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- Convenor:
-
Svetlana Peshkova
(University of New Hampshire)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Svetlana Peshkova
(University of New Hampshire)
- Discussant:
-
Svetlana Peshkova
(University of New Hampshire)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Anthropology & Archaeology
- Sessions:
- Friday 15 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
The panel assesses connections between scholarly knowledge of Central Eurasia and postcolonialism/de-colonialism. Scholarship focused on Central Eurasian people, practices, and ideologies, centered on anthropological approaches, have dealt in various ways with the multiple legacies of the region’s colonial states. Presenters hailing from different countries and different disciplinary training critically assess scholarly research on the region in light of its connections with the postcolonial condition of the region.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 15 October, 2021, -Sergey Abashin (European University at St. Petersburg)
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation, I raise a question why Russian ethnography, unlike the European and American Anthropology, is not ready to question its origin and status in (Russian, Soviet) colonial and postcolonial knowledge production
Ulan Bigozhin (Nazarbayev University)
Paper long abstract:
The archeology of Kazakhstan is the most visible publicly and dynamic anthropological sub-discipline in this post-Soviet Central Asian country. Kazakhstani state and elite pay close attention to archeology through different programs and grants. I argue that after becoming independent more than thirty years ago, Kazakhstani archeology still demonstrates a strong attachment to Russian archeology as with the former academic metropole, and in some sense still operates in many ways in the shadows of the Soviet legacy. In Kazakhstan, archeology is still heavily dependent on state ideology or used by it as a nation-building tool.
Morgan Liu (The Ohio State University)
Paper long abstract:
How can we understand non-state actors in Central Eurasia when some appear to impact the lives of people in ways that might rival the prerogatives of states? Eurasian non-state actors are often local patrons and their networks, whose activities are growing local economies, building infrastructure, providing political stability, establishing cultural and media institutions, and providing social protections for communities. I argue that these patrons accumulate power by mobilizing forms of trust based on cultural-traditionalist tropes and delivering political-economic goods. I also show that these formations of trust and power are best understood as postcolonial phenomena, whose forms result as responses to Soviet techniques of rule.
Aida Aaly Alymbaeva (Independent scholar)
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I am reflecting on reading the literature on post- and decolonial knowledge through my own observations and anthropological experience. I am thinking out loud about what is anthropology/ethnography today in post-soviet Kyrgyzstan, what questions it may help us to understand especially within the paradigm of colonial and decolonial knowledge. I show that Kyrgyz anthropologists suggest not simply representations and interpretations of such hot topics of post-colonialism and post-Sovietness as ethno-nationalism and gender. They also contribute to decolonizing knowledge with their deep ethnography rooted studies. Among other things, I suggest that, if to think of coloniality as an established and outsider-knowledge dominated dogma and canon to rule the ‘local’ via its alienation, then can we think of the later processes of Islamisation in terms of new colonialism and of the later activation of ethnic nationalism as our own internal colonialism?