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Paper long abstract:

With the fall of the Communist regime, not only physical borders between the member states and their constituencies had to be drawn anew. Also religious, linguistic and cultural boundaries that demarcated numerous Central Eurasian ethnic communities from each other have become increasingly porous, and their redefinition continues to excite much public controversy. This paper discusses three conspicuous developments, fuelled by labour migration flows and activities of foreign missionary organisations since the 1980s, that have been transforming the outlook and discourses of Muslim and Christian groups in the region: 1) The emergence and growing functions toolkit of new religious lingua francas (e.g., Russian has become not only the shared language of ethnically diverse umma in Russia but also of the Central Asian Protestant communities); 2) The participation in public discourses of in-between communities shaped by religious converts (e.g., international organisations of ethnic Russian converts to Islam, literature production and dissemination by Kazakh Jehovah’s Witnesses); and 3) The evolving interplay between language and religion (e.g., semiotic changes in prayers performed in a “non-traditional” religious idiom). The continuous process of “translocation” – in the form of linguistic (translation, transliteration, borrowing), religious (conversion) and physical (migration and travel) acts – contributes to the redefinition of what it means to be, for instance, an Uzbek or a Muslim in Central Eurasia today. This paper offers some observations into the shifting dynamics within the religion-language-ethnicity triangle and how the identities linked to it are being constructed, expressed and contested by a variety of social actors.