CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Kuziev, Faruh |
|---|---|
| Title | Maintaining Ethnic Ambiguity Via Museum-Silence in the Making of Tajikistan (1934-1958) |
| Summary | The following study is an exploration of the institutional response to Soviet nationalities policy in Central Asia through a detailed investigation of the texts compiled in the Republican History and Region-Studies (kraevedenie) Museum of Tajik SSR in the 1930s-1950s. This thesis is an attempt to address the question of how this earliest and central Soviet museum complex in Tajikistan was shouldered with the mission to visualize the ethnographic discourses and knowledge about Tajiks formed from early 19th century through the mid 20th century and represent it via an ethnographic collection in the context of continued contestation of Tajik nationhood, statehood, culture, and the past, both within and without the Tajik ASSR. This research reconstructed a unique mode of maintaining ethnic ambiguity in HRM texts of varying degree of publicity, that allowed it to comply with the pressures to represent ‘Tajik nation’ demanded by the Soviet celebration of ‘national cultures’ while at the same time acknowledge and recognize problematic relations to the idea of common nationhood and shared national identity that characterized Tajikistan’s population during the early Soviet rule. ‘Museum-silence’ should be understood as eliding and omitting ethnic markers in museum’s textual routines and privileging visual forms of representation of material heritage in which the idea of nation is present in its decontested form. |
| Supervisor | Shaw, Charles D. |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/kuziev_faruh.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University