CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review
Publication of the Central Eurasian Studies Society
ISSN 1538-5043 (Print)
ISSN 1543-7817 (Electronic)
Contents of this issue
Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2003
Perspectives
Research Reports and Briefs
Reviews and Abstracts
Conferences and Lecture Series
Educational Resources and Developments
Editors - CESR Vol. 2 No. 3
Chief Editors: Marianne Kamp (Laramie, Wyo., USA),
Virginia Martin (Huntsville, Ala., USA)
Section Editors:
Perspectives: Robert M. Cutler (Ottawa/Montreal,
Canada), Edward Walker (Berkeley, Calif., USA)
Research Reports and Briefs: Laura Adams (Washington,
D.C., USA), Jamilya Ukudeeva (Riverside, Calif., USA)
Reviews and Abstracts: Shoshana Keller (Clinton,
N.Y., USA), Resul Yalcin (London, England)
Conferences and Lecture Series: Peter Finke (Halle,
Germany), Cengiz Surucu (Bloomington, Ind., USA)
Educational Resources and Developments: Daniel C. Waugh
(Seattle, Wash., USA), Philippe Forêt (Zurich, Switzerland)
Production Editors: Sada Aksartova (Washington,
D.C., USA); John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)
Copy Editor: Michael Davis (Kirksville, Mo., USA)
Perspectives
A View from Cyberspace: The Silk Road Atlas of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
Lewis R. Lancaster, Director, and Ruth Mostern,
Head of Collections Development, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative,
University of California, Berkeley, Calif. ecai
socrates.berkeley.edu,
http://www.ecai.org/
Introduction
Geography is critical for understanding history and society. Space plays a fundamental cognitive role in ordering human knowledge and experience. Conflict, exchange, political authority and cultural practices all exist in space, and they are influenced by location. However, it is difficult to study the relationship between geography and culture, particularly over time. Ideas about place and time are culturally specific, and maps are always a partial and particular representation of a territory (Turnbull 1993). In recent years, emerging digital technologies have enlivened the study of cultural and historical geography. Multiple representations of places can coexist on a single map or website. The data-rich and quantitative methods of the social sciences can be integrated with interpretive questions emerging from the arts and humanities. This is best accomplished when qualitative (images and text) and quantitative (figures and coordinates) representations and analyses concerning space and place can be associated with one another.
Digital mapping offers the possibility of developing better tools for information discovery and retrieval, and for devising techniques to model, visualize, and analyze humanities spatial data (Gregory, Kemp and Mostern (in press); Knowles 2001). In particular, a digital atlas can be constructed from datasets that are located on many different servers and linked through the use of a common metadata cataloguing scheme. It can use the universal language of geographical coordinates to categorize information produced using diverse methodologies from many disciplines. In this way, scholars can map information resources relevant to the object of their investigation without being required to learn the cataloguing systems of any particular language or discipline.
The Silk Road Digital Atlas, developed by the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative in 2002, is a pilot project to apply these principles to the study of culture and history in Central Asia (Mostern 2003).[1] The Silk Road Atlas was inspired by the activities of the New York-based Silk Road Project, founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In 20023, the Project hosted a global series of concerts and colloquia to draw attention to the musical and cultural legacies of Eurasian interaction (http://www.silkroadproject.org/). As part of this series, the University of California at Berkeley hosted the symposium Sound Travels: A Musical Journey Along the Silk Road, and invited the Yo-Yo Ma Silk Road Ensemble to the campus for ten days of concerts and events. At the academic colloquium associated with the concert series, in opening remarks under the title Overture: The Silk Road Past and Present, the symposium organizer Sanjyot Mehendele began with a challenge to think about the etymology of the term Silk Road. This name is an historical construction that carries with it the complex relationship between the historical circumstances of travel and exchange in Central Asia. The symposium included papers about the creation of multinational Central Asian worlds from both Muslim and Buddhist perspectives. It continued with a series of papers on the arts and musics of the Silk Road, and ended with a lecture demonstration that used musical culture to demonstrate the connections and diversity of cultures throughout Eurasia (Abrams et al. 2003).
The digital Silk Road Atlas prototype was created both as a part of this process of scholarly investigation at the symposium, and for disseminating graphical and immediate information about the Silk Road to the public in conjunction with the concerts. Presented as a way to visualize several geographical and temporal views of Eurasia simultaneously, it was demonstrated for the first time at the symposium, in order to introduce new strategies of research. To be useful, the Atlas had to consist of maps that were intuitive and compelling, while conveying nuanced information of high scholarly standard. In this paper, we introduce the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative and its Silk Road Atlas pilot project to make the case that map-based digital scholarship can achieve these goals. By integrating the work of many individuals and creating projects of diverse scale, such projects offer the hope for new insights into history and culture. In particular, they represent a promising approach to the study of Eurasia, with the multiple cultural perspectives and coexisting geographies and histories that characterize the region.
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), formed in 1997, conducts research on standards and practices for the development of digital cultural atlases (http://www.ecai.org/). It creates and maintains a data clearinghouse where scholars can register cultural spatial content and users can create customized maps based on it. It also supports the development of software tools for building and sharing cultural spatial data. An international consortium of scholars interested in digital cultural atlases, it has held thirteen international conferences since its founding.
The founding meeting of ECAI in 1997 discussed, as its very first issue, how to deal with the bewildering concept of the Silk Road. The Silk Road Atlas subsequently took shape as one of ECAIs demonstration projects. The first two meetings of the international ECAI community led to the conclusion that temporal and spatial referencing of digital resources provided the best possible way to link catalogues, web sites, and databases distributed across the globe. At the time, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was an emerging technology with promise for facilitating this. However, it had not yet been applied to historical and humanities topics. The humanists in ECAI pointed out that GIS methodology lacked one crucial ingredient: that ingredient is time, since place alone cannot reveal the aspects of human experience that change over historical time. Consequently, ECAI has become not only a project of data development and integration, but a consortium to build tools, develop standards and good practices, and advocate for humanities and historical GIS. In particular, ECAI has developed in collaboration with the TimeMap Project based at the University of Sydney Archaeological Computing Laboratory a spatial browser linked to an index (a metadata clearinghouse) that points to websites, databases, aerial and satellite photography, and geo-referenced historical maps located on web, database and GIS servers throughout the world (http://www.timemap.net/clearinghouse/html/index.cgi). The TimeMap map authoring and viewing tools allow data to be filtered and animated, so as to show change over time. These are unlike traditional atlases in that users can easily create customized, interactive historical maps based on their interests, drawing upon contents that are constantly being expanded and updated.[2]
Focused on geography and time, ECAI has kinship to some other endeavors in the computational humanities. However, it is concerned not only with content and software development, but also with the institutional and technical infrastructure for community building and data sharing. Historical and cultural mapping projects such as the Ancient World Mapping Center, the Perseus Project, or the national historical GIS projects being developed for the United States, China, Great Britain, and other countries each deal with specific regions. ECAI is attempting to create a community of scholars and a clearinghouse of data that crosses all discipline and regional boundaries.
The requirements of digital humanities scholarship include some aspects that are new and often troublesome. One issue in particular to which ECAI has devoted much attention is the question of data persistence. With technology advancing at a rate that makes earlier equipment and software rapidly obsolete, we are witnessing the disappearance of large amounts of information. Developers and archivists lack plans or funding for preserving data over years, let alone for decades or centuries. In 1999, the ECAI leadership concluded that it was essential to forge a close collaboration between the production of digital material for the humanities on the one hand, and the policies and practices of digital libraries, on the other. With this in mind, ECAI entered into a partnership with the eScholarship program of the California Digital Library (CDL), the union library of the ten campuses of the University of California (http://escholarship.cdlib.org/). CDL eScholarship now hosts and distributes peer-reviewed, map-based digital projects of intellectual value equivalent to similar paper articles or monographs. ECAI and CDL are developing review standards, techniques, and services to maximize the longevity of functionality for these dynamic objects. The goal of this collaboration is to ensure that files and documentation are preserved in archival formats that will last even after the software has disappeared.
The ECAI Silk Road Atlas
The goals and methods of ECAI are particularly relevant to Silk Road and Central Asian studies, where languages and cultures are numerous. In this situation, disciplinary and methodological approaches are heterogeneous, and geography and timelines confounding. The land and sea routes traversing Eurasia have been zones of both cultural and mercantile exchange for centuries, but the study of these routes has been complicated by the fact that it is hard to identify the geography or termini of any formal roads. The so-called Silk Road is a concept a metaphor for long-distance human interaction in pre-industrial Eurasia as much as it is a place. However, the Silk Road does also have geography, as complex as this may be. Spheres of cultural influence and political authority have overlapped throughout the history of Eurasia. The journey of silk from China and glass from the Mediterranean basin arose within large empires. However, even larger regions of cultural diffusion extended far beyond the production sites of these commodities. From another point of view, smaller centers of aesthetic taste, military power, and cultural influence radiated out from oases, camping sites, water sources, mountain passes and river banks all along the trade routes.
This complex human geography has always made mapping the historical Silk Road a scholarly challenge. In addition to conceptual difficulties, the whole of the landscape and seascape for these mercantile tracks covers a sizable portion of the earths surface: it is a large endeavor for any individual researcher to deal with the largest east/west landmass on the earth. A further challenge is that information about the cultures and societies along the routes is sparse, heterogeneous, written in multiple contemporary and archaic languages and scripts, and often ambiguous or fragmentary. Existing repositories of recorded knowledge about this area are as widely distributed as the trade sites themselves.
With the technology, standards, and archival practices developed over the last five years by ECAI and its affiliates, a digital journey across the Silk Road is now becoming possible.
The ECAI Silk Road Atlas, developed in conjunction with the Sound Travels symposium, is a demonstration project. A great deal more work is needed to add contextual and representative content, to create a range of useful thematic digital maps, to allow users direct access to a clearinghouse for creating their own maps, and to integrate the maps with a website and web links. The ECAI Silk Road Atlas currently consists of four interactive maps, each comprised of many data layers. They are composed from worldwide resources accessible through our metadata clearinghouse (http://ecai.org/silkroad). One example of a thematic, interactive, full-color web-based map produced using the scholarship assembled for the ECAI Silk Road Atlas can be viewed at http://www.ecai.org/silkroad/cultures/mapspace.html. It depicts, along with the familiar boundaries of modern states, zones of musical culture defined by the use of various instruments in history and up to the present day. Sometimes, as in the instance of the (Japanese) shakuhachi and the (Indian) tabla, these zones do not overlap. In other instances they do, for example in northwestern China, where both the pipa and the daira have been played. Still other instruments are played across a broader territory: the cultural range of the ganun extends not just throughout the Middle East but eastward beyond the Caspian Sea.
In coordination with the musical theme of the Berkeley symposium and concert series, the map referred to above highlights the distribution of various musical instruments throughout Eurasia. Each musical instrument listed in the legend has a link to a web page with pictures of the instrument, a description of its history, production and use, and a sound file with a performance of it. The map layer entitled musical instruments was developed at Berkeley based on material provided by the Silk Road Project in New York. The world sites map layer links map icons to web pages served from Paris for each UNESCO cultural heritage site. The Huntington images layer links to photographs of Buddhist art and architecture hosted at Ohio State University. Finally, the layers called Chinese Buddhism, Khotan Buddhism, and Kushana Buddhism depict the geography of the religious practices associated with several of the important ancient and medieval Eurasian empires. These were adapted from work produced by the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library.
The ECAI Silk Road Atlas brings together digital scholarly projects from diverse regions, eras, approaches, and geographical scales. Many were never created with integration or mapping in mind. The constituent projects, and additional work on the Silk Road by ECAI collaborators yet to be incorporated into the Atlas, exemplify a range of approaches to digital spatial research on historical Eurasia. At present, the Atlas combines content developed in-house with content linked from collaborators. In the future, we hope to add further kinds of digital content, such as existing archives and text-based projects that can be mapped with the aid of a digital gazetteer (see below). Other projects having a geographical component are also expected to emerge. These four types of work are described in slightly greater detail below.
In-house projects. A Sasanian Seal Collection in Context: Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative Publication of the Edward Gans Collection at University of California, Berkeley, by Guitty Azarpay and Jeanette Zerneke, is one of the first ECAI ePublications (http://ecai.org/sasanianweb). This project showcases a database with images of more than 300 seals produced in the region extending from Iran to Afghanistan between the third and sixth centuries. The seals themselves are an important source for anyone who studies the commerce and cultures of the trade routes. The impressions from the stone seals, serving as signatures for contracts and communications, were an integral part of commercial and political interchange. The figures used on seals also provide valuable insights into the beliefs of those who used these emblems of mythic creatures for personal identification. For this project, the seal search database has been combined with web-accessible interactive maps. On the maps, users may add contextual layers to an outline of the empire depicting the scope of production of the seals: the locations of major Sasanian archaeological sites; topographical maps; modern political boundaries, and a gazetteer of mints, administrative centers, and religious sites in the Sasanian empire.
Collaborating digital atlas projects. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library takes quite a different approach to mapping and visualizing some of the cultural exchanges that collectively comprised the pre-industrial Silk Road (http://idp.bl.uk/). Rather than investigating large-scale movements across Eurasia, this project is an intensive effort to integrate and display records about one extremely important site. Under the direction of Susan Whitfield, the IDP has become the most important center for research on the primarily Buddhist manuscripts and artifacts from the hundreds of caves of the monastic library in northwest China at Dunhuang, sealed on the eve of invasion in the eleventh century. The central focus has been on the manuscripts and other Dunhuang artifacts catalogued by Sir Aurel Stein during his expeditions to Central Asia. Thousands of manuscripts, dispersed among collections in Asia, Europe and North America, can now be virtually linked with the caves where they were originally discovered. In addition to the manuscripts, Steins exhaustively compiled maps, photographs, field notes, and images of additional artifacts have all been digitized and geo-referenced. This project digitizes and spatially integrates important resources on medieval Buddhism but also provides an intellectual history of Central Asian archaeological practice at the turn of the twentieth century.
Gazetteer development. Gazetteers are databases about places. An index at the end of a paper atlas can be considered as a kind of gazetteer, linking the names of places to their locations on maps. Increasingly, ECAIs atlas development activities are focused on the creation of historical digital gazetteers. In a digital environment, gazetteers can include many names for the same place in different languages or at different points in time. They can include multiple and complex spatial references for places (as points, bounding boxes, or complex polygons) and information about how those locations were transformed over time. They also include information about place types, so that a place in the gazetteer can be identified as a route, a city, a pass or a monastery. Gazetteers can enable a limitless and constantly expanding amount of cultural material museum collections, library catalogues, and the work of individual scholars to be inter-associated and visualized through a digital map. As a step toward the development of a Silk Road Gazetteer, ECAI is collaborating with Hsi Lai University, a Buddhist institution in Los Angeles, to build a Chinese and Central Asian Buddhist gazetteer that can be incorporated into the Silk Road Atlas. Once the gazetteer database and system are accessible, it will be possible to integrate some of the projects that are collaborating with the Silk Road Atlas.
One of these is the Golden Web Project being executed by a group at Cambridge University led by Paul Keeler. It uses travel narratives as a source for geographical information about historical Eurasia. This group of researchers does not use the phrase Silk Road, preferring instead the term Golden Web (http://www.goldenweb.net/) because they consider that Silk Road implies a trade corridor by land, although trade was equally important on the sea lanes. Organizing their work around digitized versions of accounts and journals of pilgrims and travelers from Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to Arab travelers, they are developing a project that deals with the entire web of trade that extends far beyond the traditional view of the Silk Road. The Golden Web project provides materials in the original language and English translations. Place names mentioned in the diaries are linked to maps of the journeys themselves, and descriptions of sites and commodities mentioned in the text are hyperlinked to pictures, and to related narratives produced by other travelers, as well as to additional information. Once the locations from these maps and texts become associated with entries in a gazetteer database, the project will become a unique resource about trade routes over the centuries as well as a pioneering study of methods for linking maps, texts, and images.
A project under way at the Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art, Ohio State University, represents another large effort that can be mapped once a gazetteer is complete (http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/). The archive contains more than 300,000 photographs of art and architecture of East and South Asia taken by Professors John and Susan Huntington, including presently endangered sites as well as sites, such as the Bamiyan Buddhas, that have since disappeared. For several years the archive has been digitizing the images. Under the guidance of curator Janice Glowski, they are being made available on the Internet. At present, the database of images may be searched by country and by site name, but a map interface has not yet been developed. In collaboration with ECAI, the archive is experimenting with map-based access to the collection, including one project that matches line drawings of the interior of the Buddhist caves at Yungang, China, with icons on the map interface representing each place inside the caves that was photographed. Users can move around the cave virtually, clicking on each icon to view the photographs that were taken from that location. A gazetteer system and database capable of associating places where photographs were taken with their geographical coordinates would enable this kind of map visualization of the whole collection.
An international consortium of contacts. Future development of the Silk Road Atlas depends upon a network of additional researchers around the world who are developing historical spatial content in a digital form. As the Atlas evolves, we remain in contact with these and other scholars. The very scope of the efforts illustrates why an Atlas of the sort we are developing is an important goal. For now, their work exemplifies the range of creative efforts underway in digital studies of Silk Road and Central Asian geography. One such project that is just coming to completion is the work of a team at the University of Michigan, headed by historian Michael Bonner and his student Robert Haug, to explore the pilgrimage and marketing network between Baghdad and Mecca. The springs and streams in this region have remained relatively stable over the centuries, and many ancient camping sites are still being used. Following the hydrography along the route, the Michigan group has been able to create a reasonably precise map of the trails that led pilgrims and merchants between these two important centers. The work of these scholars relies not only on physical geography but also on textual information, such as topographies culled from ancient Arabic poetry and from accounts by medieval Islamic travelers and geographers.
Many other digital efforts concerning the geography of cultural heritage along the Silk Road and in Central Asia are underway. Maurizio Forte, of the Italian Institute for Technology Applied to Cultural Heritage at the Italian National Research Council, is surveying archaeological sites in Kazakhstan using GIS, remote sensing, and three-dimensional technology, with a particular concern to identify sites at risk of degradation or destruction. Geographer Irina Merzliakova, of the Institute of Geography in the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, is digitizing Russian maps of Central Asia dating back to the seventeenth century, and has also created a gazetteer of Russian Central Asian mountain passes. Philologist Tsymzhit Vanchikova, of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ulan-Ude, has led a team to create a digital cultural atlas of Buryatia, in Russian Mongolia, with particular attention to the geography of religious interaction in this region. UNESCO, the Japanese National Institute of Informatics, and other large institutions are leading further multinational efforts (http://www.nii.ac.jp/dsrtokyo/gaiyou2-e.html). A digital atlas like the one ECAI is creating is a promising way to integrate these and other efforts in the region.
Conclusion: The Future of Central Eurasian Studies in the Digital Age
What is the future of Central Asian studies in the digital age? Some scholars will find it too demanding to digitize texts and images, determine and document temporal and spatial information, create databases, and register them in a clearinghouse. Such projects call for the development of novel analytical frameworks and skills, and new kinds of collaboration between humanists and information technology researchers. These collaborations will require significant funding to launch larger scale projects than the humanities have traditionally supported. Nevertheless, a new generation is coming to depend on Internet digital atlases like ECAIs. These digital tools enable the researcher to discover and assemble datasets from multiple sources. The result of research through such innovative techniques is the ability to create customized animated maps tied to texts. It is possible that unhyperlinked material that is not accessible through a clearinghouse will become less appealing, particularly in a field like Central Eurasian studies. This may be true for those who do not have the individual resources to devote to its many languages, complex geography, substantial lacunae, and diverse disciplinary approaches.
One lesson of the ECAI Silk Road Atlas is about the power of data integration and map visualization. Another is about the substantial barriers that must still be overcome if the digital spatial humanities are to become a mature field. Information technology researchers must be closely tied to humanities scholars. It is crucial that technology follows the research needs of those who are part of a text-based tradition. Only in this close collaboration of scholar and technical expert can the practices that characterize the humanities be sustained in the new medium. The Atlas that is currently available online is merely a first step that indicates directions for future work. We hope that it will become an increasingly valuable tool for integrating and analyzing data through developing gazetteers, fostering international collaborations, adding further content, and working with scholars and teachers from many disciplines.
References
Abrams, Laura, Hollis Ashby, Sanjyot Mehendale, and Dana Sherry, eds.
2003 The Silk Road Project: Arts and Humanities Events at UC Berkeley. Berkeley: Cal Performances.
Gregory, Ian, Karen Kemp, Ruth Mostern
In Press Geographical information and historical research: current progress and future directions, History and Computing.
Knowles, Anne, ed.
2001 Past Times, Past Places: GIS for History. Redlands: ESRI Press.
Mostern, Ruth
2003 The virtual Silk Road Atlas: exploring culture in time and place, In: The Silk Road Project: Arts and Humanities Events at UC Berkeley. Abrams et al., eds., pp. 69-73. Berkeley: Cal Performances.
Turnbull, David
1993 Maps Are Territories, Science Is an Atlas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Notes
[1] Funding has been provided by the Ford Foundation through Cal Performances, and by the University of California Center for Middle Eastern Studies Al-Falah Fund.
[2] To be sure, there are still technological challenges that need to be addressed, and the complexity of Silk Road studies embodies many of them. Our development frontier includes enhancing the capacity for inter-operability among multiple clearinghouses in many languages; developing better tools for information discovery and retrieval; improving content standards for digital gazetteers and thesauri, and devising techniques for the modeling, visualization, and analysis of humanities spatial data. See http://www.timemap.net for more information about ECAIs TimeMap technology.
Instructional Technology and Digital Asset Management:
Implications for the Scholarly Community
Anthony R. Bichel, Director, Learning Technologies, Central
Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Mich., USA, bichelarcmich.edu
Introduction
Technological advances are once again driving changes across the academic landscape. The latest manifestation of this phenomenon, which originally dates back to the development of the printing press, involves a series of technologies that collectively have given rise to Digital Asset Management (DAM).[1] There are two major reasons why higher education is moving in this direction.
First, whereas the growth of the Web has contributed greatly to the creation and dissemination of information, DAM technology seeks to transform this vast sea of undifferentiated data into useful information by making it more accessible to contemporary knowledge workers via powerful search tools. These tools permit faculty to take full advantage of classroom time by providing ways to capitalize on learnings most sacred premise the teachable moment. Commercial search engines, like Google, make information retrieval much simpler than ever before, but they still do not incorporate the degree of specificity that most instructors require in order to adopt these tools for regular and effective use in the classroom. Attaching potentially extensive lists of metadata (data about data) to digital assets (files) has made it possible to locate and retrieve information in real-time (on-demand) environments with much greater confidence than ever before.[2]
Second, competition in the marketplace is driving institutions of higher learning to seek more effective and efficient means of cataloguing and controlling the dissemination of intellectual property produced by their employees. In this, there is no difference from corporations seeking better protection of their investments through the use of digital rights management tools. In both cases, sharing information among designated communities takes a back seat to controlling the transactions for commercial gain.[3] It should therefore be no surprise that attempts to clarify and/or revise existing campus intellectual property agreements frequently accompany academic DAM initiatives.
That said, this article addresses pedagogical applications and institutional challenges posed by DAM projects like the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI).
Technology and Teaching
The ECAI is an interesting project with a great deal of promise in both technical and disciplinary terms. Essentially a shared repository of databases with a proprietary interface much like the MERLOT (www.merlot.org) collection of shared learning objects ECAI provides humanities scholars with an excellent opportunity to explore the benefits of collaborative learning through the use of instructional technology. ECAI uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to assist the visualization and study of culture and place. Its main premise is that its sophisticated mapping tools permit the (re)creation of new knowledge by integrating previously separate datasets within a single framework. Indeed, new (re)combinations of data can readily be translated into new forms of information; however, the key to knowledge development resides not simply in the synthesis of disparate data, but in the effectiveness of its application. There lies the catch not in ECAI itself but rather in the general reticence of many humanities scholars to use technology.
These scholars in the humanities frequently find themselves ill-prepared for the challenges associated with developing effective applications for the types of materials that ECAI is designed to produce. Despite the prevalence of GIS technology, the vast majority of scholars across disciplines are unfamiliar not just with the principles and interfaces of the technology itself but with the very purposes towards which it may be employed.[4] Of course, scholars should keep current even with the purely technological advances in their fields, but the fault here is not the facultys. Rather, most institutions that are not research-intensive doctorate-granting universities lack the staffing and expertise to provide the discipline-specific support that the majority of faculty require to make full use of technology in teaching.
For example, in order to appreciate ECAIs ability to create time-delineated maps one must first download and install the TimeMap software needed to generate and display the maps. This should be simple enough to do, but network and security concerns preclude faculty from downloading such software applications to their desktops in many academic environments. Even if faculty do enjoy the privilege of being able to download programs to their office machines, they often have little or no control over the configuration of classroom and lab computers where they would also need to have the software should they choose to use it in class. While not insurmountable, such inconveniences deter faculty from following such creative and innovative learning pursuits as ECAI; and to note these obstacles does not address whether faculty know how to accomplish these tasks, irrespective of permission and authorization.
Having said that, let me briefly recount my own experience with the TimeMap application and my venture into cultural mapping. I would not describe my teaching/technology skills and experience as being at the expert level, but I have served as the director of Centers for Innovative Learning and Teaching/Learning Technologies departments at various institutions, so I am fairly confident of my abilities. After two failed attempts, I successfully downloaded and installed TimeMap and then set out to explore ECAI and its database. When I generated several maps just to see what would happen, I was, to be honest, surprised at the detail that was available. Still, I found the interface and its presentation of that detail a bit cumbersome, not to navigate and operate, but rather to interpret and apply. The timeline features were especially interesting to use, although on a number of occasions I was not certain that I was seeing what I thought I was supposed to be seeing. After a few days of playing at home I shared my creations with several of my students. (This remains the best sanity check I know.) They all responded enthusiastically to the capabilities of TimeMap, but they were less enthusiastic about taking the maps we had created and incorporating the information elsewhere.
To be fair, ECAI deals with rather context-specific materials that, for full comprehension and appreciation, require at least a working knowledge and understanding of the subject-specialized matter. But this is the sort of barrier that prevents the more experienced learners among us (faculty) from initially playing with and later adopting applications such as ECAI on any level. So I found the program much better suited for subject experts than I did for novices or casual explorers.
Where does this leave us? What are faculty to do with projects like ECAI, in view of the pedagogical and disciplinary obstacles noted above? Scholars struggling to deal with the needs of the new learner will find the ability to generate on-the-fly materials to be a tremendous classroom advantage as the overall acceptance of DAM applications increases, the ECAI database grows, and the TimeMap interface improves. Irrespective of our comfort or discomfort with the fact, the world is quickly becoming a highly integrated environment that will make current standards of information retrieval look archaic. The days of having to thumb through stacks of books to locate educational minutiae are gone; the age of on-demand information is already upon us. The future to which ECAI aspires is this transformational age of generating and applying knowledge. The highest barrier to adopting and implementing technologies like ECAI are not technical but cultural. Projects like ECAI will continue to grow, but they will do so more slowly than they might otherwise until higher education transforms itself so as to meet the needs of learners in the twenty-first century. This includes tackling such issues as tenure, intellectual property, copyright, technical standards, learning assessment and organizational accountability.
Organizational Challenges
It is useful to enumerate the general obstacles that obstruct the path of scholars who may wish to explore and apply such technologies as ECAI and to suggest some strategies for overcoming them.
Governance. If campus administrators are to support faculty in using technologies in teaching, they need to: (a) develop and maintain a sufficient information infrastructure, both hardware/software and professional support/expertise; (b) implement a system of incentives for faculty to make use of learning technology, including credit within the tenure process for risk takers; and (c) create a transformational culture that values creativity. These challenges have a tremendous impact on whether, how and how well faculty use available learning technologies.
Decentralization. Colleges and Universities are decentralized businesses, organized toward intradepartmental competition, where units often compete for scarce resources. Though adequate resources may be available for technological innovation in teaching, their allocation often is suboptimal.
Faculty Expectations. Some faculty deride advances in teaching/learning as fads, and demand high levels of proof of their effectiveness before adopting them. The new learner is a born-and-bred multitasker capable of processing several sources of information simultaneously. New models of instruction are needed to meet the needs and expectations of these students. Faculty should be encouraged to utilize existing opportunities and adopt new technologies. Since earning a Ph.D. does not usually require study of instructional design, faculty should seek help from those who have specialized knowledge of instructional technology.
Technical concerns. Access to appropriate instructional technology remains the single greatest challenge facing instructors today. The lack of professionally trained support personnel is a close second. Specialized digital and video labs are commonplace on campuses, but many institutions impede the transfer of the work done in those labs to the classroom. However, a classroom that is well-equipped with digital imaging devices presents no insurmountable barriers to the use of technologies like ECAI.
Conclusion
Instructors in higher education face great challenges today when adopting and applying new instructional technologies. However, these challenges are miniscule when juxtaposed to the opportunities that they offer for improving instruction and learning in the twenty-first century. Our collective futures depend on our collective ability to address these issues squarely and directly. Nothing less than our future in that terra incognita is at stake. Projects like ECAI help us to visualize and understand this new territory.
Notes
[1] In its most restrictive form Digital Asset Management is really nothing more than a synthesis of library cataloguing strictures, web-based data bases, emerging technical standards and the plethora of digital formats in which contemporary scholarship is produced image, video, text, audio and GIS files.
[2] One noteworthy example of this technology is the Canto Cumulous DAM system. Cantos software application, Cumulous, is available in both client and Web-based versions, making it readily adaptable to the vast majority of faculty instructional needs. The softwares interface is fairly intuitive, and its back-end database program provides ample latitude for users to create detailed metadata labels that facilitate swift retrieval of stored information.
[3] One of DAMs unavoidable consequences has been to give new life to the age-old struggle between faculty and their institutions over their prescribed relationships and roles of employee and employer.
[4] GIS use has been expanding exponentially across the curriculum as faculty seek to use its mapping powers to expose increasingly subtle layers of meaning. For scientists the application has been a matter of practicality ecosystems, animal behavior, resource distribution and other highly quantitative endeavors have led the way. For those in less quantitative disciplines the technology has been increasingly used to visually demonstrate heretofore-unseen phenomena.
Research Reports and Briefs
Reports
Market Reforms and Macroeconomic Performance in Uzbekistan
Aydın A. een, Professor of Economics and Director,
Center for International Trade & Economic Research, Central
Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Mich., USA, a.cecencmich.edu
Introduction
This report summarizes some of the preliminary results of an ongoing large-scale research project aimed at assessing the impact of market reforms on macroeconomic performance in Uzbekistan. The project is sponsored by the Center for International Trade and Economic Research (CITER) at Central Michigan University. In designing the project I collaborated with several Uzbek economists, the Uzbekistan Banking Association, and the Center for Economic Research (CER) in Tashkent. Given the confines of this report, I focus here on two major areas of the project: structural adjustment/ privatization programs, and exchange rate dynamics in Uzbekistan. In order to provide a macroeconomic context for the research results however, it is necessary to briefly review the major economic trends in Uzbekistan.
Transitional Dynamics and the Uzbek Economy
After the demise of the Soviet Union Uzbekistan experienced difficulties common to the other new republics: the breakdown of central planning and interrepublican trade, highly monopolistic market structures, and high price inflation coupled with declining output and the loss of significant budgetary transfers. Moreover, in the early 1990s the Uzbek economy faced a serious deterioration in its terms of trade due to declining world prices of its two major export items, gold and cotton. The Uzbek government adopted a rather cautious and gradualist approach to market reforms by partially liberalizing prices, imposing new taxes, and enacting new laws on banking, property, and foreign investment, and also by privatizing some small enterprises and residential buildings.
Uzbekistan remained in the ruble zone for a while after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In November 1993, however, it was compelled to issue its own national currency, the som coupon, and in July 1994 a new currency, the som, replaced the som coupon. Yet due largely to the lack of a well-coordinated and comprehensive reform program, the implemented policies failed to stabilize the economy. High inflation in 1993 and 1994 and the freezing of bank deposits during the currency conversion created a confidence crisis in the Uzbek financial system (World Bank 1997).
On the foreign trade front, Uzbekistan continued to rely largely on cotton, gold and uranium exports and developed strong ties with Korea, Germany, Turkey and the USA. Because of the nature of these export items however, Uzbekistans terms of trade have been subject to external shocks that tended to contribute to macroeconomic instability. The trade surplus of 1995 (estimated to be around $216 million) turned into a deficit of $348 million in 1996 due to low world cotton prices coupled with a poor grain harvest, which necessitated the import of grain at unusually high world prices.
Between 1997 and 1999 real GDP (gross domestic product) in Uzbekistan gradually increased from nearly $15 billion to $17 billion. Since 1999 the dollar value of output exhibited a steep decline, which pushed the real GDP below $9 billion in 2002. Concomitantly, real GDP per capita fell precipitously from $694 to $305. It should be noted that these figures reflect the rapid depreciation of the som vis--vis the US dollar and should therefore be interpreted with caution. Price inflation, on the other hand, has remained under control since 1995 and declined to 22 percent in 2002. A more alarming development has been the rising foreign debt, which reached $4.7 billion in 2002, and the lack of sustained foreign direct investment (FDI). FDI in Uzbekistan varied between $150 million and $75 million over the past five years and per capita FDI remains among the lowest in the CIS countries. Meanwhile the Uzbek som depreciated rapidly to over 800 som per $1 in 2002 (in terms of the official exchange rate of the Central Bank) from an average rate of 66 som per $1 in 1997.
Structural Adjustment and Privatization Programs: Political Risk and State Power
Given the particularities of the Uzbek economy, the rejection of a fast-track reform program was the correct economic policy to be adopted in the face of the initial shocks of the Soviet debacle (een 1999). The 1990s witnessed the tragic results of these shock therapy programs in several ex-Soviet and East European economies where output declined precipitously, pushing large sections of wage earners below the poverty line. Since the Uzbek economy was highly specialized and heavily dependent on cotton monoculture, social instability would have erupted had rapid adjustments been introduced in rural areas where a large proportion of the population lived under the official poverty line. In fact, during the period of 1991-1997, due partly to these gradualist policies, output in Uzbekistan fell less than in any other republic of the former Soviet Union, and moderate growth has resumed since 1997.
Yet, while the preservation of state power and the public sector were a sine qua non for a less painful transition, the subsequent transformation of the industrial sector was equally crucial for economic growth. More specifically, once price inflation was put under control and a functioning financial sector emerged (in 1995-1996), the Uzbek government should have concentrated its efforts to rationalize its public sector, modernize its bureaucracy and the legal infrastructure, and limit the power of industrial monopolies in order to foster market competition and attract foreign investment.
In this context our empirical analyses highlight a number of important points. First, the monopolistic structure of the industrial sector has hardly been affected by market reforms; the market concentration ratios remain very high. This is not to say that the Uzbek government should have committed itself to a fast-track nomenklatura privatization (as was done in the Russian Federation). It would have been sufficient to break up some key industries into more autonomous smaller units and then to privatize these in order to foster more competitive pricing. Accumulated evidence demonstrates that transparent privatization of some medium-size industries, whereby the state surrenders management to private stakeholders, is critical for the success of privatization programs. Generally speaking, the marketing of minority shares does not induce much demand, particularly in developing economies with underdeveloped capital markets. The so-called mass privatization in Uzbekistan, however, involved for the most part partial privatization, and as expected, did not have much impact on the structure of the industrial sector.
Another constraint on privatization has indeed been the lack of private capital. Our econometric results demonstrate that foreign investment was strongly targeted in the privatization programs of medium- and large-size enterprises. Yet foreign investment remained low for two main reasons. First, wars and political violence in the region prevented foreign firms from committing large funds to privatization programs in Uzbekistan, a factor that is largely beyond the immediate control of the government. Second, the lack of currency convertibility and the existence of inefficient foreign exchange controls hindered the emergence of a strong export sector (Agafonoff and Sirojiddinov 1996).
Given the limited size of domestic markets and the low purchasing power of consumers, export-orientation should be regarded as the main engine of economic growth in Uzbekistan. Without fast growth, neither hidden unemployment in many sectors of the Uzbek economy nor stagnant wages can be remedied. Recently the Uzbek government attempted to eliminate the gap between the official exchange rate and the free market rate. This is a positive step in the right direction but the assumption that the current free market rate is necessarily the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate is theoretically incorrect. Hence, it can be argued that the exchange rate policies have been responsible for the deterioration of the current accounts and the rapid rise of foreign debt in Uzbekistan.
It is important to underline here that during the last decade hot money and capital flight have destabilized several developing economies and induced severe financial crises. Hence concerns on the part of government authorities over the viability of capital accounts are understandable. However, financial liberalization in the form of partial capital controls may be implemented more effectively to limit the effects of capital outflows. A complex and somewhat arbitrary regulatory system distorts relative prices and causes large welfare losses. It also induces corruption and nepotism. By distorting relative prices, the existing system discriminates against the investment goods sector. It also contributes to price inflation in domestic markets by transmitting the monopoly rents of some importers to consumer goods. In fact regression results on the determinants of price inflation reveal that the monopoly prices of the investment goods sector explain much of the variation in consumer prices.
References
een, Aydin A.
1999 Uzbekistan between Central Asia and the Middle East: another perspective. In: Rethinking Central Asia: Non-Eurocentric Studies in History, Social Structure, and Identity, Korkut A. Erturk, ed., pp. 129-161. London: Ithaca Press.
Agafonoff, A., and N. Sirajiddinov
1996 The Foreign Exchange Policy of Uzbekistan During Transition. Working Paper 1996/5. Tashkent: Center for Economic Research.
World Bank
1997 Uzbekistan: Creating Financial Markets. Volume 1, Country Department III. Washington, D.C.
C. P. Skrine in Kashgaria
Daniel Waugh, Professor, Departments of History and Slavic
Languages and Literature, and Henry M. Jackson School of International
Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA, dwaughu.washington.edu
From mid-1922 through the end of summer 1924, Clarmont P. Skrine served as British Consul in Kashgar (Qashghar/Kashi), Xinjiang. The appointment was somewhat accidental. As a member of the Indian civil service, he was really a Persian specialist. The consul in Kashgar, Percy T. Etherton, was going on leave, and a temporary replacement was needed. When Etherton did not return, Skrines one year stretched into two. On returning home, Skrine drew upon his letters and diaries to publish articles (Skrine 1925a, 1925b) and what is still a very valuable book on Kashgaria, Chinese Central Asia (Skrine 1926).[1] He continued his career in the Indian civil service, his most important activity being in Iran in the 1940s, and after retirement wrote two more books, one surveying the activity of the first British Consul in Kashgar, the redoubtable George Macartney (Skrine and Nightingale 1973). Skrines career has been examined in a solid biography based principally on his papers (Stewart 1989).
My first acquaintance with Skrine was as an undergraduate, when his book on Kashgaria was recommended to me. I became seriously interested in him when heading off to the mountains south of Kashgar in the mid-1990s. Skrines explorations and mapping there were essential preparation for that trip; in fact I used his map of the Kongur Alps for navigation in areas rarely visited by outsiders since Skrine was there (Waugh 1998, 1999). The next step was to study the archive of Skrines unpublished letters and notes. Of particular interest are his field dairy and letters, written weekly to his mother from Kashgar, in which he would go on, often at great length, about life at the consulate, his travels, the local officials and politics. Fortunately for us, his mother saved everything. Alas, only scraps of the voluminous correspondence of Skrines wife, Doris (who was with him in Kashgar), seem to have been preserved.
My project is to publish for a general readership an edited selection of Skrines letters and other materials from Kashgar. The letters are fresh and lively. He was a good observer, although naturally he had his orientalist biases. He also took photography seriously, and left behind some quite remarkable photographs of landscape and people. My book will include a generous selection of his photographs, many of them previously unpublished, as well as a few of his wifes unpublished drawings.
The immediate question which academics would pose is whether this material will really contribute anything to our knowledge of the region and Skrines role as a player in the Great Game which we did not previously know on the basis of his book. In fact, I think there is a lot yet to be learned even from the limited perspective of a British India functionary and the other British India sources which pertain to the Kashgar consulate. Skrine was a compulsive re-writer, at the expense of spontaneity, and deliberately (so as not to upset his superiors) edited out of his book most of the politics in which he was involved. Thus those who have relied on Chinese Central Asia to assess what he accomplished (the usual conclusion is, not much) in fact do not begin to have the full story. There is quite a bit to be learned about the construction of narrative and self-censorship when one compares the book with its manuscript sources. Scrupulous as Skrine was about most things, he also invents small fictions involving issues that might reflect badly on the dignity of a representative of His Majestys government.
Part of my task in introducing his letters will be to contextualize his activity in the broader history of the Kashgar consulate. Skrines predecessor, Etherton, has been touted as a hero in the struggle against the spread of Bolshevism in the first years after the Revolution. Yet it seems that Etherton is as over-rated as Skrine may be undervalued. Further, Ethertons career in Central Asia ended in official censure, thanks largely to Skrines perhaps overly assiduous investigation of his wrongdoings in Kashgar. That story has not yet been told. Apart from the personal drama here, we might well reassess the intelligence role of the consuls in Kashgar and learn more about their other primary function, as defenders of the rights of British subjects who lived in Xinjiang.
One virtue of Skrines book is his systematic observations of the Kyrgyz whom he met while exploring in the mountains and so admired. He also took a particular interest in the oral literature of the area, devoting a chapter of his book to the subject. When compiling his volumes on Eastern Turki literature, Gunnar Jarring (Jarring 1946-1951) included a number of Skrines translations and transcriptions. For the most part though, the transcriptions in the original language remained unpublished in Skrines field diary.
The sources for this project include in the first instance the voluminous India Office files of the British Library. These generally are well-catalogued and often have the virtue of bringing together all the documentation pertaining to a particular topic (e.g., rights of British subjects, the Bolshevik threat). Skrines papers are on permanent deposit in the collection under the shelf mark EurF/154. His photographs are in both the British Library (Photo 920) and scattered under various file numbers in the Royal Geographical Society in London. The process of cataloguing and identifying the photographs is underway, but far from complete; one of my tasks has been to contribute to that effort.
A full history of the Kashgar consulates (both British and Russian) is badly needed but obviously would require the study of resources which I am not attempting to consult for my project. Increasingly the Russian archives are being used to provide a corrective to the Britain-slanted histories of the Great Game, but similar efforts will be needed on the Chinese side. So far the most balanced treatment of international politics in the region is Lars-Erik Nymans dissertation (Nyman 1977). The Swedish missionary archives may prove to be quite valuable for our knowledge of Xinjiang. Unfortunately, for many of the topics we might wish to investigate (e.g., trade across the borders in the first decades of the 20th century), there is a paucity of indigenous documentation. A surprising amount though can be gleaned from the consular reports for topics such as the local economy.
In addition to the edition of Skrines letters, I expect this project to result in several articles on the topics of scholarly interest mentioned above.
References
Jarring, Gunnar
1946-1951 Materials to the Knowledge of Eastern Turki: Tales, Poetry, Proverbs, Riddles, Ethnological and Historical Texts from the Southern Parts of Eastern Turkestan with Translations and Notes. Lund: Gleerup.
Nyman, Lars-Erik
1977 Great Britain and Chinese, Russian and Japanese Interests in Sinkiang, 1918-1934. Lund: Esselte Studium.
Skrine, C. P.
1925a The Alps of Qungur, The Geographical Journal, 66 (5) 385-411.
1925b The roads to Kashgar, Journal of the Central Asian Society, 12 (3) 226-250.
1926 Chinese Central Asia. London: Methuen.
Skrine, C. P., and Pamela Nightingale
1973 Macartney at Kashgar: New Light on British, Chinese and Russian Activities in Sinkiang, 1890-1918. London: Methuen.
Stewart, John
1989 Envoy of the Raj: The Career of Sir Clarmont Skrine, Indian Political Service. Maidenhead: Porpoise Books.
Waugh, Daniel C.
1998 Exploring the Kongur Alps. Unknown side of Mustagh Ata, The Himalayan Journal, 1998 (54) 25-32.
1999 The Mysterious and Terrible Karatash Gorges: notes and documents on the explorations by Stein and Skrine, The Geographical Journal, 165 (3) 306-320.
Note
[1] There are several later editions which tend to omit the fold-out photographic panoramas of the original.
Briefs
Difficulties of Conducting Field Research in the Caucasus and Central Asia
Serkan Yalın, Lecturer, Department of Management,
International Ataturk Alatoo University, serkanyiaau.edu.kg,
and İbrahim Keleş, Lecturer, Department of Management,
International Ataturk Alatoo University, Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic,
qeleshiaau.edu.kg
In this research brief we discuss the difficulties we encountered while conducting research between March and July 2003. The research investigated dimensions of foreign direct investments (FDI) in two former Soviet Union (FSU) countries: Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.[1]
The study represents a test of John Dunnings famous Ownership-Location-Internalization (OLI) Paradigm or Eclectic Theory of FDI (Dunning 1980, 1988). The research examined FDI in two FSU countries by focusing mainly on host country factors to attract foreign investments, company-specific factors that enable a company to make an overseas investment, and non-standard business practices i.e., corruption which significantly affect company performances. In this research, we attempted to find region-specific FDI variables. For this, we investigated host country and company-related FDI dimensions in the region. We identified six companies that made considerable foreign investments in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The companies represented a number of sectors, including glass packing, dairy processing and plastic products. Large international firms providing infrastructure, such as electricity and gas, and those extracting natural resources were excluded since the host country government imposes restrictions on their business practices.
In our research the intended data collection method was to use mailed questionnaires, as is done in most business field research. In both countries a total of 250 questionnaires were sent to selected companies (125 in each country), which were contacted using personal references through our universities and local business associations. However, after two months we had not received a single completed questionnaire, despite our initial contacts with several companies before sending the questionnaires and follow-up calls afterwards.
Clearly we had to modify our data collection method, but we could not afford to administer another set of questionnaires (not that another round would apparently do any good). We decided to implement a case study approach instead and conduct interviews. However, after making initial contacts, we were surprised to find that the companies were unwilling to give appointments to academics. We were later informed by local experts that companies do not give appointments easily, and even when they do they do not give out much information about themselves. Fortunately, we were at last able to get some appointments through a network of several key personal acquaintances. But our nightmare was not yet over, as we encountered one manager who refused the interview without reason after we were already in his office. In another company the person only filled out 1/5 of the questionnaire. We must point out that we have conducted similar research in Turkey, where we encountered none of these difficulties. Companies in the FSU are not accustomed to being examined in academic studies and this may explain their reticence in talking to us. We recommend that scholars conducting similar research be prepared for these kinds of difficulties when studying businesses in the FSU.
A preliminary result of our research is a change of focus: instead
of the strictly quantitative statistical analysis that we had
planned, we were able to make qualitative conclusions about cultural
issues of doing business in the host countries. This allowed us
to enlarge the scope of our research, especially for information
related to corruption. For further information concerning our
study, research questions or questionnaire, please feel free to
contact Mr. Serkan Yalın at serkanyiaau.edu.kg.
This research will be presented at the conference: Central Asia
Perspectives from the Field to be held November 7-8, 2003 at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
References
Dunning, John H.
1980 Toward an eclectic theory of international production: some empirical tests, Journal of International Business Studies, 11 (1) 9-31.
1988 The eclectic paradigm of international production: a restatement and some possible extensions, Journal of International Business Studies, 19 (1) 1-32.
Note
[1] It was supported by the International Black Sea University (Tbilisi), Penta Advertising Co. (Tbilisi), Tbilisi Turkish Businessmens Association, International Ataturk Alatoo University (Bishkek), and the Kyrgyz-Turk Businessmens Association (Bishkek).
Research Conditions in Uzbekistan: Archival Access and Conditions in Samarkand
Christine Evans, Ph.D. student, Department of History,
University of California, Berkeley, Calif., USA, ceevanssocrates.berkeley.edu
Gaining access to Uzbekistan's archives requires a good deal of patience and advance planning. The process took five of the eight weeks I spent in Summer 2003 in Uzbekistan on an exploratory research trip funded by the American Councils for International Education (ACTR/ACCELS). The Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs' United States Bureau, which is responsible for granting permission to American scholars, officially requires a letter of introduction from the US Embassy. As of July, however, the Embassy had not heard of this requirement, and ultimately refused to provide such a letter for me. Fortunately, this rule seems to be negotiable, since I ultimately obtained permission to work in the Samarkand province State Archive [Samarqand davlat arxivi] on the basis of a letter of support from the Tashkent ACTR office (with help from Foreign Ministry contacts). It is worth noting that, in hopes of minimizing questions about my very preliminary research, I had applied with a vague project title Socialism and Modernization in Post-War Samarkand (a more controversial topic might have caused additional delays). Samarkand archive staff indicated that Uzbek archives are self-financing and that I would be charged a fee as part of the application process, but I could not confirm whether money ever changed hands on my behalf. Permission, once granted, is good for a year, after which time one must reapply.
Once I was in, working conditions were challenging at best. Uzbekistans provincial archives are in a state of crisis due to the collapse of government financing and public utilities. In Samarkand the archive building did not have consistent running water or electricity, much less climate control. Bundles of yellowing papers were strewn across the floor of a storage room. Although the archive staff were helpful, a variety of discomforts including the 100+ degree (Fahrenheit) summer heat made rapid progress difficult. The reading room performed double duty as the staff meeting room and break room, and was occasionally filled with smoke from garbage burning in the field behind the archive building. Summer maintenance and preparations for a visit to Samarkand by Russian President Vladimir Putin were also disruptive: archive staff were frequently unavailable to retrieve material from the stacks because they were required to paint, clean, and weed the surrounding gardens during day-long subbotniki (days of supposedly voluntary labor).
Another potential obstacle for foreign researchers is the post-independence decision to catalogue the significant backlog of material from the Soviet period primarily or exclusively in Uzbek, making Uzbek language skills increasingly necessary. Stacks of Soviet-era photographs, for example, that were being catalogued while I was there were being identified solely in Uzbek. Archive staff attributed this in part to the fact that new entry-level employees are no longer fluent in Russian and with monthly salaries at approximately $14, many lack higher education as well. Conditions in Uzbekistans archives reflect the countrys general crisis of public finance and education, making meaningful improvements unlikely in the near future.
Library Conditions in Uzbekistan
Shoshana Keller, Associate Professor, History Department,
Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., USA, skellerhamilton.edu
This report derives from my field trip to Uzbekistan in summer of 2003 for a project tentatively titled, Teaching History, Teaching the Nation. This project is about teaching Uzbek history in elementary and high schools in the 1950s and 1960s, and how creating the Uzbek historical narrative was an important tool in creating a Soviet Uzbek national identity.
The state of libraries in Uzbekistan is deteriorating alarmingly. In late spring 2003, the Uzbek government began to demolish the Alisher Navoiy State Library in Tashkent to make way for more government office buildings. The decision apparently happened with little forewarning to the librarians. The librarys five million volume collection is now divided between two buildings. The main building is on Xorazm Street, very close to the new British Westminster University (located at 12 Oxunboboev Street). A researcher must go to the main building first to obtain a readers card, which requires presenting ones passport, residency registration, and letter of introduction from the host research institution. The library card catalogue is also in the Xorazm Street building. However, some 80 percent of the collection is in storage at 33 Sulaymonova Street, near metro Mustaqilliq Maidoni, and cannot be accessed from the main building. The next step is to present ones card and the necessary call numbers at 33 Sulaymonova, and hope that the books, newspapers or journals are actually available. The people working at the storage building try to be helpful, but they have a mess on their hands. For the first few months after the transfer the entire collection was wrapped and tied in small bundles piled floor to ceiling in rooms and hallways. The newspaper room consisted of stacks of bound newspapers on the floor of what looked like a high school gymnasium in more-or-less alphabetical order, requiring that one step on some newspapers in order to reach others. In late July the newspapers were moved onto shelves in their own building within the 33 Sulaymonova complex. Similarly the librarians have been unwrapping the books and placing them on shelves as quickly as possible, but it is going to take months, if not an entire year, before that process is complete. In the meantime large sections of the collection are unavailable. The only reason that the librarians looked for my books at all was because I was a foreign guest, and then they could find only three out of the nine books I requested. There is no climate control in the buildings, from what I could see the space for shelving is inadequate, and it is all too easy for materials to get lost in the chaos. One librarian told me that no funds for a new central library building have been allocated, so this situation is likely to continue for years. There are rumors that librarians at the Navoiy and the Academy of Sciences Fundamental Library are selling the more valuable books under the table to supplement their inadequate salaries, but I was unable to confirm anything.
In addition to these problems, some libraries are purging Russian-language and/or Soviet-era material to make room for new Uzbek-language materials. I encountered this problem in the library of the Nizomi Tashkent State Pedagogical University, and John Schoeberlein has reported a similar purge in the Ferghana Provincial Library. While some libraries are now boasting on-line catalogues and other computer resources, courtesy of Western grant agencies, they are allowing their collections to decay.
Reviews and Abstracts
Edward Harper Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars. London: Kegan Paul, 2002. xiii + 288 pp., maps. ISBN 0710307462 (cloth), $127.50.
Reviewed by: Azade-Ayşe Rorlich, Associate Professor, Department
of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif.,
USA, arorlichusc.edu
The volume under review represents yet another addition to the growing collection of classic works in the Kegan Paul History of Civilization Series which are now available to the student of history. It is a reprint of the 1894 edition of E. H. Parkers history of the nomads of Inner Eurasia, those whom he characterized as people whose country was on the back of a horse (p. i), and whom he placed under the broad label of Tartars.
A distinguished professor of Chinese at the University of Manchester, Parker, not surprisingly, produced a work representative of the scholarly tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where history and philology functioned as almost the alter egos of each other. The preface to the second edition reflects this reality as E. H. Parker reveals in no ambiguous terms his intention of offering readers the substance of all the Chinese have to say about the nomad Tartars previous to the conquests of Genghis Khan, having translated word for word, all the original Chinese authorities (p. ix). Hence, it is the Chinese perception of the nomads that defines Parkers history, despite references to authors of other lands and times, from Herodotus and Zemarchos to Chavannes, Pelliot, Radlov, and Thomsen. The reader, however, will encounter difficulties in sorting out the configurations of the Chinese perceptions of the nomads, since Parker neither identifies the authorities whose works he translated, nor provides references to them in notes. Instead, in a somewhat imperial dixit fashion, he points to the existence of some 7,000 explanatory notes without including them in the body of his work, and places the burden on his readers of judging his work on trust alone.
Parker's book comprises thirty chapters organized in seven "books." Book One is entitled, "The Empire of the Hiung-nu." Here Parker focuses on the pastoralists identified in more recent scholarship as the Xiongnu and provides a discussion of their empire. Based in the Ordos region, the Xiongnu were, along with the Donghu of Eastern Mongolia and the Yuezhi of Gansu, one of the most remarkable pastoralist associations on China's northern borderlands. Parker's discussion of the rise and decline of their empire, however, may pose difficulties for the unwarned reader. This is partly due to the fact that, by his own admission, the transliteration system he chose, "the Pekingese dialect...is about the worst that could have been chosen, so far as the chance of any resemblance to the Tartar sounds intended is concerned" (p. ix). He justifies this choice on the grounds that it is "the best known to those students in China who are likely to require references" (p. ix). This choice in transliteration makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for the unwarned reader to realize that shanyu, the Xiongnu designation for a tribal leader, is the jenuye of the Parker narrative, while shanyu Tumen of the Xiongnu is Parkers Deuman (p. 8). These difficulties notwithstanding, Book One offers a wealth of information of an ethnographic nature, allowing the reader a richer glimpse, albeit through Chinese eyes, at the worlds of the Xiongnu. In addition, its value also stems from recognizing heterogeneity as a defining quality of pastoralist cultures and from the critique, be it mild and implied, of Eurocentrism, as Parker warns that the history of the Far East is quite as interesting as that of the Far West (p. 12).
Book Two is devoted to The Empire of the Sien-Pi. The focus is on identifying the Xianbei, the label the Chinese employed to refer to those tribes which dominated the northern borderlands of China after the collapse of the Xiongnu. Here, Parker traces the genealogy of the Xianbei to the Donghu [Eastern Hu][1] commonwealth without mentioning the fact that Hu was the Chinese identifier for horse riding barbarians; along with a discussion of the etymology of Tungus he offers rich ethnographic information about them. Although the Xianbei were not successful in forging a durable pastoral state, they experienced a brief moment of glory under their leader Tanshihuai (Parkers Dardjegwe), who defeated a large Chinese army in 177 C.E. and controlled a large federation until his death in 180 C.E. Not surprisingly, Tanshihuai receives ample coverage in this book, which also contains information concerning Xiongnu military-political practices, as well as Chinese strategies of co-opting and taming the barbarians in order to establish stable tributary relationships with them. Even more interesting however, is Parkers discussion of Tanshihuais solutions to domestic crises. Many of his decisions provide additional evidence to enhance the validity of A. Khazanovs argument in Nomads and the Outside World regarding the fact that the history of the pastoralists cannot be considered in a vacuum given the importance of their relations with agrarian societies and other communities.
One of the results of this type of pastoralist/agrarian interaction was the emergence of symbiotic polities created by the Xianbei of the Manchurian borderlands. Parker discusses the deeds of Murong Hui (Mujung Hwei) the Xianbei shanyu who was the founder of the first polity of this kind, as well as the deeds of his successor Murong Huang (Mujung Hwang), and notes their membership in the most illustrious of Sien-pi houses (p. 101). Such an evaluation echoes, no doubt, the voice of the Chinese sources which most likely praised the Chinese educated Murong Hui, who adopted Chinas sedentary ways by encouraging farming and establishing a capital city in Manchuria. As well, they probably praised his equally Sinicized successor Murong Huang, who proclaimed himself Emperor of a new dynasty in 337 C.E. In doing so, he launched the pattern of Manchurian dynastic rule in China.
In this book Parker provides ample ethnographic/anthropological information about the Xianbei, as well as the Toba, or the Northern Wei of the Chinese, who by the middle of the fifth century C.E. had become powerful enough to control Northern China, most of Mongolia, and the lands west of it. Most valuable here is the information Parker provides concerning the Sinification of the Toba/Wei, which included prohibitions of their customs, Tartar language, weights, standards, and measures (p. 104). Read critically, it is this kind of information that may prove useful to the student of history and anthropology today.
Book Three, entitled The Empire of the Jwen-Jwen or Jeu-Jen, offers a brief discussion of the Juan Juan, whose confederation became so powerful in the sixth century under Anagui (Anakwe) that the Wei emperor recognized him as an equal. Much of this book is devoted to discussing the conflicts between the Toba/Wei and the Juan Juan, as well as the Sinification of the latter, whose king had Chinese literates in his employ (p. 120). Parker argues that after the death of Anagui the Juan Juan were completely annihilated by the Turks and refutes Chavanness contention that the Juan Juan are identical with the Avars who replaced the Huns in Hungary. He also considers totally devoid of foundation (p. 121) Gibbons claim that it was Attila who vanquished the khan of the Juan Juan, or Geougen as they are identified by Gibbon. Despite the extensive discussion of the ethnic roots of the Juan Juan in this book, Parker fails to provide a definitive answer. Today, there is still no consensus on either their linguistic or ethnic origin and identity: Mongolian, Turkic, and Hunnic/Avar all figure as possibilities.
Book Four is called The Empire of the Turks. Parker begins it by stating in no ambiguous terms that the ancestors of the Turks were a group of Hiung-nu families bearing the clan name Assena [Ashina] (p. 130). This statement, however, should be viewed with caution. Despite the fact that most historians agree that the language spoken by the people who ruled the eastern regions of Inner Eurasia in the sixth and seventh centuries was a form of Turkic, opinions on the origins of the Turks vary. Parker, not surprisingly, reflects the thinking of the Chinese school which traces their origins to the Xiongnu, but in many other accounts the Turks appear as the descendants of more ancient groups who were enslaved by the Juan Juan and worked as miners for them.
It was the victory of the Turks led by Tumen over Anagui, the Juan Juan leader, that marked the emergence of the first empire of the Turks (551-630 C.E.). Parkers mention of the fact that Tumen took the title ili khakhan in the aftermath of this victory offers a better opportunity for understanding the dual rule of the Turk empire. Hence, Tumen was the supreme ruler of its eastern wing and Ishtemi (Istami) ruled its western wing, and upon Tumens death his son Muhan (Mukan) joined Ishtemi in the equation of dual rule. Rich in information on the customs, social structure, language, and food culture of the Turks, this book also provides information on the relationship of these two rulers as well as of their successors. In particular, Parkers discussion of the relations of Dalobian with China (pp. 132-139) contributes to a better understanding of the fragmentation and demise of the Turk empire as one of the episodes of the pastoralist/agrarian interaction.
Parkers analysis of the second Turk empire (683-734 C.E.) is launched with the discussion of the rise and fall of Merchos Empire. Here he refers to Mocho, who ruled from 691 to 716 but was not the architect of the second empire. It was Elterish Kagan (r. 682-692) who accomplished the brief revival of the Turk empire, but the fact that Mocho is privileged by Parker may be indicative once more of his China bias, since it was Mocho who maintained good relations with China while engaging in warfare with Turkic tribes. Not surprisingly then, Parker provides here information on Turkic warfare. In this chapter in particular, however, he also offers discussions of etymologies and ethnic identities, drawing on the authority of scholars such as Chavannes and Pelliot, but particularly Thomsen and Radlov, who gained prominence for their role in deciphering the inscriptions on the Orkhon Stellae.
Book Five focuses on The Empire of the Western Turks. This is, no doubt, one of the books most difficult to follow because of the tediousness of chronicling the events that marked the last moments of glory for the Ashina clan, whose decline began with the death of its last leader in 659 C.E. This chapter also contains a discussion of the Kyrgyz. Parkers claim that the history of the Kirghiz is traceable with almost perfect clearness (p. 185) could not withstand critical scrutiny and should be discounted; the ethnographic information he provides, however, is useful for testing the validity of those sources that contain similar information.
Book Six is a brief account of The Empire of the Ouigours [Uyghurs]. Tracing the founding of the Uyghur empire to the Tiele (Ting-ling), Parker launches a long etymological discussion, and advances another sweeping claim that the Kirghiz and the Ouigours spoke the same language (p. 196). This too is a statement that would hardly withstand serious scrutiny. Parkers whimsical rendition of names is cumbersome and represents a serious hindrance throughout. Despite this, however, his account of Guli Peilo (Bira), the founder of the eighth century Uyghur empire, together with that of his son Moyancho, along with the discussion of their relations with China and their conversion to Manichaeism, do make a contribution to piecing together the complex picture of the metamorphoses undergone by various types of pastoralists as a result of their interactions with other types of societies.
Book Seven, entitled The Empire of the Cathayans [Khitans], contains a detailed discussion of those military and political developments on Chinas northern borderlands that were responsible for projecting Manchuria into prominence. Parker focuses on the two dynasties that rose from Manchuria to conquer most of northern China: the Khitan (Cathay) and the Jurchen (Nuchen), who founded the Liao (907-1125 C.E.) and the Jin (1115-1234 C.E.) dynasties, respectively. In addition, he offers an account of the Karakitai, who founded the western Liao kingdom in eastern Central Asia after the defeat of the Khitan by the Jurchen in 1124. Not surprisingly, there is ample information on lifeways, military, diplomatic, and political matters. What should be noted in this context is Parkers perceptiveness in highlighting the fact that even as rulers of northern China, the Khitans proved to be very resilient in safeguarding their nomadic traditions and practices: Cathayans appear to have adhered to one fixed principle never to abandon their ancient wandering habits of life (p. 233). Still, they were changed by their interaction with the Chinese, just as the Chinese changed as a result of their encounters with the nomads. Parkers conclusion highlights this reality, as he points to the fact that after the Han and Tang dynasties no native ruling house has ever held North China for long, and after 1643, Chinas rulers were the Manchus, an obscure tribe affiliated to the Nuchens (p. 271).
From the Xiongnu to the Khitan and the Jurchen, Parkers historical stage featured tribes and peoples of impressive diversity across the Mongol, Turkic and Siberian ethnic landscape. Yet, he crowded them all under the label of Tartar as a generic term for the pastoralist nomads beyond Chinas northern borderlands. The question that begs for an answer as one reviews Parkers book is: at a time when the student of Inner Eurasian studies can reach out for the excellent works of scholars such as Thomas Barfield, David Christian, Morris Rossabi, Denis Sinor and Khazanov, to name a few, why read A Thousand Years of the Tartars? Perhaps, to measure the road the field traveled, to sharpen ones critical skills, to test ones command of the basics, and to tease out interesting ethnographic details.
Reference
Khazanov, Anatoly
1994 Nomads and the Outside World. 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Note
[1] Terms in brackets indicate author translations, or Pinyin equivalents for Parkers version of terms and names. Parentheses indicate Parkers version of names or terms.
Balzhan Zhimbiev, History of the Urbanisation of a Siberian City: Ulan-Ude. Cambridge: Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge, 2000. Inner Asia Book Series. 121 pp., notes, bibliography, illustrations. ISBN 1874267464, $65.00.
Reviewed by: Robert Montgomery, Assistant Professor, Department
of History, Baldwin Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, rmontgobw.edu
It is all too easy to assume that provincial Soviet cities in non-Russian regions are the wholly artificial creations of the politically dominant ethnic Russians called into being by the dictates of an all-powerful central government. Supposedly these cities are the passive recipients and obedient executors of policies determined in Moscow, virtually static islands of purely Russian culture, population and language in an indigenous non-Russian sea. Yet this rather monochromatic picture is in need of coloration: the history of provincial cities situated in nationality areas is far more complex and nuanced than we often assume, as is shown by Balzhan Zhimbievs study of Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat Republic (formerly the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, or ASSR) in southeastern Siberia.
Ulan-Ude (which bore the name Verkhneudinsk until 1934) has witnessed and participated in the major dramatic events and phases in the Russian and Soviet past. Yet despite its status as the capital of the Buryat Republic and as one of Siberias larger cities (with a 1996 population of 386,000), Ulan-Ude remains relatively little studied. To be sure, we do have at our disposal several Russian-language studies of the city as an object of historical and sociological investigation written during the Soviet era, for example L. K. Minerts Arkhitektura goroda Ulan-Ude, and Pamiatniki arkhitektury Buriatii; P. L. Nataevs Ulan-Ude: kraevedcheskii ocherk; and N. V. Kims Ocherki istorii Ulan-Ude. Predictably, such works emphasize Soviet-era achievements in the areas of industrial growth, educational and cultural institutions, and housing construction, although post-Soviet works on Ulan-Ude such as G. M. Seminas Iz istorii goroda Ulan-Ude and Ulan-Ude v proshlom i nastoiashchem, edited by V. A. Shapovalov et al. have helped to provide a corrective. The ethnic Buryat population of Ulan-Ude appears as the object of anthropological study in a number of works, such as K. V. Vyatkinas Ocherki kul'tury i byta buriat and K. D. Basaevas Sovremennyi byt i etnokul'turnye protsessy v Buriatii. Yet we have no monographs in English on Ulan-Udes history.
Zhimbiev, a research fellow of Cambridge Universitys Mongolia and Inner Asian Studies Unit, has gone a long way in filling this gap by presenting us with his investigation of the development of Ulan-Ude and its environs from antiquity to the present. As befits the authors training in architecture and town planning at the Moscow Institute of Land Utilization and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Zhimbievs study emphasizes the historical stages in the growth of the built environment (p. 2). In other words, he focuses upon Ulan-Ude as a physical space utilized and manipulated by its inhabitants and economic and political authorities, rather than on the history of the political, social, and cultural developments that have occurred in the city. Thus, changes in the citys planning, layout, construction, and architectural types; the provision of housing for the population; and the interaction between humans and their physical environment occupy pride of place in most of the work. At the same time, Zhimbiev provides a wealth of valuable information relating to the ethnohistory of the indigenous Buryats in and around Ulan-Ude. For the student of the nationalities of Russia east of the Urals, it is perhaps these contributions that are the most valuable.
In the books first section, Settlements and Housing Patterns in the Region, Zhimbiev investigates the history of Ulan-Ude and its environs before the October Revolution. He notes that Tsarist and Soviet observers and historians of Siberian urbanization treated Ulan-Ude and other Siberian cities as creations ex nihilo, and assumed that the native inhabitants had never established settlements in the area prior to the arrival of the Russian invaders and colonists, nor had many dealings with the new colonial cities and their Russian inhabitants during the Tsarist period. This assumption was not only flawed, it was self-serving from the point of view of the ethnic Russians: if the Buryats were indeed a migratory and backward (p. 14) population whose hand lay light upon the land, then this suggested the lack of real ties of the migratory population to particular areas, thus enabling the claims of newcomers to be validated by their closer ties to the same land (p. 13). But as Zhimbiev points out, Ulan-Ude and its environs had been occupied long before the arrival of the Russians. Archaeologists have found remains of ancient towns and encampments, tumuli, scattered dwellings and grave sites (p. 12) constructed by the Buryats and their predecessors the Xiongnu, Turks, Qidans [Khitans], and Mongols. Once Russians began to fashion their own settlement at the confluence of the Uda and Selenga Rivers in the late 1660s, they did so on the site of a Buryat settlement, not in an unpeopled wilderness. The notion that Verkhneudinsk/Ulan-Ude was a purely Russian city with which the Buryats had little contact is equally erroneous: there were frequent interactions between urban Russians and Buryats who came in from the countryside to trade their meat and dairy products, grain, various crafts, wool, and leather. Russians predominated in Verkhneudinsks population, to be sure, but there were always Buryat inhabitants alongside them, and these urban Buryats were by no means the passive recipients of Russification and Russian influences. Zhimbiev notes that even though Verkhneudinsks Buryats often built wooden housing in the Russian style, they hired Buryat builders or instructed Russian contractors to construct homes that took into account the Buryats specific needs (such as sacred spaces for storing and displaying ongons, the statues of shamanist deities).
The Soviet and early post-Soviet eras are the focus of the books second section, Town Becomes Capital. During the Stalinist industrialization drive of the 1930s, the physical characteristics and population of Ulan-Ude changed radically. Not only did the city gain new factories in the railway, aviation, glass-making, and other economic sectors, but industrialization led to an influx of new workers. At the time of the Buryat ASSRs founding in 1923, Verkhneudinsks population stood at 20,500, but by 1939 it had swelled to 125,700, with most of the new migrants being Russians and other non-Buryats.
During the Soviet era, Ulan-Ude suffered from the insufficient and shoddy housing typical of the USSR. To alleviate these problems, the economic enterprises and the state built housing of a variety of types from the 1930s on: workers barracks and wood or brick single-family dwellings and duplexes (1930s), then multi-floor apartment blocks (1930s-1950s), standardized three-to-five-story modular apartments (1960s-1970s), and finally, beginning in the late 1970s, nine-to-twelve-story high-rise apartment buildings. Some of Ulan-Udes residents were not content to wait passively for housing to be provided for them and took matters into their own hands, illegally building shantytowns...unregulated self-built huddles of small log houses (p. 59) near their workplaces or in areas that local authorities deemed too undesirable or dangerous for officially-sanctioned construction, such as the flood plains of the Uda and Selenga Rivers. In this way, migrants to Ulan-Ude who found themselves starved for shelter managed to carve out living spaces for themselves in the interstices of the command economy and totalitarian system.
But while departure from official norms was permitted in housing construction itself, at least during the period of the most severe shortages, the display of national characteristics in housing was another matter altogether. The repression of Buryat culture that began in the 1930s and continued in varying degrees to the end of the Soviet era meant that Buryats became reluctant to display their national traditions in any form, including housing, because that might be treated as a form of nationalism (p. 68). As a result, even though the continual expansion of the citys boundaries led to the absorption of surrounding Buryat settlements, the Soviet-era heritage of Ulan-Ude displays a non-manifestation of ethnic and local characteristics in housing and architecture (p. 68).
Yet, as Zhimbiev points out in the third section, The City in the Late Soviet Period, just as the perestroika and early post-Soviet eras have allowed an explosion of new types of commercial structures and new individual housing for those who could afford it, so too has an element of Buryatness begun to flourish in Ulan-Ude and the surrounding countryside. Buddhist monasteries, temples, and suburgans (stupas), as well as shamanist oboos (sacred cairns) began to appear. At the same time public celebrations of long-banned Buryat holidays created a new space...for the indigenous culture to represent itself publicly (p. 92).
Zhimbievs slim but highly informative work fills many gaps in our knowledge of the development of Buryatias capital city. If one were to carp at minor flaws, one would note the occasional typographic error. The reader should also be aware that Zhimbiev refers to the History of the Tang dynasty, the dynasty that ruled in China in the fourth to the eighth centuries A.D. [sic] (p. 28) as a source for the study of Asiatic ethnic groups whose territory included the site of the later Ulan-Ude, when the commonly accepted dates of the Tang Dynasty are 618-907 A.D. Yet these infelicities certainly do not detract from the books overall worth. History of the Urbanisation of a Siberian City provides a unique glimpse of the evolution of one eastern colonial city that places Ulan-Udes development squarely within the context of the history and characteristics of Russian/Soviet colonial cities as a whole. Although Zhimbievs detailed treatments of city plans, architectural types, the management and ownership of housing and enterprises, and changes in the use of public space, etc., will be of interest primarily to specialists in urban studies, sociology, and economic development, the information he provides on Ulan-Udes ethnic Buryats will prove of great value to the student of nationality issues in the Russian/Soviet East.
References
Basaeva, K. D.
1984 Sovremennyi byt i etnokul'turnye protsessy v Buriatii. Novosibirsk: Nauka.
Kim, N. V.
1964 Ocherki istorii Ulan-Ude. Ulan-Ude: Buriatskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.
Minert, L. K.
1983 Arkhitektura goroda Ulan-Ude. Ulan-Ude: Buriatskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.
1983 Pamiatniki arkhitektury Buriatii. Novosibirsk: Nauka.
Nataev, P. L.
1983 Ulan-Ude: kraevedcheskii ocherk. Ulan-Ude: Buriatskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.
Semina, G. M.
1994 Iz istorii goroda Ulan-Ude. Ulan-Ude: Egregor.
Shapovalov, V. A., et al.
1996 Ulan-Ude v proshlom i nastoiashchem. Ulan-Ude: Buriatskii nauchnyi tsentr Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk.
Vyatkina, K. V.
1969 Ocherki kul'tury i byta buriat. Leningrad: Nauka.
Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. New York: New York University Press, 2000. xvii + 272 pp. ISBN 014775543 (cloth), $55; 014775551 (paper), $20.
Reviewed by: Roger D. Kangas, Professor of Central Asian
Studies, George C. Marshall Center, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany,
kangasrmarshallcenter.org
First published in the French language in 1997 under the title La nouvelle Asie centrale ou la fabrication des nations, Olivier Roys work on the national transformation of Central Asia was finally made available in an English translation in 2000. Given the timeliness of the issues discussed in the volume, it should be considered essential reading for anyone expressing an interest in Central Asia. Obviously, recent developments in the region will not be covered, but that is beside the point: the book is about how the respective identities and cultures of the Central Asian states formed over a long period of time.
Beginning with early notions of history and identity, Roy quickly moves the discussion to the era of the Russian and then Soviet control of Central Asia. The theme of how the concept of nation was created in Central Asia is woven throughout the text. While this in itself is not a new idea, the way in which Roy outlines this evolution, especially in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is a fascinating study. Beginning in the first chapter, Roy sets the parameters for what he calls group solidarities, those structures within which people identify with others. During the pre-Russian period in Central Asian history, this tended to focus on tribal and clan relations. However, Roy is quick to note that such constructs are fluid, multiple, and can vary in importance over time. It has been the mistake of outsiders to assume that such identities, or group solidarities, can remain static.
This conceptual framework is expanded in subsequent chapters on the Russian conquest, reformist movements, and finally the Soviet takeover of Central Asia. As insightfully outlined in chapter five, the Soviet era ultimately created new entities in the region, such as the kolkhoz, around which group solidarities could form. Ironically, at the same time, the Soviet government was trying to create national solidarity groups in the region. Again, while numerous scholars have explained this latter notion of Central Asian history, Roy juxtaposes the creation of national identities with the evolution of local-level solidarity groupings, suggesting that they are inextricably linked.
Roy creates a setting in which the complex nature of competing and conflicting identities can be appreciated. His knowledge of Tajikistan, in particular, is demonstrated time and again, revealing the incredibly complex nature of intra-regional and kolkhoz-versus-kolkhoz conflict in that country. He also spends considerably more time on Uzbekistan than he does on Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Turkmenistan, a fact the author himself notes in the introduction. This balance is not really an issue until the final third of the book, which highlights the post-independence experiences of the Central Asian states. Because of the limited time frame in question (up through the mid-1990s), this analysis raises more questions than answers and simply suggests possible courses of actions for the respective leaders. This is particularly evident in the final chapter on the geostrategic significance of Central Asia. The brevity of discussion means that the rather complex array of foreign policy, trade, and security arrangements in the region are reduced to standard perceptions of nascent Realpolitik.
Scholars and students already familiar with issues of tribal, clan, national, religious, and other identity questions in Central Asia will appreciate the volume more than novices. The flood of names, places and terms noted in local languages may be overwhelming to someone just getting to know Central Asia. That there is neither a detailed map of Central Asia nor, better yet, maps of the individual countries and sub-regions, will create some confusion for readers unfamiliar with the region. Lastly, minor editorial discrepancies exist in the volume, such as the incorrect noting of Faizulla Khojaevs birth year (1896, not 1898) and position in the Uzbek government (Premier, not President), as well as the name of Turkmenistans Foreign Minister for much of the 1990s (Shikhmuradov, not Sheikhmuhammed). However, these are few and far between and do little to detract from the general tenor of the book.
In the end, the book accomplishes what the author set out to do. Today, over six years after the original writing of the book, much of what is said holds true. Indeed, the declaration of President Akaev that 2003 would be the "Year of Kyrgyz Statehood" can be explained by Roy's assertions regarding the political need to transcend the local group identities and create "national level" ones. In his conclusion, the author remarks that "...the attributes of statehood have their reality, beyond flags and colored spots of land on the maps of children's encyclopediae" (p. 200). It is the discussion of the evolution of this sentiment - this national feeling - that Roy so well describes.
Daniel Heradstveit, Democracy and Oil: The Case of Azerbaijan. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2001. 115 pp. ISBN 3895002402, $32.
Reviewed by: Hooman Peimani, independent international
relations researcher and consultant with international organizations
in Geneva, Switzerland, peimaniiprolink.ch
The Soviet Unions disintegration in 1991 initiated a process of transition away from the monopolistic Soviet system to a new system throughout the successive independent states, which their citizens hoped would be democracy. In practice, the majority of these states have failed to build such a political system, despite differences among their polities. Soon after independence, Azerbaijan seemed to be in a better economic situation than many other former Soviet republics to work towards the creation of a stable democracy. As citizens of an oil-rich country, the Azeris hoped that their oil exports would help them create the necessary economic basis for their desired democratic system.
In his book, Democracy and Oil: The Case of Azerbaijan, Daniel Heradstveit examines the development of democracy, including respect for human rights, since independence. To this end, he studies the role of the Azeri oil industry, dominated by Western oil companies, in the countrys efforts to build democracy. The industry is Azerbaijans core economic sector, capable of affecting the countrys future political and economic development. Viewing corruption within the Azeri ruling elite as a factor with a major negative impact on the formation of a democracy, the author aims at determining the foreign oil companies contribution to its existence and expansion.
Heradstveit assumes that a key criterion to determine whether a country is democratic is how its rulers treat the opposition. Based on that assumption, he intentionally narrows down the empirical data he uses by drawing primarily on the perspectives of Azeri opposition groups concerning the democratization process and the foreign oil companies. He also limits the scope of his analysis to the role of the Western oil companies in Azerbaijans efforts towards democratization and human rights. He surveys the status of democratic institutions in Azerbaijan as a background for his analysis.
Heradstveit analyzes the process of state building in Azerbaijan by examining what he describes as its more or less democratic constitution, i.e., what the country is theoretically committed to, and comparing that with the existing Azeri political realities. The author pays special attention to the political systems behavior towards human rights, while emphasizing the weakness of Azerbaijans civil society as a major obstacle to the strength of democracy and the institutionalization of human rights. For him, Azerbaijans underdeveloped economy is another major obstacle. However, he suggests that its rich oil resources have the potential to develop the economy to support a democratic political system, if Azerbaijan does not follow the model of the Arab Persian Gulf states, which use their oil-generated income to consolidate authoritarianism.
The author also considers the importance of major internal and external threats to the democratization of Azerbaijans state. He identifies the irredentist movement in Nagorno-Karabakh, Bakus ties with the main regional powers (Iran and Russia), the unresolved issue of dividing the Caspian Sea among its littoral states, and Azerbaijans hostile relations with Armenia as factors slowing down the democratization.
As indicated above, the author considers the Azeri state to be a nominal democracy, meaning that, although the model of democracy in Azerbaijan cannot compare with Western models, the states efforts at emulating that model are not just window-dressing to pacify Western criticism (p. 24). He bases his argument on the Azeri elites steps towards developing a secular ideology with democratic tendencies, advocating close ties with the West. In his comparison of Azerbaijans experience with other Muslim states of the former Soviet Union in their efforts to build democracy, the author evaluates Azerbaijan as a winner along with Kyrgyzstan (p. 25).
Considering the reasons for the failure of many Muslim states to create Western-style democracy to be mainly economic problems and kleptocracy, Heradstveit sees better chances for Azerbaijan to achieve democracy (p. 25). His reasoning is based on the countrys potential to build a strong, oil-driven economy and on its short-lived experience (1918-20) as an indigenous democratic state.
Noting some of the shortcomings of Azeri President Heydar Aliev, the author gives him credit for his efforts to establish a secular state with a democratic direction, notwithstanding its weaknesses. He also credits Alievs view on the long-term nature of building a democracy in Azerbaijan, since going too fast will only lead to alienation, frustration and a vehement reaction (p. 25).
The main objective of Heradstveits book is to evaluate the role of the Western oil companies in the struggle for democracy in Azerbaijan, i.e., whether they directly or indirectly weaken or strengthen it (p. 11). Interviews with 20 opposition figures, whose biases he acknowledges, form the primary data used for the books analysis. The rest is secondary data drawn from the works of mainly Western scholars on state-building and democratization in Azerbaijan since independence.
Based on his interviews, the author concludes that the Azeri opposition regards the Western oil companies as co-conspirators in the high level of corruption, (p. 103) either due to their corrupt natures or else out of necessity for preserving their interests while working in a corrupt political system. Heradstveit thinks this should be alarming to these companies, which should demonstrate their opposition to corruption. Otherwise, the future ascension to power of the opposition will have a negative impact on their economic interests in Azerbaijan.
As an analysis of the post-independent development in Azerbaijan, Democracy and Oil is not a comprehensive work. It lacks elaboration on many factors important to the development of the Azeri state and its undemocratic character. These include the growing role of non-regional powers, especially the United States, that now have long-term political and economic stakes in the Caspian Sea region. These powers exert a significant influence on shaping the regions political future. However, within the context of its intentionally narrowed focus, i.e., analyzing the viability of a stable political system that has a long-term goal of evolution into a democratic one, the book offers insights of interest to Western oil companies that have made large investments in oil-rich Azerbaijan.
Conferences and Lecture Series
Second METU Conference on International Relations, June 23-25, 2003, Ankara, Turkey
Reported by: Isık Kuşu, Research Assistant,
Center for the Black Sea and Central Asia, Middle East Technical
University, isikkuscuyahoo.com
and Hayriye Kahveci, Research Assistant, Center for the
Black Sea and Central Asia, Middle East Technical University,
Ankara, Turkey, hkahvecimetu.edu.tr
On June 23-25, 2003, the Department of International Relations organized the Second Conference on International Relations at Middle East Technical University (METU). Similar to last years event, this years meeting was one of the largest scholarly gatherings in Ankara, which brought together over one hundred scholars from more than two dozen countries. The scope of the conference was interdisciplinary, with a geographical focus on the Balkans, Central Eurasia and the Middle East. Political transitions, democratization, ethnic-communal conflicts, state building, regional rivalries, external interventions, international security and a host of other intra- and inter-state issues were discussed in the forty-six panels held during the three-day event.
The Caucasian region and the surrounding international environment was one of the three primary geographical foci of the conference. Consequently, a large number of participants presented papers dealing with diverse issues in and around the region. Five primary issue areas dominated: state building, economic and political transitions, ethnic conflicts, Caspian oil politics, and regional rivalries. This report will focus on the keynote addresses given by Nazif Shahrani, Brenda Shaffer, Robert Olson, and Moshe Gammer, and then will offer a few other highlights of the conference of interest to Central Eurasianists.
Nazif Shahrani (Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University) made a presentation entitled, Military Victories and Political Failures? Governance in Post-Taliban Afghanistan and Iraq. Professor Shahrani discussed US policy in post-Taliban Afghanistan with special emphasis on the complexity of state formation in an international system destabilized by the so-called war on terror. He emphasized the inability of the Washington-backed government in Kabul to address the historical roots of the problems in the country and to remedy them with appropriate policy options. The war on terror, Dr. Shahrani argued, has largely run in opposition to the natural course of post-Taliban state building. Accordingly, more than two hundred years of centralized state building projects in Afghanistan have failed to achieve a viable compromise solution for the diverse ethnic and tribal communities in the country. Successive attempts at centralized state building in Afghanistan have achieved little but victimization of minorities, destruction of interpersonal trust and the instigation of intercommunal conflicts by central governments. Yet the Bush administrations dual policy of fighting against terrorism and nation-building tries to reenact a scenario played out in the past and proven to be at odds with the soil. The Bush administration has tried to install a strong centralized regime solely for security reasons, but this approach has strong potential to deepen existing fault lines in the country. According to Shahrani, instead of repeating the mistakes of the previous Afghan governments, the new state building project should focus on community-based local governance, the de facto situation in most parts of the country, and build a small but effective central government with extractive and distributive functions.
Brenda Shaffer (Caspian Studies Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) presented a paper on the foreign policies of the Caspian littoral states entitled, Is There an Islamic Foreign Policy? Islam, Foreign Policy and the Caspian Region. In her presentation, Dr. Shaffer attacked the recent revival of cultural studies literature in foreign policy studies. Her own research gives little credence to the role of cultural variables, mainly religion, on the foreign policies of the Caspian states. Presenting different examples, she argued that even though culture has a prominent place in Caspian states rhetoric, foreign policy practices are not shaped by these factors. Rather, state interests transcending cultural factors play a more prominent role. Muslim states, including Iran, often use culture to pursue material state interests as a way of contending with neighboring regimes or of forcing changes in their policies.
Another keynote speech, The Azerbaijan Question and Turkey-Iran Relations: 2000-2002, was presented by Robert Olson (Professor of History, University of Kentucky). Dr. Olson discussed the revival of Azeri nationalism as a significant player in the wider arena of Middle East politics, and emphasized the context of relations between Turkey and Iran during the last three years. According to Dr. Olson, the re-emergence of the Azerbaijan question and of Azeri nationalism is explained by a complex of local, regional, national, and international forces, which include grievances of Azeri intellectuals and nationalists, especially in Azerbaijan-Iran, due to their exclusion from the Islamic Republics government; restriction of cultural-communal rights; the poor performance of the [Iranian] economy; and regional tensions between Tabriz and Tehran. Also, the independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the nationalist uprisings as a result of Azerbaijans war with Armenia have contributed to the revival of Azerbaijani identity and unity in Iran. Other factors, he emphasized, include alienation of Azeris as a result of Tehrans support for Armenia, the Azerbaijani governments cultivation of Azeri nationalism in Iran, and Turkish support for Azerbaijani nationalism. As a net effect, Olson argued, Azeri nationalism has become an important regional issue gaining momentum in Turkish-Iranian relations.
Moshe Gammer (Senior Lecturer, Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel-Aviv University) discussed the reasons for Daghestan's choice not to follow Chechnya in its conflict with Russia in his paper entitled, The Road Not Taken: Daghestan and the Conflict in Chechnya. Detailing the complex ethnic structure in Daghestan, which has fourteen titular ethnic groups, Dr. Gammer referred to sources of tension and distrust in the republic, such as conflicts between the Highlanders (speakers of Caucasian languages) and the Lowlanders (Turkic-language speakers), and other ethnic disturbances including the problem of the Aki Chechens, a Chechen group that had been annexed to Dagestan in the 1920s and was subsequently deported from their lands in 1944. Aki Chechen claims to their historical villages met with the resistance of other ethnic groups, such as the Laks who had been resettled in Chechen villages after the deportation, or the Kumyks who were disturbed by the returning Chechens in and around Makhachkala. Similar ethnic tensions and the influx of Wahhabis to the republic after independence have been discouraging factors for the Daghestani government.
A number of papers focused on the Caspian oil basin, regional rivalries, and integration in the Caucasus. Elif Hatun Kılıbeyli and Mahal Emrahov from ukurova University, Turkey, discussed disputes on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, border problems in the region and Russias intervention in regional conflicts in Abkhazia, Azerbaijan, and Ossetia as a part of its larger strategy to dominate the oil-rich region. Niyazi Abbazov from the Azerbaijan State Economic University focused on the desire of the South Caucasian countries to integrate into the world economy, and noted the importance of having a modern transport and communication infrastructure. He argued that the Europe-Caucasus-Asia Transport Corridor (TRACECA) will contribute to the integration of the southern Caucasus into Europe and the world economy.
The Center for the Black Sea and Central Asia (KORA) organized three separate panels that offered Perspectives from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Among the papers on these panels was Petro-Politics and the State in the Caspian Region, presented by Recep Boztemur of METU. Boztemur discussed the impacts of energy resources and their uses on the political organization of the Caspian countries, and suggested that development in the energy sector might facilitate the democratization of Caspian states, assist political development in individual countries, and promote conflict management in the complex problems of ethnicity between regional powers, as well as support regional security and stability by encouraging cooperation through various political, economic and humanitarian means. Boztemur emphasized the problematic relationship between the democratization processes on the one hand and the discourse on regional security and stability on the other.
Another KORA-sponsored paper was The Russian Federations Military Policy in Central Asia in 1991-2001, presented by Isık Kuşu (KORA). Kuşu speculated on Moscows real intention behind establishing military ties with the Central Asian states, and to what extent Moscow was successful in accomplishing this aim. She argued that the Russian Federation did not perceive direct threats to its national security from the region; rather it used these threats to become the main actor in the region via military means. Kuşu discussed the shift in the Russian Federations foreign policy regarding the Near Abroad. Finally, Hayriye Kahveci (KORA) presented her research on the development of Civil Society in Kazakhstan. She divided the civil society formation process into two phases: the late Soviet era and the transitional post-Soviet era. Her paper emphasized the post-Soviet environment of a thorough transformation process from an authoritarian system towards a democratic one. Kahveci argued that if the formation of a functioning civil society is an essential precondition for the establishment of a pluralist and democratic society, then contrary to initial expectations a decade of independence reveals signs of an authoritarian state reemerging in which the so-called institutions of civil society could not have much effect.
The Third METU Conference on International Relations will be held in Ankara in June of 2004. Members of the Central Eurasian Studies Society are encouraged to take part in the next conference. Detailed information on this years conference and the proceedings can be found on the conference website, http://www.ir.metu.edu.tr/conf.
Educational Resources and Developments
Music of Central Asia at SOAS
Rachel Harris, Ph.D., Lecturer in Music, School of Oriental
and African Studies, London, United Kingdom, rhsoas.ac.uk
The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of London University added a Music Department a few years ago, dedicated to teaching the musical cultures of Asia and Africa (and their diasporas). The department has expertise in Arab, Turkish, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, West African and Jewish music. Over a hundred students choose from a range of regional and theoretical courses, and there is a strong emphasis on performance. In 2001 we added the music of Central Asia to the range of musical traditions we teach, with two lectures in the first year, Introduction to the Musics of Asia and Africa, and a dedicated half unit course for undergraduates entitled Music of Central Asia.
The course covers various musical traditions from the former Soviet Central Asian states, plus Xinjiang and Afghanistan. We look at concepts of music, comparing nomadic and sedentary traditions. We discuss the relation between music and Islam in the region, looking at definitions, prohibitions, and questions of the status and roles of musicians. We also look at music in the ritual context, from the shamanic roots of the bardic traditions of the nomadic peoples to Sufi zikr, festivals, weddings and ritual healers. The subject of musical change is an important and recurring theme throughout the course. We consider changes in musical sound brought about by professionalization and the impact of political policies and social changes on musical traditions. Ethnicity is another key issue: we look at how musical traditions relate to ethnic boundaries, the impact of Stalins creation of nation-states, and trends in the post-Soviet era. We also consider the rise of recorded music, greater access to global sounds, and the political uses of pop.
The course is designed primarily for students enrolled in the Music Department who have basic skills in musicology and who may also have knowledge of related musical cultures (e.g., Arab, Persian or Turkish). We do occasionally talk about aspects of mode and rhythm, but there is an emphasis on music as culture, taking the anthropological approach. We have admitted students taking courses in SOAS on Central Asian society and politics, as well as some with a purely Western music background.
Teaching students with such a wide range of backgrounds has been challenging. One student in the course this year has been playing the Afghan rubab for years, while others had never heard of Uzbekistan before enrolling. A mature student had spent a year working in the development sector in Kyrgyzstan and gave a lively presentation on the contemporary pop scene. A Kazakh Ph.D. student (who is actually writing her thesis on the medieval theorist Al Farabi) audited the course, gave us an excellent presentation on instrumental pieces (kui), and now plans to do fieldwork in Kazakhstan when she returns home. Beginning in Fall 2003 we will expand the course to offer a half unit at the Masters level. The first student to be accepted into this course is a Sakha disk jockey from Siberia who wants to seek out the musical links between his ancestors and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.
We have been fortunate in SOAS to host a number of Central Asian musicians over the last few years. The renowned Tajik singer Dawlatmand Kholov was invited by another Ph.D. student who is currently doing fieldwork in Tajikistan to give a concert in 2002, and he was accompanied by Afghan and Kurdish musicians resident in London.. In February 2003 two Uyghur musicians, Kamil and Gulendem Abbas, took up a months residency in the department funded by our Centre for Music and Dance Performance Research. Two students spent some time interviewing them and produced written projects documenting their lives and music. They also held workshops on the ghijak, dutar and rawap and on singing styles, and had some of the students performing a folk song after only a day. We often find that musical skills are transferable: violinists with a little adaptability can literally turn their technique upside down, put the instrument on their knee, and immediately be playing the ghijak. After that its just a question of absorbing the style and ornamentation.
I teach using as many video and sound recordings and actual musical instruments as possible, to counter students lack of familiarity with the sounds and construction of the different instruments. I have a personal library of video and sound recordings made during fieldwork over the last few years, mainly in Xinjiang. There are increasing numbers of good CDs from around the region, many with excellent liner notes by Jean During and Ted Levin. Without their work, and especially without the very accessible book by Levin, Hundred Thousand Fools of God (1996), teaching such a course at an undergraduate level would simply not be feasible. English-language books and articles are still somewhat sparse for most regions, with the exception of Afghanistan which is better represented in the literature.
Still, there is a strong sense that interest in the regions music is taking off. I was fortunate to work on the Smithsonian Silk Road Festival in 2002, where I was able to spend time with some of the most extraordinary and talented musicians of the region, albeit in very strange circumstances. The CD from the Silk Road project (Silk Road: A Musical Caravan) is now at the top of the students essential listening list. Groups from Uzbekistan, Xinjiang and Afghanistan have performed in London during the past year, and the Uzbek pop singer Sevara Nazarkhan is currently on the UK World Music charts, with her CD Yol Bolsin (2003), singing folk songs and Maqam over ambient beats provided by French producer Hector Zazou. While I do not anticipate that Central Asian music will overtake Cuban music on the undergraduate charts of whats cool just yet, the number of students who have never heard of Uzbekistan should start to diminish.
For further information on the course please contact Rachel Harris
at rhsoas.ac.uk
and visit the SOAS Music Department website:
http://www.soas.ac.uk/departments/departmentinfo.cfm?navid=16
References
Levin, Theodore
1996 The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nazarkhan, Sevara
2003 Yol Bolsin. London: Real World.
The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan
2002 Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
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