American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 4 • December 2005

The Traffic in Brides
Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. 2004. 51 min. Color. Petr
Lom, dir. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court
St. Brooklyn, NY. 11201. (www.frif.com)

BRUCE GRANT
New York University

ABSTRACT Petr Lom’s film, Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan,
offers viewers a striking visual narration of the deeply routinized
practices of bride capture in contemporary Central Asia. In this
review, I offer historical context eschewed by the film, observing
how, contrary to popular belief, bride kidnapping increased under
Russian imperial supervision. It later dwindled in the activist Soviet
period, but rose again in the relative anarchy of the postsocialist
landscape. What the film invites but does not explicitly entertain
is a complex arithmetic of culturally coded understandings of volition,
personal property, and alliance. [Keywords: Central Asia,
bride capture, kinship]

The subject of bride kidnapping in Central Asia has
gained welcome exposure in recent years through pioneering
English-language studies (Amsler and Kleinbach 1999;
Werner 2004), as well as this unusual film and the discussions
in the press that it has provoked. Few viewers of Bride
Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan will be left at ease as they watch
filmmakers unflinchingly join young men’s raiding parties
(see Figure 1), visit (but not warn) young women who are
about to be kidnapped, and follow them as they are picked
off the streets, stuffed into cars, and then physically taunted
by women in the would-be-adoptive family who are looking
to claim their new bride. Individual episodes track the
experiences of five such women, followed by a collective
epilogue. Two can be found smilingly expecting children;
two express relief about lives begun anew because of narrowly
escaping forced marriage; and one family continues
to grieve for a daughter who allegedly hung herself while
sequestered by her captors. This film’s importance comes
in vividly documenting the remarkable decline in women’s
rights since the fall of the Soviet Union, particularly in
Central Asia and the neighboring Caucasus where rates of
bride kidnapping, child marriage, and human trafficking
have increased sharply amidst the economic collapse and
endemic corruptions that have riddled these newly independent
states over the last 15 years.

Critics who charge the filmmakers with collusion may
well miss the point. The presence of the camera—rarely acknowledged
during filming except for some of the darker
moments of struggle—may have prodded reluctant groom’s
families into greater bravado, but it may have also enabled
at least two unsuspecting women to resist their captors
in light of the documentary record. The more signifi-
cant problem is that the film’s remarkable visuals leave the
viewer with few if any resources to understand the complex
kidnapping scenario. By dint of laconic intertitles, Kyrgyz
would seem to be Kyrgyz, and ancient traditions brook little
change.

It is another story to think outside the bounds of the
film, about the historical trajectory of alliance practices in a
world area where Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels
would not have wanted for material on the intertwining
subjects of marriage, private property, and the state. Despite
the film’s implication that Kyrgyz rural society has
remained intransigent to modernizing logics, it was Central
Asia’s experience under Russian imperial rule, paradoxically,
that contributed to the widespread entrenchment
of bride capture. Nineteenth-century imperial officers who
were anxious to eradicate the forceful sanction of Islamic
legal codes, or sharia, often labored to assure rural populations
that although sharia might be on its way out, most
Islamic and pre-Islamic practices such as bride kidnapping,
filed under the seemingly less-contentious category of “custom”
(adat), would be preserved. Despite widespread legislation
to eradicate abduction, officers themselves admitted
that they rarely brought cases to prosecution for fear of further
alienating rural communities.

In the Soviet period, particularly after World War II,
bride capture seemingly met its match. Most published
and oral accounts suggest that any woman bent on pursuing
legal action against her abductors could be assured
of police and court protections, abetted in rural communities
by local Women’s Councils, Comrades’ Courts, the
Communist Youth League, and party officials. By failing to
register any of this changing legal landscape or to speak
with any state officials (the film mentions only that an independent
Kyrgyzstan promulgated a new law against bride
capture in 1994 but has rarely enforced it), we are left quite
erringly in the seemingly timeless hermeticism of mountain
custom. Similarly, there is no comment on the complex
algebras of clan alliances that marriage-by-capture alternately
has sought to bypass or accommodate. As a result
of the director’s low-narrative usage, some scenes go entirely
without explanation, such as one male pageant of strength
on horseback (known in some regions of Kyrgyzstan as
tyiyn enmei), taking place on a muddy village road under
rainfall.

Scholars of bride kidnapping strain to remind us of the
remarkable and often-confusing gradations of this practice,
ranging from mock abduction (consensual elopement) to
semiwilling performance to hostile resistance, with all the
shades of gray in between. The film recognizes this in a
telling moment when Ainagul—who won her release by
standing ground against a stream of small cruelties from
women who hoped to become her in-laws—admits that she
would have stayed behind had her parents instructed her
to do so. Yet what ethnographic accounts from across the
19th and 20th centuries consistently show is that actual,
nonconsensual abduction was a crime, pure and simple,
from which most parents levied all effort to protect their
children.

The film’s director has said in separate interviews that
he hopes the film will find its greatest impact among Kyrgyz
themselves. No doubt contemporary Central Asians, raised
on the Marxist dictum that “property is theft,” will be better
equipped than most viewers to understand the historical
and legal contexts that unexpectedly marry Engels to
adat. For non-Kyrgyz audiences, to whom liner notes advertise
bride capture as a practice that is “shocking” yet raises
“provocative questions about the nature of love and marriage,”
the film’s efforts to identify those questions end not
with a sign but a shrug.

REFERENCES CITED

Amsler, Sarah, and Russ Kleinbach
1999 Bride Kidnapping in the Kyrgyz Republic. International
Journal of Central Asian Studies 4:186–216.
Werner, Cynthia
2004 Women, Marriage, and the Nation-State: The Rise of Consensual
Bride Kidnapping in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan. In The
Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet
Rule to Independence. Pauline Jones Luong, ed. Pp. 59–89.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.