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ID:
126032
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the late 1990s, I visited an acquaintance who lived in a remote mountain village of north-eastern Kyrgyzstan. In almost every way, it was a forgotten place. Built to serve as a sovkhoz (state-owned farm) connecting isolated pastures to a centralized network of services, ideologies and futures, it remained as an artefact of a system that had brought a road, some power lines and a taste for vodka. By all accounts, it was a hard place to live in that became even harder after the Soviet Union collapsed and state support for the village dried up. The altitude was too high for growing crops of any significance, trees were all but non-existent, and unemployment was described as being upwards of 90%. What such a high unemployment figure was intended to mean was unclear. There were no visible jobs aside from shepherding, but people managed to eke out some way of subsisting in a place they could not afford to leave. The characterization of life in this village became the benchmark for my understanding of misery. A Kyrgyz acquaintance put it dramatically: 'The problem is,' she said, 'that we do not die.'
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| 2 |
ID:
126038
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Narratives of hardship and suffering found in portrayals of life in Central Asia elicit policy responses that attempt to remedy the situation through humanitarian or development interventions intended to enhance local well-being. This framing obfuscates a network of relationships and interactions that are instrumental in the making of meaningful lives in Central Asia. I explore the comfort of family and friends, the hope of possibility (real and imagined), and the happiness (even if fleeting) in the sharing of stories. Furthermore, even in the most trying of times, the communal sense that emerges in sharing concerns helps mitigate the stresses and strains of many social situations. Seeing these relationships as moments of well-being is essential to understanding everyday life and contextualizing hardship and suffering, and thus to conveying a fuller sense of what is understood as 'a meaningful life' in Central Asia.
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