Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village: Cotton Farming after Communism by Russell ZancaReview by: Roger D. KangasSlavic Review, Vol. 70, No. 3 (FALL 2011), pp. 724-725Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.70.3.0724 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 22:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.69 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:22:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

724 Slavic Review

sifi cation, which is still a factor despite the many years since independence, and the weak religious foundations of a national idea, are investigated in detail using multidimensional approaches involving sociology, cultural anthropology, and political science.

The struggle between the offi cial ideology of “Belarusianness,” created in post-Soviet Belarus using essentially Soviet methods, and the multiple centers of Belarusian national identity that continue to emerge in civil society is described in the closing sections of the book. Here, Bekus introduces readers to the rich panoply of independent cultural life in Belarus, from rock music to historical reenactments.

Scholars whose interests include nationalism, post-Soviet political developments, as well as areas of Belarusian and eastern European studies will fi nd this book useful.

Andrew Savchenko

Rhode Island School of Design

Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village: Cotton Farming after Communism. By Russell Zanca. Case Stud-ies in Cultural Anthropology. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2010. xxviii, 212 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $32.95, paper.

In Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village, Russell Zanca walks the reader through a world that is both ordinary and extraordinary. The book is not your typical text on an academic subject, nor is it intended to be so. Rather, the author focuses on several audiences, and for each of these, there is a benefi t. His primary audience is comprised of students of anthropology. Zanca makes very clear at the beginning that his intention is to present this project as a “case study” for those wanting to pursue a career in anthropology. Following the other texts in the series edited by Janice E. Stockard and George Spindler, Zanca is taking what has been a two-decade journey and capturing it in a narrative that will enlighten others who chose this discipline as their own. Important are his discussions of methodology, sur-vey work, and how a professional anthropologist ought to interact with his/her subjects. How does a scholar attempt to understand and contextualize this information? The book covers a relatively long period in the life of the scholar (more than ten years), enabling us to see how these methodological skills developed over time. As a key objective of this series is to present a specifi c case study for future anthropologists, or students of anthropology, such “fi rst-person analysis” works well. To his credit, Zanca discusses instances both where his efforts worked and where he fell short of his goals. The honesty and humor with which such matters are addressed is refreshing.

Zanca’s second audience is that of scholars of all disciplines focusing on Central Asia, as well as other geographic areas that can benefi t from a Central Asian case study. Most writing on Central Asia, particularly in the post-Soviet era, tends to concentrate on high politics and address such questions as regionalism, nationalism, leadership, development, and security affairs, to name a few. The author acknowledges these areas throughout his study but directs his attention to how these play out at the micro-level in a raion (district) or kolkhoz (collective farming community) outside Namangan, Uzbekistan. It is in this study of the village of Boburkent that we gain a more nuanced view of these grand themes typical of works on Central Asian studies.

The chapters are presented thematically and can be read as separate studies of rural life. After an introduction that outlines the basic history of the region, Zanca addresses his own history in chapter 1, focusing on why and how he got to Boburkent. Vignettes of day-to-day activities in the farming mahalla are linked together in an effort to give the reader a feel for life at the micro-level. In subsequent chapters, the author addresses a range of other issues from the micro- to the macro-levels. At various times, he asks the inevitable question, “So what does this mean?” in an attempt to make sense of the changes—some subtle, some profound—in rural Uzbekistan. Chapter 2 examines the role of farming communities in Uzbekistan, and chapter 3 zeroes in on the dominance of the cotton monoculture. The latter part of the book, chapters 4 through 6, fi lls in the details of other aspects of rural community life: weddings, ceremonies, health care, education, and even topics of everyday conversation. Of particular interest is how certain traditions are

S5667.indb 724S5667.indb 724 7/18/11 8:30:47 AM7/18/11 8:30:47 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.69 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:22:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 725

being challenged, especially due to the generational changes occurring within the village community.

In the end, one is presented with a multidimensional examination of the day-to-day life in an Uzbek mahalla that is part of the cotton production so necessary for the country’s economy. While cotton has been the topic of countless articles and is mentioned regularly with respect to Uzbekistan (and Soviet Central Asia before that), Zanca is one of the few to really provide a feel for what it means to the population of the country that actually devotes its energy to it. Because his research took place over a period of time, it is possible to discern how the village of Boburkent transitioned from a Soviet village to an Uzbek one. Central to this work is how cotton farming has changed, from the fi nancial benefi ts and practical aspects of farming to the broader cultural place it holds in society. Ultimately, cotton farming has become more diffi cult over the past twenty years. The narratives told by Zanca’s countless interviewees, neighbors, and friends offer strong evidence that while something may appear positive in offi cial writings—from the management structure of farming to the procurement processes for equipment and accounting of livestock and produce—the impact may be much more profound, and challenging, for those who live in such a rural community. Life in a Muslim Uzbek Village is a worthwhile contribution to the overall discussion of transitions in post-Soviet societies and how these transitions have truly affected the citizens in a small corner of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

Roger D. Kangas

National Defense University

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. ix, 299 pp. Ap-pendixes. Notes. Chronology. Index. $26.95, hard bound.

No one studying the murky machinations of the modern Russian security apparatus can be unaware of Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two journalists who—even in an in-creasingly media-hostile environment—have probably done more than anyone else to shed some light on this secret world. Their Web site agentura.ru remains an indispensable source, a lucky-dip trove of authoritative reports, fascinating anecdotes, and second-hand snippets about agencies that, for all that they now boast their own Web sites and offi cial spokespeople, refl exively peddle misinformation and innuendo. Originally, a number of Russian newspapers gladly ran their exposes, but when Vladimir Putin ascended to the presidency, the Kremlin’s hand again began to close around the media and one by one they decided Soldatov and Borogan’s writings were not worth the risk: the last, Novaia gazeta, fi nally dropped them in 2008.

Russia’s loss may be our gain, though. This allowed, indeed forced, them instead to turn to writing this book, exploring how the “new nobility” of the Federal�naia sluzhba bezopasnosti (FSB, Federal Security Service)—the term is from a speech by erstwhile FSB director Nikolai Patrushev—“have become something very different from either the Soviet secret services or the intelligence community in Western countries,” an elite-within-an-elite “answering only to those in power, impenetrable, thoroughly corrupted and unop-posed to employing brutal methods” (5). For journalists still living and working in Russia, this is strong stuff, not least as Anna Politkovskaia’s fate proved that there is no such thing as a liberal journalist too well known and well respected to need fear retribution.

For readers in the west, this may not be either an especially new or shocking perspec-tive, but this is still a fascinating book in its details. The authors have an excellent feel for the mindset of the new Chekists, not least their provinciality (after all, the best and the brightest fl ed to the lucrative private sector in the 1990s). Their exposure of Moscow’s underground realm of tunnels and bunkers in chapter 10 is fascinating, as is their take on cases such as the persecution of Igor� Sutiagin and the murder of Zelimkhan Iandarbiev. At other times, though, they are less compelling. Too often, they rely either on potentially questionable sources, rumor (referenced to conversations with unnamed insiders—while I do not question the authors, every researcher knows to treat individual and unverifi able

S5667.indb 725S5667.indb 725 7/18/11 8:30:48 AM7/18/11 8:30:48 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.69 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:22:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions