Logo says 'To Be -- Named.'
Logo says 'To Be -- Named.'
Logo says 'To Be -- Named.'
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My Name, My Story

American University of Central Asia

The givers and bearers of a name constantly look to both past and future to (re)interpret how that name fits into their understanding of the present. The value of names and their constantly negotiated meanings are well known to the citizens of contemporary Central Asia, who, over the past century, have lived through Soviet iconoclastic socialism, Russian and Soviet imperialism, and more recent national and Islamic revivalism. For both the Soviet state and newly independent (as of 1991) Central Asian states, names and renaming have offered opportunities to simultaneously throw off the weight of the past, restore tradition, and imagine alternate futures. For ordinary Central Asian citizens, names have also served these functions, but often much more as well. While citizens too have felt the urge to overcome and reclaim history, they also interpret and sometimes change their names to place themselves in society in ways more complicated than their states’ narrow dichotomy of modernity vs. tradition. To reveal how these naming practices speak to the region’s complex history and society, American University of Central Asia’s oral historians conducted the “My Name, My Story” project, which gathered oral history interviews from AUCA students and community members. Here we have curated those interviews along one theme—“Names and the State”—to show how various respondents have competed to represent themselves through naming with a sometimes demanding and intrusive state that sees itself as the protector of national culture or a creator of orderly modernity.

The modern state needs to “see” its inhabitants, and names are one way by which it identifies them.[1] To administer financial and social benefits, to register accreditations, to provide security for the population—in a word, to deliver all the services that enable modern, socially mobile, technologically advanced, urban life—a state has to register subjects as unique individuals in order to differentiate them from one another.

This individuating function of naming is most visible among our interviewees from Afghanistan, for whom social mobility in an integrated state is a relatively new phenomenon. These interviewees note the novelty of surnames and explain the innovative means by which they have chosen their surnames in a country that does not mandate a fixed process. By contrast, some interviewees from former Soviet Central Asia describe the imperial process by which Russified surnames were assigned to their grandparents as well as the more versatile ways in which they have been able to pick and change their surnames.

But apart from individuating subjects, the modern state also seeks to transform its inhabitants into modern and national subjects through naming. As we see in various cases in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, the state, through its various bureaucracies and functionaries, pressures and sometimes even forces conformity to shifting gendered, national, and ostensibly decolonial norms. In Afghanistan, state figures, which our interviewees reference, have publicly discouraged surnames that purportedly place tribal belonging over national. In Tajikistan, a series of laws passed in the late 2010s has forced ethnic Tajiks to remove the Russian endings from their surnames in identity documents and replace them with “authentically” Tajik endings. In both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, interviewees regularly note disputes between their parents or themselves and officials at the state registry of births office or passport office over the authentic spelling of their names and their proper gendering.

In each of these cases, we see how the state’s need to individuate, modernize, and nationalize its subjects forces individuals to make difficult choices in defining how they belong to their families, communities, and nations. In short, how they identify themselves. In choosing a surname or having their surname reassigned, interviewees face the possibility of being, at least on a nominal level, separated from their family, which in Central Asia remains one of the central loci of communal identity and social support. When the state or its sometimes-idiosyncratic functionaries insist on their own paternalistic vision of nationality, other visions of what it means to be an Afghan, a Kyrgyz, or a Tajik, or simply a member of a family, have to be compromised. When the state makes it difficult to change one’s name, it cuts off the ways a person might express newfound post-Soviet identities and pass those on as an inheritance to their children.

[1] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).


https://atlassoft.space/auca/my-name-my-story-project/
Parichehr notes that she encountered persistent misgendering of her name at school and at government offices. Most girls’ first names in Tajikistan end in “a,” and thus children ridiculed her for her name’s lack of a final “a.” Moreover, a government official once needlessly added it to her passport. As she tells it, a grade-school teacher defended her from childhood bullies by explaining to the class that Parichehr is the correct Tajik girl’s name, and in fact, endings in “a” are Uzbek deviations from the Tajik norm. Whether this is true or not, both Parichehr and Parichehra are listed as possible girls’ names in the Register of Tajik National Names, a registry of first names created in 2016 by Tajik philologists and others concerned with the preservation of national culture. Tajik parents must choose the name of their newborn from this registry when registering the birth certificate.
Farangis notes some resentment at the fact that the Tajikistani government and societal norms prevent her and her compatriots from representing their matriline in their names. The Central Asian countries, even as they have changed their laws since the fall of the Soviet Union, continue to follow the Russian tradition of naming imposed on them in the 1930s. Russians have a first name, a patronymic (the name of their father with a special suffix attached), and a surname. In the 1930s as the Soviet Union created a universal passport system for the country, Central Asian bureaucrats were instructed to register names for all inhabitants of the republics in that fashion. Surnames, which most Central Asians to that point did not possess, were to be created either from the father or grandfather’s name. Tajikistan has since replaced the Russian suffixes that accompanied these names with Persian ones, but it retains the demand for a name, patronymic, and surname. The patronymic is the father’s name with a Persian suffix and the surname may be either the father’s surname, the mother’s surname, or the grandfather’s name. Nevertheless, Farangis is perhaps here responding to a recent controversy in Kyrgyzstan, where she goes to school, in which a feminist activist, Altyn Kapalova, attempted to give her son a matronymic, a name formed from her own name with a suffix attached, instead of the typical patronymic. The state civil registration office decided to sue Ms. Kapalova in retaliation for this because Kyrgyz law contains no provision for giving matronymics. Indeed, Kyrgyz law only allows for the patronymic to be omitted should the father be absent or, as in Ms. Kapalova’s case, not possess parental rights. Ms. Kapalova’s stand has received substantial support from others in the country.
Gulayim here notes some frustration she had with the latent Russian tendencies in Kyrgyz bureaucracies. Under the Soviet Union, the law required that birth certificates and internal passports (the main identity document of the Soviet Union) be written both in Russian and the official language of the republic in which the bearer resided. In many post-Soviet countries, this dual-language requirement is now gone, but it remains in Kyrgyzstan. Moreover, unlike other post-Soviet republics that have more strongly pushed back against Russian influence, educated urbanite Kyrgyzstani more often know Russian than they do Kyrgyz. It is perhaps for this reason that Gulayim’s birth certificate was recorded with a Russian “у” (like the “oo” in “boot”) instead of the short “u” Kyrgyz sound, which Russian does not possess.
Surnames are a recent innovation in Afghanistan. As of 2009, most Afghans lacked a last name and typically chose one only upon interacting with Western institutions or with expanding state structures in urban areas. More often, people distinguish one another by a compound first name or by referring to tribal affiliation, place of birth, profession, or honorific titles. Habib here describes how his father used their tribal affiliation, Ahmadzai, as his surname and encouraged Habib and his brothers, if they did not choose his surname when the time came to receive their state identity cards, to at least choose one in common. Habib’s example demonstrates how the introduction of the state and its services in people’s lives pushes them to rename and reidentify themselves in order to ensure that the state recognizes a family or other community as such. Habib also notes that, though he has chosen his tribal affiliation, Ahmadzai, as his surname, tribal affiliation surnames have since come into disfavor because they, to some, indicate a stronger level of identification with one’s tribal community than with the larger community of the Afghan nation that the US-backed government promoted until its ouster in 2021. That certainly does not seem to be the case with Habib, who does not speak of much knowledge or interest in his tribal identity. His primary goal in choosing the name was not to express his Pashtun ethnic identity or his tribal identity, but rather to ensure that the state identified him as a member of his nuclear family. The way in which Habib here has navigated this situation shows how the nationalist projects of states can often present obstacles to families and communities’ endeavors to be recognized.
Aidaana tells how her father encountered some resistance at his local birth certificate registration office when he chose a name from a book of Kyrgyz names. Such books were no doubt placed in registration offices as part of broader state nation-building initiatives to encourage parents to name their children with traditional Kyrgyz names. However, when Aidaana’s father chose a name from the book, Aidana, but then suggested a different spelling and pronunciation of it to change the meaning, the clerk there told him there was no such name and encouraged him to rethink his decision. He did not and eventually convinced the worker to permit his innovation. Aidaana’s father’s experience shows how the state’s efforts to encourage national social reproduction often interfere with other forms of social reproduction. Here the attempt to preserve traditional names threatens to impede another tradition, that of innovating from already existing names to create new ones.
Tahmina relates two moments in her personal and family history during which the state has had a profound influence on her name. As an adult in 2020, she has begun to consider changing her name because it does not comport with the Tajikistani state’s nation-building project to rid ordinary citizens of their Russified surnames and replace them with more “authentically” Tajik or Persian names. To set an example for his countrymen, in 2007 the President of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, dropped the Russian ending -ov from his previous surname, Rahmonov, to arrive at its present form. Tahmina believes that, in order to get a good job in Tajikistan, she will have to drop the patronymic (the Russian-style middle name indicating her father’s given name) and her surname for a new surname formed from her father’s first name and a Persian ending. Despite the difficulty this imposes on her and perhaps the way in which she will no longer represent her great-grandfather in her name, Tahmina is sympathetic to the government’s decolonizing project and does not see the change as depriving her of family identity. Perhaps she is not strongly tied to her current surname because it has never presented an impediment to her family ties. Tahmina also notes that, in registering surnames for her family in the 1930s, Soviet bureaucrats inadvertently split them into two lines. Her nuclear family holds one surname, Ustoev, while some of her cousins and second cousins hold another, Makhsumov, both of which are formed from her great-grandfather’s name, Usto Makhsum. Nevertheless, because she is from a small village, she likely still sees many of these cousins and second cousins regularly. The fact that they are identified as separate families by the state does not affect their personal identity as a family. Tahmina attributes this accidental division of the family to their ignorance or lack of education—rural Tajiks suddenly receiving passports in the 1930s certainly would not have recognized the importance of having their family recognized as such by the state in receiving social benefits. They had never received benefits from a state prior to that instance. However, the two different surnames might also result from another cause. No doubt, different branches of the family saw different bureaucrats, which explains the varying surnames, but those separate bureaucrats came to two different decisions probably because they were reacting to the difficulties presented in forming a surname from “Usto Makhsum.” The instructions received by Soviet bureaucrats in Central Asia explicitly noted that honorifics and religious titles were not to be used in the formation of surnames. The reasons for this were two-fold: 1) the Soviet state sought to upend class hierarchies and bureaucrats believed that by eliminating official recognition of those hierarchies in the passport, bearers could no longer use their fathers titles to claim extra privileges (in practice, they probably still received recognition on the basis of titles even without the official name) and 2) certain affiliations, particularly religious ones, could be dangerous for the bearer in an officially atheist society. The problem with “Usto Makhsum,” about which Tahmina is only half aware, is that the first name is an honorific, while the second is a religious title. “Usto” means “master,” as Tahmina notes, and “makhsum” is a variant of “makhdum,” a spiritual or clerical leader, which her great grandfather was. The two bureaucrats that met the two branches of Tahmina’s family might well have themselves been ignorant of aspects the local culture: the first recognized “makhsum” as a religious title and decided that the family in front of him would be Ustoev, while the other recognized “Usto” as an honorific and wrote Makhsumov. Neither apparently thought to ask the families for other names their father went by.
Erdeen’s story of how he received his surname demonstrates one of the ways that contemporary Kyrgyz families have managed to outmaneuver state laws and family conflict to represent their ancestors in their names as they see fit. Under the USSR, Central Asian parents (those of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan) had the option to give their children a surname formed from the first name of the father in addition to the Union standard of giving the child the surname of either parent (if they had different surnames). Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan gave parents yet another option: parents might also give their children a surname formed from the first name of the child’s grandfather. Erdeen tells how his parents could not agree on a surname for him when he was first born, so his maternal grandfather decided to resolve the argument with a compromise outside that permitted by law. He decided that Erdeen’s surname would be formed from part of his great-grandfather’s name, Akbiy, which he explains was not his name, but a title he held as a judge in the Kyrgyz steppe under the Russian Empire. According to Erdeen, his grandfather had to pay a bribe to the official at the registry office to get this name recorded on Erdeen’s birth certificate. While both the Soviet and post-Soviet states often seek to control how citizens honor their ancestors, Erdeen’s family’s experience shows the truth of the Russian saying: “The stringency of Russian laws is mitigated only by the unnecessariness of their enforcement.”