Junior Research Group, funded by the Excellence Initiative University of Tübingen
1. Group leader: Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix
2. Term: 2014-2017
3. Group members: Dr. Flora Roberts, Nurzat Sultanalieva, M.A., Xeniya Prilutskaya (M.A.)
4. Research location: Central Asia
5. Summary:
Across the world, there are enormous inequalities in people’s access to fresh water, with climate change likely to further exacerbate the situation.
As a group of environmental anthropologists and historians, we set out to trace people’s changing attitudes to water in Central Asia. We pursue historically-informed research on moral economies of water in a landlocked region where most agriculture depends on irrigation.
We ask in what contexts water in Central Asia was and is treated as sacred, as a public or private resource (in various formats) or used to produce other resources such as electricity and cotton.
Dr. Flora Roberts joined the group in 2016 to pursue a history of the ‘Tajik Sea’, the Kairakum reservoir established in the post-war Ferghana valley (PostDoc). She shares an interest in Soviet tourism and sanatoria with Nurzat Sultanalieva’s ethnography of water on holy lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan (PhD project since 2014). Group leader Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix has been conducting research with pastoralists, dam-builders and teenage residents on the Naryn river of Kyrgyzstan, using participatory video and biographic methods since 2014.
The group collaborates closely with a number of related projects in Tübingen (overview):
- Volkswagen Project 'The Social Life of a River: environmental histories, social worlds and conflict resolution along the Naryn-Syr Darya' [link]
- Collaborative Research Center 'Threatened Orders (CRC 923): 'Salinization as a threat to agrarian order in Russia, Kazakhstan/Tajikistan and Australia since 1945' [link]
- Collaborative Research Centre 'ResourceCultures' (CRC1070) [link]
Our offices can be found in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Tübingen castle and Gartenstraße 19.
