You may ask:” Why The Other?” Well, I was born and raised in Uzbekistan, Tashkent; therefore I am a part of it’s history .Being raised in Central Asia and being constantly reminded by neighbors, teachers, government that it is the East ,it is the Orient. According to E. Said’s Introduction to “Orientalism” that makes me The Other(at least I feel like one in some sense) .
Reading the course material made me wonder about a lot of things that I’ve asked myself once before already.
This summer I was visiting my family back home and I’ve had an urge to “dig a little deeper” in the history of Orient. I’ve decided to take a trip to the cities that allure great amount of tourist for many years already; cities that used to be a part of The Great Silk Road.
Walking narrow streets of Bukhara; climbing up the minaret in Khiva; and riding camels in Samarqand made me ask myself some big questions about my life, lives of people who walked those street many centuries ago and people’s believes in general.
How can I relate to those people? Can I relate to them?
My background is Russian, but I was raised in Central Asia and I haven’t even visit Russia until I was 20 y.o. Who do I really belong to? What is my ethnicity and what is ethnicity in general? I might speak Russian ,I am Christian orthodox, but I’ve inherited so much from the culture of the Orients that I feel like I could relate more to those people. What really determine your ethnicity? I don’t consider my self an Uzbek, but I have more in common with that nation that the one I actually belong to.
Also, seeing all that architecture and what a great impact religion had on building those cities made me wonder why religion was and still is so important to those people? Is it because people always need something to believe in and they seek for something beyond ordinary? It seems to me like it’s a lifestyle to those people it’s just the way it always has been for them. They just know what they have to do, because they ‘ve been doing this for so many generations. Another question that always interested me is that there are many Jewish people in Bukhara ,they are very different in some way from the rest of the Jewish people around the world ,but the question is how is it possible that two such different religions can and have so many thing that are similar even though they came from different ethnicities?
Some other things surprised me as well, the fact that people from the same regions sometimes could not understand each other dialect fully. For example, our tour guide was from Urgench ,but when we went to Khiva(city-museum) he often had a problem understanding what locals were trying to say even though those cities are 30 minutes away from each other. Whereas, in Bukhara a 12 year old girl would speak English ,trying to sell you a pashmina .
The Culture. I can speak for ages about culture of the East .How nice the people are and how proud they are of their origins and it seem like they are ready to share almost everything they have with you. I’ve also noticed that culture in that region doesn’t change with time. By that I mean if I would compare the culture of Russia, Moscow to culture of Uzbekistan I would say that culture in Russia seems to change with time. But is it possible for culture to change? The cities are growing and people become colder to each other and they forget about important things like being nice to each other. Is it possible to loose culture? How did it all started ….the culture of people, nations, world? Why do we have need for culture? Do we do things out of generosity. Do we want to share our history and traditions? Why is it so important to some of us and why it is irrelevant to others?
