A Fragmented Family Story: Transferring Cultural Capital in Soviet Tashkent

This article combines oral histories with documents from family and public archives to re-assemble fragments of a Tashkent family history, and it uses Bourdieu’s theses on social reproduction and cultural capital to analyze the ways that this family repurposed its status-seeking decisions in changed political circumstances. Beginning with the author’s effort to document an ancestor who served as a shine-keeper, the article explores what became of that religious role as successive generations turned to new sources of cultural capital. Evidence shows the author’s grandmother’s elision of her lineage, simultaneous reinforcement of her traditional social status, and embrace of the role of Soviet teacher and intellectual. Soviet period repression led some families to destroy lineage documents, and to recount the past in selective ways. The author’s research partially reconstructs the strategies of a Tashkent family who transferred, hid, and reconfigured its cultural capital.