Social Science Research Council

On April 20-22, 2002, the Eurasia Program held its annual Title VIII Dissertation Development Workshop. The workshop was entitled "Globalizing the Caucasus and Central Asia," and was hosted by the ISEEES (Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies), University of California at Berkeley. Participants in the workshop included ten graduate students, selected on a competitive basis from different universities across the US and five faculty members. Faculty participants, who were chosen from a range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, included Robert Geraci (University of Virginia), Bruce Grant (Swarthmore College), Stephen Hanson (University of Washington, Seattle), Stephanie Platz (Russell Sage Foundation), and Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley).

For centuries the Caucasus and Central Asia have been famous for their dense conglomeration of religions, languages, and peoples imperfectly drawn together around changing allegiances of empire, Silk Road trade, and communism. Yet this very plurality of social orders has also long made these regions a daunting site for scholars. Many have sidestepped these pluralisms by taking refuge in singular places, singular actors, and singular events. Yet with the carefully bounded narratives that delineate rather than explore, we risk losing sight of the boundary crossings and zones of cooperation that could suggest very different histories, sovereignties, and cultural idioms, than the language of the nation-state has long encouraged.

Among the broad questions we explored were: What have been the dominant trends in the study of this world area, and how might they be reconfigured by shifting the terms of debate, or the focus of attention? Is the term "globalization" useful for going back ten centuries to the life of the Silk Road? Did the internationalism of the Soviet period for this world region draw on particular idioms of community? Especially of interest are historically informed, theoretical questions about the constitution of global communities and the presentation of post-Soviet subjects in light of emergent global contours. What is most called for in the redirection of new social science scholarship in these areas?

SSRC Dissertation Workshop Participants, 2002

Sada Aksartova, Sociology (Princeton University) Civil Society from Abroad: Western Donors in Russia and Kyrgyzstan

Howard Eissenstat , History (UCLA) Turkic Immigrants/ Turkish Nationalism: Opportunities and Limitations of a Nationalism in Exile

Victoria Gardner, Near Eastern Studies (University of Michigan) Makhdum-I A'zum and the Boundaries of Religious Practice

Erin Koch, Anthropology (The New School) Encounters with Globalization and Governance in The Caucasus

Irina Liczek, Political Science (The New School) The Origins and Performance of Women's Policy Machineries in Post- Cold War Central Asia

Morgan Liu, Anthropology (University of Michigan) Recognizing the Khan: Authority, Space and Political Imagination among Uzbek Men in Post-Soviet Osh, Kyrgyzstan

Paul Manning , Linguistics (University of Chicago) Transcribing the Voice of the People in the First Georgian Intelligentsia Manifesto: Dialect and dialog in Ilia Chavchavadze's 'Letters of a Traveler'

Sean Pollock, History (Harvard University) "The Treaty of Kaynarca is not clear": Caucasia in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774)

Michael Reynolds , Near Eastern Studies (Princeton University) Inchoate Nation Abroad: Tsarist Russia, Nation Building, and the Kurds of Anatolia, 1908-1914

Elisa Watson, Anthropology (University of Chicago) Globalization and Rituals in Svanetia and Abkhazia