‘Urbanizing’ Bishkek: interrelations of boundaries, migration, group size and opportunity structure

Abstract

Within the context of Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, this article deals with an identity boundary between the so-called ‘urban’ Kyrgyz and Russians on the one side, and the so-called ‘rural’ or ‘newly arriving’ Kyrgyz, on the other. In the first section I discuss the ways in which this boundary is constructed among Bishkek male youth, both rhetorically as well as with regard to actual practices of social inclusion and exclusion. Starting from these insights on what ‘makes’ an urban identity, I try to approach the question of why this boundary might be drawn as it is. Linking a theory on ‘group size’ with migration data for Kyrgyzstan and the concept of ‘opportunity structure’, I try to examine the allocation and accessibility of opportunities such as jobs, marriage and living space – all of which can be considered to affect the current divide between ethnic Kyrgyz in Bishkek.

Keywords:

• Bishkek
• Kyrgyzstan
• youth
• migration
• identity (boundary)
• opportunities

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the author's work on his dissertation, which is funded by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The author is grateful for the valuable comments on this article from Erica Marat, Svetlana Jacquesson, Jolanda Lindenberg, Olumide Abimbola and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

I conducted my fieldwork in one neighbourhood of Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek between April 2007 and October 2008. Whenever I speak of ‘neighbourhood’ in this article I refer to my experiences with the inhabitants of this specific locality. My main interlocutors were males under the age of 30 who were born in Bishkek and who had lived in this neighbourhood since their childhood. Accordingly, the article mainly reflects the perspective of young urban males.

The names of all informants have been changed.

If not otherwise indicated, all words in italics are transliterated from Russian using the American Library Association–Library of Congress (ALA–LC) standard for Romanization without diacritics.

In this article I will use the term ‘urbans’ (sometimes ‘established’) for those Kyrgyz or Russians who were either born or have been living in Bishkek since before the Kyrgyz independence of 1991. For the Kyrgyz who have migrated to Bishkek from another area of Kyrgyzstan after 1991, I will use the term ‘rurals’ or ‘newcomers’. This complies with the local terms used in Russian, which are ‘urbans’ (gorodskie) and ‘rurals’ (sel'skie) or ‘newcomers’ (priezzhie) (see also Yessenova 2005). The general dichotomy behind this goes back to the seminal book by Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders (1994 [1965]).

Buchowsky (2006, p. 476) provides a fitting summary of this practice: ‘Creation of the inferior categories of people, an intellectual process that shares its logic with orientalizing modes of thought, legitimizes political practices, sanctions discrimination and possibly exploitation.’

Based on the data of a questionnaire among Bishkek inhabitants in the year 1997, Elebayeva et al. (2000, p. 346) show that such an identification of ethnic Russians as Kyrgyz citizens is not exceptional:

‘It is interesting to note that an absolute majority of respondents clearly identified themselves with the Kyrgyz state, including those of non-Kyrgyz origin: 64.8% of the respondents considered themselves “citizens of Kyrgyzstan”. It is noteworthy that 29.9% of Russian respondents considered themselves “citizens of Kyrgyzstan”, although they were born in places other than Kyrgyzstan.’

Concerning Kyrgyz migrants and the question of citizenship, see also Ruget and Usmanalieva (2008).

Bakyt could also have noted that Russian is the language which all of my informants use in their inter-ethnic (most urban Kyrgyz also in their intra-ethnic) conversations. However, Bakyt possibly felt that stressing citizenship, and by that pointing to a place (the place of birth), is a stronger reference than the one to language. Surely in this context it was the less obvious hint since we had our conversations in Russian.

This statement is obviously one that demands clarification. In my forthcoming dissertation I will take up questions of integration, social exchange and identification in this neighbourhood and beyond in more detail.

The practice of ‘othering’ Kyrgyz migrants as rurals is the attempt to negatively define what belongs to an urban identity. Beyond that, my young urban informants actively participate in both the production and consumption of Bishkek ‘youth culture’ (Pilkington 1996, p. 190). However, it is beyond the scope of this article to depict and analyse which texts and other cultural products they create or how they spend their leisure time doing sports, going to clubs or surfing the Internet. I will address such issues in my forthcoming dissertation, while Kirmse (2009, 2010) has already done so for the context of Osh. In the present article my aim for the following sections is not to enlarge upon the contents of a contemporary Bishkek urban identity or youth culture, but to explore possible answers to the question why the urbans might identify as I witnessed it.

This is why even long-term inhabitants of the city tend to be called myrky, depending on their behaviour and appearance. Among urban youth, the term is also widely used in joking relationships. On one occasion, another Kyrgyz urban neighbour demanded to have a look at Sergey's new mobile phone. After he could not figure out all of its functions immediately, he said about himself: ‘Oh look, what kind of myrk I am. I am not even able to use this phone.’

Abazov (1999, p. 247), Schmidt and Sagynbekova (2008, p. 115).

If not otherwise indicated, the official statistical material presented in this section was provided to me upon request by the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic in 2008. Since it is not in the interest of this article, I will not discuss any ethnic group represented in Bishkek other than the Russians and the Kyrgyz.

Communication with Dr Emil Nasritdinov (Department of Anthropology, American University of Central Asia), September 2009.

Schlee elaborates further on this point (which will become important again later):

‘Contractuality as a variable would have to state to what degree an arrangement is contractual and, by implication, to what degree it is shaped by non-contractual elements. On a contractuality scale from 0 to 1 a given alliance may have a value of, say, 0.6, and this would mean that it is primarily contractual but significantly influenced by other factors. These other factors may be: 1. The partners are not freely chosen. The choice of allies is limited by considerations of closeness or similarity rather than purely strategic considerations like optimal group size for the formation of a minimal winning coalition. 2. The context of agreement shows a mixture of strategic considerations with “culture” and “custom”. 3. As these factors that interfere with the purely contractual character of a relationship can be of many different kinds, we must be aware that many more qualitative questions may hide behind the seemingly purely quantitative statement that something is contractual to a degree of 0.6.’ (Schlee 2008, pp. 32, 33)

I cannot present the complete taxonomy of possible and actual identifications of Kyrgyz and Russian youth in Bishkek in this article. There were numerous situations in which the urban Kyrgyz distinguished themselves from the Russians and vice versa. In general, the respective differences were uttered openly in my presence, and in most cases the commonly known prejudices about the respective other group were put forward in a joking manner.

Based on a survey among Bishkek students Ari (2008, p. 579) notes:

‘Of the students who took part in this survey, 38.9% stated that the most worrying issue about the future was “not being able to find a good job”. “Not being able to work in one's field of study” followed with 26%, and “not being able to earn enough” was ranked next with 12%, and the issue of least concern was “not being able to graduate” with 3.5%.’

See, for example, Marat (2008).

Nazpary (2002) mentioned ‘chaos’ (bardak) as a dominant perception of post-Soviet changes in Kazakhstan. Kyrgyzstan shares the essential features of such chaos, which is generally understood as an ‘extreme moral and legal disorder in the social life’ (p. 2). With regard to the present article, to feel and experience dispossession from certain ‘economic and social rights’ (p. 2) could be read as a normative assessment of one's own contracting opportunity structure. In general, all of my interlocutors would fall in that category of ‘the dispossessed’ (pp. 13–16), yet none of them used the term bardak to describe the current state of Kyrgyz society. During Nazpary's fieldwork in 1995 and 1996 it was the expansive penetration of corruption, arbitrariness, political and economic fraud, embezzlement and favouritism that led to a perception of chaos and dispossession with regard to the post-Soviet changes. Between that time and my fieldwork (2007–2008) a decade passed, during which these practices, despite Kyrgyzstan's ‘revolutions’, have become structural. My informants were about 10 years old in the mid-1990s, and grew up already accustomed to what preceding generations still perceived as chaotic post-Soviet changes. Accordingly, my informants do not express similar feelings of loss or dispossession and their understanding of moral and legal order in the meantime has been significantly altered.

For the Kazakh context, Yessenova (2005) quotes an historian based in Almaty to point to such an ‘urban attitude’ vis-à-vis a rural one:

‘What sort of common culture could there be among those Kazakhs … who have been born and have lived in the city (e.g. third-generation [urban] residents) … and rural Kazakhs. … They have not a thing in common; they do not share culture, community, or language. The only things they have in common are ancestors or, more accurately, the myth of common ancestry.’ (Yessenova 2005, p. 666)