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

Citizenship and Languages Policies
Third, Uzbekistan rapidly built and has maintained a straightforward nationality and citizenship policy. It declared Uzbek the only state language, with Russian losing any official status, and changed to the Latin alphabet as early as 1993 in order to further cut symbolic ties with the Russian past.²⁸ This language policy has succeeded fairly well—here, too, in comparison with its neighbors. It seems that many official documents, especially those with legal and technical vocabularies, are still informally written in Russian before being translated and officially published in Uzbek. But Uzbek is without a doubt the language used in public spaces, the media, and academic institutions, with Russian increasingly marginalized. Contrary to its language policy that cut links with the Soviet past, the country’s citizenship policy has been built on its Soviet legacy: the difference between citizenship and nationality/ethnic group has been maintained in passports and administrative documents. All persons born in the republic or residing on national territory as of 1991 are considered Uzbek citizens, while people identifying as Uzbeks outside the national borders are outside the purview of Tashkent.²⁹
Political Stronghold over Academia
The ideology of national independence required the academic world to support the new ideational regime. The Academy of Sciences was, for instance, asked to publish a “popular-scientific” dictionary of independence that offers an academic legitimacy for the new vocabulary of nationalism and serves as an encyclopedia of Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet ideology.³⁰ More importantly, the disciplines considered essential to justify the new national grand narrative—namely history, archeology, and ethnology—were placed under tight supervision.
The authorities strengthened their control over the historical narrative after 1998. That year, apparently dissatisfied with the Institute of History’s lack of output, President Karimov convened a conference with Uzbek historians, after which the Cabinet of Ministers issued a decree, “On the Improvement of the Activity of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan” (O sovershenstvovanii deyatel’nosti Instituta istorii ANRU). The influence of political authorities on the discipline of history is affirmed in the first point of the statement: “The Cabinet of Ministers decrees that the main purpose of the activity of the Institute of History is the study of the authentic history of the Uzbek people and their state.”³¹ Every semester, the Institute was required to organize a seminar on the history of Uzbek statehood; to collect information on the history of the Uzbek people, its governance, and its ethnogenesis; and to advance archaeological knowledge and research on local written sources (manuscripts). The decree guaranteed new financial resources to promote national history, including the creation of the journal O’zbekiston Tarihi.
Dilorom Alimova was appointed deputy director and then director of the Institute. A former specialist on women’s liberation in the Soviet era, Alimova shifted to the study of Muslim modernist movements of the early twentieth century, a particularly sensitive issue for the authorities (see below). Under her leadership, the institute became more dynamic: Alimova developed contacts with foreign colleagues, had researchers participate in international conferences, attempted to revive publications, and recruited specialists and PhD candidates in medieval and ancient history, disciplines that require the mastery of manuscripts.³² As during Soviet times, contemporary history remains the most difficult topic, as it has to be entirely subordinated to the official state narrative.³³ Historians wishing to distance themselves from these schemes have to take refuge in more ancient history—but even that is not free of political overtones.
Archeology has become highly strategic, too, as it can confirm or deny the presence of ancient Uzbek people on their current territory and attribute to them the brilliant sedentary civilizations that developed in the famed Bactria and Sogdiana regions. Required to discover tangible physical evidence of the presence of the ancient nation on its contemporary soil, archaeology has been assigned to serve the national goals of the authorities. Ethnology also remains one of the premier sciences of Uzbek nationhood. Where historical sources are lacking, only ethnology can establish indisputable foundations for the preeminence of the Uzbek people over other national groups in their titular state and prove national ethnic continuity over time immemorial. Ethnology remains focused on studying the titular nation as well as minority ethnic groups living on its territory. Often based on solid empirical grounds, it focuses on material culture—housing, clothing, crafts, folklore, rituals, and ceremonies. Notwithstanding the discourse on disciplinary renewal and removal from Soviet-Russian perspectives, denounced as condescending, the vast majority of current ethnological work is still based on Russian sources from the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³⁴
Political science and sociology, already scarce in the Soviet academic tradition, have been further marginalized. While the National University has a chair of sociology (within the philosophy faculty), other universities offer very few—if any—courses in the field. Studies of new social practices, such as internal migration, international migration, private businesses, and Islam, are considered too sensitive because they reveal the failure of the Uzbek economic model and challenge the state narrative on Islam. The authorities regard any studies even remotely related to Islam as intrinsically dangerous, because positing a theoretical “issue” would tend to make it a reality on the ground. Political science was officially banned in Uzbek universities in 2015, accused of being a “Western pseudo-science” conceptualized by external powers to interfere in domestic affairs.³⁵ Some neutral topics, for instance Uzbekistan’s membership in international organizations, can be still be studied under the guise of international relations.