Rural families facing environmental degradation in Central Asia’s cotton oases: Soviet legacies and new challenges

Much of the population living in semi-arid southern Central Asia is concentrated in the densely populated irrigated zones in which agriculture still represents the major pillar of the economy. Large, irrigated fluvial oases have characterized this region for millennia, but their surface has been disproportionately and unsustainably expanded in Soviet years. The Soviet cotton policy has been, on the one hand, the foundation for development, modernization and vibrant rural communities centered around the Soviet-made collective farms; on the other hand, this same policy has left a trail of economic, environmental, and human disasters, culminating in the well-known Aral Sea catastrophe.

Despite being targeted by Soviet policies, the patriarchal extended Muslim family has proved resilient and adaptive to Soviet rural society, since traditional kin-groups were incorporated into large-scale modern industrial farm holdings. In the post-Soviet transition to the market, kinship and family networks retained their importance as determining factors in the ownership change from collective to individual farm enterprises, while also being a relief valve for the social inequalities and tensions resulting from it. Today land degradation is increasingly threatening agricultural systems and rural families struggle to find a balance between concern for their short-term gains and the long-term preservation of their farms’ soils. In this setting, family and kinship relationships are called into question to manage new challenges.

Based on recent anthropological literature on rural families in Central Asia and on ethnographic research conducted in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, this contribution reflects on how rural families are adapting to growing environmental problems in Central Asia’s irrigated cotton oases. In countertrend with literature stressing how lclimate emergencies and rapid environmental transformation reshape and overcome traditional family patterns, evidence on rural families in Central Asia seem to point in the opposite direction: when environmental conditions are challenging the viability of past agricultural practices, kinship and family maintain their importance in peoples’ lives at a time of growing social disparities and vulnerability.