Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to discuss conflicts of interest that arise in the process of working with legal, mostly land-related documents from 19th and early 20th century Central Asia, especially where they touch sensitive historical issues that inform contemporary identity.

Paper long abstract:

The past and the hegemony over its interpretations have become an important resource in Central Asian efforts at building a national, post-Soviet identity. In this enterprise, archival holdings, often insufficiently catalogued and explored, have become a contested terrain. Prior to the 1920s, political borders in Central Asia were radically different than today, and did not mark ethnic boundaries. As one result of the so-called national delimitation during the early Soviet period, Uzbekistan holds today the majority of all documents left from the bureaucracies of the predecessor states, parts of which lie in the neighbouring countries today. This is a privilege but also challenges efforts at writing a “new, national” history on the basis of the documents. There is an intense fear from those politically responsible that the “wrong things” might turn up in historical documents. This paper will focus on the interpretations of archival documents and wants to discuss possible ways of addressing sensibilities connected with legal and other bureaucratic evidence. Taking the example of a set of petitions from 19th and early 20th century southern Uzbekistan, it will explore the agendas of rural inhabitants, mostly farmers, who tried in various ways to engage courts and the emir to interact on their behalf. Over the past decades, these documents have seen very different interpretations some of which collide with either local or national interests because they may address sore spots like compulsory relocation or sedentarization of parts of the population.