Renegotiating Identities and Cultural Legacies Chapter Twelve Be(com)ing Uzbek

Women, Religion, and Politics
Svetlana Peshkova
In order to clarify and exemplify women’s role in social change in Uzbekistan, specifically the Fergana Valley, I utilize Susan Gal’s feminist analysis of a semiotics of private/public distinction.¹ I apply Gal’s theory to the materials collected in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2011 through a variety of ethnographic methods, including personal life histories, interviews, observing and participating in ceremonial activities and daily lives of thirty local women religious leaders and teachers (otinlar or otins).
Individual experiences in and of domestic space, such as one’s home, vary. A home can feel like a fortress that protects, a castle that imprisons, a sanctuary, or a dangerous place.² A home is also a constitutive and transformative place where different knowledges are imparted and received, such as cooking, sewing, and how to be a gendered individual and a better human by being a good Muslim.³ One’s home is also a social place—“a product of social relations”—where meropriyatiy (social events) are planned and celebrated, including religious ceremonies and life-cycle events, and where food, presents, and ideas are exchanged and shared among individuals who can, but do not have to be related by marriage or descent.⁴ My ethnographic materials were collected mainly during such social activities. In this chapter, I demonstrate the role of local women in social change by focusing on material practices and interpersonal interactions that take place in individual homes in Uzbekistan. An analysis of these practices and interactions helps to question the often-commonsensical associations among location, politics, and gender, and demonstrates women’s roles in creating social change.
Following Bruce Grant⁵ and other scholars (e.g., Abashin and Liu⁶),I too question a persistent purchase of the public/private distinction—often linked to other distinctions such as official/nonofficial, male/ female, and orthodox/unorthodox—in some academic analyses of post-Soviet and postsocialist space.⁷ The existing research shows that naturalizing such distinctions fails to capture the empirical complexity of human behavior, since boundaries between such distinctions like public/private are not well-defined.⁸ These boundaries are also dynamic and complex and can be mediated by a third, such as “semi-public.”⁹ In this chapter, I add to these latter analyses and argue that public/private distinction should not be treated as a naturalized assignation, which determines human behavior by connecting space, gender, and religion. Neither does this distinction describe any one domain corresponding to places, practices, or gender. Rather, following Gal, if treated as a communicative phenomenon, which has “a complex and systematic logic that explains its usage,” this distinction helps to understand social dynamics and individuals’ roles in social change.¹⁰
I agree with Gal that “the historical creation of a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is not dependent on the use of these and even parallel lexical terms,” but can include linguistic resources “such as ‘here’ and ‘there,’ as well as changes in gesture, posture” and so on.¹¹ In other words, in the paragraphs below, I do not argue for or explain in detail this distinction’s local linguistic use. I also do not need to establish linguistic cognates of the En-glish “public” and “private” in the Uzbek language, although one might argue that tashqari/ichkari (inner/outer) parts of the house (uy) or mehmonhona/yotoqhona (guest or living room/bedroom) could exemplify such distinction. Rather, I demonstrate how by utilizing public/private distinction as communicative—not limited to any one space or gender—we can better understand religious practice and its relations to and with the sovereign in Uzbekistan.¹² The analytical utility of such approach lies in explaining how and why some practices and behaviors that actors themselves may perceive as private and apolitical events can be interpreted as subversive political activity, as exemplified by the lives of women religious teachers and leaders, or otinlar (-lar is a plural ending of a word otin) in Uzbekistan.
In addition to this theoretical contribution, this chapter has a political agenda. It adds to the body of scholarly work in, on, and about Central Asia that accounts for the importance of women in creating social change. Experientially and empirically we all know that human ability to make choices and decisions and pursue one’s interests (often against odds) are not limited to men, families, elites, social movements, or representatives of the government. We also know that an individual’s role in social change is not limited to any one particular sphere, such as the public.¹³ Further, in this chapter I do not assume (Uzbekistani) women’s subordination to the strictures of their families, societies, and/or countries, but treat them as fundamental and essential entities that create the social. Instead of focusing on the problems these women face (though there are many), I emphasize solutions they create. These women are individuals, whose lives have social effects, and should be theorized as such.