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

1. Bazaar and Mediation

20 Osh may fail to stand out as a beautiful city in the eyes of the average Western tourist. Beyond the imposing Solomon Mountain (fig. 2) at its center, the cityscape offers few striking elements. Yet the city is fascinating for the dense social worlds that it assembles, juxtaposes, and tucks away within its urban configuration. Italo Calvino (1974, 15), in his fanciful work Invisible Cities, imagines a city called Zora that distills this impression of Osh: Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. Osh is an engaging city because it manifests patterns of convergence and contrast that tell a broader story about Central Asia as it is today and as it was under Soviet rule; however, we are not attempting to “read” the city abBazaar and Mediation 1 Bazaar and Mediation 21 stractly like a code, text, or musical score. The patterns sought here involve plummeting worlds of human activity so that Osh can be seen as a lived idiom of exchange. The mundane prevalence of urban exchange has led Osh Uzbeks to think about their post-Soviet condition through their city as a metaphor of mediation in general. Osh is more than a metaphor, though, for the subjects of this book; it is what one might call an idiom—something that brings together ideas and routine activity into a coherent whole. Osh is an idiom of exchange because the city is being treated as a kind of mediator between disparate tendencies in the tumultuous post-Soviet moment. This chapter seeks to divulge how mediation is lived out in the city. It gathers glimpses of daily urban activity that reveal various kinds of regular exchange involving things, money, people, ideas, and aspirations. Strolling the central bazaar, one witnesses the hawking of local and global commodities ; the conversion of foreign currencies; the jostling of different ethnicities, languages, lifestyles, and professions; the juxtaposition of new affluence and widespread poverty; the precarious balance between the opportunities of innovative enterprise and the nostalgic yearning for state paternalism. An important stop is the monument to Osh’s infamous interethnic riots of 1990, rooted in the city’s chronic land shortage. That critical dearth has necessitated decades of politically fraught trade-offs in land use, with emphasis shifting between old Uzbek neighborhoods, new housing for Kyrgyz rural migrants, space for industry, and areas for agriculture—competing demands that together influence what kind of city Osh is to become. Visiting Solomon MounFigure 2. Solomon Mountain and mausoleum. Photograph by the author, 1997. 22 Bazaar and Mediation tain, the Friday mosque, and the Russian consulate affords broader views of the forces rapidly reshaping urban life since independence. Emergent forms of public piety coexist and compete with both Soviet and “fundamentalist” ways of being Muslim. The tremendous exodus of migrant labor to more prosperous countries reflects the tension between the necessity of being scattered abroad for work and remittances and the desire to invest effort into local communal life. This chapter thus aims to sound out the city’s significant economic, political , and social issues at the pedestrian level. It takes literally Wittgenstein’s call to get “back to the rough ground.” In fact, this effort begins with a rock. Stone Monument A stone about the height of a person sits unobtrusively at the edge of a vast agricultural field on the north side of Osh. The stone is a monument to an event for which the city of Osh is most notoriously known, even though most residents of the city are unaware of the monument’s existence or location . The inscriptions on plaques attached to the stone simply read, “Pamiati zhertvam tragicheskikh sobytii 4 iunia 1990 goda” in Russian, and “In memory of cityzens the tragic events of Jyne 4 1990 [sic]” in English, and a similar text in old Turkic (fig. 3).1 The stone marks where groups...