500 words

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

476

PARTICIPATION AND ANALYSIS

IN STUDYING RELIGION IN CENTRAL ASIA

Nathan Light, Phd Aigine Adviser Miami University, Ohio, USA

Abstract In this chapter I consider historical and ethnographic approaches to the study

of religious practices and beliefs, and the contrasting ways participants and outsiders conceive and experience interactions with the supernatural. I focus on the ways that Islam is conceptualized within studies of Central Asian religions, and explore some of the ways of integrating the study of Islamic practices with what are variously described as local or native traditions, both in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere. Through critiques of essentialist approaches to the study of Islam, I attempt to show the problems that arise when people assume that believers do or should have consistent and standardized understandings of Islam. In contrast, scholars who conduct careful ethnographic and historiographic investigations of religion have revealed the wide diversity of practices among people who consider themselves Muslims. Through collaborative approaches to religion such as those followed in the present Aigine research project, scholars can avoid using their authority to suppress or neglect local understandings people have about their own practices. Such collaborative studies offer more accurate understandings about the varieties of religious knowledge, belief and activities, and how these relate to social life.

Introduction

In this chapter I discuss problems of the study of religion in Central

Asia, and relate these issues to the study of Kyrgyz religion. Academic study of religion is particularly difficult because of the fluidity and ubiquity of the subject matter. Scholars have significant power to make authoritative representations about religion that people will accept as facts, even sometimes the very believers about which they write. To avoid distorted ideas about religion, serious research and analysis has to stay close to the religious activities themselves and avoid the distractions of extraneous materials.

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

477

Religious practices in Kyrgyzstan are manifold and not susceptible to simple definitions or systematic descriptions. As in most societies, Kyrgyz connect beliefs and practices with many aspects of life. Kyrgyz religious practices are as diverse as those found anywhere: they are related to diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental problems, divining causes and truths about events, defining good and evil, providing cosmological and teleological explanations of existence, promoting good fortune and dealing with misfortune, interpreting and warding off catastrophes and social disorder, using supernatural and social rituals to mark life passages, interacting with the spirits of the dead, and so on. Of course, practices within Kyrgyz society differ from those of other societies, but the range of religious concepts, contexts and uses are similar to those found in many societies. Like languages, religious practices reflect cognitive structures of the human mind: what people believe is closely related to what they are psychologically capable of believing. How patterns of human cognition relate to religion is an expanding area of study (e.g., Pascal Boyer 2001).

The diverse religious practices within Kyrgyz society show the active and creative work of the practitioners in exploring the range of possibilities for connecting experience with the supernatural. People engage in religious exploration when they seek knowledge about health, fate, morality, nature, society, survival, history and so on. When people seek understanding and certainty, they come up with many answers through a variety of discovery processes. Rational and empirical scientists claim that only testable physical processes constitute reliable knowledge, but this offers no solution to social, moral, medical, and historical difficulties where testing is not possible.

Religious practices are also based in traditional practices and meanings learned in society from other people’s experiences, interpretations and actions. But religions offer many options and strategies for solving life problems, including being open to revealed knowledge from sources outside of society and of the human mind. Both tradition and revelation can provide solutions to gaps in conceptual or practical knowledge about the world. People and communities make creative choices and changes within tradition. Such changes in religious traditions can result from conscious and subconscious changes in people’s thinking and social experiences. As people’s ideas about knowledge and interpretations change, they may also change their ideas about which authority figures have the power to define religious beliefs and practices.

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

478

In Kyrgyz religious life, certain practices are widely shared: for instance, the words of prayers and ways of acting during prayers, or ways of giving respect and gifts to ancestors through actions, prayers, food, sacrifices, or burning substances. People learn these shared practices in social rituals and then reuse them in many different contexts. Specialists transmit practices such as zikir (q.v.) from one to another, and still other practices, such as healing methods, are discovered or revealed in dreams and other direct spiritual experience. As will be discussed below, Malinowski found a very similar diversity in his studies of Baloma beliefs (1916).

Insiders and Outsiders

In addition to the diversity of Kyrgyz religious practice, another vital

dimension of religious life concerns the diverse ways of thinking and talking about religion. People discuss their own religious beliefs and practices, they compare these with those of other people, and sometimes make judgments about which are more correct or effective. Understanding religious experience often includes studying the discourses and judgments people make about others’ practices.

In this chapter I make a distinction between two approaches to understanding religious practices. The first is learning to become a participant or insider through community experience and learning from other insiders. The second approach—usually less significant for participants, but increasingly important in the modern world—concerns the outsider study of religious practices. Outsiders who study religious practices tend to make historical, scientific, political or theological judgments about the practices.

In the Soviet Union, scholars studied religions as part of a speculative history of cultural evolution. Islamists of various legal schools often attempt to use what they feel are authoritative interpretations of Islam to establish the rules that should govern certain religious activities. In many areas, interested outsiders have begun to adapt insider rituals and beliefs to create so-called New Age religious systems and practices. In the Altai, outsiders that Halemba terms “energy tourists” have developed a range of esoteric practices based in Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai K. Rerikh)’s ideas about the Altai as a place of mystical experience (Halemba 2006; see also Roerich 1929). And some scholars of religion label and define certain practices such as shamanism or fetishism in order to have a consistent,

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

479

objective classificatory system and make comparisons among societies. All of these kinds of outsider thinking about religion can impose misleading concepts and assumptions upon insider practices.

The categories of participant and non-participant, or insider and outside observer, are not a rigid opposition: they are instead poles of a continuum of kinds of participation. People can move along this continuum, from non-participation towards participation, by learning practices during childhood socialization, through conversion to a new religion later in life, or through entering a new community with different ideas about religion. People may move from participating as a child to rejecting beliefs and rituals when they are older, or they may lose conviction in one set of insider practices, and adopt those of another group, or create their own. In very few social contexts are people unable to choose among and decide how strongly they will commit to the practices and beliefs they observe around them. Hence, even insiders experience varying degrees of participation.

Because of the ways formal education constructs authoritative knowledge, people often believe that religious scholars and social scientists have privileged insight into religion, but to understand a religion as people practice it, the concepts and experiences of insiders need to be given priority. Studying religion demands great respect for participant understandings. Scholars from outside with their own knowledge cannot speak authoritatively about insider practices until they participate extensively to learn how insiders understand religion. This is the purpose of the method of participant observation that cultural anthropologists have developed since the work of Bronislaw Malinowski among Trobriand Islanders. Sharing in the activities of a community offers the ethnographer a uniquely deep knowledge.

Cultural practices have meanings to participants that are not obvious to outsiders. These insider meanings may vary from person to person within the group, and there may be conflicts within the group about how to understand rituals and other activities. Such complexities of local life are important knowledge that will be difficult for outsiders to perceive until they have spent a long time in the community. In his research on magical and religious beliefs, Malinowski finds that all members of the Baloma community do not share the same beliefs. Individuals have beliefs and ideas that are shaped by personal and social experiences, while specialists are seen as having more formal and authoritative religious knowledge (1916: 423-430). Malinowski divides religion into

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

480

two domains: one shaped by shared behaviors and social dogmas that are not subject to specialist knowledge, and one shaped by the interpretations of specialists, as well as by practitioners and individuals without specialized knowledge. In the latter domain, people’s interpretations are not equally valued, but Malinowski shows the value of examining the dynamic processes whereby individuals attain community recognition as religious specialists whose ideas are considered particularly authoritative.

Some anthropologists prefer to use more objective scientific measures of social practices in order to develop theories and interpretations about local practices that do not depend on local understandings. These anthropologists do not have the goal of understanding people’s cultural and social activities as insiders do, but seek to show how ecological, environmental, or economic pressures have shaped these cultures. However, most cultural anthropologists would not attempt to explain social realities as the result of external pressures without understanding people’s active, local responses and interpretations of these pressures (see Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike & Marvin Harris, 1990). The world is a complex and uncertain place, in which people make their social and cultural lives through choices that have to be studied from an insider perspective. The outsider perspective helps form comparative explanations by objectifying social practices into stable, measurable and essentialized patterns, while the insider perspective understands social life as ongoing processes, actively shaped by individual choices.

The importance of studying insider or local knowledge, as Clifford Geertz puts it, is often overwhelmed in the academic world by the many political scientists, historians, sociologists and others who do not see the value of conducting ethnographic participant observation before making comparisons and generalizations about the cultural practices and concepts of a group. Outsiders readily end up misunderstanding local practices because they objectify them on the basis of limited experience and fall back upon prejudices and stereotypes to interpret what they observe. For instance, western scholarship of Islam in Central Asia over the past 15 years has focused disproportionately on political Islam, terrorist threats, and organizations such as the IMU and Hizb-ut-Tahrir or the Wahhabi movement that are fringe elements within Muslim society (cf. Knysh 2004). In a respected scholarly volume on Xinjiang, the only article on Islam investigates primarily its political and institutional contexts. The authors offer few details of Islamic practice, and no citations to materials that provide such details (Fuller & Lipman 2004).

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

481

There is a conflict here between the view of Islam as an ideal religion defined outside of human activities, and the ethnographic study of Islam as the religious activities of people who describe themselves as Muslims. From the latter perspective, Islam exists in people’s practices. Studying Islamic practices is becoming more widespread, but it is a rigorous and demanding approach that does not suit scholars who wish to generalize conveniently about social and political activities on the basis of limited empirical study. Although many Islamic scholars feel that human actions are prone to error or innovation (bid‘a) unless one follows the sunna of traditions established by Muhammad, in fact new discourses and activities have long been part of Muslim practice and scholars have often had little authority (Berkey 1995).

Encountering Outsiders

There is a long history of outsider analysis of religious practices: comparative investigations of religion arise when members of one faith encounter the beliefs and practices of members of other faiths. Famous historical accounts by Greek and Chinese historians offer documentation of the religious beliefs of peoples who otherwise did not leave written records. In other cases, the comparative study of religion arises when a leader seeks a religion to which he can convert his followers: we see this in the Russian Primary Chronicle when Vladimir I is said to have sent envoys to report back on Islam, Christianity and Judaism, before choosing among them the religion that is best for himself and his Rus subjects.

We find similar comparative contexts in religious debates and disputations in the Mongol courts, in Moorish Spain, or before Catholic Popes. In the courts of Moorish Spain and during the crusades, many Christian Europeans encountered Muslim and Jewish peoples and practices, giving extensive opportunities to compare practices (see for instance, Burns 1961 & 1971, Chazan 1992, Hames 2004). In his autobiographical sketches, Usamah ibn Munqidh describes daily life encounters with European crusaders who had established themselves and were living in his town in the region of Syria (1929). Likewise, geographers and travelers such as al-Muqaddasi and Ibn Battuta comment on the variations in practices among their co-religionists, as well as those who are from other faiths (al-Muqaddasi 1994: 288-9, 334-6). Ibn Battuta mentions observing different ablutions and prayer practices of

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

482

Shi’a, as well as practices among Rifa’i and Suhravardi Sufis (Dunn 91-95). Although he is judgmental of deviations among supposed followers of Islamic legal schools, Evliya Çelebi also describes religious practices and ideas among the people of Albania (2000: 127, 145, 219).

When Muslim writers observe and describe the practices they encounter, they tend more towards accurate remarks than to offhand rejection of others’ beliefs. Trade, pilgrimage, and learning from travel are important dimensions of Islamic scholarly tradition. The diversity of the world is an aspect of God’s creation from which these scholars strive to learn. Although few writers overtly grapple with the implicit contradiction between appreciating of god’s creation—including human religious diversity—and asserting that there are correct religious practices, the issue remains a part of the tradition.

In Europe in contrast, medieval knowledge of other religions tended to be limited and distorted by stereotyped Christian discourses (Tolan 2002; Beckett 2003). Some of the most detailed accounts of religious belief in Europe come in fact from the Inquisition, when descriptions were very precise (Ginzburg 1989).

Soviet Outsiders

Soviet era scholarship on religion was motivated by a number of

powerful research agendas. Scholars relied upon historical materialism to argue that religious beliefs were part of cultural systems that developed in stages defined by the mode of production. Scholars argued that people’s beliefs were ideological manipulation that prevented questions about control over the means of production: religion was studied as part of the cultural superstructure that helped justify the relations of production. Ideas about cultural evolution were important in Karl Marx’s idea that human societies pass through historical stages of primitive communalism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Many Soviet ethnologists also accepted Edward B. Tylor’s theory that societies evolved through stages from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Further, argued Tylor in his Doctrine of Survivals, although more progressive segments of society would abandon the traits characteristic of each stage when they advanced to later stages, less uneducated groups in a society preserved the cultural products of earlier stages of evolution.

Soviet scholars of religion relied upon assumptions of development through stages of cultural evolution built into both Marx’s and Tylor’s

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

483

models. Those who studied Islam tended to idealize it as consisting of rigid beliefs and practices. When they studied religious life within the Soviet Union, scholars focused on those practices that were not part of supposedly official Islam, Christianity or Buddhism that they thought of as survivals from prior religious beliefs. This allowed scholars to avoid the politically sensitive topic of contemporary religious reality and focus on supposed backwards practices that endured despite the assumed development towards socialism and atheism. Many Soviet scholars published studies of relics (relikty) and survivals (perezhitki) of traditional beliefs (Snesarev 1969, Sukhareva 1975, Baialieva 1972, Guliev and Bäkhtiyarov, 1968). As DeWeese (2002:316) points out, such studies continue a old approach exemplified by Westermarck’s study of Pagan Survivals… (1933).

Such studies also emphasized the local and ethnic styles of religious practice that co-religionists supposedly did not share, or had been elsewhere forgotten or suppressed under the influences of institutionalized Christian or Islamic religion. Scholars identified some practices as remnants of shamanism and Zoroastrianism, and others as uniquely local. Rarely did they consider such non-institutional practices to be innovations. Scholars assumed such practices were part of the shared heritage of ethnic groups, based in Stalin’s idea that one of the criteria for ethnic identity was shared religious beliefs. By finding in these survivals the non-institutional, uneducated practices of the working classes, not the elites, scholars were able to avoid being seen as studying the elite religious beliefs that were more frequently denigrated as the ‘opiate of the masses,’ or ideologies that Marxist theorists argued promoted class stratification and exploitation of the working class.

Only with the end of the Soviet Union has there been some analysis of the scholarly ideologies that produced such studies. Scholars are beginning to critique more seriously the approaches of Soviet scholars and politically-oriented studies by Western researchers (Atwood 1996, DeWeese 2002, Saroyan 1997).

Another dimension of Soviet scholarship—also found in some Western scholarship—was the study of indigenous communities as though they had preserved older traditions with little change. Scholars assumed that such practices were historical data: what people did in the present was treated as reliable evidence directly from the past. Scholars distinguished pre-Islamic practices from those that came with Islamization in terms of behavior, and disregarded beliefs. For these

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

484

scholars, a physical practice such as a particular style of burial retained a pre-Islamic essence even when people’s beliefs changed. The effect was to deny beliefs a central role in religion. In their eagerness to find local and ethnic continuity with the past, scholars described popular practices as pre-Islamic even if the entire community felt they were Islamic. The ethnic cultural past was important: shared folk practices in the present that could be identified as pre-dating Islam were claimed as autochthonous and authentic, while later religious beliefs and practices tended to be disregarded as introduced, elite and inauthentic because not part of a supposed enduring and original ethnic culture.

Further, institutional religious beliefs, such as Islam, were treated as parts of a supposedly fading past. Politicians and Soviet scholars felt that modern urban workers should lose such beliefs in the Soviet Union. Many Soviet and Western scholars held related concepts in this area, although they interpreted the situation differently. Mark Saroyan summarizes,

Briefly stated, the Soviet literature follows from the assumption that modernization has indeed taken place in the USSR; hence what remains of Islam are only its “vestiges.” In contrast, the Western specialist literature focuses on the fact of an existing Islam and thus draws the conclusion that the Muslim societies in the USSR have not in fact been modernized (Saroyan 1997: 21).

Western scholarship relied heavily on Soviet accounts of Islam in the Soviet Union, but as Saroyan points out, evaluated these accounts differently. Westerners tended to accept Soviet views of Islam as backwards. An example is the wide reliance Sergei P. Poliakov’s Everyday Islam. Although purportedly a study of popular Islam, Poliakov’s book instead demonstrates the problematic relationship of Soviet modernizers and “traditional” life in Soviet Central Asia. Since it is a critical essay written by a Soviet Russian who advocates modernization, it offers a glimpse into Soviet cultural politics, but its details about popular Islam or Central Asian culture are limited, although many Western scholars cite it. Instead, Poliakov defends Soviet colonization as an enlightenment movement, and when Central Asian Muslims reject this mission civilisatrice, Poliakov accuses them of willfully remaining backwards and bringing upon themselves problems such as poverty and poor health.

The book reveals how ideology and sloppy scholarship in the Soviet Union shaped intellectual dogma. Poliakov argues that Central Asian Muslims have not made the most of the benefits of Russian education and

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

485

the access it provides to “the heritage of world culture”—implying the Islamic learning is not part of world heritage—and “new information, which is the basis of modern development in society” (1992: 129). Ironically, Poliakov’s own work provides an example of the poor scholarship and Russian chauvinism that vitiated Soviet social science and damaged Russian-minority relations. Such a Soviet Russian education alienated many Central Asians.

Devin DeWeese provides a detailed critique of outsider scholarship on Islam in the Soviet and post-Soviet period. DeWeese sees “Sovietological Islamology” as the study of Islam arising from political analyses of the Soviet Union. Although dominant, this school of analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet Islam relies upon poor sources and poor theoretical models, and does not make connections to the study of Islam elsewhere. DeWeese argues that many of the specialists studying Soviet Islam are ‘ill-equipped to deal with all but the most superficial aspects of religion and its place in Soviet life’ (2002: 299). DeWeese offers as examples the work of Yaacov Ro’i, and of Alexandre Bennigsen and his students.

In reviewing Ro’i’s work, DeWeese finds an accurate discussion of Soviet efforts to administer and control Islam, but the analysis of Islam in the context of Soviet policies is weak and misleading. Ro’i has done important archival research but his interpretations perpetuate the limited understanding that Soviet policy makers and academics had of Islam. This narrow view of Islam excludes much of daily practice. Soviet scholars viewed Islamic orthodoxy much the same way as the Muslim fundamentalists who attacked traditional Islamic practices such as ziyarat as un-Islamic (DeWeese 309-10, see also Saroyan 1997:114). DeWeese further argues that scholars saw supposedly unorthodox practices as remnants of pagan autochthonous faiths that had been suppressed by Islam. The ideologues of the Communist Party, scholars studying local religious practices, and the institutionalizing Muslim leaders who tried to impose narrow limits to practices all promoted a similar purified and abstract view of Islam, in contrast to the actual practices of popular Islam.

Ro’i essentializes Islam by claiming that knowledge is fundamental to belief, while practice is secondary, so those who do not perform religious rituals according to learned and literate traditions have distorted the religion. He thinks those who do not follow orthodox scholarly knowledge of Islam are deceived and inauthentic believers. Although Soviet scholars and anti-religious officials, and Ro’i himself, use formal

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

486

literate learning as a test for authentic knowledge of Islam, DeWeese argues that religion does not depend on understanding scriptures: religious practices are valid without such learning (311). The idea that “real” Islam is learned and literate is a pervasive and problematic assumption. Local traditions are vital to religious practice, and should not be rejected through reference to Islamic scripture (313). Even within the traditions of literate Islam there is a long tradition of defending “pilgrimage to saints’ shrines” (317). And finally DeWeese faults Ro’i for failing to provide “any discussion, or even a brief digest, of ethnographic accounts of how Islam was lived in the Soviet context” (323).

DeWeese highlights problems that have simple causes: scholars have limited knowledge of scholarship about Islam, and Soviet and Sovietological institutions and scholarly approaches make the materials about Soviet policies more accessible than those describing Muslim practices. Most American and much European scholarship on Muslim Central Asia relies upon Russian sources. Both serious ethnography and research using primary sources in Turkic or Persian have been deficient among Soviet scholars or Sovietologists.

European Outsider Scholarship: Ethnographic Objectification

Some modern European scholars also attempt to distinguish Islamic

and non-Islamic practices within contemporary religious practices, in order to examine supposed syncretism and survivals. In studying shamanism and Islam in Kazakhstan, Patrick Garrone links his present observations with documented practices from the past. He assumes the categories of shamanism, bakhshylyk (baksylyk in Kazakh), Sufism, and Islam and divides materials according to his own assumptions. Because he classifies cultural traits according to these categories, his analysis finds what he assumed: healers are syncretically combining distinct religious practices. Garrone falls into the traps identified above, avoiding primary sources from Central Asia, and relying heavily on Soviet scholars’ a priori distinctions between Islamic and non-Islamic practices. After dividing the phenomena he observes, it is tautological that Garrone will find these same distinctions. When he describes baksylyk as “an Islamized shamanism” (2000:150), Garrone in effect asserts that Islam and shamanism are two essences that can be separated from one another, and

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

487

as an outsider, he can tell which is which. In this sense, shamanism and Islam exist outside of particular practices, and the outsider can recognize the essence of the activities better than the insider. He follows Thierry Zarcone and others in describing local varieties of Sufism and Buddhism as shamanic (2000:231).

When Poliakov describes people as backwards, or Ro’i and Garrone essentialize Islam and shamanism and deny people’s own agency in making their culture, they are participating in the practice of allochrony, which Johannes Fabian defines as placing societies on a scale of cultural evolution and discounting the lives of those who are perceived as backwards, at another evolutionary stage (Fabian 1983). Such analyses of survivals and essentialized religions suggest that some people’s practices are rooted in the past, making them backwards. Fabian suggests that colonial cultures justify the domination of others through speculative histories and arguments about archaic culture dragging some people into the past. Such people are literally excluded from participation in the modern present, and their concerns are ignored or subordinated to the projects of the supposedly advanced civilization of the colonial power. Marxist and Tylorian speculative histories served this purpose in Soviet scholarship: scholars assigned religious practices the labels of ‘relic’ and ‘survival’ and those who carried them out were not seen as valid participants in the present. Instead these were archaic superstitions that would be best as part of museum exhibits.

Academic and popular models of cultural evolution perpetuate these ideas. In his studies of Hui (Dungan), Uyghur and Kazakh folktales in China, Karl Lückert assigns each tale to the cultural stage in which it was supposedly created. Lückert and his colleagues interpret cultural traits and practices mentioned in the tales as traces of the cultural stage in which people first told the tale. Lückert argues that folklore preserves past cultural activities during transmission (Hali, Li & Lückert 1998; Li & Lückert 1994; Wei & Lückert 1998). He assumes the tales do not change across millennia and motifs continue to reflect the cultural stage at which they were created. He promotes an analytic method founded in speculative cultural history and ignores the role of folklore performers. But academic folklorists have intensively studied the ways folktales change. Research shows that taletellers do not preserve motifs from when the tale was first told because tellers can not preserve elements that do not fit with their own experience: tales change constantly according to the experiences of the people who tell them, and reflect little from the distant

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

488

past. Tales hold interest for and continue to be told to present audiences when they reflect present concerns and interests.

The Euro-American anthropologist Franz Boas was an early opponent of speculative histories of human cultural and social evolution (Boas 1920). He strongly advocated historical research that was based in actual evidence of earlier forms of cultural organization: he argued that cultural change and development could not be understood in terms of evidence from a later time. Boas did not accept that history fit a timeline or standardized sequence: instead it could be known only through the actual study of specific data from a given period.

Contemporary ethnography and cultural anthropology avoid such historicizing approaches: cultural practices are analyzed in terms of the present meaning and role they have within social life. Cultural analysis that understands people as active participants in making and perpetuating their own culture avoids imposing judgments on cultural practices that suggest people are somehow stuck in the past, missing out on historical progress. People cannot be trapped in traditions or reproduce culture automatically: scholars who imagine uncritical and passive cultural transmission are generally implying a contrast to the progress and agency of “modern” scholars and their societies. Instead, cultural analysts have to understand the motivations that lead people to preserve or change their culture.

People transmit culture through time, but this process has to be analyzed in terms of cultural reproduction: people are actively engaged in experiencing and recreating traditional practices. They try to change some practices and recreate others. Cultural structures are not mindlessly reproduced, nor do they change only because of external pressures: people form concepts and make judgments about their own cultural practices, and change them or reproduce them in ways that they find significant. Motivations in the present lead people to continue or change practices. For example, the religious rituals many Kyrgyz carry out at the Ata Bei’it shrine apply ideas about tombs to a place established as a political monument to those killed during the Stalinist purges. Similarly, victims of the Ürkün events in 1916 are beginning to be honored in both political and religious rituals. And the newly established tomb of Manas in Talas Rai’on combines a political monument to a Kyrgyz culture hero with the religious practice of pilgrimage to tombs. Culture involves communicative interaction in society, and people creatively use culture as a resource for accomplishing particular political, social or spiritual goals.

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

489

Politics and religion often interact in complex ways because people can organize politics more effectively when they have ideological legitimacy that can be created through religious authority and interpretations. As many people have pointed out, aspects of Soviet ideology and heroes were treated as if they were sacred (e.g., Keller 2001). Symbols from Russian religious practices were used in innovative ways to reinforce Soviet ideology and rituals. These creative uses of existing practices and concepts accomplished new goals.

Complex examples of creativity within Islam can be seen in the many different political systems that have been based on Muslim ideas. Rulers and their officials have devised ways of linking Islamic concepts with political processes and symbols. Religion served to legitimate rule, and rulers promoted Islam, but just as Islamic religious practice is very diverse, political ideas and practices that are based upon Islam are likewise diverse. Whether it is the court of Sultan Husayn Baiqara Myrza in Herat, or Afaq Khoja’s court at Yarkand (Papas 2005), the varied connections of Islam and politics are the product of cultural strategies. To understand the politics, one must understand the religious ideas, and vice versa.

Ethnography: Studying

Local Knowledge and Local Complexity I have argued at some length about why religions cannot be studied

adequately without ethnography. Religious cultures exist through the local understanding and knowledge of the practitioners. People carry out cultural practices because they have personal or community significance. The challenge of good ethnography is to understand what people think, feel, and say in local terms. We cannot assume we understand how and why people do things until we see how things make sense from a local perspective. The words, actions, symbols, and other aspects of local social practice have meanings that are not obvious to outsiders.

Although there are very few ethnographic studies of Central Asia in English, one excellent study is Bruce Privratsky’s fascinating and detailed ethnography of religious life in the city of Turkistan, where the tomb of Shaykh Ahmad Yasavi is located. Privratsky describes the details of Muslim daily life, and the zyyarat (q.v.) practices to the shrine of Yasavi. He shows that although Soviet era made deep changes to religious practice and belief, many domestic practices of popular Islam have

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

490

continuing vigor. On the other hand, few people in Turkistan know much about scholarly Islam. During the Soviet period, Islamic learning was largely abandoned, and at present a small, but increasing number of Kazakhs can recite from the Quran.

In other regions, ethnographers John Bowen and Mark Saroyan examine diverse Islamic practices: practices and knowledge vary from one community to the next, and among individuals within communities. During the Soviet period, Sunni clergy and Soviet officials both attempted to eliminate zyyarat, but the Shi’a clergy of Azerbaijan supported zyyarat and other aspects of tomb worship (Saroyan 1997:114). After comparing Muslim rituals in Morocco and Indonesia, John Bowen argues that the diverse and complex weaving together of local practices with local understandings of scripture is “the historical essence of Muslim ritual life” (Bowen 1997:671). Authoritative versions of Islam arise from diverse traditional sources, and interact with local understandings, beliefs and practices.

Saroyan shows that even during Soviet times in Azerbaijan, politicians were not excluded from popular Islamic practice, and clerical Islam interacted with popular practice. Power relations varied from one situation to the next: clerics relied on popular practice in some contexts, but could also be undermined by it (1997: 121-2). This reminds us that we should develop models for thinking about concrete interactions among political, clerical, and popular ideas about religion in Kyrgyzstan. As mentioned above in regard to Ürkün, Ata Bei’it, and Tomb of Manas, people are changing their ideas about political and religious rituals. Clerical interpretations of Islam that include Manas and popular Kyrgyz practices of healing and honoring ancestors have an important role in these changing practices, while less locally-informed interpretations of Islam, and those that disparage Kyrgyz practices are more contested. These contests revolve around challenges to the authority and legitimation for differing interpretations. People adopt positions depending on personal choices about which aspects of belief and morality are more important. Many people abstain from the debates but participate in spiritual activities that make sense and feel rewarding to them.

Islamists or Kyrgyz nativists who are more committed to classifying and distinguishing types of religious practices, try to define or present religious concepts and practices such as Kyrgyzchylyk or Tengrianism as being outside of Islam. Whether they consider themselves followers of

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

491

Islam or of Kyrgyzchylyk, they define narrower and more exclusive interpretations of Islamic practice. But as Bowen, Saroyan, and many others show, there are many different versions of what Islam can include, and the real question is not where to draw the boundary lines, but who can speak authoritatively about such divisions. There will always be diverse, sometimes conflicting understandings of what should be considered as Islamic within Kyrgyz religious practices, and what should be considered native. In addition to studying practices and rituals themselves, anthropologists have to study discourses about such religious categories and systems, and how and when people feel it is important to talk about them.

Many religious people understand their beliefs as having outside sources of authority, and so seek interpretations and meanings from elsewhere. Since religious practices and experiences are inherently uncertain, many practitioners rely upon authoritative knowledge, reinforced by symbolic and ritual forms that provide confidence in the “reality,” “truth,” stability or reliability of the religious knowledge and practices. In Islam—as in Christianity and Buddhism—many believers feel textual knowledge and rituals that involve texts are important sources of certainty. But many Muslim mystics have argued against relying upon textual knowledge as a source of truth or access to God. Some mystics feel that words, work and scholarship get in the way of mystical experience (Schimmel 1975:17-19). In Islam there is also a tradition of receiving knowledge and even interpreting Arabic texts directly through meditation and revelation (Privratsky 2001:118-123, 159-60, 186-188; Schimmel 1975:28). Studies of Islamic practice have to examine the ways people think about knowledge and interpretative authority. Written sources of knowledge are only some of the sources that people respect. But when literacy becomes a criterion of institutional authority, then popular and oral practices may be less respected in public, written, and media discourses (see Shahrani, 1989).

Genealogies provide good examples of how literate and oral knowledge interact. Because genealogies are often used as sources of political and spiritual legitimacy, they are included in many written compilations of oral tradition. But even such a basic element of sacred history as descent from the sons of Noah appears in many different versions. This reflects the practical use of genealogies. Ideas about ancestors and descents change over time in response to people’s present ideological, social and political goals. As oral versions of descent acquire

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

492

currency and authority, people change texts to accommodate them. People use writing as a resource to discipline or regulate oral and practical social life, but such use depends on social processes of interpretation. Written genealogies change to reflect existing interpretations and oral knowledge. Heroes in Central Asian tradition become resources that people include within lineages: Alexander, Afrasiyab, Oghuz Khan, and Chingiz Khan appear in many genealogies. Culture heroes who come from elsewhere and convert people to Islam are sometimes included as ancestors. Some versions of Kyrgyz origins include the ancestor Ana al-Haqq, whose name itself preserves the famous words of the Sufi martyr al-Hallaj of Baghdad (Materialy 1973:205; DeWeese 1994: 504-512). A sacred source of authority has been made into a part of the lineage.

Conclusion

Debates about correct practice endure in Islam because of the learned

emphasis on following sunna (the example of the Prophet) and avoiding bid‘a (innovation). In the case of Kyrgyz religion, throughout the 20th century both Soviet scholars and clerical officials have attempted to distinguish Islamic and native practices, while popular practitioners have generally been less concerned with these divisions. Since the end of the Soviet period, a renewed interest in learned Islam has meant that more people are making formal judgments about popular religious practice. Because many people perceive Islam as a shared, scripturally-based international religion, and they do not hear about the diversity of Islamic practices throughout the world, they often accept as authoritative pronouncements about what all Muslims should do.

Tolerance, and debating alternative understandings of spiritual practices are strong traditions within Islam, but it is difficult to affirm these traditions when many people interpret Islam more strictly. As in many religions, the rise of literacy and formal education have led to wider acceptance of written, institutional interpretations of Islam, while individual religious diversity can be seen as error. Through formal education, whether secular or religious, many people learn to accept the certainty of external authority and are more likely to doubt religious practices they learn within their community and in personal spiritual experience. Outsider perspectives on local practices, and a priori definitions of universal and essentialized Islam gain acceptance, with the

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

493

result that locals lose confidence in the validity of long-standing practices such as zyyarat and nazir offerings.

Ethnographic approaches to understanding local practice are important for countering the increasing influence of learned definitions of Islamic practice. Ethnographic research assumes the expertise of the people being studied. It does not classify institutional and literate versions of knowledge as more valid, nor the local as more traditional or more ethnically distinctive, but remains deeply attentive to the complex processes of negotiating knowledge, authority and practice within local social contexts. Ethnographic methods help outsiders enter a community and begin to understand the local understandings and causes of positions, debates and effects. As Alexandre Papas points out in his critique of Joseph Fletcher’s approach to Khoja rule in Eastern Turkistan, one cannot understand political and religious history as the result of ideas and practices adopted from abroad: historical events arise from processes deeply rooted in local society, people, ideas, and practices (2005:16-19).

BIBLIOGRAPHY (items in smaller font are not cited in this chapter) Arik, Kagan. Shamanism, culture and the Xinjiang Kazak: A native

narrative of identity. Dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle, 1999. ——. “A Native Taxonomy of Healing Among the Xinjiang Kazaks.”

Anthropology of Consciousness. December 1999, 10:4, pp. 8-23 Atwood, Christopher P. “Buddhism and Popular Ritual in Mongolian

Religion: A Reexamination of the Fire Cult.” History of Religions, 36:2 (Nov 1996) 112-139.

Baialieva, T. D. Doislamskie verovanie. Frunze 1972. Basilov, V. N. Kul’t sviatykh v islame. Moscow: Mysl’, 1970. ——. Shamanstvo u narodov Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana. Moscow: Nauka,

1992. Beckett , Katharine Scarfe. Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bellér-Hann, Ildikó. “Solidarity and contest among Uyghur healers in

Kazakhstan.” Inner Asia, 3 (2001): 73-98. Berkey, Jonathan P. “Tradition, Innovation and the Social

Construction of Knowledge in the Medieval Islamic Near East.” Past and Present, 146 (Feb 1995), pp. 38-65.

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

494

Boas, Franz. “The methods of ethnology.” American Anthropologist, 22 (1920) 311-322. (Reprinted in F. Boas. Race, language, and culture. New York: MacMillan, 1940.)

Bowen, John R. “On Scriptural Essentialism and Ritual Variation: Muslim Sacrifice in Sumatra and Morocco.” American Ethnologist, 19: 4 (Nov 1992) 656-671.

Boyer, Pascal. Religion explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001

Burns, Robert I., S.J. “Social Riots on the Christian-Moslem Frontier (Thirteenth-Century Valencia).” The American Historical Review, 66:2. (Jan 1961) 378-400.

——. “Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth- Century Dream of Conversion.” The American Historical Review, 76:5 (Dec 1971) 1386-1434.

Çelebi, Evliya. Evliya Çelebi in Albania and adjacent regions: Kossovo, Montenegro, Ohrid. The relevant sections of the Seyahatname. Robert Dankoff and Robert Elsie, translation, commentary and introduction. Leiden: Brill, 2000.

Chazan, Robert. Barcelona and Beyond. The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1992.

DeWeese, Devin. Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

——. “Islam and the Legacy of Sovietology: A Review Essay on Yaacov Ro’i’s Islam in the Soviet Union.” Journal of Islamic Studies. 13:3 (2002) 298–330.

Duyshembiyeva, Jipar. “Kyrgyz Healing Practices: Some Field Notes.” The Silkroad Foundation Newsletter. 3:2 (Summer 2006). Accessed at http://www.silk- road.com/ newsletter/vol3num2/8_duyshembiyeva.php. Dec. 10, 2006.

Fathi, H. 1997. “Otines: the unknown women clerics of Central Asian Islam.” Central Asian Survey 16, 27-44.

Frank, Allen J. Islamic historiography and "Bulghar" identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden: Brill, 1998.

——. Muslim religious institutions in Imperial Russia : the Islamic world of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

——, and Jahangir Mamatov. Uzbek Islamic Debates: Texts, Translations, and Commentary. Kensington, Maryland: Dunwoody Press, 2006.

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

495

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983

Fuller, Graham & Jonathan Lipman. “Islam in Xinjiang.” Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland. S. Frederick Starr, ed. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004. Pp. 320-352.

Garonne, P. 2000. Chamanisme et Islam en Asie Centrale. Paris: Jean Maisonneuve.

Ginzburg, Carlo. “The inquisitor as anthropologist.” Clues, myths, and the historical method. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, trans. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 156-64.

Guliev, H. A. and A. S. Bäkhtiyarov. Azärbayjanda gädim dini ayinlär vä onlarïn maïshätdä galïglarï. Baku, 1968.

Halemba, Agnieszka. The Telengits of Southern Siberia : landscape, religion, and knowledge in motion. Routledge, 2006.

Hali, Awelkhan, Zengxiang Li & Karl W. Lückert. Kazakh traditions of China. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998.

Hames, Harvey J., ed. Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and Around the Crown of Aragon: essays in honour of Professor Elena Lourie. Leiden: Brill, 2004.

Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike & Marvin Harris, eds. Emics and etics: the insider/outsider debate. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990.

Ibn Battuta. Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354; translated with revisions and notes from the Arabic text edited by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, by H. A. R. Gibb. Second Series, volumes 110, 117, 141, 178, 190. Cambridge: Published for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge University Press, 1958-.

Kandiyoti, Deniz and Nadira Azimova. “The communal and the sacred: women's worlds of ritual in Uzbekistan.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 10:2 (June 2004) pp. 327-349.

Keller, Shoshana. “Conversion to the New Faith: Marxism-Leninism and Muslims in the Soviet Empire.” Of religion and empire: missions, conversion, and tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. 311-334.

Knysh, Alexander, “A Clear and Present Danger: Wahhabism as a rhetorical foil.” Die Welt des Islams, vol. 44:1 (2004), 3-26.

Li, Shujiang & Karl Lückert. Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, a Muslim Chinese people. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas

496

Light, Nathan. Review of Sergei P. Poliakov. Everyday Islam. (M.E. Sharpe, 1992.) In Middle East and South Asian Folklore Bulletin 13:1 (Winter 1996), p. 5.

Lindquist, Galina. “Healers, Leaders and Entrepreneurs: Shamanic Revival in Southern Siberia.” Culture and Religion. 6:2 (July 2005), pp. 263 – 285.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Baloma; The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 46. (Jul-Dec, 1916), 353-430. [Reprinted in Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays. New York, 1948.]

Materialy po istorii Kirgizov i Kirgizii. V. A. Romodin, ed. Moscow: Nauka, 1973.

Mills, Margaret. “Folk Religion: Folk Islam.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Lindsay Jones, ed. Vol. 5. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. pp. 3161-3164.

Al-Muqaddasi, Muhammad ibn Ahmad. The best divisions for knowledge of the regions: a translation of Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma‘rifat al- Aqalim. Basil Anthony Collins, trans. Reading: Garnet, 1994.

Mustafina, R. N. Predstavleniya kul’ty, obryady u kazakhov (v kontekste bytovogo islama v yuzhnom Kazakhstane v kontse XIX–XX vv.). Almaty: Qazaq Universiteti. 1992.

Omel'chenko, Elana and Gusel' Sabirova. “Practising Islam: Rituals, Ceremonies and the Transmission of Ethno-Islamic Values.” Islam in Post- Soviet Russia. Galina Yemelianova, Hilary Pilkington, eds. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003

Papas, Alexandre. Soufisme et politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan: étude sur les Khwajas Naqshbandis du Turkestan oriental. Paris: Librarie d'Amérique et d'Orient, Jean Maisonneuve successeur, 2005.

Privratsky, Bruce G. Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. 2001.

Poliakov, S. P. Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. 1992.

Rasanayagam, Johan. “Healing with spirits and the formation of Muslim selfhood in post-Soviet Uzbekistan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 12:2, (2006) pp. 377-393

Rashid, Ahmed. The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism? Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Zed Books, 1994.

Roerich, Nicholas. Altai—Himalaya; a travel diary. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1929.

LIGHT: Participation and Analysis in Studying Religion in Central Asia

497

Ro'i, Yaacov. Islam in the Soviet Union. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000

Saroyan, Mark. Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union. Edward W. Walker, ed. Berkeley: International and Area Studies, 1997

Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

Shahrani, M. Nazif. “Local Knowledge of Islam and Social Discourse in Afghanistan and Turkistan in the Modern Period.” Turko-Persia in Historical-Perspective. Robert L. Canfield, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 161-188.

Snesarev, G. P. Relikty domusul'manskikh verovanii i obriadov u uzbekov Khorezma. Moscow: Nauka, 1969.

Subtelny, M. E. 1989. “The cult of holy places: religious practices among Soviet Muslims.” Middle East Journal, 43(4): 593–604.

Sukhareva, O. A. “Perezhitki demonologii i shamanstva u ravninnykh Tadzhikov.” In Domusul’manskie verovaniia i obriady v Srednei Azii. Vladimir N. Basilov, ed. Moscow: Nauka, 1975, pp. 5-93.

Tabyshalieva, Anara. “Women of Central Asia and the Fertility Cult.” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, vol.36, no.2 (Fall 1997), pp.45-62

Tolan, John Victor. Saracens: Islam in the medieval European imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Usamah ibn-Munqidh. An Arab-Syrian gentleman and warrior in the period of the crusades; memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munqidh. Philip K. Hitti, trans. New York: Columbia university press, 1929.

Walters, Philip. “Religion in Tuva: Restoration or Innovation?” Religion, State & Society, 29:1 (March 2001) 23-38.

Wei, Cuiyi & Karl W. Lückert. Uighur stories from along the Silk Road. Lanham, Md. : Univesity Press of America, 1998.

Westermarck, Edward. Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation: Lectures on the Traces of Pagan Beliefs, Customs, Folklore, Practices and Rituals Surviving in the Popular Religion and Magic of Islamic Peoples. London: Macmillan, 1933.