2008 Recipient

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Adeeb Khalid
Title: Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press)

With a finely tuned appreciation for the work of historical consciousness, cultural frames, and theological reason, Adeeb Khalid takes today’s “Central Asian problem,” and turns it on its head in this bravura study of how seven decades of Soviet rule deeply transformed religious and social action in contemporary Central Asia. Drawing on a diverse, polyglot range of sources, he shows the multiple ways by which socialist rule redefined the contours of Islamic practice in the USSR. Where scholars and commentators before him have been ready to declare Soviet-era Islam a unified democratic resistance movement only to later, paradoxically, proclaim post-Soviet Islam to be a threat, and in an age where Central Asian political networks are often primitivized through readings of their basis in clan or tribal structures, Khalid offers close readings of archival sources, memoirs, ethnographic record, and interviews to suggest a predominantly Muslim world area that is by no means antiquated or isolated from the political transformations across the formerly socialist world. Canons old and new are challenged in this finely written and elegant study.

Honorable Mention: Chad Bryant and John Randolph