Making a Living from Everyday Contradictions

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, political borders and sociocultural boundaries have been increasingly (re-)negotiated across and within states and societies of post-Soviet Central Asia. The government of Kazakhstan, in the last few years, for instance, has tightened control over its border to Kyrgyzstan, while state control over water management in cotton and wheat agriculture in Uzbekistan has been reinforced, drawing a clearly distinguishing boundary between water management for state-planned cash crop agriculture and for household-level small-scale subsistence agriculture.

This chapter explores the production and reproduction of inherently contradictory sets of rule and everyday practice as governance tool and mechanism by empirically assessing the practices of Uzbek water users in Khorezm Province, Uzbekistan, and of Dungan traders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and China by drawing conceptual inspiration from scholarly debate on border and boundary production. The production, dissolution and reproduction of political borders and sociocultural boundaries are studied as acts of defining difference and the attempt of ordering—in some cases territorially, in others socioculturally bound. These ordering attempts are at the same time conceptualised as processes of contestation that result in amorphous, permeable and continuously renegotiated borders and boundaries, and in at first sight contradictory, but eventually beneficial, coexistence of different systems of ordering in everyday life social practice.