Associate professor of history Marianne Kamp talks about collectivist farms in Uzbekistan during her presentation “Boy Loves Tractor” Tuesday.
Tractors have been important to cultures outside the United States.
As explored by Marianne Kamp, University of Wyoming associate professor of history, the historical effects of tractors extend far beyond what most would usually assume. Tuesday, Kamp hosted a talk titled, “Boy Loves Tractor,” where she outlined a series of recollections by a variety of correspondents from all over the world.
“In examining people’s stories about the past, I am fascinated by the link between their individual situated moment, the things that they truly experienced and the context and the way that shapes how they think about what it is that they went through and the stories they tell about that,” said Kamp.
The focus of the talk is not the history of tractors, but rather the period of collectivist farms in Uzbekistan.
“Uzbek farmers went from being individual farmers to having to work together in collectives,” explained Kamp. “This is a big period in soviet history.”
Kamp’s study about this soviet period was started in 2001 and ended in 2004. Her personal project’s main focus was the human view of the collectivist change.
The goal of Kamp’s talk is to give her audience some information about places that are unfamiliar.
“Uzbekistan is very foreign to Americans and I wanted to tell you some interesting things about this place,” she said.
Apart from providing factual information she also aims to deliver some theoretical knowledge.
“What I want you to take away is a question about how people interact with the events that will become historical,” she shared. “We go through all kinds of things; we go through them as individuals, we experience something and then we talk about it. Then we tell somebody else, but we also read about a similar experience and we see a similar experience in film and somehow, all of a sudden, what we remember is partly exactly what we went through, but it’s partly reshaped by all those retellings.”
The event was really about showing the way tractors and the transition into collectivist farms affected individuals and how these individuals felt about these changes and these moments in time.
Kamp began the talk by sharing the recollections of O’ktam Ashurova, a female tractor driver in Uzbekistan. O’ktam became a driver because her father joined the collectivist farms, said Kamp. O’ktam’s recorded statements highlighted the pride she had as a female tractor driver, as well as what living was like for her as a tractor driver. Kamp went on to talk about the reception of tractors in Uzbekistan.
The title of the talk “Boy Loves Tractors” is explained by Kamp as a reference to how Americans referred to soviet entertainment.
“This is a trope,” she said. “This is a way that American critics of soviet literature referred to soviet literature and film and so forth from the 1930s.”
Several examples of soviet media portraying tractor drivers as heroic were shown to illustrate the cultural prevalence of tractor drivers.
“Everyone in these narratives and all of our narrators regarded tractors as a totally unqualified good,” Kamp said. “This was unique in stories about collectivization, many other aspects of collectivization were painful, horrible, disruptive, and so forth.”
