ABSTRACT
In contemporary Central Asia, the development of tradition as an analytical concept has gone hand in hand with the concept of capitalist modernity, just as it served a socialist cause in the preceding decades. Tradition was introduced and promoted from ‘above’ by authorities in the newly independent nation-states, who drew on allegedly ‘authentic’ traditions to claim continuity with a distant past, which allowed them to establish national(ist) narratives that helped legitimize their claims over a certain territory. The authors are taking a praxeological approach to tradition that emphasizes how actors strategically demonstrate, imitate, claim and negotiate tradition. The early socialist regime explicitly aimed to destroy traditions that were believed to legitimize inequalities in Central Asia and were, therefore, considered harmful to societal development. Appeals to tradition can serve to disguise the unequal distributional effects of specific rules within a population.
