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"Judith Beyer presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Beyer shows how local Kyrgyz negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as salt. While salt is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation needs to be understood as a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt to suit political, legal, economic, and religious environments"--

AbstractIn this article, I follow a group of professionals in their efforts to address the problem of statelessness in Europe. My interlocutors divide the members of their group into "practitioners," on the one hand, and "scholars" on the other. Relating this emic dichotomization to Antonio Gramsci's dialectical take on common sense, I argue against a theoretical reductionism that regards expertise and activism as two essentially different and mostly separate endeavors, and put forward the concept of the "expert activist." Unpacking what I call the "practitioner–scholar dilemma," I show that in their effort to end statelessness, "practitioners" take a reformist route that aims at realizing citizenship for the stateless, while "scholars" are open to a more revolutionary path that contemplates the denaturalization and even the eradication of the state. By drawing on Gramsci, I suggest that the impasse the group encounters in their work might relate more to the structural constraints imposed by the state within or against which they operate than to the problem of statelessness they are trying to solve. This article contributes to a body of emergent work in anthropology that explores the intersection of scholarly expertise and activism.

This article deals with a neotraditional institution: the aksakal courts (courts of elders, or "whitebeards") in Central Asian Kyrgyzstan. Founded in 1993 by the first president of the country, and based on an elaborate law enacted in 2002, the newly appointed aksakal judges were supposed to judge according to what were considered to be the customs and traditions of the Kyrgyz. In this article I show in what ways the judges' way of "being aksakals" often accords neither with the letter nor intent of the law, but reflects a more fundamental way of ordering the world, here referred to as customization. I argue that the ways in which the court members in rural and urban Kyrgyzstan link themselves to traditionalist imagery and state trappings reveal a more general point about how people in contemporary Central Asia engage with their being‐in‐the‐world. This is particularly relevant in times of social change such as those initiated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.