The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan

Abstract

IN POST-COLONIAL SITUATIONS1 dual efforts to create an effective state apparatus (state building) and foster broad-based popular allegiance to that apparatus (nation building) run up against the institutional, material and discursive legacies of the previous political order.2 These two-fold imperatives are thus fraught with pitfalls that, in the extreme, can result in civil conflict, as in Tajikistan, or even near-total state collapse, as in Somalia.3 Given its implications for political stability, the difficult process of nation building leads students of identity politics to focus on a central question: 'Why do some nation building efforts succeed, while others fail?' The question is critical, but, as posed, it has an unintended consequence: it limits theoretical discussion to a single dimension. Following the broad tendency to theorise identities as single and isolatable,4 analysts routinely ignore the possibility that nation building efforts have implications that are not neatly captured on an analytical spectrum from success to failure. This article5 highlights the central linkages between forms and levels of identity politics by suggesting that elite efforts at ethnic nation building in Kazakhstan served, willy-nilly, to place sub-ethnic identities at the centre of political life. The argument is that the weak post-Soviet Kazakhstani state, bent on strategies of ethnicity-based compensation, lacked the resources to implement its programmes to promote ethnic Kazakhs. Instead, it created a broad discourse of ethnic redress that was left to individual actors in individual locales to translate into political practice. In doing so, many such actors used knowledge of genealogical lineage, which undergirded sub-ethnic identities, as a marker of Kazakhness. A virtual bidding war among locales ensued over these ethnic markers that served to construct lineage identities as politically salient. The context was a society popularly perceived as bi-ethnic. Political competition centred on two groups-Russians and Kazakhs-and much of the Kazakh political elite was culturally and linguistically russified. The actual cultural composition revealed greater diversity. When the USSR collapsed, Kazakhstan was the only successor state whose titular group was an ethnic minority (39.7%). A significant Russian population (33%), Germans and Ukrainians (4% each), Belarusans, Uzbeks and Crimean Tatars (2% each) rounded out this population of under 17 million. As for sub-ethnic lineage identities, the nomadic society of the pre-Soviet Kazakh steppe was segmentary. Kazakhs generally divided themselves into three zhuz (tribal