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

5. House and Dwelling in the World

125 House and Dwelling in the World 5 The mahalla is a potent idiom of virtuous character and moral community. The idiom allows Osh Uzbeks to ponder and attempt to practice the kind of collective life that they believe is key to renewing society for a better future. Understanding this view allows us to appreciate why so many Osh Uzbeks have desired a “traditional” courtyard house and resisted apartment neighborhoods in the “Soviet city,” even at the cost of living in the adirs, harsh hilly lands surrounding the city, as long as mahallas could be built. But what is it about mahallas that generates the kind of community life so strongly idealized or so intensely despised, as the case may be? Is the capacity to make good persons and societies really locatable within the mahalla? Conceptions about social propriety, hierarchy, and authority emerge from everyday life activity within mahalla spaces. The links between ideas and practices are neither causal nor one-to-one, but habitual activity conditions expectations about what is socially real in the mahalla, and this entire process is then interpreted as the inculcation of ethnic values in a person. Put more technically, embodied, spatially indexed social practice in the mahalla produces particular ways of being, which are glossed as essentialized traditions and mentalities. The ethnographic exposition here will proceed spatially, like 126 House and Dwelling in the World in previous chapters, moving from mahalla streets to house gates, the house courtyards, and finally the inner rooms of the house. This exploration concludes with theoretical reflections on how mahalla produces a set of conceptual and bodily expectations about the social world, constituting an entire way of dwelling in the world generally. This way of dwelling includes sensibilities of what proper social power and efficacious agency “feel like” and affects how many Osh Uzbeks conceive of the state. Street Mahalla streets are not only interstices between places but also significant places in themselves. Osh’s mahalla streets are densely social places, some of them teeming with activity in the mornings and again from late afternoon to after dark in the warmer months. But street space is never socially innocent. It is not neutral to the meanings and stakes implicit in where and how people choose to walk, linger, play, work, or chat. Merely standing at a spot on a mahalla street suggests a relationship to its residents or at least an assumed right to be seen there for a purpose (compare Gilsenan 1982). Some places seem to invite lingering, while others appear unwelcoming or undesirable. Places engage the kinesthetic faculty—the sense of one’s own bodily movement— exerting almost palpable directional resistances or attractions for those present .1 Outsiders, particularly Kyrgyz, are rarely found on the inner streets of mahallas. But mahallas impose definite constraints on activity even for their Uzbek residents, indeed, especially for them. Uzbek neighborhood life is laden with strong communal expectations about everything from conduct and comportment to conversation and conviviality. This is what waits to be explored now: what it means to inhabit a mahalla. Mahalla space is inhabited as if the space itself were complicit in the contextual assigning of social meanings and dispositions. The mahalla forms a sociospatial field charged with tacit expectations about what normally happens there, when things happen, with whom they happen, and what those happenings conventionally mean.2 These expectations are open textured, that is, always subject to surprise, expansion, or partial revision, and they operate with a sliding scale of assumed probabilities.3 Judgments about likelihoods are made moment by moment and normally without conscious reflection against a background of tacit understandings about the sociospatial world. They are made by embodied actors whose positioned engagement with inhabited space operates across the human senses in the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and kinesthetic realms. They are informed by tactical senses of efficiency, elegance , timing, flow, appropriateness, politeness, and morality, all of which constitute “etiquette” (adab).4 These senses are variously shared (overlapping greatly for many but not for all), socially indexed (dependent on position or identity in the mahalla’s social landscape), and temporally indexed (dependent House and Dwelling in the World 127 on such things as time of day or season of life).5 What I have just described applies generally to human inhabitation from a phenomenological viewpoint. “Lived space,” writes anthropologist Brenda Farnell (1999, 353), “is not a given physical reality but an achieved...