Women’s Lives and Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: Ceremonies of Empowerment and Peacebuilding

WOMEN'S LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS IN POSTSOVIET UZBEKISTAN: CEREMONIES OF EMPOWERMENT AND PEACEBUILDING Zulfiya Tursunova Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2014 Joining an expanding literature on women in post-Soviet states, this book about Central Asia uncovers a women's seldom visible in euro/north American scholarship. The book began as a dissertation completed, far from the author's native Uzbekistan, at the University of Manitoba in the program in peace and conflict studies. With participant observer and interview-based research in two regions--Khorezm in the west and the Tashkent district in the east--Tursunova focuses on rural women and their livelihoods since independence in 1991. Economies are important, but the author is most interested in the local matrices of social relations and cultural resources that support women's work. Tracing the fine structure of their lives, she attends carefully not only to patterns but also to varieties of individual experience. She also seeks women's own voices in narratives, although only a few tell stories and many speak in disembodied fragments. Overall, Tursunova develops a nuanced argument that social and cultural practices from an earlier time still underpin the agency of rural women in a contemporary era of rapid transition. Along the way, she invites us to re-examine the universal applicability of some tenets of world feminisms. Although Tursunova uses the language of patriarchy in characterizing constraints that women face, her principal critical tool is the model of colonization. Calling her subjects, like herself, indigenous, she writes of mostly Turkic-speaking people whose kin worked these lands prior to the arrival of the heavy-handed Russians, first imperial from the 1860s, and then, after 1917, Soviet. Concerning cultural visions of the past, Tursunova lumps Russian with other European commentators who, in orientalizing mode, discounted rural women as backward obstacles to modernization. Yet modernization also had its Uzbeki proponents, the Jadids, who supported Russian-instigated campaigns against veiling and seclusion from the late nineteenth century. From the perspective of rural women, though, the author renders these novelties as foreign impositions. Nevertheless, without presuming, wrongly, that harem women had no agency, it is hard to imagine twenty-first-century rural womens self-directed strategizing, that the author spotlights, without the colonizers' previous introduction of some modernizing changes. …

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