Tag Archives: Kyrgyzstan

The political lives of infrastructure

This project explores the simultaneous attraction and contention surrounding new road and border infrastructures in southern Kyrgyzstan. In the Isfara valley, where I have been conducting research since 2004, new so-called ‘independent roads’ promise connectivity, modernity and territorial integrity in a region where the juridical and geographical limits of the Kyrgyzstani and Tajikistani nation-states are contested.
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Feeling for the State

Within political anthropology, considerations of the technologies of state governance have tended to be rather divorced from discussions of feeling and sentiment. I am interested in the affective force of the state, both in the mundane interstices of ‘ordinary life’ (the desire, for instance, to have a well-ordered, infrastructurally predictable, territorially integral state), and at times of dramatic political upheaval, as occurred in Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 and April 2010, when the country’s first and second presidents were unseated in popular uprisings. Continue reading