Ruslana Bovhyria1; 1 Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Discussion
This paper explores how legal pluralism and practices of nature appropriation shaped human relations and environment of the lower Caspian wetlands in the last decades of the Russian imperial rule in Central Asia. The territory under consideration stretches over a densely populated Turkmen coast stitched together by alluvial banks of Atrek and Gurgen Rivers. In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire and Qajar Iran and their unwavering will to impose their own ideas of legality met on this watershed. The Gurgen River basin was tied together by complex hydrology, sturgeon, seasonal birds, forests, and dozens of transient communities. It was a natural border and rich geography to think comparetively about mobility, extraction, and materiality. Harvesting sturgeon, seeking oil underground, or moving livestock along the coast was deeply bound to social rituals and local articulation of legal orders. In other words, to engage with nature implied engaging with complex layers of territorial and cultural understandings of collective ownership. Yet, with Russian conquest of Transcaspia these imperatives were laced with new normative assumptions about the trajectory of land and water use. Departing from prevailing historiography on borderlands and utilizing materials from archives in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, this paper seeks to re-adress the perennial tension between capitalist development, territorial disputes, resources, and imperial law in Russian Turkestan.
