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FOREWORD
A. M. Khazanov's global and comparative study of pastoral nomadism is aquite outstanding scholarly achievement. Astonishingly, this task had notbeen attempted before. It very much needed doing, and it is a remarkablepiece of good fortune that, the first time it was attempted, it should be doneso brilliantly. But it is perhaps no accident that it should have been done by aman of Khazanov's background and qualifications. His principal previouswork was a social history of the Scythians,1 and he is, amongst other things,an historian thoroughly at home in the classical sources relevant to ourknowledge of the Scythians, the first properly documented pastoral nomads.His intimacy with this classical material is complemented, on the one hand,by a mastery of the documentation relevant to the medieval and modernnomads of the Eurasian steppe, and on the other, by a remarkablefamiliarity with Western anthropological work on nomads in other parts ofthe world. The synoptic view which we are offered would not have beenpossible without this unusual, and perhaps unique, scholarly equipment.
But it is not, of course, simply a matter of a mastery of the relevantdocumentation. The study of pastoral nomads, as of any other subject, onlycomes to life if inspired by some important question, some hauntingproblem. Khazanov's study is the fruit not merely of his remarkable range oferudition, but equally of the questions which inevitably haunt the Russianand Soviet intellectual tradition of which he is part.
It is of course not surprising that a major study of nomadism shouldemerge from Russia. Russian history and consciousness - whether througheducation or through a genuine folk memory - is pervaded by an awarenessof the nomad problem, more so presumably than any other Europeannation. The Magyars may look back romantically to a nomadic past, and theirpopulist ethnographers may seek the nomad origins of institutions stillfound in nineteenth-century Hungarian villages; but the Russian connectionwith nomads is deeper and more persistent. The first Russian state wasdestroyed by nomads; the Muscovite state began its career as fiscal agent of a nomad empire, and when the balance of power tilted away from theinhabitants of the steppe to those of the forest, this tax-collector state firstceased to pay up, keeping its revenue for itself, and then expanded tobecome, in turn, an empire eventually incorporating and administering anumber of nomad societies, including its own erstwhile rulers. Theexpropriators were in turn expropriated. If the conquest by nomads has leftits mark on the Russian soul, mythology and literature, then the conquest ofnomads has left behind rich administrative and other records of thefunctioning of nomad society.
It is not merely the Russian background which is relevant. The specificquestions asked spring from the sociology of Marxism, and indeed from thewider tradition which has dominated Russian social thought since thenineteenth century, and of which Marxism is but an element.2 The centraltheme in that tradition is the notion of progress or social evolution. This wasa natural idea in a nineteenth-century milieu: it was the perception ofmassive and apparently persistent change which inspired social thought andpresented the problem. The meaning, mechanisms, direction of thatchange, if located, would have constituted its solution.
In Western anthropology and sociology, a rival theory or approach, known as Functionalism, was to be found. This took social cohesion andpersistence as the central datum, and strove to explain it. The best knowncriticism of that school, so well known as to become a hackneyed and almosta joke phrase, was that it 'failed to account for social change'. The critics of Functionalism sometimes went further and suggested that functionalists hada political motive for ignoring or denying change: perhaps they were paid bythe established order to try and stop it, or to discourage anyone fromendeavouring to initiate it, by pretending it did not or could not occur, andought not really to occur; that society was essentially a self-maintaining, self-reproducing system, and that any deviation from this norm waspathological.
Functionalism has often been attacked in this manner. Marxism, muchcriticised in other ways, has strangely seldom been attacked by means of themirror-image criticism to which it seems conspicuously open: can it accountfor stagnation? Pastoral nomadism is not the only area in which this questionis pertinent. In fact, the most proper way to put the question is in a genericform. Was nineteenth-century thought justified in being so smitten by thefact of change and development as to make it the central trait of social life? Isnot change, and in particular sustained cumulative change on the one hand, and really radical, structural change on the other, something quiteuntypical, which may constitute our predicament, but is not normally part ofthe human condition?
When Marxism did eventually come to face this problem, it did not occurprimarily through the consideration of pastoral nomadism, but rather that ofthe famous Asiatic Mode of Production. This form of society, if it exists, contradicts both the sociological theory and the eschatological hopes ofMarxism, a number of times over. It is stagnant and self-perpetuating, thusoffering no hope to the humanity caught in its toils, unless it be accidentalliberation from outside; which, however, must then be contingent on theexistence of some other and less stagnant society, and on the conquest of the'Oriental' society by it. It also offers the spectacle of a self-serving politicalorder built upon violence, and serving the members of the state machineitself and no one else - in other words, a machine of oppression set up not indefence of a pre-existing class system, which has itself been engendered bydifferential relations to the means of production, but by violence andcoercion, and serving a class brought into being by its control of the means ofcoercion, rather than of production. By allowing coercion to be, in thismanner, an independent agent in history, it destroys the optimistic theorythat coercion is only a by-product of economic exploitation and can befinally eliminated when such exploitation ends. It thus encourages what Soviet anthropologists have called the 'idealist theory of violence'. Thiscontradiction between the central doctrines of Marxism and the AsiaticMode of Production has been invoked both against Marxism and against thevery idea of the Asiatic Mode of Production.3
Pastoral nomadism presents a problem for Marxism which is just asfundamental, if less conspicuous. The societies of pastoral nomads are not inthemselves offensive and repugnant, notwithstanding the way in which theymight appear to hapless populations whom they conquer from time to time. On the contrary, they have often exercised a fascination for outsideobservers, as objects not merely of investigation, but of admiration. As oneSoviet scholar pointed out, here every man was not merely shepherd, butalso bard, orator, soldier, historian, senator and minstrel. Nomadicsocieties know a certain equality (or at any rate a precariousness of fortuneprecluding stable and internalised inequality), a wide diffusion of civic, political and military participation, an incapsulation of almost the entireculture in each individual, and a certain quite conscious aversion for thatdivision of labour, that specialisation, which Karl Marx also abhorred andwished to see abolished. They often feel and express a certain aversion forthe specialist even when they need him, and they relegate him to an inferior status. If his specialism is religious and requires reverence, this reverence isliable nevertheless to be tinged with ambivalence.
Ironically, it is the very attractiveness of nomads which creates a problem. It is not simply that the charm of their society is but one side of the coin, ofwhich the other is their brutality and capacity as raiders and conquerors -facts of which the Russians retain a well-maintained historical recollection.The problem does not arise from the fact that they are not altogetherattractive. It is rather that as far as theory goes, they have no business to beattractive at all. Their cohesion, egalitarianism, wide social participation, aversion to specialisation, and rudimentary political structures, would be allvery well, if only pastoral nomads were still at the stage of primitivecommunism, or if they had but recently left it. Then one could welcome theappealing traits of nomadic society as survivals confirming that piece ofsociological reconstruction. The attractions could be credited to theabsence, or at any rate to the but recent emergence, of private property.
Unfortunately, the facts of the case firmly exclude such an interpretation. The rough formula which now seems to be accepted (rightly in my view)amongst Soviet ethnographers for the social organization of nomads is this:communal ownership of pasture, family ownership of herds. Moreover, thefocus of the major debate - and this was long, persistent and fascinating -was land tenure amongst the nomads, not the ownership of animals. Thecritics of the above formula contended that land was being or had beenmonopolized by one class within nomadic society. The private, noncommunalownership of herds was not disputed, even for the past, as farback as the first millennium B.c. If any nomads did indeed pass, as nomads, through the stage of primitive communism, as some Soviet scholars do claimthey did, then this stage had to be short and sweet indeed, short enough toleave no traces in archaeological or any other kind of record.
This may be the appropriate point to indicate to the reader one of theplaces where, due to a divergence of conceptual background, Khazanov'swork might be misunderstood. Khazanov speaks of inequality amongstpastoral nomads. No doubt there may be a genuine empirical disagreementhere with those who find that such pastoralism' is conducive to a relativeequality; and indeed, the degree of inequality amongst nomads variesaccording to time and place, and the whole issue is subject to legitimatedebate. But part of the disagreement at least is terminological andconceptual rather than substantive. Whether or not concerned with thereconstructed 'stage' of primitive communism, Soviet ethnographic theoryis so pervaded by this idea of 'primitive society' - an incomparably moreheavily theory-loaded term in Soviet discussions than it is in the West- that it is difficult for a Soviet scholar not to have this notion at the back of hismind, as a kind of backcloth and yardstick, and not to be influenced by it inhis choice of language, whether or not he is interested in that alleged historicx formation. Where a Western scholar will be struck by the egalitarianism ofnomads in comparison with the (to us) repellent extremes of inequalityamongst Asiatic sedentary agrarian societies, the Soviet scholar - noting thecommunalism of nomads, their non-specialisation, rudimentary politicalcentralisation, and collective control of land- can hardly fail to note that, allthings considered, nomads are a bit less equal than might be expected, giventhe lack amongst them of the preconditions of inequality ( class monopoly ofthe means of production) or indeed of its political reflection (developedstate formation). Compared with other real, concretely observed large-scalesocieties, they do seem rather egalitarian, but when silhouetted against thebackcloth of primitive communism - which they evoke by their feeblestratification and centralization, and their rudimentary division of labour -they seem less equal than others.
Pastoral nomads are a problem for Marxism not merely because of thelack of coherence between their attractive traits and their individualisticeconomy. As in the case of the Asiatic Mode of Production, it is difficult toexplain their political structure in terms of the preconditions or requirementsof their economic and class organization. Given their privateownership of the crucial animals, they seem to have too little by way ofa state, and also too little class stratification. What state formation andsocial stratification there is, seems to be ephemeral and unstable and elusive.
On the other hand, from time to time they seem to acquire far too much ofit: nomads have founded astonishing empires. Too much or too little, butnever just right: the superstructure does not seem to adjust itself to therequirement of the base, as theory requires. Moreover, if the state oscillatesbetween being under-developed and over-developed, theoretical decencywould require that the base keep in step and oscillate similarly (preferably alittle ahead in time, as would be appropriate to its causal priority). Theavailable evidence, alas does not confirm any such expectation. Furthermore, the general nature of that superstructure, the social and politicalinstitutions of nomads, seems to be often dictated directly by politicalmilitaryconsiderations, by the needs of defence, cohesion and security, rather than being a reflection of the requirements of the social organizationof production.
Closely linked to all these problems, there is the issue of whether nomadicsocieties develop. Marxism is profoundly Heraclitean and requires changeto be the law of all things: you ought not to be able to immerse yourself in thesame society twice, or indeed once. Development towards new and higherforms, through the eventually uncontainable tensions of every classendowedsociety, is essential both for the sociological mechanics and for thesoteriology of Marxism: it guarantees the eventual deliverance of mankind. This is the issue central to Khazanov's treatment of nomads, and the issue has a long, complex and fascinating history in Soviet thought, the landmarksof which can only briefly be indicated here.
Soviet orthodoxy had at one time endeavoured to incorporate pastoralnomads in the general onward march of humanity, and to some extent stillcontinues to do so. The general device employed for this end was theattribution to such pastoralists of their own special nomadic feudalism. There was, as one nomadic member of a primitive communal society mighthave ruefully observed to another, a distinctively nomadic way towardsfeudalism. Was there indeed? One of the paradoxes, from a Marxistviewpoint, of Russian ethnography of nomadic peoples under Czarist rule, was that it was possible to find some who were still semi-patriarchal and notyet properly feudal, and others who had entered market relations and weresemi-capitalist and no longer properly feudal, but there was a markedshortage of any nomads who were properly feudal, neither too early nor toolate. The two demi-tones were available, but the primary colour in betweenseemed to be missing from the spectrum.
Nonetheless, feudalism was credited to the nomads. The giant amongstthe scholars putting forward the thesis of nomadic feudalism wasVladimirtsov (who died in 1931). Academician Vladimirtsov was a scholarwith roots in pre-revolutionary Russia. He became interested in the Orientin 1905 as a result of the disastrous Russo-Japanese war, and wanted to studyJapanese. The University of St Petersburg, however, was ill-provided withJapanese scholars, although well-equipped with Mongolian ones; so hebecame a Mongolist instead. Though he noted the need to study Mongolsocial structure in his diary as early as 1910, he spent most of his lifepublishing works on Mongolian language and literature, as well as abiography of Ghengiz Khan, a translation of which by Prince Mirskyappeared in London in 1930. But it was only close to the end of his life, in1930, that he set out to carry out his project, and his crucial book4 appeared posthumously. Its subtitle - Mongol nomad feudalism - conveys its thesis.
Whether or not all his details have stood the test of further research, andwhether or not one agrees with its central idea, it is an impressive piece ofscholarship. Moreover, it pre-dates the excesses of Stalinism and containsneither sycophancy nor any evidence of political motivation of the mainthesis. If one does not accept his conclusion one may, leaving aside details, invoke the following consideration.
Vladimirtsov was primarily an orientalist, and relied on texts above all. Texts tend, however, to stress ideal andlegal requirements, rather than concrete social reality. In texts at any rate, Mongols appear subject to complex nuances of unsymmetrical rights andduties between various ranked layers of the population, in a mannerwhich certainly suggests a 'feudal' society. Furthermore, and moresignificantly, much of the material supporting the feudal interpretationcomes from the imperial period of Mongol history, and shows that, at a timewhen Mongol herdsmen were doubling up as soldiers of the empire, astreamlined military organization was superimposed on the system of clans.The leaders of the decimally organized military units had to be located inprescribed places so that the Emperor could mobilize them, and theordinary Mongol in turn had to graze his flocks in the area assigned to hissuperior military officer. This can be made to look like the granting of land inreturn for military service. In general, the central charge that can be leviedagainst the feudalizing thesis is that it takes its evidence from periods wheneither the Mongols were conquering, or when they were conquered andincorporated in the Manchu empire.
Vladimirtsov's earlier and rather un-doctrinal work does not even cite theclassics of Marxism; by contrast, in later years even revisionists quotescripture for their purpose. But his ideas were destined to become crucial onlater and much more overtly and deliberately political occasions, notably atthe Congress convened in 1954 in Tashkent to consider the nature of socialrelations amongst the nomadic nations of Central Asia and Kazakhstan.5 Here the feudalists prevailed, but did not succeed, or were not allowed, toextinguish all opposition. At least one firmly dissenting voice, that ofTolybekov, refused to be silenced. But before we reach this high point in thedebate about the feudalizing thesis, one other book, highly relevant to themanner in which Soviet ex-nomads were to be related both to the nationalquestion and to the pattern of human history, should be considered.
In 1947 the Soviet Academy of Sciences once again published a book ofgreat interest for the history of this debate, namely Vyatkin's Batyr Srym.6 The hero of the book is the leader of the Kazakh struggle against Russian Czarist imperialism in the late eighteenth century. The book is concernedwith the issue of nationality and nationalism, and the analysis of Kazakhnomadic society is only introduced indirectly, in so far as a national struggle, for a Marxist, must also be interpreted in class terms. Vyatkin's formulationof the problem is interesting. Stalin had shown, he notes, that the nationalproblem is in its essence the peasant problem. Now that is all very well, butwhat do you do when you plainly have a national conflict, but you haveshepherds and pastoralists where there should have been peasants? What doyou do in a situation in which peasants and serfs are in very short supply? Thatis the question. Is the national question not merely a peasant question butalso a shepherd question? There seems to be' no canonical authority forsaying so. So what's to be done?
Another solution is, however, available. At the Tenth Congress of theCPSU(b) in 1921, Comrade Stalin had provided invaluable help towards thesolution of this problem, Vyatkin notes, by characterizing the recentcondition of the various pastoral nations of the Soviet Union aspatriarchal-feudal. Vyatkin here uses an a fortiori argument: if they stillretained patriarchal elements at the time of the October Revolution, theycan be assumed to have been endowed with even more of them two centuriesearlier! This solution, which consists essentially in seeing nomadic society (or rather, in this case, a single nomadic society at a certain time), aspossessing a mixture of patriarchal-communal and of feudal traits, was onedestined also to be adopted later in the masterly studies of Kazakh society by Tolybekov.
Vyatkin sees and recognizes that under conditions of pastoral nomadism, the maintenance of clan units is essential, and these in turn perpetuatecollective ownership of land. So a proper feudalism, in which a class wouldmonopolize land and also deprive ordinary clansmen of their freedom andturn them into serfs, does not develop. Nevertheless, masked by theretention of the ideology of kinship and collectivity, feudal relations doemerge. Vyatkin is sympathetic to his hero and sees him as the champion ofthe oppressed Kazakhs both against Czarist imperialism and against theirown emerging aristocracy, tempted by its own interests into collaborationwith the alien conquerors, or at least into dragging its feet in the nationalstruggle. But a proper pastoral equivalent of a Bauernkrieg neverdeveloped, simply because neither the leader nor the followers ever freedthemselves from the false consciousness of tribalism, which masked anemergent feudal reality.
A theme which is of interest, and which was subsequently to reappear, isthe idea that feudalism amongst pastoral nomads is liable to be connectedwith the imposition of alien domination. It should be added that althoughVyatkin wrote and published at the height of Stalinism, and does contain theinevitable canonical vindications of central points, his book is neverthelessvery interesting, and is argued at an extremely high level.
The next important occasion in the debate occurred in 1954, after Stalin'sdeath, when an inter-disciplinary conference was convened in Tashkent todiscuss the pre-revolutionary history of the nations of Central Asia andKazakhstan, a conference whose proceedings were published the followingyear. 7 This seems to have been a somewhat openly political occasion, andone which for a time established the feudal and developmental theory ofpastoral nomads as the orthodoxy. Its main protagonist was one L.P. Potapov. He castigated8 the view, prevalent before the Revolution and evenduring the early years following it, that these populations had lived within atribal structure in which kin relations prevailed and hence there were noclasses or class conflict, as a 'theory ... used by bourgeois nationalists, rightist opportunists and rigid ideologists and defenders of exploitativeclasses destined for liquidation amongst these nationalities ...'. (Italics mine.)
Potapov's concern is clearly different from Vyatkin's. Vyatkin endeavouredto give a class interpretation to a national conflict which hadoccurred two centuries earlier. Potapov is, in effect, offering an interpretationof very recent, post-revolutionary conflicts. If he had allowed that thesenomadic nations were made up of kin communities, without anything muchin the way of class formation, he would have been faced by a problem. Onecan imagine a Kazakh herdsman in his pastoral collective, scratching his earwith a bit of stubble as his herd grazes peacefully, and wondering: 'now ifweKazakhs really had no classes to speak of before the Revolution, whoexactly was it that we liquidated during the recent decades? A rumbusiness ...
Potapov's emphatic feudalism provides a clear and unambiguous answerto this conundrum. In his own words, they were 'exploitative classesdestined for liquidation'. Nothing could be clearer. At the same time, herescues nomads for a developmental vision of human history, ensuring thatthey, and thus humanity at large, were available for eventual salvation, whether or not they happened to be engulfed by an alien imperialism. OnPotapov's account, nomads must have passed through, as pastoral nomads, at least three very important and distinct stages - primitive communism, patriarchal society and feudalism. Potapov asserts in so many words9 that the earlier nomadic pastoral community had shared ownership not merely of pasture, but also of herds. His use of the argument from survivals is strange. He admits that the conditions of nomadic pastoralism were unfavourable tocollective ownership of herds, that nomadism only began in the firstmillennium B .c., and that by the middle of the millennium, when historical andarchaeological evidence concerning nomads becomes more richly available,communalism is no longer to be found. Yet survivals of it are alleged topersist in more or less contemporary ethnography! This seems to imply thata highly unstable social condition, which could barely have lasted a fewcenturies before it was displaced because of its internal organisationalincoherence, nevertheless leaves social marks which then tenaciouslyperpetuate themselves for two and a half millennia …
Whatever the merits of his anthropological ideas, it would be difficult todeny that Potapov was capable of eloquence and vigour in politicaldenunciation. 10 The person whom he denounced with specially forcefulirony was S. E. Tolybekov. 'It seems to me, Comrade Tolybekov, that theKhans and Sultans, if only they were here, would receive you with a standingovation ...’ These feudal lords would welcome Tolybekov's views that theywere not true feudal lords after all, because they did not own the land andpasture used by their societies. Starting out from such erroneous theoreticalpremisses, one can reach erroneous political conclusions, and end upobjectively as a defender of large feudal property-owners, Potapov notespointedly. Tovarishch Tolybekov, Potapov adds darkly, finds himself in justsuch a danger.
The objective dangers of Tolybekov's position (in whichever of the twopossible senses one chooses to interpret that phrase) evidently did notintimidate him. Far from it. On the contrary, they seem to have stimulatedhim into a lifetime of devoted scholarship concerning the social history ofthe Kazakhs, the theoretical backbone of which is clearly a passionaterepudiation of the 'feudal' thesis. His two books on this subject, whichadmittedly repeat each other in some measure, contain superb andextremely rich ethnography, coherently and interestingly organized aroundhis central ideas. 11
One of the most interesting aspects of Tolybekov is his values. He ishimself of Kazakh background, and his name is clearly a Russification ofToly Bey. (Amongst the Kazakhs, however, unlike other Turkic groups, beyis an honorific term not implying membership of a hereditary aristocracy.) Unlike his predecessor Vyatkin, Tolybekov repudiates Batyr Srym's risingof 1783, which he insists was motivated by nothing better than the pursuit ofloot, slave-raiding, and opposition to the unification of the junior Kazakhzhus (maximal segment) with Russia.
Elsewhere, and more than once, Tolybekov insists that the Kazakhs united with Russia voluntarily. (In fact, fear of renewed aggression by the then ascendant Djungarian Mongols mayhave had some connection with Kazakh eagerness for Czarist protection.) His admission that Batyr Srym and his followers opposed this unificationdoes not amount to a contradiction, in so far as he explicitly says that thebeneficiaries of these raids by Batyr Srym were simply the members of theparasitic batyr class, such as Srym himself. (On this point he agrees with S.Z. Zimanov, who otherwise takes a kinder view of Srym's movement. Seen.11.) Srym was, as you might say, a feudal bandit, rather than a social bandit.
Tolybekov's warm ex post facto endorsement and ratification of theincorporation of the Kazakhs in the Russian world, does not, so to speak, hang in the air in an opportunistic manner, as a piece of politicalsycophancy. Tolybekov's retrospective repudiation of the primary resistanceof the Kazakhs to Czarist imperialism is, on the contrary, rooted in animportant, convincing, and persistently reaffirmed sociological theme: thatnomadic society is stagnant. It does not, and cannot, as pastoral nomadicsociety, develop any further. It constitutes a sociological cul-de-sac, or, touse the expressive Russian word, a tupik. His sociological reasoning as towhy this is so, and must be so, is complex, subtle and well documented: itwould certainly deserve intensive study and a much more detailedexposition than it is possible to offer here. It also contains some surprising elements, such as the idea that the protracted period of awaiting economicreward amongst pastoralists, which is a consequence of the long gestationperiod of camels, inhibits the development of productive forces. This is inmarked contrast to the Western tendency to see Delayed Return, and thecapacity to wait for it, as the prime mark of economic virtue and a crucialfactor in innovation - an idea forcefully reintroduced into anthropology byDr James Woodburn. 12 Tolybekov's repudiation of Kazakh nomadicseparatism strictly follows from this theory. On their own they weredebarred from any real development.
More specifically, and with a great wealth of ethnographic and historicaldocumentation, Tolybekov denies the capacity of pastoral nomads ingeneral, and of Kazakhs in particular, to advance anywhere near a ripe andproper feudalism. No feudalization without sedentarization might well behis motto. The picture of Kazakh traditional society which emerges from hisanalysis and documentation contains precisely those traits which have ledWestern scholars to use terms such as 'segmentary' in connection withpastoral nomads: the weak, elusive, ephemeral nature of politicalcentralization, the wide diffusion of power and political participation, theprecarious and relatively mild degree of social differentiation, theprominence of collectives practising mutual aid and self-defence. One mayspeak of a ruling stratum and also of a servile one, but both are very small incomparison with the numerically dominant stratum of ordinary freetribesmen. The number of servile families attached to the household of aruling khan barely reaches double figures, and suggests the camp of achieftain, not the court of an oriental monarch.
Tolybekov roundly accusesthe feudal school of projecting Western or Russian medieval developmentsonto the Eurasian steppe. Even as conquerors, the Hun or Mongol rulersdid not have the capacity for establishing feudalism which was displayed byTeutonic barbarians, who were familiar with the use of serf labour. Tolybekov argues in effect that, compared to central Asia, the West wasfortunate in possessing a better class of barbarian, if you know what I mean,who were endowed with a far greater potential for progress. If anyone haddeveloped a mature feudalism in central Asia, it was the sedentarypopulation of Khorezm, but what it had built up was destroyed by theTatars.
Tolybekov invokes S. P. Tolstov 13 who pointed out that it wasKhorezm and Kiev which, by their resistance and sacrifice, exhausted theMongols sufficiently to save Europe from also being overrun by them. It wasKhorezmian and Kievan blood which saved Europe, and thus allowed it todevelop.
Thus Tolybekov unambiguously condemns nomadic pastoral society, when considered from the viewpoint of its contribution to the evolution ofhuman society. It constitutes a barrier to further development. He firmlydenies that it can ever reach even mature feudalism - let alone anythingbeyond that. He firmly rejects the view of his predecessors that underneaththe patriarchal and kin terminology of nomads, a feudal society was hiding, wildly signalling to be liquidated. He rather manages to score against hisopponents, who claimed that this underlying feudal reality had succeeded inestablishing itself surreptitiously, under the guise of patriarchal and clanideas, and had used this camouflage to befuddle its potential opponents, such as the hapless Batyr Srym. If this doctrine is taken seriously, it seems toimply that a transition from one social form to another can take placequietly, without the aid of violence as the licensed midwife of history; that, in brief, a peaceful transition to feudalism is possible.
Tolybekov evidentlyobtains a good deal of satisfaction from highlighting this implicit heterodoxyof his opponents. Tolybekov himself characterizes nomadic society aspatriarchal-feudal, as a transitional stage in which some weak feudal traitsappear in a pre-feudal social order. His use of the term 'transitional'(perekhodnye) is strange, in so far as it is absolutely central to his muchreiterated position that this transition can never be completed by nomads asnomads. Is a transition that can never be completed a transition? Can abridge be a cul-de-sac?
But if Tolybekov roundly condemns the lack of growth-potential ofnomadic society, and welcomes its incorporation in a society which did havethe seeds of growth, he is far from hostile to nomad culture, and Kazakhculture in particular. His account of its merits is eloquent and moving.
Every illiterate nomadic Kazakh, like all nomads of the world, was in the fifteenth tothe eighteenth centuries simultaneously a shepherd and a soldier, an orator and ahistorian, poet and singer. All national wisdom, assembled by the ages, existed onlyin oral form.14
Thus, though Tolybekov does not say so, nomads already in somemeasure exemplify that multiplicity of roles, that overcoming of the divisionof labour, that multi-faceted human personality, which Marx in the GermanIdeology predicted only for the liberated man of the future. Tolybekov infact warns the Russian reader against the unimaginative philistinism whichmight lead him to fail to appreciate the beauty of Kazakh lyrico-epic poetry, in which, for instance, the movements of the great Kazakh beauty, Kyz-Zhibek, a kind of Helen of Troy, are compared to those of a three-yearoldram. The failure to appreciate the beauty of such a simile, Tolybekovsternly warns us, only goes with an inability to understand that aesthetics vary with the material conditions of life. Certainly, given a pastoralinfra-structure, it is entirely fitting to compare a girl with a three-year-oldram. Even without being a pastoral nomad, I find the idea of a girl movinglike a three-year-old ram exciting. Perhaps, one wonders, the Kazakhsactually preferred a three-year-old ram?
Whatever the truth about these details of Kazakh culture, and whateverthe general terminology he employs to describe it, there can be no doubtconcerning Tolybekov's characterization of Kazakh society and of pastoralnomadic society in general. Its culture is widely and evenly diffused andincapsulated in its members, its stratification is ephemeral and weak, itspolitical formations are fragile and elusive, and even if on occasion theygrow into something bigger, this leads to no permanent, irreversible, structural changes in society. It is this doctrine, and all it implies in terms ofthe intellectual tradition within which it was articulated, which is central toTolybekov's work, and to his life-long struggle with the 'nomadic feudalism'thesis; though he must be at least as much valued for the richness andsuggestiveness of his historical and ethnographic material.
The two men who continued Tolybekov's argument against thefeudalizing thesis, and the recognition of the basically stagnant or oscillatingnature of pastoral nomadic society, are G. E. Markov and A. M. Khazanov.Khazanov presents his own case in the present volume better than anyoneelse could do on his behalf, and there is no need to summarize his position.But the remarkable work of Markov, the present holder of the Chair ofEthnography at the University of Moscow, does deserve mention in thiscontext.15
Markov and Khazanov (Markov is somewhat older) seem to have reachedsimilar conclusions independently. If Tolybekov's central concern is theKazakhs (though he firmly generalises his conclusions), the main concern ofMarkov's book and of Khazanov's present work is comparative (though thisis not the case for Khazanov's earlier work on Scythians). The backgroundknowledge they bring to this theme is not identical. Markov refers in hisbook to many years of repeated seasonal field trips to the nomadic, or ratherex-nomadic, parts of the Soviet Union, and in his book he combines thisethnographic background with a very thorough use of the traditionalhistorical documentation concerning the nomads of Asia (those of Africabeing excluded from its purview). Khazanov was initially a historian of theScythians, and his major previous work deals with them. His concern, in thatwork, with the cyclical pattern of Scythian history, is then expanded into ageneral theory of pastoral nomadism, expounded in this volume, andsustained by a remarkable familiarity with modern Western anthropologicalliterature concerning pastoral nomads.
As Markov's excellent study is not available in Western languages, a briefaccount of some of its points is apposite here. He notes that the origin ofpastoral nomadism remains unclear, but that it was preceded by complexnon-nomadic agriculture. 16 He locates the emergence of full nomadism ataround 1000 B.c. But he explicitly endorses Tolybekov's assertion that inessential social features, the Huns of the third and second centuries B.c., theMongols of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Kazakhs of thefifteenth to eighteenth centuries, were similar. However, whilst endorsingTolybekov's critique of the feudalizing school, and castigating the evidentlytraumatic 1954 discussions as scholastic, Markov does not endorse theterminology - at least - of Tolybekov's positive solution, i.e. his generalcharacterization of pastoral nomadic society as 'transitional patriarchalfeudal'.He shares Tolybekov's view that evidence for feudal land relationsamongst nomads is drawn either from what the Czarist administration hadimposed on them, in violation of their own customary law, or (when basedfor instance on Piano Carpini's reports on the Mongol empire) fromtemporary devices superimposed by Ghengiz Khan on the Mongol clanorganization in the interests of military centralization. He also assertsexplicity that amongst nomads, developed forms of class conflict are absent.'History knows no rising of nomadic tribes, comparable to peasant risings.'17
Inequality amongst nomads is not very great, and when it does emerge, isa consequence of war and trading rather than of the normal functioning ofthe economy, within which leaders, members of the privileged stratum,have no interest in depriving their fellow tribesmen of access to the means ofproduction. (One might say that if capitalism requires a reserve army ofunemployed, pastoral nomadic chiefs need a reserve army sans phrase; andthey can hardly deprive themselves of it, by denying their shepherdreserviststhe means of subsistence.) Productive relations had the form ofeconomic cooperation or consent, not of feudal dependency. Markovcriticises Tolybekov for overconcentrating on the relatively small classes ofleaders and servile dependents, to the detriment of the far larger and moretypical middle stratum of free tribesmen. It is this stress which enabled Tolybekov to include the feudal element in his 'patriarchal-feudal' formula.
In other ways, Markov is distinguished from Tolybekov by his theoreticalcaution. Where Tolybekov did have his transitional (with a never-to-becornpletedtransition) formula for characterizing pastoral nomads generically, Markov declares the problem of the sociological classification ofnomads to be unsolved, and thus refrains from attaching any formal label totheir social structure. Where Tolybekov asserts with firmness, and perhaps atouch of bitterness, that nomads could not develop further than they did, Markov contents himself with asserting that they did not. Further, he insiststhat in order to understand their social structure, we must look at theposition and role of chiefs amongst them. It could be considerable, intemporary military and imperial situations. But the leaders did not form aclosed stratum and did not retain stratum privileges when they lost theirleading position. The kinsmen of Ghengiz Khan did have a few privileges, but it did not amount to much. Members of the White Bone clan amongstKhazaks (supposedly kinsmen of Ghengiz Khan) had no great power, evenif they attained chiefly status, and were often called chiefs-faineants (mnimymi nachalnikami). They collected no rent and, to maintain theirposition, were obliged to entertain lavishly, which put a great strain on theirhouseholds.
Markov asserts explicitly that the nomad empires had no economic base. Amongst agrarian populations, government, once it appears, is irreversible,and leads to permanent structural changes; but amongst nomads,centralization, in any case incomplete, is ephemeral, and is followed by areversal to communal organization. Thus Markov ends with a cyclical oroscillatory account of the socio-political organization of nomads, not unlikethat of lbn Khaldun (who is not invoked by name). But before claimingMarkov's conclusions for an lbn Khaldunian sociology, it is only fair to notecertain differences. (These may in fact reflect significantly the differencesbetween the Eurasian steppe on the one hand, and the Arabian peninsulaand North Africa on the other.) For lbn Khaldun, urban life is a permanentnecessity, and pastoral tribalism is the only source of state-formation, thestate being the gift of the tribe to the ever-present city. Markov's account onthe other hand does not make urban life quite so essential as acomplementary element for the nomads; and furthermore, sedentary areasseem to be credited with an endogenous and independent capacity togenerate political centralization - they do not need to be provided with it bytribal conquest.
Finally, it is worth noting the extent to which Khazanov's remarkableearlier work on the Scythians already fomulates the ideas systematized incomparative perspective in this volume. The central idea of continuity in theEurasian steppe, as opposed to a developmental pattern, is alreadyxxivForewordasserted. In the steppe, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Alans, Khazars, Pechenegs, Turks, Polovtsi, Tatars, the Golden Horde, Kazakhs and othersfollowed each other, but without any basic structural change. He criticisesefforts by scholars such as Vainshtein, 18 Artamonov, Griaznov, Chernikovand Smirnov to find a systematic difference between early and late nomads. It is true that the earlier 'houses on wheels' were replaced by yurts that canbe dismantled, and that nomads of Iranian speech were replaced by othersof Turkish/Mongolian speech; but there has been no fundamental social change.
Within Scythian history itself, a certain cyclical pattern emerged. TheScythians established three successive empires, and only the last of thesewas accompanied by sedentarization and hence by a real state, as opposed toa merely rudimentary tribute-extracting organization of the first twoScythian formations. During this earlier period, the tension between urbanand sedentary life and the pastoral nomadic style was already apparent, inthe form of hostility between Greek and Scythian. The greater theireconomic and cultural complementarity, the greater also the politicalconflict. The Young Scythians, as Khazanov describes them on an implicitanalogy with the Young Turks, were notoriously drawn to Greek music andwine (a taste which was of course ruthlessly exploited by Greek exporters), and they delighted in the flute-playing of a Greek captive. But theirnarodnik King repudiated these Western temptations, and was heard toobserve that he preferred the neighing of his horse to that damned Greekflautist. Plus ça change ...
The general conclusions of that study of the Scythians could be summedup as follows: there was urban-tribal economic interdependence, combinedwith political and cultural tension: political development was cyclical; andsocial stratification and political centralisation was weak amongst thenomads except at times when they turned themselves into a dominant, conquering stratum of a wider society. Such conclusions can only givepleasure to the present writer, for he is after all a card-carrying Ibn Khaldunian.
Fontanili, September 1981
ERNEST GELLNER's
1 A. M. Khazanov: Sotsialnaia istoriia skifov. Nauka, Moscow, 1975.
2 Cf. Alexander Vucinich: Social Thought in Tsarist Russia. The Quest for a General Science ofSociety, 1861-1917. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1976.
3 There is an excellent discussion of the incompatibility of the notion of the Asiatic Mode ofProduction with the central doctrines of Marxism in V. N. Nikiforov, Vostok i vsemirnaiaistoriia, Nauka, Moscow, 1975. Nikiforov's work constitutes a Soviet answer to the Wittfogelthesis; but Nikiforov agrees with Wittfogel about the incompatibility of the AMP and Marxism. He disagrees with him only about the question concerning which of the two mustgive way. For a discussion of Nikiforov's argument, see my 'Soviets against Wittfogel', forthcoming.
4 B. Ya. Vladimirtsov: Obshchestvennyi stroi mongolov. Mongolskii kochevoi feodalizm. lzdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Leningrad, 1934.
Also translated into French as: Le Regime Social des Mongols: le feudalisme nomade; preface par Rene Grousset; translation par Michael Carsaw. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve,1948.
One of the early Soviet ethnographic affirmations of the feudalist thesis is to be found in R. Kabo. Ocherki istorii i ekonomiki Tuvy (Sketches of the History and Economy of Tuva), Gosudarstvennoe Sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe Izdatelstvo, Moscow/Leningrad, 1934.
An important theoretical contribution to the debate also appeared the same year, by S. F. Tolstov, Genezis feodalizma v kochevykh skotovodcheskikh obshchestvakh (The genesis offeudalism in nomadic pastoral societies), which constituted a chapter of Osnovnye problemygenezisa i razvitia feodalnovo obshchestva (Basic Problems of the Genesis and Developmentof Feudal Society), ed. by S. N. Bykovskii and others, OGIZ, 1934. This constituted theproceedings of a plenary session of the state Academy of the History of Material Culture, which took place from 20 to 22 June 1933.
Tolstov was destined to play an important part in Soviet ethnography. His contribution isinteresting, amongst other reasons, for his open stress on the political significance of theproblem. For instance, he affirms in this contribution: 'At present, the "tribal survivals"
emerge as the most dangerous weapon in the hands of the class enemy, aiming to use them atthe new stage of the class war in his struggle against the construction of socialism.
5 Materialy Obedinennoi nauchnoi sessii, posviashchennoi istorii Srednei Azii i Kazakhstanav dooktiabrskii period. Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, Tashkent, 1955.L. P. Potapov reaffirms the feudal thesis, with special reference to Tuva, in his contributionto a publication which appeared as late as 1975, namely Sotsialnaia istoriia narodov Azii (Social History of the Nations of Asia) eds, A. M. Reshetov and Ch. M. Taksami, Nauka, Moscow, 1975.
6 M. P. Vyatkin: Batyr Srym. lzdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Moscow, Leningrad, 1947.
7 Materialy Obedinennoi nauchnoi sessii etc.
8 Op. cit., p. 17.
9 Op. cit., p. 22.
10 Op. cit., p. 138.
11 S. E. Tolybekov: Obshchestvenno-ekonomicheskii stroi kazakhov v XVII-XIX vekakh. Kazgosizdat, Alma-Ata, 1959, and S. E. Tolybekov: Kochevoe obshchestvo kazakhov vXVII - nachale XX veka. Politiko-ekonomicheskii analiz. Alma-Ata, 1971.
A year before Tolybekov's first book, a volume appeared dealing specifically with theKazakhs, and still affirming their feudal status, at any rate during the first half of thenineteenth century. It was S. Z. Zimanov's Obshchestvennyi stroi kazakhov pervoipoloviny XIX veka (Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR, Alma-Ata. 1958). ButZimanov was obliged to moderate his thesis: 'The monopolistic right of the feudals to pasturewas a factual and not a juridical right.' (op. cit., p. 148.) Here again, feudalism is said to belurking under a communal, tribal guise, preserving earlier legal forms. Zimanov stresses inparticular the role played by the subtle rank differentiation within the two principal, 'real'classes (the rulers and the exploited), in inhibiting the development of an effective classconsciousness. The consequence of this was that when genuine social movements arise – and he is willing to class Srym 's rebellion as such a movement - in the end they serve not the narodwhich provides its driving force, but the egoistic interest of this or that sub-stratum of theruling class, which happened to associate itself with it. (op. cit., pp. 288-9.) He admits thatthe feudalism of the Kazakhs was poorly developed, even in the nineteenth century, butconnects this with the absence of urban traders, artizans etc. amongst them. (op. cit., p. 290.) This is a theme which also reappears in the work of S. Vainshtein (seen. 18).
A similar picture of part-feudal, part-patriarchal and communal society emerges from themajor book devoted to the Kirgiz, S. M. Abramzon's Kirgizy i ikh etnogeneticheskie iistoriko-kulturnye sviazi (Nauka, Leningrad, 1971). The author asserts the presence of'feudal relations' amongst the Kirgiz in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and assertsthat these must have emerged no later than the end of the first millennium A.D. But he rapidlygoes on to qualify this by saying that the low and backward level of productive force foundamongst pastoral nomads, ensured that these features remained intertwined with'pre-feudal, kin-patriarchal, communal relations' (pp. 155 and 156). Such a formulation iscertainly congruent with Tolybekov's views. But Abramzon goes out of his way to polemicizewith L. Krader (Social Organisation of the Mongol-Turkic Pastoral Nomads, Indiana Univ. Pub!., 1963) for exaggerating the importance of corporate kin groups, and missing out thefeudal traits (p. 209).
12 'Hunters and Gatherers today and reconstruction of the past', in E. Gellner (ed.) Soviet andWestern Anthropology, Duckworth and Columbia University Press, London and New York, 1980.
13 Po sledam drevnekhorzmskoi tsivilizatsii, Moscow and Leningrad, 1948, pp. 321-2.
14 S. E. Tolybekov, Obshchestvenno-ekonomicheskii stroi etc., p. 426.
15 G. E. Markov: Kochevniki Azii. Izdatelstvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, Moscow, 1976.
16 A recent work dealing specifically with this issue is V. A. Shnirelman, Proiskhozhdenieskotovodstva, Nauka, Moscow, 1980.The latest contribution to the problem of the socio-political organization of nomads seemsto be S. A. Plemneva's Kochevniki srednevekovia (Medieval Nomads), Nauka, Moscow,1982. This work combines an attempt at formulating a three-stage theory of nomadic society, with a stress on the impermanence of political formation amongst nomads (a stress speciallymanifest in a fourfold typology of their political decline and disintegration). This would seemto imply a marked concession to an 'oscillatory', rather than developmental, theory ofnomadic political formations.
17 Op. cit., p. 305. The absence of visible or self-conscious stratification in central Asia was apractical and political, as well as a theoretical problem for the Soviets. Cf. Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1974. Thebook discusses the attempt to see the feminine sex as a whole as the exploited class, for lack ofany other plausible and really satisfactory candidate for this role.
18 One of these is accessible in English. Cf. Sevyan Vainshtein: Nomads of South Siberia.Edited and with an Introduction by Caroline Humphrey, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980. This work of Vainshtein's however is concerned primarily with theethnography of the Tuvinians, rather than with questions of theory, though the book doescontain a brief summary of Soviet debates on these matters. For a recent discussion bynumerous Western Scholars of these general problems, see Pastoral Production and Society, collectively edited, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979. A Western anthropologistspecifically concerned with the central Asian peoples in the Russian orbit is L. Krader. Seehis Peoples of Central Asia, The Hague, 1963.
Introduction to the second edition
Habent sua fata libelli. The manuscript of the first edition of this book wasfinished in Moscow at the end of 1979 and was immediately sent to Cambridge.I had many good reasons to hurry. In the worsening political and ideologicalclimate in the USSR, there was no chance to publish the book in the country-itwould be considered too revisionist (Khazanov, 1992a). Moreover, it was quitepossible that the Soviet authorities might attempt to prevent its publication in theWest. Two weeks after I received a message that my manuscript had reachedEngland safely, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Two weeks later, I appliedto emigrate.
Actually, I had decided to try to emigrate several years earlier, but writingthis book delayed my application. However, January 1980 was not the best timefor such an endeavor. The Soviets never showed good will towards those whopreferred the capitalist hell to the communist paradise. In the first half of the1980s, when detente collapsed completely, they tended to tolerate such peopleeven less than in the 1970s. Just as I had expected, my application was rejected. What I did not anticipate was that it was rejected on the curious ground that myemigration "was not in the interest.… " In spite of all my attempts to inquirewhose interests the authorities were concerned about-my own, the Soviet state, or maybe the world capitalist system - I never managed to get an answer to thisquestion. Thus, I became but another refusenik with all the consequences.
After my application, the Soviet authorities did their best, among other things, to cut all my communications with the West. To a certain extent they failed butthat was not their fault. Even the Iron Curtain had some holes. Nevertheless, it took almost five years for this book to be published. Duringthose years the staff at Cambridge University Press was extremely patient, understanding, and sympathetic; they were eager to assist me in all possibleways. I wish to use this opportunity to express my great gratitude to them. Manyother people, both my colleagues and those who did not have any connectionwith anthropology whatsoever, also helped me considerably. Thus, MichaelLavigne, an American who at that time was living in Moscow, assisted me verymuch in my correspondence with the West through clandestine channels, al … |
