Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power
- 2 Racial categorization and censuses
- 3 Ethnic categorizations in censuses: comparative observations from Israel, Canada, and the United States
- 4 Language categories in censuses: backward- or forward-looking?
- 5 Resistance to identity categorization in France
- 6 On counting, categorizing, and violence in Burundi and Rwanda
- 7 Identity counts: the Soviet legacy and the census in Uzbekistan
- Index
- References
7 - Identity counts: the Soviet legacy and the census in Uzbekistan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power
- 2 Racial categorization and censuses
- 3 Ethnic categorizations in censuses: comparative observations from Israel, Canada, and the United States
- 4 Language categories in censuses: backward- or forward-looking?
- 5 Resistance to identity categorization in France
- 6 On counting, categorizing, and violence in Burundi and Rwanda
- 7 Identity counts: the Soviet legacy and the census in Uzbekistan
- Index
- References
Summary
Nations … are not out there to be counted; they are a function of social, political, and economic processes.
David AbramsonIdentity matters in so far as perceived ties and interactions between people, appearance, speech, place of residence, and behavior are all observable and classifiable differences. How social difference is constructed and the meanings attributed to those constructions are the basis for abstract, often overlapping and contradictory systems of classification such as kinship, language, race, ethnicity, and religion. As the chapters in this volume show, the names of these abstract systems are incorporated into the language of censuses whose manifest function is to count the state's citizens for a range of purposes including taxation, electoral districting, military conscription, affirmative action programs, and the selection of official languages. These studies also demonstrate that the census is a highly politicized project whose particular forms of interrogation and categorization are subject to contestation and manipulation. The census claims to represent collectivities in the form of social identity and, thereby, sets the terms for this very politicking.
My objective for this chapter is to show that in the case of Uzbekistan, such political possibilities were and are predicated on national difference. Soviet nationality policies, aided by such official state practices as census-taking and the application of census results in reinforcing citizenship and territoriality, have given birth to a political culture organized along the lines of national difference. This is not to say that post-Soviet “cultures” are nationally based.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Census and IdentityThe Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses, pp. 176 - 201Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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