20th November 2020
Cite this chapter:
Breed, A., Iğmen, A. (2020). Introduction: Making Culture in (Post) Socialist Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang. In: Breed, A., Dubuisson, EM., Iğmen, A. (eds) Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_1
Abstract:
In this volume, we introduce specific contexts of historical and contemporary negotiation around the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘performance’ in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural environments in Central Asia. How are cultural forms imagined, created, and performed—as a mechanism to both perform sovereignty and to reimagine traditional forms in the socialist and postsocialist periods? The relationships, institutional conditions, and creative labor required to generate or maintain particular forms of culture (literature, education, oral tradition, performance) are referred to here as ‘culture work,’ and theorized as a form of liminal interweaving. How and why do processes of culture work occur? What is the specific content of what might be promoted or allowed as ‘culture’ in highly ideologized contexts, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as instances of nation-building and identity formation, or as a mode of cultural survival under cultural assimilation and violence in China today?