Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute JRAI D RAI O DV Bride abduction in post-Soviet Central Asia: marking a shift towards patriarchy through local discourses of shame and tradition CYNTHIA WERNER Texas A&M University The apparent revival of non-consensual bride abduction in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan is somewhat surprising seventy years after the Soviet state banned the practice and introduced sweeping legislation to emancipate women. This article relies on local discourses of shame and tradition to explain changing marriage practices and to mark a shift towards greater patriarchy in post-Soviet Central Asia. Discourses of shame are mobilized by local actors in support of the popular view that a woman should 'stay' after being abducted. Women can and do resist abductions, but they risk dealing with the burden of shame. Further, in Kyrgyzstan, where bride abduction is increasingly re-imagined as a national tradition, women and activists who challenge this practice can be viewed as traitors to their ethnicity. In post-Soviet society, these discourses of shame and tradition have helped men assert further control over female mobility and female sexuality. My first encounter with bride abduction took place in 1994 while I was conducting fieldwork in a rural town in southern Kazakhstan. I was living with a Kazakh family when the neighbour's 18-year-old daughter, Raisa, was abducted by a stranger who lived in a nearby village and wanted to marry her.1 A few months later, my host family's 19-year-old daughter, Aigul, was abducted by her college boyfriend. Although the Soviet Union established laws banning forced marriages in the 1920s, these two experiences revealed that bride abductions were a reality in the 1990s and that they varied greatly from one case to the next. While Raisa was surprised and upset by the abduction, Aigul conspired in her own kidnapping in order to avoid a marriage that her parents preferred. In a previous article, I have described the rise of bride abduction in the post-Soviet period, the different motives used to explain this practice, and the varying levels of consent (Werner 2004a). Relying on ethnographic accounts of bride abduction in southern Kazakhstan, the following article gives voice to Kazakh women and men who have experienced social transformations throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the first section, I provide a cross-cultural framework for understanding bride abduction and present two stories of non-consensual bride abduction in con- temporary Kazakhstan. I then provide a brief historical overview of marriage practices and gender relations among the Kazakhs in the pre-Soviet and Soviet eras. In the final Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15, 314-331 @ Royal Anthropological Institute 2009
BRIDE ABDUCTION IN POST-SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA 315 sections, I look at how discourses of shame and tradition mark a shift towards greater patriarchy. I use marriage practices as a prism for understanding how Kazakh 'culture' is being dissected and reconstructed by local actors in ways that are shifting power relations between men and women. I focus on two issues related to bride abduction that are contested by local