CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Kosmarski, Artyom Anatolyevich |
|---|---|
| Title | Walking in a Strange City: A Study of Post-Colonial/Post-Socialist Tashkent |
| Summary | The aim of this thesis is to explore the practice of subjective, spontaneous, ethnographically minded and phenomenologically informed walks in the city. Assuming that merely theoretical elaboration will not suffice, the author “grounds” a certain Western tradition of exploring and narrating the city (epitomized by Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau) in contemporary Tashkent, putting its philosophical/artistic insights to anthropological use. The Central Asian city of Tashkent was the official capital of Turkestan, the province of the Russian Empire, then the unofficial capital of the “Soviet East”, and is now the capital of the republic of Uzbekistan, the most populous and arguably the most culturally diverse of all Central Asian states. Drawing upon my own walks in Tashkent, go-alongs and life-story interviews with the city residents, and corresponding texts (blogs, online forum discussions, booklets, tourist guides), I discuss in detail the key processes and tensions in contemporary Tashkent’s cityscape: state-led national reconstruction of the symbolic landscape of the city (and resistance to it) and the evolution of the ethnic divide (autochthons versus Russians) from a clear-cut colonial dual city model to more ambiguous and contextual “invisible borders”. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/kosmarski_artyom.pdf |
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