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“Discover the ‘Central Asian World’ through the lenses of leading anthropologists.
Drawing from empirical data and giving voice to local communities, the authors help
us to explore the complex lives and experiences of contemporary Central Asians.
These original contributions were possible due to the generosity and hospitality of
Central Asians who welcomed ‘outsiders’ into their homes and generously shared
their food, time, and knowledge with them. If a decade ago, Central Asians had
served foreign anthropologists as research assistants, translators and/or informants,
today, they have become established and emergent scholars contributing to the inter-
national discourse on the region.”
Elmira Köchümkulova, Co-ordinator of the Cultural Heritage and
Humanities Unit, University of Central Asia
“This collection of deeply informed essays puts the ‘Central’ back into ‘Central Asia’ –
a region too long treated as a cultural and intellectual backwater but in historical and
ethnological reality an arena of socio-cultural ferment and reciprocal permeation on
a global scale. The authors transform the charge of marginality into an object of crit-
ical reflection across an impressive array of disciplines, topics, and venues.”
Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the
Social Sciences, Harvard University, USA
“Central Asia has long been unaccountably marginalized in disciplinary and polit-
ical worldings. This superb collection of essays triumphantly demonstrates the huge
importance of this vast region for anyone interested in understanding the contem-
porary world. Offering a comprehensive, polyphonic introduction to the area’s diverse
and fluid pasts and presents, the volume advances cutting- edge anthropological
approaches in explorations of how more-than-human reverberations of previous
regimes affect and shape material culture, ecologies, cosmologies, kinship, economies
and state encounters. With contributors from both within and beyond Central Asia,
this looks set to be a foundational work for the region and social sciences alike.”
Catherine Alexander, Professor of Social Anthropology,
Durham University, UK
TH E C E N TR A L ASIAN WO RL D
This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to con-

temporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically
interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ at the intersection of post-Soviet,
Persianate, East and South Asian worlds. Encompassing chapters on life between
Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, this volume situates the
social, political, economic, ecological and ritual diversity of Central Asia in histor-
ical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of
Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonising and
queering approaches to Central Asia. The volume’s discussion of More-than-Human
Worlds, Everyday Economies, Material Culture, Migration and Statehood engages
core analytical concerns such as globalisation, inequality and postcolonialism. Far
more than a survey of a ‘world region’, the volume illuminates how people in Central
Asia make a life at the intersection of diverse cross-cutting currents and flows of
knowledge. In so doing, it stakes out the contribution of an anthropology of and
from Central Asia to broader debates within contemporary anthropology.
This is an essential reference for anthropologists as well as for scholars from other
disciplines with a focus on Central Asia.
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix is a social anthropologist focusing on water and energy

issues. She is the author of Iconic Places in Central Asia: The Moral Geography
of Pastures, Dams and Holy Sites (2017) and is co-editor with Beatrice Penati of
Environmental Humanities in Central Asia (Routledge, 2023). She is setting up
a transdisciplinary team at the University of Bern to foster environmental justice
around marine renewable energy technologies.
Madeleine Reeves is Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of

Oxford. Her interests lie in the anthropology of space, power, mobility and reproduc-
tion. She is the author of Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia
(2014) and the co-editor, most recently, of The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty with
Rebecca Bryant (2021). She is currently leading a new research project on infertility
and the emergence of new reproductive markets in Central Asia.
T HE ROU T L E DGE WO RLDS
THE ANDEAN WORLD THE TOKUGAWA WORLD

Edited by Linda J. Seligmann and Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao
Kathleen Fine-Dare
THE INUIT WORLD
THE SYRIAC WORLD Edited by Pamela Stern
Edited by Daniel King
THE ARTHURIAN WORLD
THE FAIRY TALE WORLD Edited by Miriam Edlich-Muth, Renée Ward
Edited by Andrew Teverson and Victoria Coldham-Fussell
THE MELANESIAN WORLD THE MONGOL WORLD

Edited by Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope
THE MING WORLD THE SÁMI WORLD

Edited by Kenneth M. Swope Edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio,
Saara Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga
THE GOTHIC WORLD
Edited by Glennis Byron and THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT
Dale Townshend SILK ROAD
Edited by Xinru Liu, with the assistance of
THE IBERIAN WORLD Pia Brancaccio
Edited by Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim,
and Antonio Feros THE WORLD OF THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH
Edited By Robert H. Stockman
THE MAYA WORLD
Edited by Scott Hutson and Traci Ardren THE QUAKER WORLD
Edited by C. Wess Daniels and
THE WORLD OF THE OXUS Rhiannon Grant
CIVILIZATION
Edited by Bertille Lyonnet and THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE WORLD
Nadezhda Dubova Edited by Kyle H. Keimer and
George A. Pierce
THE GRAECO-BACTRIAN AND
INDO-GREEK WORLD THE ANGKORIAN WORLD
Edited by Rachel Mairs Edited by Mitch Hendrickson, Miriam T
Stark and Damien Evans
THE UMAYYAD WORLD
Edited by Andrew Marsham THE SIBERIAN WORLD
Edited by John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson
THE ASANTE WORLD and Vladimir Davydov
Edited by Edmund Abaka and Kwame Osei
Kwarteng THE CENTRAL ASIAN WORLD
Edited by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and
THE SAFAVID WORLD Madeleine Reeves
Edited by Rudi Matthee
THE EPIC WORLD
THE BIBLICAL WORLD, Edited by Pamela Lothspeich
SECOND EDITION
Edited by Katharine J. Dell
www.routledge.com/Routledge-Worlds/book-series/WORLDS
THE CENTRAL
ASIAN WORLD
Edited by
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and

Madeleine Reeves
Designed cover image: Copyright Cholpon Alamanova 2020. Naryn Syr Darya panorama
First published 2024
by Routledge
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© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves;
individual chapters, the contributors
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authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Feaux de la Croix, Jeanne, editor, author. | Reeves, Madeleine, editor, author.
Title: The Central Asian world / edited by Jeanne Feaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge worlds |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023005022 (print) | LCCN 2023005023 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367898908 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032492179 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003021803 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology–Asia, Central. | Asia, Central–Civilization. |
Asia, Central–History. | Asia, Central–Politics and government. |
Asia, Central–Social conditions. | Asia, Central–Economic conditions. |
Asia, Central–Ethnic relations. | Asia, Central–Social life and customs. |
Asia, Central–Religious life and customs.
Classification: LCC DK851 (ebook) | LCC DK851 .C465 2023 (print) |
DDC 958 23/eng/20230–dc08
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005022
ISBN: 978-0-367-89890-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-49217-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02180-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
CONTENTS
List of Figures xii

List of Tables xvi
List of Contributors xvii
Acknowledgements xxiv
1 Introduction: centring the anthropology of Central Asia 1

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves
PART I: REVERBERATING LEGACIES 17
2 Ethnogenesis through the lens of Soviet ethnography: academic

research in the service of nation-building and socialist modernity 21
Sergey Abashin
Translated by Matthew Naumann
3 Lasting legacies in Central Asia’s agro-pastoralist livelihoods 39

Jeanine Dağyeli
4 Aftershocks of perestroika: Tajikistan’s flattened modernity 55

Isaac McKean Scarborough
5 Struggling to interpret Islam in Central Asia: religion, politics, and

anthropology 68
Julie McBrien
6 Decolonizing ‘the field’ in the anthropology of Central Asia:

‘being there’ and ‘being here’ 82
Alima Bissenova
vii
— C o n t e n t s —
7 Utterly Other: queering Central Asia, decolonising sexualities 96

Mohira Suyarkulova
PART II: SOLIDARITY AND STRUGGLE 113
8 Qara Shangyraq: searching for a Qazaq home between two worlds 115
Zhaina Meirkhan
9 The Dvor and urban communities: socio-spatial rhythms in

Bishkek and other cities of Central Asia 130
Philipp Schröder
10 Fighting back: the older working-class women’s resistance against

market forces in Kyrgyzstan 144
Elmira Satybaldieva
11 Local political organization in Afghanistan 159

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili
12 Daughters as Ojiza: marriage, security and care strategies for

daughters among Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan 173
Aksana Ismailbekova
13 New churches and the religious freedom agenda in Kyrgyzstan 188

Noor O’Neill Borbieva
PART III: CARE AND INTERDEPENDENCE 205
14 Theorizing Central Asian neighbourhoods as social interdependence,

state encounter, and narrative 209
Morgan Y. Liu
15 Life and death in the margins: care and ambivalence in southern

Kyrgyzstan 222
Grace H. Zhou
16 Bargaining over care and control: money transfers and ICT-based

communication in transnational families between Tajikistan
and Russia 237
Juliette Cleuziou
17 Outsourcing domestic care: gendered labour mobility and

ambiguities of Turkmen migrant work in Istanbul 253
Marhabo Saparova
viii
PART IV: NAVIGATING THE STATE 267
18 Ethnicising infrastructure: roads, railways and differential

mobility in northwest China 269
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi
19 Language choices, future imaginaries, and the lived hierarchy of

languages in post-industrial Tajikistan 284
Elena Borisova
20 Sonic statecrafting: the politics of popular music in Uzbekistan 302

Kerstin Klenke
21 Before the law: policy, practice and the search for the ‘Prepared
Migrant Worker’ in the transnational migration bureaucracy 318
Malika Bahovadinova
22 Reeducation time: the banality of violent paternalism in Xinjiang 334

Darren Byler
PART V: PERSONS, HEALING, AND

MORE-T HAN-H UMAN WORLDS 349
23 The art of interpreting visionary dreams 351

Maria Louw
24 Early childhood health care in rural Kyrgyzstan 365

Baktygul Shabdan
25 Drunkenness and authority between animal and human worlds:

on the partridge hunt in Tajikistan 379
Brinton Ahlin
26 Healing with spirits: human and more-than-human healing

agency in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan 392
Danuta Penkala-Gawęcka
PART VI: ETHICAL REPERTOIRES 407
27 Legal pluralism in Central Asia: the customization of state and

religious law in Kyrgyzstan 409
Judith Beyer
ix
28 Hospitality in Central Asia 422

Magnus Marsden
29 Mobile livelihoods of Kyrgyz Tablighi Jamaat: living between

two worlds 434
Emil Nasritdinov
30 The value of a dead miner: industrial accidents, compensation

and fairness in Kazakhstan 446
Eeva Kesküla
PART VII: EVERYDAY MORAL ECONOMIES 463
31 Who owns the (good) land? Cotton farming, land ownership

and salinised soils in southern Central Asia 465
Tommaso Trevisani
32 Changing pastoral livelihoods 482

Carole Ferret
33 Small-scale gold mining communities in Kyrgyzstan: torn between

extraction projects 499
Gulzat Botoeva
34 The Central Asian bazaar since 1991 514

Hasan H. Karrar
35 Halal as a site of dilemma and negotiation 528

Aisalkyn Botoeva
PART VIII: MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 545
36 The money of home: remittances and the remaking of an Afghan

transnational family 547
Said Reza Kazemi
37 Gendered worlds and cosmopolitan lives: Muslim female traders

in Yiwu and Dushanbe 560
Diana Ibañez-Tirado
38 Informality and Uzbek migrant networks in Russia and Turkey 577

Sherzod Eraliev and Rustamjon Urinboyev
39 Diasporas of empire: Ismaili networks and Pamiri migration 591

Till Mostowlansky
x
PART IX: MATERIAL CULTURE, PERFORMANCE

AND SKILL 605
40 Uzbek cinema as a lens on early Soviet state-and nation-building 607

Cloé Drieu
41 In the blood and through the spirit: learning Central Asian textile skills 622
Stephanie Bunn
42 The differentiated authenticities of Rishton pottery in Uzbekistan 642

Haruka Kikuta
43 Clans as heritage communities in Kyrgyzstan 658

Svetlana Jacquesson
44 Uyghur subnational histories as meta-heritage 672

Ildikó Bellér-Hann
45 The Uyghur twelve muqam and the performance of traditional literature 685
Nathan Light
PART X: SACRED WORLDS 701
46 Using experience differently: religion, security, and anthropology in

Central Asia 703
David W. Montgomery
47 Sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan as a phenomenon of power 717

Gulnara Aitpaeva
48 Uyghur Islam, embodied listening, and new publics 732

Rachel Harris
49 Mosque lives 747

Yanti M. Hölzchen
Polyphonic afterword: anthropology for Central Asian Worlds 761
Index 771
xi
FIGURES
2.1 The ethnographer T. Zhdanko (second from right) with kolkhoz

workers in Karakalpakistan, 1953–54 23
2.2 The ethnographers Kh. Esbergenov (third from right), T. Zhdanko
(standing in the middle), A. Utemisov (first from left) with informants
in Karakalpakistan, 1969 25
3.1 Soviet map from 1926 depicting areas suitable for cotton growing
with irrigation (green), proposed for irrigation (dark pink) and without
present plans for irrigation (light pink). The map was composed by
a commission from the Academy of Sciences headed by V.I. Yuferev
(available in colour at www.prlib.ru/item/417526) 43
3.2 Qarakul market in Bukhara 47
8.1 ‘Basbau’, the ornate belt hung above the door of Qazaq yurts, used
here as a decoration for a bench 124
8.2 The multicultural surroundings of the ‘Atameken’ Complex 125
15.1 A client at the Community, a centre in Osh run by a local non-profit
that provides shelter and services to vulnerable groups of women 224
16.1 ‘Two countries in one sim-card. Profitable calls in Russia and
Tajikistan’ Megafon commercial for cheap transnational tariffs,
Tajikistan, 2021 240
16.2 T-Cell commercial for the smartphone application ‘Chi gap’ (‘what
are you saying?’), showing a young man in Russia (identifiable
from Moscow’s Red Square behind him) and his wife in Tajikistan
(identifiable via Dushanbe’s Rudaki statue) talking on the phone for
a cheap tariff. The gender division of mobility is often represented in
phone companies or online banking commercials, Tajikistan, 2021 241
16.3 ‘With online Eskhata the distance is closed.’ Commercial of Eskhata
bank reflecting the importance of money transfers sent by Tajikistanis
in Russia to their relatives at home, Tajikistan, 2021 247
18.1 Screenshot of the China Road and Bridge Corporation website 270
18.2 A roadblock under construction on the Naryn–Kucha road 270
18.3 Map of Xinjiang 273
xii
— F i g u r e s —
19.1 The House of Culture in Mehnat 288

19.2 Regular morning school assembly (lineika) 289
19.3 Distributing lessons for the following term among young teachers
of Russian. The poster on the wall praises the beauty of the Russian
language as a treasure to be preserved 294
20.1 The Turkiston Palace, one of the biggest concert halls in Tashkent
and seat of O’zbeknavo and later O’zbekkonsert at its rear side.
The caption on the monument reads: ‘Uzbekistan’s future is a
great state’ 305
20.2 At the folk fair for Independence Day in Alisher Navoiy National
Park. The banners on stage read: ‘Congratulations on your holiday,
dear fellow citizens!’ and ‘The homeland is singular –the homeland is
unique’ 307
20.3 Promoting ‘Students’ clothing culture at Uzbekistan’s State
Conservatory’ 311
21.1 Migrant workers depicted as tools laying bricks: ‘In order to safeguard
your health and life, be attentive, and follow safety procedures!’ 327
21.2 Saying goodbye to ‘tools’ at the airport 328
23.1 Dreams may be a lens to explore the intangible hopes, fears and
regrets that accompany a life 352
24.1 No.1 Kelechek Family Medical Practitioners Group, one of the
hospital buildings in Kochkor 366
24.2 Kleinman’s diagram: popular, professional and folk sectors
(1978, p. 86) 370
24.3 Four sources of treatment in Kochkor 370
25.1 Chukar partridge in captivity on the hunt 380
26.1 Rakhilyam’s healing séance 397
26.2 Rakhilyam with her patient during the healing session 401
30.1 The grave of a young miner after the funeral 447
30.2 Two coal processing plant workers standing in front of their home in
Shakhtinsk 454
30.3 The 2008 Abai mine explosion memorial in the steppe 455
31.1 Abandoned farmland in the Maktaaral District. (September 2017) 467
31.2 Cotton plants on salinised soil 470
31.3 Cotton farmer and his grandchild, Maktaaral District. (September
2017) 476
32.1 Preparation for the transhumance. Kaz./AA/Raĭymbek, June 2012 485
32.2 A flock of fat-tailed sheep coming back to the village in the evening,
Kaz./South/Tolebi, April 2008 489
32.3 A few rare dark fat-tailed sheep among a flock of white Arkharo-
Merinos arriving in the summer pastures, Kaz./AA/Raĭymbek,
June 2012 491
33.1 Meeting in the Kichine-Too village 506
33.2 General meeting in Asyl-Tash 506
34.1 The large bazaars in Central Asia tend to be container bazaars where
shipping containers are repurposed as outlets. Here a buyer purchases
from the wholesale section of Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar 516
xiii
34.2 On the outskirts of the bazaar, one tends to see pushcarts, as well as
goods being sold from stalls, as here at the Barakholka market, in
Almaty 517
34.3 In Central Asia’s large bazaars, multiple currencies are freely traded.
In this image, taken in Bishkek’s Dordoi bazaar, exchange rates are
prominently displayed 522
35.1 A scene from a halal bakery in Osh 531
35.2 Chubak aji Jalilov tasting one of the products at a halal expo in
Kyrgyzstan 535
35.3 A poster advertising Muslim women’s apparel. Pictures illustrate
both modern Muslim outlooks as well as Kyrgyz traditional outfits
with a modern flare 536
36.1 Hakimi’s family 548
37.1 Billboard of a cargo company shipping goods from Yiwu to Tajikistan,
Yiwu, 2018 564
37.2 USSR halal restaurant in Yiwu 565
37.3 Retail vendor of art and prints in Yiwu’s Night Market 567
37.4 One of the numerous shops selling Muslim clothes in Yiwu’s area
known by foreigners as ‘Maedah’ 570
38.1 Pulat and his co-villagers waiting for Chechen protection racketeers 584
38.2 Everyday life in Kumkapi 586
40.1 Shaykhantaur medresseh, transformed into a film studio 611
41.1 Felt toys for tourists 624
41.2 Felts for sale in Ashkhabad bazaar 626
41.3 Munara imitating her grandmother Sabira palming yak hair rope 627
41.4 Tajik Kyrgyz bedding pile 629
41.5 Kygyz shyrdak 631
41.6 Uzbek embroidered felt with positive and negative imagery 632
41.7 Kurak 633
41.8 Guard outside the Emir’s palace, Bukhara, wearing ikat 635
41.9 Fabric merchant, Samarkand 1912–16, with a framed page
from the Koran hanging at the top of his stall 637
42.1 A master looks at his productions from the 1970s (2003) 646
42.2 Master Komilov’s works with national ash glaze from the
1990s (2003) 647
42.3 Zafar’s works (2003) 651
42.4 Diagrammatic representation of the social aspects of pottery
technique 652
42.5 Diagrammatic representation of the axes of authenticity in
Zafar’s pottery dolls 652
42.6 Diagrammatic representation of the axes of authenticity in
Asadbek’s pottery 653
42.7 Sample of Asadbek’s work from 2018 655
43.1 The covers of genealogy books reassert 1) the old age of genealogies
(as old as petroglyphs); 2) the role of elders –ak sakal –in their
preservation and transmission; 3) relatedness through sharing a
xiv
common putative ancestor or the same root (as in a tree); 4)

pride in the land inhabited and bequeathed by the ancestors 663
43.2 Various ways of representing ancestries as genealogical charts:
while in the first genealogy books (upper left) genealogical charts
were like illustrations, subsequently they became more ‘data-bound’ 665
46.1 A typical taxi stand outside a market, with drivers hoping to catch
fares from shoppers, Kyrgyzstan, 2012 705
46.2 An intracity taxi driver with “Allah” and “Muhammad” ornaments
hanging on the windshield, Kyrgyzstan, 2006 707
47.1 Praying at the Mausoleum of Shadykan-Ata, Naryn region, 2014 718
47.2 Talmazar-Buva mazar, Batken province, 2012 722
48.1 Propaganda image from a 2014 ‘peasant art’ competition, depicting
the dangers of mediated listening, Xinhuanet, 2014 734
48.2 Bekhtiyar, an Uyghur businessman from Karakol, Kyrgyzstan in 2016,
holding a family photo taken before they adopted a pious lifestyle 736
48.3 Women at a Qur’an class in the Pokrovka neighbourhood of
Bishkek, 2016 738
49.1 This printout announces the date and time of circumcisions organised
at the mosque and offered to villagers by mobile doctors (name of
village and doctor’s mobile numbers pixelated; photo by the author). 748
49.2 Posters in the prayer hall of Kyzyl-Too mosque. In the centre, the
poster entitled ‘The sequences of ritual prayer (namaz)’ displays 17
separate images of a man wearing a Muslim-style cap (doppi), a long-
sleeved white shirt and black trousers moving through the standardised
routine of ritual prayer. The poster to the right lists the ‘Al-Fatiha’, the
first surah of the Qur’an; the poster to the left is entitled ‘Zikir and
duba prayers after namaz’ – that is, prayers of supplication (Arab.:
duʿāʾ). The posters to the right and left each spell out the texts both in
Arab script and Cyrillic transliteration (photo by the author). 749
xv
TABLES
30.1 Mining accidents in Karaganda area, 1961–2009 450

33.1 Sequence of events around Solton-Sary and Kum-Bel mining sites in
August 2019 502
xvi
CONTRIBUTORS
Sergey Abashin is Professor of Anthropology at the European University at St

Petersburg, Russia. He is the author of Nationalisms in Central Asia: In search of
Identity (Aletheia, 2007) and Soviet Kishlak: Between Colonialism and Modernization
(Moscow, NLO 2015). In his current research, he is exploring migration processes in
Russia and Central Asia.
Brinton Ahlin is Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate
Division at the University of Chicago, and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the University
of Chicago Society of Fellows. He is a cultural anthropologist specialising in the eth-
nography and history of Islam in Tajikistan during and after the Soviet Union.
Gulnara Aitpaeva is Director of the Aigine Cultural Research Center in Bishkek,
Kyrgyzstan. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of sacred sites, Kyrgyz lit-
erature and folklore. She is the co-editor of 1916: Depoliticizing and Humanizing Our
Knowledge on the Uprising in Central Asia (Bishkek, 2020), The National Manual
for Safeguarding Sacred Sites and Ritual Practices’(Bishkek, 2020) and Literature and
Society in Central Asia, in Cahiers D’Asie Centrale (Paris and Bishkek, 2015).
Malika Bahovadinova is a political anthropologist working on migration, bureau-
cracy and development. Her research has covered labor migration, development aid,
gendered labour practices and migration law. She is investigating these themes to
explore the changing content and normative ideas of citizenship in Eurasia. She is a
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities in the University of Amsterdam.
Ildikó Bellér-Hann is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen where
she teaches Turkish and Central Asian Studies. She is the author of Community
Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur
(Brill, 2008), and co-author (with Chris Hann) of The Great Dispossession: Uyghurs
Between Civilizations (LIT Verlag, 2020).
Judith Beyer is Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of
Konstanz. She specialises in legal and political anthropology and has conducted long-
term ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar. In Central Asia, her research
xvii
— C o n t r i b u t o r s —
focuses on legal pluralism, (neo-)traditionalisation, activism, the state and practices

of social ordering. She is the author of The Force of Custom. Law and the Ordering
of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan and co-editor of Practices of Traditionalization in
Central Asia (with Peter Finke) and Performing Politics. Ethnographies of the state in
Central Asia (with Madeleine Reeves and Johan Rasanayagam).
Alima Bissenova is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Nazarbayev University.
She specialises in urban anthropology, anthropology of Islam, postcolonial studies
and intellectual history. She has published her work in English and Russian in the
journals Religion, State, and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, Ab Imperio, Novoe
Literaturnoe Obozrenie and Sotsiologiya Vlasti.
Noor O’Neill Borbieva is Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University Fort
Wayne. Her research, on gender, religious change, and the development sector in
the former Soviet Union, has been published in numerous journals, including Slavic
Review, Central Asian Survey and Anthropological Quarterly. Her book, Visions of
Development in Central Asia: Revitalizing the Culture Concept, was published by
Lexington Books in 2019.
Elena Borisova is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Social Anthropology at the
University of Sussex, specialising in migration, (im)mobility, and citizenship in
Eurasia. She received her doctorate from the University of Manchester in 2021. Her
research explores the imaginative and moral aspects of migration in Tajikistan, and
covers the questions of morality, personhood, modernity, the good life, kinship, care
and gender.
Aisalkyn Botoeva is a researcher who is fascinated by questions in economic sociology
and economic anthropology. Among other things, in her past and ongoing research,
she has examined how people adopt varying strategies and economic repertoires of
action in the face of uncertainty and shortage of resources. She has published her
individual and collaborative works in Politics & Society, Theory & Society, Families,
Relationships and Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs and Central Asian Survey, as well as
other journals. Aisalkyn lives in Alexandria, Virginia and currently works at the inter-
national NGO, Search for Common Ground.
Gulzat Botoeva is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Swansea. Her
research focuses on illegal economies in Central Asia working at the intersection of
economic sociology and criminology. Her doctoral research examined illegal hashish
harvesting in Kyrgyzstan, focusing on issues of legitimation of illegality and the use
of alternative monies in a cashless society. Her current research on mining disputes
furthers her analysis of the effects of neoliberal policies on rural communities in
Kyrgyzstan.
Stephanie Bunn is an anthropologist of textiles at the University of St Andrews,
conducting research into Central Asian textiles and basketry. She has curated numerous
exhibitions, including the first ever British Museum exhibition of Kyrgyz felt textiles.
She is author of Nomadic Felt (British Museum Press), editor of Anthropology and
Beauty (Routledge) and co-editor of The Material Culture of Basketry (Bloomsbury).
She currently collaborates with several scholars and basket-makers on Forces in
xviii
Translation, www.forcesintranslation.org researching the relationship between

basket-work and mathematics.
Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the School for
International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.
He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in
a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. His current
research is focused on state power, policing and carceral theory, infrastructure devel-
opment and global China.
Juliette Cleuziou is an Assistant Professor at the anthropology department at
University Lumière-Lyon 2 (France). Her doctoral research explored marriage and
‘de-marriage’ in Tajikistan. More recently, she has been conducting a research project
on funerals and death among Central Asian migrants in Russia. Her main research
topics are kinship, gender relations, and ritual economy in Tajikistan, as well as trans-
national families and community building in migratory contexts.
Jeanine Daǧyeli is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies
at the University of Vienna and research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies,
Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the history and anthropology
of labour in Central Asia, human-environment relations, disease and death, and cul-
tural heritage.
Cloé Drieu is Research Fellow at CNRS in the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan
and Central Asia Studies. She specialises in the history of Central Asia during the
interwar period, which she has studied through the lens of Uzbek cinema. Her book
on the subject, Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919–1937 (2019) was
first published in French (2013). Since 2019, she has been coordinating a comparative
project on ‘Mass Violence on the Shatterzones: Caucasus and Central Asia beyond
the Great War (1912–1924)’.
Sherzod Eraliev is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sociology of Law Department of
Lund University and a Visiting Professor at Tashkent State University of Economics.
His research interests include labour migration, state and society relations, and inter-
national affairs in Eurasia.
Carole Ferret is a French ethnologist, researcher at the CNRS (Laboratory of Social
Anthropology, Paris). She has carried out extensive fieldwork since 1994 among the
Turkic peoples of Siberia and Central Asia, especially Yakuts-Sakha and Kazakhs.
Her main research topics are the anthropology of action, technology, nomadic pas-
toralism, nature, and children.
Rachel Harris is Professor of Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London.
Her research focuses on expressive culture, religion and state policies in China’s
Muslim borderlands. She led the Leverhulme Research Project ‘Sounding Islam in
China’ (2014–17) and is now working with Turan University in Kazakhstan on a
British Academy Sustainable Development Project to revitalise Uyghur cultural heri-
tage in the diaspora. Her latest monograph, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (2020), is
published by Indiana University Press.
xix
Yanti M. Hölzchen is an anthropologist who has worked in north-eastern Kyrgyzstan

on mosques, Islamic funds, imams and the Tablighi Jamaat, as well as in Ethiopia,
focusing on burial and pilgrimage practices in interreligious settings. Since May 2022,
Yanti is employed at the College of Fellows of the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Diana Ibañez-Tirado is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Global
Studies at the University of Sussex. Based on her fieldwork in southern Tajikistan,
Diana has published numerous articles that discuss the anthropology of time, the
senses, and family life. More recently, Diana has conducted research with Russian-
and Persian-speaking traders who work and live across Eurasia, drawing on field-
work in China, Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan and Turkey.
Aksana Ismailbekova is a research fellow at Leibniz- Zentrum- Moderner Orient
(ZMO). Ismailbekova completed her dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. A monograph based on her doctoral research
was published as Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan
by Indiana University Press in 2017.
Svetlana Jacquesson is a senior research fellow at the Department of Asian Studies
(Palacký University). In her current research, Jacquesson explores the politics of know-
ledge production on and in Central Asia, focusing on popular ways of re-emplotting
history to support old and new identity claims and on the politics of knowledge pro-
duction on or in Central Asia. She is the author of Pastoréalismes (2010), co-editor
of Local History as an Identity Discipline (2012) and editor of History Making in
Central and Northern Eurasia (2016).
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Fribourg, Switzerland. She is also the managing editor of the platinum Open Access
journal Roadsides. Agnieszka focuses in her research on Xinjiang and the Sino-
Central Asian border regions.
Hasan Karrar is an Associate Professor in a multidisciplinary humanities and social
sciences department in at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in
Pakistan. His research and writing cover contemporary China, Central Asia, and the
Karakoram region of north Pakistan.
Said Reza Kazemi is a visiting researcher in the Institute of Anthropology at the
University of Heidelberg and holds a PhD in anthropology (2021) from the same
university. His doctoral research examined transnational family relationships from
Afghanistan in the context of displacement and war. He previously worked as a
researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Herat and Kabul.
Eeva Kesküla is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tallinn University. She
has conducted fieldwork in mining communities in Estonia and Kazakhstan and
published articles on labour, health and safety, and working-class lives in the post-
Soviet space. She is currently studying location-independent workers and the impact
of CO2-reduction policies on Estonian miners.
Haruka Kikuta is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Hokkai Gakuen University
in Japan. She has been engaged in cultural anthropological studies in Uzbekistan
since 2002, where her first research explored Islamic patron saints for artisans. Her
xx
current research examines the social influence of labor migrants from Uzbekistan on
changing family relationships.
Kerstin Klenke specialises in the anthropology of music with a focus on Central Asia
and the Caucasus. She is author of The Sound State of Uzbekistan. Popular Music and
Politics in the Karimov Era (Routledge); her current research project is Abkhazia –
War, Music, Memory. She is head of the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy
of Sciences.
Nathan Light is Docent in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Intimate Heritage: Creating
Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang (LIT Verlag, 2008), and has published widely on
history, language, ritual, economy and kinship in Central Asia.
Morgan Liu is Chair of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the
Ohio State University, with a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan.
He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows and served
2019–22 in the Presidency of the Central Eurasian Studies Society.
Maria Louw is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus
University and leader of the cross-disciplinary Center for the study of Ethics and
Community. She has conducted extensive research in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Her interests include religion, secularism and atheism; morality and ethics, phenom-
enology and philosophical anthropology.
Magnus Marsden is a Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and
Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. His books include Living
Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Northern Pakistan, Trading Worlds: Afghan
Merchants across Modern Frontiers, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier and Beyond
the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia.
Julie McBrien is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam
and Director of the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality. Her
research focuses on religion, secularism, gender, development, and nationalism. She is
the author of From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of
Religion in Kyrgyzstan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
Zhaina Meirkhan is a PhD student in the History Department at the University
of Michigan. Her research examines Qazaqs’ relationships with imperial Russia
and Qing China, legacies of state violence, ethno-national identity, the politics of
belonging, oral literature, oral history, migrations in comparative contexts, human
experience of exile, imperial formation, and the politics of expulsion.
David W. Montgomery is Research Professor in the Department of Government and
Politics and the Center for International Development and Conflict Management
at the University of Maryland, and director of program development for
CEDAR –Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion. His books include
Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding; Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience,
and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan, Living with Difference: How to Build
Community in a Divided World and Everyday Life in the Balkans.
xxi
Till Mostowlansky is Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology

and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He is the author of Azan on the
Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and co-editor of Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia
(University of Hawai’i Press, 2022).
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is Professor of International Affairs and Founding
Director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh.
Her research explores bottom-up governance arrangements across diverse spheres
including governance, security and development. Her books include Toward a
Political Economy of the Commons: New Rules for Sustainability (with Meina Cai,
Ilia Murtazashvili, and Raufhon Salahodjaev), Land, the State, and War: Property
Rights and Political Order in Afghanistan (with Ilia Murtazashvili), and Informal
Order and the State in Afghanistan.
Emil Nasridtinov is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology,
Urbanism and International Development at the American University of Central Asia,
Kyrgyzstan. He is also a director of SILK –Social Innovations Lab Kyrgyzstan. He
holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Melbourne. His main research
and teaching expertise areas are migration, religion and urbanism. His main long-
term ethnographic field engagement in researching religion is with Tablighi Jamaat.
In addition, he has conducted research and written on state policy towards religion,
Islamic education and madrassas, Islamic civil society, vulnerability and resilience to
radicalisation, migration and Islam, and Islam and peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan.
Danuta Penkala-Gawęcka is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Anthropology and
Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where she received PhD
and Dr. habil. degrees. She specialises in medical anthropology and Central Asian
studies (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). Her publications have focused on
medical pluralism, spiritual healing and people’s health-seeking strategies.
Marhabo Saparova is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northeastern University, in the
US. Her research interests are in migration, gender, and urban studies with a focus
on care and domestic work, informality, and migrant governmentality in Turkey and
Central Asia.
Elmira Satybaldieva is a Senior Research Fellow at the Conflict Analysis Research
Centre, University of Kent. Her main area of research interest is on grassroots activism
in Central Asia. She is the co-author of Rentier Capitalism and its Discontents: Power,
Morality and Resistance in Central Asia.
Isaac McKean Scarborough is Assistant Professor in Russian and Eurasian Studies
at the Institute for History, Leiden University. He is interested in post-war social and
economic development in Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia, especially in terms of
continuities across historical boundaries, such as the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Philipp Schröder is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Nazarbeyev University,
Astana. He focuses on identity, urban spaces, youth and gender, as well as on translocal
mobilities and entrepreneurialism. He is the author of Bishkek Boys: Neighbourhood
Youth and Urban Change in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital.
xxii
Baktygul Shabdan is a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Social

and Cultural Anthropology, Goethe University Frankfurt. She is the co-editor (with
Deepak Kumar Ojha) of Dynamics of Speaking and Doing Religion (TUP, 2022).
Her research focuses on the anthropology of childhood and personhood, the anthro-
pology of Islam, Sufism, digital religion, medical anthropology, Kyrgyzstan and India.
Mohira Suyarkulova is an Associate Professor at the American University of Central
Asia (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). Her research focuses on nationalism, statehood, gender
and sexuality, and environmental politics in Central Asia. She has co-authored the
Book on Happiness for Young (and not so) LGBT (but not only) People (in Russian)
together with Nina Bagdasarova and Georgy Mamedov (2021), based on ethno-
graphic studies of psychological well-being of LGBTQ+communities in Kyrgyzstan.
Tommaso Trevisani (DPhil in Social Anthropology, Free University of Berlin) teaches
Societies and Cultures of Central Asia as an Associate Professor at the University of
Naples L’Orientale. He has conducted research in Uzbekistan and in Kazakhstan on
topics including: agrarian change, class and industrial work, marriage and family,
post-socialist state- and nation-building.
Rustamjon Urinboyev is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology
of Law of Lund University. Rustamjon is an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar,
studying migration, corruption, governance and penal institutions in the context of
Russia, Central Asia and Turkey.
Grace H. Zhou is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Maynooth University. Her research
focuses on transnational intimacies, practices of care, and the mobility of colonial
forms across Central Asia. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford
University and was previously a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State
University.
xxiii
newgenprepdf
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Any book of this size depends on the work of many hands. As editors, we gratefully
acknowledge the willingness of our author colleagues to contribute to this project.
This book collaboration took shape during a particularly fraught and anxious time
in the parts of the world we live and work: we would like to thank all our contrib-
uting authors for their dedication, cordiality and dogged attention to detail, through
many rounds of review and revision. We are grateful to the enthusiasm and support
of our commissioning editor at Routledge, Meagan Simpson, and to the calm effi-
ciency of Eleanor Catchpole-Simmons, our production editor. Jeanne Brady, at Cove
Publishing Support Services, has been a wonderful copy-editor to work with in the
final stages of this project. Cholpon Alamanova has graciously allowed us to use her
stunning artwork on the cover of this book. We thank the Universities of Manchester,
Oxford and Tübingen for making it possible to dedicate several years to this book.
This project accompanied us over the last five years through a pandemic, maternity
leave, a transatlantic move, changes of job, illness, and unemployment. We would
like to express our deepest thanks to our families, our support networks, and to one
another for keeping going when the task at hand seemed altogether too unwieldy and
the time available to work on it, too short.
xxiv
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Centring the anthropology of
Central Asia
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves
This book celebrates the anthropology of Central Asia as a flourishing and consoli-
dating field. It began with conversations between the co-editors about a paradox that
seemed to intensify during the 2010s. On the one hand, as social anthropologists
teaching and researching this vast region, we were part of a vibrant and rapidly
growing subfield of Central Asian anthropology. It was an arena of rich internal
debates, proliferating avenues of research, and probing analyses of the inequities of
knowledge production on the region and their legacies.1
On the other hand –and even as the scholarly subfield was burgeoning –we found
Central Asian ethnography remained marginal within the wider anthropological
canon. Not only did Central Asia not seem to have any of the gatekeeper concepts
(and perhaps also the gatekeeper senior scholars) that are associated with the anthro-
pology of other world regions. It also had little in the way of visibility in general and
comparative anthropology texts, introductory readings lists, or surveys of the field.
To our students, Central Asia often came across –if it figured at all –as what Louw
(2007: 18) calls an ‘anthropological no-man’s land’, where debates and arguments
had to be gleaned from a still rather limited number of published monographs, or
from PhD work that was difficult to access and often written for an entirely different
audience.
Equally importantly, there were few introductory resources that gave a sense of
how one might theorise from this region –from the experiences of this particular
postsocialist postcolony in all its historical specificity and complexity. Indeed, the
only introductory anthropology text that explicitly included Central Asia, Dale
Eickelman’s The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, had
much more to say about the former region than the latter. The most recent, fourth,
edition (2001) was already two decades old as we worked on this project. Seminal
as it was when it appeared, Eickelman’s text simply didn’t reflect the vibrancy of
the scholarly field as we encountered it in seminars, workshops and conferences.
Nor did it capture the urgency of calls to address historical biases and blindspots
in the production of anthropological and historical knowledge about the region
(Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva 2021).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-1 1
— J e a n n e F é a u x d e l a C r o i x a n d M a d e l e i n e R e e v e s —
To be sure, there were and are plenty of books about Central Asia aimed at a
general and student audience. But these have mostly either been descriptive country
surveys, or analyses of high politics focused on what David Lewis (2008) pithilly
calls the ‘temptations of tyranny’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union (see, e.g.
Cummings 2013, Rashid 2017, Roy 2016). There were few accessible texts that gave
a sense of the complexity and vibrancy of social life beyond the tropes of Central
Asia as a place, in the subtitle of one recent book, of ‘revolution, murder and intrigue’
(Shishkin 2013).
The dominance of top- down approaches and grand abstractions have real
consequences for the way Central Asia comes to figure in the public imagination –
and the shelves of bookshops. For one thing, Central Asia often comes to seem over-
determined by the machinations of outside interests: the region’s leaders mere pawns
in a new ‘New Great Game’ between Russia, China and the West (Cooley 2012). For
another, an excessive focus on political elites and their capacity to mobilise society
can result in a rather thin and reductive account of the social. Political scientists, for
instance, have devoted considerable attention to ‘clan politics’ and its role in driving
what Collins (2006: 16) called ‘negative political trajectories’ in Central Asia. But
much less attention has been given to how, and in what circumstances, lineage affili-
ation or ‘clan’ membership comes to serve as a salient register of identification or
political affiliation (though see, notably the work of anthropologists Beyer 2011,
Gullette 2010, Ismailbekova 2017).
This lack of attention to emic registers of analysis and interpretation means that
researchers often bypass the question of how people make sense of, navigate, or co-
constitute particular political configurations, whether those of revolutionary protest
in Kyrgyzstan, the securitisation of social life in Xinjiang, the closure of an Islamic
public sphere in Tajikistan, or the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Turkmenistan.
In a compelling recent critique of such blind spots, Asel Doolotkeldieva (2022) has
shown how an over-emphasis on ‘elite-led protest’ and popular manipulation, par-
ticularly by US-trained political scientists (e.g., Radnitz 2010) has occluded sustained
attention to protesters’ political agency –or the substance of their political demands
(see also Satybaldieva 2018). More generally, the discursive dominance of top-
down frames of analysis leads to the evacuation of attention from issues that matter
most to people in the region, such as the burden of housing debt (see Sanghera and
Satybaldieva 2021 and Elmira Satybaldieva, this volume), the preservation of cul-
tural heritage (see Svetlana Jacquesson, this volume), the passing-on of craft skill
(see chapters by Haruka Kikuta and Stephanie Bunn, this volume) or the making
of a good life, (see Montgomery 2013 and Borisova 2021, as well as the chapters
contributed by Yanti Hölzchen, Danuta Penkala-Gawęcka and Maria Louw in this
volume).
Talking to friends and colleagues, we sensed that we weren’t alone in our frustra-
tion at the lack of accessible entry points to an ethnographically grounded analysis of
social, political, economic and cultural life in Central Asia. In part, this is the result of
largely uninterrogated colonial and Cold War legacies in the institutional organisa-
tion of anthropology departments in the global North, still often wedded to a ‘Three
Worlds’ division of academic labour (Pletsch 1981, Ben-Ari 2009). In teaching,
hiring, and institutional organisation, Central Asia tends to be treated as an appendix
of other, more visible elsewheres, whether defined in terms of geography (the Middle
2
— I n t r o d u c t i o n —
East, South Asia, Eastern Europe), religion (the ‘Muslim-majority world’), or histor-
ical experience (‘the post-Soviet states’). Such divisions create arbitrary silos of know-
ledge production about a region that straddles these boundaries. The five post-Soviet
states of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are often
treated as part of a ‘postsocialist’ world and thus grouped together for institutional
and teaching purposes with Russia and Eastern Europe. Afghanistan, meanwhile,
is typically studied as part of South Asia or the Middle East, and Xinjiang is typ-
ically subsumed into East rather than Central Asia. While such global divisions of
scholarly labour might be helpful for exploring certain themes and commonalities,
such as the legacies of Soviet socialism, it also occludes the analysis of processes and
relationships that link, say, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, or Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
Such bounding also has the effect of privileging the perspective, language and schol-
arship of former imperial metropoles. If prospective anthropologists of Kazakhstan,
for instance, are trained in the Russian language rather than Kazakh, or scholars
of Xinjiang are trained in Mandarin rather than Uyghur, they are more likely to be
exposed to some perspectives, ideas and scholarly literature in their training than
others (Picket 2017). They are more likely to privilege research topics that foreground
the perspective of those who speak the (former) colonial language. And they are more
likely to hear certain narratives from their interlocutors. The fact that many people in
Central Asia are bi-or tri-lingual doesn’t mean they express the same ideas when they
are speaking one or other language, a point poignantly illustrated in the case of Osh
Uzbeks by linguistic anthropologist, Emily Canning (2016). Context matters –and so
does the listener’s own social position.
Two further consequences follow from the institutional marginalisation of Central
Asia in anthropological teaching and research. The first is the discursive erasure of
internal heterogeneity. If Central Asia as a world region is marginal to anthropo-
logical knowledge production, then its significant ecological, political, linguistic,
cultural and religious diversity is more likely to be reduced to flattening generalisa-
tion. This is reflected in the pejorative simplifications that saturate public discourse
(‘the Stans’, ‘Russia’s back yard’) as well as the metaphors through which foreign
policy decisions are interpreted (as a ‘new Great Game’, or a ‘Giant Chessboard’).
These simplifications simultaneously deny agency to Central Asian publics and treat
huge regional variations in social and political organisation as simple variations on
a theme of post-Soviet statehood. The second consequence is that it can be hard for
our students to distinguish the metaphorical ‘wood for the trees’. If the only texts
available to our anthropology undergraduates are specialist monographs exploring
a specific social practice, place, or social group, it can be difficult for them to make
the connections between disparate materials, to reflect on the linkages between broad
political transformation and everyday lifeworlds. It can also be difficult to appre-
ciate the ways that, say, practices and expressions of what it is to be a Central Asian
Muslim might differ between town and village, young and old, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks,
men and women (Montgomery 2017, Peshkova 2014, Privratsky 2001).
It was as researcher- teachers engaged in conversations about the stakes,
consequences and inequities of knowledge production about the region that we first
mooted the idea of compiling this book: one that, we hoped, would convey some-
thing of the vibrancy and diversity of Central Asian anthropology as it existed in the
early 2020s. We hoped to offer this curated collection to fellow anthropologists, to
3
area specialists from other disciplines, and to a wider public interested in deepening
their understanding of this region’s social complexity.
This approach and these imagined audiences informed our editorial choices
throughout the process of commissioning, editing and compiling chapters. We expli-
citly sought to produce a volume that represented and amplified a diversity of scholarly
voices, including those of early career and more senior scholars. We wanted to recog-
nise the range of scholarly traditions that characterise the anthropology of contem-
porary Central Asia and the varied sites in which that knowledge is being produced.
In doing so, we have taken inspiration from colleagues who have critically explored
the way that an imagined ‘we’ gets invoked across a global landscape of anthro-
pology. As Chua and Mathur note in a recent introduction, ‘although anthropology’s
long-standing “romance with alterity” has been subject to extensive critical scrutiny,
the same cannot be said for presumptions of affinity between anthropologists, which
… are equally instrumental in shaping ethnographic knowledge’ (Chua and Mathur
2018: 1, citing Ntarangwi 2010: xii; see also Bošković 2008).
We wanted in particular to give prominence to a generation of scholars trained
in, or currently teaching in Central Asia, whose critiques of a ‘field’ that is also
home have been some of the most incisive and important for Area Studies in recent
years (see especially the critical collections edited by Kudaibergenova 2019, Marat
2021 and Doolotkeldieva 2022). While not all of our contributors would identify
as anthropologists, each has conducted sustained, immersive fieldwork, using this
research to generate theoretical insight. In commissioning chapters –and each of the
contributions here is published in English for the first time –we have encouraged
our authors to provide ethnographically driven introductions to a range of contem-
porary debates, rather than dry, encyclopaedic overviews or textbook-style surveys.
We encouraged a narrative style that would draw in a wide, non-specialist audience
to a particular domain of enquiry, giving them a ‘deep dive’ into some of the themes
that animate contemporary research through the practice of ethnography. The result,
we hope, is a take on ‘the Central Asian World’ as a locus of empirical and theoretical
enquiry that reflects the plurality and vibrancy of these scholarly approaches.
Readers will see that some places and some themes have generated significantly
more anthropological research than others. We could have filled an entire book with
contributions based on ethnography from Kyrgyzstan, while there remains a ser-
ious dearth of anthropological scholarship on contemporary Turkmenistan. This
is in part a reflection of the different degrees to which sociocultural anthropology,
as a theoretical practice of comparative enquiry on the human condition, has been
institutionalised in Central Asian universities. But it is also a reflection of the greater
openness to foreign research in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan than neighbouring states,
making these comparatively more accessible to ethnographic fieldwork.
Uzbekistan remained largely off-limits to foreign anthropologists for much of the
last 15 years, though there are encouraging signs of change, including the reopening
in 2020 of a department of anthropology and ethnology at the National University
of Uzbekistan.2 In other parts of the region, the research landscape remains bleak.
Many of the scholars who conducted ground- breaking research on Xinjiang in
the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s find themselves blacklisted from return. Research in
Tajikistan has become increasingly restrictive in a context of consolidating authori-
tarianism and repression of critical voices –particularly for Tajik scholars themselves.
4
In Afghanistan, the return of the Taliban to power in 2021 forced many Afghan
scholars to flee (including one of the contributors to this volume), while few uni-
versities abroad would now allow scholars to conduct sustained anthropological
research in Afghanistan.
If this is intentionally a polyphonic collection, then, it is also a reflection of the pol-
itically constricted times in which it was produced: times in which the conditions of
possibility for long-term ethnographic research have varied dramatically and where
the competing demands upon writing time fall differently and unequally among
scholars with and without secure academic positions. Our hope is that, by dipping
into chapters across its span, the reader can get a sense of Central Asia, not just in
context (Montgomery 2022), but as context for reflection on how, where and when
anthropological theory is produced and recognised within a wider scholarly commu-
nity (cf. Herzfeld 1987 for the case of Greece).
Below, we map out some of the contours of this evolving field before introducing
our take on what the ‘Central Asian World’ might offer for anthropology.
AN ASYMMETRICAL FIELD
Anthropological knowledge is not produced in a vacuum. It depends on a whole
ecosystem of mentorship, training, funding, research access, serendipity and luck. It
depends on scholars being deemed by those mentors to have acceptable, research-
able, interesting, or ‘relevant’ topics of study that warrant funding and publication. It
depends on gatekeepers and facilitators; it may rely on interpreters and transcribers,
reviewers and editors. During the 70-year existence of the Soviet Union, that eco-
system of ethnographic knowledge production about Central Asia was centred on
Moscow and St Petersburg. Within this centripetal system, it was Russian-speaking
scholars from the Soviet centre who generated most authoritative accounts of social
life in Central Asia for a Russian-reading public, even as they often relied on those
whom Roche (2014) felicitously calls ‘faithful assistants’: local anthropologists,
conversant in the regional vernaculars, who acted as gatekeepers, facilitators and
knowledge-providers for visiting ‘expeditions’ (ekspeditsii) of faculty and students.
As Sergey Abashin explores in his contribution to this volume, this was an asym-
metrical field, even as it allowed a certain degree of social-academic mobility to indi-
vidual Central Asian scholars. In a rare analysis of this field of knowledge production
from the periphery, Roche (2014) has explored how Tajik anthropologist Muhiddin
Faizullaev’s meticulous documentation of Tajik social life was sidelined within a
Moscow- centric hierarchy of knowledge production. Faizullaev’s work was also
‘filtered’ through the theoretical preoccupations of the anthropologists with whom
he collaborated in the 1970s and 1980s: these preoccupations centred on ethnos
theory and the study of religious and cultural ‘holdovers’ (perezhitki) (e.g., Bromlei
1973, Polyakov 1992) (Roche 2014: 5). The stakes of mis-alignment with political
priorities were considerable. Noted ethnographer Saul Abramzon, who spent most of
his adult life in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, for instance, found that his 1971
monograph on the ethnogenesis of the Kyrgyz People (Abramzon 1971) was subject
to harsh and sustained criticism in the pages of Sovetskaia Kirgiziia for stressing the
enduring salience of tribal identities in Soviet Kirgiziia, after decades of ostensible
‘modernisation’ (Horolets 2018: 189; Tchoroev 2002).
5
This ecosystem and the funding system that sustained it began to fracture and
eventually collapse after the end of the Soviet Union. In the ‘wild’ 1990s, detailed
ethnographic studies of what were now foreign states were no longer considered a
priority for the Russian Academy of Sciences. Many of the scholars trained within
these institutes either abandoned academia, switched geographical focus, or came
to concentrate on questions deemed ‘urgent’, such as the rise of inter-ethnic conflict
in regions previous celebrated for their social harmony (Reeves 2014).3 In 2005, the
division of Central Asia and Kazakhstan within the Institute for Anthropology and
Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences was downgraded to a research group
within the Centre for Asian and Pacific Research. Well-funded research expeditions
to Central Asia, which had often involved numerous staff and students travelling en
masse, came to a grinding halt.
Nor was this just a question of shifting economic priorities. On the one hand,
Central Asian scholars found themselves sometimes being treated as research
assistants rather than as peers by researchers with foreign credentials and funding (de
Boulay 2019). In a political economy of knowledge production, in which donors from
the global North could call the shots, local scholars could find themselves exploited
and censored, prohibited from ownership of data they themselves had gathered (Kim
2019). On the other hand, local anthropologists in Central Asia were often treated
by political leaders as de facto scholars ‘of and for’ the nation (see also Amsler 2007
for the case of sociology). Political and institutional prominence was given to a rather
essentialised reading of national culture as a means of demonstrating who ‘we’ are
and where ‘we’ have come from (Gullette 2010, Horolets 2018).
University departments for the study of sociocultural anthropology (etnologiia)
often explicitly foregrounded the study of the titular ethnic group in that particular
republic. Opportunities for scholars to collaborate across borders were restricted
by the dramatic hike in regional travel costs, new border regimes and the shifting
priorities of newly nationalising regimes. Renewed political pressures also meant
that Central Asian anthropologists, particularly in the restrictive academic environ-
ments of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, often avoided topics that could in any way
be perceived as politically sensitive –which largely excluded any research that did
not celebrate the enduring spiritual culture of the titular nation (Abashin 2009). In
Tajikistan, scholarly ethnography was recruited to the task of exploring a distinct
Aryan heritage to the Tajik nation. One Tajik ethnologist, who during perestroika
researched an authoritative monograph on land use and agricultural traditions in
Uzbekistan’s Tajik-majority Sokh Valley (Dzhakhonov 1989), became a vocal advo-
cate of Aryanism a as a national ideology for Tajikistan, supposedly as a counter-
weight to the nationalisms of Central Asia’s Turkic populations. In Uzbekistan, by the
early 2000s ethnology had become, in Marlene Laruelle’s words, ‘one of the reigning
sciences of Nationhood’, tasked with demonstrating ‘indisputable foundations for
the preeminence of the Uzbek people over other national groups in their titular state’
(Laruelle 2010: 104).
In this period, the ecosystem of anthropological knowledge production shifted in
significant measure to the global ‘West’. Anthropologists trained outside the Soviet
Union had been undertaking fieldwork-based doctoral research on Central Asia since
the mid-1980s. However, many of these ground-breaking studies remained access-
ible only as doctoral dissertations (Schoeberlein-Engel 1994, Tett 1996, Kuehnast
6
1997, Keshavjee 1998, Werner 1998), or were not published until many years later
(Liu 2012, Zanca 2010). It was not until the early and mid-2000s that there emerged
a small but steady trickle of published anthropological monographs in European
languages, typically drawing on field research conducted the previous decade (Louw
2007, Pétric 2002, Privratsky 2001). Valuable conversations emerged around the
revival of Islam, the role of ethnicity in daily life, and what might be glossed as
everyday economic strategies after the end of socialism (Kandiyoti and Mandel
1998). There were publishing initiatives too, with dedicated book series on ‘Culture
and Society after Socialism’ and the ‘Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia’,
both of which located Central Asia within a comparative ‘Eurasian’ or ‘Postsocialist’
field. Anthropologists often described the experience of addressing a wider scholarly
audience as a challenge of specificity. Writing in 2007 in the introduction to her sem-
inal book on Bukharan Muslims, Danish anthropologist, Maria Louw, described the
sense of engaging in ‘a kind of analytical bricolage … wavering between the fear of
making points that seem banal to other anthropologists on the one hand, and the
temptation to draw sweeping conclusions based on limited material, on the other’
(Louw 2007: 16).
The landscape of publishing on the region has changed significantly in the decade-
and-a-half since Louw wrote these words. If in the early 2000s the number of
anthropological monographs in English on Central Asia could be counted on the fin-
gers of two hands, there are now enough to fill a small bookcase. The kinds of theor-
etical and substantive debates in which anthropologists are engaged has expanded to
include linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of infrastructure, the anthropology
of secularism, the intersections of kinship and politics, and the anthropology of cli-
mate breakdown (see, indicatively Dubuisson 2017, Mostowlansky 2017, Billaud
2015, Ismailbekova 2017 and Wheeler 2021). There are more scholars engaged in
these conversations, and from a wider range of countries. Anthropology has also
had an outsized impact on the wider ‘Area Studies’ community, with anthropological
publications widely referenced also by geographers, historians, sociologists and pol-
itical scientists. Anthropologists have been key figureheads in creating scholarly asso-
ciations, and building institutional ties and training opportunities within the region
and abroad. Openness to interdisciplinarity is perhaps frequently the hallmark of
‘small’ regional expertise and ‘new’ scholarly domains –the anthropology of Central
Asia most certainly is such a case in point.
But for all these grounds for optimism, this is still a radically asymmetrical
field. Scholars from Central Asia often need to travel ‘West’, geographically and
epistemically, in order to be read or recognised in a wider scholarly community. The
dominance of English in anthropological publishing reinforces hierarchies of know-
ledge production, distribution and valuation that privilege those whose scholarly
training has been in that language. This dominance in turn leads to valuable research
findings being inaccessible to the majority of scholars or practitioners based in the
region, or worse, to a kind of ‘data drain’, in which the primary results of fieldwork
in the form of interview transcripts, survey results, or ethnographic observations
are stored in libraries and personal archives outside the country that furnished the
research.
The coloniality of knowledge production also goes well beyond language of
training and publication. As Madina Tlostanova (2015: 49) has argued in her seminal
7
article, ‘Can the Post-Soviet Think?’, access to the spaces of Western academia is
often contingent on abstaining from criticism of the West’s ‘monopoly of knowledge
production and distribution’. In this way, scholarly priorities or epistemic framings
that are discordant with those of the West are ‘erased or negatively coded even in
the works of local scholars themselves who are forced to buy their way into the aca-
demic sphere through conforming to Western mainstream research’ (ibid.: 52; see
also Marat 2021).
Many of our contributors have experienced such forms of epistemic disciplining,
including being steered towards comparative projects with more internationally
legible regions, or being discouraged from conducting research ‘at home’. One con-
tributor to this volume was warned that they would have problems competing in the
North American academic job market if they didn’t include a China comparison for
a project originally focused on Kyrgyzstan. Others have been encouraged, explicitly
or implicitly, to foreground the figure of the (typically female) ‘suffering subject’ as
a way of rendering their work legible to funding agencies in the anglophone global
North (de Boulay 2019). As Iranian-born anthropologist, Sadaf Jadvani, has noted
of her experience in German academia, projects which ‘depict an oppressed, exotic
other … tend to be well-received by lecturers and students. But these projects play
into deeply problematic expectations of colonial narrative’ (Javdani 2019: n.p.).
Perhaps most importantly, research relationships have often been unequally
structured by a global hierarchy of research sponsorship in which most funders,
donors and Principal Investigators are located in the global North. While there have
been many instances of generative international collaboration, this asymmetry can
also invisibilise forms of academic extractivism by reframing them as ‘training’ or
‘mentorship’ (Kim 2019). Erica Marat, reflecting on the field of Central Asian Area
Studies 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, has noted how, during the 2000s
‘Western and Russian scholars began holding joint forums more often, yet, still
without the representation of Central Asian voices. Speaking “about us, but not for
us” was a common experience (Marat 2021: 479, quoting Sultanalieva 2019). When
scholars spoke to Central Asian colleagues, it was rarely to co-produce knowledge
together, but rather to extract notes from the field and assistance with local contacts.”
Epistemic injustices are reinforced by very real inequities of time, money and
international mobility. The very training that enables scholars to participate in an
ostensibly ‘global’ but resolutely anglocentric anthropological conversation can then
leave scholars marginalised from academic debates (or even excluded from academic
careers) in their country of origin, facing a kind of double estrangement (Suyarkulova
2019). Most anthropologists employed at universities in Central Asia do not get the
kind of sabbatical leave that would allow for sustained periods of ethnographic
fieldwork. Teaching loads, academic pay, visa regimes and the cost of transnational
travel can make participation in scholarly conferences in the global North de facto
impossible.
And then there are the more subtle forms of exhaustion, physical and intellec-
tual, that exist when ‘the field is also home’, as Kudaibergenova (2019) puts it in
the introduction to a brilliant collection of essays on the coloniality of knowledge
production on Central Asia. Many scholars from Central Asia are also activists, for
whom writing about (say) forms of gendered shaming around dress and behaviour
(Nozimova 2022), the rise of nationalist populisms (Baialieva and Kutmanaliev 2021,
8
Doolotkeldieva 2021), heterogeneous expectations and lived experience of ‘develop-

ment’ (Arzieva 2022) are not mere theoretical problems or intellectual puzzles, but
urgent and existential questions of political and intellectual praxis. As Suyarkulova
(2019) notes, for many Central Asian feminists, the field is not just ‘home’ and a
source of livelihood. It is also a ‘battlefield’ in which the very possibility to carry on
conducting critical intellectual work is at stake. These are themes that we return to
in the collective Afterword to this volume: a small attempt to give these critiques the
prominence they deserve.
IS THERE A CENTRAL ASIA WORLD?

This book is part of an anthropology series featuring ‘world’ as the key idea
connecting overviews on regions such as Melanesia and the Andes. We were initially
wary of reifying a singular life-world, and would have much preferred signalling
plurality with ‘Central Asian Worlds’ as our title. As the riotously diverse chapters
here attest, certainly making a case for THE Central Asian World as a single, uni-
form entity would be absurd. Nevertheless, in a territorially and digitally contiguous
space, these plural existences are all more or less connected, and thus do indeed form
an uneven, brittle whole of sorts. This connectivity is self-evident in the case of the
massive impact of migration (see Juliette Cleuziou’s contribution to this volume),
but these patterns also fuse in other ways at their ‘outer’ edges with social and spa-
tial elsewheres, such as fashions in Egyptian Quran recitation (Rachel Harris), or
U.S. notions of good formal governance (Jennifer Murtazashvili). We therefore take
‘THE’ Central Asian World as a challenging heuristic for identifying patterns and
variations. Every single chapter of this book documents interconnection, be it the
involvement of Indian companies in Kazakhstan’s mines (Eeva Kesküla), or WHO
posters in rural Kyrgyzstani clinics (Baktygul Shabdan). Rather than attempting a
full ethnographic survey of a ‘world region’, the volume thus seeks to ask how people
in Central Asia make their lives at the intersection of diverse cross-cutting flows of
knowledge and practice.
We believe there is a second good argument for holding on to Central Asia con-
ceptually, which might be glossed as a kind of strategic essentialism. This move
focuses anthropological attention on a world region that has tended to be treated as
the margin of other Worlds. Central Asia, as mentioned above, often features as the
western edge of China, the northern edge of the Islamic World, the southern edge of
the Socialist World, or some kind of other languishing or hotly contested no-person’s
land between Great Powers.
In this book, we chose a definition of Central Asia that encourages a view of com-
monalities, overlaps, borrowing and ‘open edges’. What to ‘count’ as Central Asia is a
long-standing question, always linked to the purposes of the definition, as recognised
by Transregional and other reformulations of regional studies. Past collective names
for the current nation-states we cover have included ‘Mahwarana’ (in the Arabic),
‘Turkestan’, ‘Middle Asia’ (R: Srednaya Aziya) and ‘Inner Asia’, as well as quite other
scopings and denominations, for example by Chinese and Persian-language scholars
(see Gorshenina 2014 for a detailed survey) .
Holding in view ‘Central Asia’ as a site of interaction and debate at the intersection
of Eurasian worlds advantageously highlights particular legacies in the intellectual
9
division of labour (see in particular the contributions by Sergey Abashin and Alima
Bissenova, this volume). But our editorial decision also holds significant costs. Our
scope occludes other enduring connections, for example with enduring links of
livelihoods and the arts with Mongolian and Siberian pastoralists, the contiguity
with Azeri epics and traditions, or practices in adjacent areas of the Muslim world,
in particular Iran and Pakistan (though see the contribution by Till Mostowlansky
to this volume). Our chapters empirically attest both to strong interrelations in the
region of our grasp, while also clearly showing how social life continually challenges
the intellectual (and often policy) project of regional boundary-making. We therefore
invite readers to continue critiquing the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ even as we
recognise it to be a productive heuristic.
PATHWAYS THROUGH THE BOOK

Putting an order to 50 analytical glimpses on the Central Asian World has been both an
exhilarating and, at times, an excruciating task. We were intrigued by two facts: first,
that our authors’ collective did not turn to the more exoticising anthropological
concepts such as ‘purity and pollution’, ‘taboo’, or ‘the evil eye’ in crafting their ana-
lyses. We were also struck by the fact that in contrast to other regional handbooks,
we did not see strong sections on the most classic anthropological topics emerge, such
as ‘kinship’, ‘ritual’, or ‘rites of passage’. We followed this collective lead in forging
relatively abstract, unconventional book sections such as ‘Solidarity and Struggle’.
There were other reasons for resisting conventional mapping: for one, ‘economy’ and
‘religion’ are such stong themes in the anthropology of Central Asia that they sprawl
well beyond any single section. We found many chapters cross-fertilised theories, e.g.,
gender and migration studies (chapter by Diana Ibañez-Tirado), queer studies and
postcolonial theory (Mohira Suyarkulova), the anthropology of Islam and know-
ledge (Julie McBrien). We therefore designed the book sections to highlight diversity
and tensions in Central Asian worlding, such as tensions inherent in ‘care and inter-
dependence’. We also sought to foreground themes like ‘navigating the state’ as urgent
concerns that interest an audience far beyond anthropology. The upshot of this design
process are ten thematic sections, each holding four to seven chapters representing
a wide regional scope in covering essential topics ‘aslant’, such as kinship, politics
and migration. We have prefaced each section with a brief overview to draw out its
theoretical contribution, cross-cutting arguments between chapters and potential for
further thematic research. For reasons of space, we regretfully refrained from ref-
erencing the large bodies of work feeding our discussion of, e.g., statehood in the
region: please see individual chapters instead.
This volume opens with ‘Reverberating Legacies’, an analytical overture introdu-
cing anthropological scholarship on Central Asia. Our contributors span analyses
of Soviet ethnography, recent histories of pastoralism and agriculture, Islam and
late Soviet life, decolonising and queering lenses of enquiry. In the following section
on ‘Solidarity and Struggle’, the authors make a strong case for attending to the
action, imagination and skill of non-elite actors who fight, for example, for afford-
able housing (Elmira Satybaldieva), or full citizenship for Kazakhs migrating from
Xinjiang (Zhaina Meirkhan). This set of chapters highlights the normative registers
through which calls for justice are articulated, from the use of verbal arts to kinship
10
structures. Countering uni-dimensional accounts of ‘patriarchy’ or ‘gerontocracy’ in

Central Asia, the chapters featured in ‘Care and Interdependence’ explore relational
complexities and experimental forms in domestic and quasi-domestic settings such
as mahallah neighbourhoods (Morgan Liu). At the same time, they demonstrate how
hierarchical patterns of care and interdependence are gendered, raced and reproduced
as ‘natural’.
For the anthropology of Central Asia, it has never been an option to analytically
‘ignore’ state structures and actors. Consequently these feature on every page of this
book. In the section on ‘Navigating the State’, we feature contributions that put the
experience of statehood centre-stage, be it as a representation, as repression, or as
promoting and controlling cultural forms like estrada music in Uzbekistan (Kerstin
Klenke). ‘Persons, Healing and More-than-Human Worlds’ illuminates the classic
anthropological topic of personhood through the angle of healing, spirit-encounters
and –intriguingly –the sport of partridge hunting in Tajikistan (Brinton Ahlin). The
authors here take experiences with other-than-human beings seriously, and reveal
surprising parallels in the fluctuating relations tapped by mothers to cure their off-
spring (Baktygul Shabdan), and students making sense of mind- blowing dreams
(Maria Louw).
How to live well: this is the key question animating the chapters of ‘Ethical
Repertoires’. While Central Asians frequently describe a situation of moral decline and
vacuum, the ethnographies here tell other stories: of committed Muslims struggling
to be responsible car-salesmen (Emil Nasritdinov), of astute differentiations made in
judging Afghan hospitality (Magnus Marsden), of fighting for the ‘right’ compensa-
tion after mining accidents (Eeva Kesküla). While the catastrophic Soviet unravellings
of the 1990s preoccupied many of the early English-language anthropology studies
in the area, the circulation of things still remains a strong focus in Central Asia. The
spark of fascination with an economic ‘otherwise’ is far from exhausted, and elo-
quently showcased in ‘Everyday Moral Economies’ by studies on updated bazaar
economies (Hasan Karrar), artisanal gold- mining (Gulzat Botoeva), or the link
between land ownership and cycles of land degradation (Tommaso Trevisani).
Famous as Central Asia is for particular histories of movement such as ‘Silk Roads’
and ‘Nomadism’, we explore contemporary forms in ‘Mobility and Migration’.
In this section, authors examine ideational and real- time travel, including the
powerful effect of Russian and international agencies’ converging imagination of
‘the’ migrant as a problematic ‘other’ (Malika Bahovadinova), or the unequal inclu-
sion of Pamiris in ‘pluralistic’ Ismaili networks (Till Mostowlansky). A gratifyingly
thick section on ‘Material Culture, Arts and Performance’ attests to at least some
of the myriad forms of cultural production, from early cinematography in Soviet
Uzbekistan (Cloé Drieu) to Uyghur muqam music (Nathan Light). Despite per-
sistent attempts to devalue or control art forms like tent-making or pottery, this
section shows how tenaciously skills and art forms have been safeguarded and
adapted (Haruka Kikuta).
Since religious policies are also examined elsewhere in the volume (see chapters
by Emil Nasritdinov, Aisalkyn Botoeva), the concluding section on ‘Sacred Worlds’
highlights the moments when Central Asians seek out numinous, collective
experiences. While some form of Islam is the operating framework for many Central
Asians to do so, ethnographic work emphasises that this is not the only one (Pelkmans
11
2017). Many long-standing practices such as the maintenance and pilgrimage to

holy sites (Gulnara Aitpaeva), but also the mushrooming of mosque sponsorship
(Yanti Hölzchen) are both ubiquitous and hotly contested. The maelstrom of global
and regional crises at the turn of the 2020s gave very little opportunity for collegial
discussions in person. We therefore created a polyphonic afterword, for which our
authors’ collective generously shared their thoughts.
This text brings together quite different assessments of the strengths and
weaknesses in how anthropologists have engaged in Central Asian worlding, as well
as inspiring suggestions for reformulating the anthropology of Central Asia. We see a
whole swathe of Central Asian life that urgently calls for the kind of interconnected
analyses which not only allow us to understand, but also to interact with the world
in life-affirming ways. How, for instance, would an explicit ethnography of ageing in
the Ferghana Valley read? What would we learn from an institutional ethnography
of Turkmenistan’s gas industry? Where will anthropological analyses of literary and
scientific practices in the region emerge? Who will produce comparative analyses
capable of holding in view, for example, both environmental and other forms of
violence? When will we learn how to simultaneously hold both the longue durée
of human life and the urgency of political events in Central Asia in view? As we go
to press, we feel both humbled and thrilled by the sweep of both good ‘new reads’,
for example on environmental anthropology (Wheeler 2021) and autoethnography
(Taalaibekova 2022), as well as the energetic and demanding new initiatives for
reforming anthropological debate and publishing modes, particularly from the region
itself (Nasritdinov 2022).
NOTES
1 For the purposes of this book, we include ethnology, social and cultural anthropology. We
do not cover biological or other subfields of anthropology in this volume.
2 The department’s website notes quite frankly that between 2010 and 2020 ‘attention to
ethnological sciences decreased and reached the point of extinction’ (https://nuu.uz/en/
antropologiya-va-etnologiya-kafedrasi/, accessed 4 November 2022).
3 In 1990, for instance, the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography within the Russian
Academy of Sciences launched a series on ‘applied and urgent ethnology’ (Issledovaniia po
prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii).
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15
PART I
REVERBERATING LEGACIES
Apparently more so than other world regions, Central Asia is frequently cast as a
region tethered firmly to its past. In our Introduction, we examined the benefits and
costs of interpreting Central Asia as bearing the long ‘shadow’ of Soviet development
and practices. On the other hand, Central Asia is also celebrated for the glorious
artistic legacies of flourishing city, court and ‘nomadic’ societies. We look at inter-
pretations and struggles around this material culture, heritage and history-making
more closely in the last section of the book. We view the following section as an ana-
lytical ‘overture’, introducing key themes and schools of thought in the scholarship of
Central Asia. Each contributor showcases an approach, spanning analyses of Soviet
ethnography, pastoralism and agriculture, Islam and late Soviet life, decolonising and
queering lenses of enquiry.
As discussed in the volume’s Introduction and afterword, the knowledge produced
by Soviet ethnographers is often neglected by contemporary anthropologists. We
strongly believe this body of work, as scarce as it has now sometimes become in
libraries, deserves both recognition and critical discussion. So to open the book,
Sergey Abashin introduces the work of leading Soviet scholar Tatyana Zhdanko, and
her engagement with the dominant institutional focus on ‘ethnogenesis’. Zhdanko
collected a huge range of ethnographic material, especially among Karakalpaks
between the 1940s and late 1980s. She helped to shape the Soviet scientific program
of explaining the formation of ‘ethnos’ and its relation to the desired project of
nation-building. Like many social scientists of the time, she was preoccupied with
‘survivals’ from the past such as Khorezmian architecture, and how to deal with
them in pushing forward socialist transformation. Through Zhdanko’s scholarly
biography, Sergey Abashin demonstrates the history of unequal relations between
‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ Soviet institutions of knowledge production, as well as an
increasingly autonomous body of ethnographic work from Central Asia itself.
In the following chapter, Alima Bissenova critically comments on the norms of
anglophone anthropology that came to dominate scholarship on Central Asia from
the 1990s. Comparing these with Tsarist-era Russian ethnography, she asks crucial
questions about access and relations in what anthropologists call ‘the field’. Alima
Bissenova examines the work of Aleksei Levshin and Chokan Valikhanov, two
nineteenth-century orientalists writing on people we now call ‘Kazakhs’ and ‘Kyrgyz’.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003021803-2 17
— R e v e r b e r a t i n g l e g a c i e s —
The author points particularly to the price of institutional and personal ‘distance’
from the field, and the persistence of representational tropes around ‘discovering’
‘inaccessible’ and ‘unknown’ peoples in the anthropology of Central Asia.
The next two chapters bring together ‘the steppe’ and ‘the sown’, a classic frame-
work of viewing history in the region that we find at play both in vernacular and
scholarly interpretations. In her study of rural economies in the Bukharan oasis,
Jeanine Dağyeli unpacks the idea of static and radically distinct nomadic and farming
ways of life. She traces the entanglement of livelihoods based on cotton and sheep
with each other, as well as with global commodity markets over the last two cen-
turies. Jeanine Dağyeli discusses both colonial and Soviet efforts to modernise, for
example by introducing new breeds and specialist professions. Taking care not to
idealise pre-colonial livelihoods, the author argues that these policies catalysed large-
scale environmental degradation and increased poverty through deskilling, over-
grazing and over-stretching water resources to support cotton monocultures. Carole
Ferret’s discussion of pastoralism in the steppes and mountains of Kazakhstan also
comments on the intense pressures on rural Central Asia. She describes the ‘double
death’ of pastoral livelihoods, first through collectivisation in the 1930s, and then
with privatisation in the 1990s. Carole Ferret takes a detailed look at the evolu-
tion of animal husbandry that weathered and adapted to these cataclysms, such as
techniques to fatten livestock. Through her analyses of principles and adaptations in
transhumance, she takes issue both with idealised notions of ‘nomadic’ movement,
and with the idea of predominantly ‘sympathetic’ animal-human relations.
If economic themes have been a dominant strain in studies on the region, so have
studies of religion, in particular –of Islam. Similarly to economic concerns, the anthro-
pology of religion here bears the traces of public anxieties, both among Soviet and
post-Soviet elites and governments. Though the sponsorship of many studies on Islam
may be motivated by such anxieties, as Julie McBrien shows, many anthropologists
have worked to overcome the fixation with Islam as a ‘security concern’. In drawing
a vastly more differentiated picture of Muslim religious practices in the region, the
author argues that ethnographies have come to modify Talal Asad’s famous notion
of Islam as a discursive tradition. Could Muslims emerging from the restrictions of
the Soviet period be said to engage in ‘instituted practices’, as Asad would ask, if they
themselves feel a heightened sense of inadequacy in this regard? Studies of Islam in
Central Asia have therefore instead opted to conceptualise Islam as ‘Muslimness’ and
emphasise this both as a form of belonging, and of ideological debate. Through her
close reading of recent ethnographic work, Julie McBrien argues that this emphasis
does not contradict Asad’s definition, but rather poses important questions that could
expand and modify the conceptualisation of Islam.
Examining Perestroika as an earthquake with repeated aftershocks in Tajikistan,
Isaac Scarborough uses this trope to undo the prevalent notion of a finished Soviet
modernising project. As he argues for the case of Tajikistan, there was certainly no
clean ‘cut’ between late Soviet reforms, economic collapse and the social degradation
and civil war of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic observation, memoirs, interviews
and archival materials from the capital Dushanbe, Scarborough shows how local
experiences of time and causality were both ‘flattened’ and ‘stretched’. People may
feel that ‘restructuring’ in fact never ended, and sense ‘aftershocks’ in the way vio-
lent events and warlords resurface in politics. Scarborough also describes how the
18
— R e v e r b e r a t i n g l e g a c i e s —
practical reverberations of late Soviet ‘restructuring’ affect property rights and

become relevant, for example, when trying to reclaim a family dacha. As in the pre-
vious chapters of this section, re-cognising basic assumptions made about the region
is at the heart of Mohira Suyarkulova’s manifesto for queering Central Asian Studies.
She suggests that Central Asia itself can be understood as ‘neither here nor there’
between post-Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds, a ‘queer time-space’ in
itself. And yet, with very few exceptions, Central Asians themselves are portrayed as
‘straight’. The author uses Utterly Other (Sovsem Drugie), a recent collection of fem-
inist and queer science fiction stories written in Bishkek, to explore the possibilities
of queering the region. This means making the familiar strange, not only in relation
to gender, but also for instance in relation to the politics of ethnicity, contemporary
communism and globalisation. She calls for a new regional studies that does not
adhere to the binary logic of importing theory and exporting data. Instead, Mohira
Suyarkulova proposes a regional studies grounded in an ethic of creatively imagining
better ways of living together, a form of regional studies that draws out Central Asia
as a place generating complexities and hybridities of its own, in many directions.
19
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Al darle ahora la bienvenida, llevando vuestra voz, experimento,
Sres. Académicos, una de las satisfacciones más grandes de mi
vida. Hijo de una de las ciudades más antiguas y gloriosas del viejo
Reino sevillano, la ciudad de los Guzmanes, tengo á orgullo, y es
para mí eterno vínculo de gratitud y de cariño, haber recibido mi
educación literaria é histórica en las aulas hispalenses y en el trato y
comunicación de los ingenios de Sevilla, y que el nuevo Académico
fuese de los que con mayor interés y afecto me alentasen en mis
primeras tentativas y ensayos. ¡Quién me dijera entonces que en
acto de la solemnidad del presente habría de disfrutar la grata y
honrosa participación con que vuestra bondad se ha dignado
favorecerme!
Entre los muchos é interesantes asuntos que las ricas y variadas
aptitudes y conocimientos del nuevo compañero le habrían permitido
escoger como tema de su discurso de ingreso, el docto americanista
ha preferido oportunamente el de mayor alcance y trascendencia de
todos, esto es, el examen de las últimas doctrinas y trabajos
referentes á Cristóbal Colón, examen que acabáis de coronar con
vuestros aplausos, y que ha evidenciado una vez más el acierto y
elocuencia peculiares á su entendimiento y á sus facultades
literarias. Mis enhorabuenas más cordiales por la elección y el
desempeño.
La celebración del cuarto Centenario del descubrimiento de
América dió origen, como era de esperar, dentro y fuera de la
Península, á numerosos estudios relativos á los dos grandes é
inseparables factores de aquel acontecimiento sin igual en la
historia: Colón y España. Natural era que el docto americanista
sevillano siguiese con vivo interés las nuevas publicaciones,
estudiando cuanto en ellas se dijese tocante á las mismas
cuestiones que había tratado en su Vida de Colón, á fin de
comprobar y perfeccionar sus propias investigaciones.
La Academia, que cuenta en su seno americanistas
mantenedores de distintas y encontradas opiniones sobre puntos
capitales de la historia colombina, debía oir de igual modo las del
nuevo Académico, que no son otras, en esencia, que las que ya
consignó en su obra magna, robustecidas ahora con los datos y
materiales con que el Centenario ha contribuido al esclarecimiento
de cuestiones sobrado graves y empeñadas para que nadie pueda
osar resolverlas todas y en absoluto, máxime dada la naturaleza de
los conocimientos históricos.
Por mucho tiempo la leyenda colombina y la leyenda
anticolombina han de disputar tenazmente la plaza que sólo cumple
de derecho á la verdad histórica. Panegiristas de Colón y
panegiristas de España seguirán luchando con apasionamiento,
hasta que al fin luzca el día sereno de la justicia, así para el
incomparable marino genovés como para la nación generosa que
amparó é hizo posible la hazaña más prodigiosa de la Edad
Moderna.
Mis sentimientos y mis convicciones coinciden, de antiguo y casi
por completo, en estas materias, con las del nuevo Académico, y ahí
están que lo prueban los trabajos que dí á luz en el Centenario; sin
que por eso deje de reconocer en ningún caso que ni está ni es
posible que esté cerrada la puerta á ulteriores investigaciones, en
esta, como en toda clase de controversias históricas.
Creo más, señores Académicos: creo plenamente que, á pesar de
las exageraciones, aun de las injusticias con que la pasión haya
podido tratarla, en lo antiguo y en lo moderno, la figura gigantesca
del descubridor del Nuevo Mundo ha resistido victoriosamente los
embates de la ceguedad y del encono, llegando incólume á los días
del Centenario, y, como dijo magistralmente nuestro ilustre Director,
en su discurso de apertura del Congreso de Americanistas
celebrado en el Convento de la Rábida, «en puesto único, al que
nadie puede acercarse, ni de lejos, en la Historia.»
Después de todo, por fortuna nuestra, Colón no fué considerado
nunca en los trabajos del Centenario como llegó á serlo, por el
mismo tiempo, en algunas de las publicaciones italianas, esto es,
como simple ejecutor del pensamiento de Toscanelli; ni tratado
tampoco con la crueldad incalificable con que algunos portugueses
escribieron del Infante Don Enrique en los días mismos de la
celebración de su Centenario, ni como tratan hoy otros, con motivo
del que ha de celebrarse dentro de pocos días, al glorioso
Taumaturgo de Lisboa.
Y es que las divisiones religiosas, políticas y científicas de nuestro
tiempo, y aun más, si cabe, el espíritu crítico, cuando no escéptico,
dominante, tenían que ejercer su propio y natural influjo aun en
ocasiones tan extraordinarias y solemnes. Lo verdaderamente
extraño es que se nieguen ó regateen tanto la admiración y el
aplauso á las grandes figuras de la historia, y se prodiguen con
largueza, mejor dicho, con verdadero escándalo, en ocasiones, á
entidades subalternas, como lo prueban las apoteosis pomposas
que vemos celebrar en gloria de algunas y las estatuas erigidas en
honor de otras, careciendo, como aún carecen de ellas, el Cid,
Guzmán el Bueno, el Rey Católico y tantas otras glorias
indisputables y legítimas de la patria.
¡Dichosos los que, como el nuevo Académico, han sabido
conservar siempre inextinguibles en su alma el entusiasmo y la
admiración debidas á lo verdadero y lo justo, lo grande y lo sublime!
He dicho.
ÍNDICE
Páginas.
Prólogo v
Las Conferencias americanistas del Ateneo 1
Los Reyes Católicos en el descubrimiento de 33
América
El Cardenal Mendoza en el descubrimiento 61
de América
Colón y Fray Diego de Deza 73
El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Colón, 87
comedia de Lope de Vega
La patria de Colón 99
Españolismo de Colón 111
La Duquesa de Alba 121
El Maestro Lebrija y el descubrimiento de 135
América
La Aurora en Copacavana 147
Pedro de Valdivia 157
Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada en la poesía y 167
en la historia
El Alférez Doña Catalina de Erauso 179
La Historia de la Conquista de México, de 199
Solís
Los restos de Pizarro 207
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 221
El Centenario en Chile 231
El Centenario en Colombia 239
Los Americanos en el Ateneo 247
Colón en las publicaciones italianas del 265
Centenario
Un americanista notable 287
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The Central Asian World 1st Edition

Jeanne Féaux De La Croix

The Fables of La Fontaine 1st Edition Jean De La

The Meditations of Manuel de la Vega Cora Cruz

Hague Yearbook of International Law Annuaire de la Haye

Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations

The Broken Mirror A Never After Story Melissa De La

Chess Explained The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition Sam Collins

Starting Out The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition John Emms

The French Chef Handbook La cuisine de reference 1st

This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to con-

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix is a social anthropologist focusing on water and energy

Madeleine Reeves is Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of

THE ANDEAN WORLD THE TOKUGAWA WORLD

THE MELANESIAN WORLD THE MONGOL WORLD

THE MING WORLD THE SÁMI WORLD

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and

List of Figures xii

1 Introduction: centring the anthropology of Central Asia 1

PART I: REVERBERATING LEGACIES 17

2 Ethnogenesis through the lens of Soviet ethnography: academic

3 Lasting legacies in Central Asia’s agro-pastoralist livelihoods 39

4 Aftershocks of perestroika: Tajikistan’s flattened modernity 55

5 Struggling to interpret Islam in Central Asia: religion, politics, and

6 Decolonizing ‘the field’ in the anthropology of Central Asia:

7 Utterly Other: queering Central Asia, decolonising sexualities 96

PART II: SOLIDARITY AND STRUGGLE 113

9 The Dvor and urban communities: socio-​spatial rhythms in

10 Fighting back: the older working-​class women’s resistance against

11 Local political organization in Afghanistan 159

12 Daughters as Ojiza: marriage, security and care strategies for

13 New churches and the religious freedom agenda in Kyrgyzstan 188

PART III: CARE AND INTERDEPENDENCE 205

14 Theorizing Central Asian neighbourhoods as social interdependence,

15 Life and death in the margins: care and ambivalence in southern

16 Bargaining over care and control: money transfers and ICT-​based

17 Outsourcing domestic care: gendered labour mobility and

PART IV: NAVIGATING THE STATE 267

18 Ethnicising infrastructure: roads, railways and differential

19 Language choices, future imaginaries, and the lived hierarchy of

20 Sonic statecrafting: the politics of popular music in Uzbekistan 302

22 Reeducation time: the banality of violent paternalism in Xinjiang 334

PART V: PERSONS, HEALING, AND

23 The art of interpreting visionary dreams 351

24 Early childhood health care in rural Kyrgyzstan 365

25 Drunkenness and authority between animal and human worlds:

26 Healing with spirits: human and more-​than-​human healing

PART VI: ETHICAL REPERTOIRES 407

27 Legal pluralism in Central Asia: the customization of state and

28 Hospitality in Central Asia 422

29 Mobile livelihoods of Kyrgyz Tablighi Jamaat: living between

30 The value of a dead miner: industrial accidents, compensation

PART VII: EVERYDAY MORAL ECONOMIES 463

31 Who owns the (good) land? Cotton farming, land ownership

32 Changing pastoral livelihoods 482

33 Small-​scale gold mining communities in Kyrgyzstan: torn between

34 The Central Asian bazaar since 1991 514

35 Halal as a site of dilemma and negotiation 528

9 The Dvor and urban communities: socio-spatial rhythms in

10 Fighting back: the older working-class women’s resistance against

16 Bargaining over care and control: money transfers and ICT-based

26 Healing with spirits: human and more-than-human healing

33 Small-scale gold mining communities in Kyrgyzstan: torn between

40 Uzbek cinema as a lens on early Soviet state-and nation-building 607

44 Uyghur subnational histories as meta-heritage 672

30.1 Mining accidents in Karaganda area, 1961–2009 450

focuses on legal pluralism, (neo-)traditionalisation, activism, the state and practices

Translation, www.forcesintranslation.org researching the relationship between

Yanti M. Hölzchen is an anthropologist who has worked in north-eastern Kyrgyzstan

structures. Countering uni-dimensional accounts of ‘patriarchy’ or ‘gerontocracy’ in

2017). Many long-standing practices such as the maintenance and pilgrimage to