Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia

Description

Politics and the state in everyday life in post-Soviet Central Asia

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.

Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine Reeves

Part I. Staging the Political
1. The Global Performance State: A Reconsideration of the Central Asian "Weak State" John Heathershaw
2. Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons Eva-Marie Dubuisson
3. Performing Democracy: State-Making through Patronage in Kyrgyzstan Aksana Ismailbekova
4. "There is This Law..." Performing the State in the Kyrgyz Courts of Elders Judith Beyer

Part II. Political Materials, Political Fantasies
5. The Master Plan of Astana: Between the "Art of Government" and the "Art of Being Global" Alima Bissenova
6. State Building(s): Built Forms, Materiality, and the State in Astana Mateusz Laszczkowski
7. The Bulldozer State: Chinese Socialist Development in Xinjiang Ildikó Bellér-Hann
8. The Time of the Border: Contingency, Conflict and Popular Statism at the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary Madeleine Reeves

Part III. Moral Positionings
9. Reclaiming Ma'naviyat: Morality, Criminality and Dissident Politics in Uzbekistan Sarah Kendzior
10. The Reshaping of Cities and Citizens in Uzbekistan: The Case of Namangan's "New Uzbeks" Tommaso Trevisani
11. Massacre Through a Kaleidoscope: Fragmented Moral Imaginaries of the State in Central Asia Morgan Liu
12. Cold War Memories and Post-Cold War Realities: The Politics of Memory and Identity in the Everyday Life of Kazakhstan's Radiation Victims Cynthia Werner and Kathleen Purvis-Roberts

Sujets

• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• History of Asia
• Central Asia
• Anthropology
• World
• Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011473
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF THE STATE IN CENTRAL ASIA Performing Politics
Edited by Madeleine Reeves, Johan Rasanayagam, and Judith Beyer
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone]
2014 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01140-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01141-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-01147-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
Contents
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine Reeves
Part 1. Staging the Political
1. The Global Performance State: A Reconsideration of the Central Asian Weak State John Heathershaw
2. Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons Eva-Marie Dubuisson
3. Performing Democracy: State-Making through Patronage in Kyrgyzstan Aksana Ismailbekova
4. There is this law . . . : Performing the State in the Kyrgyz Courts of Elders Judith Beyer
Part 2. Political Materials, Political Fantasies
5. The Master Plan of Astana: Between the Art of Government and the Art of Being Global Alima Bissenova
6. State Building(s): Built Forms, Materiality, and the State in Astana Mateusz Laszczkowski
7. The Bulldozer State: Chinese Socialist Development in Xinjiang Ildik Bell r-Hann
8. The Time of the Border: Contingency, Conflict, and Popular Statism at the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary Madeleine Reeves
Part 3. Moral Positionings
9. Reclaiming Ma naviyat: Morality, Criminality, and Dissident Politics in Uzbekistan Sarah Kendzior
10. The Reshaping of Cities and Citizens in Uzbekistan: The Case of Namangan s New Uzbeks Tommaso Trevisani
11. Massacre through a Kaleidoscope: Fragmented Moral Imaginaries of the State in Central Asia Morgan Liu
12. Cold War Memories and Post-Cold War Realities: The Politics of Memory and Identity in the Everyday Life of Kazakhstan s Radiation Victims Cynthia Werner and Kathleen Purvis-Roberts
Contributors
Index
Note on Transliteration
Sources in several languages appear in this book. In choosing a system of transliteration we have aimed for consistency across chapters with regard to the names of people and places for ease of cross-referencing, while also remaining faithful to the language in which a comment was originally spoken in cases of direct quotation. For languages written in the Cyrillic or Arabic scripts (Russian, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Tajik), we have used a modified version of the U.S. Library of Congress system of transliteration, except in those cases where alternative spellings have become more familiar to North American readers (for instance, Nazarbayev rather than Nazarbaev; Uyghur rather than Uighur). For quotations from Uzbek, we used the official Latin script.
Acknowledgments
This volume emerges from an ongoing conversation among a group of anthropologists and political scientists interested in exploring the everyday, localized practice of politics in Central Asia, drawing on long-term fieldwork in local languages. This conversation developed over e-mail, in reading groups, and at the corners of conferences for several years. In 2009, a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research enabled us to meet for a dedicated three-day workshop in Buxton, England, entitled Rethinking the Political in Central Asia: Perspectives from the Anthropology of the State. This workshop afforded the luxury of close, unhurried discussion of pre-circulated papers in conversation with senior scholars, and it provided a space for reflecting on how we might develop those papers in dialogue with one another for eventual co-publication.
In addition to the Wenner Gren Foundation, which generously funded a group of relatively junior scholars, post-docs, and PhD students in financially straitened times, we would like to thank the organizations and institutions that co-sponsored that 2009 meeting, including the University of Manchester, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (CEELBAS), and the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies (CRCEES). The papers that emerged from that workshop benefited from the careful, insightful, and spirited readings of our co-presenters, discussants, and chairs. We would particularly like to thank Felix Girke, Penny Harvey, Deniz Kandiyoti, David Montgomery, Michelle Obeid, Stefanie Ortmann, Atreyee Sen, Katie Swancutt, and Chad Thompson for their insightful and generous comments. Josine Opmeer s wonderful administrative support ensured the workshop ran smoothly. As editors we discovered the work of Jonathan Spencer, professor of anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, at a critical moment in the development of our ideas. We are indebted to him for the intellectual inspiration of his work and his support for this project, both moral and practical.
As editors we have each had an active role in working with the contributing authors and crafting the volume as a whole. We are grateful to Rebecca Tolen, sponsoring editor, and to Sarah Jacobi and Angela Burton at Indiana University Press for supporting the project through to publication. We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and helpful suggestions, to Sarah Brown for her careful copyediting, and to Dr. Monica Sandor, Jonas Katzmann, and Judith Marie Eggers at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle for their help with the index. We would like to thank our contributors for their patience, generosity, and responsiveness as we have developed this project from workshop to book. Above all, we would like to thank the many friends and acquaintances in our respective fieldsites who have shared their welcome, their time, and their insight. We hope we have done justice to their words and experiences in the chapters that follow.
Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia

Introduction
Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia
Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine Reeves
What does politics look like in Central Asia? How is politics performed, and what is at stake? How should we, in fact, understand the political as a sphere of activity and what sort of object is the state, in Central Asia or elsewhere? Central Asia, in this collection, refers to the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People s Republic of China. The post-Soviet Central Asian republics are relatively recent creations. Their territorial boundaries were established under Bolshevik rule in the 1920s, carved out of the former Tsarist administrative entity of Turkestan and the protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva. Soviet nationalities policy classified Central Asian populations into ethno-national groups, each associated with a distinct linguistic, cultural, and historical lineage and a defined territory. While not entirely arbitrary, Soviet policy and practice reified previously fluid registers of identification and belonging, and in some cases created entirely new nationality categories. 1 Those ethno-national groups that were regarded as most advanced along a supposed evolutionary trajectory toward nationhood-the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Turkmens-were constituted as national republics within the framework of the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, its Central Asian republics were abruptly cut loose from the economic and political infrastructure that had sustained them. The ideological frame that had located individual citizens within an encompassing polity was lost along with it. The national leaderships were forced to reinvent their republics as independent nation-states. They have sought to fashion new state ideologies and narratives of nationhood. Central Asian populations have had to cope with the collapse of previous certainties; the abrupt withdrawal of the state provision of employment, housing, and social welfare; and the ensuing material hardship (Kandiyoti and Mandel 1998). They have had to negotiate within new modes and practices of governance. This dynamic moment of invention and creative negotiation makes Central Asia a particularly productive site for comparative study of the political and the state.
The inclusion of China s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in this volume provides an important comparative perspective. The region is territorially contiguous with the former Soviet republics, the populations have much in common, linguistically and culturally, and there are Uyghur populations in many of the former Soviet states, particularly in Kazakhstan. The continuing experience of the Chinese version of socialism, moreover,