Xavier Hallez is a senior fellow at the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asian Studies at the French Institute for Higher Studies in Social Sciences and a researcher at the French Institute for Central Asian Studies. Fluent in Russian, English, Kazakh, Uzbek and other languages, Alai has long conducted research in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, and has extensive experience in archival reading and fieldwork. On October 26, 2022, the School of Foreign Chinese of Peking University invited Professor Alai to give an online lecture entitled "Central Asian Studies in France".
The Supplement to the Oriental Series (1776 edition), compiled by De Ebelo with great effort. The book is still widely cited by French academics today.
French Studies of Central Asia in modern times The study of Central Asia began first with France's interest in the Ottoman Empire. Barthélemy d'Herbelot (1625-1695), an early representative, was born in Paris and studied at the University of Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of oriental languages and literature. De Ebelo devoted his life to the compilation of the Supplement to the Oriental Series. Based on the index to the 17th-century Ottoman scholar Katip Celebi's encyclopedia, the Oriental Series, the book compiles information from other Arabic and Turkish banknotes, and includes a relatively complete collection of Turkish and Central Asian historical documents. After De Ebelo's death, the French orientalist Antoine Galland (1646-1715) completed the compilation of the book in 1697. The book is still widely cited by French academics today. The concept of "Central Asia", based on the geographical space of today's five Central Asian countries, gradually took shape in the second half of the 19th century. The French academic community also made significant progress in the study of the region during this period. The orientalist, explorer and writer Léon Cahun (1841-1900) was a representative of this period. From 1878, Kahn went on expeditions to the eastern Mediterranean coast to collect relevant historical documents. In 1890, Kahn was a professor of Asian history at the Sorbonne, and his Introduction to Asian History (1896) had a profound impact on the Ottoman intellectual elite and 20th-century Turkists.
With the improvement of global transportation and communication conditions, more French scholars joined the study related to Central Asia in the second half of the 19th century. Jacques Bacot (1877-1965) represented the Orientalists who developed academic interests in their travels and became scholars. The other category is those who have received systematic academic training and mastered the language skills of the target region. They travelled to Central Asia specifically to collect information. These included many scholars from the French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO), most notably the Orientalist Paul Pelliot (1878-1945). It is worth mentioning that he visited the Arai Mountains in present-day southern Kyrgyzstan and visited Kurmanjan Datka, an influential local female political figure. Also present was Gustaf Mannerheim (1867-1951), then an officer of the General Staff of Tsarist Russia and later president of Finland. Berch and Noh were able to talk to the Kyrgyz people of the time and took many precious photographs. The documents he left behind are of great significance for understanding Kyrgyz society more than a hundred years ago. One of the current research projects of the French Institute for Central Asia is to collect and organize the archival documents of Berch and Kyrgyzstan, and translate them into Turkish and Russian. In the mid-twentieth century, due to the influence of World War II and the subsequent Cold War, it was difficult for French scholars to enter Central Asia to conduct field research, and the only way to understand and study the region was to learn the region's languages and study historical documents. This phenomenon objectively contributed to the survival of the French Oriental tradition and led to the development of Central Asian studies based on philology. Louis Bazin (1920-2011) is a representative of this tradition in the mid-twentieth century. He studied at the Institut National de l'Oriental Languages and Cultures, where in the 1990s he was Director of the Department of Oriental Languages and Cultures at the CNRS and Vice-President of the Ural-Altai Society in France. The other was Gilbert Lazard (1920–2018), a French-Chinese linguist and Iranianist, a former professor of Persian at the French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures, who founded the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Paris in 1972. It can be said that one of the main contents of French Central Asian studies in the mid-to-late twentieth century was the study of language, documents and history in the Oriental tradition. During this period, another academic thread of French Central Asian studies was the study of Soviet national issues within the framework of Soviet studies during the Cold War, represented by Alexandre Bennigsen (1913-1988). Benichson was born into a German aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1924, the Benichson family moved to Paris. During his studies, Benichson studied Iranian language and culture at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures. He first joined the French Army as an officer in World War II and participated in the French Resistance, and after the war he served in the Chancellery to organize documents relating to the Soviet Union, and later taught at the Ecole des Hautes Erises des Réséutes des Sciences des Sciences (EHESS). He founded the Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Turkish Studies in 1961 and taught at several universities in the United States, which also influenced the Soviet studies community in the United States during the Cold War. Alai believes that two of Benichson's works have high reference value, one about Russian Muslims before 1920 and the other about the Sufi tradition in Central Asia. The study of ethnic issues within the framework of Soviet studies is an important part of the academic history of contemporary French studies of Central Asia.
Russian World Literature (April-June 2022)
The opening of the archives of Russia and Central Asian countries and the improvement of fieldwork conditions after the end of the Cold War, France's leading Central Asian research institution, give us the opportunity to rethink the paradigm used to understand Central Asia. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were rich Russian and native language literature, and on the other hand, there were considerable ethnographic documents, and the modern transformation of Central Asia became an important topic that attracted scholars in Europe and the United States. At present, the main institutions involved in Central Asian studies in France are as follows: the Center for Russian, Caucasus and Central European Studies (CERCEC), formerly known as the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Turkish Studies, founded by Benichson in the 1960s at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences. In 1995, the center was split into two institutions, one focused on Turkic-speaking populations and the other on Russian-based populations and spaces. The latter was transferred to the French National Centre for Scientific Research in 1999 and became a joint research unit in 2001. In 2004, the institution changed its name to the Center for Russian, Caucasus, and Central European Studies, so it focused relatively little on Central Asia. The institution manages Cahiers du Monde russe, the most important Russian studies journal in French-speaking languages. Centre for Turkic, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asian Studies (CETOBaC), as mentioned above, was spun off from the research institute established by Benichson in 1995 and was named the Center for Turkish and Ottoman Studies at the beginning of independence. In 2010, the center changed to its current name, and the center advocates interdisciplinary research focusing on the following six areas: Ottoman history, contemporary Turkish studies, contemporary Balkan studies, Central Asian and Caucasian studies, language, culture and society of Turkic-speaking peoples, and Sufism. The Centre is one of the very few higher education institutions in France that has long offered postgraduate courses in Central Asian Studies and Central Asian History. In addition, given the profound influence of Iranian culture on the history of Central Asia, the Iranian World Studies Center (CeRMI) can also be considered a member of the French Institute of Central Asian Studies. Formed in 1995 by the merger of three research units in Paris, the institution focuses on the linguistic, historical, and sociocultural studies of Iranian-speaking populations, maintaining an international academic network through the French Institute for Iranian Studies (IFRI) in Tehran, the French Institute for Central Asian Studies (IFEAC) in Bishkek and the Delegation of Afghan Archaeology (DAFA) in Kabul. The cultivation of regional research talents and the promotion of scientific research require strong language teaching resources, and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures is the common foundation of French regional research institutions in this regard. The college has specialized in the teaching and research of oriental languages and cultures since 1795, and currently teaches 96 languages including Farsi, Arabic, Chinese, etc., with students and teachers from more than 120 countries, and conducting research projects in more than 100 countries. A number of important scholars mentioned above, including Bako, Berchhe, Bazin, Lazar, Benichson and Dr. Alai himself, studied at the institution. Finally, the French Institute for Central Asia is a key link in the French regional research system to ensure the supply of local knowledge. Since 1907, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has opened the "French Academy" overseas with the aim of promoting the international influence of the French language and French culture. There are two types of the system: the French Cultural Institute, whose main goal is cultural dissemination, and the French Institute, which focuses on academic research. The latter, jointly managed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has 14 bases named after target countries or regions around the world, including the Modern Maghreb Institute in Tunisia, the Institute of Modern Southeast Asia in Bangkok, and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Egypt. One of them is the French Institute for Central Asian Studies, originally founded in 1993 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and transferred to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, in 2010. Its main mission is to provide academic resource services to national researchers working in various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences in the region. It is worth mentioning that the scope of services of the French Institute for Central Asia is not limited to French citizens. Since its establishment, the institution has become an important channel for scholars from many European countries to carry out archival research or fieldwork in Central Asian countries. Its research subjects are geospatially based on five contemporary Central Asian countries, while focusing on the bordering areas of neighboring countries (Russia, China, Afghanistan, Iran and Mongolia). The main work of the French Institute for Central Asian Studies is to carry out academic activities in cooperation with local research institutions, to provide a platform for cooperation in various fields of humanities and social sciences between France and Central Asian countries, and to promote the international influence of the French academic community. The French Institute for Central Asia has long operated the bilingual academic journal Cahiers d'Asie centrale. At the end of the lecture, Alai mentioned that his initial interest in Central Asia was due to reading French historian René Grousset (1885-1952) The Steppe Empire and Bosch's works on Central Asia and the Mongolian Plateau as a young man. As an undergraduate, Alai witnessed the geopolitical upheaval in Eurasia. The openness of the Central Asian countries and the availability of a large number of archival materials inspired him to devote himself to Central Asian studies. To further this field, Allet lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan, for two years to fully master Russian and Kazakh, before going to Russia to carry out archival research for writing his doctoral dissertation. His research direction was influenced by the works of Alexander Benichson, focusing on the leading intellectuals of the Eastern peoples of the Soviet Union. He selected three historical figures, Sultan Galiev, Leskurov and Rinchenno, as examples, and observed and analyzed the thinking of Eastern revolutionary figures from different ethnic, regional and religious backgrounds on communism and identity by comparing the central and local archives of the Soviet period. Influenced by the anthropological research of French scholars, Alai has since devoted more energy to the study of modern history of Kazakhstan, focusing on the role of tribes in the modern political and social structure of the steppe region of Central Asia. He also paid long-term attention to the post-independence construction of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan's respective countries' histories, especially the role of the 1916 Central Asian uprising. When asked if there are differences between contemporary French and Central Asian studies and English-speaking studies, Alai candidly said that there are no significant methodological differences. Compared with their British and American counterparts, French scholars pay more attention to publishing in French, and it is easier to form academic communities with French scholars in other fields. Therefore, in terms of modern history of Central Asia and contemporary Central Asian issues, French scholars may prefer to combine anthropological and geographical methods to explore the changes and current conditions in Central Asia since modern times. (The authors are assistant professors at the Center for Oriental Literature Research of Peking University and the School of Foreign Chinese of Peking University; Master candidate, School of Foreign Chinese, Peking University)
Author: Shi Yue Li Yushan
Editor: Liu Di