Национализмы в Средней Азии: В поисках идентичности по Сергей Абашин (review)

539 Ab Imperio, 4/2008 Marianne KAMP Сергей Абашин. Национализ- мы в Средней Азии: В поисках идентичности. Санкт-Петербург: “Алетейя”, 2007. 304 с., илл. ISBN: 978-590-335-428-3. This volume is a collection of articles that have been published in various journals since 2000. They demonstrate Abashin’s interests in two aspects of ethnography, fieldwork , and excavating ethnographic writings. Abashin was trained in the Soviet school of ethnographic research but his intellectual interests draw directly on Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and Benedict Anderson’s presentation of nations as imagined communities. His fieldwork itself seems to follow some of the methodology of long-term individual participant-observation, as established by Mead and others, rather than the Soviet approach of organized ethnographic expeditions, with multiple observers carrying out short-term research through questionnaires. Abashin’s earlier work was a study of ethnicity in the Fergana Valley.1 These articles grow out of that study. Each chapter of this work examines some aspect of Central Asian national identities in light of a particular theoretical approach , and each chapter serves as a contextualized illustration of the questions provoked by theory and the way that theory forces reconsideration of facts and narratives that are familiar to any serious student of Central Asian nationalities. In the introduction to this collection , Abashin remarks that even in his student years, he responded negatively to the Soviet explanation of ethnos, as explicated in Iulian Bromlei’s canonical texts. Soviet study of ethnicity declared the “ethnos” to be an eternal identity , with ancient roots, developing 1 See: Ferganskaia dolina: Etnichnost’, etnicheskie protsessy, etnicheskie konflikty / Ed. S. N. Abashin, V. I. Bushkov. Moscow, 2004. 540 Рецензии/Reviews in an unbroken, linear fashion up to the present, dividing the world into rationally cohesive groups, each of which shares a language, a culture, a history, a way of life, and at least historically, a territory. Scholars who compare theories of nation and nationalism call this the “primordialist ” understanding of that process. The nation (natsional’nost) emerges naturally from the ethnie, in a process of ethnogenesis that is explicable in cultural terms, rather than a result of political actions. The paradigm is clearly founded on many of the suppositions of nineteenthcentury romantic nationalism, and makes a seamless connection between Stalin’s theory of the nation and the on-the-ground work of Soviet ethnographers. Against this theory of ethnos as natural and eternal, Abashin takes a constructivist position: ethnic groups do not really exist, and the nation is constructed in the modern period by the state. For those who are steeped in the arguments about nationalism produced by Anthony Smith, Rogers Brubaker, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and other Western theorists, this is familiar territory. But in the land of positivist ethnography, where the task of the ethnographer was always to define the boundaries of each nationality and never to question whether the definitions prefigured the findings, discussion of the imagination or constructedness of nations is heresy, indeed.Abashin tries to mitigate the charge that his approach to ethnography is entirely formed by his deep exposure to Western scholarship, arguing that although the Soviet school of ethnography regarded Bromlei’s theory as its official position, nonetheless , a closer reading of Soviet ethnographical writing reveals many differing points of view, including doubts about the concrete identifiability of specific nationalities as separate from others, and inklings about the modern constructedness of various nationalities. The first chapter, “On the SelfConsciousness of People of Central Asia: How Aleksandr Igorevich Argued with John,” enters a debate between constructivism and primordialism by comparing and analyzing the arguments of two authors concerning who Uzbeks are. Abashin compares two articles that appeared in the journal Vostok in 1999: John Schoeberlein-Engel’s “Perspectives on the establishment of national selfawareness of Uzbeks,” and its response fromA. I. Sheviakov, “On the article by Dr. Schoeberlein-Engel.”2 Abashin presents Schoeberlein’s work as within the constructivist 2 Shoeberlein later dropped the last half of his formerly hyphenated name, and thus, although his earlier work appears in print under Schoeberlein-Engel, this review will simply use Schoeberlein. 541 Ab Imperio, 4/2008 school, based on Schoeberlein’s explanation that “any community of people, including ethnic, is first of all an image or a concept that is constructed in specific...