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Spirited Performance
In the heart of Asia, straddling the western Tien Shan mountain range, lies the former Soviet republic Kyrgyzstan. The country prides itself in an age old oral epic tradition that recounts the mighty deeds of the hero Manas. When explorers first encountered Manas performers in the late nineteenth century, they hailed their art as a true representation of the heroic age, and compared it to masterpieces such as the Kalevala and the Iliad. Today there are still many excellent performers who can keep their audiences spellbound. They are believed to draw their inspiration from the spirit of Manas himself. This book portrays the meaning of this huge work of art in Kyrgyz society. Based on extended...
Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia
Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia: Texts, Traditions and Practices, 10th-21st Centuries is a collection of fourteen studies by a group of scholars active in the field of Central Asian Studies, presenting new research into various aspects of the rich cultural heritage of Central Asia (including Afghanistan). By mapping and exploring the interaction between political, ideological, literary and artistic production in Central Asia, the contributors offer a wide range of perspectives on the practice and usage of historical and religious commemoration in different contexts and timeframes. Making use of different approaches – historical, literary, anthropological, or critical heritage studies, the contributors show how memory functions as a fundamental constituent of identity formation in both past and present, and how this has informed perceptions in and outside Central Asia today.
Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia
This book brings together historical and ethnographic research from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Xinjiang, in order to explore how individuals and communities work to create and maintain forms of ‘culture’ in contexts of ideological repression and erasure. Across Inner Central Asia, in both China and the Soviet Union, while ethnic culture was on one hand lauded and promoted, it was simultaneously folklorized in the face of broader projects of socialist modernity. How do local intellectuals, cultural organizers, and performers work to negotiate their own forms and understandings of cultural meaning within the institutions and frameworks of a long twentieth century? How does scholarly attention to cultural production, tradition, and performance help to inform our understanding of (ethnic) nations not as given, but as coming into being?
Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia
The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, fro...
The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives
Presenting a new take on what made the Homeric epics such successful examples of verbal artistry, this volume explores the construction of the Homeric simile and the performance of Homeric poetry from the neglected comparative perspectives offered by the study of modern-day oral traditions.
Epic Adventures
The many adventures of the "epic" in modern times are fascinating topics in themselves. The Romantics claimed that every self-respecting nation should, at some time, have had one and they set out to reconstruct these epics for political as well as cultural reasons. Such epics represented earlier stages in the development of nation-states and in this modern world they were, for a long time, hard to appreciate. The introduction of tape recorders, however, brought the epic back in the limelight. It became fashionable for scholars to record long oral narratives, and to present them as long written poems that reflected deeply ingrained ideas. Because of this technology, the idea of the epic was r...
The Politics of Knowledge in Central Asia
Through careful historical and ethnographic research and extensive use of local scholarly works, this book provides a persuasive and careful analysis of the production of knowledge in Central Asia. The author demonstrates that classical theories of science and society are inadequate for understanding the science project in Central Asia. Instead, a critical understanding of local science is more appropriate. In the region, the professional and political ethos of Marxism-Leninism was incorporated into the logic of science on the periphery of the Soviet empire. This book reveals that science, organizes and constructed by Soviet rule, was also defined by individual efforts of local scientists. Their work to establish themselves ‘between Marx and the market’ is therefore creating new political economies of knowledge at the edge of the scientific world system.
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics
Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE, but what of the earlier history of Homeric texts? This volume draws on scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies to offer a comprehensive study of Homeric texts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period.
The Semetey of Kenje Kara
Mixed media: accompanied by CD of same title.
Language Attitudes Towards Kyrgyz and Russian
Language contact between Russian and Kyrgyz speakers in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic and in present day Kyrgyzstan has historically been a source of conflict. With independence, the young state began its search for a new identity in which language played a crucial role. Communicative and symbolic necessities therefore had to be considered in the formulation of an adequate language policy. This book describes the sociolinguistic processes in independent Kyrgyzstan from an ethno-linguistic perspective and gives an overview of language policy in both the Soviet Union and independent Kyrgyzstan. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews and observations conducted during two years of fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, the author explains why, in contrast to the status of titular languages in other former Soviet republics, the Kyrgyz language in Kyrgyzstan is still dominated by Russian after more than a decade of independence.
