NOTE: This post gets pretty thick, and doesn't really tell much of interest about my trip. Feel free to skip it, and otherwise read at the risk of the better use of your time.
For the weekend, I went with my co-worker Eleanora to visit her home village and the family she still has living there. I will post again shortly with a narrative (and photos) from the weekend, but first, a few thoughts as my recent reading, travels, and ample thinking time have allowed.
Like virtually everyone I've met in Bishkek, regardless of age, Eleanora was born in a village, grew up mostly in a town, and now lives with the rest of her immediate family in Bishkek (The City). To these three strata (village/town/city) should be added the truly-rural, which consists more of yurt-dwelling ranchers than the independent homesteaders of the American equivalent. From what I could see on my drive across the North of Kyrgyzstan, this last group, for which the term "traditional" is equally useful and misleading, is a pretty small percentage. It may be different in the South, but from what I've seen, it seems that the majority populace live in villages and small towns, with the larger remainder in Bishkek (1 million of total 5 million national pop.), and the smallest sliver in yurts.
But these categories, useful as they are for the moment, are not absolute: One family may have a daughter in Bishkek and a son in a yurt; or even some families may live part of the year in a Yurt, then part in a town/village. Regardless, the definitional boundaries are crossed regularly, and while some amenities (toilets, for ex) do not transition, most (ex: electricity, TV, Nike) do. So the yurt family watches the same TV programs as a Bishkek family, whether via broadcast, or satellite TV (admittedly more common in villages than yurts).
Further, since most of the Bishkek crowd are still closely linked to the countryside (whether semi-urban, semi-rural, or full-rural), many of the "cultural" norms are - if not identical, at least easily negotiated. The hipster urbanite with spiked hair and fashionably-ripped jeans will still stop off at a roadside Yurt for a fresh bottle of traditional kumis when traveling through the country side.
It is very difficult for me to think of a comparison based on my experience in travels elsewhere, but I think that's more due to the specifics of my previous itinerary rather than a comment on the uniqueness of the Kyrgyz situation. The relationship is like nothing I found in Europe, or most of the US. In these places, the young people still watch the same TV, and often dress more similarly than they might admit, but a certain cultural cache divides them. City kids are devoid of country experience (shooting, riding, working heavy machinery, etc), while I'm not sure how strongly the gap goes the otherway. The stereotypes of the extreme exist (redneck vs. city slicker), as I think they do in Kyrgyzstan, but in America some people seem to actually personify these stereotypes, while in Kyrgyzstan they are only an amalgam of the worst-possible traits in a population that mixes urban/rural characteristics regularly.
I'm no American studies expert, so I apologize if this is too-naive. My point is that in Kyrgyzstan, it is nothing like how I see America's bifurcated society.
"Tradition" is the all-emcompassing term under which this unity of disparate elements is fused. Few people in Bishkek are "native Bishkekers," and further, no one is more than 2 or 3 generations removed from the villages. More than that, the entire country is no more than 5-6 generations removed from an 18th-19th century version of nomadic yurt dwelling. Please don't misread - the life of a yurt dweller in the 19th century was NOT the same as that of a similar person from the 17th, 13th century, or 9th century. The "traditional" lifestyle is not eternally isolated in time, despite some (soviet) efforts to suggest otherwise.
What it gets me thinking about, honestly, is what America would be like today if we hadn't engineered the genocide of Native Americans. If there was a large body of the population that, when given the choice of "modern" / "Western" lifestyle, chose to adopt certain elements, technologies, ideologies, and reject others. It's hard for me to imagine, because while "education" about Native Americans was a big part of my childhood in Oklahoma, the entire discourse was framed on 2 pillars I now hold to be false: 1) "Indians" only existed in history books or living history museums, and 2) the "Indian" lifestyle, being "traditional," was unchanging over time.
The first was patently false, and should have been all the more obvious living in Oklahoma, while the second was ridiculous given the dual narrative of "primitive arrowheads" and the existing photography, universally showing native americans in full regalia (and often war paint) with rifles.
In looking at Kyrgyzstan, and only a small part of it, and only through the limited lense of my own social awareness, it seems to me that a great many of the methods by which we (here being Western society in general, and unfortunately as often Western policymakers or even academics) dismiss groups different than ourselves by relegating them to the classification of "traditional," and therefore timeless, incapable of improvement except through "modernization" (read, "westernization"), and usually only capable of that change w/ Western assistance.
For those not familiar with this line of reasoning, I am stealing quite liberally from a very important critique of Western scholarship by Edward Said, first published in 1978, and called Orientalism. It's a thick read, but if you've ever wondered how an Oxford (or Harvard, or Columbia - I'm not playing favorites)-educated Westerner can come to the point of speaking with authority about "The Arab mind," or just "the Arabs," as if an entire and horribly ill-defined group (Despite its common use, "Arab" is not a linguistic, racial, ethnic or religious category. It's some combination of these which changes to suit the needs of the person using it. see Darfur, for evidence) consisting of millions of unique individuals could have their personalities described through scholarly analysis of a classic literature they may or may not have ever read, or the political choices of an empowered (thus, by definition of having power in the colonized world, pro-Western) elite.
I'm beginning to ramble, and getting my threads quite crossed. Let me leave you with a few things to think about, and see if I can get some bites on the comments thread for a change.
1) Anytime you hear keywords like "The Arabs," (really, "The (anygroup)"), "Development," "Modernization," or "Traditional," keep in mind that these are not factual descriptions, but rather subjective, and usually judgmental ones, employed for a purpose that goes beyond description and involves intentionality. "Development," for example, implies first that one society or group of people is "less advanced" than another, second, that the "less advanced" society needs to improve, and third, that this can only happen through imitation of, or direct involvement by, the "more advanced" society.
2) It's hard to put Kyrgyz and other societies that maintain pre-Western social elements into comparison with America. It's easy for this difficulty to reinforce how much "more advanced" the US and the West generally is. Let's allow that if the Europeans (and even the freedom/human rights-loving US of A) hadn't massacred (there is no other word appropriate) an entire indigenous population, we would have a much better connection with the rest of the world. The resulting gap in understanding has more to do with a brutal and voluntary extermination of the autochthynous connection to North and South America than it does to an unprecedented leap in social/technological/cultural progress.
3) Anyone who tries to "deal" with the world must pursue one of 2 things: to understand the world we live in and the various people who inhabit it, or to control it for our own benefit. Those of us who self-righteously place ourselves in the former category are nonetheless all-too-often instruments of the latter, and the indirect nature of the resulting exploitation should probably not leave our consciences as clean as we allow it to.
4) If might does not make right (whether in schoolyard bullying or genocide), then the West has been wrong quite a lot, which problematizes its critique of others. Even drawing a line in history and declaring that, from this point forward, ethics should dictate behavior, is a problem when claims of exceptionalism are made anytime local rights run against US policy or interests (the catalogue of US-funded coups, etc. from the 1940s-1980s is just the most flagrant example. As more documents become available, you can be sure the same patterns will emerge, especially regarding the US "Salvation" of Iraq).
That covers a lot of ground.
And is a pretty bad blog entry.
But it's written (as if in stone), so rather than spending time trying to re-write over and over, I'll just move ahead to writing something more interesting and less tedious for all you wonderfully patient readers.
I do feel as though a slight weight is lifted, so thanks for putting up with my off-loading.
Weber (on the lamb)
1 comment:
The summer my Kyrgyz father-in-law spent with us, he watched (not speaking any English) Into the West - a miniseries that shows how the west was "settled." His commentary was "Look, they did it to the American Indians, too." He felt an incredible link with the American Indians and their plight and definitely paralleled it with the history of the Kyrgyz under the Soviets. Thanks for the blog, it has been interesting reading.
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