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Protecting the Holy Water of the USSR: Islam and Environmentalism in Late Soviet Central Asia

Sun, December 9, 8:00 to 9:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, Floor: 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon C

Abstract

The Soviet Union's 1977 Constitution included an article that enshrined the protection of nature as a key obligation of the country's citizens. Journalists, writers, and other intellectuals were responsible for building public awareness and producing popular literature to promote this new policy. How did Central Asians interpret and advance this new environmentalist imperative? How was it reappropriated and transformed as they popularized it? In this paper I analyze novels and journalistic sketches to argue that environmentalism became a new avenue for the valorization and promotion of places of local religious significance in Central Asia in the late Soviet period. Special attention will be given to material from the southern districts of Tajikistan and the religious shrine and natural mineral waters at Forty-Four Springs, where I have conducted substantial field research from 2014 to 2016. I draw on ethnographic material and relevant knowledge of the religious landscape to show how narratives that appeared prima facie to be secular and environmentalist had concrete religious significance for Muslims in the region. When seen in this context, popular and literary works from Tajikistan and neighboring republics provide an unconventional take on the uses and ends of environmentalist rhetoric in the late Soviet period and another avenue for exploring the vivacity of Muslim religious life and its intersections with state initiatives and discourses. I conclude by suggesting ways in which productive convergences and hybridizations of Islamic and environmentalist discourses retain continuing influence in the post-Soviet era.

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