Recognizing the Khan: Authority, space, and political imagination among Uzbek men in post -Soviet Osh, Kyrgyzstan.

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 current events and trends 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 good authority and polity around 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. These men recognized the virtuous character of Khan authority when they considered the economic and political phenomena occurring within his state. Osh Uzbek men treated space more generally as being everywhere marked with the effects of human authority, which I show by working through narratives about economics in rapid postsocialist flux, local language press, and an ethnography of body and space informed by phenomenological perspectives. I argue that the spatiality of everyday social life within Uzbek neighborhoods (mahallas) produced tacit expectations of authority as being something spatially dispersed. That is, the effects of authority were pervasive and recognizable throughout space, a characteristic that I call a field. These expectations framed their conception of the state as a quasi- mahalla field of Khan authority. This vision of state authority was so compelling to Osh Uzbek men that they clung to it even when doing so hurt their clear interests. I unpack a case where President Karimov suddenly closed Uzbekistan's border to Osh without explanation, to which Osh Uzbek men voiced strong support despite tremendous 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 Khan authority to solve post-Soviet problems. This study describes an idiomatic vision of modern state and community that stands as an alternative to Western models of state and civil society in the postsocialist sphere.Ph.D.Asian historyCultural anthropologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129989/2/3042118.pd