Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia

This book brings together historical and ethnographic research from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Xinjiang, in order to explore how individuals and communities work to create and maintain forms of ‘culture’ in contexts of ideological repression and erasure.  Across Inner Central Asia, in both China and the Soviet Union, while ethnic culture was on one hand lauded and promoted, it was simultaneously folklorized in the face of broader projects of socialist modernity.  How do local intellectuals, cultural organizers, and performers work to negotiate their own forms and understandings of cultural meaning within the institutions and frameworks of a long twentieth century?  How does scholarly attention to cultural production, tradition, and performance help to inform our understanding of (ethnic) nations not as given, but as coming into being?

Ali İğmen is Professor of History and Director of the Oral History Program in California State University, Long Beach, USA.

Ananda Breed is Professor in Theatre in the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln, UK.


Eva-Marie Dubuisson is Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literatures at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan.

"This wonderfully rich collection reaches across a hundred years to give us an uncommon look at the foundations of Kazakh and Kyrgyz social worlds. Moving well beyond Central Asia in its importance, it reminds us that “ministry of culture” has been cultivated by rural teachers and poets as readily as by national leaders, and across registers of gender, generation, and class."


--Bruce Grant, Department of Anthropology, New York University, USA