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Farideh HeyatCentral AsiaA significant characteristic of the Central Asian
family is its flexibility in make-up and also, in many
aspects, in location. This was even more marked
before the 1917 Russian Revolution when there
were several distinct lifestyles in Central Asia: the
nomadic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, and the sedentary
Uzbeks and Tajiks, with the Turkmens, Karakal-
paks, and other related groups drawing on ele-
ments from both.
The nomadic peoples typically lived in tents, or
yurts, easy to dismantle structures divided into
men’s and women’s quarters, with separate sleep-
ing sections for the parents and a central kitchen.
Their household can be conceptualized as a group
of family units residing in a cluster of yurts, form-
ing a camp or aul, and jointly owning the family
herds. These aulsusually moved location from
winter to summer and did not always consist of
an identical group of people.
The sedentary household was situated within a
courtyard (havli), containing anything from one
room to a large group of houses/rooms, each
accommodating a family unit. The 1897 Central
Asian census data indicated an average of 5.5 peo-
ple per household but this figure obscures large dif-
ferences in size, from one-person households to
those containing 50 or more (Krader 1971, 147–9).
Both nomadic and sedentary peoples lived in
extended patrilineal families, usually consisting of
a patriarch, his wife or wives, and their unmarried
offspring, married sons and their wives and chil-
dren, and in larger households the patriarch’s
younger brothers, their wives and progeny, and
perhaps also distant cousins. Thus, most male
central asia 251members would be related by blood, with wives
marrying in. Richer men might live between several
households, each run by a different wife, sometimes
in a different town.
When they became too big or at the patriarch’s
death, households would split, each son forming
his own. In smaller households a son would sepa-
rate soon after marriage or at the marriage of the
following son, except for the youngest, who would
remain with his parents for life and inherit the yurt
or havli after their death. However, wives who did
not get along with their in-laws might try to per-
suade their husbands to split from the extended
family sooner. Families without sons might prevail
upon a son-in-law to move in with them perma-
nently to carry on the line.
Those too poor to afford their own homes could
serve the rich. Poor women might work as indoor
servants. They might even accompany a daughter
married to a wealthy man as her servant. In no-
madic areas men with insufficient herds to support
themselves could act as servants to those with large
herds until they could afford independence. Sim-
ilarly, among the sedentary, poor men would hire
out their services to wealthier ones in whose house-
holds they would live. An impoverished man might
arrange to give bride labor instead of the usual
bride-price, living as a servant in his future wife’s
household meanwhile. In general, class distinctions
were not strong, servants frequently intermarried
with their employers’ families, and there was little
differentiation between kin and non-kin within the
household.
After the revolution, the Soviet regime encour-
aged the development of nuclear households
throughout the region. Nevertheless, in rural areas
today the extended family remains the norm,
despite changes in economic relations as a conse-
quence of collectivization and the forcible settling
of the nomadic tribes. In urban areas the govern-
ment tried to enforce its policies by building apart-
ments too small for extended families. However,
even when fathers and sons live in physically sepa-
rate residences, they and their families may spend
most of their free time together, functioning virtu-
ally as an extended family, so that it is often diffi-
cult to decide where to draw the line round the
household unit. Moreover, offspring often give
their eldest child to their parents to rear, which also
skews the division of households into nuclear units.
The Soviet government provided dormitories for
factory employees from rural areas. Today these
may house whole families, each living in a single
room and sharing bathrooms. Some workers have
a home elsewhere. However, for the poorest, and