Since the last third of the nineteenth century, major reterritorialization1 has occurred in Central Asia, including both the geographical reformulation of political territories and the socially constructed reformulation of cultural territories. The central facts are well known: between 1865 and 1920, all of Central Asia north of the Amu Darya became part of the Russian, and subsequently, the Soviet, colonial empire. Under Soviet rule, Central Asia was divided into political territories whose boundaries did not accurately reflect the cultural boundaries of the populations that lived there. The Central Asian republics remained geo-politically stable from 1929, when Tajikistan was recognized as a full-fledged Soviet republic, until 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the five Central Asian republics—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, Kirghizia, and Kazakhstan—were thrust, some of them rather unwillingly, into a new life as independent states.