History Of Central Asia Research Articles

Everyday life in Central Asia: past and present

Introduction: Central Asia and Everyday Life Part One: Background Introduction 1.Turks and Tajiks in Central Asian History Scott Levi Part Two: Communities Introduction 2. Everyday Life among the Turkmen Nomads Adrienne Edgar 3. Recollections of a Hazara Wedding in the 1930s Robert Canfield 4. Trouble in Birglich Robert Canfield 5. A Central Asian Tale of Two Cities:Locating Lives and Aspirations in a Shifting Post-Soviet Cityscape Morgan Y. Liu Part Three: Gender Introduction 6. The Limits of Liberation: Gender, Revolution, and the Veil in Everyday Life in Soviet Uzbekistan Douglas Northrop 7. The Wedding Feast: Living the New Uzbek Life in the 1930s Marianne Kamp 8. Practical Consequences of Soviet Policy and Ideology for Gender in Central Asia and Contemporary Reversal Elizabeth Constantine 9. Dinner with Akhmet Greta Uehling Part Four: Performance and Encounters Introduction 10. An Ethnohistorical Journey through Kazakh Hospitality Paula A. Michaels 11. Konstitutsiya Buzildi: Gender Relations in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan Peter Finke and Meltem Sancak 12. Fat and All That: Good Eating the Uzbek Way Russell Zanca 13. Public and Private Celebrations: Uzbekistan's National Holidays Laura Adams 14. Music Across the Kazakh Steppe Michael Rouland Part Five: Nation, State, and Society in the Everyday Introduction 15. The Shrinking of the Welfare State: Central Asians'Assessments of Soviet and Post-Soviet Governance Kelly McMann 16. Going to School in Uzbekistan Shoshana Keller 17. Alphabet Changes in Turkmenistan: State, Society, and the Everyday, 1904-2004 Victoria Clement 18. Travels in the Margins of the State: Everyday Geography in the Ferghana Valley Borderlands Madeleine Reeves Part Six: Religion Introduction 19. Divided Faith: Trapped between State and Islam in Uzbekistan Eric McGlinchey 20. Sacred Sites, Profane Ideologies: Religious Pilgrimage and the Uzbek State David Abramson and Elyor Karimov 21. Everyday Negotiations of Islam in Central Asia: Practicing Religion in the Uyghur Neighborhood of Zarya Vostoka in Almaty, Kazakhstan Sean Roberts 22. Namaz, Wishing Trees, and Vodka: The Diversity of Everyday Religious Life in Central Asia David Montgomery 23. Christians as the Main Religious Minority in Central Asia Sebastien Peyrouse

The Kurganzol Fortress (on the History of Central Asia in the Hellenistic Era)

The Kurganzol Fortress (on the History of Central Asia in the Hellenistic Era)

:Medieval Central Asia: Polity, Economy and Military Organization (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)

State & Polity in Turco-Mongol Central Asia The Kurultai & the Kangash Administration Under the Samanids The Administrative Structure Under the Uzbegs The Uzbeg State & Nobility in the Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries State & Religion Under Timur & His Successors State & Religion Under the Uzbegs Military Organization Under Chingiz Khan Military Organization Under Timur & His Successors Agriculture & Agrarian Relations of Central Asia System of Taxation Under the Uzbegs Workshops & Markets Money, Wages & Prices Index.

New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840-1918 by Michael s> Melancon Alice K. Pate (review)

764 SEER, 83, 4, 2005 even though it has not been revised and possesses only a supplementary bibliography. There is still no study in English to replace Becker's work althoughwith the new availabilityof archivalmaterialit may be expected that such studies will eventually appear. Becker relied on published documents and secondary sources mainly in Russian but he made thorough use of them and his book has stood the test of time. Khiva and Bukharamay be regardedas the two CentralAsian stateswhich survivedas protectorates.Kokand, at one time the most favouredby Russia, might have formed a third but an uprising gave the excuse to annex the wealthy Farganavalley. The Turkmen statesperhaps lacked the resourcesto survive and the position of Kuldja was such that international relations ensured that Russian influence must be exercised indirectly.That Khiva and Bukhara survivedwas not the choice of the government of Tashkent which always looked to annexation and saw the protectorate status as only a temporaryand preferablya brief defermentof the eventual result.Nor was it the choice of the Ministryof Warwhich backedTashkent.It was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which, although unable to stop the advance of Russian generals in Central Asia, prevented them converting all their conquests into possessionsand thatforreasonsof internationaldiplomacyandparticularlyof maintainingreasonablyharmoniousrelationswith Britain. Becker describes various features of Russian relations with Khiva and Bukhara. He is concerned with these aspects rather than with the internal historyof the khanatesand it is, of course, on internaldevelopmentsthatmost recent scholarly work has concentrated. On the whole Russia interfered as little as possible with the khanates, perhaps in the hope that they would collapsewithout support.And the khanatesexperiencedless developmentand less change than the neighbouring Russian-ruled territories.It would have been instructive if Becker had drawn more explicit comparisons with the relations between the Indian states and British India the differencesare illuminating but he leaves this to other readers, content to provide the materialswhich might help readersto make theirown comparisons.Not only students of Russian and Central Asian history will be glad to have a new opportunityto put thisvaluableworkon theirshelves. London M. E. YAPP Melancon, Michael and Pate, Alice K. (eds).NewLabor Histo:y.Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, I840-I9I8. Slavica, Bloomington IN, 2002. v + 248 pp. Tables.Notes. Index. $25.95 (paperback). THIS collection of nine essays, with an introduction and afterword, by a selection of American and Russian scholars,'deliberatelyeschews the imposition upon workerexperience of ideology externalto workers'dailylives'(p. 2). In short, the aim of this book is to examine the practical needs, motives, aspirations and actions of Russian workers, rather than treat them as the proletariat of Marxist ideology, guided by a historic mission. In this the contributorsare successful.If Boris B. Gorshkovaddressesthe value of child labourto theRussianeconomy in thelate nineteenthcentury,andgovernment REVIEWS 765 attemptsto regulateit, ratherthan focusingon the experiencesof the children themselves, he certainly raises key issues on a little known theme of Russian labour history. Not the least of these is the compromises forced upon wellmeaning government officials,when facing the resistanceof factoryownersto restrictingtheexploitationofchildlabour.PaulHerrlingerandSergeiL.Firsov both examine aspects of the spiritualityof the Russian workers. While the decline in religiosityamong urbanworkersthat caused the Church considerable anguish was real enough, it was over-exaggerated. Lacking spare time, money and the supportof extended families,workersabbreviatedor adapted the sacramentsto suittheircircumstances,or turnedto civil rites,for example civil marriage, simply through lack of funds for Church services. But if their attitudetowardsthe Churchbecame more questioning,many stillneeded the solace of theirreligionin a harshand oftenbewilderingnew industrialworld. From Nikolai V. Mikhailov, Alice K. Pate and Mark D. Steinberg come interpretationsof workermentalities.Workerpoets showed an obsessionwith the loss of dignityof factorywork, and outrage at 'insultand humiliation, and pervasivedemands to be recognisedas "humanbeings", not slaves,machines or animals' (p. I 25). Remaining peasants at heart, workercollectives had an agenda independent frompoliticalleadership,and the recoveryof lost dignity remained central to that agenda. They certainly had little interest in the theoretical disputesbetween Mensheviksand Bolsheviks,and only tended to turn to the latter when they seemed to represent unity in the working-class politicalmovement. WilliamG. Rosenberg,MichaelMelancon andMichael C. Hickeyexamine aspects of the workers'movement during I9I7. In Petrograd,for example, factory committees seized control of state-owned munitions plants very quickly, while the committees in...

Yuri Bregel. An Historical Atlas of Central Asia. Handbuch der Orientalistik, Section Eight: Central Asia, Volume Nine, Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2003, 109 pp.

Every student of Islamic Central Asian history must have in their reference collection three books: Persidskaya Literatura: Bio-bibliograficheskii Obzor, Bibliography of Islamic Central Asia, and this historical atlas – all three, remarkably, the work of the dean of Islamic Central Asian historical studies, Prof. Yuri Bregel. This atlas should be the model for any future historical atlases of any region of the Islamic world. The atlas is remarkable because it combines a lucid, detailed, and p...

Некоторые размышления после дискуссии о национализме в Узбекистане

SUMMARY: Sergei Abashin suggests two reasons for the relative isolation of indigenous Central Asian scholarship. The first is the officially supported Soviet theory of etnos , which proved to be a useful tool for describing independent nationhood in ways different from the Marxist orthodoxy. At the same time, Abashin suggests that the often arrogant critique of the Soviet legacy by Western scholars contributes to the relative isolationism of Central Asian scholarship. In Abashin’s view, “constructivist” approaches to the history of Central Asian nations should go beyond conspiracy theory and attempt to answer questions about the relative success of the massive reconfiguration of Central Asia’s social and political map that was Soviet nation-building. Moreover, these approaches tend to reproduce the nation-centered historical paradigm, while the task now is to include various ethnic, confessional, and social groups in a new non-ethnic and non-nation-centered history of Central Asia.

SCOTT C. LEVI, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002). Pp. 319. $93.00.

This fine book provides the first comprehensive account of the Indian merchant communities that arose in Central Asia in the 16th century and continued to occupy an important niche in the local economy until the turn of the 20th century. The subject of India's relations with Central Asia and Russia has often been addressed, but it has usually fallen afoul of methodological and linguistic boundaries that divide the historiographies of the two regions. This is the first work that is equally at home in both Indian and Central Asian history. Levi's greatest contribution is to bring Central Asian sources to bear fully on his argument. He uses Persian-language narrative and documentary sources from Central Asia (housed in the manuscript collections of the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent) and the state archives of Uzbekistan to glean useful new information about life in the diaspora and the activities of its members. He backs these up with accounts of European travelers, which he has mined with great thoroughness for all references to Indian merchants.

Review: Studies on Central Asian History in Honor of Yuri Bregel.

Review: Studies on Central Asian History in Honor of Yuri Bregel.

Devin DeWeese. Studies on Central Asian History in Honor of Yuri Bregel. Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, 2001, xii-354 p. [Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, Denis Sinor, Editor, volume 167

Livre collectif impressionnant tant par la qualite des contributions – toutes par des specialistes internationaux renommes – que par l’ampleur de la vision de l’Asie centrale medievale et moderne qui se degage a la lecture de ce volume. Les articles ici rassembles, pour la plupart bases sur l’exploitation de sources et documents nouveaux, representent chacun une contribution originale a la recherche historique, mais aussi a la numismatique, a la philologie, a l’ethnographie... Apres une intro...

DEVIN DEWEESE (ed.): Studies on Central Asian history in honor of Yuri Bregel. xi, 354 pp. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 2001.

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Resisting Colonialism in the Uzbek Historical Novel Kecha va Kunduz (Night and Day), 1936

AbstractIn this essay on the Uzbek author and poet Abdulhamid Sulayman Cholpon (1897–1938), his novel Kecha va Kunduz (Night and Day) is examined as a bold critique of both Russian and Soviet colonialism in early twentieth century Central Asia. Despite increasing censorship and previous arrests by Soviet authorities, Cholpon subtly employs a variety of techniques including satire and farce to undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet government that was being established around him. Bitterly portraying the hypocrisy and collusion of jadid reformists, Muslim clerics and local Russian officials, this unfinished novel, which was halted by the author’s execution in 1938, remains as one of the darkest comments on Soviet Central Asian history in the Uzbek language.

The Ahrārī Waqf in Kābul in the Year 1546 and the Mughūl Naqshbandiyyah

Charitable endowment deeds or registers (waqfiyyah), represent one of the most important and underutilized sources for the history of the Islamic world. These documents provide a variety of data for architectural, economic, social, and religious history that are often ignored by annalistic historians. The waqfiyyah texts of the fifteenth-century Central Asian Naqshbandī pīr, Khwājah Ubayd Allāh Ahrār (1402-90), are important examples of such documents, and their publication by the renowned Soviet scholar, O. D. Chekhovich, has made them generally accessible to scholars. All of the texts in this collection illustrate aspects of Timurid-era Central Asian history, but the second half of document number seventeen is unique in that it describes Ahrār's endowments in Kābul. This section is also uniquely important for understanding the spread of the Naqshbandī order from Central to South Asia. It demonstrates that, when the Timurid Zāhir al-Dīn Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) used his base in Kabul successfully to invade north India in 1526. Ahrārī Naqshbandīs possessed an economic and institutional base in the new South Asian Timurid state, the Mughūl empire.

Mounted Archers: The Beginnings of Central Asian History. By Laszlo Torday. pp. x, 447, 13 maps. Durham etc., The Durham Academic Press, 1997. £22.50.

Mounted Archers: The Beginnings of Central Asian History. By Laszlo Torday. pp. x, 447, 13 maps. Durham etc., The Durham Academic Press, 1997. £22.50.

The Rise of Tīmūr and Western Diplomatic Response, 1390–1405

Tīmūr (or Tamerlane), the Barlas tribesman whose empire stretched from the Mediterranean to India in the early fifteenth century has been a much studied and much romanticized figure in the history of Central Asia. His displays of macabre and often brutal intimidation of enemies have become almost as legendary as his military prowess. Indeed, Western legend of Tīmūr is as full of spine-tingling grotesquerie as any Gothic novel, and has been embellished far beyond plausibility.

La Chrétienté et l'idée de Croisade (review)

Short notices Alphandery, Paul and Alphonse Dupront, La Chretiente et I'idee de Croisade, postface de Michel Balard (Bibliotheque de «L'evolution de l'humanite»), 2nd ed., Paris, Editions Albin Michel, 1995; pp. 597; R.R.P. ? The history of the making of this book is almost as fascinating as the book itself. It was conceived in the years before the First World War by Paul Alphandery, who continued to work on it until his death in 1932. His student Alphonse Dupront then undertook to see it to publication at the request of Alphandery's family but took over twenty years to complete his task, the book finally appearing in two volumes in 1954 and 1959. The book whichfinallyappeared was not the one which Alphandery conceived. At his death he left a typescript of 1098 pages which he had used for his seminar at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, but which was incomplete. H e had only begun to work on the thirteenth century. The tasks offillingout the work on the one hand and of editing it down for publication on the other had to be done by Dupront. Predictably, the process of seeing Alphandery's work through to publication was complicated by the different nature of Dupront's interests to those of his master. H e was far more interested in the psychological aspects of religion than Alphanery had been, and in 1956 he defended at the Sorbonne his own massive and still unpublished doctoral thesis of 2,681 pages on Le mythe de Croisade. Essai de sociologie religieuse. The valuable postface by Michel Balard draws out this internal history of the book and comments upon its continuing value extremely well. In the 1950s the work of Alphandery and Dupront was important because it brought to the study of the Crusades new insights from the perspective of the history of mentalities, collective psychology, the history of ideas, and popular religion. Any serious student of the Crusades must s t i l l read it, and for that reason this new paperback edition is very welcome. But the book has attracted criticism, particularly directed at aspects of its methodology, and the enormous advances made in Crusading studies since then has made of it a book which will increasingly be read more for its stimulus than for its authority. Whereas Karl Erdmann's Die Enstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (1935) was translated into English in as 77ie origin of 194 Short notices the idea of Crusade (1977), one feels that Alphandery and Dupront probably never will be now. John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Atti del Convegno "Strevi nel millenio" 991-1991, Alessandria, Comune di Strevi, 1991; paper; pp. 166; numerous colour and monochrome plates (not numbered); R.R.P. ? This attractive publication celebrates the millenium of the oldest known reference to the small town of Strevi (Septebrium) in the province of Alessandria. It contains a number of papers of interest to medievalists including "II monachesimo nella diocesi di Acqui", "Strevi tra acquesi ed alessandrini nei secoli XII-XIII", "II culto di San Bovo in Strevi", and "In margine al dibattito sui nome di Strevi". However, the most important study consists of the Latin text and an Italian translation of "La carta di fondazione e donazione dell'abbazia di San Quintino in Spigno—4 maggio 991", in which Strevi is mentioned for thefirsttime (as Septeuro). John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Beckwith, Christopher I., The Tibetan empire in central Asia: a history o the strugglefor great power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs and Chinese during the early Middle Ages, 4th printing, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993; paper; pp. xxii, 281; 2 maps; R.R.P. U S $ ? As Professor Beckwith says in the Afterword which has been added to the paperback edition of this book, ' . . . the total number of "specialists" in early medieval Central Asian history probably does not exceed a dozen worldwide' (and this reviewer is certainly not one of them). One might wonder, therefore, why such a book has m n through two additional printings in hard cover and now a paperback edition since it was first published in 1987? The answer is, simply, that...

Ancient Tajikistan Studies in History, Archaeology and Culture (1980-1991)

AbstractSystematic archaeological research began immediately after WW II with work on Iran Age monuments at Kala-i-mir, Boldai-tepe and Baidudasht IV. Of recently studied Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic monuments, the most important is Takhti-Sangin (thought to be the source of the Oxus treasure). More than 5000 votive objects have now been recovered from the temple here (now completely excavated and dated to the first quarter of the 1st c. B.C.). Excavations at Ai-Khanoum prove that the strength and persistence of Hellenic culture seen at the Oxus temple was not unique in Bactria, while a complex now being studied at Dushanbe pushes the range of Greco-Bactrian culture far further to the north than was hitherto thought. Investigation of burial monuments at Tup-khana testifies to the acceptance of Bactrian material culture by incoming nomad groups, whereas study of a Buddhist complex of the 3rd-4th c. A.D. at Ushurmullo shows its continued use down to the 7th-8th c. Ancient written sources on the history of Central Asia have been studied by I.V. Pyankov, whilst E.V. Zeimal has produced a description, classification and analysis of the coin series of the region. Finally, T.P. Kiyatkina has written a series of works on palaeo-anthropological material from Tajikistan and Turkmenia.

The Centrality of Central Asia

From time to time Studies in History will carry a contribution challenging received wisdoms or turning long-standing issues on their head. Our first dialogue is initiated by Andre Gunder Frank who argues that the history of Central Asia is crucial to the understanding of developments in a very large part of the world. Four scholars of Central Asia then comment on this provocative thesis from an unabashed non-specialist, anchored in world-system theory. Daniel Balland comments as a geographer of the region, Thomas Barfield as an expert on China-Central Asia connexions. Mansura Haider specializes on medieval Central Asia and has a command over the Uzbeg and Persian language sources, and Lawrence Krader, known in India primarily as a Marxist theoretician, is an authority on political processes amongst Central Asian peoples. Frank's rejoinder sums up the debate—for the moment!

The Residential Quarter in Bukhara before the Revolution (The Work of O. A. Sukhareva)

Soviet Scholarship on Islamic studies exists in almost hermetic isolation from its Western counterpart for both linguistic and methodological reasons. Soviet scholarship is concerned with a different set of questions that emerge from Soviet Marxism, rarely tackling the conceptual questions formulated in the West. Nevertheless, Soviet scholarship is very strong on descriptive detail which could, if properly utilized, enrich Western debate. Unfortunately, few Western Islamicists (except those involved in Central Asian history) know Russian, and therefore a wealth of factual information unearthed by Soviet scholars remains virtually unknown in the West and plays no part in the scholarly discourse here.

Revolt in the Mountains: Fuzail Maksum and the Occupation of Garm, Spring 1929

Military operations conducted by Afghan guerrilla forces in the spring of 1987 against Soviet troops inside the Soviet Union, to include the actual penetration of Soviet territorial boundaries by insurgent tactical units, must have been viewed by Soviet authorities with a sense of deja vu.1 The 9 April 1987 attack on Soviet border-guard positions in the republic of Tadzhikistan represented the first hostile crossing of the Soviet-Afghan border in the Tadzhikistan region in over fifty-six years (hostile in the Soviet view; one must not forget the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979). While the Soviets were able to defeat this incursion, the spectre of past insurgencies in the very same region a little over a half century ago must have played upon the psyche of not only senior Soviet officials, but anyone with a knowledge of Soviet history in Central Asia. The purpose of this study is to examine certain aspects of that history, concentrating upon an outbreak of armed insurgency that took place in the mountains of Tadzhikistan during the spring of 1929. The insurgents, headed by an influential Uzbeki tribal leader named Fuzail Maksum, represented a chronological extension of a larger anti-Soviet movement collectively known as the Basmachi, which from 1918 to 1933 challenged Soviet rule in Central Asia.2 The revolt against Soviet rule in the mountains of eastern Tadzhikistan during the spring of 1929 is not well documented in English language studies of Soviet Central Asia. Indeed, no complete study of the Basmachi revolt as a whole exists in any western language at all. But the lack of published material should not detract from the significance of Fuzail Maksur's insurgency or the Basmachi movement as a whole. The events that took place in Tadzhikistan in 1929 were as complex as any in Soviet history, weaving together a myriad

Archeological Data on the Genesis of Feudalism in Central Asia: A Case-study of Nakhsheb, Khorezm, and the Chu River Valley

The outstanding historians and archeologists S. P. Tolstov and A. Iu. Iakubovskii first posed the problem of the nature of the transitional period from the slaveholding socioeconomic order to the feudal one in Central Asia. S. P. Tolstov found signs of a decline in classical society in the fourth to sixth centuries [C.E.] on the basis of archeological findings in Khorezm [1, pp. 27-29]; the term "classical" was first applied by Tolstov to the study of the history of Central Asia in order to describe an essentially slaveholding society.1 He dates the beginning of the medieval period to the sixth to eleventh centuries [1, p. 29].