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ABSTRACT
What are ethnic boundaries made of? How do people come to experience such boundaries? Notwithstanding the formidable analytic attention to the role and effects of boundary drawing in social life, such questions are rarely asked. We look at the apparently stable boundary between Russians and Kyrgyz villagers in the Issyk-Kul region to trace how its dimensions were naturalized through settler colonialism, Soviet modernization, and post-socialist upheaval. But even if naturalized, the boundary behaves as a ‘presence absence’ whose relevance fluctuates and whose momentary features remain unpredictable, as we demonstrate by focusing on transgressive mixed marriages between Russian and Kyrgyz villagers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The ethnographic data contained in this article were collected through a combined four months of fieldwork in the villages of Grigorievka and Mikhailova, both located in Issyk Kul province in north-eastern Kyrgyzstan, in 2015 and 2016. The project was purposely designed as a joint effort, allowing us to study the topic of mixed marriages from different ethnic and gendered positionalities. In this article we have replaced the names of our interlocutors with pseudonyms that reflect their social, cultural, and generational background.
2 In Russian and in Kyrgyz the word metis, as in English, refers to a person of mixed descent or to a hybrid when applied to non-humans. It is related to the French métis and the Spanish mestizo.
3 We use these ethno-national labels as emic terms, following local definitions that are based on bureaucratic logic and usually follow the paternal line.
4 Issyk-Kul province, named after the 181-kilometre-long Issyk-Kul Lake that dominates the region, is in the north-east of Kyrgyzstan and borders on Kazakhstan to the north and China to the east.
5 Our own approach is clearly influenced by this famous statement of Barth, as well as by Abbott's later provocative phrasing that ‘we should not look for boundaries of things, but things of boundaries’ (Citation2001, 261). Similar to these approaches we start with processes of binding and bounding instead of the categories (cultural, ethnic, national, or other) upon which these processes acts; but we differ in that we focus on how the boundaries themselves are experienced and constituted.
6 Without denying the value of works that describe the ‘multidimensional’ and ‘liminal’ qualities of boundaries (e.g. Akkerman and Bakker Citation2011; Lamont and Molnár Citation2002), or that differentiate between stable and unstable boundaries and tease out the factors that account for variation (Wimmer Citation2008, Citation2013), we stand by our claim that this provides little insight in the experiential realities of boundaries.
7 The phrase ‘sense of boundary’ is a liberal reference to Sarah Green’s (Citation2012) phrase ‘sense of border’ which she uses to capture the way borders are experienced. While she focuses on territorial borders and describes long-term processes, we use ‘sense of boundary’ to describe how sensory experiences of boundaries are situationally contingent.
8 Deleuze uses the term ‘emergence’ together with ‘actualization’ and ‘becoming’ to underscore the uncertainty of process. He uses becoming in subject-oriented passages (becoming animal, etc.) and actualization and emergence in relation to essences and phenomena (see Citation2004, 233–234, 306-307).
9 In a study of the Spanish–Moroccan frontier, Driessen shows how it is in ritual and ceremony that features of ethnic boundaries become tangible (Citation1992). Inspired by his approach, we look at how elements of the boundary emerge in the life trajectories of villagers.
10 Fieldwork was carried out in Mikhailovka and Grigorievka, both of which had been established in the early twentieth century, and up until 1991 had a predominantly Russian population of respectively around 4,500 and 6,000 inhabitants.
11 Schröder (Citation2017) observes a similar configuration in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, where Russians and urbanized Kyrgyz clustered together to distinguish themselves from Kyrgyz migrants arriving from more rural or peripheral origins and were seen as lacking in culture. Also similar to Schröder's urban case is that alliances between Kyrgyz and Russians rarely ‘go beyond the status of being acquaintances’ (Citation2010, 454).
12 The taboo was particularly strong for relationships between Kyrgyz women and Russian men, and less stringent for Kyrgyz men and Russian women, especially after a first marriage had dissolved.
13 Discussing similar issues, while linking them explicitly to political processes, Stoler talks about the ‘micro-ecologies of matter and mind’ that are the sediments or debris of empire (Citation2008, 194).
14 This brings to mind Sarah Green's discussion of lines, traces, and tidemarks (Citation2018, 71), which inserts a temporal dimension to discussions of bordering, and draws attention to the ‘traces of previous efforts at marking a separation.’
15 By 1916 the Issyk Kul basin counted 30,000 (mostly Slavic) settlers among 150,000 Kyrgyz, a proportion that in Turkestan was only surpassed by the Chui valley (Brower Citation1996, 51).
16 The revolt spread across a much larger territory in what is now Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, but was particularly intense in the Issyk Kul region (Brower Citation1996, 51).
17 The revolt and exodus (or ürkün) was largely omitted in Soviet historiography, but has received new attention since Kyrgyzstan's independence in 1991 (see Umetbaeva Citation2015; Chokobaeva Citation2016).
18 Kyrgyzstan first became an administrative unit in 1924 as the Kara Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast, which then was renamed Kyrgyz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic in 1926, and became a full-fledged Socialist Soviet Republic in 1936.
19 The new administrative format required fixed ethno-national labels. This was a contentious process when group affiliation rested on tribal, occupational, or residential patterns rather than ‘ethnicity’ (e.g. Hirsch Citation2005), but such contentions did not concern the distinction between ‘Kyrgyz’ and ‘Russians.’
20 A local publication on Grigorievka illustrates this ethnic division of labour. Its 1970s pictures of ‘cattle-breeders’ show only Kyrgyz, and those of ‘toilers’ only Russians (Sereda, Zhiliaeva, and Sakeev Citation2009, 41, 83).
21 Between 1959 and 1979 the percentages of ethnically mixed families in the Kyrgyz SSR rose from 18.1% to 23.1% in urban contexts, and from 5.5 to 5.9% in rural contexts (Gorenburg Citation2006, 147). These percentages cannot be applied directly to Kyrgyz – Russian marriages, because most of these documented mixed families consisted of people from groups considered to be close, such as Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, or Russians and Ukrainians (see also Edgar Citation2007, 586–588).
22 This enumeration should not be read to mean that Grigorievka was ethnically highly diverse; in fact Russians and Kyrgyz together made up over 95% of the population. Rather the enumeration should be seen as a testimony to the Soviet ideal of internationalism.
23 We identified six marriages between Russians and Kyrgyz in Mikhailovka and seven in Grigorievka, which amounts to less than one per cent of all marriages. We acknowledge that this does not include people from these villages who entered a mixed marriage but are living elsewhere. In all thirteen instances we reconstructed the genealogies of wife and husband and collected additional information on residence, professional, educational and socio-economic background, and labour histories. In most instances we managed to interview both husband and wife, often more than once. Of these thirteen marriages we provide elaborate discussions of five in this article, while drawing on the others to provide further contextualization. The relatively small number of cases prevents us, however, from making significant quantitative claims.
24 According to the story, Igor's father was born around 1900 as the child of a Russian mother and a Kyrgyz father, and although mother and child lived in the Russian community, this heritage was said to have saved their lives during the 1916 intercommunal violence.
25 Cleuziou (Citation2016) similarly finds that in Central Asia second marriages are far less accentuated, and that parents have less of a say in the decision-making process leading up to marriage.
26 Lena mentioned that strangers invariably ‘act surprised’ when discovering that she is more fluent in Kyrgyz than in Russian.
27 Elaborate discussions of weddings and gift-giving in Central Asia can be found in Werner (Citation1997), McBrien (Citation2006).
28 See Turaeva (Citation2017) for a general discussion of the role of kelin in Central Asia and Ismailbekova (Citation2014, 377–379) for a concise discussion of the kelin within the ‘typical’ Kyrgyz marriage.
29 We documented two instances in which the Russian bride terminated the marriage in the first months. This was a relatively straightforward procedure because these marriages had not been officially registered and in contrast to marriages between Kyrgyz had not been accompanied by an extensive exchange of gifts between the families.
30 Maksat's mother had moved in with the couple in Magadan, and the couple had spent the summer months in Grigorievka, living with Margarita's parents.
31 Marina's first marriage had lasted for three years, after which she moved back in with her mother. Azat's first marriage had lasted for ten years, but during the last four years his wife had lived semi-separately in Bishkek.
32 Two of Azat's relatives told us about these episodes in some detail.