Subject: "tribes" and "clans"
From: Ed Schatz (SCHATZ@POLISCI.WISC.EDU)
Date: Mon Jul 03 2000 - 13:59:03 EDT
I'd like to weigh in with two points about "tribal" and "clan"
identities in the region. (My experience is based largely on
Kazakhstan.)
First, I agree that the importance of patrilineal descent in
distributing resources and fostering loyalty is more limited than one
might expect. But, perhaps the question might be posed differently.
Instead of asking whether "tribes" and "clans" are the wellspring of a
paramount social and political identity in Central Asia, we might
inquire what social/political significance these "tribal" and "clan"
identities have in comparison to other, competing identities. In other
words, in an increasingly complex Central Asia, it is rare that such
subethnic divisions are of paramount importance (as Peter Fienke points
out, there are too many competing allegiances to make such an
unequivocal claim), so the central issue is the circumstances under
which these affiliations DO matter.
(I don't think it necessarily supports a view of "archaic
structures"-which I would hope not to do!-to suggest that patrilineal
descent identities and ideologies inform SOME behavior SOME of the
time.
Second point: there is, and always has been, an importantly discursive
nature to such identities. The colonial ethnographer Levshin pointed
commented about genealogies among Kazakhs,
"How much effort and love for genealogies is necessary in order to
verify and sort through the testimonies, in which one Kirgiz [i.e.,
Kazakh] says that his segment [rod] divides into 5 or 6 parts, another
from the very same segment assures that there are 12, a third confuses
outside divisions with his own, and a fourth, and the most frank
[informant], responds that he is completely ignorant." (Levshin,
Aleksei Iraklieich. 1832. Opisanie kirgiz-kazach'ikh, ili
kirgiz-kaisatskikh, ord i stepei. Reprinted 1996, Almaty: Sanat, p.
289 fn).
Since the Soviet collapse, the widespread public and private discussions
about these divisions suggest that while there may be less continuity
from the pre-Soviet period in terms of "social structure," there is some
continuity in terms of the discourse that accompanies these identities.
Ed Schatz
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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