Institutionalised communication – the 'gap'

Even though the inhabitants of Khujand are quite critical towards countryside life and countryside values, one particular aspect stands out. Compared to Khujand, the rural population has conserved tight neighbourhood bonds: “Life in the countryside is different from life in the city: [...] They build their houses together, marry their children and live closer to each other than people in the city” (Interview Muhabbat, 2010, pp. 00:23:14-4). And this apparently got

lost in Khujand: “Previously, people lived as a closer community (posploŝënnee). When there was a celebration (tuy), the whole mahalla would come to help you” (Interview at the Shoemaker's place, 2010, pp. 00:01:35-7). Life in microraion apartments might have contributed to dissolution of pre-modern sociality – as the Soviet planners intended it. Parviza receives many less visits in her apartment than in the village, and she does not seem to regret it:

To me, life in the countryside means that there are always guests coming, and relatives. At my mother's place there is always someone. We live in the district centre, so everyone who comes from other villages – our good or not so good acquaintances, father's relatives – when they go to the hospital or something, they think they have to come along or to stay overnight. You spend a lot of money on the house, so that there is always enough to eat for all the guests. In an apartment it's somewhat easier. All people think that when you live in an apartment (v sekcii), then they rather won't come. Even to my apartment, which is rather big – four rooms [...] I've told you, this year I have bought a one-room apartment in the 32nd

(microraion), and I am perfectly sure that people won't come to visit me. They would think: 'it's just one room, she doesn‘t have so much place for herself' (ko mne ne budet nikto prihodit'. Vse budut dumat' – odnokomnatnaâ, ej samoj tesno)” (Interview Parviza, 2010).

Yet when interlocutors compare their home town Khujand to places abroad, the picture looks different. Akpar, who has lived a couple of years in Dubai, considers that Khujand stands out in terms of communication:

Dubai is beautiful if you compare the buildings, but if you look at the people, our town is better, I think. In our town, people like to communicate. You won’t see such thing in Dubai. You could live there for ten years and still not get to know your neighbour, who he is and what he’s doing. But here, neighbours communicate closely. But you know, in Dubai, who lives there? You might see only Indians, all newcomers (priezžie). You rarely see an original (korennoj) inhabitant; all are migrants: from America, the Philippines, India, from different countries (Interview Akpar, 2010).

Firuza, the director of an NGO and a language school, also considers communication as a distinctive pattern of the Khujandis' way of being urban. Her family belongs to Khujand's urban elite. Although she had spent her childhood there, she moved to Dushanbe afterwards and came

back “due to circumstances” during the civil war.

When I moved to Khujand […] first it was a psychological trauma for me. […] I thought, I'm not in a city […] I saw, the streets were somehow strangely crooked, I don't figure out why [...] But then I understood: by its contents, Khujand is a city (Â ponâla, čto po soderžaniû, Hudžand – èto gorod) […] Usually, you think that rumours usually spread faster somewhere far way, at the periphery. But here, I understood that it's not just gossip, it's some etiquette (èto ne prosto razgovory, èto kakoj-to ètiket). First, I thought people were just gossipping about someone. Then I was really surprised that they provide you with information. In a friendly way they provide you with an information which you will need at some point. This is why we become part of this flow (my vlivaemsâ v èto) and we make an effort. When you meet someone, you have to tell him something which he might need. It's not about spreading gossip, that's an information transfer going on (Interview Tahmina, 2010).

And the best way to pass on information is through people. If you need something, you say it, then we will pass it on. People know it themselves and take part in transmitting information […] This is why I think, passing on information is a mentality of a developed society. Not reasoning, but the transfer of information, without adding your comments (Interview Tahmina, 2010).

Children, too, underline this communicative density of Khujand, as compared the countryside: “Here, we go to parks and sit together – that is, we have a communicative (obŝitel’nyj) town” (Interview Firuza, 2010). Indeed, Low has argued that urban public spaces serve as “spatial templates of urban symbolic communication” (Low, 1996, pp. 400–401), which enable people to share information, and thus to pass on a “metropolitan knowledge”, a particular urban culture. One reason why Khujand has become such a 'communicative town' is a social institution which Khujandis consider to be a particular feature of their town – the gap:

A gap mostly takes place once a week. Men meet each other according to their interests, for instance classmates from school or the university, or friends. They meet once a week or once a month and they cook palov. By the way, they usually cook very good palov with a lot of mutton and good quality oil, because they take turns in cooking […] Previously, this took place in a choykhona, but today some people do it at home as well […] For women this existed as well, but it was mostly a venue for choosing brides, and today it is not so widespread. But the male

tradition still holds on (Interview Muhabbat, 2010).

Indeed, the gap is by no means an urban tradition: Kandiyoti has described in detail the gap practices in rural Uzbekistan. After a period of decline, this practice enjoyed a revival in the 1970s in Uzbekistan's cities. Women's gap circles emerged. These get-togethers had not only the purpose of socialising, but increasingly involved money gathering and distribution among its members (Kandiyoti, 1998, pp. 570–571) – which I did not witness in Khujand. As Muhabbat remarked, the meal – in male circles invariably a palov – is the only element of conspicuous consumption involved. Matluba regularly meets her former classmates, each time in another restaurant (Interview Matluba, 2010). One gap circle comprises around ten to twenty people who all have something in common: a circle of art teachers and artists comes together in a choykhona at the Syrdarya river; the gap of the chair of ethnography and archaeology takes place in the teachers' room; the friends of the shoemaker Nabijon meet up every first Sunday of the month at his cabin. Others meet in the courtyards of the housing estates or at home. People usually take part in several gap circles; yet being member of more than three or four gap circles is often seen as a burden, because of the investments of both time and money which are involved (Interview Sherzod, Interview Nazir, 2010).

Gaps mostly take place at lunchtime or on weekend mornings. The meetings are in general very informal. The gap members come in casual dresses; often alcohol consumption is involved. People keep coming along, sit a while, and go their ways. Yet apart from the sociality aspect, I would side with Firuza in her interpretation of the gap as a node of intense information exchange35 _{with wide societal implications:}

At a gap, people meet regularly. They collect information and everything is kept under control. They would also tell you how someone has managed to achieve something, or if there are some problems. If you know about a problem, it is easier to solve. This helps. It is amazing: after the civil war when the state and the legal system did not work, society lived on by its own rules. Here, society did not wear out (ne razboltalos'), because legal norms exist and are communicated independently from state control […] People take responsibility and speak with each other. This is why they got through it here (Interview Tahmina, 2010, pp. 00:18:18-0).

35 In this regard, the gap comes close to the Afghan maylis – “a cultivated social reunion”, where Afghan men “pass on information while socialising” (Baldauf, 2007, p. 137).

While the urban mahalla has lost a part of its potency as a site of information exchange and societal control, the gap as an institutionalised site of information exchange has come to supplant it. Because of its flexibility, and its attractiveness as a form of non-hierarchical sociability, the Khujand gap was able to adapt to individualisation tendencies and the rise of apartment housing. At the same time, mahalla structures were not as keen to adapt to new conditions, and transformed to administrative units instead. In spite of also being a widespread feature of rural communal life, the common perception goes into framing the gap as a genuinely Khujandi marker of 'being urban'