The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan: Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War

7. Territorial Loss: An Intracultural Adaption

7. Territorial Loss: An Intracultural Adaptation FRONTIER: THE CONCEPT THE CONCEPT OF frontier as it is used here has a much broader implication than generally accepted in anthropological literature, where its implication is restricted to cultural frontiers (e.g., see Bohannan and Plog 1967 and other acculturation and adaptation studies). For frontier historians such as Owen Lattimore, the concept has geographic (spatial), temporal, social, and cultural referrents (see 1962b, pp. 469-91, and 1951; also see F. J. Turner 1961, p. 38, and 1962). I find the frontier historians' view of the concept of the frontier more comprehensive, dynamic, and more relevant to my own discussion of social change in Kirghiz society (from a diachronic perspective) than the more restricted anthropological interpretation. Owen Lattimore distinguishes between at least three types of frontiers and frontier processes. The earliest, according to Lattimore, was the Inner Asian frontier, the frontiers between the despotic states of the great river basins (in China, Western Asia, and the Middle East) and the pastoral nomadic societies of the steppe, the desert, and the highlands of Central and Inner Asia. By the end of the fifteenth century, the opening of the era of great navigators, the second type, which Lattimore has called the overseas frontier, or colonial frontier, was created (1962b, pp. 488-89). The third type, the new frontier, was created for the most part after the First and Second World Wars. Both the Inner Asian and the overseas frontiers were free and open zones, subject to territorial expansion and loss with considerable socioeconomic and cultural consequences for the neighboring societies over a period of time. The new frontiers are, however, marked by 169 170 Closed Frontiers linear closed boundaries and are absolute in theory and practice, which both restrains and excludes those who live across the lines (Lattimore 1951, p. 241). The new linear boundaries, particularly in Asia, have resulted in territorial losses (especially by pastoral nomadic groups), as well as the severance of long established and ongoing socioeconomic and cultural relations between numerous adjacent communities that were part of a single "key economic" and/or "key strategic" region(s) (see Lattimore 1962b, p. 498). These are what I refer to as the closed /ront£ers that have characterized the external situation in the Wakhan Corridor and the Afghan Pamirs during the past thirty years or so. Internally, because of its distance and remoteness from the regional (provincial) and national market and administrative centers, as well as the lack of reliable communication and transportation systems because of the terrain, this area of Afghanistan has remained isolated, and as a result a frontierlike socioeconomy has prevailed. The major constraints, therefore, that have influenced the direction of chapge and provided the impetus for the adaptation processes in Kirghiz and, to some extent, Wakhi societies under these closed frontier conditions have been the severance of former socioeconomic and cultural ties with the peoples of Chinese and Russian Turkistan (i.e., the reverse of the cultural contact situation), the loss of territory to the Soviet Union, and the self-imposed confinement to the isolated Afghan Pamirs. The kind of change Kirghiz society has experienced under these conditions is not radical but accumulative, which I have characterized earlier as disjunctive structural change without accompanying cultural change-or a pastoral nomadic involution . It is therefore the aim of this section (Part III) to explore and explain the processes through which the structural refinement, complication, and specialization in the Kirghiz social and ecological adaptation system has been achieved, and the means by which the Kirghiz have been able to retain their high-altitude pastoral nomadic mode of subsistence. OPEN BORDERS: BEFORE 1949 It is not possible to understand the direction, the nature, and the magnitude of the adaptive success or failure of any kind of systemic change uniess the relationship between and among various component parts within a given system, as well as its relations within the total environment, are assessed under different conditions at different times. It is only then that the study of " 'change' becomes a mode both of explaining and experiencing the working of the institution Territorial Loss 171 and its milieu, including, of course, its social and cultural milieu" (Bohannan 1967, p. xviii). Therefore, to clarify the dynamic process of sociocultural and ecological adaptation of the Kirghiz under the closed frontier conditions, it is necessary to recapitulate briefly some pertinent aspects of their adaptive strategy and socioeconomic...