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Most research on labour migration from Central Asia has explored the motivations and strategies of those who move. Comparatively less attention has been given to the experience of family members who stay behind. This paper draws on ethnographic research amongst the wives of migrant husbands in a site of gendered out-migration in eastern Uzbekistan to explore diverse experiences of ‘staying put’. Whilst spousal absence is experienced by some women as expanding the possibilities for social and spatial mobility, for others it can exacerbate the degree of control exerted by in-laws. Through this ethnography the author argues for a relational politics of mobility: that is, attention to the ways in which the movement of some can constrain (or compel) the mobility of others. Gendered out-migration is both embedded in, and transforms, the domestic organization of honour (nomus), in ways that are socially consequential. In Central Asia, the author argues, a richer understanding of labour migration can be gained by bringing different scales of movement into the same analytical frame and by attending ethnographically to the habitual production of place.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was supported by a doctoral training grant from the Economic and Social Research Council; the writing of this paper was supported by a Research Council's UK Research Fellowship. I am grateful to the many men and women in Sokh who shared their experiences of migrating and staying put with me, and in particular to the couple identified here as Parviz and Sayora, who welcomed me into their home. This article has benefited from on-going discussion with Medina Aitieva and Aliaa Remtilla at the University of Manchester. I am grateful for the opportunity to present parts of the argument to audiences in Manchester, Paris and Almaty. Any inaccuracies, of course, remain my own.
Notes
All names of people in Sokh are pseudonyms. In order to protect respondents' confidentiality, certain identifying features have been changed and individual mahallas have not been identified. In contemporary literary Uzbek, Sokh is rendered So'x. I have transliterated the name of the district according to the Russian spelling for ease of reading in English. I use Ferghana rather than Uzbek Farg'ona to refer to the provincial city and administrative district since this is the spelling more commonly used in English.
Atlas is a woven silk fabric of bright colours, traditionally warn in Ferghana. In the late Soviet period, synthetic varieties became available and new fashions, with short sleeves and short skirts, were popular among Uzbek and Tajik women.
In a Central Asian context, ‘household’ is a complex and flexible unit, which may include several generations and members not related by kinship (cf. Kandiyoti 1999). For the purposes of the survey, ‘household’ was taken to include all of those currently residing together under one roof and constituting one economic unit, eating together bir qozon (around one cooking pot). The mean household size in Sokh was 6.55, with the lowest consisting of one person, and the highest consisting of 18.
A detailed analysis of So'xchilik is beyond the scope of this paper. It can perhaps best be characterized as a discursive framework within which individual behaviour is socially situated and morally evaluated and through which Sokh as a region is imagined to itself and presented to the outside world. It is shorthand for talking about the ‘Sokh way of doing things’, but it also gestures to a particular normative content of that behaviour premised upon cultural conservatism and social control.
In a 2004 study, Irina Röhner found that in two Kyrgyz villages immediately bordering Sokh, 8% and 9% of those who had left the villages during the preceding year in search of work were women (Röhner 2007, p. 52). In my own survey the following year in Kyrgyz villages of the Isfara Valley, west of Batken, I found that of 216 journeys undertaken by migrant households over the preceding five years, 14.8% had had been undertaken by women. By 2010, in a repeat survey in the same region, this had increased slightly to 16.7% (242 of 1,448 recorded journeys undertaken between 2005 and 2010). This data is explored by Reeves (2008, forthcoming). Anecdotally there appears to be a steady shift in Kyrgyz-majority regions of southern Kyrgyzstan towards ‘family migration’ (semeinaia migratsiia) although in Batken province it remains extremely unusual for unmarried women to travel to Russia for work. Research undertaken by Bakty Kydyrmysheva and myself in Kara-Suu raion of Osh oblast' in 2010 suggests that there is considerable variation in this respect, with the migration of unmarried Kyrgyz women becoming more common in peri-urban villages neighbouring Osh. On the traditional Kyrgyz practice of leaving children in the care of other family members see Sanghera et al. (nd).
Although see Thieme (2008a), Massot (2010) and Reeves (2010a) for a more explicit attention to questions of gender identity.
These are themes that I have explored in Reeves (2007, 2008, 2010b) respectively.
On the social significance of weddings and circumcision ceremonies as enactments of community membership and as sites for ritual gifting see Rasanayagam (2002, pp. 75–102), Abashin (2003) and Zanca (2011, pp. 90–126) on rural Uzbekistan, Roche and Hohmann (2011) on Tajikistan, Werner (1998, pp. 238–269) on Kazakhstan, and Kuehnast and Dudwick (2004) on Kyrgyzstan. On debates in southern Kyrgyzstan over ritual ‘inflation’ as a result of migration see Reeves (forthcoming).
Survey data indicate that amongst those people from Sokh who were travelling to Russia for work in the mid-2000s, 10% had first travelled there in search of work before 1991, and it is precisely this older generation who predominate today amongst those involved in market and wholesale trade (Reeves 2008, pp. 91–94).
Members of the local intelligentsia would often point out to me that, whereas the majority of schooling in other Tajik-majority areas of Uzbekistan was carried out in Uzbek, the Sokh intelligentsia had actively resisted ‘assimilation’ and were fiercely preserving their cultural identity in the face of its erosion elsewhere. Great pride was taken, for instance, in ensuring that students competed in Tajik-language Olympiads; one of the school directors regularly travelled to Tashkent to oversee the translation of school textbooks into Tajik, and the older generation spoke anxiously of the fact that many younger people in the region saw fluency in Uzbek as their only real ticket to social mobility in independent Uzbekistan.
Indeed, on one occasion, I was asked by a Sokh family to send a telegram to Tajikistan from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, to invite family members to their son's wedding. Sokh had no mobile phone signal during my period of research, and few homes had a landline connection. Telephoning from the telegraph office and telegrams were the primary means of announcing important life-cycle events to distant relatives. This situation has changed considerably in the half decade since I have conducted fieldwork in Sokh.
The cost of satellite dishes declined dramatically in the early 2000s, with the result that by 2004 they were a common site in Sokh, available for about US$200 from the large wholesale market at Kara-Suu on the Kyrgyzstan/Uzbekistan border.
Author's interview, Usto Jahonov, Khujand, March 2005.
Bibikhon, one of my colleagues at the technical college, an Uzbek ‘from the valley’ (vodiydan) stressed this difference through the relative strength of prohibitions on women's movement, differences in styles of dress and comportment, and above all through a comparison of mourning practices following the death of a family member, which she characterized as excessively ‘strict’ in Sokh. Women in Sokh would wear black or dark green clothes as a sign of mourning for up to five or six years after the death of a loved one, she told me, compared to only a year in her village of origin.
In the Spring of 2005, whilst several of my class of 11th grade College pupils had ambitions to study at university, not one of the graduating women, to my knowledge, actually did so; cf. Falkingham (2000, p. xvi) on the preference for boys over girls in post-compulsory education in Tajikistan.
Some young people were still continuing to study in Khujand in the early 2000s, but the introduction of a visa regime between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the uncertainty as to whether a Tajik diploma would actually secure employment in Uzbekistan meant that young people, if they studied further at all, would typically do so in Ferghana, Kokand and Margilan, where higher education is in Uzbek. Most young people in Sokh speak Uzbek fluently, since they are exposed to it in school and it is the dominant language of popular culture. However, young people I spoke to indicated that they struggled with higher education in Uzbek since the terminology was so different from what they were exposed to at school. Others complained that they felt disadvantaged in the university entrance exams, which assumed that people sitting the exams where native Uzbek speakers.
For a detailed analysis of shifting age of marriage in the Qarotegin Valley in Tajikistan and a discussion of the pressures to marry young, see Roche and Hohmann (2011); on the role of fear about the possibility of finding a suitable husband because of protracted male absence, see Hegland (2010, p. 20). One of my male respondents in Sokh, who at 24 was making the preparations to marry the 17-year old daughter of his mother's sister, responded to my question concerning the young age of his bride with the comment: ‘We have a hadith that says, “why delay a good deed?”‘ See also Temkina (2005) and Kasymova (2005) on the (renewed) importance of early female marriage in Tajikistan.
Cousin marriages initiated by sisters were some of the most frequent of those that I observed in 2004/5 in Sokh, although I have not studied their occurrence systematically. One respondent explained that whilst there was greater risk of a child being born with a disability, cousin marriages were popular because they were more ‘peaceful’: that is, if either partner sought to leave the marriage, each would be pressured to remain by their respective mother (‘otherwise how would she speak to her sister?’) Such marriages were deemed easier in a material sense: the same respondent indicated that sisters could more easily agree to a small dowry (‘10 mattresses [kurpacha] rather than 20’) and to curtailing wedding expenses on the exchange of gifts. They also enabled families to ensure that their wealth remained within the family, rather than being dispersed. (See also Harris [2004, p. 103]).
Bazin (2008) has explored the ubiquity and intense moral resonance of the idea of being outside (lit. ‘on the street’ [ko'chada] in Uzbek), showing how working outside has neutral or positive connotations for men (where it suggests being occupied and busy), whereas the term is fraught with connotations of immoral labour – and prostitution specifically – when applied to women.
Sokh is located in a seismic zone and landslides in the higher Sokh villages are frequent in winter.
The realities of six or seven-day working weeks in Russia, survival rates of pay and lack of privacy on building sites and in railway wagons mean that opportunities for any kind of intimacy are minimal, and men would often depict the working ‘season’ as a period in which all human needs and desires were subordinated to the uncompromising demands of earning, saving and keeping out of the way of the local police. For Sokh men who were undocumented in Russia, without a propiska registering their presence in the city, travel ‘off site’ was kept to a minimum and visits to commercial sex workers were fraught with risks. Keeping a ‘second wife’, meanwhile, was largely confined to the relatively small group of more established migrants: those who felt at home in the city; who enjoyed the privacy of an apartment; and whose earnings allowed them some degree of material comfort and security.
I was once invited to the home of Hakim, a wealthy Sokh trader who had recently returned to his mahalla accompanied by Lena, a middle-aged Russian woman from Novosibirsk. Hakim introduced Lena as his ‘second wife’, but, as it emerged during conversation, she was also his landlady and the intermediary who secured his trading stall at one of the city's markets. As Bloch has argued, we should be wary of assuming that obviously ‘strategic’ relationships in contexts of migration are not also motivated by a search for intimacy. The boundaries between ‘love, obligation and transaction’ are often intensely blurred (2010, p. 2).
Dunyo ohi buzildimikan?/ Chin erkaklar uzildimikan?/ Qo'shig'imiz cho'zildimikan?/ Mardikorga chiqdi ayollar. I am grateful to Abdujalil Abdurasulov for his help in interpreting this song.
On the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan border north of Batken, the mardikor market had become so ethnically marked by 2005 that my Kyrgyz host father would no longer speak generically of mardikor but would rather talk of ‘getting in 10 Tajiks’ [onto Tajik alyp kelebiz] when he needed hired labour on his fields.
Indeed, in 2006, Uzbekistan's official religious establishment condemned the mardikor ayollar as contravening shariat by seeking work without soliciting their husband's permission. Uzbekistan's mufti, Abdurashid kori Bakhrovomov, is quoted as saying: ‘Even in the most difficult times our women did not go out on the street and did not become mardikors. It has always been the responsibility of the man to provide for the wife according to Muslim canons’ (quoted in Sogdiev 2006).