Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine Reeves
Part I. Staging the Political
1. The Global Performance State: A Reconsideration of the Central Asian "Weak State" John Heathershaw
2. Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons Eva-Marie Dubuisson
3. Performing Democracy: State-Making through Patronage in Kyrgyzstan Aksana Ismailbekova
4. "There is This Law..." Performing the State in the Kyrgyz Courts of Elders Judith Beyer
Part II. Political Materials, Political Fantasies
5. The Master Plan of Astana: Between the "Art of Government" and the "Art of Being Global" Alima Bissenova
6. State Building(s): Built Forms, Materiality, and the State in Astana Mateusz Laszczkowski
7. The Bulldozer State: Chinese Socialist Development in Xinjiang Ildikó Bellér-Hann
8. The Time of the Border: Contingency, Conflict and Popular Statism at the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary Madeleine Reeves
Part III. Moral Positionings
9. Reclaiming Ma'naviyat: Morality, Criminality and Dissident Politics in Uzbekistan Sarah Kendzior
10. The Reshaping of Cities and Citizens in Uzbekistan: The Case of Namangan's "New Uzbeks" Tommaso Trevisani
11. Massacre Through a Kaleidoscope: Fragmented Moral Imaginaries of the State in Central Asia Morgan Liu
12. Cold War Memories and Post-Cold War Realities: The Politics of Memory and Identity in the Everyday Life of Kazakhstan's Radiation Victims Cynthia Werner and Kathleen Purvis-Roberts
