The New Woman In Uzbekistan

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

Fascinated by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, Tanya Merchant ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas. Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, Merchant challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, she notes, Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Merchant's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, Merchant ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity. Important and revelatory, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan looks into music's part in constructing gendered national identity and the complicated role of femininity in a former Soviet republic's national project.

The first comprehensive work in English on the three major regional styles of Uzbek women's dance – Ferghana, Khiva and Bukhara – and their broader Silk Road cultural connections, from folklore roots to contemporary stage dance. The book surveys the remarkable development from the earliest manifestations in ancient civilizations to a sequestered existence under Islam; from patronage under Soviet power to a place of pride for Uzbek nationhood. It considers the role that immigration had to play on the development of the dances; how women boldly challenged societal gender roles to perform in public; how both material culture and the natural world manifest in the dance; and it illuminates the innovations of pioneering choreographers who drew from Central Asian folk traditions, gestures and aesthetics – not Russian ballet – to first shape modern Uzbek stage dance. Written by the first American dancer invited to study in Uzbekistan, this book offers insight into the once-hidden world of Uzbek women's dance.

Women in Uzbekistan have been labeled as victims of patriarchy and submissive, voiceless bodies who lack agency and decision-making power. They are also often symbolized as preservers of rituals and culture and also the victims of socio-economic transformations. During the years of land tenure changes from collectivization to de-collectivization, World War II and the five-year plan economy, women played a vital role in pursuing a diverse range of livelihood opportunities to sustain their families and communities. But what kind of livelihood activities do women pursue in rural areas in Uzbekistan? What do they think about themselves? Do they exercise agency? What are their values, desires, dreams, and inspirations in the post-Soviet period in Uzbekistan? Women’s Lives and Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan presentswomen’s voices and their experiences of carrying out livelihood activities such asfarming, trading, baking, sewing, building greenhouses, and establishing furniture workshops. In a major contribution to the study of post-Soviet transformations, Zulfiya Tursunova demonstrates how women exercise multi-dimensional empowerment by joining social and economic saving networks such as gap and chernaya kassa. These networks represent a collective movement and action against economic dependency of women on men and the state micro-loan bank system. The networks that do not require external donor interventions have been able to empower women for social justice, knowledge, redistribution of resources, and conflict resolution in ways that are vital to community development. Tursunova provides accounts of such ceremonies as mavlud, ihson, Bibi Seshanba, and Mushkul Kushod. These ceremonies show the ways the conflict resolution practices of women are woven into their everyday life, and function autonomously from the hierarchical elite-driven Women’s Committees and state court systems established in the Soviet times. Many local healers and otins (religious teachers) use their discursive knowledge, based on Islam, Sufism, shamanism, and animism to challenge and transform women’s subordination, abuse, and other practices that impinge on women’s needs and rights. These female religious leaders, through different ceremonial practices, create space for raising the critical consciousness of women and transform the social order for maintaining peace in the communities.

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.

In recent years bitter controversies have erupted across Europe and the Middle East about women’s veiling, and especially their wearing of the face-veil or niqab. Yet the deeper issues contained within these controversies – secularism versus religious belief, individual freedom versus social or family coercion, identity versus integration – are not new but are strikingly prefigured by earlier conflicts. This book examines the state-sponsored anti-veiling campaigns which swept across wide swathes of the Muslim world in the interwar period, especially in Turkey and the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. It shows how veiling was officially discouraged and ridiculed as backward and, although it was rarely banned, veiling was politicized and turned into a rallying-point for a wider opposition. Asking a number of questions about this earlier anti-veiling discourse and the policies flowing from it, and the reactions which it provoked, the book illuminates and contextualizes contemporary debates about gender, Islam and modernism.

In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.