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Morgan Y. Liu , Under Solomon's Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh (Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press , 2012). Pp. 296. $29.95 paper.
Regional Crossings and Peripheries
In recent years, the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan has largely been known in and outside of Central Asia for the tension and violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that erupted in 1990 and later in 2010, which resulted in injury or death for thousands and in displacement for more than a hundred thousand. Morgan Liu's new book discusses these incidents, but it is not concerned with them as such. Rather, its task is to tell the stories of the places behind the headlines and of the people for whom the city was home as well as a site of hopes for the future and efforts to create good lives--before the events of 2010 shattered many of these hopes and efforts.
Through extensive anthropological fieldwork conducted between 1993 and 2011--a period spanning almost twenty years--Morgan Liu tells a story about Osh's Uzbek community and their post-Soviet predicament as a doubly marginalized group. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics in 1991, Uzbeks living in Osh became citizens of an independent Kyrgyzstan, where political power came to be held predominantly by ethnic Kyrgyz. A strict border regime limited their access to Uzbekistan, the country they identified with and, influenced by the Uzbek media, tended to see through rose-colored glasses as characterized by stability, prosperity, and global importance.
The book describes their liminal predicament and their various ways of coping with it, of finding niches within it, and of imagining better futures for themselves and their communities. More particularly, it focuses on the central role played by the Osh cityscape itself in all...