The book examines the relations between an economic phenomenon, pastoralism, and a social one, patrilineal descent-reckoning. These relations are described and analyzed on the basis of long-term fieldwork and through the investigation of the existing historical and ethnographic sources. By developing a historical anthropological approach, the book offers a new perspective on pastoralism in a region that has remained largely unexplored up to now. It is of interest for specialists of Central Asia as a cultural area, for anthropologists and historians as well as for all those who are willing to initiate themselves in the past and present of Kyrgyzstan.

This volume seeks to extend our understanding of how knowledge about the past was and is being produced in central and northern Eurasia. Its authors use the methods of several disciplines literary studies, history, anthropology, area studies in an attempt to seize all the complexity of "history making" as a social phenomenon and to locate the actors and practices of history making in central and northern Eurasia within a broader context of scholarly reflections on what past or history is, and how it matters.