Введение: Этнология, Национальное Становление и Политика в Узбекистане

SUMMARY:

The introduction to the forum “Constructing a National History in a Language of Soviet Science after the Collapse of the USSR: The Case of Uzbekistan” by Marlene Laruelle thematizes the problem area of the forum and places it in the context of the relationship between ideology/political power, science, and identity building in post-Soviet Central Asia. The author of the introduction explicates the reasons behind the politicization of such fields as history, ethnography, and archeology in contemporary Uzbekistan, and demonstrates how the publication of Alisher Il’khamov’s Atlas revealed fundamental problems in the discourses of nationhood and their relevance to power and scholarship in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Laruelle surveys the debates on Atlas in Uzbekistan that involved the authors of this publication, representatives of “official” Uzbekistani science, and Russian and international experts, and demonstrates how the debate gradually outgrew the initial parameters and became a debate on the problem of socially and politically relevant knowledge, the theoretical assumptions of primordialism and constructivism in studies of ethnicity and nationalism, and the legitimizing and delegitimizing impact of nationalism studies on the regimes of nationalizing states in the post-Soviet space. The introduction also briefly presents the history of the publication of a thematic forum on Atlas in the Russian journal The Ethnographic Review as well as the input to the debate of the contributors of the present forum.