The Ersari Türkmen of Afghanistan : some aspects of social and economic organization and change in a central Asian Türkic society

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the socio-economic organization and change of the Ersari Tlirkmen, a little known people of Northern Afghanistan. They live in Afghan Turkistan, a region which is ethnically very mixed and where members of many different tribal and linguistic groups are in competition for scarce resources. Ersari ethnicity and tribal identity are constructed in terms of language, religion(Sunni Islam) and a patrilineal genealogy which links them with the founding TUrkmen ancestor. Fieldwork was carried out under difficult conditions for seventeen months in 197 6/1977 before the Saur Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion. The study, therefore, offers an ethnographic account of a world that has vanished. The main purpose of the study is twofold: 1) to provide a detailed ethnographic account of the Ersari TUrkmen of the Mingajik area; 2) to present an analysis of the different ways watani (indigenous) and muhajirin (refugee) Ersari communities are dealing with social and economic changes brought about by an influx of several waves of TUrkmen refugees from Soviet Central Asia during and after the Russian Revolution; and by firmer integration of the area into the Afghan nation-state by the Central Government. Concentration of the analysis is on the basic social unit of Ersari social organization, the oba, a small lineage-based community of some 6-26 households whose members are linked by agnatic and affinal ties, multiplex relations of economic co-operation and ritual duties and obligations. The study tries to reveal social and ideological processes in the lives of those small communities struggling to maintain authonomy within the encapsulating larger and more complex political and economic structures. The watani, characterized by a pastoral Weltanschauung and ideology, thus representing the traditional element of Ttirkmen society, are slow in changing from a nomadic or semi-nomadic subsistence economy to a mixed agropastoral, largely cash-oriented ecnomic existence. On the contrary, the refugees, due to their generally destitute state as newcomers to a foreign land, were forced to adapt a more diversified economy to safeguard economic viability. Today (1976) they represent the wealthy, politically influential and powerful segment of Ti.irkmen society. They are well integrated in the regional market economy and have largely undertaken a shift from subsistence economy to agropastoral production and trade and from tribal identities to social class.