1- Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state. Yale University Press.
This book was very inspirational because it asks big, fundamental questions: Why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition failed? According to Scott, the main reason for the failures of those grandiose projects is the ignorance of local know-how. For Scott, the state is disconnected from social realities. I particularly like how Scott tells us how states attempt to control societies by using standardized administrative techniques, through forced settlement, the construction and imposition of surnames for instance. He has a chapter on the design of grandiose, modern cities that do not really serve the practical purposes of its inhabitants but are instrumental in consolidating the image of a strong state. I think Kazakhstanis can relate to that. :)
2- Keller, Shoshanna. 2001. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941. Greenwood Publishing Group.
While I was conducting my research about Islam in Tajikistan, I was greatly impressed with this book that details the secularization campaign in the early days of the Soviet Union, which led to profound social transformations and which consequences we still observe today. The author perfectly captured the dynamic at work: “Instead of creating a hard-headed atheist proletariat, the state would have to settle for close control over the “official” clergy while maintaining pressure against “unofficial” religious observance, a system that would survive into the post-Soviet period.” This ambivalent relationship between the state and religious communities is still present today in many post-Soviet countries where the presence of official clergies somehow contradicts the principle of secularity, which posits that separation of state and religion. In Central Asia in particular, states continue to co-opt the clergy.
3- Schatz, Edward. (Ed) 2009. Political ethnography: What immersion contributes to the study of power. University of Chicago Press.
Some of my professors at the University of Ottawa had chapters in this edited volume and it greatly inspired me prior to conducting my fieldwork in Tajikistan. Schatz describes ethnography as “a sensibility that goes beyond face-to-face contact. It is an approach that cares – with the possible emotional engagement that implies – to glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality.” For me, this was the most honest way to produce knowledge. This book also taught me that so-called objectivity in social science is hardly attainable, especially if one conducts fieldwork. Who you are and where you come from really impacts the way we do research: from the choice of topic to the interactions with informants.
4- Everything that Olivier Roy has written about Islam and/or Central Asia.
It was rumored that this French scholar was once a spy during the Afghan-Soviet war. He has a deep and extended knowledge of the region and of Islamic cultures. Olivier Roy’s work brings necessary nuances between different variations of Islamic political thinking. In the case of Central Asia, he argued that despite the fact that the Soviets perceived Sufism as a threat, it was a cultural marker which is not connected to militancy. Same dynamics are at work in Central Asia today too. In Globalized Islam, Roy describes the difficulties faced by Muslims in trying to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. Roy suggests that uprooted Muslims, in search of new identities, are seduced by fundamentalist propositions to establish an imaginary Ummah. They are certainly extremely conservative, perhaps fundamentalist but not necessarily extremist nor violent. Finally, in his work about ISIS, Roy argued that the barbarity of Islamic State is quintessentially modern, they embraced “the esthetics of violence”. They could, a generation earlier, have been attracted to violent militant groups in Europe. For him, we now witness the “Islamization of radicality” instead of the “radicalization of Islam.”
5- Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press.
Hirsch poses the following questions: How did the Soviet Union come into existence? What was the role of ethnographers and local elites in this formation? Hirsch refers to the ethnographers who traveled all over the USSR in its early days to make censuses, create maps and museums. The categorization of the entire population according to “nationality” – including the ones without a national consciousness – redefined the ethnic composition of the region. But not all clans and tribes got a chance to create their nations and hundreds of languages, cultures and separate identities were wiped out. For instance, a citizen of Samarkand who would have answered “Samarkandi” when asked about his identity would have been asked to choose another category because it was not an option in the census. Therefore, he would have been classified as Uzbek or Tajik. It shows how cultural identities can be fluid and not fixed in time.