Central Asian Ethnicity Compared: Evaluating the Contemporary Social Salience of Uzbek Identity in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
In this article, I utilise a contextual understanding of ethnicity and unique data to demonstrate that the ethnic Uzbek identity category is both widely available and frequently a useful means of making sense of the world in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. While Uzbek ethnicity is generally salient in both states, the context in which it becomes so varies across space. In particular, there are significant urban–rural distinctions that affect when Uzbek ethnicity is utilised to interpret the world. In addition, compared to others, rural Tajikistani Uzbeks perceive that the boundary between Uzbeks and the titular groups is particularly permeable.
Hierarchies of trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: The case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan
This article focuses on the trading trajectory of an Uzbek family of merchants from Tajikistan. This family runs businesses in both Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, and China’s famous international trading city: Yiwu. The analysis is centred on the accounts placed by Tajikistan’s Uzbek merchants about their historically sustained experience, often across several generations, in trading activities. These merchants’ claims of belonging to a ‘historical’ trading community rather than being ‘newcomers’ to long-distance commerce are articulated in relation to notions of ‘hierarchies of trade’ as they evolve in a twofold relational model linking Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood and Dushanbe. I suggest that the forms of conviviality enacted in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood need to be understood in terms of the historical, multinational and transregional contacts that have occurred within the spaces of the former Soviet Union, as well as along the China-Russia and China-Central Asian borders. Equally, the hierarchies of trade of Uzbek merchants from Tajikistan in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood cut-across markers of identity that juxtapose the roles of Tajik and Uzbek communities in Tajikistan’s contemporary politics and economics.
Language and Education in Post‐Soviet Kazakhstan: Kazakh‐Medium Instruction in Urban Schools
From the decline of korenizatsiia (indigenization) in the 1930s until the late 1980s, the Communist party (CPSU) actively promoted the Russian language as a common bond uniting the multiethnic "Soviet people." As Isabelle Kreindler describes, the party supported Russian not only as a common lingua franca, but also as a key component of a common Soviet cultural foundation.' In these capacities, Russian was assigned a central role in fostering rapprochement (sblizhenie) of the many nationalities inhabiting the USSR. According to official Soviet ideology, linguistic and other differences among nationalities in the USSR would progressively weaken, and eventually lead to their merger (sliianie). The political foundation for Soviet policies of sblizhenie and sliianie disappeared with the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. In the wake of this collapse, the countries which emerged-many with no histories as independent states-faced the urgent task of developing a basis for common identity of their citizens. Among other things, this meant articulation of policies relevant to transmitting cultures of the titular and other nationalities through the educational system. A critical component of this was determining the respective roles in the schools of the state language and Russian, as well as of other local minority tongues. In all of the USSR's non-Russian former republics, new policies fostered a relative decline of Russian and a rise of the titular state language. This article examines an aspect of the changing language balance in Kazakhstan, the Soviet republic which upon independence had the smallest proportion of titular nationality population. The study will focus on the language shift (from Russian to Kazakh) as medium of primary and secondary school education in the very late Soviet period and the years since independence. As in other former republics, the trends in language of instruction reflect not only the directives of the leadership of the emerging state but also