The Spectacular State

Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan’s production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national holidays, Navro’z, the spring equinox celebration, and Independence Day. Her analysis of the content, form, and production of these ceremonies shows how Uzbekistan’s cultural and political elites engaged in a highly directed, largely successful program of nation building through culture.
Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan’s national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan’s ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan’s independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.

Laura L. Adams is a lecturer on sociology and co-director of the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus at Harvard University.

"In this finely nuanced study, Laura L. Adams presents the first serious analysis of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Focusing on the elaborate spectacles that mark Navro'z, the spring holiday, and Independence Day every year, Adams shows how the Soviet legacy, global norms, and state interests intersect to shape the ideology of national independence. With its sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, The Spectacular State makes an important major contribution to postsocialist and postcolonial studies."--Adeeb Khalid, author of Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia "Better than anyone else I have read on Central Asia, Laura L. Adams takes seriously what the local people say about the ethnographic present, and she uses her sociological background to explain how it is that they come to such conclusions. Yet The Spectacular State is not only a major sociological account of the region; it is also a significant contribution to broader social scientific discourses about the state and culture."--Michael D. Kennedy, author of Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War "Drawing on her own observations and interviews with artists, intellectuals and bureaucrats, Adams looks at how the Uzbek government has staged massivecultural extravaganzas in an attempt to produce and express national identity." Survival