An Inheritance of Paper: Paper, Taxonomy, and Power in the Writing of Shoqan Valikhanov

• In Event: Empires of Paper: Knowledge Production, Paper Technology, and Power in Imperial and Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

This paper will examine the notebooks of Shoqan Valikhanov, an indigenous officer who spent his career entangled in paper in the power-laden, indeterminate spaces at the edges of the Empire. It is concerned with his efforts to transform the disorder of experience into more certain lines and words and with his attempts to make sense of the inheritance of paper and taxonomy in the steppe, a landscape layered with ethnographic, botanical, and linguistic categorizations. It examines how he navigated a maze of erudition in his writing while also trying to relate it to the human and geographic confusion he described in still more maps, list, categories, and paper.

Author

• Christopher Baker, American U of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)