MUSEUMS AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION: DUNGANS AND UIGHURS IN THE QAZAQ SSR

Abstract

Abstract. This paper examines how Soviet knowledge about Dungans and Uighurs was produced through institutional practices rather than simply discovered. While existing scholarship has emphasized the role of population censuses and academic ethnography in managing ambiguities surrounding national classification, this article shifts attention to a less examined site of knowledge production-the museum.

Drawing on acquisition acts, expenditure records, and departmental plans from the Central Museum of Qazaqstan, the paper argues that museological practice in the 1930s functioned as a key technology of classificatory governance. Targeted collecting campaigns conducted by the Museum in 1936–1937, in cooperation with the Qazaq Base of the Academy of Sciences, resulted in extensive and carefully documented Dungan and Uighur collections that exceeded acquisitions for many other population groups. These patterns of collecting indicate institutional prioritization. By translating classificatory decisions into inventories, prices, and exhibition narratives, the museum rendered previously fragmented categories materially stable and administratively legible.

The paper further traces how this stabilization of knowledge was reorganized spatially over time. From the mid-1950s onward, Dungan studies became institutionally consolidated in the Kyrgyz SSR, while Uighur studies remained centered in the Qazaq SSR. This redistribution of scholarly authority reflects a “single-space” principle embedded in Soviet nationalities policy, demonstrating that governance of diversity operated not only through territorial administration but also through the structuring of knowledge infrastructures.