Beschreibung
This first detailed “grass roots” account of Uzbekistan’s
protracted decollectivisation process explores continuity
and change in the relations between rural communities,
agricultural producers and local state authorities in the
cotton-growing region of Khorezm. Built up during the Soviet
period, the cotton sector has maintained its importance for
the state and for rural communities in the years after
independence, although economic parameters and social
conditions have worsened significantly. Uzbekistan’s
agricultural reform path does not follow that of most
postsocialist scenarios and continuity with the past remains
strong. Despite seeming immobility, the local view on rural
society presented in this book unveals an unexpectedly
dynamic situation, characterised by shifts in patronage
relations, struggles over legitimacy, transformations in
family structure and community life. Poised between the
state, their communities and an emerging stratum of absentee
farm “sponsors”, the focus of Trevisani’s analysis is on the
new farmers (“fermer”) and their struggles for a place in
rural society. What emerges from decollectivisation is a
complexely articulated new agrarian question: its new
inequalities are rooted in the political economy of cotton.
