The Sociology of Central Asian Youth

Choice, Constraint, Risk

Mohd.Aslam Bhat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815380603
• eBook ISBN: 9781351212816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At the onset of the twenty-first century, 'youth studies' emerged as a distinct field of inquisition. Discourses and debates in the field have since become more sophisticated, and the spectrum of analysis has likewise broadened. However, it is striking to note how little reference is made to young people of peripheral regions like Central Asia.

The Sociology of Central Asian Youth seeks to critically broaden the discussion on youth transitions discourse by moving beyond the geographical terrain of North America, Britain, Australia and Western Europe. The work establishes an in-depth understanding of young Central Asians, with a special focus on those in Uzbekistan. This is accomplished through the explanatory powers of the various forms of sociological theory and, specifically, by pursuing an ambitious aim: to introduce the classic sociological debate about the relationship between structure and agency in social behaviour into the study of modern Central Asia.

Presenting the experiences of youth against the backdrop of contemporary socio-economic and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space, this empirical monograph will appeal to postgraduate students and post/doctoral researchers interested in fields such as Youth Studies, Central Asian Studies, Social Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Sociology.

1 Introduction

Post-/late variety theory, youth research and the Central Asian context

Young people’s cultures and various aspects of their living conditions have long been subject to sociological analysis, interpretations, debates and discussions. Amidst the many different aspects of contemporary social change and wide-ranging commentaries on these, the concept of youth and understanding youth’s lived experiences have increasingly come to be seen as important, especially from economic and political standpoints. Indeed, at the onset of the twenty-first century, ‘youth studies’ has emerged as a rapidly growing field of inquisition and research. Discourses and debates in the field have become more sophisticated, and the spectrum of analysis has likewise broadened. From sociology, cultural studies, psychology, social work, criminology, ethnic studies, anthropology, women’s studies and history; youth studies with different objects of intellectual abstraction, different methods, forms and levels of analysis, and different interpretive frameworks, constitute a discursive terrain of contemporary cross-disciplinary interest. Specifically, in the sociological discourses, this field takes much of its inspiration from the brainwaves of post-modernists, late-modernists or reflexive modernists. Relatively recently the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s notion of ‘individualisation’ of the modern life course, the growing role of individual agency in the shaping of life-course transitions and the increasing prominence of risk have been highly influential. Prominent contributions and responses to this line of theorising can be observed in such concepts as ‘structured individualisation’, ‘standard biography’, ‘bounded agency’ and ‘choice biography’, etc.

On closer inspection, however, most of these themes and concepts, though increasingly doing justice to local diversities, are rooted in North American, British, Australian and European experience. It is striking to note in this framework of broader intellectual interest and vigour, how little reference is made to young people of peripheral regions like Central Asia. Substantial, serious and critical debates about categories such as adolescence, youth transitions, or school-to-work transitions in the context of the former Soviet Union, particularly Central Asian republics, which have been described as receiving a ‘demographic dividend’ in the World Development Reports, are seriously lacking. Looking onto the contemporary, rapidly changing social realities of young people as they grow up in an historical moment fiercely guarded and shaped by advanced communication systems, labour market transformations and hyper-inequalities, there is pressing need to understand what exactly is going on in the life trajectories of the burgeoning number of young Central Asians, who in the 1990s were thrown sharply away from the once rigorously guarded school-to-work transition patterns of the Soviet Union into the sea of heightened risks and uncertainties posed by the conflicting challenges of nationalistic mobilisation, economic underdevelopment and globalisation. These conditions have given rise to multiple regimes of youth transitions with a huge diversity in choice, flexibility and in/security in young people’s experiences across different contexts of post-Soviet setting, thereby providing a central site for reflection on the state of youth transitions in Central Asia.

As such, this book, primarily based on ethnographic research carried out in 2012 in Uzbekistan, seeks to offer a nuanced and specifically contextual reading of young people’s everyday lives in post-Soviet Central Asia, and propose ways to divulge and theorise the processes that define youth life trajectories across the geographical terrain of modern Central Asia. Nevertheless, given the peculiar conditions as noted above, doing youth study in the context of post-Soviet Central Asia calls attention to a kind of persistent and systematic appraisal of complexity pertaining to youth’s everyday life experiences and to the data collection that it warrants. Specifically given its continued strength of politico-economic preferences and practices inherited from the Soviet period, Uzbekistan among Central Asian republics provides us with both a unique opportunity and a pressing need to study the scenario of youth. However, securitising the plethora of literature on Central Asia in general and Uzbekistan in particular, the thing that struck us especially was how little interest there has been on the part of academicians and social researchers in the concept of ‘youth’ in one of the most ambitious republics of the former Soviet Union (FSU), i.e., Uzbekistan. This lack of interest is striking insofar as the study of youth in Uzbekistan has become an unsafe thing to touch upon. There may be various reasons for this indifference, but the core one (a point I shall return to later on) includes a specific political problem in Uzbekistan, wherein one finds limited freedom of expression, and this is more so when it is Uzbek youth to be studied. While recently a few research articles on Kyrgyz and Tajik youth have emerged, very few of these works place any attention on the scenario of Uzbek youth. Thus, the present book’s focus on Uzbek youth not only fills a gap in the literature insofar as most of the youth researchers have shifted their interest to other republics of the region, but may also offer a valuable standpoint from which to examine cultural processes in Uzbekistan at large. Before moving further, it may be useful to turn in greater detail to the theoretical and analytical framework of this book. And as such, this introduction takes up three tasks.

First, it seeks to provide some reflective reading of the contemporary sociological conceptualisations around the study of social transformations and youth transitions. This double debate concerning the character of the current trends in sociological analysis, offers how new theoretical positions mnemonically indicated by the prefixes post, reflexive, late and liquid tend to challenge the adequacy of classical notions about ‘youth’ as a transitional phase of life, and the life course as a series of stages, linear, cumulative and non-reversible. Second, it attempts to deploy this reflective reading in specifying the diverse experiences of young people through the lens of global perspective and presents how chains of human interdependence and crucial structural features of contemporary societies, shaping young people’s life chances, remain intact and can’t simply be ignored or their casual consequences denied as some post-/late variety theories make us believe. Next it looks at the possible theoretical refit that would facilitate to widen and thrive the significance of contemporary youth studies, and help in theoretical sophistication and a more holistic sociology of youth. Against this backdrop, the third task of this introduction is to give readers methodological detail vis-à-vis the field study carried out in Uzbekistan in 2012 for my doctoral research, which comprises the primary empirical material of the book. Finally, this chapter gives a description of the geographical and historical layout of the book.

Youth corridor in classical sociology

It is the truism of classic ‘youth’ studies of varied theoretical beliefs that the term is clearly related to a transitional phase, where a person’s role in life and their identity become ambiguous. In his prominent scholarship, Centuries of Childhood, Philip Aries (1965: 46–56) makes a case that in the Middle Ages, children were simply seen as small adults. This construct altered in the modern age when childhood began to be considered as a unique phase of life with its own distinctiveness. However, to mull over childhood as distinct from adulthood posited the question of how children achieve adulthood, and here the idea of youth as a phase of change, rupture, disruption, discontinuity and transition is born. Youth increasingly came to be thought of as a cultural assignment of social locations, which are related to institutions and lifestyles, and no longer reduced to any kind of natural process alone.

Sociologically speaking, such comprehensions about ‘youth’ can be located at least as far back as Auguste Comte’s (1830: 3) fourth volume of Cours de la philosophie positive, lecture 51, wherein he suggests a hypothesis that the degree of dynamism in society is allied to the succession of generations: ‘the shorter the life-span of a generation the more vigorous the social dynamics.’¹ This hypothesis posits youth as a factor of social change: not in view of the fact that youth is subjected to the socialising influence of the adult institutions, and a stage in formation of social identity, what Erikson’s (1968, in Baron et al., 1999: 484) psychoanalytic perspective posits the formation of an adult identity as task of the adolescent identity crises. But youth is an imperative touch in the course of historical development and of cultural change. Comte asserted that youth is endowed with the ‘instincts of change’, and as a positivist his archetype of progress was linked to the positive appraisal of youth. And although he was simultaneously very much critical of the disruptions of social order (Kuczynski et al., 1988: 4), youth, however, provide for Comte the ‘thermometer’ category of wider social changes.

As such, there are wide-ranging and rich classical conceptualisations of youth and at this multidisciplinary junction, it is the developmental psychology approach (e.g. Inhelder and Piaget, 1958) that still seems to be influencing the public discourse. This approach articulates youth as the time when the thought form of ‘concrete operations’ gives way to that of ‘formal operations’, while a qualitatively new form of ‘moral reasoning’ becomes available. Unlikely research on youth culture, the culture of young people and cultural aspects of youthful phenomena, classically associated with the Chicago School,² often looked at youth as a social problem. With an authoritarian approach, it proposed that youth was or should be seen as a ‘value’ and the research evaluated the possibilities for social integration and the fears for social disintegration (Coleman, in Sven, 1961: 51). The now ageing trucks of ‘Birmingham Cultural Studies’³ as Baron (1999) calls it, detailed the problems of youth in interaction with the school, parental cultures and the media, etc. (Forans and Bolin, 1995: 1–11), hence depicting youth as a cultural assignment of social locations. The rise of women’s studies as an interdisciplinary ‘field’ encompassed or tended to concentrate on the assumption of a de-gendered subject (male model), highlighting gender-specific patterns of reproduction and transition (MacRobbie, 1980: 37–49).

To make things more elaborate, the novel writings of K. Mannheim, L. Rosenmayr, P. Bourdieu, and S.N. Eisenstadt, etc., portray youth as: a value concept, connoting a vital force; a source of renewal for the whole society; a category of chronological age; a segment in the lapse of the individual’s life; a stage of psycho-biological development; an element of social replacement; a stage in life marked by incomplete access to social positions; a marginal social category; and a constellation of ideologically homogeneous cohorts (Kuczynski et al., 1988: 6–7). While all these portraits set the tone, however, the most detailed analysis of youth was provided by Eisenstadt (1962: 28–56), who seeks more specifically sociological criteria and defines youth as a

period of transition from childhood to full adult status of full membership in society. In this period, the individual is no longer a child especially from a physical and sexual point of view but is ready to undertake many attributes of an adult and to fulfil the adult roles. But he is not acknowledged as an adult, a full member of society. Rather he is being ‘prepared’ or is preparing himself for such adulthood.

Equally, Mannheim’s (1952) discussion of ‘generations’ explores youth as one of the several possible categories of ‘fresh contacts’ contributing to an important change in human consciousness. However, he agreed that the special role of youth as a vital biological factor consisted in the continuous ‘rejuvenation’ of society.

On the underlying level there is a shared conjecture in this wide-ranging literature mostly based on the disciplines of psychology and sociology, that youth is a phase of life which marks the ‘take-off’ from one stable state (childhood) to another stable state (adulthood), with youth as the stage in which the emerging adult tries on a variety of roles and ways of behaving as preparation for making critical choices. The coming of age ‘physiologically’ demands attendant psychological and social changes, which must be faced and resolved before one can settle as a personally satisfied and socially acceptable individual. Auguste Comte’s conception of youth is philosophical, close to the idea of re-living in ontogenetic development⁴ of all stages of the natural history of species. For developmental psychology, ‘formal operations’ is the apex stage of cognitive development facilitating access to scientific logic and reflections on one’s own thought, whereas the ‘universal ethical principle orientation’ is the apex stage of moral development. Youth for cultural studies based on a structural-functionalist model appears at the moment of ‘disintegrating’ with a ‘re-integrating’ function and the highest stage is conformist adulthood. For feminists, youth appears as a moment between gender-specific socialisation and transition of young women into dual roles in production and domesticity, which follow a different logic to that of young men. Eisenstadt, Mannheim and others looked upon youth as ‘a transitory phase between the world of childhood and the adult world’, and a kind of ‘freshness’. For none of these theoretical accounts is the outcome of the transition unproblematic; rather, the underlying notion is common, with ‘youth’ predominantly understood as a developmental stage, one in which new kinds of roles, relationships and competences must be practised and mastered in order to pass from the social status of childhood to adulthood.⁵ Just as infancy gives way to childhood, youth gives way to adulthood – a state centred on more or less stable subjectivity and social being. Hence, the life course⁶ is looked upon as a series of stages, linear, cumulative and non-reversible, as being on a road to adulthood and of becoming more independent and established.

In recent times, however, the adequacy of such classical conceptions of life course has been targeted by new theoretical accounts about pace of contemporary social and economic change, which triggered a renewed interest in modernisation process, mnemonically indicated by the prefixes post, reflexive, late, high, super, liquid and hyper. Such theories have gained wide currency in youth research. Late-modernisation, however, is perhaps the most often used, even though obviously no one knows what will crop up later. Nevertheless, within this sociology of youth, there is an increased interest in the diversity of the experience of youth, the centrality of identity, and the subtle interplay of individual agency, circumstance and social structure. The relationship between timing, opportunity and identity lies at the heart of these contemporary concerns. Specifically, the ‘take-off’ from youth to adulthood is increasingly understood as non-linear and heterogeneous (Irwin, 1995, in Thomson et al., 2002).

Post-modern social theory and youth identity

The contemporary communication revolution,⁷ the accumulation of change in the global economic system, and the consequent changes in society, politics and culture have ushered in a large volume of research on the implications of societal change for life experience and human development. Amidst many aspects of this change and wide-ranging commentaries on these, it is largely held that living in the ‘brave new world’ of globalisation has changed the way we perceive time and space, and the way we think about the world and ourselves (Kunitz, 2000; Beck, 2000): flexibility, diversity, differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralisation, and internationalisation are in the ascendant. And in this process, identities, sense of self, and subjectivities are being seen to have transformed (Hall, 1988). Perhaps the emerging direction of contemporary social theory is nowhere more evident than in the attention it lavishes upon the nature of the self, self-identity and individual subjectivity (Elliot, 2001, in Callero, 2003: 115).

The labour force of this mode of production is seen as being recomposed to be flexible, working on demand across different tasks with less ‘secure jobs’, casualisation (contract work), ‘too much work’, ‘not enough work’, and ‘no work’, ‘training’ and ‘retraining’, ‘multiple careers’, and ‘early retirement’ as production demands: the learning society is born.⁸ Since, in much of the literature the spheres of education and employment are privileged as the most central in the transition from youth to adulthood and in formation of social identity (Erikson, 1982, in Bhat and Rather, 2012: 14). As the penultimate sentence in this restructuring and consequently ‘the virtual collapse’ of the traditional youth labour market, social identity has been one of the central concerns to this discourse of change. And the recurring themes, including the relation between human lives and a changing society, the timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives and human agency, etc., emerged increasingly, with most of the commentators negating the ‘transition fit’ that classical youth studies observed. Contrarily, it is argued that the period of youth has been moved later in the life course, extended, removed for better or for worse from meaningful contact with the adult world, and experienced as meandering, arbitrary, dissolved and fragmented. Hence ‘growing up’ today is not what it used to be.

It is in this area of personal life that post-modernists⁹ have launched an attack on the idea of centrality of work in people’s lives – ‘I am what I do’ – and on the pre-existing identities based on occupation and class, previously taken for granted. For most of the post-modernists, one of the essential features of post-modernity is the way work and production have given way to consumption, both as the linchpin of social cohesion and as the source of individual identity. Hence, dealing with the ‘post-modern condition’ involves attempting to ‘make sense of our lives in a context of multiple, open-ended, ever proliferating narratives and language games’ (Norris, 2000: 29). In this connection, following Foucault, Stuart Hall stresses that there can be no true self hiding ‘inside’ or behind the artificial or superficial, because self and identity are constructed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. Introduction: Post-/late variety theory, youth research and the Central Asian context
• 2. Locating the young Central Asian: Recourse to history
• 3. Uzbek youth culture in the quandary of transition
• 4. Constituting post-Soviet Uzbek identities: Three types of youth
• 5. Young people facing the post-Soviet ‘state’: A landscape of Uzbekistan
• 6. Epilogue: Mainstreaming perspectives on the Central Asian pattern
• Bibliography
• Index