Environmental Humanities in Central Asia Relations Between Extraction and Interdependence

Introduction

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Beatrice Penati

Part I: Extractivism

1. There Used to Be Water: Soviet Water Policies, Archaeologists and Ethnographers in Central Asia

Irina Arzhantseva and Heinrich Härke

2. Administrations, Herders and Experts: Crossing Sources and Scales to Write a Social History of Overgrazing in Soviet Kazakhstan (1960-1980)

Isabelle Ohayon

3. Environmental and Community Preservation in the face of Fossil Fuel Development: The Case of Berezovka, Kazakhstan

Kate Watters

Part II: Paternalism and Protection

4. Saiga Antelopes (Saiga Tatarica) in the Environmental History of the Qazaq Steppe and Desert

David Moon

5. To Tame, Improve, Protect: Environmental Discourse in Soviet Graphic Satire, 1950s-1991

Flora J. Roberts

6. What is in the Air? Citizen Science, Eco-Internationalism and Urban Air Pollution in Bishkek and Almaty

Xeniya Prilutskaya

Part III: Enspirited Nature

7. Get Set! Horse Training as a Discontinuous Action: A Central Asian Physiology that Forces Nature, but is in Tune with the Seasons

Carole Ferret

8. Relating to People, Homeland and Environment the Kyrgyz Way? A Dialogue Between Activism and Engaged Scholarship

Gulnara Aitpaeva and Jeanne Féaux de la Croix

9. The Bee-Human: Imagining a New Qazaq identity in Oralkhan Bökei’s Novel Atau-Kere

Laura Berdikhojayeva

Part IV: Threats from Nature

10. Climate Disaster or Anticipated Crisis? Ways of Knowing the Environment in Pre-Soviet Central Asia

Jeanine Dağyeli

11. The Power of Apricot: Border Disputes, Land Scarcity and Mobility in the Isfara River Basin

Asel Murzakulova

12. Water and Irrigation Arrangements in the Pamirs of Tajikistan

Andrei Dörre

Biography

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix is a social anthropologist based at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Beatrice Penati is a Lecturer in Russian and Eurasian history at the University of Liverpool, UK.

“Through innovative approaches in the environmental humanities, the authors of this collective volume explore the vital cultures and economies of the five countries of Central Asia, a region of mountains and glaciers, deserts and treeless steppe, and rivers plundered for irrigation and industrial purposes. They reveal the complex interactions between humans and nature, and between economic development imperatives and environmental protection strategies, all against the backdrop of powerful agricultural and political traditions. The authors go far beyond analysis of Soviet colonialism, providing rich interdisciplinary and universal perspectives in commodity, water and animal histories whose messages are based on eyewitness accounts, scientific sources, government documents, literary works – and on reeds, apricots and horses.”

Paul R. Josephson, Professor Emeritus, Colby College, USA

“With Environmental Humanities in Central Asia, editors Jeanne Feaux de la Croix and Beatrice Penati have mapped out a generous, interdisciplinary invitation to a new field. A diverse ‘collective’ of scholars – junior, senior, Central Asian, global – has anchored a theoretically sophisticated, well-structured vision in a provocative set of empirical studies. The book’s large tent subsumes apricots, antelopes, bees, horses, and reeds; oil, pasturage, community water management, and Soviet-era hydraulics; historical legacies, authoritarianism, and activism around pollution and extractivism; environmental imaginaries, fiction, sacredness, and cosmologies. Organized around four core relationship themes -- extractivism, protection, ‘enspiriting’, and fear -- the book dissolves disciplinary boundaries, challenges assumptions, and provides roadmaps for additional research.”  

Judith Schapiro, Professor, American University, Washington, D.C., USA