ABSTRACT
In Uzbekistan, the state has attempted to introduce new forms of administration that are represented as traditional, and therefore as acceptable. This is consistent with the objective of consolidating the state’s centralised and monopolistic claims to authority, inherited from the Soviet era. In this way, statist rhetoric papers offer differences between the ‘traditional’ Mahalla and the contemporary Mahalla office, which are presented as though they were one and the same thing. Thus, in Mahalla Mehri, whose author is an important proponent of the policy of Mahallisation, we find the assertion that Mahallisation should not be understood simply as an encompassing registration of territory, but instead – and here the author notes a significant contrast with the Soviet Mahalla – as an institutionalisation of the Mahalla’s very essence. In this way, the state tries to give the impression both of dedication to the traditional form of the Mahalla – viewed as the sole indigenous form of self-administration, which persists in harmony with the Uzbek people’s true nature – and of supporting its revival. The state, then, presents a novel, multi-functional administrative unit as though it were a preexisting one – one, moreover, that is evolving quasi-naturally out of a national tradition that had been oppressed during Soviet rule. This strategy, it is hoped, will grant the Mahalla a greater degree of popular legitimacy.
