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Environmental Humanities in Central Asia. Relations Between Extraction and Interdependence
The Soviet authorities continued the imperial water policies of the Tsarist government in Central Asia on a much larger scale. They were supported in their destructive landscape management not just by engineers and scientists, but also by historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers, foremost among them the Khorezmian Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. These scholars were believers in socialist progress who wanted to contribute to the Soviet transformation of Central Asia by identifying, with innovative methodology, areas of ancient irrigation where they thought irrigated agriculture could be resumed. The disastrous environmental consequences (the ‘Aral Crisis’) raise questions not just about the water policies of authoritarian empires, but also about the active involvement in them of scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and related disciplines.