Dr van den Berg, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge
This proposal is highly original and distinctive
Book Description
Control and Subversion makes a real contribution to the study of Muslim societies in general as well as being a specific and unique study of a very neglected area - post-Soviet Tajikistan - which is gaining increasing importance in the international arena of Central Asia.
Harris moves effortlessly from a macro-political perspective, examining Tajik resistance to Soviet rule, to the micro-politics of family relations, love and sex. Utilising the insights of Michel Foucault, Harris explores how order is produced in Tajik society by practices of surveillance to ensure the maintenance of particular norms. Women, she finds, are at once the most repressed and the most repressing community members.
Colette Harris' experience is very rare: she speaks both Russian and Tajik, and has set up a development project in Tajikistan. This book combines both an ethnographic and gender perspective with practical insights into a society about which little is known in the West.
