Mahabat Sadyrbek - Legal Pluralism in Central Asia

Legal Pluralism in Central Asia reports on historical, anthropological and legal research which examines customary legal practices in Kyrgyzstan and relates them to wider societal developments in Central Asia and further afield. Using the term legal pluralism, the book demonstrates that there is a spectrum of approaches, available avenues, forms of local law and indigenous popular justice in Kyrgyzstans predominantly rural communities, which can be labelled living law. Based on her extensive original research, Mahabat Sadyrbek shows how contemporary peoples systematically address challenging problems, such as disputes, violence, accidents, crime and other difficulties, and thereby seek justice, redress, punishment, compensation, readjustment of relations or closure. She demonstrates that local law, expressed through ritually structured communicative exchange, through dictums and proverbs with binding characters and different legal practices or processes undertaken in specific ways, deem the solutions appropriate and acceptable. The reader is thereby enabled to see the law in peoples deepest assumptions and beliefs, in codes of shame and honour, in local mores and ethics as well as in religious terms. In this way, the book reveals the dynamic, changing and living character of law in a specific context and in a region hitherto insufficiently researched within legal anthropology.

Mahabat Sadyrbek is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany.

Local Jurisdiction and Customary Practices

Mahabat Sadyrbek

First published 2018

by Routledge

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2018 Mahabat Sadyrbek

The right of Mahabat Sadyrbek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Sadyrbek, Mahabat, author.

Title: Legal pluralism in Central Asia : local jurisdiction and customary practices / Mahabat Sadyrbek.

Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017042240 | ISBN 9781138551763 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315147772 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Legal polycentricityAsia, Central. | Customary lawAsia, Central. | Legal polycentricityKyrgyzstan. | Customary lawKyrgyzstan.

Classification: LCC KLA482 .S23 2018 | DDC 340.90958dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042240

ISBN: 978-1-138-55176-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-14777-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

The foundation for this book is my doctoral dissertation, completed in spring 2016 at the Institute of Central Asian Studies, faculty of Cultural, Social and Educational Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Since that time, the original manuscript has been slightly altered and lengthened, but the central argument and core content of the thesis remains the same. This book is the report of a historical, anthropological and legal research project concerning the forms of local law and indigenous popular justice in predominantly rural Kyrgyz communities. Under the critical heading of legal pluralism, I offer a broad and empirically-based survey of the spectrum of available avenues by which contemporary peoples in Kyrgyzstan systematically address challenging problems, such as the occurrence of disputes, violence, accidents, crimes and trouble-cases, and thereby seek forms of justice, redress, punishment, compensation, readjustment of relations or closure in relation to such problems. The relationships between different norms, institutions, principles and different legal systems also receive prominent attention. The centrepiece of the book is a description of more than 15 trouble-cases recorded and reconstructed between 2003 and 2015, followed by analyses of these incidents, of the nature of the living law and local justice, and its place in the social control system of communities, as well as its historical background. The presentation of the central themes is preceded by a chapter that includes the explanatory theory and analytical tools needed to deal with the data. Further chapters follow that describe the history and socio-economic circumstances of local communities and their social systems in detail. Various factors and local conditions that facilitate this special form of living law will be particularly discussed.

It is with sincere and heartfelt gratitude that I acknowledge the support of so many teachers, colleagues and friends who have been a part of this work and a part of my life. My deepest thanks go to my dissertation advisors Professor Ingeborg Baldauf and Professor Antoni Huber at the Institute for Asian and African Studies of Humboldt University Berlin. They both enthusiastically suggested and encouraged me to transform my doctoral thesis into a book. Their constructive comments on a late draft greatly enhanced the quality of this work. In addition, Dr Beate Eschment and Dr Jeanine Elif Dayeli had a strong influence on the organization and content of the research project, and significant parts of this manuscript have benefited from several classificatory discussions with them. Much cherished professional guidance came from Professor Russell Kleinbach (Philadelphia), who has always managed to offer insightful academic advice and challenged me to sharpen my analyses and clarify my arguments. It is a pleasure to receive an abundance of moral support from a distance and I am very much looking forward to future collaboration with him.