This monograph’s leading contribution is its innovative understanding of women’s complexity in ways that oppose the received wisdom about what must happen at the state, government, or international development level for women to be considered empowered. . . .The book will be useful primarily for graduate students and researchers focused on Central Asia, but it will also appeal to scholars of feminist studies concerning women in development and transitional societies. . . .Tursunova has set a standard for detail throughout the eight chapters because she provides a near-complete understanding of how rural women work, cope with state-imposed constraints, seek out opportunities, involve themselves in credit networks, and learn about and practice Islam in part to deal with interpersonal relationships, cure illnesses, and salve relationships. For example, her discussion of gap—an Uzbek practice whereby small groups of friends socialize at a particular friend’s home to enjoy themselves, eat, and provide each other with material support for all sorts of needs (rotating credit societies)—is unparalleled in contemporary writing on Central Asia.

Slavic Review

Women's Lives and Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: Ceremonies of Empowerment and Reconciliation is very timely and pertinent to the current geopolitics of conflict and to the disciplines of anthropology, women’s studies, global studies, and peace and conflict programs. Through exhaustive research, Zulfiya Tursunova calls for women’s empowerment by emphasizing the links between economic development and conflict resolution from a feminist perspective. Through ethnographic research in a village in Uzbekistan, Tursunova details how grass roots women achieve equality in their society in culture-specific ways. Women’s Lives and Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan calls for researchers to look at the alternative strategies women employ to empower themselves and become mediators, not in an attempt to challenge dominant western paradigms of feminism and conflict resolution, but to expose the west to these strategies as viable options for local women.

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, San Diego State University

This is a groundbreaking book on how rural women strive for personal and social development, peacemaking, and healing during a time of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. Through their labor and social activities, women mobilize a wealth of strategies and draw on cultural knowledge and practices in order to confront barriers and hardship. Dr. Tursunova conducted the research in Uzbek and in a spirit of relational accountability with the women whose voices, experiences, and perspectives are central to this research.

Jessica Senehi, University of Manitoba