This thesis offers a new approach to the theory of group identity while examining the complex manifestations of identity in Central Asia. The theoretical dimension of the study contrasts conventional conceptions of culturally defined identity groups with a constructionist approach. Conventional conceptions entail implicit assumptions treating groups as entities in the world. This thesis makes these assumptions explicit and characterizes them as the "organismic model" of identity. It argues for a constructionist approach, termed the "attention-channeling model." Group identity is understood, not as a property of groups, but of individuals, who maintain situationally contingent, contradictory, and complexly articulating conceptions of their simultaneous membership in multiple groups. Criteria are developed for assessing how particular identities are formed and made compelling by the social world which channels attention to their significance in life situations; such criteria characterize forms of identity in terms of their situational relevance, and the richness, comprehensiveness, essentialness, and intensity of the ways they are defined.; In former-Soviet Central Asia, despite official efforts to establish "national" and "Soviet" identities, numerous alternative conceptions of group maintain great importance in social life. The "national" identities indicated by the terms "Ozbek" and "Tajik", which acquired their current official meaning with the establishment of Ozbekistan and Tajikistan in 1924, have not become exclusive, as intended. Many other overlapping concepts of descent, region, religion and other cultural groups continue to structure the lives of Central Asians. This study is among the very few that have been based on extensive Western anthropological fieldwork in the former Soviet Union, and it is the first in Central Asia (based on fieldwork between 1986 and 1993). In seeking to trace the historical development of the forms of identity observed in the present, extensive use is also made of historical sources.; The study examines implications of scholarly "misperceptions" and political manipulations of identity. Efforts to form identity have played an important role in ideological control, state legitimacy, and conflict, as well as mobilization of resistance. Politicized identity, and particularly the construction of "ethnic animosity," were instrumental in recent Central Asian conflicts, especially Tajikistan's Civil War of 1992.
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