The sharp debate over Alisher Il’khamov’s “Archeology of Uzbek Identity” indicates the existence of real differences among scholars of Central Asia. It is clear that the lines are drawn between those who see nationality and ethnicity as socially constructed, and those who see them as “natural-historical” (estestvenno-istoricheskie). It is also clear from the debate that these basic assumptions lead scholars to study rather different things. Scholars belonging to the first group focus on identity and identity formation; the question for them is how human beings identify themselves and how that identification changes over time. The second group seeks ultimately to discern the true underlying nature of ethnic groups; the process of group formation (“consolidation”) lies in the realm of nature, and can be understood through biological metaphors (hence ethnogenesis). Individuals belong to groups, whether they know it or not, and part of the task of the scholar is to discern how consciousness comes to coincide with actual reality.
The basic divide cannot be subsumed under the labels “Western” and “Soviet.” It is, rather, a debate between the heritage of positivism and objectivism common to both the Western and Soviet academic traditions, and the challenges to it. Soviet scholarship had to contend with political and ideological strictures not encountered in the West, but it was as rooted in the same certainties of nineteenth-century science as its Western counterpart. In the West, that heritage was questioned in the second half of the twentieth century from a number of directions, although it was never vanquished. It is this conglomeration of challenges that is labeled “constructivism” in Russian, and “poststructuralism” or “postmodernism” by those who engage in it. The rise of “constructivist” explanations of ethnicity and nationality, then, is part of much broader intellectual developments in the West.
Equating “constructivism” with “Western scholarship” would, however, flatter the West. The challenge of postmodernism has hardly carried all before it in the West. Foucault & Co. do not represent a new orthodoxy, and their ideas have encountered resistance within the academy, let alone beyond it. Especially among historians, there is a great deal of suspicion of “theory,” and the empiricist tradition remains very strong. Indeed, the popularity of Samuel Huntington’s formulations of civilizational conflict, based on a facile essentialism, indicates that, especially in the United States, the wider intellectual field remains hostile to postmodernists or “constructivists.”
The term “constructivist” itself requires comment. It lumps together a number of different approaches that have quite different lineages. Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm both come out of a Marxist tradition, and are comfortable with the existence of objective realities (such as classes). Hobsbawm popularized the notion of the “invention of tradition,”^[1] but for him the invention was something quite concrete and served specific political purposes. There are no references to Foucault in their work. The work of Miroslav Hroch,^[2] although not cited very often in Russian-language debates, has been equally influential in the new histories of nationalism. It too is descended from Marxism, with no affinity for postmodernism. Anthony Smith and his followers, of course, have worked out a position much closer to primordialism. Authors with a greater debt to Foucault or to literary theories have a much more iconoclastic attitude toward the foundational categories of class, race, nation, and caste. They take the business of invention much further. The fact that all these approaches disagree with the very positivist and primordialist notion of ethnogenesis is perhaps not enough to make them a single school.
This is clearly evident in the case at hand. Il’khamov’s attempt at writing a “constructivist” history was so sharply criticized by Uzbek academics because Il’khamov had sinned against the norms and structures of Uzbekistan’s academic life, with its solid continuities with the Soviet past.^[3] Even more important, however, was the fact that the ethnic history of Uzbeks is a matter of state import in Uzbekistan. (Uzbekistan is, of course, not unique in this regard among the states of the post-Soviet space.) The current regime in Uzbekistan seeks its legitimacy from its claim to have reestablished Uzbek statehood (o’zbek davlatchiligi, or, in Russian, gosudarstvennost’ uzbekskogo naroda). It also upholds “science” as an unambiguous source of authority. Hence, it is no surprise that Il’khamov’s “transgression” was criticized for being both “antiscientific”^[4] and not “serving the interests of the Uzbek people.”^[5] The connection between a particular ethnogenetic argument (one that locates the formation of the Uzbek people at an appropriately early period of time) and state-sponsored processes of nation-building is quite clear here.
The implications of all this for the possibility of dialogue between the two traditions of scholarship are not encouraging. The differences are fundamental, and they lead the two groups of scholars to ask different kinds of questions. In a way, Il’khamov’s article is an example of dialogue between the two schools, since he sees the modern Uzbek identity as constructed, but does not deny the “objective” existence of the three major groups that for him constitute the Uzbek nation of today. This, however, leads to internal contradictions in the argument. “Constructivist” scholars urge him to carry his argument further,^[6] while scholars in the ethnogenetic tradition find even the mere attempt problematic. Indeed, one can go further and say that most commentators from that tradition do not even understand the basic intent behind Il’khamov’s argument, which is to locate the emergence of modern Uzbek identity in the early Soviet period. Rather, they take him to be arguing that the “formation of the Uzbek people” took place in the sixteenth century (and not earlier) through the influence of Uzbeks from the Dasht-i Qipchaq; the problem they criticize is not the radically new way of conceptualizing the issue, but merely a different, more recent dating of the phenomenon conceptualized as before.^[7]
That said, I do believe that the ethnogenesis argument is teleological and cannot answer questions raised by history. Approaches to the study of ethnicity and identity developed in the West provide new ways of thinking about these questions, and therefore should be used. As a historian, I also believe that there are no “typical” or “atypical” cases of social phenomena, but rather variations on themes. Thus, there is no typical colony or no typical nation against which other colonies or nations may be measured, but rather a vast array of concrete historical phenomena to be understood through asking similar, methodologically self-conscious questions of all of them. Nor should we use critical approaches simply as “models” to be applied to new cases. Rather, new cases help rethink theoretical conceptions. Central Asian cases were not even considered by the founding fathers of the theories of nationalism or postcolonial discourse; yet, the rich material from the region’s modern history can reflect back on those theories and help sharpen them. This – and only this – is the function of theory as I see it.
The current realities of Central Asia cannot be understood without recourse to “constructivist” approaches. As I will show in the balance of this paper, the manner in which people identify themselves, and how states and others classify them, is a product of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, none of the identities currently held to be “natural” were in evidence. How they came to be deployed, how their meaning was defined, stabilized, and accepted by large majorities of the populations, how they came to be seen as “natural” – these are the questions to be answered. But this has come about through a historical, not a natural, process and has to be investigated as such.
Group identities in pre-Russian Central Asia presented a complex mosaic of fragmented identities intimately intertwined with the social and economic fabric of the land. People identified themselves and others according to a vast array of attributes. To the extent that they were used, broad labels such as “Turk” or “Tajik” served as broad categorizations that made sense only in opposition to each other. They were not meant to indicate internally cohesive groups, and they coexisted with any number of other oppositions. Other tribal conglomerates, such as the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz, and the Türkmen, retained their distinctive identities, rooted in myths of origin that defined them against other groups in Transoxiana. There were also smaller, more localized groups (such as the Moghuls of eastern Bukhara or the Qurama of the Chirchik valley) that did not fit the various tribal federations neatly and therefore remained distinctive. Moreover, language did not serve as a marker for Turk, Uzbek, or Tajik. It was quite possible for groups to identify themselves as Uzbek while speaking only Persian, as was the case with many Uzbeks in Bukhara. In 1949, the anthropologist Belqis Karmysheva found groups in Baljuvon who claimed descent from “Turk” tribes but spoke only Persian and considered themselves “Tajiks of Turkic descent [Tadzhiki roda tiurk].”
Urban dwellers, many of whom did not use tribal designations, were referred to variously as “Tajik,” “Sart,” or “Chaghatay,” regardless of speech. The usage of these terms was neither constant, nor universal, but varied over time and place. In practice Sarts and Tajiks were marked as different by their urban status, not by common origin or language. A nineteenth-century history from Kokand used Sart (sartiya) to oppose the sedentary population of the khanate to the nomadic (ilātiyya). To paraphrase John Schoeberlein-Engel, seeing the Sarts as an ethnic group or a nationality is analogous to seeing all town dwellers of southern Europe as a nationality. Nor did these labels exhaust the diversity of the urban population, in which groups such as Sayyids and Khojas asserted their distinctiveness on the basis of their sacred descent, even though they spoke the same language as their neighbors. The same held true, at the other end of the social spectrum, of the Loli, the “Gypsies” of Central Asia, whose identity was also defined by their social status.
Individuals felt themselves to be Uzbek or Turk or Tajik not through some abstract sense of belonging to a national group, but through the concrete fact of being born in a family that was located socially in a ramified structure of relationships conceived in kinship terms. Tribal designations were far more significant to individual identity than broader categories such as Turk or Tajik. There is no reason to assume that individuals classified by court chroniclers as “Turk” would have felt any affinity for each other, or that divisions between Turk and Tajik or Uzbek and Sart mentioned in the literary sources implied anything but divisions among the court elites. Among the sedentary population without tribal divisions, geographical designations played a similar role.
This manner of identifying survived into the 1920s (and even later), but by that time had come under attack from the idea that humanity is divided into discrete nations united by a language and common descent through history. Behind this idea lay the classificatory impulse inherent in modernity, which aspires to the categorization of all phenomena according to unambiguous, objective, and hence, scientific criteria. Russian imperial functionaries and ethnographers (often they were the same individuals), local modernist intellectuals, the Jadids, and the contemporary scholars at Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences all share this basic assumption.
From the beginning, Russian officialdom had looked to anthropology to render Central Asia comprehensible by classifying its inhabitants. These new classifications, created to understand and control the local population, became integral to bureaucratic practice in Central Asia, and from there entered local understandings of identity. The same understanding of community underlay the vision of the various nationalist movements in the Russian and Ottoman empires, even though the political aims of these movements were often diametrically opposed to those of officialdom. Romantic ideas appealed to Turkic intellectuals in the two empires who began to re-imagine their histories toward the end of the nineteenth century. Given the nature of the romantic nation, and the fact that they tapped into common sources (new findings in history, Turkology, and anthropology) and common sensibilities (enthusiasm for romantic nationalism under the influence of pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism), these groups soon discovered mutual affinities, and the idea of a broader pan-Turkic nation emerged. The study of these various Turkisms (Tatar and Crimean nationalisms in Russia and Turkism in the Ottoman Empire) has been long overshadowed by an emphasis on the purely political side of pan-Turkism, with the result that the complex connections and contestations between them are poorly understood. The writings of Turkic émigrés from Russia in the Ottoman Empire, such as Yusuf Akçura, Ağaoğlu Ahmed, and Hüseyinzade Ali brought the most extreme versions of the two currents together in pan-Turkism, which professed the goal of the political unity of those who belonged to the Turkic race/nation. But such pan-Turkism was not synonymous with the variegated discourse of Turkism. While pan-Turkism had limited success as an intellectual movement, the more basic idea of the affinity of various Turkic groups, and the knowledge of the their Turkicness, rapidly suffused all notions of identity in the Turkic world.
The romantic idea of the nation wreaked havoc on older notions of community and identity. Armed with an understanding of the world that saw it divided into discrete groups, amenable to rigorous, “scientific” classification if only sufficient “objective” data could be obtained, Russian officials and scholars proceeded to find the objective reality behind every label they encountered in their new domains. The ensuing enumeration and classification of the population created new understandings of old labels. The complexities of Central Asian identity were nowhere better demonstrated than in the case of the “Sarts.” The career of this label in the half-century of Tsarist rule demonstrates the forces at work in shaping identities in Central Asia.
The basic assumption that each label should accord to an actual group whose existence could be objectively and scientifically established was shared by most observers. The problem was that no one could pin down exactly who the Sarts were, although officials and scholars never doubted that the acquisition of sufficient objective information would provide the answer. The answers were sought in the realms of science and history, but not in social practices, for how the people defined themselves was of very little importance to the concerns of “science.” For physical anthropologists, craniological measurements provided a key to the truth, which would be clouded by the social conventions of naming. A. Bogdanov used craniological data to argue that Sarts and Uzbeks were distinct peoples. The anthropologist N. A. Aristov suggested a narrower definition of Sart as “sedentary Turks and Turkicized natives who have already lost their tribal way of life and the tribal divisions connected with it.” The notion of “Turkicization” also evoked racial admixture, which proved compelling to the romantic imagination, and soon became a characteristic trait of the Sarts. Similarly, while Orientalists exhaustively examined the etymology of the term and its occurrences in historical texts, they did not deign to look at how the term was used in actual practice. Perhaps the most influential view was formulated by V. V. Bartol’d, for whom “Sart” was an old Turkic term of Sanskrit origin, meaning “merchant,” and which in the post-Mongol period came to be used as a synonym for “Tajik” in referring to bearers of the Persian Muslim culture of the towns, in opposition to the nomadic Turkic culture of the steppe. The distinction between Turk and Tajik was of little interest to the Uzbek conquerors of Central Asia, and after the sixteenth century, “Sart” distinguished the sedentary population of the conquered territory from the conquerors and their allies. Gradually, “under the influence of the conquerors,” the urban dwellers began to call themselves Sart, “but the tribal differences between Turks and Tajiks were so great that the representatives of both peoples could not call themselves by the same name. Since the majority of the settled population now spoke Turkic, urban Turks began to be called ‘Sarts,’ in contradistinction to not just the nomads, but also the Tajiks.”
For N. P. Ostroumov, the longtime editor of Turkiston viloyatining gazeti, the official native-language newspaper, the question was not difficult to answer. In a work titled Sarts: Ethnographic Sketches, he reviewed the scientific literature on the question for forty pages, but then concluded simply that “Sarts are the sedentary natives, predominantly of the Syr Darya and part of the Ferghana oblasts.” What Ostroumov thought was important, since his editorship of the newspaper and his stature as an Orientalist allowed him to elaborate a Sart literary language, distinct from Uzbek and other Turkic dialects. Sart also appeared as a linguistic category in the census of 1897.
The use of the label provoked resolute opposition from the Jadids. They too saw labels connected to objective reality. But they did not recognize Sarts as a separate group (or nation), and therefore condemned the use of the label as inaccurate and unscientific. Criticism of the official use of the term came as early as 1893. Sher Ali Lapin, an interpreter in the chancellery of the governor of Samarqand oblast and a Kazakh himself, argued in a lecture that “there is neither a Sart people, nor a Sart language.” Rather, the word was a contraction of sarï it, “yellow dog,” a derogatory appellation used by Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads for all sedentary people, regardless of origin. “We have no basis for calling the language of the Sarts ‘Sart,’ since the language of the Sarts includes both Tajik and the language of the sedentary Uzbeks; therefore the language should be called ... the Uzbek language, in the dialect of the sedentary Uzbeks.” The issue came up again in 1911, and was this time directed at Tatar authors, who used the term Sart routinely. “Are we Sarts or Turks?” Behrombek Davlatshoyev, another interpreter, asked the editors of Shura, perhaps the most respected magazine in the Tatar world. Noting that Turkestan means “the land of the Turks,” he continued:

“Why is it that we are called “Sarts”? Is it that in earlier times Turks lived in this “land of the Turks,” but later left it, leaving their name behind? If so, then where did the people called “Sart,” that is, us, come from and when? ...And how is it that we inherited Turkic literature? Did the Turks leave it to us? Or did we take it, and the land, from them by force?”

No Tatar writer responded, but Mahmud Xo’ja Behbudiy joined in with a lengthy article in which he argued that the origins of the word “Sart” were unknown, and that it was used pejoratively only by the northern neighbors of Central Asia (Kazakhs and Tatars, from whom the Russians took it). Another author denied the existence of a Sart people. “The inhabitants of Turkestan, that is, Turan and Transoxiana are, from the point of view of race and nationality [jinsiyat va qavmiyat], predominantly Turks and Tajiks.” The opposition of Turk and Tajik had become a metaphor among “Oriental poets,” but neither old Arabic, nor Persian histories, geographies, or dictionaries contained the word “Sart.” Quoting Russian authors in the original, he went on to show the many, often contradictory, explanations given for the word. “To call the Uzbek Turkic inhabitants of the five oblasts of Russian Turkestan and the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva ‘Sart’ is an injustice, the despotism of opinion, the cause of doubt and division; [in short,] a huge mistake.”
Not everyone in Central Asia shared the Jadids’ position. A student from Osh criticized those who wanted to protest the use of the term. “Sart,” he argued, was not a pejorative term, but rather carried connotations of “royal descent” and “philosopher.” Another author, writing under the pseudonym “Sart, son of Sart [Sort o’g’li sort],” contended that “we Sarts do not hate the name, since our faith does not consider names and lineages important.” So Sarts did exist as a group because people answered to that name. But they were to disappear as a group when that label was banished from science and politics after the revolution.
In disowning “Sart”, the Jadids were as far from the pre-Russian usage of “Sart” as a social marker as were Russian scholars and functionaries, but whereas the latter searched for the nation hiding behind the label, the Jadids rejected it because, they argued, there was no nation there. Nations were objective identities, but their objectivity was defined by race; hence the concern with biological origins, which made Tajiks into Iranians and Khojas into Arabs. Nationhood, moreover, was considered to be the very essence of modernity, and knowledge of one’s origins a prerequisite for progress. “In our age, the ‘national’ [milliyat] question has taken precedence over the question of religion among Europeans,” wrote a writer who unfortunately remained anonymous, “so there is no harm if we too occasionally discuss the ‘Sart’ question, which is considered a national question, and thus remember our nation.” A Tatar writer Abdurauf Muzaffar made the point explicit: “religion exists only on the basis of the nation and national life... A religion without a nation is destroyed.”
It is equally important to note that criticism of the use of “Sart” was directed against Turkist authors. The discourse of Turkism was polyphonic, and the debate described above was an attempt by Central Asian writers to define their own version of Turkism. More significant, especially with hindsight, is the fact that the distinction between “Uzbek” and “Turk” disappears entirely. Uzbekness became, for the Jadids, a defining feature of the Turkic-speaking population of Central Asia.
The Jadids began using “Uzbek” occasionally as synonymous with the nation of Turkestanis, but identity discourses were still not clear cut before 1917. Islam remained a significant marker for the Jadids, even though it was meant in a purely political sense. Behbudiy concluded his article criticizing the use of the term Sart thus: “Of course, they will ask, ‘What should we call you if we cannot call you Sart?’ The answer is very easy: [Call us] the Uzbeks of Turkestan, the Tajiks, Arabs, Turks, Russians, Jews of Turkestan. If they say, ‘We’re unable to distinguish the Turks, Arabs, and Persians [Forsiy] of Turkestan from one another, and need a name common to all,’ we say, ‘Write “the Muslims of Turkestan [Turkiston musulmonlari]”.’” Territorial, confessional, and ethnic identities coexisted, as the following word list, taken from Munavvar Qori’s primer for new-method schools, shows:

“THE CATEGORIES OF MUSLIMS [Islom siniflari]:
Arab Turk Fars Uzbek Noghay Tatar Bashkir Persian Cherkes Lezgin Tekke Turkmen Afghan Kazakh Kyrgyz Qipchaq Tungan Taranchi Hanafi Shafi‘i Maliki Hanbali Ja‘fari. All of them believe in the existence and unity of God and the prophecy of Muhammad, on whom be peace.”

The political mobilization of the spring of 1917 took place in the name of “the Muslims of Turkestan.” At that time, this was how the Jadids defined the nation. It was a secular nationalism in which concern with the welfare of Muslims firmly took precedence over questions of religious doctrine. But their discourse ethnicized very rapidly over the course of the year. By the winter of 1917-1918, Turkist discourse, with its evocation of the region’s Turko-Mongol heritage, had become dominant among the Jadids, with Muslim identity firmly subjugated to it. Over the next few years, the most common term used in local-language sources to describe the local population of Turkestan and Bukhara was “Turk” (tiurkskii in Russian). On one hand, this was connected to the popularity of Turkist discourses among the region’s intellectuals. On the other, it was deployed in a pan-Turkist sense to imply the unity or the homogeneity of all Turkic groups of Central Asia. “Turk” did not include Kazakhs and Turkmens, although those who became the Tajiks were.
In the process, Sart disappeared from the political lexicon of the region. The Jadids had always opposed its use because it was inaccurate and “unscientific,” and in the revolutionary era made a point of banishing it from the lexicon. These arguments also carried weight with the Soviets, who were also keen to distance themselves from the legacy of the past. Soviet ethnographers debated the use of the label, and those who saw it as inaccurate – because it did not refer to a real narodnost’ – won out.^[8] Ultimately, “Turk” also fell by the wayside, and “Uzbek” won out as the descriptor for the unmarked sedentary population of Turkestan and Bukhara.
This is clearly a case not of the appearance and disappearance of groups, but of competing views on classification and labeling. To say that there were no Sarts (or, for that matter, Qipchaqs, Chaghatays, or Qurama) in Soviet censuses from the 1920s onward does not mean that these groups ceased to exist, or that they merged (slilis’) with the Uzbeks. It simply means that certain labels were banished from discourse, and the individuals concerned relabeled and reclassified. The disappearance of “Sart” and other labels that were located in the complex ambiguities of social practice and could not be subordinated to the requirements of elegant but ruthless “scientific” classification was perhaps inevitable in an age when the principle of ethnic classification triumphed. But processes of classification are historical and political, not “natural” or “biological.”
The disappearance of Sart and the triumph of Uzbek were the result of changes in local discourses dating back to before 1917, but which coincided with the concerns of Soviet ethnography and nationalities policies. The nations of Central Asia today are not “natural” phenomena; nor are they simply the work of an imperial Soviet regime bent on dividing its subject populations the better to conquer them. Rather, their origins lie in new ways of imagining the world and Central Asia’s place within it. In this, they are like all other nations of the world, which too have been imagined and constructed in modern times through the complex interaction of intellectuals, state power, the classificatory power of science, and much else. Once imagined, new identities become very important factors in society and politics. To say that a community is “imagined” is never to say that it is “imaginary” or not real as a political force. Far from it; ethnicity is a potent force in all post-Soviet societies, a basic building block of people’s worldview. But how this comes about is important. As Ernest Gellner pointed out two decades ago, the claims of nationalist movements, that the nation creates its own statehood, are true more often in the reverse — that it is states that build nations. This is equally true of the so-called “historical nations” of Western Europe. The French nation exists as a homogenous, self-conscious entity because the French state imposed a great deal of centralization over the territories it governed, destroying the heterogeneity of local identities, power structures, dialects, and so forth. And yet, as Eugen Weber has argued, it was only military conscription at the end of the 19th century that finally replaced particular social identities with a national one and finally turned peasants into Frenchmen. Or remember the oft-quoted words of Massimo D’Azeglio, one of the architects of Italian unification, to the first meeting of the parliament of the newly united country: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”
What was involved in the Uzbek case was the imposition of alleged analytical clarity, based on the objective truths of ethnic origins, on a mixed population that did not identify itself by those criteria. Two other cases might be of greater relevance for the comparative study of the emergence of an Uzbek identity and its divorce from the Tajik. One is Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, where locally specific identities gave way to broader, “regular” ethnic ones. The other is the emergence of modern Turkish identity. At the end of World War I, the unmarked Muslim population of what was left of the Ottoman Empire was decreed to be a single, homogenous, ethnically defined Turkish nation. The parallels with the Uzbek case are striking and worthy of closer investigation.
At a purely academic level, then, there is no question in my mind that the assumptions of the Soviet school have to be recast and rethought. But I am also fully aware that the study of identities is never a purely academic matter. The current debate provides an opportunity for self-reflection by scholars of Central Asia based outside the region. To the extent that postmodernism places relations of power at the forefront of its agenda, this is an important point to ponder. I wish to end with two points in this regard. First, we work under vastly different conditions and relations of power to our subject than do our colleagues in the region. Our different positioning vis-à-vis our subject (our greater physical, political, and emotional distance) allows us to use new methodological approaches, to frame questions in ways that do not have to be sensitive to political realities on the ground. Our colleagues in the region may or may not aspire to that distance. After all, historians of the United States writing in the United States themselves have little interest (and quite often a pronounced hostility) to comparative insight or theoretical innovation. They write within tightly circumscribed parameters to a narrowly national audience. This lack of interest is sometimes explained in terms of “American exceptionalism,” although much more often it is driven by complete indifference to the rest of the world. This historiography is as provincial as the post-Soviet historiography might appear to us. Writing the history of one’s own polity is perhaps necessarily different from writing about another. Second, the emergence of postmodernism and postcolonialism in the Western academy is itself a historical process, made possible by a host of factors – the democratization of higher education, the influx of large numbers of scholars from the formerly colonized world, the very different configuration of relations between humanities scholarship and state power – which both allows innovations and manufactures political irrelevance. The institutional and political arrangements that define academic life in post-Soviet space are, of course, very different. Should we really expect Western patterns to be replicated in such conditions?