Laura L. Adams

The spectacular state : culture and national identity in Uzbekistan

Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan’s production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national holidays, Navro’z, the spring equinox celebration, and Independence Day. Her analysis of the content, form, and production of these ceremonies shows how Uzbekistan’s cultural and political elites engaged in a highly directed, largely successful program of nation building through culture. Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan’s national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan’s ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan’s independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.

THE MASCOT RESEARCHER Identity, Power, and Knowledge in Fieldwork

In this article, the author examines issues of power and situated knowledge in fieldwork by reflecting on her own research experience in Uzbekistan. She argues that playing the mascot researcher role can cause field-workers to feel they have lost control over their identities and the direction of their work. On the other hand, mascots are given special attention and access because of their gender, race, nationality, or guest status. In addition to analyzing the dynamics of the mascot researcher role, she specifies the effects that this role had on her access to information as well as on the conclusions she drew about Uzbek national culture. She concludes that field-workers need to explicitly analyze their knowledge about their research topics in terms of their relationships with informants.

Mass Spectacle and Styles of Governmentality in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

MOST ACCOUNTS OF POLITICS IN CENTRAL ASIA ARE variations on a theme: former Soviet apparatchiks usurped state power and became authoritarian leaders in their respective states (Bunce 1998; Collins 2006; Gleason 1997; Jones Luong 2002; Olcott 2005). Authors often point to the basic similarities between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which both score as ‘not free’ on indexes of political and civil liberties published by organisations such as Freedom House (Collins 2006, p. 6; Olcott 2005, p. 148; Rumer 2005; Smith et al. 1998, ch. 7; Spechler 2008, ch. 5). In spite of rather dramatic differences in the economic policies they have pursued, President Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan and President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan are indeed similar: both leaders have remained in power for more than 17 years by manipulating formal political institutions and by becoming increasingly repressive of societal institutions. Rather than fostering the development of civil society and implementing democratic political reforms, both leaders have perpetuated inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies and encouraged a view among their population that they alone have the ability to take care of their people. But in this last point the leaders again diverge: each president takes a rather different role in relation to his citizens, and thereby cultivates differences in the ways that their respective states relate to their populations and vice versa. In this article we explore this relationship between state and population that Michel Foucault (1991) termed governmentality, in order to highlight what we find to be important differences between the two countries that larger political analyses might overlook. We do not attempt to theorise or explain as much as we seek to interpret the differences, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, in what techniques and practices are enacted, what forms of knowledge are produced, and what kinds of subjects are constituted in each country. While a strictly Foucaultian approach would require us to investigate everyday micropolitics, our research is grounded instead in relations of power that are typically cast in the state–society paradigm (Jones Luong 2003; Migdal 2001; Mitchell 1991). De-centring the state from its stereotypical functions (such as repression, taxation, welfare provision) to the realm of celebration provides us with interesting insights into how power relations are produced in the two countries. Rather EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 61, No. 7, September 2009, 1249–1276

Globalization, Universalism, and Cultural Form

When we think of the globalization of culture, we tend to think of the consumption of cultural goods produced in the West and the effects of these goods on the values and practices of non-Western consumers. The literature on the globalization of culture also tends to focus on how Western markets for non-Western cultural goods affect patterns of cultural production in the non-Western world. 1 Naturally, this focus on markets tends to draw our theoretical interest toward questions of capitalism. However, when we look at societies without a history of capitalism, new questions come to light. That men wear Western-style suits in both Uzbekistan and Italy, that orchestras use polyphony in both Kazakhstan and Austria, and that King Lear is popular in both Turkmenistan and England cannot be explained by the dynamics of capitalism.

Invention, institutionalization and renewal in Uzbekistan's national culture

Accounts of national renewal in the republics of the former Soviet Union tend to present these regions as awakening from a long slumber of cultural repression. In this paper I argue against this notion, examining the ways that Soviet cultural institutions developed some aspects of national culture in Uzbekistan while suppressing others. The effects of Soviet institutions and ways of thinking about culture are examined in the context of contemporary cultural production in Uzbekistan, specifically the production of national holiday spectacles. Based on observation of these events and on interviews with cultural elites, I outline Soviet schemas of culture and trace the effects of these schemas on the elites conception and presentation of Uzbekistans national culture today.

Ethnicity and the politics of heritage in Uzbekistan

The UNESCO office in Uzbekistan has been relatively successful in nominating cultural practices to The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Selection for the List conveys prestige and draws international attention to local culture that is deemed of universal value. What is striking about the first successful nominations from Uzbekistan is that they point to the inseparability of Tajik and Uzbek culture, a touchy subject for both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In this article the author looks at how the politics of ethnic cultural heritage play out through these projects, highlighting the tensions between a rhetoric of diversity promoted both by UNESCO and by the official national ideology, and practices that demonstrate a more mundane, ethnically exclusive sense of national culture. Although ostensibly celebrating the rich diversity of Uzbekistans national culture and eschewing the strict delineation of Tajik culture from Uzbek culture, the effect of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage programmes is to perpetuate the occlusion of Tajik culture in Uzbekistan.

Who's Afraid of the Market? Cultural Policy in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

ith the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the power of Communist ideW ology over the arts also broke down. In Russia, the government’s fiscal crises of the early 1990s ravaged the arts communities, but recently the arts have been recovering from the economic and ideological chaos, and in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the fine arts are again flourishing. Russian cinema has also experienced a renewed international cachet. In other parts of the former Soviet Union, however, artists have been reticent to exercise independent control over the content of their work. In Uzbekistan, for example, cultural production is carried out much the way it was during the Soviet period. The state continues to take the leading role in both arts administration and in suggesting, if not dictating, appropriate themes for artistic works. While Soviet cultural content is no longer popular in Uzbekistan, the new state ideology continues to determine what creative workers write, paint, and compose. Using information collected during fieldwork in 1996 and in 1998, I describe the current arts-administration system in Uzbekistan and explain some of the reasons cultural producers in Uzbekistan have a difficult time resisting bureaucratic domination in arts administration.’ In many ways, both government administrators and artists are afraid of the changes a move toward market-driven cultural production might bring. As a result of this fear, the changes in the production of culture since independence have not been radi-