Changing My Ideas a Bit

I originally came to Kyrgyzstan with an idea about how people became interested in their country. I figured, not everyone cares about their country on an everyday basis, but everyone cares about some basic things—food, shelter, safety, family—on an everyday basis. Therefore, if people come to see their country as necessary for them to fulfill their everyday needs, then they will become interested in their country.

I also figured that there was a middle-man, in the form of groups. “Groups” is a bad term, because it doesn’t really explain what I am looking at. I spent an hour last night coming up with an alternative name, and I’m afraid it’s even more ambiguous than the term it replaces. Voluntary indirect meaning-based associations. How’s that for academic babble? Let me explain what I mean by it. Take religion, for example. No one forces you to care about your religion. If you care about it, then you get involved it. If you don’t care about it, you don’t get involved in it. It’s voluntary. The interesting thing about religion, though, is that it is an association where you don’t ever meet or know most of the other people who belong to it. On a sports team, a community organization, or even a school, you tend to know who belongs to it and who doesn’t. In a religion, you only know a few of the people who belong to it. So you association with the membership of your association is indirect—you know that other people belong to it, but those people aren’t the reason for your belonging. The reason for your belonging is the personal meaning you attach to your membership. You feel that your religion is an important part of who you are, therefore you belong to it.

If you don’t mind, I’ll just use “groups” instead. Just keep in mind what I mean when I use it. Religion, ethnicity, class, gender—these are all the kinds of groups that I just described. I figured that these would be a little closer to people’s everyday lives than their country, so I envisioned a step-by-step process: if people see their everyday needs as tied up in the well-being of one of these groups, then the group will become important to them. If they see their government as affecting the well being of a group that is important to them, then their country will become important.

Yeah. I think I was pretty much wrong about that.

The fact is, the grand majority of the people here know incredibly little about any of the groups I’ve mentioned. Being a certain ethnicity, gender, religion, class, or anything else is something that everyone is aware of, but very few people actually think about it. It’s just what they do. That doesn’t mean these things don’t affect them. For example, a lot of Muslim women are not able to do many of the things the Muslim men do. They often aren’t allowed in a mosque unless the mosque is big enough to accommodate a women’s section. There are some behavior restrictions on women that don’t apply to men. Most women I have talked to know about these rules, but, even if Islam is very important to them personally, they don’t really think much about them. It’s just what they do.

The only people I have found who have thought about these kinds of groups are people who have had to learn about them quickly—new converts, apostates, students—or people who have had to learn about them for goals not directly associated with their personal lives—clergy, teachers, NGO workers. It seems that the main factor that determines whether your religion, ethnicity, country, or anything else becomes important to you is whether or not you have had to learn how to talk about those things as part of belonging to an organization. Belonging to the group isn’t enough. You have to belong to an organized effort to understand or advance the interests of the group. I used to see that kind of organizational effort as an effect of group belonging. I’m not starting to think of it as a cause.

I’m still working on these ideas, but I just conducted two interviews yesterday that completely conformed to the new predictions I just mentioned. That’s not evidence, but it is encouragement. What I am seeing in this country and the things people are saying here make a lot more sense in light of this new perspective.