Northrop’s reading portrays a failure of the Bolshevik indigenization and sovietization politics in Uzbekistan in 1920s. It gives us a quite clear idea that onе of the most crucial reasons of this failure was the inconsistency of the Soviet government in regard to the Uzbek national determination. This national determination was mostly defined through Uzbekistan’s distinctive patterns of gender relations and customs of female seclusion. The Uzbek women, their clothes and customs, “embodied” Uzbek national identity, but at the same time Bolsheviks acknowledged these women as “dark” and backward. Hujum manifests this dual policy: the veil, which after 1917 was used for identifying Uzbek nation, in 1927 becomes the emblem of dirt, debauchery and primitivism and has to be taken from people who were supposed to be Soviet, modern, and equal. Would this Bolshevik policy have been more productive had they chosen another, more neutral and common, less “backward” thing to identify the Uzbek nation with? Would such a policy be effective, given the conditions that existed in Uzbekistan at that time?
In the first chapter, Northrop mentions that the wide appearance of paranji and chachvon was partly a response to the Russian colonial conquest in the middle of XIX century. In this way, removal of the veil seemed to be an act of colonial politics as well. Apparently, the Bolshevik’s claimed their unique colonial power to control and change the traditions and customs of the Uzbek people. For this reason, when Central Asian competing interests (such as jadids) advocated for unveiling, the Soviet government saw their advocacy as a threat. The implementation of non-Bolshevik reforms could lead to the loss of revolutionary initiative — initiative which was expected to originate from women who were portrayed by Soviet propaganda as oppressed and miserable subjects who were finally emancipated by the Bolsheviks. As Northrop suggests, this revolutionary rhetoric seems to be “more colonialist than emancipatory” [p.66].
«Working at the intersection of anthropology and biomedicine, Soviet scientific “experts” set out to define precisely what made a woman Uzbek» [p. 52]. The part of the text in which Northrop writes about the detailed studies of the Uzbek woman’s body seems to me terrifying. What motivated the Bolsheviks to study the bodies of Uzbek women? In response to this question, Northrop mentions common diseases, unsanitary conditions, and the Bolsheviks’ intention to improve the health situation amongst Uzbek women. Still, I think the question – why did the Bolsheviks ask “What made a woman Uzbek?”- remains. Why did the Bolsheviks, who did not support a biomedical approach in the case of national determination in census politics, find the same approach relevant here? Were similar studies of the body conducted in the case of Uzbek men? Was the biomedical approach pursued for other Central Asian national identities? Otherwise, such studies indeed seem to be “a clear exercise” [p.55] of colonial, scientific and patriarchal power.
The reading suggests that the “unveiling” of Uzbek women only became a policy goal after other initiatives were unsuccessful. Perhaps this reveals the inherent flaw of a national self determination policy that appears to be conditional. These national identities are encouraged as long as they align with the Soviet agenda. Here we see a cultural identifier and practices rooted in religion and that present a gender dynamic that doesn’t align with the Soviet movement. It seems impossible that these cultural practices could persist and align with the goals of Soviet policy. However, it seems that ending these cultural practices already has an association with colonialism, which the Soviets tried to avoid. This makes it seem as though the national self determination policy couldn’t be successful in Uzbekistan at the time.
With regards to the “biomedical approach” question, the way it appears in the reading, it doesn’t seem like similar case studies would have been undertaken to characterize Uzbek men. Northrop describes the research as “voyeuristic” and shows Uzbek women to be the subjects of sexualized exoticism, making it both colonialist and patriarchal.
I also find the choice of the “biomedical approach” question – above all, because we have to reconcile it with how, later in the 30s, Soviet census takers took self-identification with nationality as a point of principle. Perhaps this is a pre-revolutionary ethnographer in action, or perhaps this is how Soviet ethnography sought to find “nationalities” when no territorially-bound nation previously existed.
In any case, you do point out that being Uzbek is ultimately identified with cultural practices – above all, unveiling. You ask why Soviet authorities eventually decided on veiling as a marker of Uzbek nationality. His argument for why Soviet authority chose veiling as marker of Uzbek identity seems to lie on latent Soviet Orientalism, described in Chapter 1: the veil seems to have replaced the harem as the object of male “European” curiosity. Which is a fine thesis, but I wish he’d followed it through into Chapter 2, when specifically analysing Soviet policymaking.
I think it’s important that we meditate on the fact that the veil was adopted after Russian Imperial rule came to Central Asia, to the extent that it is important to realize that cultures are not static, and that they do not develop in isolation. While we may view the Soviet unveiling campaign as a moment of cultural violence, it’s also an extension of how this natural process come to mediate different influences coming from around them. Would it have been better, or been considered less violent if the veil dropped out over time as people came to realize that their careers would be enhanced by not wearing the veil? In other words, would have the gradual assimilation of Uzbek women in Central Asia been an any less violent technique for building Soviet hegemony?
The question of why the veil was chosen to identify and distinguish the Uzbek nation has a complicated answer. For one, I think in this reading and we’ve even seen it in the Brown reading and probably others, is the idea that “that cultural authenticity often inheres to the female sphere: gender and culture construct each other, and women are seen as markers of a society’s identity” (37). This orientalizing mindset that had a long history of associating Eastern culture with women and the veil was combined with the issue that “Once Bolshevik leaders had created geographical boundaries and called them national, then, much work remained to make these borders meaningful. This in turn meant defining through difference: devising ways to point out distinctions between the new nations” (50). Language was difficult because of bilingualism, as well as a common literary language, so that the already common idea of associating a culture and people with the gender roles and practices allowed the Bolshevik state to decide to define Uzbek nationality by the practice of veiling.
What this demonstrates to me is that the result of a nominally “anti-imperial” Bolsheviks deciding to superficially designate and allow for national consciousness without truly examining their colonial practices necessarily lead to contradictions and failures. They wanted to have it both ways. Whoever lernerm is, I really find their question interesting as well, and I don’t really know the answer to it.
It seems like the veil was chosen because it hit a particular point at the intersection of religion and gender. The Soviet’s whole thing was that they were more evolved and as such were both irreligious and gender equal (though we know this wasn’t actually true and that there was still a lot of misogyny in The Soviet Union). The veil made a good symbol, and therefore piece of propaganda, to promote how backwards religion was and how incompatible it was with the equality and modernity of Soviet life. Religion seems like one of the things that the Soviets struggled with most in terms of turning non-Russians into Soviet peoples so it makes sense that they would try to tie the letting go of religion with something good, like gender equality.
I also think it’s interesting that the use of the veil as an argument against Islam, despite failing for the Soviets in Uzbekistan, is still a common argument today. 13 countries have banned the burqa, including both communist countries like China and capitalist countries like France. The veil as a symbol for both female oppression and otherness has far outlasted the Soviet’s campaign against it in Uzbekistan.
I’m really curious about the social + political climate in Uzbekistan during tsarist rule and how that climate contributed to the large-scale adoption of the veil. Like, why did people choose to use the veil, and why did other Uzbek people socially enforce the use of the veil?
Also, the physical examination of Uzbek women was something that really struck me. I was reminded again of the objection of black people in European human zoos, and Sarah Baartman, who was a South African woman who was displayed living and dead for well over a century due to the apparently outrageous proportions of her body. In a more abstract way I’m wondering who tf approved that program, but more concretely I wonder if this program was approved because it would terrorize women/make Uzbek people feel more vulnerable, or if those that approved it really just don’t understand the humanities of others.
I think the point you raised about the issues the Bolsheviks created by forming Uzbek national culture around something simultaneously labelled backwards to a good one. There seems to be a mix of orientalism and poor planning in the Bolshevik campaigns in Central Asia. The orientalism is pretty clear, in that the Bolsheviks emblematized Uzbek culture with the paranji and chachvon which they labeled backwards, putting forward a belief of the inherent “backwardness” of Uzbek culture (Northrop, 50). One thing that has stood out to me in these last few readings is the belief that women are the bearers of culture in a sense. I’m not sure how well I can really summarize the belief, but its seems to present women as the conservative element of society preserving culture, and “backwardness” in each generation. We saw this previously in the kresy and JAO where women were believed to be the bastions of religion, and as an extension “backwardness”. The way this translates into Central Asia is strange in that the women are still “backward” in their lack of education and supposed dirtiness, but another layer is added which locates the religiosity in the men. This might be a marker of orientalism, specifically in how Bolshevik authorities viewed Christianity, Judaism, and Islam comparatively.
Anna, I’m really interested in your question of neutrality and “backwardness.” Based on our readings during the past few weeks, it seems to me that one of the hallmarks of Soviet imperialism is the exchange of cultures. Specifically, it seemed like officials were invested in constructing a system whereby metropolitan Soviet culture flowed outward into peripheral territories, in large part because of longstanding cultural hierarchies across the regions. I’m not sure there could ever have been a construction of Uzbek identity that would not have read as intrinsically “backward” because the premise of this exchange seems to be that Uzbek people need to be enlightened to the correct, Soviet way of thinking. I think identifying veiling with “backwardness” was not only the result of decades of exoticization, but also a deliberate choice that legitimized the Soviet project of nationalization in Uzbekistan.