Ambivalent heritage: tourism, weddings and pilgrimage in Hisor, Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

This article considers the social and symbolic work of Hisor as a site of Tajikistan’s cultural heritage. Hisor carries with it an array of meanings and represents a convergence of multiple spheres of social life: leisure, education, life-cycle rites and religiosity. Hisor’s flexibility allows it to materialize Tajikistan’s governing ideology as one local project of modernity. This article discusses three contexts in which visitors experience Hisor as heritage: tourist visits to the ‘Old Madrassa’ museum, wedding photographs in front of the fortress walls and pilgrimages to the shrine of Makhdumi Azam. The heritage practices and discourses associated with Hisor offer a complex case study of how the temporal ambivalence of heritage operates on the ground in Central Asia and suggest some of heritage’s utility as a social practice for instantiating cultural memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural heritage
• Tajikistan
• tourism
• weddings
• Islam
• cultural memory

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge research support provided by a Faculty Research and Development Award from George Mason University. I am grateful to colleagues at the Folklore Fund at the Institute of Language and Literature in Dushanbe for their ongoing support. Thank you as well to two anonymous CAS reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I also want to thank Nick Seay for his feedback on early versions of the ideas contained here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

Research included in this article was approved by the institutional review boards of The Ohio State University, Duke University, and George Mason University. Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Notes

1 https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5790/.

2 Brinton Ahlin (2018, x), too, has written about a shrine area in southern Tajikistan and, observing some of these same qualities, called the site ‘chameleon-like’.

3 In writing about the national museum in Dushanbe, Blakkisrud and Kuziev (2019) comment on the linear nationalist narrative constructed across several floors of exhibits. Still, they note its gaps and overarching ambiguity.

4 In contrast, museums in Estonia were perceived as ‘object-centered mediator[s] of the past … There was a profound neglect of alternative histories and new minorities, while both public and professional interest was focused on the older minorities, so to speak “invisible” during the Soviet period’ (Kuutma and Kroon 2012, 72).

5 Similar dynamics are also in effect in Uzbekistan. See Trevisani (2016).

6 Katherine Hughes (2014, 255, 307) references artist Yerbossyn Meldibekov’s work, ‘Mutations’ (2010), to illustrate the fraught relationship of sites like Hisor with historical memory in Central Asia, particularly in juxtaposition with newer locations such as Soviet WWII memorials. Meldibekov’s installation included photographs of people standing in front of Soviet-era monuments and later in the same location after the monument had been changed or removed. The figures in Meldibekov’s photographs outlived the monuments, while in contrast sites like Hisor remain.

7 The artist is likely Davron Mukhitdinov (1940-) https://arthive.com/artists/29642~Davron_Mukhitdinov. A large quadriptych painting depicting Hisor, by the same artist and with a related title (Az kar”ri asrho), is displayed in the national museum in Dushanbe at the entrance to the historical galleries.

8 I am grateful to Lisa Gilman for this point.