In this book, authors present specific contexts of historical and contemporary negotiations around the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘performance’ in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural environments in Central Asia. Together, our authors aim to address a current lack of scholarship regarding the use of culture work—the ways in which cultural forms are imagined, created, and performed—as a mechanism to both perform sovereignty and to reimagine traditional forms in the socialist and postsocialist periods. The contributing chapters will analyze how and why these processes of work occur, as well as the specific content of what might be performed, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as instances of nation building and identity formation, and as a mode of cultural survival under cultural assimilation and violence in China today. Since cultural forms in Central Asia have been largely under-researched within the fields of Performance Studies, Anthropology, Literary Studies, Area Studies, and History, the co-editors and contributors of this volume will provide a cross-disciplinary approach to provide some of the key concepts, practices and contexts. In particular, there will be an emphasis on what social and political factors informed the cultural forms at different stages of history.
All of the new independent states of post-Soviet Central Asia, in particular Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, have inherited mechanisms of national celebration, as well as its object: the ‘nation’ itself defined largely in linguistic, cultural, and territorial terms. However, while newly national states have inherited a strong institutional and ideological legacy in the sphere of cultural production, this cannot be viewed as a simple case of post-Soviet reproduction (Adams 2010: 6). The Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan lack not only the underlying hard power of the previous system, but also even the organizational and ideological commitment to soft power resources such as mass spectacle (Ibid.: 5–6). That means that within the institutions of cultural production, there is plenty of space for actors to—whether intentionally or unintentionally—subvert the aims of stated projects (Ibid.), which were largely geared toward the celebration and memorialization of national identity and culture within each former republic. As Adams rightly noted, though we can say in the case of contemporary Uzbekistan that the state maintains a certain dominance over cultural discourses in the country, ultimately that ‘state’ is a ‘collectivity of actors who were in the process of making difficult decisions about the future of their country and their culture’ (5).
The chapters presented in this collection speak to the heart of this argument, and challenge one of its assumptions: given the flexibility we see in cultural production today, perhaps we could conjecture that such practical and ideological ‘wiggle room’ was actually always a fundamental feature of the system, even in the strong power days of the Soviet period. While Soviet discourses of shared, recognizable national cultural forms were certainly predominant and highly active, it is important to recognize that these were not ultimately totalizing in their scope, nor defined top-down. Kudaibergenova (2017) has similarly argued that titular ethnic intellectuals and authors in the Soviet period, though highly constrained, certainly managed to insert their own conversations and images of ethnicity and history in the ‘national’ canon of Soviet Kazakhstan. Similarly, papers from the contemporary period emphasize that though cultural organization and performances may draw on existing structural forms, the vision and content of those projects is one not predetermined, but rather perpetually ‘coming into being.’
We hope the analyzes presented here will generate the potential to learn from past and present articulations of culture within the in-betweenness or liminal space of performance, in order to better articulate the embodiment of culture as a negotiating factor of identities, cultures, and countries in transition. What kind of social and political interventions have been negotiated through culture? What are some of the artistic adaptations of cultural forms for new and emerging purposes? How might cultural forms serve as a microcosm of the macrocosm of current global movements? How do the examples provided in this volume respond to overarching challenges or innovations in the interdisciplinary crossover between performance, politics and culture?
The Soviet discourse and practice of ‘culturedness’ (kul’turnost’) became an established political and cultural form during the Stalinist era in Soviet Central Asia, just as all other regions of the Soviet Union.1 The ‘cultured’ Soviet citizen in the region needed to be well-versed in literature, music, theatre, and other artistic fields, all within the bounds of the Marxist–Leninist ideology. In urban centres such as Tashkent and other capital cities of the Soviet Socialist Republics, the state opera, ballet, theatre, and philharmonia carried out the state-sanctioned cultural activities in larger scale. The nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakh populations, and those in smaller rural regions came into contact with Soviet ‘culturedness’ mostly in Lenin’s Corners in factories and collective farms, and in Red Clubs and other Houses of Culture. First, being ‘cultured’ required the improvement of traditional forms of art with modern, namely Western forms of art. For example, modern stage productions were to replace traditional performances of the akyn (bards).
Gradually, however, indigenous cultural forms found their way into Soviet literature, theatre and film. The Soviet policy, supported by the slogan ‘national in form, socialist in content’ encouraged talented writers such as the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov to forge a Soviet artistic tradition that blended indigenous and Soviet forms of cultural productions. During the first half of the Soviet era most Soviet authors, artists, actors and other people of the arts learned to assert themselves within the limitations of the official Soviet cultural forms. This delicate and often dangerous assertion took place in a liminal space, in which professional artists found various ways to stay ‘national in form, socialist in content,’2 a dictum guiding the research and understanding of every performative sphere of life from art (Tagangaeva 2016) to music (Harris 2008) to language (Shelestyuk 2019); one could even understand the very category or notion of tribal identity itself in this new way, as Edgar (2004) has well-described in the case of Turkmenistan.
The two-sided notion of a specifically socialist multiculturalism was experienced throughout the former Soviet Union and China over the twentieth century and tended to follow relatively specific patterning linking categories of ethnic and performative identity. For example, in her exposition of the establishment and development of Soviet national art in Buryatia, Tagangaeva (2016) explains how ‘a specific visual aesthetic and discourse [was] formed, based on the close link between art and ethnicity. National art was tied to the development of Soviet ethnography, which enabled the naturalization of art through geographic and ethnic essentialist attributes’ (393). Ethnographic and academic research on ‘folk’ and artistic traditions led to a typology of nations defined in cultural terms, all which in turn orbited, and were still oriented toward, the cultural center of Russian modernism, and thus the Soviet institutionalization of art can be understood also as the colonization of cultural form (Ibid.: 397–399). In Buryatia, for example, artists working in the Soviet framework confronted the category of the ‘national’ as clichéd orientalism (Ibid.: 405–406). In China at the same time, comparable demarcations of cultural form led further, for example, to the canonization of ‘national musical traditions’ of ethnic minorities like the Uyghur Shashmuqam (Harris 2008). Although the artistic outcome of such endeavours often created bland and propaganda laden productions, many individuals dedicated themselves to improving the quality of their work. Many took pride in their education in art institutes and higher education institutions while not abandoning their ethnic, regional, and national ways of seeing and being in the world.
In our contributions to this volume, we wish to foreground the work and activity of individuals and groups in the establishment, maintenance, and performance of cultural traditions across Central Asia. Here we view ‘culture’ not as a given, but as a space continually (re)claimed by those working creatively within environments of political socialism and nationalism including indigenous performative and intellectual traditions. In formulating our approach to this special collection of essays and to best articulate the ‘coming into being’ of varied cultural forms and performatives, we bring together key concepts and terms that are derived from our varied disciplines and theoretical frameworks including: interweaving, liminality, dwelling, and affective sovereignty, which we explain briefly here. Additionally, throughout our research articles we explore how other cultural and linguistically specific terms that connote a specific definition within Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Russian, Tajik, or Kazak, might contribute a deeper understanding of how our theoretical terminology might apply in other contexts or across cultures as well. The terminology provides a web-like structure that links between the articles in this volume to generate new thought processes that potentially provides alternative points of access or lenses between disciplines, our own form of border crossing or liminality.
Anthropologist Victor Turner has described liminality as ‘a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to and anticipating postliminal existence’ (1990: 12). The articles here explore the Kyrgyz thinker Arabaev’s and Kyrgyz actresses’ development as influential intellectuals in their ow...