Ritual, strategy, and deep culture in the Chechen national movement

Abstract

This paper probes the dichotomy between strategic performance of cultural text and a strong approach to culture that sees fundamental texts as encompassing and determining social action. The central question posed is whether the paradigmatic emphasis on strategy in cultural analysis of protest and social movements misses the compelling influences that cultural texts may exert under certain conditions. Regarding protest movements and political contention, I am especially interested in the ‘deep textual grammar’ of the conflict, which can strongly constrain and guide social action. By identifying and analysing the deep cultural text of the Chechen nationalist movement for the period 1989–1999, this study shows that, in addition to strategic decisions, movement trajectories are sometimes strongly – almost ritualistically – culturally determined. As a first step towards reconceptualising the role of culture in social movements and to spur further investigation, this paper offers several propositions derived from the Chechen case about the relationship of deep culture and mobilisation.

Keywords:

• Chechnya
• terrorism
• Islam
• jihad
• culture
• text
• discourse
• ritual
• strategy
• nationalism
• mobilisation
• Russia
• ethnic-national movements

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Jeroen Gunning and Richard Jackson for their editorial assistance. Also, I am grateful to Jeff Goodwin and Jim Jasper, whose invitation to a conference on Islam and social movements at New York University originally turned my interests toward Chechnya, and provided the original impetus for this study. Finally, thanks go to two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions and comments strengthened its presentation. Any errors that remain are mine alone.

Notes

The seminal work on framing theory included diverse treatments of the origins and application of framing processes. However, as a perspective that has guided subsequent research, the strategic elements of framing theory seem to have attracted more attention than any others. For new cultural approaches in protest research, see Johnston (2009).

Franzosi (1999, 2004) suggests that the basic story grammar of subject–action–object can be applied to the study of protest events and used in event analysis. While this is the topic of another paper, it is a provocative idea that this same ‘semantic triplet’ of subject–verb–object may structure deep elements of deep cultural text. My discussion of deep cultural text proceeds according to a similar tripartite structure without making any claims at this time about its correspondence to a deep cognitive pattern.

According to one Soviet-era ethnographer, ‘At the heart of Chechen life were the ideals of the hearth, strong and healthy male heirs, and the flourishing of the kinship group. Individual death was not considered evil, because it was inevitable and sent by the supreme God, or Dela. But if there was a danger of the extinction of the teip, that was thought a most terrible misfortune’ (Mamakayev 1973, quoted in Lieven 1998, p. 340). Another Soviet anthropologist states: ‘From the point of view of a Chechen, a teip characterises his or her personality.’ According to a Soviet intelligence report (1994): ‘Clans are largely closed, internally cohesive and mutually exclusive building blocks [of Chechen society], which take hidden but mainly united political decisions and which give their allegiances as teips to different causes and leaders’ (Lieven 1998).

There is a Chechen maxim, ‘A doctor can cure a wound, only a dagger can cure a dishonoring word.’

This section will look at the Russian–Chechen ethnic opposition as analytically separable from its Islamic character insofar as it draws on economic, political, and military factors rather than faith and holy war.

The 1991 Chechen state was not an Islamic one based on the sharia, but rather had a constitution that guaranteed religious freedom, much like Turkey's. This perhaps is a measure that the political–strategic use of Islam had not yet progressed very far.

The politics of this period 1991–1992 are labyrinthine, to say the least. Here I present only the general patterns. There are several detailed treatments, among them Dunlop (1998), and German (2003) (also Smith 2001, pp. 122–143; Gall and de Waal 1998, pp. 91–123; Omrod, 1997; and Wier, 1999).

An anecdote (and therefore of questionable veracity) is told of Dudayev: at a public meeting he encouraged Muslims to pray three times a day. He was awkwardly corrected by a mullah. ‘Uh, Honored President, it's five times a day.’ Dudayev replied, ‘Well, the more the merrier.’

This was significant for many Chechens, but showed Dudayev's theological ignorance. Clerics saw it as a questionable desecration of the Quran. It was well known that Dudayev was not an observant Muslim, and in fact was ignorant of basic practices before he took office (Dunlop 1998, p. 98).

Given space limitations, this review must gloss over many details of this period's political manoeuvring, but I have endeavoured to present the basic trend. With Dudayev's decreasing popularity, he attempted to draw support by exploiting traditional forms of social organisation and Islam, both of which he had little knowledge upon returning to Chechnya (German 2003, p. 78). His political competitors used the same tactics.

Wahabbism originated in the Arabian Peninsula in the 18th century as the ideology of the Arab struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Wahabbites see it as the path of pure Islam, strict, internally logical, offering an alternative social order. Their goal was to proselytise their form of Islam, taking advantage of a society characterised by disintegration, corruption, criminality, and inequality. Wahabbites also condemned vestiges of pre-Islamic worship, as had Mansur and Shamil long ago. These remained common in Chechnya – adat merged with Sufism (Bowers et al. 2004, pp. 400–401).

Paradoxically, religion played less of role at this stage in Chechnya than in some other nationalist movements in the USSR: Lithuania, Western Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, for example. The reason for this is probably the diffuse structure of Sufi Islam and the concomitant weakness of official, state-controlled Islam when compared with official religious organisations in these other republics, which, in the cases mentioned here, were Christian, not Islamic. Although subject to the same anti-religious campaigns and restrictions, the centralised Church organisations – as weak and compromised as they were – could provide resources, organisation, and cover in the early stages of the nationalist movements not available to underground Sufism in Chechnya. In varying degrees, early-riser groups in these republics' nationalist movements took advantage of these – Lithuania the most (Johnston 1993).