From clan narratives to clan politics

Abstract

This essay focuses on clan narratives as cultural tools in a particular sociocultural setting where mass literacy meets mass media. It shows how the interactions between different producers of clan narratives – the news media, the academic establishment and an intellectualist movement for the recovery of Kyrgyz history and culture – have resulted in a profound reshaping of the content of clan genealogies, of the claims of their compilers and, more significantly, of the ways various social actors relate to clan identities. Based on these analyses, it is argued that social representations and social practices related to genealogy and clans have undergone significant changes over the last 15 years, and that the production and consumption of clan narratives have played a crucial role in this transformation.

Keywords:

• clan
• identity
• narrative
• genealogy
• Kyrgyzstan

Acknowledgements

A prior version of this essay was presented at the weekly seminar of Department II (‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’), Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. I am grateful to all the participants in the seminar for their helpful comments and questions. The research on which the essay is based was supported by a VolkswagenStiftung grant.

Notes

Descent lines are patrilineal and they define more or less extended unilineal kinship groups referred to as descent groups in this essay. Genealogical lines are used in exactly the same way as descent lines, but they circumscribe larger categories of patrilineally related persons. In earlier publications I held to the use of ‘genealogical lines’ instead of ‘clans’, but the developments described in this essay make it possible to refer to these categories as ‘clans’.

Jusupov (1993 − 95) and Jusupov et al. (1994).

Clan voting refers to an electoral process in which clan members tend to vote for candidates who are members of the same clan, regardless of whether the elections are local, parliamentary or presidential.

Such as ‘language, various systems for counting, mnemonic techniques, algebraic symbol systems, works of art, writing, schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings, all sorts of conventional signs; and so on’ (Vygotski 1981 cited Wertsch [2000, pp. 511-512]).

Again in the examples of Wertsch, anything from knotted ropes through records and texts to Amazon and Google today.

‘Unequal’ stands here for the fact that some social actors are more knowledgeable than others and that, in general, the volume of knowledge stocked in cultural tools is greater than the volume of knowledge of individual or collective social actors.

None of these was published but they were preserved, in some cases in ‘lockers’, as I refer to the locked filing cabinets in the manuscript department of the Academy of Sciences. The first genealogical narratives made public after independence were retrieved from these collections (Jusupov et al. 1994).

As exemplified in the works of the Soviet ethnographers S. M. Abramzon (1960) and Ia. R. Vinnikov (1960).

The article appeared in the 24 December 1989 edition of the newspaper Kyrgyz madaniyat [Kyrgyz culture].

The neologism klan (and its plural, klany) replaced the Russian rod ‘clan’ and plemia ‘tribe’, which in the Soviet ethnographic tradition were conceived of as referring to past social formations. Given the abundance of journalistic writings on political clans, it is fruitless to attempt a selection here. A search using the key word klany on www.vb.kg and www.msn.kg for the Russian-language press, and on www.presskg.com for the Kyrgyz-language press, proves convincingly the abundance of such writings.

For an overview of the equally abundant publications on uruu and uruk, check www.presskg.com.

Among the most authoritative or prolific scholars who took part in the news-media discourse on ‘clans’ were the historians J. Junushaliev, V. Ploskikh (Dzhunushaliev and Ploskikh 2000), A. Mokeev (2006) and T. Jumanaliev (2010) as well as the political scientists N. Omarov (2005) and N. Rakymbay uulu (2005a, 2005b).

On this, see the section titled ‘Practising genealogy’ below.

For instance, see the genealogies included in Jusupov et al. (1994), Jusupov (1993 − 95) and, more recently, Asanov (2006) and Joldoshov (2009).

The authority of Attokurov's opinion was reinforced by the fact that in the late 1980s he was accused of ‘nationalism’ for including the history of Kyrgyz clans in his courses and was dismissed from the university. Moreover, he himself published a genealogy of the Kyrgyz in 1996. He thus had the legitimacy of a victim of the Soviet regime and of a genealogy connoisseur; see Attokurov (1995) and Satybaldieva (2008).

Such an analysis is being carried out within the framework of the research project ‘Genealogy and history: collective identities in independent Kyrgyzstan’, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (2010–13) and based at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Regionalstudien of the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle, Germany.

Clan genealogies narrate the past and the present of a single genealogical line. In the field of genealogy production they are encountered side by side with common genealogies improvising on the origins of the Kyrgyz as a genealogical community on the one hand, and local genealogies that tell the history of various localities through the genealogical affiliations of their inhabitants on the other.

See for instance Rumiantsev (1916).

See below, ‘Practising genealogy’.

See for instance Kenchiev (2002, p. 31): ‘If we analyse and compare them [pieces of oral genealogical data] we cannot but observe that all of them are exaggerated tales.’ See also Sooronkulov (2007, 2008) for his use of manjyra as a sarcastic term for ‘fake’ genealogies.

For examples, see Sooronkulov (2007) and Usupbaev (2010).

It is significant that the first collection of genealogies was published by Ala-too, the official journal of the Kyrgyz union of writers; see Jusupov et al. (1994).

This is still how some of them are known today, for example, ‘the genealogy of Balyk ooz’, ‘the genealogy of Togolok Moldo’, and so on.

On the process of local-history production in general and genealogies in particular, see R. Hardenberg (2012) in this volume.

Kto est' kto: nekotorye kirgizskie rody i ikh nabolee izvenstnye predstaviteli. Delonom [online], 4 February 2010. Available from: http://delo.kg/index.php?option=com_docman&Itemid=103 [Accessed 1 March 2012].

Tak kto-zhe kto. Delonom [online], 11 February 2010. Available from:http://delo.kg/index.php?option=com_docman&Itemid=103 [Accessed 1 March 2012].

There are some indications that these assemblies, whether ‘kin’ or ‘clan’, were initially held ‘secretly’ or at least behind closed doors in the sense that no outsiders were admitted; see Nochevkin (2010). This might explain why during my fieldwork (2000–6) in the Kochkor region I did not hear of such assemblies. The assemblies became public and open with the rise of the ‘clan movement’ that started in 2008; see below.

The common genealogy of the Kyrgyz is tripartite, that is, composed of three main divisions referred to as Oŋ (‘Right [Wing]’), Sol (‘Left [Wing]’) and Ichkilik (‘Interior/Centre’).

Koshaliev is a journalist who used to be the director of the Osh State Television Programme.

A former state secretary and a successful businessman. Before the clan movement he was the initiator of the Tengrism movement which, however, had very little to do with clans and genealogies; see Laruelle (2007).

Secretary of the surviving Communist Party in the first year of independence, an acolyte of Sarygulov in the Tengrism movement and a newly hatched genealogist.

Düyshöbaev is a jurist with a long career at different levels in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was president of the State Committee for National Security in 2010–11, and is a major general in the Kyrgyz army.

It would not be so far-fetched to suggest that political science's ‘clan politics’ (Collins 2006) has been turned on its head by the recent developments in Kyrgyzstan.

One of the anonymous peer reviewers found that writing about a ‘clan debate’ in the study of Central Asia is ‘a bit of an exaggeration’. I rather disagree and consider instead that the ‘clan debate’ is one of the most intense and fruitful debates waged in the field. It has opened a lively dialogue between political scientists, anthropologists and historians, and has produced a significant quantity of conceptually, analytically and methodologically reflexive studies. On the stakes of the ‘clan debate’, see Jacquesson (2011).