Ways of Seeing the Illiterate: Classification as Curriculum in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, 1924–1927

In the mid-1920s Soviet officials in Kyrgyzstan, a largely nomadic territory in Central Asia where fewer than one in ten people could read, set out to teach the population to read and write. Drawing on the records of the provincial education authorities in the Kyrgyz state archive, this article argues that the campaign worked as much by classifying people as by teaching them. Officials sorted the population by nationality and district, separated the illiterate from the semi-literate, who could read but were judged politically unformed, and ranked learners by age, nationality and cost. The article calls this pedagogical legibility: the categories through which the state saw a population were also the stages through which it meant to change it. The same way of seeing shaped the debate over replacing the Arabic script in the late 1920s and the language politics of present-day Kyrgyzstan.