Introduction. Practices of Traditionalization in Central Asia (original) (raw)
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'National Identity between Tradition and Reflexive Modernisation in Central Asia' (2001)
2001
Central Asia, one of the most understudied areas in the world, is currently going through the upheavals of modernisation and nation formation. Arguing against the one-dimensional modernist conclusion that this process was arrested during the Soviet period, the article sets out to explore the complex weave of historical continuity and discontinuity in the formation of national identity in the new states. It argues against the notion that national identity involves the necessary dissolution of traditional ties.
Social and Cultural Change in Central Asia: The Soviet Legacy
2013
Focusing on Soviet culture and its social ramifications both during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet era, this book addresses important themes associated with Sovietisation and socialisation in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The book contains contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, and looks at topics that have been somewhat marginalised in contemporary studies of Central Asia, including education, anthropology, music, literature and poetry, film, history and state-identity construction, and social transformation. It examines how the Soviet legacy affected the development of the republics in Central Asia, and how it continues to affect the society, culture and polity of the region. Although each state in Central Asia has increasingly developed its own way, the book shows that the states have in varying degrees retained the influence of the Soviet past, or else are busily establishing new political identities in reaction to their Soviet legacy, and in doing so laying claim to, re-defining, and reinventing pre-Soviet and Soviet images and narratives. Throwing new light and presenting alternate points of view on the question of the Soviet legacy in the Soviet Central Asian successor states, the book is of interest to academics in the field of Russian and Central Asian Studies.
After more than two decades since the breakdown of Socialism in Central Asia, an awareness seems to emerge that the future of this region is more determined by its past than many would like to accept. Among the different analytical lenses approaching Central Asian states as a post-Soviet space, the concept of hybridity has played a crucial role but was, as this paper argues, unduly limited to the analysis of polities and politics rather than Central Asian societies at large. The transition and democratisation literatures have used hybridity as a concept to explain Central Asian states' non-compliance or failure to adapt to the institutional isomorphism of the post-Cold War era. To overcome the limitations and failures of such approaches, especially their preoccupation with explaining a 'failed' transformation, it is time to use hybridity as a concept to inquire the social processes that take place in the formation of post-Soviet states within their specific social setting. Looking at the case of Central Asia, particularly Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, this paper will analyse how Soviet historical heritage is hybridised in the discourse and agency of the formation of states. This analysis will shed light on how historical processes of modernisation, colonisation and secularisation inform today's social processes. Furthermore, it will explicitly adopt a relational perspective on the state and the ways in which it is constituted by society, and vice versa, to augment the state-centrism that has limited other contributions. Departing from a critical discussion of recent arguments that Central Asian statehood should be conceptualised from a post-colonial perspective, the paper will illuminate the colonial experience of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The analysis then presents examples continuities and changes in the historical emergence of the two countries in order to further conceptualise the post-Soviet trajectory that inextricably links Central Asia's past with its future.
Occasionally, despite our best intentions to control circumstances, life still experiences disruptions like natural disasters which send us knocking on our neighbor's door for help. Even if we manage to control all other critical situations, unpredictable disruptions will occur. We have a lot to learn from history about creative cooperation, and how to build a safe and better future. It's imperative to actively take steps to promote unity and understanding, because inertia is always in the other direction. Today it is obvious that societies need each other, and stagnate when they are isolated. It is time to break down the walls and learn to live together and help each other. Dr. Niyazov says, "My daughter was born in Moscow and grew up in Tashkent, UZ. She then went to college in Madrid, Spain, and now lives there with her husband and two daughters. She integrates traditions from all 3 cultures in her family life, and has created a new cosmopolitan culture of respect for her own heritage." Dr. Khan's daughter is a film producer who studied and lives in Seoul, S Korea, but her background draws her attention to making films about life in Central Asia.
Beyond post-Soviet: layered legacies and transformations in Central Asia
2021
Thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian republics are still often granted the epithet “post-Soviet.” While this is technically true, the region has been shaped and diff erentiated not only by seven decades of Soviet rule, but also by a pre-Soviet feudal and colonial history as well as various more recent phenomena and developments. Thus, each social phenomenon observed in Central Asia today has its own unique combination of elements from the past deriving from “layered legacies” – legacies of diff erent phases that reinforce, interact with or contradict each other in complex ways and can have very diff erent consequences in diff erent local contexts. This volume examines some of the region‘s layered legacies by eclectically zooming in on to-pics, such as urban planning, water management, agricultural production, communal coopera-tion, migration patterns, ethnicity, Islam and gender. The overarching question explored across these diff erent examples perta...
Between Empire and Revolution: New Work on Soviet Central Asia
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2006
Review of: Marco Buttino, La Rivoluzione Capovolta: L'Asia centrale tra il crollo dell'impero Zarista e la formazione dell'URSS [(Naples: L'Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2003); Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Vladimir Genis, Vitse-konsul Vvedenskii: Sluzhba v Persii i Bukharskom khanstve (1906-1920 gg.). Rossiiskaia diplomatiia v sud´bakh (Moscow: Sotsial'nopoliticheskaia mysl´, 2003); Arne Haugen, The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paula Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); and Douglas T. Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).