In a world where the visual is becoming an integral part of knowledge, visuals can also express scholarly knowledge.

As such, for the 2019 conference, the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) organized its first-ever photo contest under the title: “The Researcher and His/Her Fieldwork in Central Eurasia“. In the gallery below, scholars and journalists present photos that reflect on the relationship between the researcher and the object of research and illuminate the different faces of fieldwork.

Photos by:

Abel Polese, Aksana Ismailbekova, Alexandru Badarau, Assel Choibekova, Cara Kerven, Kasia Ploskonka, Christian Kelly Scott, Everett Price, Jennifer Murtazashvili, Katerina Zach-Kozlova, Liliya Karimova, Matthew Brown, Moira O’Shea, Rashid Gabdulhakov, Farit Gabdulhakov, Snejana Atanova, Verena La Mela, Nyani Quarmyne, Laura Salm-Reifferscheidt and Talant Sultanov.

Abel Polese

Carpets in Turkmenistan, Mary oblast’ 2011 -A team of researchers (including myself) was invited to a celebration in a small village. They were offered food, drinks and a spectacle. To our surprise, the inhabitants of the village were not allowed into the area, separated by “carpet-fences”. Carpets also covered the entire ground of the celebration site. This little girl was too curious to see what was happening inside the carpet village and managed to sneak in.

Celebrations, Turkmenistan, Ashgabat 2011 – I was invited to lay flowers on a monument to Mollanepes to celebrate the great minds of the Turkmen nation. Many local people were also attending wearing national costumes. Details were looked after to perfection to give the few foreigners present a splendid image of Turkmenistan. These images then informed my work on informal nationalism.

Welcoming, Turkmenistan, Mary 2011 – Foreign guests arrived at the national theater for an international event. They were offered an idyllic picture of the country, full of young women and a taste of national food. This also informed some of my work on nationalism echoing what Vonnegut said “we are what we pretend to be”. We offer an image of the country in which we would like to believe ourselves, hoping that our guests will buy it and then convince us that we are really like that.

Musicians, Turkmenistan, Mary oblast’ 2011 – One of the many music shows shown to foreign researchers during an international event. I found it emblematic and intriguing that musicians were placed exactly under a large photo of Berdimuhammedov as if he was overseeing them. The image highlights once more the cult of personality developed in the country since 1991.

Aksana Ismailbekova

Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan – I am drawing a genealogical tree of Uzbeks in order to see the cousin and cross-cousin marriages. In Uzbek families, marriages are endogamous, i.e. people marry within specific social groups or social units and marriages are arranged between families.

Alexandru Badarau

The RO-CRESS 2018 expedition involving 11 researchers from Babeș-Bolyai University and ”Vasile Fati” Botanical Garden from Romania. Researchers aimed to collect a large number of soil and tree-ring samples along a 12,000 km transect from eastern Europe to eastern Asia to analyze the effect of climate change on the central Eurasian environment. Here is the usual work day in the Republic of Buriatiya, Russian Federation. Researchers on the left are collecting soil samples while the researcher on the right is taking a photograph of an iconic member of the Central Eurasian flora: Papaver nudicaule, the golden steppe poppy.

Assel Choibekova

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – The World Nomad Games took place in Kyrgyzstan on the “shoe side” of lake Issyk Kul. Surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Tian Shan mountain range and the vast meadows of a sweeping mountain Kyrchyn Gorge, Issyk Kul is the second largest alpine lake in the world.

Cara Kerven

In the Gara Gum desert of Turkmenistan, a newly married woman kneads bread for her husband’s family. After letting the dough rise, she will take it outside to the clay oven (tamdyr) and secure the loaves to the hot walls inside. The tedious process of cleaning the baked loaves is shared between her and her husband’s brother’s wives (elti). She wears the appropriate silk scarf (gýnaç) of married women and, when in the presence of older men, secures a portion of the scarf in her mouth (ýaşmak).

In the Gara Gum desert, Turkmenistan, a grandmother looks after her youngest grandson. In the background, her granddaughter helps spool the yarn, which will then be used to make plaited lengths (alaja) that protect against the evil eye. These alaja are most commonly plaited with four colors, the brown color often made from undyed camel hair.

In the Gara gum desert of Turkmenistan, a bride is given a neighbor’s child to hold on her wedding day in the hopes that the bride too, will soon have children of her own. The mother’s hand rests on a parcel of wedding gifts (podarka) and to the side, a young girl looks on excitedly. The bride is looking down and holding a white scarf (ak ýaglyk) between her lips in recognition of her modesty. She is covered from head to toe in layers of intricately embroidered silks and cotton (kürte), with her hair bound in scarves and adorned with metal jewelry which falls to her knees.

Hired camel shepherd in Moinkum, Jambyl Province, Kazakhstan.

In Murghab town, the largest settlement in the eponymously named district in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, Tajikistan. Many families lease their livestock to hired shepherds. Here, the wife of a shepherd pours yogurt (ayran) made from yak’s milk to take with us back into Murghab town.

Christian Kelly Scott

Passionate local Kyrgyz professionals and Christian Kelly Scott gather during a frigid morning in the Alai Rayon of Kyrgyzstan to strategize and assign the days research activities in March 2019. Local professionals were hired as part of Christian’s research team to conduct household surveys related to food security, social life, labor migration, and the environment in a remote high elevation village.

Everett Price

Uzbekistan, 2018 – Two senior policy advisors at the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Helsinki Commission) traveled to Bukhara, Uzbekistan as an official delegation to investigate the state of religious freedom in the country. This picture was taken by one of the advisors during a meeting with the Bukhari Jewish community in a local synagogue.

Farit Gabdulhakov

Uzbekistan, 2019 – School children from the city of Namangan on an excursion to the ancient city of Akhsikent. Destroyed by an earthquake in 1622, Akhsikent was a city with well-developed metallurgy. Swords produced there were widely sold all over the region, including in the famous markets in Damascus. After the earthquake, Namangan was founded by a surviving resident of Akhsikent.

Jennifer Murtazashvili

Kyrgyzstan, 2019 – The photo was taken on the outskirts of Jalalabad in June 2019. A blue building has the word “MAGA” spray painted on it. I thought this to be an unusual place to find MAGA propaganda. I’ve spoken to friends from the area to see if the photo may have more local meaning. There was no consensus on this. The juxtaposition of the spray-painted car was also quite interesting.

Kasia Ploskonka

Smaïl Bayaliyev’s artist studio in Shymkent, Kazakhstan – Bayaliyev was one member of the Kyzyl Traktor Group, the first avant-garde movement to emerge in Southern Kazakhstan after perestroika. Playing with the notions of self-Orientalisation within post-Soviet Kazakhstan, Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor) Group used Eastern mysticism, such as shamanistic practices and the iconic image of a wild nomad turning tradition and ritual into performance art. In this photo Bayaliyav spontaneously plays and dances along the lines of the shamanistic performances the group was known for. The intensity of these performances increased into the early 2000s; as group dynamics changed, individual projects formed along mutlithematic lines such as nomadicism, ritual and identity.

Kateřina Zäch-Kozlová

Water Supply in Kyzyl-Oi, Kyrgyzstan, 2016 – I focused on daily use of public wells and everyday experiences with them in terms of their social and cultural water value. I explained from a cultural-historical perspective that the way people think about wells as material objects and what they connect to them shapes their subjective perception, as well their understanding of wells. In this perspective, wells embody individual thoughts, reminiscences and collective memories of local people. They are an important part of local Kyrgyz culture and water history.

Technical knowledge and skills, Kyzyl-Oi, Kyrgyzstan, 2016 – I looked at the water infrastructure and explained how the technical functionality of wells has changed overtime. In this perspective, I showed the difficulty between the local weather climate and wells’ technical conditions.

Kyrgyz Woman on the Riverside of the Kökömeren, 2015 – The aim of my master’s thesis (2017) was to systematically examine the everyday habitat of the water culture and changing infrastructure in the Kyrgyz village. My role as an ethnologist was to decipher social Kyzyl-Oi’s organisation of water and complex networks of human relation using a water lens – whereby empirical research of water places of everyday life and water history, were of special importance. Kyzyl-Oi, Kyrgyzstan.

Liliya Karimova

Tatarstan, Russia, 2018 – I took this photo at a mosque one Saturday afternoon in July 2018 in Tatarstan, Russia. I came to the newly-built mosque in a small town outside of Kazan to meet with a Muslim Tatar woman I wanted to interview. While waiting for the woman in the balcony—the women’s prayer section of the mosque—I peeped from behind the vertical blinds that blocked the view from the balcony onto the main floor, the men’s section. My female ethnographic gaze fell on a man who settled on the floor with a copy of the Qur’an. While the man could not see me, I could see and photograph him.

Matthew Brown

Kyrgyzstan, 2016- This photo was taken in June of 2016 in the Suusamyr Valley of Kyrgyzstan through a bus window. I was in Bishkek for a summer language program and knew next to nothing about Central Eurasia. This is one of many such scenes I viewed from our school bus asit took us around the country, and I wanted nothing more than to transcend that glass and learn more.

Moira O’Shea

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – Research on the history and contemporary form of Kok-boru has led to conversations about the origin of the game, about which country’s rules to use in international games, and the mutual understanding between a rider and his horse. One idea that has stood out, however, is the idea that Kok-boru is something that is in the blood and which is not explicitly taught but rather demonstrated. To me, this picture, taken after Kyrgyzstan won the final match during the World Nomadic Games in 2018, illustrates the sharing of knowledge of the game from one generation to the next. Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – Kelechek, the name of the team in blue, means ‘the future’ in Kyrgyz. Winning the Mayor’s Cup during this game certainly meant big things for the team as they were able to compete in the Victory Day celebrations and have a chance to move from the semi-professional to professional league. While Kok-boru is a game with an ancient history, it is simultaneously being popularized and formalized in Kyrgyzstan. with the creation of two leagues, and much attention being paid to international standards for the game. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 2019.

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – This photo was taken during the World Nomadic Games in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan, 2018. Attending every match of Kok-boru, I became friendly with some of the fans who also watched every match, like this group, some of whom had come from Jalal-Abad together. Sitting with them was an education in the skills and characteristics one needs to become a good Kok-boru player, as well as an opportunity to hear stories about their own adventures, and sometimes misadventures, when playing the game.

Rashid Gabdulhakov

Uzbekistan, 2019 – An old man from the fairytale ‘1001 nights’ at Chorsu bazaar in the centre of Namangan. He is captured here selling “misholda” – a local marshmallow-like sweet substance served during the holy month of Ramadan.

Snejana Atanova

Turkmenistan, 2018 – Turkmen wedding, Ashgabat, May 2018. A Turkmen bride in traditional dress -koynek and kurte. This photo was taken during my fieldwork on “National identity in everyday life in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan.

Nyani Quarmyne

text by Laura Salm-Reifferscheidt, submitted by Talant Sultanov

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – A sheep in a wheelbarrow beside the main street of the village of Suusamyr, which lies above 200m in a valley of the same name in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, on 14 October 2018. The village is home to Suusamyr Net, a community network that has brought a high-speed Internet link to the community, and will soon be providing residents with fast connections by fibre to the home.

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – Rayana Imankulova (4), September 2018, lives with her parents Akylbek Imankulov (46) and Gulzat Raimbekova (43) in the rangelands of Tokoilu in the Suusamyr Valley, above 2000m in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan. She loves to watch cartoons on her parents’ smartphone. Before a Suusamyr Net community network tower was erected right next to her family’s small corrugated iron home, they had to buy expensive and unreliable mobile data package. The family now has free WiFiin exchange for looking after the tower equipment, and Rayana can watch her favorite cartoons non-stop – she particularly loves the Russian series Masha and the Bear. “The one where the rabbits ate all the carrots and potatoes and Masha had to spank them is the best.”

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – Elchibek Karabaev, 58, September 2018, is a farmer in the Suusamyr Valley in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, where he has 20 hectares of grain fields, 200 sheep, 40 horses and 10 cows. He does not use the Internet for doing business himself, but he sees the importance of fast and reliable connectivity in the valley. “Suusamyris very mountainous and underdeveloped. It is known for its rough climate and the harsh winters. Internet will help to bring this place forward,” Karabaev says. “The Internet has a lot of benefits. We get more news. Before there was only one TV channel and two weekly papers that reached us here. Now we can get news from all around the world.”

Kyrgyzstan, 2018 – A dish bringing a high-speed wireless Internet link to the village of Suusamyr, which lies above 200m in a valley of the same name in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, on 13 October 2018. The village is home to community network Suusamyr Net, and now that the main link has been established, the network will soon be providing residents with connections by fibre to the home.

Verena La Mela