Adrienne Edgar - Böcker

Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia examines the practice and experience of interethnic marriage in a range of countries and eras, from imperial Germany to present-day Tajikistan. In this interdisciplinary volume Adrienne Edgar and Benjamin Frommer have drawn contributions from anthropologists and historians. The contributors explore the phenomenon of intermarriage both from the top down, in the form of state policies and official categories, and from the bottom up, through an intimate look at the experience and agency of mixed families in modern states determined to control the lives and identities of their citizens to an unprecedented degree.Contributors address the tensions between state ethnic categories and the subjective identities of individuals, the status of mixed individuals and families in a region characterized by continual changes in national borders and regimes, and the role of intermarried couples and their descendants in imagining supranational communities. The first of its kind, Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia is a foundational text for the study of intermarriage and ethnic mixing in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

Co-winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society's prize for best book in History and the Humanities in 2022 and 2023, and winner of the The Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies of the Association for the Study of NationalitiesIntermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.

В отличие от своих соперников по холодной войне, Советский Союз прославлял смешанные браки среди разнообразных этнических групп как знак нерушимой дружбы народов и скорого появления единого «советского народа». Однако в последние десятилетия существования СССР взгляд на национальный вопрос становился все более примитивными и даже расистским. В этой ситуации смешанные семьи оказывались не в состоянии понять или принять свою сложную идентичность: выходцы из межэтнических советских браков часто отмечали, что «официальная» национальность в их документах не соответствовала их субъективным ощущениям. Опираясь на десятки интервью, а также советские документы, статьи, фильмы и книги, Адриенн Эдгар показывает, как смешанные пары и семьи остро и болезненно переживали слом идеи «советского народа».