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

Tajikistan
Tajikistan occupies a special place in the ethnic configuration of Central Asia as the only remaining state with an Iranian-speaking majority and literary language. It is also infamous for a bloody civil war that shattered the early years of independence and left an enduring political legacy. As this was primarily a conflict between different regional affiliations among the Tajiks, neither Uzbeks nor other ethnic minorities were at the forefront of the fighting (if the Pamiri groups are not considered a distinct ethnicity), although they have been involved in one way or another. Uzbeks have also been affected in the longer run by the specific national or nationalist discourse that set in in the aftermath of the civil war.³³
Most striking in regard to this case study is certainly the drastic decrease in numbers. According to official statistics the percentage of Uzbeks in Tajikistan dropped from 25 to merely 12 percent since the early 1990s, yet there have not been any reports about any large-scale out-migration. Part of this is undoubtedly the result of people declaring themselves to be Tajiks, the reverse of what is going on in Uzbekistan. This is related to the fact that increasingly it became a disadvantage to be an Uzbek in Tajikistan—for example, when looking for a job. So, similar to the situation described for Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, people decide to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation-state, but in this case by giving up their ethnic identity, at least on paper.
Another reason for the apparent decline in numbers is that the government has turned several former Uzbek subgroups, such as Laqay or Qarluq, into distinct ethnic units. This happened primarily among the tribal groups in the southern part of the country, for whom also the distance with Tajiks is much greater than among the nontribal Uzbeks in the northern province of Sughd. The latter had for many decades been very powerful in politics, usually in alliance with the ruling elites in Dushanbe. Some of the tribal groups were all too happy to stress their distinctiveness from sedentary Uzbeks, a category that is usually labeled as Sart in the more northern parts of Central Asia.
The impacts on language and intermarriage have been equally mixed within the southern provinces. Uzbek and Tajik are equally spoken in public, but the role of the latter has clearly increased. Mixed marriages are quite common for some groups but avoided by others, creating a rather complex situation. But overall, assimilation tendencies have thus taken a pronounced turn toward Tajikization. This is mixed with an ideology that views Tajiks as the victims of centuries, if not millennia, of suppression and expulsion. It is thus a kind of an imagined reconversion to the original that is entailed in this process. Tajiks are, not quite correctly from a linguistic point of view, seen as the heirs of the autochthonous population of Central Asia, sometimes conceptualized as Aryans, who have been forcefully assimilated and discriminated against by succeeding waves of Turkic invaders. Interestingly, the Uzbeks seem to be the prime target in this regard, although—or because—they are closest in terms of cultural and social patterns, while, for example, the Kyrgyz in Tajikistan’s Pamir region are hardly an issue in national politics.