2 Artistic Interventions: Working with Environmental (In)Justices in Peripheral Places

On the northern fringes of the old town where the sand bordered on fields, the cobra said good-bye to the desert. It raised its head high and flattened its neck, and its copper coin eyes examined the environment, full of pride and sorrow. From now on, it would creep on even more carefully even if no human soul was in sight, only in the distance some figures staggered across the street into the city, like a mirage. Much less distant, not farther away than a stick would fly, a highway on which big cars raced past wound through the landscape. Again, the cobra turned towards the desert and captured its sorry state with a cold glance. In its view, the desert had become hardly different from the roisterous street. One could have read a sorrowful question in the eyes of the snake now: It could be true that beauty might save the world but who would then save beauty . . . ?^[1]

In the novel Cobra whose Russian edition was published in 2005 by the Turkmen author Ak Welsapar, the eponymous reptile becomes frustrated and angry with humans who are incessantly destroying its habitat with toxic fertilizers used on cotton fields, and through fossil fuel extraction. After two chapters set the scene, the cobra decides to seek revenge and leaves its native steppe for an undesignated town, likely the Turkmen capital Ashgabat. In a classical act of shapeshifting, a narrative device drawing on Central Asian folk literature, the cobra transforms into a provincial villain and calls himself Musa Chöli, his last name echoing his desert origin, the chöl.

In Central Asian folk literature, animals that are able to transform themselves into humans and back do so to teach something to humans, for example, patience, trust, sincerity, or dedication. In doing so, they retain their supernatural powers, which help them in reaching their goal. This also applies to Musa Chöli who retains the hypnotic powers of his snake alter ego. However, he also retains a “snaky” speech that puts him in a somewhat vulnerable position of being uncovered. Musa Chöli rises to the highest circles of an absurd political elite led by a person called Mr. Comrade President who reserves for himself the freedom of speech and other liberties. Little imagination is needed to identify this erratic president with various elite figures in the post-Soviet realm. During a public speech about the national constitution, the cobra-turned-human discovers that all of its habitat is merely regarded as a commodity, a repository of oil, gas, and minerals.

The ones who destroy the cobra’s habitat are not, as in many other postcolonial settings, multinational companies from afar who bribe their way through an underpaid, disinterested, and ultimately powerless local bureaucracy. Rather, they are the country’s own elite, which chooses to allot habitat to international oil reconnaissance companies, reserving for itself power, rent, and royalties. In this sense, the novel Cobra echoes Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, which describes the complete turnover of the environment on the Arabian Peninsula and the socio-political entanglements people find themselves in.^[2] Musa Chöli exemplifies the multiple layers of complicity, ambiguousness, and “looking the other way” that pervade this society; he cannot survive without getting involved in evil schemes as well. For all its humorous elements, the novel sets a didactic and pessimistic tone towards the almost inevitable corruption in this authoritarian political system. After the cobra-human is uncovered, he wonders whether his original plan to take revenge on humans is still practicable, seeing as humans were literally destroying not only the animals’ but also their own livelihoods. The cobra turns back into a snake to take revenge, at least on Mr. Comrade President, who in a furious showdown, also transforms into animal shape, a monitor lizard, one of the most dangerous predators to snakes.

At first sight, the cobra alias Musa Chöli is a bad example of an ethical agent. He gets involved in lies, debauchery, and the regime’s atrocities, and is ready to kill for revenge. In a sense, the cobra is not so much ethical as aloof of human dilemmas. It may share their occasional shortsightedness and greed. The cobra-turned-human seems to be one of the few actors in the novel, however, that is capable of reflecting on its own and others’ motives, actions, and shortcomings. Left for dead at the end of the final showdown, it wonders whether what humans needed might be help instead of hate but concludes that no one can save humans except humans themselves. The whole novel is steeped in magical realism paired with a humoristic nod to popular beliefs, not only shapeshifting. Yet, its topic is deeply serious. Not surprisingly, the novel is on the index in Turkmenistan and its author, Ak Welsapar, has lived in exile in Sweden for many years.

We argue in this article that under authoritarian political circumstances, literature and art more generally become not only affective but also effective instruments in environmentalist struggles by promoting, transmitting, and disseminating knowledge about acute environmental and social problems, as well as the silences that exist along with them. Especially, these silences may become contested sites for artistic expression because they work in either direction. If addressed openly, they serve as pointers to problems the government or other powerful actors would wish to hide. If the silence is retained, the void thus created in the artistic work speaks between the lines, often about loss as well as the pain an artist might feel in the face of environmental destruction.^[3]

In many postcolonial settings, literature and art have been powerful tools helping to rethink one’s own historical past, feed into public history, reestablish cultural identity, and comprehend the traumas caused by hegemonial politics. Through studying objects of art, literature, music, and cinematography, it has been amply demonstrated how colonial policies imposed valorized ideas of heritage, nature-cultures, and knowledge, and how these narratives resonated with and affected colonized societies. The postcolonial space, with all its entanglements that constantly generate different forms of relations and resistance, is usually conceived as predominantly human. Human agency is the core concern in many works on postcolonial studies.^[4] On the one hand, this is understandable because the human agency of the colonized has largely been denied in colonial representations. On the other hand, it is pertinent not to exclude nonhuman voices from the postcolonial space. Not only are nonhuman (biotic and abiotic) bodies and systems also involved in power relations, but they are often also significant participants in indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies. Nonhumans may be conceptualized as agents who interact directly with humans across a wide range of socio-cosmic encounters. They may also be seen as ethical agents who are able to re-calibrate human moralities.^[5]

Similar to humans, nonhumans were and are affected by colonial and neocolonial power, violence, and neglect. Colonial powers crafted an “Other” that excluded communities, cultures, forms of economies, and spirituality from being considered “Us,” and likewise treated landscapes, nonhumans, and resources as different through exoticization, romanticization, and Otherization. The colonial image of colonized nature teeters between being dangerous, empty, and wild (certainly in its ambiguous meaning) on the one hand, and pristine, vulnerable and in need of protection by the colonizer on the other. Such constructions of nonhuman worlds, along with a modernist concern for progress, shaped rationales for the transformation of colonized lands along human/nonhuman and nature/culture dualism.^[6] The colonial image of nature was connected to the extraction of tangible and intangible resources with the introduction of new forms of scientific, agronomic, and biological ideas about land improvement. Agricultural reforms, afforestation (even where no forest had grown before), and the relocation of species between different climate zones and continents to “improve” husbandry and habitats, directly affected local knowledge systems, human interconnections with nonhuman ecosystems, and supernatural beings. Ultimately, this rationale justified the forced relocation of local inhabitants to make way for farms or extraction sites. The development of tourism and national parks, and the consequent enclosure of territories, closely relates to how ideologies and hierarchies were constructed regarding the land and different species. Alfred Crosby called these processes ecological imperialism, stating that both indigenous communities and their subsistence practices along with colonized territories and ecosystems experienced transformative reforms and damage.^[7] At the same time, colonial discourse and practice symbolically and politically relegates the indigenous to the periphery of the “civilized world,” and to the margins of familiar space and the inhabitable.

Any discussion about the colonization of nature needs to consider how ideas about nonhuman worlds and ecologies are conceptualized and constructed differently by different societies, communities, and cultures, and how colonial as well as neocolonial hegemonic and other actors leave their own imprint on them.^[8] The question then is how to look at transformations of land, ecologies, and relations in meaningful ways. How, if so, do indigenous communities return the gaze? How do they talk back about themselves, their ecosystems, and the making of peripherality against the backdrop of a still powerful Cartesian model of the world? Revisiting traditional motives from vernacular literatures (including oral ones) eventually also questioned nature-culture and human-animal dualisms and promoted an understanding of how human beings are involved in affective interconnections with the nonhuman worlds around them. In this sense, literature became instrumental in imagining the decolonization of Central Asian environments and a lens through which to approach postcolonial ecocriticism.^[9]

Ecocriticism serves as a vantage point to analyze ecological transformation, the interaction of humans and nonhumans, and environmental destruction by integrating environmental and postcolonial studies. By combining a postcolonial perspective with an ecocritical one, unequal power structures can be uncovered, unearthing the agencies and voices of those entangled in colonial relations that continue to experience its impacts. As mentioned above, an anthropocentric bias, including in scholarship, often hides nonhuman colonial experiences.^[10] Conversely, ecocriticism puts the nonhuman world center-stage by addressing animal rights, ideas about the putative purity of nature, or by tackling questions of environmentalism and conservation.^[11] Pippa Marland sees ecocriticism as an “umbrella term for a range of critical approaches that explore the representation in literature (and other cultural forms) of the relationship between the human and the non-human, largely from the perspective of anxieties around humanity’s destructive impact on the biosphere.”^[12] While James Moore and others have aptly problematized the convenient distribution of responsibility on all humankind in the Anthropocene debate, combining postcolonial and ecocritical approaches still helps to unveil the voices of more-than-human bodies as well as to show how nonhuman worlds also experience changes within the colonial and neocolonial relations.^[13] Ecocriticism provides the basis for a deeper engagement with questions of environmental and social injustices without privileging anthropocentric perspectives. Likewise, it allows for turning away from the dualism of human/nature and to look at mutual entanglements and co-dependences of humans and nonhumans, or in the words of Bruno Latour, nature-cultures.^[14]

Returning the Gaze: Central Asian Ecocriticism through Postcoloniality and Periphery

In all these deliberations, Central Asian ecocritical and postcolonial literature occupies a somewhat awkward space that is tied on the one hand to the Soviet experience in a self-proclaimed anti-colonial state and on the other hand to its peripheral status within the USSR. While Soviet leaders propagated an end to the oppression and exploitation of common people by the colonial Russian Empire, they continued and even expanded many former policies towards the environment, including industrialization and technocratic development. Besides following models of Western provenance, they pursued a process of rapid industrial catch-up through their own “great transforming projects” to gain a solid foothold within the international arena and attest to the superiority of the socialist system.^[15] In this aspiration, the sheer size of the country and the spatial dispersion of people and resources were some of the greatest challenges for the USSR, demanding extensive infrastructural development.^[16] In the process of overcoming these challenges, Central Asia, but also the Siberian and Arctic regions, became widely involved in new forms of power relations with the political center. They faced rapid urbanization, industrialization, and a shift to intensive agriculture. This in turn required new railroad and irrigation systems, the construction of dams, and similar infrastructural development, all of which required constant technological and scientific surveillance as well as huge human labor resources.^[17] The heavy toll these practices had on health and livelihoods was tacitly accepted by planners, with the desiccation of the Aral Sea, soil degradation, and the former Semipalatinsk nuclear test site being the most notorious examples from Central Asia. “Mastering” the land, along with the transformation of local cultural systems, was regarded as essential to eradicating differences between ethnic groups and played a central role in bringing modernity, culture, and enlightenment.^[18] At the same time, the centralized nature of the Soviet state, with its hub in Moscow and its graded regional centers and sub-centers, cemented the peripheral status of the former colonies.

Despite being situated in the heart of the Eurasian continent, dominant colonial and later socialist imaginaries and policies had relegated Central Asia to the periphery of the Russian and Qing Empires, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China respectively, while breaking up long-standing translocal connectivity through modern state borders. Besides direct political interventions, literature and artwork were actively used for the promotion of new identities within the socialist framework.^[19] At the same time, some intellectuals reflected the loss of their own identities, languages, and land in their works. This was only possible by writing around censorship, crafting deliberate silences, and making small concessions to save the main concerns. Writing from a peripheral space could mean access to resources is restricted, but it could also open paths for formulating alternative visions of life or offer leeway for negotiating the speakable.

When Chingiz Aitmatov first presented his by now-famous novella Jamila, he received scorching criticism from members of the writers’ union of the Kyrgyz SSR for putatively misrepresenting the “honor of the Kyrgyz woman.” However, it was enthusiastically welcomed by writers elsewhere, not least by colleagues in Moscow. While Jamila was on the surface a success story of Soviet modernization, with a self-determined female hero and former nomads turned into agriculturalists working hard for the greater benefit of the country, it offered multiple paths for thinking to those who were able to decipher it. The director of the 1969 film Jamila, Irina Poplavskaia, recalled how the novella had struck her as invigorating and inspiring during what she called the hypocrisy and rigid rules of her time. To her, the freedom represented by the untamed nature at the margins of Soviet space corresponded to the main character, Jamila, the inner “free human being.”^[20] Thus, the peripheral status also provided some carefully equilibrated space for self-reflection and a reconsideration of what heritage, tradition, and ecology might mean.

In academic literature, the periphery has often been treated as a discursive construct, construed and maintained by powerful, mostly urbanized elites to stigmatize the rural or otherwise peripheral as the cultural Other. Accordingly, an important intent of this literature is to identify ways to empower people in peripheralized places.^[21] Thinking from the periphery may also suggest alternative views, however. We argue that, similar to the varied ways marginality has been discussed, peripherality also allows for deviations and freedoms inconceivable in the center.^[22] We thus use the periphery not only as a description of certain places less well connected to a conceptual center but as an analytical tool that helps to detect spaces with less defined boundaries and consequently greater freedom to experiment. This approach does not cherish the periphery as romantic. Rather, the periphery in both Soviet and post-Soviet ecocritical literature throws a glaring light on otherwise hidden spatial inequalities while allowing for certain agency that would not be tolerated in the center. Peripherality imbues layers of rural-urban relations, but also relations between the urban political centers of any Central Asian union republic that is reduced to a peripheral status under the gaze of Moscow. This is also reflected in the novels of Chinghiz Aitmatov and Abdizhamil Nurpeisov, which we discuss in more detail later. In their works, the Central Asian capitals often appear as mere extensions of the central government in Moscow, sites where ambitious climbers, in their exaggerated endeavor to overfill orders from Moscow, employ schemes that turn out to yield long-term irreversible consequences.

The Soviet approach to land, its transformation, and ensuing ecological problems occupied a special place in Soviet Kazakh literature between the 1960s and the 1980s. Environmentalism had early on been a topic that promised some freedom because it was not considered directly political. Also, environmental destruction became increasingly visible. In post-Stalinist years, public involvement of intellectuals and artists rose with environmental protection, challenging the monopoly that science held on the protection of nature, for example as in enclosed natural reserves. The proclamation of transparency and reform under Gorbachev instigated further environmental discussions in literary works and media, as well as among the wider public.^[23] Literary journals like Druzhba Narodov became avenues for real controversies about environmental justice and the distribution of benefits and burdens. One particular feature of these later Soviet Central Asian literary works was that they often took a decisively non-anthropocentric perspective. Sore spots like the disconnection with the native land or the loss of language and cultural memory were linked to more-than-human grievances that echoed local human experiences.

To some degree, the preoccupation with ecology that we find in Central Asian literature also existed elsewhere; especially in Siberia, a subgenre of the village prose started to question a Soviet paradigm, namely the idea of human mastery over nature. For example, this is reflected in Rasputin’s “Farewell to Matyora” (1976) and “Fire” (1985), Zalygin’s “Commission” (1988), Astafiev’s “Tsar Ryba” (1976), and Gogolev’s Ühüs Kharakh (1999).^[24] In their critique of technocratic projects that harm Siberian ecosystems, they develop an imaginary better world in the past. Astafiev’s Tsar’-ryba, for example, juxtaposes large-scale extractive industries and poaching with the small-scale subsistence practices of local people living in the Taiga. This turn towards the past, a radical breakaway from the Soviet preoccupation with the future, does not necessarily boil down to nostalgia. Gogolev’s Ühüs Kharakh, for example, does not solely evoke a beautiful, bountiful nature with mutual human-spirit communication but also shows the life-threatening potential of nature for the hunter-gatherer and pastoralist populations of the Arctic Far East.

While the Siberian village prose fits well within the framework of ecocriticism, it hardly engages with postcolonial thought, contrary to ecocritical Central Asian works. An exception may be Ivan Gogol’ev, an ethnic Sakha, but even he wages his concerns about cultural loss very carefully. This may point to a larger argument that cannot be fleshed out here, namely that indigenous Siberian writers were and are in a weaker position vis-à-vis the Slavic populations in their regions as compared to Central Asia. What makes the works of Soviet Central Asian authors like Chinghiz Aitmatov, Olzhas Suleimenov, Bakhytzhan Kanap’ianov, and Abdijamil Nurpeisov different is that in writing about environmental destruction, they also write about enforced assimilation, collectivization, as well as cultural and technocratic imperialism, and call for a decolonization of land and mind.^[25] While crafting their narratives against a backdrop of pesticide overuse, soil salinization, or the construction of new dams in the mountains of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, they weave in stories of loss of one’s land, language, and culture. Central Asian ecocritical literary works thus merge postcolonial perspectives with ecocritical thinking accompanied by non-human actors and the impacts environmental and social injustices have on everyone.^[26] These topics also resonated in other artistic fields.^[27] The Kyrgyz filmmaker Algimantas Vidugiris filmed the construction of the hydraulic stations on the Naryn River (Naryn Diaries, 1971) and the Toktogul Reservoir. His film critically engaged with the grand construction projects of his time and their possible ecological consequences but was banned from distribution and destroyed.

Soviet Central Asian Authors Write Back

By looking at the interconnection of humans with nonhumans and ecological problems in their novels, Aitmatov, Nurpeisov, and other authors also engage with oral histories, folklore, legends, myths, dreams, and storytelling, which are rooted in local knowledge. Using these knowledge registers within a novel (a literary genre that only appeared in Central Asia during the first half of the 20th century under hegemonic rule), represents what Salman Rushdie terms “writing back.” These literary works serve as a hidden form of protest, allowing the authors to claim their own identities, memories, and alternative approaches to the environment.^[28] Chingiz Aitmatov’s works developed increasingly towards his key concerns, the importance of collective historical memory, and the mutual relation between humans and nonhumans, where every single body represents a part of the whole system. In novels like “The White Steam Ship” (1970), “The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years” (1980), and “The Place of the Skull” (1987), he deplores the decline of human values as well as the loss of connections to the past, the ancestors, and the whole socio-cosmic world. Notably, in “The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years” Aitmatov employs the term mankurtism to talk about how Soviet assimilative policies and technocratic projects were portrayed as gifts of modernity yet brought about the loss of cultural memory. Using a narrative about torture that eradicates all memories of the victim and placing this in a historical setting, he is able to address in a veiled way cultural loss in the face of the construction of a Soviet cosmodrome on Kazakh lands, a manifest reference to the Baikonur cosmodrome.^[29] In the novel, local people living near the cosmodrome face their own Otherization and the successive enclosure of their land with all its sacred places and graveyards for a putatively greater future. As of now, the Baikonur cosmodrome is still rented and operated by the Russian Federation, while local Kazakh people bear the burden.^[30] The novel can thus still be read as actual in its postcolonial and ecocritical outlook.

Another prominent work that combines ecocritical and postcolonial ideas comes from the Kazakh writer Abdijamal Nurpeisov. Titled Final Respects in its 1999 English translation, its original title Songhy paryz plays with the multiple meanings of the word paryz that is rooted in an Islamic discourse of fulfilling an order of God (from fard/farz) but expanded to signify other kinds of serious duties. Through the story of a classical love triangle, the author problematizes the Soviet policy towards the Aral Sea that led to its current desiccated state. Through his three main characters, each representing a particular type, the reader feels the pain of dispossession of the land, the despair of rural powerlessness, and also the cold-blooded schemes of one of them who is willing to forget his own origin in order to make a career.^[31] In many of the Soviet ecocritical novels, land is central because it represents a complex medium through which different organisms comprehend, identify, and represent themselves.^[32] Colonial, anthropocentric, and transformative interventions interfere with the social and material relations that communities have with their landscapes, which causes traumas and endangers memories, culture, and identities. Nurpeisov reflects in Final Respects the trauma of technocratic and military interventions for Kazakhs and their land:

Surely there is no poison left in this world that the Kazakhs have not drunk since the dying agony of the dying sea began. Here, for more than half a century the Semipalatinsk test site is spitting the death, there is the Baikonur cosmodrome. But as if this all is not enough for one nation, they began nuclear weapon and missile tests on the plains of the Mangystau Peninsula and the ancient creepy mountains of Aktobe, among the dunes of Uralsk and Ordynsk sands! The whole country was turned into a solid landfill.^[33]

In Final Respects, Nurpeisov turns back to events that happened in the 1970s to show the slow death of the Aral Sea that was caused by industrial agriculture, especially cotton monoculture that demanded water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. To show the global crisis interconnected with Aral’s desiccation, Nurpeisov builds his novel from the perspective of the small local Aral village and the pathways of three main heroes and members of the love triangle: Jadiger, his friend-foe Azim, and Bakisat (Jadiger’s wife and Aziz’s lover). Throughout the novel, the author achronologically moves his characters back and forth within their memories, haunting thoughts, and the questions of identity, collective memory, changed social structure and coexistence with local environments. The three bounded fates of the main characters move to a tragic ending, paralleling the dying Aral and the impossibility to change this ecological catastrophe. By using different forms of narration (first, second, and third person), Nurpeisov also reveals how varied perspectives on catastrophe can encounter and contradict each other. Thus, to reflect on the desiccation of the Aral Sea, the author uses the figure of Jadiger who serves as a chairman of the fishing kolkhoz and fulfills the Moscow requirements on fish extraction for the Soviet economy. The necessity to regularly provide the center with a sufficient number of fish also illustrates the relations between Moscow and the periphery, where Jadiger is still part of the socialist system and involved in fulfilling production quotas since this leads to the progress of the USSR.

Noticing the shrinking Aral Sea and depletion of its fish, Jadiger tries to inform his supervisors of the expanding crisis. Yet, Jadiger himself did not realize that the desiccation of the sea was a consequence of cotton production and the modernization plan for the area. Nurpeisov reveals how by following a socialist system, Jadiger, at the same time, was also the part of the periphery and local landscape, where local knowledge of elders and connection to land enhanced his understanding of the catastrophe. Jadiger subsequently sees his debt in the protection and conservation of the Aral Sea. Meanwhile, his former friend Azim is the impersonation of the center’s ambitious climber, aimed at modernizing and transforming at all costs. Azim is from the local area but studies and makes a career as a scientist in Almaty only to return, against better judgment, with schemes that eventually lead to the sea’s desiccation. Nurpeisov resists the apparent temptation to blame the ensuing environmental catastrophe on policy makers in the political center alone, and rather discusses through Azim individual agency, unequal power relations, complicity, looking the other way, and responsibility. Even as Azim travels to the Aral Sea, and thus geographically to the periphery, he still carries with him his network of political relations and his cultural preferences that define him as a non-peripheral figure. Being in or out of the periphery is defined less by the geographical proximity to or remoteness from political centers like Moscow and Almaty, and more by being connected or not to the political elite.

Such different perspectives appear when Jadiger’s local knowledge and attachment to the landscape opposes the “true” scientific knowledge of the pragmatic Soviet representative Azim, who views desiccating Aral as creating promising new “empty” space that can be used for land reform projects like growing cotton:

We, scientists, are also thinking. You have to understand, for a land-locked sea like the Aral, there is no future. For the sake of preserving a useless body of water in the middle of the desert, we can’t deprive the residents of five . . . you understand, an entire five republics, of the water of two rivers. . . . We need radical measures. . . . That’s the problem, that’s why we offer the most effective and progressive outcome: to grow crops on the fertile earth freed up from the sea.^[34]

The regularly raised question of whose knowledge is the true one, either scientific and colonial or indigenous and local, takes a centrality here and indicates the postcolonial ecocritical perspectives of Nurpeisov. The author problematizes the perpetual production of colonial land transformation even under the threat of ecological catastrophe and damage to human and nonhuman bodies.^[35] The ongoing conflict between the imperial center and the periphery is topical in the novel. The periphery and its human and nonhuman bodies can be considered subalterns whose voices are regularly silenced and undervalued. According to Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern cannot speak and is situated within the imperial context, which marginalizes the beings and deprives them of the possibility to raise their voice, express their opinion, or stand up for themselves.^[36] The discourse and agenda are thus built by those who can create reality and advance true knowledge. The villagers near the Aral Sea and the nonhumans (fish, other animals, and plants) all represent subalterns. Spivak states that the subaltern is not a subaltern anymore if they can speak, yet this excludes nonhuman bodies and their agencies. In the case of desiccating Aral and the disappearing nonhuman bodies, it can be said that all of them were and are continuing to speak in their own ways. By also representing subaltern groups, local people were those who noticed the changes within the sea, land, and its inhabitants. The crisis happening with Aral could not be simply silenced because people raised and discussed these issues. Nurpeisov also reflects how instead of organizing protests, local citizens started to move from the settlements of the dying Aral. According to Sarah Cameron, such relocation might be a strategy used by Kazakh pastoral nomads to flee in cases of unfavorable environmental and political situations, helping increase their chances of survival.^[37] Thus, this mobility tactic in the novel can also be viewed from the perspective of how peripheral “subaltern” protest reacts to the center that ignores a growing environmental and social crisis.

The question of nature’s role should also be raised here, as it relates to being subaltern in connection with more than human beings and parts of the landscape like the Aral Sea and its rivers. “Nature” in this regard still has a productive role. Andy Bruno highlights the significance of looking at “how parts of the material environment acted within history.”^[38] The idea of the Soviet state as the one controlling nature can be questioned by the analysis of how biotic and abiotic beings themselves influenced the plans of the authorities and undermined their fantasies. This is where both Soviet power and nature remade and affected each other.^[39] The Aral Sea in this case became an influential actor who was shrinking because of misguided policies but, at the same time, disrupting socialist plans, depriving the state of fish, and affecting wildlife. The shrinking sea also impacted human and nonhuman health through salinization and dust/salt storms. Throughout the Final Respects, the myth of total human control is questioned by Nurpeisov, who challenges anthropocentric centralization by revealing how the Aral Sea is a symbol of life, affecting surrounding ecosystems and the fates of people. Nature, Aral Sea, and humans are hence represented as those who are mutually codependent on each other, where both nature and people act and react dynamically. The excerpt below shows the memories of the main hero, Jadiger, as he visits the dry shores of what was formerly filled with the Aral Sea:

Driving to the bottom of the former estuary, the truck’s wheels would kick up a thick white dust, bitter with salt. . . . The sea had grown shallow and receded from its original shores. It unattractively bared the bottom of the coves and bays, where only recently, ships and barges would stand at sea moored by their anchors, and motor boats would dart in and out nimbly. Beyond the turn, behind a gently-sloping sand dune, the small islands along this side—Jalanash, Buyurgundy and the famous Kok-aral—had now come together like old men at a funeral and merged with the mainland, mournfully glowing white with salt patches. Some of your ancestors lived on these islands, fishing in season, maintaining wealthy homes here. Now, only with an effort of memory, with difficulty, you found them and the pictures of the past, one more alive than the other, rose before you and tormented you soul with the fact they could never return.^[40]

The author also effectively reflects on the changes within the Aral Sea by engaging with mythological, paganist, and religious references. Nurpeisov thus turns to the Kazakh indigenous forms of narration through legends, dreams, and myths, which are also applied in postcolonial works of, for example, Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Pauline Melville. Such use of powerful narrative devices helps in writing back and narrating with the tools of one’s own culture.^[41] Final Respects thus decolonizes the Kazakh landscape, nonhuman beings, and environment by providing space for different voices and engaging with the questions of Soviet modernization policies.^[42] Finalizing this part and based on the discussion above, it can be said that we view the novel as a postcolonial ecocritical work that raises questions of center-periphery and human-nonhuman interconnections, as well as ecological, cultural, economic, and social problems that emerged during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. It is certainly noteworthy that the first part of Nurpeisov’s Final Respects, and the works of Aitmatov discussed earlier, were written during the Soviet period, which represent an attempt at writing back and fighting against epistemic violence and hierarchies dominated by central Soviet authorities.

Environmental Destruction and the Animal Mirror

One of the fundamental differences in ecocritical writings from Western countries and Central Asia is probably the cultural background of whether wilderness and the “untamed” as such or the ordered and cultivated are the objects of longing, nostalgia, and appraisal. Central Asian pre-modern classical and folk literature tends to describe the “good” environment as a garden, well irrigated and orderly. Similarly, later Central Asian literature does not set humans apart from an idealized, pristine nature but rather sees the Cartesian detachment of humans from nature as the source of all violence and destruction. Many authors have argued that it was the cultural shift in the increasingly urbanizing regions of Western Europe that fostered a romanticized perception of the land and changed perceptions of “wilderness” from being a potential danger to the wild as a refuge of pristineness that excluded people.^[43] In this romanticizing perception, the desert and steppe lands were often (and sometimes still are) considered “barren,” “useless,” and “empty,” while forests and verdant lands were viewed as magnificent. While cultural biases are inevitable and we certainly do not want to impose today’s judgements on earlier writers, the power asymmetries wrought by colonialism turned these biases into a hegemonic perception that justified all kinds of interventions into this “useless” landscape.

Soviet Central Asian writers and artists, however, also perceived themselves and their relations with the environment differently from many of their colleagues in other formerly colonized countries, where environmental problems are often fraught with resource wars, continued dispossession, and neo-colonial exploitation. At the heart of postcolonial ecocriticism outside of the USSR lie socio-political rights and the question of social justice. By contrast, in the late Soviet Union, where many socio-political deficits could not be addressed openly, environmentalism became the main resort to voice criticism that was otherwise unspeakable. Here, peripherality again came into play. In the lively debates waged during the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Soviet Union, Central Asian contributions differed. Unlike their colleagues from Baltic countries or Russia proper, Central Asian intellectuals spent little time advocating for political reform, democracy, or the dissolution of the union. their central concerns were the status of their respective languages, their histories and cultural heritage, and environmentalism. During Perestroika, roughly during 1986–1991, a range of documentaries appeared in Central Asia that opened a space for raising existing ecological issues, for example “Zhamankum” (by Yuri Litvyakov, 1987), “Rekviem po Aralu” (Requiem on Aral) (by S. Makhmutov, 1988), “Nevada-Kazakhstan” (by Yuri Shavkun, 1989), or “Zhoktau. Hroniki mertvogo morya” (Zhoktau. Chronicles of The Dead Sea) (by S. Azimov, 1990).”^[44] In 1989, the Kazakh poet Oljas Suleimenov, the writer Rollan Seysenbaev, and others organized the Nevada-Semipalatinsk antinuclear movement in an attempt to join forces with indigenous victims of nuclear testing in the US. They were joined by other writers, activists, workers, and citizens, and they finally successfully appealed to close down the Semipalatinsk polygon.^[45]

Clearly, Central Asian writers felt an urge to address pressing problems like the desiccation of the Aral Sea, nuclear test sites at Semipalatinsk, large-scale salinization of soils because of cotton monoculture, and poisonous industrial waste and emissions. These topics demanded caution and often literary roundabouts like dreams or putatively historical events to be able to speak. In a political climate where dissident writers like the Turkmen poet Annasoltan Kekilova, who wrote openly about environmental destruction and the terrible labor conditions for predominantly female cotton workers, were harassed and persecuted by authorities, choosing more subtle ways to address these issues seemed wise.  The aim of this literature is not to represent “nature” as true-to-life as possible. Rather, the non-human is chosen to mirror the ethical conscience of humans that the latter seem to have lost.

Nonhuman animals hold an established, active role among the figures that populate Central Asian folk literary genres. Reformist and modernist paradigms during the 20th century relegated nonhuman animals, together with plants and other features of the natural environment, to a mere backdrop “setting,” a “nature” waiting to be transformed by the “New Soviet Man and Woman.” Interestingly, animals emerged again as protagonists during the later 20th century, this time in the (for Central Asia) relatively new genres of the novel, the novella, and the short story. Under Soviet as well as post-Soviet authoritarianism, Central Asian authors have often taken recourse to literary traditions for telling the otherwise unspeakable. One of those is to let putatively innocent or “ignorant” voices (e.g., of children, the “wise fool” or animals) insist on certain ethical standpoints that seem untenable in the view of the “rational” majority. These “marginal” narrators or protagonists are often chosen to address the nexus of environmental destruction and human hubris. Through their putatively non-rational perspectives, it becomes possible to address social, political, and environmental concerns. Far from mitigating the critique itself, this shift in perspective allows an Othering of human society whose actions are observed and questioned from a position beyond.

Authors like Abdijamil Nurpeisov or Chingiz Aitmatov started to populate their novels with animals from around 1980 onwards, which was different from their earlier works, where animals, if they appeared at all, represented a kind of background setting. Now, animals were allotted active roles, both in describing their actions but more so because they carried ethical values that were seemingly missing in human society. In this sense, Aitmatov is a pioneer because his Farewell, Gulsary and The White Steamship were already published in 1966 and 1970. He had studied animal husbandry before becoming an author and remained attached to animals whom he portrayed as “our little siblings.” Farewell, Gulsary is a story where horse and man share success and downfall, a camel plays a prominent role in A Day Lasts Longer than 100 Years, and The Scaffold interweaves the insights of the she-wolf Akbara and her pack with human fate. From the more paternalistic view of animals as “little siblings,” they started a literary life of their own, again, as in pre-modern literature, becoming wiser and more insightful than humans.

The tradition is continued in post-Soviet Central Asian literature. Presumably, it resonates with established literary patterns. Hardly secondary is the still-authoritarian leadership in the region, although the differences are considerable. The question of which existential concerns can be negotiated through the presence of a non-human animal is a serious one. Today, this not only links to a tradition of ecocriticism but also to global debates around how animals should be and are regarded and treated, and how this should be presented or problematized in literature. This is a sensitive topic that may touch on sore spots of identity, cultural values, and practices, especially if past practices or core cultural beliefs are being criticized. Timothy Clark refers to this as the “animal mirror,” the image thrown back at humans through the animal encounter.^[46] If contemporary literature takes recourse to the narrative figures of Central Asian folk literary traditions like nonhuman protagonists or phenomena like magic and shapeshifting, it now integrates them into works that speak to an increasingly global readership. With and through nonhuman animal protagonists, powerful narratives like progress and modernity are questioned, as are cultural and ethical issues that touch on sore spots of Central Asian identity or (state-sponsored) imaginaries about Central Asia’s precolonial past.

Speaking Local in a Global Voice

In the summer of 2020, a popular protest was organized around the preservation of Taldyköl Lake in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. Most of the lake was to disappear and give way to real estate construction for residential complexes, a school, a kindergarten, a hospital, offices, and business premises. A small part of the lake (20 ha out of 600) was to be preserved but reconstructed and integrated into a landscaped park with walkways as a recreation zone. It was apparent that through the ways the city, its infrastructure, and its environment were being built and rebuilt, different, and at times contradictory, possible futures were negotiated. As a response to the construction plans, protests formed under hashtags like “SOS Tadyköl” and “Kishi Taldyköl saqtayıq” (“Let’s save Little Taldyköl”), initiated by some 150 activists, including artists.

Environmental movements in Kazakhstan are usually on a rather small scale because of restrictions on rallies. Artistic performances can be one of the instruments used to raise public awareness of an issue and connect with people and authorities. In the case of the Taldyköl protests, artistic performances played an important role, most prominently one called “Baqsy saryny,” which was performed by the contemporary artists Askhat Akhmediyarov and Aigerim Ospan.^[47] The word baqsy refers to a traditional shaman-healer and harks back to pre-Islamic Turkic practices. Other elements of the performance, like the performers clothing and musical instruments, were also full of symbolic, affective, and valuable meaning, connecting to popular understanding of Kazakhness and of the past. At the same time, the performance was done in the highly aesthetic, artistic, and globalized language of social media. The stage of the performance was the strip of land near Taldyköl Lake that was used by bulldozers loaded with gravel. Aigerim and Askhat performed at two parallel areas where bulldozers were filling of the lake. Aigerim played a musical instrument, the kobyz, traditionally associated with communications between humans and spirits or God. Here, the instrument was chosen to attract the public’s attention to the local ecosystem’s degradation and to transmit the affective sounds of the land and the worries of the lake and nonhuman world. At the same time, Askhat chose the character of a baqsy who blocked the passage of bulldozers with open arms and who represented the guide between the worlds. Notably, allusions to shamanic practices and steppe mythologies already caught the attention of the Kazakh contemporary artists during the critical decade of the 1990s and became part of the reimagination of Kazakh and nomadic identities in contemporary art.^[48] This also affects the way social and environmental issues can be raised since contemporary Kazakhstani artists problematize the Soviet and currently constructed official narratives, which cannot reflect the true situation, or the real problems happening within a socio-ecological scope, including Kazakh culture itself.^[49]

Askhat Akhmediyarov discreetly raises a wide range of questions, from reimagining the identities of nomadic peoples before the Soviet and Islamic eras to more current environmental problems. The performance not only aimed to raise awareness of the Taldyköl Lake issue but also to reconstruct the people’s perceptions of nature. In some ways, this might resemble a romanticization of the practices and relations people had with nature and shamans in the past; however, this also produces alternative narratives and creates space for rethinking and discussion. Both performers took on the roles of those who represent the voices of the lake and nonhuman worlds and, following Ervin Goffman, other identities which can affect and in turn be affected by the space and people around.^[50] In this regard, artists become parts of the performance by activating the chosen art space through critical voices and alternative meanings in their works.^[51] In the case of Taldyköl Lake, the stage was a real confrontational situation with a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors: land, lake, various bird species, including endangered ones, activists, citizens, performers, workers, cars, etc. At the same time, authorities and businesses were invisible witnesses and actors at Taldyköl.

The Taldyköl Lake performance and environmental documentaries are not the only instances of artists intervening in environmental issues while also saying something more fundamental about human-nonhuman relations. The desiccated Aral Sea that set the stage for Nurpeisov’s novel, was turned into a road poetry performance by the Kazakh poet and spoken word artist Anuar Duisenbinov. Duisenbinov based his artwork on a road trip through the sandy former Aral lakebed. The background music to the trip itself came from the album “Aralkum” (literally Aral sand, a pun on the Aral Sea) written by the Kazakh-British composer and violinist Galya Bisengalieva, who dedicated the project to the story of the Aral Sea. Another album named jeruyık? was recently released by Turan Nurgozhin, who traveled across endangered places and polluted cities of Kazakhstan and made field recordings of air, water, and the sound of the industrial space. The entanglement of aesthetics and art constitutes an affective force that artists here use to address the needs of different actors from the government to their opposition, humans and nonhumans alike.

While contemporary artists and their works are not very popular or well-known among most Kazakhstani citizens, the artists tend to perform in public, where their shows have aesthetics and modes that are “instagrammable.” As such, the performances speak to an environmentally interested, global audience about significant social and environmental issues. Recent performances at Taldyköl Lake, art exhibitions raising environmental issues, as well as existing artistic, literary, and musical works about the Aral and Caspian Seas, Balkhash Lake, and many degraded industrial areas, show how contemporary art can raise the idea of a mutual connection between the environment and people in Central Asia. This art also advances questions of environmentalism in connection with ethnocultural identity and self-awareness.^[52] It is obvious that some artistic expressions have a tendency to romanticize earlier relations between humans and more-than-human worlds. At the same time, the past is a product of the present, and contemporary artists may choose to create a mirror image which throws back at the public long-term colonial dependencies as well as current injustices and neglect of the more-than-human worlds.

Conclusion

In contemporary Central Asian ecocritical literature, elements of folk literary traditions are often employed, such as choosing nonhuman protagonists, including magic and shapeshifting, or referencing pre-Islamic spiritual traditions. Such contemporary literature does so by integrating these features into works that address current problems and speak to an increasingly global readership. This is especially relevant for authors who were exiled from Central Asia and need to find new readership in new places, possibly including diaspora Central Asians. Integrating folk literary traditions into their work is also vital for younger artists who find themselves with little space to address their concerns. With and through nonhuman animal protagonists or the re-appropriation of spiritual connectivity, powerful narratives like progress and modernity are questioned, as are cultural and ethical issues that touch on sore spots of Central Asian identity or (state-sponsored) fantasies about Central Asia’s precolonial past. This last point especially connects to epic literary traditions insofar as they speak of nonhuman animals as the often wiser, more ethical, and stronger partners of the human hero, and who may become central figures in their own right. In contemporary literature, the role of the ethical teacher is preserved but the ethical stance is usually very different. Animals as protagonists in contemporary Central Asian literature have not yet received much attention. However, nonhuman animals make for a specific contribution to the field of ecocriticism from a region where neither established Western theories of ecocriticism nor their postcolonial counterparts fully apply. The apparent quandary of needing to write in a postcolonial setting while at the same time refuting official simplistic reductions of a shared, complex, and complicated heritage can easily be seen throughout Central Asia. Contemporary artists who are working across fields challenge existing cultural stereotypes disseminated by state-supported artists. In doing so, they aim to convey more realistic versions of people, and their social and cultural issues, while also including more-than-human agency and environmental perspectives in their work.

Bibliography

Abdikassymov, Bauyrzhan, and Aida Mashurova. “Environmental, Natural and Man-Made Disasters Reflected in Kazakh Eco-Documentary Films.” Central Asian Journal of Art Studies 7, no. 3 (2022): 44–60, https://doi.org/10.47940/cajas.v7i3.603.

Akhmediyarov, Askhat, and Aigerim Ospan. “BAQSY SARYNY. #SOSTaldykol Performance.” SOS Taldykol, September 15, 2021, YouTube video, 0:59. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYo5ErILorI.

Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Bayat, Asef. “Marginality: Curse or Cure?.” In Marginality and Exclusion in Egypt, edited by Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb, 14–27. London: Zed Books, 2012.

Breyfogle, Nicholas ed. Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.

Bruno, Andy. “How a Rock Remade the Soviet North: Nepheline in the Khibiny Mountains.” In Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History, edited by Nicholas B. Breyfogle, 147–64. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.

Bruno, Andy. The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Buell, Lawrence, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber. “Literature and Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417–40, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-111109-144855.

Caffee, Naomi. “Between First, Second, and Third Worlds: Olzhas Suleimenov and Soviet Postcolonialism, 1961–1973.” Russian Literature 111–112, (2020): 91–118, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2020.03.004.

Cameron, Sarah. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Clark, Timothy. 2011. “The Animal Mirror.” In The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, 179–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976261.023.

Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Coombs, David Sweeney. “Entwining Tongues: Postcolonial Theory, Post-Soviet Literatures and Bilingualism in Chingiz Aitmatov’s I Dol’she Veka Dlitsia Den’.” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 3 (2011): 47–64, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.34.3.47.

Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Dağyeli, Jeanine. “Climate Disaster or Anticipated Crisis? Knowing the Environment in Pre-Soviet Central Asia.” In Relating to Central Asian Environments: Between Predation, Protection and Exchange, edited by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Beatrice Penati, 225–245. London: Routledge, 2024.

Davis, Diana K. The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2016.

DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Florin, Moritz. “Emptying Lakes, Filling up Seas: Hydroelectric Dams and the Ambivalences of Development in Late Soviet Central Asia.” Central Asian Survey 38, no. 2 (2019): 237–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2019.1584604.

Gillespie, David. “A Paradise Lost? Siberia and its Writers, 1960 to 1990.” In Between Heaven and Hell, edited by Galya Diment, and Yuri Slezkine, 255–73. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956.

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment London: Routledge, 2015.

Josephson, Paul, Nicolai Dronin, Ruben Mnatsakanian, Aleh Cherp, Dmitry Efremenko, and Vladislav Larin. An Environmental History of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Klubnikin, Kheryn , Cynthia Annett, Maria Cherkasova, Michail Shishin, and Irina Fotieva. “The Sacred and the Scientific: Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Siberian River Conservation.” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1296–306, https://doi.org/10.1890/1051-0761(2000)010[1296:TSATST]2.0.CO;2.

Kudaibergenova, Diana. Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature: Elites and Narratives. Lanham, MD & London: Lexington Books, 2017.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Marland, Pippa. “Ecocriticism.” Literature Compass 10, no. 11 (2013): 846–68, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12105.

Marten, Gerald G. Human Ecology: Basic Concepts for Sustainable Development. London: Routledge, 2010.

Monani, Salma, and Joni Adamson. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies. Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Moon, David. “Planting Trees in Unsuitable Places: Russian Steppe Forestry, 1696-1850”. In Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History, edited by Nicholas B. Breyfogle, 23–42. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.

Moore, Jason W., ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.

Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Postcolonial Environments. Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Munif, Abdelrahman. Cities of Salt. Translated by Peter Theroux. New York: Vintage International, 1987.

Nurpeisov, Abdijamil. Final Respects. Translated by Catherine Fitzpatrick. New York: Liberty Publishing, 2013. https://kazneb.kz/kk/catalogue/view/1162780.

Nurpeisov, Abdijamil. Posledniĭ Dolg. Translated by Gerold Belger and Anatoly Kim. Moscow: Kultura, 2002. https://kazneb.kz/kk/catalogue/view/1169953.

Poplavskaia, Irina. “Djamilya.” PeterShop.com – Russian Movie, October 26, 2018, YouTube video, 29:37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyUcMRGodbA.

Samotik, Ludmilla. “Kto Est’ Brakon’er? (Regional’nyĭ Aspekt ‘TSar’-Ryby V. P. Astaf’eva)”. Vestnik Krasnoiarskogo Gosudarstvennogo Pedagogicheskogo Universiteta 40, no. 2 (2017): 201-7, https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/kto-est-brakonier-regionalnyy-aspekt-tsar-ryby-v-p-astafieva/viewer.

Sarkulova, Manifa, and Roza Khassenova. “Cosmodrome as a ‘Gift Of Modernity’: Representation of the Theme of Space in Kazakh and Kyrgyz Literature”. TRAMES: A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 26, no. 4 (2022): 413–26, https//doi.org/10.3176/tr.2022.4.04.

Schieffelin, Edward. “Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality.” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (1985): 707–24, https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1985.12.4.02a00070.

Sharipova, Dina. “The Decolonization of the Environment in Kazakhstan: The Novel Final Respects by Abdi-Jamil Nurpeisov.” Nationalities Papers 47, no. 2 (2019): 296–309, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2018.24.

Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Spivak, Gayatry. “Can the subaltern speak?” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 24–29. London: Routledge, 1995.

Tilley, Christopher, and Kate Cameron-Daum. An Anthropology of Landscape: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary. London: UCL Press, 2017.

Tsay, Alexandra. “Contemporary Art as a Public Forum”. In The Nazarbayev Generation. Youth in Kazakhstan, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 269–87. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019.

Tsay, Alexandra. “Contemporary Art in Central Asia.” In Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia, edited by Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, 377–90. London: Routledge, 2021.

Tyukhteneva, Svetlana. “Art and ethnic identity: On the Example of the Culture of the Altai People.” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 54, no. 3 (2015): 58–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/10611959.2015.1194691.

Weiner, Douglas. A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Welsapar, Ak. Kobra. Tula: Izd. Selena, 2005.

Westerman, Frank. Ingenieure der Seele: Schriftsteller unter Stalin – eine Erkundungsreise. Berlin: Ch. Links, 2003.

Willet, Joanie. “Challenging Peripheralising Discourses: Using Evolutionary Economic Geography and, Complex System Theory to Connect New Regional Knowledges within the Periphery.” Journal of Rural Studies 73 (2020): 87–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.11.016.