SUMMARY:

The article by Marlene Laruelle, a former research fellow of the French Institute of Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, focuses on the concept of ethnogenesis in post-Soviet Uzbekistani scholarship and political discourse. The article surveys the development of the methodological apparatus of Soviet ethnography, the emergence of the primordialist inclination to equate the ethnic group with the territorial administrative unit, and fluctuations in ethnographic, historical, and archeological identification of the ethnic origins of the contemporary Uzbek titular nationality. Laruelle traces the impact of Soviet ethnography on the formation of Uzbekistani sciences and the influence of the shifting priorities of Soviet nationality policy on nation-specific scholarship. Thus the author contends that Zhdanovshchina in the Union Republics resulted in an overrepresentation of the respective titular nationality in the national historical narrative that underpinned the legitimacy of the territorial and political boundaries of the national units of the USSR. The article demonstrates how political concerns about legitimacy influenced the shift in the discussion on Uzbek ethnogenesis to the concept of the origin of modern Uzbek nation in the sedentary Turkic population of the region. Taking the example of the academic career of Karim Shaniazov, the author demonstrates a continuity in the employment of the concept of ethnogenesis in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and discusses the persisting political implications of this concept for the affirmation of a distinct Uzbek identity (separate from the Kazakh and Tajik ones) and the claim of legitimacy of the Uzbek nation-state.