School of Social and Political Science

Description

Drawing on ethnographic research in southern Kyrgyzstan, my talk delves into the lives and worlds of chronically homeless and unemployed populations struggling with opioid and alcohol addiction, most of whom are Tatar or from other ethnic minority backgrounds, whose families had been displaced from their homelands and resettled in Central Asia by the Soviet state.

I take their family histories and life stories as an entry point to thinking of the Soviet Union as a settler colonial project which violently displaced and resettled populations on a massive scale, producing and reinscribing ethnic and racial differences. The Muslim republics of Central Asia were primary sites of state-sponsored resettlement—from the forced sedentarization of indigenous nomadic populations and land development projects like the Virgin Lands campaign, to the relocation of skilled laborers from across the Union and the exile and resettlement of groups like Tatars and Koreans.

Through the lifeworlds of marginalized and disincorporated groups, I explore how regimes of labor facilitated the recognition and structuring of both indigenous and settler populations across Soviet Central Asia, creating a differential system that gave rise to ethnicized and racialized ideas of value and deservedness.