Shaping inequalities or building social bonds? Ceremonial economy under and after socialism in Central Asia (1960s-2020s) – CEREMONIAC

In order to explore the dual potentiality of this phenomenon to generate both social bonds and inequalities and the issues it raises in all their complexity, this project gathers an interdisciplinary team of academics, specialised in history, economy and socio-economics, anthropology, sociology and geography. To this day, research on ceremonial expenditures – exclusively anthropological – primarily delved into the issue over a short period of time and focused on very localised areas, at the expense of potentially detaching it from trends and evolutions affecting Central Asian society at large. A diachronic and intersectional analysis will therefore enable us to examine the scope of this phenomenon over time and through its kinship with other areas of social practice: the Soviet collectivist economic system and the market economy, the institutional framework governing ritual practices, the reconfiguration of local political relationships, the transnational transformations of the Islamic religious sphere and the evolution of consumer practices, etc. Under this perspective, this project will rely on different types of field surveys: participant observation in rural and urban areas of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; oral history surveys and archival research; surveys by semi-directive interviews with actors in institutions offering formal credit lending but also informal credit, as well as with small and medium entrepreneurs of the ceremonial and religious economy.

Due to the covid pandemic field investigations and the collection of empirical and archival data were postponed with the exception of a few surveys carried out by the Uzbek partner. These surveys, as well as online press monitoring, initially led to the assumption that the pandemic experience would not only lead to greater modesty in gatherings and ceremonial spending, but would also serve as a pretext for the less affluent segments of society to free themselves from the social pressure to invite generously. However, this assumption proved to be ineffective. As soon as the stranglehold was lifted, the ceremonies resumed a quasi-normal course while being privileged places of contamination of covid 19. Moreover, daily commensalities returned to their usual rhythm. The constraint linked to the pandemic thus highlights the primacy of the ceremonial injunction over the vital risks incurred during gatherings. This situation raises new questions about the status of elders, who are the most vulnerable but also the most sensitive to the social commitments that underpin their honour.
Secondly, we conducted a seminar at EHESS (https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2020-2021/ue/698),which focused on the state of the art, on comparative case studies with Mexico, North America and France, as well as on points of theory and method.

On the basis of what has been achieved (data collected in 2019 and before) and of the reflections conducted collectively, the project members have published or are to publish articles and have participated in international conferences, workshops and seminars.

We will conduct the field surveys postponed due to the pandemic.
The questions raised by the pandemic about the unconditional nature of ritual profligacy will be incorporated into future Ceremoniac surveys.

Among the publications, let mention 1- Cleuziou, Juliette and Dufy, Caroline, «Marriages, divorces and mutual indebtedness: perspectives from Tajikistan«, Journal of Extreme anthropology, accepted, forthcoming and 2-Mory, Guéorgui, «'The security of mutual indebtedness?': life-cycle rituals, gifts and bonds without debt in two Kyrgyz villages«, Journal of Extreme anthropology, accepted, forthcoming.

This project deals with life-cycle ceremonies and festive sociability spending; a growing phenomenon among Central Asian populations (in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) that has taken ostentatious dimensions between the end of the 1960s and this day. These practices have taken on such proportion that they drove the States to legislate to mitigate their nefarious effect on the national economic development and the individual household budgets.
This project proposes to study the extent of this phenomenon under a dual perspective. Our aim is to apprehend ceremonial economy and its inflationary nature as one of the engines behind the reconfiguration of social bonds in Central Asian societies through its capacity to generate group cohesion. It will also analyse how one-upmanship and social injunctions to spend more contribute to create social differentiation and, in fine, uphold hierarchies and forms of solidarities that reinforce statutory, economic and even political inequalities.
A key parameter in the analysis of these transformations is the transition from a Soviet system based on restricted or discretionary access to consumer goods to a neoliberal market economy and consumerism.
In order to explore the dual potentiality of this phenomenon to generate both social bonds and inequalities and the issues it raises in all their complexity, this project gathers an interdisciplinary team of academics, specialised in history, economy and socio-economics, anthropology, sociology and geography. To this day, research on ceremonial expenditures – exclusively anthropological – primarily delved into the issue over a short period of time and focused on very localised areas, at the expense of potentially detaching it from trends and evolutions affecting Central Asian society at large. A diachronic and intersectional analysis will therefore enable us to examine the scope of this phenomenon over time and through its kinship with other areas of social practice: the Soviet collectivist economic system and the market economy, the institutional framework governing ritual practices, the reconfiguration of local political relationships, the transnational transformations of the Islamic religious sphere and the evolution of consumer practices, etc. Under this perspective, this project will rely on field research – that will comprise investigation in oral history – in rural and urban areas of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and will be divided into three articulated axes of research (later referred to as “tasks”). A historical and contemporary anthropological analysis of these ceremonies will strive to reconstruct the gradual progression of ritual spending and the means allocated to it since the 1960s, and to produce an ethnography of the social dynamics at play within this economy. (Task 1) A socio-economic survey of quantitative and qualitive nature will examine the resources assigned to these ceremonies in the budget of households and their networks. This will be correlated to a study of the development of this ceremonial economy and its service, consumer goods and bank credit markets, leading to an analysis of the forms and modalities of debt. (Task 2) Finally, a review of the public policies regulating these practices and the political and clientelist uses of these ceremonies will be conducted, alongside research on Muslim religious actors and their involvement in the public debates, around the ethics of ceremonial expenditure, as well as in the ceremonial service market. (Task 3)
This research aims at shedding light on the rationales behind ceremonial economy in order to proffer a comparison to the inflationist forms it takes in many other societies over the world, such as China, Vietnam, Senegal, etc. It will help impart expertise of remarkably valuable use on these matters to public institutions, civil society and non-governmental organisations.