Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, Iconic Places in Central Asia : The Moral Geography of Dams, Pastures and Holy Sites

What can places tell us about a people?How are the ways by which places are built, inhabited, used, or imagined revelatory about cultural ideas and sensibilities?Anthropologist Faux de la Croix presents a series of studies organized around this question, concerning the residents of the Toktogul region of the post-Soviet Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan).Central Asia is famously characterized by natural landscapes of breathtaking beauty and contrast: high mountains, lakes, rivers, steppe, desert, and oasis towns.Its people were historically divided between nomadic pastoralists exploiting alpine ecologies and sedentary city dwellers engaged in agriculture and craft.Over a century of Russian and Soviet rule resulted in the nomads being forcibly settled and modernized in many ways.The Kyrgyz are one formerly nomadic ethnic group who now have an independent republic to their name after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.A productive question to ask is, have centuries of nomadic adaptation, with the intimate forms of knowledge of pastures, mountains, water sources, climate, seasons, animals, etc., resulted in persistent ways of relating to the land?Does a nomadic past influence a kind of modern post-nomadic worldview and ethos?What would that look like?Faux de la Croix suggests that the Kyrgyz today indeed have a characteristic set of ways to conceive and engage with their environment, though she is careful not to essentialize mentalities nor reduce cultural repertoires to ecological adaptation.This is especially apparent when one contrasts her insights with parallel studies concerning conceptions of space of other ethnic groups in the region, particularly of historically sedentary peoples such as Uzbeks, Tajiks, or Uyghurs.Ex-nomads like the Kyrgyz or Kazakhs tend to sacralize landscape, imbuing it with powers, capacities, qualities, and agencies that interpenetrate human-nature-spirit boundaries.The book explores a range of sites and human activities within them to tease out Kyrgyz ways of relating to local place.It focuses on three kinds of places in the mountainous rural Toktogul region of Kyrgyzstan, which the author calls "iconic places," because they each provoke much thought, emotional attachment, and sense of significance in the lives of the Kyrgyz in the area.The three iconic places appear to form a curious grouping, with little to do with each other: summer pastures (called jailoos), hydroelectric dams, and sacred sites (called mazars).The author wants to argue that though these places do not directly influence each other, they need to be considered together because each is productive of local peoples' imaginations and senses of well-being.Moreover, she claims that, "it is likely that the meanings of these iconic places 'feed' off and implicate each other, rather like Derrida's diffrance.To understand the one place, it is necessary to comprehend the others" (293).This is an intriguing claim in light of the above discussion about post-nomadic