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- Convenors:
-
Amanda Wooden
(Bucknell University)
Mohira Suyarkulova (American University of Central Asia)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Posvar 3800
- Start time:
- 25 October, 2018 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
The perspective of political ecology, developed primarily with a focus on the "third world" or post-colonial societies, has far more rarely been called upon to shed light on the internal dynamics of Central Asia's present or recent past. The Soviet Socialist republics, developed within an explicitly anti-colonial, Marxist political context, rejected the exploitative relations of capitalism and justified ambitious interventions in the natural environment as designed to benefit society as a whole. Nonetheless, postwar Soviet Central Asia witnessed some of the most dramatic cases of environmental degradation in the world, and, just as in postcolonial societies, the fallout affected the population unevenly, with marginalised groups often more negatively impacted.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union the independent republics of Central Asia have had to deal with a complex legacy: on the one hand, zones of extreme environmental degradation and specific forms and structures of natural resource exploitation, and on the other hand, a long tradition of nature conservation and protection zones. New trends and forces related to globalization processes as well as dominant global discourses of sustainability and climate change influence the human-environment relations in Central Asia significantly today and lead to reconfigurations of the involved actors and power (im)balances. This panel seeks to understand how unequal relations between stakeholders within and beyond Central Asian society affected - and continue to affect - the natural environment.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Flora Roberts (Leiden University University of Tubingen)
Paper long abstract:
In my paper, I seek to reconstruct the normative interplay between individuals citizens, society and nature (the non-human natural world) as portrayed in Tajik discursive prose of the postwar period. Socialist realist novels depict an idealised, and highly normative, view of how interactions between individual citizens, Soviet society and the state were supposed to function. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a large number of publications addressing - in a wide range of genres - the theme of rapid changes in the relationship between humankind and the natural world. Novels were written about most of the major infrastructure projects that reshaped the landscape and physical geography of the Union republics. In my paper, novels about dam and canal construction in Central Asia, in which the transformation of nature under socialism is a central theme, are used to shed light on how writers sanctioned by the Writers Union portrayed relations between individual citizens, the natural world, and the state. In particular, I am interested in how official Soviet writers portray tension and conflict between groups, and the means by which such conflicts are resolved - for although social tensions were relatively low in Central Asia between the 1950s and 1980s, they are reflected in the literature of the time. The literary treatment of social tensions over environmental changes was, of course, inherently political. Further, I use descriptive passages in fiction to explore what meanings or moral valences are attributed to human interactions with nature. Alongside novels and reportage, I will use the local press and letters to the editor to complement my analysis of discursive tools available to ordinary citizens wishing to share concerns about environmental changes, thus shedding light on the political ecology of late Soviet Tajikistan.
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix (University of Bern)
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork, archival work and media analyses between 2014 and 2018 along the highland Naryn river, to explore different ways of understanding these headwaters as the main water-source of the Syr Darya river. Water distribution in this basin has long been contested, between the competing interests of irrigated agriculture, energy production through hydropower and different Soviet and post-Soviet republics and interest groups. With new dams in the pipeline in a number of sites, water politics not only reflect relationships between riparian neighbour-states, but also attitudes among riparian residents with different livelihoods and dependencies on the river. Alongside these older perspectives, glaciers have recently loomed into view both through new climate change discourses in the media, associated locally with extreme and shifting weather patterns. In this paper, I set out both the tensions and alignments in notions of river-rights, as well as more individual, affective and abstract concepts of the Naryn river and the glaciers feeding its headwater. I experiment with theoretical perspectives that link up the political relations in Soviet and post-Soviet knowledge-making practices to riparian livelihoods, and influential, yet harder to grasp aesthetic and cosmological notions of the Naryn's ice, water and nature.