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Paper abstract:

The aim of this article is to analyse the processes of what many educational reformists in Central Eurasia term “academic corruption”, based on ethnographic data gathered in and around the classroom while teaching English Composition in an American-funded school (Rus. kolledzh) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, during the 2021-2022 academic year. The article consists of four main sections, each of which decompose one ethnographic aspect in the light of the region’s history, and more contemporary sociological and anthropological theories. The first section focuses on the discrepancy between the expectations of the school’s academic Liberal Arts programme and those of some of the students and their parents. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of French academia, a second section peers into how the influential economic capital of students’ parents, rapidly acquired during the post-independence years in the early 1990s and 2000s, can clash with the cultural capital the school curriculum tries to cultivate in their children. Based on the emerging anthropological literature of affect and emotions, a third section examines the phenomenon of nationally-driven, affect-based academic solidarity and Central Eurasian hospitality between some students and their teachers in the geopolitical frame of a common Central Eurasian agency of developmental urgency. A fourth section explores how the abovementioned elements lead some students toward barely covered up acts of plagiarism and a general disregard for the promises of a Liberal Arts scholarly culture. By way of conclusion, a final section attempts to build the case to call for more ground-level academic interest in the Central Eurasian educational and pedagogical spheres, to ensure its integral and perennial survival more convincingly among the region’s still strenuously emerging educational and scholarly initiatives.