Post-Soviet Chaos is a fine-grained ethnography of the changes occurring in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as they are understood by those persons most adversely affected by the introduction of capitalism: the dispossessed. Joma Nazpary provides the reader with a look into the everyday life of a society that, like many other postsocialist countries, is often defined in the Western general media in terms of transition success and failure. In bringing to light the voices of those he terms the dispossessed, the author intends to counterbalance the dominant, Western mode of explaining away the negative impacts of such transitions as evidence of the lack of development of the society or culture in question and of the country's need for Western aid and intervention. In contrast to this view, Nazpary argues that the development of the chaotic circumstances in Kazakhstan must be understood in relation to capitalism's inner contradictions and global expansion: in other words, as already a result of Western intervention in the form of globalization (p. 3). His ethnography is an account of the practices and categories with which certain Kazakh local actors make sense of Kazakhstan's transition from socialism as well as of the West's role in these changes.

Nazpary argues that the collapse of the Soviet system brought with it the distintegration of Kazakh society into two social networks: that of a rich elite minority and that of the dispossessed. The author works from the definition of the dispossessed developed by Caroline Humphrey to refer to those persons who have been deprived of the property, work, and entitlements they had received under socialism (p. 14). The emergence of these two social networks was a result of the former communist elite's response to the crisis of hegemony of the Soviet system. Far from suffering the loss of the Soviet system's ideological and moral authority, the former elites managed to regroup and ultimately accumulate even greater power and wealth by implementing what Nazpary defines as a “chaotic mode of domination” (pp. 6-7). This term refers to a new balance of power formed by two interlocking networks of the elite--holders of high offices in new government institutions and members of informal networks of influence--and the ability of these elite networks to arbitrarily exercise power over the entire population in spite of democratic reforms.

For Nazpary, the dispossessed are defined as much as by their having lost certain elemental benefits provided under the Soviet system as by their having been compelled under existing circumstances to assume new social strategies, obligations, and social relations (p. 14). The core of Nazpary’s book is an analysis of the main characteristics of Kazakh post-Soviet chaos as they are understood by the dispossessed and the range of strategies these social actors developed to survive in the face of this chaos. Individual chapters address the interlocking elements of the dispossessed's understanding of and reactions to chaos, including how the process of wealth differentiation through privatization is understood as plunder, the drastic increase of domestic and public violence, the development and operation of new social networks, women's practice of economic sexual strategies, ethnic tension, and the construction of Soviet and Western identities.

Nazpary's in-depth research among the numerous social networks he encountered during his fieldwork in the Kazakh city of Almaty enables him to provide grounded analyses of certain issues that in postsocialist societies are often addressed in an abstract or standardized manner. One of the strongest points of his analysis is the way he is able to illuminate the complex relations between women's new sexual strategies under Kazakh capitalism, ethnic tension, and the construction of an idealized Soviet identity. Nazpary does not address the issue of gender simply to include women in his ethnography. Addressing the cultural importance ascribed to gendered practices enabled the author to identify the cultural bases for a dichotomy that has developed between an idealized Soviet identity and the construction of capitalism and capitalists (domestic or foreign) as alien. By taking into account the social role of Soviet-alien opposition, Nazpary provides an alternative analysis of the ethnic tensions among Kazakhs as well as between Kazakhs and non-Kazakhs, which has often been described as the inevitable result of the clash between cultures (p. 182).

Nazpary's argument that the chaos in Kazakhstan is due in large part to capitalism's global expansion, epitomized by U.S. imperialism (p. 3), and to the complicity between the local elite and the West is, however, far less grounded. This is to some degree the result of Nazpary's almost exclusive focus on the dispossessed, which has enabled him to shed light on issues whose analysis has been until now hampered by almost ideological conceptions of the differences between socialism and capitalism. Although Nazpary's assertion that Kazakh social reality should be addressed as part of the global capitalist system is indisputable, his analytic approach should be expanded to address such an assertion ethnographically. This drawback aside, Nazpary's work is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet societies as well as a valuable resource for those interested in the effects of capitalism's expansion across the globe.