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Dooley, Kathryn Amelia

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Kathryn Amelia

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Dooley, Kathryn Amelia

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    Selling Socialism, Consuming Difference: Ethnicity and Consumer Culture in Soviet Central Asia, 1945-1985
    (2016-09-13) Dooley, Kathryn Amelia; Martin, Terry; Elliott, Mark; Najmabadi, Afsaneh; Plokhii, Serhii
    In the decades after World War II, consumption became the ground for a series of debates about Central Asian ethnic and cultural distinctiveness and its fate under modern, Soviet conditions. For nearly the entire span of Soviet history, state institutions in Central Asia manufactured not only “modern,” European-style consumer goods of the sort that were produced throughout the USSR, but also a set of locally specific “national goods.” Discussions within Soviet economic institutions, among Soviet artistic experts, and in the local-language press increasingly portrayed these national-style objects and the culturally distinctive practices they enabled as legitimate and even desirable components of a modern, socialist life for Central Asian consumers. Simultaneously, the state’s anxieties about the growth of consumer acquisitiveness and “bourgeois” mentalities allowed Central Asian traditionalism and ethno-cultural specificity to be reframed in the public discourse of the region as a potentially healthy influence, shoring up Soviet values against Western-looking consumerism and dissolute youth culture. By the Brezhnev-era 1970s, the permissible “national forms” defined in Soviet nationalities policy had expanded to include locally particularistic practices, ways of dressing and decorating the home, and gender and family relationships, all of which were imagined as broadly compatible with Soviet citizenship. Yet far from resolving the question of the relationship between Central Asian ethnicity and modernity, the state’s legitimation of certain types of Central Asian ethno-cultural difference only opened up further ground for debate among Central Asians themselves, relocating these discussions from the realm of state policy to the domains of family, community, and everyday social life in the region. Individual decisions to use one kind of good or another – a European-style table or a low Uzbek xontaxta, a modern knee-length skirt or a more modest “national dress” – became freighted with symbolic meanings in terms of both official Soviet and local Central Asian discourses of backwardness, modernity, authenticity, and ethnic identity. The result was that consumption fueled a flourishing of processes of contestation and boundary-drawing within local society in the late Soviet period, generating new lines of intra-ethnic differentiation – generational, cultural, geographical, and socioeconomic – among the Uzbek and Kyrgyz populations.