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Studying Central Asia: Looking at the Merits of ‘Eavesdropping’
7 October, 2013 @ 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
with Svetlana Jacquesson, Director, Central Asian Studies Institute
One of the most striking features of Central Asian Studies, as Western scholars have practiced it since the fall of the Soviet Union, is the absence of structured and meaningful debates. Publications proliferate on a given topics, but they rarely engage in a dialogue. The debate on “clan politics” waged among political scientists, anthropologists and historians between 2005 and 2010, is the exception that proves the rule. In this talk, Svetlana Jacquesson will use the “clan politics” debate in order to show that Central Asia, as marginal as it might appear in mainstream social sciences debates, is not that easy to crack and that we have to be patient eavesdroppers instead of agenda-driven scholars. She will then relate clan assemblies to the “clan politics” debate in order to highlight some paradoxes of knowledge production on Central Asia.
