Julie McBrien

Listening to the wedding speaker: discussing religion and culture in Southern Kyrgyzstan

Autumn 2003 was a particularly busy wedding season in Bazaar-Korgon, Kyrgyzstan. The fresh fruits and vegetables needed for wedding parties in the small Fergana Valley town were plentiful and at the lowest prices of the year. Cash crops had just been harvested, the sale of which provided the funds needed to finance the weddings. The number of weddings was particularly high that year because Ramadan began at the end of October. No one would marry during the month of fasting, and not many wanted a winter wedding, so all the autumn weddings were crammed into September and October. It was easy to tell when there was a wedding nearby from the trumpeting of horns that marked the commencement and conclusion of various stages of the day’s events. The rush to marry before Ramadan meant that the days and nights of September and October 2003 were filled with the cacophony of competing horns. The climax of wedding celebrations in Bazaar-Korgon was the evening party. At a typical event the celebration was held outside in the courtyard of the groom’s parents’ home. Party lights were strung about, interwoven in the grape vines hanging overhead. The courtyard was dominated by a head table covered with chocolate, alcohol and floral arrangements. The bride and groom, with their witnesses beside them, sat at the table. The bride wore a ‘European style’ (evromoda) wedding dress, rented from a local shop. Her hair would have been carefully styled and perhaps even coloured with metallic-flecked spray, her make-up was most likely ‘professionally done’. The bride’s witness also wore her best dress and had done her hair and make-up in a similar fashion. The groom and his friend donned suits and Uzbek hats (doppas). Behind the party hung a large backboard colourfully painted with the words ‘Welcome’ (kosh kelingniz) and bedecked with blinking lights. Evening wedding parties nearly always included a DJ who played music and orchestrated the toasts, the exchange of gifts, and dances. Several tables would line the centre of the yard. Guests, generally friends of the bride and groom, sat at the tables and ate. During the festivities, members of the opposite sex Central Asian Survey (September 2006) 25(3), 341–357

Watching Clone: Brazilian soap operas and Muslimness in Kyrgyzstan

ABSTRACT In 2004 Clone, a Brazilian soap opera that featured Moroccans and Brazilians as main characters, broadcast throughout post-Soviet Central Asia. The program rose to tremendous popularity in the Kyrgyzstani town of BazaarKorgon partly due to the romanticism of its imagery. The towns residents said they were so taken by the soap opera because it was the first fictionalized program that featured Muslims as main characters that had aired in the post-Soviet period. While the rather orientalized images featured in the serial can be read as highly stereotypical, Bazaar-Korgonians nonetheless utilized the soap to widen conceptualizations of what “true” Muslimness could be. Some even used it to support their efforts at religious piety. The soap opera was certainly not a religious object. Nevertheless, residents utilized it in explicitly religious projects. This forces us to consider the role that such ambiguously classifiable objects—those that fall outside of the undeniably religious/non-religious dialectic—play in “doing religion.”