Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics - Paperback

by Bruce Grant (Author), Madeleine Reeves (Editor), Johan Rasanayagam (Editor)

With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provide a unique perspective on how politics is performed in everyday life.

Author Biography

Madeleine Reeves is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories.

Johan Rasanayagam is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and author of Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience.

Judith Beyer is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and author of Kyrgyzstan: A Photoethnography of Talas.