(Re)Presenting Identities: National Archipelagos in Kazan1

1. This paper is the result of my Ph.D. thesis “Representing Identities in Tatarstan: A Cartography of Post-Soviet Discourse, Schooling and Everyday Life,” School of Social Sciences, University of Wales, Bangor, 2002.

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Notes

1. This paper is the result of my Ph.D. thesis “Representing Identities in Tatarstan: A Cartography of Post-Soviet Discourse, Schooling and Everyday Life,” School of Social Sciences, University of Wales, Bangor, 2002.

2. From the experience of this research, I believe it is essential to dispense with the notion of “identity” and to operate in terms of “identities” as one of the first axioms. Any possible approximation to the “identity” approach is a simplification that will fail to include and represent all the different dimensions that are involved in the process. In this particular research the notion of “identity” is not adequate because the research aims to illustrate the multidimensional character, the ongoing process, the diversity, situational and circumstantial idiosyncrasy, movement, different discourses, social actors, different social worlds, enunciative strategies, the past, the present and the future; and in that sense “identity,” in the singular, would be deficient in representing these dynamic processes and movements.

3. For discussion in English about language policies in Tatarstan, see Davis et al., “Media, Language Policy and Cultural Change in Tatarstan.”

4. Kharisov, “O Iazykovoi situatsii v byvshem SSSR,” 56.

5. Calhoun, Critical Social Theory.

6. Drobizheva, “Natsionalizmy v respublikakh Rossiiskoi Federatsii.”

7. Kharisov, Vserossiiskoe soveshchanie rabotnikov obrazovaniia, 66.

8. About Tatar language attitudes inside Tatar gymnásias, see Álvarez Veinguer and Davis.

9. Kuiran Bairam is the most significant Muslim holiday. It is a holiday of sacrifice in memory of the Prophet Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son for the sake of Allah. Each Muslim has to bring a sacrifice, preferably an animal with hooves, and invite someone to eat this animal's meat.

10. Smith, The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union, 189.

11. Edwards, in Billig, Banal Nationalism, 14.

12. Billig, Banal Nationalism, 29.

13. Riggins, The Language and Politics of Exclusion.

14. Ibid., 4.

15. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 120.

16. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 80.

17. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 224.

18. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 165.

19. McCrone, The Sociology of Nationalism, 36.

20. Enloe, “Religion and Ethnicity,” 199.

21. Bennigsen, “Volga Tatars,” 287.

22. Vertovec, “Young Muslims in Keighley, West Yorkshire,” 101.

23. Cesari (1998).

24. Vertovec, “Young Muslims in Keighley, West Yorkshire.”

25. Cesari (1998, 29).

26. Ibid., 30.

27. Ibid., 31.

28. Musina Rozalinda Nurievna, Candidate of History, Head of the Department of Ethnology of the Institute of History of TAS. Interview, 5 March 1998.

29. Musina, “Reislamizatsiia Tatar kak forma ‘religioznogo natsionaliszma.’”

30. Musina, “Islam i musul'mane v sovremennom Tatarstane.”

31. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141.

32. Maffesoli, Ordinary Knowledge, 141.

33. Interview, March 1998.

34. Kondrashov (2000, 35).

35. Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power, 21.

36. Ibid., 154.

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Aurora Álvarez Veinguer

Aurora Álvarez Veinguer, Research Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Granada, Spain. Email: [email protected]