The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan
256
The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan
256eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan’s national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan’s ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan’s independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822392538 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2010 |
| Series: | Politics, History, and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Laura L. Adams is a lecturer on sociology and co-director of the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus at Harvard University.
Read an Excerpt
THE SPECTACULAR STATE
Culture and National Identity in UzbekistanBy Laura L. Adams
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4651-7
Chapter One
MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN UZBEKISTAN
Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history.... Populations and customs have changed several times; the name, the site, and the objects hardest to break remain. Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.... A given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them each time, then try to assemble them. Perhaps Clarice has always been only a confusion of chipped gimcracks, ill-assorted, obsolete.
| Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities |
In January of 1990, as a senior at Macalester College, I did a research project on the urban geography of Russian colonial cities in Central Asia. I was fascinated by the twisty streets of Tashkent and Samarkand's "old cities" that wove around the marketplaces and public squares. Equally striking was the way the nineteenth-century Russian city abruptly confronted the organic tangles of the old city with its radial design, capping the unruly indigenous head with an orderly imperial crown. Further out, in the parts of the city developed during the Soviet era, the linear aesthetic was carried to its logical extreme in the rectangular grid pattern of superblocks subdivided by narrow paths that would barely accommodate a single vehicle. Since this was back in the days of rudimentary word processing, I carefully pasted pictures by hand to the essay's pages: maps of Tashkent and Samarkand, and photocopies of the kinds of buildings to be found in each section of the city: adobe buildings with interior courtyards in the old city, Italianate candy-colored buildings in the Tsarist city center, and monolithic concrete apartment blocks in the contemporary Soviet developments.
Five years later, when I finally arrived for my first visit to Tashkent, my expectations of the city were shaped by these earlier images. I had become infatuated with pictures of the blue-domed buildings and colorful marketplaces of the old city, but I was equally enamored of the stark Soviet aesthetic, exemplified by the apartment buildings and grocery stores I had encountered several years before in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since declaring independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Uzbekistan had entered yet another new era, represented to me in my first tour of the city by the construction of a new type of building: the glass skyscraper, future home to banks and hotels. What was it like to live in this place, with its juxtaposition of cultures, histories, and ideologies? What was it like to be so far from Moscow and yet to have shared with Russians (and with Armenians and Yakuts, for that matter) a self-concept as Soviet? What was it like to come of age in the stability and security of the Brezhnev era, only to find yourself reaching mid-life in the wild uncertainty of independence and in a period of rapid globalization?
The answers to some of these questions came from my first host in 1995, a woman several years my senior named Saida. Saida opa grew up in a hovli, an adobe courtyard-style house, in a village outside the city of Namangan. As a young adult, she lived in Namangan and rose through the ranks of the local Communist Party apparatus. After independence, her facility with English allowed her to find a job in Tashkent, working for a foreign nongovernmental organization (NGO). Saida opa accepted and integrated the various parts of her life, from the obligations she felt toward her elderly parents back home to the demands of being a single professional woman in the city; from her ardent Communist past to her competence at aiding the progress of democracy in the post-Soviet era. She read mystery novels in English in her free time, spoke Russian at work, and communicated with her family in Uzbek. She struggled, of course, with the normal hassles of everyday life in a disintegrating economy and corrupt bureaucracy, and she agonized over being single and childless late in her thirties, but her conflicts were far from exotic. Saida opa was by no means a typical Uzbek woman, yet her experiences gave me insight into some of the key issues that other Uzbeks struggle with in crafting a collective identity: mixing traditional lifestyles with Soviet education and ideology, and then retooling to adapt to the realities of a post-Soviet jumble of nationalism, Islam, market socialism, and authoritarianism.
One way this politics of culture is negotiated by the Uzbek government is through the reinterpretation of history, but political and cultural elites working on the official nation-building project are limited by what had been commonly understood as historical facts during the Soviet period, by the national borders established in 1924, and by what "significant others" in the world community will accept, ignore, or reject. The state was also limited by the exigencies of the present, such as the perceived need to create new national heroes, the political requirement that explorations of Soviet atrocities not taint anyone presently in power, and the common sense that Uzbeks and Tajiks were two entirely different ethnic groups rather than a revival of the multiethnic category of Sarts (a name that designated the inhabitants of urban oases) that existed in pre-Soviet times.
The evidence and arguments in the rest of this book deal with the form, content, and organization of holiday concerts in particular, while this chapter focuses more broadly on the complexities of the contemporary politics of culture in Uzbekistan. In order to understand the contemporary situation, this chapter first provides a brief overview of the history of Uzbekistan. However, as a sociologist, I am interested less in history as an attempt to present a narrative that reflects an actual past than in the past as experienced in contemporary social memory. Studies of social memory give us a valuable way to investigate how collective identity is shaped by presentist interpretations of the past. This method recognizes that memory is not something that takes place inside one's head, but rather is a fundamentally discursive act and, as such, requires references to connect to a shared system of ideas. Every statement about personal or societal history must make sense both in terms of what are agreed upon "facts" as well as within the framework of how people make sense of their world.
Just as Saida opa gave me valuable insights into Uzbekistan even though she was not a typical Uzbek woman, my perspective on culture and national identity in Uzbekistan also comes from a particular social location. Although studies of social memory do a brilliant job of deconstructing both history and collective identity, many lack reflexivity on the part of the author about her own role in interpreting the local interpretations of the past. This becomes especially problematic when an outsider is reading a different story in the landscape than would a native. The collective identity that I present in this chapter is inextricable from my own background and interpretation. For example, the fact that I grew up in the 1970s with liberal, egalitarian values that made me question both the cold war anti-Soviet stereotypes and the Soviet stereotypes about "exotic" Uzbekistan. Therefore, my interpretation of Uzbekistan's collective memory needs to be seen as just that: my interpretation, shaped by my own knowledge and perspectives. Unlike those who take a more ethnographic approach to studying social memory, I do not claim that my analysis in this chapter presents the worldview of my informants. The story I tell emerges from a dialogue with people and places in Uzbekistan, but it is still very much my own story, crafted for my audience of Western readers, and not necessarily the one a native would tell.
A Question of Identity
As Italo Calvino demonstrated so poignantly in the epigraph to this chapter, cities tell stories. Social memory, embodied in the ill-assorted artifacts of urban landscapes, museums, and recorded histories, is always a bricolage with more stories to tell than its official interpretation. While history can be recorded and lie undiscovered for centuries, collective memories have to be experienced to exist. Memory can be renewed in many ways: through books, storytelling, recollection, or strolling through a city, but it is always ephemeral, always open to interpretation and vulnerable to distortion.
Questions of social memory are highly charged because although both individual and collective memories are subject to inevitable distortions, we rely on them as if they were objective. Though memories are malleable like clay, we treat them as if they were etched in stone. Memories in the distant past fade: details are lost, new perspective are gained, and old stories are recast into more contemporary forms. Selective remembering and forgetting takes place in a society when present interests determine which events or persons are publicly commemorated and which are collectively ignored. Other cases of remembering and forgetting are shaped, not by conscious manipulation, but by the conventions of memory, the common features of national narratives such as the battle for independence and victories in international sporting events. Triumphs are more often recalled than failures, though a failure of the past may be recast as a triumph of the present. In collective memory, though outright fabrication will fail to convince most people, often the bald-faced truth is also unwelcome, especially when it threatens the very myths that hold a community together. A significant collective memory (such as the Vietnam War, in the case of the United States) can unite a society, but it can also lay out the society's divisions, both past and present, even as other aspects are in the process of being lost from collective memory.
I weave together my exploration of national identity in this section with examples of how social memory is written in the cityscape of Tashkent. Tashkent is a city of more than 2 million, the most populous of the former Soviet Union's Central Asian republics. The features of Tashkent's urban landscape dramatize the city as a point of cultural, temporal, and spatial convergence. During the 1990s, the geographical and symbolic center of Tashkent's urban landscape was Mustaqillik Maydoni, Independence (formerly Lenin) Plaza, an enormous public space in central Tashkent that used to have a kilometer-long parade alley, designed for the military parades of the Soviet era (and this space will feature prominently in later chapters as it is the location of the Independence Day concert). On the plaza were beautiful fountains, walking paths along the Anhor River, and several important buildings, including the building housing the offices of cabinet ministers. Standing in the middle of the plaza, looking to the east on a very clear day, one could see stunning, snow-capped peaks of the Tien Shan Mountains. Turning toward the west, there was a large, red stone pedestal upon which a statue of Lenin used to stand. After the statue was taken down and unceremoniously dumped in a nearby vacant lot, a (supposedly temporary) monument was put in its place. The monument was a golden globe with a relief outline of Uzbekistan that was so outsized, it took up a good part of the globe's face.
Looking around the plaza, some of Tashkent's most important landmarks were visible, including the stadium of the Pakhtakor soccer team. To the north was the Turkiston Theater, a performing arts venue designed in the style characteristic of Tashkent buildings of the 1970s and 1980s: blocky but stately, using white stone or concrete, with ornamentation such as blue tile, mosaics, or screen work that evokes Oriental themes. There was also a movie theater on the plaza, with a sign on its roof commemorating the date of Independence: 1 September 1991. On top of the building was one of the first slogans of Islam Karimov, the first and (so far) only president of Uzbekistan, though the part of the sign attributing the quote to Karimov himself was removed between 1995 and 1996. The slogan was "O'zbekiston Kelajagi Buyuk Davlat": in the future, Uzbekistan will be a great state. The plaza also looked to the past in its memorial of the Second World War that was remodeled for the twenty-first century, going from a Soviet-style minimalist design to a more elaborate one that reflected both Islamic architecture and the contemporary international trend of remembering the dead by name.
Mustaqillik Maydoni was filled with the symbols of modern nationhood. When viewed in the context of the rest of central Tashkent, including the Eski Juva, the old city district, the urban landscape narrated a story of national identity as it was conceived by government officials in the 1990s. While many citizens of Uzbekistan lived their lives in a rural landscape that told a very different story of Uzbek identity, Tashkent's story told of a glorious history and the hope of a glorious, or at least prosperous, future. However, often the government seemed less concerned with the material prosperity of the country than with its international cachet, resulting in a Potemkin-village effect when a visitor passed through a spectacular mosaic archway only to confront litter on a crumbling marble staircase. The government was also interested in the spiritual renewal of the people, but they wanted that renewal to resonate with universal human values and internationally accepted models of secular nationalism. The synthesis of Uzbek and international culture was an elusive answer to the puzzle of identity faced by Uzbeks and other groups experiencing rapid social change: where do we come from and where are we going?
To answer the question "where do we come from?," the government sanctioned the exploration of the history and traditions of the people who had lived in the territory of Uzbekistan (many of whom were not ethnic Uzbeks). To answer the question "where are we going?," the government had to grapple with the role of tradition in the modern world, with its desire to become a "normal" nation, and with the legacies of Soviet institutions. Before I embarked on my field research, I expected cultural and political elites to be preoccupied with a search for authenticity, the elimination of Soviet themes and symbols that didn't "make sense" to Uzbeks, and a recovery of the "true" Uzbek culture that had been repressed or neglected by the Soviet authorities. What I found instead was less a concern for authenticity than an interest in normalcy. In the 1990s, many Uzbeks in Tashkent did not seem to feel strongly that Soviet culture had been difficult to make sense of or had been somehow incompatible with Uzbek culture. They did, however, feel that Uzbek culture was more normal than Soviet culture, that certain Soviet impositions such as Russophilia and the prohibition of private markets were deviant, and that Uzbek culture on its own was much more compatible with global norms than Soviet culture had been. At the same time, they did not hesitate to use dialectical materialist theory to explain why Uzbek culture was "advanced," and they gave credit to the Soviet system for helping Uzbek culture become more normal, through modernization and so on.
As the Karimov regime consolidated its power in 1992, the particular answers to the question "where do we come from?" were narrowed down to a select few and only gradually expanded over the next ten years. What is surprising is the extent to which the historiography of post-Soviet Uzbekistan was firmly rooted in what Olivier Roy calls the "Soviet conceptual matrix," which mapped out the great figures and events of Soviet Uzbekistan's past. The job of the new historiography was simply to reverse the negative evaluations of certain figures deemed by Soviet ideology to be feudal tyrants (such as Amir Timur) or so-called bourgeois nationalists (such as the Jadid writers Cholpon and Fitrat). Contemporary historiography in Uzbekistan shares with its Soviet predecessor the desire "to obliterate the [pre-Soviet] Turkestani identity in favor of an Uzbek ethnic identity, but with the added ingredient of Uzbekistan's desire to pose as a legitimate rallying-point in Central Asia." These official tropes of social memory gave a clear picture of what the government's answers were to the questions of who they were and where they hoped they were going.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SPECTACULAR STATE by Laura L. Adams Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. The Politics of Culture in Uzbekistan 1991–2002
1. Mapping the Landscape of National Identity in Uzbekistan
2. Cultural Form: Globalization and the Spectacular State
3. Cultural Content and Postcolonial Civic Nationalism
4. Culture Production and Participation in the Spectacular State
Conclusion. Spectacle and the Ideology of National Independence
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
“Better than anyone else I have read on Central Asia, Laura L. Adams takes seriously what the local people say, and she uses her sociological background to explain how it is that they come to their conclusions. Yet The Spectacular State is not only a major sociological account of the region; it is also a significant contribution to broader social scientific discourses about the state and culture.”
“In this finely nuanced study, Laura L. Adams presents the first serious analysis of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Focusing on the elaborate spectacles that mark Navro’z, the spring holiday, and Independence Day, Adams shows how the Soviet legacy, global norms, and state interests intersect to shape the ideology of national independence. With its sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, The Spectacular State makes an important, major contribution to postsocialist and postcolonial studies.”