Blood Ties and the Native Son

Aksana Ismailbekova

Description

A pioneering study of kinship, patronage, and politics in Central Asia, Blood Ties and the Native Son tells the story of the rise and fall of a man called Rahim, an influential and powerful patron in rural northern Kyrgyzstan, and of how his relations with clients and kin shaped the economic and social life of the region. Many observers of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia have assumed that corruption, nepotism, and patron-client relations would forestall democratization. Looking at the intersection of kinship ties with political patronage, Aksana Ismailbekova finds instead that this intertwining has in fact enabled democratization—both kinship and patronage develop apace with democracy, although patronage relations may stymie individual political opinion and action.

Foreword: On Native Sons, Fake Brothers, and Big Men / Peter Finke
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
List of Acronyms
Introduction: The Native Son and Blood Ties
1. Kinship and Patronage in Kyrgyz History
2. Scales of Rahim's Kinship: Zooming In and Zooming Out
3. "Renewing the Bone": Kinship Categories, Practices and Patronage Networks in Bulak Village
4. The Irony of the Circle of Trust: The Dynamics and Mechanism of Patronage on the Private Farm
5. Patronage and Poetics of Democracy
6. The Return of the Native Son: The Symbolic Construction of the Election Day
7. Rahim's Victory Feast: Political Patronage and Kinship in Solidarity
Concluding words: Native son, Democratisation, and Poetics of Patronage
Glossary of Local Terms
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• History of Asia
• History of Europe
• Central Asia
• Anthropology
• Eastern
• Asia
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253025777
• Langue: English

Extrait

BLOOD TIES AND THE NATIVE SON
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE
Michael Herzfeld, Melissa L. Caldwell, and Deborah Reed-Danahay, editors
BLOOD TIES AND THE NATIVE SON
Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan
Aksana Ismailbekova
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Aksana Ismailbekova
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02528-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02539-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02577-7 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
Contents
Foreword: On Native Sons, Fake Brothers, and Big Men / Peter Finke
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
List of Acronyms
Introduction: The Native Son and Blood Ties
1 Kinship and Patronage in Kyrgyz History
2 Scales of Rahim s Kinship: Zooming In and Zooming Out
3 Renewing the Bone : Kinship Categories, Practices, and Patronage Networks in Bulak Village
4 The Irony of the Circle of Trust: The Dynamics and Mechanisms of Patronage on the Private Farm
5 Patronage and Poetics of Democracy
6 The Return of the Native Son: The Symbolic Construction of the Election Day
7 Rahim s Victory Feast: Political Patronage and Kinship in Solidarity
Concluding Words: Native Son, Democratization, and Poetics of Patronage
Glossary of Local Terms
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
On Native Sons, Fake Brothers, and Big Men
I F I WERE to summarize this book in one sentence, I would probably proceed with something along the lines of Aksana Ismailbekova has provided us with a wonderful and theoretically inspired ethnography on kinship and patronage in post-socialist Kyrgyzstan. If I were to add a second sentence, this would go on to elaborate on the impact of both institutions on local economics and on national politics. That is to say, one key argument of Ismailbekova is that in local understanding there is no contradiction between patronage and democracy, as most of the political science literature would want us to believe, but that both are intricately entangled and, to a certain degree, mutually supportive. And for the very same reason, neither kinship nor patronage necessarily disappear with the appearance of modernity.
There would be nothing wrong with such a statement, but it would provide only a glimpse of what the author has to offer to the interested reader. All in all, this is what the book is all about, and it undoubtedly succeeds in making this point. In contrast to much of the recent scholarship, Ismailbekova shows us that patronage is neither an alternative path nor necessarily a contradiction to kinship but in the Kyrgyz case both institutions must be considered as closely interwoven and overlapping categories. This also implies that membership in either category is open to manipulative strategies to make things look neat and tight. Thus, definitions of kinship are stretched to include those linked in patron-client relationships, yet the latter are framed in a more hierarchical and reciprocal way than they actually are in order to correspond to social expectations of kin relations.
As such, one merit of this book is that it sets an important counterargument against scholarly as well as popular accounts of tribalism and clan politics in contemporary Central Asia. These all too often take a rather simplistic, and sometimes plainly wrong, concept of kinship and of local political processes as their starting point. And often they do not efficiently support their claims with, admittedly difficultly obtainable, data. Ismailbekova clearly shows, as have others before in less thorough ways, that on-the-ground patterns and motives for alliances are far more complex and flexible. This is not to say that nepotism and corruption do not exist. But they come in a variety of forms that might more aptly be labeled as networks or cliques, thus stripping them of their putatively archaic nature and also highlighting their similarity to phenomena well known also in Western societies.
What Ismailbekova also demonstrates is that patronage in Kyrgyzstan in its current form is neither a traditional nor a new institution but one that underwent several metamorphoses in the course of its history. In particular, it thoroughly survived the socialist period, during which it achieved new meanings within the command chains of a planned economy and came out alive and well. It then proved even more to be a very valuable institution-though not for everyone in equal shares-in the period thereafter. Today, possibly more than ever, patronage should be seen, so Ismailbekova, as a coping mechanism that provides guideline and support in times of economic shortage and social instability.
The native son is thus a superb ethnography of the transformation period in Kyrgyzstan. It touches in particular on the economic and political aspects of this process that has so fundamentally changed the lives of millions of people in the former Soviet Union. With mass unemployment and increasing poverty after independence, people have faced a situation of great insecurity. Newly emerging forms of patronage seemed one way for at least some economic and social safety-and a pathway for entrepreneurially minded individuals to use them for their own ambitious plans. The fact that these new structures became heavily interwoven with traditional kinship structures, on the one hand, and new forms of parliamentary democracy, on the other, is, in the author s reading, a concession to both the existing institutional and moral understanding, as well as to the challenges and international expectations ahead.
Ismailbekova analyzes and explains her material in a sophisticated way by making use of a somewhat unorthodox yet fruitful cocktail of theoretical ideas. Her starting point is in studies on identification and the rationale as to why actors ally themselves with specific others, and the price they have to pay for those alliances. This is complemented by borrowings from new institutional economics and the theory of social poetics. The occurrences in Kyrgyzstan are, of course, first of all a process of institutional change affecting all aspects of society. People thus have to adapt to new rules while simultaneously trying to influence the direction these changes take in order to better support their individual aims. In such processes there are inevitably winners and losers when compared with the previous distribution of benefits. And any change of rules is equally inevitably an obstacle for creating or maintaining societal trust and cooperation, as both rely to a certain degree on the stability of mutual expectations. To describe this phenomenon, institutional analysis in general and bargaining theory in particular seem perfectly adequate tools. And, in turn, patronage is a highly illustrative institutional device for the ongoing transformation process in post-socialist Kyrgyzstan. Yet how people manipulate and promote specific institutional pathways of change is influenced by traditional understandings of doing things the appropriate way. To describe this, Ismailbekova utilizes the concept of social poetics, basically saying that manipulative rhetoric people use to persuade others to support their aims must be embedded in existing perceptions of appropriateness.
But anthropology always subsists not only of good theorizing but also of skillful and engaged ethnography. Here, Ismailbekova s book is also in the best tradition of our discipline. Fieldwork was not always easy, as she explicates in her introduction, owing to the fact that her status as a native of Kyrgyzstan and a young mother did not make her, in the eyes of informants, the natural person to do the kind of work she did. Much of the research was in fact teamwork with her husband, Rufat, who accompanied and supported her. And while Kyrgyzstan is certainly not a typical Muslim society, wherever one would find such one, and gender relations are less strict than in other places in the region, to stay there as a couple enriches the insights one gets enormously.
As a book, Blood Ties and the Native Son is borne by a special dramaturgy, organized around a somewhat dubious character, the patron Rahim, and analyzes the specific economic and social configurations that develop out of the system he is able to establish. I will not give a detailed summary of the individual chapters, as Ismailbekova does so in her own introduction, but will pick up a few aspects that illustrate the strengths of the book. After laying out the theoretical and methodological framework the ethnography itself starts with two chapters on kinship and patronage in Kyrgyzstan. While the first provides more of a historical overview, the second introduces the reader for the first time into village life and its everyday practices. Important to note here is that Ismailbekova takes an intermediate stand regarding the segmentary lineage model so debated these days in anthropology. While recognizing th