In today’s New York Times, Ilan Greenberg has a story on a topic of special interest to me: tribe, pastoralism, and politics in Central Asia (and beyond).
Washington University’s Michael Frachetti has been conducting research in Eastern Kazakhstan on how Bronze Age pastoral societies “employed flexible temporal and spatial patterns of mobility to negotiate ecological constraints as well as alter the political and social conditions of their landscape.” While his work concerns societies that existed thousands of years ago, he notes that many of the countries that are of particular concern to Western states are those with institutions marked by a nomadic heritage. Dr. Frachetti tells Greenberg that with Afghanistan, for example, he believes that “some of our foreign policy complications derive from our inability to locate a nomadic dynamic within contemporary political structures.”
Instead, scientists like Dr. Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.
While the view that tribe and clan — the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies— influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policy makers have overlooked important “cultural intelligence,” like family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.
I’m no specialist in studies of nomadic societies, but I entirely agree that Western policymakers suffer from a lack of “cultural intelligence.” There are some very sharp people out there who are well-versed in the nexus between nomadic social legacies and modern politics, but there is quite a bit of disagreement on the extent to which nomadism, tribalism, etc. manifests itself today. Good cases can be made that recent institutional legacies are most important to understanding, for example, modern politics in former Soviet Central Asia. And I think that there is a danger that nonexperts who are turned on to the idea of looking for cultural roots of politics behavior will take the ball and run too far with it. This is a concern I share with Sean Roberts, who is quoted in Greenberg’s story.
“What’s almost as dangerous as ignoring the cultural context of politics is misinterpreting it,” he said. “The policy community just doesn’t have a background at looking at cultures’ differences. So even if they do the right thing and start to look at cultural intelligence, the result is they will take stereotypes of Kazakhstan’s nomadic past and call it a complete truth.”
It is fairly clear that there needs to be attention paid to both the deep cultural history as well as more recent history that may have reshaped cultural, social, and political institutions. As Roberts correctly notes, it makes little sense to use Kazakhstan’s nomadic past as a roadmap for understanding modern Kazakh politics; one also needs a hearty helping of Soviet history. And there is also the danger of assuming too many similarities between neighboring, superficially similar groups. Uzbeks are different from Turkmen, who are different from Kazakhs, who are different from Tajiks, etc. And even within countries the differences can be huge. Afghanistan’s different ethnic and linguistic communities not only have different cultural legacies; their cultural, political, and social institutions were all touched differently by the last three decades of war.
There’s no simple solution to this problem. As an anonymous source for the story notes, it takes a lot of time and money to train specialists. And in the case of Central Asia policy, there seems to be a dearth of will in Washington to put much effort into diplomacy in the region. Stories such as Greenberg’s may be an indication of a growing awareness of the need for deeper historical and cultural awareness in our policymaking, and one can hope to see an increased emphasis on this in future decisionmaking.
For those who might be interested, Dr. Frachetti’s dissertation, along with an article he authored in 2004, is available here. My masters thesis, which deals with similar themes, can be found here.
This post was made on my personal computer.
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Nathan, I’m afraid all the talk of more emphasis on nomadism and tribalism, while appealing for tourists and lovers of the “exotic”, is as off-base as saying to do business with the US one must understand the relationship between WASPs, Irish-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Southerners, Texans, Westerners, Ivy Leaguers, et al. What a waste of time. Just learn how business is done, and then do it. IMHO, The US has faced setbacks in Central Asia because of failed geopolitical strategies that operate at a different level from clan politics, based upon an imaginative failure to understand the national interests of Central Asian states rather than clan, tribe, or religion. In order for the US to prosper in the region, the US government might try to take the existing states and their leaders seriously and work with them as legitimate sovereign governments rather than attempt to undermine or overthrow them. I got very tired of Americans saying that Central Asian nations were fakes created by Stalin and calling them names like “Trashcanistan.” Guess what? The US is a fake nation created by politicians. It’s not organic, and doesn’t have a unified ethnic composition. IMHO, it is condescending attitudes like those, found in scholarly literature that doesn’t acknowledge fundamentalist Islam was a colonialist imperialist project which oppressed Central Asians for generations and is both feared and hated by most of the population–concomitant with an adolescent romanticization of nomadism, tribal life, or Sha’aria–that lie at the root of America’s problem in the region. Modernity, meaning, ExxonMobil, GE, Microsoft, Apple, McDonald’s, Google, Starbucks, Coca-Cola are what we have to offer and where America’s comparative advantages lie. We should stick to what we know, treat people as equal human beings, and see what happens. The inhabitants of Central Asia can handle their tribal and nomadic past on their own….
Laurence, obviously one can go overboard, but the important point is that there needs to be an understanding that “how business is done” in many parts of the world is according to the unwritten rules of informal institutions. Further, if one is to understand informal institutions, one must examine the cultural and historical milieu of a society. I don’t think that anyone in the story advocates using a romanticized understanding of nomadism as a roadmap for understanding modern Central Asian politics, and I certainly do not myself. I do find it helpful to examine whether or not the social structures that emerged in previously nomadic societies persist and influence modern politics.
But, if you want to see my argument on this, read my thesis. Feel free to disagree.
Much of the rest of what you write strikes me as awfully caricatured when leveled against academia. I’ve read plenty of academic literature on Central Asia and don’t find what you cite — which certainly may be public attitudes of certain academics — the least bit indicative of the literature.
As for the policy, no one is necessarily saying that we shouldn’t work with the governments in the region. I believe though that we can better understand the governments’ motivations if we understand the domestic political environments in which they operate. On the point of not trying to undermine or overthrow governments, do you think it is good policy for western governments to send the signal to Central Asian (or any, for that matter…) governments that anything goes in the domestic arena?
Nathan, I think I read a draft of your thesis a while ago and it was excellent in terms of explaining local politics–but I didn’t think you argued local clan politics should be at the center of American foreign policy towards Central Asia, unless I misunderstood your point…
Nope, I didn’t argue that, and I’m not sure anyone would. But those making policy should have a greater awareness of the social and cultural environment in which foreign governments operate.
I’m reading Kennan’s two volume history of U.S.-Russian relations after St. Petersburg’s withdrawal from WWI, and that is the exact point he makes about (failed and misdirected) U.S. efforts to create ties with the transitional government following the fall of the monarchy.
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