Relationality and Uprooting

towards a Caribbean reading of ex-Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

This paper offers a new way of understanding ex-Soviet Central Asia based on the intersection between ethnography and the thought of Édouard Glissant, who elaborates on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizome. My argument is that a political critique of the way Central Asian identities are lived and displayed can be made without recourse to the role that the state plays in everyday life, turning on its head the approach centered on the anthropology of the state. Relationality is presented as the rhizomatic alternative in a non-essentialist analysis of identities.