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The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

author:Beijing News

Central Asia is a land that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us. This land once gave birth to a glorious civilization, and it also became a vast stage for the nineteenth century imperial game. Today, it is often a land of curiosity and talk, and the exaggerated irony of the movie "Borat" is perhaps the best impression. They rarely become the focus of the world, and history and change seem to be extinct here.

The young Norwegian anthropologist Erica Farland has entered the land twice. In her eyes, this land is not just a historical site and a black hole of civilization. People living here strive to touch the traces of civilization and use traditions and memories to show their existence. After the end of the Cold War, it left not only scars and disappointments here, but also people here in the new world order who tried to find their own voice. Whether nostalgic or rebellious, staying or running away.

Perhaps it was Fatland's female perspective that gave her record a different kind of care than other travel writers. She pays special attention to marginalized people—herders who have lost their livestock, botanists who have taken root in the desert, guides who have fled to a foreign land. In them, Fatland found that history was never far away, and on the contrary, their courage and judgment had long since merged with the land beneath their feet.

The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

Chronicles of Central Asia by Erica Fatran Translator: Yang Xiaoqiong Version: May 2022 Henan Literature and Art Publishing House

The countries of Central Asia are able to connect with many imaginary worlds in people's minds. In Samarkand or Khiva, Uzbekistan, you can find the Persian flair of your mind – towering minarets, adobe houses, ornate buildings made of geometric and colourful bricks... In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, you can experience the old Soviet face - the Khrushchev or Brezhnev buildings decorated with the patterns of the Central Asian peoples, the Russian-speaking natives, the hotels and local guides with the theme of Soviet nostalgia, the lenin statue that was transferred to the back of the National Mall... In the new capital of Kazakhstan, you can think of yourself as if you were in the Middle East's "tycoon country" – postmodern buildings designed by Japanese designers, indoor all-weather man-made beaches built on the grasslands of minus 40 degrees Celsius, the tallest skyscraper in Central Asia... In Tajikistan, you can pretend to be in Afghanistan and ride a horse through the snow-capped mountains of the Pamir Plateau... Yes, there's also the mysterious Turkmenistan, where you'll find bizarre regulations, such as not being able to paint nail polish.

But Central Asia can also disappoint people's expectations at any time — to make you realize that everything is a little different from what you thought. You'll find street-filled Central Asian Korean restaurants that have been part of since Stalin's time, selling kimchi, miso soup, Russian red cabbage soup, grilled meats and naans; You'll meet a taxi driver with a copy of the Quran in the back seat and talk to you about his admiration for Putin and his disguised praise for "Orthodox traditional values"; You will meet a new generation of young people who follow Han Chao and speak three or four foreign languages fluently; You'll also meet an unexpected variety of Central Asians, either nostalgic or rebellious or conservative or avant-garde, as The Norwegian author of The Chronicles of Central Asia did.

The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

New science and technology park in Nur-Sultan. The photographs are the photographic works of the author of this article.

Perhaps because this is the easiest way for the reader to imagine these five Central Asian countries, or perhaps because the author himself is more familiar with the Russian language than with the many Turkic or Persian languages of Central Asia, the theme that runs through this nonfiction is what was left here after the Cold War? The answer may be decay, trauma, disappointment. Fatland went to the former Aral Sea fishing port of Aral and witnessed the vast lake of the Soviet era that was gradually depleted under agricultural and development policies; She traveled through the whole of Turkmenistan and experienced how the new president could use the legacy of past state control to construct his all-knowing and all-powerful personal image in this closed country; She went to the mountains of Tajikistan and the countryside of Kyrgyzstan, to visit the minorities – The Germans, the Poles, the Jews – who had been moved thousands of miles away by political movements over the past hundred years and who had repeatedly moved and turned their homelands into their homelands. The rich history of Central Asia and its inextricable connection to the political processes experienced by humanity in the 20th century make this travelogue particularly fascinating.

As a female author, Fatland's journey experiences more perverse aspects of male-dominated Central Asian society in the post-Cold War era: on the way to Tashkent, he talks to the businessmen he meets with his lover about how men and women can get along and how women should dress properly; In Kyrgyzstan, activists showed her how people glorified "marriage snatching" into some long-standing cultural tradition, and then grinned at the abduction, transportation, and trafficking of young women; In Tajikistan, barmaids told her how her husband, like most Tajikistan men, had gone to Russia to work, and that, like many similar men, he had one day announced his divorce, leaving his wife, children, and hometown behind.

In these newly independent countries after the end of the Cold War, "Who am I" is enough to be a constant anxiety for all. The answer to this question often goes back to ancestors—male, courageous, heroic ancestors. And these ancestors also have to provide historical material for modern political attitudes – just as Uzbekistan recently commemorated the last king of Khwarazm, Zalandin, who fought against the Mongol army in history. Perhaps the story behind this is that at the beginning of the year, karakalpakstan, an autonomous region in Uzbekistan, there was a dispute over identity. The question of the rights of the Karakarpaks, who have cultural and ethnic ties to the Kazakhs, has sparked a rather clear rift in popular opinion between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which places more emphasis on historical ties with Mongolia.

The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

Erica Fatland, author of The Chronicle of Central Asia, searched for herders in Central Asia.

This is a certain historical dilemma of the Central Asian countries – the need to build nation-states without being able to escape the legacy of history. According to the narrative that has now become the dominant narrative in Central Asia, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the central nation was "sleeping". One of the big questions they face is how to inherit in a proper way the legacy of history, which includes the planned economic supply chain and railways, light and heavy industries connected to factories in Eastern Europe, and the tens of millions of "Soviet" peoples in Central Asia, such as Russians, Germans, and Ukrainians. These peoples constitute a rich and pluralistic world on the one hand, while on the other hand laying the groundwork for worrying possibilities of conflict.

As Farland wrote in the Kyrgyzstan chapter about hiding, fear, and death, the end of the Cold War did not avoid death and killing in Central Asia as it did in Europe (and perhaps after 2022, people will have to rethink this proposition). In Central Asia, clashes broke out among the mixed-dwellers of the former republics — in the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities, where and gangs took advantage of the chaos to kill and loot ordinary people, while in Tajikistan there was a civil war that lasted for many years. Farland keenly captured the hearts and minds of those who followed the upheaval and chaos—those who preferred to rule more strongly than risk social unrest, and those who realized that these upheavals only provided ample excuses for a more rigid society.

Fatland also poignantly depicts the soviet-era borders and ethnicities in Central Asia that have left a legacy of the post-Cold War era: in the mountains of Tajikistan, she visits a unique settlement of an ethnic group called the Jacobians. Their language is arguably one of the few remnants of the ancient Sogdian language in the world today. But when she curiously asked the old people if they had any special cultural rituals or self-identification, the old people were puzzled or coldly said that they were "Tajik Muslims", and there was no difference except that the language was a little different.

But it must be pointed out that in addition to these keen observations, Farland's journey through five countries still has many regrets. In particular, as her title suggests, her observations of the five Central Asian countries are not much different from those of many Western European writers when they write about Eastern Europe—except for a little more spectacle. The Central Asians she writes about are more of an image that has been swept up, coerced, and passive by the tide of history.

The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

Chingis Aitmatov (1928-2008), a famous Kyrgyz writer, whose representative works include "Chamilla", "The Story of the Steppe and the Mountains", "The White Steamer", "One Day Is Longer than a Hundred Years", etc., has won the Lenin Prize and the Soviet State Prize many times. His novels have a broad vision and a wide range of materials, full of rich life atmosphere and romantic poetry, especially with distinct national colors and widely praised, and have a profound influence on contemporary Chinese writers.

Farlan was not able to observe the changes that were brewing in Central Asian societies at that time. It was in the years in which she wrote this travelogue that there was a revival of the public and historical consciousness of young people in Central Asian society. Unlike the generation that was born just in time for the post-Cold War to mature, unlike the generation that was surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union, tormented by economic regression and social upheavals, these new generations of Central Asian youth are more curious to discuss and pay attention to what happened in the past precisely because they have distanced themselves from history. More and more educated young people are able to use their mother tongue and Russian and English proficiently, and are more comfortable exploring their place and expression in the world.

These changes gave rise to a new trend of historical discussion: in those years, in many Central Asian cities, such as Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and Almaty in Kazakhstan, discussions of history, and public writing around urban history, were revived. Unlike works that Farlan came into contact with, which often viewed the history of the 20th century as gross deprivation and violence, a new generation of young people sought to dig beyond what was still worth preserving and future-oriented. In Bishkek, for example, an art group had published a collection of essays on "Utopian Bishkek" a few years earlier. They recreate the story of a Czech workers' cooperative after the October Revolution that traveled across eurasia to the foot of the Tian Shan Mountains to build a heavy industry and workers' autonomous community. They also studied soviet pedagogical creations—especially the theory of the development of human behavior by the master of educational psychology Vygotsky. Behind these intellectual interests, what they are trying to pursue is in an age of increasingly conservative, more intolerant, more and more looking to the past rather than the future, and they believe that these old utopian ideals can help people regain their imagination of human society in the future, rather than stopping at nostalgia and lamentation.

The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

"One Day Is Longer Than a Hundred Years" Author: [Kyrgyzstan] Aitmatov Translators: Zhang Huisen, Zong Yucai, Wang Yulun Version: November 2017 East China Normal University Press

Of course, the trauma and pain of history, and the imagination and inspiration brought by history, were two sides of the same coin in Central Asia in the 20th century. In the 1930s, when famine broke out in Kazakhstan and large numbers of people were either killed or displaced, in Kyrgyzstan, not far away, the food supply was still guaranteed, and the future Nobel Laureate in Literature Aitmatov was witnessing the rapid industrialization and revolutionization of traditional society into the modern era. This historical context makes the perspectives of Central Asian intellectuals often contradictory and even self-contradictory—Aitmatov praises the newcomers of the new era, and his stories are protagonists of collective farm workers, truck drivers and the first generation of young people who entered the city, but he also laments the loss of the souls of old ancestors and the demise of nomadic traditions with industrialization and collectivization. The insulting term "mankurt", which is used by nationalists today by nationalists to describe those "lost mother tongues" and Russified Central Asian elites, derives from a fictional memory-erased slave personality of Aitmatov in his novel "A Day Is Longer Than a Hundred Years", although this is probably not the intention of Aitmatov, who wrote skillfully in Russian.

This historical entanglement of language and identity is a missing part of Fatland's writing, but it is also an indispensable perspective for our understanding of post-Cold War Central Asia. She was too anxious to leave ink on the "post-colonial" state of the Central Asian countries, but her understanding of the region as a whole happened to be highly dependent on her fluent Russian. In Central Asia, you can comfortably travel north and south with just one language, but to see the different world experiences that are offered there, you have to knock on different doors in different languages.

The entanglement of language, identity and history is extremely delicate in Central Asia and challenging in response to geopolitical changes. Even in 2022, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict also seriously affected the social situation in Central Asia. Prices have risen, and many goods cannot be imported through the Trans-Siberian Railway because of Western sanctions against Russia. Flights outside of Central Asia have increased in price because they have to take a detour through other airspace. Millions of Uzbek and Tajik workers working in Russia face the question: If financial sanctions against Russia are increased, how can they ensure that their hard-earned money will not shrink? Should they leave Russia to work in Eastern Europe? The political, economic and social landscape of the post-Cold War era in Central Asia as a whole has encountered unprecedented changes and challenges at present.

The Dialectic of the World and History in Central Asia: Life has only just begun after history has left

Residential buildings in Almaty. The picture shows the photographic work of the author of this article.

It also means it becomes more difficult to find ways to describe history. Just a while ago, several artist friends complained to me that as the war became visible, the younger generation's sense of national identity was strengthening, and their understanding of the Soviet Union and the Russian language became more nationalistic. In the new generation's narrative, the catastrophes of history are more emphasized to cement their own nation-state identity. This means that the plans of the post-90s generation to provide inspiration for the future through utopian experiments that retrace modern history are also in danger of becoming a generation of self-nostalgia.

In the face of the legacy of the empire, it is difficult for people to separate its "civilization" from the disasters brought about by "civilization". Many times they are all the same thing, and this dialectic of empire, through the revolutions of the twentieth century, is most evident in the Central Asian countries. At the end of the book, Fatland laments that the future of Central Asia is full of uncertainty. When you read this sentence, sometimes you will feel that the author is extraordinarily arrogant, and sometimes you will feel that it is also the mentality that continues to plague many of the inheritors of the imperial heritage.

Author/Let it go

Editor/Yuan Chunxi

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