Modern Clan Politics: The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond

2/ Nomads, Diffuse, Authority, and Sovietization

NoltL"-L, Diffoe A"-tkorit3-' "-d5 o vietiz,"-tLo"'The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering. - Barrington Moore MODERN HISTORY IS A STORY OF STATE EXPANSION - EXPANSION not into empty space but over inhabited territory. The rapid conquest by tsarist Russia into Central Asia has many parallels-notably in the feverish scramble for African colonies-but even in Africa, rare is the case in which a stateless population so radically and so quickly succumbed to alien state institutions. In this sense, Kazakhstan is terra firma for examining the influence of states on indigenous identity patterns. Apart from the institutions ofRussian colonial expansion, the steppe nomads had minimal exposure to the apparatuses ofstate before the consolidation ofSoviet rule. This affords an unusual opportunity to trace how states produce identity politics.1 To understand the collision ofclan and Soviet authority patterns, we require a step backward. Conceptually, we must first cover terminological issues. Chronologically, we need clarity on what lay at the heart of the traditional, pre-Soviet clan dynamic. As I will show, nomadic pastoralism generated an entire social system built on kinship ties. Readers who skim this chapter will miss the presentation of key evidence, but the logic of the book's argument should not suffer. 21 22 CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND Some definitional clarity makes analysis possible. As Hobbes wrote, "A man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he uses stand for, and to place it accordingly, or else he will find himselfentangled in words, as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles the more belimed."2 To avoid such a messy fate, I consider the use of three key terms: identity, ethnicity, and clan. Identity "Identity" is a term whose utility as empirical descriptor and analytic category may be uneven. The postrnodern turn in the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990S harkened to the social psychology ofMead and the strategic interactionist sociology of Coffman in contending that any given person has multiple, overlapping relational identities, the expression of which is situation-dependent.3 Together with the post-Cold War ascendance ofliberal democratic norms, these insights powerfully suggested the individual as the unit ofanalysis for research in identity politics. This was useful as a corrective to previous primordialist theorizing , but it suggested an oversight: identity involves more than the irreducible and elusive individual singularity suggested in both postmodernism and liberal democratic theory. Identity entails a sameness that links individuals in a group. The recognition that groups are unstable, contested, and overlapping should not obscure the fact that identity is a social phenomenon that on some level must be described in Durkheimian terms.4 In the extreme, a postmodern lens that focuses attention on various, ever-changing multiple identities loses sight ofthe coercive power ofgroups by depicting them as mere paper tigers. Identity is at root about group behavior and group selfunderstandings . By the same token, there is an opposite pitfall in studies of identity : the assumption that group identities remain discrete and constant. Invoking the need for parsimony, some analysts reify difference and create static, categorical cultural amalgams with the appearance of mutual exclusivity. In extreme form, this practice is clear in the "Clash of Civilizations" argument, wherein Huntington essentializes and homogenizes world"civilizations" and expects that conflictwill result from these divisions.5 To be sure, cultural differences are important Nomads, Diffuse Authority, and Sovietization 23 for politics, but the political significance ofdifference does not inhere in the difference itself.6 Rather, it is continually constructed through social interaction and can therefore take on a variety of forms. Any scholarship that imbues entire cultural groups with unity and agency can fall prey to this practice. Avoiding the reification ofgroup boundaries, on the one hand, and recognizing social behaviors, on the other, is an ever-present challenge for identity research. With this in mind, I understand identity as a minimal set ofcharacteristics that an individual is recognized to share with others in a group. Ethnicity "Ethnicity" is a term that students of the former USSR rapidly embraced to describe the primary cultural categories that appeared in Soviet censuses. There is little conceptual difference between what Sovietologists had referred to as "nationalities" and what scholars of other world regions referred to as "ethnicities," but the shift in vocabulary...