Bøger i Central Eurasia in Context serien

By interweaving case studies on kinship, legal negotiations, festive events, mourning rituals, and political and business dealings, Beyer shows how salt is the binding element in rural Kyrgyz social life and how it is used to explain and negotiate moral behavior and to postulate communal identity.

The first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan.

This textbook offers the most comprehensive introduction to the region available.

Provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia's social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence.

Provides a comprehensive and unsettling account of the Soviet campaign to forcefully sedentarize and collectivize the Kazakh clans. Viewing the nomadic life as unproductive, and their lands unused and untilled, Stalin and his inner circle pursued a campaign of violence and subjugation, rather than attempting any dialogue or cultural assimilation. The results were catastrophic.

Learning to Become Turkmen examines the ways in which the iconography of everyday life--in dramatically different alphabets, multiple languages, and shifting education policies--reflects the evolution of Turkmen society in Central Asia over the past century.

Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the boundary between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, using a combination of political, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on this process.

A fascinating anthropological inquiry into the deeply ingrained presence of ancestors within the cultural, political, and spiritual discourse of Kazakhs.

This rich ethnography looks at how modernity affects the everyday lives of Tajiks, and how they are connected to a globalized word, by studying communities along the remote and isolated Pamir Highway.

Paradox of Power takes careful stock of the varied experiences of Eurasian states to reveal a wide array of surprising outcomes.

A Broad Revisionist Account of Central Asian History (1500-1800)

Based on extensive archival research, Botakoz Kassymbekova analyzes the tactics of Soviet officials at the center and periphery that produced, imitated, and improvised governance in this Soviet southern borderland and in Central Asia more generally.

Through his years of on-the-ground research, Montgomery assembles both an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of Islam, demonstrating how individuals make sense of and draw meanings from their environments.

Based on the case of Kyrgyzstan, while going well beyond it to elaborate a theory of the developing state that comprehends corruption as not merely criminal, but a type of market based on highly rational decisions made by the powerful individuals within, or connected to, the state.

Stronski tells the fascinating story of Tashkent, an ethnically diverse, primarily Muslim city that became the prototype for the Soviet-era reimagining of urban centers in Central Asia. He shows how Soviet officials, planners, and architects worked to integrate local ethnic traditions and socialist ideology into a newly constructed urban space and propaganda showcase.

A compelling study of the divergent political courses taken by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan in the wake of Soviet rule. McGlinchey examines economics, religion, political legacies, foreign investment, and the ethnicity of these countries to evaluate the relative success of political structures in each nation.

This book analyzes how Central Asians actively engaged with the rapidly globalizing world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In presenting the first English-language history of the Khanate of Khoqand (1709-1876), Scott C. Levi examines the rise of that extraordinarily dynamic state in the Ferghana Valley.

The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In this comparative study, Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the 'new' states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries--one "western" and democratic, the other "eastern" and dictatorial.

We are still struggling to fully understand the transformation of Islam in a region that's evolved through a complex and dynamic process

Presents a nuanced ethnographic study of Islam and secularism in post-Soviet Central Asia, as seen from the small town of Bazaar-Korgon in southern Kyrgyzstan. Opening with the juxtaposition of a statue of Lenin and a mosque in the town square, Julie McBrien proceeds to peel away the multiple layers that have shaped the return of public Islam in the region.

The Political, Public Significance of Temporality and How Time is Experienced in Contemporary Kazakhstan