Joint Seminar of CASI and the Anthropology Club “Central Asian Anthropology Accelerates: The past decade in context”

April 12, 2017

SPEAKER: Nathan Light, PhD, Researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden

Abstract: This lecture considers the past 60 years of social and cultural anthropological research in Central Asia explores what has held the field back for so long, and why and how it has become so productive in the past decade. I seek to stimulate a conversation about the value and potential of anthropology of Central Asia, and the reasons it has been slow to develop as an academic field. How can we expand its potential moving forward? What kind of institutional and other support is still needed and how can we improve its contributions to the wider field of anthropology? My analysis is rooted in comparisons among institutional contexts of anthropology in different countries of Europe, North America and elsewhere, as well as among programs and accomplishments of anthropological research in different areas of Eurasia. Although there are many questions and few clear answers, part of the task undertaken here is to refine the questions and identify relevant examples of academic success in the study of Eurasia.

Bio: Nathan Light received his PhD from Indiana University in 1998, and is now a researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has conducted field research in northwest China and Kyrgyzstan and has published on economic anthropology, cultural performance and history in Central Asia, including the volume Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang (2008). He spent five years as a researcher at the Max Planck institute for Social Anthropology investigating history, kinship, ritual and economy in Kyrgyzstan. He was part of the project “Genealogy and History: collective identities in independent Kyrgyzstan” funded by VolkswagenStiftung, and is now engaged in the project “Embedded in History: A study of Kyrgyz historicity and historical consciousness” that investigates forms of historical knowledge in Kyrgyzstan, funded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

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