Download or read book The Genealogical Construction of the Kyrgyz Republic written by David Gullette and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the conceptions of genealogy, kinship and ‘tribalism’ in the intertwined construction of personhood and national identity in the Kyrgyz Republic. It makes an important contribution to several theoretical and regional debates.
Download or read book Kinship State and tribalism written by David Cameron Gullette and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blood Ties and the Native Son written by Aksana Ismailbekova and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthropologist explores the politics and society of Kyrgyzstan through a study of one influential man’s life. A pioneering study of kinship, patronage, and politics in Central Asia, Blood Ties and the Native Son tells the story of the rise and fall of a man called Rahim, an influential and powerful patron in rural northern Kyrgyzstan, and of how his relations with clients and kin shaped the economic and social life of the region. Many observers of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia have assumed that corruption, nepotism, and patron-client relations would forestall democratization. Looking at the intersection of kinship ties with political patronage, Aksana Ismailbekova finds instead that this intertwining has in fact enabled democratization—both kinship and patronage develop apace with democracy, although patronage relations may stymie individual political opinion and action. “This book is an important contribution to a growing literature on Central Asian politics and society, and by complicating dominant narratives about the dangers of weak state institutions, Ismailbekova has much to offer to the broader research project on democratization and clientelism.” —Europe-Asia Studies
Download or read book Understanding Geographies of Polarization and Peripheralization written by Thilo Lang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a multifaceted perspective on regional development and corresponding processes of adaptation and response, focusing on the concepts of polarization and peripheralization. It discusses theoretical and empirical foundations and presents several compelling case studies from Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.
Download or read book The Family in Central Asia written by Sophie Roche and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die Reihe Islamkundliche Untersuchungen wurde 1969 im Klaus Schwarz Verlag begründet und hat sich zu einem der wichtigsten Publikationsorgane der Islamwissenschaft in Deutschland entwickelt. Die über 330 Bände widmen sich der Geschichte, Kultur und den Gesellschaften Nordafrikas, des Nahen und Mittleren Ostens sowie Zentral-, Süd- und Südost-Asiens.
Download or read book Mapping the Media and Communication Landscape of Central Asia written by Elira Turdubaeva and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central Asian post-independence media and communication industries, professional practices, education, persisting and evolving values, and traditions remain critically understudied with a notable scarcity of research and scholarly publications on the complex and increasingly changing communicative ecology landscape of this region. Mapping the Media and Communication Landscape of Central Asia: An Anthology of Emerging and Contemporary Issues addresses this gap in literature by exploring, analyzing, and shedding light to the field, practice, research and critical inquiry of media and mass communication in four countries in Central Asia—Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. This book includes local authors as well as new and emerging researchers from this region to contextualize the issues explored and provide a supportive dialogue between different points of view.
Download or read book Central Peripheries written by Marlene Laruelle and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. Although relative latecomers on the international scene, the Central Asian states see themselves as globalized, and yet in spite of – or perhaps precisely because of – this, they hold a very classical vision of the nation-state, rejecting the abolition of boundaries and the theory of the ‘death of the nation’. Their unabashed celebration of very classical nationhoods built on post-modern premises challenges the Western view of nationalism as a dying ideology that ought to have been transcended by post-national cosmopolitanism. Marlene Laruelle looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. She takes into consideration the ways in which the Soviet past has influenced the construction of national storylines, as well as the diversity of each state’s narratives and use of symbolic politics. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling allows Laruelle to depict the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia. Based on the principle that only multidisciplinarity can help us to untangle the puzzle of nationhood, Central Peripheries uses mixed methods, combining political science, intellectual history, sociology and cultural anthropology. It is inspired by two decades of fieldwork in the region and a deep knowledge of the region’s academia and political environment. Praise for Central Peripheries ‘Marlene Laruelle paves the way to the more focused and necessary outlook on Central Asia, a region that is not a periphery but a central space for emerging conceptual debates and complexities. Above all, the book is a product of Laruelle's trademark excellence in balancing empirical depth with vigorous theoretical advancements.’ – Diana T. Kudaibergenova, University of Cambridge ‘Using the concept of hybridity, Laruelle explores the multitude of historical, political and geopolitical factors that predetermine different ways of looking at nations and various configurations of nation-building in post-Soviet Central Asia. Those manifold contexts present a general picture of the transformation that the former southern periphery of the USSR has been going through in the past decades.’ – Sergey Abashin, European University at St Petersburg
Download or read book Incomplete State Building in Central Asia written by Viktoria Akchurina and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-19 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about transformation of the state and an incomplete state-building. It defies the transitology assumption of continuity, linearity and dichotomy of formal and informal in the transformation of the state. Contrary to the conventional approaches, it claims that any social order or its political scaffolding, the state, is always incomplete and we need to develop cognitive maps to better understand that incompleteness. It reflects on the social practices, processes and patterns that evolve as a non-linear result of three sets of factors: those that are historical, external, and elite-driven. Three Central Asian states - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan - are examined here comparatively as case studies, as Central Asia represents an interesting terrain to challenge conventional understanding of the state. Specifically, the book captures a paradox at hand: how come three states, which made different political, economic, cultural, and social choices at the outset of their independence in the 1990s, have ended up as so-called “weak states” in the 2000s and onwards? This puzzle can be better understood through looking at the relationship among three main sets of factors that shape state-building processes, such as history, external actors, and local elites. This book applies an interdisciplinary approach, combining political anthropology, political economy, sociology, and political science. It helps conceptualize and understand social and political order beyond the “failed state” paradigm
Download or read book Where Are All Our Sheep written by Boris Petric and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the collapse of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan chose a path of economic and political liberalization. Only a few years later, however, the country ceased producing anything of worth and developed a dependence on the outside world, particularly on international aid. Its principal industry, sheep breeding, was decimated by reforms suggested by international institutions providing assistance. Virtually annihilated by privatization of the economy and deserted by Moscow, the Kyrgyz have turned this economic “opening up” into a subtle strategy to capture all manner of resources from abroad. In this study, the author describes the encounters, sometimes comical and tinged with incomprehension, between the local population and the well-meaning foreigners who came to reform them.
Download or read book Dynamics of Social Class written by Craig B Howley and published by IAP. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Half the world’s population lives in rural places, but education scholars and policy makers worldwide give little attention to rural of education. Indeed, most national systems, including in the developed world, treat their educational systems as institutions to “modernize” the global economy. The authors in this volume have different concerns. They are rural education scholars from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Kyrgyzstan, and here their focus is the dynamics of social class: in particular rural schools but also in rural schooling as a local manifestation of a national (and the global) system. For the most part, the volume comprises relevant empirical reports, but none neglects theory, and some privilege theory and interpretation. First and last chapters introduce the texts and synthesize their joint and separate meanings. What are the implications of place for social class? How do class dynamics manifest differently in more and less racially homogeneous rural communities? How does place affect class and how might class affect place? How does schooling in rural communities reproduce or interrupt social-class mobility across generations? The chapters engage such questions more completely than other volumes in rural education, not as a final word or interm summary, but as an opening to an important line of inquiry thus far largely neglected in rural education scholarship.
Download or read book Kyrgyzstan beyond Democracy Island and Failing State written by Marlene Laruelle and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kyrgyzstan is probably the best known of any central Asian country, the one that has elicited the most academic publications, reports by NGOs or advocacy groups, and op-eds in the media. The country opened up massively to Western influence through development aid for civil society and for economic reforms, faced two revolutions in 2005 and 2010, and experienced bloody interethnic conflict in 2010. Kyrgyzstan is therefore commonly studied as a twin case: that of having been, for more than two decades, both an “island of democracy” in Central Asia—and the only country of the region to have made the transition to a parliamentary regime—and the archetypical example of a “failing state,” one marked by endemic corruption, criminalization of the state apparatus, and collapse of public services. This volume goes beyond these two clichés and provides a research-based and unideological narrative on the country. It identifies political dynamics, their powerbrokers, and the role of international organizations; investigates the profound social transformations of both the rural and the urban worlds; and examines the broad feeling, by local actors, that Kyrgyzstan’s fragile state identity should be consolidated. This book gives the floor to the new generation of scholars whose long-term vernacular-language field research made it possible to provide new interpretative prisms for the complex evolution of Kyrgyzstan.
Download or read book Central Asia written by David W. Montgomery and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 879 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 chapters with detailed case studies, readers will learn to appreciate the richly interconnected aspects of life in Central Asia. These wide-ranging, easy-to-understand contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field provide the context needed to understand Central Asia and presents a launching point for further reading and research.
Download or read book Iconic Places in Central Asia written by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeanne Féaux de la Croix maps three iconic places as part of Central Asians' 'moral geographies' and examines their role in navigating socialist, neo-liberal and neo-Islamic life models. Dams provide most of Kyrgyzstan's electricity, but are also at the heart of regional water disputes that threaten an already shrinking Aral Sea. Mountain pastures cover much of Central Asia's heartland and offer a livelihood and refuge, even to urban citizens. Pilgrimage sites have recovered from official Soviet oblivion and act as cherished scenes of decision-making. Examining how iconic places, work and well-being can mesh together, this book moves debates about post-Soviet memory, space and property onto fresh terrain.
Download or read book Practicing Islam written by David W. Montgomery and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-11-23 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David W. Montgomery presents a rich ethnographic study on the practice and meaning of Islamic life in Kyrgyzstan. As he shows, becoming and being a Muslim are based on knowledge acquired from the surrounding environment, enabled through the practice of doing. Through these acts, Islam is imbued in both the individual and the community. To Montgomery, religious practice and lived experience combine to create an ideological space that is shaped by events, opportunities, and potentialities that form the context from which knowing emerges. This acquired knowledge further frames social navigation and political negotiation. 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. He reveals subtle individual interpretations of the religion and how people seek to define themselves and their lives as "good" within their communities and under Islam. Based on numerous in-depth interviews, bolstered by extensive survey and data collection, Montgomery offers the most thorough English-language study to date of Islam in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. His work provides a broad view into the cognitive processes of Central Asian populations that will serve students, researchers, and policymakers alike.
Download or read book The Central Asian World written by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-20 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary 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 historical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonizing 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 globalization, 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
Download or read book China s Borderlands written by Steven Parham and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This region - which marks the meeting of China and post-Soviet Central Asia - is increasingly important militarily, economically and geographically. Yet we know little of the people that live there, beyond a romanticised 'Silk Road' sense of fraternity. In fact, relations between the people of this region are tense, and border violence is escalating - even as the identity and nationality of the people on the ground shifts to meet their new geopolitical realities. As Steven Parham shows, many of the world's Soviet borders have proved to be deeply unstable and, in the end, impermanent. Meanwhile, the looming presence of Modern China and Russia, who are funneling money and military resources into the region - partly to fight what they see as a growing Islamic activism - are adding fuel to the fire. This lyrical, intelligent book functions as part travelogue, part sociological exploration, and is based on a unique body of research - five months trekking through the checkpoints of the border regions. As China continues to grow and become more assertive, as it has been recently in Africa and in the South China Seas - as well as in Xinjiang - China's borderlands have become a battleground between the Soviet past and the Chinese future.
Download or read book Under Solomon s Throne written by Morgan Y. Liu and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2012-05-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Solomon's Throne 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. Morgan Liu illuminates many of the challenges facing Central Asia today by unpacking the predicament of Osh, a city whose experience captures key political and cultural issues of the region as a whole. Situated on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—newly independent republics that have followed increasingly divergent paths to reform their states and economies—the city is subject to a Kyrgyz government, but the majority of its population are ethnic Uzbeks. Conflict between the two groups led to riots in 1990, and again in 2010, when thousands, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, were killed and nearly half a million more fled across the border into Uzbekistan. While these tragic outbreaks of violence highlight communal tensions amid long-term uncertainty, a close examination of community life in the two decades between reveals the way Osh Uzbeks have created a sense of stability and belonging for themselves while occupying a postcolonial no-man's-land, tied to two nation-states but not fully accepted by either one. The first ethnographic monograph based on extensive local-language fieldwork in a Central Asian city, this study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership. Living in the shadow of Solomon's Throne, the city's central mountain, they envision and attempt to build a just social order.
