By Gian Luca Traverso and Carlo Nicoli Aldini
A few weeks ago, we left Tashkent for a 10-day journey in the West part of Uzbekistan. We spent the first three days in the ancient town of Khiva and then, for the remaining week, we roamed around Karakalpakstan, a region of Uzbekistan with the status of “Autonomous Republic”. This journey was intense, adventurous, and magical at the same time, and we had the opportunity of experiencing Uzbekistan in its various forms. To mention two, we slept in a night train and in a yurt by the shores of the Aral Sea!
Khiva and Karakalpakstan appeared to us as very different places aesthetically. While Khiva is a touristic ancient gem that speaks history and a glorious past in all its corners, Karakalpakstan is home to one of mankind’s worst tragedies, the drainage of the Aral Sea caused by the Soviet planning of the cotton economy.
Despite the aesthetic chasm, in both places we witnessed locals’ effort to make the best of what the natural and cultural contexts provide them with. In this blog post, we would like to share some of our thoughts about these resilient behaviors.
We arrived in Khiva after a thirteen-hour journey on the night train. Once there, we noticed a sharp contrast between the ancient citadel, renewed for the use of tourists, and the rest of the city outside the ancient walls. It seemed to us that, in the citadel, the only form of sustainment were the souvenir shops and the accommodation sector. Walking around the less touristic part of Khiva, we saw a place trapped between past and future, with a quite empty plaza, but also many construction sites. That said, we are not saying that the citadel, the well-maintained, shining, city centre, is fictional. On the contrary, many people live there: there is still life beneath the “touristic surface”. We had this confirmation during the evening of our second day in Khiva.
We were looking for a place to have dinner, and we found a nice restaurant, clearly intended for tourists. Luckily, the restaurant was closed, so we strolled around looking for another place. During our out-of-the-map search, we came across a place without signs, and we decided to enter. It was a restaurant managed by locals for locals. We ate fish with the company of local musicians and dancers. The whole mahalla started to dance and we joined them. Perhaps, on that occasion, we ripped the veil of the touristic sight in favour of an authentic glimpse of an ordinary evening in Khiva.
The following day, we had another occasion to peek beneath this veil. We were at our nice Bed and Breakfast in the city centre and, after getting acquainted with the house’s cat Belly, we had a brief, but deep, conversation with the daughter of the B&B owner, who we will call Nashira. She explained to us that she was studying English at the nearby Urgench university, and her dream was to study abroad in Europe or the US. Suddenly, we heard, not so far away, the call for prayer and both Nashira and her mother – who was sitting with us – stopped to talk and prayed for a while, making du’a’. We observed what was happening around us, then Nashira, probably noticing our fascination, asked us if we were Muslim, and we responded we both received a catholic education.
Afterwards, Nashira talked about family and religion, and she explained to us that Uzbek women can pursue a career in the same way the “western women” do but their priority is to build a family, and only later they think about a career: “we do the same things [the western women do], only later”. We listened silently; a bit caught by surprise. Carlo asked Nashira if there was anything she would change in this culture and she said spontaneously: “well, I do not really like that guys can date all the women they want and that does not affect their reputation at all, while if a woman dates more than a man, well that is not good. People in the mahalla (the neighbourhood) will gossip about it and it will affect the possibilities for the girl to date again in the future. That I don’t like” (this quotation is not reported verbatim as we did not have a recorder, but we immediately wrote down notes after the conversation).
After this chat, we reflected on how complex and fascinating the continuous changing and reinterpretation of cultural schemas is. At a first glance, Nashira’s narrative might be defined as “emancipatory”, but perhaps there is more than that. Besides her desire to study abroad, there is also a different understanding of the role of Uzbek women in society who, in her view, are more similar to western women than we might think, they only have different priorities. She explained to us her disagreement with some aspects of daily life in the Mahalla and the Uzbek dating culture. At the same time, such a disagreement was articulated within her religious and cultural beliefs, in a creative and active way.
Let us move to Karakalpakstan now. Nukus, the capital of the Autonomous Republic, is roughly a 2-hour drive from Khiva. On the first day we visited the world-famous Nukus Museum of Art and wandered around the town bazars. Then, we planned the journey to the Aral Sea region for the following two days, which started with a driver coming to pick us up with a big Toyota jeep early in the morning. We thus left for Mo’ynoq, a town that is a living testimony of the Aral Sea tragedy. Once overlooking the Aral Sea shores and thus involved in a prolific fishing industry, now Mo’ynoq lies more than 150 km from what remains of the lake’s water. Where once were the lake’s shores, now rests a ship cemetery: several rusted wrecked ships are left there to testify the Aral Sea tragedy. Some of them have been lined in a museum-like disposition, while others seem to have been left in the very position they used to be when the water started to recede.
Visitors can roam around the ships, climb them, look inside, and are left to wonder how, some time ago, they must have sailed the Aral Sea to catch fishes and ensure locals a living.
We then left the ship cemetery and, after a tasty lunch at the house of our driver’s friends, we proceeded with our compass pointed at the Aral Sea shores. We soon understood why it was necessary to have a big Toyota jeep: after a few-minute drive, we abandoned concrete roads and we entered a desert landscape, full of holes, dunes, rocks, sand, and dust.
The drive lasted for roughly 2 hours and half, during which we gazed at the surreal surroundings, talked with the driver in our elementary Russian, and listened to some old-fashioned Italian music which – we have discovered – is unbelievably popular in Uzbekistan!
Undeniably, the highlight of these days was sleeping in the yurts by the Aral Sea shores, an incredible and surreal (and cold!!!) experience which we will hardly forget. However, something else caught our attention during the drive to the Aral Sea, which we would like to report here. In the first part of the “road” to the Aral Sea, in fact, one can observe many plants for the extraction of gas. The driver explained to us that, in recent years, the government and many companies have started to invest in the gas extraction in the (former) Aral Sea basin. This decision has helped to develop a new economy in the area, and thus to create jobs for the locals. We in fact witnessed many people at work in the desertic fields.
Upon reflecting over this experience, we both felt that it was fascinating to notice the locals’ attempt to turn the Aral Sea drainage disaster into new economic opportunities. First, locals have developed a touristic economy surrounding the drainage of the Aral Sea, creating a museum and the ship cemetery, as well as the possibility to sleep in yurts by the current lake’s shores. Second, the state itself and big enterprises seem to be trying to develop a new economy originating from the Aral Sea basin itself, by using it as a new energy reservoir, and thus to improve the socio-economic conditions of the local population. Whereas the Aral Sea tragedy could have annihilated life in the surroundings, we truly had a different impression. Mo’ynoq has newly built edifices, schools, some hotels and restaurants. Despite being “clearly one of the worst environmental disasters of the world” (UN News 2010), as former UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon said (and nobody can deny it), we also witnessed a lot of life and resilient behaviors by the local population.
From the ancient city of Khiva to the barren desert of the Aral Sea, we found living humans who are not passive actors, but who strive to change their surroundings or avoid following pre-established models. True, Nashira gave us the impression to be fully immersed in the local culture surrounding dating and male-female role divisions, however she also showed us her agency when actively challenging some of the local cultural expectations. Similarly, locals in Mo’ynoq did not twiddle their thumbs in front of the Aral Sea drainage, but they found alternative resources to develop new opportunities even within a hostile environment. We believe these instances of social, cultural, and economic resilience represent interesting insights for future research in social scientific disciplines.
References
UN News. 2010, «Shrinking Aral Sea Underscores Need for Urgent Action on Environment – Ban». Accessible at https://news.un.org/en/story/2010/04/334402.