Mathijs Pelkmans

Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam, Nation-State and (Post)Socialism

Abstract This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different roles across the region since 1991. For the secular authorities, Islam may be valued as a source of nation building or it may be feared as a potentially destabilising force. The resulting attempts to co-opt, channel and control religious expression provide insights into the nature of secular power and raise questions concerning the applicability to this region of influential theories in the sociology of religion.

A wider audience for anthropology?: political dimensions of an important debate

Anthropologists are convinced of the societal relevance of their discipline, but they have failed to claim a significant presence in the public domain for decades. As Eriksen documents in his book Engaging anthropology (2006), anthropology has by and large retreated from public debates since the end of the Second World War (see also Borofsky 2000). These days, ethnographies are rarely read by large non-specialist audiences; anthropologists with the status of ‘public intellectual’ are few and far between; and in most popular media outlets one will frequently look in vain for anthropological voices.

Awkward Secularity between Atheism and New Religiosity in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

The term “chaos” has the dubious honor of being one of the terms that has been used most frequently to characterize the post-Soviet condition of the 1990s, both by those who lived through the period and by those who observed and wrote about it (e.g. Manning, 2007; Nazpary, 2002; Pelkmans, 2012). In the post-Soviet Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where I have carried out several research projects over the past 15 years, the locally preferred term was bardak, which the dictionary translates as chaos but also as brothel, thus nicely allowing moral judgment to be woven into expressions of frustration. When people used the term chaos they were often talking about post-Soviet conditions: the declining standards of living, the deteriorating infrastructure, the privatization of law, and the monetization of patronage networks, or blat (cf. Ledeneva, 1998). But apart from highlighting existential uncertainties and dissatisfactions, the term also pinpointed epistemological conundrums. The official truths that together represented “communist ideology” had lost their institutional backing and were challenged by new sets of ideas. In order to illustrate the destabilizing character of this process let me cite from a conversation in the late 1990s with a befriended academic and former communist party member, someone who presented himself as being “not religious.”

The restlessness of doubt, and the tenacity of belief

Comment on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.