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?