Social Science Research Council

Abstract

Amidst post-Soviet Central Asia’s economic stagnation and political instabilities of the 1990s, Uzbek men in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan, interpreted a wide range of pressing issues through the frame of a political imagination about what an ideal postsocialist state looks like, and how a state leader should govern it. They articulated a vision of ideal authority and polity around idealized images of Uzbekistan, the neighboring post-Soviet republic, and its president, Islam Karimov. Osh Uzbek men narrated President Karimov as a “Khan” figure, a benevolent despot whose harsh ways worked for his people’s good, and Uzbekistan as an extension of the Khan’s personhood into statewide space. Uzbek men of Osh clung to this vision of state authority even when doing so hurt their clear interests. I unpack a case where Karimov suddenly closed Uzbekistan’s border to Osh without explanation, to which Osh Uzbek men voiced strong support despite adverse effects on them. This case reveals their predicament between the diverging post-Soviet courses of the Kyrgyzstani and Uzbekistani states, and their belief in the efficacy of the Khan to solve post-Soviet problems.

The most intriguing aspect of this imagination is how the Khan idiom of authority presented itself as compelling to the men within social contexts. Osh Uzbek men saw Khan authority as operating everywhere and potentially in everything within his state. Authority was treated as being dispersed through a space in the sense that its effects were recognizable throughout the space, a characteristic that I call a “field.” Uzbekistan was Karimov’s field of authority in that economic trends there were regarded as indexing his effective leadership. I argue that the propensity of Osh Uzbek men to treat authority as a field is partly grounded in their everyday social life in distinctive neighborhoods called mahallas, where authority operates like a pervasive field. The dissertation’s analyses work through extended narrative excerpts, ethnographic description, print media, and television.