Kandiyoti PostColonialismComparedPotentials 2002

Post-Colonialism Compared: Potentials and Limitations in the Middle East and Central Asia
Author(s): Deniz Kandiyoti

Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Special Issue:
Nationalism and the Colonial Legacy in the Middle East and Central Asia (May, 2002), pp.
279-297
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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 34 (2002), 279-297. Printed in the United States of America
Deniz Kandiyoti
POST-COLONIALISM COMPARED: POTENTIALS

AND LIMITATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND
CENTRAL ASIA
The term "post-colonial" is a relative newcomer to the jargon of Western social sci-
ence. Although discussions about the effects of colonial and imperialist domination
are by no means new, the various meanings attached to the prefix "post-" and different
understandings of what characterizes the post-colonial continue to make this term a
controversial one. Among the criticisms leveled against it, reviewed comprehensively
by Hall (1996), are the dangers of careless homogenizing of experiences as disparate
as those of white settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada; of the Latin American
continent, whose independence battles were fought in the 19th century; and countries
such as India, Nigeria, or Algeria that emerged from very different colonial encounters
in the post-World War II era. He suggests, nevertheless, that "What the concept may
help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks
the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence
and post-decolonisation moment" (Hall 1996, 246). Rattansi (1997) proposes a dis-
tinction between "post-coloniality" to designate a set of historical epochs and "post-
colonialism" or "post-colonialist studies" to refer to a particular form of intellectual
inquiry that has as its central defining theme the mutually constitutive role played by
colonizer and colonized in shaping the identities of both the dominant power and
those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial projects. Within the field of post-
colonial studies itself, Moore-Gilbert (1997) points to the divide between "post-colo-
nial criticism," which has much earlier antecedents in the writings of those involved
in anti-colonial struggles, and "post-colonial theory," which distinguishes itself from
the former by the incoporation of methodological paradigms derived from contempo-
rary European cultural theories into discussions of colonial systems of representation
and cultural production. Whatever the various interpretations of the term or the vari-
ous temporalities associated with it might be, Hall claims that the post-colonial "marks
a critical interruption into that grand whole historiographical narrative which, in lib-
eral historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant
traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate presence in
Deniz Kandiyoti is Associate Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell
Square, London WC1H OXG, United Kingdom; e-mail: dkl @soas.ac.uk.
? 2002 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/02 $9.50
280 Deniz Kandiyoti
a story that could essentially be told from its European parameters" (Hall 1996, 250).
In what follows, I will attempt a brief discussion of some of the circumstances leading
to the emergence of this concept and interrogate the extent to which it lends itself to
a meaningful comparison of the modem trajectories of societies in the Middle East
and Central Asia.
The early masters of European social science-Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and
Max Weber-who were primarily interested in theorizing transitions to industrial cap-
italism, had little to say about the nature of colonial encounters and the social struc-
tures of non-Western societies. Theirs was, indeed, a story that was told primarily
"from within its European parameters." It was the formal dissolution of European
colonial empires after World War II and the "national development" agenda of newly
independent states that prompted the appearance of a new discourse about the modem
trajectories of non-Western societies-that of development. Cowen and Shenton
(1995) make a convincing case for the 19th-century origins of development by arguing
that it was in Europe that development was first meant to create order out of the
profound social dislocations created by rapid urbanization, poverty, and unemploy-
ment. The early proponents of the development doctrine-the Saint Simonians, Au-
guste Comte, Friedrich List, and John Stuart Mill-did not simply prefigure more
contemporary debates but were themselves implicated in the developmental practice
of their time. Nevertheless, the period of development "is now routinely assumed to
be the span of imperial and post-colonial history since 1945" (Cowen and Shenton
1995, 29), a periodization that neatly coincides with the most commonly accepted
temporal framework of post-colonial scholarship. And, indeed, when the term "post-
coloniality" first appeared in the jargon of political theory, it was exclusively associ-
ated with the predicament of nations that had thrown off the yoke of European impe-
rial domination after World War II.
In the aftermath of World War II, faith in the efficacy of purposive human interven-
tion in achieving the goals of development was at its height. Practical concerns about
promoting rapid economic growth, the fact that the "new nations" became a prime
stake in the Cold War, and the establishment of the Bretton Woods financial and
trading regimes were, according to Leys (1996) the taken-for-granted backdrop for
early development writing in the 1950s. However, disillusionment with the record of
early economic-planning efforts, despite formal political independence, soon gave
way to a search for "obstacles" to development in the social and political structures
of former colonies now relabeled "underdeveloped" countries. Modernization theory
became the broad rubric under which "failures" of development were addressed, develop-
ment itself being defined as a process of transition from "traditional" to "modem"
societies. The persistence of tradition and the imperfect transformation of pre-capital-
ist social structures were held primarily responsible for blockages in the transition
process, a tendency that, as we shall see, was also strongly present in Soviet ethno-
graphic writing. One of the distinguishing features of this approach was a stress on the
endogenous nature of underdevelopment. The effects of colonization were generally
underplayed, and relations with former metropolitan centers were presented as essen-
tially benign. Modernization was about embarking on the path already traversed by
Western capitalist societies, which were assumed to represent the end point of this
process.
Post-Colonialism Compared 281
The earliest critique of this approach emanated from Latin America, a continent
that, although it had enjoyed the longest period of formal independence from direct
colonial rule, had yet to reap the economic benefits presumed to flow from it. The
late 1960s and '70s were dominated by dependency theory, popularized by Andre
Gunder Frank, which turned modernization theory on its head by inverting its central
assumptions. Underdevelopment was explained as the result of the exploitation of
Third World peripheries by metropolitan centers, and the experience of colonial ex-
ploitation was privileged to such an extent that the specific histories of the countries
concerned often became blurred through their amalgamation into the concepts of
"satellite" or "periphery." This had the unintended consequence of reproducing the
a-historicism of the category of "tradition" employed by modernization theorists via
the spatial metaphors of center and periphery. However, dependency and world-system
theories did stimulate a process of sustained reflection on the relationships between
the global spread of capitalism and forms of imperialist domination and were sub-
jected to many revisions and elaborations in different regional contexts.
By the 1980s, the international context that underwrote these earlier approaches to
development was substantially transformed. The end of the Cold War in the 1990s
signaled a final break with the post-war configuration of superpower rivalry in the
Third World. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the effects of these
changes on social theory per se. It should suffice to note that post-colonial studies
flourished in the midst of a "crisis of representation" that also coincided with the
erosion of the leading paradigms of development. Indeed, despite their apparent diver-
gences, these paradigms rested on certain shared assumptions: a faith in the efficacy
of scientific rationality, a particular conception of progress, a vision of emancipation
based on the liberal concept of the autonomous individual-in short, the shared legacy
of Enlightenment ideas. It is this very set of shared assumptions that became the target
of attack by post-structuralist and post-modemist critics. Central to this attack was the
notion that the universalist claims of grand narratives of emancipation (in both their
Marxist and bourgeois-liberal variants) foundered on the exclusion from subjecthood
of the non-Western, the non-white, and women. Critics of modernity treated it as a
powerful discursive construct whose dark underside became manifest in the practices
of racism, colonialism, and sexism and argued that the very notion of the Western
Self was predicated on the construction of the non-Western Other. As Rattansi puts it,
"The idea of the 'West' as white, Christian, rational, civilized, modern, sexually disci-
plined and indeed masculine was put into place in a protracted process in which the
colonized Others were defined in opposition to these virtues" (Rattansi 1977, 482).
Foucault's writings on the nature of modem orders and on the mechanisms of surveil-
lance and disciplinary power deployed through modem institutions had a defining
influence on post-colonial scholarship, despite the fact that they took France and
northern Europe as their primary object. This influence was largely mediated through
Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), which can be considered one of the founding texts
of post-colonial studies (in its post-colonial-theory variant). Said combined the central
insights of Foucault about the mutual relations of knowledge and power with Gram-
sci's notion of hegemony to argue that Western power enabled the production of
knowledge about other cultures that, in turn, became an instrument of further Western
domination. This domination was not based merely on processes of surplus extraction
282 Deniz Kandiyoti
but on a process of construction of the Orient that acted as a grid for filtering ideas
and practices that ultimately establish the positional superiority of the West. This
approach was not without its critics (Ahmad 1992; Clifford 1980) but acted to stimu-
late further analyses of the process of production of knowledge about non-Western
societies in a wide range of historical and geographical contexts. The work that fol-
lowed went beyond colonial encounters per se, critically evaluating the projects of
modernization made evident in post-colonial nationalisms (Chatterjee 1986, 1993).
One of the major contributions of post-colonial scholarship was to draw attention to
the formative influence of colonial encounters in the shaping of national cultures and
nation-states. This influence was acknowledged by Anderson (1991), who revised his
initial assumption that official nationalism in the colonized world was modeled on that
of the dynastic states of 19th-century Europe and proposed instead that its immediate
genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state. The later "develop-
mentalisms" of post-independence states were also subjected to new scrutiny in the
light of a critical rethinking of modernity.
These endeavors helped to define the contours of post-colonial scholarship, a field
whose concerns may be articulated somewhat differently in different disciplines. Hall
(1996) introduces a note of caution in his otherwise complimentary assessment of
post-colonial studies; he notes a growing divergence between two halves of the current
debate on late modernity-the post-colonial and the analysis of new developments in
global capitalism-a divergence that he feels is detrimental to both sides of the debate.
He attributes this state of affairs to the fact that post-colonial scholarship has been
developed most fully by scholars in the humanities who were unwilling or unable to
address contemporary transformations in global capitalism and to the move away from
reductive forms of economism, which has, in some instances, gone as far as dispensing
with political economy altogether. This observation may hold one of the keys to ex-
tending the reach of post-colonial analysis, especially if one intends to put it to com-
parative uses. Indeed, any fruitful comparison of the post-colonial trajectories of Mid-
dle Eastern and Central Asian societies must necessarily take into account not only
the historical specificities of their colonial encounters but also the very different
modalities and temporalities of their insertion into world capitalist markets. This
would amount to a rather ambitious comparative agenda that we have barely begun
to explore.
The analysis that follows does not purport to go beyond providing some tentative
suggestions concerning the potentialities and limitations of post-coloniality as a con-
cept in the context of the Middle East and Central Asia. Furthermore, it does not
pretend to provide a balanced or exhaustive presentation of post-colonial scholarship
in the two regions but to draw some parallels between discourses on modernization
emanating from very different scholarly traditions. Students of the Middle East have
had a much longer engagement with theorizing the nature of colonial encounters with
the West and have produced classic works on this subject, some engaging in radical
critiques of their disciplines (cf. Asad 1973). These works, which map out a rich
and varied terrain, also consider the implications of post-colonial modernities and
nationalisms for family and gender relations (Abu-Lughod 1998; Chatterjee 1990;
Kandiyoti 1993). In contrast, studies of Central Asia, emerging from the dual legacies
of Western Sovietology and Soviet ethnography and historiography, have a narrower
repertoire of analytic and substantive concerns and have only recently begun the work
of reassessing the encounters with imperial Russia and the successor Soviet state. The
article is therefore biased toward achieving a better understanding of these emerging
tendencies. The first part provides a brief sketch of the development of post-Oriental-
ist scholarship in the Middle East; the second part analyzes contrasting approaches to
the modernization of Central Asia; and the conclusion offers a critical commentary
on the usefulness of their comparison under the rubric of post-coloniality.
FROM THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

TO COLONISING EGYPT
If one had to pick out two texts that best exemplify the path traversed by Middle East
studies between the heyday of early modernization theory and the turn to post-colonial
scholarship, the choice could easily go to Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional
Society (1958) and Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (1988). The thirty-year span
that separates their publication witnessed, among other things, the rise and fall of
state-led developmentalism and a general disenchantment with the legacies of post-
independence states. The concept of modernity, that was so central to analyses of
social change in the region, became a contentious category, appropriated by some,
vilified by others, and subjected to critical scrutiny in post-Orientalist scholarship.
The Passing of Traditional Society is mainly of historical interest because it is
arguably the last text that could still refer on its back cover to the ancient cultures of
the Middle East as having remained "substantially unchanged for twenty centuries."
It presents modernization as both desirable and imperative, although the road to mo-
demity may be beset by problems and difficulties. The Preface sets the tone by point-
ing out that modernization, initially conceptualized as a technical "fix" generating a
self-sustaining cycle of growth, may not be quite so easy to achieve. "The trouble
with this cogent technical solution," the authors states, "is people. They don't do what,
on any rational course of behavior, they should do" (Lerner 1958, vii). Modernity
therefore requires above all a characterological transformation that has already taken
place in the West but must inevitably become generalized to the rest of the moderniz-
ing world. Lerner leaves the reader in no doubt that the process he claims to be
witnessing in the Middle East is a recapitulation of a previous historical transition
achieved over a much longer time span in the West. There is, furthermore, a single
road to modernity: "[u]nderlying the various ideological forms which modernization
took in Europe, America, Russia, there have been certain behavioral and institutional
compulsions common to all" (Lerner 1958, 47). Evaluating the advances of any new
nation, as Hermassi (1972) has noted, then became a matter of assessing the degree
to which they approximate the characteristics of industrial societies, which is precisely
what Lerner attempted to do by classifying countries and individuals as "Traditional,"
"Transitional," or "Modern" by means of quantitative indicators.
Going beyond the more transparently ethnocentric and ideological prescriptions of
this text, one is struck by a certain lack of fit between the schematic typologies set
up in the theoretical section and the chapters on individual countries where the intru-
sions of history act to disrupt the neat categories on offer. The chapter on Egypt is
particularly revealing in this respect. After arguing for a version of Tradition as a self-
284 Deniz Kandiyoti
enclosed, immobile, and unchanging universe, Lerner has to concede that this may
not apply to Egyptian farmers who have long been incorporated into world markets
through cotton cash-cropping. "Their interest in what happens to cotton markets thus
pierces the shell of Traditional isolationism and extends their horizons beyond the
village limits" (Lerner 1958, 227). Likewise, elite and non-elite responses to British
colonial domination and the emergence of a potentially militant working class are all
acknowledged before being tidied back into the traditional, transitional, modern typol-
ogy. The difficulties of sustaining the myth of Eastern immobility (or Tradition) are
everywhere apparent but not allowed to get in the way of the ideological message of
the modernization school. Lest we imagine this to have been a temporary aberration,
we may turn to Gilsenan's (1990) incisive commentary on the staying power of the
trope of the Middle East as a timeless "village" society threatened by looming forces of
social change at a time that Orientalism was giving way to "Middle East studies" as an
area of expertise and anthropologists were trying to find their own niche within it.
By the 1970s, the dependency and world-systems approaches had started making
substantial inroads into studies of the Middle East. The first stirrings of post-Oriental-
ist scholarship were predominantly informed by political economy, a fact that may
easily be overlooked in reference to Said's Orientalism as a pathbreaking text. Eco-
nomic historians of the Middle East engaged with these post-Marxist schools, and
some of the most stimulating work emerged through a creative tension between the
central assumptions of dependency and world-systems approaches and the discussion
of their applicability to Middle Eastern contexts. Roger Owen's The Middle East in
the World Economy 1800-1914 (1981) made reference to ongoing debates about Third
World economic transformation while the text itself strongly militated against any
facile importation of center-periphery models of surplus extraction and the role of
local states. Numerous works by 19th-century economic historians on Ottoman Tur-
key, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran started filling out an increasingly
sophisticated picture of both the entanglements of the region in an expansive European
capitalism and the particularities of local economies and polities. In their introduction
to an influential volume, Asad and Owen (1983) distanced themselves from ap-
proaches to Middle Eastern development that consisted "mainly of the somewhat sim-
plistic employment of concepts taken from the history of modern Europe or from the
study of other parts of the non-European world" (Asad and Owen 1983, 1). The
former could refer equally well to modernization theory as to orthodox Marxist ap-
proaches to transitions from feudalism, while the latter might apply to cruder versions
of dependency theory. Significantly, this introduction ended with a recommendation
for more work on culture and cultural processes, an inducement to bridge the gap
between the central concerns of political economists and what would become the areas
of predilection of post-colonial scholarship.
Asad's later work develops new and more searching perspectives on the question
of the impact of the West on cultural production in non-Western societies. Taking
issue with anthropologists who fashionably insist on the thesis of agency and creativity
in the non-European world in the name of cultural autonomy, he suggests instead that
an anthropological understanding of Western thought and history is crucial, because
"its conceptual geology has profound implications for the ways in which non-Western
traditions are now able to grow and change" (Asad 1993, 1). He therefore proposes a
historical anthropology that takes the cultural hegemony of the West as its object
of inquiry. Having done that, however, he also refuses to reduce other traditions to
epiphenomena of the expanding influence of the post-Enlightenment West. More spe-
cifically, he argues that orthodox Islamic criticism must be understood with reference
to its own discursive logic, emanting from a different tradition than that of the post-
Enlightenment West. He sets himself the difficult task of theorizing both the effectivity
of the West and the simultaneous existence of traditions of reason and political debate
emanating from "non-Englightenment societies" (Asad 1993, 207).
It is Mitchell's Colonising Egypt that gives the task of "anthropologizing" the nature
of modem orders one of its more comprehensive expressions. This is partly achieved
through the ingenious device of relativizing and "provincializing" 19th-century Eu-
rope itself and analyzing it as a local curiosity-much as the Orientalists had done
with the cultures of the Middle East. This approach is greatly indebted to the earlier
insights of both Foucault and Said and extends their mode of enquiry to an analysis
of the colonial shaping of institutional arenas such as modem schooling, the creation
of a modem army, the regimentation of rural Egypt, urban planning, and public health.
The author shows how modem practices of ordering, disciplining, and enframing cre-
ate a world seemingly divided into two: "into self and other, into things themselves
and their plan, into bodies and minds, into the material and the conceptual" (Mitchell
1988, 171).
In order to drive home the specificity of this modernist metaphysics, on which he
elaborates with reference to the works of Heidegger and Derrida, Mitchell resorts to
comparisons with settings and periods in which other principles might have been at
work-such as pre-modem Middle Eastern towns or Kabyle villages. The author en-
gages in this exercise with some trepidation, aware of the possible perils of setting up
some reified opposite to modernity in the form of self-contained, pre-capitalist totality
that satisfies our yearning for some lost age of innocence. In fact, he states quite
clearly that any impression of other kinds of orders as total and self-contained oppo-
sites to the modem is totally unintended. This reticence is well placed, given the ease
with which the demonology of modernization, vilifying tradition as a source of stasis
and oppression, may be turned on its head, with modernity now being cast as both an
alien and a repressive order that relegates culturally more authentic forms to the mar-
gins. This may, in turn, stimulate a rhetoric of return to authentic culture based on
further myth-making and reification, a move that would invalidate the anti-founda-
tional thrust of Colonising Egypt. This, indeed, is what Gilsenan (1990, 238) suggests
may have happened in the rejection of Orientalism by some Arab intellectuals in favor
of indigenous models of thought and representation frequently articulated in strongly
cultural nationalist terms. That would totally defeat the purposes of post-colonial
scholarship that aims, in principle, to dismantle binaries such as East-West and indig-
enous-foreign and analyze instead the processes of cultural hybridization that charac-
terize post-colonial modernities.
There has, however, been a conjuncture in Middle East studies that has attenuated
the potential for such exploration and prompted a process of renewed reflection on
the nature of Muslim polities that sometimes paved the way to new forms of essential-
ism. The developmental failures and legitimacy crises of post-colonial regimes
throughout the region, aggravated by their inability to push through policies of eco-
286 Deniz Kandiyoti
nomic adjustment and the simultaneous rise to prominence of Islamist movements and
parties, acted to fuel renewed debates on the nature of the state and civil society in
Muslim societies. Some, such as Zubaida (1988), argued convincingly that Islamist
projects are articulated within the political field of the modem nation-state, while
others, such as Badie (1986), argued for the specificity of the Muslim state. A wave
of "neo-Orientalist" writing argued the incompatibility of Islam with modem forms
of governance (Sadowski 1997), while others insisted on situating political Islam in
the context of international economic and political influences on the region (Beinin
and Stork 1997). As noted by Hall for post-colonial studies more generally, culturalist
discussions on the nature of modem and post-modem identities and the roles of Islam
and the West and discussions grounded in international relations and political econ-
omy started showing signs of drifting apart. The challenge for post-colonial studies
in the Middle East will be to achieve a better integration of these currently fragmented
concerns.
SOVIET MODERNIZATION IN CENTRAL ASIA: A PARADOX
In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Said (1993, xxx) remarks that the
British, French, and American imperial experience "has a unique coherence and a
special cultural centrality." This implies that other imperial formations such as the
Russian, the Ottoman, and the Austro-Hungarian (each with their own troubled histo-
ries of modernization and ultimate decline) may represent distinct patterns that are
not comparable to the history of Euro-Atlantic expansionism. There is, therefore, a
sense in which the field of post-colonial studies is itself Eurocentric to the extent that
it privileges a particular type of colonial encounter-namely, that between the capital-
ist metropolises of the West and their colonies or semi-colonies in the rest of the
world. Recent volumes such as Russia's Orient (Brower 1997) may help to broaden
our perspectives by drawing attention to both the similarities and the differences be-
tween the Russian policies and practices of imperial rule and those of other Western
empires.
The case of Central Asia is particularly productive for the purposes of comparison
because it was both colonized through Russian imperial expansion in the late 19th
century and subjected to new forms of control by a non-capitalist metropolis after the
victory of the Bolsheviks. What adds to the intricacy of this case is the fact that the
Bolsheviks evolved their own critique of colonialism as part and parcel of their ideo-
logical onslaught on the Russian ancien regime and claimed to have made a decisive
break from their imperial past while retaining political-administrative control over the
former subject territories. The continuities and discontinuities between the colonial
and Soviet periods is a subject that is likely to continue to occupy historians, not least
because these issues, which were mainly debated within a perspective that reflected
official Soviet ideology, are currently being subjected to extensive revisions. The So-
viet version emphasized the voluntary nature of the participation of Central Asian
republics in the communist project and cast local elites as feudal oppressors (Pierce
1960). However, as Brower (1997) notes in his examination of Russian colonial policy
in Turkistan, there were numerous areas of continuity and, indeed, of further refine-
ment of colonial policies after the Bolshevik revolution. He suggests, for instance,
that "the ethnographic project thrived at the hands of Soviet officials who proved far
more zealous practitioners than Kaufman in claiming to 'know' ethnic groups and in
drawing ethno-national boundaries" (Brower 1997, 133). Currently, new analyses of
the emergence and role of national intelligentsias prior to the victory of the Bolshe-
viks, and in particular that of Jadidist reformers, are challenging the Soviet historiog-
raphy of the region. Nationalist historians are going further by recuperating former
villains, such as the basmachi rebels who fought against the Bolsheviks, as heroes of
national resistance and reinstating figures from the past as the true heirs of national
culture. In this respect, Burbank (1993) cautions us against the debilitating effects of
the "teleological read-back of 1917" on historical research and argues for a rejection
of the artificial categories of both the Soviet canon and the various national canons.
There is, nevertheless, little doubt that Soviet historiography has exerted a powerful
influence on writing on the region. Stahl (1950), for instance, argued that in contrast
to the Russian imperial period, in which the peoples of Central Asia where little
interfered with in terms of their customary lifeways (a questionable proposition in
itself), the communist regime embarked on an aggressive course of rapid moderniza-
tion. "The arduous task of turning these primitive tribal peoples into active communist
citizens, of transforming their ways of life by the introduction of collectivized, mecha-
nized agricultural methods and of industrialization, requiring not only the import of
plant but also of industrial workers, was pressed through by methods which took no
cognizance of the national peculiarities of the peoples concerned and often at a pace
more suited to the requirements of military than economic development" (Stahl 1950,
75). This construction of a stagnant, backward, and immobile traditional society,
forced to "awaken," was so well-established in the annals of Soviet writing that it
was, as in this case, rather uncritically accepted by some Western scholars, as well.
Yet it is difficult for any Western reader not to be struck by the coexistence of two
totally contradictory discourses on Soviet modernization in Central Asia. On the one
hand, there are numerous ideologically inspired celebrations of the achievements of
Soviet-style modernization, pointing, among other things, to the emancipation of
women, universal literacy, and the triumph of Soviet forms of expression over "tradi-
tional" cultures. English-language reviews of Soviet sources, such as Silver (1992)
and Jones and Grupp (1992), reveal themes that are thoroughly familiar to any reader
well versed in the Parsonian variants of Western modernization theory. In addition to
those, transcending national particularisms through assimilation into "Soviet" culture
is presented as the highest point of modernization, and indicators of success are elabo-
rated on in numerous writings on so-called cultural convergence (see, for instance,
Dunn and Dunn 1973). On the other hand, many commentators, depending on their
inclinations, either lamented or celebrated the durability of local (Muslim) cultures,
the relative lack of penetrative capacity of the Soviet state, and the strength of local
social patterns.' How can we explain such apparent contradictions? And what underly-
ing processes do they reveal or conceal?
There were clearly striking parallels between Western modernization theory and
Soviet writing on social transformation. These reached a climax at the point at which
so-called convergence theory predicted similar outcomes of modernity for high indus-
trialism, whether this was achieved through a capitalist or a socialist route.
Jones and Grupp (1992, 487), who reviewed the results of Soviet social surveys in
288 Deniz Kandiyoti
an attempt to assess the impact of modernizing institutions such as school, factory,

and urban living on the "late modernizing minorities of the USSR," rehearsed familiar
themes and concluded, "Exposure to mass communications, education, urban life and
the modern bureaucrary in the USSR has produced dramatic changes in family values
and gender roles-changes that parallel those found in non-socialist settings." The
accepted wisdom was therefore that Soviet institutions were modernizing the other-
wise stagnant traditional Central Asian cultures. Interestingly, Pierce offered a similar
assessment of the Russian colonial heritage as a modernizing influence:
[F]or this was not merely a Russian affair but a facet of the entire Western colonial tradition,
traceable to the days when Rome brought water, roads and bridges and her pax to the ends of
the known world, including some of the very lands which in modern times built their own
empires around the globe [Pierce 1960, 302].
There was, therefore, a sense that as far as Central Asia was concerned, both the
Russian colonial period and the Soviet regime that followed could be construed as
part of the inevitable dominion of the West over the East. This is all the more ironic
if we note, as Burbank (1993) does, that unfavorable comparisons with the West, of
the "catching up" variety, were a central part of Russian culture, a phenomenon that
is thoroughly familiar to students of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, this assumed,
albeit ambiguous, superiority was couched in the Soviet period in a new language of
tutelage, invoking "fraternal help" to nations that were less able to help themselves.
There was, for a long time, surprisingly little discussion of the possible effects of
the Moscow-led command economy on the Asian peripheries of the Soviet Union.
The close analytic connection between capitalist expansion and imperialism by and
large retarded a parallel discussion of the role of the Soviet state. However, a style of
enquiry reminiscent of dependency theory did develop, as did critical perspectives on
the nature of the encounter with the Soviet state (e.g., Gleason 1991). One of the
earliest discussions, provided by Nove and Newton (1967), drew attention to the diffi-
culties of conceptualizing Soviet rule as a clear-cut case of colonial domination be-
cause it exhibited many contradictory features: a diversion of capital to less developed
areas that are difficult to justify on strict economic grounds, on the one hand, and the
centralizing practices of the Soviet state and dominance of the Russians, on the other.
The clearest case for treating the role of the former Soviet state as an extension of
Russian colonization was made by Shahrani (1993). He argued that Soviet policy in
Central Asia should be evaluated as a colonial project geared to the center's aims of
economic and ideological control. On the economic front, the Muslim periphery was
utilized as a source of primary commodities-petroleum in the case of Azerbaijan
and cotton in Central Asia. On the ideological front, the modernization of Central
Asian populations mandated nothing short of a systematic onslaught on existing pat-
terns of social institutions, identities, and loyalties. This onslaught took the form of
territorial fragmentation and the constitution of artificial ethno-national entities, the
severance of links with both the Turko-Persian heritage and the wider Muslim world
through the adoption of differently modified forms of the Cyrillic alphabet, and the
systematic destruction of Muslim institutions. This approach, which evaluates Soviet
designs as having achieved their main objectives, may be contrasted with that of
Khazanov (1995), who presents the key problem of the region as that of underdevelop-
ment. This condition was induced by the inter-regional division of labor imposed by
Moscow, which worked to the detriment of the region by defining it as a supplier of
raw materials within a framework of unequal exchange. Lack of industrialization and
the immobility of the local populations were exacerbated by the ethnic stratification
resulting from the settlement of non-ethnic populations in the Central Asian republics.
He concludes bleakly that in the post-Soviet period the region appears as "another
Third World region with unsolved structural problems and minimal potential for rapid
economic and sociopolitical development" (Khazanov 1995, 155).
Against this background, it may appear somewhat surprising to learn from some
Russian commentators that the Soviet system made limited inroads into the societies
in question. Some, such as Malashenko (1993) go as far as arguing that if we are
talking about culture loss, then the turmoil created by the Soviet regime has been far
greater for the Russians, because the institutions of Russian Orthodoxy were disman-
tled more thoroughly than those of Islam, which, for a variety of reasons, received
more support at the official level.2 Indeed, one may easily be left with the impression
that the formerly "backward" peoples of Central Asia are being recast by Russian
commentators as sturdy local cultures that have managed to retain and reproduce some
immutable cultural essence. These notions of unbroken, trans-historical ethno-cultural
essence may also be put in the service of the articulation of post-Soviet nationalisms,
as indeed they currently are, in the search for lineages to independent nation-states.
However, such understandings are not new, and their antecedents in Soviet policies
and scholarship-particularly, in Soviet ethnography-must be explored.
SOVIET ETHNOGRAPHY AND NATIONALITY POLICY
The local cultures the Russians encountered in Central Asia in the late 19th century
could easily be construed by the colonists as archetypes of "tradition": patrilineal
tribal formations among the nomads, sometimes with tribal aristocracies; sedentary
populations subject to the control of the patriarchal family; local autocrats and the
strictures of Islam; and all of this overlaid by the "Asian immobility" assumed by
Soviet commentators to be associated with the so-called Asiatic mode of production.
The modernizing encounter was not between two civilizations-that of the West and
the "Orient," however defined-but between a declining colonial power, uncertain
about its own place of insertion into the historic West, and subject to much soul-
searching about its own backwardness, and diverse indigenous formations, ranging
from the sedentary populations of the great Islamic centers and urban settlements of
the Maverannahr, literate and Islamized, to the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of
the steppes, whose conversion to Islam came later and remained for a long time a thin
veneer on their ancient animistic beliefs and cosmologies. The task that fell to Soviet
ethnographers of understanding, classifying, and ultimately playing a role in trans-
forming these entities presents unique features that cannot be assimilated to the role
of anthropologists in the colonial encounters of the West, despite a similar interest in
administering ethnically and religiously disparate subject populations. One noteworthy
feature of this case is the particular role attributed to the category of "ethnos" in
Soviet ethnography, the antecedents of which can be traced to Russian imperial modes
of knowledge production from the 18th century onward (Slezkine 1997).
290 Deniz Kandiyoti
Shanin (1989) offers an incisive account of the interpenetration between Soviet

nationality policy and the notions of ethnos and ethnogenesis that dominated Soviet
ethnography. He draws our attention to the fact that Soviet perceptions of ethnicity
and their expression in the social sciences differed significantly from those of their
Western counterparts. The very fact that the term natsional'nost (which he translates
as ethnicity, with many reservations ) has no exact equivalent is telling in this respect.3
Differing radically from Western approaches that adopt a relativistic position, by the
1960s Soviet ethnologists saw ethnicity "as a culturally self-reproducing set of behav-
ioural patterns linked to collective self-identity, which continues through different
modes of production and is significantly autonomous from the forces and relations of
production. A new cross-modes concept of ethnos was declared the differencia specif-
icia of ethnology as a discipline" (Shanin 1989, 413).
Inevitably, various adjustments were necessary to make this notion of ethnos fit in
with the orthodox evolutionist sequence of socio-economic formations postulated by
Stalin. Skalnik (1990) argues that the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy
of Sciences, under the leadership of Bromley, squared this circle by invoking the
concept of "ethno-social organism" (ESO). This subsumed both etnikos-namely, the
stable common features of language, culture, psychology, and self-consciousness char-
acterizing a collectivity-and the types of broader societies (primitive, feudal, capital-
ist) of which they formed a part. "It is precisely," Bromley (1974, 69) suggests, "this
relative conservatism and certain independence of ethnic qualities that conditions the
possibility to preserve basically the same 'ethnikos' over a period of several socio-
economic structures." This made it possible to posit ethnos as something consistent,
enduring, and objectively existing, thus creating a space for traditional ethnographic
research while at the same time paying lip service to the Marxist-Leninist sequencing
of socio-economic formations. This produced a reification of cultural diversity on the
basis of arid definitional speculations and an aversion to any real discussion of the
actual problems of inter-ethnic relations. Skalnik (1990) is particularly critical about
the fact that this theory served as window-dressing for Soviet ethnic pluralism and as
evidence of the respect of the party for the language, culture, and mentality of each
ethnic group in the USSR. He suggests, furthermore, that ethnographers provided the
ancient policy of Russification, inherited from the czarist regime, with the new wrap-
ping of "progressive" amalgamation into the first international (inter-ethnic) formation
based on socialism. Thus, the highest point of modernization was represented by the
merging (slianiie) of ethnic particularisms into a new superordinate entity-the Soviet
people (sovetskii narod), whose lingua franca happened to be Russian, the language
of inter-ethnic communication, universalism, and civilization.
There is overwhelming evidence that Soviet representations of "ethnic" cultures,
however arbitrary, may have been powerfully internalized by those Soviet peoples
who may have had a different vocabulary to articulate their sense of identity and a
less salient sense of themselves in ethnic terms. Roy (1991-92), for instance, suggests
that what took place under the Soviet system was the reification of a play of identities
that were much more open, dynamic, and relational than either theories of ethnos or
state policies could adequately reflect. One of the most frequently cited paradoxes of
Soviet nationality policy is that, although it officially espoused the goal of merging
nationalities and transcending ethnic particularisms, it institutionalized, codified, and
established them as a primary basis for solidarity. Numerous authors appear to be in

agreement about the Soviet Union's role in the process of nation-building among the
non-Russian peoples (Bremmer and Taras 1993; Smith 1993; Suny 1993; Zaslavsky
1993). In Central Asia, the drawing up of new territorial boundaries in the region
formerly known as Turkistan achieved lasting importance as the context for the devel-
opment of institutions laying the groundwork for nationhood: the cultivation of local
national intelligentsias and cadres, the codification and elaboration of national lan-
guages, cultural and scientific establishments, and an elaborate system of schooling
in non-Russian languages, to name but a few. Roeder (1991, 205) goes as far as to
suggest that for many Soviet citizens, "the first sustained contact with the great tradi-
tions of their own ethnic group was in the form of this national-Soviet hybrid." Slez-
kine, who traces the ups and downs of Soviet nationality policy through its initial
period of "pursuit of countless rootless nationalities" to the period of high Stalinism,
which shifted the emphasis to the consolidation of fewer full-fledged "titular national-
ities," demonstrates convincingly that the notion of ethnicity as "universal, irreducible
and inherently moral" (1996, 227) became firmly entrenched in the Soviet system.
Anderson's (1991) suggestions concerning the colonial origins of post-colonial nation-
states seem amply borne out in these examples. However, as Brubaker (1994) points
out, these nation-building processes bear the hallmark of a system of institutional
mismatch between ethnocultural nation and citizenry, whereby nationhood is not re-
lated to legal citizenship of a state but is the prerogative of sub-state ethno-territorial
groups. It is not citizenship but natsional'nost, an ascriptive legal category, that deter-
mines one's life chances-positively if one is a member of one of the "titular" nation-
alities, and negatively if one happens to be a member of a "minority" nationality.
Thus, Gleason (1993) suggests that ethnic belonging is not merely about preferences
in lifestyles and customs; it is very much related to something as crucial as expecta-
tions about the future. Roeder (1991) relates the recent aggravation of this state of
affairs to a redistributive crisis. The ruling cadres of titular republics put in place
through the policy of indigenization (korenisatsiia) were able to create their own
power bases and secure avenues of mobility, given the measures of positive discrimi-
nation in their favor. The Soviet Union-wide economic slowdown meant that titular
nationalities could shift the brunt of the drying up of central resources to their minority
populations by discriminating against them. He shows cogently how specific patterns
of Soviet elite co-optation and distribution of rewards led to new patterns of ethnopoli-
tics. A clear conclusion emerging from these observations is that the institutions put
in place played a crucial role in defining the parameters of social life, a conclusion
that is in keeping with some of the central insights of post-colonial scholarship.
"TRADITIONALISM" OR "HYBRIDITY"?
We can now return to the apparent paradox signaled in the section on Soviet modern-
ization-that what appeared to some as rapid modernization and radical change was
interpreted by others as cultural stasis and immobility. The most striking feature of
these contradictory interpretations is an apparent inability to recognize the mutual
imbrication of Soviet institutions with local cultural forms and to identify processes
commonly referred to as "hybridization" in post-colonial scholarship. Paradoxically,
292 Deniz Kandiyoti
to the extent that until relatively recently the countries of the Soviet Union have been
somewhat more immune to the globalizing effects of world capitalism, center-periph-
ery models of domination on which theories of hybridity have implicitly relied may
have even greater purchase there than in the capitalist West. This systematic oversight
is in part due to the fact that Soviet ethnographers had a particular attachment to the
concept of "traditionalism" as a means of explaining social forms and outcomes that
did not conform to their prescriptions of modernity. By invoking this concept, it be-
came possible to talk about cultural complexes that could actively resist or block
attempts at social transformation and result in stasis and continuity, thus constituting
actual targets for propaganda and social-engineering work.
The most forceful case for such continuity, despite decades of Soviet rule in Central
Asia, was made by Poliakov (1992). His main contention was that behind the facade
of modernization lay the reality of an untransformed traditional society that has both
resisted and subverted Soviet attempts to change property relations and the moral and
cultural bases of community life. Superficially, one can discern similarities here with
the "cultural obstacles to change" literature of early modernization theory, with its
stress on endogenous factors that block development. This impression is quite mis-
leading, however, because Poliakov, a convinced materialist, was willing to accord
the cultural complex that he describes as "traditionalism" only the status of a super-
structural phenomenon that could not survive outside the economic context which lent
it life and substance. It is only with reference to this untransformed economic base
(rather than to Islam per se) that we can understand a host of empirical phenomena:
widespread petty commodity production despite collectivization, sharp age and gender
hierarchies in large rural households, the prevalence of arranged marriages and kalym
(bride price), high fertility, the subordinate status of women, high levels of spending
for lifecycle rituals, and the salient role of the mahalla (neighborhood) and the mosque
as key socializing agencies competing with formal Soviet schooling, to name but a
few. Poliakov's approach was quite bold because he put aside the language of "rem-
nants" and "survivals" used by his colleagues when witnessing similar phenomena,
choosing instead to present these features as endemic.
Poliakov explained these outcomes as evidence of a failed transformation. He was
not able to discern, as Lubin's (1984) study did, some underlying rationales behind
indigenous nationalities' livelihood strategies. Lubin suggested that preferences for
work outside the socialized sector, in agriculture and the services, were based on solid
economic reasons because these offered much better prospects for higher incomes
earned as unofficial emoluments for scarce services and commodities or as the result
of parallel activities on unofficial markets. Poliakov, who insisted on the "irrational"
nature of Central Asian social patterns, opted instead for a materialist-structuralist
account. His starting point was that Central Asian societies constituted an instance of
the Asiatic mode of production manifesting itself in diverse forms of livelihood, such
as subsistence agriculture, irrigated farming, and mobile stock-breeding (Poliakov
1993). This system was characterized by the absence of private property and the
limited development of the forces of production. The beginnings of agrarian capital-
ism stimulated by incorporation into the Russian empire, and the islands of private
property to which it gave rise, were swept away by collectivization, which reached
Central Asia in the 1930s in the form of "Stalinist communal-serfdom" (Poliakov
1993, 126). Collectivization restored to its former strength the local community, which
had been weakened by colonial rule, and the authoritarian-patriarchal management of
the collective-farm system based on patron-client relations between superiors and
subordinates could readily be absorbed into customary lifeways. The clear conclusion
emerging from his analysis was that the Soviet system in Central Asia, far from effect-
ing a progressive transformation, actually reinforced and gave a longer lease on life
to pre-capitalist forms of production and social organization. This is a suggestion that
must be taken seriously, despite the fact that Poliakov attributes what he interprets as
cultural stasis to the arrested capitalist development of the Central Asian periphery,
and the resulting strength of "traditionalism." The possibility that local cultural fea-
tures and institutions may have articulated with some intrinsic aspects of the command
economy and Soviet political-administrative structures to produce diverse new forms
was simply not entertained.
Yet evidence abounds pointing to the "colonization" of Soviet institutions by pre-
Soviet forms of social organization. Bacon (1966) was one of the first to note a
process of overlap between Soviet institutions such as kolkhozes and brigades and
tribal formations in Central Asia. Olcott (1987) also showed that, among the Kazakhs,
the real structure of local power was controlled by traditional clanic leaders behind a
facade of Communist Party organization. Poliakov's own data on collective farms in
Tajikistan point to the continuing importance of the extended family, the avlod in
work organization, and the constitution of work brigades in collective farms. Referring
to similiar patrilineal groupings as elat among the Khorezm Uzbeks, Snesarev (1974,
229) acknowledges that "[t]he prevalence in our day, although in residual form, of
these territorial-kinship groups introduces certain complications in the social life of
the kolkhoz." These take the concrete form of refusing to leave inhabited places for
new settlements and continuing to maintain the mutual aid and ritual functions of the
elat, even though its economic role may be marginal. Dragadze's (1988) ethnography
of a Georgian village also suggests that, far from modifying and undercutting family
solidarities, the Soviet system actually reinforced them as the only refuge from power-
lessness and as a source of security in a shortage economy. In the rather different
context of Turkmenistan, Bouchet (1991-92, 66) makes the observation that "the
kolkhoz does not abolish tribalism, it becomes its context." Whereas originally tribal
formations served significant socio-economic roles and worked in pursuit of common
economic objectives, under the Soviet system their role may have been reduced to the
pure exchange of services and, in cases of asymmetrical exchange, to new forms of
clientelism. It is in this sense that it is possible to discern a degree of capture of Soviet
institutions and of possibilities of maneuvering within them in the framework of local
networks of obligation and clientelism. This point is also clearly illustrated in Hum-
phrey's (1983) ethnography of a Siberian collective farm, which demonstrates that
internal contradictions within the command economy result in the local Buryat "gift
economy" seeping into its cracks and transforming the nature of both economic trans-
actions and Buryat practices in the process.
Is it then the very adaptation of Soviet institutions to local forms of organization
and consciousness that paradoxically accounts for the "sovietization" of the local?
Bouchet would seem to concur with this evaluation when he states: "Soviet Turkmens
are not merely Turkmens living in the Soviet Union, they integrate deeply the 'soviet'
294 Deniz Kandiyoti
dimension to their identity" (1991-92, 66). Bouchet, like Humphrey, comes close to
abolishing the distinction between some pristine notion of indigenous culture and the
Soviet institutions that are assumed to stand in some relationship of exteriority to
them. He invites us to think instead in terms of multiple and overlapping identities
that may be shaped and reshaped through diverse historical encounters.
More recent research on patterns of social stratification in the former Soviet Union4
confirms the co-existence of diverse subcultures that stand in a different relationship
to both the immediate Soviet past and the emerging national cultures after indepen-
dence. These exhibit different degrees of cosmopolitanism or attachment to local val-
ues and may express different stakes vis-at-vis the changes currently taking place in
post-Soviet societies. Further in-depth analyses will be required to tease out the differ-
ent strands in the formation of these identities and to evaluate the extent to which
they are susceptible to new forms of politicization. Let us note, however, that it is
only since the break-up of the Soviet Union that an acknowledgement of hybridity
and of more complex definitions of identity appears to have become possible.
CONCLUSION
A parallel reading of sources on colonial encounters and modernization in Middle

Eastern and Central Asian societies reveals significant commonalities as well as im-
portant differences. Some of the central themes of both the modernization and depen-
dency theories can be found in writings about both regions. At a very broad level of
generality, it is also possible to argue that Orientalist constructions of timeless Tradi-
tion were evoked, if somewhat differently, in both regional contexts. It would,
however, be unnecessarily sterile to pitch comparisons at such a high level of abstrac-
tion and merely add the case of Central Asia to a growing body of post-colonial
scholarship that concerns itself principally with a critique of Western modernity. That
would not only fail to capture the specificities of the Soviet case, with its distinctive
approach to the institutionalization of ethnonational difference as the basis for the
distribution of social rewards and its consequent implications for post-independence
nationalisms; it would also limit more open-ended explorations into the possible
meanings of post-coloniality itself. As Moore-Gilbert suggests, "there are many de-
grees, forms and (characteristically intertwined) histories of colonization and there
are going to be many different degrees, forms and histories of postcoloniality as a
consequence" (1997, 12).
I started out by suggesting that an understanding of the trajectories of post-colonial
states cannot limit itself to an analysis of colonial encounters. It also has to take into
account the ongoing influences of global markets and transnational forces. I will con-
clude by proposing three areas for investigation that would satisfy these criteria and
lend themselves particularly well to useful comparisons between the Middle East and
Central Asia. The first concerns the natural histories of two leading commodities-
cotton and oil-that played and continue to play a central role in the economies
of both regions. The contrasting historical and institutional contexts in which these
commodities rose to prominence, in fertile valleys with sedentary populations and
arid regions dominated by pastoralism, deserve careful investigation, as does their
continuing importance in further integration into world markets. The second area has
to do with patterns of social stratification and elite formation. Although a great deal
has been written on the Middle East (and South Asia) about particular forms of inter-
nalization of Western models by local elites and on the gulf that often separates nation-
alist elites and the masses they were meant to lead, such studies have barely begun in
Central Asia. Yet the process of Russification, plainly evident in the language and
schooling of Soviet elites, can be demonstrated to have gone a great deal deeper
and spread farther into the grass-roots than the Westernism of their Middle Eastern
counterparts. Indeed, one may go further to suggest that the diffusion of the fruits of
Soviet development to the lower strata of society separates Central Asian societies
from those of the Middle East.5 Finally, the very different insertions of Islam into the
cultures and polities of the two regions, and its current evolution under the impact of
varied national and transnational influences, also constitutes an important focus for
comparison. Our discussions of post-colonial nationalisms would remain purely for-
malistic if they failed to take account of struggles over resources, legitimacy, and
meaning.
NOTES
Author's note: I acknowledge the useful comments of Bhavna Dave, Timothy Mitchell, and Lila Abu-
Lughod on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks are also due to the participants of the SSRC Work-
shops on "Nation Building after Independence in Central Asia and the Middle East," Tashkent, Uzbekistan,
October 1996, and Berkeley, California, November 1997.
'For instance, Carrere-d'Encausse (1979) suggested that, far from producing "homo Sovieticus," Central
Asian societies remained dominated by "homo Islamicus," which would inevitably reveal fault lines in the
Soviet system. She contends, furthermore, that Soviet modernization ran into "an almost impenetrable
socio-cultural situation" (Carrere-d'Encausse 1979, 249).
2This author points to cycles of leniency and repression based on political expediency, as in the co-
optation of the Muslim clergy during World War II to establish the "just" character of the war, followed
by severe repression and atheistic propaganda from the mid-1950s.
3It is also significant that Gellner's Preface to Soviet and Western Anthropology (1980) is, in large part,
devoted to terminological differences and the non-comparability of superficially similar terms. For a further
elucidation of the term "ethnos" in the Soviet context, see also Dragadze (1980).
4Coordinated by the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
and carried out in Ukraine, Estonia, and Uzbekistan.
51 thank Bhavna Dave for calling my attention to this point, which is easy to overlook in view of the
deteriorating socio-economic indicators for the region.
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Kandiyoti PostColonialismComparedPotentials 2002

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Post-Colonialism Compared: Potentials and Limitations in the Middle East and Central Asia

Author(s): Deniz Kandiyoti

POST-COLONIALISM COMPARED: POTENTIALS

? 2002 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/02 $9.50

FROM THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

SOVIET MODERNIZATION IN CENTRAL ASIA: A PARADOX

an attempt to assess the impact of modernizing institutions such as school, factory,

SOVIET ETHNOGRAPHY AND NATIONALITY POLICY

Shanin (1989) offers an incisive account of the interpenetration between Soviet

established them as a primary basis for solidarity. Numerous authors appear to be in

A parallel reading of sources on colonial encounters and modernization in Middle

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