PLACE

There are no universally-accepted definitions of the terms Central Asia, Inner Asia, or Inner Eurasia. As is perhaps fitting, the scholarly debate is unsettled.

“Central Asia” most often refers to the 5 Soviet-created republics (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). “Central Asia” can also mean the Muslim-majority parts of the region regardless of political boundaries, including northeast Iran (the region called Khurasan), northern (non-Pashtun) Afghanistan and Xinjiang Province of western China. Central Asia can also be thought of as two very different but interacting human environments: the settled oases of Khwarezm, Bukhara, Herat, Samarkand, Kashghar and Urumchi, and the nomadic steppelands of the Desht-i Qipchak east into Mongolia.

“Inner Asia” usually refers to the Buddhist areas to the east of the Tien Shan/Pamir mountain barrier: Inner and Outer Mongolia, Tibet, the Manchu area north of Beijing and  the regions of Altay, Tuva, Buriatia and Amur that are part of southeast Siberia in today’s Russian Federation. Sometimes “Inner Asia” refers to the entire area under Chinese cultural influence, and so can include Xinjiang Province.

“Inner Eurasia” refers to the large interior plain of the Eurasian continent, roughly bounded by Pripyat Marshlands of Belarus/western Ukraine to the west, the southern seas and mountain ranges from the Caucasus to the Himalayas, and the Amur and Manchuria regions north of Beijing. The Eurasian continent is the enormous landmass that includes Europe, the Middle East, Siberia and East Asia to the Pacific coast.

People in a difficult environment

Nomadic lifeways are a common response to environmental conditions of  “low abundance and low predictability” of resources [Casimir and Rao, p. 16]. Historians cannot separate culture from geography and environment, as Central Asian history shows particularly clearly. As David Christian writes, “The flatness of the Inner Eurasian plains had immense political, cultural, and military consequences,” [Christian, 1998, p. 4.] Travel within the region was unobstructed by high mountains (with the important exception of the Tien Shan/Pamir chain in the east) or wide rivers. Invasion from without was also unobstructed. Before modern state borders and surveillance technology, an invading army could appear quite suddenly. In these harsh physical circumstances, being able to move quickly to richer and/or safer areas was essential for survival.

In addition to topographical flatness, Inner Eurasia has a continental climate, generally dry and cold but also subject to wild changes because it is far away from the moderating influence of any large body of water. Sudden blizzards, droughts and late spring freezes occur frequently, with devastating consequences for humans and animals. Inner Eurasia’s environment is not good for growing grain or vegetable crops, except in the southern regions watered by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers and their tributaries. Nomadic groups have fed themselves through pastoralism—herding sheep or goats from summer to winter pastures within a loosely-bounded territory—and through trade with settled, agricultural societies.

In addition to topographical flatness, Inner Eurasia has a continental climate, generally dry and cold but also subject to wild changes because it is far away from the moderating influence of any large body of water. Sudden blizzards, droughts and LINK late spring freezes LINK occur frequently, with devastating consequences for humans and animals. Inner Eurasia’s environment is not good for growing grain or vegetable crops, except in the southern regions watered by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers and their tributaries. Nomadic groups have fed themselves through pastoralism—herding sheep or goats from summer to winter pastures within a loosely-bounded territory—and through trade with settled, agricultural societies.

Nomadism conferred the advantage of flexibility in social structure. When a tribal unit became too large for the local environment to sustain, it could split in two so that one branch could search for new pastures. As Casimir and Rao write: “The practice of mobility itself can be considered a resource; maintaining flexibility through mobility is, for instance for herding communities, the best guarantee of continued and optimal exploitation of resources in unpredictable ecological conditions. The hindrance of a mobile life-style by international state borders often leads to impoverishment. . .” [pp. 5-6]

MOBILE COMMUNITIES -- Territory and identity

Nomadic societies—mobile groups—are by definition not tied to a particular village or town, although each nomadic unit generally had a territory within which it traveled. These were cultures with a sense of territoriality but not of property ownership. Nomadic tribes would fight to defend their rights to a territory without necessarily having firmly demarcated borders for that territory. In times of scarcity mobile groups could choose to share access to grazing with others rather than risk war. One mobile group could be recognized by others as having customary access rights to a particular pasture or stream for a period of time, then with changes in ecological or political conditions another mobile group would be recognized as having acquired customary access.

European Christian and Middle Eastern Muslim societies constructed very different relationships between territoriality and political power. The cornerstone of Western law and personal status was exclusive rights to property. Before the modern nation-state became the dominant form of political organization, settled peoples identified with their town or region (examples: Burgundians, Bavarians, Venetians). In the Middle East, including Central Asia, many people’s names ended with their place of birth: the philosopher Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan ibn Awzalagh al-Farabi (870–950 CE, born in the small town of Farab in what is now southern Kazakhstan), the religious scholar Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810–870; Bukhara is in the current state of Uzbekistan), or the Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Ruholla Khomein-i (ca. 1900–1989, from Khomein, Iran).

However, where European dukes and barons derived legal rights and political authority from their hereditary title to rule over a particular territory, rulers in Muslim lands did not derive their identity and political legitimation from territory. Instead notables in the Middle East gained legitimate power from a patent to rule from the caliph (“successor” to the Prophet Muhammad), even if the notable in question was a Seljuk Turk who could forcibly demand a patent at sword-point. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, regional rulers were legitimate because they had permission to rule from the caliph. The caliph was legitimate because he was a successor to the Prophet Muhammad, not because he controlled Baghdad. As historian Beatrice Forbes Manz writes, “We find therefore that in Islamic imperial traditions, the most strongly expressed identities brought with them no specific territorial claims.” [Manz, p. 81]

In this context, people derived identities from the roles that they, both as individuals and as members of ethno-linguistic groups, played in society. For example, Iranians were cultured and sophisticated, but steppe nomads (Turks and/or Mongols) made the best fighters. Hindus from India and Jews were merchants, with the characteristics of worldliness and cunning associated with long-distance trade. The generic name “Turkmen/Turkoman,” anthropologist Thomas Barfield tells us, “[A]ppears to have been applied. . . as a sort of a residual category for a type of Turko-Mongolian frontier tribe that lived independently just beyond the control of state power. It was as much a political category as an ethnic label, and their larger units had mostly geographically based names. . .” [Barfield, 2002, p. 70] These socially-derived identities were often what we in the United States would call ethnic stereotypes. Nonetheless, they had ascriptive power in Central Asian societies.

Note that all peoples identify themselves partly in opposition to others: “We Turks are not effete Iranian courtiers, but strong warrior nomads.”  Note also that identifying a group with a particular social role means that identities can change as societies change. In the 18th and 19th centuries Cossacks (Slavic and Christian) and Kazaks (Turkic and Muslim) worked together on the Imperial Russian frontier east of the Ural mountains, bound by their similar low social status and roles as fighters and by their common enemy, imperial officialdom. In the mid-20th century Cossacks in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan preferred to align themselves with “white” Europeans (Russians, Germans, and even Korean exiles) against the “dark” Asiatic Muslims (Kazakhs or exiled Chechens).

MOBILE COMMUNITIES -- mobile communal identities

Just because territory did not define nomads does not meant that nomads did not have a sense of personal identity. “Identity” is here defined as a communal and individual sense of where one belongs in the world, in relation to space, time and the metaphysical structure of the universe. For nomads, family genealogy was the most important mechanism for locating oneself in the world. Genealogy was a flexible system, however.

Western and Soviet ethnographers have constructed many neat, orderly models of tribal structures. These models showed that tribes were based on conical or segmentary male descent lines, bounded by rules determining who was and was not eligible for marriage (commonly a person could not marry anyone related to him/her within seven generations of patrilineal descent) or by behavior such as war cries. Unfortunately, real human behavior does not conform to neat models. While Kazak nomads were exogamous (only marrying outside of their tribe and seven generations), Turkmen tribes were endogamous (preferring to marry within the tribe). Not all of the sub-units within a defined group of tribes even followed the same marriage rules. Tribespeople themselves gave ethnographers inconsistent accounts of their lineages, partly because of gaps in their own information (particularly about tribal sub-units that lived some distance away) and more importantly because rigidly-defined blood relations were less meaningful to them than to the ethnographers interrogating them. When politically or economically useful, nomadic tribes could always find or invent common ancestors to help seal alliances. Tribes could also rise or fall in status depending on the prowess of their current leaders, without regard to traditional seniority rankings.

One useful definition of tribal boundaries comes from Paul Geiss, who suggests that a tribe is “a peaceful and legal community, whose members are obliged to maintain peaceful relations. The commitment to such a group enables conflict regulation and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Due to common legal community structures, tribesmen share one normative framework which provides the rules for this task” [Geiss, p. 33]. The boundaries and membership of a tribe are determined by who one is obliged to remain at peace with and who one is obliged to attack to avenge a crime or offense. Genealogy is still important in Geiss’s definition, but he recognizes that rigid genealogical models are not helpful in understanding how Central Asian nomads identified themselves.

SUMMARY -- factors determining nomadic tribal identities

• patrilineal descent based on oral traditions
• who one is and is not allowed to marry
• who one must live in peace with, and who one must fight
• economic or political need