The Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) with the generous sponsorship of the New Uzbekistan University (NUU) in Tashkent is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the CESS Book Awards.
History & Humanities Category
Co-Winners
Adrienne Edgar – Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia
Based on interviews conducted in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, Edgar convincingly argues that despite promoting interethnic marriages, the Soviet state retained biological assumptions about ethnicity, especially in the late Soviet era. This is a highly original work that highlights the contradictory nature of Soviet attempts to integrate ethnic groups, promoting unity while reinforcing ethnic divisions. Her book shows a Soviet Union on the move, with a high degree of personal mobility even as attachments to family and homeland remain strong and are sometimes strengthened. She successfully combines conceptual/theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies that include oral history with categories that engage issues of race, intimacy, and mixing, which have historically been vastly underrepresented in the literature not just on Central Eurasia but also on the Russian/Soviet zone as a whole.
She manages to deal effectively, in a nuanced manner, with two quite different Soviet republics. We have a sense of the ambivalence of the Soviet project, from above and below, at once intentional and unintentional. Oral histories allow us poignant entry points into individual and family decisions critical to their own lifeways. Sometimes we feel the emotions through the book’s pages. Edgar is a wonderful co-winner of this award, a longtime CESS member and advocate.
Dilnoza Duturaeva – Qarakhanid Roads to China A History of Sino-Turkic Relations
Duturaeva’s book takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating Chinese, Russian, and Western sources to study the Qarakhanid dynasty. The work’s key themes include representation and knowledge exchange between the Sino-Turkic world, imperial encounters and diplomacy, and trade and cultural transfer. Duturaeva’s work highlights trade and exchange history and is the first comprehensive account of the Silk Road during the Qarakhanid period, challenging theories of its decline after the Tang dynasty.
Overall, this book is an excellent example of the importance of integrating data from Chinese sources as well as archaeological, art-historical and numismatic studies to shed light into this little-studied historical period of Central Asian history, and, by extension, the aspects of global medieval trade that the Qarakhanids were part of. The revised political history of the Qarakhanids can be written only thanks to such works that bridge sources from multiple languages and disciplines. There is certainly much additional work to do in Qarakhanid studies.
Focusing on the Qarakhanids and using little-accessed Chinese documents, Duturaeva catalogues a surprisingly extensive program of trade missions. Her encyclopedic knowledge and patient teasing out of her conclusions from philological sources in Chinese, Turkish, Arabic and Persian, are admirable.
Qarakhanid Roads to China offers a comprehensive portrait of the peoples and the activities of this little-known era of the Silk Road, and will be a valuable reference for students and scholars alike.
Social Sciences Category
Joldon Kutmanaliev – Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking: The Dynamics of Urban Violence in Central Asia
Joldon Kutmanaliev’s Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking considers the horrific if short-lived violence that convulsed southern Kyrgyzstan as the central state broke down in 2010. Why, he asks, did violence erupt in some neighborhoods but not in others? Based on fieldwork conducted in Osh, as well as Jalalabat and Uzgen, Kutmanaliev deploys the latest analytic tools of quantitative social science to demonstrate the power of two factors. First, neighborhoods that engaged in intracommunal policing—i.e., that monitored and sanctioned the behavior of their own members—tended to avoid violence. Second, neighborhoods that forged nonaggression pacts with their neighbors also tended to keep the peace. This focus on micro-variations across space helps to produce a compelling, ground-level view of how violence unfolded. In doing so, Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking helps us to grapple with this horrific episode while contributing to broader theories of violence.
Kutmanaliev has produced a clearly written, soberly analyzed, carefully calibrated, and systematic account. It masterfully marries a ground-level view with attention to existing theoretical frameworks. With its focus on what helps to inoculate communities against violence, it ultimately strikes a hopeful note even as it tackles a gruesome episode. Kutmanaliev’s account, while clearly rooted in the particulars of southern Kyrgyzstan, therefore, speaks more broadly to similar episodes of violence wherever they occur across the globe. In this sense, we expect it to jumpstart a much-needed scholarly conversation.
Grateful for this seminal contribution, the Awards Committee is delighted to award the Best Book in Social Sciences Award for 2024 to Joldon Kutmanaliev.
Honourable mention also goes out to Yerkebulan Sairambay for his book New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan: Exploring the Lived Experiences of Young People in Eurasia.
