[lbo-talk] Marriage and Prostitution

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Chris wrote:
>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
><blockquote>More than half of Kyrgyzstan's married women were 
>snatched from the street by their husbands in a custom known as "ala 
>kachuu," which translates roughly as "grab and run." In its most 
>benign form, it is a kind of elopement, in which a man whisks away a 
>willing girlfriend. But often it is something more violent.
>---
>
>Interesting how this stuff resurfaced after 70 years of 
>Sovietization. Or maybe it existed then too, and got covered up. It 
>happens a lot in Chechnya.
>
>I couldn't access the article. Does the it say if this is more 
>prevalent in the Kyrgyz or Uzbek areas of Kyrgyzstan?

What the article says is that "[i]t is practiced in varying degrees 
across Central Asia but is most prevalent here in Kyrgyzstan, a poor, 
mountainous land that for decades was a backwater of the Soviet Union 
and has recently undergone political turmoil in which mass protests 
forced the president to resign" (Craig S. Smith, "Abduction, Often 
Violent, a Kyrgyz Wedding Rite," The New York Times 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/30/international/asia/30brides.html>30 
Apr. 2005).

My hypothesis is that the Soviet government never succeeded in making 
political tensions between it and Central Asian republics go away, so 
it probably went easy on gender relations and the like in exchange 
for peace.  It's like the relation between the Yugoslav government 
and Kosovo.
-- 
Yoshie

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