DECOLONIZING ‘THE FIELD’ IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CENTRAL ASIA: ‘Being there’ and ‘being here’

I wrote this chapter in the spirit of contributing to the decolonization of Central Asian anthropology. Drawing on an analysis of the works of the Russian orientalist, Aleksei Levshin (1798-1879), and his Kazakh critic, Chokan Valikhanov (1835-1865), I analyse historical practices of ‘entry into the field’, ‘being in the field’, and publication of the results, i.e., ‘descriptions and stories of the field’, in the West and Russia before the so-called ‘reflexive’ and ‘postcolonial turns’. I examine what Clifford Geertz terms the ‘gap between engaging others where they are and representing them where they are not,' and discuss how this gap continues to inflect the anthropology of Central Asia today.