Improvising the Voice of the Ancestors

Download or read book Improvising the Voice of the Ancestors written by Mustafa Coskun and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural heritage and national identity have been significant themes in debates concerning Central Asia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not only in academic circles, but more importantly among the general public in the newly independent Central Asian states. Inspired by insights from a popular form of traditional cultural performance in Kyrgyzstan, this book goes beyond cultural revival discourse to explore these themes from a historically informed anthropological perspective. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork and archival research in Kyrgyzstan, this historical ethnography analyses the ways in which political elite in Central Asia attempts to exercise power over its citizens through cultural production from early twentieth century to the present.