Introduction
The so-called ‘Forum for Culture and Science’ organized by the Assembly of People of Kazakhstan, a major legislative body nominally chaired by President of State Nursultan Nazarbaev was attended by numerous leaders of the country’s ‘diasporas’. Held in September 2011 in one of Almaty’s most prestigious restaurants, its entertainment program consisted of ‘traditional’ dance performances accompanied by various signature dishes belonging to the different groups that are part of multi-ethnic Kazakhstan, alongside national delicacies. However, Husey Daurov, a successful businessman and head of Kazakhstan’s
1 The research for this chapter was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the framework of the competence network
‘Crossroads Asia’. I would like to thank both BMBF and Crossroads Asia for their generous support during the research process. Furthermore, I am grateful for the open discussion of an earlier version of this chapter at a workshop of the Volkswagen-Foundation-funded project ‘Translocal Goods’ of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in April 2015. I especially want to thank Philipp Schröder and Manja Stephan-Emmrich as well as Barak Kalir, Nathan Light and the two anonymous reviewers of the volume for their valuable input, which helped to improve the argument.
© Henryk Alff, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0114.05
Association of Dungans, a group of Chinese-speaking Muslims, used the event as a venue for negotiating business deals rather than celebrating culture and science. Trade entrepreneurs seeking support, as well as phone calls to and from China, constantly interrupted my interview with Daurov, an interview that took place on the sidelines of the larger meeting. As Daurov clarified, excusing himself for the frequent interruptions, Dungan connections built over the past three decades between Central Asia and China far exceed the level of mere commerce. They include a range of exchanges regarding education and innovation that facilitate the Dungans’ role as political and socio-economic mediators across what is presented from the state perspective in both Kazakhstan and China as a newly emerging ‘Silk Road’.
Originating predominantly from the Chinese provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu, Dungans in Central Asia are descendants of refugees who were forced to leave the late Qing Empire in the course of what has become known as the Hui revolts (1862–1877). Following these events they established themselves in the Russian Empire and later in Soviet Central Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the second half of the twentieth century, Dungans were negatively affected by the Sino-Soviet divide that, in 1963, led to the closing of the border between the two Communist powers. However, starting with the Sino-Soviet rapprochement and increasingly so since the breakup of the Soviet Union, many of Kazakhstan’s Dungans have managed to establish relations with Huizu2 and Han Chinese business networks and position themselves favorably in cross-border exchanges between coastal China, Xinjiang, and post-Soviet Central Asia. Dungans value the position of socio-spatial liminality they occupy, and they often attribute particular meaning to the places their practices connect. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the relational and translocal production of place and the sense of multiple belongings that occur as a result. Notably, during interviews in Russian, my Dungan interlocutors referred not only to themselves but also to their perceived co-ethnics in China, as Dungan, even though Hueitsu is in widespread use as a common emic label or ethnic self-denomination in the ‘Dungan language’.
2 The Huizu are an ethnic group; the word is used in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) collectively for Chinese Muslims. They are one of the fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups in the PRC.
This chapter explores the relations and practices among the people of coastal China, Almaty, and south-eastern Kazakhstan and the impact they have on notions of belonging and social change within a Dungan community. It takes an ethnographic approach to examine how the socio-economic and socio-cultural changes in interrelated places are perceived, represented, and narrated and how they both shape and are shaped by the actors’ social practices. The focus of this inquiry, therefore, is on issues of human interaction and translocal flows of ideas and how they influence the production of a particular sense of place. I argue that because of their discursive positioning between ‘rising’ China and post-Soviet Kazakhstan, the Dungans perceive themselves as belonging to multiple groups. I will then investigate how the translocal socio-spatial positioning of a group impacts on the exchange of goods and people, as well as the appropriation or translation of particular ideas of social change between interconnected places.
Field research for this study was conducted between September 2011 and May 20143 in the large village of Shortobe, about 200 kilometers from Almaty, and in the Barakholka bazaar agglomeration in Almaty.
My ethnographic methods included semi-structured interviews with residents and participant observation.
My initial engagement with the Dungan community of Kazakhstan was facilitated by Husey Daurov, the most prominent community leader and businessman in Almaty. Since travelling to the People’s Republic of China in search of family links for the first time during the 1980s, Daurov has remained the main facilitator of Dungan cultural and political exchanges between Central Asia and China. As one interview partner said: ‘Husey Shimarovich [Daurov] has done a lot for the Dungans, in particular for those here in Shortobe. In fact, all of the people doing business with Chinese partners have received contacts and built their business through him’. Daurov therefore served as a crucial resource for my inquiries into Dungan history. He was also a key point of entry into the Dungan community, helping me to identify other interlocutors, including students and entrepreneurs in Shortobe and Guangzhou. The twenty respondents I selected were predominantly entrepreneurs, running their own trade businesses in Almaty, but the
3 These periods of field research were complemented by a short stay in Guangzhou in December 2014.
group also included local representatives of the Association of Dungans, several high-school teachers, and college students in Shortobe and the neighboring Dungan-populated village of Masanchi. In addition to these more formal interviews, I enjoyed many informal conversations with Dungans in Kyrgyzstan, as well as three interviews with Dungan students in Guangzhou, Southeast China.
This method of acquiring contacts enabled translocal research.
However, my reliance on Husey Daurov as a gatekeeper resulted in interlocutors who were close to the community leaders. Facilitated by this ‘snowball system’, but also due to the self-proclaimed pious Muslim identity of the Dungans, my interlocutors belonged exclusively to the well-connected and highly mobile male Dungan community. This introduces a certain amount of gender and (im-)mobility bias to the current study,which reflects the fact that the vast majority of Dungan women do not take part in either trade operations or educational exchanges with China.
This chapter comprises six parts in total: a brief section on the socio-cultural and historical background of Kazakhstan’s Dungans, followed by an outline of the theoretical background of this research.
The remainder of the chapter explores Shortobe’s Dungans and their relations, socio-spatial boundaries and narratives of multiple belongings, ending with some concluding remarks on my analysis.