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Enacting Memoryscapes: Urban Assemblages and Embodied Memory in Post-Socialist Tashkent

Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, my doctoral dissertation explores the ways in which embodied memory processes are generated by and through the interaction of humans with urban infrastructure. Drawing upon a wide range of approaches from across several disciplines – anthropology, sociology, human and cultural geography, and science and technology studies – in order to propose a framework capable of capturing the multiplicity, fluidity, messiness, and contingency of memory, my dissertation suggests a reconceptualisation of the notion of the memoryscape which departs from the traditional structuralist representational approaches to the notion. Instead, it sees the memoryscape as an assemblage – more than one but less than many, at the same time collective and individual – enacted by means of the co-functioning of human and non-human components, and especially by the various memory processes that this co-functioning generates. Accordingly, rather than a uniform collective socio-cultural process materialised and enacted in space and/or by objects, this project understands memory as a collective phenomenon that is embedded in our bodily processes and embodied practices and hence is experienced and performed in individualised contexts of everyday lives of bodies moving through the time and space of affective life. Such a conceptualisation, the dissertation argues, can provide us with an ontological, epistemological, and methodological apparatus suitable for understanding how memory processes are enacted in different ways at different sites within an urban context.

In this direction, the analytical chapters of the dissertation are devoted to the examination of three urban infrastructural systems in Tashkent: the informal taxi economy and its role in the wayfinding practices of the population; the centralised district heating system and the various ways in which the population deals with its structural limitations and failures; and the city’s urban trees and how Tashkent dwellers negotiate their – often illicit – felling. In each case, the interaction between humans and the various actors that comprise those infrastructural systems which occurs by means of everyday practices results in the generation of memory processes. Riding taxis has resulted in the creation of a local system of orientation points known as orientiry, which are personal and collective at the same time and simultaneously exist in the present and in the past. Using the city’s centralised district heating means devising strategies to heat up or cool down one’s apartment, which produces narratives that juxtapose the new alternatives with the socialist era infrastructure and position the latter in the past. And the felling of trees inflicts a series of phantom pains, which can take the form of nostalgic narratives but can also evolve into physical somatic pain as a result of the exposure to sunrays and UV radiation.

While these systems – in more or less the same material form – can be found in most post-Soviet Central Asian cities, in the case of Tashkent their negotiation results in everyday practices and bodily processes that are characteristic of and exclusive to urban life in the capital of Uzbekistan. By offering a historical and technical background to each of the infrastructural systems selected and analysing the everyday context within which the practices produced and/or supported by them are situated, the chapters highlight the fact that the memory processes generated by means of these practices are unique as well. At the same time, however, they weave together memoryscapes that are both entities themselves and parts of larger memoryscapes.