00:04 Kelly
From the Imperiia project at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, I'm Kelly O'Neill. This is the MapMaker.
00:17 Kelly
My guest today is Jackie Erlon-Baurjan. Jackie, I was talking with your friend Valerie recently, [Jackie: mhm] and because of our conversation, I can't stop thinking about place names. So if you don't mind telling us the name of the place where you were born. [Jackie: mhm]
00:35 Jackie
Sure. Hi everyone. I was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, so Ulaanbaatar, O-U-B, it technically means red warrior, red hero, Ulaanbaatar in a lot of other languages, but yeah.
00:51 Kelly
So, um, tell us a little bit about Mongolia and your family life and how you, yeah.
00:00:58 Jackie
So I was born there in the capital like my grandparents, like my parents. But my family's from the western provinces in around Bayan-Ölgii. Bayan-Ölgii is around the Altai mountains. We, my grandparents moved to the capital in their in their young adulthood, and they were born into a traditional her-, a kind of herding family and into a Kazakh herding family, and they settled in the capital in the late ‘60s. So that's when, when my parents were born, they were born when Mongolia was a Soviet satellite to Russia or to the Soviet Union. And I spent most of my childhood in Mongolia, and I came here for to the US for college.
01:45 Kelly
So when you think about Mongolia and your childhood, [Jackie: mhm] what kinds of images are in your head?
01:52 Jackie
Mhm, that's a good one. Recently I've been more thinking about… It's impossible for me to not when I think of Mongolia, I think of my grandparents always. We used to go on summer trips to Bayan-Ölgii and because a lot of my relatives still live there, they still practice their kind of pastoral mobile lifestyle around the mountains. So, I got to experience something that I think is something that's more precious because it's something that a lot of Mongolians and Kazakhs like my family have been losing more recently because a lot of herders every summer settle. And I got to experience a way of life and a way of kind of knowing the land or just a glimpse into the way that my family still practices herding, and I don't want to romanticize or exoticize it at all. But I keep on thinking about the lessons I've learned and at each stage of my life, it means something else to me. I thought, when I was growing up, I thought “Oh my gosh, this is, it’s, it must be a really difficult life!” but I came at it through being younger and kind of growing up in the capital where I had different ideas of development and progress that a lot of Mongolians grow up with in school. We grow up kind of with this kind of a teleology, a narrative of progress where eventually I'll go to school, my parents will go to school, and we'll go into abroad and we'll come back to Mongolia as a certain type of Mongolian citizens but going back home and seeing my relatives, it's a different type of not only life, but a way of passing on knowledge and of relating to the land that, I think a lot of Mongolians and Kazakhs, that we tend to sideline.
03:53 Kelly
So this idea of relating to the land is something and the idea that this can be lost [Jackie: mhm]. Even within one's own lifetime, [Jackie: right] let alone across generations, is such an important and interesting idea. I think in my work as a historian I find myself, it's one of the things I'm always looking for, it’s the sense of the land [Jackie: mhm]. What did things look like? [Jackie: mhm] What did they smell like? [Jackie: mhm] Where was the wind blowing? [Jackie: mhm] Which direction did the [Jackie: right] water flow in? Because when you think about how you exist in a space, [Jackie: mhm] there are these really real material elements of a space and when we're talking about historical space, I think there's a little panic [Jackie: mhm] that I feel sometimes that all of that is lost, [Jackie: right] right? And if only I can find the right documents, maybe I can restore a little bit of that. [Jackie: mhm]
So I think maybe that's something for us both to be thinking about as we're having this conversation, this idea of that kind of searching for the land [Jackie: right] and finding a way to relate to it. I think it's important to both of us in, in different ways. So I guess there's a panic to being a historian, if you're a historian like me. But there is also a pleasure to it, [Jackie: mhm] because you do get to go on that treasure hunt, right? One of my favorite things about being a historian is that you get to kind of go back through the record of the past and sift through all of this stuff, right, in the hopes of finding something real. [Jackie: mhm] Something that you can something useful, that, that will allow you to reconstruct what life was like, and every once in a while you stumble across something and you get excited and I find that I often get irrationally excited about [Jackie: mhm] things that no one else gets excited about. [Kelly laughs, Jackie: yeah]
So one of those things was this report that was published in 1867 [Jackie: mhm], and it's a report, um, that was compiled by someone who was working for the Russian Empire for the tsarist state and his task had been to walk or, you know, meander across the space of the Crimean Peninsula and compile basically the first state survey of water resources [Jackie: mhm] in Crimea. And I got all excited about this because I was thinking “OK, here is a key to our being able to relate to the land of Crimea,” right?, as it was in the 1860s. This isn't really exciting reading, it's not filled, it's not page after page of dramatic story. But I asked you to read it and kind of wrestle with it. And I would love to know how you reacted to it and what you saw in it.
06:33 Jackie
Right. So in the process of digitizing the historical data my first reaction to it was all these village names, and because I'm a native Kazakh speaker, the Turkic names stood out to me. I could understand. I even sent you a screenshot of my own name, which was a village name also in Crimea. And so, I was like, “oh, look, like, my name is also a village.” This kind of, like, name that doesn't really make sense in either Mongolia or in the US but here it is in Crimea, a place I've never been to, I've thought about. And I try to think about if there is a relationship between the village name, if that was more Russified, if that seemed indigenous or Turkic and its relationship to water, and I couldn't really find one. It seemed that when we were thinking about water and the availability of water a lot of villages that tended to have a lot of underground water, so wells and infrastructure tended to be more, just in my very superficial understanding, it seemed that they were more Turkic and working through the document then there are more Mennonite and Jewish settle[ments], German settlements. These were separate colonies and separate places with their own kind of infrastructure around water, and it seemed that a lot of these villages had their own kind of relationship with water in ways that perhaps the document also doesn't fully cover.
08:09 Kelly
Absolutely. So what can you tell us a little bit about the kinds of water sources (Jackie: mhm) that you're described here? (Jackie: mhm) You mentioned that some of them are underground. (Jackie: yeah) yeah, tell us, what do we have?
08:21 Jackie
So, we have the wells, those I think are the most common. We also have the streams, the springs, the mountain streams. I think these are a bit more rare and sometimes we have the occasional village located around, on the steppe that have a steppe water source and so the document would describe whether the wells are bitter water, salty water, sometimes both, sometimes fresh water or sometimes the author of the document would get a little bit lazy and say good water, bad water. And we can't really tell what that means. Is good water always fresh? There’s also a certain kind of infrastructure. Besides the walls, there were dams. No knowledge of who built the dams, for what reason they were there, who took over these dams, whether they're indigenous. I've also found that story where a lot of dams on the steppe are actually indigenous dams and the Russians kind of took them over and took on these little, like, water infrastructure and didn't necessarily always make it better. But yeah.
09:30 Kelly
Absolutely. One of the strange things about this document is that at least, well, I'm wondering if you felt the same way when I was paging through it. You kind of get the sense that this surveyor, this water surveyor, (Jackie: mhm) was the first person to go around and notice all of the wells and compile this information. It feels like, you know, fresh information being pulled together (Jackie: right) and excitedly delivered to imperial officials whereas you know that none of these water sources are new, right? These are existing water sources. They have history, right? They have been used by, by people (Jackie: mhm) for generations, centuries, possibly even millennia. But you get no sense of that depth, of use or meaning or knowledge, right? The document itself is really flat in that sense, (Jackie: right) and it's kind of up to us to figure out a way to understand why it matters, right? Why these places matter. (Jackie: mhm)
So when you think about water, and the Crimea is kind of a funny place to think about water, because on the peninsula water has always been scarce in most parts of it, right? You're right, there are mountain streams that flow down in the southern part of the peninsula. But two thirds of it is essentially, steppe (Jackie: mhm) where water is scarce and that has been a story in the news, especially over the last year. Last June there was a major explosion at the Kahkovka dam and the Dnipro River now ceases really to provide fresh water. Eighty-five percent of the fresh water that was flowing into Crimea was coming through the canal. And I've been a little bit amused looking at the news coverage because the canal is described as the traditional water source for Crimea. (Jackie: mhm)
And of course, the canal was opened in 1975, which to me, as a historian, feels really recent (Jackie: yeah) and not very traditional. (Kelly laughs, Jackie: right) Right? Water has been scarce in Crimea for a really long time. The peninsula itself is completely surrounded by salt water, so it's a case of water, water everywhere, (Jackie: right) And not much of a drop to drink. But when you look at the story of the abundance or scarcity of water in Crimea, we've talked about this a little bit, you have been connecting that story (Jackie: right) to other parts of the post-Soviet world, right? (Jackie: right)
12:00 Jackie
Yes. So, what I study is, what I'm interested in, is in environmental history and particularly around the steppe region of Central Asia, steppe and desert, sometimes those distinctions are not very clear and wherever water is scarce, there is usually a social infrastructure, a social world built around water and it's complex and also a beautiful thing to think about because it's so hard to recreate that kind of world. Especially, I was thinking around the Kazakh steppe.
There’s a story that I encountered where this Russian official in the late 19th century, around the same time of our Crimea water source. He is asking these local Kazakhs about what their water source is, and he is trying to contain all of these water sources and put them down on paper like our own surveyor. And these Kazakhs look at him like, “what's the use for paper?” And I just thought that was so brilliant. What is the use for paper when you know your area, your homeland, also like the back of your palms.
And so I moved towards more Kazakh songs and poetry that survived during this age, and a lot of them have place names for: this is a good mountain. This is a bad mountain. Or, this is the Blackberry Hill. And these place names offer a way of their own kind of cartographies of place that are passed through generations, between Kazakhs and their families. And they're not meant for anybody else, right? The way a certain stream or a well is allocated is often through certain clan relationships. And I remember also encountering a source among Kazakhs that even the way a clan is organized, the number of people within a clan that can move as a village together because (background sharp noise) they are nomadic peoples, is often determined by water. How many people will this water in a well feed throughout the summer? And that determines your relationships, your social relationships, and your, even a certain kind of cosmology because…
14:13 Kelly
What do you mean by that?
14:15 Jackie
Right. In Turkic/Mongolian the word tenger (тэнгэр) means both sky, it means god and also it means the weather. And those three words, I think encapsulate a certain type of almost a fear and a reverence for the weather, especially on the steppe where a drought is very common occurrence, and the drought is something that the Russian empire has struggled with for more than its existence... yeah.
14:49 Kelly
So how do Kazakhs think about drought? Is it something to be feared? Is it something to be embraced?
14:54 Jackie
Right. That's a good question. So, of course the drought is an objectively, it's a terrible phenomenon, right? But I think it takes a lot of intellectual labor to make a certain thing a disaster, right? Or catastrophe. And for Kazakhs, and this is what my thesis was a little bit about, the drought or the frost that comes every winter where it covers the fodder with an icy crust known in Mongolian as dzud or in Kazakh, I think it's known as жұт and they had a way of knowing that the drought would come, it was very cyclical. In every few years there’s a drought, and there was a preparation period. There's a way to kind of, mobility was a way to kind of even out the unevenness of the land. And so the way that a lot of clans had a specific stream or river or a way of knowing the land and where they could go in moments of frost or in drought. And there were steppe astrologers who would predict the weather. There were ways of complex social organizations. Every time there is a natural disaster in a way of kind of not only relationship mutual aid networks, but also a kind of pattern that children knew or children learned, and that was their inheritance on the steppe. And so, I think when the empire came in and suddenly the drought becomes a phenomenon tied to agriculture and expansion that introduces a new relationship to land and a new set of expectations on to nomads. Because it not only limits their mobility, but also limits the ways of knowing that land and their relationships to their land. And these kind of knowledge networks I think also are cut off.
16:47 Kelly
Absolutely. It's just, it's an interesting thing, the word empire. There's so much bound up in that word, and I think we associate it so naturally with power and capacity, Right? (Jackie: mhm) But when you study the way empires actually work on the ground, the more you look, the more you see evidence of their incapacity right? An inability to function in some really basic ways, right? They can be really surprising and striking. The Crimean Tatar population in the 19th century and even in the 18th century, was already primarily sedentary. They had shifted toward a more sedentary lifestyle much earlier, and yet a lot of the things that you're describing on the Kazakh steppe there are kind of echoes of that, even in Crimea (Jackie: mhm).
One of my very favorite stories that I pulled out of an archive described events in, I think it's 1827, late 1820s, and there was a drought in Crimea, and Crimea at that point had been part of the empire for roughly 40 years, (Jackie: mhm) and there was a drought. There was concern about the ability to develop new crops and the Imperial government was kind of getting all ramped up and anxious and didn't know what to do. And the Crimean Tatar population knew exactly what to do, right? So, one of the brother of one of the most important Crimean elites was sent to the family lands in Anatolia (Jackie: mhm) in the Ottoman Empire, which right away is already an interesting story because they're crossing imperial boundaries, right? From the Russian Empire into the Ottoman Empire, with the intention of coming back again, right? So, this whole process of crossing borders is in play. So he goes to the family lands in Anatolia where they have a holy, there's a holy well nearby and they bring back water from the holy well and a bunch of sufis (Jackie: mhm) to come back to perform a ceremonial cleansing of the drought land in Crimea.
And so, they process from village to village throughout Crimea, spreading the holy water across the dry land and the idea was that this was going to, you know, for various reasons, this was going to solve the drought and made perfect sense. It was very calm. It was very orderly, and the local governor was beside himself (Jackie: mhm) because he could not understand this as anything other than scary, you know, Tatar, Turkic (Jackie: mhm) Muslim peoples doing something that the Russian government could not understand. And so they sent, he actually assigned a couple of local Greeks to try to infiltrate the process, the, the procession. And he had them dress up, to kind of blend in and they were they were local Greeks and they spoke Tatar and they were supposed to report back and give all the gossip right, (Jackie: mhm) who was about to betray the Russian Empire, because surely they're all Ottoman agents and, you know, these Greek guys come back and they're like, “well, it seems like they're just trying to solve the drought problem they haven't been talking about politics or betrayal,” but despite all of that, the governor just can't resist. And he, you know, expels all the Ottoman subjects back to the Ottoman Empire. And, you know, they bring an end to the ceremonial procession.
But it's really all about this misunderstanding and this complete, just, you know, this ignorance not only of the land, but of how it's understood and how it's managed (Jackie: mhm) by the native population, by the people who have been there forever, right? And so, yeah, this intellect, I love this idea that you have of the intellectual work that is necessary to produce catastrophe. (Jackie: yeah) I mean, that's exactly what's in place (Jackie: mhm), right?
So, you have these echoes across the Crimeans, you know, from the Crimean steppe to the Kazakh steppe.
20:45 Jackie
Right. It's only a certain moment, historical moment, when drought starts to matter, when suddenly they want to deal with the frost and from what I've been reading on the Kazakh steppe, it becomes tied to these notions of, well in the early 19th century it was like, “ok, Kazakhs are nomads, and that's how they're they live on this steppe. And that's fine with us.” It's maybe, it's more productive for them, or it's more productive for the land. That's how they managed this land. But at a certain later moment in the 19th century it's a kind of historical moment where now surveyors are suddenly interested in the weather in a way that they have never been before. So, drought begins to matter because they're looking to expand the wheat frontier into the Kazakh steppe. Then, and of course, drought matters when it comes to agriculture, suddenly nomads also begin to matter because they, in a true James Scottian manner of, they’re not necessarily legible for the empire. They move around. There's no census or statistics can be made about them, but especially they've come to think more so about the ways of knowing the land. That is also something that cartography tries to capture, or at least tries to mimic. And it's something that I think is profoundly local and embodied for a lot of Kazakhs that makes it not legible to the empire, and that is a risk and that produces a space of knowing and space of illegibility that, I think, is dangerous for an empire. (Kelly: mhm)
22:27 Kelly
And you see changes over time in the way that either the kinds of stories or songs (Jackie: mhm) that are told, the ways of knowing, you know as whether it's because of a reaction to the incursion of imperial, (Jackie: mhm) you know, power (Jackie: mhm) or for any number of other reasons maybe other exogenous forces, right? Climate change or other things going on, (Jackie: yeah) do you do you see changes in the way that Kazakhs maintain or perpetuate those cartographies?
22:57 Jackie
Right. As in, they could be more subversive, or the way that I think knowledge internally, the way that knowledge is shared is changing.
23:06 Kelly
Yeah, the latter, yeah.
23:10 Jackie
Right. So, for what I know about pre-19th century, if songs and stories and dances were their own archives of the past, then towards the later 19th century we have also a national moment on the Kazakh steppe. And it's not tradition. It's not being a pastoral nomad. It's not necessarily your clan, but also there's this new idea of a nation and what it means to be a Muslim. And they're also speaking to Crimean Tatars about this and other people around the Russian Empire and beyond, such as the Ottoman Empire that become a formative moment. And it's not necessarily the tradition, but rather territory that comes into play. It's this idea of land, “the corrosion of Russians onto our land and what that means for us. And in order to essentially protect this land, we need to settle.” And that's one discourse among Kazakh elites that is being spoken around this time, and usually Russophone urban intellectual Kazakhs that kind of come to dominate the conversation.
But a lot of what I could glean from ordinary Kazakhs at this moment was also that people persisted into being herders even during the famine. There's always these reports in the Russian sources that I could see of Kazakhs always fleeing every time there was some kind of incursion into, those Russian settlements incursion, they flee to the Qing Empire or this cross-mobility between borders. This constant cycle of movement was always part of our Kazakh tradition, because even borders, even when they came into play, they were, unless enforced, essentially meaningless, and this cross-border mobility was something that Kazakhs always had, or to a certain degree, until borders became into formation and had begun to be enforced.
25:09 Kelly
So when people talk about tradition (Jackie: mhm) and the idea of the traditional and, kind of, and rituals, I think there's often a judgement going on there that something that's traditional is somehow maybe a little backward looking and maybe a little bit, you know, anti-, well if it's a little traditional then it's not modern, right? (Jackie: right) Something like that, and therefore something that could be improved upon, right? (Jackie: mhm) It's a pretty reductive understanding of tradition, (Jackie: right) and it doesn't seem to be the right understanding of tradition, the kinds of traditions that you're describing. There's something kind of really essentially important to the way that Kazakhs think about the land and the water, right, that sustains them over time.
Do you have, with all the sources that you were going through for your thesis work, do you have a favorite one? Was there one that you felt your heart race and your, you know, your eyes sparkle when you stumbled upon it? (Kelly laughs, Jackie: umm) You don't have to be that nerdy.
26:17 Jackie
There were the ones where these travel to, I think, the Hungarian Arminius Vámbéry and, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, but they, there's just these minor accounts of, they would talk to Kazakhs on the steppe about how they thought about mobility and these were my favorite because I could hear because he would quote them, and if you tried to read against the grain, these are the primary sources from their own mouth and it's hard to come across Kazakhs from their own, like ordinary Kazakhs, from their own, in their own voices and any source that could give me a glimpse of that, that was my favorite.
And in the Central State Archive I saw a lot of petitions. This is also a moment when a lot of statisticians were coming in the late 19th century and there was this one where I incorporated my thesis where it was a typed-out petition of a local official had gone to survey this homestead, essentially. Or like, this was a Kazakh village that was going to be demolished because the Russian settlements were being built and in the words of these two Kazakhs, the Russian official, said something along the lines of “well he planted all these trees on this on his village because he thought he was going to get rewarded for his efforts” and he had described the kind of local water sources the corrals. Corals?
27:56 Kelly
Corrals for pasture, for livestock>
28:02 Jackie
Yeah, corrals. (Kelly: mhm) He described this kind of amazing, like, the house, what they built, (indistinguishable short noise) the built infrastructure around and he goes “well, why are we trying to destroy this? Doesn't that seem beyond the point of what we're trying to do because we want to build something like this, we want to build gardens and it seems counterintuitive,” and so this Russian official seems coming at this moment of like, “well, what is the point of what am I? What am I doing?” And that voice kind of rings clear. And I thought “wow, this is a moment of, like, self-doubt. These engineers are also people too, who have ways of thinking about this as well.” And, but he still carries out the kind of order to demolish and to kind of let the original Kazakhs to leave. He ordered them to leave.
I was thinking about these ordinary Kazakhs who, what was their way of either resisting but also coming to terms with the empire encroaching on their land? These land seizures that were going on at this moment in the late, after 1891, when more, more Russian settlers come into this steppe, the Kazakh steppe. And I remember I keep on thinking about this book by the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, and in the book the two characters Jamilia and Daniyar, they flee the village. This village, which is sedentarized. This village, after collectivization, they're sedentarizing a lot of Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads. And in this moment the two characters flee the village. And it reminded me of, that a lot of Kazakhs, including my own family, they fled the empire. They fled into, whether that was to the Qing Empire of China or into Mongolia.
And I'm thinking about these ordinary, many Kazakhs live outside of Kazakhstan because this was a way of protest as well. They were also fleeing the conditions of sedentarization during the Stalin era, but they're also fleeing the land seizures that are happening. They were literally refusing the empire. And this is a story that's not really contained in the archive and contained other than secret police reports or correspondences between the Russian empire or the Qing empire of many Kazakhs crossing the borders; that’s the only way that they're recorded in history. And so, you have how many millions outside of the Russian empire or outside of Kazakhstan as well, who were part of this long heritage of mobility that was long on the steppe. Because before borders there were these Kazakhs who were navigating this land as well. And kind of ancestral pastures around the Altai mountains that Kazaks knew for a long time, and I was thinking about that as a way of, this heritage of mobility as both not only resistance to an empire, but it is resistance, essentially, because this is a refusal to be made legible to both empire, but also to the kind of hegemonic voice of the archive as well.
31:22 Kelly
So it sounds like a refusal. Yeah. I mean, this idea, the refusal to be made legible (Jackie: mhm) means that in so many ways, right, an empire can't be represented on a piece of paper. It can't be represented on a map, (Jackie: mhm) right? Let's just come back to the idea of a map though, as maybe the, the last thing I want to ask you about, are there maps (Jackie: mhm) that you have looked at that you think do capture some important element of either the Kazakh experience, the Kazakh understanding of space or anyone else's understanding of space? Have you ever kind of encountered a map and thought “ok, you know, this kind of gets it right. (Jackie: mhm) This gets, this gets at something” or do you feel like maps are just well-intentioned but woefully inadequate pieces of paper?
32:13 Jackie
I think they can be both, right? They can be both. Sometimes, I don't know why, but when you said map that gets at the Kazakh experience and my grandfather drew this map around the mountains, and he was trying to trace his lineage, his paternal lineage of our clans, and, like, how they had moved around this area. And he didn't add any borders, he didn't add names, he did the mountains, he did the waters that he knew. And something about it I never thought about it as a map because I always thought about it as something, a precious memory, just our home, our homelands. And I doubt any map could ever reproduce the same amount of love and loss that that map my grandfather knew in, by his memory alone, and, yeah.
33:14 Kelly
Do you still have the map?
33:16 Jackie
Yeah, we do. It's at home in Mongolia, yeah. Yeah. Just also the, I guess the imagined geographies of other worlds and elsewhere that people have that I don't think necessarily cartography can capture, only mimic in certain ways But I think we can try and for people and I think trying and striving for the other- otherwise and elsewhere, that's also the beauty of, like, living, we… That's what I think of constantly about the fleeing moment. It's an imagined geography elsewhere besides the empire. Yeah, that people carry within themselves.
33:57 Kelly
Alright, well, we'll keep trying. (Jackie laughs) It's worth it, isn't it? (Jackie: yeah) Thank you, Jackie.
34:02 Jackie
Thank you so much.