The Control and Voluntary Subjection of “Citizens”: Uzbekistan's Mahalla

Central Asia and the Caucasus

Abstract

This paper argues that the institutional mahalla (residential organization) developed in Uzbekistan is an applied example of the modern technology of power. With reference to the insights offered by Michel Foucault's arguments on power, this paper examines the control of “citizens” from above and the voluntary subjection of “citizens” from below through the intermediary of the institutional mahalla.
Accounts by Tsarist colonial administrator/orientalists and studies by Soviet scholars show that mahallas were traditionally street-level units of selfrule in the cities and large villages of sedentary Central Asia. For several reasons, the Tsarist administration could not fully penetrate the mahalla in the old cities and rural areas to implement modern methods of control of the local population. To some extent, they had to rely on the traditional authority of community elders until the Soviets seized office.
Full-fledged interests in controlling the daily life and behavior of the local population appeared after 1917 in the course of the governmentalization of the state. A 1922 circular called for the establishment of mahalla commissions in the old cities, and a 1932 decree defined mahalla committees as “supplementary social organizations under the city Soviet.” A series of decrees and resolutions aimed at the internalization of regulations among the newly labeled “citizens” (fuqarolar) followed in the Soviet period. Just as important was the subjectivation of the “citizens” from below. The voluntary activities of the “Ilg'or (avant-garde)” mahallas of the October District in Tashkent in the 1960s- early 1970s clearly illustrate this. Mahalla “citizens” themselves were activists who took part in the surveillance, preservation of the sane body, and correction of the behavior of the individual.
Post-Soviet leadership discourse on mahalla as a foundation of civil society (fuqarolik jamiyati) in Uzbekistan is partly driven by the desire to maintain control and voluntary subjection of “citizens” under the reorganizing administrative system. In recent years, mahallas and its posbons(guardians) have been instrumental in the surveillance of potential Islamists in the local “war against terror.” Presently, the mahalla is frequently referred to by the authorities in the newly set dichotomy of “traditional Eastern spirituality” and “interventionist Western-style democracy.” Making use of notes and primary documents obtained from field survey, this paper explores the mahalla institutions (or formally “Organs of Self-Government of Citizens”) and their activities in Uzbekistan.