Settling descent: place making and genealogy in Talas, Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

This article explores how the inhabitants of two villages in northern Kyrgyzstan relate to one another and to their environment in terms of both place and genealogy. By performing relatedness, people make claims upon a physical landscape, while their relationships are simultaneously shaped by perceptions of the particular place they live in. The term ‘settling descent’ evokes this dialectic, in which people ‘settle’ descent in a literal sense in rituals, statues, objects and the stories they tell about the past and the present. The often-repeated academic opposition of ‘identity through kinship’ vs. ‘identity through locality’ is resolved by showing how both are aspects of the same historical process. The paper draws on oral histories of key informants, ethnographic case studies and classical as well as recent literature on kinship, place, post-socialism and the anthropology of Central Asia.