Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia : Performing Politics

With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provide a unique perspective on how politics is performed in everyday life. Cover Contents Note on Transliteration Acknowledgments Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia Part 1. Staging the Political 1. The Global Performance State: A Reconsideration of the Central Asian “Weak State” 2. Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons 3. Performing Democracy: State-Making through Patronage in Kyrgyzstan 4. “There is this law . . .”: Performing the State in the Kyrgyz Courts of Elders Part 2. Political Materials, Political Fantasies 5. The Master Plan of Astana: Between the “Art of Government” and the “Art of Being Global” 6. State Building(s): Built Forms, Materiality, and the State in Astana 7. The Bulldozer State: Chinese Socialist Development in Xinjiang 8. The Time of the Border: Contingency, Conflict, and Popular Statism at the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary Part 3. Moral Positionings 9. Reclaiming Ma’naviyat: Morality, Criminality, and Dissident Politics in Uzbekistan 10. The Reshaping of Cities and Citizens in Uzbekistan: The Case of Namangan’s “New Uzbeks” 11. Massacre through a Kaleidoscope: Fragmented Moral Imaginaries of the State in Central Asia 12. Cold War Memories and Post–Cold War Realities: The Politics of Memory and Identity in the Everyday Life of Kazakhstan’s Radiation Victims Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z With fresh and provocation insights into the everyday reality of politics in post. Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplace about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of states power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in setting that range from the local to the transnational, the mondane to the spectacular, to provide a unique perspective on how politics is performed in everyday life. Book jacket