Signs of Sovereignty

This chapter focuses on sovereignty as it appears and disappears from view in everyday life in sites where that stretch and reach is contested or problematic. Drawing on several periods of fieldwork over the course of a decade (2004–2014) in Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, and focusing on fieldwork around two geographical exclaves, Sokh (Uzbekistan) and Vorukh (Tajikistan), it explores how sovereignty might appear differently if we track its movement through claims, names, and objects as they circulate and reverberate in the region of a historically contentious and still, in parts, officially “unwritten” (neopisany) and internationally disputed border. In a situation of contested histories, the challenge for local residents was often not so much that of “obeying the law” as knowing “whose rules rule” in any given encounter. The chapter then looks at maps, and stories of past mappings and countermappings, as a vehicle for exploring these local signs of sovereignty and their (non-)recognition in everyday life. Indeed, maps have a particularly critical role to play in producing an affect of sovereignty at the juncture between people and territory.