In recent years, the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan has largely been known in and outside of Central Asia for the tension and violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that erupted in 1990 and later in 2010, which resulted in injury or death for thousands and in displacement for more than a hundred thousand. Morgan Liu's new book discusses these incidents, but it is not concerned with them as such. Rather, its task is to tell the stories of the places behind the headlines and of the people for whom the city was home as well as a site of hopes for the future and efforts to create good lives—before the events of 2010 shattered many of these hopes and efforts.

Through extensive anthropological fieldwork conducted between 1993 and 2011—a period spanning almost twenty years—Morgan Liu tells a story about Osh's Uzbek community and their post-Soviet predicament as a doubly marginalized group. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics in 1991, Uzbeks living in Osh became citizens of an independent Kyrgyzstan, where political power came to be held predominantly by ethnic Kyrgyz. A strict border regime limited their access to Uzbekistan, the country they identified with and, influenced by the Uzbek media, tended to see through rose-colored glasses as characterized by stability, prosperity, and global importance.

The book describes their liminal predicament and their various ways of coping with it, of finding niches within it, and of imagining better futures for themselves and their communities. More particularly, it focuses on the central role played by the Osh cityscape itself in all of this: for the author, Osh is a lens through which he sees more general developments in post-Soviet Central Asia, such as the introduction of a market economy, growing inequality, changing border regimes, and the growing importance of ethnic and religious identifications. Osh Uzbeks, it is argued, treated urban places as “frameworks for making sense of the world and potentially for acting on it” (p. xx).

In order to demonstrate this, the author takes the reader on a tour through and around Osh, pausing at various places and pondering what they tell us about Central Asia and Osh Uzbeks’ ways of viewing and engaging the post-Soviet world. Liu focuses on what he sees as a variety of central idioms anchored in urban space, which, he argues, organized the thoughts and actions of Osh Uzbeks. We are taken to the bazaar, for instance, which was destroyed during the 2010 events, but which was until then seen as an idiom of mediation because of its role as a site of various sorts of urban exchange and contact between groups of people that otherwise tended not to encounter each other. For those whom post-Soviet developments had dispossessed, forcing them to become sellers in order to make a living, the bazaar stood for shattered lives and despair, whereas for others it represented new opportunities and sources of wealth. We are also taken to the border with Uzbekistan, which is seen as a space that concretized Osh Uzbeks’ marginal and liminal status in both countries. And we are taken on a tour through what residents and visitors alike tend to see as the two “parts” of Osh: the Central Asian city of the maḥalla neighborhoods and the Soviet city of boulevards, shops, microdistricts, and government buildings. Far from representing two different worlds—one “traditional” and the other “modern”—Liu demonstrates how these two “parts” are intimately connected, and together tell a story of evolving relations between the Soviet and the Central Asian, between state and subjects.

In what is for this reader the most interesting chapters of the book, we are taken to Osh's maḥallas, the Uzbek-majority neighborhoods which, with their narrow and labyrinth streets and inward-facing houses, seem impenetrable and intimidating to many outsiders, while embodying the very essence of Uzbekness to Uzbeks themselves: they “have been heavily invested with the thoughts, memories, and dreams of [their] residents. The mahalla is central to what it means to be Uzbek in Osh” (p. 105). The author argues that for Osh Uzbeks, the maḥalla was an idiom for thinking and attempting to live out a moral community, and its very structure tended to produce a certain kind of being in the world that some people cherished as authentically Uzbek and others experienced as claustrophobic. For the former, the maḥalla stood out as the site for (forming) proper Uzbek morality and virtues, such as propriety and respect for elders and tradition. For the latter, and in particular those who did not fit into predominant ideas of proper Uzbekness—divorcees and single women, for example—it was experienced as an oppressive space that did not allow much deviation from the norm. The author goes on to argue that the maḥalla idiom provides content to Osh Uzbeks’ imaginaries of the state. For them, the state is essentially a maḥalla writ large and under the tarbiya—upbringing or training—of the president, who is imagined as a khān—a virtuous character who oversees his state “with the same sense of personal stewardship as elders were supposed to oversee the neighborhood” (p. 188).

Morgan Liu's well-written book is an impressive piece of work. The fieldwork on which it is based covers an unusually long time span, enabling the author to focus on processes rather than structures. Liu offers an immensely rich ethnography that testifies to an intimate knowledge of the places and people described and that situates the reader in the midst of Osh's urban landscapes. It forces us to see the things that local residents see—and that they see with—and at times provides at least this reader with the feeling of getting lost in the complexity of the cityscape, described in minute detail. The book demonstrates a core anthropological virtue: that of focusing on seemingly marginal phenomena and showing how they may add new light to larger issues. In this case, Liu demonstrates how a city with a marginal status in a region that is itself most often treated as marginal, adds new light to the broader story of Soviet and post-Soviet transformations in Central Asia as well as to postcolonial predicaments more generally. It tells close-to-the-ground stories about post-Soviet “transition” through Osh Uzbeks’ various efforts to cope with, and understand, its effects. While doing so, the book provides an extraordinarily nuanced picture of Kyrgyz–Uzbek relations, which, although replete with tensions and cultural stereotypes of the sort that are typically manipulated in conflict situations (e.g., civilized Uzbeks vs. primitive Kyrgyz nomads, or free Kyrgyz vs. authoritarian Uzbeks), are also characterized by a will to coexistence. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the region and an important contribution to the anthropology of Central Asia. More generally, demonstrating how whole imaginaries may be rooted in space, in everyday urban life, it is an important contribution to discussions of the significance of place in how people conceive of the world and should, as such, be of interest to a larger audience.