Nations Layered upon Ethnic Groups:
Shadow of the Silk Road

February 15, 2008

As I near completion of Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, I am growing convinced that it will be a classic. As with many travel narratives, there is an element of luck to its success. This book captures a region—the old silk road through central Asia—that is in the midst of change. On the Chinese side there is rapid colonization and modernization, with ethnic groups struggling to maintain their identities. In the countries formerly administered by the USSR there is instead the depressing feeling of emptiness and the loss of a conceptual framework. The reader can feel one cultural tide pushing in even as another recedes.

Thubron seeks remnants past, but while he knows something about the archeology of many sites, he is not satisfied with imagining the past. He adds his own lively reflections about how contemporary peoples relate to their past. It turns out that relating to the past is a task that makes fools of most people. We are treated to the sight of the people of Uzbekistan heroizing the conqueror Tamerlane as the father of their nation.. even though the Uzbeks themselves arrived in this country after Tamerlane. So here, as in so many other cases in Central Asia, we have a national tradition coalescing out of the thin air of history.

This attention to the conceptual changes that living in a nation state introduces is valuable.. pointing up something central to our own time:

So the tsarists, and the Bolsheviks after them, entered a land without nations, where a state was only the outreach of a ruler. Its heart was not an abstract institution, but a living dynasty. Its frontiers were blurred opinions. Craving order from this multilingual soup, Moscow prescribed labels, tinkered with languages. allotted suitable heroes, and carved out countries as best it cold. By the time Uzbekistan lurched to independence in 1991, the nation was a full-blown Russian invention. Its rulers, part of the myth themselves, discovered legitimacy in the Soviet fantasy of a pre-existing Uzbekistan, embracing the glory of Tamerlane now, and fading back into an indefinite past. [201]

Note the relation here between nations and the previous mixed ethnic groups. We can imagine the "multilingual soup" as a complex patch-work of colors laid out over the landscape. The nation state, despite its claim to being natural, imposes a monolithic demand upon that patch-work of colors. The outsized puzzle pieces of nation states—as we know them from our maps and globes—lies uneasily upon the actual ethnic landscape inherited from centuries past.

This is the central drama of our time: the reconciliation of ethnic mixture with the demand of national unity. One of the most shattering and violent processes of all human history has been this slow motion struggle to impose nation status upon the patch-work of ethnic groups. Over the past few weeks we have watched Kenya show signs of buckling as its ethnic groups fight for supremacy.. and Thubron provides rich documentation of the same kinds of struggles within the states formed along the former Silk Road. In a zone whose glory is exactly its mixed status that is inimical to the nation state.. we discover the ways that such ethnic mixture can be explained away and controlled by the nation state.