Prehistories of Globalization: Circassian Identity in Motion
However undisciplined the term globalization might still be, there is increasing agreement as to the kinds of processes that it points to in the world. Whether interpreting alternative modernities, cultural hybridities, commodity circulations, transnational migrations, or identity politics, globalization theory largely looks to the future, attempting to prefigure the new millennium while eschewing notions of linearity, teleology, and predictability. Concomitantly, the notion of modernity has acquired remarkable fluidity, indicating that it has become plural, uneven, contested, and “at large” ( Appadurai 1996). Building on ideas of the past as constructed, invented, and produced, globalization presents itself as a theory of the present moment. Powerfully expressing that “we now live in an almost/not yet world” ( Thrift 1996, 257), it captures the in-betweenness of a world always on the brink of newness.
Modernization theory has also been concerned with process, innovation, and rupture, but it is differently invested in notions of the past. In its earlier, more concrete, more confident era, modernity invented an array of pasts. There is the past as Tradition, a timeless, static past whose value lies not in explanation but in revealing the alter ego either as the anachronistic self or the distant other. A different past is History. In one variant, this focuses on the rise of European hegemony, producing a causal narrative of how, why, and when modernity started. Quite different again is the past as Evolution, an indexical, ascending past that naturalizes the present. A fourth type of past, Antiquity, is indispensable to modernity’s prime embodiment, the nation-state, which it territorializes. A fifth is the past as Civilization, a foundation myth featuring the migrations of the spirit of the West from Ancient Greece to present-day democracies. One could go on enumerating pasts, following the lines of Fabian’s (1983) discussion of the different notions of Time that, among other things, served the anthropological production of self and other. Anthropology, history, archaeology, and other disciplines jostle one another to lay authoritative claims to the pasts of modernity: alternative pasts characterized by fixed temporalities, marked epochs, and bracketed periods, which work together to define, explain, enhance, and anchor the notion of modernity.
Will pasts be invented by globalization? What kinds of pasts will they be? How will globality trace its genealogies? These are the questions with which this paper grapples at its most general level. They are questions that speak to ongoing theoretical and ideological deliberations: Does globalization represent rupture or continuity? postmodernity or late modernity? Americanization or “glocalization”? I do not presume to give answers, and typologies or classifications would clearly not be the route to follow given the critical differences between the premises of globalization theory and modernization theory ( Appadurai 1996). I will instead explore the issue through a closer look at an emergent notion that might be called the prehistory of globalization. Further, I will focus on how the pasts of one small diasporic group, the Circassians, act upon their present engagements with globality and the ways in which they experience a newly accessible homeland in the North Caucasus. In looking at the linkages between Circassian pasts and presents, mobility and migration emerge clearly as a constitutive element of Circassian identity.
To explore the relationship between motion and identity I will juxtapose two texts from different time-spaces. The first is an ethnographic text narrating a journey undertaken by a Circassian woman in 1993 from diaspora to homeland, from Turkey to the Caucasus. The second is an historical text dating from 1854 and documenting the journey of a Circassian woman from homeland to slavery, from the Caucasus to Egypt. The unexpected divergences, convergences, and counterintuitive insights illuminated by the juxtaposition illustrate the changing trajectories of migration, memory, and imagination. They help assess the utility of prehistory as a conceptual link between past and present and reveal the profoundly gendered nature of globalization and its pasts.
Circassian Migrations and the Diasporic Imagination
Migration and imagination are historically linked processes that produce memorable moments in the pasts of peoples, nations, communities, and individuals. Each sustains the other, expanding circumscribed experiences and elaborating localized meanings. How do new forms of mobility and transgressions of boundaries invoke new imaginations? How are experiences, acts, utterances, and thoughts made meaningful given changing relations of mobility and incarceration? Situated at the nexus of such transformations, diaspora populations hold special promise for insights into cultural dimensions of globalization. They constitute “crucibles of a postnational political order” ( Appadurai 1996, 22) generative of hopes for “nonabsolutist forms of citizenship” ( Clifford 1997, 9). Diaspora identities are constructed in motion and along different lines than nation-states. They affirm multiple attachments, deterritorialization, and cultural hybridity.
The Adygei, better known by outsiders as Circassians (or Çerkez, Sharkass, Tcherkess), are an example of identity in motion. Circassians trace their origins to the Northwest Caucasus, which was historically part of the interconnected regions of the Black and Mediterranean Seas, as chronicled by the voyages and tribulations of Odysseus, Jason, and Prometheus. The Caucasus was also a source of warriors and slaves for various empires in the area ( Toledano 1982). One example is the Circassian Mameluk slave dynasties in thirteenth- to sixteenth-century Egypt, whose descendants, augmented by later individual and group migrations, came to form a Turco-Circassian elite. The history of the Caucasus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is largely framed by the conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in which local peoples were pawns, partisans, and victims ( Berkok 1958). Mass migrations of Circassians and other Muslim Caucasian peoples to the Ottoman Empire started in the 1850s, and the earliest immigrants were settled by the state in the Balkans. There they were immediately embroiled in the ongoing conflicts that resulted in the withdrawal of the Ottomans from the region. Within a few decades of settlement, therefore, they became part of the inflow of Muslim populations from the Balkans into the Anatolian and Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Together with the continuing flows from the Caucasus, the number of Circassian settlers by the beginning of the twentieth century reached an estimated total of 1.5 million ( Karpat 1985).
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Notes
This paper was written while I was a fellow in residence at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala. An earlier version was presented at the SCASSS seminar and benefited greatly from discussion and comments. Very special thanks are due to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Katherine Young.