Everyday Life in Central Asia. Past and Present ed. by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca (review)

Everyday life in the Soviet Union and in the former Soviet republics has constituted a main field of investigation in recent decades and has disclosed the way in which the traditional and national cultures survived through socialism or were surpassed by a longing for modernity and modernization.¹ This new and interesting volume edited by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca fills an important gap in the history of everyday life of Central Asia. This region was studied in past decades more from the point of view of building democracy, religious extremism and terrorism, natural resource holding, and the war in Afghanistan. The editors’ challenging task concerned not only the large variety of topics included in the collection but also the coordination of twenty-three well-known scholars dealing with the different aspects of everyday life in Central Asia, including the topics of Turkmen nomads, Afghan villagers, Kazakh scientists, Kyrgyz border guards, Tajik “strongmen” and guardians of religious shrines in Uzbekistan. The volume also includes a very useful selected bibliography and index of names and topics.

The introduction presents some reflections on “everydayness” in Central Asia, the geopolitical features of this huge region (located between the Caspian Sea, the Urals, the middle range of the Altai and Tien Shan mountains, and the Hindu Kush), and a historical survey covering the period from the 1930s to the beginning of the Afghan war. It is followed by five thematic sections dealing with gender, religion, power, culture, and wealth. As the editors argue in the introduction, the links between the past and the present constitute the core of the volume, revealing the “significance of the Soviet transformation of Central Asian culture and society”:

In addition to political leaders and systems, the continuities of the Soviet era are anchored in multiple aspects of everyday life – the way people read, learn, work, and think. Soviet legacies go to the heart of modern identity of various Central Asian peoples. We focus specifically on what Central Asians themselves have to say about this identity issue, which varies, of course, depending on their level of interest in notions such as cultural dominance and transformation. We aim to impress upon readers the centrality of the intertwined Russian, Soviet, and Marxist transformations among ordinary people from the semi-desert environments of western Uzbekistan to the lush valleys of the Pamir Mountains shared by Tajiks and Kyrgyz, to say nothing of the cosmopolitan setting of Almaty and Tashkent … [I]mperial and Soviet experiences themselves were shaped at the level of everyday life by local customs, behaviors, and traditions (P. 9).

The originality of this volume consists not only in the detailed and multidisciplinary presentation of everyday life in the region but also in the fact that “Ordinary people in Central Asia emerge … as agents in a series of complex transformations” (P. 9).

The only chapter in the first section, by Scott Levi, deals with the role of the communities of Turks and Tajiks in Central Asian history. He looks for the key factors that have shaped the region over centuries, describing how modern-day Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, and Uzbeks were formed out of various Turkic-speaking groups, how Iranian-speaking groups became Tajiks, and how

the lines between ethnic groups shifted due to socioeconomic, political, and demographic factors. Islam, spreading across Central Asia from the eighth century to the eighteenth, also continually evolved, adopting beliefs and practices from older religious systems and adding those from new arrivals.

(P. 13)

The second section deals with communes, which have been of critical importance across Central Asia because they acted as “anchors” during the transition, and highlights how “group loyalties today remain multilayered, even as many residents of Central Asia identify themselves as Afghans, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, or Uzbeks, or, in a larger sense, as Muslims” (P. 33). The four chapters constituting...