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UZBEK (AFGHANISTAN) 841
frame. Felt namad, often elaborately decorated, are tied over the poles, the
designs usually facing the interior. A two-part, wooden frame door, often carved
with ethnic designs, serves as the entrance. Many Uzbek (and others) use yurts
as summer dwellings inside their compounds, even if they do not make short
migrations.
Some migrants prefer to live in a chapari, another portable dwelling but simpler
to construct and smaller than a yurt. The chapari has no latticework foundation.
Curved or straight poles are either placed in the ground or securely braced and
then sided with matting and roofed with matting or felt namad. Chapari are
often used as summer cooking huts inside compounds.
Sports and games often reflect the ethos of a people's culture. Only a few
centuries ago the Turko-Mongol peoples, direct ancestors of the Uzbek and
Turkmen, thundered across Mongolia, south Siberia, Central Asia and deep into
Russia, creating empires from yurts. The epic poetry of these Turkic speakers
resounds with memories of past greatness—and past recreation, some of which
continues to the present.
Launching falcons after game birds remains an important pastime, and hunting
with tazi (Afghan hounds) for desert gazelle, rabbits and other rodents occupies
some of the leisure time of the Uzbek. The tazi hamstring gazelle and wait for
their masters to cut the throat of the animal, thus making it halal, or clean.
Animals that die without their throats cut are considered haram, unclean, and
cannot be eaten.
One contact sport is buzkashi, seldom played in Soviet Central Asia but
remaining popular on the Turkestan plains of northern Afghanistan. Buzkashi
literally means "goat grabbing," but modern play uses a carcass of a small calf
instead. Traditionally, the game developed in the steppe lands of Mongolia and
Central Asia, where conquering nomads reputedly used live prisoners of war.
A released prisoner would try to evade two teams of horsemen, who ultimately
dismembered the victim. Buzkashi pits one team of whip-wielding horsemen
against another, the purpose being to pick up and carry the animal carcass from
a starting circle to the goal of one's team. While simple to describe, the actual
execution is another matter. The spirit of competition runs high, compounded
by limitless numbers of players and a minimum of rules. Besides courage and
endurance, buzkashi requires skilled horsemanship.
Although mingled with the Tajik (and other groups), the rural Uzbek have
not merged with them. The Uzbek's true feelings toward the Tajik can best be
expressed in the saying: "When a Tajik tells the truth, he has a fit of colic."
To denigrate one's own neighboring ethnic group is, in reality, a way of indicating
a positive pride in one's own group.
Since 1973, Afghanistan has been racked by coup d'etat, civil war and the
1979 Soviet invasion. The 1 million Uzbek (the largest Turkic-speaking minority
in Afghanistan), along with other Afghan minority groups, hoped that the founding
of the Republic of Afghanistan in 1973 would guarantee them wider participation
in political life above the tribal level. The plans of the republic (never