Ethnographies of the state in Central Asia - Madeleine Reeves

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.

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.

It is a rare edited volume that keeps readers moving from chapter to chapter like a single-authorbook, but that is precisely what Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia accomplishes.
Central Asian Survey

Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia is the right kind of edited volume. . . . it showcases the richness and diversity of the scholarship that is being carried out at the intersection of anthropology and science. The chapters . . . speak the same conceptual language, address each other's claims, and complement each other's insights. . . . The volume is enjoyable to read and largely jargon-free, meaning that it is suitable for assigning in an undergraduate course, but it is theoretically sophisticated enough that it will serve as a valuable source for graduate research as well.
Russian Review