younger brothers, ‘distracted’ him from making use of his educational opportunities. There were, of course, many words he could have chosen in this regard, and his choices here were significant. The accumulation of and energy spent on informal and household-based agricultural farm knowledge in particular was a ‘distraction,’ as he placed school knowledge at the top of the knowledge hierarchy. As he put it,

E: You do not need any skills [Kyrgyz: shyk] to know how to look after cattle. But, yeah … hmm …You still should have ability [Kyrgyz: jöndöm]. You need to learn to be clean and manage time. You should be timely in giving them water, feeding them and also hmm…

Q: What do you think of having a special subject like taking care of animals at school?

E: [smiling] I would have been the first to do well in it [Laughing loudly].

Q: And why do you think so?

E: Well, I would be able to explain how it is done, how to feed, how to give water, and when. Show how to do it practically. …I learned to look after cattle when I was four years old. My mother taught me how to do it. She would start attending to the cattle from early morning. And I used to follow her. She would instruct me to clean the barn with her, so I would sweep and clean, with my big boots (laughing). That’s how I used to look after the cattle. Like giving water or feeding them. Like that. (Edil, Interview 2)

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The knowledge of rural farming and running a rural household required energy, time, and one’s interest in investing these forms of cultural capital, though it fell outside the formal educational and employment contexts of the young people or it was not necessarily equated with becoming kul’turnyi. Edil’s evaluation was a direct reflection of the prevalent doxa on the relationship between formal education and social status, which excluded the informal knowledge of rural farm practices. Although limited in his description of the activities, Edil recognized that if the subject of agriculture had been part of his school curriculum, he would have excelled in it because of his practical experience and knowledge.

Edil’s conversation above demonstrated how the household and the school continued to maintain this separation of knowledge fields in a distinctive way. This separation was historically constructed when the Soviet state introduced formal schooling to traditionally nomadic and semi- nomadic pastoral communities. The reproduction of pastoral culture remained as a responsibility of family and kinship; meanwhile, formal schooling took charge of socializing young people into codes of national citizenship, the modern division of labour, and academic training. However, it was largely individuals, like Edil, who maintained and reproduced such ideological principles of the division of knowledge and enacted them in their daily practices.

Ensuing from the conversation above, we note that Edil’s birth order in the family and his gender, combined with the absence of his father and the low socioeconomic status of the family, mediated Edil to become the main breadwinner of his household. His contribution to the family economy is openly acknowledged and valued. We learned that Edil as well as his brothers developed their class habitus at a very young age, and we will later come to see how this habitus, as well as their current work and life conditions, shaped their orientations towards labour migration.

6.5.3. Edil in school: The habitus of kolkhozchu and educational disadvantage In this section, Edil’s case illuminates how the social conditions in which Edil grew up—that is, the combination of poor economic capital, the low educational cultural capital of his parents and a lack of school-related resources at home—defined his working-class, masculine habitus. The hyper-masculine ways of being and growing up in extreme economic conditions at home were not supportive of success in an institution of education. His habitus structured Edil’s poor participation in academic activities and his interest and participation in sports, which eventually

191 shaped his orientation to labour migration. This section observes how formal education shifted from the Soviet collectivist and polytechnical curriculum to an emphasis on academic learning and the attainments of individual students. I argue that this educational restructuring accentuates individual achievement and individualizes the learning process, resulting in the individual student’s self-censure and pathology, which stands in stark contrast to the Soviet collectivist educational ideology.

Edil participated in school sports competitions, practice games and sports clubs. His ‘choice’ to go into sports was informed by a type of farmer [Kyrgyz: kolkhozchu] habitus, which led him to invest in and accumulate athletic (volleyball) capital requiring substantial time, practice and perseverance. Edil represented his school in inter-school volleyball tournaments for two years, which was itself a symbolically valued position among his male friends. Discussing sports came naturally to him, and he talked passionately and enthusiastically about his volleyball practices and competitions. In our conversations it became clear that his athletic male and working class habitus rejected the formal educational curriculum. Edil depicted his peer group’s attitude to learning in the following way:

E: My friends here hmm always say and do … like … hmmm

Q: What do they do?

E: Well like ‘Let’s go there’ or ‘Let’s play volleyball’. And you come late at night from there and then hmmm. I become tired. Like that.

Q: So do you think playing volleyball affects your learning at school?

E: Yes, it has bad effects. But when you hear the bouncing ball, you cannot just sit there. It [the ball] looks more interesting (laughingly).

His apparent disinterest in academic achievement was due in part to his interest in another field of action. This field of action was the rural farm economy in which physical strength, not formal academic capabilities, was most valued. This physical strength that he developed at a young age because of his participation in the farm economy could find its outlet in school only in the context of sports. The physical body, in the case of Edil, was one of the few forms of capital that he was left with as a young person born to a former Soviet collective farmers’ family. His physical capital seemed to take on value in the fields of the migrant labour market, such as construction work in Russian cities, where not cultural capital but the physical

192 body was highly employable for its cheap price.

As mentioned above, Edil’s athletic male and farmer habitus discouraged rigorous academic engagement. This habitus was manifested in a restricted linguistic style, a limited understanding of spoken Russian, and a lack of interest in computers, Kyrgyz literature, or any other subjects.

E: Quality education? [hmm] It is hmmm [smiling]…quality education is [smiling] I am forgetting hmm… quality education hmmm…

Q: Let’s say a good education means?

E: Good education, in my view, let’s say, knowing well, many things, well, and you achieve well in your classes and like that.

Q: Do you know how to type [Russian: pechatat]?

E: What did you say? (Edil did not understand the Russian word in my question)

Q: How to type [Kyrgyz: komputerde tergendi]?

E: Yeah (nonchalantly) (Edil, Interview 1).

In our interviews, Edil found difficulty in freely express himself, and he referred to such as moments as ‘forgetting proper words,’ as though conversation relied entirely on academic vocabulary and a literary linguistic style. During our interviews, Edil often times did not complete his sentences: he clustered several ideas together, jumped to the next idea leaving the other incomplete, and paused on questions for long periods, asking for clarification. Edil’s uneasiness was perhaps due to the type of questions that were asked, that is about his schooling and educational experience, for a formal academic linguistic context. As noted earlier, his domestic linguistic context, shaped by the family’s linguistic capital as farm workers, was informal or vernacular Kyrgyz of southern dialect. Edil’s linguistic capital was limited to this vernacular Kyrgyz dialect despite his aspiration to greater competence in the Russian language. His farm habitus and his peer as well as his family social capital did not require him to be fluent neither in foreign languages such as Russian nor in formal literary Kyrgyz. His Kyrgyz rural farm habitus and his lack of Russian linguistic capital also worked to reproduce his lower social position in the field. It is important to elaborate on this further. Edil did not have the basic Russian language proficiency that was considered to be linguistic capital from which a migrant

193 in Moscow could benefit in relation to employment and legal citizenship opportunities. He often found it difficult to understand Russian words and expressions in our conversations, even though these words were used in everyday speech contexts. His limited Russian language proficiency would more than likely channel Edil towards those work situations in the Russian migrant economy in which Russian was not needed to function. Such work contexts would typically include manual jobs in construction and street cleaning services. His inability to speak Russian as a migrant worker would handicap him in negotiating work conditions, wages, and living spaces. Thus, his Kyrgyz linguistic capital might help him in the rural context but it would limit his chances for wider communication and a life outside Kyrgyzstan.

Edil’s educational orientation and strategies were conditioned by his family socialization and the limited school-related cultural capital at home. The poor quality of the instructional curriculum at school and the lack of cultural resources at home left Edil with little interest in borrowing books from libraries or spending time in computer laboratories. Reading a textbook, let alone working on a computer, seemed to be a rare activity in his family.

Q: So tell me more about school learning conditions. Are there good opportunities to learn?

E: Well, there may be opportunities to learn. I really don’t know though…. Don’t know really. I should study. But teachers also don’t pay attention to our learning anymore. You know what I mean? They say, “Anyways, you won’t study”. They say that to us all the time.

Q: Does anyone discourage you to study?

E: Well (smiling), I usually hang out with friends and I don’t pay attention to subjects. You do what your friends do, no?

Q: Do you all study together?

E: Oh no. If they see me studying they laugh at me. They say, “Oh, now you are pretending to study, huh?” “ Oh, you are writing?” “You have written a page already?” So, they tease me like that.

Q: Does it affect you?

E: It affects me badly. Sometimes I wonder why I should study when other boys are

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hanging around and doing nothing (Edil, Interview 2)

Nor did Edil’s school require him to accumulate cultural capital or to develop school-related dispositions. In the conversation above, Edil points out that low teacher expectations and peer pressure discouraged him from further pursuing academic learning and reinforced his interest in sports.

Having outlined these issues, Edil still placed the main blame on individual students who ‘wasted’ their time at school. Quite reasonably, he did not make any explicit argument about how interest in individual learning, the quality of rural education, and the wider economic conditions of post-Soviet Kyrgyz society were rather complexly interrelated. In Edil’s account, he had failed to ‘make an effort’ at school due to his demanding domestic work, a condition that he identified as an individual problem specific to his family circumstances, rather than as a structural one.

Edil reinforced the prevalent ideology of formal education. He studied until the end of grade 11 even though he did not pursue the trajectory of post-secondary education. One of Edil’s reasons for continuing high school was related to his attempt to claim a sense of distinction from another group of rural male youth who were ’unschooled’ or dropouts. This distinction between schooled and unschooled youth, for Edil, was expressed through one’s functional literacy level.

E: I think we should study at school, if you don’t, you become a loafer [Russian: bezdelnik] or how should I explain to you? (Thinking for a short period, he continues) There is still a difference between a person who went to school and the one who did not.

Q: What is that difference?

E: You know there are those people who cannot write their names. They didn’t go to school or did not continue after grade five or eight. So, there is a difference between those who go to school and those who don’t. Those who go to school, they can at least have some knowledge.

Q: Do you think you know more than those who don’t go to school?

E: Well, I cannot say that I am very educated, but I am average (and laughed). (Edil, Interview 2, p. 3)

Edil developed his ‘schooled’ identity by juxtaposing it with the perceived youth identity

195 of a ‘bezdelnik.’ A ‘bezdelnik’, in his understanding, was a person who was idle, who was engaged with socially ‘unproductive’ activity, lacked some kind of structure in life, and did not go through ‘legitimate’ social institutions. Edil, by identifying himself as different from a ‘bezdelnik’, produced a criterion of exclusion and territorialized the educational space for those who ‘belonged’ and ‘played’ according to the rules set by the state’s ideology of education, which localized social norms in post-Soviet rural communities. Edil noted that to some extent he enrolled in Grade 11, despite his lack of opportunity for post-secondary education, to avoid becoming a bezdelnik.

To sum up, even though his farm working class and masculine habitus oriented Edil towards school sports rather than acquiring scholastic capital, Edil demonstrated his competence in the field of household farm economy, managing the family’s farm, which required a stock of cultural knowledge about the land, animals, and a variety of situations, as well as sharp observation and intuitive responses to problems and challenges. However, these competences were not necessary considered to be cultural capital in the formal educational field, in which only those who possessed modern and urban forms of knowledge and the behavioural traits of urban cultural standards, including Russian linguistic capital, enjoyed the highest social positions. Moreover, the experiences of many rural Kyrgyz youth from financially fragile social and familial conditions led them to question the utility and relevance of formal education to the post- Soviet labour market. Despite their continued schooling at high levels, their schooling experiences were structured by socioeconomic conditions in which the pursuit of further academic learning was neither ‘desired’ nor ‘encouraged’ since their immediate conditions and future plans were not necessarily linked to post-secondary education and professional types of jobs. They remained in school for entirely different reasons: to acquire functional literacy skills, to support the family farm until their younger siblings grew up, and to further strengthen their moral values and the knowledge of the rural Kyrgyz community.

6.5.4. Edil: The future of a migrant worker Edil’s aspirations for the future cannot be explained through the conventional western middle- class category of present and future security. They are rather a result of the lived experience of growing up in a poor family under the post-Soviet conditions of rapid economic transition. Edil’s case was illustrative of youth whose family’s economic, social, and cultural situations structured disparate post-secondary trajectories and led many to project themselves into a precarious

196 migrant future. Throughout our interviews, Edil’s stated aspirations were very different from the coherent post-secondary goals of Darika and Kerim. The following excerpts from his essay and interviews demonstrate the inconsistency of his goals:

By winning prizes I dream about honoring Kyrgyzstan at international sport competitions. I wish to let the world know about Kyrgyzstan. My dream is to finish my school and go to Bishkek. I want to seriously train myself for wrestling. I want to become a champion (Edil, Essay, p.1).

I want to continue my education. I want to study to become a traffic policeman. I like to keep order (Edil, Interview 1)

I also like to construct something with my hands or repair something. Like a mechanic you know. If I had a car I would have been busy with it, fixing it, opening the pieces, so to say. (Edil, Interview 1)

These aspirations to post-secondary college education or to being a sportsman or car mechanic reveal Edil to be a young person with incoherent future orientations. His change in aspiration from one career to another might have been influenced by social forces or subjective evaluation, but what remained consistent within these ‘options’ was his preference for semi- skilled professions that did not require a college degree. Moreover, Edil aspired to such professions as were currently dominated by men in Kyrgyzstan, which illustrates the effects of gender on occupational aspirations. Deeper analysis would link these goals to his gendered and social class habitus. More specifically, Edil’s preferences for a car mechanic, a traffic police or a sportsman were still within the range of his objective probabilities as a young man from a farm working class and gendered backgrounds.

Both Edil and his mother reported how the aunt and uncle had encouraged them to enter the mercantile business and to consider transnational labour migration in order to support their household. His household’s poor economic capital generated the conditions for the influence of his kinship group on his migrant trajectory in the future. Thus, Edil’s future aspirations were not individualized perspectives or decisions; such decisions were instead made jointly between him, his immediate family and the larger kinship group:

I am going to Moscow because my uncle is inviting me there. My mother also agreed with him. That’s why I am going there. What would I do if I remained here in the village?

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I need to make an effort too. If we had better conditions in the family, I would have remained in the village. But we don’t have a choice and I need to go to Moscow. I may even go before May (before his school academic year ends). I need to take care of my family. I need to take care of my young siblings. That’s why I am leaving for Moscow. It would have been the best to stay here with them. That’s it. Well, life in Moscow isn’t that easy too. But you need to do something in life, for the family. (Edil, Interview 2).

Edil’s kin not only provided informational resources about migration and kommertsia, but they were also drawn into assuming a responsibility to socialize Edil into the migrant culture of Moscow. Despite his trust and confidence in his kin, Edil demonstrated concerns about his prospective cultural context based on his marginal social position as a migrant from a Central Asian rural village. Edil demonstrates his reflexive, rather than ‘unconscious’, attitude in the following excerpt:

Q: Do you feel any fear of going there [to Moscow] without having visited it before?

E: Well, yes. I am scared. Well… hmm … I know that I will have problems. There will be difficulties. We go there and Russians will dictate what to do. They will also do hmmm well… it is difficult there… Moscow is still not our village … Moscow is not Kyrgyz land… It is difficult to work in someone else’s country and land. It would have been the best if we could work in our own land [country].

Q: How will you learn to work in Moscow?

E: Well, hmm, I will learn from my uncles. Or you make an effort to learn on your own, like ‘If you do this way, it will be like this’… (Edil, Interview 2)

Bearing the curse of negative symbolic capital as a rural migrant from Kyrgyzstan even before he actually arrived in Moscow, Edil demonstrated by his fears and misgivings the precarious state of social existence in his community.

Edil also demonstrated an established sense of place and community. The rural space was positively associated with his family, childhood, and nature. However, the rural context was also recognized as a space without any employment opportunities for youth like Edil. This recognition, as an element of his gendered class habitus, was conditioned by his family’s poor economic capital and his experience of continuing struggles to earn cash within the village and engage in urban kommertsia during school vacations. For these reasons, Edil envisioned a

198 migrant future in which he could earn money and send remittances to maintain the household in the village:

E: I like that its air is clean. And I have my mother and family here. I was born here and that’s why this place looks special to me (laughing). Well, what I dislike about this place. On the one hand, you can pretty much idle most of the time. Your family does not scold you. No, you cannot say that they won’t scold you, they do: What are you doing? If not my mother, then my grandma scolds us. I don’t like to live in the village. In general, I dislike idling here in the village. You just hang out in the street, idle around and do nothing. You study, and if you don’t go to school, then you will just waste your time, a come-and-go type of life. When spring comes, the hay making starts, you farm crops. That’s how you spend your time pretty much. That’s all.

Q: What would you like to be improved in the village?

E: I don’t like it here, as there is not anything to do [no jobs]. I wish we had industries or markets here. Hope we get jobs here. But you can also do cattle business. Or transport stones and sand for construction if you have your own truck.

Q: Why don’t you stay here and work then?

E: Livestock farming involves a lot of hurdles and difficulties. The work is repetitive: you take the cattle out in the morning and then bring them back in the evening.

Q: But is the migrant work easy then?

E: (smiling) But, the money is good, that’s why people are leaving (Edil, Interview 2).

Edil’s position demonstrated his comparative analysis of farm life and migrant work and their respective economic costs and benefits. Despite the difficult work conditions of migrants, he perceived that the money earned was good as compared to farm labour. Edil’s ‘choice’ to go to Moscow was structured by his sense of constraint on his thinking, choices and actions. His individual biography reflected the strong and persistent influence of his parents’ collective farmer class habitus. From a very young age, Edil had accumulated knowledge and skills in cattle farming and construction, and later he was involved in seasonal petty trading/kommertsia. Ultimately, he decided to migrate to Moscow as a worker. Throughout our conversations, Edil communicated his hesitance and fear for his future by the generality and vagueness of some of

199 his aspirations, but in the end (drawing on sources of support and information, including knowledge of migrant experience, obtained within his kinship network), he remained hopeful that learning to live in a new cultural and geographic context would lead to a better type of life.

6.5.5. Summary Edil dreamed of a happier future outside his village. However, as a son of precarious farmers, he no longer imagined a reality beyond menial labour. Workers and farmers like Edil and his parents, relatives and his friends, value a strong physical body capable of working on land with or without agricultural equipment. His masculine working class habitus oriented him towards those fields of actions, such as sports. Edil did not actively reject the ideology of academic success of his school, but his participation in the alternative fields of action, such as sports, farm, and kommertsia, encouraged him to accumulate and convert the physical capital, the knowledge of kommertsia, and future migrant capital. All these competences were neither valued in education nor in professional labour market.

Edil’s future trajectory as a rural migrant worker to Russia was, then, strongly shaped by the complex workings of his family’s lower socioeconomic class positions, especially the family’s economic livelihoods in the postsocialist transformation period, his gender and birth order among five siblings, and his Kyrgyz farmer habitus which favoured physical or manual labour skills over academic labour at school. All Edil’s strategies were not only mediated by a set of dispositions generated by his precarious social conditions, but also constrained by his position within larger social structures.

6.6. Conclusion In this chapter divergent trajectories pertaining to family roles, education, learning and future aspirations have been examined in the light of personalized situations, thinking and choices. Charting individual trajectories allowed us to better understand individual circumstances and personal agency within the structural conditions of families and schools. However, it becomes of paramount importance to link these trajectories to grasp and explain the collective experiences of this young, post-Soviet generation in a rural Kyrgyz community.

Through these three cases I reconstructed the genesis of distinctive types of youth habitus, which were objectified and became embodied as guiding systems of thought and action. The diverse experience and outcomes of the young people were partly the consequences of each

200 family’s socioeconomic circumstances, their ability to convert available social capital such as kinship and professional networks, their independent individual and family resources, the forms of capital accessible to and accumulated by the family and other members, and the age of the parents. Even what, on the surface, were un-predictable (un-structured) events, such the death of the fathers in all three cases, nevertheless took on analytical significance based on the idea, not that the events themselves were a reflection of one’s standpoint in a field, but rather that the effects and treatment of such events were subject to the structure of the field from a particular standpoint, determined by accumulated capital, habitus, and so on.

What we observe through these three cases is that each individual made choices, more or less consciously, within a (habitus/capital/field) structure of opportunities and constraints. We also note that the lives of young rural Kyrgyz people are socially structured and organized in historical time, with the result that certain rapid changes are experienced and understood as generationally distinct.

The detailed cases outlined the differing dispositions of three young rural people, whose families occupied different social positions in the village and these youth produced three distinct projections into the future. Darika’s example shows a fit between the intelligentsia family’s values and those of the educational field. This fit produced a coherent and positive, as well as successful, educational experience for Darika. Her academic success, in addition to her intelligentsia family’s continued configuration of cultural, social, and economic forms of capital, gave rise to her strong inclination to pursue post-secondary education. Kerim’s case revealed how his kommersant family’s values of leadership and profit making resulted in his active participation in student leadership positions in the educational field, already manifesting the leadership that the entrepreneurs have to show. He demonstrated the ability to discipline (Kyrgyz: tartipke chakiruu; bashkaruu). His success in student leadership, combined with the kommersant family’s further reconfiguration of economic, social, and cultural capital, shaped Kerim’s orientation towards entrepreneurship or more profitable employment. The case of Edil demonstrated how his family’s poor economic, cultural, and social capital generated the habitus of a young person who experienced disinterest, ambiguity and incoherence in the academic aspects of schooling combined with a strong inclination towards sports and other physical activities. Edil’s lack of interest in academic schooling produced disparate career goals, while his family’s precarious material conditions generated his strong inclination towards labour

201 migration.

These three cases reveal that in post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz society the impact of social origins, particularly the socioeconomic positions of rural families, produced divergent parental attitudes and practices in regards to education, which in turn resulted in the different educational habituses of these rural youth. Their individual habitus then oriented their current practices and future projections of themselves in relation to education, employment, residence and lifestyles in general. The case of Edil illustrates the experiences of those young people who have limited educational cultural capital, limited, unstable or no viable economic capital, and social capital that is mostly embedded in kinship networks. The trajectory of these young people typically includes labour migration. By contrast, Darika’s case illustrates and describes the youth trajectory of post-secondary education. Young people with this trajectory tend to have comparatively expansive educational cultural capital, stable economic capital, and extended social capital that includes kinship but also access to the parents’ professional networks. We observe a third trajectory in the case of Kerim, who illustrates the turn towards entrepreneurship among those young people who have only moderate levels of educational cultural capital, but stable and strong economic capital, including extensive social capital.

There were also characteristics common to these three young people. Firstly, for each of them farming was an integral part of their rural Kyrgyz cultural life. They all learned the necessary skills, such as attending to livestock and serving their family whether preparing food, growing vegetables, or other activities, at a very young age. According to all of these three young people, farming and serving their kinship in the village was not an alternative work option. However, the work for wage (to support the family back in the village) and work to the service of the larger community and the state was. Secondly, Darika, Kerim and Edil and their parents reproduced common educational doxa about the importance of education in the post- Soviet economy. These parents believed that employment opportunities for youth had become much more limited than in the Soviet era, and that higher education was therefore essential in accessing stable forms of professional employment. However, what emerge strongly are their diverging interpretations of the type of knowledge within and outside the school, which they want their children to acquire and learn: tartip (discipline) of oneself especially in the context, in which often these parents and the youth complained about missing among people in the times of postsocialist crisis and transition. According to Darika, Kerim, and Edil and their parents, the

202 discipline to study well, to work and live honestly, and to lead the community and the state is no longer there. Therefore, the parents of these youth and the young people themselves felt that they needed to go to school and learn to discipline themselves and others, hinting the need and importance of tartip (the discipline) to be incorporated as a characteristic of their cultural capital acquired in the school (and in the case of Edil, further solidified in the local mosque). Tartip (the discipline) is also embodied cultural capital that one acquires in the family, the extended family, and the peer group, instilled through everyday routines of household work, social interactions, in the sports practice, and community events such as funerals and weddings.

This chapter has presented a portrait of rural Kyrgyz youth in the postsocialist transformation by outlining indicative cases of their divergent trajectories. The next chapter provides more detail to that portrait by exploring variations within these trajectories.

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Chapter 7

Persisting and emerging social inequalities in families and education: Post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz youth trajectories

7.1. Introduction In Chapter Six I presented three distinct types of habitus of rural youth, along with their diverging strategies and future trajectories, as empirically informed analytical categories to explain the transformation as well as the reproduction of social structure and social relations in post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz society. In this chapter I argue that each of these types of rural youth habitus can be conceived in relation to distinct combinations of forms of capital resulting from distinct strategies of conversion and conversion of those forms, as well as from the history and positioning within various fields of individuals and households (and sometimes broader networks). These three types of youth trajectories are not, however, rigid analytical categories. They are identified to initiate further analysis of the typology of the data sets of rural Kyrgyz youth developed in this study, as well as variations across those data sets.

7.2. Clusters of youth trajectories, sub-cluster variations, and social inequalities Youth in the first type of habitus - illustrated in the last chapter by the case of Darika - predominantly employ strategies to accumulate intelligentsia’s cultural capital, imagine themselves into the future of post-secondary education and professional employment, and aspire to maintain their social positions as members of the rural intelligentsia or improve their social positions as urban intelligentsia. Youth in the second type of habitus, exemplified in the last chapter by Kerim, produce strategies oriented to further accumulating economic capital, but also converting it into and accumulating the institutional cultural capital to be used instrumentally as means, not so much to learn a skill or knowledge in itself, as to solidify their leadership in the village communal network as well as their social capital. In contrast to the strategies of youth in the first habitus, this conversion strategy also allows youth in this entrepreneurial future trajectory to disassociate themselves from reliance on conventional public employment wages or salaries. The youth in this type of habitus envision various forms of entrepreneurial future in the

204 village or elsewhere, by means of which they seek to expand their economic assets further and build political and social capital in an emerging category of wealthy rural households. The third type of youth habitus includes those youth with limited post-secondary educational aspirations, whose energy is mostly devoted to ‘getting-by’ strategies, and whose future orientation is towards transnational labour migration. In the case of the third group of youth, it is their lack of strategy and agency vis-à-vis the fields of formal education and professional employment that reproduces their lower social positions within the existing social hierarchy in the village and beyond. As was detailed in the case of Edil in the previous chapter, the intergenerational transmission of economic and cultural disadvantage structures their views of the future as precarious and unstable.

The differences between the habitus of these youth can be explained through an analysis of their families as sites of social reproduction and transformation, for it is the families that initially shape the individual habitus of the youth. In the previous chapter, this approach established a strong link between the social positions of families—former Soviet intelligentsia, emerging class of successful post-Soviet kommersants, former Soviet kolkhoz workers or emerging migrant workers—and the emerging habitus of the youth. As we saw, the differing social positions of these families reflected their possession of different forms of capital, such as rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia cultural capital, political and professional social capital, and kommertsia-based economic capital, and the volume and composition of these forms of capital. Cultural capital in this context indicates the cultural resources including the possession of higher educational qualifications (institutionalized form of cultural capital), objectified cultural resources (such as home library, subscription to newspapers and journals), and the embodied cultural habits and tastes (such as the linguistic capital that is distinguished by the use of proverbial Kyrgyz expressions, the knowledge of Russian). Social capital includes the networks maintained by families, including extended kinship groups (from family to tribes), local political leaders (local government and political parties), and professional ties, both within and outside the village. Economic capital is characterized by the ownership of bigger, newer, and more urban- style houses (often with brick houses), barns, cattle and more acres of land, within and beyond the village, and by regular wages, and including migrant remittances or business deals.

The analysis of the detailed accounts of their post-Soviet conditions of social existence helped us to understand how diverging principles of vision and division generate and are

205 generated by the specific social position of persons endowed with differing volumes and structures of capital. These embodied cognitive, affective and behavioural dispositions were identified as habituses that produced distinct and diverging strategies and orientations towards the future. Bourdieu defines the concept of habitus as a set of

…systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated' and ‘regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1990; p. 53)

Dispositions, strategies and future orientations of the three young people reflected the objective conditions of class-specific (as well as gender-specific) existence, namely their intelligentsia, entrepreneurial, or farmer-migrant class positions (Bourdieu, 1984). As Bourdieu argues,

Each class condition is defined, simultaneously, by its intrinsic properties and by the relational properties, which it derives from its position in the system of class conditions, which is also a system of differences, differential positions, that is by everything which distinguishes it from what it is not and especially from everything it is opposed to; social identity is defined and asserted through difference (Bourdieu, 1984; p. 172).

Differentially positioned youth share a collective, class-specific habitus. Darika’s case illustrated the sense of the world of the rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia class, while Kerim illustrated that of the emerging wealthy stratum in this post-Soviet Kyrgyz village, and Edil reflected the sense of precariousness and uncertainty of the class of former kolkhoz labourers and emerging migrant workers. Bourdieu explains class habitus as follows:

biological individuals who, being the product of the same objective conditions, are endowed with the same habitus: social class (in itself) is inseparably a class of identical or similar conditions of existence and conditionings and a class of biological individuals endowed with the same habitus, understood as a system of dispositions shared by all individuals who are products of the same conditionings. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990; p. 59)

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Having analyzed these three distinct types of youth habitus and trajectories, it is important to highlight here that the strategies and the sense of the world of these youth should be treated as emergent orientations, for their dispositions are still being formed as they experience their world through participation in different fields of action as they grow up.

The intention in this chapter is to consolidate the established characteristics of the three typologies by including the biographies of the other thirty-three young people in this study. Below each typology of rural Kyrgyz youth trajectories is presented separately and in more detail. Additionally, this chapter presents variations within these trajectories by examining seemingly diverse strategies of accumulating and converting forms of capital from one another. The variations identified are explained by the possession of differing volumes and compositions of capital, as well as by different accumulation and conversion strategies.

Discussion of variations within class-based types of youth trajectories alludes to the understanding that each young person carries a unique set of dispositions despite sharing key characteristics of her/his class habitus. It is therefore important to conceptualize the unique characteristics of embodied principles of vision and action. According to Bourdieu (1984), an individual habitus is not a unique system of mental structures; rather it is a subjective variation of the past objective conditions of a collective:

Accordingly, the individual strategies of these rural Kyrgyz youth result from their possession of differing volumes and compositions of the forms of capital. Therefore, the unique habitus of each young person in this study still characterizes the common trajectory, though oriented by the key dispositions of their social class through minor variations in their strategies.

This chapter concludes with the broader claim that youth trajectories should be analyzed together with the positions of their families and the resources available to them within the

207 hierarchical structures of their society. The forms of capital available to the youth in this study, in their families and in school, are closely tied to their submission to familial and social norms. Their success in the educational field, especially under the conditions of poor education quality in rural areas, is shaped principally by their families’ social positions. However, the future trajectories of these rural youth are also influenced by the changing characteristics of the post- Soviet conditions of employment and educational opportunities, which transform, to some extent, the initial social positions of these youth (and their families). Thus, the findings of this study help to construct a deeper understanding of the sources and mechanisms of social transformation and persistent as well as emerging social inequalities by analyzing the dispositions and practices of young people and their distinct experiences of the relatively rapid and drastic changes in the objective conditions of material existence in transitioning post-Soviet societies.

7.3. Intelligentsia habitus, conversion of cultural capital and professional futures In Chapter Six, Darika’s case was presented to illustrate key characteristics of a larger group of youth in this study, whose experiences, strategies, and orientations towards the future are constituted by the relations of cultural capital to the educational field and the field of professional labour/occupation. This type is characterized by a prevalent emphasis on the primacy of cultural capital, which takes the form of being highly educated and kulturnyi. The dominant strategies of these youth and their families are oriented towards accumulating educational cultural capital and aspiring to some type of professional post-secondary education and salaried employment future. Cultural capital conversion strategies are based on their relatively stable family economic situations and encompass actions directed towards enhancing higher education opportunities and investing in skills, including foreign language and computer skills, which can currently get consideration in the labour market in Kyrgyzstan. Young people in this cluster are engaged in the intergenerational and multi-generational transmission, conversion, and mobilization of the cultural capital of the intelligentsia and of their professional parents into their own emergent educated habitus. Their parents as well as their grandparents transmit the values of the intelligentsia to them within their family fields, despite continued tensions between their immediate rural farm culture and the urban-centered values of the educational field. Due to this transmission of values, these young people develop a consistent

208 educated habitus that enables them to feel like fish in the water when dealing with the dominant values of their schools.

The self-reports of the youth in this cluster on their mundane activities in the family, on the farm, among their peers and in school, succinctly capture how the relative occupational security and economic stability of rural Kyrgyz professional families during the Soviet and post- Soviet periods has produced a stability of thought in youth which continues to orient their strategies by pooling all forms of capital, including the available social networks and cultural capital of the intelligentsia family, in turn to reproduce their intelligentsia and professional social position. Their education-oriented practices, formed by their persisting intelligentsia attitudes, pave their aspirations towards stable and salaried employment and their pathways towards destinations of a professional future. Growing evidence of the rate of unemployment and of poverty among the university-educated intelligentsia, especially among the rural intelligentsia, may raise concerns over the probability of achieving a professional future. While the case of Darika speaks to this the concerns about a professional future quite clearly, in fact the strategy of cultural capital conversion and the probable trajectory of a professional future is a dominant story line in five cases (Kymbat, Dinara, Roza, Saltanat, and Jangyl) and it emerges in mixed forms in another nine cases (Asylzat, Jangyl, Begay, Nurgazy, Suyumkan, Nuriza, Saltanat, Adilet, Saikal). It is also important to point out that while this type of youth strategy is predominant in the biographies of female youth in this study (two male out of 15 youth in total), it appears to be a less attractive trajectory to male rural Kyrgyz youth.

7.3.1. The rural Kyrgyz intelligentsia habitus and the changing meanings and values of kulturnyi

In the conditions of post-Soviet Kyrgyz education and society, the meanings of cultural capital as well as the context in which it is valued has undergone changes. The central aim of the familial strategies of this cluster of youth is the production of a kulturnyi person, or a person with ‘culture’ and ‘moral integrity’ (Kyrgyz: tartip; tarbiya). The reproduction of a kulturnyi person is strongly supported by the intergenerational transmission of the cultural capital associated with the status of intelligentsia. To begin with, I detail the core characteristics of being, behaving, feeling, and thinking as kulturnyi in this rural Kyrgyz society, which were introduced in the biography of Darika in Chapter Six. The intelligentsia families generally consider themselves to be kulturnyi people in the village and they transmit the values associated with that status to their

209 children. They perceive that the kulturnost, or the habits of the educated and cultured person, rest on her/his possession of the institutionalized cultural capital, which is obtained from schools, universities or colleges and typically takes the form of academic degrees in teaching or the arts.

Simply holding a degree from an educational institution does not, however, automatically establish one as kulturnyi, or even necessarily enable one to lay claim to the values of an intelligentsia family. To achieve ends, institutionalized cultural capital needs to be converted into embodied forms of this culture, such as demonstrating good manners (tarbiyaluu), obeying the rules and norms (tartiptuu), maintaining personal hygiene (taza) and practising a literary linguistic style, characterized especially as the absence of coarse language in Kyrgyz and good proficiency in Russian language. The latter in particular aligns with Bourdieu’s (1993) claim that language style and form are the salient markers of social distinction, demonstrating proximity to positions of power and privilege in a particular social space. In Chapter Six, Darika’s speech and linguistic behavior in the interviews clearly reflected her family’s intelligentsia class position. The youth in this cluster demonstrate fluent and familiar linguistic competence, manifested in their ability to speak to the point, choose ‘right’ words, and maintain a ‘right’ type of posture and tone. They usually employ an eloquent language style with rich vocabulary, proverbial expressions, references to novels and academic terminologies with Russian equivalents, and in this process they establish their linguistic and hence social distinction from those who do not embody such competence.

The embodiment of intelligentsia class-specific linguistic capital results mainly from the availability of cultural capital in the home. In the last chapter, Darika’s eloquent and elaborate speech with rich proverbial references exemplified the successful conversion of a parent’s linguistic capital and the transmission of the kulturnyi habitus. Another young woman, Akmaral (17), portrayed this habitus by noting, “We can distinguish those who have never gone to school from those who have school education and have completed university. The difference between them is like Earth and the sky” (Akmaral, Interview 2). Similarly, in defining the ‘educated person,’ other parents as well as the youth in this cluster often made reference to Kyrgyz sayings or quoted from novels. A female student, Raihan (15), referring to the saying ‘illiteracy is blindness,’ argued that an uneducated person was similar to a blind one in that they would not be able to ‘see the world’ and so to ‘enjoy life.’ Another female student, Keremet (16), referred to the literary character of a ‘Mankurt,’ described by the well-known Kyrgyz writer, Chyngyz

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34 Aitmatov, as a person who lacks knowledge of himself and his family origins . In contrast to Aitmatov’s Mankurt, who is stripped off his memory of himself, his family, and community, and the tribe (the past), the interpretations of these youth and their families of Mankurt also include the illiterate rural person. When compared to their interpretations of illiterate Mankurt, the meanings of kulturnyi or culturedness according to some of these youth, include the ability to set a future goal and achieve it through education. Education, for this cluster of youth, is a necessary resource for ‘extending’ one’s individual power and enabling one to move across and beyond social and physical boundaries in the future.

When Darika’s mother exclaimed (above, Chapter Six), “People like you and me are different. We are educated people,” she was asserting the cultural and social distinction of the intelligentsia stratum and the role of education in producing that distinction. Expanding on this question of social and cultural distinction, Saltanat’s grandfather (65), a former kolkhoz administrator and avid reader of Kyrgyz literature, along with his partner (a retired early childhood educator), confidently confirmed the role of education in the transformation of an uneducated “Mountain Kyrgyz” into an educated ‘kulturnyi’ person (Kyrgyz: adam), again by referring to these mountain Kyrgyz people as ‘Mankurts’. He argued, “Education enlightens you; you get out of the darkness. An uneducated person is like living in darkness. They [the uneducated] usually speak rudely and their speech is always up and down [not fluent]. They behave like ‘Mountain Kyrgyz’ or Mankurt’ (Saltanat’s grandfather interview). In the views of these intelligentsia families and their youth, schooling is an important phase in the life of a young person, enabling them to undergo a cultural as well as physical metamorphic process of personal change from a ‘rough,’ ‘rude’ and ‘uncivilized’ ethnic personhood into a ‘cultured’ and ‘not mountain’ one. In addition to schooling, the transformation into a kulturnyi person occurs in family contexts, where all the members engage in the transmission of their cultural capital to their younger ones. In the following example of Keremet the reproduction of intelligentsia family values is clearly seen:

I go to school to get education, widen my worldview, achieve my goals in life, and learn useful things for my future family and life. Without education, you are just a Mankurt.

34 See Mozur (1987) Doffing ‘Mankurt’s cap’.

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You cannot even wish and achieve your goals in life. If a person gets a good education she can achieve something in life (Kyrgyz: bir nersenin ichinen chigam degen oi)” (Keremet Interview 2)

In the case of this cluster, cultural capital transmission occurs coherently across generations and we can easily observe the continuity of its core characteristics; however, what kulturnyi means had shifted unmistakably. As the socio-political context has fundamentally changed over the last two and half decades (since the national independence in 1990s), so too the makeup of the cultural capital of the intelligentsia had not remained static. A retired teacher, Saltanat’s grandmother (65) expressed her irritation towards the younger generation’s focus on accumulating wealth rather than learning to become a kulturnyi person by widening their worldview through schooling. As she stated,

one wonders whether these youth are going to school and learning manners. I wonder whether their school is able to educate them. I send my grandchildren to school so they learn at least 36 letters and the mathematical logarithmic table. We lowered our expectation of them from becoming Doctors of Philosophy (Russian: Kandidat Nauk). I think there is hardly anyone who still has high expectations (Saltanat’s grandfather’s Interview).

She likewise noted the changing values of the younger generations as follows: “When you were growing up, your generation learned the cultured way of behaving because you read books and learned manners from these characters,” and “Nowadays youth are interested in technology and making money. They think that money, not education, is the most important thing in life.” As though confirming the observations of Saltanat’s grandmother, in my interviews with the young people I found that, for their generation, science and technology had become the key components of post-Soviet Kyrgyz cultural capital. According to these youth, the practice of schooling and reading literature alone could no longer determine one’s cultural capital and intelligentsia status; scientific and technological fluency was also believed to be necessary to connect one to the current age. Saltanat explained this changing meaning and context of the cultural capital when she said, “We live in the 21st century; it is a society of educated people. It was before that you could be illiterate and survive in life” (Saltanat, Interview 2). It is the changing meanings of embodied cultural capital (of being educated, or kulturnyi) and the post-Soviet educational or scholastic cultural capital, linked with the status of the intelligentsia stratum, which explains

212 variations in cultural reproductive strategies and hence differences within this first cluster of young people

In summary, rural Kyrgyz culture is produced as well as reproduced by extended kinship social relations, and predominantly by the grandparents, parents and relatives of the younger children. The youth in this cluster reproduced the gendered social world by embodying the gendered habits, the gendered perception of their domestic roles, and gendered perceptions of their future. However, the pursuit to become successful in their local community by converting rural Kyrgyz, farm cultural capital was not the entire interest of the youth in this cluster. In the process of participating, competing and struggling in the conversion of intelligentsia cultural capital, the reproduction of the privileged position of kulturnyi is at stake for families of the intelligentsia. It is not simply a matter of having parents or relatives with institutional cultural capital accessible at home, but of the specific educational strategies employed by the parents and others at home as a part of their daily lives. These strategies generate the educated habitus of the young people and ensure their success in the school system as well as in negotiating and adjusting the content of their cultural capital as ‘legitimate’ players in the changing context of the educational “game”.

7.3.2. Conversion and conversion of cultural capital In the course of observing youth and their families in this study, I noticed that they were engaged in multiple, simultaneous and relational processes of conversion of available cultural capital, as well as economic and social capital, in order to convert them to the scholastic cultural capital of the younger generation. First of all, the parents and family members typically had higher educational degrees, and had held or continued to hold professional jobs, and they instilled the values of the intelligentsia throughout the childhood of this generation. Secondly, despite clear evidence of unemployment and underemployment within their families despite their educational degrees, these youth inculcated the importance of being highly educated along with retaining faith and hope in the future, if not the current, value of cultural capital in its institutionalized form—a diploma.

The families of the youth in this cluster maintain, to some extent, their tradition of valuing books, newspapers, and other cultural resources, and their children are exposed at a young age to those resources as well as to their school textbooks. As was outlined in the

213 biography of Darika, it is evident that the parents’ relative economic stable conditions, due to their income from wages and cattle farms, and their intelligentsia cultural capital incorporated as an intelligentsia habitus, enables them to purchase more cultural resources and their youth to appropriate and use these resources with the specific purpose of accumulating more cultural capital. Most of these families possess a collection of literature; often substantial home libraries, especially when one or both of the parents have worked or continue to work as teachers. Akmaral’s grandmother (70) expressed surprise in asking, ‘How could a teacher live in a house without books on shelves?” These parents and youth appreciate their family cultural resources as a type of ‘wealth’ and books as a form of ‘inheritance’ to be passed from one generation to another.

I often noted that the households in this cluster arrange desks or tables with chairs for children to carry out their schoolwork at home. This physical environment resembled, on the one hand, the learning environment of the school in that the very furniture reflected expectations of discipline and formality, and on the other hand, it was reminiscent of forward-looking professional work environments. The youth and their parents acknowledged that they devote time for schoolwork in the home; this is predominantly the case when the children are young. The parents are actively engaged in the literacy development stage of their children, often teaching them to read, write, and count, and later to discuss historical facts, literature, technology, and politics. The social conditioning of these youth into the culture of the intelligentsia, which reflects the academic culture of the school, produces an appreciation of their cultural resources and of their scholastic physical environment.

In the case of a need for more expert help, these parents reach out to the external community, be it relatives, school teachers, or an institution, to arrange extra lessons for their children. Youth in this cluster are often enrolled in private tutoring with teachers or relatives. The biographies of Nuriza (16) and Saltanat (16) provide examples of these strategies. Nuriza’s maternal grandfather tutored her in mathematics, despite her disinterest in this discipline, as her father believed that Nuriza needed good mathematical skills to pass the university entrance examinations.

The subjective evaluation of these students as ‘the best’ and ‘naturally intelligent’ manifests one characteristic of the intelligentsia’s educated habitus. Their self-image as accomplished learners rests on a commonly held belief in the ‘naturalness’ of intelligence

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(Kyrgyz: balanin nary jagynan). Here we observe a manifestation of the successful acquisition of intelligentsia cultural capital in its embodied form by these youth, which is clearly supportive of the subsequent acquisition of educational cultural capital in academic institutions.

The link between the economic capital of these parents and families and their appropriation of cultural capital can be established through an analysis of different strategies oriented towards the one ultimate goal: the conversion of more cultural capital in its institutionalized form. Firstly, the parents’ efforts in purchasing books, teaching literacy, and generally engaging with their children in the learning process at home presupposes an expenditure of time that is made possible by their possession of economic capital. Secondly, in cases where the parents of these youth, despite their college or university degrees, suspend their occupational engagement in favour of improving their economic capital, and hence their social position, they often begin the process of reconverting the accumulated or accumulating economic capital into the children’s scholastic cultural capital.

All the strategies of transforming capital into the cultural capital of youth require a concerted and significant expenditure of time, attention, care, and concern, so as to personalize, and thus to successfully embody, this form of capital (Bourdieu, 1986). The solid investment of these parents and families in the cultural capital of the youth in this cluster aims to yield profits in the long run, in the form of symbolic status as educated people or intelligentsia, as well as monetary gain in the form of salaries. Thus, the ultimate end is pursued despite growing dissatisfaction with the content and quality of education in rural schools and its poor social and economic returns, and current material necessity among a few of the families in this cluster. In the changing conditions and shifting symbolic meanings in the current educational field the scholastic yield from familial educational strategies in the home becomes more essential to their children’s educated habitus to achieve well academically beyond their schools, and to enable comparisons of their scholastic aptitude with youth who receive better quality urban education by dint of their physical proximity to the centers of cultural elitism. This helps to explain how differences in student learning and their subjective evaluations of themselves as learners can be traced to the scholastic yield from parental and family domestic educational actions.

All these youth and their families are engaged in the same struggle for cultural capital. The mechanisms of the transmission, acquisition, and re-conversion of economic as well as cultural capital are beyond the simple capacities of the rural school, which are confined to

215 educational enrolment and participation. The youth and their families all struggle for a type of cultural capital that is rare in the local educational field so as to be able to succeed in the national and regional employment/labour market field(s). Despite growing evidence of unemployment and even poverty among the university educated intelligentsia, especially in rural regions, these youth and their parents still consider institutionalized cultural capital—in the form of university diplomas—to be an important social resource in differentiating their overall lifestyle from those of the emerging kommersant and migrant classes in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan, as well as in obtaining jobs in the future. The parents continue to invest in the conversion of their children’s cultural capital with the hope of a return to ‘social normality’ in the future. The normality of the future here refers to a return to the values of ‘a formal profession,’ ‘scientific knowledge,’ and ‘labour’ (in the sense of ‘intellectual labour’). It is important to note that these youth do not have first-hand experience of ‘the normal life’ of a tight correspondence between education and employment in the Soviet era, yet they continue to reproduce family doxa based on the assumption of such a correspondence. Deep in this interaction between subjective hopes and aspirations and objective conditions is their commitment to the struggle to maintain or re- establish their previous symbolic and social position as the rural intelligentsia. To what extent the acquisition or conversion of cultural capital translates into economic capital remains quite controversial for the growing number of young women and men in rural Kyrgyzstan given the current stagnant labour markets.

7.3.3. Professional futures In this section on the projections of the youth in the first cluster, their hopes and expectations for professional future(s) are conceptualized, following Bourdieu (2000) as constitutive of a class habitus. Ensuing from this conceptualization, analysis reveals that these youth and their families anticipate professional futures, often explaining and/or justifying their aspirations by their dedication to Kyrgyz society and economy or their local rural community. The capacity of the youth in this cluster to anticipate professional futures is conditioned by their intelligentsia habitus, which is itself generated by their intelligentsia families’ experiences of the relative stability of such professions as teaching, medicine, and accounting, as well as of their incomes, though these have usually significantly depreciated in relative as well as absolute value in the wake of the economic crisis that accompanied the postsocialist transformation. In the biography of Darika, the characteristic of this type of youth was clearly evident, as despite the sudden death

216 of the father, the household’s reliance on a single income of the mother, and the heavy responsibility that fell on the women to manage the farm, Darika and her family still enjoyed relative economic stability as compared to youth like Edil in the third cluster. Their relative economic comfort then enabled the stability of their projections of themselves into a professional future.

With the help of their parents, youth in this first cluster pull together all available resources and energy, including time, emotion, and money, to convert and enhance their educational cultural capital. It is this attitude or disposition towards education and academic success that sharply differentiates this from the other clusters of youth. Their sense of self is rooted in education and a professional career in the future. Their expectation of a professional future is supported by a large volume of cultural capital that is transmitted inter-generationally and produces an interest in further conversion of this form of capital, though this process is constrained in part by structural changes in the fields of education and employment brought about by the post-Soviet capitalist transformation. For their parents, the world of post-secondary education and a professional/occupational future is generally familiar territory; these parents navigate through the educational and employment fields with assurance, for the most part regardless of changes in the specific condition of these fields. They are able to forge links competently between the past, the present, and the future.

Bourdieu (1984) describes social class as being based on judgments of classification, which themselves go through the process of being classified and classifying. He argues that “[t]aste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (Bourdieu, 1984; p. 6). By denying value to, or even any possible future of, kommertsia and transnational migration, these youth and their families engage in acts of classifying worthwhile ‘pathways’ and ‘futures.’ Or as Bourdieu puts it, “...one has all the acts of refusal in which what is valued by one is refused by the other…” (1984; p. 6). Their capacity to envision professional futures is simultaneous to the process of rejecting the emerging youth strategies and trajectories, already dominant among post-Soviet adults, of kommertsia and labour migration. Often referencing assigning them as temporal solutions, most of the parents and the youth in this cluster explicitly exclude both migration and kommertsia as morally and socially

217 destructive of the reproduction of dominant Kyrgyz familial culture. In their view, the current precarious economic conditions and poor job prospects of rural migrant Kyrgyz are closely connected to their educational levels. As many students and their parents argue, the uneducated mountain Kyrgyz are left with the ‘dirty’ jobs of washing dishes, sweeping the streets, and labouring in construction sites where no ‘respectable’ Russian citizens would work. Doing such ‘dirty’ jobs is seen by them as degrading to one’s human dignity and one’s pride as Kyrgyz. Attyrgul (17, female) summarized these sentiments succinctly: “I feel sad that many Kyrgyz migrants are sweeping the streets, cleaning the dirt and washing the dishes of the Russians. I think it is how Kyrgyz are badly treated (southern Kyrgyz dialect: Paska (tomongo) tepkendik)” (Attyrgul, Interview 2). Although the youth in this cluster vary in their opinions of those who generate economic capital and improve their financial conditions, they maintain, somewhat more consistently, that such people lack ‘culture.’ Keremet (16, female) spoke to this viewpoint: “These people build big houses and have cars. But when you start talking to them you see that they have nothing in their brain” (Interview 2). Accordingly, for these youth from intelligentsia backgrounds, the significance of cultural capital as against economic capital, and their current concerted efforts to accumulate cultural capital, are justified as ‘the right way to live.’ In the current competitive conditions of the post-Soviet educational field, as well as of the kommertsia and migrant labour market fields, it is never enough to accumulate capital as individuals and families only; it is necessary also to seek to maintain the relations of capital/field/habitus—and thus the legitimacy of a specific classification system—more generally.

As mentioned earlier in this section, professional parents and youth tend to engage in acts of classification and judgment to degrade the capacity of others to accumulate educational cultural capital. As university education and cultural experience become available to the masses, acquiring higher education is no longer extraordinary, and the former evaluative criterion of holding a university fails to retain its previous symbolic power. In this context, the embodiment of the desirable characteristics of cultural capital is increasingly based on a distinction between those who associate with such capital ‘naturally’ and those—notably the group of “rush to university” young people—who have merely acquired cultural capital but not ‘culture’. This distinction serves to exclude those young people who acquire a university degree with poor prospects for employment, and who are widely believed to bribe their way through admission, evaluation, and graduation from their programs, thus, lacking institutional cultural capital and the

218 values and practices attached to it. The competition to benefit from the perceived value of higher education allows alternative strategies to emerge and even dominate within the system. For many youth in the first cluster, the currently widespread corruption devalues the educational cultural capital of such students. Saykal, a female student (15), argued strongly that, while bribery and corruption in university education can secure the goal of obtaining a degree, it becomes a self- defeating strategy as well as one that places a financial burden on families. Students such as Saykal consider themselves ‘inherently’ and ‘culturally’ better ‘fit’ to higher education as they study ‘by themselves’. They often use the expression oz kuchum menen okuim—to study with one’s own effort and labour—to mean that their university admission, studies and graduation would not involve any of the bribery, corruption and nepotism that have become common in the Kyrgyz higher education system since the collapse of the USSR.

While it is true that families, especially the parents and their cultural capital conversion strategies and resources, shape the imagined futures of the youth in this cluster, their aspirations include a range of complex choices and practices. We have observed that their choice of university, discipline and type of degree is negotiated and accommodated among the youth, their parents, grandparents, and sometimes their extended family members. As we noted in our discussion of Darika and her older brothers, the young people in this cluster actively debate, discuss, and oppose their families’ ‘choices’ for both further studies and a professional career. In Chapter Six I argued that Darika’s interest in journalism, which deviated from her mother’s expectations of a teaching career for her, still demonstrated her rural intelligentsia habitus since both these ‘preferences’ were within the objective probabilities of the intelligentsia. This is example of variations within the cluster. In earlier comments I noted the way that changes in the content of educational capital might help to explain variations and turbulence in an otherwise coherent and persistent trajectory.

There is no reason to believe that professional careers are less vulnerable than others to the uncertainties of the postsocialist transformationing economy, which is increasingly dependent on Russian-influenced geopolitics (e.g. Kyrgyzstan’s membership of the Eurasian Custom’s Union). The UNDP report by Slay, Danilova-Cross, Papa, Peleah, Marnie and Henrich (2014) on transitioning and developing countries in Europe and Central Asia argues conclusively that more years of schooling does not necessarily diminish vulnerability and poverty in those regions. On the contrary, the report concludes, the category of the poor in postsocialist societies

219 now includes “the working poor… public servants in such sectors as education, health, science, and the arts, as well as farm workers and petty traders, particularly in rural areas (and their families)” (Slay et al., 2014, p. 13). Their rural locations and occupational aspirations in education, health care, and other social sectors will, in all likelihood, lead the youth in this cluster to material poverty in the future. These youth acknowledge that their futures as professionals or intelligentsia are no guarantee of wealthy lifestyles. For them, their professional ‘calls’ are constructed rather on the basis of their ‘moral’ obligation to contribute to Kyrgyz society and economy. I note that such attitudes towards the national economy and their perceived ‘call to support people’ are generated through their positions as the rural intelligentsia. Croix (2014) argues that despite that the jobs of teachers, health workers, and bureaucrats may not give them a livable wage, but they do become the professional status, the job security, and more importantly, the access to social networks, which help to gain economic gains, often illegally. In addition, as Croix, notes these workers do not completely and solely rely on the agricultural production by tilling the land or attending the livestock.

7.4. Entrepreneurial habitus, conversion of/from economic capital, and entrepreneurial futures The individual biographies in this cluster open up the possibility of examining family economic strategies that are based on the conversion of future-oriented economic capital in the field of private business. Unlike the rural intelligentsia class, the relatively high social positions of the families in this cluster are dependent upon their newly accumulated economic capital side-by- side with the conversion of non-educational cultural and communal village social capital. The reproduction of their social positions relies less on the educational system than on the business field in which they have made and continue to invest their profits. Their pursuit of a specific type of village leadership by means of this specific mix of village entrepreneurial and communal social capital enables them to hold dominant status in a local area, although they draw on resources -economic, cultural, technological and other forms - from elsewhere. Thus, in this cluster of youth the importance of the mix of economic and communal social capital is apparent. Their economic and communal social capital conversion strategies result from their families’ stable and expanding economic capital and growing financial assets. However, it is important to note here that these families, like many others in this study, also experienced insecurity in the initial years, that is the 1990s, of the transition. What differentiates this type of family from

220 others is their disassociation or break from their socialist past, especially from their reliance on the state. These families have largely overcome insecure economic conditions by envisioning ‘uncertainty’ as an opportunity to break away from their past to construct an alternative future.

The young people’s economic and communal social capital conversion strategies in the educational field include their exceptional leadership tactics of establishing strong student support and challenging the authority of schools, while yet approaching all the issues strategically and diplomatically. Unlike the cultural capital conversion strategies of the professional trajectory, this trajectory is characterized by the intergenerational transfer and conversion of economic capital, and communal social capital and its strategies are oriented by the particular dispositions of risk taking, profit making and leadership. These dispositions structure the educational views and future orientations of these young people, particularly in regard to the expansion of the volume of their families’ economic capital and strengthening their symbolic privilege in the village and beyond. The conversion of economic capital into educational cultural capital serves as an alternative strategy of providing the necessary cultural and social resources in case the current economic and social context should change. The consistent improvement of their families’ socioeconomic position produces a strong sense of stability for these young people and their future aspirations. Despite a range of variations in future aspirations and parental occupational goals for the young people in this category, they typically envision a return to the village and the pursuit of a rural lifestyle in the future. Their distinct attitudes of risk taking, profit making, and strategies of economic capital conversion and reconversion enable them to find opportunities in the rural economic structures despite social upheaval and the generally bleak prospects of the post-Soviet rural economy. This type of youth habitus is highly masculine, and all three cases examined for this study are male. An example of this cluster of youth habitus, detailed in Chapter Six, was Kerim’s biography.

7.4.1. Entrepreneurial habitus - a new post-Soviet economic habitus Bourdieu (2000) argues that the post-French Algerian economic transformation required a radical transformation of the social and mental structures of Algerians, which had rested on pre- capitalist economic logic and practices. The capitalist transformation established the importance of economic capital over symbolic capital based on the logic of honor and philia. In studying the coping strategies of Polish workers in the postsocialist transformation, Mrozowicki (2011) noted that the role of economic capital among these workers had become more significant than that of

221 other forms, particularly as a result of the devaluation of physical labour, which had previously been a highly valued form of capital, especially in rural regions. Analysis of interviews with the young people and their parents in this study also indicates that the significance of economic capital came to eclipse that of other forms of capital during the postsocialist transformation of the economy. The post-Soviet economic transformation of this rural society also brought about diverging economic strategies among its people. Their previous economic logic - which rested on the traditional Kyrgyz kinship economy of honor, reciprocity, and solidarity embedded in Soviet collectivism or kolkhoz or bridage kollektiv—became all but incompatible with the logic of the monetized market economy. Croix (2014) argues that hero-entrepreneurship in the postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan draws both the admiration as well as criticism. The postsocialist Kyrgyz hero- entrepreneurs, who often narrated their entrepreneurial success relating with their wealth of knowledge (including from their educational and scientific training and from the work) and a vision of leadership and risk taking, also drew criticism among their villagers, about their wealth that was seized from the collective capital (machinery, land, and funds of the kolkhoz because of their social and administrative connections). However, in the case of the youth in this cluster, the sources of their capital investments for their future enterprises would likely stem from both their parents’ resources (social, cultural, administrative, and economic) – including those that Croix (2014) earlier described - and from the resources or the profits of their older siblings made from informal kommertsia and formal enterprises.

As we saw in the biography of Kerim, the previous doxa about the tight correspondence between education, well being, and socioeconomic prosperity has been challenged. Kerim’s familial trajectory of successful entrepreneurship and the subsequent yield of their accumulated economic capital were converted into the symbolic privilege of ‘kolunda bar’. Such a transformation of the social position of this family questions prevailing doxic assumptions of the superior status of the cultural elite or the intelligentsia. Here the arbitrariness of previous classifications that privileged the intelligentsia over other social groups in the village has been exposed, resulting in a real contestation over the categories and mechanisms of social classification in post-Soviet society.

The economic capital that hierarchically positions its holders does not consist of material assets alone, for these become manifested in the person of these agents. In the case of these youth, their families’ relatively rich economic capital, accumulated within the twenty years since

222 the collapse of the Soviet system, is embodied in the form of their values and dispositions, or what Bourdieu (2000) elsewhere calls their ‘economic habitus,’ which is aligned with the current economic logic. One of the most vivid manifestations of the embodiment of economic capital, as we saw, is the linguistic capital of these youth. Kerim, Akyl (16), and Mukhtar (18) demonstrated their knowledge, arising from their masculine/gendered entrepreneurial habitus, of the specific language of entrepreneurship, including such terms as ‘loans to expand business,’ ‘profit’ and ‘the market price.’

7.4.2. Conversion of/into economic and communal capital The economic capital of the rural Kyrgyz family is transmitted and converted into different forms of capital through diverse strategies. One of these strategies is the conversion of economic capital into the educational cultural capital and social capital of its young people. In other words, the economic capital of these families is turned into the objectified form of cultural capital. Their economic resources enable the youth to have and to use cultural objects and resources that are rare, due to their affordability for many rural families. For example, Kerim, Akyl, and Mukhtar all had easier access to modern communication technologies and other cultural and educational resources because of this conversion of capital. Their parents paid extra attention to securing resources that they believed would contribute to advancing their educational status within local schools, bringing them up to par with the quality of learning in the cities and in the global context. These resources included computers and satellite TV programs, which were rare cultural objects, especially among those with poor material conditions.

I bought a laptop for 60,000 soms [CAD 1,500] for my son to be connected to his time. I do not want to boast here, but the computer is a necessity. We are living in the period of technology and information. Akyl lives in this era of technology. I want him to grow with his time requirements. He needs to learn to use a computer. But I tell him that I buy all these resources so he can learn modern skills. Otherwise, he should tell me that he does not desire to learn these things and I don’t need to invest then. But I believe that this is the time for science, technology and knowledge. Of course, he won’t be able to learn it quickly but he should not lag behind other people of his time. If he learns from now on, he will improve in the future. (Akyl’s father, Interview, p. 7)

Unlike the necessity of food and clothing experienced by Edil’s household, Akyl’s father

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(57) considered that the computer was ‘a necessity’ rather than ‘a luxury’. The definition of ‘necessity’ for this type of family is constructed as being beyond the basic goods required for survival. Although choosing these resources does not presume their immediate use value, the very attitude of the families in making these choices presupposes a certain amount of cultural capital, and such an investment is expected to yield its benefits in a different social market, such as the urban market of post-secondary education. The emphasis is on learning computer skills to be ‘connected with the requirements of his period’ so that he will not ‘lag behind other people.’ Such references to ‘time requirements’ and ‘other people’ were made to connect the aspirations of Akyl and his family to those of people in cities and other parts of the world, rather than to the immediate rural community, which is in itself a clear social marker. It is striking to note the difference between this attitude towards the changing meaning of educational capital and that of Darika’s family, which we noted in Chapter Six as well as in the earlier sections of this chapter on the professional trajectory of her cluster of youth.

The economic capital of wealthier families is converted into symbolic capital to support the conversion of scholastic cultural capital. The completion of secondary school in the village as well as a degree from post-secondary education should be considered simply as capital that Kerim and other youth in this cluster could convert into maintaining and building their social capital in the future. The youth in this cluster enjoy positive teacher instructional reinforcement and occupy student leadership positions. Kerim’s biography alluded to the fact that his family’s rich economic capital served as symbolic capital in his school experiences. Kerim was elected as the school student council president and enjoyed the privilege of this role, while Gulnara (18, female), who falls within Edil’s trajectory type, experienced lower teacher expectations, the disinterest of her teachers in her academic abilities, and even being slapped by her teacher despite not being responsible for the mess in her classroom. When their social class is brought into the analysis, these mundane incidents from the lives of the three youth suggest that the conversion of economic capital into different forms of capital is not just a matter of access to cultural objects and resources.

Additionally, the rich economic capital of families such as these results in tastes and lifestyles that lead them to develop the type of cultural capital normally associated with urban youth. For example, when comparing the city experiences of Edil and Kerim, we saw that their stories were quite different. Kerim went to the city for a vacation away from ‘the dirt’ of the

224 village, whereas Edil’s trip was to the market to manage a small stall with cheap Chinese goods. Families such as Kerim’s, who vacation in resorts and cities, provide further opportunities for their young people to adopt the values of urban culture and transport them back to the rural village. Such opportunities, which are possible only because of their rich economic resources, establish their distinctiveness from those many rural families whose trips to the cities are occasioned primarily by their material needs. However, Kerim preferred to retain his distinction as a village entrepreneur and community leader than to become an urban youth with a rural class and educational background.

The conversion of the economic capital of the family into the economic capital of its youth is carried out through familial inheritance practices. A clear manifestation of such transmission of the family’s capital to the young generation was seen when we considered the link between the general rules or norms of patrilineal inheritance, the birth-order and gender of the children, and their aspirations to entrepreneurial futures in their village. However, in the biographies of Kerim and Akyl, though both male heirs, we observed different attitudes towards traditional Kyrgyz inheritance norms. Kerim’s eldest brother possessed a substantial volume of economic capital and continued to expand his economic assets in both the city and the village; Kerim’s ‘choice’ to remain in the village and ‘manage’ the village farm was directly related to his interest in these and other economic assets of his family. His future inheritance included three houses with substantial land, a commercial farm, and a car. All of these were already designated to Kerim’s use, but they would fall completely under his ownership and control if he chose to remain in the village. In contrast to Kerim, Akyl did not encounter the immediate prospect of becoming a heir, or therefore the burden of carrying out the responsibilities associated with heirship. This can be attributed to the fact that his parents felt that they were still young and that Akyl had time to pursue more schooling, travel, and professional development. Having noted this marginal difference in their parents’ attitudes towards heirship and their immediate future, the strategies of these youth and their families were still directly linked to their household’s interest in maintaining and augmenting their social position as ‘kolunda bar’ and in preserving property ownership within their kinship group. In both cases, the preservation of the patrimony remained central to these families’ strategies and to the young people’s subordination of their individual future goals to these household strategies.

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7.4.3. Entrepreneurial futures A key characteristic of an entrepreneurial future is that stability in the future is guaranteed only if youth conform to the dominant family ideological doxa of allegiance to the kinship group and its inheritance rules in addition to being willing to contribute to the conversion of its economic capital. The preservation of the patrimony is central to the social reproduction of these families.

In contrast to those youth who project professional and migrant futures, the youth in this cluster ‘spot opportunities’ within their rural village despite the bleak prospects of the post- Soviet rural economy, the collapse of the youth labour market, and mass youth out-migration. One such entrepreneurial opportunity is to restructure their subsistence farms into commercialized and specialized farms. A clear distinction can be identified between these youth and those who assume their farms for subsistence use (Edil) or for the conversion of farm income and its conversion into educational cultural capital (Darika). On this note, Akyl elaborated his entrepreneurial idea in the following way:

I would remain on our farm (Russian: ferma). We have a different breed of sheep. Each of them costs 10,000 Kyrgyz soms [250 CAD]. We have 100 of them now. We are trying to expand this farm with this breed only. We could look after them well and sell them at higher market prices due to their breed. I think it is the best business to earn money (Russian: pribyl’) (Akyl, Interview 2)

Mukhtar (18) put a similar idea forward when he stated,

If I live in the village, I want to have a horse farm. Looking after horses is much easier and more profitable than any other cattle. Horses are independent animals. You let them free in the pasture, they return in the evening. Horses do not often get sick as compared to sheep and cows. If you sell horses you make more money. But of course it is difficult to open such a business, as the market price of horses is high. So one should buy them small and then grow them. The farm will grow gradually. (Mukhtar Interview 2)

These youth aspired to found formal types of business based on their subjective evaluation of the demand for specific services, that is, on their vision of entrepreneurship within objective probabilities, so for them the rural Kyrgyz economic context was not confined to cattle farm alone. They did not even consider petty trading or kommertsia a legitimate business despite the fact that the initial economic capital of these families had been generated from their involvement

226 in kommertsia. These families seemed to have approached kommertsia in the markets simply as a means to establishing their formal businesses. Moreover, as the capitalist transformation of the economy changed to allow and even encourage the establishment of formal businesses, the kommertsia that relied on the black market circulation of goods encountered more legal regulations and restrictions by the government. These youth also considered other possible profitable businesses such as opening a bank branch in their village (Kerim), leisure clubs, restaurants (Akyl), and car repair workshops (Mukhtar). These ideas for entrepreneurship were based on their objective conditions as well as on their subjective assessment of the current rural economy, which was surviving largely on migrants’ remittances. It is this vision of their lives in rural areas that differentiates the youth in this cluster from other groups of young people. These youth typically envision life in the village as the choice not of ‘culturally backward losers,’ or of Mankurt (as mentioned by the youth in Darika’s type of trajectory), but of concerned, nationalist ‘patriots’ of their country and community. Their aspirations are to a large extent those of the local/national petite bourgeoisie. They are also critical of those types of youth who either ‘rush into university’ even though they lack the necessary knowledge, or migrate abroad ‘to contribute to foreign economies.’ Primarily, the youth in this cluster demonstrate the service to one’s state and nation (Kyrgyzstan) and opposed to the ideals of the service to the world (Croix, 2014). They distinguish themselves as having higher educational qualifications as well as a business mindset rather than as simply pursuing university education to land professional jobs. In the former Soviet Central Asian countries, including Kyrgyzstan, the close link between higher educational attainment and business ventures has long been established (Slay et al., 2014).

Variations within this cluster become apparent when the volume and composition of the capitals possessed by the youth and their families are analyzed. Kerim and Akyl were endowed with relatively substantial economic and cultural capital. In addition, they occupied the position of family heirs, simply by dint of being the last born of the sons. Of the two, Akyl had more opportunities to convert his parents’ cultural capital into his cultural capital. Kerim’s mother had a diploma in trades and, as a woman, did not have access to social and political capital in the village. On the contrary, Akyl’s father occupied an influential position in the larger tribal community as well as in the village council. Unlike Kerim’s and Akyl’s strategies to convert their family’s accumulated economic capital into their own economic capital through the inheritance mechanism, Mukhtar (18) was directly involved in his family’s strategies of

227 accumulating initial economic capital. Of these three cases, Mukhtar had the least economic and cultural capital; moreover, Mukhtar was not the last-born son, as he had both a younger brother and sister. His household was considered young among these three families in this cluster, for his parents were in their forties, whereas Kerim’s mother and Akyl’s parents were in their fifties. Although Mukhtar’s extended family members occupied higher social positions in local institutions of symbolic authority such as village schools and mosques, the conversion and conversion of these forms of capital was not direct and easy but required the time, interest, and energy of these relatives as well as of Mukhtar himself.

These differences in the volume and composition of capitals then produced variations in the entrepreneurial future orientations of the three young people. Akyl’s orientations were towards a university education in software programs or architecture, as well as towards expanding his family’s commercial farm in the village, while Kerim hoped to pursue degrees either in law or economics, with a view to starting a business in banking services, and Mukhtar was leaning towards a college education in trades with the aim of starting a car mechanics workshop. Despite the minor divergence in their strategies, each of these male youth was pursuing or intending to pursue entrepreneurial projects in the future.

7.5. The habitus of necessity, ‘getting-by’ strategies of the capital-dispossessed and their precarious future The third cluster of youth and families are endowed with a low volume of economic and cultural capital, and thus occupy lower social positions in the economic and educational fields. They predominantly employ getting by strategies in everyday life to cope with the challenges of postsocialist transformation. The getting-by strategies of the youth and their families in this cluster denotes particular educational and family life practices, guided by the habitus of necessity, which orient the youth exclusively towards labour migration to Russian cities, the retail trade of low-end, cheap Chinese goods in small market stalls in nearby towns (kommertsia), or subsistence farming in the village. In contrast to the strategies of “cultural capital conversion” and “economic capital conversion”, the pattern of getting-by strategies is founded in a combination of poor stock and composition of the forms of capital, including the low volume of cultural capital, as well as the low amounts of economic capital possessed by these youth and their families. The most important properties of the youth who employ getting- by strategies include relatively low educational expectations of their parents, poor cultural

228 resources in the family, limited opportunities for parent-youth educational engagement at home, low interest in the core school curriculum, perceptions of teacher bias along class lines, and the orientation of daily practices towards physical labour, especially on the farm, in construction, and occasionally in urban markets. The dominant story line in the biographies of sixteen youth in this cluster is the strategy of ‘daily survival.’ The economic condition of families such as theirs is often described as ‘kolunda jok,’ literally translated as ‘not having anything or much in hands.’ The precarious socioeconomic position of these families in the postsocialist transformation period, and their lower institutional cultural capital, results in rather unstable thoughts and disparate post-secondary goals among their youth. Since these youth have little or no capital with which they could achieve anything other than passive reproduction, I suggest that their agency and strategies are limited to outlining clear and stable aspirations and establishing future life projects that are identifiable as well as agentive.

Unlike other youth in this study, whose projections of geographic mobility in their futures are shaped by feelings of being ‘forced’ to ‘choose’ to move to larger cities or other countries as unskilled labour migrants, the youth in this cluster are often assumed to face the inevitable future of ‘migration to Moscow’ as balee (Kyrgyz) or a misfortune, as Edil’s mother put it in Chapter Six. Their future trajectory of geographic mobility is, then, horizontal as they are obliged to move from one economically marginalized status, that is as an unemployed farmer with lower educational cultural capital in a post-Soviet Kyrgyz village, to another, that is that of a precarious migrant worker without legal status in Russia. An illustration of this cluster of youth was provided by Edil’s case in Chapter Six. The ‘getting by’ strategies in his story line are encountered in many of the biographies of both female and male youth from the former kolkhoz farm worker and the current migrant and farmer backgrounds.

7.5.1. Habitus of dispossessed former Soviet collective farmers and precarious migrant workers The third cluster of youth and families are endowed with a low volume and composition of economic and cultural capital, and they occupy low social positions as subsistence farmers, petty traders, and labour migrants in the larger economic field. Their social positions are a consequence of the postsocialist transformation of the economy, in which as Walker (2007) also observed in the case of vocational youth in rural Russia, the physical labour was devalued when economic capital became the primary source of distinction and privilege. In contrast to their

229 previous valued economic and social roles as kolkhoz workers in the workers’ socialist state, their physical labour found itself severely undervalued in the post-Soviet capitalist economy.

Despite the initial privatization policies of the Kyrgyz government, by which these households were given land along with a small herd of cattle and sheep, they quickly found themselves at the lower end of the economic capital configuration in their society. As former workers of the state-owned kolkhoz farms, their life-strategies in this new economy were concentrated on coping with the material necessities of their daily existence. Finding themselves under severe economic necessity to feed their households with no income and no employment of any sort but for a small farm, many such households could not even maintain their farm for as long as three years. To cope with the material necessities of life they employed a diverse range of getting-by strategies, including trading low-end, cheap, smuggled Chinese goods, labouring for insignificant wages and at irregular intervals locally or in the cities, working on their subsistence farms if they still owned them, and becoming transnational labour migrant workers in Russia.

The role of these parents as workers and farmers in the Soviet kolkhoz system required polytechnical high school education with basic technical skills, but this minimal cultural capital became obsolete in the new economy, resulting in a more precarious material existence. In addition to their structurally produced low educational cultural capital, and hence their inferior social positions, the economic capital of these households was almost minimal at the time of the collapse of the Soviet economy. Thus, the biographies of this group of rural youth are shaped by the former kolkhoz family life practices, later guided by the habitus of necessity, which have oriented them distinctively towards structurally precarious social positions. All of these getting- by economic strategies have been reproduced in the form of durable dispositions of material necessity and dispossession in their children. Thus, the biographies of the youth and their parents in this cluster demonstrate the multigenerational transmission of economic and cultural disadvantage and poverty. In contrast to the strategies of “cultural capital conversion” (Darika) and “economic capital conversion” (Kerim) of the youth in the two other clusters, the pattern of getting-by strategies of these youth is founded in the low volume and the composition of the cultural and economic capital possessed by their families.

Analysis of the interviews with youth and families in this cluster reveals that their conversation and language are dominated by such expressions as ‘turmushtyn ayinan,’ ‘because of life necessity.’ Although these youth are generally enrolled full time in school, their

230 educational participation is undermined by their families’ dependence on their physical labour, which restricts their aspirations to the objective probabilities of earning cash and working on family farms, and confines their activities in school to ‘hanging out with friends,’ enjoying leisure time before or after long periods of household labour, and playing sports. As we saw in the biography of Edil in Chapter Six, these youth assume adult responsibilities to contribute to the financial and labour needs of their households by illegally working in Russian cities, running stalls in the market in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cities, producing vegetables for sale as well as for family consumption, earning cash from casual construction work or hay making, and providing child care for their relatives.

The poor educational participation and relatively low academic success of the youth in this cluster, subjectively evaluated as ‘okay’ [Kyrgyz: orto] students, can be explained by examining the volume and stock of the cultural capital of their families (including parents, siblings, and members of extended kinship groups) as well as their economic conditions (including the size and ownership status of the family farm, the sources and size of other income such as remittances, the regularity of cash flows from these sources, and so forth). Analysis of the interviews with these youth reveals that the social disadvantages of their families are directly manifested in their educational disadvantages. Variations in the strategies and future projections of these youth can be identified, firstly, by analysis of their linguistic competence in interviews. Their distinctive linguistic behavior in the educational field presents itself as an initial point of analysis, especially their language and linguistic competences during interviews on questions related to their views on education, their experiences of learning and school conditions, and their future aspirations. Youth in this cluster almost always employed the form of language with limited or no verbal elaboration (Kyrgyz: neme, ‘yy’, ‘yky’, chyk, osho/oshol, jon ele); expressions of self-doubt in their understanding (oshondoi bele?), constant requests for clarification or repetition of questions, and short replies with yes/no or non-verbal expressions (shaking their heads, remaining quiet for a long time). The similarities between the interviews with Argen (16, male) and Gulbarchyn (17, female) in regard to their restricted form of linguistic capital allow us to eliminate the effects of gender on language style and form, thus, leaving social class – their kolkhoz worker, farmer, and migrant worker class backgrounds - as the strongly probable explanatory factor. Analysis of their interviews on attitudes to education, schooling experiences, and future aspirations, suggests that their poor academic performance in

231 the educational field, and their weak formal linguistic skills in particular, were linked to their families’ socially disadvantaged positions—economic as well as educational—in the hierarchy of power and privilege in and beyond the village, which was constructed historically and symbolically as such.

That said, a close analysis of all the interviews with the youth in this cluster reveals sub- unit variations in their linguistic capital, and thus in their acquired educational/scholastic cultural capital. The analysis of the conversations with two other young people in this cluster, reveals another picture, as their linguistic capital was richer than of Argen and Gulbarchyn. Mairamkan (18, female) and Yrysberdi (18, male) employed more elaborate vocabulary; they constructed long sentences and spoke with ease when issues of schooling conditions and experiences, teachers and curricula, and future aspirations were being discussed. The linguistic capital of these young people can be explained by the available data on their families’ possession of cultural, and social capital. In other words, their variations from others in this cluster can be linked to their exposure to, and the time and energy that they spent on, resources that they accessed, mobilized, and then converted into linguistic capital in the form of durable sets of bodily hexis. Mairamkan’s extensive and elaborate linguistic capital was acquired in her school, and in particular her peer group in the school, in part because of the close physical proximity of her home to her school and her mother’s work as a school cook. All of her friends at school belonged to families with previous or current intelligentsia social backgrounds. She also enjoyed her school because of ‘hanging out with her friends there,’ which establishes a direct link to the positive yields of such social capital (in the form of social networks). In the biography of Yrysberdi, as another example of this variation, the reasons for his rich linguistic capital appear to include the previous position of his mother as an English language teacher and the current status of her eldest sister who was pursuing an undergraduate education in Turkey. Despite the crisis of his mother’s psychological breakdown and the subsequent break in the successful intergenerational transfer of intelligentsia cultural capital at home, Yrysberdi’s earliest familial conditions, and his exposure to the form of linguistic capital of his mother in particular, left a noticeable evidence in his speech and his posture, and help to explain the variation in his linguistic capital.

Although the youth in this cluster were mostly enrolled in schools situated, at first glance, in closer proximity to the educational cultural capital than those of the youth in the previous two

232 clusters, it is vital to note firstly, as does Bourdieu (1986), that the “scholastic yield from educational action depends on the cultural capital previously invested by the family.” The youth in this cluster came from families in which the conditions of cultural capital acquisition and transmission were poor, largely because of the few available educated family members. Often their parents had attained relatively low educational levels, thus lower institutional cultural capital, and/or worked in jobs that required no post-secondary educational training. When the conditions for the conversion of cultural capital in the family are restricted in these ways, expectations of the school to be the medium of cultural capital transmission, thus, as means to social mobility, increase among youth expected ‘to do good at school.’ These youth find themselves lacking free time at home during which they could engage in school or education- related work, which is a basic and necessary condition of acquiring or appropriating cultural capital even if in its institutional form. The necessities of daily survival experienced by former collective farmer and migrant families force these youth to engage in other fields, leaving no time and energy to devote to acquiring scholastic cultural capital. The acquisition and appropriation of scholastic cultural capital must take place in school and during school time, as it cannot be expected to occur at home or by the family’s intervention. These observations and conclusions are congruent with those of Bourdieu (1997):

It can immediately be seen that the links between economic and cultural capital is established through the mediation of the time needed for acquisition. Differences in the cultural capital possessed by the family imply differences first in the age at which the work of transmission and accumulation begins – the limiting case being full use of the time biologically available, with the maximum free time being harnessed to maximum cultural capital – and then in the capacity, thus defined, to satisfy the length of time for which given individual can prolong his acquisition process depends on the length of time for which his family can provide him with the free time, that is, time free from economic necessity, which is the precondition for the initial accumulation (time which can be evaluated as a handicap to be made up) (pp. 47-51).

The acquisition, appropriation and mobilization of scholastic cultural capital for the youth in this cluster are related to the availability of time away from the necessity of physical labour in or outside their family households and their capacity to utilize this time for learning. The restricted conditions of cultural capital transmission in the families from farming backgrounds

233 create a situation in which these families heavily rely on the authority of education system, school and schoolteachers in particular. In this regard, Gulnara’s mother (43), with her background of high school education and her unemployment history, complained that teachers constantly demanded money instead of collaborating with parents on their children’s learning. Similarly, Argen’s mother (43), who had college education and limited semi-professional employment experience, argued that the school could not live up to its mission to ‘educate’ her children.

In general, despite their moderate success in accumulating linguistic capital and scholastic cultural capital, the lack of interest in the field of education, especially among the male youth in this cluster, orients their interest and energies towards other fields of action, in which the transmission, accumulation and conversion of these alternative forms of capital appear to be feasible. In the next section, their strategies of configuration of alternative forms of capital in alternative social markets are elaborated.

7.5.2. Strategies of accumulating alternative capital: physical capital and migrant/kinship social capital The close proximity of these youth and families to the material necessity to create and employ multiple forms of getting-by strategies, from subsistence farming to hired labour to migration, requires a good deal of their energy and forces them to search for alternative forms of knowledge or cultural capital outside their formal schooling, as well as to capitalize on the available social ties in the kinship migrant communities.

The youth in this cluster actively participate in the configuration of physical and bodily capital as well as farm cultural capital, which is valued in the construction sectors, including in Russia, as well as the household farm economy in rural Kyrgyzstan. Subsistence and even commercial farms in the post-Soviet rural economy have predominantly become deindustrialized, and they rely largely on human physical strength. Investment in physical bodily capital means that these youth constantly engage in handling heavy objects, working with their hands and bodies, and playing sports (including volleyball, soccer and ulak) to strengthen their muscles. Simultaneously, these youth acquire farm-specific cultural capital such as knowledge of livestock, cattle fodder, soil quality, and vegetables. These activities develop attitudes or the habitus associated with the hands-on aspects of farm work culture, such as endurance of cold and hot climates, the ability to attend to cattle in mountains or valley barns, and to make hay for

234 cattle. They also establish a certain form and style of language, which is the embodied bodily hexis, of which roughness in speech and body movements and restrictive verbal elaboration is a clear manifestation. Such language styles have been identified in many of the interviews with youth in this study, and they will be further discussed below. It is important to note here that the physical capital of the farm is hyper-masculine, as it is often constructed in the male peer group as well as in male kinship interactions, despite the fact that female peers and relatives are also involved in the acquisition and configuration of farm cultural capital (Corbett, 2007).

Some youth in this cluster are directly engaged in generating trade-specific forms of cultural capital so that they can generate cash by working in market stalls in towns or work as construction workers locally or elsewhere. As was elaborated in the biography of Edil in Chapter Six, these youth learn the rules of petty trading either by employing trial-and-error strategies or by being informally mentored by their relatives. Due to their lack of economic capital to start up independent stalls, these youth generally rely on a relative who is already ‘in the business’ of being a migrant and who is willing to include them in that business and share their knowledge. By supporting these relatives in their businesses before attending to their independent stalls, these youth mobilize the migrant-specific social capital of their kin. Reliance on kinship-based social capital in kommertsia does not always result in steady forms of income, however. The field of kommertsia is not one of fair game. Even in kommertsia, these youth occupy low social positions, due to their lack of initial economic capital to start a business or forms of cultural capital that could help them to make profits. Moreover, they find that there is a link between cultural capital and success in kommertsia especially when proficiency in formal or ‘legitimate’ Kyrgyz or Russian would be advantageous. With their backgrounds in the rural Kyrgyz family farm families and their poor educational cultural capital, they generally speak the southern dialect of Kyrgyz (not standard northern dialect of Kyrgyz language that is more approximate to the one they learn at school) with limited to no Russian language proficiency. Often these youth disguise their low proficiency in Russian in urban Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan in case their clients are Russian speakers or they hide their southern dialects by making concerted efforts to adopt vocabulary of the northern regions if they work in markets in the cities such as Bishkek.

Some youth in this cluster are reported to already have migrant work experience in Kazakhstan and Russia, and many had migrant experience internally within Kyrgyzstan, despite their official status as registered students in their schools and even though they are officially

235 underage for formal employment. These youth develop the forms of social capital from migrant kinship or peer groups that allow them to determine the likelihood of work opportunities before leaving for migrant destinations. They generate a migrant-specific form of cultural capital that includes knowledge of migrant laws (starting with learning how to obtain work permits), institutions and programs to acquire necessary trade skills and certifications, migrant cultural norms and practices, the locations closest to support networks and affordable housing in those locations, work-related rules and regulations including safety, the Russian language proficiency, and ways of identifying established migrant workers willing to informally mentor them in work culture. Their success in migrant jobs and life abroad depends largely on their willingness to take risks, such as breaking Russian laws with possible penalties of detention and deportation, encountering racism and nationalism, and so forth.

The trajectory of these youth is characterized by an accelerated process of growing up, in which their transition from childhood through adolescence to independent adulthood is poorly articulated. The multigenerational transmission of poverty in the postsocialist transformation period is evident in their precarious migrant and kommersant lives, despite their young ages, and their apparent incapacity to ‘envision’ or plan for a conventional and stable long-term future. Their futures are diverse and unconventional; stable only in the sense of the certainty of their migration and precariousness.

7.5.3. Precarious futures or migrant futures The key characteristic of this cluster of youth is the predominance of a sense of economic precariousness in the current conditions of their household economy. Unlike the other two clusters, whose uncertainty as to the future is accompanied by an increase in the struggle for accumulating cultural capital in its institutional form and economic capital, the uncertainty characterizing the future of the youth in this cluster can be explained by the precariousness of their past, which continues into their present and orients their future. In earlier sections I highlighted the need to consider that youth in this cluster have limited to no capital with which to achieve anything other than passive reproduction in the post-Soviet economic context, as their lives are constrained by ever diminishing fields of agency (subsistence farming, urban trading/kommertsia, and the market of professional sports) surrounded by an ever enlarging array of closed fields (for example, education and the formal, professional labour market) in which they see limited probabilities. At the heart of their aspirations is their allegiance and service to

236 their immediate and extended family (Croix, 2014).

The former kolkhoz working class experienced the ‘socialist’ past as relatively stable, even though they were comparatively disadvantaged in terms of their possession of intelligentsia cultural capital and Soviet political capital. The subsequent instability of their employment and income sources in the postsocialist transformation period was especially harsh because their labour capital and the limited educational cultural capital in the form of high school certificates were completely devalued. With the collapse of their formerly secure employment structure, the families in this cluster were confronted with the certainty of continuous uncertainties in the postsocialist transformation. The long-term material poverty of these families and their continuing precarious income conditions for the last twenty years have had a deeply destabilizing effect on the ability of both parents and their children to develop a coherent perspective on the future. Their migrant futures are highly sensitive to the effects of any changes in the geopolitical and economic conditions of Kyrgyzstan and Russia. The youth in this cluster and their families lack an ability to grasp these larger social forces since it seems hardly possible thinking beyond their day-to-day situation or making any realistic employment or educational plans, their future being so unforeseeable, unpredictable, and elusive. Edil’s fear and insecurity in the face of his future in the migrant life of Moscow are the dominant feelings among the youth in this cluster.

Unlike the youth in the two other clusters, whose projections of geographic mobility in their futures, or their migration strategies, are associated primarily with the purposes of advancing education, cultural enrichment, and professional or business/enterprise development, the youth in this cluster express feelings of being ‘forced’ to ‘choose’ the trajectory of unskilled labour migration. ‘Migration to Moscow’ as balee (Kyrgyz) or a misfortune, as Edil’s mother put it, is considered to be the probable future of these youth, with the exception of a few who plan to pursue college education. A biographical illustration of this cluster of youth was provided by Edil’s case in Chapter Six. Edil’s story line of getting-by strategies is manifested in the lives of both female and male youth from former kolkhoz farm worker backgrounds, and it is featured throughout the biographies of youth in this cluster.

The youth and their families in this cluster also aspire to post-secondary education and some type of skilled or semi-skilled employment. Most of these youth belong to families in which the older siblings are labour migrants who send their remittances to the village. Farm families with poor economic capital do not require all their children to remain in the village, so

237 they often encourage at least some of their children to envision off-farm employment. Many of them identify college education as a means of obtaining such employment. However, the parents’ and children’s talk about post-secondary college education remains largely ideal or wishful in their current conditions of existence, but quite possibly realistic in the period of their Soviet life, especially when (as was frequently the case in this study) the youth have already abandoned their school education. The link between the present and the future is then already broken, with the result that their aspirations are simply unattainable. The connection between educational cultural capital, economic capital and their present strategies is rarely immediately apparent to these youth and their families. The scholastic yield from college education would be minimal in any case because of the low cultural capital previously invested by the family. Moreover, the economic returns are also highly questionable if the cost, time, and energy spent on acquiring qualifications were calculated. Under these conditions alternative strategies, including bribery for academic grades, are identified as possibilities. Some of the youth have older siblings who have already experienced unsuccessful forays into the formal semi- professional labour market, which further channels them towards labour migration. The cases of Gulbarchyn (17, female) and Ilimbek (17, male) are the best examples in this regard. Gulbarchyn’s eldest sister immigrated to Russia, as she could not find a suitable position as a nurse after graduating from a medical college in the city. Her father grievingly elaborated on his daughter’s experience with the current semi-professional labour market, ascribing it to nepotism in hiring and the necessity for social connections, thus, alluding to the necessity for accumulating social capital beyond the cultural capital of institutionalized form. In these cases the links between the initial volumes of economic capital, educational cultural capital and social capital can be established to explain the perpetuation of economic and social precariousness even though one receives a college education degree with the background in the former kolkhoz background. Thus, college education strategies would not completely transform their present social conditions and their futures would remain economically precarious and uncertain.

7.6. Conclusion This chapter has consolidated the defining characteristics of three emerging types of youth trajectories in rural Kyrgyzstan, or largely the richer description and analysis of the persistent and emerging class cultures within postsocialist rural Kyrgyz society. Within the first trajectory we observed the continuity of the former Soviet economic doxa around the tight correspondence

238 between formal employment and higher education and training. The intelligentsia habitus guided the strategy of accumulating cultural capital, which remained central in the lives of former Soviet intelligentsia families. In the current context of higher education expansion, however, the meanings of education, knowledge, and kulturnyi have shifted to incorporate the characteristics of education as a commodity. Moreover, the occupational aspirations of the youth in this cluster more or less reflect the reality of the current employment structures. Their investments (of time, energy, resources) would not yield economic gains as the jobs to which they aspire are undervalued financially and experience decreasing social status. These youth reject the possibilities of migration and kommertsia as alternative trajectories, but they will have to supplement their wages just as their parents did. Having a profession and a job under post-Soviet conditions does not ensure economic prosperity. On the contrary, professionals, including teachers and doctors, continue to supplement their income with farming or petty trading or by migrating to Russia as workers for a period of time.

In the second trajectory of youth we observed the weakening of the former Soviet doxa of economic prosperity and social standing that were tied to levels of education and formal employment. The familial biographies in this cluster revealed that they had achieved considerable conversion of economic capital in the post-Soviet economy. The relatively stable and rich economic capital of these families was accumulated initially through kommertsia and currently through formal small businesses located outside the villages or in commercial farms within the village. Their newly accumulated economic capital secures them high social standing in this rural social structure. Analysis of the reproductive and economic strategies of these families reveals significant variations in the trajectories of youth within the cluster. These variations were explained through their unique positions within their families, determined by their birth-order and gender, family dispositions of solidarity and reciprocity, and their deference towards the familial norms of inheritance (the family doxa).

In the third trajectory, we observed how the formerly secure livelihoods of Soviet kolkhoz workers were replaced by economic chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union, resulting in displaced families and children, experiences of extreme poverty, and out-migration as a means of household survival. The youth in this cluster encountered harsh economic conditions with sorrow and helplessness and their lives were characterized by ‘getting-by’ strategies, which helped them to survive the rapid and drastic economic transformation of post-

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Soviet Kyrgyzstan. These daily strategies of getting-by, however, became constant and dominant economic strategies even after twenty years of economic transition. Analysis of the biographies of youth in this cluster showed that they had limited opportunities for upward social mobility through formal employment with or without formal educational degrees. They also lacked the initial financial capital (in the form of financial resources or the access to such resources through social ties), intelligentsia cultural capital and professional-oriented social capital required to start or engage in commercial activities that would yield economic profits and improve their social standing. As the enterprise in local agriculture or livestock could have been ideal, as their ability to attend the agricultural work is also extensive, it depends on the availability of the minimal investment of capital and the capacity to manage such an enterprise with profit-oriented mission. Lacking both, instead these youth oriented themselves towards transnational labour migration as their principal survival or getting-by strategy, thus reproducing their precarious social positions as dispossessed and dislocated Kyrgyz labourers from rural backgrounds.

By elaborating on the dynamic youth trajectories of growing up in post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz society, this chapter has provided a better understanding of the diverse responses and coping strategies of rural families and young people under the conditions of postsocialist transformation. As noted, the third trajectory was characteristic of former kolkhoz workers with limited educational levels and little economic and social capital. The experience of the youth in that cluster is typical of those who have been dispossessed economically and socially, as well as educationally. That said, however, the other two trajectories of professional and entrepreneurial types of youth should not be confused with economic prosperity, stability and upward mobility. These youth and their families continue to experience uncertainty on a daily basis. When considering the migratory patterns of all the families in this study, it becomes apparent that instability has, regrettably, become the stable condition of social existence in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Neither of these trajectories has been entirely spared from some form of migration, whether experienced in the past, currently as part of their lives, or envisaged in the future. Because of the adverse conditions of the labour market in Kyrgyzstan, transnational migration continues to offer an attractive alternative pathway for many rural youth, and thus to structure their lives, even when they complete higher education and/or find work in the field of their occupational training. The migrant trajectory should not, therefore, be associated solely with the third type of youth in this study.

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The findings of this study further establish the significance of analyzing the positions of families and the available resources that generate young people’s dispositions, orient their practices, and shape their future goals and aspirations. Youth in post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz society rarely follow individualized life trajectories equipped with free and rational choices. Analysis of their biographies reveals that the ways in which forms of capital are available to these youth in their families and in school are closely tied to their submission to familial and social norms (family doxa). In other words, the interest and also the disinterest of young people in the struggle to accumulate cultural capital in the educational field, especially under the poor conditions of education in rural areas, is highly determined by their family’s social position. However, the future trajectories of these rural youth are also influenced by the changing characteristics of the post-Soviet conditions of employment and educational opportunities, which have transformed, to a large extent, their initial social positions. The findings of this study can, then, increase our understanding of the sources and mechanisms of social transformation and social inequalities through analysis of the dispositions and practices of young people, which have been structured in part rapid and drastic changes in the objective conditions of material existence in postsocialist societies.

The hierarchy of the cultural capital in this postsocialist rural Kyrgyz society was maintained by the parents as well as the youth in all these three clusters. For these rural Kyrgyz, the value of the cultural capital obtained from school was higher than the knowledge and competencies they developed about their pastoralist way of life and kinship-oriented economy. According to them, the school cultural capital was universal, urban, modern and mobile, which added the value to their rural personhood. In contrast, these youth as well as their parents often referred to the rural cultural capital of the Kyrgyz community as particular and specific to household and family, semi-self-sufficient as well as partly dependent on their kinship, and intimate, embedded, and embodied naturally in the bodies and minds (Kyrgyz: Omur boiu kerek, olgucho kerek, biroodon surabaising). As the detailed cases of Darika, Kerim, and Edil elaborated, this type of Kyrgyz rural cultural capital of the pastoralism and tribal kinship relationship, often dismissed as the natural competencies of rural youth, is considered in abundance, and on the contrary, the cultural capital of the school or being kulturnyi, was the resource that was rare, therefore, worth competing for.

There is another common element that these youth displayed in their aspirations for the

241 future irrespective of their socioeconomic backgrounds. Across the cases of youth in all clusters, the emphasis on their reciprocal service to their parents in the future was dominant. These youth often expressed that they needed to take care of their parents and provide for the household in the future (Kyrgyz: Ata-enenin sutun, meenetin aktoo). This was the ambition, especially, of male youth, like Kerim and Edil. Whether they wanted to serve their parents in the old age, their extended family, their rural community, or the Kyrgyz state/nation, these aspirations were rarely individualistic ambitions. Similar to what Croix (2014) reported in the case of three rural Kyrgyz adults, the collectivist expectations of these youth – whether rooted in the traditional Kyrgyz kinship culture or the legacy of the Soviet ideology of the kollektiv – were often instilled through the socialization of their families, and especially their grandparents, who condemned the changing moral economy of this postsocialist rural Kyrgyz society. These parents and grandparents, like the mother of Edil in Chapter Six, complained that the individualistic morality became prevalent in the contemporary postsocialist Kyrgyz society (Kyrgyz: “Kaniet kilgan adam jok”, “Ushul zamandy adamdar kotoro albai jatyshat”, and “Adamga duino turkun bolboit”).

The importance of work in the lives and aspirations of these youth - whether it is the tilling of the land, attending the livestock, preparing the fodder, cooking dinner, doing laundry, managing a shop, helping the grandparents and uncles and aunts to get to the pasture (Kyrgyz: jailoo), caring for children, feeding the elderly grandparents, entertaining guests in funerals and weddings of a kin or tribal community member, or going to school and getting a profession, emigrating to Moscow to earn cash, or operating an enterprise back in the village – was legitimized as an ethically and morally right effort as opposed to being ‘bezdelnik’ (the slacker) or ‘kocho-taptar’ (the street wanderer). The value of (the disciplined) work became more pronounced in their daily life descriptions in the family and the school and took a central role in the aspirations for the future especially in the current conditions of widespread unemployment in postsocialist rural Kyrgyzstan. However, the aspirations of the kind of work that these youth in this study had was the one the waged labour or the one that helped them earn income, which was scarce, as Croix (2014) also highlights that “… this very scarcity is likely to make having a paid job a mark of success, a measure of recognition no longer available to most” (p. 94). Although, the locally available options to work as teachers and nurses were the only ones stood the test of time (Kyrgyz: Zamanga turushtuk berdi), they neither promised higher income (categorized as the working poor) nor earned much respect (accused of corruption and nepotism) in this

242 transitioning society. This could explain the cases of all youth and their parents, who aspired – whether wishfully or strategically – of getting some type of work and employment that helped them receive recognition (of the kinship and the rural community), provided a source of dignity, and more importantly, provided a livelihood for their households.

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Chapter 8

Conclusions and recommendations 8.1. Conclusions

This study investigated the impact of the postsocialist transformation on the rural economy, society, and rural schools of the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. It showed how the transition has fundamentally shaped the lives of rural Kyrgyz youth who were born after the disintegration of the Soviet state in the early 1990s and schooled in the 2010s. The findings were generally consistent with other studies on rural postsocialist youth, whose historical experience of changes in education, culture, and the economy in the post-Soviet era has been described as uncertain and unstable, as well as differentiated along socioeconomic or class, gender, and residential backgrounds (Roche, 2014; Korzh, 2013; Bhat, 2013; Walker, 2011; DeYoung, 2010; Kirmse, 2010; Roberts, 2010; Kuenhast, 2000). Moreover, the experience of these youth has been connected to global transformations in the demography, labour markets, education and training (Standing, 2011; Ortiz and Cummins, 2012; Janta, Ratzmann, Ghez, Khodyakov and Yaqub, 2015). In relation to education of youth in particular, the experiences of the postsocialist Kyrgyz rural youth in this research are parallel with youth growing up in Europe in mid-1990s. Despite that education was a prerequisite for a professional or semi-professional career, it failed to facilitate social mobility among educated youth (Cavalli, 1995).

The three illustrative types of youth trajectories distinguished in this study were not exhaustive of all youth trajectories in rural Central Asian or other postsocialist societies; however, they were sufficient to challenge the popular notion of postsocialist rural Kyrgyz youth as a socially homogeneous group. We saw that, with the disappearance of Soviet collective farms that employed many women and men in rural areas, one group of young people pursued economic opportunities locally, while another group, strongly committed to service to their extended family and kinfolk, searched for better job and income prospects elsewhere, and a third group aspired to post-secondary education with the ultimate aim of either returning to the local region to find employment in the surviving public sector or remaining in the metropolitan regions of Kyrgyzstan to pursue careers in the urban public or private sectors.

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Rural life is generally subordinated to urban centres economically, culturally, and politically (Corbett, 2005). Growing up in postsocialist rural communities, which have been described as “new economic wastelands” (Tarknishvili et al., 2005), therefore positions young people in social locations inferior to those of urban youth with regard to education and employment opportunities and privileges. The place or geographic location of one’s upbringing and education has a crucial role in determining access to necessary social resources (or forms of capital) and the capacity to convert one form of capital into another. Urban youth tend to be located in closer physical proximity to educational and economic resources (Kirmse, 2010) than their rural counterparts, whose access to such resources is curtailed due to the sheer remoteness of their geographically distant regions. Young people’s experiences of the post-Soviet social world, and the changes it has undergone, are culturally and geographically/physically distinct from those of youth raised in the metropolitan centres of postsocialist societies. These differences stem largely from the proximity of urban youth to valuable social resources and the physical and cultural distance of rural youth. However, rural youth are differentially positioned in relation to distribution of social resources within their rural communities as well regards distribution in the larger context of the postsocialist Kyrgyz educational system and labour market opportunities. These youth experience class-based and gendered social institutions, including schools and families, in which they develop distinct relationships to the means of production and waged employment in the context of the de-industrialization of agriculture and the individualization of production in post-Soviet rural economies.

The findings of this research, conducted in rural post-Soviet Kyrgyz society, connect with those of empirical work in societies in the global North in regards to the relations between education and society in times of global capitalist expansion. In his critical analysis of formal schooling in rural Canada, Corbett (2007) argues that contemporary education instills aspirations of mobility in rural youth so that they seek to achieve their life goals outside their local communities. As the countries such as Canada move from industrial to post-industrial capitalism, or towards what has been characterized as the knowledge economy (Drucker, 1966), formal education in rural communities is expected to produce competent knowledge workers rather than manual labourers. In a post-industrial economy, the accumulation and possession of cultural capital in the form of education takes on prime importance.

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Research in a rural community in a Central Asian society reveals a different picture of the meaning and value of cultural capital, however. For one thing, post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz society is not close to being a knowledge economy, and the demand for knowledge workers is actually declining. The historical legacy of Soviet Kyrgyz economic policies that predominantly emphasized collective-based agriculture and animal husbandry in rural regions and import-based urban industries partly facilitated the process of the collapse of semi-industrial Soviet agriculture (Abazov, 1997). The deconstruction of socialist labour in post-Soviet villages was carried out by the deindustrialization of agriculture (Verdery, 2003; Humphrey, 2001; Abazov, 1997).

At least two cases – those of Darika and Edil – very vividly portray the cost of postsocialist transformation on children and youth in rural communities. Unlike in Soviet times, unregulated and informal sectors of economy forced children and youth enter the labour market at a young age, as households are unable to sustain themselves through subsistence farming or wages. In rural regions, male youth drop out of school to support their households on farms or move to cities to trade in markets. Children and youth in rural Kyrgyzstan find themselves having less time for their education and often experience that schooling conflicts with work at home and playtime, resulting in conditions of child exploitation in household economy (Bauer, Boschmann, Green, and Kuehnast, 1998).

The Kyrgyz rural economy continues to be based largely on agriculture and animal husbandry, but with key differences from the Soviet era, including an unequal distribution of farm assets and land as well as individualized production. Due to a high birth rate, labour in rural regions is in abundance and family farms cannot employ every household member. At the same time there is a growing demand for cheap labour in economies such as Russia and Kazakhstan due to oil exports and the flow of foreign direct investment (Vinokurov, 2013; Thieme, 2014). The demand for labour in these international markets has an indirect impact on the educational and employment aspirations of rural youth, who grow up in the context of resource-poor economies and stagnant professional labour markets.

The contradictions of post-Soviet economies, with their migrant labour, subsistence farming, and liberal arts-based secondary education, are not dissimilar to those countries in the global North. Corbett (2007) notes that formal schooling in rural Canada in times of neoliberal restructuring shapes the consciousness of people to value migration for social mobility and

246 discourages them to have a strong attachment to their place and community. Formal education emphasizes the standardization of knowledge and undermines the process by which a sense of community and place are developed. However, the urbanization of the rural mind in Kyrgyzstan is not simply a consequence of post-Soviet educational changes, as the Soviet educational model was itself biased in favour of urban values. What have been the effects of the post-Soviet liberalization of the economy and the standardization of the formal educational curriculum in rural Kyrgyzstan? Since the 1990s the Kyrgyz education sector has been heavily criticized for its inability to produce workers who are capable of adapting to the changing economic ideology and realities of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. The Soviet polytechnical philosophy of secondary education has been gradually dismantled and the post-Soviet secondary education curriculum has moved towards liberal arts-based academic curriculum with limited connection to the rural and agricultural realities of Kyrgyzstan in the extra-curricular activities. Post-Soviet secondary education in rural communities promotes academic training over practical competences and rejects the cultural experiences of youth rooted in their kinship traditions and subsistence-based family farm economy. The Soviet as well as the Kyrgyz collectivist nature of school experiences, and thus the Soviet socialist student identity of these rural Kyrgyz youth, has gradually been replaced by an individualized learning process, in which rewards as well as sanctions are experienced individually rather than collectively as part of a grade or section (Russian: klassnyi kollektiv).

This transformation of the student identity, as well as its consequences for the well-being of young people, was captured in the case of Edil’s story when he stated that he could not do well academically because he was ‘busy with sports” or ‘needed to work to support the household’ and had no time for school. He felt that he had failed as a student to the extent that he defined his schooling progress according to the standards and values externally imposed on rural communities. An evaluation of Edil’s academic participation, his family’s socioeconomic conditions, and his responsibility as the eldest male adolescent in the household, suggests that he had reproduced his gendered class position as a precarious, poor and migrant Kyrgyz man. Unlike the generation of his parents, Edil could not even claim the identity of a Soviet collective farm worker, as this identity could be realized only through waged farm labour and occupational stability in the Soviet collective farm industry, and not through labour on his village family farm or the occasional trading in the urban markets. In the contrasting case of Darika, we observed

247 how her parents’ occupational backgrounds and their former membership in the Soviet rural intelligentsia seemed likely to facilitate the reproduction of her position as an educated, professional and urban salaried worker in the future. Moreover, the postsocialist shift from polytechnical curriculum to academic one works in favor of Darika, whose intelligentsia habitus values academic learning and professional jobs more than physical and farm labour in the village. In both of these cases, the postsocialist rural Kyrgyz schools and school curriculum facilitated rather than challenged the reproduction of the young person’s social standing, developed distinct student identities, and structured their future in the present conditions substantially.

A Bourdieusian analysis of youth in rural Kyrgyzstan revealed that divergence in their trajectories was based on their individual modes of perception and action (their emerging habitus), which they owed to differences in the volume and composition of forms of capital (the configuration of their forms of capital) within their families and the position of these families within and beyond the rural social structure. The divergent schemes of perception and action of the young people embodied the class and gender principles of rural Kyrgyz social life and resulted in their projecting themselves into segmented futures of education and employment along class and gender lines.

In this study the concept of social class received particular attention. The differences between the habituses of the youth were explained by the initial conditions of the formulation of individual habituses, and specifically through an analysis of their families as sites of social reproduction and transformation. This approach established a strong link between the families’ social positions—former Soviet intelligentsia, an emerging class of successful post-Soviet kommersants, and former Soviet kolkhoz workers turned into an emerging class of unskilled migrants—and the developing or emerging habituses of the youth. The different social positions of these families were explained by their possession of particular forms of capital, cultural, social, and economic, and by the volume and composition of that capital. Cultural capital in this context referred to the possession of higher educational qualifications (institutionalized form of cultural capital), cultural resources (the objectified form), and cultural habits (embodied form). Social capital included the networks maintained by the families, including extended kinship groups (from family to tribes), local political networks (local government and political parties), as well as professional ties, both within and outside the village. Economic capital was

248 characterized by the possession of houses, barns, cattle and land within and beyond the village, and regular income and wages, including migrant remittances. Through their experiences of these conditions of social existence the youth in this study developed diverging principles of vision and action. Their embodied cognitive, affective and behavioural dispositions were identified as differential habituses that produced individual strategies and distinctively oriented their projections into the future.

In addition to the social class effects of their locations, these young people occupied gendered positions within and outside their families. Their visions of the future were structured through their gendered experiences of their postsocialist rural social life with their class-specific dispositions. This study exposed a gender imbalance in the structural opportunities and constraints shaping youth trajectories in rural Kyrgyzstan during the postsocialist transformation. For instance, while the pursuit of educational cultural capital remained quite strong among female youth, the accumulation of economic capital through entrepreneurship was predominant among male youth, and the common social trajectory of a migrant future was manifested differently among female and male youth. Male youth in the migrant future trajectory projected their role as breadwinners of two households, their immediate family and their own future household. Female youth in the migrant trajectory primarily hoped to save money to pursue post- secondary education at a later time and their hope to support their households in the future was secondary one.

The findings of this study demonstrated that rural Kyrgyz youth had high educational aspirations regardless of current social conditions that could support or constrain them in turning these aspirations into reality. Even when the immediate material necessity of their households required them to earn money by migrating to Russia as workers to cities in Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan as traders, young people such as Edil still aspired to have post-secondary education. Similarly, youth like Kerim wanted to pursue higher education even though their economic capital was accumulated largely through commercial trading or kommertsia, rather than by utilizing the capacity of their educational cultural capital.

The youth in this study unanimously reproduced doxic assumptions about the link between higher education and professional employment success. However, their assumptions about higher education should be examined by analyzing the Soviet socialist past as well as the

249 current educational market in the postsocialist transformation period (DeYoung, 2010). Firstly, the educational aspirations of these youth, as indirect manifestations of their embodied principles or schemes of vision and action, could partly be explained by the socialization effects of their families and, to some extent indirectly, of their school-teachers, for these socializing agents often impose their taken-for-granted assumptions of the social world on the next generation. Unlike the generation of youth discussed in this study, their parents enjoyed free education at all levels provided by the state. The Soviet rural economy was characterized by cultural modernization and economic development and, despite a non-diversified economic structural element, the state ensured formal employment. The Soviet state systematized agriculture, instituting a formal, production-oriented occupational structure. The rural population generally remained within their local communities, as employment and a guaranteed wage, in addition to social services, were obtainable within their localities. For many kolkhoz workers in the Soviet period, despite holding manual jobs that required only minimal schooling, educational degrees remained a valued social resource, or form of capital, albeit a symbolic form. All the parents in this study had obtained at least high school certificates; some had undergone occupational training for one or two years, while others had completed four-year degrees at higher educational institutions. For many of these parents and their relatives, education served as a mechanism of upward social mobility, and more specifically as a mechanism of cultural transformation from ‘rough’ nomads, ‘Mankurts’ or mountain Kyrgyzs, into kulturnyi Soviet citizens with occupations and ‘culture’. They typically associated kulturnyi habits with one’s level of schooling and education. Thus, the educational aspirations and expectations of these parents, a legacy of their Soviet socialist past, were transmitted to their children as guiding principles of ‘the way of the world’.

The aspirations of the youth in this study were shaped as well by the current conditions of expansion of higher education in Kyrgyzstan, a consequence of the neo-liberalization of educational institutions in post-Soviet society. Thus, such aspirations are not simply subjective, but are also the subjective dimensions of the social world, which youth both inhabit and simultaneously produce by their actions. In spite of setbacks encountered in the current educational field, the Soviet habitus remained partly intact as regards its emphasis on education as a form of capital. For parents and youth in this study, education was a resource of hope, a useful if symbolic form of capital, to be stored for a time when ‘normalcy will be restored’.

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Even in the cases of Edil and others in that cluster, whose future plans were strongly linked to migration to Russia as unskilled workers, migration was typically considered a temporary livelihood strategy. They aspired to save money in order to return to enroll in post- secondary educational programs, choose an occupation, and find formal employment. Similarly, even for cases like Kerim and others in that cluster, education remained a valued resource even though their economic capital was actually accumulated outside the fields of education and the formal economy. These youth and their families still aspired to convert their economic capital into educational cultural capital. Lastly, for youth like Darika, whose intelligentsia positions were mostly obtained, maintained, and improved by means of educational cultural capital, educational qualifications from prestigious programs and universities remained the principal manifestation of cultural capital, one that could subsequently be converted into economic capital. In sum, the struggle to acquire, maintain and convert educational cultural capital remained central to this post-Soviet rural Kyrgyz society. This struggle has been reflected in the burgeoning demand for higher education institutions, which expanded substantially from nine in 1990 to 53 in 2013. The educational as well as labour market success rate of the youth in post- secondary educational programs remains unknown, and requires further academic as well as policy attention.

The findings of this study uncovered social inequalities in rural Kyrgyz society that were more pronounced in the absence of the welfare support provided by the Soviet state. In the current neoliberal political and economic context, the accumulation of economic capital has come to the forefront and the rapid and radical transformation of the economy has had a detrimental impact on the life projects of the younger generations. Unlike their parents’ generation, today’s youth cannot rely on education to live up to its promise as a mechanism of upward social mobility. As the youth labour market was virtually non-existent in the rural Kyrgyz community where this study was conducted, young people had to depend on their families’ resources, economic, cultural, and social. Their families’ social positions, as former intelligentsia, emerging entrepreneurs (a new category of wealthy rural households), or former kolkhoz workers turned petty traders (kommersants) and migrant workers, were hierarchically structured on the basis of their volume of economic, cultural, and social capital. The families socialized their children and the children acquired their sense of their world from their experience of their social positions. Thus, three youth trajectories were distinguished on the basis

251 of the practices and perceptions of these youth, which were in turn shaped largely by their families’ social position.

On the question of increasing out-migration among rural youth, the findings of this study aligned with those of other studies (Corbett, 2007). Rural youth generally aspire to migrate out of their villages in search of better employment and educational opportunities. Migration is also the response of the rural youth to persistent and new forms of inequalities that resulted in the process of the haphazard postsocialist agricultural restructuring and the vanished role of the welfare- oriented state. High rates of out-migration can be expected in the post-Soviet rural economy, which has been underdeveloped and stagnant, subject to high degrees of economic instability and political volatility in the country. With the exception of schools, a small hospital, and local government administration, there are no formal jobs available to youth upon completing their high school education. Living expenses are soaring, but labour on family farms is unwaged and there is limited cash available in the village. In post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan the number of high school leavers who migrate is greater than those who remain in the country to pursue post- secondary education or join the labour market. The geographic mobility of rural Kyrgyz youth is mostly dependent on the economic resources of their families as migration is widely thought to accelerate the process of accumulating economic capital. Under the conditions of a rapidly transforming society, these families believe that they need to accumulate and increase their economic capital elsewhere (especially in those places where they could save up) so as to create some form of stable income for their households back in the village. The youth in this study often referred to people who get rich quickly, building new houses, purchasing new cars, and spending luxuriously on family events, including lavish weddings and funerals, while other families struggle to meet their basic material needs. These youth perceptions and their imagined futures established a link between emerging inequalities and divergent lifestyles in the postsocialist transformation.

In this study, the strategies of accumulation of the most desirable forms and combinations of capital were usually simultaneous with strategies of conversion of economic capital into other forms of capital. These were typically kinship-oriented strategies stemming from the reproduction of traditional Kyrgyz cultural doxa, which postulate that the economic and social well-being of individuals in rural Kyrgyz society rests on the social position of their kinfolk. Kinship remains a strong form of social capital as well as a means of accumulating other forms

252 of capital for rural Kyrgyz youth. All members of the families in this study, including the young people, supported or intended to support their parents and siblings. For example, Darika’s farm strategies were oriented towards contributing to the accumulation of her brothers’ educational cultural capital, and her current practices projected future gains in terms of supporting the family’s cultural as well as economic capital. The accumulation of extended kinship social capital was evident as well in the cases of Kerim and Edil. Kerim’s brothers accumulated their economic capital with the aim of improving the social standing of all the family members. The maintenance and improvement of the eldest brother’s social standing in the village was closely linked to Kerim’s decision to remain in the village to invest further in its social and political capital. Edil’s household received substantial financial support from their extended family members, and their socialization of Edil and his eldest sister into the logic of kommertsia and migration. In the postsocialist transformation period, individuals tend to mobilize and invest in their kinship social capital, as access to and survival within the formal institutions of education and employment has become highly selective and skewed towards those with greater economic and social capital.

Although this study reported the findings of a qualitative case study, it was able to interpret the experiences of youth throughout Kyrgyz rural communities, which are mostly struggling with the complete de-industrialization of Soviet agriculture and its consequent economic, social and demographic crises, including widespread unemployment, extreme material poverty, mass out-migration among the working age population, and the crumbling of those basic social services that might alleviate economic, social, and emotional distress. The biographic trajectories of the youth and families in this study were illustrative of the economic and social suffering of several generations affected by the collapse of the socialist system in a backyard of the former Soviet state, a rural village in southern Kyrgyzstan. In the face of the increasingly penetrating role and effects of the global capitalist ideology and the complete withdrawal of the postsocialist Kyrgyz state from its role in regulating the labour market and providing the means of social inclusion, many rural Kyrgyz youth who enter the world of adults, with or without adequate forms of capital, cling to available—and yearn for alternative—sources and forms of dignity, honour, recognition, and livelihood.

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8.2. Recommendations

This study adopted a small-scale qualitative case study research methodology to explore and examine the divergent experiences of learning, education, and work of a group of high school students between the ages of 15 to 18 in a rural community in southern Kyrgyzstan. The study could not account for all types of youth trajectories in the postsocialist transformation period or explain how all possible educational and life experiences impacted the destinations of youth in the subsequent adult world. The findings did, however, expose largely unexplored dimensions of young lives and the ways families and kinship shape the experience and life chance of youth in post-Soviet Central Asia, including their experiences of the rapidly changing social conditions of the postsocialist transformation in a former peripheral Soviet state.

There has been some recent interest in the study of Kyrgyz youth, investigating such dimensions of their lives as the transition from education to work (Baumann, Jansova, & Saar, 2014), experiences of higher education (DeYoung, 2010), and consumption practices and lifestyles (Kirmse, 2010). However, the transition of rural youth from high school to postsecondary education, along with their adaptation strategies and dropout experiences, remains largely unexamined. Longitudinal surveys and qualitative biographical accounts would fill this gap by exploring how expanding higher educational opportunities are structured by class, gender, language, and rural backgrounds when these youth enroll and graduate from universities and access the internal as well as foreign labour markets.

Rural youth experiences are shaped by larger social forces, including geopolitical events such as the role of Russia in the current Ukrainian crisis and the creation of the Customs Union among the former Soviet states. Given that half of the youth in this study (n= 17 out of 36) projected a migrant future after completing high school, further research into the effects of regional economic restructuring on youth in and from Central Asia would enrich our understanding of youth transitions from school to the migrant labour market, as well as their job experiences abroad. In addition to providing insight into the effects of geopolitical events on individual life projects, such studies could help to determine whether transnational economic reintegration further accelerates out-migration among youth in rural areas and reproduce or transform their and their families’ social positions.

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A strong link has been reported between entrepreneurship, educational attainment and the well-being of youth in Kyrgyzstan (Baumann, Jansova, & Saar, 2014). Most development agencies seem to assume that link as they have invested in providing training in entrepreneurship and business skills to youth. Further studies on the relationship between entrepreneurship, education, and rurality would help to examine the plausibility of this dominant claim in the rural context and in relation to rural youth.

The popular image of urban Kyrgyz youth often portrays them as more progressive and culturally advanced than their rural counterparts (Kirmse, 2010; Schroder, 2010). Furthermore, it is widely believed that urban youth grow up with relatively more opportunities for education, employment, and leisure. Thus, comparative studies of the trajectories of rural and urban youth in post-Soviet Kyrgyz society could examine how the socio-spatial dimensions of coming of age, in addition to their social class, gender, ethnicity, and linguistic backgrounds, structure the subsequent life chances and destinations of individuals.

This study reported findings on rural youth of Kyrgyz ethnic backgrounds; it excluded the unique experiences of minority youth, ethnic and linguistic minorities, orphans, street children, and those youth who are identified with special physical or mental challenges. The study of Uzbek ethnic youth is of particular interest here. The findings of the current study shed light on the nationalist sentiments of rural youth of Kyrgyz ethnicity (Darika’s negative images of migrant Kyrgyz in Russia as below human dignity (shame and honor of the nation); Edil’s acceptance of Russian nationalism against migrants as their right as Russian citizens). Moreover, the current study was conducted after five months of bloody ethnic conflict between Kyrgyz and Uzbek in June of 2010 in southern regions of the country. The anecdotal records noted that most of those who fought in the cities of Osh and Jalalabad came from neighboring rural regions, including the district where this research was conducted. Although the youth participants in this study did not directly mention about their involvement in this conflict, their nationalist sentiments should caution educators and policy makers in the future. Additionally, Uzbek children and youth have opportunities to study school curriculum in their mother tongue until they complete general secondary education. Until 2010 these youth could continue their post- secondary education in their languages in two private universities in the southern cities. The 2010 ethnic conflict consolidated nationalist policies in Kyrgyz education system, which prohibited these two universities to use Uzbek as the medium of instruction. There are still few

255 departments within state universities in the southern regions in which Uzbek youth can continue their education, however, this means they have fewer options for education and later in the labour market in Kyrgyzstan. Therefore, the study of ethnic Uzbek youth, their educational experiences and future aspirations would help us understand how ethnicity and language shape the life chances of minority youth in increasingly nationalist Kyrgyz society. Such studies are not only important to develop youth-friendly policies and improve practices and create equal opportunities for all youth in Kyrgyzstan to achieve their potential and lead fulfilling adult lives but they are essential part of developing a socially cohesive and just society in the future.

The experience of rural youth in the postsocialist transformation demands serious policy attention to reforming rural secondary education and local employment for youth. Several recommendations can be outlined to reduce the effects of initial social inequalities and facilitate the transition of rural youth to further education and employment.

Firstly, rural school education in Kyrgyzstan currently suffers from low public funding, which results in high teacher absenteeism, poor material infrastructure, and limited curricular activities. The young people in this study relied on their families to obtain information on post- secondary educational opportunities, as their schools could not provide any post-secondary academic advising or career counseling services. This study also showed that rural youth must leave their communities to pursue post-secondary education, which has resulted in an exodus of youth. The provision of higher education in rural areas would be difficult to achieve, but college and trade school education should be available for rural youth within their districts. Therefore, rural schools should restore its transformative mission to ensure that youth of all social origins can access quality education. Education should again act as a mechanism for upward social mobility and as a means of preparing youth for occupational training and preparing for active citizenship. The schooling experiences of rural youth are closely linked to their social origins in that the most economically disadvantaged youth have limited opportunities outside formal educational institutions.

Secondly, this study found that kinship social capital has come to play an increasingly central role in pursuing educational and employment opportunities in rural Kyrgyzstan. Kinship networks emerge as mediating agents in accessing opportunities under conditions of weak institutional support for career advice, job searches, and further training. Youth from poorer

256 family backgrounds rely on kinfolk who also have limited resources, which results in the reproduction of disadvantage in education and employment. Therefore, the Kyrgyz government needs to establish stronger institutional support through improved youth employment agencies with particular emphasis on the employment of socially and regionally disadvantaged youth in order to alleviate discrimination against them.

Lastly, we have seen that a high percentage of working age youth in rural areas seek employment opportunities outside their communities, and that migration to Russian cities has become the dominant trajectory of many youth (Edil’s cluster). International migration in particular has become a common response to inequality of the youth who experience persistent economic and social disadvantages in the current educational and labour market conditions in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan. A comprehensive and coordinated rural development policy does not currently exist in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan. Such policy, including better educational and health care investment, meaningful and stable employment and infrastructure improvement, may help youth not only remain in their rural communities but such policies could also improve economies of these rural regions to contribute to the larger economic stability of the country in general.

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01892206/Rendered/PDF/PID0Sept1017.pdf World Bank (2006). Local infrastructure investments improve life in Kyrgyz villages. Retrieved August 26, 2011. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/IDA/0,,contentMDK: 21358516~menuPK:4754051~pagePK:51236175~piPK:437394~theSitePK:73154,00.ht ml. Wortherspoon, T. (2009). The sociology of education in Canada: Critical perspectives, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wyn, J. (2011). The sociology of youth: A reflection on its contribution to the field and future directions. Youth Studies Australia, 30(3), 34-39. Wyn, J., & White, R. (1997). Rethinking youth. Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Yamamoto, Y., & Brinton, M. (2010). Cultural capital in East Asian educational systems: The case of Japan. Sociology of Education, 83(1), 67-83. Yanowitch, M. (1977). Social and economic inequality in the Soviet Union. White Plains, New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Yin, R. (2003). Case study research: Design and methods. Third Edition. London, UK: Sage Publications. Yoshida, S. (2005). Ethnographic study of privatization in a Kyrgyz village: Patrilineal kin and independent farmers. Inner Asia, 7, 215-247. Zajda, J. (1980). Education in the USSR. Oxford ; New York, NY: Pergamon Press. Zajda, J. (1980). Education and social stratification in the Soviet Union. Journal of Comparative Education, 16(1), 3-11. Zaslavsky, V. (1982). The neo-Stalinist state: class, ethnicity and consensus in Soviet society. New York, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Zhang, H. (1999). Female migration and urban labor markets in Tianjin. Development and Change, 30(1), 21-41. Zholdoshalieva, R., DeYoung, A., & Zholdoshalieva, U. (2014). Schooling and place: A hundred years of contests in rural Kyrgyzstan. In C., Howley, A., Howley, and J., Johnson (Eds.). Dynamics of social class: Race and place in rural education. (pp. 39-65). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Zholdoshalieva, R., & Shamatov, D. (2009). Gendered identities and roles: A case of two rural schools in Kyrgyzstan. Unpublished research report, Osh: Soros Foundation Kyrgyzstan.

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Appendix 1: Information Letter for Participants (English)

Title of the Research: Rural youth within changing schooling, learning and informal work contexts during Post-Soviet period in Kyrgyzstan

Researcher: Rakhat Zholdoshalieva, Doctoral Student, University of Toronto, Canada

Dear student,

I am happy that you are interested in learning more about this research study and intend to participate in it. Below are the details of this research, procedures of your participation, your time commitment and your rights as a research participant in this study, which is protected by the Ethics Board of the University of Toronto, Canada. This study is conducted as part of my doctoral study requirements at the University of Toronto, Canada.

This study aims to gain understanding of your experiences of schooling, learning from home and community, and your involvement in the household and rural economic activities in the village and community at present time in Kyrgyzstan.

Many scholars have argued that education and economy are inter-dependent and inter-related in many respects. However, education is also affected by the changes in the economic system of the society. Your parents and you may observe this change in Kyrgyzstan, the country, which has changed from soviet economic system towards market economy. The demands towards education have also changed and education is currently required to meet the demands of market economy. Thus, this study intends to explore your experiences of schooling and work in the rural community to understand how the link between education, learning and economy can be explored and analyzed.

There will be 25 young people, including you, who will be approached to participate in this study. In addition to these, there will be interviews with some of the members of the families of these young people from the month of December 2010 until June, 2011.

The information will be collected through in-depth interviews and observations.

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Interviews: I intend to converse with you three or four times about 30-45 minutes each time to learn about your views on your schooling experiences, your involvement in the family household and other activities in the rural village and your learning experiences at home and in the community in general. You will choose the place where you want me to interview you and the length of interviews for each time. I will also approach some of the members in your family and maybe neighbours to explore their views on work and education in the rural village. I will interview them once or twice in the process. I intend to record your interviews in the tape recorder so that I keep myself attentive while you are speaking during interviews and later transcribe the interviews in full detail to correctly capture your words. The recorded interviews will not be accessible to anyone except myself and will be kept safely with me. If you do not wish to be audio-recorded during the interviews, you need to inform me about it, so that I should be able to record by taking notes during interviews.

Observations: I also intend to observe your activities in the household and your contributions in other economic activities to understand the link between education and work of the rural youth in Kyrgyzstan. Some of your work and educational activities may be conducted with your student colleagues and teachers, and members of your family or other household members. In this case, I will try my best to keep their identity confidential and assign pseudonyms.

Your participation in this research study is voluntary, which means that you may refuse to participate and you may also withdraw at any time without any consequences, and may decline to answer any question or any parts of the procedures/tasks in the research process. Your participation in this study is not paid monetarily.

All the information collected during this study will only be accessible to me. My doctoral thesis supervisor may access some chunks of interview information for analysis purposes; however, your identity will not be disclosed to anyone including my supervisor.

Transcribed interviews will be stored in my personal computer with pseudonyms for you, and other participants. I intend to keep the data from this study for 2 years period while I am writing thesis. After that period, the information will be destroyed. The research results will be published in the form of doctoral thesis in which no mention will be made about any participant and specific village location and school. This thesis will be publicly accessible document. I also

304 intend to publish articles in the scholarly journals and make conference presentations based on this research study in Kyrgyz, Russian and English languages.

Consent to Participate in the Study

I have read the above information about the research study and I understand the purpose and procedures that are required along with my rights as research participant in this study. By signing this consent form, I am aware that I will be approached to be interviewed 3 or 4 times for 30-45 minutes each at a convenient time and location for me. I understand that my participation in this study is voluntary and will not be paid monetarily. I may refuse to answer questions or some parts of questions without any consequences to me. I will be also observed several times during this research while I am involved in work, education and learning activities. I am assured that interviews will be audio-recorded for the transcription purposes after the interviews by this researcher. All the information in the research will be kept confidential and no names and references will be made to identify my family and me in the writings and presentations. I am aware that the results of this research study will be published and presented for academic purposes by this researcher.

Name: ______

Signature:______

Date:______

Please indicate by ticking off one of the boxes whether you want to wish to keep a copy of the information letter for your own reference

Yes

Please indicate by ticking off one of the boxes your wish to receive a summary of the research results

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Yes

A summary of the research results will be handed in personally to you.

Thank you for your agreement to participate in this research study!

Contacts:

Researcher: Rakhat Zholdoshalieva, 2nd year Doctor of Education Student, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto-Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Email: [email protected]

Phone #: +(996 3222) 6 24 15

Address: Apt 62 Block 12, Toloikon mikrorayon, Osh city, 714000 Kyrgyzstan

Supervisor: Peter Sawchuk, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto-Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Email: [email protected]

If you want to know more about your rights as participants, you can contact the Office of Research Office of the University of Toronto at [email protected] or +1 416 946 3273

Letter of Agreement to Host a Researcher in the School

I, ______(first and last name), as in the position of ______of the school #____ named after ______, agree to host Ms. Rakhat Zholdoshalieva during her doctoral research project, titled as, Rural Youth in changing education, learning and work contexts in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan from December 2010 till June 2011.

Ms. Rakhat will seek consent of potential research participants among the students of Grade 9, 10 and 11. In case, potential research participants among the students want to seek the consent of the members of families, Ms. Rakhat will approach the identified guardian(s) of that selected

306 student by herself. Ms. Rakhat will also collect information beyond the school and may attend community activities and visit families. The researcher is solely responsible to solve any risks and problems generated during data collection period. The school will not have any responsibility for the results and activities of her research study.

Ms. Rakhat will make an announcement about her research study and purposes during school assembly for senior secondary students. Ms. Rakhat Zholdoshalieva will interact with teachers and students and observe lessons and other school events and activities within the period of December, 2010-June, 2011. These observations and conversations will not be used to disclose the information about school to the Ministry of Education or other related departments.

The school’s name will not be mentioned in the study. The names of the teaching and administrative staff will not be disclosed in any writings or presentations by this researcher. Code or pseudonyms will be used in the writings and presentations.

Ms. Rakhat Zholdoshalieva will conduct 2 workshops for teachers on teaching strategies to enhance students’ effective and meaningful learning during her stay in the school and the village as a reciprocal activity to the school.

Signature: ______Position title: ______

Date: ______

Contact address and phone number(s): ______

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Appendix 2: Information Letter for Participants (Kyrgyz)

Изилдоонун катышуучуларына маалымат

Изилдоонун темасы: Айылдык жаштар-Кыргызстандагы откоол мезгилдеги озгоруп жаткан билим беруу, жумуш базары (формалдуу жана формалдуу эмес) экономика системасы убагында

Изилдоочу: Рахат Жолдошалиева, Канададагы Торонто Университетинин Билим беруунун Доктору программасынын 2 курсунун студенти

Урматтуу улан/кыз,

Сенин ушул изилдоого болгон кызыгуун абдан кубандырат жана ушул изилдоого катышууга макул болгонуна чон рахмат. Томондогу маалымат сага жалпы изилдоо тууралуу жана сенин катышуун, убакыт олчомун, жана укугун жонундо маалымдайт. Сенин укугун Канададагы Торонто Университетинин Изилдоо Этикасы комитети тарабынан корголот. Бул изилдоо менин Торонто Университетинин Билим беруунун Доктору программасын бутуруудогу негизги болук болуп саналат.

Бул изилдоо аркылуу силердин билим беруудоогу, уйдо жана айылдагы жашоодо уйронгонунор, силердин айыл экономикасына кошкон салымынар жонундо уйронуу болуп эсептелет.

Коптогон окумуштуулар билим беруу менен экономиканын байланышын тастыкташкан. Бирок экономикадагы озгорулор билим беруу системасына таасирин тийгизишет. Сен жана сенин ата-энен ушуга окшогон озгоруулорду Союз таркагандан бери Кыргызстанда байкап келе жаткандыр. Билим берууго болгон талаптар озгоруп, азыркы базар экономикасынын талабына жооп беруу болуп эсептелинет. Бул изилдоо билим беруунун, уйронуунун жана экономиканын кандай жолдор менен байланышы бар экендигин анализдоо (серептоо) болуп эсептелет.

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Бул изилдоодо 25-40 жаштар катышышат. Андан башка ошол жаштардын уй було мучолору менен болгон кошумча баарлашуулар дагы болот. Изилдоо 2010 жылдын декабрынан 2011 жылдын июнь айына дейре созулат. Бул изилдоодого маалыматтар баарлашуу жана байкоо жургузуу аркылуу топтолот.

Баарлашуулар: Сен менен 3 же 4 жолу 30-45 муноттон баарлашуум мумкун. Анда сен озун, окуун тууралуу, жана уй булолук жана айылдык экономикага кошкон салымын тууралуу айтып бермшмн болот. Сага ынгайлуу убакыт жана баарлашуу орунун тактоошун мумкун. Сенин кээ бир уй було мучолорун менен дагы баарлашуу болушу мумкун. Эгер каршы болбосон баарлашууну диктофонго жазышым мумкун эмне дегенде бул даярдык баарлашуу убагында сенин жоопторуна толук конул бурууга жардам берет. Диктофонго жазылган баарлашууну мен гана угам. Андагы маалымат изилдоонун суроолорун жооп берууго гана колдонулат. Эгер диктофонго жазууга каршы болсон эртереек маалымдашын керек.

Байкоо жургузуу: Бул изилдоодо сенин окуу жана уй турмушундагы салымынды байкоо жургузуушум мумкун. Ошол байкоодогу адамдарга алардын аты-жонун сактоо учун оз атынан башка аттар берилет.

Сенин бул изилдоого катышуун оз эркин менен, жана эч кандай материалдык жардам берилбейт. Эгер изилдоо учурунда катышуудан баш тартатсан дагы оз эркин.

Маалыматты мен гана колдономун. Баарлашуунун кээ бирки маалыматын менин профессор жетекчим корушу мумкун. Бирок сенин атынды анда мен башка ысым менен жазам.

Сенин адресин, айылын жана башка маалыматтар 2 жылга менин оздук компьютеримде гана сакталат. Андан куйун баардык маалыматтар компьютерден очурулуп коюлат. Изилдоонун жыйынтыгы диссертация катары жана илимий конференцияларда корсотулушу мумкун. Англис тилинен сырткары, изилдоонун жыйынтыгы кыргыз жана орус тилинде болот, бирок сенин аты-жонун, адресин жана башка информациялар алынып салынат.

Изилдоого катышуу боюнча макулдук беруу

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Мен изилдоого байланыштуу жогоруудагы маалыматтарды окудум. Бул баракчага кол койгонум ушул изилдоого катышууга макулдук бергеним. Мен 3 же 4 жолу 30-45 мунотко созулган баарлашуу болорун билем. Менин бул изилдоого катышуум оз макулдугум менен. Мен кээ бирки суроолорго жооп беруудон баш тарканга мумкунчулугум бар экенин билем. Менин катышуум учун эч кандай материалдык жардам берилбейт. Баарлашуулар диктофонго жазылат. Илимий конференцияларда ушул изилдоонун маалыматтары аты-жонусуз жана дарексиз берилет. Изилдоонун жыйынтыгы диссертация катары жана илимий конференцияларда корсотулушу мумкун.

Аты-жон______

Колу______

Дата______

Ушул келишимдин бир версиясы сенде болушун каалайсынбы? Бирисин белгиле:

Ооба______

Жок______

Эгер изилдоонун кыска жыйынтыгын алууну кааласан, бирисин танда:

Ооба______

Жок______

Ушул изилдоого катышууга макулдук бергенин учун чон рахмат!

Маалымат учун

Электрондук дарек: [email protected]

Телефон: +3222 6 24 15

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Дарек: Толойкон микрорайону, 12 уй, 62 квартира/батир, Ош шаары, Кыргызстан

Илимий жетекчиси: Профессор Питер Соучак, Торонто Университети, Канада

Эгер оз укугун жонундо кобуроок билгенди кааласан, Канададагы Торонто Университетинин Изилдоонун Этикасы Офисинин электрондук дареги: [email protected] жана телефон дареги: +1416 946 3273

Мектеп менен келишим

Мен, ______(аты-жону), ______(мектептин аты),______(ээлеген орду), изилдоочу Рахат Жолдошалиеванын, «Айылдык жаштар-Кыргызстандагы откоол мезгилдеги озгоруп жаткан билим беруу, жумуш базары (формалдуу эмес) экономика системасы убагында» деген темадагы доктордук изилдоосун 2010 жылдын декабрынан 2011 июнуна чейин откоргонго макулдук беребиз.

Рахат Жолдошалиева изилдоого катыша турган жаштар жана алардын ата-энелери менен озу макулдук жургузот. Рахат мектептен сырткары дагы айылдагы башка жумуштар жана мероприятияларда ушул жаштар менен иштеши мумкун. Изилдоочу озу башка катышуучулар менен келишим тузот. Изилдоо учурундагы баардык чыгым жана тиешелуу проблемалар изилдоочу тарабынан чечилет. Мектеп изилдоонун жыйынтыгына жана изилдоо процессине эч кандай жоопкерчиликти албайт.

Рахат озунун изилдоосу тууралуу мектептин эрте мененки чогулушунда окуучуларга маалымдайт. Андан кийин, тийиштуу мугалимдер жана окуучулар менен байланышат. Рахат мугалимдер жана окуучулар менен баарлашуусу жана кээ бирки сабактарга катышуусу мумкун. Топтолгон маалыматтарда мектеп жонундо так маалымат айтылбайт.

Колу:______

Ээлеген орду:______

Дата:______

Дарек:______

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Appendix 3: Protocol 1 for Youth Interview

Goal: To gather data on the general descriptions of events, activities, and perspectives on informal learning, work, and school education and aspirations for their futures.

• Self: Will you briefly tell me about yourself: Your name, your date of birth, the name of your school? • Family: How would you describe your family? Who are your parents? How would you describe their education? What were/are their occupations? Who are your family members? How would you describe their education and occupation? • School: Will you please tell shortly about your school? Which subjects do you like? Why? Can you walk me through your typical school day? Your classes? Your peers? Your teachers? Your school environment? • Future: What are your goals for your future? Educational plans? Occupational aspirations? Will you elaborate on your future aspirations? • Work: Outside your school and education, how would you describe your typical day in winter (December to March)? What do you do from the time you wake up until you go to bed? Now how would you describe your typical day in spring (March to June)? Your typical day in summer (June to September)? Your typical day in fall (September to December? • Rural cultural capital: Now how would you describe about your learning at home (e.g. How did you learn about cattle raising, household chores? Who taught/teaches you? How do/did you learn?) • Forms of cultural capital: In your opinion, how is what you learn at school connected or not with what you learn at home? Will you elaborate on your learnings? • Gender: In your opinion, if you were the opposite gender, how would your learning, experience and life in this village and beyond be different? Why?

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Appendix 4: Protocol 2 for Youth Interview

Goal: To gather data on specific biographic and familial events in young lives, their evaluation and perception of rural community, kinship social capital, peer social capital, future aspirations, perception of work.

• Rural life (Sense of place): What do you like the most about your village? How do you typical spend your time in your village? What do you like the least about your village? What would you improve in your village? (Probes: If you were to stay in the village after your school, how do you imagine your future here?) • Family and community (Sense of family and community): How do you describe what family is? How do you describe what community is? How would you describe your family? How would you describe your kinship? (Probes: Who are your relatives/kins? What is your family’s relationship with other members? What is your relationship with your relatives? Where do your relatives live? How often do you and your family meet relatives? How do you perceive your future relationship?) • Peers, friends, (and if they mention about romantic relationship on their own) (peers as social capital): How would you describe your relationship with friends? How do you usually spend your time with friends? (Probes: What do you consider important in friendship? Why? What is your friendship with them based on? How do you help each other? What activities do you usually do? How do your parents view your friendship? How do your friends impact your education?) • Home and school-related work (education vs. household economy; family cultural capital; family economic capital): How would you describe the most favourable conditions for your learning at home? (Probes: When do you do your homework? Who helps you with your homework? What learning resources does your family provide at home? What are the challenges for your school-related learning at home? How do you describe your parents and others’ attitude towards education/schooling? How does the work at home influence your schooling? Do the household chores negatively impact your achievement at school?)

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• Attitudes to schooling (Cultural capital): What value would your schooling have in your present and future life? (Probes: Why do you think you go to school? What kind of education is important? Why? What are the characteristics of good education? What skills and knowledge are the most useful for you? What is your opinion about your teachers? Your classmates? Your school infrastructure? What school resources do you often use? How would education influence your life?) • School/Learning (Forms of cultural capital): How would you describe your school days? (Probes: What are the most memorable learning have you had since our first interview? How would you describe your yesterday’s school day? What would you say you have learnt yesterday? What challenges did you face at school? What support did you receive at school? What social and cultural activities do you often participate? What roles do you have at school? Any leadership roles?) • Importance attached to home learning and school learning (Cultural capital): How important is your home learning? How important is your school learning? What are the parallels between your home and school learning? What contradictions do you experience between your school and home learning? How would you combine these learning into your school curriculum?) • Rural youth and migration (mobility as capital?): How do you describe the situation of youth migration in your village? What is your opinion about those young people leaving for different cities and countries? Who mostly leaves? Who is remaining in the village? Why? In your opinion should youth migration be controlled by the government? If yes, why? If no, why not? • Leisure and youth (economic capital; social capital; cultural capital): How do you usually spend your free time? What are there for youth for leisure? What do rural youth find interesting to participate in their free time? What would you rather prefer to have in the village for your free time? What would you have changed? Why? What should be done to improve leisure facilities for rural youth?

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Appendix 5: Protocol for Parent or Family Member Interview

Goal: To gather data for understanding of family conditions and culture in relation to children’s education, growing up, identity formation, work, and future aspirations. • Will you briefly tell me about yourself? (When were you born? Where? Who were your parents? What is your occupation? How many years have you been working in this/that occupation? What kind of education do you have? If you have been housewife/unemployed officially, what are your activities at home? What do you usually do?) • Will you briefly tell me about your spouse? (Who, what does she/he do, and what is her/his occupation? Education?) • How would you describe your household income? How would you describe your household expense (Probes: Household assets, ownership, and household income sources and expenses)? • Could you talk about your children? (Probes: How many, who are they? Where are they now? Do they come to see you often? Talk often? Help you with money or other things?) • Could you also tell about education of your children? (Probes: What kind of skills and knowledge do your children need? Why do you want your children to go to school? What should your children learn from school? What do you expect from schooling? What do you think about quality of education at schools? What should be the education about/for? Do you monitor your children’s education? How?) • How would you describe your home environment for children’s learning and education? (Probes: What resources do they have for their school/education? Textbooks, books, space for doing homework-table and chairs, computer, time for doing homework? Parental and sibling support? • What are your aspirations for your children’s future? (Probes: Do you have conversations about the future aspirations with your children? Who has more influence on children’s aspirations? Who makes the decision? What support do you provide?) • How would you describe your child X’s support in the household? (Probes: What does he/she do at home mostly? Where did he/she learn how to do those things? At what age? Which skills or/and knowledge is important for doing household activities? What kind of

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contribution does your child do to your household? Why do you think he/she should do these activities at home? • How does (or does not) school contribute to children and young people’s learning to lead rural lives? How connected or disconnected is children’s school education from rural life? (Probes: Who teaches children skills and attitudes to live in rural communities? Raising cattle? Farming? Household chores? Community participation? • What changes would you hope to see in the education system of Kyrgyzstan? In the education of your children?