ABSTRACT
In some Central Asian oasis towns, the patron saints of craftsmen, known as pirs, have continued to be venerated, despite the repression of Islam and changes to the industrial structure during the Soviet Era. This paper analyses the social function and individual significance of pir veneration in the modern era, using ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in a ceramics town in Uzbekistan. Today, many old customs practised in pottery studios have become mere formalities, and the controlling role of the pirs over ceramist groups is declining. However, this is not necessarily indicative of an immediate decline in the pirs’ power. Some ceramists believe their highly skilled masters to be quasi-pirs and that the pir provides them with desirable goals, in addition to an ideal form to which to aspire.
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Mr Anvar, the Rishton ceramists, and the locals who helped me carry out my research. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, and Editage (www.editage.jp) and the editor of Central Asian Survey for English-language editing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Pir was originally a Persian word that meant ‘old’ or ‘elderly person’. It later began to indicate Sufi masters. Subsequently, workers’ collectives started to use the term to refer to their patron saints (Kawamoto Citation2002, 819).
8 Case studies have been conducted (Dzhabbarov Citation1959; Tursunov Citation1972) on kasaba and also on similar organizations in Khorezm and Tajikistan.
11 Copies of the ceramists’ risala do exist in the State Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, but most of the people in Rishton did not know of these copies’ existence.
12 According to accounts given in December 2012 and November 2014 by Ganizhon, an esteemed ceramist in his sixties who was born into a family of successive ceramists, the sole self-proclaimed descendant of Amir Kulol had died during the revolution, leaving only daughters behind.
13 At the time of the research, there were 130 ceramics masters holding membership in the national craftsmen’s collective; Anvar told me that ‘there are between 70 and 80 truly gifted ceramists working in Rishton today’, for whom I calculated there to be two or three apprentices per master.
14 Instead of ceramics, many of the residents have started to make their living by going to Russia to find work; see Kikuta (Citation2016) for more on this labour migration.
16 Some elder masters remembered this taboo when interviewed in 2003.
17 See Rasanayagam (Citation2006) on re-Islamization among healers.
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Funding
This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI) [grant no. 15H05983].
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