Review of Russell Zanca, Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village: Cotton Farming After Communism

Abstract

Having included Everyday Life in Central Asia Past and Present on the syllabus for my Sufism in Central Asia seminar at Columbia University, I was looking forward to the publication of Russell Zanca’s new book, Life in aMuslimUzbek Village: Cotton Farming after Communism, in Wadsworth Cengage Learning’s Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology series. Written for students taking introductory and intermediate courses on ethnographic writing, the book investigates the economic, social, cultural, political and religious dimensions of ‘cotton farming’ in Uzbekistan to introduce students to postSoviet cultural patterns in Central Asia. As Zanca explains in the introduction, ‘while cotton farming serves as a key part of this ethnography, the real story of this anthropological work is the erosion of the Communist political order and socialist way of life’ (p. xii). For those who are unfamiliar with Uzbekistan, choosing to concentrate on ‘cotton’ production as a lens throughwhich to view the cultural transition from the Soviet economy to the present capitalist system might seem an unusual choice. But cotton, the ‘white gold of Uzbekistan,’ is the cornerstone of the Uzbek economy, and central to the Uzbek way of life. Through a series of interviews with informants, Zanca presents interpretations of villagers on how life has changed—for better and worse—on cotton farms since the fall of the Soviet Union. Zanca begins Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village by tracing the roots of his own attraction to Central Asia. By modeling for students how to position the subjectivity of the anthropologist in ethnographic writing, Zanca simultaneously introduces the reader to the Uzbek diaspora living in New York. Growing up in Queens surrounded by Uzbek immigrants, Zanca became interested as a young child in the former Soviet Union. After its collapse, Zanca began fieldwork in Boburkent in the Ferghana Valley in themid-1990s, and continued his interviews with villagers through the first decade of 21st century. In this thorough and engaging ethnographic work, Zanca explores how villagers negotiated and interpreted the transition from the stresses of Soviet communism to the ongoing challenges of market capitalism on formerly state-administrated collective farms (kolkhozes). Cont Islam (2015) 9:365–367 DOI 10.1007/s11562-014-0296-9