SUMMARY:

In his essay Alisher Il’khamov presents his views on the state of post-Soviet ethnography as a disciplinary field that is situated in a volatile nexus of politics and nationalism. Partially, these remarks were written as a response to a discussion published in the Russian journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (The Ethnographic Review). Using Jurgen Habermas’s sociological theory, Il’khamov offers a sweeping view of the development of nationalism that insists on a differentiation between the liberal (civic) and conservative (ethnic) perspectives. He contends that constructivism in theories of nationalism is an intrinsic part of the liberal view of national identity. Il’khamov then concludes that the alliance between the primordialist, ethno-centric view of nation and authoritarian regimes and ideologies is natural and observes that this alliance is dominant in post-Soviet Central Asian states. The author agrees that the logical consequence of theoretical constructivism is the acceptance of the constructed nature of both titular nations and national minorities. However, he insists that current policies in Central Asian countries, such as Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, is dominated by an amalgam of authoritarianism and nationalizing ethnocentric ideology that invites the countermeasure of rescuing and adequate representing silenced and threatened ethno-cultural minority groups.