Tatars

Islamic Historiography and "Bulghar" Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia

Allen J. Frank, Islamic Historiography and "Bulghar" Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden: Brill, 1998. ix + 232 pp.This text deals with the development of Bulghar regional identity among Tartars and Bashkirs — Muslims living in the Volga-Ural region. Based on locally-produced Islamic manuscripts, the book examines how these Muslims manipulated legends, conversion narratives, and sacred geography to create a body of sacred historiography that expressed a meaningful regional identity, and one which responds to the changing relationship between these Muslims and the Russian state over the 19th century. The book also traces the debate between traditionalist supporters and reformist detractors of this sacred historiography in the 19th century, and addresses the fate of Bulghar identity in the 20th century, including its transformation in Soviet and post-Soviet times into a secularized national identity.

Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia

Shnirelman V. A. Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 112 pp.The diversion of scholarship on ethnicity by political forces has been studied in Nazi Germany, where folklore became central to national self-perception and consequently suffered from uncritical enthusiasms. Who Gets the Past? is one of the first studies of this phenomenon in another arena.
In the Middle Volga region of Russia, the intellectuals of two ethnic groups are engaged in a protracted competition for the right to claim descent from various ancestries, most dating back to the first millennium A.D. Archeologists from both the Chuvash and the Tatar ethnic groups are attempting to present evidence connecting the groups with Turkic-speakers, Finnish-Ugric groups, Bulgars, or Sarmatians. At stake, according to Victor Shnirelman, are both territorial and political advantages.
Who Gets the Past? tells how and why, from the Stalinist period to the present, these intellectuals have made different, sometimes self-contradictory, claims on the past. The Soviet legacy of reinforcing and politicizing ethnic identities is largely responsible for the original extent of the competition, according to Shnirelman. But the importance of ethnic claims since the Soviet breakup has only contributed to its persistence.

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