Knowledge and Power on the Kazakh Steppe, 1845-1917.

[摘要] This dissertation is a study of imperial epistemology -- the Russian Empire’s attempts to produce useful knowledge about the Kazakh steppe, and the complex interrelationships between geographic, ethnographic, and statistical accounts of the region and imperial power.The dissertation pays particular attention to the role of intermediary figures from the Kazakh population of the steppe in producing, shaping, and re-interpreting information about themselves and their surroundings, emphasizing Kazakh agency in the construction of imperial knowledge.Drawing on Russian- and Kazakh-language sources, this dissertation makes a series of interrelated arguments about knowledge production and Russian imperialism.It demonstrates that the corpus of information that scholars and bureaucrats gathered about the Kazakh steppe was both crucial to sustaining Russia’s colonial presence there and fragmented in unpredictable ways.Such contradictory information, in complicated feedback loops with organs of political and administrative power, produced incongruous social, economic and environmental outcomes, sometimes strikingly different from the expectations of its producers.The wide variation of imperial Russian thought concerning the steppe and its inhabitants also created opportunities for Kazakh intermediaries to make original contributions to it.As Russian imperial power shaped their views of the world, so too did they shape the way the Russian Empire viewed the steppe and its inhabitants.Moreover, by focusing on Kazakhs imbricated in the discursive and institutional space of the Russian Empire, the dissertation moves beyond binaries of colonizer and colonized.It shows, instead, that myriad positional gradations existed between these two poles, and that shared knowledge was deployed in support of a wide range of views about imperialism, identity, civilization, and progress.Kazakh intermediaries neither resisted nor unquestioningly accepted imperial rule, but, participating in the Russian Empire’s knowledge-gathering project, attempted to negotiate its meaning.Both imperial Russian scholarship concerning the steppe and Kazakhs’ contributions to it were profoundly ambivalent.While Russian scholars and administrators were uncertain of the loyalty and civilizational aptitudes of their new subjects, Kazakh intermediaries strove to reconcile the opportunities they identified in Russian imperialism with the harm it caused the steppe’s inhabitants.Such mutual ambivalence led, ultimately, to inconsistent policymaking, frustrated expectations, and widespread rebellion.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Central Asia

[关键词] Russian Empire;Central Asia;Postcolonial Theory;Imperialism;History (General);Russian and East European Studies;Social Sciences;History