Pomegranate, fig, and almond trees
Examining my experience of Uzbekistan through the lens of environmental constructivism. Concepts defined by Paul Robbins from a chapter of Environment and Society. Written by Angelica Ruzanova in summer 2024.
Shokhrukh Rakhimov in Rakhimov's Ceramic Studio, photographed by me in July 2023, Tashkent. We came to the studio twice, and both times there were people drinking tea on the tapchan.
My Uzbek roots gravitate to land. The living clay, the quilted kurpacha, the plowed soil. The love for earth disciplined and arranged my people’s way of life. It took and it gave, nourished and destroyed.
I am back in my hometown in Tashkent. On my 20th birthday, I made pottery in an Uzbek garden.
Social construction: any category, condition, or thing that exists or is understood to have certain characteristics because people socially agree that it does.
Locals overlooking one of the markets near Registan from the former president’s memorial, Samarkand. Photo by me.
My clay was stubborn, and, like the master it is, gave me three tries to make an earthenware flower pot. Our teacher Shokhrukh is the seventh in his family line to lead the ceramic seminary. He lives on the second floor of the studio, and told us that his grandfather said he only started to understand clay at 78 years old.
Constructivist: emphasizing the significance of concepts, ideologies, and social practices to our understanding and making of the world.
Watermelon stands near Samarkand Central Station, Uzbekistan. The typical way of checking the melon’s ripeness is by knocking on it and looking for a deep, hollow sound. Taken by me.
The clay, made of kaolin compound, was kneaded and thought into creation on the wheel. Occasionally, the clay used in the studio is extorted from Afghanistan. All other material is local. I looked at the spiraling body on my spinning wheel, a distorted cosmo of terracotta, and shapeshifted its natural order by molding it with my palms and fingers. Dishes, spherical cups, pílalas, vases, jugs, and pots orbited my table.
We used colors found in pigments of quarts, lapis, lazurite, and cobalt. The decorative tiles on the walls took inspiration from the Samanid dynasty (819-999 CE) during which Ferdowsī wrote his “Book of Kings.” A rule of thumb: no design is repeated twice.
I felt the changing plasticity while rolling my cube of mud on the table (this is done to get rid of any oxygen). I felt the stupor of time as I applied pressure and it refused to surrender. My mom’s family migrated to Qarshi, Uzbekistan, during World War II from the Republic of Bashkortostan. It lies between Volga and the Ural Mountains. I thought about their journey to the promising Silk Road, to fields of mulberry trees, poplar, and reed.
Nature: the natural world and everything that exists that is not a product of human activity; often put in quotes to designate that it is difficult if not impossible to divvy up the entire world into discrete natural and human components. “A product of biophysical forces through a history of human occupation and management.”
The slated madrassah columns of Registan square, summer 2023. Photo by me.
A lot in Uzbek culture is accomplished with hands. I remember gypsies who read my palm on the streets of Saylyk when I was younger; people eating plov with cusped fingers out of a shared plate on a tapchan; the picking of cotton, or “white gold” of Central Asia during harvest; prayer and worship.
On the tapchan, people eat with crossed legs as the canopy structure shades them from the sun. This kind of cooling furniture is common in Central Asia because of something we call “chillah,” or 40 days of heat between July and August, possibly attributed to the shrinking of large bodies of water such as the Aral Sea.
Social context: the ensemble of social relations in a particular place at a particular time; includes belief systems, economic relations of production, and institutions of governance
My cousin Timur and friends in front of the largest madrassah of Registan square, summer 2023. Photo by me.
Less than a century ago, the country began using the Aral basin as one of its primary water sources for irrigation, resulting in agricultural mismanagement due to the monocultural dependency on cotton that the sea powered. By 2014, the Aral Sea dried by a factor of 14 of its original size, previously being the fourth largest lake in the world.
Natural properties of things are derived from authoritative methods and sources (take universally agreed-on scientific theories or language, as an example). This suggests a relationship between environmental knowledge and power. Who benefits?
A propped-open door to a house in a narrow Samarkand street. Historically, it is custom for house windows to not face outward. Photo by me.
Toxic salts and minerals, including fertilizers and other chemicals used in large quantities for agricultural purposes, are air-blown as much as 1,000 kilometers from the basins’ radius, resulting in heavy dissemination in neighboring food and water sources (1995 UNDP background report).
That has caused a lot of dust storms in the area - something I've always wondered about as a kid.
Discourse: at root, written and spoken communication; thicker deployments of the term acknowledge that statements and texts are not mere representations of a material world, but rather power-embedded constrictions that (partially) make the world we live in.
Geographers Barnes and Duncan called it “frameworks that embrace narratives.”
A broken (but well-used) swing set in Yunusobod district playground of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Photo by me.
Back at the ceramic studio, on my finished pot, I drew two birds whose beaks were raised to each other – like the Humo bird on the national emblem or the singing birds in Farid un Attar’s “Conference of the Birds.” Our teacher scratched two lines across their necks to imitate that they were dead. In Islam, it is customary to avoid drawing living beings as it can be interpreted as an act of creation.
Co-production: the inevitable and ongoing process whereby humans and non-humans produce and change one another through their interaction and interrelation.
“Beings do not pre-exist their relatings,” said Donna Haraway. Humans constantly remake the world but are remade in the process.
