Pahta Gul and Pahta Bairam: Cotton as a National Symbol and an Invented Tradition

• In Event: Songs of Cotton and Nomads: Invented Traditions in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

This paper focuses on the cotton propaganda in Soviet Uzbekistan between the 1940s and the 1980s, which took many shapes and forms, from the "invented" tradition of annual cotton festivals to the anthropomorphized cotton boll in children's literature and films, from Uzbek porcelain to Uzbek soccer pennants. In doing so, this paper traces the appropriation of cotton as a “national” Soviet Uzbek symbol, which remains an integral part of the Uzbek national imagination even three and a half decades after the Soviet Union's collapse.

Author

• Zukhra Kasimova, Bucknell U