Title: Who gets the past? : competition for ancestors among non-Russian intellectuals in Russia /
Authors: Shnirelʹman, V. A.
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Johns Hopkins University Press,
Year: 1996
Subjects: Tatars Ethnic identity.; Chuvash (Turkic people) Ethnic identity.; Bulgars (Turkic people) History.; Ethnology Russia (Federation) Volga River Region.
Abstract: 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 to the first millennium A.D. Archaeologists from 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 are territorial and political advantages, according to Victor Shnirelman.
Contents: 1. The Mythologization of Ethnic History -- 2. The Effect of Soviet Ideology on Anthropological Theory -- 3. The Tatars and the Chuvash under the Soviet Regime -- 4. The Rivalry for the Bulgar Legacy -- 5. Variants of Ethnohistory: The Tatars -- 6. The Neo-Bulgarists -- 7. Variants of Ethnohistory: The Chuvash -- 8. Ethnogenesis and Ethnopolitics.