ABSTRACT
The practice of rock partridge hunting, in which captive birds are used to attract and ensnare wild ones, is a favourite pastime of men in certain parts of southern Tajikistan. This chapter uses an ethnographic exploration of this activity to argue that the complex of relations it sets in motion between birds and men can be an especially productive avenue for grasping difficult-to-articulate forms of ambivalence with widespread resonances in Central Asian society. One especially prominent ambivalence concerns drunkenness, or ‘being mast’ in Tajik, a quality that many men regularly partake of even as they also routinely disavow it. The tension encapsulated in this cultural practice is, to a certain degree, resolved in the partridge hunt, where birds are purposefully and vicariously inebriated in a way that is valorised and encouraged, devoid of the ethical quandaries so prevalent in human instances of drunkenness. This analytical interpretation of the partridge hunt both explains its visceral yet enigmatic appeal to many Tajik men and illuminates many otherwise paradoxical dimensions of the ways in which Tajiks speak about drunkenness in relation to political power and authority, occasionally decrying its excesses even as they are at other times drawn to them.
