ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the legacy of Soviet ethnographic knowledge about Central Asia, through an analysis of the works of Tatyana Zhdanko. Zhdanko was a leading Soviet ethnographer, who studied ethnography in the 1920s. From the 1940s until the 1990s, she worked at the Institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where for a long time she headed the Department of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Zhdanko wrote several significant works on the ethnography of the Karakalpaks, which was her special interest, and she also took part in the writing and editing of several general studies on Central Asia. I show how the work of Zhdanko – and Soviet ethnography in general– was shaped by, and in turn informed, various political processes and academic concepts. I explore how the researcher’s academic work – specifically the collection and classification of new materials and the search for theoretical explanations – was determined by political and ideological frameworks, on the one hand, and personal interests and connections, on the other. In particular, I consider how theories of ethnogenesis and ethnos were recruited for the purpose of nation-building, as well as how assumptions about ‘survivals’ (perezhitki) and traditionalism were invoked both to describe society and to account for apparent obstacles to socialist transformation in Central Asia.
