Tajikistan
Central Asian People.
Modern Development.
Central Asia is divided today among Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, and Mongolia. The traditional ways of life of the indigenous Turks and Mongols have been radically changed by the revolutionary processes of the 20th century. From the 1920s on, millions of Russians and other peoples from different parts of the erstwhile Soviet Union settled in Central Asia, continuing a process that had begun in the 19th century. The surviving remnants of older regimes, such as the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, were replaced by the political system of the powerful Soviet Union. As a consequence, the profound divergencies and symbiosis between cultivators and pastoralists were virtually eradicated. The two great cultural wings were caught in a single institutional system emanating from the regime of the Soviet Union.
Central Asian agriculture has continued to require artificial irrigation, and the same crops are raised: the cereal grains (notably wheat and rice), cotton (of improved sorts), vegetables, hemp and other fibres, fruits and melons. Tractors and trucks have advanced the mechanization of agriculture. The agricultural population still lives in villages of sun-dried brick, but electric power is everywhere. The pastoral practices of Central Asia and Mongolia have been rationalized. The herds now consist of great flocks or herds of one type of animal, instead of mixed combinations as of old, because the family no longer maintains the old pastoral practices; teams of herders are now employed instead. The family used to need animals in a definite proportion; now the herding family lives in a settled village and the herders go off to ranges with the animals for pasturing (transhumance). They no longer live in tents but in the same kinds of houses and villages as the tillers of the soil.
Under Soviet rule, the Islamic faith was much restricted, the number of colleges and mosques reduced, and the brotherhoods and foundations generally banned in the Central Asian republics. Since their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, however, religious proselytization has been permitted again.
Each of the former Soviet Central Asian republics bears the name of one of the major peoples of the region. Kazakstan is included with these republics in the ethnographic accounts. Russians form the majority of the population of Kazakstan, and they are second in number to the native people in each of the other republics. The Russian migration into the area accompanied a vast effort, begun in the 1930s, to collectivize the agriculture and the herding according to the Soviet pattern and to nationalize all the land for farming and herding and all the manufacturing and mining industry. The cities were built up along modern lines and transportation modernized. The Russian population has been closely associated with such developments, as well as with government administration. The capitals and other cities of the region have become centres of industry, trade, education, the arts, and public entertainment. The natural resources of Central Asia are intensively exploited, including oil, iron ore, coal, and nonferrous metals. Railroads and airfields have replaced the caravans of old.
The Mongolian People's Republic was developed on the pattern of the Soviet system; Mongolia long was a member of several economic and political blocs of nations in which the U.S.S.R. was the dominant power, although by the 1990s this political and economic relationship was diminishing. Ulaanbaatar, the administrative, industrial, and cultural centre of the country, contains one-quarter of the total population.
The ancient lineage and clan systems have been entirely forgotten. The genealogies are no longer kept up because their function in social organization, marriage, and military and economic activities is no longer applicable in modern Central Asia. The great extended families, under a patriarch's dominion, have been replaced by the new forms of the family, small in size and composed of parents and their children. The father of the family is typically a wage earner in a factory or state farm. The children now go to schools run by the Islamic or Buddhist clergy.
Modern technology is being introduced throughout the region, and modern medical, educational, and welfare practices have been instituted. The desire of parents to have many children in order to have someone to take care of them in old age is no longer a deeply felt social incentive; medical practices have reduced infant mortality so that the need to have many children in the hopes that a few would survive to care for the parents has likewise been reduced as a social force. These trends hold equally for pastoralists and cultivators alike, because the old differences in institutional organization between them have been eradicated by the broad trends of modernization and collectivization.
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