Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia PDF Download

Author: Madeleine Reeves
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provide a unique perspective on how politics is performed in everyday life.

Author: Madeleine Reeves
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801470889
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested by a range of actors including politicians, state officials, border guards, farmers and people whose lives involve the crossing of the borders. In territory where international borders are not always clearly demarcated or consistently enforced, Reeves traces the ways in which states' attempts to establish their rule create new sources of conflict or insecurity for people pursuing their livelihoods in the area on the basis of older and less formal understandings of norms of access. As a result the book makes a major new and original contribution to scholarly work on Central Asia and more generally on the anthropology of border regions and the state as a social process. Moreover, the work as a whole is presented in a lively and accessible style. The individual lives whose tribulations and small triumphs Reeves so vividly documents, and the relationships she establishes with her subjects, are as revealing as they are engaging. Border Work is a well-deserved winner of this year’s Alexander Nove Prize.

Author: Judith Beyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000045366
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Practices of Traditionalization in Central Asia focuses on how tradition is ‘everyday-ified’ in contemporary Central Asia, including Tatarstan and Tibet, and what people seek to achieve in its name. The case studies range from political demonstrations and industrial workers’ gatherings to institutions of religious education, minority communities, weddings, and the Internet. In this volume we regard tradition as a practice that needs to be explored in its institutional and interactional context at a particular time, rather than as a reliable guide to the past: tradition can only be judged from the present; it is an interpretative concept, not a descriptive one. While the scholarly debate has so far centered on what tradition entails and what it does not, including the question of invention and ownership, less attention has been devoted to investigating how tradition is enacted, enforced, or motivated – in short, how it ‘gets done.’ In Central Asia, practices of traditionalization are closely related to the transformation of the socialist order and the emergence of highly stratified societies. This volume asks: When does tradition emerge as a line of argumentation, who are the actors invoking it and how is it being (materially) manifested? Practices of Traditionalization in Central Asia will be of great interest to scholars of Central Asia, Anthropology, History, Political Science, and Sociology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

Author: David W. Montgomery
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 879

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Book Description
Central Asia is a diverse and complex region of the world often characterized in the West as exotic, remote, and difficult to understand. Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding offers the most comprehensive introduction to the region available for students and general readers alike. Combining thematic chapters with detailed case studies, readers will learn to appreciate the richly interconnected aspects of life in Central Asia. These wide-ranging, easy-to-understand contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field provide the context needed to understand Central Asia and presents a launching point for further reading and research.

Author: Madeleine Reeves
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135700125
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Central Asia is a region singularly marked by attempts to transform social life by transforming place. Drawing together established scholars and a new generation of historians, geographers and anthropologists, this volume brings empirical specificity and theoretical depth to debates about the politics of place-making in this diverse region, making an important contribution to Central Asian studies and a distinctive regional comparison to the ‘spatial turn’ in social analysis. Case studies draw on archival research and oral history to explore the workings—and unintended consequences—of policies aimed at sedentarizing, collectivizing and resettling populations as a means to fix and territorialize space. The book also examines ethnographic studies attuned to the role of movement in sustaining social life, from Soviet-era trade networks that linked rural Central Asia and the Russian metropolis, to pilgrimage routes through which ‘kazakhness’ is articulated, to the contemporary moralization of migration abroad in search of work. Rather than analysing ‘flows’ as abstract processes, the book enquires about effortful activity, material infrastructures, political relations and social habits through which people, ideas, knowledge, skills and material objects move or are prevented from moving. As such, it offers new insights into the complex intersections of movement, power and place in this important region over the last two centuries. This book was originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

Author: Mateusz Laszczkowski
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533719X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

Author: Jeroen Fauve, Adrien De Cordier, B. J. Van Den Bosch
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838215184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1064

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Book Description
This handbook is the first collection of comprehensive teaching materials for teachers and students of Central Asian Studies (CAS) with a strong pedagogic dimension. It presents 22 chapters, clustered around five themes, with contributions from more than 19 scholars, all leading experts in the field of CAS and Eurasian Studies. This collection is not only a reference work for scholars branching out to different disciplines of CAS but also for scholars from other disciplines broadening their scope to CAS. It addresses post-colonial frameworks and also untangles topics from their ‘Soviet’ reference frame. It aims to de-exoticize the region and draws parallels to European or to historically European-occupied territories. In each chapter, the handbook provides a concise but nuanced overview of the topics covered, in which way these have been approached by the mainstream literature, and points out pitfalls, myths, and new insights, providing background knowledge about Central Asia to readers and intertwine this with an advanced level of insight to leave the readers equipped with a strong foundation to approach more specialized sources either in classroom settings or by self-study. In addition, the book offers a comprehensive glossary, list of used abbreviations, overview of intended learning outcomes, and a smart index (distinguishing between names, locations, concepts, and events). A list of recorded lectures to be found on YouTube will accompany the handbook either as instruction materials for teachers or visual aids for students. Since the authors themselves recorded the lectures related to their own chapters, this provides the opportunity to engage in a more personalized way with the authors. This project is being developed in the framework of the EISCAS project (www.eiscas.eu), co-funded by the Erasmus + Program of the European Union.

Author: Gül Berna Özcan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351739425
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Newly gained sovereignty, uneven penetration of neo-liberal ideals and the growth of disparate capitalist markets have elicited varied responses in Central Asia. What does development mean for the political class and for ordinary citizens? What are the effects of new capitalist institutions and markets? What impact did western development blueprints and external donor engagement leave in the region? This book illuminates the diverse realities of post-Soviet development in Central Asia through a multidisciplinary prism. The contributing articles are grounded in a range of social science disciplines including architecture, anthropology and geography. The analyses demonstrate how a synthesis of specialist knowledge from area studies and individual disciplinary methodologies can provide well-grounded critical positions on development. The book highlights the complexities of everyday routines of dispossession and coping strategies in the face of natural and manmade disasters. These experiences create deep moral anxieties under the debilitating effects of monetisation and marketisation of ordinary livelihoods, social ties and environmental resources. This book was originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

Author: Nick Megoran
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982390
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich "biography" of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this volatile and geopolitically significant region. Megoran draws on twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities, boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control versus resistance, and mass violence in 2010, all of which have exacerbated territorial anxieties. Megoran also revisits theories of causation, such as the loss of Soviet control, poorly defined boundaries, natural resource disputes, and historic ethnic clashes, to show that while these all contribute to heightened tensions, political actors and their agendas have clearly driven territorial aspirations and are the overriding source of conflict. As this compelling case study shows, the boundaries of the The Ferghana Valley put in succinct focus larger global and moral questions of what defines a good border.

Author: Eva Marie Dubuisson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Eva-Marie Dubuisson provides a fascinating anthropological inquiry into the deeply ingrained presence of ancestors within the cultural, political, and spiritual discourse of Kazakhs. In a climate of authoritarianism and economic uncertainty, many people in this region turn to their forebearers for care, guidance, and advice, invoking them on a daily basis. This "living language" creates a powerful link to the past and a stable foundation for the present. Through Dubuisson's participatory, observational, and lived experience among Kazakhs, we witness firsthand the public performances and private rituals that show how memory and identity are sustained through an oral tradition of invoking ancestors. This ancestral dialogue sustains a unifying worldview by mediating questions of faith and morality, providing role models, and offering a mechanism for socio-political critique, change, and meaning-making. Looking beyond studies of Islam or heritage alone, Dubuisson provides fresh insights into understanding the Kazakh worldview that will serve students, researchers, GMOs, and policymakers in the region.