Paper long abstract:

This paper describes a project of research and scholarly capacity-building by an international team of specialists of early modern Central Asian history, verbal arts, languages, and manuscript sources, related to oral-derived narrative sources in the Turki and Kyrgyz oral/literary milieu from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The materials, housed mainly in the archives of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic, open pathways of research on ethnic, regional, and Islamic identities; the intertwining of oral and written modes of transmitting knowledge about the past; Central Asian Turkic linguistic fluidities; and Central Asian nomads' experience of the Russian Empire. The narratives were created within networks of changing oral and written genres including history, genealogy, and epic poetry, and thus lie at the intersections of different interpretive trends where historians, linguists, paleographers, philologists, and scholars of oral tradition require each other's insights and methods to do sustained work. Our main concern is to protect and develop intellectual capacity in an area where post-Soviet gains have been meager and progress may soon become more difficult without directed intervention. The project envisions both face-to-face and digital interactions of the working group and a wider scholarly community. Beyond Kyrgyz, we intend for our research to become a resource for scholars of the broader Central Asian region, and a site for discussing systemic questions of language and field concentrations in Central Asian historical and philological studies in relation to source collections and research conditions.