‘The state starts from the family’: peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs

Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Basing their reasoning on the officially promoted analogy between family and state, people in the eastern Pamirs distinguish between social spaces that are related to well-being and those that are not. As a factor of distinction, and crucial to the establishment of peace and harmony, the moral quality of leadership plays an important role. Positive experiences of such leadership as balanced and morally pure are mainly identified and witnessed within families and neighbourhoods and only occasionally in state institutions. This discrepancy raises the question of where to locate boundaries between good and bad, moral and immoral, harmonious and conflictual. Thus, this article contributes not only to the study of local concepts of well-being in Central Asia but also to the study of local concepts of ‘ill-being’ which challenge them.     

State engagement with non-state justice: how the experience in Kyrgyzstan can reinforce the need for legitimacy in Afghanistan

Currently there is a question of whether and how Afghanistan should engage non-state councils of elders to resolve disputes. In order to harness their benefits (e.g. efficiency), control their abuses (e.g. occasional controversial resolutions), and stabilize the resolution of disputes, some have argued that formal links should be established between the state judicial system and non-state councils of elders in Afghanistan. Others argue that mere informal links between the two systems should be established. Still others suggest that prior models of state engagement in Afghanistan should be revived. In Kyrgyzstan, just 65 miles north of Afghanistan, the Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet administrations have used various methods to engage non-state councils of elders. Despite these vastly different attempts at controlling local dispute resolutions, elders independently resolved disputes outside of Tsarist and Soviet control and continue to resolve disputes outside of post-Soviet state control in Kyrgyzstan. This phenomenon highlights the need for legitimacy in any models of state engagement that are considered for Afghanistan. If, as observed in Kyrgyzstan, people do not use state-sanctioned local councils in Afghanistan, then their purposes may be frustrated. Therefore, in addition to reviewing the experience with state engagement in other parts of the world, policy makers in Afghanistan should also review the historical and contemporary experience with state engagement in Kyrgyzstan. As the need for legitimacy is reconsidered and applied to the design of models for Afghanistan, it may be more likely that those models will be used by more people in Afghanistan and that their purposes will be furthered.     

Housing subsidy projects in Amdo: modernity,governmentality, and income disparity in Tibetan areas of China

This paper explores the ways in which housing projects in the northeastern Tibetan region of Amdo (Qinghai) produce governable citizens through rural reconstruction projects. Since the beginning of the “Construction of the New Socialist Countryside” project in 2005, the Chinese state has made great efforts to improve the living standards of rural populations, with a particular focus on the construction of “comfortable” and modern housing. This paper examines the housing subsidy projects that were launched in Amdo in 2009. Drawing on qualitative data, including participant observation and interviews, the paper examines the ways in which Tibetan villagers seek to achieve their versions of modernity through these projects. It analyzes how housing projects have encouraged villagers to become more avid market consumers by cultivating and increasing their desires for material improvement. In doing so, these projects have increased income disparities among households in the same village.     

Migration past and present: changing patterns in Kyrgyzstan

Internal and international labour migration is a main livelihood strategy for many people in rural areas of Kyrgyzstan. It is estimated that approximately one-third of the employable population of Kyrgyzstan is working abroad. However, current labour migration phenomena are not exceptional since Central Asia's history has always been characterized by the movement of people, including external and internal, forced and voluntary, legal and illegal, permanent and temporary, ethnically or economically motivated migration. This article gives an overview of the historical and present migration processes with a special focus on three village communities in rural Kyrgyzstan. It deals with the opportunities and difficulties with which labour migrants and their non-migrating family members are confronted today. The results are based on extensive field work in Kyrgyzstan.     

Representing Women in Chinese Village Self-Government: A New Perspective on Gender,Representation, and Democracy

ABSTRACT

Recent feminist debate about how to achieve the substantive representation of women in government has been conducted largely in relation to national parliaments in democratic states. This article brings a new perspective by examining grassroots rural government in contemporary China – an authoritarian state, which, however, began implementing village “self-government,” including elections, in 1987. The article draws on qualitative fieldwork in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Yunnan. The authors went into this fieldwork with an understanding that women's substantive representation, democracy, and gender equality are mutually constituted and with an expectation that village self-government might make a much-needed contribution to the achievement of all three. However, we ran into trouble with this analytical framework. First, there were marked variations in villagers’ practices and understandings of “representation.” Second, we found that democracy was not a prerequisite for substantive representation. Third, most villagers we talked with claimed that “men and women are equal” and there was little conception of villagers’ interests diverging by gender. This article explores our analytical “trouble,” with a view to advancing scholarship on constraints to democracy in authoritarian states and suggesting fruitful directions for feminist theorists interested in the relationship between gender, representation and democracy.     

Anxiety,order and the other: well-being among ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks

Neither well-being nor suffering can be understood without understanding how the two experiences are related. In this paper, the author focuses on the experiences of well-being and suffering in everyday, mundane contexts, such as food preparation, cleaning and hospitality. Data presented are drawn from fieldwork conducted among ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan, shortly after independence. The author discusses how the experiences of well-being and suffering are informed by symbolic systems that are linked to religious beliefs. This examination contributes to an understanding of the power of religious symbols, arguing that the expectations of well-being or suffering make systems of religious symbols more compelling.     

Embedded rubber sandals: trade and gifts across the Sino–Kyrgyz border

How does a group of Uyghur traders from a village in Atush (Xinjiang, China) end up with a stock of unsellable rubber sandals in Kadamjay (Batken, Kyrgyzstan), and why don’t they compete according to market principles? This article explores the social investments of the traders and their families, and reveals their behaviour to be rational, both economically and socially. It illuminates the business and daily life of Uyghur traders in southern Kyrgyzstan, an environment that is increasingly challenging and uncertain. The examination of exchange relations between their households explains why the traders cooperate as they do and also why they do not cooperate more. Economic rationales and social obligations prove to be mutually embedded. This insight expands and deepens a nascent analytical approach that recognizes social motivation for economic activities in Central Asia alongside undeniable economic incentives. This approach has much to gain from being more explicitly reconnected to classical anthropological theories of gift giving.     

Sewing to satisfaction: craft-based entrepreneurs in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

This article focuses on the reassembling of apparel production in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. We contribute to this special issue on well-being in Central Asia by examining how individual craft-based apparel producers (a subset of producers in the apparel industry) describe the process through which they built upon their Soviet past and reoriented their professional trajectories in a new competitive market environment. These producers locate professional satisfaction in their ability to draw upon and creatively re-employ local knowledge and experience learned in Soviet institutions, ultimately – as they articulate and perceive – deriving pride and well-being from the process of selling highly regarded ethnically inspired apparel products both at home and abroad.     

The politics and economics of “retraditionalization” in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan

This paper analyzes attitudes of women enrolled in secular and religious universities in the capital cities of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan toward family life and the role of Islam in the private and public sphere. Survey data indicate that women from both types of universities in both countries sympathize with retraditionalization, or “a return to traditional values, family life, and religion, which entails, in part, women being moved out of the work force.” Thus far, there is no statistical evidence of this phenomenon in the literature. Sympathy for retraditionalization is unfolding in the context of ongoing economic uncertainty that has plagued Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan since the Soviet Union's collapse, and its manifestations produce political responses. I argue that Kyrgyz and Tajik elites push a particular gender norm implying female secularization to counter expressions of retraditionalization among young women. In conclusion, I highlight counterintuitive findings of the survey regarding Islam's role in Central Asian society and discuss collective versus individual acts of resistance to female secularization policies in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.     

Kyz ala kachuu and adat: non-consensual bride kidnapping and tradition in Kyrgyzstan

The position of Kyrgyz adat (traditional customary law) on the practice of non-consensual bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan has not been documented nor is there a consensus among the ethnic Kyrgyz on whether or not non-consensual bride kidnapping is a Kyrgyz ‘tradition’. This paper provides a review of the historical and ethnographic evidence regarding the frequency and appropriateness (according to Kyrgyz adat) of non-consensual bride kidnapping in traditional Kyrgyz society before the political, economic and social changes of the Soviet period. The evidence presented by this research discredits the widely held belief in Kyrgyzstan, that non-consensual kidnapping is a Kyrgyz adat tradition that was widely practiced with general social approval in ancient times. The information provided in this paper can be used by educators, legislators and the media to demonstrate that non-consensual kidnapping is not legitimated by pre-Soviet Kyrgyz adat tradition.     

Village Self-Government and Representation in Southwest China

Villages in China are, according to recent law, “self-governed” by villager committees, whose members are elected by villagers and held accountable to villagers and villager representative assemblies. Previous studies have focused on the institutions of self-government, assuming that, if unimpeded, they will enhance both direct villager participation in governance and the representation of villager interests. In contrast, this article focuses on local understandings and ideals about political roles and relationships, as constructed through everyday political claims and practices. The article draws on qualitative research in four villages in Yunnan, southwest China. In these villages, neither cadres nor villagers used the word “represent” to characterise the role of members of village government. Furthermore, villagers could not explain what villager representatives do or what “representative” in the title “villager representative” means. This leads us to ask: How do village residents conceive the responsibilities of villager representatives and cadres? Is the lack of reference to “representation” merely a linguistic issue, or do they have a different conception of villager-cadre and villager-representative relationships? In addressing these questions, this article aims to enrich our understanding of village self-government in China and contribute to theorising about political representation.     

“I am concerned with the future of my children”: the project economy and shifting views of education in a Tibetan pastoral community

Tibetan pastoralists have been subject to large-scale state-led development policies over the past three decades. The provisioning of institutionalized state schooling, in particular, has all along been part and parcel of these development projects, including urbanization and resettlement initiatives. However, for a variety of reasons, the promotion of schooling in Tibetan pastoral areas has been a challenge since the first Maoist efforts in 1950s. By focusing on a case study of a Buddhist monk’s persistent effort to build a primary school in his home village in the eastern region of Tibet in 1990, and on how Tibetan villagers’ views of him and his school project have changed over time, this paper examines the nexus of relationships between schooling, and social and cultural changes in pastoral Tibet. I also aim to relate Tibetan pastoralists’ shifting values of schooling to the larger social and political context, particularly the ubiquitous Chinese xiangmu (project) economy and Tibetan pastoralists’ ever-increasing dependence on the state. This paper argues that although state schooling is highly contested, it has been one of the driving forces of social change in Tibetan pastoral areas today.     

LAW,TRANSLATION, AND VOICE

The channeling of popular struggles through legal cases is central to the strategy of the emerging “rights defense” movement in China, linking grassroots contention with professional mediators who translate grievances into the institutional environment of law. This was the case in an unusual, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 2005 to remove an elected village chief in Taishi Village in Guangdong, China, by legal means. While the grievances that sparked the campaign were about the unequal distribution of the benefits from village development, the strategy of instituting a recall procedure and the framing of the campaign in terms of democracy and rule of law obscured distinctly gendered issues of poverty and inequality in the village, even though women were among the most visible protesters. This article employs a “sociology of translation” to link framing processes and power dynamics, thus proposing a methodological approach to reconnecting framing with other aspects of movements. In the Taishi case, the translation of the dispute into the language of law had contrary effects: it opened the door to a legitimate, if temporary, public space for the airing of villagers' claims. At the same time, translation legitimized the voices of “experts” who then became de facto leaders in this public space; it also increasingly shifted the action to the internet, to which the villagers apparently had no access. This analysis raises questions about whether such strategies may result in either the formation of durable rights-based identities among grassroots participants or a sense of being connected to a broader social movement.     

From mice-eaten passports to fingerprint scanning: fluctuating state presence and ‘entangled documents’ along the Kyrgyz–Uzbek border

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on engagement with identity documents among the rural Uzbek population in the borderlands of Kyrgyzstan. By exploring the materiality of the documents and people’s concern with these material artefacts of bureaucracy, this article illustrates how the state has been moving in, out and through the lives of the people living on the margins of the state. People’s engagement with documents illuminates the temporal dynamics of the state’s spatialization practices and highlights the fluctuating presence of the state. In addition, this article exposes the discrepancies between the classificatory bureaucratic order and the changing realities of everyday life. Gaps between these two domains are filled with what I refer to as entangled documents. People’s attempts to disentangle documents reveal how people on the margins of the state manage encounters with state bureaucracy and provide insight into the internal dynamics of a local bureaucracy.     

“Extremely Rightful” Resistance: Land Appropriation and Rural Agitation in Contemporary Vietnam

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores a rural protest against the appropriation of arable land for a development project. The focus is on villagers’ collective memories of an exceptional protest staged in 2010. The aim of the protest was to pressure local district authorities to increase the compensation villagers agreed to take three years earlier. While originally accepting compensation when their holdings were appropriated to build an industrial park, they later considered that the compensation paid was unfair and that some funds were misappropriated. They were aware that the likelihood of getting additional compensation was small and the risk of repression high. In tracing their struggle, the article argues that villagers did not seek to retain land as their primary subsistence source or as cherished ancestral land. Neither were they driven by an abstract sense of justice. Rather, they represented themselves as active, responsible decision-makers, determined to risk their own safety to bring their family a better future. They therefore employed an “extremely rightful” form of resistance rarely documented in the scholarship on Asia. They not only confined actions within officially sanctioned channels, but also underplayed all oppositional intentions against central and local authorities.     

The politics of literature: Writers,intellectuals and German unity

The relationship between politics and literature is beset by tensions and difficulties. The traditional dichotomy in Germany between ’Geist’ and ‘Macht’ has come to the fore again in debates about unity. The events of 1989/90 provoked a fierce controversy over the role of writers and intellectuals in both German states. This article chronicles the debate and seeks to place it in its socio‐political context: the alleged role of GDR writers as loyal supporters of their state, alleged complicity with the Stasi, and the supposed indifference of western writers to the German Question.     

Even honey may become bitter when there is too much of it: Islam and the struggle for a balanced existence in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

In Kyrgyzstan, as in the rest of Central Asia, recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islam. What is perceived as a growing ‘religiosity’ is often seen as a symptom of post-Soviet chaos and excess, but people equally tend to see Islam as an important source of well-being, for themselves and for society as such. It is argued that a general feature of the Islam many Muslims strive for – and occasionally experience glimpses of – is one that expresses, embodies and enables a balanced existence: a balance between well-being in this world and in the afterlife; a balance between the acceptance of one's fate and the attempt to improve one's situation; or a balance between adherence to abstract dogmas and respect for local moralities.     

How to build a better future? Kyrgyzstani development workers and the ‘knowledge transfer’ strategy

The development industry has moved from concepts of aid and technical assistance to the idea that closing ‘gaps’ in people's knowledge is the most effective way of alleviating poverty and injustice. My data show the means through which this ‘knowledge transfer’ is actually supposed to happen. I examine the micro-politics of development: the role and agency of development workers, who are so frequently employed to conduct ‘training’ on a wide range of topics affecting citizens' well-being, such as conflict prevention or sustainable agricultural practices. This paper draws on ethnographic research between 2010 and 2012 with Kyrgyzstani NGO workers to analyse the ‘side-effects’ of development, such as the creation of a new social class and softening age hierarchies. I examine the widespread conviction among trainers that education can solve most social ills, and their concepts of how knowledge, sometimes in the guise of ideologiya, shapes people. I argue that this faith in knowledge reflects both the life course of NGO workers themselves and what they can offer from within the ‘knowledge transfer’ paradigm. An understanding of the friction between different expectations of knowledge content, teaching relationships and aims in creating well-being is not only essential to a critical reflection on these development efforts but also illuminates wider political and social processes and relationships, such as expectations of the state and international community.