SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY OF FAMILY, MARRIAGE, GENDER EQUALITY AND TRADITIONAL RITUALS IN UZBEKISTAN: A CRITICAL REASSESSMENT

Abstract

This article examines the representation of family, marriage, gender relations, and traditional rituals in Soviet historical and ethnographic scholarship on Uzbekistan. Particular attention is paid to the methodological and ideological framework through which Soviet scholars interpreted changes in family structure, marriage practices, women's social status, and traditional customs. The study argues that Soviet historiography generated a substantial body of empirical material concerning Uzbek family life and social transformation, but its interpretation was strongly influenced by Marxist-Leninist concepts of social development, modernization, secularization, and the transformation of so-called patriarchal relations. Soviet scholarship frequently presented women's emancipation, participation in education and labor, civil marriage, and the transformation of traditional rituals as indicators of socialist modernization. At the same time, religious and customary practices were often interpreted primarily as remnants of the pre-socialist social order. The article proposes a critical reading of Soviet ethnographic literature that distinguishes its empirical value from its ideological interpretive framework. Such an approach makes it possible to reconsider Soviet-era scholarship as an important historical source for studying the transformation and continuity of family and gender relations in Uzbekistan.