This book is the first collection to showcase the flourishing field of environmental humanities in Central Asia. A region larger than Europe, Central Asia possesses an astounding range of environments, from deserts to glaciated peaks. The volume brings into conversation scholarship from history to social anthropology, demonstrating the contribution that interdisciplinary and engaged research offers to many urgent issues in the region: from the history of conservationism to the tactics of environmental movements, from literary engagements with ‘pure nature’ to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. The collection focuses on the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, where a complex layering of nomadic and sedentary, Turkic and Persianate, Islamic and Soviet cultures ends up affecting human relations with distinct environments. Featuring state-of-the-art contributions, the book enquires into human-environment relations through a broad-brush typology of interactive modes: to extract, protect, enspirit and fear. Broadening the scope of analysis beyond a consideration of power, the authors bring into focus alternative local cosmologies and the unintended consequences of environmental policy. The volume highlights scholarship from within Central Asia as well as expertise elsewhere, offering readers diverse modes of knowledge-production in the environmental humanities. This book is an important resource for researchers and students of the environmental humanities, sustainability, history, politics, anthropology and geography of Asia, as well as Soviet and Post-Soviet studies.

This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ at the intersection of post-Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds. Encompassing chapters on life between Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, this volume situates the social, political, economic, ecological and ritual diversity of Central Asia in historical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonizing and queering approaches to Central Asia. The volume’s discussion of More-than-Human Worlds, Everyday Economies, Material Culture, Migration and Statehood engages core analytical concerns such as globalization, inequality and postcolonialism. Far more than a survey of a ‘world region’, the volume illuminates how people in Central Asia make a life at the intersection of diverse cross-cutting currents and flows of knowledge. In so doing, it stakes out the contribution of an anthropology of and from Central Asia to broader debates within contemporary anthropology. This is an essential reference for anthropologists as well as for scholars from other disciplines with a focus on Central Asia