Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 19 – Central Asians
are “a patchwork of the Soviet, religious, archaic, and the contemporary,”
Bakhtiyor Alimdzhanov says, with the values of families, neo-conservatism and
religion currently predominant and promoting “’the feudalization’ of culture
and identity.”
This divided, “hybrid,” consciousness
benefits the elite, the independent Kyrgyz historian says; and the
intelligentsia in these countries is “powerless.” As a result, the situation is
“locked in” and may continue well into the future (mk.kg/politics/2020/04/19/v-centralnoy-azii-idet-feodalizaciya-kultury-i-nacionalnoy-identichnosti.html).
In this often confused situation,
various groups are pushing revisionist agendas about the past. The three most
prominent areas where new approaches are being called for concern “the
heroization of the basmachi movement, the pressions against the national
intelligentsia and the pressure against the indigenous population by “’colonizers.’”
These represent efforts by the
current elites to legitimate themselves by showing their sympathies for those
who resisted the Bolsheviks, but, Alimdzhanov says, he doesn’t believe that
these attempts at revision have as yet had much impact on the population at
large. The danger will come if they are raised to the level of official
history.
“The archaization of society in
Central Asia, unfortunately, is taking place rapidly,” he continues. “In the
first instance, this is connected with Islam, that is, with the attractiveness
of the Islamic way of life and the decline of civil culture, economics and
education. Unfortunately, over the last 20 years, an integral national
consciousness has not taken shape.”
He argues that such a consciousness
needs to be promoted through the mass media and the Internet lest either indigenous
counter-elites or foreign governments hijack the identities of Central Asians
by playing up one element in the mix to the exclusion of all the others.
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