The nomads of Central Asia were already well accustomed to life under the power of a distant capital when the Bolsheviks fomented revolution on the streets of Petrograd. Yet after the fall of the ...Tsar, the nature, ambition and potency of that power would change dramatically, ultimately resulting in the near eradication of Central Asian nomadism. Based on extensive primary source work in Almaty, Bishkek and Moscow, Nomads and Soviet Rule charts the development of this volatile and brutal relationship and challenges the often repeated view that events followed a linear path of gradually escalating violence. Rather than the sedentarisation campaign being an inevitability born of deep-rooted Marxist hatred of the nomadic lifestyle, Thomas demonstrates the Soviet state's treatment of nomads to be far more complex and pragmatic. He shows how Soviet policy was informed by both an anti-colonial spirit and an imperialist impulse, by nationalism as well as communism, and above all by a lethal self-confidence in the Communist Party's ability to transform the lives of nomads and harness the agricultural potential of their landscape. This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivisation drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history. In doing so, the book offers a path to refining conceptions of the broader history and dynamics of the Soviet project in this key period.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government
launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy
targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic
groups. ...Intended to modernize infrastructure and halt environmental
degradation, its tactics in western China have resulted in the
displacement of pastoral Tibetans to urban residence and sedentary
livelihoods, causing massive social and economic shifts and
uncertainty and eventually leading to signs of discontent in
ethnically Tibetan regions.
Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Exile from the
Grasslands documents the viewpoints of both the people
affected-Tibetan pastoralists in Qinghai Province-and the Chinese
officials charged with relocating and settling them in newly
constructed housing projects. As China's international influence
expands, the welfare of its ethnic minorities and its handling of
environmental issues are receiving close media scrutiny. Jarmila
Ptáčkova's study documents a politically and ecologically
significant process that is happening-unlike events in Lhasa or
Xinjiang-largely outside the view of the wider world.
The growing human tibia is uniquely responsive to repeated activities, resulting in identifiable morphological patterns that can be applied to ancient populations. Much of the bioarchaeological ...research in this area focuses on the transition to agriculture, noting a decline in bone strength and robusticity with increasing levels of sedentism. However, not all human groups adopted agriculture simultaneously or uniformly, and there continues to be variation in subsistence strategy based on climate, resource availability, and cultural practice. In Sudan, groups have continued to practice nomadic pastoralism alongside agriculture, although sedentary agricultural societies tend to be the focus of most archaeological research in the region. This work examines the difference in tibial morphology between groups utilising different subsistence practices within the same geographic region and archaeological period to explore activity-based changes to the tibia, using both cross-sectional geometry and geometric morphometrics to quantify the difference between tibial cross-sectional shapes at midshaft. The results suggest that while clear differences exist in midshaft tibial shape between the Sudanese groups practicing differing subsistence strategies, there is no one shape that is indicative of nomadism or sedentism; rather, there are general trends indicating higher mobility among more members of the nomadic group and more local movement among the members of the sedentary groups. Further, there is more similarity between females of all groups than males, problematising the idea that all individuals respond to bone remodeling activity in the same way. The conclusions presented here recommend that more research needs to be conducted on tibial shape variation in Sudan and worldwide using geometric morphometrics, as it presents a more nuanced approach than cross-sectional geometry, and that bone remodeling in response to activity must continue to be explored in light of differences in age, sex, and musculature.
Anthropologist as Nomad Boskovic, Aleksandar
Anthropological journal of European cultures,
03/2022, Letnik:
31, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
My anthropological journey has consisted in movement not only between different disciplines, but also between languages, countries and continents. This has involved stories of identity (imagined, ...constructed, or both), changes of place (teaching in six countries on three continents, and in four languages), searches for a safe haven, and belief in understanding the motives that govern human beings. In this wonderful journey, my coming to the
Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
seems almost an inevitable event. Or perhaps it is just a product of ‘chance and serendipity’.1 In retrospect, I look at my anthropological journey so far as a voyage of discovery – to different places, under different circumstances and in very different parts of the world.
The Hungry Steppeexamines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's ...population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society
Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991.
Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately,The Hungry Steppedepicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
The economy is entrenched in the domestic and the domestic enables the economy. We consider this dialectical relationship between the economy and 'home' through a case study of coliving, a new type ...of privately delivered shared housing emerging in response to increasingly precarious economic conditions. We examine how the proliferation of coliving signifies shifting meanings and cultures of home for digital nomads, the latest iteration of the creative class. We draw upon a content analysis of twenty websites of coliving organisations located in New York and San Francisco, United States of America. Our analysis uncovers emergent meanings and cultures of home that are strongly associated with economic conditions. We consider how the spatial manifestations of a precarious economy are supported by new homemaking practices and imaginaries of home - what may be termed home cultures of precarity. Coliving challenges conventional meanings of home: a reprieve from work, private, secure and inhabited long term. Instead, home is a capital accumulation technology for this cohort - a site for the active production of capital. The ideal home for the new creative class is a place of work that is mobile and social. The economy, meanings of home and homemaking practices are co-productive and co-emergent.
