Suchergebnisse

Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Paolo Sartori -- 1.  Amlākdārs, Khwājas and Mulk Land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest /Alexander Morrison -- 2.  Managing Rural Landscapes in Colonial Turkestan /Beatrice Penati -- 3.  Who Should Manage the Water of the Amu-Darya? /Akifumi Shioya -- 4.  High Rank and Power among the Northern Kirghiz /Daniel G. Prior -- 5.  Performance and Poetics in Kyrgyz Memorial Feasts /Svetlana Jacquesson -- 6.  Using Turki-Language Qazaq Letters to Reconstruct Local Politi­cal History of the 1820s-30s /Virginia Martin -- 7.  A Month among the Qazaqs in the Emirate of Bukhara /Allen J. Frank -- 8.  Creating the Façade of a Despotic State /Andreas Wilde -- 9.  Fathers and Sons /Thomas Welsford -- Index of Islamicate Terminologies /Paolo Sartori -- Index of Persons and Social Groupings /Paolo Sartori -- Index of Places /Paolo Sartori.

The essays in this collection, "Rethinking Sovereignty," draw on the historiography of postcolonial studies to cast new ways of apprehending the semantic ambiguity of the idiom of power. By anatomizing the language of sovereignty derived from colonialism and statist nationalism, the editors of this special section advocate for a graded geography of political thought. They also gesture at the capaciousness of the historiographies of Asia to include various, particular, but no less historically significant manifestations of statehood. Sartori argues further that, by taking a more capacious view of records produced and preserved by the Uzbek khanates (roughly from the 1750s to the 1860s), an engagement with Central Asian history allows us to inscribe banditry into the complex, at times puzzling, texture of pre-Westphalian forms of sovereignty, and, in so doing, help us expand and fine-tune our analytical baggage when addressing forms of fragmented rule.

AbstractCui bonoinformation and record keeping? In his most recent work devoted to the study of British and French imperialism in the Levant in early modern history, Cornel Zwierlein has argued that "empires are built on ignorance." It is, of course, true that during the old regime Western knowledge of things "Oriental" was patently defective, marked as it was by blind spots and glaring gaps; and if observed in the broader context of European colonialism in Asia, the British and French cases are hardly exceptional. Sanjay Subrahmanyam'sEurope's Indiahas shown compellingly that the Portuguese, too, blindly forged ahead in their imperial expansion into South Asia, with a good dose of improvisation. By focusing on a mission to Khiva, Bukhara, and Balkh in 1732, I set out to show that the Russian venture in Asia too was premised upon ignorance, among other things. More specifically, I argue that diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and Central Asia developed in parallel with the neglect of intelligence gathered and made available in imperial archives. Reflecting on the fact that the Russian enterprise in Asia was minimally dependent on information allows us to complicate the reductive equation of knowledge to power, which originates from the "archival turn." Many today regard archives as reflective of projects of documentation, which granted epistemological virtue to the texts stored, ordered, and preserved therein. The archives generated truth claims, we are told, about hierarchies of knowledge produced by states and, by doing so, they effectively operated as a technological apparatus bolstering the state. However, not all the texts which we find in archivesalwaysretained their pristine epistemic force. To historicise the uses, misuses, and, more importantly, the practices of purposeful neglect of records invites us to revisit the quality of transregional connectivity across systems of signification in the early modern period.

AbstractThis thematic issue of Itinerario brings together a selection of papers presented at the international conference Beyond the Islamicate Chancery: Archives, Paperwork, and Textual Encounters across Eurasia, which was held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in early October 2018. The conference was the third instalment in a series of collaborations between the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Pittsburgh examining Islamicate cultures of documentation from different angles. Surviving precolonial and colonial chancery archives across Eurasia provide an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of connectivity across writing cultures and, especially, documentary practices. This particular meeting has attempted to situate what has traditionally been a highly technical discipline in a broader historical dialogue on the relationship between state power, the archive, and cultural encounters.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011, 228 pp. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, 312 pp.

AbstractThe history of Islamic law in Russian Central Asia defies many of the categorizations offered by both global and Russian imperial history. Recent studies of law in the age of colonialism have concluded that the attainment of legal hegemony in the colonies was consequent upon the initiative of indigenes that strategically manipulated jurisdictions; as colonial subjects increasingly involved the state in their private conflicts, they effectively pushed their masters to consolidate the institutional arrangements through which the state dispensed justice. Historians of the Russian Empire have reached a diametrically different conclusion: under tsarist rule, they argue, Muslims continued to access the services of the "native courts," which remained mostly untouched following Russia's southeastward expansion. As the empire promoted a policy of differentiated jurisprudence, Russians effectively safeguarded the integrity of Islamic law. I argue that both of the aforementioned approaches are confined to the level of institutional history, and thus fail to consider that the creation of colonial hegemony rested on ways in which colonial subjects understood law and viewed themselves as legal subjects. I show that Russians, from the outset of their rule in Central Asia, initiated Muslims into colonial forms of legality by overcoming the jurisdictional separation they had themselves put in place. In allowing the local population to file their grievances with the military bureaucracy, the Russians effectively pushed Central Asians to reify colonial notions of justice, and thereby distance themselves from the tradition of Islamic legal practices.

Abstract
In this essay I reconstruct a conflict over the legitimacy of a waqf established in Tashkent in 1881. The litigation involved a qāḍī and the heirs of the founder of the endowment; Russian colonial authorities investigated the case. Looking, as they were, for an instance of qāḍī malpractice, the Russians sought recourse to legal concepts borrowed from sharīʿa and fabricated evidence as they saw fit. I draw on the idea of legal pluralism in order to highlight how, in Russian Central Asia, legal praxis inevitably embraced diverse conceptions of legality. I also show how locals were able to maneuver government officials into using procedures from various legal traditions and thus produce a legal hybrid.
Le présent article s'attache à reconstituer un contentieux touchant la légitimité d'un waqf établi à Tashkent en 1881. Le litige opposait un qāḍī aux héritiers du fondateur de la dotation; les autorités coloniales russes étaient en charge de l'enquête. Prompts à mettre en cause les qāḍī pour malversations à la moindre occasion, les Russes n'hésitaient pas à recourir à des notions juridiques empruntées à la sharīʿa, voire à forger des preuves au besoin. Mon analyse de cette affaire s'appuie sur la notion de pluralisme juridique, qui permet de mettre en évidence la coexistence, dans la justice telle qu'elle se pratiquait en Asie Centrale sous domination russe, de conceptions hétérogènes de la légalité. Cette étude révèle aussi le rôle des populations locales, et leur capacité à induire les fonctionnaires d'état à mettre en œuvre des procédures émanant de traditions différentes, au point de produire de véritables hybrides juridiques.

AbstractWhile in the Ottoman Empire reconciling disputing parties insharīʿacourts occurred without the direct involvement of state officials, in modern Central Asia functionaries appointed by the ruler's chancellery acted as mediators and mediation procedures were consistent with the state's intervention in the resolution of a conflict. This ended with Russian colonization. Conflict resolution was left to thesharīʿacourts; mediation continued to be important but state appointees were no longer officially involved in bringing it about. The Russian colonial and Soviet administrations made the community responsible for seeking amicable settlements. Only afterwards did they realize how easy this made it for local groups to circumvent the state's supervision.