History Professor to Speak on New Uzbekistan Book Thursday

Feb. 9, 2007 -- Marianne Kamp, associate professor in the University of Wyoming Department of History, will discuss her new book, "The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism," Thursday, Feb. 15.

The public talk begins at 4 p.m. in Room 252 of the Agriculture Building. She will sign books following the talk.

Kamp's groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women in their own words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

"You can read all of the documents, but when you actually hear from the people what they went through -- who gained, who lost and how they all felt -- history comes to life," Kamp says.

Drawing from oral histories and writings, Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation."

"In the 1920s Muslim women in Uzbekistan unveiled in this mass campaign. Some wanted to, some were forced to. The Uzbek society got very upset and as a result, several thousand Uzbek women were murdered," she says.

The examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early 20th century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today, Kamp says.

"When I talk to people now about what went on then, Uzbeks remember it as either a moment of liberation or a moment when the state basically forced all the women to become naked. There are polar extremes of the interpretation of the past," she says, adding that other factors, including government-mandated land reallocation and the closing of religious mosques, created the "Perfect Storm."

"Talking with the women who had unveiled, I learned that they came from all families, all backgrounds. Not one of them said, 'I wish I could wear that kind of veil again,' but, at the time, nothing was that clear and times were quite different," Kamp says.

"The kinds of questions that get raised in Uzbekistan are those that come up in other parts of the world: What are women's rights? What does it take to establish those rights? When we have them, we tend to take them for granted," she says. "Equality of any sort in society comes about in difficult ways, not because someone simply passes a law. It happens because people work toward it."

Paula Michaels, author of "Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia," says Kamp's book represents important new scholarship about Central Asia.

"This is surely a book that will set the standard in Central Asian women's history for a long time to come," Michaels says.

Posted on Friday, February 09, 2007