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- Convenor:
-
Verena La Mela
(University of Lucerne)
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- Discussant:
-
Edward Schatz
(University of Toronto)
- Format:
- Open panel
- Theme:
- Anthropology & Archaeology
Abstract
Mistrust toward formal institutions is currently fiercely debated across the globe. In
Central Asia, people often navigate institutions they rely on but do not necessarily trust.
In this panel we take institutional mistrust as a starting point to explore how political
and socio-economic transformations in Central Asia have reshaped relations between
people and institutions from the late Soviet period to the present. While trust has been
extensively discussed and theorized in the social sciences (Corsín Jiménez 2011, Farrell
2009, Gambetta 1988), mistrust has received comparatively less systematic attention,
with a few notable exceptions (Mühlfried 2018; Humphrey 2018; Carey 2017). We think
that the post-Soviet space provides particularly fruitful ground for mobilizing mistrust as
an analytic category.
We invite contributions that examine how mistrust—and trust—is produced, negotiated,
enacted and contested across different social institutions in Central Asia. Key questions
include: Which institutions do people trust or mistrust, and why? What alternatives
emerge when institutional trust erodes? How is trust cultivated, performed, or
repaired in everyday life? We are also interested in the discrepancies between
publicly articulated and privately lived forms of (dis)trust, as well as in the
methodological challenges researchers face when working in mistrustful environments.
Possible contributions may address institutions such as the state, kinship networks,
ethnic and religious communities, media and digital infrastructures, health systems,
education, bureaucracies, law, energy infrastructures, or practices such as gift-giving
and marriage. We also welcome papers that introduce lesser-studied social
institutions through which trust and mistrust are articulated.
By foregrounding mistrust as an analytical lens, the panel aims to open new
perspectives on institutional change, social relations, and everyday political and
economic life in Central Asia.
Accepted papers
Abstract
This research examines interethnic marriage as a lens for understanding identity formation, kinship transformation, and social belonging in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Kazakhstan (Turkistan region) and complementary interviews conducted in Eastern Kazakhstan, the study highlights how mixed families navigate cultural norms, gendered expectations, and moral anxieties in contexts marked by divergent regional legacies.
In the South, kinship remains governed by patrilineal structures, Islamic ethics, and clan-based obligations (e.g., zheti ata), often framing interethnic unions as socially disruptive or morally ambiguous. By contrast, the East—shaped by Soviet industrialisation, multiethnic coexistence, and relative secularism—exhibits more fluid perceptions of identity and mixed marriage. This contrast allows for a rich comparative framework on how postcolonial states like Kazakhstan regulate symbolic boundaries through both policy and intimate life.
The research draws on over 95 in-depth interviews, participant observation, and family-level narratives gathered between 2021 and 2025. It explores how couples and extended kin engage in emotional and ideological negotiations about language, religion, naming practices, and children's upbringing—the role of women, particularly mothers and mothers-in-law, as cultural mediators is critically examined.
The study also integrates a digital ethnography component. Using natural language processing, topic modelling, and sentiment analysis, it investigates online conversations about interethnic unions across TikTok, Instagram, and Telegram. These platforms serve as “affective publics,” where humour, nostalgia, resentment, and pride circulate in ways that both echo and challenge offline discourses. Digital spaces thus become key arenas where post-Soviet imaginaries of nationhood, ethnicity, and purity are performed and contested.
Importantly, the fieldwork in Eastern Kazakhstan was enriched by a collaborative component—interviews conducted by a regional colleague—enabling a grounded comparative perspective.
This study contributes to debates in kinship anthropology, postcolonial identity, and digital culture, positioning marriage not as a static institution but as a dynamic arena of cultural transformation. The research was supported by a national grant AR23490262 “Tarbagatai Region Kazakhs: A Historical-Ethnographic Study (19th–21st Century)”.
Abstract
This paper examines competing claims concerning the distribution, origin, and ownership of khöömei (throat-singing) in Mongolia. Historically, the practice was transmitted through close apprenticeship with senior practitioners. Learning involved assisting masters, observing, imitating, and engaging in sustained repetition, through which apprentices acquired not only technical skills but also embodied and socially embedded knowledge. Although khöömei is practiced across Turko-Mongolic communities in Mongolia and neighboring regions and is widely recognized as a shared cultural form, its historical origins and geographical boundaries remain contested. Competing narratives of emergence underpin rival claims to cultural ownership, authenticity, and authority. I argue that debates about authenticity are closely linked to shifts in the transmission and performance contexts of khöömei. Claims to cultural authority are grounded in ideas of inherited belonging, legitimate lineage, and proximity to locally rooted modes of learning, which differentiate between more and less “authentic” bearers of the tradition within the post-socialist heritage landscape. At the same time, the distribution of khöömei cannot be explained solely by ecological conditions or pastoral nomadic lifeways but must be understood in relation to long-term historical interactions and cultural exchange across the Altai-Sayan region and Western Mongolia. Since 1990, these debates have intensified with the growing institutionalization of khöömei and expanding international discussions about its origins and ownership.
This paper draws on published materials and on ethnographic research conducted over several years of fieldwork in Khovd Province in western Mongolia.
Abstract
Over the past years, the number of studies on informality has sharply increased. In early 2026 google scholars provides 200k results, against 100k recorded in 2023. This flourishing of literature has also led to some terminological confusion among scholars, resulting in what I classified as:
a) romanticisations (considering informality belonging only in certain countries or contexts),
b) generalizations (treating informality as a residual category of whatever is not immediately understood or just the “non formal”, often even failing to define the formal)
c) banalisations (when someone claims: I never studied informality but I’ve seen a lot of it in my life/during my fieldwork so I have the authority to talk about it
Based on my recent piece: Informality as the dumping ground of social sciences (theory), this presentation will engage with the growing literature on Eurasian informality to suggest:
Informality is not the opposite of formality. It’s the formal that is the opposite, the domestication, of the informal. Indeed, Every human interaction is born informal, unregulated. And then, if necessary may become formalised.
Informality is a language. You learn the one of the environment where you were born. It looks natural to you but informality without self-reflection is difficult to explain
And eventually explore some guiding principles that may help engaging with current informality debates:
a) Demoralisation; b) use it as a proxy for quality of governance; c) contextualise it (in some cases it may be helpful, in others harmful) d) ask “why informality did stay instead of all attempts to wipe it out?”
Abstract
Xinjiang (XUAR) is the biggest province in China and is an important strategic region in terms of its borders with Central Asian states, Russia, India as well as Pakistan. It occupies an important role in the Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure program that aims to connect China with the rest of the world.
Multiple studies have focused on clear deformations in cultural and ethnic policies in Xinjiang. Some scholarship has also been oriented to studying the changes in residential lifestyles and everyday habits. Surprisingly, very little has been done in studying the relationship of the growing role of Xinjiang as a tourist destination and specifically the urban transformations in Xinjiang due to this touristification. Tourism studies of Xinjiang offer one such arena to explore the changes in the region, and can provide useful insights and contribute to our understanding of changing relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs, changing urban/rural lifestyles and perceptions of urban change.
The objective of this talk is to deconstruct the unfolding tourist culture in Xinjiang through the perspective of theme park or Disneyification, a process where consumption culture and experience economy merge and different types of heritage (natural and cultural) are packaged in a consumable way (such as in a theme park).
This deconstruction is based on visual ethnographic analysis of Uyghur cities as self-contained theme parks and is informed by the fieldwork conducted in various parts of Xinjiang in 2022-2025. While it largely focuses on urban tourist clusters of Kashgar and Turpan the study also contributes to decoding ritual interaction chains (to use the term proposed by R. Collins) of tourists in places, which are often featured in “the grand tour” of most tourists in China.
The talk will discuss diverse ways how Uyghurness or otherness is packaged and presented to Chinese tourists within the narrative of single national idea. Different mechanisms are visible within the sphere of tourism, such as creation of new Han-based narratives and omission of Uyghur-based narratives. Uyghur cultural landscape as a specific landscape is also presented as a typical Chinese landscape, but part of the diverse ethnic tapestry in China. At the same time, refabrication of urban heritage for tourist consumption is not particularly unique, as it follows the same trend as in other parts of China (or urban centres in general) and is dictated by development goals, safety standards and commercial interests.
Abstract
This paper critically explores the linguistic ideologies supporting codeswitching between the linguistic registers of Kazakh and Russian within Astana’s society. I conducted three months of ethnographic fieldwork to place life-story interviews in dialogue with observations of social interactions and of the linguistic landscape. I show that Russian is the main language used in public spaces, such as sales transactions, workspaces, and educational institutions. For this reason, Russian is an index of social prestige, echoing earlier soviet discourses that constructed Russian as the lingua franca. I divide my analysis of linguistic ideologies about the Kazakh language in Astana by looking into two registers. A majority of my interlocutors told me they mostly used Kazakh in contexts concerning tradition or family. A register that I describe as “domestic” emerged from this context and came to perform it. Consequently, it also serves as a marker of ethnic authenticity. However, the circulation of colonial and orientalist discourses through time and space stigmatized the Kazakh nacional’nost and contagiously stigmatized this register. The purist register that I describe as “institutional” is an explicit initiative from the Kazakhstani state to offer an alternative to this stigma and to bring Kazakh into the public space. To replace borrowing from Russian, this register includes a lot of neologisms, which can also be alienating for people who have been socialized in the “domestic” register. The “institutional” register is mostly disseminated by educational institutions. The same naturalization between language and nacional’nost leads to different expectations about linguistic abilities based on students’ physical appearance. For individuals who do not match those expectations, this linguistic ideology creates performance anxiety that counters the linguistic revitalization efforts and reinforces the use of Russian. Christiana (2023) argues for imagining de-ethnicisation as a mean to empower people to rethink categories that support biopower. In line with her argument, I aim to make visible the process of essentialization to support impulses for change in the shifting contemporary context.
Abstract
The paper examines the history of changes to Mäshhür Zhüsip Köpeyuly’s shrine as a reflection of state policy and power relations from 1931 to the 2020s (up to 2024). The shrine was built in 1930–31, destroyed in 1952, restored in the 1970s as a historical heritage monument, and renovated in 2006. Mäshhür Zhüsip Köpeyuly (1858-1931) is a revered saint, as well as a significant ethnographer and scholar of the region. His shrine is functioning as a pilgrimage site that has been popularized not only locally but also within the broader national sacred landscape.
The data for the research were collected through the fieldwork at the shrine in 2018 and 2023–2024, as well as archival sources from the State Archive of Pavlodar Region. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of power and Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad, this paper shows how the shrine has been perceived over time by society, communities, and the state, as well as how these perceptions have evolved.
The results demonstrate that Mäshhür Zhüsip Köpeyuly’s shrine is deeply embedded in national pilgrimage networks and represents the transformation of attitude and policy towards sacred sites. By combining historical material with contemporary analysis of shrine pilgrimage activities, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationships between religion, power, and space.