Böcker i Central Eurasia in Context-serien

The Political, Public Significance of Temporality and How Time is Experienced in Contemporary Kazakhstan

Paradox of Power takes careful stock of the varied experiences of Eurasian states to reveal a wide array of surprising outcomes.

Provides a comprehensive and unsettling account of the Soviet campaign to forcefully sedentarize and collectivize the Kazakh clans. Viewing the nomadic life as unproductive, and their lands unused and untilled, Stalin and his inner circle pursued a campaign of violence and subjugation, rather than attempting any dialogue or cultural assimilation. The results were catastrophic.

We are still struggling to fully understand the transformation of Islam in a region that's evolved through a complex and dynamic process

By interweaving case studies on kinship, legal negotiations, festive events, mourning rituals, and political and business dealings, Beyer shows how salt is the binding element in rural Kyrgyz social life and how it is used to explain and negotiate moral behavior and to postulate communal identity.

Based on the case of Kyrgyzstan, while going well beyond it to elaborate a theory of the developing state that comprehends corruption as not merely criminal, but a type of market based on highly rational decisions made by the powerful individuals within, or connected to, the state.

Through his years of on-the-ground research, Montgomery assembles both an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of Islam, demonstrating how individuals make sense of and draw meanings from their environments.

The first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan.

Provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia's social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence.