Writing about peoples: an American’s reflections on 30 years of Central Asian studies

ABSTRACT

Recalling knowledge and instruction about Central Asia toward the end of the Cold War (1945–91) in the United States, this article provides a retrospective on an anthropologist’s coming of age and ability amidst prevailing interests and convictions concerning the region. It continues to discuss some of the early topics and studies that initiated a grounded approach to understanding Central Asia ethnographically as it broadens the analysis via a consideration of contributions from Europe and Central Eurasia. Not a literature review per se, the article focuses on some major concerns among anthropologists and their subjects since the beginning of independence. It then concludes that while studies have developed in complexity and theory within our field, we continue writing about culture via overarching political and economic systems that inform how we apprehend the world. The multiple and overlapping identities of Central Asians will continue to occupy much of our academic thinking for years to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• Sovietology
• anthropology
• ethnographic studies
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Stephen F. Cohen springs to mind when thinking of a kind of anti-Cold War Sovietologist, particularly his classic Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (1985).

2 From the mid-1990s to the 2000s, it was common for observers of Central Eurasia (the former USSR) to invoke nostalgia when other scholars wrote of common feelings of empathy and support for aspects of Soviet life and society, including topics as wide ranging as education, consumer goods, salaries and travel. The problem with invoking nostalgia as synonymous with an uncritical romanticizing of one’s past or reminiscing about how one grew up better than those growing up in the (ethnographic) present is that it ignores what people actually were saying about why they felt as they did about their bygone Soviet experiences and reality.

3 At the risk of overgeneralizing here, I maintain this had little to do with anthropologists’ ideological leanings per se, and much more to do with the lack of long-term fieldwork opportunities into the 1980s. One of the only Anglophone works on joint research was Gellner’s (1980) effort, and yet the book has very little concrete data on particular places and regions of the USSR. Even Humphrey’s (1985) essay on North Asian shamanism is a mere analytical reading of Soviet ethnography.

4 Indeed, I am taking liberties with Anderson (1983) because he never explicitly mentions Central Asia or any non-Slavic areas of the Russian Empire in this connection. However, because he applies the Russification concept to the empire as a whole (Anderson 1983, 87–88), I think it makes good sense to establish the strong connection between the making of a Russian nationality with all the geographical and ethnographic nation-building approaches of the late imperial and early Soviet periods vis-à-vis Central Asia. Francine Hirsch makes this point far more sagaciously than I (Hirsch 2005).

5 In his classic Istoriia Tadzhikskogo Naroda (1952), Gafurov minces few words in discussing the history of Bukharan domains as inhabited mainly by ‘Tajik people’ and a ‘Turkic-speaking population’, (327–345) implying that these were first and foremost Tajik territories from long before the Timurid and Shaybanid periods.

6 Sean Roberts makes this point amply with regard to a different subject, but connected to 9/11 and the Global War on Terror (Roberts 2020).

7 Based on her research and professional roles in Kyrgyzstan, Boorbieva has written excellently on the anthropological need to rethink the culture concept in anthropology, with a particular emphasis on these perceptions of separability (Boorbieva 2019).

8 True, Nick Megoran is not an anthropologist but a political geographer. Still, his book on Central Asian nationalism (via border politics and border activities) is based on much fieldwork, and his reproduced dialogues with interlocutors furnish vital ethnographic substance for cross-cultural perceptions.

9 In 1993, when colleagues at the History Institute in Tashkent told me to curb my excitement for life among the kolkhozniks, one anthropologist earnestly advised me to re-read Tolstov (1962) in order to better acquaint myself with rural Central Asia.

10 I do not mean to imply that area studies are bad per se or should be abandoned. However, I subscribe more to the revised articulation that Arjun Appadurai devised some 20 years ago when he used the phrase ‘process geographies’. This was his way of critiquing the US academic approach to area studies that indeed had been implicated in security studies concerns rather than thinking of how areas themselves change frequently owing to ‘trade, travel, pilgrimage’, etc. (Appadurai 2002, 275).

11 We owe a debt to Sergey Abashin for writing a brilliant essay that helps to explain a fascinating and almost power-mad period of Soviet ethnographic history that was related to primordialism and ethnogenetic theory regarding the contemporary titular nationalities of Central Asia (Abashin and Jenks 2015, 145–168).