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This course seeks to introduce students to Central Asia – a region including the five former Soviet republics as well as parts of Afghanistan, China and Pakistan – through the lens of historical and social anthropology. By reading core texts in the study of Central Asia we will first go back in history, to a period when the region had not yet been dissected by the boundaries of modern nation-states. We will then work towards an analysis of societal processes that led from colonialism to socialist revolutions and different forms of nationalism. We will do so by looking at these processes as embedded in contexts of everyday life in which social practices linked to economy, gender, law, religion, ethnicity, politics, and local history intersect and entangle.