Research Catalog

Title

Who gets the past? : competition for ancestors among non-Russian intellectuals in Russia / Victor A. Shnirelman.

Author

Shnirelʹman, V. A. (Viktor Aleksandrovich)

Publication

Washington, DC : Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, ©1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 98 p. : maps; 24 cm.

Summary

• 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.
• 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.

Subject

• Tatars > Ethnic identity
• Chuvash (Turkic people) > Ethnic identity
• Bulgars (Turkic people) > History
• Ethnology > Russia (Federation) > Volga River Region
• Bulgars (Turkic people)
• Ethnology
• Etnogeschiedenis
• Etnoarcheologie
• Afstamming
• Tataren
• Tatars > Identité collective
• Bulgares > Histoire
• Ethnologie > Russie > Volga, Bassin de la (Russie)
• Russia (Federation) > Volga River Region

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-92) and index.

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.

ISBN

• 0801852218
• 9780801852213

LCCN

95038908

OCLC

• ocm33166369
• 33166369
• SCSB-9243069

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library