CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review

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: Ed Schatz (Carbondale, Ill., USA), Jamilya Ukudeeva (Aptos, Calif., USA)
Reviews and Abstracts: Shoshana Keller (Clinton, N.Y., USA), Resul Yalcin (London, England)
Conferences and Lecture Series: Peter Finke (Halle/Salle, Germany), Payam Foroughi (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)
Educational Resources and Developments: Philippe Forét (Zurich, Switzerland), Daniel C. Waugh (Seattle, Wash., USA)
Copy Editor: Michael Davis (Kirksville, Mo., USA)
English Language Style Editor: Helen Faller (Ann Arbor, Mich., USA)
Production Editor: Sada Aksartova (Washington, D.C., USA)
Web Editor: Paola Raffetta (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Indexer: Charles Kolb (Washington, D.C., USA)
Editorial and Production Consultant: John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)

[Contents]

Perspectives

The Complexity of Central Eurasia

Robert M. Cutler, Research Fellow, Institute of European and Russian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont., Canada, rmcalum.mit.edu, http://www.robertcutler.org

Up until now, "Perspectives" has presented in each issue of CESR a single essay regarding Central Eurasia within the global sociology of knowledge, offering a particular view conditioned by the evolution and construction of disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge. In the current issue of CESR, "Perspectives" presents instead a series of shorter essays. Several of them were submitted as commentaries on longer published essays, and readers are encouraged to continue this practice. Such comments will receive consideration for publication in "Perspectives," and it is hoped that this practice will give rise to further exchange and debate.

All of the "perspectives" offered in the present issues of CESR address questions about how to situate Central Eurasia in time and space, and how that situation changes through time and over space. This essay introduces the four that follow, and establishes a context that seeks to integrate them conceptually, by outlining a perhaps unorthodox but systematic international relations approach to current study of the region.

In their essays below, Doulatbek Khidirbekughli and Alexander Lehrman both emphasize historical and cultural continuities that justify considering the region as a unity. Khidirbekughli's "Mysterious Eurasia," offering remarks on John Schoeberlein's (2002)[*] presidential essay in CESR, emphasizes the longue durée while consistently underlining the region's historical nature as an intermediary among cultures and peoples, and indeed empires. He tends to regard Central Asia as the most "central" part of Central Eurasia, geographically limited to the five contemporary Central Asia states with those contiguous cross-border regions sharing a culture or a language. Alexander Lehrman's "The Distinctive Factors of Central Eurasia," commenting on Gregory Gleason's (2003) presidential essay in CESR, argues that the living legacy of the Russian language is today a substratum providing a broader Central Eurasia with unity in spite of contemporary changes, which have not effaced the recent Slavophone inheritance or its significance.

The essays by Amineh and by Pomfret focus on the region's future rather than the past. Such a vantage point yields a different conceptual perspective; and that perspective differs today from what it would have been a decade and a half ago. Since the end of the Cold War, global international relations are more clearly a "complex system," a self-organizing network rather than a top-down hierarchy (Bar-Yam 1997). Superpowers (or at least one), great powers, and regional powers still exist, but middle-level phenomena have become important drivers in a world that now self-organizes from bottom up.

Before the USSR disintegrated in the early 1990s, the late Turkish President Turgut Özal's strategic vision provided a bridge between the concepts of "Southwest Asia" and Central Asia. The concept of "Southwest Asia" emerged as a focus in US strategic thought after the 1979 Iranian revolution. To Southwest Asia there is being added the so-called "Northern Tier," not just in strategic thinking but as a result of events on the ground. This process creates a new and larger geopolitical entity that extends from Turkey in a crescent east-northeast through Kazakhstan (Barylski 1994; Bininachvili 1993). The Caucasus, which historically has been part of an extended Middle East, is regaining its role as a crossroads among continents. Central Asia is recognizing its cultural links with Southwest Asia while it puzzles out its relations with Russia.

One way to see Central Eurasia is to employ seven scales of analysis, even if one focuses on only a few of them at a time. The first and finest scale of analysis is the national scale - i.e., state level - of analysis where each of the Central Asian countries may be taken separately. (This scale of analysis subsumes a yet finer scale, that which analyzes subnational differentiations such as the contrast between northern and southern Kazakhstan.) Second, there is the regional scale of Central Asia itself, which takes the five former Soviet republics as a whole and also considers their transnational cultural and demographic interrelationships. Third, the "macro-region" of Greater Central Asia includes "political" Central Asia (i.e., the five former Soviet republics) plus their cultural and economic connections with such neighboring regions as western China, southern Russia (including southern Siberia), northern Afghanistan, and northeastern Iran.

Fourth is the "meta-regional" scale of Central Eurasia, a still broader construct. Although "Central Eurasia" is sometimes used as a shorthand designation of the former Soviet territory, it is perhaps more apposite to adopt the definition from the CESS website, that it "include[s] Turkic, Mongolian, Iranian, Caucasian, Tibetan and other peoples[, and] extends from the Black Sea region, the Crimea, and the Caucasus in the west, through the Middle Volga region, Central Asia and Afghanistan, and on to Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet in the east." The collapse of the Soviet Union did not assure the consolidation this crescent-shaped "meta-region" containing the Caucasus and Central Asia as an acknowledged new region in geopolitics or energy geo-economics. Expert opinion is that this required three things: international financial and industrial interest in the impressive natural resources in the region, the political will of the only remaining superpower, and the free and rapid exchange of information possible only through the Internet and other electronic telecommunications. These three conditions have all taken hold in a decade.

In a broader historical and cultural sense, Central Eurasia (like Greater Central Asia) includes portions of Russia and China. However, the latter are fully integrated at a fifth, "mega-regional" scale of analysis, including not only Russia and China but also the whole of South and Southwest Asia, from India and Pakistan through Iraq and Turkey, to which we may refer simply as Eurasia. A sixth scale of analysis is Greater Eurasia, from Spain to Sakhalin and Spitzbergen to Singapore, including the European Union and its family of institutions (Cutler 2003). Finally, the seventh scale of analysis is the global scale, which adds the United States, American transnational corporations with a global reach, and worldwide international organizations having especially an economic, industrial or financial vocation.

It is not necessary to treat all these scales of analysis together, although it is useful to employ the first and the seventh together so as to anchor any discussion. These "scales" of analysis differ, both in conception and in application, from what are traditionally considered to be "levels" of analysis in international relations. This difference means that they are not stacked upon each other in a mechanistic manner, even though it is convenient to discuss them sequentially for expository purposes. The levels are not strictly hierarchical, meaning that they also are not "nested." Rather, as in any "complex system" - i.e., a system where the behavior of the whole is not predictable from analysis of its components and where properties of the system emerge from one scale into another - these scales of analysis overlap; and what one sees depends upon where one stands.

The foregoing sketch illustrates one way to make connections among different levels of analysis in a manner more nuanced than traditional geopolitical analysis. In "Towards Rethinking Geopolitics," Mehdi Parvizi Amineh introduces a new approach to the topic, called "critical geopolitics," which challenges the "orthodox geopolitics" usually associated with realist and neorealist theories of international relations. In particular, he highlights the role of non-state actors, such as international financial institutions (IFIs), in both the conceptual and the material construction of the region. Richard Pomfret's essay on "The Specific and the General in Economic Policy Analysis and Advice" concludes with some more extended reflections on IFIs in particular. His remarks may be read as a commentary on Morgan Y. Liu's (2003) "Detours from Utopia on the Silk Road: Ethical Dilemmas of Neo-liberal Triumphalism" previously published in this space, addressing specific results of liberal economic intervention in Central Eurasia.

Readers are encouraged to submit to "Perspectives" shorter essays and commentaries such as those published here, as well as longer sociology-of-knowledge reviews.

[*] References can be found at the end of the Perspectives section - Eds.

[Contents]

Mysterious Eurasia: Thoughts in Response to Dr. Schoeberlein

Doulatbek Khidirbekughli, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Kazakh University of International Relations and World Languages, Almaty, Kazakhstan, doulatbek3hotmail.com, doulatfreenet.kz, http://www.freenet.kz/~alumni/doulatbek

Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of the Turkic tribes inhabited Central Eurasia. These Turkic Eurasian tribes migrated in all directions. During this great migration of peoples, they influenced the cultures of the European peoples, including Western Christianity, as well as the cultures of the Mongol and Chinese civilizations in the East, where the Paleo-Asian and Proto-Mongolian peoples emerged from the mixture of alien (proto-Turkish) and autochthonous (local Mongol). Some of these subsequently crossed the Bering Strait, forming the stock from which some Native American peoples descended. In Western Eurasia contact between Turkic and Germanic peoples came with the fall of the Roman Empire as the Huns settled in Europe.

Dr. Schoeberlein (2002) was correct to state that "in North America, the entire northern tier of Central Eurasia has been claimed by a society whose name and orientation feature 'Slavic Studies' for the simple reason that this territory has been under Russian domination. Scholars who are interested precisely in that Russian domination may find a home in Slavic studies, but others in both Slavic studies and Central Eurasian studies find the connections too tenuous to be meaningful." Only specialists in North America, Europe, and Islamic countries really have knowledge of this region, which in the popular mind is still identified as part of Russia.

Scholars from Islamic countries consider Central Eurasia as a part of Muslim history and culture. Islam dominated in Central Eurasia from the ninth through the 19th centuries. Central Eurasia thereafter fell under Russian domination and European culture. Central Eurasian languages are based either on Turkic or on Persian roots, with more recent Russian overlays, adaptations, and vocabulary transfers. Divided between Islamic and post-Soviet studies, the study of Central Eurasia should be considered as a separate and independent field.

"Eurasianism" was a traditional Russian construction that included the precepts of Russian colonial policy and great power nationalism. Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia used such an ideology as a basis for empire, combining Western colonialism with Asian despotism inherited from traditions going back to Chinggis Khan.

The Soviet Russian conception of "Middle Asia" (Sredniaia Aziia) included only the former Soviet republics between the Tian Shan-Pamir Mountains and the Caspian Sea, but "Central Asia" (Tsentral'naia Aziia) meant "Inner Asia," namely the territory of Mongolian Republic and contiguous Inner Mongolia, including the Gobi Desert. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, geographers in the post-Soviet space adopted the Western nomenclature and speak of "Central Asia" instead of "Middle Asia". Mongolia thus became construed as a part of East Asia; but Mongolia and Inner Mongolia are populated by non-Han peoples. Meanwhile, scholars of China, Japan and Korea study Mongolia, Tibet, and (at least part of) Turkistan under the rubric of "(East) Asian Studies."

As the empire of Chinggis Khan was divided after his death, his grandchildren and descendants became rulers of countries and peoples speaking diverse languages. To the sedentary peoples he invaded, Chinggis Khan was a despot but the Kazakh Khanate inherited nomadic traditions and structures. Its way of life included certain democratic elements, such as resistance to abuse of power in peacetime, coupled with the acceptance in wartime of "tyranny," much like Cincinnatus of Ancient Roman history. While the khan was not a crown prince, only the descendants of Chinggis Khan might be kings. The Qurultay selected the potential candidate for election. Over time, the chief of the tribe became only a nominal representative of the tribe or the clans or communes within it. His functions were under the control of the council of aqsaqals (elders). This democratic aspect of Asian nomadism in fact distinguishes it from the more widely disseminated concept of Asian state despotism, characterized by China, India, the countries of Indochina and the Islamic world.

The term "Central Eurasia" could be thought superficial and stereotypical. Dr. Schoeberlein remarked that the definition of Central Eurasia is anything but dogmatic. Eurasia is populated by Tungusic and Turkic peoples of Siberia, by Uralic peoples of the Volga Basin, by Caucasian Muslim and Caucasian Christian peoples, by Muslim peoples of Eastern Europe and of Central Asia. It includes Slavic peoples living in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia as well as the indigenous population. But Central Eurasia is fundamentally Central Asia, with other regions and subregions adjoined. The territory of Central Asia is an historical space of interaction of nomadic and settled peoples, in contact with both Islam and Christianity, and likewise with both Asian and European cultures. It seems to me that the territory of the former Soviet Union, with extension into western China and the greater Middle East, is a "full" Eurasia.

In general, we must understand that Eurasia is a composite of two basic cultures and layers. Central Eurasia occupies a central place in the system of interactions between Western and Eastern civilizations. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks imposed upon CESS an "urgent responsibility to communicate its knowledge to the world," to communicate to Western mass publics and leaders how Central Eurasia differs from Russia, East Asia, and the Islamic World. This is a principal obligation of CESS in the world today: to promote the study, in their full depth and breadth, of the historical, political, socio-economic, ethno-psychological, and cultural aspects of this great region. We must combine knowledge of the past and present to ascertain the future of the region.

[Contents]

The Distinctive Factors of Central Eurasia: A Response to Professor Gleason

Alexander Lehrman, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Delaware, Newark, Del., USA, lehrmanudel.edu

Central Eurasia possesses a unique combination of linguistic and cultural factors that make it a distinct area. The geographic, historical, and socioeconomic circumstances of these factors are quite well known and do not need to be reiterated here. The importance of linguistic factors, however, is typically overlooked and deserves to be pointed out.

The determining role of shared language and culture, particularly literature, has been systematically underestimated in contemporary theory which has privileged secondary (economic, social, and political) factors. Yet shared language, and the shared culture based on the transmitted texts in that language, clearly play the generative role in forming the population's expectations and attitudes that ultimately determine the speakers' choices, with important consequences, both short- and long-term.

The most obvious examples include the recent "Anglophone" go-it-alone military alliance in Iraq - a continuation of the virtually unchanged close cooperation among the English-speaking populations of the globe for over a century. There is also the continuing struggle of the French-speaking world, led by France, to assert its independence from the "Anglophone" world in every domain. And there is the relatively cohesive "Arab world" which has defined itself unabashedly along the linguocultural lines, with the Quran as the main transmitted value-imparting text, in reaction against the successful incursions of the "Francophone" and "Anglophone" entities. These recent examples, and more could be listed, clearly demonstrate that the forces of attraction and repulsion work along the linguocultural lines.

Central Eurasia is no exception. If we wish to find the distinctive features of Central Eurasia and attempt to discover the "power" lines along which this area's development is likely to proceed, we need to understand its linguocultural situation and the tendencies inherent in that situation. Contrary to Professor Gleason's assertion (2003: 3) that "no single language is spoken everywhere in the [Central Eurasian] region", there is indeed such a language. The existence of such a language also stands contrary to the ideological aspirations of certain currently ascendant groups in the area. Those aspirations, reflecting a strong reaction against a dominant factor, are probative of this factor's enduring power.

This factor, this language is Russian. The populations of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, constituent parts of Russia for several hundred years, are of course primarily Russian-speaking and thoroughly bilingual. The peoples of most of the independent states in the area - Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan - are to a considerable extent conversant with Russian. Some of the artists, performers, and writers native to those parts achieved wide fame in the larger Russian-speaking urban areas of the former Soviet Union, thanks precisely to their work in and through the medium of Russian (e.g., Rasul Gamzatov, Fazil Iskander, Chingiz Aitmatov, Mukhtar Auezov). These countries' professional elites have a perfect command of Russian, their higher education having been conducted almost entirely in that language. The same applies to a predominant number of professionals in Mongolia, though not to the population at large. Even in Afghanistan, to an extent much larger than currently admitted, there is a significant number of Russian-educated professionals. The areas not affected by the dominance of Russian during the Soviet period include, of course, Iran and, to a lesser extent, Xinjiang, although the latter deserves special study in view of Chinese Turkistan's complicated contacts with the largely Russian-speaking Kazakhstan. Russian has deeply affected many of the languages of the area: their writing systems remain Cyrillic-based, with the exception of Azeri that switched recently to Latin and of course Armenian and Georgian which have long preserved their epichoric alphabets. All of the languages, particularly the Turkic ones, have borrowed their technical and sociocultural vocabularies from Russian, often complete with the Russian norms of pronunciation.

The authority of Russian, whose character has been changed by the bankruptcy of the Marxist-Leninist ideology and its transmitted texts, continues to be enhanced by a steady flow of prestigious scientific and technological texts. Classical Russian texts also have enduring importance, and are often markedly respectful of the values of the autochthonous peoples (particularly certain works by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy). The Russian-language works by Central Eurasian writers deeply rooted in the classical Russian tradition also remain highly valued.

When Russian became a linguocultural determinant in the area, three other determinants had already been at work. Most of the people living in Central Eurasia are Turkic-speaking: Tatars, Bashkorts, Azeris, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and Uzbeks all share a common Turkic language heritage. This of course includes not just the fundamental lexicon and grammar but also texts, idioms, proverbs, and even portions of oral epics, such as the Alpamish, which derive from a linguistically transmitted common Turkic heritage.

Iranic linguocultural heritage is the second important determinant. This stratum is directly represented by the languages and cultures of Iran (Persian),Tajikistan (Tajik), and Afghanistan (Dari), to all of whom the highly prestigious Classical Persian literature and its language belong. These, however, have exerted a great influence on the Turkic-language civilizations of the region. Only Mongolia has remained outside of the Iranic sphere of influence. It has also remained unaffected by the third important determinant: Arabic.

The influence of Arabic, the language and the texts of the Islamic civilization, is well-known and can hardly be overestimated. The loanwords from Arabic in the Iranic and Turkic languages of the region constitute from 50 to 60 percent of their vocabularies. Arabic contributed greatly to all areas of culture now inseparable from the basically Iranic and Turkic societies, beginning with the writing systems and calendars of the area. It was only in the 20th century that the Arabic writing system and calendar were replaced with the Russian-derived ones for the Turkic and Iranic languages of Central Asia.

I hope that these remarks have made it quite clear that there is a unique combination of determinants characterizing Central Eurasia precisely and objectively and in a fashion that is truly meaningful. Geographic, political, and economic factors are the venue, the ways, and the means, but the linguocultural factors are the content - the explanatory narrative and the "mission statement" - of the people sharing them.

[Contents]

Towards Rethinking Geopolitics

Mehdi Parvizi Amineh, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research and International Institute for Asian Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, aminehpscw.uva.nl

The term "geopolitics" has various meanings, for example: it may be taken as synonymous to political geography or politics in its spatial dimension. For the realist school of international relations it means rivalry among great-power states. It can mean the geographic dimension of the foreign policy of a single state. In strategic terms it may signify the struggle for control of a certain geographic area. Also, the term "geopolitics" is sometimes used as a synonym for international politics stressing political and military behavior in a specific context.

The main ideas of traditional or "orthodox" geopolitics are related to the realist and neo-realist schools of international relations, based upon the Westphalian conception of the international system. According to this view, the nation state is paramount and international relations are best understand through a balance-of-power approach among stages struggling for influence and dominance in world politics. This geopolitical discourse emerged in the 19th century (Kjellen 1897; Ratzel 1897; Mahan 1890) and developed in the first half of the 20th (Mackinder 1904, 1919; Haushofer 1932; Spykman 1942). However, both the end of the Cold War and globalization (internationalization of trade, transnationalization of production and finance, and the internationalization of functions of the state) have forced social scientists to rethink the meaning of geopolitics.

A new approach to geopolitics, called critical geopolitics, has been trying to create a synthesis between the traditional understanding of geopolitics ("orthodox geopolitics") and the "geo-economics" of the world political economy. Critical geopolitics developed in the 1970s when some researchers began to reject a narrow concern with "national security" as the defining feature of geopolitics and sought a wider context of social and human development, encompassing such concerns as poverty, violence, and environmental degradation. Based on neo-Marxist political economy and "world-system" theory, scholars started to incorporate not only the geographic but also the economic dimensions of global politics into the conceptualization of geopolitics (especially Taylor 1993). Under the influence of critical theory and post-structuralist theory, the concept of "critical geopolitics" has been introduced into geopolitical discourse (Agnew and Corbridge 1995).

"Critical geopolitics" does not constitute the world as a fixed hierarchy of states, cores and peripheries, spheres of influence, flashpoints, buffer zones and strategic relations. Rejecting state-centric reasoning, it favors a more nuanced vision of world politics as a system dominated not only by political states but also by economic and technological developments that are capable of threatening the well-being of the citizens of those states. The critical geopolitics approach holds that geographic arrangements are social constructions that may change over time with changing human economic demography. It holds that the relevant actors for analysis of the political-geographic world include not only states but also international and nongovernmental institutions, as well as transnational movements and transgovernmental interest groups. Critical geopolitics also disagrees with the assumption of objectivity self-imputed by world-system theories as well as by orthodox geopolitics. Rather, the critical-geopolitics school holds that any geopolitical approach to world politics carries conceptual and methodological assumptions that cannot help but animate and influence analysis. Writers on critical geopolitics therefore call for a methodological and conceptual re-evaluation of political geography.

With the end of the Cold War, Central Eurasia has become an important geo-strategic and geo-economic region in world politics. Many countries in the region are politically weak and economically dependent on Russia. The internal sovereignty of many governments is contested by grave economic, financial, social and political challenges. The critical-geopolitics school asserts that there are causal relationships between socio-economic underdevelopment on the one hand and, on the other hand, ethnic conflict, political unrest, and (for instance) Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

Central Asia and the South Caucasus are located north of the great mountain chain that divides the Eurasian landmass as a pastoral corridor of flat and easily traversed steppe lands. In the past, the region functioned as the historical crossroads between Europe and Asia. The history of Central Eurasia has been conditioned to a large extent by the westward movements of Central Eurasian peoples at least a far back into the past as 4000 BCE. For centuries external forces have made contact with and sometimes ruled over this region from different parts of the world. The main external forces in the early Islamic phase of Central Eurasian history from the eighth and ninth century onwards were the Abbasid Empire (750-1258) and the Mongol Empire (1141-1469). However, after 1400 the horse-mounted archer was increasingly outgunned by artillery, the musket and powder. Mobile societies of herdsmen were unable to support manufacturing required to cope with invaders. Invaded by Russians from the north, by Chinese from the east, by the Ottoman and Persian Empires from the west, the region was conquered by outsiders. Tsarist Russia colonized the region, which was subsequently taken into the realm of Soviet industrialization.

Features characterizing the Central Asia and Caucasus regions, if not the whole of Central Eurasia, thus include: the historic confrontation between nomadic horsemen and settled agriculturalists; the lands where Turkic, Iranian, Caucasian, Mongolian, Tungusic and Tibetan peoples have proliferated; the Inner Asian territories of Islam, Buddhism and Shamanism; and the emergence of the newly independent states from the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The strategic importance of the Central Asia/South Caucasus region to the West is bound to increase substantially in the coming decades, not least due to the region's vast energy resources. Also it is a natural trade and transit link between Europe and Asia. Critical geopolitics holds normatively that all these actors would benefit from converting the region from a zone for geopolitical competition and confrontation to a zone of cooperation. Even under the assumptions of "orthodox geopolitics," the region's political stability and socio-economic development in this region would be crucial for global peace and security.

Critical geopolitics considers that the main actors in the contemporary international relations of Central Eurasia comprise several levels. The "inner circle" includes Russia, Iran, and Turkey. The "outer circle" includes (a) the more distant states China, India, Pakistan and also Afghanistan; and (b) the peripheral states Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. There are also actors external to the broader region, mainly the United States, European Union, Japan and East Asian states. Non-state actors such as ethno-religious movements, international organizations, transnational energy companies, and international crime syndicates are also significant to international relations.

[Contents]

The Specific and the General in Economic Policy Analysis and Advice

Richard Pomfret, Associate Dean and Professor, School of Economics, University of Adelaide, Australia, richard.pomfretadelaide.edu.au

In all social sciences there is a tension between seeking generalizations and acknowledging specific conditions. In the Eurasian context, this has been highlighted by the urgent need for well-founded policy advice after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dichotomy is often sharpest between economists on the one hand, especially those related to the international financial institutions (or IFI, meaning the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), and, on the other hand, regional specialists. The area studies specialists criticize the economists' models and econometric analysis as based on general assumptions inappropriate to specific countries, while the economists are dismayed by ad hoc treatment of social structure, historical specificity or personal characteristics of the leadership.

One reason why this dichotomy has been especially pronounced with respect to Central Eurasia was the low status of studies of this area in the high-income countries before 1992. While centers of excellence existed, their salience was far less than that of centers of Latin American studies in the United States or of African studies in Europe, or of (East) Asian studies in most OECD countries. After 1991 a large group of new independent countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as Mongolia, urgently sought advice on introducing and managing a market economy. For this they turned to individuals and to institutions with high technical reputations, the IFIs. The latter assumed this role despite their lack of expertise in the region, and their limited experience with formerly centrally planned economies. At the same time, area specialists, unused to being involved in active policy debates, largely remained in their ivory towers.

What was the outcome? Important elements of the early policy advice were clearly right. For example, many Soviet-trained economic policymakers blamed inflation on monopolies, but consistent emphasis and explanation by foreign economists helped to convince policymakers of the links between money creation and inflation, and between financial deficits and money creation. The hyperinflation of the early 1990s was only tamed after governments accepted this argument and gave priority to monetary stabilization.

In other areas, however, economists' advice based on general models was too simplistic. Large-scale privatization was not just a matter of creating property rights so that resource allocation could be efficient, as economists argued from the Coase Theorem. The way in which privatization occurred mattered, both directly in its impact on managerial quality and on equity and indirectly through feedback effects on the political system. Economists underestimated the potential for state capture, and that this might take diverse forms in different countries.

The one-size-fits-all recommendations of the IFIs have had mixed results. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia were relatively willing pupils, but the economic outcomes differed markedly. Kyrgyzstan liberalized its economy quickly but with disappointing outcomes due to poor infrastructure, inappropriate institutions, and lack of resources. Kazakhstan was slower to liberalize but, despite a counterproductive alienation of state assets, had greater long-term success, which might be explained by higher initial income levels and human capital or by abundant resources. Mongolia, also resource-poor, has been more successful than Kyrgyzstan, apparently due to its more democratic and open political system than those in Central Asia.

The poor pupils of the IFIs have also had diverse outcomes. Uzbekistan's economic performance, in terms of GDP the best of all former Soviet republics, does not fit into the IFIs' model. Ascribing this success simply to "gradualism," as critics of the IFIs' "shock therapy" approach are wont to do, is not helpful. Turkmenistan has also been a gradualist, but with a significantly different policy setting and economic outcome. Uzbekistan may have poor prospects because of failure to reform more thoroughly, but its economic performance during the 1990s cannot lightly be dismissed, and predictions of future prospects would be more convincing if we had a good explanation of past performance. For me, this has something to do with inherited administrative strength derived from Tashkent's central role in Soviet Central Asia, but there may be other explanations which deeper country-specific analysis might uncover.

How we assess the policy performance during the first post-Soviet decade depends in part on our evaluation of the general outcome. Critics of the IFIs' role emphasize the traumatic fall in living standards, deindustrialization and rising external debt. Things could, however, have been worse. Governance, including economic management, has been sufficiently good to avoid widespread bloodshed, except in Tajikistan. The whole of the former Soviet Union has had a terrible time economically and, given their starting points at the bottom of the heap, it is surprising that the Central Asian countries have done better than the average.

In the second post-independence decade, things are more complex. How to end hyperinflation, the principles of monetary and fiscal policy, or of price reform are all more straightforward and universal than managing an established market economy. Now, needs will change from broad-based policy advice to deeper analysis of the consequences of policy decisions or of other events or phenomena.

From the economists' side, the time should be ripe for fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation. One of the most exciting branches of economics in recent years has been the study of differences in economic growth rates, in which there has been a fruitful blending of theory and empirics. The consensus has moved beyond proximate explanations of growth to "deeper" explanations of why some countries, and not others, adopt policies conducive to economic growth, and why good policies work well in some settings but are ineffective elsewhere. While there is debate over the role of deterministic factors such as geography and resource abundance, there is a strong consensus that institutions matter. Institutions are, however, broadly defined and remain essentially a black box which economists need help in understanding.

In conclusion let me stress that this is not intended as a partisan approach to the Methodenstreit between area specialists and economists. Economists filled a policy void in the 1990s and much of that early advice was good, even if far from perfect. Area specialists may have had better understanding of Central Asia, but they failed to meet the challenge in the 1990s because much of their criticism of the economists' universal models was of little practical help to policymakers facing novel problems for which their training had not prepared them. In the second decade of transition, more sophisticated analysis of Eurasian economies is required and that will need the combined skills of good economists and knowledgeable regional specialists.

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2003 "Detours from utopia on the Silk Road: ethical dilemmas of neoliberal triumphalism," Central Eurasian Studies Review, 2 (2) 2-10.

Mackinder, Halford J.

1904 "The geographical pivot of history," Geographical Journal, 13: 421-437.

1919 Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction. New York: Holt.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer

1890 The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown.

Ratzel, Friedrich

1897 Politische Geographie. München: Oldenbourg.

Schoeberlein, John

2002 "Setting the stakes of a new society," Central Eurasian Studies Review, 1 (1) 4-9.

Spykman, Nicholas

1942 America's Strategy in World Politics. The United States and the Balance of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.

Taylor, Peter

1993 Political Geography of the Twentieth Century: A Global Analysis. London: Belhaven.

[Contents]

Research Reports and Briefs

State Decline in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

Lawrence P. Markowitz, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., USA, lmarkowpolisci.wisc.edu

This study investigates why Tajikistan's state collapsed in 1992 into civil war while state power in Uzbekistan declined into a mixture of coercion and material inducement consistent with predatory rule.[1] To explain the patterns in these two cases, my research has come to focus upon the conditions under which local economic elites ("strongmen"), patronage politics, and regionalism in national institutions contribute to and detract from the use of coercion in state building.

Based on preliminary data analysis, I find that specific combinations of local strongmen and regional patrons promoted very different forms of regionalism in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan during the Soviet period. The distinctive shapes of regionalism persisted into the 1990s, influencing the strategies and effectiveness of law enforcement agencies in each case. In 1992, dissension over one region's hegemony in Tajikistan split its national institutions from within, leading to the capture of the central coercive apparatus, the state's failure to police mass demonstrations, and eventually to state collapse. Uzbekistan's decentralized regionalism, however, left the center consolidated and its coercive apparatus intact. This prevented the type of rapid breakdown that occurred in Tajikistan, but the central leadership's growing reliance on coercion as a means of political control has encouraged predatory behavior in its law enforcement organs. State capture in Tajikistan and emerging predatory rule in Uzbekistan are diverging outcomes that can be best explained by each country's configuration of strongmen, patronage, and regionalism.

By the end of the Soviet period, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan resembled many "weak" states in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, whose efforts to complement their juridical sovereignty with empirical sovereignty are complicated by diffused systems of authority at the interstices of state and society (Migdal 1988; Jackson and Rosberg 1982). Yet, state weakness in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was characterized by two features of the Soviet system: (1) concentrations of wealth under local agricultural, industrial, or resource extraction operations, constituting the heads of these operations as "strongmen" within their localities; and (2) devolution of political authority to provincial governors (Obkom [oblastnoi komitet; provincial committee] First Secretaries), giving them opportunities to construct regional patronage relations. Local strongmen and regional patronage relations influenced the organization of state power in all Soviet republics (albeit in different ways), but these variables are of particular interest here because they distinguish Tajikistan and Uzbekistan from each other better than variables identified in general theories of state breakdown.[2]

In conducting my research, I used a comparative case study approach which placed Tajikistan and Uzbekistan within a "most similar" research design - one that seeks to explain different outcomes among cases that are otherwise similar. I organized my field research so that I could spend the first phase (September 2002 in Uzbekistan and October-December 2002 in Tajikistan) collecting data on strongmen, patronage relations, and regionalism. I designed my data collection on these variables around specific indicators[3] and used national, regional, and district newspapers, various issues of the economic handbook Narodnoe khoziaistvo, and ministry publications. My research yielded biographies of central elites and regional governors, several databases of tenures of central elites, district governors and collective farm chairs, and local budget figures in each country from 1960-2001 (though gaps in the data remain to be filled). In addition, I collected several elite biographical works and conducted brief interviews with local elites, journalists, and on selected collective farms.

Preliminary analysis of these data confirms most assessments of Tajikistan: that a type of regionalism emerged which effectively split the center from within (Dudoignon and Jahangiri 1994; Roy 2000). Specifically, my analysis suggests that concentrations of strongmen of collective farms and regional patronage relations in the Leninabad province promoted its hegemony in key ministries of the republic's political economy, while local strongmen active in the Mountain-Badakhshan Autonomous Province's growing underground economy sustained its control within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Data also show that these same variables were more evenly spread across regions in Uzbekistan, leaving Uzbekistan's central leadership undivided but ringed by powerful regional political machines. I believe that this difference accounts for the mobility of Uzbekistan's coercive apparatus in policing demonstrations in the early 1990s and for Tajikistan's immobility. Since much of this became clear to me while I was in the field, I was unable to interview elites who worked in the central offices of each country's law enforcement agencies at that time. I plan to interview these former officials during a follow-up field trip.

During the second phase of my research in Uzbekistan (January-August 2003), I investigated the effects that local strongmen, patronage, and regionalism have on the country today. I decided to focus on the Prosecutor General and its regional and district offices. Since the mid-1990s the Prosecutor General's office has been given permission to use its wide-ranging formal powers to spearhead state-building in the country. Its mandate has included reducing the power of regional and district governors. I designed my ethnographic research so that it focused on the successes and failures of this effort among regional and district prosecutors. Over several months I conducted approximately 50 semi-structured interviews of high-level staff in district prosecutors' and district governors' offices and another 50 interviews of journalists, external observers, and lawyers in regional law offices. I conducted these interviews mainly in Uzbek (several were in Russian) in a random selection of districts in Tashkent City and in the provinces of Samarqand and Ferghana (lawyers were interviewed in other regional centers as well). Within each locality, informants were selected based on their professional position only, not according to ethnicity, sex, or social class.

Preliminary findings from these interviews suggest that the use of the Prosecutor General's office to undermine regional elites in Uzbekistan has had mixed results. There have been some successes, but prosecutors are underpaid, overworked, and often in debt from (formal and informal) law school expenditures. In addition, many view their primary role not as an anti-corruption mechanism but as a support for local resource extraction. As such, many of the local offices of the Prosecutor General have become incorporated within regional patronage relations and, paradoxically, enhance them. At the same time, where prosecutors remain relatively autonomous from regional governors and local strongmen, patterns of predatory behavior upon local economic actors have emerged, posing a new challenge to Uzbekistan's political and economic development. However, variation within Uzbekistan is significant and I hope to specify patterns in other localities through interviews in several regional centers upon my return to the field.

References

Beissinger, Mark, and Crawford Young, eds.

2002 Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Deng, Francis M.

1995 War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Dudoignon, Stéphane A., and Guissou Jahangiri, eds.

1994 Le Tadjikistan existe-t-il? Destins politiques d'une "nation imparfaite" [Does Tajikistan exist? The political destinies of an 'imperfect nation']. Cahiers d'Etudes sur la méditerranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien, Vol. 18.

Ellis, Stephen

1999 The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War. New York: New York University Press.

Jackson, Robert H., and Carl Rosberg

1982 "Why Africa's weak states persist: the empirical and juridical in statehood," World Politics, 35 (1) 1-24.

King, Charles

2001 "The benefits of ethnic war: understanding Eurasia's unrecognized states," World Politics 53 (4) 524-552.

Lewis, Ioan M.

1994 Blood and Bone: The Call of Kinship in Somali Society. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Red Sea Press.

Migdal, Joel S.

1988 Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Reno, William

1995 Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roy, Olivier

2000 The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. New York: New York University Press.

Rubin, Barnett R.

1995 The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Notes

[1] State breakdown or decline is a general term describing the diminishing effectiveness of a state's institutions to function. State collapse refers to the complete failure of state institutions and concurrent social disintegration (often internal conflict). Predatory rule denotes a personalistic regime ruling through coercion and rewards to collaborators. For more, see Beissinger and Young (2002) and Lewis (1996).

[2] Three common theories would emphasize that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan differ in: (a) how identities were formed and mobilized (Lewis 1994; Deng 1995); (b) the incentives among state rulers whose informal pacts of accommodation with local strongmen may or may not force them to purposely dismantle state institutions (Reno 1995; Ellis 1999; King 2001); and (c) levels of economic dependence on a foreign patron (Rubin 1995). While possible to apply to Tajikistan's collapse, none of these explanations adequately accounts for why Uzbekistan did not also collapse.

[3] A "strongman" exists when his or her (and there were female strongmen) tenure outlasted that of his/her immediate superior (the Raikom [raionnyi komitet; regional committee] First Secretary). The shape of regional patronage relations is indicated by the lateral movements of Raikom First Secretaries within a province and by the origins of provincial governors. Types of regionalism are defined by the distribution of key positions in national institutions among regionally based elites.

[Contents]

Towards a Connection between Religion and Nationality in Central Asia

Sébastien Peyrouse, Post-doctoral Fellow, French Institute for Central Asian Studies (Institut Français d'Etudes sur l'Asie Centrale, IFEAC), Tashkent, Uzbekistan, sebpeyrouseyahoo.com

This report presents findings of a research project conducted for a Ph.D. on Christian movements and believers in Central Asia from 1945 through the present. It is a result of a two-year stay (1998-2000) in the five republics of Central Asia with the support of IFEAC, where I currently pursue research on politics and religion in Central Asia after independence. This research is based on library work (in Paris, Nanterre, Strasbourg, Oxford, Moscow, and throughout Central Asia, especially in Tashkent, Dushanbe, Ashgabat, Bishkek, Almaty and Öskemen [Ust'-Kamenogorsk]), plus surveys and interviews. I also extensively used Russian-language Soviet and post-Soviet newspapers, such as Kazakhstanskaia pravda, Kommunist Tadzhikistana, Pravda vostoka, Sovetskaia Kirgiziia, and periodicals covering religious issues, such as Bratskii vestnik, Zhurnal moskovskoi patriarkhii, Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane, Vedi, Zhizn' very, and Slovo zhizni. A number of important documents came from church libraries or were given to me by priests, pastors, and believers. I interviewed state officials in charge of religious affairs, representatives and believers of all Christian denominations present in the area, from the Orthodox Church to the Catholic Church, and the numerous Protestant denominations.

In Central Asia Christianity was not only persecuted by the atheist regime, but it was also a minority religion in a Muslim area. After independence the national character of a minority faith appeared more obviously within the framework of the Muslim majority and of the new nation-state building. This did not prevent numerous movements from successful missionary work. Many missions, especially Protestant ones, are now active among the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks. What is the link between nationality and religion, and how did the Russian Orthodox Church appropriate the concept of nationality after 1991? Are Orthodoxy and Islam trying to bipolarize the religious spectrum in Central Asia in the name of the link between nationality and religion?

The Soviet pattern - that is, a faith fighting for its own existence in an atheist regime - has given way in the post-Soviet period to a Central Asian specificity: Christianity as a minority faith which appears as a symbol of European identity in a Muslim land. European emigration significantly increased from the times of perestroika and independence, considerably diminishing the number of Christians, and arousing the Christian clergy's anxiety. Minorities have expressed their fear evoked by the indigenization of power, and ethnic nationalism has become a key element in the religious revival. This "ethnic-religious" combination constitutes one of the responses to the Central Asian situation. From the titular group's point of view Islam may be viewed as a just return of religion which used to be persecuted by a foreign regime, and which would be essential in the context of nation-building.

The Titular Nationality-Islam Connection

The rapid rise of foreign Christian missions and the conversions of members of the titular nationality (e.g., Uzbeks in Uzbekistan) have caused some hostile reactions from the Muslim clergy who consider themselves "at home" in Central Asia. If Muslims claim to respect Christianity, pressures have grown against the religious movements whose proselytism amidst Muslims is too obvious. This hostility is expressed in countries such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but also the other republics less influenced by Islam such as Kyrgyzstan, where Christian missionary activity is especially potent: petitions against the activities of these movements were signed in Kyrgyz mosques. In Uzbekistan, the Muslim clergy's pressures have born fruit: the political authorities have reviewed legislation on religion.

The Russian-Orthodox Connection

The Muslim refusal of Protestant or even Catholic proselytism is supported by the Orthodox Church, which tries to justify its position towards Islam and its predominance over the other Christian movements. It asserts an intrinsic tie connecting every Russian to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The terms "Russian" and "Orthodoxy" would then be strictly bound together. The Orthodox Church tries to crystallize to its advantage the Russian population's status of political and cultural minority. The prayer house enables people to meet "compatriots," while the liturgy uses multiple specific cultural aspects.

The link between nationality and religion in Kazakhstan is emphasized by the notion of canonical territory, which according to Orthodoxy concerns all of post-Soviet space. In the name of a supposed precedence over all other churches today present in this area, Orthodoxy claims the right of preeminence, not only over the religious affairs of Russians, but over those of all citizens. In this perspective, a Christian living in any area colonized by Russia would have to be Orthodox. There would be only two exceptions: first, people of non-Slavic origin whose history and culture are bound to another religion (e.g., Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians), and second, people whose nationality is culturally bound to a church situated beyond the former USSR borders (e.g., Catholic Poles, Protestant Germans).

The simple presence of some Russian soldiers, Cossack garrisons or Old Believers since the beginning of the 18th century, in particular in the northern Kazakh Steppe, would be enough to support the idea that Central Asia belongs to the Russian world and is intrinsically bound to Orthodoxy. The two Orthodox journals published in Kazakhstan, Vedi and Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane, highlight pre-Soviet Russian history while erasing the Soviet period, which has lost its legitimacy. In this perspective the Russian presence in Kazakhstan is a legacy from the Russian empire and not from Soviet rule.

The Russian Orthodox Church also highlights its link to the Russian nation, while preserving a moderate and accommodating discourse on the new states' political reality, where challenging political frontiers or expressing any kind of irredentism is strictly banned. The Church has to distance itself from the most nationalistic and Cossack movements and has refused to be associated with any kind of unofficial political action. The archbishop of Astana and Almaty has made several statements in interviews and articles weakening the link between religion and nation. The Church especially focuses on the notion of civic patriotism based on territory of residence. Nevertheless, the Orthodox Church cannot solve the contradiction stemming from its claim of a "canonical" territory that implies the existence of a specific link through which Kazakhstan would be, on a religious plane, dependent on Moscow.

Islam and Orthodoxy: Between Cohabitation and Alliance

In the name of national stability, which would be threatened by proselytism and so-called "foreign denominations," Orthodoxy tries to polarize the religious spectrum around the Orthodoxy-Islam duo in order to minimize the influence of Protestantism and so-called non-traditional denominations. Orthodoxy and Islam each refuse to engage in proselytism among nationalities traditionally belonging to the other religion. "In Central Asia and in Russia, there is a natural distribution of the sphere of influence between the two main religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, and no one will destroy this harmony" (Botasheva and Lebedev 1996). The Orthodox hierarchy emphasizes its mutual understanding with Islam and asserts that "Islam is closer to Orthodoxy than other Christian confessions" (Peyrouse 2003: 288). Some embarrassing elements of Orthodox history in Central Asia are then forgotten, as for example the existence of a "Kyrgyz" (i.e., Kazakh) anti-Muslim "mission" in the Kazakh steppes in 1881. The Church also participates in several symbolic events in Kazakhstan, such as commemorations of Abay Qŭnanbaev or Shoqan Uälikhanov [Valikhanov].

If Orthodoxy advocates Russians' rights in Central Asia, it also strives to preserve its good favor with local regimes. When the Russian nationality refers to Orthodox history, this notion of Orthodoxy is not, according to the Archbishop of Astana and Almaty, transnational but on the contrary comes within the scope of the territorial entity in which a Christian lives. Orthodoxy in Central Asia claims to be "autochthonous" (e.g., Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane 1999). Despite its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate, it refuses to get involved in the Russian Federation and rejects all supra-state political thought so as not to appear a foreign element in Central Asia.

The effort to bipolarize the religious spectrum in Central Asia has met with uneven success, but it is at times strongly supported by local governments. President Niyazov of Turkmenistan has divided the religious spectrum into two distinct wholes which cannot interfere with each other in terms of flux of believers and conversions. Thus, a Turkmen believer is supposed to be Muslim and a European believer - Orthodox. The other republics, especially Uzbekistan, are also evolving in this direction despite the persistence of an official policy of a more diversified religious spectrum.

Unlike certain other Muslim countries, there is no discrimination against Christianity on the whole in post-Soviet Central Asia, as Orthodoxy and other denominations, such as Catholics or Lutherans, are fully recognized. Although discrimination exists against some specific denominations that are viewed as foreign movements (such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals and even Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists), in practice, no Orthodox in Central Asia complains about flagrant inequality, which would give Christians a lower status. The religious differences are dominated by national identification. Central Asia in this sense remains closer to the rest of former Soviet space than to the Near and Middle East. There is no desire to eliminate Christian practices, whether Orthodox or non-Orthodox, but rather a more subtle discrimination against national (European) minorities through the violation of certain religious rights.[1]

The religion-nationality connection is, of course, not unique to Central Asia and Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, it reveals various questions people raise while facing numerous changes in their society. At the same time it also shows a certain continuity in post-Soviet Central Asia, as this paradigm existed prior to independence. For Russians in Tsarist and Soviet Central Asia, Orthodoxy was a way to mark their identity in a Muslim environment. This link is being reinforced by the new social, economic, and national context, and by the new opportunity for individuals to practice their religious beliefs with fewer restrictions.

This work on Christianity is part of an ongoing research project at IFEAC on the mutual instrumentalization of politics and religion in post-Soviet Central Asia. One of its goals is to study how political discourse uses religious (Muslim, Christian, etc.) phenomena in the framework of nation-state building, and how political powers are attempting to display an image of religious pluralism and freedom. Our present research also examines how religion is viewed by the national minorities, especially in their politico-cultural claims. This question not only concerns minorities of Muslim origin, such as Caucasians or Central Asians living outside their eponymous state, but also the European-Slavic minorities. Since 2003 we have concentrated our work on the Russian minority living in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan. One of the objectives is to study how Russians are attempting to use the Orthodox Church in defense of their rights in this republic and how the Church replies in the framework authorized by the political power.

References

Botasheva, I., and V. Lebedev

1996 "'Krestonostsy' kontsa XX veka," Kazakhstanskaia pravda, April 2, 1996.

Peyrouse, Sébastien

2003 Des chrétiens entre athéisme et islam: regards sur la question religieuse en Asie centrale soviétique et post-soviétique. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.

Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane

1999 No. 9-10 (66-67) 10-11.

Note

[1] The Orthodox and Muslim hierarchies take remarkably similar positions in each of the Central Asian republics: all condemn Protestant proselytism. In the area of religious legislation, however, missionary Christian movements are much less restricted in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan than in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

[Contents]

The Role of the Pilgrimage in Relations between Uzbekistan and the Uzbek Community of Saudi Arabia

Bayram Balcı, Researcher, the Turkey and Caucasus Program, French Institute for Anatolian Studies (Institut Français d'Etudes Anatoliennes, IFEA), Beyoğlu-Istanbul, Turkey, balciazeurotel.com

This report presents the results of my study of a Central Asian community - Uzbeks in today's terminology - who settled in Saudi Arabia in several successive waves starting from the early 1940s, and who are identified by Saudis as Turkistani or Bukhari, according to the regions of their origin. Given Uzbekistan's independence, Saudi Uzbeks today define themselves as Turkistani or Uzbek, depending on the situation.

The study was conducted during two two-week pilgrimages (umra) with Central Asian pilgrims and Saudi Uzbeks at the time of Ramadan in December 2000 and November 2001 in Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. I also conducted several field visits among the Uzbek community in Turkey and in Uzbekistan, where I followed Saudi Uzbeks visiting their relatives. The findings of this study are based on regular contacts with 15 families who invited me to their homes, on interviews with more than 80 individuals during each pilgrimage, and on family archives, i.e., pictures, letters and videos. The research was supported by the Centre Français de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain (CERMOC, located in Beirut and Amman) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

In this report I argue that the pilgrimage plays an important role in preserving Uzbek identity on the ground. The Uzbek community (with Uyghurs, another Turkic community exiled in Saudi Arabia, not studied here) is one of only two national groups that have succeeded in achieving relative integration in Saudi Arabia without being completely assimilated. This is notable, since the kingdom makes it difficult for immigrants to preserve their identities.

Before Russian colonization in the 19th century, Central Asians had multiple identities - familial, tribal, regional, and religious. When needed, one would refer to one or all of his/her identities. According to scholars and old refugees in Mecca and Medina, in the early 1930s when Soviet control over the region of Central Asia grew stronger and more violent, the term "Uzbek," that already existed at the time had no real meaning for the exiles. Synonymous with "confederation of tribes," it was of secondary importance for the people who preferred to be identified as "Kokandi," "Namangani," "Marghilani," "Farghani," etc. The outsiders called them Turkistani or, more frequently, Bukhari, referring to the last local independent Emirate and then Socialist Republic of Bukhara (Shalinsky 1994).

Reasons for Exile: New Political and Economic Order

The existing literature on Central Asian migrations (e.g., Shalinsky 1994; Komatsu, Obiya and Schoeberlein, eds. 2000) and my interviews with elders in Saudi Arabia highlight two main reasons for the Turkistani to leave their homeland. Soviet control over the region, with its new coercive economic structure (collectivization and its rejection by landowners) and social-political order (abolition of religious courts and "Russification" of the educational system) pushed people to exile.

Two directions were chosen - East to Kashgar and South to Afghanistan. Some, after a relatively short stay (a couple of months or years), proceeded farther to Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This route was especially attractive partly because of the holy status of the destination, and also because the young Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was among the few Islamic countries to welcome refugees. For pragmatic reasons the Saudi government viewed the migrants as an opportunity to support the population and development efforts of the kingdom. It was also important for the first Islamic state to prove solidarity with the Muslim population persecuted by a communist and atheist regime. With leadership ambitions over the Muslim world, King Abdel Aziz (1876-1953) was not only in charge of the holy cities but also desired to be considered as the protector of all Muslims. This explains the warm welcome and reception of the Turkistani exiles, even as foreign communities enjoyed no separate existence as national groups in Saudi Arabia.

Evolution of Uzbek Identity in Saudi Arabia

The Turkistanis used different identity strategies to ease their migration. The differences in tribal identities were smoothed away in favor of muhajir and Bukhari. On the thorny path of exodus the community considered itself as muhajir - refugees fleeing persecution, in the Islamic sense of the word, comparing oneself to the first muhajir, the Prophet Muhammad in his hijra (exile) from Mecca to Medina. The use of the word muhajir probably commanded sympathy among the Saudis; so did the second identification as Bukhari, which bears not only a geographical significance, but most importantly a religious meaning. By calling themselves Bukhari they demonstrated to the Saudi authorities and population their close relationship with Isma'il al Bukhari, the great Islamic thinker from Bukhara, who was respected in Saudi Arabia.

Like other foreign communities Uzbeks were deprived of the right to create cultural associations and to teach children their native language. Contacts with Turkistan (soon subdivided into five Soviet republics) were made impossible during the Cold War. The community was linguistically Arabized in less than two or three decades. However, contacts with the Uzbeks of Turkey and with Turkish workers or pilgrims in Saudi Arabia facilitated (at least for the community leaders) the survival of Turkic vernaculars that mixed Anatolian and Uzbek languages. In Soviet times the impossibility of visiting the homeland pushed the community leaders closer to Turkey, where exiles established an important Uzbek community.

In 1991 the independence of Uzbekistan brought new hope to the Uzbeks of Saudi Arabia, who were threatened with dilution into the Arab culture. Renewed relationships through the pilgrimage undoubtedly influenced the Saudi Uzbeks' identity.

In the Soviet literature the hajj, synonymous with obscurantism, was totally forbidden except for 10 to 15 handpicked loyal officials. Even though forbidden, the institution of the ribat turned hajj into a cohesion tool within the diaspora. Ribats, created by Turkistani sponsors to facilitate the hajj of their poor countrymen, had existed even before the Uzbek immigration to Saudi Arabia. They functioned as rest houses for fellow townsmen. Namangan, Kokand Marghilan, and even Kashgar and Khotan had their own ribats. Until 1991 these foundations played a crucial role in maintaining the solidarity among the members of the Central Asian community at large. In the absence of legal, cultural, or ethnic associations the ribats also functioned as meeting centers for old leaders (aqsaqal) of the community with the Turkistani-Uzbek pilgrims exiled in Turkey. Now ribats have a chance to evolve into business centers to coordinate cooperation, to develop networks and forums for the exchange of views, and eventually, to redefine the common identity.

Much was expected from the pilgrimage, as Saudi Uzbeks (especially the young ones) do not travel much to Uzbekistan. Pilgrimage had become a source of interest in Uzbekistan long before the end of the Soviet regime (Hayitov, Sobirov and Legai 1992). In 1992 Islam Karimov adopted a more open policy towards Islam after he performed the hajj and received an excellent welcome from the Saudis (thanks to the Uzbek community leaders who had presented him as a descendant of Isma'il al Bukhari). Above all, Uzbekistan's independence marked the reopening of the route to Mecca. From 1992 to 1996 the relationship between the two countries was good and 3,000-4,000 Uzbek pilgrims visited Saudi Arabia annually for the hajj or umra. After 1996, due to the rise of Wahhabism in the Ferghana Valley with alleged involvement of some Saudi Uzbek leaders, Tashkent decided to tighten its control over religious activity in the country and restrict the entering of Saudi Uzbeks into their homeland. The growing scope of pilgrimage and mutual influence contributed to the transformation of the Saudi Uzbeks' identity.

Independent Uzbekistan and Uzbeks have revived pride among the Turkistani group. While some intellectuals eschew the term "Uzbek" as a pure invention of the Russian colonizers to break the Turkic unity in Central Asia and beyond, today when asked about their identity most Saudi Uzbeks tend to add the term "Uzbek" after "Muslim" and "Turkistani" to indicate their belonging to the broader Turkic family. However, for the Saudi population and authorities nothing has changed as Saudi Uzbeks are still perceived as Turkistani or Bukhari. Furthermore and surprisingly, they do not differentiate Saudi Uzbeks from the other two Turkic communities exiled in Saudi Arabia - the Uyghurs of Eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang) who arrived after the communist takeover in China in 1949, and the Afghan Uzbek refugees who arrived after Afghanistan's invasion by the Soviet Army in 1979. Although all these Turkic groups are called Turkistani in Saudi Arabia, they present significant differences in terms of identity and solidarity. This is a subject which requires further study.

References

Hayitov, Sh. A., N. S. Sobirov and A. S. Legai

1992 Xorijdagi O'zbeklar [Uzbeks in Foreign Countries]. Toshkent: Fan Nashriyoti.

Komatsu, Hisao, Obiya Chika and John Schoeberlein, eds.

2000 Migration in Central Asia: Its History and Current Problems. JCAS Symposium Series 9, Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies.

Shalinsky, Audrey

1994 Long Years of Exile: Central Asian Refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan. London: London University Press.

[Contents]

Reviews and Abstracts

Reviews

Mark Slobin, Afghanistan Untouched. Traditional Crossroads CD 4319, 2003. 2 CDs, 40 pp., notes, photos, ASIN B0000A4GAH, $14.00.

Reviewed by: Rachel Harris, Ph.D., Lecturer in Music, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, rhsoas.ac.uk

"Before its lands were crushed, its people scattered, and its music silenced by chaos and decree, Afghanistan overflowed with musical treasure" (CD back cover).

On the eve of the US-led overthrow of Taliban rule, that regime's suppression of music became a powerful symbol in Western portrayals of Afghanistan (Baily 2001). Footage of unspooled cassette tape hanging from Afghan trees came to symbolize the cultural wasteland. In the aftermath of the Afghan war, with the introduction of a more liberal regime at least in Kabul, Western groups have been active in seeking to aid a musical renaissance. Crate-loads of classical Western instruments have arrived at the Kabul conservatory, where no one can be found who knows how to play them; a passing German rock band persuaded two burqa-clad women to pose for photographs playing an electric guitar and drum set. Ethnomusicologists have been more interested in the possibilities for revival of the myriad Afghan traditions. This new release joins a number of re-issues of books (Sakata 2002) and CDs (Ustad Mohammad Omar 2002), and complements Mark Slobin's new website (http://www.wesleyan.edu/its/acs/modules/ slobin/html/) which makes available a great deal of original material from his earlier book on music in Northern Afghanistan (Slobin 1976).

The sound quality on these CDs, mastered largely from the original 1968 Uher 4000/L mono recordings, is remarkably fresh and immediate. The tracks on the first CD were recorded among the Central Asian peoples of northern Afghanistan, descendants of Uzbeks who crossed the Amu Darya in 1500 and Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Turkmen who fled the USSR in the 1920s. These are Central Asian folk traditions, a world away from the "classical" Indian-derived tradition of the Afghan rubab. There are some fabulous recordings of the felak songs of tragic love which are also common in southern Tajikistan, (CD1, tracks 2 and 5, with beautiful translations of the lyrics), and there is a rare recording of professional Uzbek women wedding singers (CD1, track 12) which is very reminiscent of the Bukharan style. The second CD contains some real treasures from the eastern city of Herat with its Iranian influences: a charming children's song (CD2, track 9), and some stunning Herati dutar playing (CD2, track 10). This CD also includes some extraordinary rarities from the small Kazakh and Turkmen communities in Afghanistan.

The accompanying liner notes are lucid and packed with information. The recordings serve as an admirable illustration of Slobin's earlier theories of shared and discrete music cultures, but these notes differ from his earlier writing in their attention to the personal. They include many sensitively drawn portraits of the featured musicians, complemented by some beautiful black and white photographs. It is the throw-away remarks which are most revealing of the culture of the time: the inclusion of Hindi film tunes in the local repertoire; references to the expensive local delicacy of Polish candy; the musicians' habit of "vamping indeterminately" to keep the dance going. The freshness of the material at this remove in time is a tribute to the great dedication and care with which the original fieldwork was undertaken. This is a welcome and moving addition to the excellent Traditional Crossroads series.

References

Baily, John

2001 "Can You Stop the Birds Singing?" The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan. Copenhagen: Freemuse. http://www.freemuse.org/03libra/pdf/ Afghanistansats.pdf

Ustad Mohammad Omar: Virtuoso from Afghanistan

2002 Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Sakata, Hiromi Lorraine

2002 [1983] Music in the Mind: The Concepts of Music and Musician in Afghanistan. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Slobin, Mark

1976 Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

[Contents]

Eric W. Sievers, The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia: Sustainable Development and Comprehensive Capital. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. 264 pp., illustrations. ISBN 0700716602, $75.00.

Reviewed by: Daniel Stevens, Doctoral Candidate, Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, stevenspobox.com

That the 1990s was a decade of decline for Central Asia is a conclusion that resonates with the experience of many, and yet largely for reasons of politics is one that few have admitted in official reports and scholarly writings. In this idiosyncratic and yet important work, Eric Sievers bravely attempts to develop a "robust" explanation for this decline, using the idea of "comprehensive capital." The author begins to unpack this concept in the introduction, arguing that sustainable development involves more than just preserving physical capital, but depends upon a virtuous cycle of increasing stocks of physical capital along with less tangible phenomena of health, education, institutions and trust. The author draws on a number of theories that have attached the label "capital" to such issues, and takes these disparate theories and attempts to relate them to each other under the heading "comprehensive capital," focusing on the way that deficits in one can negatively affect the others. This is then illustrated in the first half of the book, as the author charts the squandering of capital stocks built up in the Soviet era in the areas of natural capital (Chapter 1), human capital (Chapter 2), organizational capital (Chapter 3), and social capital (Chapter 4). The chapters are full of well-judged commentary and tantalizing detail, and reflect the author's depth of experience in the region and an equally impressive breadth of understanding of theoretical approaches. His case for the decline of human capital is particularly compelling, and the section on social capital showcases an ability to draw from a range of material - a quantitative study of mahallas (neighborhoods) in Uzbekistan accompanied by excellent insights into how everyday phenomena such as queues and taxi rides can illuminate wider social processes.

The second half of the book takes international environmental law as the "lens through which to frame a workable investigation into how Central Asia's comprehensive capital relates to aspirations for sustainable development" (p. 27). There follows a somewhat involved investigation into how the Central Asian states have encountered and responded to the increasing number of environmental treaties, institutions and NGOs that make up the "international environmental regime." His conclusion is that "both donors and Central Asian governments can pretty much say whatever they want and do whatever they want in Central Asia without much concern ... for their veracity, legality, or [the] consequences of their actions" (p. 144).

Considerable blame for this is attributed to the actions of donors, and Sievers concludes his critical review of "internationalizing" the Central Asian environment by asking whether things would have been much worse if the international community had not become involved (Chapter 6). Given the amount of resources invested in seeking to lead the new Central Asian states down the right path, it is damning that Sievers ends on an equivocal note. The World Bank and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) come off particularly badly, being likened to Soviet institutions in their command style of management, their lack of democracy, their violations of their own rules, and in particular the UNDP's effective arrogation of the role of ministries of the environment in many of the republics.

The final chapter sums up the decline and makes explicit a theme implied in many of the chapters, namely that Central Asia took a wrong turn in the early 1990s by rejecting perestroika dialogues on issues such as the environment and the rule of law in favor of nationalist ideologies and the embrace of the international community, neither of which proved to be sufficient checks on the self-serving behavior of local elites.

While the book is full of firsthand and thorough insight into the decline of Central Asia during the 1990s, the volume sets itself up to be judged at a higher level - as offering a unique and comprehensive explanation for this decline. As such, the question is whether the book is anything more than the sum of its excellent parts. A table on the interrelations of the various types of capital (p. 29) promises much, yet some might question whether it really delivers. Theoretically this work may not be rigorous enough for the macro-theorist who wants to see a few more testable hypotheses and more added to the conceptual backbone of interrelated capital stocks. On the other hand, those favoring an ethnographic approach could be uncomfortable with reducing complex social processes to a game-theory-driven understanding of social capital, or the rather broad concept of organizational capital. Whether the concept of comprehensive capital can provide a framework for further research is unclear, yet I consider that the case made in this volume was very stimulating and worthwhile.

[Contents]

Brian Glyn Williams, The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation. Leiden: Brill, 2001. xxvii + 520 pp., maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN 9004121226, $123.00.

Anna Oldfield Senarslan, Languages and Cultures of Asia Ph.D. Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., USA, acowisc.edu

Brian Williams' ambitious history of the Crimean Tatars sweeps from the prehistoric to the present day, offering a comprehensive work that is both rich in detail and broad in scope. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including travelers' accounts, recently de-classified NKVD documents, interviews with surviving deportees, Ottoman histories, Russian periodicals, Crimean Tatar ballads, recent Western scholarship, and personal observations, Williams creates a multi-textured account which combines ethno-genetic, political, social, economic, and cultural histories. While guiding the reader carefully through time in a series of 14 chapters, Williams simultaneously constructs an interpretive/theoretical layer, which he uses to explain and shape the phenomena he describes. Consistently reminding the reader that he is working in a highly contested and politicized arena, Williams challenges Russian, Soviet, Tatar, and Western views alike, offering his own "fundamental reinterpretation" (p. 42) of Crimean Tatar history.

The book is organized chronologically in clearly marked thematic sections. Beginning with ethnic origins, Williams elucidates the genesis of the various subgroups that constitute the Crimean Tatar people, emphasizing their status as indigenous peoples of the Crimean Peninsula. As he leads the reader through the periods of the Crimean Khanate, Russian imperial rule, and diaspora in the Ottoman Empire, Williams presents and discusses previous histories and eyewitness accounts culled from letters, travelogues, periodicals, etc., before constructing his own versions. Williams treats each topic carefully and gives detailed attention to many areas seldom explored in Western sources, such as the social and cultural life of the Crimean Tatars before and during Russian colonial rule. He also provides an excellent and often harrowing section on the fate of those who emigrated to the Dobruca region, and an in depth-investigation of the 1944 deportation and ensuing life of exile in Central Asia. Ending with recent descriptions of new Tatar settlements, the book will leave many readers concerned and eager to find out more about the current state of affairs in the Crimea. Interviews with survivors of the deportation, and important national leaders such as Mustafa Jemilev together with the author's eyewitness accounts greatly enliven the later sections.

In Chapters 5 and 6, which treat the period of Russian colonial rule and the Tatar "migration" to the Ottoman Empire, Williams elaborates on the central argument of his work, which seeks to explain the construction of Crimean Tatar nationality as a process of development from a pre-modern, Islamic identity to a modern, secular-nationalist identity. As support for his argument Williams highlights the two waves of migration to the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Williams contends that after Russian colonization "the Crimean shores, mountains, and steppes had ceased to be considered their homeland in the traditional Islamic sense and had been transformed into the Dar al-Kufr (Abode of the Infidel)" (p. 108). While asserting the reality of the sufferings of non-Russian nationalities under Russian rule, Williams argues that the Crimean Tatars left the Crimea because of factors inherent in their cultural belief system, migrating to the Dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam) to preserve their religious identity. Completing the argument in subsequent chapters, Williams describes the transformation of the Crimean Tatars into a people with a national territorial identity, attributing this change to a combination of factors including the diaspora experience, the influence of Western ideas, the impact of modernist Ismail Gaspirali (Gasprinskii) and his followers, and, ironically, the enthusiasm of early Soviet policies intended to encourage national culture. Tracing the growth of a politicized sense of national consciousness, Williams explains why this people, whom he repeatedly characterizes as having "abandoned" their lands, maintained an intense attachment to the Crimea as an idealized, Edenic homeland while in diaspora, and braved many miseries to return there fifty years after their forced deportation.

Williams crafts his argument well, building it carefully from chapter to chapter. However, it is disappointing that this author, who so effectively deconstructs other versions of history, does not clearly explain the underpinnings of his own constructions. Although he appears occasionally in the narrative as an observer, Williams does not elaborate on his own position as an American scholar, consider what may be his own biases, or explain the development of his theoretical framework. Problematic concepts, such as the assumed opposition of Islam to modernity, or the meanings of "pre-modernity" and "modernity" in this context, are not sufficiently discussed, and could be challenged by readers coming from other disciplines where these terms are strongly contested. Although unstated, Williams' biases seem to show up in the unfortunate characterization of pre-modern Crimean Tatars as "apathetic Muslim peasants" (p. 3), along with the repeated use of the word "simple" to describe the non-literate peasant class. These designations, which belie the well-known complexities of orally transmitted culture, are contradicted by Williams' own descriptions of the activity, creativity, and resourcefulness of the Crimean Tatar villagers. At times, it seems that Williams is so enthusiastic about his theoretical paradigm that he fails to see places where it might be challenged by his own evidence. For example, the destan ballads he uses to illustrate the Tatars' voluntary abandonment of the Crimea, could be interpreted to the contrary, as an indication that they were forced out from a cherished place which they had already constructed as a homeland. An awareness of his own interpretation as one of many possible constructions, and a stronger consideration of possible alternative interpretations, would add depth and maturity to Williams' work.

Any discussion of this book also needs to consider the issues involved in representing living people, particularly those at the mercy of an extreme power imbalance. The knowledge that policies and decisions are currently being made that could affect the people in question would call for extreme caution, particularly when representing a small Muslim minority claiming land in a region that is already being contested between Russia and Ukraine. While Williams undertakes his work with clearly expressed compassion and respect for the Crimean Tatar people, quotes such as "it was only in the 20th century that the Crimean Tatars ceased to abandon their ancestral land" (p. 2) could be used out of context by those who aim to delegitimize the Crimean Tatars' current settlements. At the very least, the use of the words "abandon," and "migration," which connote a voluntary action rather than a reaction to an outside force, should be considered very carefully along with other alternatives. In addition, his characterization of a beleaguered Crimean Tatar leadership fraught with petty infighting could have a negative effect on the vital fundraising work among foreign governments and NGOs that these same leaders need to accomplish, and seems an absolutely unnecessary addition to this work. This is not the place to debate problems of representation, but because of the precarious nature of the Crimean Tatars' situation and their extreme hardships with regard to basic human needs such as housing and healthcare, issues surrounding both the positive and negative possible impact of this work cannot be ignored.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, these problematic areas, this book makes for engrossing reading. Written with the dramatic flair of a novel, this history is ideal for an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar and could spark a great deal of productive discussion. The writing is accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike, and would be of great interest to anyone working in the fields of diaspora research, identity construction, nationality studies, and of course Russian, Soviet, Turkish, Ottoman, or East European history. The volume includes 35 illustrations (many from the author's own travels in the Crimea), a detailed index, and an extensive bibliography (with sources in Russian, Turkish, and several Western languages). An important contribution to a seldom explored yet very contentious area of history, Brian Williams' book will hopefully bring more attention to the past, present, and future of the Crimean Tatars, and catalyze a lively debate on many aspects of this important subject.

[Contents]

Bruce G. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001, xxi + 321 pp., map, plates, bibliography, glossary, index. ISBN 0700712976, $85.

Reviewed by: Pınar Akçalı, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, akcalimetu.edu.tr

Bruce G. Privratsky's book, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory, analyzes the persistence of Islam among Kazakhs in the city of Turkistan in southern Kazakhstan during the Soviet period. The author specifically focuses on religious terminology in the Kazakh language and places his analysis within the theoretical framework of collective memory. The book is the end product of field research conducted between 1991 and 1999, when the author lived in Turkistan and taught ethnology at Yasavi University.

The first chapter provides the historical setting as well as a general introduction to the book. Chapters 2 to 6 cover various aspects of popular Islam in Turkistan. In Chapter 2 the emphasis is on Kazakh demography and Kazakh ethnic markers, and to what extent they are interrelated with Muslim values. In Chapter 3 the author specifically focuses on Kazakh values in Islam, daily experiences related to the Muslim Five Pillars, and finally memories of the Sufi tradition. Chapter 4 deals with the Kazakhs' intense involvement with their ancestor-spirits and how this is reflected in their religious rites and practices. In Chapter 5 the author puts the emphasis on the Muslim saints and the tradition of shrine pilgrimage among the Kazakhs. Chapter 6 deals with the practices and importance of Kazakh healers and their activities. The last two chapters focus on the specific case of Kazakh religion within collective memory theory.

Privratsky's book is, in very general terms, ethnography: "a traditional empirical effort to specify cultural content" (p. 237). The basic theme of the book is the survival of Islam among the Kazakhs in Turkistan. According to the author, the religious experiences of the Kazakh Muslims must be understood as "an integral experience of the Muslim life and a local version of the Islamic cultural synthesis, rather than as a survival of shamanism or a shamano-sufic hodge-podge" (p. 237). In other words, the author suggests that Kazakh religion is a local contextualization of Islam in which ethnicity is conceived of as a Muslim identity shaped by the local practices of remembering Kazakh ancestors (the cult of ancestor-spirits), pilgrimage to peripheral shrines and family cemeteries, and the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses by traditional Islamic medicine and the blessings of the healer's ancestor spirits.

In analyzing these local practices the author examines the Kazakh language closely and elaborates on the religious content of many words and phrases used in everyday life. According to the author it is important to find out "how Kazakhs describe and categorize religious things in their own language" (p. 24), because there is "basic linguistic evidence" of the Islamization of the "conceptual apparatus of the Kazakh religion" (p. 76).

In his book Privratsky places this linguistic emphasis on local religious rites of Turkistan's Kazakhs within the general context of Maurice Halbwach's theory of collective memory. According to the author, collective memory is "the key to understand the social forces that have enabled Kazakh religion to persist into the 21st century" (p. 252). Privratsky suggests that collective memory is "primarily affective, only secondarily cognitive," and that it is "embodied" (p. 21). Privratsky further suggests that "landscape evokes collective memories," and "language stores collective memories" (p. 23). Throughout the book these characteristics are applied to the case of Turkistan's Kazakhs. According to Privratsky, "Islam has survived among the Kazakhs because both holy places and holy people have survived to remind them of it. The collective memory works through its architectural monuments and its living memorials" (p. 102).

This heavy emphasis on the theory of collective memory is one of the most important contributions of the book. The author reconstructs, or "reworks" (p. 247), a theory that has been used "primarily for radical postmodernist projects, which explain religion away as a social construction" (p. 20). However, according to Privratsky the idea of the construction of history and religion is problematic. Anthropological theories of religion have one major weakness: "the tendency to dismiss religious explanation of religion" (p. 20). Thus, attempts to develop collective memory "as a theory of religion per se" are meaningful because this theory has "particular value for the study of religion" (p. 20).

In this general perspective it is possible to suggest that Privratsky provides new, rich data on the semantics of Kazakh religion and popular Islamic practices in the city of Turkistan in his well-organized and well-researched book, which is enriched by maps and plates. His analysis of the theory of collective memory further provides an insightful approach. However, one should question whether the findings of the book are applicable to all Kazakhs (including for example, the urban Kazakhs in Almaty), let alone to other Central Asian people. The author conducted his work in Turkistan, a city of Islamic heritage "that has been tested and distended, but not destroyed" (p. 2). There is no doubt that Turkistan is a very famous and important city, the "holy hearth" and the "axis" as described by the Kazakhs (p. 28). This is mostly due to the fact that the city has the shrine of the 12th century Sufi master Ahmed Yasavi, built in the late 14th century by Timur. However, focusing in a very detailed manner on the religious semantics and practices performed only in one city may not provide the reader with a general picture. The author frequently makes generalizations using words such as "Kazakhs" and "Kazakh religion," even though the theme of his book is limited to the local practices of Turkistan's Kazakhs. This raises an internal contradiction, because the author himself clearly states that "Kazakh religion" (not the religion of Turkistan's Kazakhs) should be analyzed in comparative perspective. According to the author, "[i]f Kazakh religion is to be understood, its similarities with and divergences from Muslim lifeways must be engaged in detail" (p. 14). Even though throughout the book Privratsky provides examples of similar experiences from other Muslim societies, one must consider the fact that Islam is practiced differently not only in different countries, but also among the people of one country, even one city. In this sense there may be an inevitable limitation to the explanatory power of Privratsky's findings.

As a final note, it must also be pointed out that in the book there is not even one short summary section on either Ahmed Yasavi's life or of his teachings. This is a shortcoming of the book, considering the importance of Yasavi's legacy and his shrine in Turkistan.

[Contents]

Korkut A. Ertürk, ed., Rethinking Central Asia: Non-Eurocentric Studies in History, Social Structure and Identity. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1999, vi, 202 pp., index. ISBN 0863722407, $49.50.

Reviewed by: Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)/Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France, dudoignonaol.com

At first glance this volume offers an unexpected orientation: each paper presents an attempt at comparing the results of the author's personal research or readings on Central Eurasian societies with data from the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Most of the contributions are revised and updated versions of papers originally presented at the Central Asian Republics and Turkey conference held at the Middle East Center, University of Utah, July 14-16, 1994. As such, the whole volume bears testimony to a state of the art at a specific stage of Central Eurasian studies, in the immediate aftermath of the dislocation of the Soviet Union.

In his general foreword, the editor rightly points out the lacunae in "Western" research on Central Asia, a region which has often been studied, indeed up till recent times, with no great care for its specific and richly documented history (pp. 1-9). However, judging by the very late date of the volume's publication, it would perhaps have been more pertinent to point out, at least in the introduction, the significance of the past decade's "Western" (North American and German, in particular, to say nothing of Japanese research) contributions to a general reappraisal of "historical heritages" in the study of Central Eurasian societies, medieval and modern. Although Eurocentric approaches to the Central Eurasian world remain a reality even now, the weight of such approaches, especially since the mid-1990s, should have been relativized. More subtlety in this matter would have been permitted by the use of the rich recent "Western" bibliography, which was almost completely ignored. And yet this bibliography is mostly based on the study of primary, manuscript or oral sources, whereas several contributions to the present volume satisfy themselves with a survey of the existing academic literature.

Several papers in the volume consist of short résumés of books or other works published before 1999 by the same authors. Such is the case with Andre Gunder Frank's contribution, "Re-Orient: From the Centrality of Central Asia to China's Middle Kingdom," which develops an earlier thesis that until the Industrial Revolution, when the flow of goods and money was reversed, the Europeans were only able to take part in an Asia-centered economy thanks to the African and American resources accumulated through the slave trade (see the same author's well-known monograph: Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age). We also find such a synthesis of previously published works in the brief contribution by İsenbike Togan, "Patterns of Legitimization of Rule in the History of the Turks." The author here analyzes how major changes in the legitimization of rule among Central Eurasian nomads, especially among Central Eurasian Turkic societies, have coincided with periods of rupture in internal redistributive patterns where the questions of local redistribution versus accumulation in the center reappeared (see Togan's Flexibility and Limitation in Steppe Formations).

In a paper on "Central Asian Societies and the Oral Literature of Epic Heroes," Lois A. Giffen identifies three stages in the evolution of the Central Asian Turkic (not "Turkish," a terminological confusion common in the whole volume) oral epic literature: 1) the heroic folktale; 2) the classical heroic poem or epos - tribal or "feudal"; and 3) the epic romance of later "feudalism." This paralleling of a classical hierarchy of production systems with that of systems of oral creation has been adapted from N. K. Chadwick and V. Zhirmunskii's Oral Epics of Central Asia. Less starchy approaches to the global history of medieval and modern literatures of Central Eurasia are still being awaited - many "Western" specialists continue, in this matter, to find their inspiration in Soviet encyclopedias.

Sharon Baştuğ, in "Tribe, Confederation and State among Altaic Nomads of the Asian Steppe," concerns herself with understanding the specific structure of the patrilineal descent system among the Altaic peoples. On this question she offers us a walk through the theoretical literature and through some studies on the area. She argues that the traditional form of descent of the Altaic pastoral nomadic peoples was the segmentary lineage system. With strict genealogically defined units of exogamy, the processes of group formation and dissolution were played out within an ideological framework of two competing kinship-based sources of loyalty - genealogical closeness on the one hand, and affinal obligations on the other. These processes operated in a cultural environment in which political alliance was equated with kinship, consanguine or affinal, but which also provided mechanisms for the transformation of non-kin to kin. Such extremely dynamic patterns of group formation and dissolution are attributes not limited to nomadic societies - as I have tried to suggest in my own works on the functioning of Bukhara's qawms or ta'ifas during the colonial period. This raises the question whether such a general perspective on descent systems and their role among the Altaic peoples, when lacking comparison with the sedentary world, may lead to a substantialist view of a transhistorical non-periodized past of nomadic societies.

Şerif Mardin's "Abdurreshid Ibrahim and Zeki Velidi Togan in the History of the Muslims of Russia," shows how the intellectual tone within the Jadid movement in the Volga-Urals region of Russia shifted from Islamic cultural renewal to Turkic nationalism in the span of a few decades. In spite of the paucity of primary sources used for this paper and the author's lack of interest in the main "Western" as well as "Eastern" research works on both Ibrahimov and Velidi (e.g., those by E. Lazzerini, F. Georgeon, H. Komatsu, I. Türkoğlu), his article shows a relatively new attention, inspired by the reading of Hamid Algar's reknowned paper on Shaykh Zayn-Allah Rasulev (1992), to the heritage of the Naqshbandiya Mujaddidiya in early modern and modern Central Eurasian intellectual circles. The author has meritoriously tried to measure the respective influence of Mujaddidi affinities and genealogical affiliations - which are both merely sketched here - among the early modern Bashkorts, notably through the emergence of local history writing (see recent works by A. J. Frank and M. A. Gosmanov (Usmanov)).

Although Mardin rightly underlines the significance of the memory of the Urals 18th century "uprisings" in the constitution of modern local and regional historiographies during the following century, the specific relationship between the spoken and the written, of which these early modern chronicles bear the testimony, remains to be studied. Besides, the description of these historiographies as a "potent mixture of clan memories, Western philosophy and Islamic reformism," although astute, does not take into account a rich historiographical manuscript literature now well studied by Allen Frank, in particular, which bears no trace of a reformist trend (1998).

Whether "Western" or not, most studies devoted to the history of "Jadidism" continue to take into account only "positive" sources on this movement; they ignore the mass of documentation pertaining to more "traditionalist" trends. The same dialectics seem to be at work in Jadid studies in both "Western" and self-proclaimed non-Western academia - the apology of Mujaddidiya being now, probably for different reasons, one of the most striking common points of both. Let us conclude by noting that the author does not show great interest in such an appealing phenomenon as the unprecedented multiplication of autobiographical texts throughout Islamicate Central Eurasia in the years and decades following the Bolshevik revolution - although autobiographical writings, especially Togan's published Hât#305;ralar [Memoirs] (1969; a highly problematic kind of primary source), make up the bulk of the first-hand documentation which has nourished this contribution.

The next paper, by A. Aydın Çeçen on "Uzbekistan between Central Asia and the Middle East: Another Perspective," provides the best possible illustration of the risks of writing at too high a level of generality. The author's focus on the region, specific ways of modernization in Central Asia, and Uzbekistan's historical links with the Middle East has been more sharply developed during the past decade in many other publications (for example, Menashri 1998).

Fortunately, İsenbike Togan's second contribution to this volume, "In Search of an Approach to the History of Women in Central Asia," would disperse any doubt that one may have of the validity of the academic postulates of the present volume. In her paper, which can be read as a corrective to previous publications, the author tries to identify those historical dynamics, rather than Islam per se, that have been responsible for fluctuations in the intensity of patriarchal domination of women among various Turkic peoples. In Togan's account, patriarchal domination and private property intensify in Central Asia at a time when political power weakens in the center and tribes re-emerge as powerful autonomous forces. Beginning with the dates of the execution of the last ruling queens (1457 in Herat, 1651 in the Ottoman Empire, 1695 in Eastern Turkistan), Togan sketches comparative perspectives on the reinforcement of patriarchy in various pre-modern or early modern Central Eurasian societies, at times when women were obliged to withdraw from public life. Through the comparative study of the status and public role of women in the "Turkic" world, the author manages an exceptional contribution to a global understanding of Central Asian societies. We may of course regret that the current period, which has been exceptionally interesting for the observation of a permutation - or at least a deep re-definition - of sex roles, has been generally neglected in the present volume. Nonetheless Togan's paper with its appeal for comparative gender history as a key to global history, and to a general dissociation of ideas on Islam and Islamicate societies, is a major contribution to a necessary rupture with the ethnic and religious substantialism which dominates in the discourse of Western media (more than in Western academia) on the "Islamic worlds" in general. In this sense the present volume perfectly fulfils many of the goals that its editor assigned to it.

References

Algar, Hamid

1992 "Shaykh Zaynullah Rasulev: the last great Naqshbandi shaykh of the Volga-Urals region," In: Muslims of Central Asia. Jo-Ann Gross, ed., pp. 112-133. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chadwick, Nora K., and Viktor Zhirmunskii

1969 Oral Epics of Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frank, Andre Gunder

1998 Re-orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Frank, Allen J.

1998 Islamic Historiography and "Bulghar" Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Social, Economic, and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia Series, Vol. 61. Leiden: Brill.

Gosmanov [Usmanov], Mirkasïm

1996 Yabïlmagan kitap: yaki chăchelgăn orlïklar. Kazan: Tatarstan Kitap Năshriyaï.

Menashri, David

1998 Central Asia Meets the Middle East. London: Frank Cass.

Togan, Isenbike

1998 Flexibility and Limitation in Steppe Formations: The Kerait Khanate and Chinggis Khan. Series: Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, v. 15. Leiden: Brill.

Togan, Ahmed Zeki Velidi

1969 Hâtıralar: Türkistan ve diğer Müslüman doğu Türklerinin milli varlık ve kültür mücadeleleri. Istanbul: n.p.

[Contents]

Boris Rumer, ed., Central Asia: A Gathering Storm? Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. xiii + 442 pp., map, index. ISBN 0765608626, $75.95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).

Reviewed by: Michael Kaser, Emeritus Fellow, St Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK, michael.kasereconomics.ox.ac.uk

Since 1996 M. E. Sharpe has been publishing symposia on Central Asia funded by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation; the present volume is the fourth edited by Boris Rumer of the Davis Center at Harvard University. Of his nine chapter authors all but two are native to the region, while the two Russians are closely connected with it; Konstantin Syroezhkin is on the journal Kontinent in Kazakhstan and Stanislav Zhukov is Central Asia specialist in the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations (known by its Russian acronym IMEMO). With about half the text devoted to security and foreign policy and half to the domestic polity and economy, the book takes account of the two external events which thrust Central Asia into world prominence - the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, and the US invasion of Afghanistan the following month. None of the contributors perceived Iraq, the ensuing object of invasion, as relevant to those events: the index has no entry for that country, but 40 on Iran. Saddam Hussein is mentioned only as an ally of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose partisans were the main recipients of weapons for the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan.

But it is of course the US-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of a war against Islamic-inspired terrorism which render the book of topical significance for a wide readership, particularly for its chapters by Evgenii Abdullaev and Bakhtiar Babadzhanov (Babadjanov) on the place of Islam in national politics. Each rejects the facile attributions of "Islamic fundamentalist" and "Wahhabi" revolutionaries; Abdullaev argues that "oppositionist Islam" is generally characteristic of ex-Soviet Central Asia, while Babadzhanov notes the poles of conflict over religious practice between the Wahhabi and Hanafi schools. Abdullaev finds that greater moderation in religious practice is due to Central Asians' embracing what traditionally has been the least theocratic form of Islam - the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, with much Sufi influence. This does not of itself explain a lack of radicalism; the present-day Taliban are Hanafi Sunni. Abdullaev argues that moderation emerged because Central Asian Islam for most of its 13-century history has had to coexist with other powerful societal forces - Zoroastrianism until the 10th century, Manichaeism until the 12th, Nestorianism until the 15th and Russian colonization since the 19th century. Under Russian, and still more under Soviet, rule, "Central Asia increasingly found itself on the periphery of the Muslim world, its religious life consequently becoming more secluded" (p. 248). Contrasting the Turkic tradition in which power was exercised by a secular, often military, state, with the caliphate model for Arab Muslims and the theocratic model for Iranians, Abdullaev leads the reader to the authoritarian presidential regimes of the present. On the theocratic model, a politicized Islam gained control in Iranian-populated Tajikistan (1997), as it had in Iran (1979) and Afghanistan (1992). Abdullaev offers many insights into the ethnic, linguistic, social and economic patchworks of the five republics, but may underestimate the danger constituted by external (mainly Saudi) funding of religious schools while public expenditure on secular education shrivels, as Rumer's own "Overview" stresses in describing the many strands of contemporary pauperization.

Babadzhanov traces the regionally distinctive adaptability of Muslim practice back to the 12th century teachings of a local theologian, Burkhan al-Din al-Marghinani. Closer to today, he describes a divergence which began as Soviet power was consolidated in the 1920s: anti-Bolshevik Basmachi who conducted guerrilla warfare, and those who sought an "Islamic socialism" within a Soviet state (albeit with many "neutrals" in between). Reflecting the latter, republican civil codes contained Islamic provisions as late as 1932, but the anti-religious purges of 1933-53 eliminated both extremes. When Soviet tolerance reemerged - starting, as for Russian Orthodoxy, during the Second World War - the chosen organizational form was the Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Its Mufti in the 1950s, Ziya ad-Din Babakhan, fought Hanafi liberalism to the point that even today some Hanafi ulama "hold that [he] was 'the first official Wahabite'" (p. 306). When this reviewer met Babakhan in 1957 during a UN mission to Tashkent, he was uncompromising in his opposition to religious schools, which, Babadzhanov shows, with other underground networks, have been a major generator for a "purified" Islam and the overthrow of the conformist Muslim establishment.

The authoritarian presidential rule under which the four Turkic republics have fallen since independence leaves no overt space for political parties, Islamist or secular, in a closed polity; in two of them, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, it has imposed a largely closed economy, earning foreign exchange from cotton extracted from farmers at below world prices. Stanislav Zhukov describes the state in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as the predominant economic agent whose fiscal resources shape capital formation toward import substitution. The other two are drawn toward globalization by their export potential, Kazakhstan in oil, gas and mineral-ore extraction, and Kyrgyzstan in gold-mining, but with many attendant risks, which Eshref and Eskender Trushin delineate. They summarize their policy recommendations in ten imperatives, in the execution of which international agencies could play an important counseling role. "Overcome the import-substitution bias" would be supported by World Trade Organization membership, which only Kyrgyzstan has. "Strengthen financial stability" is the nostrum of the International Monetary Fund, but the Turkmen and Uzbek presidents reject Fund conditionality. "Reverse the decline in foreign direct investment" would be helped by the co-finance of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but the latter is deterred by its statutory commitment to work for democracy in tandem with capitalism.

No urgings toward democracy are, however, promoted by the four powers which vie for regional influence. In his opening chapter Boris Rumer analyzes the "provisional equilibrium" that Central Asia reached between China, Russia and the United States in the 1990s, but equilibrium swung towards the United States after September 11, 2001. Sultan Akumbekov shows in a detailed survey of the conflict in Afghanistan that it strengthened the hands not only of both Russia and China in the region, but also of the republics' own rulers, while creating a power vacuum in the majority-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. Rustam Burnashev postulates an earlier "geopolitical vacuum" immediately after the break-up of the USSR, which Russia, in his view mistakenly, declined to fill, being preoccupied with ties to the United States and the European Union. Both he and Konstantin Syroezhkin, discussing "Central Asia between the gravitational poles of Russia and China," cite as a major error the Russian termination of the ruble zone, which forced four of the republics (Tajikistan maintained a ruble link) into separate currencies, although neither of the economics chapters re-examine the 1993 currency shock. In a recent special symposium in Comparative Economic Studies (Winter 2002), which has contributions by former Russian Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Yegor Gaidar, his key Western advisers and the IMF chief of the time, the latter, John Odling-Smee, explains that with the Russian Cabinet then divided on whether to abandon the ruble zone, the IMF could not politically advise one way or the other. The present reviewer, who advocated CIS currency independence during an informal discussion of the issue in the EBRD at the time, concurs that some Russian ministers, with the weight of the European Commission behind them, were keen to maintain a currency union.

The European Union's role among Central Asian states in 1992-93 is explained by Murat Laumulin as derived from "an absolutely erroneous conclusion" that the EU should encourage intraregional integration (p. 237). Since the monetary scission, EU policy has been to deprecate "any kind of anti-Russian alliances" while fostering a "belt of stability" to separate the region from Russia to the north and an unstable Islamic zone to the south, through which Caspian oil can flow to European markets. However, his forecast of "the EU as the new centre of geopolitical force" (p. 224), has since been nullified by the division of the imminently enlarged EU between the UK and Poland on the one side and France and Germany on the other over the UN's exclusion from "regime change" in Iraq in spring 2003. The place of Central Asia in the geopolitical configuration post-Iraq must be the topic of Rumer's next valuable symposium.

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Abstracts

Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941. Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 2001. xvix + 277 pp., maps, glossary, bibliography, index, ISBN 0275972380, $64.95.

Abstracted by: Walter Comins-Richmond, Department of German, Russian and Classical Studies, Occidental College, Los Angeles, Calif., USA, richmondoxy.edu

In To Moscow, Not Mecca, Shoshana Keller provides an encyclopedic account of the systematic destruction of the Central Asian Islamic communities in the Soviet Union. Making extensive use of archival material, Keller outlines both the theoretical and practical aspects of Soviet cooptation and betrayal of both liberal and conservative Islamic groups, providing a full picture of a process that was previously understood only in general terms.

Keller begins with a discussion of the reformist trends within the Central Asian Islamic community on the eve of Soviet conquest. While much of this material has already received attention in other works, Keller uses it to establish the context within which the Soviets began their efforts to destroy Islam. Soviet strategies were carefully planned, based upon the actual trends present upon their rise to power, and Keller's subsequent description of Soviet exploitation of the cultural context in early 20th century Central Asia is intricately tied to this introductory chapter.

Keller's account of the gradual and inexorable assault upon Islam in the 1920s is highly detailed and not only paints a comprehensive picture of this process but also provides a blueprint of duplicity, deception and betrayal that the Soviets used effectively to consolidate their power throughout their realm. Their alliance first with Islamic liberals, then with conservatives, then with secularized Muslims whom they ultimately exterminated, is mapped out precisely and objectively. The multifaceted campaign to impoverish the Islamic communities and destroy their juridical influence is also clearly described.

Keller marks 1928 as the "watershed" year in which the Soviets felt sufficiently powerful to launch a full assault on the Islamic clergy, to whom they previously gave verbal support while carrying out a covert economic war against them. In the chapter "Discussing the Problem," Keller argues that regardless of the actual strength of oppositional nature of the Muslim clergy, the Soviets redefined them as a direct threat to the socialist state and enacted policies designed to eliminate the clergy's ability to function in civil society.

Once direct means of destroying the Islamic clergy were decided upon, the Soviets began to use legal means to impede the private practice of Islamic rituals. Chapters Five, Six and Seven describe the process of crushing Islam not only in the mosques and madrasas but also within the communities of Central Asia. Keller highlights the disorganization and ineptitude of the local groups charged with this campaign, and the central government's belligerence and unreasonable demands, a combination which led to a distorted picture of the actual state of the Central Asian Islamic community in the 1930s.

The Soviets did more damage to Islam in 75 years than the Russian Empire did in more than 400. Keller's chronicle of the "carefully planned and utterly chaotic" campaign against Islam in the 1920s and 1930s provides a clear picture of Soviet anti-Islamic policies that will be of value to political scientists, anthropologists, religious scholars, and cultural historians.

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Rafis Abazov, Historical Dictionary of Kyrgyzstan. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003. xxxiv + 336 pp., maps, tables, glossary, index of names, ISBN 0810848686, $75.

Abstracted by: Jamilya Ukudeeva, Department of Political Science, Cabrillo College, Aptos, Calif., USA, jaukudeecabrillo.edu

This is a much-needed contribution to Kyrgyz scholarship, as this publication is the first reference book on Kyrgyz history in English. It begins with a concise but comprehensive introduction highlighting the important events in Kyrgyz history in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the current debates on Kyrgyz identity and the current rethinking of Kyrgyz history. The book is a well laid out list of approximately 300 entries on prominent figures, traditions, institutions and events that have defined the history of Kyrgyzstan.

To assist the interested researcher in learning more about Kyrgyzstan, the comprehensive up-to-date bibliography of titles, dated from as early as the 19th century, provides an overview of scholarship on Kyrgyzstan in the English, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Kazakh languages. A comprehensive name index is also a useful feature, providing an enormously valuable research resource. Maps, tables, glossary, and a list of abbreviations make the dictionary useful and easy to use.

As a political scientist, the author devotes considerable attention to political aspects of Kyrgyz history by providing thorough up-to-date details on political parties and non-governmental organizations. The dictionary reports the most current economic data and identifies Kyrgyzstan's main regional security issues. Abazov has compiled hard-to-find biographies of many Kyrgyz statesmen from the early 1920s up to and including current appointees. The coverage of contentious issues, such as the origin of the word "Kyrgyz" and the antiquity of the nation are handled with circumspection and care. The calm and cerebral tone of entries on the most controversial issues and individuals (i.e., border delimitation, the Aqsï (Aksy) conflict, and Azïmbek Beknazarov) provide facts rather than heat.

The dictionary needs to be expanded to include more entries, as it currently lacks records on such political figures as Tashtanbek Akmatov and Abdïkerim Sïdïqov (Sydykov). To be sure, they are not major figures but not lesser than many whose biographies are included in the dictionary. Of course, what to include is a question of judgment. Nevertheless, the academic community, the press, and decision-makers in various governments who have frequently seen Kyrgyzstan through the eyes of Moscow and who now have to deal with a new political entity, need the new source of information that this publication provides.

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Conferences and Lecture Series

The Fourth Annual Conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society

Cambridge, Mass., USA, October 2-5, 2003

Reported by CESS Board and Publications Committee members: Laura Adams, Thomas Barfield, Gregory Gleason, Marianne Kamp, Shoshana Keller, Virginia Martin and John Schoeberlein, and compiled by Virginia Martin

With nearly 500 presentations on roughly 80 panels, it would be impossible to summarize the experience of the Fourth Annual Conference of CESS. These numbers in themselves say something. Not long ago, a gathering of so many specialists on Central Eurasia would have been unthinkable. Central Eurasian studies is gaining critical mass with growth and strengthening of the field. CESS has made significant strides in realizing its goals of building scholarly communication and strong standards of scholarship.

While we can continue to set our sights higher for better conferences in the future, it is worth reflecting on the point of development our field of study has reached. In the past, Central Eurasian studies has lacked some of the key institutional features which help to make scholarship strong - most notably here, the opportunity for scholars to hear feedback from others knowledgeable in their subject matter, which leads to higher quality publications and future work. Central Eurasian studies was riven into small enclaves of scholars operating in isolation among themselves or connected only to other fields of study, such as Middle Eastern studies or Slavic studies. In addition, Central Eurasianists were very few, there was a dearth of empirical research on the ground by non-local scholars, and Central Eurasian research made little contribution to broader thematic and theoretical discussions.

The situation for Central Eurasian studies, as represented at this conference, has changed. No more of the old complaints: that topics central to us are viewed by the audience as obscure; that it is necessary to devote half one's presentation to background information which scholars of other parts of the world can assume is basic knowledge. In this year's conference, scholars in all fields of study, from all over the world - with 37 countries represented, including all of the countries of Central Eurasia - presented their work before knowledgeable colleagues, and whether the presentations were strong or weak they had the opportunity to receive to-the-point feedback and exchange ideas and information with others working on related topics.

In going forward, CESS is determined to continue to strengthen its conference by selecting, fostering and enabling better presentations and more useful discussion. We plan to continue to insist on prior submission of papers to ensure more polished work and more useful discussant presentations. We will continue also to encourage pre-organized panels, which provide for thematic coherence and a strong discussion. And we will work to have even better representation of scholarship in the full range of social science and humanities fields and scholars from all parts of the world. We welcome input on how we can achieve better participation and a stronger conference.

In this report we offer some selected summaries of a range of panels to give a taste of the conference. One can get another sense of the conference by visiting the website with the conference program and abstracts of all of the papers presented (see below). Of course we cannot convey the lively discussions that began in many of the panels and continued in the corridors, receptions, and restaurants of Harvard Square. Nor can we give a sense of all the valuable networking that came from this gathering (though presenters' contact information is available on the website, as well). We can only encourage you to come to this year's conference on October 14-17 at Indiana University (see the Call for Papers at the back of this issue), and to assure you that it will be a rich experience!

Panels and papers addressing gender issues were surprisingly numerous. One of those panels, "Central Asian Women: History and Current Issues" (HC-06) stretched from women's history to contemporary activism. Nurten Kiliç-Schubel drew out issues of interpreting women's political roles from pre-modern sources, specifically the Humayun-nama, in her discussion of Gulbadan Begum's shaping of dynastic politics in Afghanistan. Leaping over several centuries, Chiara De Santi reviewed the Women's Division's mixed and conflicting efforts in the unveiling campaign in Central Asia in the 1920s, suggesting that this effort was at least in part the reason for the Women's Division's demise. Marianne Kamp presented recent oral history research exploring how farmers in Uzbekistan understood women's roles in farm labor before and after collectivization. Daria Fane discussed the possible lessons, positive and negative, that the Hujum campaign in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan might hold for reformers wanting to raise women's status in present day Afghanistan. And Sakena Yacoobi brought an activist's perspective on raising Afghan women's status, by discussing successes in opening schools for girls (and boys) in conservative Afghan communities.

Another panel on gender issues, "Gendered Economy in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan: Separate and Unequal" (EC-03), presented new empirical research on women's entrepreneurship and business activity in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. From this panel it was clear that research paradigms on women in Central Asia have shifted. While in the Soviet period Communist objectives for social change defined what would be studied, now international development organizations have set forth new research templates. Social scientists from Central Asia have been working with Women in Development standards to examine the seeming contradictions of women's labor participation in Central Asia. While women have education that equals men's, their advancement in business and entrepreneurial activities is hindered by a number of factors. Liudmila Kim, Dinara Alimdjanova, and Yelena Istileulova presented substantial new survey research examining barriers to women's advancement in workplaces and businesses in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Gulnora Makhmudova also addressed obstacles to women's career development in Uzbekistan, drawing on experiences as a businesswoman and with women's NGOs. Each of the presenters focused on social attitudes towards women's advancement and employment. Istileulova and Makhmudova examined women's success in establishing independent businesses, but noted that woman-owned businesses, in spite of support from micro-lending programs, still constitute no more than 15 percent of all small enterprises in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Alimdjanova and Kim explored the roles of women in a number of fields, management attitudes that prevent their advancement, and noted the anomaly of women's prominence in the expanding field of banking and finance.

The papers on the panel "Local Responses to Global Intervention" (SO-08) all dealt with the ways that ideas originally coming from an outside source are accepted, rejected or adapted by local actors. Catherine Poujol's paper on confronting modernity was highly speculative and covered a vast history of the assimilation of new ideas in Central Asia. Alex McKay's paper on the introduction of biomedicine in Tibet delved into some interesting historical sources and hinted at some of the ways that the English were transformed by their experiences in the empire, as well as why they were bent on transforming their colonial subjects. Nancy Rosenberger's paper gave a preliminary but engaging look into the lives of women NGO leaders in Tajikistan that accounted for material as well as cultural factors, and Soviet as well as international influences. Sada Aksartova's paper on NGOs in Kyrgyzstan contributed a solid empirical case to a growing theoretical literature on how international assistance shapes local contexts and pointed out the dangers of local NGOs losing touch with their actual and intended constituents as they assimilate to the culture of international donor organizations.

The papers on the panel "Reinventing the Self in a Post-Soviet World" (SO-11) took a variety of approaches to the reinvention of the self in relation to larger identities. Gnl Pultar's paper analyzed the diasporic self that was created through Ayaz Ishaki's Idel-Oural. Ishaki's work was suppressed during the Soviet period, but is now being recovered by intellectuals in Tatarstan who wish to reinvent their own ethno-national identity. In Zulaikho Usmanova's provocative paper on Tajikistan the individual is given identity through the public display of national ideology which she argues is an exercise in mythmaking. In Jeff Sahadeo's paper on the researcher's experience of working in the archives in Uzbekistan the self being invented was that of the researcher as well as that of the historical subject. And in Mesut Yeğen's paper, a civic (and ethnic) self is created and recreated through the constitutional definitions of citizenship in recent historical periods in Turkey.

On the panel "Sufism and Shrine Culture in Central Asia" (HC-02) discussant Ali Asani connected the five papers by observing two major themes: the shifting and fluid identities of Sufis and shrines, and the changes over time in Sufi doctrine regarding what it meant to belong to a tariqa. Jo-Ann Gross' stimulating paper, presenting the foundations of new research she is undertaking on understudied Islamic shrines and local circles of Sufi shaykhs in Tajikistan, discussed ways in which Naqshbandi and Hamadani-Kubravi shaykhs of the 14th-15th created alternative organizations in Khuttalan, Chaghaniyan, and Hisar to those centered in the urban milieu of Bukhara. Beatrice Manz, through her research on the Sufi shaykhs Isma'il Sisi in Tabriz and Zayn al-Din Khwafi in Herat, argued that many Sufis studied with numerous shaykhs of different orders in the course of their education and that the links forged and maintained outside the order of their primary affiliation continued to matter throughout their lives. Thus when seeking lines of influence and cooperation we should look at circles of shaykhs in close contact, as well as at the actual tariqa affiliations. Florian Schwarz demonstrated through an analysis of the shrine of Baha' al-Din Naqshband in Qasr-i Arifan that shrine histories are defined and redefined by changing political and intellectual discourses. The shrine of Naqshband took on an identity as a "dynastic shrine" under the early Manghits and eventually was redefined and castigated as a symbol of the oppressive rule of Bukharan emirs in the 20th century. Today its identity is shaped by Uzbekistani nationalist politics. Two final papers examined Sufism in descriptive ways: Habibeh Rahim analyzed the writings of the 11th century Sufi, 'Abdallah al-Ansari, and Vahe Boyajian examined the changing identities of Sufi tariqa in Iranian Baluchistan.

Ethnic identity is often assumed to be more fixed than it really is and may result in a misapprehension of the historical past or contemporary politics. This was an idea underlying the papers on the panel "Nation and Invention among the Mongols and Tajiks" (HC-01). Johan Elverskog ("The Fragmented Mongol Nation in the 16th Century") and Mark Elliot ("The Mongol Subaltern") both argued that Mongols did not see themselves as a single group historically. Rather, divisions among various Mongol groups in the past and the variety of political roles they played in Qing China produced a much more fractured political structure in which ethnicity played a relatively small role. Similarly Michael Hall ("Viewing the Nation through a Fractured Lens") demonstrated that for the contemporary Tajiks of Tajikistan a common ethnic identity did nothing to prevent regional divisions from serving as the basis for a violent civil war, although most analysts of post-Soviet Central Asia took it for granted that it was ethnic division that caused conflict. Eva Fridman ("Rebirth of Shaman Initiations in Dornod Province, Mongolia") and Maduhai Buyandelgeriyn ("The Spirit of My Homeland is Calling Me") both documented through ethnographic studies the importance of ritual connections and ceremonies that produced strong connections to specific places and created a common identity even among nomadic people.

The common theme among the papers on the panel "Cultural and Political Spheres Intersecting" (HC-15) was the study of national identity as depicted in artistic or print media. Zahra Faridany-Akhavan showed slides of a dozen or so paintings and archaeological drawings done by Englishmen in Afghanistan in the early 19th century. These men came for a variety of reasons, from army service to personal curiosity, and made detailed records of Afghanistan's landscape and archaeological heritage, including the first ethnographic map. While these records were mostly made in the service of British imperial expansion, Faridany-Akhavan emphasized their exceptional historical importance, since many of the buildings, landscapes and artifacts depicted have been destroyed in the last 25 years. Ali Igmen discussed the intersections between the life of Chingiz Aitmatov, growing up in a family of strong women, and the role that women play in his fiction. Igmen focused on the tensions in Aitmatov's work between his desires to preserve Kyrgyz tradition and to please Soviet literary officials. Nouchine Yavari d'Hellencourt focused on the problem of conflicting public and private identities that Tajiks developed to survive the Soviet system. Private space - the realm of home, family, and religion - was where Tajiks nurtured a national identity under defensive conditions. That realm was also one of complete patriarchal control over women's lives. Yavari d'Hellencourt argued that because of Soviet pressure, Tajik society "stopped working upon itself," with the result that Tajik women, who gained public rights under the Soviets, experience severe oppression in their private lives that is justified as Tajik tradition. Tsetsenbileg Tseveen discussed current efforts at a self-narration of national identity among the Mongols. National identity is a knotty problem for modern Mongols because they are divided among four ethnic groups living in three different countries. They are also extremely poor, regardless of where they live, and have made attempts to create national images that can attract foreign tourists and aid money (capitalizing on Chinggis Khan, most prominently). The complex and far-from-finished process presented by Tseveen attracted intense discussion that extended well into the lunch period.

"Current Legal Topics in Central Eurasia" (LS-01) was a heavily attended panel session that featured four scholarly papers and commentary by Philip Nichols of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. Artie McConnell presented a paper entitled "Secession, Intervention, and Multilateralism: International Legal Perspectives on the Abkhazian War" in which he argued that while Soviet law may have provided a valid legal basis for Abkhazian independence, international law does not support Abkhazian claims of statehood. Peter Maggs, doyen of American legal studies of the post-Soviet world, contributed a paper entitled "The Civil Codes of Central Eurasia: A Comparison." Maggs' vividly illustrated discussion of the past decade of legal reform pointed out that while the countries of Central Eurasia shared the Soviet legal tradition, they differed widely with respect to the amount of local drafting talent, attitudes toward a market economy, and susceptibility to foreign donor influence. Maggs argued that the civil codes adopted reflected these differences. Ainash Alpeissova, an independent scholar conducting research at Harvard University, analyzed how bilateral tax treaties for the avoidance of double taxation on income and capital have played an important role in Kazakhstan. Eric Sievers provided an analysis of the largest enforcement action in the history of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

For more information on these and other panels, with presenter names and affiliations, paper titles, contact information, and thematic indexes, consult the CESS 2003 conference website at http://cess.fas.harvard.edu/CESS_Conference.html.

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Symposium: Customary Law (Adat Law) between State and Society: Caucasus/Central Asia in Comparison to Other Regions of the Islamic World

Bamberg University, Germany, September 26-28, 2003

Reported by: Michael Kemper, Seminar für Orientalistik der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, Michael.Kemperruhr-uni-bochum.de and Maurus Reinkowski, Visiting Professor, Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des Nahen Orients, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, München, Germany, reinkomgmx.com

The symposium took place between the 26th and 28th of September, 2003, at Bamberg University (Germany) and was financed by the Volkswagen Foundation within the framework of a special Central Asian program, which aims to enhance scholarly exchange between the CIS countries and Germany.

Adat law, which existed prominently in all regions of the former Soviet Union with a predominantly Muslim population, came to be seen in the 20th century as a mere remnant of the past which would finally be superseded by modern Soviet state legislation. Soviet research into adat law therefore was merely understood as no more than the preservation of local folk customs. The resurgence of customary practices since the 1990s is testimony to the dogged persistence of adat law into the present and the need to better understand its functioning both in the past and in contemporary societies.

When convening the symposium, organizers Michael Kemper (Bochum) and Maurus Reinkowski (Bamberg) had four major questions in mind. First, in which respects can adat law in the Caucasus and Central Asia be compared to the customary law of other regions (Northwest Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Albania/Kosovo) of the Islamic world, particularly in the field of mediating institutions and procedures (such as compensation in blood feud cases and fines being paid to the community)? Second, what is the relationship of adat law to other simultaneously functioning legal systems, i.e., colonial, state, and Islamic law? Third, how are legal claims negotiated? What kind of strategies are mobilized and what kind of economic and political interests are pursued by the groups involved? And finally, how can the general resurgence of customary practices in recent decades (in Central Asia and beyond) be explained?

The symposium, during which German and Russian were used alternately, was opened by Keebet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle) with a paper on legal pluralism based on theoretical considerations and many years' fieldwork in Indonesia. Sergei Abashin, Irina Babich, Olga Brusina, Vladimir Bobrovnikov (Moscow), Zhaylagi Kenzhaliev (Almaty) and Timur Aytberov (Makhachkala) delivered papers on various aspects of customary law in Central Asia. Besides Michael Kemper's paper on Daghestan and Ildikó Bellér-Hann's on Xinjiang, all other contributions dealt with regions beyond the Caucasus and Central Asia. In some cases adjacent regions were discussed: for instance, Afghanistan by Christine Nölle-Karimi (Munich), and Iran by Michael Werner (Freiburg) and Bert Fragner (Vienna). All other papers, by Ralf Elger (Bonn), Tilmann Hannemann (Bremen), Christian Mller (Paris), and Christoph Rauch (Bochum), concentrated either on the Arab world or - in the case of Karl Kaser (Graz) and Maurus Reinkowski - on the Balkans.

As expected, the interdisciplinary composition of the symposium (specialists in law, Middle East Studies, sociology of religion, anthropology) raised some questions on the heuristic value of the term "customary law." Ralf Elger, for example, argued that customary law might finally be nothing more than the "refuse bin" of all those elements that would not be acknowledged or ejected by the powerful specialists who are in charge of defining and enacting state law and religious law (Sharia) respectively. Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann pointed to the position still upheld by jurists that law in order to be law has to be promulgated by the state and that therefore law in its real sense was introduced into many societies only with the coming of colonial rule. Whereas all could agree on the judgment that local adat law can be perfectly well defined as law, Zhaylagi Kenzhaliev came rather close to a "statist" position by arguing that Kazakh customary law since the 17th century had been enacted exclusively by the Khan. Iran was identified as a special case since there adat (and the synonymous term urf) had always been conceived as part of state law and seen as far apart from the tribes' customs.

Sergei Abashin contributed an important observation by stressing the ritual and formulaic traits of adat law. He argued that negotiations on dowry - conceived as a central feature of present-day Uzbekistan's customary law - do not imply actual payments, but that they are part of the ritual preparations before the wedding ceremony.

The basic intention of the symposium - to approach the phenomenon of customary law from a comparative perspective - proved successful. For example, the parallels of Albanian customary law to those in the Caucasus and Central Asia turned out to be particularly noteworthy. The comparative approach was especially rewarding for the questions of gender, colonial collections of adat law, and the revival of customary law since the 1990s. Furthermore, numerous papers converged on the issue of arbitration courts and methods of consensual conflict resolution. In various instances it was shown that in societies that have known consensual processes of conflict resolution - with no party being formally defeated - the introduction of democratic electoral systems may have disastrous results in that the losers will be threatened by expulsion or even physical annihilation.

The papers delivered at the symposium and important portions of the intense discussions will be published in German in 2004; a publication of the papers in Russian is also planned. A list of the participants and the program of the conference is available at
http://www.uni-bamberg.de/~ba4ts1/tagungen/gewo03.htm. Additional information on the symposium and the papers to be published can be obtained from Michael Kemper or Maurus Reinkowski.

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The 2003 Middle East and Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, October 16-18, 2003

Reported by: Payam Foroughi and Kristian Alexander, Department of Political Science and Christopher Patterson, Middle East Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, middle-eastutah.edu and central-asiautah.edu

The 2003 Middle East and Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference: Contemporary Affairs and Future Prospects, held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, was sponsored by grants from 12 collegiate, departmental and other entities of the University of Utah, including the university's student government, the US Peace Corps and the Utah Humanities Council. Though a conference on Central Asia was held at the University of Utah in the early 1990s (see review in this issue of the resulting publication, edited by Korkut Ertürk), the 2003 conference with its theme and objective of bringing together scholars from the two area studies of Middle East and Central Asia is a very rare event in this country. The organizers have hope that this conference will be the first of many annual scholarly events with the objective of uniting the scholarship of Middle East and Central Asia in a conference setting.

In addition to nearly 85 paper presentations distributed within 32 theme-specific panels, the conference featured five plenary lectures. Guive Mirfendereski kicked off the conference through a timely presentation titled "Today's Fuzzy Frontiers of International Law." Mirfendereski analyzed the legal framework of the current US foreign policy with respect to the issues of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, spread of hazardous technologies, and terrorism, with special emphasis on the Middle East and the atmosphere of the emerging New World Order in the post-Soviet era. Part of Mirfendereski's argument was that what appears as a new "saber rattling" unilateralism of the United States is not necessarily a new phenomenon. The next plenary was that of Ravil Bukharaev, a historian, journalist and analyst for the BBC, who spoke on the theme of "Islam in Russia: A Personal Journey along the Volga." Bukharaev elaborated on the intricacies of Russian Islam and the mostly tolerant Islamic movements in various regions of the Russian Federation.

Majid Tehranian, the Director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research in Hawaii, presented the third conference plenary titled "From Silk to Silicon: Communication and Globalization." Tehranian discussed the incorporation of post-Soviet Central Asia into the new world economy, with emphasis on the pitfalls and successes of the transition economies. The next day Tehranian presented another talk with the theme of "Pax Americana in the Persian Gulf," emphasizing the dangers of a new American hegemony in the Middle East and its ramifications for Central Asia. The final plenary lecture by Eric Hooglund was on a related theme: "The United States, Central Asia, and Iran: A Security Polygon or Unfateful Axis?" Hooglund gave a succinct overview of the triangular relations of Iran, the United States, and the broad region of Central Asia.

Conference participants came not only from various institutions in the United States, but from as far away as Kyrgyzstan, Israel, Sweden, Moldova, Turkey and Britain. Panels touched on a large variety of issues important to world affairs today. For example, three of the panels were related to Turkey, including its internal and external relations. Among the presenters in the Turkish panels was Hakan Yavuz, author of the recently-published book Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2003), who presented a paper entitled "Political Islam and the Kurdish Question." There were also two panels on Iran titled "Iran: Identity and Internal Affairs" and "Turmoil in US-Iranian Relations." In the latter, Masoud Kazemzadeh, who is working on a book on US-Iran relations, presented a paper titled "The Bush Doctrine and Iran: Alternative Scenarios and Consequences." Another noteworthy presentation was by Seyed Mohammad Mussavi-Rizi of Tufts University who presented a stimulating paper titled "Marriage Made in Heaven: Young Reformists in the Theodemocracy of Iran." In another session, Fred Lawson, the well-known expert on Syria, presented an analytical paper titled "Political Liberalization in the Middle East and Central Asia: A Synthetic Approach." Yet other panels included, inter alia, "Issues of Language and Identity," "Prospects of Conflicts in Central Asia," and "Pressing Security Issues in Eurasia." Some papers in the latter panel were Larissa Ousmanova's "New Security Environment in Central Asia: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization as Case Study" and Odil Ruzaliev's "Is the Unification of Central Asia Possible?" Please view the conference website at http://www.hum.utah.edu/mec/ for a full program.

Modest conference fees covered two meals, one Bosnian and the other Persian, and a free concert "Music and Dance of Persia and Central Asia" organized by Eastern Arts and the Utah Character Dance Ensemble. Among the Central Asian performers was Anwar Yusuf of Washington, D.C., who performed music from East Turkistan. In order to improve on this year's conference, a short survey of open-ended questions was sent to participants. Based on incoming feedback, the conference committee has been pleased to hear of the general success and the atmosphere of intellectual engagement of the 2003 conference. "The panel discussions," to quote Bukharaev, "were deep, thoughtful and, for the most part, of genuine academic value." Participants were especially pleased with the opportunity to network with their peers. For the 2004 conference, among other things the conference committee is planning to strengthen organization, encourage the formation of topic-specific panels by participants, and hold a general farewell session. The conference committee is already planning the 2004 Middle East and Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference, scheduled for September with the likely theme of "Inequality and Transition in the 21st century." The call for papers will go out in February 2004.

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AAASS 2003 Annual Conference

Toronto, Canada, November 20-23, 2003

Reported by: Shoshana Keller, Associate Professor of History, Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., USA, skellerhamilton.edu

The 2003 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) was held November 20-23 in Toronto. Perhaps because of the large size and success of the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference in October, panels and individual papers on Central Eurasian topics were noticeably fewer this year than in the past, and attendance at these panels tended to be low. Approximately 16 panels out of 374 were devoted to Inner Eurasian topics, with a handful of individual papers appearing on other panels as well. The conference schedule did not work in presenters' favor: five of the panels were tucked into either the first or last sessions of the conference, in direct competition with each other and with travel schedules. All but one of the panels and papers focused on modern history and politics (18th century to the present) with the exception of one paper that touched on the 16th century.

Not surprisingly, current preoccupations with military security and Central Asian Islam dominated five of the Inner Eurasian panels. While I did not make it to all of these panels the general opinion seemed to be that Central Asia is not currently producing a serious threat to the United States, although if its internal political and economic situation continues to deteriorate and the US continues to support oppressive governments, that may change. Pauline Jones Luong (Yale University) presented the early stages of a very promising comparative approach to analyzing the potential of Islamist militancy in Central Asia, looking for socio-political patterns across the entire Islamic world rather than focusing on artificially-defined regions in isolation. Her paper generated many questions and discussion about the limitations, as well as the utility, of statistical data. At a panel on demographic change in Central Asia, Cynthia Buckley (University of Texas at Austin) presented recent, sometimes raw, data on the alarming rise of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases in Uzbekistan and Michel Guillot (University of Wisconsin at Madison) made the preliminary suggestion that Russians are dying disproportionately faster than are Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan. Both trends could have a large impact on political and economic conditions in the region.

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) sponsored a roundtable discussion on "Central Asia and the Caucasus: A Multilingual, Multidisciplinary Approach," featuring Seteney Shami of SSRC, Cynthia Buckley, Marianne Kamp (University of Wyoming) and Scott Levi (University of Louisville). For Inner Eurasianists this was the highlight of the conference, with a lively discussion of the field's location between the cracks of Russian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese area studies and the problems and possibilities that this location affords us. While it is clear that we will not get the funding and infrastructure of Russian and East European Studies in the foreseeable future, we can still use that structure for our own benefit as we try to push the borders of traditional "areas" outwards. One difficulty that the AAASS conference illustrated clearly was getting Russianists (or Middle Eastern or Chinese specialists) to listen to us; low attendance at the Inner Eurasian panels was a frustrating problem for everyone. One suggestion was to do more mixed panels with Russian specialists. We also need to keep talking up the importance of the field and to make new connections with the burgeoning field of world history. Cynthia Buckley emphasized that people working on contemporary topics need to learn the language of the World Bank, United Nations, and large international NGOs, since these organizations, not the scholars, are shaping general discourse around Inner Eurasia. In all the mood was hopeful, but there is a great deal of work to do.

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Educational Resources and Developments

Teaching about Central Asia at Yeditepe University, Istanbul

Nadir Devlet, Chairman, Department of History, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey, ndevletyeditepe.edu.tr and Daniel C. Waugh, Professor of History, The University of Washington, Seattle, Wash., USA, dwaughu.washington.edu

Yeditepe University was created as a "foundation university" (i.e., private institution) in 1996 by the Istanbul Education and Culture Foundation. Its enrollment now exceeds 10,000 students, of whom about 30 percent are graduate students. In keeping with its emphasis on preparing students to function in the modern world of business, law, medicine and technology, the university's primary language of instruction is English, although some course work is also in French and German. (The main language of instruction in state universities is Turkish.) Among the divisions within Yeditepe University are a School of Applied Sciences and a School of Vocational Studies.

Two departments within the Faculty of Science and Letters - the Department of Turkish Language and Literature and the Department of History - offer courses pertaining to Central Asia. In contrast to the American system where students often do not choose a major until their third (junior) year and tend to take a broad range of electives, at Yeditepe the major is selected at admission and the curriculum is largely fixed, with most of the course work directly connected to the discipline. Thus all of the students in these two departments receive some exposure to Central Asian history and culture. This is a situation which those in other countries who teach only the occasional Central Asia course, and that rarely a "required" one, can but envy.

Yeditepe's Department of Turkish Language and Literature offers two courses on the historic Turkic languages of Central Asia. The texts studied include the Orkhon inscriptions, Qutadghu Bilig, Diwan lughat al-Turk of Mahmud Kashgari, the Muhabbatnama, Babur's memoirs, and writings by Alisher Navoi. While the historic languages of Central Asia are offered, the department's focus has shifted to the study of modern Turkish language and literature, which is important preparation for the study of other Turkic languages.

The History Department's program understandably includes a heavy emphasis on the history of Turkey and its immediate neighbors, of the Turkic peoples and of the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds. Students take either six or seven courses each semester. No fewer than seven of these semester courses deal with Ottoman history and another four required semester courses (offered within the History Department) are to teach students how to read Ottoman texts. Russian/Soviet history receives a fair amount of attention, both in a separate course and as the context for the study of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Among the electives are courses on the history of the Balkans and history of the Caucasus. There are also required courses on historical methodology. Students may elect to do a double major. Most courses have small enrollments, which provides plenty of direct contact with the instructor in a seminar setting.

In their freshman year students take a two-semester sequence on the history of the Turkic peoples in the pre-Islamic period. This provides some of the background for Professor Devlet's two-semester course on Central Asia from Chinggis Khan to the 20th century, required of all history majors in their second year.

Professor Devlet's course begins with several sessions on geography, emphasizing the features of the natural environment which have affected patterns of human habitation. This section of the course also ensures that students have a basic acquaintance with important places and the locations and boundaries of political entities, both historic and modern. The knowledge acquired is reinforced by having students draw their own maps of the region and then take an in-class map quiz. This considerable emphasis on geography addresses the issue that too many students may never previously have looked seriously at a map of Central Asia and may not even know the locations of the contemporary Central Asian states. Where possible, videos and other visual aids are used to enhance the course and occasionally visitors from the region meet with the students.

Readings for this survey course and for Professor Devlet's senior year course on the Contemporary Turkic World are drawn from scholarship in English and in Turkish. Two of his own books are among the required readings. One is an English-language textbook survey, Empires in Eurasia from Chingiz Khan to the 20th Century, and the other a monograph, Rusya Türklerinin Milli Mücadele Tarihi (1905-1917) [The History of the National Struggle of the Turks of Russia (1905-1917)].[1] For the survey course students read Grousset's Empire of the Steppes, Allworth on the Uzbeks, Olcott on the Kazakhs, and Hopkirk's Great Game. For the upper division course on the contemporary Turkic world, the readings include Bennigsen and Wimbush, Rywkin, Fisher on the Crimean Tatars, and Rorlich on the Volga Tatars. Other reading is drawn from a broad range of literature in Turkish. Students may read in Turkish their William of Rubruck and such classics of scholarship as Spuler's study of the Ilkhanids, Vladimirtsov's interpretation of Mongol "feudalism," and Togan's Bugünkü Türkili Türkistan ve yakın tarihi. There is also a very extensive Turkish-language literature on various Turkic peoples of Central Asia, for example: Müstecib Ülküsal on the Crimean Tatars, Muzaffer Ürekli on the specific topic of Ottoman-Crimean relations, and Erkin Alptekin on the Uyghurs. The issue of East Turkistan receives attention in, among other sources, İsa Yusuf Alptekin's Doğu Türkistan Davası [The Case of East Turkistan]. Several of the reading assignments concern the development of national identities, ranging from the period of the late Tsarist empire down to the post-Soviet era. The course on the contemporary Turkic world also draws upon recent publications dealing with relations between Turkey and the countries of Central Asia, e.g., Devlet's "Turkic World and Turkey (Perspectives - Realities)."

As Professor Devlet emphasizes, the substantial presence of Central Asia-related courses in the curriculum does not necessarily indicate a high level of demand for the subject. He is the only faculty member in History with a real specialization in the region, even though two of his colleagues teaching international relations have some knowledge of the area and incorporate related material in their courses. Although the students at Yeditepe take the required courses, most are less interested in studying Central Asia than they are in learning about the European Union, presumably in part because of their perception that Turkey's economic future lies there. That said, there are a good many Turkish businessmen active in Central Asia and the Russian Federation. Turkish businesses operating in Central Asia often prefer to hire those who come from that region because of their knowledge of both the local languages and Russian. Such employees can often be found among the substantial number of Central Asian students studying today in Turkish universities.

While Yeditepe University does not have exchange programs with Central Asian countries, some of the state universities do offer opportunities for both faculty and students to study there. Such programs are often coordinated and supported by the Turkish Higher Education Organization and in some cases by private firms which fund Turkish schools in Central Asia and send teachers there. Most of those teachers attend the local universities and learn the local language. There are also Turkish universities in Kazakhstan and in Kyrgyzstan. Other opportunities for Turks to study in Central Asia are supported by the TIKA (Türk İşbirliği ve Kalkınma İdaresi Başkanlığı) program of the Prime Minister's office, which undertakes various development projects.

More information on the program and Yeditepe University can be found at http://www.yeditepe.edu.tr/7tepe/

Note

[1] Full bibliographic information on all titles assigned in the course "Contemporary Turkic World" can be found in the course's syllabus at http://cesww.fas.harvard.edu/CESWW_syllabi.html.

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CESR Central Eurasian Studies Review

Contents of this issue

Perspectives

Research Reports and Briefs

Reviews and Abstracts

Conferences and Lecture Series

Educational Resources and Developments

Editors - CESR Vol. 3 No. 1

Perspectives

The Complexity of Central Eurasia

Mysterious Eurasia: Thoughts in Response to Dr. Schoeberlein

The Distinctive Factors of Central Eurasia: A Response to Professor Gleason

Towards Rethinking Geopolitics

The Specific and the General in Economic Policy Analysis and Advice

References

Research Reports and Briefs

State Decline in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

References

Notes

Towards a Connection between Religion and Nationality in Central Asia

The Titular Nationality-Islam Connection

The Russian-Orthodox Connection

Islam and Orthodoxy: Between Cohabitation and Alliance

References

Note

The Role of the Pilgrimage in Relations between Uzbekistan and the Uzbek Community of Saudi Arabia

Reasons for Exile: New Political and Economic Order

Evolution of Uzbek Identity in Saudi Arabia

References

Reviews and Abstracts

Reviews

References

References

Abstracts

Conferences and Lecture Series

The Fourth Annual Conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society

Symposium: Customary Law (Adat Law) between State and Society: Caucasus/Central Asia in Comparison to Other Regions of the Islamic World

The 2003 Middle East and Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference

AAASS 2003 Annual Conference

Educational Resources and Developments

Teaching about Central Asia at Yeditepe University, Istanbul

Note

Issues of CESR

CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review