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Hierarchies of Place, Hierarchies of Empowerment: Geographies of Talk about Postsocialist Change in Uzbekistan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Morgan Y. Liu
Morgan Y. Liu*
Affiliation:
Society of Fellows, Harvard University, mliu@fas.harvard.edu
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Extract

This study concerns how people throughout Uzbekistan were making sense of the tremendous socioeconomic changes taking place in their Central Asian republic during their first decade of independence from Soviet rule in 1991. This paper analyzes talk about the daily struggles of Uzbekistanis in order to arrive at ground-level insight about the kind of postsocialist state Uzbekistan was becoming in the 1990s, and how its citizens envisioned it. The extent to which people felt empowered to understand and potentially act on social issues, I argue, depended on geographical location. Looking at a series of focus group interviews conducted in three Uzbekistani cities in 1996, I identify spatial inflections in talk about social problems. The results of the study allow us to think about the Uzbekistani state's changing bases of legitimation since the late 1990s.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 33 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Identity Formation and Social Problems in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan , September 2005 , pp. 423 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. I thank the Ford Foundation for funding the project that made this study possible. My special thanks go to Michael Kennedy, Alisher Ilkhamov, and Marianne Kamp.Google Scholar

2. Islam A. Karimov, Address by H.E. Islam Karimov, President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, at the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 28, 1993 (Tashkent: ‘Uzbekistan’ Press, 1993).Google Scholar

3. An oft-quoted aphorism among Uzbeks about post-Soviet Uzbekistan is: “Davlat boy, halq kambag'al” (“The state is rich, the people poor”).Google Scholar

4. See International Crisis Group, Uzbekistan's Reform Program: Illusion or Reality? (Osh, Kyrgyzstan and Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2003); and Gregory Gleason, Markets and Politics in Central Asia: Structural Reform and Political Change (London: Routledge, 2003). Other reports include: Annette Bohr, Uzbekistan: Politics and Foreign Policy (London and Washington: Royal Institute of Internal Affairs Russia and Eurasia Programme, 1998); Erika Dailey, Jeri Laber, and Helsinki Watch, Human Rights in Uzbekistan (New York: Helsinki Watch, 1993); William Fierman, “Political Development in Uzbekistan: Democratization?” in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds, Conflict, Cleavage, and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 360–408; Human Rights Watch, Republic of Uzbekistan: Crackdown in the Farghona Valley, Arbitrary Arrests and Religious Discrimination (New York, 1998), p. 31; Human Rights Watch, Uzbekistan: Class Dismissed: Discriminatory Expulsions of Muslim Students (New York, 1999); International Crisis Group, Uzbekistan at Ten: Repression and Instability (Osh, Kyrgyzstan and Brussels, 2001); Acacia Shields and Human Rights Watch, Uzbekistan: Leaving No Witnesses: Uzbekistan's Campaign against Rights Defenders (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2000), p. 32.Google Scholar

5. See Morgan Liu, “Detours from Utopia on the Silk Road: Ethical Dilemmas of Neoliberal Triumphalism,” Central Eurasian Studies Review, Vol. 2, 2003, pp. 2–10; and Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, “Introduction,” in Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds, Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 1–18.Google Scholar

6. Alisher Ilkhamov supervised and I participated in the conducting of these focus groups as part of the larger project “Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan,” whose principal investigator was Michael Kennedy. The excerpts provided below are taken from English-language translations of the transcripts produced by the project, supplemented by my own translations of the original Uzbek- and Russian-language transcripts. Remarks about the tenor of the discussions are also taken from my field notes, since I was present at nine of the ten focus groups.Google Scholar

7. Sharon Vaughn, Jeanne Schumm, and Jane Sinagub, Focus Group Interviews in Education and Psychology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), pp. 20–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See Derek Gregory and John Urry, eds, Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan, 1985); and Doreen B. Massey and John Allen, Geography Matters! A Reader (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The spatial dimensions of human societies have become a particular concern in the social sciences in recent decades, and anthropologists have called for space to be taken into more central consideration in social analysis, including in key texts such as: Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 178–200; Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds, Senses of Place (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996); and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

9. Katherine Verdery, “Whither Postsocialism?” in Chris M. Hann, ed. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 15–28. Concerning the spatiality of Soviet techniques of rule in a Central Asian city, see Morgan Y. Liu, “A Central Asian Tale of Two Cities: Locating Lives and Aspirations in a Shifting Post-Soviet Cityscape,” in Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, eds, Everyday Life in Central Asia, Past and Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

10. For conceptual discussion, see Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). See also Morgan Y. Liu, “Post-Soviet Paternalism and Personhood: Why Culture Matters to Democratization in Central Asia,” in Birgit Schlyter, ed., Prospects of Democracy in Central Asia (Istanbul and Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2005); and Morgan Y. Liu, “Recognizing the Khan: Authority, Space, and Political Imagination among Uzbek Men in Post-Soviet Osh, Kyrgyzstan,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 2002.Google Scholar

11. Faizullo was a 38-year-old accountant with higher education, while Fotima was a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher.Google Scholar

12. Caroline Humphrey, “Traders, ‘Disorder,‘ and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Russia,” in Caroline Humphrey, ed., The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 69–98.Google Scholar

13. The Uzbekistani state later moved to severely restrict imports in March 2002, increasing border customs checks and vendor inspections. This has, of course, driven shuttle trade to seek illegal channels, such that foreign goods were still readily available in Tashkent in 2003. The restriction of trade also played a role in the economic grievances of protesters in Andijan and Karasuv in May 2005, which led to the crackdown by Uzbekistani authorities and mass deaths.Google Scholar

14. All focus groups in the project were supposed to be asked how their situation compared with other regions. In fact, there was no mention of any provinces in the entire Tashkent Uzbek women focus group discussion. But when the moderator of the Tashkent Russian women group somehow left the comparative question out in this focus group, no participant brought it up herself, so there was no mention of any provinces in that entire discussion. Other provinces were mentioned without explicit prompting in the Tashkent Uzbek men group, but, significantly, they were not used to explain Tashkent's local problems, as we will see in the next section.Google Scholar

15. Linda R. Waugh, “Marked and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure,” Semiotica, Vol. 38, 1982, pp. 299–318.Google Scholar

16. Participants in Fergana and Bukhara included those with Oqtam's educational level and occupation, so this detached posture is not just a matter of his profession.Google Scholar

17. So convincing were the Uzbekistani media about the state's course that Uzbeks living outside of Uzbekistan watching this coverage truly believed during the late 1990s that Uzbekistan's poverty was a necessary temporary evil that would enable the state to bring about the people's long-term good. Interestingly, these Uzbeks internalized this media propaganda in terms of an Inner Asian Islamic morality and re-appropriated it in response to their current political dilemms. See Liu, Recognizing the Khan .Google Scholar