Review of Morgan Y. Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

Abstract

In a body of scholarly literature on Central Asia that has tended to foreground dramatic themes, polarized identities and the grand abstractions of ‘transition’, Morgan Liu’s carefully crafted portrait of Uzbek social imaginaries in the city of Osh is a striking and refreshing contribution.Under Solomon’s Throne is an urban portrait in miniature. It is at once a brilliant example of the capacity for immersive, long-term fieldwork to bring new light to enduring questions of urban conviviality, and a demonstration that subtle, multilayered analysis can be rendered in clear and accessible prose. Liu’s focus is on what he calls Uzbek social imaginaries. An ‘imaginary’ here is a regularly structured, socially organised and tacitly held model of the social and political world: one that is learned in, and articulated through, the spaces of the city. Liu’s is an expressly ‘ground up’ approach; social relations are not merely played out in place, he argues, but ‘constituted by it in a fundamental sense’ (p. 135). His ethnographic narrative draws upon extensiveUzbekand Russian-language fieldwork in several Uzbek-majority mahallas (residential communities) in Kyrgyzstan’s second city, Osh, between 1993 and 2011. This extended temporal scope, perhaps unique in the growing ethnographic literature on the region, illuminates an ongoing process of social navigation, as Osh Uzbek men use their city to calibrate the virtues and failings of two very different models of post-Soviet statehood, those of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The result is a manylayered story of social complexity and social change. Uzbekistan’s protectionist economic policy, led by the seemingly khan-like Islam Karimov, for instance, invited pervasive praise from Liu’s male Uzbek interlocutors in 1995. Ten years later, after an unprecedented demonstration of state violence in Uzbekistan towards unarmed protestors, the range of attitudes was much more diverse, and many Osh Uzbeks felt relieved to live in the relatively freer environment of Kyrgyzstan. Liu’s attentiveness to the practice of social navigation enables him to bring a nuanced voice to debates about Kyrgyz-Uzbek relations that are often conducted in sharply polarised terms. His research was undertaken in a context of considerable economic Cont Islam (2015) 9:109–112 DOI 10.1007/s11562-013-0260-0