ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the “conceptual conquest and mastery” of Central Asia at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. Studying nationalism and self-awareness in the region, one can understand the importance of the way in which the ethnographic map of Central Asia was created in the eyes of imperial administrators in this period, and, in particular, the importance of the statistical description of Central Asian society as one of the procedures or technologies of imperial knowledge-power. To count is not simply to assign a number, but also to name, to provide a social, ethnic, gendered, and age-group label, that is, to form an image of the counted, to place him or her into some sort of definite niche in an imagined space and time. To count is to classify, to reveal important attributes, to establish differences and similarities, to draw borders, to construct hierarchy and subordination. To count is to establish relations with the counted, to include them in the field of social interactions with the authorities.
