During fieldwork primarily conducted by Wang Jianmin in the Tianshan and Altai mountains among several Kazakh herding groups, there were frequent discussions of the relevance of the state’s designated identification of these herders as "Kazakh nationality" in relation to their own notion of "tribal" (Kazakh: juz) identity. In several discussions with government officials and local herdsmen, we found that the notion of tribal identity has not only resurfaced as an important marker of different levels and kinds of Kazakh collective identifications, but particularly since the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, the term "tribe" has increasingly dominated Western discourses about identity in Central Asia as well. The discourse of "tribe" is thus contingent upon fairly recently introduced state identifications of "nationality," which has also been called into question by the establishment in 1991 of the new nation of Kazakhstan. The redeployment of the notion of "tribe," after lying discarded in the waste bin of anthropological history for nearly two decades, has taken place in both popular and more scholarly depictions to account for the resurgence of ethnic nationalisms and communal identities around the globe. By contrast, this paper will argue that people subscribe to certain identities, under certain highly contextualized moments of state- and self-identifications, and these meanings shift in the context of social and political relations. These identifications, though regulated and imposed by the nation-state, are negotiated along rather stereotypical lines of representations.

Though anthropologists discarded the notion of "tribe" over two decades ago, since it was felt that "tribe" was often only applied to less developed, non-Western societies (viz., "they are tribal; we are ethnic"), the idea of tribalism has resurfaced to explain the recent reassertions of identity politics as distant and diverse as the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Africa.¹ Central Asia, given its historic connection to nomadic and pastoralist societies, is most vulnerable to suggestions that it is "tribalism" that is at the core of the new Central Asian identities (see Garthwaite 1993: 142). In China, the earlier interest in tribal ("buluo") identifications was almost completely replaced by that state-designated term of minzu (nation, nationality, ethnicity, people). For Chinese scholars and officials, the term minzu has so dominated public discourses about identity that most people assume their minzu identification is a natural part of their history, extending back several millennia prior to the rise of the nation-state. The naturalized identification of minzu is accepted in China as not only the official designation of ethnicity and nationality, but also the basic expression of identity which everyone possesses from birth (and is stamped on their identity card, minzu shenfen).

While it has perhaps become axiomatic that ideas of identity, ethnicity, and nationality are socially constructed, the problem with suggesting that these identities are generally "imagined" is that Anderson is often taken too literally (in ways he may have never imagined), as if ethnic and national identities were completely "invented" (to use Hobsbawm's and Ranger's formulation which can be, and is just as often as Anderson, completely misconstrued) out of thin air, a fiction of the collective imaginaire, or an idea which arose in the smoke-filled drawing rooms of a few nouveau British aristocrats (as Liah Greenfeld 1992 seems to suggest). As a corrective, this paper was written out of a desire to locate the rise of national identifications in particular moments of history, coterminous but not synonymous with the end of empire, the rise of colonialism, the expansion of global capital, and the domination of groups gradually classified and taxonomized as subject peoples, ethnicities, and eventually nations. This paper with its focus on the Kazakhs of the Altai mountains in Northwest China, a group with relatives on all sides of the border (in Mongolia, Russia, and Kazakhstan), also problematizes the way we see Central Asia, and how Central Asians might see each other.²

This paper places national identifications in a field of contemporary and historical social relations, particularly with regard to certain interacting social groups and newly invented nations in Central Asia and China. Given the long history of interactions with powerful others and colonizing empires on the Eurasian steppe, a purely relativist or, at the other extreme, a de-historicized essentialized position with regard to identity formation is particularly questionable. Both extremes ignore issues of power, hegemony, "internal" colonialism, and cultural economy which have long dominated the region.


"TRIBES" and "NATIONS"

Ramazan Kubilay currently lives in Istanbul and is the son of the great Tursunbay, a Kazakh who helped lead his people out of China, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Turkey, about the same time as the Uygur Ibrahim. Though they came from the same part of Inner Asia (northwest China), the 2nd and 3rd generations of the Kubilay family claim to have not lost their Kazakh language or culture. They continue to reserve one part of their homes to sit on the floor and eat "Kazakh" style, drink milk tea, and have searched all over Europe for appropriate Kazakh spouses among other Kazakh émigré families for their children. He is one of many extremely successful leather factory owners, with boutiques throughout Europe, which assist him in maintaining these extended networks of Kazakhs in exile, who are now becoming active in advising the leaders of the new state of Kazakhstan.

When in 1992 Gladney asked why they attempted so hard to preserve what they thought to be a "traditional" Kazakh identity, they responded, "We are descended from the great Kazakh nomad leader Genghiz Khan (he was Kazakh you know, not Mongol), we know our entire genealogy, and it is the first thing every Kazakh remembers about themselves, besides being Muslim. Whenever we meet another person who looks Kazakh on the street, we don't ask them if they are Kazakh, but what Kazakh lineage, which Jü z they are from. Then we can see just how closely we are related."

They are having more opportunity to do so. The Turkish government gave 10,000 scholarships to invite Central Asians from the Central Asian States to study in Turkey while I was doing fieldwork among Kazakhs in Istanbul in 1992-93, and 10,000 more the following year. Many were not prepared for the difficult adjustment that they would have living in Turkey. Not only do they complain about the cramped dorms and less money than they were expected to receive, but also how difficult Turkish is to learn, how horrible the food is (no rice pilaf), and how different the culture is from home. They did not take to Turkish society as quickly as the politicians in Ankara expected. And many Central Asians are returning from Turkey disappointed by what they found there, complaining of its secularism, hedonism, and inferior education, which many of them found far beneath their Russian training. At the same time, Turks in Turkey discovered how different they were from their "ancestors" and "distant cousins", leading to increasingly public doubts about Ataturk's dogma regarding the Central Asian origins of the Turks. Many of the Kazakh Turks have traveled to the Altai region and to Kazakhstan in search of their "tribal roots," and often return home disappointed at how different these peoples are from their imagined past.

One Swedish scholar, Ingvar Svanberg (1989), noticed the profoundly different acculturation patterns of Uygurs and Kazakhs in Turkey. Svanberg estimated that there are 60-100,000 of these Inner Asian émigrés, but we really do not know, because they are not counted by a state interested in defining a majority, through quantifying only certain minorities. Despite the popular Turkish proverb: "Türkyede yetmisbir buçuk millyet var" ("There are 71 and a half nations/ethnoreligious groups in Turkey"),³ Ataturk's policy was to stress Central Asian Turkish origins, and then limit interaction with Central Asia to keep the Russians from getting nervous about pan-Turkism. Once the borders opened, Turks travelling to "Turkestan" were surprised to find Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyz whom they could hardly understand, and who were not interested in acquiring yet another "elder brother" (aga bey) after losing the Soviets.

Gladney’s study in Turkey was designed to try to understand the construction of this "Kazakhness" by looking at sub-Turkic ethnicity, just as he questioned the construction of "Han-ness" in China through looking at the construction of minority identity among the Hui and other minorities (see Gladney 1991, 1994a, 1996). Wang’s research among nomadic Kazakhs in the Tianshan and Altai demonstrates that the Kazakh at one level do see themselves as official Kazakh minzu, but also share multiple other levels of identification that are perhaps even more important to their daily social and economic lives. This calls into question the nature of majority representation as "homogenous" in these regions, and "heterogeneous" in Europe, as Hobsbawm seems to suggest: "...China, Korea, and Japan, which are indeed among the extremely rare examples of historic states composed of a population that is ethnically almost or entirely homogeneous.... Thus of the (non-Arab) Asian states today, Japan and the two Koreas are 99‰ homogeneous, and 94‰ of the People's Republic of China are Han" (Hobsbawm 1991: 66, and nt 7). For Hobsbawm and other Eurocentric nationality theorists (and here we include Greenfeld and Samuel Huntington [1993: 4], e.g., his "West versus the rest"), Europe and the West are troped as heterogeneous and diverse, while the "Orient" is broken up into more or less homogeneous national chunks.

Tursunbay in Istanbul and the Kazakh tribal groups studied in China, represent different kinds of discourse about identity that diverge widely from each other, though they all came from Inner Asia at about the same time, and in the case of the Kazakhs in the Altai region, from about the same place. For these Kazakh, descent-based transhumant identities (that extend well-beyond the nation-state) link them into a larger segmented network of relations that help to form a sense of Kazakh-ness that goes beyond their "minzu", tribal, and local identities. In very important ways, these segmented discourses of identity transgress the nation-state in that they make claims against the nation, originally conceived as pure, stationary, and politically circumscribed.


RELATIONAL ALTERITY AND OPPOSITIONAL IDENTITIES

One way of conceptualizing contemporary Kazakh discourses of identity in Northwest China and Central Asia, and even Turkey, is to envision an identity that is both relational, relative, and grounded in an historical representation in which the people who have come to be known as the Hui situate themselves. We argue that it might be best understood through the notion of relational alterity, loosely abstracted from anthropological descent theory. Though in an entirely different territorial and economic context, Evans-Pritchard's (1940) classic study of the Nuer first suggested the expansive-contractive character of hierarchical segmentary lineage style among acephelas nomadic societies. When the Nuer (or Dinka) were confronted with an outside power, they unified and organized to a higher degree of political complexity in order to respond to the perceived challenge. When the threat subsided, they diversified and atomized, in an articulated pattern of what Gregory Bateson (1972: 96) once described as nested hierarchy. While Evans-Pritchard's study was mired in the nineteenth century colonialist structuralisms which portrayed "tribal" pastoralists as pre-modern and over-determined by tradition, his model of alterity is surprisingly relevant to the post-modern, post-cold war period, where it could be argued the world is becoming increasing acephalus and breaking down into smaller and smaller relational units. These relations, like E-P's Nuer, are segmentary in principle, taking as their basic components not the face-to-face herding units, but the imagined community of the nation, and its constituent parts.

This approach can be roughly conceptualized for heuristic purposes as an articulating hierarchy of relational alterities, a schematic that segmental kinship theorists have been playing with for some time. As David Maybury-Lewis and Uri Almagor (1989) once argued, it is the attraction (or repulsion) of "perceived" opposites that is key, there is nothing critical to binariness beyond that perceptual act. Indeed, there is nothing that prevents three groups from becoming a fourth in actual social relations, though it is difficult to portray in two-dimensional diagrams. Also, it is important that these alliances, relations and oppositions are based on our own observations and reading of social histories; it is not a cognitive map, and the only constraints are those imposed by the specific contexts of alterity.

As Gladney has argued elsewhere, these alterior relations are best perceived as "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" (Gladney 1996: 76-8), insofar as strict dialectics (Hegelian vs. Maoist) are generally thought to move in a certain direction, always negating a past relation, rather than dialogic interaction that can move back and forth, up and down, depending on the nature of the interaction.⁴ Wang (1999) has examined how Marxist dialectical theory suggests alternative ways of constructing segmental, shifting identities. In both senses, we are attempting to trace a "chain of stereotypical representation" (Bhabha 1994: 251), and seeking to outline in rather static terms constantly shifting relations and multiplicities of perceived identities that mask many levels of social simultaneity.⁵ As Rachel Moore (1994: 127) observes, these fluctuating alterities can become so stereotypically fixed and represented that essentializing regimes, elites, and anthropologists often engage in "marketing alterities" for remarkably different purposes. The hierarchy of alterior opposition emerges within the context of social relations. As Thomas (1994: 171) has argued, these are often "strategic reformulations" and do not represent "eternal properties of self-other relations" divorced from particular sociohistorical moments. Nor does this assume a cognitive map, or that there are no other options available depending on shifting social relations. And as Lawrence Schehr has argued in his recent work on French realism, Figures of Alterity (2003), realist narrative often constructs "the other" through bringing them into the realm of the discursively representable. We would argue here that the state identification of the Altai tribal nomadic peoples as Kazakh nationality (hazake minzu) in 1952 profoundly influenced sub-tribal and minority-majority relations in the Altai and Tianshan regions.

If we examine the case of the Kazakh of Fuyun county region where Wang has conducted the bulk of his research, it becomes clear that Kazakh represent themselves as such depending on the nature of their interaction with others. Thus, Molqi and Saqabay Kazakh differ in language, custom, and locality, often leading to disruptive and non-hierarchical competitive herding and migratory relations, often only until a non-Kazakh or different tribal member enters the scene. At this moment, the other rival Kazakh may unite at a higher "tribal" level, and so-on up the scale of interactions. When these Kazakh move outside of China, their "Kazakhness"-ness may become enhanced in interactions with other Kazakhs, Chinese and non-Chinese, or "Muslim-ness" in interactions with non-Muslims. Indeed, the very nature of the Kazakh as a "nationality" is based on Chinese nationality policies that recognized them as an official minzu , giving them legal status. This initiated a process that we have described elsewhere in which a Muslim people became transformed into a minority nationality (Gladney 1996; Wang 1999).

Outside the confines of the Chinese or Kazakhstan nation-states, it should come as no surprise that the Kazakh will begin to regard themselves less as a nationality and emphasize other aspects of their identity, such as Islam or their Kazakh and Turkic language. This helps to understand how the Kazakh in Istanbul often related to others simply as Muslims, hoping to over-ride differences between "Turk" and "Kazakh". Here we should note, there is nothing determinative in these relations. They are merely reflections of what we have observed in the field. The hierarchy of segmentation is not fixed; it is determined by the local context of difference, as defined by specific constellation of stereotypical relations, of hierarchy, power, class, and opposition, that are often shifting and multifaceted, but never arbitrary. Thus, even in China, there have been times where Hui have united with Han Chinese against other Hui, when it was in their interest to do so, often downplaying their Muslim identity, in favor of cultural, ethnic, or linguistic similarities to the Han Chinese with whom they sought to share practical interests. The history of Xinjiang is filled with these shifting power-alliances (see Forbes 1986), where brother united with brother, and sometimes with the Chinese, against a cousin who was often a rival Muslim warlord (Lipman 1984). The relational alterity approach seeks to map out the significant fault lines of relation, opposition, and nodes of hierarchy—a heuristic way of depicting this phenomenon. It does not, of course, pretend to have predictive or universal, dehistoricized explanatory value.


NOMADIC NOSTALGIA AND THE POWER OF GENEALOGY

When two Kazakhs who do not know each other meet, they make their acquaintance by giving the lineage to which they belong and their closest patrilineal relatives. In East Berlin Kazakhs from Turkey established contact with Kazakh guest students from the Mongolian People's Republic studying in the German Democratic Republic. As the Xinjiang Kazakhs the Kazakhs from Mongolia belonged to Orta Jü z and generally also to the same lineages that are found in Turkey. In some cases they have found common kinship relations which even led to organized meetings in East Berlin between relatives coming from Turkey and visitors from Mongolia [Svanberg 1989a: 116].

While it has yet to be demonstrated that Kazakh pastoralists in the Altai mountains have posed any threat to the grasslands of the alpine meadows or valley floors, Svanberg and Benson (1988: 200-205) have documented a resurgence of traditional nomadic pastoralism with the free market reforms. Humphrey and Snead (1999) have argued that the state identification of the Kazakhs as a nationality with certain nomadic traditions has done as much to influence their pastoral economy as the politics of grazing rights and land in the region. At the same time, based on extensive fieldwork in the Altai mountains among a neighboring Kazakh community, Tony Banks (2001, 1999) that state politics, rather than over-grazing or a "tragedy of the commons" has been most responsible for determining economic development in the region. It is our argument in this paper that state identificaitons of the Kazakh nationality has played a privileged role in influencing social relations in the region. As descendants of the Turkish Khanate that dominated the Mongolian Steppe in the 6th century A.D., the Kazakhs are pursuing a style of nomadic pastoralism that is derived from these Turkish ancestors, who, according to the late Joseph Fletcher (1979:24), "developed steppe nomadism in its final form, the form in which the Mongols later adopted it." Even as Kazakh nomadism disappears from the Central Asian steppe, debate has raged in the former Soviet Union over the role of religion and Turkism in defining Kazakh national identity. While some intellectuals argue for the role of Islam in defining Kazakh identity, others maintain that it is only pan-Turkism that can unite the peoples of the steppe (see Saray 1993: 16-17). These endless debates have marred the important role of nomadism for Kazakh national identity, the idea of a nomadic past that unites Kazakhs transnationally from China to Central Asia to Turkey, among a people for whom, according to Martha Olcott's study, "traditional Kazakh culture defined a man through the animals he owned, making private ownership of livestock almost the definition of what it was to be Kazakh" (Olcott 1987: 248). While Russian-speaking urban Kazakhs in modern Almaty certainly do not wish to become nomads, we argue that a kind of "nomadic nostalgia" nevertheless characterizes much current discourse regarding the re-discovery of their pastoralist past, a resumed interest in pre-Islamic Kazakh belief systems, an urge to preserve and discover "pure" Kazakh nomadic traditions in the Altai Mountains of China, a continued lament over the tragedy of Stalinist sedentarization, and this discourse impedes to some extent the construction of a contemporary "Kazakhstani" identity that includes non-Kazakhs.

In the Altai mountains of China, with the pervasiveness of market economies in China and the former Soviet Union, and the increasing contacts of these Kazakhs with the large immigrant community in Turkey, the role of animal husbandry and Kazakh identity is resurfacing as an important factor in changes in their socioecological nexus (Kazakh 1987). During interviews with Kazakh immigrants in the Zeytin Burnu district of Istanbul (see Gladney 1990; Svanberg 1989a), we found a population that largely defined itself in terms of its burgeoning leather and tanning industry, with leather fashion boutiques run by extended Kazakh networks in Istanbul, Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, and New York. Now that more unrestricted travel has been taking place between Turkey, Kazakhstan, and China (there are direct flights from Istanbul to Urumqi, Istanbul to Almaty, and Almaty to Urumqi, which I flew in May and June of 1993, as well as the Eurasian rail connection between Urumqi and Almaty which I traveled in 1995, 1998, 2001), Kazakhs once separated by artificial political boundaries are beginning to trade and exchange ideas and products to an unprecedented extent.

The continued salience of "nomadic nostalgia" to contemporary Kazakh identity in Kazakhstan is clearly demonstrated by their recently selected national stigmata: the flag of Kazakhstan, which has the famous flying horses beneath the interior dome of the yurt on a field of blue sky. Most importantly, the "shanyrak" top of the tent is handed down generation-to-generation and father-to-son, as the only part of the yurt that does not break apart.

In my interviews with Kazakh pastoralists in the Southern Pastures in 1987, 1992, and 1995, and in the Tianshan and Altai in 2001 and 2002, I noticed that whereas a traditional Kazakh auyl had the mutual participation of all members in a wide-range of tasks, each household of the clan in the post-collectivist period divided up the various tasks of nomadic pastoralism: herding, marketing, leather processing and rug-making. Yang noted this pattern in his extensive surveys of Kazakh herding groups in the Tianshan and Altai regions over the last decade. This pattern was almost completely abolished during the Chinese collectivization campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s and the de-privatization of the herds, just as under Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s. There was no inherent incentive to care for the animals when the state controlled the profits, and traditional shared work roles were reassigned to specific collective enterprise tasks. The traditional household and auyl economies were dismantled. Now that there has been a return to traditional nomadic pastoralism in China and the private ownership of animals one would expect a resurgence of traditional household and auyl economic organization. However, unlike the traditional Kazakh social structure as outlined by Alfred Hudson (1938) and Lawrence Krader (1963), one now finds that often each yurt will perform specialized tasks for the entire clan or auyl: one household will be responsible for herding, another for marketing, and another for production of certain leather goods, crafts, or rugs. While this may not be the rule for all Kazakh auyls of the Altai, it represents a new form of household economy and social organization that is perhaps due to the collectivized experience of the 1960s and 1970s. These households are also becoming tied into the local and transnational economies through the marketing of their products. This reorganization of traditional household economies may be one factor in the increased herd sizes reported in the Altai and will be an important aspect in the changing socioecology of the region.

The Kazakhs of Kazakhstan and Turkey look to the nomads of the Altai as their living cultural ancestors. Understanding of this nomadic way of life will assist in determining the evolving nature of Kazakh national identity. It is a way of life that is resurgent, albeit in a somewhat altered form, in China, while passing away elsewhere. It is clear that in reciting the oft-memorized genealogies among the Kazakhs, nomadism and its cultural by-products loom large as an important factor in their representation of Kazakh identity. For the Kazakhs, the tracing of genealogy is a much more powerful force in their identity construction than we have found for other Muslim groups in the region. For Kazakhs, their identity is represented as segmentary in principle. For groups such as the Hui Muslim Chinese, a generalized notion of descent from foreign Muslim ancestors is important for contemporary identity. It does not really matter to modern Hui if these ancestors may have been Arab, Persian, or Turk, only that they were Muslim, migrated to China, and maintained their distinctive identities. For the Uygur Turkic Muslims, knowledge of genealogy seems to be important only as it relates to the land, as proof of early Uygur settlement in the Tarim oases, prior to the Chinese or other nomadic Turks. The keeping of detailed genealogies, according to Uygur informants in Xinjiang and Turkey, is something the Chinese like to do, not them. Indeed, it is Kazakh preoccupation with genealogical minutiae that not only influences mate-selection and nomadic nostalgia, but may also contribute to an increased awareness of identity.

A typical Kazakh genealogy among members of the Saqabay sub-lineage with whom we interacted in Istanbul and the Altai region is several levels deep. At the highest level, most Kazakhs among the Saqabay knew they were descendants of the Orta Jü z (middle) (mistranlated "Horde" or in Turkish, "orda", which refers to the original tribal military formations). At the level Kazakhs refer to as "tayipa" (from the Arabic, tayifa), which Svanberg (1989a:115) translates as "tribe" and Hudson (1938: 19) as "uru" (Krader 1963 as "ru") they identified with the Kerey. At the next level of ru, or "lineage" (Svanberg 1989a: 115), they traced their lineage to the Zantekey. Yet many Kazakhs call all of these levels juz or ru, and there is no real consistency. At the base is the emphasis upon migration groups known as "auyl" (or "awl" Hudson 1938:19), which would have been comprised of different households, related by these complicated descent lines. It was clear, however, that a Saqabay would rarely marry a Barzarkul or Tasbike, and only with great reluctance marry outside of the Zantekey line. As Svanberg notes, beyond the Kerey, there was not much knowledge of specific connections to other Orta lineages. This knowledge is increasing, however, with frequent travel to Central Asia, where Kazakh members of the Ulu (or "Great") Orda are primarily concentrated. Interactions traditionally would move up the scale from household to auyl to lineage. Now, there is specific interest only at the lineage and above level, since migration groups have changed dramatically as noted above. It is noteworthy that distinction from Uygur and Hui only takes place at the sixth and seventh levels of interaction, revealing a much higher range of relations than has been described for Uygur or Hui. Kazakh preoccupation with genealogy is reflected in their more detailed scale of relational alterity.⁶

Genealogies travel well. Kazakh notions of transhumance based on the auyl that trace to the roots of nomadic descent lines also extend far beyond any contemporary configurations of the nation-state. It allows Kazakh networks that extend throughout Central Asia, China, Turkey, and Europe. It finds its representation on the Kazakh and Kyrgyz flags. As Charles Scott has argued:

Genealogies are ways of allowing differences, discontinuities, and the priority of exteriority and spatial imagery while one comes to know various ordered regions of human life [Scott 1990: 57].

Recent maps of the Central Asian region have begun to clearly delineate the composition of the so-called major ethnic groups and divide them into majorities and minorities (e.g., Kazakhstan: 40‰ Kazakh, 38‰ Russian). This contrasts to former maps of Inner Asia that generally blended these groups all together, since former Marxist/Stalinist and modernization paradigms stressed the disappearance of these Central Asian identities, as either Russified, Sinicized, or secularized. Yet even the ethnic maps show the overlapping natures, and geographic maps indicate that there are no natural boundaries between these regions divided geopolitically during the period known as the "Great Game." The game of ethnopolitics is still being played across the steppes of Inner Asia, though no longer on a scale so "great."

This paper has attempted to provide an approach to relational alterity that seeks to understand different configurations of identity across transnational boundaries among the many traditionally nomadic tribal peoples now known as Kazakh. Two-dimensional diagrams detract from the emphasis here upon dialogic relationality and run even harder into the dilemma George Marcus (1994: 48) aptly describes as the "problem of simultaneity" in contemporary ethnographic writing. While the specific "nodes" of relation and alterity might be disputed in reference to the groups discussed above, the argument in general concerns the nature of hierarchy, power, representation and relationality among these peoples of Inner Asia. And, as Paul Rabinow (1986: 234) reminded us, representations are, or often become, social facts (tragically so, for groups such as the Bosnians, Chechnyans, and Hutu). It is clear that in some cases the oppositional relations described above may not always pertain—one could find examples say, of instances where Hui and Uygur have united against Kazakh interests in Xinjiang or even Almaty—yet the move here is toward a more contextualized, relational approach to identity formation and expression in which imagination, representation, and subscription play important roles in identity formation, as opposed to essentialized "tribal" or relativized "situational" formulations. Similar to linguistic code-switching in social speech forms, encoded identities are often switched depending on contexts, moving up and down stereotypical scales, or perhaps discarded altogether. Kazakh herders when they encounter each other, non-Kazakhs Muslims, and Han Chinese, engage frequently in this linguistic code-switching, identifying themselves simultaneously at many different levels depending on with whom they are interacting.

An important component of this argument is that of subscription: groups often are enlisted by states or elites to subscribe to certain kinds of identities (ethnic, national, racial, religious, class, ranked, etc.), but in many cases they might not choose to do so. In others, subscription is mandatory, as in government-controlled census designations and legislated national identity cards. It is the modern nation-state, however, with its regulatory powers over not only census categories, but citizenship, ethnic national identities, and land-use rights (see Cohn 1987), which exerts a privileged role in defining the most accessible national identifications, and provides the means to enforce them.

This approach has attempted to describe the context of "both/and" identities: how it is, say, a person who calls himself a "Turkestani" can be both Kazakh and non-Kazakh, Saqabay and Molqi, Muslim and Turk, Chinese and Central Asian. In China, all of these groups are Chinese citizens, and travel on a Chinese passport, whether they like it or not. The project then becomes not any essentialized attempt at a final definition of the meanings of these representations (i.e., what is a Kazakh), but an examination of the conditions of relationality (i.e., when is a Kazakh). As this paper has argued, being Kazakh is not as meaningful for younger émigrés in Istanbul, nor was it between the 15 and early 20th centuries, but it certainly has become relevant for the 8.6 million Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and the 1.3 million Kazakhs in China who have been labeled "Kazakh" minzu since 1953 as a result of nation-state incorporation, great game rivalries, and Sino-Russian nationality policies.

It is clear that we must attend to the nature of shifting national identities in these regions, and the impact of changing international geo-politics. But geo-politics are not enough, as these processes of identity formation and re-formation cannot be understood without attention to historiography and cultural studies. It is even more apparent that relations between the various Central Asian states, Russia, and China will hinge on the shifting identities of the mainly Turkic, mainly Muslim peoples in the region. Identities, as this paper has sought to shown, not easily united across pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic lines. The styles of national identity among these groups pose fundamental challenges, or transgressions, to the nation-states they find themselves in: Kazakh idealization of nomadic transhumance suggests that no nation-state should be allowed to contain them, to some extent arguing against the very notion of the "nation," that the diasporic condition is part of everyone's modern and post-modern predicament, and that there is no pure nation, ethnicity, or race that can claim state power on that alone. Perhaps this belief in hybridity has generally kept the Kazakh from voicing separatist tendencies, as some Uyghur in the region have done (see Gladney 2002: 22-3).

In China, recognition of official national identities has empowered these groups in their claims against the nation, particularly for the Kazakh, to a crystallization and ethnogenesis of identities—identities that have now moved above and beyond the bounds of the Chinese nation-state, encouraging other unrecognized groups to push for recognition and political power. As Kazakh nomadic herders have shown, movement and migration is intimately tied to their traditional identifications. Identities shift as individuals move across these many borders, and as the old Bedouin saying reminds us, these identities are formed in relation to others across the field of social and political interactions.

I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, our cousins and us against the outsider
—Bedouin proverb

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1.The debate over the inappropriateness of the term tribe for group identity in anthropology is best summarized in the collections by Gulliver (1969) and Helm (1968). For later references to ethnicity as tribal, see Isaacs' (1975) classic, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity, and the work by Glass (1990), Tribes With Flags: A Dangerous Passage through the Chaos of the Middle East. It is interesting that in the ethnic national conflicts in Eastern Europe, only rarely has the term tribal used, but it dominates discourse regarding communal violence in Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, suggesting a racist and developmental connotation in the term. [Back to text.]

2. That we see Central Asia as somehow "Central" (to what?) or "Inner" (as opposed to outer?) is theorized in a recent unpublished paper (Gladney, forthcoming). The region's centrality is taken for granted and vehemently argued by most Central Asianists (see Frank 1992). [Back to text.]

3. The "half" millyet ("religious," "national," or "ethnoreligious" group) in Turkey refers, of course, to the gypsies. [Back to text.]

4. As Taussig notes, identity is constantly constructed in imitation of and resistance to an often imagined "other", creating sameness-es and differences in mimeotic interaction: "...mimesis registers both sameness and difference, of being like, and of being Other. Creating stability from this instability is no small task, yet all identity formation is engaged in this habitually bracing activity in which the issue is not so much staying the same, but maintaining sameness through alterity" (Taussig 1993: 27). [Back to text.]

5. In this sense, Eriksen (1993) is correct to stress relationality and relativity. The problem is that he neglects to place stress upon the context of the perception of difference, assuming it almost always to pertain. For Eriksen, everyone is ethnic, whether they like it or not. "Virtually every human being belongs to an ethnic group," Eriksen (1993: 11) decides for us, "whether he or she lives in Europe, Melanesia, or Central America." This ignores the relevance and irrelevance of ethnicity, its historicity, and why, say, majorities (such as the "whites" in my Introductory Anthropology class, or the "majority" Han in China, or dominant Turks in Turkey, have a hard time thinking of themselves as "ethnic"). [Back to text.]