Ingcborg Baldauf, Some thoughts on the making of the Uzbek nation.
The natsional'noe razmezhevanie in Central Asia (1924-1925) aimed at the formation of « national republics and territories. » In the cases of Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Turkmens, and to a certain degree Tadzhiks, the question of ethnic coherence and self-denomination of the emerging nations could be solved without major problems. The rest of the sedentary, semi-nomadic, and nomadic Turkic-speaking Turkestanians, larger by number than any of the other groups, had never in history formed an ethnic or national unit ; there existed several pre-modern concepts of self-identification based on regional, tribal, or even religious definition, none of them depicting congruency with the European romantic, language-centered concept of a nation. The introduction of this concept by Lenin-Stalinist national politics made it necessary to define a new nationality. Out of the prenational identilicatory concepts Sart, Chagatay, Muslim, Turk, and Uzbek, « Uzbek » was chosen to give a name to the nation, and to its territory, the Uzbekistan SSR The paper traces some of the problems the nation-builders found themselves confronted with in the process of shaping the Uzbek socialist nation.
This article focuses on mythico-historical texts belonging to the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex, an oral and written tradition that emerged over the course of seven centuries in post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East. It disentangles the narrative strategies creatively employed by authors and tradents who deconstructed and reconstructed narratives that blend the genealogy of Chingiz Khan with the epic story of Oghuz Qaghan, showing how they mobilized and developed the plots and motifs at their disposal to meet the political, ideological and communal requirements of their times. Focusing in particular on the changing ways in which the texts foreground particular mothers and the maternal line over nobility granted through paternal descent, the article highlights narrative traces of multiple religious beliefs and postulates-Jewish and Christian, as well as Inner Asian theistic and Islamic. It also demonstrates that some later texts refute claims to descentbased continuity in power and rule altogether.
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