Spectacular State

Adams Laura L. Adams

Description

Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan's production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national holidays, Navro'z, the spring equinox celebration, and Independence Day. Her analysis of the content, form, and production of these ceremonies shows how Uzbekistan's cultural and political elites engaged in a highly directed, largely successful program of nation building through culture.Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan's national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan's ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan's independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Uzbekistán
• Sociology
• Cultural studies
• Uzbekistan
• Ouzbékistan

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822392538
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T H E S P E C T A C U L A R S TA T E

p o l i t ic s , h i s t o r y , a n d c u l t u r e A series from the International Institute at the University of Michigan

Fernando Coronil Mamadou Diouf Michael Dutton Geo√ Eley

s e r i e s e d i t o r s George Steinmetz and Julia Adams

s e r i e s e d i t o r i a l a d v i s o r y b o a r d

Fatma Müge Göcek Nancy Rose Hunt Andreas Kalyvas Webb Keane

David Laitin Lydia Liu Julie Skurski Margaret Somers

Ann Laura Stoler Katherine Verdery Elizabeth Wingrove

Sponsored by the International Institute at the University of Michigan and published by Duke University Press, this series is centered around cultural and historical studies of power, politics, and the state—a field that cuts across the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and cultural studies. The focus on the relationship be- tween state and culture refers both to a methodological approach—the study of politics and the state using culturalist methods—and a substantive one that treats signifying practices as an essential dimension of politics. The dialectic of politics, culture, and history figures prominently in all the books selected for the series.

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∫2010 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Heather Hensley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

C O N T E N T S

vii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N The Politics of Culture in Uzbekistan 1991–2002

21 C H A P T E R O N E Mapping the Landscape of National Identity in Uzbekistan

C H A P T E R T WO 69 Cultural Form: Globalization and the Spectacular State

C H A P T E R T H R E E 101 Cultural Content and Postcolonial Civic Nationalism

153 C H A P T E R F O U R Culture Production and Participation in the Spectacular State

C O N C L U S I O N 193 Spectacle and the Ideology of National Independence

201 N O T E S

221 B I B L I O G R A P H Y

I N D E X 235

A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

My list of intellectual debts begins with one to my parents, Rodge and Ruth Adams, whose love of theater and music has influenced my interests and choices throughout my life. I seem to be the only one in the family without musical talent, but my brothers, David and Brian, and my extended family continually inspire me to pur- sue the arts through scholarship. In my intellectual biography, several key events, including theusa/ussrhockey match in the 1980 Olympics, the availability of a performing arts high school magnet program in Minneapolis in the 1980s, readingAnna Kare- ninainapEnglish, and the engaging professors in Macalester’s sociology department laid the path to this project. I want to thank my mentors at Macalester College, especially Jim von Geldern, Michal McCall, and Victor Rios, for nurturing the enthusiastic kid who wanted to study places they’d barely heard of and topics that nobody else had written about yet. In graduate school, Ann Swidler gave me valuable feedback and enthusiastic support from the first day to the last, and beyond. I want to thank Neil Fligstein for showing me how to make sociological theory work for me and Yuri Slezkine for pushing me, but not too hard. In addition to grat- itude, I want to express my admiration and a√ection for Michael Burawoy, an exemplary teacher, scholar, and citizen of the world. In my postdoctoral days, the Georgetown Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies rescued me from a fourth year of a 3/3 teaching load and gave me the opportunity to refine a lot of the ideas that appear here. The book really took shape during my time at Princeton, where the support and encouragement of

Miguel Centeno made a huge di√erence in my life. The Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Comparative Politics Working Group, and the Sociology Department all provided collegial and stimulat- ing environments. It is to Stephen Kotkin, however, that I owe the biggest thank you, because he not only made it possible for me to stay in academia long enough to finish writing, he gave me hope that it was worth doing. A number of institutions have provided material and intellectual sup- port for this project over the years. The Jacob Javits Foundation funded my early graduate training. The Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies administered Foreign Language and Area Studies funds that en- abled my advanced Russian language study and supported two research trips to Uzbekistan, and the University of Washington’s Near Eastern Lan- guages and Civilizations summer language study funds gave me two years of training in Uzbek. The International Research and Exchanges Board supported my dissertation year in Uzbekistan, as well as a follow-up trip in 2002. The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus have provided me with a schol- arly community and an academic home base for the last twelve years. Finally, the Harvard Writing Program provided funds to support the pub- lishing of this book. I want to recognize my friends and colleagues in Uzbekistan for all they did to make this book possible. The Tashkent State Institute of Culture, the Ministry of Cultural A√airs of Uzbekistan, and the Tashkent City Depart- ment of Culture and their sta√s all assisted my work in various ways. The Rakhimberganov and Alimov families provided me with material and emotional support and with very pleasant introductions to everyday life in Tashkent. Along the way, this book has benefited from the advice and input of numerous additional colleagues, friends, and reviewers. I want to shine the spotlight of gratitude on two people in particular: Michael Kennedy, whose interest in my work and advice about publishing were encouraging and helpful in a very concrete way, and Doug Northrop, who is a gener- ous and conscientious colleague who has held me to his own high stan- dards, much to my benefit. I want to thank many others here because creativity is collaborative and besides, we all like seeing our names in print: Alisher Abidjanov, David Abramson, Sada Aksartova, Gulnora Aminova, Doug Blum, Cassandra Cavanaugh, Kathleen Collins, Alexander Dillon,

Acknowledgments viii

Paul DiMaggio, Adrienne Edgar, Hilda Eitzen, Bruce Grant, Fran Hirsch, Jen Hunter, Daniel Goldstein, David Guss, Alisher Ilkhamov, Pauline Jones Luong, Marianne Kamp, Shoshanna Keller, Adeeb Khalid, Umida Khikmatillaeva, Saodat Kholmatova, Charlie Kurzman, Ted Levin, Morgan Liu, Kelly McMann, Nick Megoran, Neema Noori, Usmon Qoraboev, Mi- chael Rouland, Ed Schatz, John Schoeberlein, Said Shermukhammedov, Kelly Smith, Anara Tabyshalieva, Joshua Tucker, Kristina Vestbo, and Rus- sell Zanca have all contributed to this book in ways large and small. Finally, thanks and love to Todd Horowitz, with whom I have shared everything that makes me me. The introduction to this book was shaped by feedback I got when I presented it at Princeton University. Chapter 1 of this book benefited from comments I received during public presentations of the material at Har- vard University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Illinois. Parts of this book have been published previously in a di√erent form. Chapter 2’s discussion of the Olympics and cultural form can also be found in ‘‘Globalization, Universalism and Cultural Form,’’Comparative Studies in Society and History50, no. 3 (2008), 614–40. Chapter 4’s analy- sis of the seduction of cultural elites draws on parts of ‘‘Cultural Elites in Uzbekistan: Ideology Production and the State,’’The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence, ed. Paul- ine Jones Luong, 93–119 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

Acknowledgments ix