Central Eurasia in Context

Total 22 results found.

Polygynous Marriages among the Kyrgyz

Polygynous Marriages among the Kyrgyz

Institutional Change and Endurance
During Soviet rule, the state all but imposed atheism on the primarily Islamic people of Kyrgyzstan and limited the tradition of polygyny—a form of polygamy in which one man has multiple wives. Polygyny did continue under communism, though chiefly under concealment. In the decades since the fall of the ...
Central Asia

Central Asia

Contexts for Understanding
Honorable Mention, 2023 CESS Outreach Award Central Asia is a diverse and complex region of the world often characterized in the West as exotic, remote, and difficult to understand. Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding offers the most comprehensive introduction to the region available for students and general readers alike. Combining thematic ...
Toward Nationalizing Regimes

Toward Nationalizing Regimes

Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm
Finalist, 2021 CESS Book Award 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 ...
Steppe Dreams

Steppe Dreams

Time, Mediation, and Postsocialist Celebrations in Kazakhstan
Steppe Dreams concerns the political significance of temporality in Kazakhstan, as manifested in public events and performances, and its reverberating effects in the personal lives of Kazakhstanis. Like many holidays in the post-Soviet sphere, public celebrations in Kazakhstan often reflect multiple temporal framings—utopian visions of the future, or romanticized ...
The Bukharan Crisis

The Bukharan Crisis

A Connected History of 18th Century Central Asia
In the first half of the eighteenth century, Central Asia’s Bukharan Khanate descended into a crisis from which it would not recover. Bukharans suffered failed harvests and famine, a severe fiscal downturn, invasions from the north and the south, rebellion, and then revolution. To date, efforts to identify the ...
Stalin’s Nomads

Stalin’s Nomads

Power and Famine in Kazakhstan
Robert Kindler’s seminal work is 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 ...
Learning to Become Turkmen

Learning to Become Turkmen

Literacy, Language, and Power, 1914-2014
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. As Victoria Clement shows, the formal structures of the Russian imperial state did ...
From Belonging to Belief

From Belonging to Belief

Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan
From Belonging to Belief 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 Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709-1876

The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709-1876

Central Asia in the Global Age
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. Levi reveals the many ways ...
Azan on the Moon

Azan on the Moon

Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway
Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people's lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Constructed in the 1930s in rugged high-altitude terrain, the road fundamentally altered the material and social fabric of this former Soviet outpost on the border with Afghanistan and China. The ...
Nationalism in Central Asia

Nationalism in Central Asia

A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary
Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich “biography” of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building ...
Living Language in Kazakhstan

Living Language in Kazakhstan

The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview
Eva-Marie Dubuisson provides a fascinating anthropological inquiry into the deeply ingrained presence of ancestors within the cultural, political, and spiritual discourse of Kazakhs. In a climate of authoritarianism and economic uncertainty, many people in this region turn to their forebearers for care, guidance, and advice, invoking them on a daily ...
Paradox of Power

Paradox of Power

The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia
“State weakness” is seen to be a widespread problem throughout Central Asia and other parts of post-socialist space, and more broadly in areas of the developing world. Challenging the widespread assumption that these “weak states” inevitably slide toward failure, Paradox of Power takes careful stock of the varied experiences of ...
The Force of Custom

The Force of Custom

Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
The Force of Custom presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Through her extensive fieldwork and firsthand experience, Judith Beyer reveals how Kyrgyz in Talas province negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, ...
Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia

Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia

During the 1990s, there was a general consensus that Central Asia was witnessing an Islamic revival after independence, and that this occurrence would follow similar events throughout the Islamic world in the prior two decades, which had negative effects on both social and political development. Twenty years later, we are ...

Total 22 results found.