This volume is a collection of articles that have been published in various journals since 2000. They demonstrate Abashin’s interests in two aspects of ethnography, fieldwork, and excavating ethnographic writings. Abashin was trained in the Soviet school of ethnographic research but his intellectual interests draw directly on Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and Benedict Anderson’s presentation of nations as imagined communities. His fieldwork itself seems to follow some of the methodology of long-term individual participant-observation, as established by Mead and others, rather than the Soviet approach of organized ethnographic expeditions, with multiple observers carrying out short-term research through questionnaires. Abashin’s earlier work was a study of ethnicity in the Fergana Valley.^[1] These articles grow out of that study. Each chapter of this work examines some aspect of Central Asian national identities in light of a particular theoretical approach, and each chapter serves as a contextualized illustration of the questions provoked by theory and the way that theory forces reconsideration of facts and narratives that are familiar to any serious student of Central Asian nationalities.
In the introduction to this collection, Abashin remarks that even in his student years, he responded negatively to the Soviet explanation of ethnos, as explicated in Iulian Bromlei’s canonical texts. Soviet study of ethnicity declared the “ethnos” to be an eternal identity, with ancient roots, developing in an unbroken, linear fashion up to the present, dividing the world into rationally cohesive groups, each of which shares a language, a culture, a history, a way of life, and at least historically, a territory. Scholars who compare theories of nation and nationalism call this the “primordialist” understanding of that process. The nation (natsional’nost) emerges naturally from the ethnie, in a process of ethnogenesis that is explicable in cultural terms, rather than a result of political actions. The paradigm is clearly founded on many of the suppositions of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, and makes a seamless connection between Stalin’s theory of the nation and the on-the-ground work of Soviet ethnographers.
Against this theory of ethnos as natural and eternal, Abashin takes a constructivist position: ethnic groups do not really exist, and the nation is constructed in the modern period by the state. For those who are steeped in the arguments about nationalism produced by Anthony Smith, Rogers Brubaker, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and other Western theorists, this is familiar territory. But in the land of positivist ethnography, where the task of the ethnographer was always to define the boundaries of each nationality and never to question whether the definitions prefigured the findings, discussion of the imagination or constructedness of nations is heresy, indeed. Abashin tries to mitigate the charge that his approach to ethnography is entirely formed by his deep exposure to Western scholarship, arguing that although the Soviet school of ethnography regarded Bromlei’s theory as its official position, nonetheless, a closer reading of Soviet ethnographical writing reveals many differing points of view, including doubts about the concrete identifiability of specific nationalities as separate from others, and inklings about the modern constructedness of various nationalities.
The first chapter, “On the Self-Consciousness of People of Central Asia: How Aleksandr Igorevich Argued with John,” enters a debate between constructivism and primordialism by comparing and analyzing the arguments of two authors concerning who Uzbeks are. Abashin compares two articles that appeared in the journal Vostok in 1999: John Schoeberlein-Engel’s “Perspectives on the establishment of national self-awareness of Uzbeks,” and its response from A. I. Sheviakov, “On the article by Dr. Schoeberlein-Engel.”^[2]Abashin presents Schoeberlein’s work as within the constructivist school, based on Schoeberlein’s explanation that “any community of people, including ethnic, is first of all an image or a concept that is constructed in specific social context and in relationships among those people”(P. 13). Abashin uses Sheviakov’s answer to demonstrate a primordialist approach. Shoeberlein asserted that those who are now called Uzbeks were made up of a number of ethnic groups, among which were Kipchaks, Xo’jas, Samarkandis, and Sarts, as well as Uzbeks. Schoeberlein argued that the disappearance of such groups as Kipchaks shows that they were forced to identify themselves as Uzbek in the 1920s. Abashin spends little time on Sheviakov’s counter-arguments, but uses Shoeberlein’s description to launch his own analysis of detailed census materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Abashin calls for a more careful use of the term “ethnic group,” which he sees as poorly defined in Schoeberlein’s article, where even the trans-ethnic status group Xo’ja is called an ethnic group. Ultimately Abashin agrees with Schoeberlein that the numbers of people ascribed to the census categories “Kipchak” and “Sart” diminished rapidly in the early twentieth century, and that these people instead were identified in the census as Uzbek. However, Abashin disagrees that this was the result of pressure; he sees assimilation as reflecting changes in the social positions of various groups, that is, as a result of processes of modernization. Like Anderson, Abashin regards the creation of nations as linked to modernization.
Abashin explains his arguments about modernization and national self-awareness more thoroughly in the second chapter, “Mindonis in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A History of Shifting Self-Awareness,” which is a minute examination of changing census categories and ethnic identification in Mindon, a village in Uzbekistan’s Fergana Valley. Through this examination, Abashin demonstrates that the population of the Fergana Valley grew exponentially and changed radically between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries (as a result of immigration from Xinjiang and from mountain areas in what is now Tajikistan) due to settlement of nomads, and due to changing political fortunes of particular groups.
The 1897 census identified the people of Mindon as Tajik, Kashgari, Sart, and Kyrgyz, but in the 1926 census they all were listed as Uzbeks. Abashin draws on much more detailed, annual census material to argue that censuses did reflect self-identity to some extent, but that categories were also aggregated according to ideas about nationalities espoused by regional census authorities, and reflected top-down political processes. But not all political processes were due to the Russian Imperial authorities: the decline of the Kalmyks came about because they supported the losing side in an internal struggle in the Kokand Khanate, suffered large-scale massacres, and were dispersed.
Notably, many of the groups in the Fergana Valley were identified not by ethnonyms, but by names reflecting a move: Kashgaris were not Kashgaris until they came to Fergana; Kalmyks were not Kalmyks (those who stayed) until they stayed in Fergana when the Oirat/Jungar expansion receded; Tajiks had been called Dagistanis or Kuhistanis in their former places of residence, before they moved to the Fergana Valley. In Abashin’s rendering, Fergana was the home of peoples who moved, settled, changed and assimilated: “the boundaries between sedentary populations and nomads, between Sarts and Kashgaris, between Turkic-language and Iranian-language speakers, and between neighboring villages and districts were fully permeable both physically and mentally” (P. 70). Their re-identification as Uzbeks was part of the modernization process initiated by Russian rule, and as such should not be read as simply a stark new direction in ethnic engineering led by a modernizing state that wanted to categorize peoples and in doing so disrupted the real existence of ancient, rooted ethnies, but as a “crystalization” related to a changing economy and state, and to longer-term growth and change in Fergana’s population. Abashin concludes that evidence supports the contentions of constructivists regarding nations: “researchers cannot locate in the Central Asian past anything that might be called either ‘ethnic groups’ or ‘ethnic communities’” (P. 71).
In a chapter entitled “Archeology of Central Asian Nationalisms,” Abashin draws on Foucault’s method of close reading of a succession of texts in order to show how a particular concept is developed over time, creating new categories of knowledge which then shape interpretations of the observed world. Abashin characterizes Filip Yefremov’s eighteenth-century account of his captivity and travels to Bukhara as an example of a primary scientific text in which observations are presented as a long series of descriptions, without any particular hierarchy. Groups in Bukhara are depicted in terms of language, or personality characterizations, or social roles. However, early nineteenth-century editions of Yefremov’s account that were edited by Kondyrov reveal a new interest in schematizing identities, as scholarship moves into a stage that seems closer to Foucault’s “classical” phase.
N. V. Khanykov’s account, “A Description of the Bukharan Khanate,” is a stronger representative of this “classical” presentation of scientific knowledge, where what had formerly been seen as “natural” is now put into order by using tables and making a conscious effort at completeness. Finally, Abashin discusses Ol’ga Sukhareva’s “Bukhara in the Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries,” as an example of what Foucault would see as “contemporary” scholarship, which is descriptive, attempts to create thorough order, but also sees its object primarily through history, subject to transformation and evolution (P. 75).
Through this sequenced reading, one can see changing outsider perceptions of Bukharan identities. While Yefremov wrote of “Bukharans” as a majority and an unmarked category, in opposition to Uzbeks, whom he associated with political rule, Khanykov instead called the primary residents of Bukhara “Tajiks,” in opposition to Arabs, Uzbeks, Persians, Jews and so on. While Yefremov wrote that Bukharans called themselves Bukharans, Khanykov did not reveal whether Tajik was a self-name, or whether the Uzbek tribes that he lists are self-names. “For the Russian scholar, ‘tribes’ are biological and social communities, whose members do not have their own ‘I,’ but are absolutely in need of categorization” (P. 83). Khanykov’s classification of ethnic groups relied heavily on “character” and “way of life” generalizations, presenting Tajik and Uzbek as binary opposites. For both Yefremov and Khanykov, Uzbek is seen more as a social status group than a cultural or ethnic group.
For ethnographers who followed Yefremov, language or anthropological “type” (meaning physiognomy) became the primary factors for categorizing and distinguishing ethnic groups. Sukhareva, a Soviet ethnographer writing in the 1960s, instead viewed ethnic groups as formed through historical processes, and historiography – a study comparing and contextualizing prior ethnographic writings – as part of her method of analysis. Her work avoids earlier binaries and divisions of peoples into “good” and “bad.” In her attempt to find the boundaries between Bukharan ethnic and social groups, she “runs into an unsolvable contradiction: the boundaries between categories are broken, ‘apparent’ characteristics and ‘organic structures’ – that is, the real functioning of communities – do not correspond among themselves.” Rather than describing categories as Uzbek and Tajik, Sukhareva instead refers to a “Tajik-speaking population” and “Turkic-speaking population,” but this raises another contradiction between linguistic groups and group self-identifications: people who speak Tajik will, in response to a direct question, often identify themselves as Uzbek (P. 90).
Ultimately, Abashin concludes that a study of ethnographic writings tends to uphold Anderson’s claim that states create national categories before nationalisms form. In the context of Central Asia, these ethnographic descriptions created national categories, and then led to the formation of national institutions and governments. Only in the contemporary period does one find the creation of the “ethnic person.”
Chapter four, “The Sart Problem in Russian Historiography of the Nineteenth and First Quarter of the Twentieth Centuries,” builds on the preceding chapters, examining Russian ethnographic and political writings, as well as a few pieces by Jadid authors, to demonstrate how the concept of “Sart” evolved. Because “Sart” was so widely used as an ethnonym in the nineteenth century, and disappeared not only from official use, but as a self-name in the early twentieth century, it provides a very clear test of the proposition that modern ethnic groups or nations are constructed categories. In the 1897 census, the categories that census takers used were Kyrgyz-Kaisak, Sart, Uzbek, Turk, Tajik, Turkmen, and Kara-Kyrgyz. By the 1920s, these categories were aggregated under new official terms: Kazakh (formerly Kyrgyz-Kaisak), Uzbek (formerly Sart, Uzbek and Turk), Tajik, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz (formerly Kara-Kyrgyz). The census with its national categories was an imperial Russian administrative instrument. Abashin refers to Benedict Anderson’s view of censuses as imperial tools that allowed administrators to order their domains into understandable units. In Abashin’s translation of Anderson, then, the imperial administrations themselves established “‘the grammar of nationalisms,’ which then would be used by colonized elites in conflict against [the empire]” (P. 99). This points to the recent roots of nations.
During the Imperial period, there was an on-going, lively debate about whether and how to use the term Sart, which, Abashin says, gives a thorough picture of the approaches that Russian scholars used at the time. Russian ethnographers debated over the characteristics that constitute, or allow differentiation among, nationalities, choosing from among “language, external (anthropological) appearance, and way of life (including customs, beliefs, and psychology)” (P. 103). Although when Khanykov surveyed Bukhara and Khiva in the 1840s, he wrote that the major nationalities there were Uzbeks and Tajiks, after Russia conquered Central Asia, administrators found that the name “Sart” was widespread, especially in the Fergana Valley and around Tashkent and Samarkand. For ethnographers, Sarts defied categorization. “If [reckoning by] way of life, customs, psychology and external appearance, then Sarts should be considered ‘Iranian’ peoples. But if judged by language, then they need to be included among ‘Turkic’ tribes. If all of these markers are considered to be of equal value, then Sarts might be called a separate people with their own original culture, though it may come from mixed descent” (P. 105).
For those who have read Adeeb Khalid’s The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform,^[3] this topic will be familiar, and indeed Abashin refers to the same body of source material as Khalid. Abashin’s textual excavation is much more detailed, though, showing that ethnographers and other participants in the discussion adhered to differing positions on “Who is a Sart” based on their own understanding of ethnography, their administrative role, or their political goals. Those who tried to define the boundaries of the term “Sart” drew on philological studies, on anthropological taxonomy, on history, or on discussions about language and culture. For some, Sarts were “really” Tajiks, meaning anthropologically Iranian, who may have mixed with Turks and “forgotten” their language. For others, Sarts were all of the sedentary peoples in Central Asia, regardless of language, and even regardless of religion (so that Jews and Lo’li/gypsies could also be Sarts). For others, Sarts spoke Turkic only, not Tajik. While ethnographer A. F. Middendorf stressed anthropological type as the basis for discerning who is a Sart, the colonial administrator Vladimir Nalivkin focused on way of life (sedentary) and self-identification, and argued that race had nothing to do with who should be called Sart (Pp. 117-120).
Central Asians joined in the discussion about identities, sometimes responding to Russians, and also arguing among themselves. One of the earlier Central Asian contributors was Sherali Lapin, a Kazakh who worked for the Russian administration as a translator. Lapin’s notion of identities in Central Asia was political and he rejected the term “Sart” as insulting, arguing that the so-called Sarts should be recognized as Uzbeks. Abashin recounts Lapin’s exchange with V. V. Bartol’d, the Orientalist scholar, who viewed names as products of objective history, thus suggesting that a decision about who is “really” a Sart can be made by reference to texts. For Bartol’d, as well as for colonial administrator N. P. Ostroumov, Sart and Uzbek should be differentiated.
Despite difficulties of definition, census officials included Sart in 1897 All Russian Census categories, and in the smaller-scale local censuses of the early twentieth century. Ascription was left to the determination of the actual census takers, usually local elders (aksakal) (P. 138). The census did not include names that referred to tribes, and so those who may have thought of themselves according to other categories were instead forced to choose from among the limited preferences of the census officials. Although Abashin does not mention this, the census primarily categorized people by religion. This may have been the most important category of self-consciousness among those who responded to the census, but Abashin avoids the whole discussion, raised by Khalid and others, of “Muslim” as a form of national identity.
Numbers for each of the major ethnic categories in the “Statistical Overview of Fergana” for the early twentieth century fluctuated. In most years between 1905 and 1914, there was a strong increase in the number of people identifying themselves as Sarts, and a strong decrease in the number identifying themselves as Uzbek, while in 1914, there was a large jump in the number identifying themselves as Tajik (P. 140). Here, as in chapter two, Abashin demonstrates from census figures that identification with specific ethnic categories was subject to changes that reflect not a change in the actual population, but a change in self-identification. However, self-identification possibilities were limited by bureaucrats. Abashin shows that in 1909, a year when census takers were given no strict instructions on ethnic categories, and instead recorded voluntary answers, the list of groups was much more varied.
After 1905, with greater freedom of the press, Jadid newspapers weighed in on the question of Sarts, with most voices arguing that the people who were called Sart should either be known as Uzbek or Tajik, depending on language, although there were a few voices defending “Sart.” Again, Abashin does not observe the other obvious point that arises in these newspapers: Jadids also defended the use of the term of territorial identity “Turkistani,” and also a collective religious identity, Muslim.
In 1917, following the Russian Revolution, the census official Zarubin, whose opinions had apparently been shaped either by Jadids, or by Russian officials who were close to the Jadids, decided that the census would not longer use the category Sart, but instead would use Uzbek. Politically, both those who were associated with socialism (like Nalivkin) and Central Asian elites who joined the conservative Shuro-i Ulamo (like Lapin) opposed using the word Sart, which they tended to associate with Russian colonialism in Central Asia (Pp. 154-156). In essence, “Sart” had no political support from anyone. As Soviet power was established in Central Asia, its officials, too, chose to use the term “Uzbek” instead of “Sart.” The statistician I. P. Magidovich agreed with Zarubin that only Uzbek would be used in census documents, because there was no significant difference between the two and because using only one official category would aid in their merging (P. 159). Abashin argues that in supporting this position, the census takers placed political goals over scholarly analysis, and favored arguments that would support elimination of “Sart” and its replacement by “Uzbek.” In doing so, moreover, “Central authority was forced to legitimize a pan-Turkist attitude under the label of “Uzbek” (P. 164). Some ethnographers and other scholars continued to argue that Sarts were different from Uzbeks, but even Bartol’d eventually acknowledged that a nation is a matter of political choice (P. 169).
Abashin proposes that the merging of a number of categories of self-identity under the name Uzbek was the doing of the state, but that it was also supported by Central Asian political elites. He notes that when Uzbekistan was delineated, many of the leading political figures were Bukharans. Although Sart was a widely-used term of self-identification in Fergana and Tashkent, it was not widely used in Bukhara, where the term Uzbek predominated. Perhaps this is one of the major reasons that the term Uzbek replaced Sart, but I would suggest that a more careful reading of Uzbek language publications from this period gives evidence of other, earlier support for the term Uzbek. Before the delimitation of Uzbekistan, and before the merging of the Bukharan Communists and the Turkistan ASSR Communists into the Communist Party of Uzbekistan (in 1924, which was when Faizulla Xo’jaev and other Bukharans came to play a leading political role), newspapers in Tashkent referred to people as Uzbek, and not as Sart. Publications declared that their language was Uzbek. Schools in Tashkent categorized children as Uzbeks. Documents from courts of law noted the identity of judges as Uzbek, not Sart, but in documents from the courts, plaintiffs are identified as Muslim, not by ethnic group (this is because the people’s courts were still defined as Muslim courts). Abashin’s careful, almost exhaustive reading of the relevant Russian materials for the pre-Soviet period is not really matched for the post-1917 period, and the evidence about why Uzbeks chose Uzbek is much thinner than it might be. After 1917, there seems to have been no organized constituency for the name Sart, even if there were still plenty of people who, in their daily lives, called themselves Sart. But the larger point here is that one will naturally interpret the unification of Turkic-speakers under the label “Uzbek” as a Russian/Bolshevik administrative project to shape Central Asian identities if one focuses almost exclusively on Russian-language discussions of the issue. Although Abashin does consider the voices of Jadids before 1917, he does not seek out Central Asian voices after 1917, which might have provided stronger evidence for his conclusions.
The census, by limiting categories and merging many ethnic groups under the label Uzbek, made Uzbek a matter of state identity, not a reflection of ethnic identity, argues Abashin. He links this point to the fact that the census used the term millat, which he translates as state identity, rather than qawm, which he translates as ethnic identity (Pp. 172-174). There are numerous problems with this distinction, not the least of which is that qawm more clearly refers to a kinship group, or to the co-residents of a neighborhood, than an ethnic group. However, if one raises the question of translation of the Russian term narodnost’, one might make different assumptions if one reads more widely in Turko-Iranian discussions from the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the rising tide of political change in both the Ottoman Empire and Iran, as well as among Turkic speakers in Russia who read newspapers from the Ottoman Empire, millat was the new universal term for discussing a politics of nation, defined both in state and ethnic terms. Qawm was not used in these discussions. When Jadids in Central Asia published their own thoughts about nation and progress, their term was millat, not qawm. It would be hard to imagine why a Russian adminstrator would have selected some term other than millat, and if they did discuss this choice, Abashin provides no sources.
In sum, Abashin sees the post-1917 turn away from Sart, toward Uzbek, as a collaboration between Bolsheviks and Central Asian elites, both of whom rejected Sart as a colonial term. All of this, Abashin asserts, supports Anderson’s contentions about the recent invention of nations, as well as about the state’s role in creating a “grammar of nationalisms.”
Chapter five, “History of the Birth and Contemporary Condition of Central Asian Nationalisms,” is less theoretical, and less inclined toward deconstructionist readings of ethnographic texts than prior chapters. It is rather a reconstruction of history based on multiple sources. However, even with its unusual read on the relationship between the formation of Uzbek and Tajik nationalisms and the formation of the Uzbekistan SSR and the Tajikistan SSR – which Abashin views as a product of nationalisms, more than a product of a central Bolshevik effort to divide up Central Asia – Abashin’s framing of the question allows room only for the discussion of the state’s role, and not of society’s role in producing nationalisms.
Soviet bureaucracy viewed Uzbek and Tajik as binary opposites, but also as indistinguishable. Since independence, Uzbek and Tajik nationalisms have been in conflict. Abashin asks why. When did this begin?
As in the rest of this volume, Abashin regards both Uzbek and Tajik nationalisms as recent projects. Until the twentieth century, Central Asian identities were fragmented (though because “fragment” suggests the existence of a previous whole, perhaps constructivists should choose another term that is less linear in its implications). The Jadids combined several tendencies, including Muslim integration and a pan-Turkist form of nationalism. In 1917, Central Asian elites identified with a greater Turkestan project, seeking either independence or autonomy. Plans for Uzbekistan and Tajikistan came about after 1920, essentially because of Moscow’s fears of pan-Turkic unity. Here Abashin’s interpretation echoes Western and Central Asian exiles’ charges of ruling by a strategy of divide and conquer. Abashin notes that the Bukharan People’s Republic (BPR, est. 1920) was heavily influenced by pan-Turkist foreigners, like Enver Pasha and Zaki Validi Togan. The Bolsheviks regarded pan-Turkism as a Basmachi ideology, supporting the pretensions of the exiled Bukharan Emir, and fought it both by defeating Enver Pasha in 1922, and by purging the BPR leadership in 1923.
When the Soviet state announced its justification for national-territorial delimitation in 1924, it emphasized resolving enmity between ethnic groups and creating state forms necessary for development. The policy transferred ideas and plans that the Bolsheviks had adopted for the USSR’s western regions to Central Asia.
Uzbekistan was delineated as a sort of smaller Turkestan, and as a reaction to the Kazakh/Kyrgyz versus Uzbek alignment of groups that had formed the Turkestan ASSR. Bolsheviks in the center saw Uzbekistan as an anti-pan-Turkic formation, but Jadids regarded Uzbekistan as a fulfillment of pan-Turkist aspirations. In the 1926 census, many groups were included in the category Uzbek: the state sought to spread Uzbek political identity and loyalty, rather than to promote unity based on shared language. Moving the capital of Uzbekistan to Samarkand showed that the state did not see the predominant use of Tajik in Samarkand as a barrier to its identification with Uzbekistan. However, some Tajik speakers disagreed. Tajikistan was delineated as an ASSR within Uzbekistan comprised of the mountainous eastern regions of the former Bukharan Emirate.
Supporters of a greater Tajikistan, including Central Asians who opposed pan-Turkism, as well as some former Turkists who lost out in political competition in the new Uzbekistan, began organizing in 1926. A commission was formed to study the “Tajik question.” Proponents of greater Tajikistan laid claim to all of the former Emirate of Bukhara, basing their case on Russian Orientalist discussions of “Aryans,” and on their assertions that Persian speakers had a more ancient history in Central Asia than Turks.

“Many leading actors who not long before had insisted on Greater Turkestan and were sources in the founding of an “Uzbek government” revealed themselves as Tajiks, declaring this in self-exposing articles. Among them was A. Mukhitdinov, a former Bukharan Jadid, and later president of the Tajik ASSR Sovnarkom. Sent to work in former Eastern Bukhara as a result of his defeat in an internal struggle among various factions, he now attempted to use his existing links to the center for lobbying the idea of “Greater Tajikistan” (Pp. 191-192)”.

Mukhitdinov argued that Uzbeks were forcing Tajiks to become Uzbek. Actors in the center saw the creation of the Tajikistan SSR (separate from Uzbekistan) as a way to keep in check pan-Islam, pan-Turkism, and the efforts of the Basmachis to influence Uzbekistan. However, the Uzbek elite opposed Tajik plans. Moving the capital from Samarkand to Tashkent shifted political influence to Tashkent and Fergana Uzbeks, and away from the Bukharans.
Tajikistan was declared a full-fledged Union Republic in 1929, but it did not include any of the major cities that the newly identified Tajik elite had demanded; they were left with only “smaller Tajikistan.” The inclusion of the city of Khujand gave some force to the idea that the state did not regard Tajiks only as mountain people, but also as urban and sedentary farmers.
Throughout this discussion, Abashin argues that both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were the creation of nationalists who were helped by Bolshevik ideology and by the actions of the Communist Party in Moscow. In pursuing this line, Abashin departs from the divide-and-conquer interpretation, typical of pan-Turkist exiles and the Westerners whom they influenced, and which Abashin himself alludes to, uncritically, at the beginning of this chapter. The Central Asian republics were not simply top-down creations; instead, Abashin argues that Jadids, pan-Turkists, and anti-pan-Turkists from Central Asia lobbied for and achieved some of their own goals.
Abashin argues that the contemporary struggle between Uzbek and Tajik nationalisms is related to the “founding trauma” that defined the words Uzbek and Tajik in the 1920s. This statement would be more convincing if the author explored what the founding trauma was. Certainly, in terms of the daily lives of most Central Asians, the felt affects of national delimitation (as a sort of “trauma”) pale in comparison with victimization at the hands of Basmachis, the Bolshevik state’s crackdown on religious leaders and the wealthy, collectivization, and the creation of a new elite allied with the Party, all of which played very important roles in forming the new nations. As both Douglas Northrop and the present author have argued, the Hujum was a deep trauma and a crucial battle over identity, especially in Uzbekistan.^[4] But in this chapter, as well as elsewhere in this volume, Abashin seems more interested in the theoretical trauma of state delimitation, instead of the everyday violent actions that formed, repressed, divided and reshaped the peoples of Central Asia. Having tossed the idea of “founding trauma” into this chapter, Abashin then skips any discussion, and leaps to the 1990s and the post-Soviet appearance of Tajik and Uzbek nationalisms.
Uzbekistan’s post-independence promotion of “Turkestan – our common home” suggested a return to greater Turkestan, but also Uzbekistan’s pretentions to regional dominance. Independent Uzbekistan’s national ideology incorporates what seem to Abashin to be contradictory ideas: that the Uzbek ethnos developed Uzbek government, which now, logically, forms the core of Uzbekistan; but at the same time, that Central Asia was a region where many nationalities lived mixed together, in mutual dependence, and hence the Bolshevik division of Turkestan was a colonial imposition. The ideal would be a polyethnic government, with Tajiks and Uzbeks recognized as “one people, who speak in two languages,” as Abashin cites the words of President Karimov (P. 200). Uzbek nationalism places more emphasis on support of the government of Uzbekistan, than on the ethnic role or unity of Uzbeks, and makes no claims to support of the diaspora.
Tajik nationalism mirrors Uzbek nationalism, argues Abashin. In its ideal version, Tajikistan is ancient and much larger than the contemporary version, encompassing most of Central Asia. The idea of “Greater Tajikistan” poses problems such as differentiating Tajiks from Iranians, and whether Sunni Islam should be emphasized in this differentiation. More important is the concept of the Tajik diaspora, with nationalists claiming that the sedentary peoples of Bukhara and Xorazm are Tajiks, on the basis that “Sarts” were Turkic-speaking Tajiks who had forgotten their language. “The ethnicity which Tajik nationalists ascribe to them exists in emphatic objectivity: it does not matter who ‘Tajiks’ right now feel themselves to be or what they call themselves (and they, as a rule, call themselves ‘Uzbeks’); the important thing is whether they know the Tajik language and speak it, whether they have European facial characteristics, how sedentary their lifestyle is – according to these conditions they are Tajiks” (P. 204).
Tajik nationalists seek to assign blame for the fact that the project for “Greater Tajikistan” was thwarted in the 1920s. R. Masov named the enemies of Greater Turkestan directly as pan-Turkists and Uzbeks, and accused them of genocide against Tajiks (P. 205). Common, too, are accounts of Tajik “traitors,” who identified themselves with Uzbekistan, like Faizulla Xo’jaev. The contemporary values of Tajik nationalism concern culture and language; unlike Uzbek nationalism, Tajik nationalism does not stress the role of the state.
The comparison of Uzbek and Tajik nationalism in this chapter draws primarily on “official” histories published since independence, written by historians and politicians who seem to be speaking on behalf of the state. Abashin notes that his research does not ask how widely held these positions are among ordinary people, nor how modern nationalism has spread through society.
Here, as in much of this collection of articles, Abashin relies on theory, as well as on recent published works by historians, both Western and Central Asian. Although this is accepted practice among many who write about nationalism, the historian still wishes that the arguments concerning the nationalist demands of the 1920s had a stronger basis in primary sources (meaning the polemics or arguments written by the nationalists themselves), similar to what is found in the final section of this chapter, where the author reads the polemics of contemporary nationalists.
The sixth chapter, “Gellner, ‘Descendents of Saints’ and Central Asia: Between Islam and Nationalism,” originally appeared in Ab Imperio.^[5] Abashin turns to Ernest Gellner’s analysis of nations and modernization in Islamic North Africa. Gellner focused on the role of saintly lineages, and ultimately concluded that the model of nationalism that he found in Islamic societies was not universal. Modernization seemed to point to the eclipsing of traditional religious leadership, found in rural-based saintly lineages, by fundamentalists who preach a modern, urban version of Islam that ignores place and lineage. Gellner argued that the Islamic world developed its own modernization, different from an also culturally specific European/Christian form of nationalism and modernization. This insight inspired Abashin to examine the social roles played by saintly lineages in Central Asia.
The article explores the ways that various saintly descent groups, xo’jas, ishons, and turas, have recreated themselves under changing circumstances, drawing in part on claims to holiness from their connections to saintly ancestors, but also on resources provided by local sites of pilgrimage. In villages, members of different saintly lineages compete to respond to, and benefit from, local religious needs. Both rural and urban saintly lineages maintain or improve their status through endogamy, and in cities, members of these families are prominent in politics and among the elite (P. 224). During the Soviet period, they may have re-invented themselves and appropriated roles more conducive to upward social mobility by identifying with the Party and state, but in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, members of these lines can make use of religious legitimacy (P. 228).
Abashin sees less division between the rural and the urban in Central Asia than Gellner found in North Africa, though there is competition between rural and urban religious actors. Abashin notes that in Central Asia, modernization and development took a different pattern, not bringing a full transformation from agrarian to industrial society, but arriving at a position in between the two, which might be thought of as incomplete modernization. Identities are varied, but Abashin suggests that both “the nationalism of the elite (and also the fundamentalism of the counter-elite) are simply covering narrow group interests” (P. 233).
In this chapter, Abashin’s village level analysis, rooted in participant observation, provides convincing evidence that members of saintly lineages respond to new opportunities to develop influence, increase status, and provide for themselves materially. Whether members of these saintly lineages who maintain shrines and provide consultation in villages constitute any sort of rural “intelligentsia” seems more open to question, and this makes Abashin’s final argument, concerning the competing claims of the rural and urban intelligentsia over saintly and religious identities, seem less than apropos of Gellner’s thesis. Instead one might like to see a more historically based analysis of the conflict between the advocates of reformed Islam (analogous to Gellner’s fundamentalists) and the representatives of saintly lineages. In some places in Uzbekistan, for example, such lineages are appropriated to the purposes of contemporary reformists, who zealously seek to stamp out traditional shrine practices that are deemed un-orthodox, even while maintaining the prestige of the shrine, the role of saintly lineage members as consultants, and the income of the shrine. Abashin’s reference to Gellner provokes one important vector of analysis, but deals incompletely with Gellner’s thesis about modernization and Islam.
Abashin turns to an analysis of the Tajikistan Civil War, or at least of the discourses about that war, in Chapter Seven, entitled “Regionalism in Tajikistan: The Making of an Ethnic Discourse.” Following recent trends in Western scholarship, Abashin reads the published analyses written by journalists, scholars, and political actors about the causes of the conflict (1992-1997). Early analysts of the conflict tended to explain its causes in Marxist terms, focusing on class and economic struggle, or in terms of Islam, positing conflicting tendencies and degrees of religious practice, or ethnicity, which eventually turned toward “sub-ethnicities.” Gradually, most explanations shifted to regionalism and sub-ethnic identities. Abashin asks in a footnote whether the important factor is identity itself or the use that elites make of identity.
Although Tajikistan’s political conflicts in the last years of the Soviet period took the form of arguments about Communism and democracy, participants in the mass meetings of 1991 competed to develop slogans that would appeal to the masses, and began to deploy both Islamic and regional slogans and discourses. Regional slogans proved more useful at dividing people into an “us” and a “them,” and then provided the basis for experts’ analyses that regionalism was the cause of the conflict. However well-taken the point about evolution in discourses among participants in Tajikistan’s competing meetings, one still needs to ask why regionalist slogans held appeal, but this is not the focus of Abashin’s article.
After the Civil War broke out, many experts turned toward an ethnic explanation, positing that Tajiks did not have a “consolidated” national identity, and instead were drawn to the politics of their sub-ethnos, which then were described in ever more elaborate tiers of divisions, all of which tended to lead again to a regional explanation for conflict. In these analyses, conflict was spurred when regional politicians tried to defend their region’s interests against disadvantage, and when they claimed grievances against other regions over inadequate investment, theft of resources, or contests over specializations. However, Abashin argues that many of these cogently presented arguments seemed to be abstractions that bore little evidence of direct observation, but instead were simply taking political slogans from regional actors as fact.
As the explanations of regional and sub-ethnic causes of conflict became more complex, experts turned to mentalité as the underpinning of regional difference, or to different levels of religiosity, linking some regions more to fundamentalism than others. Some explanations even turned toward discussion of anthropological “type,” code for differences between Tajiks and Uzbeks. Some Tajiks argued that Uzbekistan provoked the conflict in order to weaken Tajikistan and thus prevent Uzbekistan’s huge proportion of assimilated Tajiks from identifying with Tajikistan. These explanations then incorporated ideas about religion, with nomadic Uzbeks as less religious and Tajiks as more religious, and ideas about relations with Russia, arguing that Russians had turned Uzbeks toward themselves, while Tajiks opposed Communism. But the latter theme produced an alternative argument, that Tajiks always had better relations with Russia than Uzbeks had.
Because experts had converged on regionalism as the root of the Tajikistan Civil War, this interpretation played a major role in peace negotiations. Participants argued that there had to be “balance” among regional leaders and that this could be achieved through creation of a federal system, as well as by denying leadership roles to the previously dominant Leninabadis (Khujandis). After the war ended, expert analysts of Tajikistan stopped discussing regionalism, and instead turned their attention to new problems, such as narcotics trafficking and labor migration. The interpretation of the war focused on regionalism and sub-ethnicities as the cause of conflict, but Abashin finds it interesting that while these factors were used to explain why Tajiks went to war among themselves, the same factors were remarked on in the simultaneous first Chechen War, but used to explain an anti-Russian conflict rather than an inter-Chechen struggle.
After reviewing the tendencies among expert analyses, Abashin makes a plea, on ethical grounds, that experts treat the idea of ethnicity with more caution: “If these divisions are referred to as ‘ethnic,’ then immediately we see the emergence of the collective subject (ethnos, subethnos) with its specificities of psychology, culture, and political striving and interests. As soon as this subject arises questions of collective rights or responsibilities are unavoidable” (P. 260). Consistent with his constructivist explanation of nation, here Abashin argues for a causality that seems to reverse the approach of the experts: that conflict brings about definition of ethnic or subethnic claims, instead of the idea that ethnic claims lead to conflict. This method of reading such published analyses is de rigueur for constructivism, but one wonders whether Abashin’s own constructivist perspective might be challenged if his work had been based on first-hand observation of the type that he sees lacking in the published works. That is, perhaps we observe the construction of identities when we excavate texts precisely because we are excavating representations and not observing their deployment in everyday life.
Abashin’s cautionary plea speaks to academics, journalists, and other experts, but what if those experts had instead found the Marxist, economic and class division argument more convincing? Would Abashin then say that by arguing that there was class conflict in Tajikistan, the experts were themselves feeding class conflict, and making new class-based claims unavoidable? If so, then what is the solution? Does Abashin suggest that experts should not seek any cohesive explanation for conflict because, in doing so, they create conflict?
By examining discourse, does Abashin explain anything beyond the development of experts’ consolidating opinions, and the interaction of their discourses? Why, indeed, did this conflict start and grow? Did the actors who used the language of regional grievances draw on already existing discourses, or did they construct a new understanding, and make previously unnoticed grievances and claims into newly felt realities? Abashin suggests that by studying the writings of experts on the Tajik Civil War, the researcher will not come to a single truth about its causes. Perhaps he is right, but one wonders whether a strenuous effort to understand the evolution of the dominant interpretation of the Tajik Civil War, and to deconstruct that explanation, brings scholars any closer to recognizing the factors that drove Tajikistan into peril and war.
The final chapter of the collection is Abashin’s most experimental. “One’s Own among Strangers, A Stranger among One’s Own (Ethnographic Musings Occasioned by A. Volos’ Novella ‘Svoi’).” If all of the other chapters, in one way or another, read and evaluate ethnographic and historical writings and their documentary sources, this chapter breaks with the accepted methodologies of theorists of nation, by interrogating identity in a novel. Andrei Volos’ 1998 novel Khurramabad won awards and acclaim for its rendering of Russians in Tajikistan. The “novel,” as Abashin describes it, is a collection of shorter pieces, novellas, among which one, entitled Svoi, drew the most attention and interest from critics.
Abashin responds to the novel by exploring its depiction of identity as fixed even when malleable. Abashin asks, “Can a modern person change ethnicity?” In the novella, a Russian scientist moves to Khurammabad, which seems to be based on Dushanbe in the late 1980s. The Russian, Sergei Makushin, becomes enamoured of Tajik life and moves fully into a new role as a trader in a bazaar. He abandons his Russian family, marries a Tajik woman, and becomes known as Sirojiddin. He learns Tajik customs and language. However, Tajiks always question his identity, and Makushin, too, is not convinced that he is accepted. When Tajikistan’s political demonstrations and mass meetings begin (1990-1991), Sirojiddin/Makushin joins the crowd on the square, and feels thoroughly part of the proceedings. However, he is caught up in a conflict between Tajiks from different regions, and murdered. A man with an “Uratiube” knife forces him to recite a Tajik lullaby in order to see whether he has a Kulabi accent. Because Makushin pronounces the song not as a Kulabi would, but presumably like a Tajik from “Khurramabad,” they stab him. Thus in death, Makushin, who until now had felt rejection from Tajiks, finally is recognized as Tajik.
The tale includes Makushin’s ponderings about his own identity, and this in itself suggests to Abashin that his attempt to change ethnicity is incomplete and in doubt. Is Volos saying that one cannot change ethnicity? Abashin turns to Soviet ethnographers, especially V. I. Kozlov and Iu. V. Bromlei’s discussion of the issue.
Soviet ethnographers, although they posited that ethnicity is “natural,” also, and somewhat contradictorily, understood ethnicity as a matter of socialization. They observed the obvious – that if a small child from one ethnic group is raised by a different ethnic group, that child will share the language and culture of the group that raised him/her. Kozlov noted that for children of marriages between members of two ethnicities, ethnic identification is a matter of choice [and in the Soviet official recognition of nationality, a legal choice as well], and that people who live among a significant variety of ethnic groups may not have any strong ethnic identification. However, those who move into a new ethnic milieu when they are older will not change their self-consciousness in the ways that children do. Other ethnographers noted that members of groups that seem quite close, like Ukrainians and Russians, or Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, might change ethnicity, but they were convinced that this could not happen among culturally unlike peoples because their self-conscious identity would not be so transformed.
To sum up their idea, then, writes Abashin, “Rejection of the possibility of a change in ethnic self-consciousness is blocked not so much by ‘objective signs,’ like language, culture, external appearance and so forth, as by human self-consciousness. There is no external obstacle. . . except the power of self-consciousness, which seemingly forces a person to doubt that he has changed ethnicity, even in cases when ‘objectively’ – in his way of life – he has already done this” (P. 291).
Abashin finds this to be surprisingly constructivist logic for the primordialist theorists. Abashin then traces arguments over constructivism and primordialism among Russian academicians since the 1990s, pointing out that both sides have put forward contradictory explanations, especially when addressing the question of whether one person’s ethnicity can truly change. Primordialists argue that ethnicity is “in one’s blood” but then also suggest that it is a matter of socialization. Constructivists argue that because identities are products of external factors, one can change ethnicity, but then they tend to suggest that there are limits to the possibilities for change.
Abashin concludes by arguing that all of this should push us to view ethnicity as a dynamic and never completed process and people as the conscious creators of their own identities, rather than simply passive recipients of ethnicity. This seems to me to be a valid comment only to the extent that exceptions or extreme cases (adoption, mixed ethnicities, border zones) can be seen as the most important evidence. These are circumstances that often push people to become self-conscious about identity and thus able to perceive alternatives to their own identities. But do most people who live in post-Soviet societies, where “nationality” has been an accepted part of discourse and an inherent legal and personal identification for generations, really ponder their self-identification with a nation in the way that Makushin does? An argument based on exceptional cases does not convince me that most people who identify themselves with a particular nationality do so with self-consciousness or in such a way that we should see their identity as a never completed process.
In the conclusion to this collection, Abashin raises the question of the reception of his ideas in Central Asia, where the primordialist version of ethnos is dominant among academics. Primoridialism’s popularity is not solely due to government pressure – because this theory can be used to legitimate new nation states – but also because in the Soviet period, the theory of ethnos proposed that nationalities or ethnicities could be historical subjects and thus it posed a strong theoretical alternative to Marxism’s focus on classes as historical subjects. Radical critiques of the primordial theory, such as accusations that it indicates the isolation of Soviet social science from the ideas of the rest of the world, are seen as thorough and dismissive attacks on a whole class of academics. In addition, an attack, like Abashin’s, on primordialism is seen as a foreign import. Central Asian scholars who do engage with Western theorists of nationalism tend to be drawn to those who resemble the primordialists, like Anthony Smith, and they are not drawn to the more radical constructivist theories of Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, or Rogers Brubaker. Although he does not say so directly, Abashin implies here that Central Asians view his work as part of this foreign attack on their national histories and identities.
Although throughout this volume Abashin pays little attention to Western scholarly writings on Central Asia per se (with the exception of Schoeberlein’s article in the first chapter) and focuses instead on theories of nationalism, he briefly notes that recent Western histories of Central Asia, such as works by Adrienne Edgar or Olivier Roy,^[6] seem to adopt elements of both primoridialism and constructivism. The older trend of analysis among anti-Soviet exiles and Cold War scholars was just as primordialist as its Soviet counterpart, but with a different narrative: that there was a unified Turkistani “nation,” which the Soviets wrongly and immorally divided into false nations. From my own reading, I would say this older narrative is one that Central Asian scholars themselves either adopt in order to bolster their own claims that their nations were wronged, or reject as showing that Western scholarship is politically motivated, wishing to undermine the legitimacy of the present day nations.
Abashin argues that constructivism can help scholars better analyze what took place in Central Asia between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and why the Soviet experiment in creating nations was so successful. He asks, how did this project go about changing mentalité, so that people now accept and believe in these modern nationalities? However, in discussing the past, constructivist scholars run into difficulties of terminology. How does one talk about the Tajik or Kazakh past without seeming to talk about an already-existing nation? And how does one discuss the kinds of identities that were more important: religious, tribal, and so forth? Abashin expresses his hope that if one can examine the past carefully, without falling into terminological traps, then it may be possible to write a “new – non-ethnic, non-national – history of Central Asia, as a field for dialogue among various theoretical directions and different schools of thought” (P. 302).
Abashin does not address how his arguments, laid out in a series of articles and in a book, have been received in the Central Asian academies. If recent Central Asian scholarly works that I have read are representative, the contest between primoridalism and constructivism is not yet a central question; the primordialist version of nations is still foundational. However, among a younger generation of scholars, whose reading and research has included Western theorists of nations, there is more active discussion. Nonetheless, most of these scholars still seem to find constructivism to be both tendentious and threatening. Reading the initial chapters of this collection of Abashin’s articles with a group of younger scholars from Central Asia suggested to me the difficulty of questioning the assumptions that primordialism establishes. One of those scholars remarked to me: “After reading Abashin, I can see how Uzbek identity is constructed, but I still do not see how that relates to [my nation], which is ancient.”
This lengthy review has attempted to present the core of a very rich body of argument by summarizing key points of each chapter and discussing the interaction of Abashin’s arguments with those of various theorists of nation. Every chapter raises some unanswered questions and each can be subjected to critique, but these critiques are minor. For a collection of previously published articles, this volume has remarkable coherence: Abashin poses constructivist approaches to and readings of a wide variety of themes related to Central Asian nations and nationalisms. His arguments are cogent; the evidence is fascinating; and the theoretical approaches are clearly explained. As a collection that introduces competing theories about the nation to a discussion of Central Asian nationalisms, this volume can serve several purposes. Although Abashin’s primary goal may be to provoke deeper conversation about nation and nationality, the volume also provides an understandable introduction to non-Soviet theories of the nation, as well as a comprehensive presentation of Soviet and post-Soviet sources and analyses of ideas of the nation in Central Asia. My hope is that this volume will become widely read in Central Asian academies, contributing to more critical ways of thinking about the national past. In addition, I hope for a translation into English, which would make this volume accessible both to scholars who study nationalisms and to students of Central Asian studies. Although it is quite understandable that a collection of articles appears without maps or an index, both would be valuable additions to any future printings.