26-27 June 2024 | 'Measuring Eurasia: A Conference on Survey Sciences at the Edges of Empire' Conference
Date: Wednesday, 26th June & Thursday, 27th June 2024-350x241.png)
Time: Day 1: 9.15am-5.30pm | Day 2: 9.30am-3pm
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor)
This conference analyzes attempts to survey the edges of the Russian Empire, from the Baltic and Black seas to the Bering Strait. Historians and geographers have used “survey science” to study global enterprises of astronomy and physics in the early nineteenth century, focusing on their coordination across the British Empire. Measuring Eurasia reorients this field of research to develop new histories of science and surveillance in the Russian imperial world. It emphasizes diverse surveys carried out across disparate borderlands—ethnographic as well as geodetic surveys, expeditions of land and sea, and sciences of ice, plants, and peat.
Recent research points to an emerging study of Eurasian survey sciences not as self-evident acts of expansion and modernization, but as social and cultural endeavors that need to be explained. The production of space is complex terrain: surveillance projects often enrolled diverse artists, brokers, and servitors. Maps might therefore be used to negotiate or subvert indigenous claims to land, nation, or dynasty. Contest over survey technique and nomenclature could similarly magnify questions of social and political (dis)order.
KEYNOTE LECTURE | 26 June @ 4.30pm | Humanities Institute H204
Professor Adeeb Khalid (Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota): "Getting to Know Central Asia: The Production of Imperial Knowledge and its Discontents”
ABSTRACT
When Russian armies conquered Central Asia in the 19th century, the Russians knew very little about the region. Over the decades, imperial ethnographers, geographers, and Orientalists created a vast corpus of colonial knowledge about the newly conquered territories. In doing so, they had the help of numerous local actors. Some, such as Shoqan Wälikhanov (Chokan Valikhanov), acted as imperial officers. Far more commonly, locals acted as collaborators and intermediaries to imperial experts. Russian imperial knowledge of Central Asia owed a great deal to their local collaborators, who then appropriated this collaboration for their own ends. In this paper, I will explore the production of geographic and ethnographic in Tsarist Central Asia through these collaborations, with a focus on a few key figures and sites of collaboration in the Tsarist period. Ethnographic knowledge, at least, remained unstable and weak down to the end of the old regime. The paper will conclude with a brief look forward into the early Soviet period.
SPEAKER BIO
Adeeb Khalid is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College. He is a leading historian of Central Asia and a specialist on its sedentary societies from the Russian conquest of the 1860s to the present. Supported variously by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others, Adeeb has published four books: The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (1998), Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (2007), Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Revolution, and Empire in the Early USSR (2015) and Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (2021), which provides an integrated narrative of the “Russian” and “Chinese” parts of the Central Asia. Thematically, these and other works range explore transformations of culture and identity and the fate of Islam under Tsarist and Soviet rule.
Conference organiser: (opens in a new window)Dr Patrick Anthony (IRC Postdoc Fellow, UCD School of History & Hi Resident Scholar) | Contact email: (opens in a new window)patrick.anthony@ucd.ie
This conference is supported by the IRC, UCD Humanities Institute, UCD College of Arts & Humanities (CAH), UCD Earth Institute, and CAH Environmental Humanities Thematic Research Strand.