The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: neither colonized, nor modern?

Abstract

This article examines scholarly debates that cast Soviet policies for the emancipation of women in Central Asia as instances of colonial domination, as the modernizing endeavours of a revolutionary state or as combinations of both and takes them to task for overlooking the gendered consequences of the ‘Soviet paradox’. This paradox is evident in the combined and contradictory operations of a socialist paternalism that supported and legitimized women's presence in the public sphere (through education, work and political representation), with a command economy and nationalities policy that effectively stalled processes of social transformation commonly associated with modernity. Post-Soviet gender ideologies do not represent a simple return to national traditions, interrupted by Soviet policies, but constitute a strategic redeployment of notions of cultural authenticity in the service of new ideological goals. The politics of gender, thus, plays a crucial role in signalling both a break from the Soviet past and in creating new imaginaries of the nation that enhance social solidarity in increasingly fractured post-Soviet societies. The official endorsement of Islam, as a central tenet of national identity and the simultaneous rejection and policing of its more radical expressions contributes further to the politicization of gender, while the promotion of gender equality by the international donor community carries limited credibility in a context where the core of women's former claims to citizenship—through welfare entitlements and social protection by the state—has been thoroughly eroded.

I owe thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for support that enabled me to work on the project titled ‘Islam and the politics of gender: state, society and modernity in central Asia and Afghanistan’. I also thank Adeeb Khalid and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments. In addition to the cited works, this article draws upon periods of fieldwork in Uzbekistan in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2002.

Notes

1. Selected examples may be found in Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘End of empire: Islam, nationalism and women in Turkey’, in D. Kandiyoti, ed, Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp 22–47; Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and its discontents: women and the nation’, in L. Chisman and P. Williams, eds, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory(Lodon: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); Juan Cole, ‘Feminism, class, and Islam in turn-of-the-century Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol 13, 1981, pp 387–407; Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1995); Beth Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender and Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in 20th Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Partha Chatterjee, ‘The nationalist resolution of the woman question’, in K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds, Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986); Lila Abu-Lughod, ed, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

2. This encounter demarcated different categories of colonial subjects. The Tatars who had been part of the Russian empire since the 16th century were more thoroughly integrated into its administrative structures. They fulfilled a special role as the tsars spread their rule into extensive Muslim areas in the mid 19th century. The Kazakh Hordes of the northern tier came under Russian domination in the second quarter of the 18th century and were subject to openly interventionist colonial policies, including missionary activity and a massive influx of Slav settlers. The southern tier, conquered in the latter half of the 19th century, experienced more accommodationist policies, with tsarist officialdom working within the framework of Islamic institutions and according the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva nominal independence under a Protectorate status.

3. Jane Burbank, ‘Revisioning Imperial Russia’, Slavic Review, Vol 52, No 3, 1993, pp 555–567; Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Picador, 2003).

4. Accounts of accommodations of indigenous beliefs with Islam may be found in: Devin De Weese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1994); Bruce G. Privatsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001).

5. Edward J. Lazzerini, ‘Defining the Orient: a nineteenth-century Russo–Tatar polemic over identity and cultural representation’, in Edward Allworth, ed, Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); also see D. R. Brower and E. J. Lazzerini, eds, Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).

6. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

7. In practice, the record was replete with instances of evasion of new rules by means of supplying false witnesses on the age of marriage partners, presenting false grooms and brides or substituting a child-bride with an older sister. Criminal prosecution for qalin cases evidently took place mainly when the parties failed to honour their promises so that, ironically, Soviet courts were used to enforce the proper practice of qalin. Douglas Northrop, ‘Subaltern dialogues: subversion and resistance in Soviet Uzbek family law’, Slavic Review, Vol 60, No 1, 2001, pp 115–139.

8. Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

9. Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

10. Douglas Northrop, ‘Nationalizing backwardness: gender, empire and Uzbek identity’, in Ronald Suny and Terry Martin, eds, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p 213.

11. Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

12. Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity and Unveiling Under Communism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006).

13. Massell had, similarly, attributed this explosion of resentment and hostility to the fact that under Soviet rule men's opportunities for martial, acquisitive and hegemonic self-assertion were severely circumscribed, making assertions of authority in the domestic realm, over women and children, their last refuge. Massell, op cit, Ref 8, pp 275–276. Women, Keller claims, found themselves in a bind between complying with the demands of the state and remaining loyal to the customs of their community. Shoshanna Keller, ‘Trapped between state and society: women's liberation and Islam in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1926–1941’, Journal of Women's History, Vol 10, No 1, 1998, pp 20–44.

14. Adrienne Edgar, 'Bolshevism, patriarchy and the nation: the Soviet ‘emancipation’ of Muslim women in pan-Islamic perspective', Slavic Review, Vol 65, 2006, pp 252–272.

15. Some, like Slezkine, argued that the struggle against ‘backwardness’ was the USSR's sole claim to legitimacy and that ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ were its principal idioms. ‘Other states may have other claims to legitimacy: the USSR had nothing but progress and modernity’ (p 228). Yuri Slezkine, ‘Commentary: imperialism as the highest stage of socialism’, Russian Review, Vol 59, No 2, 2000, pp 227–234.

16. David L. Hoffman, ‘European modernity and Soviet socialism’, in D. L. Hoffman and Y. Kotsonis, eds, Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (London: Macmillan Press, 2000); Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern times: the Soviet Union and the interwar conjuncture’, Kritika, Vol 2, pt 1, 2001, pp 111–164.

17. Jowitt, among them, coined the term ‘neo-traditionalism’ to describe the stalled transformation, under communism, of ascribed status groups into economic classes turning an ostensibly impersonal modern bureaucracy into a caste of ‘tribute-demanding apparatchik notables’. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p 139. Zaslavsky, likewise, invoked a process of counter-modernization evident in technological stagnation, declining productivity and, eventually, a reversal of the trends of demographic transition typical of industrialized countries (with increases in infant mortality, decreases in male life expectancy and a continued population explosion in the southern periphery of the Soviet Union). Victor Zaslavsky, ‘The Soviet Union’, in K. Barkey and M. von Hagen, eds, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp 73–96.

18. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

19. Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or neo-traditionalism? Ascribed nationality and Soviet primordialism’, in Hoffman and Kotsonis, op cit, Ref 16.

20. R. Brubaker, ‘Nationhood and the national question in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eurasia: an institutionalist account’, Theory and Society, Vol 23, 1994, pp 47–78; Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge in the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); P. G. Roeder, ‘Soviet federalism and ethnic mobilization’, World Politics, Vol 43, 1991, pp 196–232; Gregory Gleason, ‘Uzbekistan: from statehood to nationhood?’, in I. Bremmer and R. Taras, eds, Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

21. For a similar argument, see Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism,’ in Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny, eds, Becoming National (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

22. Some, like Dienes went as far as claiming that the region remained ‘an undigested and undigestibly separate realm of the USSR’ by virtue of its ‘Asianness’ and legacy of colonial conquest. Leslie Dienes, Soviet Asia: Economic Development and National Policy Choices (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), p 120.

23. This ‘backwardness’ received official endorsement both through the Marxist–Leninist sequencing of evolutionary stages and in the affirmative action policies that were meant to enable ‘catching up’ with more advanced Soviet nationalities.

24. This was borne out by achievements such as impressive increases in literacy rates, improved standards of health care, extensive electrification and an expanding transport infrastructure. In the specific case of women's emancipation, see Rakhima Aminova, The October Revolution and Women's Liberation in Uzbekistan (Moscow: Nauka, 1985); Bibi Pal'vanova, Emansipatsiia musul'manski (Moscow: Nauka, 1982).

25. For an incisive account of the vagaries of Soviet ethnography as it tried to define both itself and the pre-industrial societies of the USSR, see Yuri Slezkine, ‘The fall of Soviet ethnography, 1928–38’, Current Anthropology, Vol 32, No 4, 1991, pp 476–484.

26. M. A. Bikzhanova, K. L. Zadykhina and O. A. Sukhareva, ‘Social and family life of the Uzbeks’, in S. Dunn and E. Dunn, eds, Introduction to Soviet Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: Highgate Road Social Science Research Station, 1974), pp 239–271; S. Poliakov, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992); G. P. Snesarev, ‘On some causes of the persistence of religio-customary survivals among the Khorezm Uzbeks’, in Dunn and Dunn, op cit, pp 215–238.

27. Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Modernization without the market? The case of the “Soviet East”’, Economy and Society, Vol 25, No 4, 1996, pp 529–542.

28. A. M. Khazanov, After the USSR (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Nancy Lubin, Labour and Nationality in Soviet Central Asia (London: Macmillan, 1984); M. P. Sacks, ‘Roots of diversity and conflict: ethnic and gender differences in the work force of the former republics of Soviet Central Asia’, in Y. Ro'i, ed, Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies (London: Frank Cass, 1995).

29. Ajay Patnaik, ‘Agriculture and rural out-migration in Central Asia, 1960–91’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol 47, No 1, 1995, pp 147–169.

30. Richard Anker, ‘Introduction’, in V. Bodorova and R. Anker, eds, Working Women in Socialist Countries: The Fertility Connection (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1985).

31. Victor Agadjanian and Ekaterina Makarova, ‘From Soviet modernization to post-Soviet transformation: understanding marriage and fertility dynamics in Uzbekistan’, Development and Change, Vol 34, No 3, 2003, pp 447–473.

32. Martha Brill Olcott, ‘Central Asia: the reformers challenge a traditional society’, in L. Hajda and M. Beissinger, eds, The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).

33. Rein Taagepeva, ‘National differences within Soviet demographic trends’, Soviet Studies, Vol 20, No 4, 1969, pp 478–489; David M. Heer and Judith Bryden, ‘Family allowances and population policy in the USSR’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol 28, No 4, 1966, pp 514–519.

34. It is difficult to assess the actual effects of these incentives. The impact of family allowances on fertility were judged to be negligible by some in 1960s. Heer and Bryden, op cit, Ref 33. However, social benefits had reached a non-negligible proportion of the social wage by the late Soviet period.

35. M. Feschbach, ‘The Soviet population policy debate: actors and issues’, Working paper N-2472-AF, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 1986; C. Weber and A. Goodman, ‘The demographic policy debate in the USSR’, Population and Development Review, Vol 2, No 2 1981, pp 279–295; Michael Rywkin, Moscow's Muslim Challenge (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982).

36. K. Watters, ‘The current family planning debate in Soviet Central Asia’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 9, No 1, 1990, pp 75–86.

37. Sergei Poliakov, ‘Modern Soviet Central Asian countryside: traditional forms of property in a quasi-industrial system’, in V. Naumkin, ed., State, Religion and Society in Central Asia (Reading, MA: Ithaca Press, 1993).

38. Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). Collins, also notes the resilience and durability of what she broadly defines as clan relations in the politics of Central Asia. Kathleen Collins, Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

39. This was especially stark in areas of Central Asia where forced sedentarization resulted in massive losses in livestock and human lives. It is estimated that almost two million Kazakhs either perished or fled across the border to China or Iran. Revisionist historians of the collectivization period claim that nearly 47 per cent of the rural population was decimated. M. K. Kozybaev, Kollektivizatzia v Kazahstane: tragedia krest'iantsva (Almaty: BI, 1992). For the Soviet Union more generally, see R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (London: Macmillan, 1980); Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

40. Scott who presents collectivization as the epitome of high modernist planning writes; ‘The kolkhoz was not, however, just window dressing hiding a traditional commune. Almost everything had changed’. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p 214. This general statement makes little allowance for the possibility of locally specific outcomes—intended or otherwise.

41. A text by Urunov is fairly typical of these concerns: ‘In development of public catering in rural areas of Uzbekistan the problem of lepeshka (flat bread) production is still unsolved. The seriousness of the matter is increased by the fact that rural woman spend 2–3 hours daily for lepeshka baking’. See V. S. Urunov, Party Leadership for Social Development of Villages (Tashkent: ‘Uzbekistan’ Publishing House, 1979), p 211.

42. Nancy Lubin, ‘Women in Central Asia: Progress and Contradictions’, Soviet Studies,Vol 33, No 2, 1981, pp 182–203.

43. Gail W. Lapidus, ed., Women, Work and Family in the Soviet Union (Armonk, NY: New Literature, 1982); Ajay Patnaik, Perestroika and Women Labour Force in Soviet Central Asia (New Delhi: New Literature, 1989).

44. Tamara Dragadze, Rural Families in Soviet Georgia: A Case Study in Ratcha Province (London: Routledge, 1988).

45. Caroline Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

46. Marfua Tokhtahodjaeva, Between the Slogans of Communism and the Laws of Islam (Lahore: Shirkat Gah, 1995).

47. See Adeeb Khalid, Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); Yaacov Ro'i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Hans Braker, ‘Soviet Policy Toward Islam’, in Allworth, op cit, Ref 5; Ro'i, op cit, Ref 28.

48. A. V. Malashenko, ‘Islam versus Communism: the experience of co-existence’, in D. Eickelman, ed., Russia's Muslim Frontiers: New Direction in Cross-Cultural Analysis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993).

49. The tendency of Sovietologists to describe Islam in the Soviet Union with reference to dichotomies such as ‘official’ (state-sanctioned) and ‘parallel’ (underground) Islam has been extensively critiqued. See, for example, Mark Saroyan, ‘Rethinking Islam in the Soviet Union’, in E. W. Walker, ed, Minorities, Mullahs and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, Research Series, 1997). It is not my intention to invoke yet another dichotomy but merely to highlight the fact that the survival of Islamic practices owed a great deal to the fact that they were intertwined with everyday domestic observances and rituals. For a similar argument, see Privatsky, op cit, Ref 4.

50. Khalid, op cit, Ref 47, p 114.

51. Tett cites, for instance, a collective farm chairman who claimed to keep a ‘Muslim’ home because his wife and brides kept the Muslim fast during Ramadan despite the fact that he himself remained free of religious observances. Gillian Tett, ‘Guardians of the faith: gender and religion in an (ex) Soviet Tajik village’, in C. El-Solh and J. Marbro, eds, Muslim Women's Choices (London: Berg, 1994). See also Nayereh Tohidi, ‘Guardians of the nation’: women, Islam and the Soviet legacy of modernization in Azerbaijan', in H. L. Bodman and N. Tohidi, eds, Women in Muslim societies: diversity within unity (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp 137–162. It must be noted that the ‘feminization’ of tradition has also been identified in other socialist contexts. See, for instance, Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual Poetic and Popular Culture in Transylvania (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).

52. It is noteworthy, however, that the role of Islam tended to be downplayed in favour of pre-Islamic survivals and the lingering influence of shamanism. V. N. Basilov, Shamantsvo u narodov Srednei Azii I Kazakstana (Moscow: Nauka, 1992); ‘Texts of Shamanistic Invocations from Central Asia and Kazakhstan’ in G. Seaman and J. S. Day, eds, Ancient Traditions: Shamanism in Central Asia and the Americas (Denver, CO: Denver Museum of Natural History, 1994), pp 273–292; P. G. Snesarev, Remnants of Pre-Islamic Beliefs and Rituals among the Khorezm Uzbeks (Berlin: Reinhold Scheltzer Verlag, 2003).

53. Habiba Fathi, ‘Otines: the unknown women clerics of Central Asian Islam’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 16, 1997, pp 27–44; Habiba Fathi, Femmes d'autorite dans l'Asia Centrale Contemporaine (Paris: Maisonneuve &Larose, 2004); Annette Krämer, Gesetliche Autorität und Islamische Gesellschaft im Wandel. Studien über Frauenälteste (otin und xalfa) im unabhängigen Uzbekistan (Berlin: Klaus Schwatz Verlag, 2002).

54. Deniz Kandiyoti and Nadira Azimova, ‘The communal and the sacred: women's worlds of ritual in Uzbekistan’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol 10, No 2, 2004, pp 327–349.Cynthia Werner, ‘Women and the art of household networking in Rural Kazakstan’, Islamic Quarterly, Vol 41, No 1, 1997, pp 56–68.

55. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

56. Graham Smith, Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

57. Kathleen Kuenhast and Carol Nechemias, ‘Introduction: women navigating change in post-Soviet currents’, in K. Kuenhast and C. Nechemias, eds, Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival and Civic Activism (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.); Shirin Rai, Hilary Pilkington and Annie Phizacklea, eds, Women in the Face of Change: The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China (London: Routledge, 1992); Helena Goscilo, ‘Domostrioka or perestroika? The construction of womanhood in Soviet culture under glasnost’, in Thomas Lahusere, ed, Late Soviet Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds, Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 1993).

58. Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, ‘Debates over Islam in contemporary Uzbekistan: a view from within’, in S. A. Dudoignon, ed, Devout Societies vs. Impious States? (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2004).

59. Presidents Niazov of Turkmenistan and Karimov of Uzbekistan both performed the hajj to Mecca and Karimov made the symbolic gesture of swearing his presidential oath on a Qu'ran. See Martha Brill Olcott, ‘Islam and fundamentalism in independent Central Asia’, in Ro'i, op cit, Ref 28.

60. The civil wars in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, repeated episodes of violence in Uzbekistan, and the new geopolitics of the ‘war against terror’ became the backdrop for increasingly repressive measures in the name of containing religious extremism.

61. David Abramson, ‘Engendering citizenship in postcommunist Uzbekistan’, in Kuenhast and Nechemias, op cit, Ref 57.

62. For pertinent examples see the special issue of this journal entitled ‘Post-Soviet Islam: An Anthropological Perspective’ (Guest editor: Johan Rasanayagam), Central Asian Survey, Vol 25, No 3, 2006.

63. Habiba Fathi, ‘Gender, Islam and social change in Uzbekistan’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 25, No 3, 2006, pp 303–317.

64. See for instance Sh. Bashbekov, ‘Ayol asli ichkainikidir’ (Woman belongs ‘inside’), Xalq Süzi, 1 March 1997, p 3; N. Kabul, ‘Erkak uy ostanasida bosh egmasin’ (Men are masters of their home), Saodat, No 3, 1990, p 11; A. Akbarova, ‘Kup xotinlik ayb emas’ (Polygyny is not shameful), Uzbekistan adabiyati va san'ati, No 18, 1997, p 4.

65. Marianne Kamp, ‘Between women and the state: Mahalla committees and social welfare in Uzbekistan’, in Pauline Jones Luong, ed, The Transformation of Central Asia: State and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp 29–58.

66. For a stark depiction of the commodification of sex in Kazakhstan, see Joma Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

67. It is quite significant that in a survey carried out in Tashkent in 2001 less than 2 per cent of respondents mentioned that the institution of polygamy is justified by the laws of Islam. Most identified polygamy as the prerogative of new wealth although the majority disapproved of its effects on the health of the family unit. Igor B. Pogrebov, ‘Prevalence and assessment of polygamy in Uzbekistan’, Sociological Research, Vol 45, No 4, 2006, pp 88–95.

68. On the contrary, there is evidence that new patterns of mal-distribution of wealth are eroding the social fabric. For illustrations of the various ways in which poverty acts as a barrier to the performance of local customs and obligations (such as reciprocal gift exchange and hospitality), see Nora Dudwick, Elizabeth Gomart and Alexandre Marc, with Kathleen Kuehnast, eds, When Things Fall Apart: Qualitative Studies of Poverty in the Former Soviet Union (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2003).

69. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Valentine Moghadam, ed, Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Mary Buckley, ed, Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay and Kathryn Pinnick, No More Heroines? Russia, Women and the Market (London: Routledge, 1996); Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movements in East Central Eyrope (London: Verso, 1993); Maxine Molyneux, ‘Women's rights and the international context: some reflections on the post-Communist states’, Millennium, Vol 23, No 2, 1994, pp 287–313.

70. I am not suggesting that this is unique to Central Asia. The restoration of men to their ‘natural’ positions of authority is presented as a central feature of post-socialist ‘national’ rehabilitation in other contexts as well. See, for instance, Joanna Goven, ‘Gender politics in Hungary: autonomy and anti-feminism’, in Funk and Mueller, op cit, Ref 57. However, the degree of official elaboration of these themes and the extent to which they are appropriated by state elites may vary. The question of how and why national imaginaries differ in this respect would deserve an in-depth exploration.

71. Cynthia Werner ‘Women, marriage and the nation-state: the rise of non-consensual bride kidnapping in post-Soviet Kazakhstan’, in Luong, op cit, Ref 65, p 61.

72. ‘Public’ patriarchy, as distinct from domestic patriarchy, denotes more collective forms of appropriation of the services of women by the market and the state. Sylvia Walby, Theorising Patriarchy (Blackwell: Oxford, 1990). Verdery, argues that the socialist state usurped certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities, thereby altering the relation between gendered ‘domestic’ and ‘public’ spheres (Verdery, op cit, Ref 55). In the same vein, Chatterjee states that ‘The Bolsheviks made no attempt to dismantle patriarchy per se, but they tried to replace the authority of the local male, of fathers, brothers and husbands with that of the absent, omnipotent male of socialist patriarchy.’ Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), p 14.

73. Kamp, op cit, Ref 12, p 233.

74. Shirin Akiner, ‘Between tradition and modernity: the dilemmas facing contemporary Central Asian women’, in Buckley, op cit, Ref 69.

75. The coexistence of multiple registers of thought, action are readily apparent. For instance, a retired kolkhoz brigade leader who I encountered in the course of my fieldwork spoke with pride both of her recent pilgrimage to the hajj and of the numerous red flags her brigade earned as champions at the cotton harvest. Her achievements as a collective farm worker and her Muslim piety defined different facets of her identity. Likewise, the collective farm chairman who treated his guests to multiple toasts could see no contradiction between alcohol consumption and closing the proceedings with the recitation of the fotiha (the Muslim prayer).

76. Lest we imagine that subversion of state directives only took the form of shielding Islamic practices from the unwelcome intrusions of officials, we must remind ourselves of some Central Asian reactions to Gorbachev's Union-wide campaign against alcohol. The consumption of alcoholic beverages at wedding parties, which was quite commonplace, apparently carried on regardless but the drinks were served in teapots to avoid detection. It is only in the context of self-consciously ‘Muslim’ weddings that alcohol and music are now prohibited.

77. For very different points of view, see William Fierman, ed, Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); Nazif Shahrani, ‘Soviet Central Asia and the challenge of the Soviet legacy’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 12, No 2, 1992, pp 123–135.

78. Laura Adams, ‘Cultural elites in Uzbekistan: ideological production and the state’, in Pauline Jones Luong, op cit, Ref 65.

79. It must be acknowledged that this patriarchal revival is not unique to the Muslim-majority republics of Central Asia but is evident in the Russian heartland of the former Soviet Union and beyond. For a discussion of Russia, see Anastasiia Posadskaia, ed, Women in Russia: A New Era in Russia's Feminisms (London: Verso, 1994).

80. Dilorom Alimova, Zhenskii vapros v srednei Azii (Tashkent, 1991); Dilorom A. Alimova, ‘A historian's vision of Khudjum’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 17, No 1, 1998, pp 147–155.

81. For NGOs in general, see David Abramson, ‘A critical look at NGOs and civil society as means to an end in Uzbekistan’, Human Organization, Vol 58, No 3, 1999, pp 240–250. An appraisal of women's machineries and NGOs may be found in Meghan Simpson, ‘Local strategies in globalizing gender politics: women's organizing in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol 26, No 1, 2006, pp 9–31; Irina Liczek, ‘Cultural parameters of gender policy making in contemporary Turkmenistan’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol 25, No 3, 2005, pp 467–483. A more balanced treatment pointing to the contradictory effects of foreign aid encounters may be found in Julie Hemment, Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGOs (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007).

82. For further details see Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Post-Soviet institutional design and the paradoxes of the “Uzbek path”’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 26, No 1, 2007, pp 31–48.

83. Parallels may be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and beyond. See Hemment, op cit, Ref 81, for a sensitive treatment of the resistance and hostility the term ‘gender’ generated in Russia and the difficult encounters between international feminists and their Russian counterparts.