Introduction

This chapter celebrates the anthropology of Central Asia as a flourishing and consolidating field. It begins with conversations between the co-editors about a paradox that seemed to intensify during the 2010s. On the one hand, as social anthropologists teaching and researching this vast region, the authors were part of a vibrant and rapidly growing subfield of Central Asian anthropology. It was an arena of rich internal debates, proliferating avenues of research, and probing analyses of the inequities of knowledge production on the region and their legacies. Equally importantly, there were few introductory resources that gave a sense of how one might theorise from this region – from the experiences of this particular postsocialist postcolony in all its historical specificity and complexity. The dominance of top-down approaches and grand abstractions have real consequences for the way Central Asia comes to figure in the public imagination – and the shelves of bookshops.