Takhira Tashbaeva

Takhira Tashbaeva was born on 7 September 1938 in Tashkent into an educated family. Her mother was Mohinur Nazirova. After finishing Tashkent School No. 42 she studied from 1955 to 1960 at the history faculty of Central Asian State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan), where her teachers included M. E. Masson, P. Kovalev, I. M. Muminov and L. V. Gentschke.

After graduating she entered postgraduate study at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan under the ethnologist O. A. Sukhareva. She defended her candidate dissertation in 1968.

In 1994, at the Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, she defended her doctoral dissertation on the modern family and family life of the Uzbek rural population and became a Doctor of Historical Sciences. Her scientific consultant was the ethnographer T. A. Zhdanko. In the 1990s Tashbaeva was scientific secretary of a dissertation council at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan.

Her work deals with the Uzbek family, everyday life and rites: “New Rites in Child-Rearing” (1980), “The Uzbek Woman in the Past and Present” (1987) and “The New and the Traditional in the Life of the Rural Uzbek Family” (1989, with M. D. Savurov). Copies of these books are held in the libraries of Princeton, Toronto and Stanford universities.

Her husband was Shamsiddin Sharapov, a Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor. She had two children. Takhira Tashbaeva died on 23 April 2022.