Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia

Madeleine Reeves is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories.Johan Rasanayagam is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and author of Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience.Judith Beyer is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and author of Kyrgyzstan: A Photoethnography of Talas.

• Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia Johan Rasanayagam, Judith Beyer, and Madeleine ReevesPart I. Staging the Political1. The Global Performance State: A Reconsideration of the Central Asian "Weak State" John Heathershaw2. Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons Eva-Marie Dubuisson3. Performing Democracy: State-Making through Patronage in Kyrgyzstan Aksana Ismailbekova4. "There is This Law..." Performing the State in the Kyrgyz Courts of Elders Judith BeyerPart II. Political Materials, Political Fantasies5. The Master Plan of Astana: Between the "Art of Government" and the "Art of Being Global" Alima Bissenova6. State Building(s): Built Forms, Materiality, and the State in Astana Mateusz Laszczkowski7. The Bulldozer State: Chinese Socialist Development in Xinjiang Ildikó Bellér-Hann8. The Time of the Border: Contingency, Conflict and Popular Statism at the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary Madeleine ReevesPart III. Moral Positionings9. Reclaiming Ma'naviyat: Morality, Criminality and Dissident Politics in Uzbekistan Sarah Kendzior10. The Reshaping of Cities and Citizens in Uzbekistan: The Case of Namangan's "New Uzbeks" Tommaso Trevisani11. Massacre Through a Kaleidoscope: Fragmented Moral Imaginaries of the State in Central Asia Morgan Liu12. Cold War Memories and Post-Cold War Realities: The Politics of Memory and Identity in the Everyday Life of Kazakhstan's Radiation Victims Cynthia Werner and Kathleen Purvis-Roberts

Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia is the right kind of edited volume. . . . it showcases the richness and diversity of the scholarship that is being carried out at the intersection of anthropology and science. The chapters . . . speak the same conceptual language, address each other's claims, and complement each other's insights. . . . The volume is enjoyable to read and largely jargon-free, meaning that it is suitable for assigning in an undergraduate course, but it is theoretically sophisticated enough that it will serve as a valuable source for graduate research as well.(Russian Review) It is a rare edited volume that keeps readers moving from chapter to chapter like a single-author book, but that is precisely what Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia accomplishes.(Central Asian Survey)