History of Central Asia

The border relationships between the five countries of Central Asia represent something of a paradox for foreign policy analysts and practitioners. On the one hand these borders are responsible for crippling conflicts between the five countries.  At the same time they connect and define the region.  This dynamic has the potential to thwart external attempts to impose strategic coherence on the region.  To arrive at a better understanding of Central Asia border relationships and their impact on regional economic and security initiatives, this chapter analyzes six cross border variables: foreign policy approaches, geography and historical background, ethnicity and identity issues, trade relationships, infrastructure challenges and threats to security. 

These six variables offer a useful perspective on the evolution of strategic relationships between the actors and how those relationships shape border relations.  The interplay between these variables also illustrates the extent to which Central Asia resists easy definition as a region.  What connects the region?  What divides it?  Is it a set of countries bound by common interests and shared geographical, historical and cultural narratives?  Or, as some experts have claimed, is Central Asia itself a meta-geographical construct, a product of arbitrary spatial division and taxonomic designation that reflects the interests of those doing the dividing and naming of the region?



Opening chapter of in the book "Central Asia in the Era of Sovereignty."

В статье проанализированы основные проблемы киргизстанской историографии советского и постсоветского периодов по теме восстания 1916 года. В круг использованных источников входят новые архивные документы, научные и публицистические публикации на русском и киргизском языках.

In the 21st century, the scientific study of the history of colonial policy pursued by the great empires on the basis of modern approaches has not lost its relevance. Their policies in different regions have led to political, economic and cultural changes as well as conflicts of interest. In particular, in the XVIII century in Central Asia  there  was  a  sharp  political  process.  Not  only  will  there  be  military  conflicts  in  the  region,  but  the political  interests  of  several  major  empires  will  clash  in  the  region.  In  particular,  the  growing  economic potential of the Russian Empire increased its aspirations for East Turkestan, and on the other hand, after the Manchu dynasty took the Chinese throne, their bold move to the region aggravated the political situation. The  short-lived  occupation  of  Mongolia, Tibet,  Lobnor,  and  the  present-day  Xinjiang Uyghur  Autonomous Region by the Qing Empire resulted in the abolition of the centuries-old statehood of the peoples of Central Asia. In this sense, the occupation of East Turkestan by the Manchus was the responsibility of the Russian Empire and the Chinese administration.

[Paper presented at 2015 conference in Kokshetau, Kazakhstan.] As a contribution to the international conference of "Valikhanov’s Readings," this paper briefly summarizes recent and on-going research and museum partnerships of the Asian Cultural History Program, Smithsonian Institution, toward improved understanding of the cultural history of Central Asia. After first presenting a brief overview of the Smithsonian Institution, then introducing the Asian Cultural History Program as an integrated curatorial program within that structure, this paper briefly summarizes some recent and on-going work on the expeditions of Chokan Valikhanov, and related work on topics of Turkic ethnography, art, and textual interpretation in Kazakhstan and elsewhere, of a kind that develop themes initiated within Valikhanov‘s own research. Also in 2010, we published a website [3] and subsequently in 2011 two editions of a major book [4] presenting new findings about the cultural history of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and eastern Turkey uncovered as a result of the placement of oil and gas pipelines in the BTC-SCP corridors through those countries. Both bilingual editions (English-Azerbaijani and English-Georgian) resulted from partnerships with local scholarly institutions, but also indicated the possibilities for ethnographic and archeological work that can be presented using an ―expedition‖-like metaphor following the route of a major construction project [5]; while the data can be published online with extensive associated photographic material and other data from each site, as we did within the journal Internet Archaeology for sites in Azerbaijan [6]. Subsequent examples of related contributions include studies of the art and ethnography of Turkmenistan; which in the manner of many other Turkic peoples (as Valikhanov himself noted) is heavily influenced by or represented in epic or poetic traditions [7, 8, 9].

Suggested citation format: Taylor, Paul Michael 2015. Current Research about the Ethnography of Chokan Valikhanov, and about Turkic or Central Asian Cultural History and Cultural Memories, at the Asian Cultural History Program of the Smithsonian Institution. Pp. 284-288 in: Kazakhting uly ghalymy, tarikhshy, etnograf, saiakhatshy zhene aghartushy Sh. Ualikhanovtyng 180 zhyldygyna arnalghan “Shokan Okulary-19” Khalykaralik ghylymi-tezhiribelik konferentsiia: Materialdary, 17-18 seuir = Materiali: Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii “Ualikhanovskie Chteniia—19”, posviashchennoi 180-letiyu velikogo kazakhskogo uchyonogo, istorika, etnografa, pusteshestvennika i prosvetntelia Sh. Ualikhanova, 17-18 aprelia. (Tom 1.) A.A. Abzhapparov, editor. Kokshetau, Kazakhstan: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Kazakhstan and Kokshetau State University.

Full conference proceedings (including this paper):
http://www.kgu.kz/sites/default/files/documents/nauka/konf/19-1.pdf

[Free download from https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68114 during the COVID-19 pandemic!]
While a large number of researchers have studied the revolt of 1916 in Central Asia, they have not provided sufficient answers to two fundamental questions. Why did the uprisings take place almost only in Central Asia, while the edict to mobilize labourers was issued also to indigenous peoples (inorodtsy) of other parts of the Russian Empire, namely Siberia, the Caucasus, and Kalmykia? Why did it occur in the year of 1916, although, according to many researchers, its causes had been accumulated during many years of Russian rule? In order to answer these questions, it is important to examine specificities of administration in Russian Central Asia, social changes in this region during World War I, and people’s perception of Russia’s situation in the war and relations with its adversaries. The last point is also related to international factors of the revolt.
This revolt was a colonial rebellion not simply in the sense that colonized people stood against the colonizers, but also because it reflected defects in the colonial administration. Russian rule in Central Asia had persistent problems, including weak integration of the native population into the imperial administrative system epitomized by the lack of metrical books. There were cleavages between the Russians and the natives, as well as mistrust between officials and the population, both exacerbated by large-scale land seizure for Russian settlers.
Still, Russian Central Asia was basically peaceful until the first half of the First World War period. A large-scale revolt erupted in the atmosphere of the increased social activity and upheaval, and after the news of the difficult war situation and the reduction of armed forces in Central Asia gave some natives an impression that Russian rule had been weakened. The edict on labourers, which was a result of the confused decision-making of the tsarist government faced with the crisis of the whole empire, revealed a contradiction between the level of mobilization required by a total war and the weak, segregationist administrative system in this region. The world war turned the latent colonial crisis into an explicit one. Therefore, the 1916 revolt has to be analysed as an interface of the World War and the Russian colonial crisis in Central Asia.

ЭКСПЕДИЦИЯ АЛЕКСАНДРА БЕКОВИЧА-ЧЕРКАССКОГО В СРЕДНЮЮ АЗИЮ: ИСТОРИОГРАФИЧЕСКАЯ ДИНАМИКА

Статья посвящена историографии изучения одного из первых военных походов России в Среднюю Азию – экспедиции А. Бековича-Черкасского,  показана динамика исследований по истории экспедиции, созданных в колониальный, советский и независимый периоды, показаны достижения и недостатки этих исследований, проблемные стороны. Для полнейшего освещения вопроса к анализу привлечены работы российских исследователей, опубликованные после 1991 года.

ALEXANDER BEKOVICH-CHERKASSKY'S EXPEDITION TO CENTRAL ASIA: HISTORIOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS

Article devoted to the historiography one of the first Russia’s military campaign to Central Asia – expedition of A. Bekovich-Cherkasky, research’s dynamics on history of expedition created in colonial, soviet and independence periods. It reflects achievements and shortages, problematic sides of these researches. To shedding the light this issue fully there were added the works of Russians scientists published after 1991.

The study of the history of the peoples of the Caspian region involves a systematic approach. It provides: analysis of ancient written sources; attraction of archaeological data; the study of toponymy of the region; geological history of successively alternating bodies of water up to the present-day Caspian, i.e. the totality of elements characterizing the evolution of the peoples of the Caspian region. This is due to the fact that an attempt to explore the geographical descriptions of antiquity based on the current geological and geographical situation, leads to a distortion of real history. Paying tribute to the mythological tradition of the Indo-Persian peoples, written sources of ancient authors and the rich material of the Chinese documentary base, in the light of the achievements of modernity, you can find a new look at the history of the peoples of the Caspian region.

Applying quasigenetic markers – non-biological traits which are nevertheless inherited in generations – is one of the research fields within human population genetics. For the West European, East European, and Caucasus populations , surnames are typical quasigenetic markers. For Central Asian populations, particularly Kazakh, the clan affiliation serves as a good marker: a set of papers demonstrated that many clans include mainly persons which biologically descent from a recent common ancestor. In this study, we analyzed a large (~4.2 million persons) dataset on quasigenetic markers – the geographic distribution of 50 Kazakh clans at the beginning of the 20th century, and compared the dataset with the direct data of the Y-chro-mosomal diversity in modern Kazakh populations. The analysis included three steps: the isonymy method, which is standard for quasigenetic markers, comparing frequencies of quasigenetic markers, and comparing the quasige-netic and genetic datasets. We constructed 50 maps of frequency of the distribution of each clan and revealed that these maps correlate with the maps of genetic distances. The Mantel test also demonstrated a significant correlation between geographic and quasigenetic distances (r = 0.60; p < 0.05). The analysis of inter-population variability revealed the largest diversity between geographic territories corresponding to the social-territorial groups of the Kazakh Khanate (zhuzes) rather than to other historical groups that existed on the territory of Kazakhstan in preceding and modern epochs. The same is evidenced by the principal components and multidimensional scaling plots, which grouped geographic populations into three clusters corresponding to three zhuzes. This indicates that Использование для изучения генофонда квазигенетических маркеров – признаков небиологической природы (фамилия, род), но четко наследующихся в поколениях, – одно из направ-лений в популяционной генетике человека. Если для популя-ций Западной Европы, европейской части России и Кавказа в роли квазигенетических маркеров выступают фамилии, то для популяций Центральной Азии эффективным квазигенети-ческим маркером является родовая принадлежность. В ряде исследований было показано, что для центральноазиатских популяций, в особенности казахов, во многих родах просле-живается происхождение большинства членов рода от обще-го биологического предка. В настоящей работе представлен анализ большого массива данных о 50 казахских родах у ~4.2 млн человек в начале XX века в сравнении с разнооб-ра зием Y-хромосомы в современных казахских популяциях. Анализ состоял из трех блоков: описание разнообразия ква-зигенетических маркеров стандартным методом изонимии; сравнение популяций по частотам квазигенетических марке-ров; сравнение квазигенетических и генетических данных. По-строено 50 карт частоты представленности каждого рода на территории Казахстана и ряда смежных территорий. Показано, что эти карты частот квазигенетических маркеров оказываются скоррелированы с картами генетических расстояний. О связи генетических и квазигенетических расстояний свидетельствует и тест Мантеля: обнаружена достоверная корреляция между матрицами географических и квазигенетических расстояний (r = 0.60; p < 0.05). Анализ межпопуляционной изменчивости выявляет наибольшее межгрупповое разнообразие между географическими территориями, соответствующими социаль-но-территориальным объединениям казахского хан ства – жузам, нежели другим историческим территориальным объ-единениям (феодальные государства, улусы, области), сущест-вовавшим на территории Казахстана в предшествующие и со-временную эпохи. С этими результатами согласуются графики главных компонент и многомерного шкалирования, на кото-рых географические популяции объединяются в три кластера, соответствующие социально-территориальным объединени-ям – трем жузам. Это указывает на то, что окончательное струк-турирование казахского генофонда могло произойти в эпоху существования казахского ханства.

This book is the third volume of the annual named "Questions of Ethnogenezis and Ethnic History of the Central Asian Peoples". This volume encluded collection of new studies on the ethnogenezis and ethnic history of the Central Asian peoples. Editor of the volume: Shamsiddin Kamoliddin.

This book is the first volume of the new annual named "Questions of Ethnogenezis and Ethnic History of the Central Asian Peoples". This volume encluded collection of new studies on the ethnogenezis and ethnic history of the Central Asian peoples. Editor of the volume: Shamsiddin Kamoliddin.

With an appendix by Rian Thum and David Brophy.

The story of the Sufi saint Khwaja Muhammad Sharif is one of the best-loved hagiographies from East Turkistan (present-day Xinjiang, China), where the saint’s shrine remains a place of pilgrimage and devotion to this day. The Khwaja’s narrative recounts his adventures as he travels from Central Asia to Hindustan, Mecca, and back again, guided by saintly spirits and working miracles at every turn. He saves Muslims from shipwreck, gains powerful disciples, wages holy war, and ends his days as a beloved Sufi master. Jeff Eden’s introduction and notes offer insights into the text and its interpretation, and his translation marks the first time that a complete East Turkistani hagiography has been made available to readers in English. The appendix, by Rian Thum and David Brophy, reveals the intricate liaison between Muhammad Sharif’s shrine complex, its elite patrons, and the present hagiography. A classic of its genre, the Life of Muhammad Sharif provides both an accessible introduction to Central Asian Sufi literature and a compelling mystical allegory on the attainment of spiritual perfection.

The main purpose of this work is to provide a cartographic representation of the process of Islamization of the vast area of “Kafir” cultures and Indo-European languages here styled “Peristan”. This area once extended from present-day Nuristan to the borders of Kashmir over a surface of some 80.000 square km. The Kalasha of lower Chitral are now the last surviving heirs of this area. Only recently scientific research has produced new elements to reconstruct the history of this process, which had so far remained obscure. After a brief analysis of the different forms of perception of ethnic and religious identities in the area, the paper deals with the relationship between the process of Islamization and that of subjection to the authority of states from ca. 1500 CE to this day. Then the sources on which the cartography is based are discussed. The result is a somewhat unexpected image of what was once “Kafiristan”, perhaps the most remote and tenacious barbaricum of the Asian continent, and one of the largest.