Domesticating the Intellectual

Domesticating the Intellectual: sustaining values and ways of life in times of radical socio-political turmoil

While many intellectual histories typically focus on the often public-facing lives of socially and politically influential intellectuals, this paper’s intervention is to argue that at the heart of intellectual histories are family ones. Focusing on the movement of families between Samarqand, Bukhara and Dushanbe over the last hundred years, this paper directly links kinship to knowledge production, showing how everyday family life plays a major role in shaping, sustaining and safeguarding intellectuals’ lives through decades of radical societal upheaval and political persecution.

About the speaker

Dr Aeron O’Connor is a Social Anthropologist focused on family and intellectual histories in urban Central Asia, particularly Tajikistan. Her research interests lie in knowledge and cultural production, social mobility and cosmopolitanism, and she draws on existing scholarship on the Persianate sphere to situate Central Asia in a more complex web of values and histories than its recent Soviet history allows.