ABSTRACT
The city of Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan) was surrounded by several rings of intra- as well as extra-muros neighbourhoods. While this spatial arrangement separated what was perceived as different grades of urban, suburban and rural populations, Bukhara consisted of topographies where spatial, social and economic marginality responded to more complex schemes than the representation of a city made of concentric circles suggests. Taking the communities of corpse washers, lepers and Lūlī (a minority often described as the “gypsies” of the Persian world) as examples, this chapter examines the relationship between centre and margins in Bukhara and argues that these patterns were largely informed by notions of purity and impurity.
