Johan Rasanayagam

Informal economy, informal state : the case of Uzbekistan

Purpose – In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a “shadow” economy. In the post‐socialist context, the unregulated, often extra‐legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of post‐socialist “Mafias”, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept of the “informal economy”.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on long‐term participatory research over a period of three years.Findings – The paper argues that what we might think of as informal economic activity in Uzbekistan cannot be understood in relation to a formal economy, but is rather an expression of a more general informalisation of lifeworlds following the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union, the informal does not emerge from and exist in relation to formal political and economic structures. The state itself...

Spheres of communal participation: placing the state within local modes of interaction in rural Uzbekistan

There are no medium-sized e rms in Uzbekistan, only large and small ones. (Trader) The person who said this meant that it is dife cult to operate private businesses except on the basis of a single individual or household because of high taxes and levels of regulation, and because of dife culties in obtaining large amounts of long-term credit at reasonable rates of interest. Economic activity is seen as divided between the ‘state’ and ‘household’ sector. The former is made up of state or privatized former state enterprises subject to varying degrees of central government control, and also joint venture operations with foreign companies, while the household sector consists of individual traders, petty commodity agricultural production on household plots and small businesses run on the basis of a single individual or household. Broadly adopting this distinction, Ilkhamov 1 proposes a dual economy in Uzbekistan, made up of a command-type economy geared towards export or import substitution and controlled by central government and a free market economy based on household production, with each sector operating according to its own logic while at the same time being interconnected. In this article I am interested in how state institutions or the state as an idea encompassing households, state institutions and the national government administrative hierarchy, can be incorporated within local ideals of active participation in the community and modes of communal interaction, and I argue that in order to do this we have to discard dual economy models that place the state and household into separate spheres. Mitchell 2 has argued that the concept of the economy, referring to the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given territory, only emerged in the mid-20th century. The economy as a reie ed, self-contained entity is an ‘effect’ created out of the discursive practices which separate it from the state and the household. By placing the economy, state and household into different spheres of action, Marxist writers commenting on agrarian relations in Egypt and Turkey have

The politics of culture and the space for Islam: Soviet and post-Soviet imaginaries in Uzbekistan

This article examines how possibilities for Muslim expression were and are shaped by the political imaginaries in Soviet-era and independent Uzbekistan. It develops the concept of social ‘imaginary’ in Charles Taylors critique of Western secular modernity. Political imaginaries are the assumptions about the nature of being, the essential categories through which the world is understood and acted upon, that are produced within dominant state discourses and that shape the space for the political. The article compares the Soviet vision of socialist modernity and the logic of the current state ideology in independent Uzbekistan, and discusses how these have framed the possibilities for being Muslim. It argues that the category of culture is produced in distinct and contrasting ways in these imaginaries, and plays a central role in delineating the public space for Islam.

Post-Soviet Islam : An Anthropological Perspective - Introduction

This collection is the result of a conference on Islam in post-Soviet societies held in the summer of 2005 at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. The conference discussed how Islam has developed and is being practised in these societies after the end of 70 years of official Communist atheism. A second aim was to explore how an understanding of Islam in this region could benefit from comparison with the anthropology of Islam in other Muslim societies. The Muslim populations of the former Soviet Union share a common historical experience. Soviet state policies towards Islam were relatively uniform throughout the territory of the Union. Until the perestroika reforms in the latter half of the 1980s, the majority of Muslim citizens were isolated from contacts with the wider Muslim world. Access to formal religious education was restricted to a small circle of official imams who studied in the two religious training institutions serving the entire country. For others, opportunities for Islamic learning were limited to lessons from neighbourhood mullahs or female religious specialists, most of whom had little religious training themselves. The number of mosques permitted to operate was relatively small and people were discouraged from attending them. As a result, the practice of Islam for most Muslims was largely confined to the performance of life cycle rituals such as weddings, circumcisions and funerals. With the break-up of the Soviet Union there was an upsurge in interest in Islam on the part of the Muslim populations of all the successor states. In many of the Muslim majority republics, such as those of Central Asia, central governments have adopted the Islamic heritage of their region as a key element of nation-building projects. What unites the experience of Muslims in these societies is the sudden re-emergence of Islam into the public sphere, the opening up of contacts with the broader Muslim world, and greater opportunities for studying Islam both abroad and at home in newly opened madrasas and religious higher education institutions. As students have returned home and as missionaries from Muslim countries have entered the region, people have become acquainted with ideas and movements within Islam which have long been circulating in the wider Muslim world. The institutional structure of religious administration, a legacy of the Soviet period, is another factor common across the Muslim republics. The Soviet Union’s four regional Spiritual Boards were responsible for registering mosques, appointing imams, and monitoring religious practice. These have been ‘nationalised’, with each Central Asian Survey (September 2006) 25(3), 219–233

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique: In conversation with an Islamic tradition

Funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland This research was funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. I would like to thank Arnar Arnason, Alison Brown, Tim Ingold, Jo Vergunst, and the anonymous JRAI readers for their critical feedback, which greatly improved the quality and coherence of this article.

Fragile conviction: changing ideological landscapes in urban Kyrgyzstan, by Mathijs Pelkmans, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2017, xvi + 213 pp., US

Fragile Conviction is an ambitious book. Pelkmans seeks to develop a ‘conceptual framework that is capable of illuminating how collective ideas gain and lose force’ (171). He examines his theme of ...

89.95 (hbk),ISBN: 978-1-5017-0513-7

This author-critic forum originated as a panel discussion of anthropologist Johan Rasanayagams new book at the annual meeting of the Central Eurasian Studies Society at the University of Wisconsin...

Author-critic forum

Rasanayagam focuses on the varying ways in which Islam is invoked as important to people in Uzbekistan and argues that to explore Islam either as a bounded discursive tradition or an objectified form can be misleading. The study opens the category ‘Muslim’ to ethnographic exploration in terms of people’s everyday life-worlds and pays attention to the ways that Uzbeks bring together a remarkably diverse range of ways of understanding morality, religion and the self. These are recognisable to many as distinctively ‘Islamic’ yet they are also mutually intelligible to varying others – Christians, atheists, the followers of new religions –who recognise shared forms of experience in them.

Beyond Islam: Tradition and the Intelligibility of Experience

Recent years have seen the emergence of a growing body of academic work on aspects of Mongolia’s post-Soviet transition, including Bruun’s own edited volumes. Precious Steppe, a welcome addition to the canon, offers an empirically grounded, ethnographic analysis of the diverse dimensions of herders’ postdecollectivisation struggles in Khotont, central Mongolia. In this respect it represents a departure from many previous books, wherein the experiences of Mongolia’s pastoralists constitute only one strand in multi-dimensional accounts of the country’s ‘Age of the Market’. In Precious Steppe the author draws on his own lengthy engagement with Mongolia as an aid worker, but particularly as a researcher and anthropologist, to illuminate the recent life histories of Khotont’s herders and thus to explore the micro-scale impacts of profound political and socio-economic transformations at the level of the broader polity. The book does move beyond the local level to provide a considerable volume of contextual material on post-Soviet transformations in Mongolia’s herding sector, although much of this will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the area. Undoubtedly, such material provides a useful introduction for nonspecialists, but the real strength of the text lies in its ability to put a human face on recent events through exploration of aspects of everyday life in Khotont. Bruun explores herders’ experiences within the context of wider transformations though eight core themes, each of which is allocated a separate chapter. Following an introduction to the recent history of the Khotont region, he considers its geographic, demographic and livelihood characteristics, herders’ annual cycles of work and movement, social organisation, religion, concepts of time and tradition, experiences of migrants in the city and the recent politics and practices of development in rural areas. The book concludes with an examination of aspects of nomadic–sedentary relations, with particular reference to the Sino-Mongolian context and to the discursive, strategic articulation of a Mongolian nomadic identity in opposition to a sedentary Chinese ‘other’. Bruun argues that Mongolian nomadism has acquired a somewhat curious status as a contemporary symbol of national identity. He highlights how an idealised, glorious nomadic tradition, constructed chiefly by new urbanites and abetted by foreign donors and ‘Western steppe romanticism’, is in increasing tension not only with urbanisation and modernity as elements of an emerging elite identity, but with the realities of contemporary herding. The apparent neglect, misunderstanding and marginalisation of Mongolia’s herders by the post-Soviet state and increasingly influential international Central Asian Survey (September 2007) 26(3), 445–463