Nation, Language, Islam
You can purchase my first book HERE.
“Nation, Language, Islam is a study of
how people living in a particular post-
Soviet space imagine their cultural
possibilities and their connections
to political and social groups. In her
careful exploration of two language
communities, people bilingual in Tatar
and Russian and Russian-only
speakers, Helen Faller uncovers
distinctive ‘referential worlds.’ Based
on vivid analysis of Tatar cultural
practices, including song, festivals,
educational policy, and revived Islam,
Dr. Faller reveals the multiple roots
of Tatarstan’s palpable civic peace and
its multi-cultural politics. Helen Faller’s book captures the ambiguities of the situation in which Tatarstan’s citizens exist, the limitations and possibilities of their Soviet and post-Soviet experience, as well as the resilience and grace of present-day Tatar culture.”
Jane Burbank, New York University
“a richly detailed account of the complexities and ambiguities involved in a post-Soviet nation-building project, vividly illustrating how Tatarstan’s quest for sovereignty affected the lives of those who experienced it”
“breadth in no way comes at the expense of depth”
“Faller’s up-close examination of Tatarstan’s sovereignty movement is as yet unparalleled in providing insight into the lives of those who inhabit one of Russia’s most culturally rich regions. It is, in short, essential reading…”
Central Asian Survey
“engaging and insightful book”
“insightfully challenges normative notions of nation-state building and identity construction processes.”
“Faller thoughtfully engages with the way different agents (citizens, politicians, newspapers) interpret and engage with language and culture”
“a well-written and useful read”
Europe-Asia Studies
“a clear illustration that the role of language in nation-building is not as homogeneous as many Western theorists, focusing mainly on a bourgeois, male, Western public, have implied.”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Tatarstan’s Word Wars
By Ky Krauthamer + August 27th, 2012
….
In her book Nation, Language, Islam: Tatarstan’s Sovereignty Movement (Central European University Press, 2011), Helen M. Faller devotes much time to the fascinating twists and turns of Tatar orthography, and more time dissecting the interplay between Tatar speakers and Russian speakers in Kazan. Her book is less about the sovereignty movement (which she pronounces dead) than about how the world view of the Tatar-speakers in Tatarstan has transformed radically since the late Soviet period. This transformation “has caused them to see the world in ways profoundly different from Russian-speakers.” The drive for sovereignty may be dead, but nation-building goes on although perhaps at a slower pace than in the 1990s. Faller draws a useful distinction between nation-builders and ethnicity-based nationalists. Where the standard model of nationalism theory stresses belief in a unified, geographically limited community bound together by a common language, Faller writes that she didn’t find this among the Tatars she got to know during many visits to the country. (Most of her sources were women; if there are heroes in her book, they are the resourceful Tatar-speaking women.)
There are no “average” Tatar-speakers, and the boundaries between “Tatar culture” and “other cultures” are “permeable and shifting.”And no wonder, any culture whose language underwent the manipulations suffered by Tatar over the past century would almost have to learn to shift with the tides of history.After centuries of neglect after the brutal Russian invasion of 1552, the Tatar language, like others, become a lab specimen for Soviet cultural scientists. The Arabic script used to write all of Russia’s Turkic languages was regarded as difficult and anti-modern, so in the ’20s planners inspired by Lenin’s theory of national self-determination made the Tatars, Azeris, Turkmen, etc., adopt the Latin alphabet, which they saw as more progressive than Cyrillic.
In the ’30s Stalin’s Russo-centric views became the fashion, and the Turkic languages were ordered to use only Cyrillic. One linguist put the view that as Tatar came more and more under the influence of Russian it was beginning to transform from an agglutinative language (representing a lower order of progress) to a modern, inflected one, like Russian, and should now undergo changes in orthography, phonetics, and morphology.
Another language lurch was in the offing as the Soviet system began to collapse in the 1980s, but this time it was pushed by the Tatars themselves. Like other Turkic-speaking regions in the Soviet orbit, the Tatars re-embraced the Latin script as a means to embody their newly liberated dreams of self-determination. However, most of the other Turkic areas on the outer ring of the old Soviet boundaries were now independent countries, leaving the Republic of Tatarstan marooned deep in the Russian heartland. Even so, in 1992, 61 percent of voters supported a referendum measure to establish the republic as a sovereign state – while remaining within the Russian Federation.
That may have flown during the heyday of Boris Yeltsin, but later, after Chechnya exploded and Putin emerged as Yeltsin’s successor, the Kremlin was having none of it. The Russian Constitutional Court ruled against sovereignty declarations by Tatarstan and other republics. (Historical note: the Soviet Union comprised 15 union republics possessing, on paper, the right to self-determination. Every one of them is now a separate, independent state. None of the second-level republics within the Russian Federation became independent; only one that I know of seriously tried to do so: Chechnya.)
Alongside Faller’s study, another recent book looks at the Kremlin’s sustained campaign to whittle away Tatarstan’s sovereignty and even control the alphabet used in its schoolbooks. Katherine E. Graney’s Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia (Lexington Books, 2009). The two authors draw dramatically differing conclusions. For Graney, Tatarstan’s nation-builders grew if anything stronger under the withering fire led by Putin….
Faller’s vision of Tatarstan, and Russia, is much bleaker.
“… Tatarstan sovereignty no longer exists as a political movement. The majority of Tatar-speakers have lost hope in the possibility of changing their society into one more equitable than that which existed during the Soviet period,” she writes in conclusion. Anxiety and despair are pulling Tatars in two directions – toward religiosity and, for younger people, toward digitally-based cultural and language activism. “What these two trends mean for Russia’s future development as a multi-national state is unclear, though it is unlikely that a peaceful transition towards inclusive pluralism will occur in the foreseeable future.”
Faller’s vision of Tatarstan, and Russia, is much bleaker.
“… Tatarstan sovereignty no longer exists as a political movement. The majority of Tatar-speakers have lost hope in the possibility of changing their society into one more equitable than that which existed during the Soviet period,” she writes in conclusion. Anxiety and despair are pulling Tatars in two directions – toward religiosity and, for younger people, toward digitally-based cultural and language activism. “What these two trends mean for Russia’s future development as a multi-national state is unclear, though it is unlikely that a peaceful transition towards inclusive pluralism will occur in the foreseeable future.”
Regretfully, I incline more to Faller’s than Graney’s conclusion.
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