ABSTRACT
Despite great interest and investment in reforming cultural institutions throughout the post-Soviet world, there has been little rigorous research into either this project or the more specific dynamics of organized intellectual activity in the region. Sociologists of knowledge and science who in the past have mobilized en masse to analyse lesser upheavals in scientific and intellectual life have remained curiously silent about the fate of ideas in post-Soviet societies. This is particularly true in what were once the ‘borderland republics’ of Central Asia, where academic and scientific institutions are often treated as development projects or anthropological exercises as opposed to subjects of legitimate theoretical analysis. This can be explained in a number of ways: a historical apartheid between Cold-War-era ‘area studies’ and mainstream sociological theory, the marginalization of Soviet academics and intellectuals within the global science system, their preoccupation with the daily hardships of academic practice, and Orientalist ideologies and prejudices which led scholars to conclude that there was no legitimate science under the Soviet regime, that no serious work was produced during that time, and therefore there was nothing worth consideration.1
