Under Solomon's Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

4. Neighborhood and Making Proper Persons

105 neighborhood and Making Proper Persons 4 A neighborhood is more than a place to live. Inhabited places are always saturated with a wide range of human concern, whether through narrative about them or engagement in everyday acts of dwelling in them (Casey 1997). Places gather material things, experiences, thoughts, dispositions, habits, concerns , and their histories into particular local configurations that can become deeply meaningful.1 In particular, “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind,” writes Gaston Bachelard (1964/1994, 6). Osh’s Uzbek-majority neighborhoods have been heavily invested with the thoughts, memories, and dreams of its residents. The mahalla is central to what it means to be Uzbek in Osh. This chapter is about how Osh Uzbeks talk about the mahalla and how they make sense of their entire post-Soviet situation through their conception of it. Narratives reveal the mahalla as an idiom by which residents think about and try to live out moral community. There will be much talk about the preSoviet mahalla as the site of pristine Uzbek culture and how Soviet rule eroded traditional values. Residents remarked that social relations in the mahalla today lack the sense of respect for elders, concern for the communal good, propriety of behavior among women, honesty, and industriousness compared to 106 neighborhood and Making Proper Persons what they understand mahalla life to have been like before Soviet rule. On the other hand, the mahalla is also narrated as a bulwark against Soviet attempts to “destroy Uzbek culture” by razing mahallas and building micro-districts during the postwar urban reconstruction of Osh, as noted previously. Mahallas were a key site where local Soviet social projects touched ground and drastically changed the communities’ physical and social composition. It was precisely the mahalla’s value as “the only place where one could properly be Uzbek,” as one person put it to me, that led most of the displaced to choose the harsh life in new mahallas on the hilly adirs rather than take apartments. And so, the Soviet-era mahalla could paradoxically index either the loss of Uzbek traditions or their preservation. The mahalla was for Osh Uzbeks a deep cultural reservoir that was drained by Soviet efforts but still retained some of its essence. It was their Aral Sea. The mahalla is also central to the post-Soviet project of restoring this conceptual reservoir to its alleged former high-water mark through the revival of “national traditions” and Islam. It is the place where moral persons are cultivated, and it is ultimately a key to building a successful society. Osh Uzbeks are, in other words, thinking with the mahalla about critical questions concerning personhood, community, and post-Soviet futures. The mahalla operates as a figure of thought and practice—an idiom—that makes a claim about what Uzbek collective existence ought to look like. This chapter progressively discloses that idiom, examining how Osh Uzbeks treat the mahalla as a cultural reservoir and as a site for the formation of good persons. There is, however, a dominant assumption that, for Osh Uzbeks, mahalla is always primarily about ethnic territoriality. If one reduces the meaning of mahalla to be only about turf, one misses the other significances of these neighborhoods to their residents. In order to make room for unfurling the mahalla idiom, it is first necessary to dispel the assumption that ethnic territoriality has fundamental importance regardless of context. Moving beyond Territoriality Ethnic territoriality refers to an ethnic group’s claim that a place is properly under its control, a claim they are often ready to defend, and this appears to be precisely how Osh Uzbeks see the city’s mahallas.2 The 1990 Osh riots erupted as the result of a land dispute over whether newly urbanized Kyrgyz should settle on land that Uzbeks saw as theirs. The 2010 events quickly devolved into interethnic tit-for-tat attacks that ended up destroying mostly mahalla houses, Uzbek institutions, and Uzbek-run businesses. Both incidents involved barricades on mahalla streets and the literal tactics of defending one’s neighborhood against encroachment. The sense of territoriality will undoubtedly continue in the very long aftermath of the violence, as hundreds of Uzbeks remain displaced, their property and place in Kyrgyzstani society neighborhood and Making proper Persons 107 lost, and perceptions of continuing unjust treatment persist. The posture of ethnic claim to...