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Central Asian Survey

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After the Kolkhoz: rural elites in competition

Tommaso Trevisani Version of record first published: 06 Aug 2007.

To cite this article: Tommaso Trevisani (2007): After the Kolkhoz: rural elites in competition, Central Asian Survey, 26:1, 85-104 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02634930701423509

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Central Asian Survey (March 2007) 26(1), 85 104

After the Kolkhoz: rural elites in competition

TOMMASO TREVISANI

Introduction
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Caught between predictions of Islamist upheaval and the menace of regional fragmentation,1 current understandings of the social dynamics in rural Uzbekistan continue to be trapped by discourses of danger2 that make it difcult to recognise what is really happening on the ground. Clans and patronage networks are widely used terms to address local political dynamics, while some authors stress that the key political processes are informal and evolve around relations between clans and regimes.3 Yet attention to the underlying social and political conguration has seldom been accurate. Uzbekistan is still portrayed as an essentially immobile country in which, unlike most post-Socialist nations, rural areas have been very minimally impacted by substantial reform.4 As a result, most literature dealing with rural social developments in Uzbekistan implicitly or explicitly maintains an image of continuity between the kolkhoz of the Soviet period and todays supercially reformed equivalents of the kolkhoz. The central argument of this paper is that, contra these assumptions, recent reform intensication has produced a signicant shift in the patterns of political dynamics in rural Uzbekistan. Research conducted in Khorezm tells us that both assumptions of socio-political immobility, as well as the analytical inferences drawn from it, have to be reconsidered in the light of empirical evidence. This paper addresses signicant changes in the relations of power and of production and claims that a changing scenario is producing a new dynamic that has so far not received adequate attention. The reforms that have led to decollectivisation also had the unforeseen consequence of affecting the implicit and ofcial rules through which local producers and local elites conducted their interactions within the rigid framework of state agriculture. In the absence of other viable forms of political participation, these rules were the expression of a voice from below in a context in which the local peoples councils and assemblies, rather than being veritable bodies of self-governance, were made to acclaim and follow centrally commanded instructions and policies. Despite Soviet (and post-Soviet) centralism and its institutional animosity towards genuine political participation, power politics never ceased to also have a local expression, manifest in local struggles around the distribution of
Correspondence should be addressed to Tommaso Trevisani, Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, Germany (E-mail: tommaso_trevisani@hotmail.com). 0263-4937 print/1465-3354 online/07/010085-20 # 2007 Central Asian Survey DOI: 10.1080/02634930701423509

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resources and in the shaping of community life. In this respect the coping and ` appropriation strategies adopted by the rural communities vis-a-vis the centrally set political frame should be considered as a surrogate, albeit opaque and indirect, form of participation, which so far the central government contained successfully. This is the locus of the transformation I want to address in this paper. Taking the example of a rural district, I argue that local struggles and local forms of coping develop a dynamic that only partially matches the scenarios implied by the centre periphery narratives of power relations employed to describe socio-political ferment at a more general level. In an attempt to understand the centre periphery struggle in a specic district, I analyse the evolution of the mechanisms through which new inequalities are created and uncover some unsuspected dynamics that create challenges and resistance to state control. Not clans, but individuals responding to new sets of constraints and opportunities are at the core of these mechanisms. Centre periphery dynamics in Uzbekistans rural sector The notion of an all-encompassing state has been frequently invoked to characterise state society relations in Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, according to Ilkhamov, the dominance of the Uzbek state over society only hides the frailty of its power. The absence of an independent public sphere does not render state power more stable, as stability remains based on continuous negotiations between layers of the state that largely leaves out society.5 In such a context the centre periphery dynamics represent the motor of the social and political transformation: they replace state society relations in the role usually ascribed to them in other modernising countries.6 Ilkhamov writes of this centre periphery dynamic in antagonistic terms. It is characterised by the paradox of a strong centre permanently endangered by the destabilising claims of a locally rooted periphery. His argument is further substantiated by what he calls the battle for cotton,7 in which an only seemingly strong centre, represented by the top executive power, struggles to fully impose itself on a recalcitrant periphery, represented by regional elites within the state apparatus. The argument is that because the loyalty and acquiescence of the regional elites largely depends on the centres (in)ability to satisfy their budgetary demands, the latter end up posing a real threat to the centre. Looked at from a general perspective the battle for cotton originates in the diverging economic and political interests between central government, local producers and the regional elites in respect to an agricultural system once built up to serve the demands of the Soviet textile industry8 and now in evolution towards newly dened domestic concerns.9 During the Soviet period the central government implemented a cotton quasi-monoculture in the areas suitable for this crop. Local producers became employees integrated in the kolkhoz system, for which the Soviet government, via the local administrators, allocated consistent budget resources. The regional elites gained some discretion over the state budget devoted to agriculture. Their technique consisted in over-reporting the cotton production, a device that enabled state enterprises and organisations to 86

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obtain higher budget and resource transferrals from the central administration. Local elites used these rents to satisfy their needs and those of their clients, and succeededin part by means of the cultural complicity that linked them to their communitiesin developing a pervasive system of patronage, ranging from the higher echelons of the state and party system, down to the kolkhoz staff, and their local constituencies.10 According to Ilkhamov this legacy of the past lives on in current relations:
more often than not, kolkhoz chairmen nd patrons among local authorities with whom they enter into mutually benecial clan-like relationship. This patron client network pulls in other inuential forces, such as heads of law enforcement agencies, bazarkoms (administrators of local bazaars), and even sometimes people from the central government. . . . Ordinary rural households are also in some way involved in these patron client networks. The role of patrons towards them is played by kolkhoz chiefs. From this point of view such kolkhoz household relationships can be considered as a sort of social archetype inherited from the pre-Soviet past.11

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After independence the government privileged a conservative course of reform, whose aim was to enhance the condition of a poorly performing and decit ridden agricultural economy, without loosening its grip over the returns of agriculture. Stability concerns were prioritised over the need to reform the inefciencies of the state controlled collectives. Supercially reformed into cooperatives and later into farmer unions, they maintained their most important characteristics.12 However, now the government was unable to ensure the regular payment of wages and to provide for those social services and investments that in the past effectively counterbalanced its extractive cotton policy. Budget cuts also aimed at reducing regional elites capacity to ensure their rents from agriculture.13 These measures naturally clashed with the consolidated web of interests, collusions and tactics developed by the stakeholders at various levels that in the past had already led to the so-called Uzbek affair.14 As a consequence, post-independence agro-policy created resentment and hardship among primary producers. In order to compensate its incapacity to maintain past living standards in the rural areas starting from the 1990s the government enlarged the share of land for household use and reduced the overall share of land grown with state order crops,15 but with little success. Local elites, deprived of their share of rents from the business with cotton and the other state crops, were compelled to nd alternative sources of income, which they found at the expense of the rural population. The result was to further penalise the primary producers, now forced to endure a double burden imposed on them by the central government and their local bosses.16 In the colonial17 context of late socialist Uzbekistan local elites were appreciated as supportive patrons of their communities. Their capacity to divert and allocate resources to their patronage networks could even nd a moral legitimacy by guring as a sort of passive form of resistance against the centrally imposed cotton programme. In this sense, the local elites demonstrated their loyalty by stealing from Moscow to give back to the communities. In the context of independent Uzbekistan, by imposing an additional burden on the communities they lose the legitimating Robin Hood bonus: the 87

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moral support rural elites enjoyed in the past now fades away and gives way to a post-independence legitimacy crisis.18 Despite this, the position of the rural elites retains some ambivalence, as their interests and loyalties can move back and forth between the political centre and their (former) local constituencies, depending on the situation.19 An interest the regional elites have in common with the local producers consists in expanding the sector of agriculture not devoted to cotton production, as this is the sector that they can control autonomously and that allows them to earn the material resources that are no longer available through the governmental budget. The centres reaction against this strategy results in augmented pressure in the form of periodical staff reshufes and intensied controls on the production process as a mean to guarantee their control over the situation. While this reconstruction of the political and economic dynamic around the cotton sector is plausible in general terms, little is known about how these dynamics impact concretely upon local elites and producers in the rural areas. In the following section, I attempt to transpose this model to a rural district in order to see how far the paradox created by the centre periphery dynamics is also reproduced at a lower level of the agricultural production hierarchy and if it does, which particular form it assumes. The battle for cotton transposed to Yangibozor Ilkhamovs model of the centre periphery relations in Uzbekistan is based on his understanding of the dynamics between top level state hierarchy and regional elites. Seen from within the cotton growing district in which I conducted my eldwork20 the scenario described in the battle for cotton is not immediately recognisable. With a population of 63.4 thousand, 57.3 of which registered in the rural councils around the Raizentr area, Yangibozor is a truly rural district,21 representative of other densely populated and intensively cultivated areas in Uzbekistan, where centrally administered irrigated agriculture has a similar importance for the livelihood of people. Among the university students of Khorezm the district is well known because, having fewer residents than other districts of the viloyat, at harvest, ever since the Soviet period the university faculties used to be allocated to the cotton growing collectives to support the yearly cotton harvest campaign. More importantly, this district is a trail-blazer of the Uzbek decollectivisation policy. Anticipating a nation-wide trend, the shirkats of the district were already disbanded by January 2003. By then 18,656.8 of the ca 20,000 hectares of agricultural lands once managed by the 11 shirkats were transferred to 1164 fermer enterprises.22 In 2006 the remaining tenth of land grown with state crops was nally transferred to the fermers, whose number reached 1406.23 Research carried out in this district aimed at studying the way in which national agricultural reform policies were perceived and implemented locally and how they impacted production, social organisation and community life.24 While in Ilkhamovs model the emphasis is on the rivalry between the regional elites and the central government, in Yangibozor the district establishment seems 88

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to be genuinely loyal and does not represent a challenge to the government. Also, local producers are much less passive than portrayed in Ilkhamovs account. Yangibozor has in the past mostly matched the cotton production targets set by the government, although at the cost of many sacrices and hardship for the direct producers involved in cotton growing, who represent the overwhelming majority of Yangibozors population. In a context characterised by a reagrarianisation and a demonetisation of agriculture25 rural inhabitants became more dependent on their produce. For this reason rice, which unlike cotton can be directly consumed by the households or freely sold for cash in the bazaars, increased in its importance both for the small producers (more oriented to grow it for their subsistence) and for the large farm holders (inclined to grow rice as a cash crop). Already under the state collectives the opportunity to make prots with rice, which district authorities try to limit in order not to endanger the cotton production, but also to keep it under their exclusive control, has been attractive to local producers. Now, with the changing conditions of land usage available to the fermers, it has even increased its appeal. The hokims and the other district level staffs attempt to keep this sector under their control has not remained unchallenged locally. Portraying post-reform Yangibozor as a scenario of conict or of social unrest would surely be mistaken. However, relations between district authorities and recently established private farms ( fermers) were a continuous source of tension rooted in the latters determination to manage their farms independently and expressed in various forms of locally circumscribed phenomena of resistance against the authorities.26 In June 2004, one year after the lands of the former rice growing sovkhoz Amudarya27 were entirely transferred to fermers, these tensions poured out in an exceptional and locally circumscribed, though emblematic, uprising against the authorities. A casual spectator described the event to me in these words:
Yesterday around 10 11 in the morning in Amudarya people gathered on the bridge and stopped the circulation, approximately 300 people, most of them dehqons [peasants], ca 50 of them fermers, the rest people working for the fermers, all were from Amudarva. . . . To calm down the crowd, who were protesting because the rice growing had been banned, also A. [Head of Regional Agricultural Department] had to come from Urgench to support the hokim. The people were shouting at the hokim! An angry woman saying: We have already paid for the tractors, bought the seeds, made everything ready, why you tell us only now to stop? Then A. had to speak [explain the reasons for the ban] to calm down the people while the hokim sat aside. In the end the authorities promised that rice could be grown again. But after the people went home the authorities took back their promise and stuck to their no to rice. Now there is no electricity in Amudarya, the hokim today has stopped the supply [so nobody can run the electric pumps to take the necessary water for the irrigation of the rice elds from the channels]. Without the water, in a few days the rice paddies will dry and all be gone . . . .28

While relations between district authorities and producers only rarely deteriorate so overtly, the episode is telling of the type of constraints local producers have to face and of the asymmetric relations of power between them and the state authorities, hence their volatility. Moreover, it portrays the top down implementation 89

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of policies as a far more complex and contested process than is usually recognised, and points at some of the means of coercion utilised. In this account local producers speak against the hokim through the one voice of an angry peasant woman, erroneously suggesting that local producers constitute a clear front against the local establishment. However, the reason for their anger, the interdiction of the rice cultivation, brings us closer to the heart of the matter: triggered by the ambiguity of the reforms that, on the one hand, generate more space for entrepreneurship while, on the other, maintain constraints on the entrepreneurial freedoms, the contested issues in their essence are the possibilities and the modalities of gaining prot in agriculture. Rural producers are not a homogenous class,29 and not even a we-group in Elwerts minimalist sense.30 However, in the aftermath of decollectivisation these tensions are the by-product of a new social differentiation with a still uncertain outcome. Transposed to a lower rung of the agricultural command hierarchy (rayon/tuman level) Ilkhamovs centre periphery battleeld scenario unfolds here between the district authorities and those (newly established) producers who do not wish to comply with their orders and abuses. Reproducing dependency patterns At the time of my eldwork the district hokim was a machine engineer, originally from neighbouring Gurlen district, who upon his arrival to Yangibozor served as city hokim in the nearby regional capital Urgench, where he still resides. His arrival to Yangibozor coincided with the start of decollectivisation, one of the most wide-ranging measures of the recent governmental reform agenda, which the hokim accomplished successfully. Nationwide Yangibozor was among the rst four districts where all collectives were disbanded. The end of the shirkats 31 created space for the emergence of private farms ( fermers) as the predominant form of agricultural production. The lands of the former collectives (kolkhozes and sovkhozes, later turned into shirkats) were transferred to newly established fermer enterprises on the basis of individual long-term land leases linked to a compulsory production plan.32 While fermer enterprises already started to make their appearance within the framework of the kolkhozes and shirkats in the 1990s, with decollectivisation the novelty lies in the fact that the agricultural production plan of the collective enterprises is now entirely handed over to the individual fermers, who also gain access to opportunities for prot and exposure to economic risks in a way unknown to them within the framework of the collective farms. The collective farms as such ceased to exist. The hierarchy of the administrative structure based on the repartition in districts, shirkats, brigades and working units, however, is maintained by the district authorities even after the end of the collectives, because of the need to support and monitor the fermers state crop production. Fermers welcomed the end of the shirkats: to them, although in the form of a conditional land lease, decollectivisation entailed a legal claim on land and the end of their dependency on the former kolkhoz bosses. In practice, however, the conditions did not change so radically. This is because by law they still depend 90

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on a network of nominally privatised but de facto still state controlled input- and marketing services that make them fall easy prey to state ofcials. It is precisely the inadequacy of the conditions above and around their farm enterprises that renders fermers so vulnerable to unpredictable factors of risk. The consolidated dependency patterns that were established under collective agriculture have survived decollectivisation and are now being transposed to the new scenario after the collectives. In line with Christophes analysis of the Georgian state, in rural Uzbekistan the creation of insecurity, be it via structural system shortcomings or through outright intimidation of the producers, appears to be a calculated means of state building.33 Uzbekistans regime of agrarian transition is reminiscent of contexts for which Verdery has developed the notion of fuzzy property. At the end of the Romanian decollectivisation process she observed that the importance of the external conditions in which legal titles are embedded are more important than the ownership titles in a narrow sense, as these conditions, on which producers have limited capacity of inuence, dene what ownership rights ultimately entail.34 Uzbekistans situation is similar: often misunderstood by Western-minded reform agendas, the fuzziness of these surrounding conditions, including the persistence of pseudo-collective structures, the social embedding of work, the necessary web of personal relations, infrastructure and the availability of markets, have become the critical pressure points in the decollectivised production process. Therefore, these factors (more than secure ownership titles) end up being what really matters to the producers. As Rasanayagam put it, in Uzbekistan rights over land are even likely to be more fuzzy.35 This is only because private property on land has still not been introduced, causing different actors to having asymmetrical inuence over the access, use and control of land as compared to the context Verdery analysed. Legislation36 also lacks clarity and gives rise to a number of interpretative difculties, which are often used as a last resort to make fermers comply with the orders of the authorities. In Yangibozor, the fuzziness of the fermers right over land is a result of three main factors. One more technical consideration consists in the lack of equipment in the institutions that are interposed between the district administration and the fermers, meaning that the ofcially privatised but de facto still state-regulated services are very unreliable. The other reason is that the district authorities manipulate these institutions for their own ends. As a consequence, the FDA (Fermer and Dehqon Association), established as a republican level organisation with regional and district level branches, with the declared aim of supporting the development and the strengthening of the private farms, de facto sidelines the district department of agriculture in the coordination of the state crop planning. The eleven MTPs (motor traktor parki) that comprise the still unprivatised machinery of the shirkats, although ofcially independent service enterprises, are de facto to be considered follow-ups of the kolkhozes, controlled by the hokim who appoints the managers (raislar). The banks, the agencies for the supply of agricultural inputs, the MTPs and the district department for agriculture all form the indirect levers through which the hokim can make the fermers compliant to his will. Wealthy fermers with their own technical means are less 91

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dependent on the MTP services, but can still be intimidated through the periodical checks and controls of the procurators ofce and of the militia. This legal administrative realm of sanction is a third factor of uncertainty for the fermers. These instruments are used by the ofcials of the district agricultural department to impose centrally determined cropping arrangements on the fermers, while according to law the fermers can freely decide what to grow on a signicant share of their land leases.37 As a key instrument that determines the protability of an agricultural enterprise, the imposition of cropping arrangements represents the political lever that empowers district ofcials in their dealings with the fermers. Although legislation and norms prescribe equitable treatment of farms, district ofcials have a margin for discretion, which they use to turn these arrangements into a commodity. In the past this was a prerogative of the kolkhoz bosses, as they would assert private claims over land as a valuable resource under their control from which to obtain personal prot through the illegal transfer of rights over it.38 Now, with the dismantling of the collectives, the hokim emerges as the only one entitled to grant land leases to the fermers and struggles to keep these transactions under his control. The logic of the transaction is that of selling land cropping patterns in exchange for cash or a share of the harvest. Cropping arrangements are negotiated individually and differ in the share allocated to each crop from farm to farm. Agreements that include rice and other non-state order crops are condential and are settled secretively. State ofcials dealing with this data keep them secret because a comparison of the cropping schemes of different farms in a district (yer balans) would reveal that the state plan is unevenly applied to the fermers. To some extent, these opportunities for prot are used as a reward to compensate individuals for their loyalty and their role in the command chain in a context in which, after the end of the shirkats, local ofcials have maintained their obligations towards the command hierarchy, but have also lost the direct instruments to ensure the fullment of the crop production targets. By law, it is not possible to be head of a farm and at the same time an ofcer in a state administration. However, various forms of indirect farm control are common. In 2004 de facto in Yangibozor all MTP managers and other high ranking district ofcials made their living with their own large farm enterprises. In this sense, in line with past practice, privileged land deals are granted to particular fermers with a role in the local state apparatus, as a means to ensure that the plan from which the political survival of the local authorities depends is fullled.39 Beyond the fullment of the plan, the concern of the district heads seems to be the control over the sources of wealth of the district. Because of their assumed wealth, especially well-to-do fermers are targeted with continuous requests for payments, contributions and chakana nalog (one-time taxations, as they are called in the Khorezmian context) that can be requested by the district ofcials on the pretext of any public concern such as the renewing of public buildings, donations to the poor, contributions to public celebrations and other expenditures for which the district is short of money. In Yangibozor, a percentage of the harvest of the wheat state crop and of rice every year is donated by the fermers 92

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to an ad hoc philanthropic foundation for service such as the renovation of the district hospital or the stadium. While these requests signal that there is an overall attention on behalf of the district authorities to make fermers aware of their social responsibilities towards their communities, fermers complain about the coerciveness and the lack of transparency of these operations. In a discussion40 with Egambergan, a wealthy rice fermer from Amudarya, it was evident that the pressure exerted by the district authorities, even if unspoken, has a strong capacity of intimidation:
TT: What will happen if you dont give money, if you dont help for the hospital, if you resist chakana nalog? These things have no legal basis. Egambergan: You have to give. These are people with whom you cannot play: they will call the militia, they will nd something, for example they will beat up someone and say you did it, or they will nd narcotics on you, they will send you to jail, or take your land. You have to give. I am also thinking about whether to stay or leave [agriculture] . . . .

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Old established vs newly emerging rural elites If in Yangibozors battle for cotton the centre periphery antagonism takes the form of a tug-of-war between the local authorities and non-complying fermers, then so far this story has not revealed anything paradoxical about the centres strength. However, fermers are less weak and defenceless, and the agents of the state less pervasively powerful than so far portrayed. The regime of fuzziness, invoked before as a reason for the fermers submission to the district authorities, is more ambivalent and, in various ways, can even turn out to be a benecial resource to the fermers. The subsidised context that makes it possible for the cotton gins to buy the fermers cotton cheaply, also causes one hectare of rice paddy to become on average 8 10 times more protable and less labour intensive, thus more attractive than its equivalent in cotton. On the side of the authorities this creates a strong need to monitor that the subsidised inputs (fertilisers especially) do not end on the wrong elds, a task that calls for more capacities than the district hokimiyat can dispose of. Every year, rice bans proclaimed at the beginning of the season, often on the pretext of (real or pretended) water shortage, are then reconsidered later in the season and nally drastically revised. Fermers plan their eld activities and their cropping strategies accordingly. The eventuality of interference by the district authorities or the militia is a calculated risk that fermers try to mitigate with their personally available strategies and resources. This sort of arm wrestling between planners and farm managers is not restricted to cropping decisions only, but also extends to the use and the yield of farmland. In this context I found the term sponsor as applied to a form of indirect control of a farm, which bears the marks of a patronage relationship. In an interview, Komilbek, fermer and university teacher, explains:
. . . there is a person who is ofcially in charge (the ofcial leasehold owner) and there is somebody who is really responsible for the fermer, who is really the head. For instance: if you dont have enough fertilizers, or if you cant rely on the work of your own tractor, what will you do?

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Who will help? . . . So for instance there we have K.H., owner on paper of a farm of almost 70 hectares, but M.H., Secretary (muovin) of the MTP, is the sponsor or real owner. He uses the tractors of the MTP as he pleases on the farm, and so he makes a very good deal. Normally, the machinery of the MTP is very unreliable: you cannot be sure to get it in time, sometimes to get it at all. So, if you have a good connection with the MTP you can rely on it, otherwise you have to use your own! So you have a person who is legally registered and a person who controls and factually owns the farm.41

Informed by a literature that postulates the centrality of clan-like patronage networks in the relations between centre and periphery,42 my expectation to nd such structures as local carriers of resistance or as vehicles of some sort of political counter-claim was disappointed. Instead, hidden farm sponsoring emerged as an ambiguous practice: apparently, it is a strictly speaking illegal but a widely tolerated coping strategy. In reality it rather appears to be a proactive prot seeking strategy. The law prohibits land subleasing and land transactions must be ofcially channelled through the district heads. In Khorezm hidden farm sponsoring is a widespread way to circumvent these restrictions. External farm sponsoring is an elite phenomenon, mostly involving large farmland areas, which are subleased under a sharecropping arrangement or sold unofcially to the tillers, with a mutually advantageous deal between the contractors. As a patron client relationship it is eminently business oriented and thus different from family, clan, or other sorts of solidarity groups based on a shared identity. Fermer enterprises are ofcially registered by individuals but always run as a joint enterprise of the extended family, involving several households. Therefore they always have a degree of informality.43 The sponsoring practice, however, is different: as an informal practice with a degree of impersonality, it must be distinguished from the informality of family farming. Finally, as a sponsor is exposed to potential legal retaliation, which he must be able to avoid or resist, sponsoring necessitates political skills in the sense that economic success directly emanates from the sponsors de facto power. For Baxtiyor, a language teacher from Yangibozor who in the past occasionally has illegally sub-rented land from a fermer to grow rice on a sharecropping basis, fermer enterprises can be distinguished along their management structure into two different types: in the rst type the owner sits in Urgench, never comes to see the farm, and takes the prot. Owners of this kind can be for instance: prokuror, militsiya, tashqilot [state organisation]. The second type is the group of the ordinary persons. As soon as he becomes fermer, he will try to manage everything by himself in order to save money.44 This division into different types develops along the separation of two spheres of farming into a managerial, dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy, with increasingly political overtones, and the agricultural labour process. In Yangibozor, in the aftermath of decollectivisation most fermers have just started their enterprises and face strained or even difcult conditions. In contrast, big farms are exceptional. Their presence often indicates the existence of a sponsor, because of the higher capital inputs they require. In a situation in which the conditions for overall protability depend so much on factors external to the farm, formal 94

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ownership is less important than the de facto control over the farm as a generator of prot. In Yangibozor, being a fermer is acquiring increasingly political overtones in the sense that a successful fermer must have the strength (kuch), the capacities and the capital to impose himself on the endemically adverse circumstances of the local agricultural setting. With the end of the shirkat, land has become more easily accessible to wealthy people with no links to the former collectives, because now land is centrally redistributed through the district centre. Emerging political entrepreneurs (sponsors), bypassing the role of the MTP managers, in this way can more easily access land and sidestep the former kolkhoz/shirkat administration. In the past, these kinds of arrangements would have required the mediation of the shirkat manager and the use of the lands of a collective farm. Although asymmetric power relations persist, today these new actors are determined to achieve lucrative cropping arrangements and are unwilling to retreat before of the paternalistic reprisals of the district authorities. In Egambergans perception, the wealthy rice fermer from Amudarya, todays fermers are reverting to the time of the beys, as they submit to their bosses (yoshulli) who pretend to rule as did the beys in the past.45 The conictual relation between authorities and their challengers is expressed through the question of who exerts paternity (otalik qilmoq) over the fermers and their resources. In the local dynamic of competition the sponsors claim over the paternity of farm yields threatens the exclusivity of the hokims primacy in the district. Interestingly, by referring to otalik46 the terminology of this competition invokes the language of traditional politics with reference to eldership. Although traditional political terminology is revived, this does not imply, however, that a return to traditional political structures is underway. In the same way that todays sponsors are not clan elders, todays otalik have nothing traditional about them except the origin of their name. The fortuitous discovery of an ofcial document commissioned by the procurors ofce to the district level department for agriculture was revealing of these struggles between otaliklar. The document listing farms allegedly controlled by external sponsors that had to be checked on the regularity of their farm activities, comprised 118 farms that were well above the average size (at that time approximately one tenth of the total farms of the district). It included the names of the registered titular leasee and, in separate columns, of the suspected sponsor with his professional afliation. According to Komilbek, and for two other interviewed ofcials who, in the past, worked in the district department, the list has been deliberately compiled to make trouble for the hokims potential enemies, in order to make them compliant with his requests:
The hokim orders the preparation of such lists to the agricultural department for the prokuratura. . . . He orders it because these are people who have another protector [sponsor] and dont pay to him. Everybody pays, but these people dont pay so much. For instance: here we have a fermer controlled by a guy from the militia. The hokim says to him: give me 2t of wheat [at the end of the harvest]. The man from the militia says: dont give it to him. There is competition on this.

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Therefore these people are rivals of the hokim, and the hokim ordered the list for the prokuratura in order to give them trouble.47

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In Ilkhamovs national battle for cotton the centres pressure exerted on the local elites . . . has resulted in shirkats being frequently visited by representatives from the prosecutors ofce and the state militia who have been charged with enforcing cotton and wheat land quotas and preventing farms from growing crops that are more lucrativefor them as well as for regional elites.48 On the contrary, seen from the district perspective, such checks and controls often follow local rationales that can be totally different from those from which they nominally originate. They can start off from personal rivalry or be used and manipulated for purposes such as intimidation, blackmailing, or (as in this case) the attempt of the hokim to afrm his paternity over the whole district, in the knowledge that if he does not, sooner or later, his authority will be challenged by the individualism of the emerging fermers. Changing patronage patterns The new prospects of achieving wealth through agriculture have attracted those who in Yangibozor are called the yangi fermerlar (new fermers). These newcomers to agriculture are people who, rich with capital acquired in other sectors (militia, business, state organisations), and struggling to nd sectors where to invest their money securely and lucratively, enter agriculture with the idea of obtaining considerable material gains through informal deals on protable land cropping schemes. In the words of a land surveyor of an MTP with whom I worked, these new actors see the growing crops as if they were banknotes, but are otherwise not knowledgeable about agriculture.49 These actors mobilise their social and political capital to ensure protable farming conditions, without directly getting involved in farming. Typically, the structure of the farms of these newcomers are reminiscent of a form of absentee landlordism, in the sense that the farm owners exercise external control on the farm, while they outsource the management of the farm to local workers on the basis of a sharecropping agreement. The emergence of these yangi fermerlar can be traced back to a more general phenomenon. Reverting a trend that was strong during the Soviet period, the town is gaining advantage over the village.50 Before independence the village had become a reservoir of autonomy (political, cultural, economic), as the kolkhozes could be run as relatively autonomous efdoms in which external interference was low and mediated by the central hierarchy embodied by the rais. After independence the town regained control over the village by rening the mechanisms of squeezing the surplus produced in and around agriculture. This resource extraction is now easier and more efcient than before. As a result, cash shortage aficts rural households at a time when cash cannot be so easily replaced by manipulable resources51 as in the past. The kolkhoz society52 has lost its economic basis; its decline is evidenced by the decline of status of the rais, as its 96

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symbol of authority. Big fermers, newcomers to agriculture, and village outsiders who obtain the land by paying bribes and then grow rice, mostly have a base in town: they are businessmen, doctors, militia-men, employees of administrative departments or of the hokimiyat. Even in agriculture, many among the new bosses are construction engineers, architects, or buchgalter (accountants) with an experience in administration, who have supplanted a generation of rais educated as agronomists and who now nd themselves as managers of MTPs without an adequate educational background. Conversely, the villages dependence on the town has increased: sanitation, higher education, the bazaar and all the administrations are in the town, and the villagers, unable to nd the necessary cash, . . . sell their cows to satisfy the citys appetite.53 In Yangibozor, against all appearances of weak reform decollectivisation has brought about signicant transformations both in the substance and in the modalities of the ongoing struggle between central assertions of power vs local forms of resistance (see Table 1). Among the actors able to inuence resource ows locally, in the shift from a mostly subsidised to a mostly taxed agriculture54 a redirection of the local political game has taken place: the rationale of political action moves away from the control over the budget resources accessed by the actors by virtue of their afliation to the quasi-state collectives and allocated by them to their constituencies, towards the possibility to produce for and to gain access to markets. Under the kolkhoz system, the source of competition was over control of the budget and its repartition that outside control aimed at keeping on predetermined tracks. Today, local entrepreneurs seek the opportunity to make prots and face constraints from local authorities that try to keep the emerging market dynamics under their oversight. The shift is from a political game governed by a redistributive logic to a more market oriented logic of action. This shift to the market, although still imperfect, has wide ranging consequences. It modies the economic basis of the patronage relations that now lose much of their past appeal, and therefore need to be re-established on a new consensus building mechanism. As a result, the monolithic patronage system centred upon the kolkhoz and its network is replaced by a more diffuse practice of indirect control over the means of production, which nds an important expression in the practice of farm sponsoring. While in the national battle

Table 1. The local political game: changing forms and contents During collective agriculture Main contested resource Competing actors Forms of resistance Modalities of resistance budget allocation kolkhoz staff vs external controllers underreporting of production monolithic patronage pattern After decollectivization freely marketable crops (rice) fermers (old producers and newcomers) vs local authorities diversied struggle for political conditions over farming hidden practice of farm sponsoring

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for cotton . . . rebellion takes place in the form of underreporting of resource use (such as land) and hiding a share of locally acquired wealth from the centres strict scal accounting,55 in todays Yangibozor rebellion patterns are extended to a diversied struggle around the political conditions over farming. Local political entrepreneurs In the aftermath of decollectivisation, the MTP Guliston counted 134 fermer enterprises.56 Here, with its 10 hectares of land, Bozorboys farm is representative of a class of small fermers for whom their new status seems to entail more liabilities than opportunities. Since 2000, the year of the establishment of his farm, Bozorboy never managed to full his production target for cotton. In the spring, in which I rst met Bozorboy, he complained that, given the high soil salinity, the production plan for his land had been set by the district authorities in a totally unrealistic way. Even in the unlikely event of plan fullment his prots would be low: according to him if they let him grow one hectare of vegetables he could earn almost three times as much as for his 10 hectares of cotton: at harvest a net amount of US$1000 in 2003. On the question of how he sees himself in 10 years time as a fermer, Bozorboy answered: not in 10 years, in 2 years I will be bankrupt and lose the land. They dont care about bringing people to bankruptcy. It is like a feudal system!57 This is an attitude he would diametrically change later on. The son of local notables (his grandfather was rais of a forest compound, the father, a militia ofcer and Second World War veteran), after having studied law in Tashkent, Bozorboy returned to his native kolkhoz to marry a half Tatar woman. He served in the militia until early 1990s whenfor reasons that remained unclear to mehe was discharged after a trial. After that Bozorboy ended up working as legal advisor of the district branch of the Fermer and Dehqon Association (FDA). Additionally, for an unofcial payment of land he acquired a land lease under the name of his wife in 2000 and established a cotton and grain farm which he named after his father. He agreed with a former leader in a work brigade on the kolkhoz living closely to the plots of his farm on a sharecropping deal. Bozorboys eldest son, aged 22, works there as farm supervisor. Asked why he started getting involved in agriculture he answered that it has been the lack of alternatives that made him take the risk of private farming. In 2003 Bozorboy was undoubtedly a very low prole yangi fermer. Either because his land was really unsuitable for cotton, or because the sharecroppers family did not put enough work in his elds, the farm was giving poor results. In the FDA, his situation was also precarious: as a result of cash shortage in the district the yearly salary consisted of two sacks of wheat, while most fermers in the district were not paying the membership fee. The high turnover of the appointed managers, former raislar and high district ofcials, originated in the lack of adequate returns for their engagement and reected the FDAs weakness. Since my arrival in Yangibozor the FDA ofce moved three times, before 2006 98

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the district branches were combined into one single regional level ofce. For Bozorboy, the FDAs only attractiveness was that of being a platform that enabled him to deal with documents of the state administration and to have an ofcial pretext to relate to the agricultural hierarchy. The authorities knew about the illegal sharecropping agreement through which Bozorboys farming was conducted. However, there is a degree of tolerance for the farms that full the cotton plan. For this reason, because of harvest shortages, in 2001 and 2002 he had to nd ways to adjust the production plan of his farm with the district department ofcials and buy cotton undercover to deliver it back to the cotton gin, in order to avoid sanctions. To cover his expenditures Bozorboy, who had 15 cows before starting his farm, sold three cows each year in the city bazaar. In Yangibozor this represents a remarkable capital. Things started to improve in 2004, thanks to his links with the district department of agriculture. Short of personnel trained in jurisprudence and with an augmented need for legal expertise derived from the sudden increase in the number of the fermer enterprises Bozorboys skills were increasingly demanded. Bozorboy helps out in the preparation of trials in which fermers are involved, prepares dossiers on farms that have legal disputes with administrative bodies and habitually follows district staff in their rounds in the former kolkhozes of the district. With his job Bozorboy is continuously involved in the juridical counselling of fermers in everyday life, however, in contrast with the ideal mission of the FDA, his primary concern slowly turned into the safeguard of the hokims interests: hokim buyurgan shu ishni man bajaraman.58 During farm inspections, a photo camera, lists of farms with details on their balance sheets and their business plans, correspondence with the court and prosecutors ofce gure among the habitual work instruments, which testify the acquaintance with a methodology of local governance based on a distorted understanding of law and public institutions. Spying for the hokim on the real condition of the farms in the district, he has gained his favour, a precondition for later rewards and success. In late spring 2004, after a meeting with the deputy hokim, Bozorboy managed to turn the cropping specialisation of his farm from cotton and grain into poultry, paving the way to the suspension of the mandatory state order quota on cotton. Thanks to this subterfuge, which the law allows when the unsuitability of a given land plot for the cotton cultivation has been certied by the administration, Bozorboy has acquired the possibility of legally turning his cropping scheme into 10 hectares of rice. In 2004 he became one among the handful of farms in the district that were legally exempted from the rice ban. In the end Bozorboy informally turned over an agreed part of his rice harvest to his district bosses, keeping a good prot for himself. Bozorboy has managed to change his situation and to turn the bad initial conditions of his farm into an asset, thus, realising what in theory is legally possible, but inaccessible to most: reverting cotton land into free cash cropping land. What were the conditions for his success? Various factors seem important: the plasticity of the law, namely the arbitrariness of legal processes, that a small caste of insiders can easily manipulate for the own purposes; the wealth of contextual 99

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knowledge over many fermers and state ofcials, which transformed Bozorboy into a useful asset for the powerholders in the district; the knowledge of the rules and tricks of a non-transparent and overregulated agriculture, that held the prospect of the privilege of state crop exemption as something legally achievable. Bozorboys story is indicative of the current transformation in Uzbekistans agricultural world. In a context in which the market is not yet totally liberalised and the planned economy not totally overcome, Bozorboy represents the transitory model of agency best adapted to the scenario emerging from Yangibozor: a new market of political protection around the conditions of farming, in which, besides capital, agricultural knowledge, or access to markets, successful entrepreneurial skills have to take power into account. Equally distant from the centre and the periphery, he resembles neither the big man of the early political anthropologists,59 for which, after the decline of the rais, there seems to be no real replacement below the level of the hokim, nor does he resemble the colonial broker, with its dual allegiances and its double burdens towards the state and his community.60 Unlike the latter, Bozorboys is not a loyalty dilemma, but rather a strategic switching of conformity to and subversion of the rules of ofcialdom, an attitude which he sees legitimated by the perceived insecurity of his personal future. Like Webers political entrepreneur Bozorboy has everything to gain (or to lose) from politics.61 As an individually driven manager/manipulator of the political conditions around farming it is maybe to this role that he comes closest. Conclusion Has the post-Soviet transition reinvigorated an informal system of governance based on clan-like patronage networks, as posited by Collins?62 Do the patronage networks at work indicate the perpetuation of Soviet (or even pre-Soviet) patterns, as tacitly assumed by many? Post-reform Yangibozor, where the past informal structure of the steering- and control-system has opened up in parallel with the reforming of the production system, is a good vantage point to follow up these questions. Empirical ndings seem to minimise the usefulness of clans63 and of solidarity groups64 as appropriate analytical categories for the understanding of informal political processes. Attention to more territorially linked dynamics better captures a too often misinterpreted and misrepresented local dynamism. Radniz acknowledgement of the power of the local65 or Fumagallis attention to local authority gures66 in this sense seem to better address such processes and comes closer to what I found in Yangibozor. Yet the novelty emanating from Yangibozor is that the kolkhozdespite attempts to reanimate it by some scholars and some governmentshas really come to an end, in Uzbekistan as well as in Central Asia. Sociological and anthropological analyses of socialism and of post-socialism often highlight that the kolkhoz has always been more than just a large-scale collective agricultural enterprise.67 It pervaded the life of its rural inhabitants as a total social institution that encompassed the whole range of their political, cultural, and economic relations. As an emanation of an ideology and of a 100

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state-building project, the kolkhoz acquired the characteristics of a system of governance, able to impart a uniform trajectory upon the most disparate local realities of the socialist sphere. In practical terms the system of governance represented by the kolkhoz was the reality of socialist rule: it socialised the rural citizen through the propagation of an implicit model of power relations nominally egalitarian but de facto stratied hierarchically. For many theorists of (post-) socialism the specicity of this system of governance lies in its operating principle. Different from capitalist relations, the kolkhoz was governed by a redistributive dynamic, the motor of which is what Verdery has called the bureaucratic allocation, referring to the capacity of individuals to exert control over the distribution of resources by virtue of their afliation to the apparatus of state bureaucracy.68 The socialist model of redistribution is not that described by Polanyi,69 but the resemblances are fairly strong: In the redistributive system commonly described by anthropologists, chiefs redistribute goods to their followers, just as socialist bureaucrats allocate social rewards.70 Verdery further observes that Like chiefs in such redistributive systems, bureaucrats are constantly under pressure not to be outdone by other bureaucrats: they must continue to strive for inuence, amass more resources, and raise the standing of their segment of bureaucracy,71 as if the engendering of a specic dynamic of competition among chiefs/bureaucrats was an intrinsic characteristic of the system she outlined. In this respect as well, the kolkhoz seemed to display a remarkable degree of uniformity across the socialist world. The Central Asian kolkhoz was no exception to this, and was not the only kolkhoz that developed such dynamics. With the end of collective agriculture and the switch to progressively more market oriented economy, this is also having repercussions on the vacuum that the kolkhoz left behind in the local organisation of politics. My research results from Khorezm indicate that we can speak of a switch from a straightforward system of patronage during the kolkhoz, to a more open but not less restraining market of political protection, in which those who were controllers of agricultural resources before, now get more closely involved in the process of production. Notes and references
1. On this see, for instance, H. Fathi, Islamisme et pauvrete dans le monde rural de lAsie centrale post sovietique. Vers un espace de solidarite islamique?, UNRISD paper, No 14, 2004; A. Ilkhamov, Impoverishment of the masses in the transition period: signs of an emerging new poor identity in Uzbekistan, Central Asian Survey, Vol 20, No 1, 2001, pp 3354; B. Petric, Pouvoir, don et reseaux en Ouzbekistan post-sovietique (Paris: PUF, 2002), p 235ff. 2. C. D. Thompson and J. Heathershaw, Introduction: Discourses of danger in Central Asia, Central Asian Survey, Vol 24, No 1, 2005, pp 14. 3. K. Collins, The logic of clan politics. Evidence from the Central Asian trajectories, World Politics, Vol 56, 2004, p 230. 4. On this, see International Crisis Group, The failure of reform in Uzbekistan. Ways forward for the international community, Asia Report No 76, 11 March 2004. More focussed on the reforms of the agricultural sector: Z. Lerman, C. Csaki and G. Feder, eds, Agriculture in Transition. Land Policies and Evolving Farm Structures in Post-Soviet Countries (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); S. Wegren, ed., Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1998).

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5. A. Ilkhamov, The limits of centralization: regional challenges in Uzbekistan, in P. Jones-Luong, ed., The Transformation of Central Asia. States ad Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p 162. 6. Such as understood in J. S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: StateSociety Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 7. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, pp 162 170. 8. Cf. B. Rumer, Soviet Central Asia: A Tragic Experiment (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989); G. Gleason, The Pakhta Programme: the politics of sowing cotton in Uzbekistan, Central Asian Survey, Vol 2, No 2, 1983, pp 109 120. 9. D. Kandiyoti, The cry for land: agrarian reform, gender, and land rights in Uzbekistan, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol 3, 2003, p 227. 10. A. Patnaik, Central Asia: Between Modernity and Tradition (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1996), pp 155 173; J. P. Willerton, Patronage Politics in the USSR (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 11. A. Ilkhamov, Divided economy: kolkhozes vs. peasant subsistence farms in Uzbekistan, Central Asia Monitor, Vol 4, 2000, pp 514. 12. Ibid. Also, see A. Ilkhamov, Shirkats, dekhqon farmers and others: farm restructuring in Uzbekistan, Central Asian Survey, Vol 17, No 4, 1998, pp 539560. 13. Cf. P. Jones-Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp 131 132. 14. T. Gdlian and N. Ivanov, Kremlevskoe delo (Rostov na Donu: AO Kniga, 1994). 15. Z. Lerman, Land reform in Uzbekistan, in S. Wegren, ed., Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1998), p 144. 16. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, p 168. 17. See: S. Akiner, Social and political reorganization in Central Asiatransition from pre-colonial to postcolonial society, in T. Atabaki and J. OKane, eds, Post-Soviet Central Asia (London: Tauris, 1998). 18. W. Fierman, Political development in Uzbekistan: democratization?, in K. Dawisha and B. Parrot, eds, Conict, Cleavage and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p 393. 19. Gleason describes this dual allegiance of local ofcials in G. Gleason, Fealty and loyalty: informal authority structures in Soviet Asia, Soviet Studies, Vol 43, No 4, 1991, p 614. 20. Research was carried out in 2003 (2 months) and in 2004 (9 months) within the framework of the ZEF/ UNESCO Khorezm project on Economic and Ecological Restructuring of Land and Water Use in the Region Khorezm (Uzbekistan). My acknowledgements for funding go to the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF; project number 0339970A). The Italian Ministry for Education and Research (PRIN ` research project La penetrazione russa in Asia centrale e nel Caucaso, Universita degli Studi di Venezia/ ` Universita degli Studi di Torino) funded a short research trip in SeptemberOctober 2006. The views expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reect those of my funding institutions. 21. Oblstat Xorazm, 1 January 2004. 22. Interview at the Yangibozor District Land Measurement Ofce, March 2004. According to this source at that point in time 1339.5 hectares of agricultural land remained to be transferred to the fermers. 23. Source: Yangibozor District Land Measurement Ofce, October 2006. 24. Research is based on interviews with local ofcers, fermers and peasants, and with other residents of the district. Interviews were integrated with participant observation, eld experiments and the collaboration with district staff, which enabled me to access local statistical sources. Data on the district history (1960 2002) was collected in the district archive (see T. Trevisani Kolkhozes, sovkhozes, and shirkats of Yangibozor (19602002): note on an archival investigation into four decades of agricultural development of a district in Khorezm, in H. Fathi, ed., Les islamistes dAsie centrale: un de aux Etats independants?, Cahiers dAsie Centrale, No 1516, 2007, pp 354365. 25. Kandiyoti, op cit, Ref 9, p 251. 26. See on this: C. Wall, Peasant resistance in Khorezm? The difculty of classifying non-compliance in rural Uzbekistan, in P. Sartori and T. Trevisani, eds, Patterns of Transformation In and Around Uzbekistan (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, forthcoming 2007). 27. Names of places and of persons have been substituted by pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of respondents. 28. Interview in Yangibozor with Muhammad, aged 45, former shirkat rais, 10 June 2004. 29. T. Trevisani, Rural communities in transformation. Dehqons, fermers and the state in Khorezm, in Sartori and Trevisani, op cit, Ref 26. 30. G. Elwert, Nationalismus und EthnizitatUber die Bildung von Wir-Gruppen, Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, No 3, 1989, pp 440 464.

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31. See on this, Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 12. 32. Law on Dehqons and Fermers, 1998. 33. B. Christophe, Understanding politics in Georgia in O. Norgaard and L. Johannsen, eds, DEMSTAR Research Report, No 22, 2004, available online at http://demstar.dk/papers/Georgia Understand.pdf (accessed 8th June 2007). 34. Fuzzy property, in the examples given here, consists of complexly overlapping use and revenue rights lodged in external conditions that give the holders of those rights incomplete powers for exercising them. The external conditions include such legacies of socialism as a systemic bias against individual ownership and in favour of state or quasi-collective forms. For something more closely approaching exclusive individual proprietorship to emerge would require not so much clearer legal specication of who has what rights these rights are fairly clearbut modications in the surrounding economy that would permit individuals to acquire the means of cultivation affordably and to dispose of their product protably while outcompeting quasi-collective associational forms, quoted from: K. Verdery, Fuzzy property: rights, power, and identity in Transylvanias decollectivization, in M. Burawoy and K. Verdery, eds, Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 1999), pp 64 65. 35. J. Rasanayagam, The moral contstruction of the state in Uzbekistan: its construction within concepts of community and interaction at the local level, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2002, p 18. 36. An example for such law inconsistencies can be found in: Law on Dehqons and Fermers (Ref 32), 30 April 1998, the paragraphs 5 and 32, give contradicting reasons for farm closure. Information drawn from an interview with an ofcial of the Fermer and Dehqon Association in Yangibozor, eld notes, 11 August 2004. 37. At the time of my eldwork, according to law only 30 per cent of the land of the farm leaseholds had to be grown with cotton, in theory the residual land could be cultivated freely. 38. Rasanayagam, op cit, Ref 35, p 19. 39. Interview note, 4 September 2004. 40. M. Thurman, The command-administrative system in cotton farming in Uzbekistan. 1920s to Present, Papers on Inner Asia No. 32, Bloomington, IN, 1999. 41. Interview with Komilbek in Urgench, 8 June 2004. 42. E. Schatz, Modern Clan Politics, The Power of Blood in Kazakhstan and Beyond (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004); Collins, op cit, Ref 3. 43. T. Trevisani The emerging actor of the decollectivization in Uzbekistan: private farming between newly dened political constraints and opportunities, Paper presented at the international conference The Cotton Sector in Central Asia, Centre of Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus, SOAS, University of London, 34 November 2005. 44. Interview in Yangibozor, 7.09.2004 45. Interview with Egambergan (same respondent as for Ref 39) in Yangibozor, 19 August 2004. 46. This word derives from ota, meaning father, but also ancestor or progenitor. Historically, the term otalik was used to dene a guardian and tutor of a young prince and, in this capacity an actual governor of his appanage (Y. Bregel, atalik, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, P. J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs, eds, Vol XII, Supplement (Koninklijke Brill, Leiden: 2004), pp 9698). Later on the term was gradually transformed and it came to intend the Uzbek term for tribal leader, of the sort of beg or bey, or like the denominations for the military ranks, like mingboshi or yuzboshi (see: P. G. Geiss, Pre-Tsarist and Tsarist Central Asia. Communal Commitment and Political Order in Change (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003)). While in everyday language the term has lost this meaning, today the term is used to express the paternity over something (otalik in Ozbek tilining izoxli lughati, Vol I, Uzbek Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1981, p 548). 47. Interview with Komilbek, Urgench, 8 June 2004. 48. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, p 168. 49. Interview note, 17 September 2004. 50. C. Hann, Introduction, in The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition, C. Hann and the Property Relations Group, eds, Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia (LIT, Munster: 2003), p 39. 51. C. Humphrey, Marx Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p 195f. 52. O. Roy, Kolkhoz and civil society in the independent states of Central Asia, in M. Holt Rufn and Daniel Waugh, eds, Civil Society in Central Asia (Seattle, WA: Washington University Press, 1999), pp 109 121. 53. Field notes of 16 August 2004, after an interview with a land surveyor of a MTP in Yangibozor. 54. Whether cotton is subsidised or not, however, still is a scholarly debated issue, cf. M. Guadagni, M. Raiser, A. Crole-Rees and D. Khidirov Cotton taxation in Uzbekistan. Opportunities for reform, ECSSD Working Paper, No 41, vs M. Mueller, A general equilibrium approach to modeling water and land use reforms in

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Uzbekistan, PhD dissertation, University of Bonn, available online at http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de/diss_ online/landw_fak/2006/mueller_marc/index.htm (accessed 2nd June 2007). Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, p 169. Of these 134 farms, 42 were orchards with each less than 5 hectares of land, 51 had 5 to 20 hectares, 29 farms ranged between 20 and 40 hectares, 11 farms between 40 and 80 hectares, while the biggest farm, controlled by a former rais, amounted to 115.7 ha. Source: Yangibozor harvest balance sheet, year 2003. The other former shirkats of the district have similar patterns of land distribution. Interview note, 19 April 2003. What the hokim commands, this is my job. Interview notes, 17 July 2004. See: M. Sahlins, Poor man, rich man, big man, chief: political types in Melanesia and Polinesia, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol 5, 1963, pp 285303; see also: M. Godelier and M. Strathern, eds, Big Men and Great Men: Personications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Such an attempt to explore the role of the local ofcial in a reform socialist setting of Central Asia has been undertaken by: I. Beller and C. Hann, Peasants and ofcials in southern Xinjang: subsistence, supervision and subversion, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, Vol 124, 1999, pp 132. Cf. M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972 [192122]), pp. 840 860. Elwert has recently revisited the concept of political entrepreneurs, although his description of the political entrepreneurs as catalysers of collective switching diverges from the reading of my case study. See G. Elwert, Boundaries, cohesion and switching. On we-groups in ethnic, national and religious form, in B. Brumen and Z. Smitek, eds, Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School (Lublijana, 1995) p 112. Collins, op cit, Ref 3, p 224. Schatz, op cit, Ref 42; Collins, op cit, Ref 3. O. Roy, Groupes de solidarite en Asie centrale et en Afghanistan, Les Annales de lAutre Islam, No 4, INALCO-ERSIM, Paris, 1997. S. Radniz, Networks, localism and mobilization in Aksy, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asian Survey, Vol 24, No 4, 2005, pp 405-424. M. Fumagalli, Informal (ethno-)politics and local authority gures in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, Ethnopolitics, Vol 6, No 2, 2007, pp 211 233. Rasanayagam, op cit, Ref 35; Petric, op cit; C. Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982). K. Verdery, Theorizing socialism: a prologue to the transition, originally published in: American Ethnologist, Vol 18, No 1, 1991, reprinted and quoted from J. Vincent, ed., The Anthropology of Politics. A reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critique (London: Blackwell, 2002). K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg and H. Pearson, eds, Trade and Markets in Early Empires (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958). Verdery, op cit, Ref 67, p 372. Ibid.

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