ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that what occurred in Tajikistan was the use of Hobsbawm's concept of tradition as an anticolonialist strategy to preserve local culture and power structures and simultaneously resist cultural penetration. Karomat's story shows how it is possible to embrace some aspects of modernity while simultaneously retaining many local traditions. She felt am-bivalent about the Russian lifestyle. Both in Tajikistan and Western Europe, people who felt under attack by pressures towards modernization were able to turn their traditions into a structure in the Levi-Straussian sense, in order to protect their cultures. In the late nineteenth century, the arrival of Russian settlers in the wake of the conquest had brought Central Asians into contact with a group of people whose way of life was qualitatively distinct from theirs, most especially as regards the behavior of their women. After 1917 the Bolshevik-led government was determined to impose its own ideology on the peoples of the new state.
