A Community of Order: Morale, Internal Discipline and Punishment in the Craft Milieu of Turkestan

Pre-socialist Central Asian craftspeople, irrespective of their specific profession and locality, shared a wide range of work-related values, religio-ethical beliefs and practices across Turkestan and the wider Persianate Central Asia. They were the carriers of a translocal, milieu-specific culture that emphasised, among others, brotherliness, community and modesty. While this “morality in the background” (Abend 2014) served as a normative guidance, in real life conflicts, attempts at fraudulence or imposture of course occurred. To maintain work morale and discipline within any local professional group, trespassing had to be punished. In the case of internal, crafts’ related violation of rules or conflict, juridical procedures from sharîca and adat legal traditions were usually not suitable. Either because the offence was not litigable according to their stipulations, or because the local group of craftsmen wanted to deal with the issue within its community. That does not mean that justice was completely done in secret. Many of the punitive stipulations imposed collectively by an assembly of masters or by their elder (āqsaqāl) had at least public elements, if not from outside the crafts’ sphere. Sanctions against another master from the same professional community would usually be announced publicly by the elder of the craft during an assembly. These included fines or other measures against the economic interests of the trespasser. A mixture of corporal punishment and public shaming could only be imposed on those hierarchically below the group of masters who we on a normative level considered equals, or outside “intruders”.

Disciplinary or enforcing measures, and penalties that were imposed within professional groups are seldom mentioned in the sources. A rare insight into these practices is provided by two late 19th century crafts’ manuals (risāla) of āsh-cooking (one from East Turkestan, the other of unclear provenance) which give instructions on how to handle apprentices who open their own shop without prior permission (rukhsat) from their master. This paper will look at discourses and practices of internal order within the Central Asian crafts’ milieu on the basis of local sources like the crafts’ risāla as well as travel accounts and colonial reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It will analyse in which ways disciplinary measures built, maintained or challenged the collectivity of craftsmen of a given locale, and why certain professions seem to be more prone to problems of order than others.