Authors

Discussion

Alexander N. Samoilovich (1880—1938) was a linguist specialising in the Turkic languages. During the imperial period, he spent several years in the Transcaspian region of the Russian empire (territory of modern-day Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan) with the aim to study ‘a local vernacular’. Previously, in the 19th century, the Arabic and Persian were seeing as the sources of meanings spread through the Islam as a framework which regulated the everyday life of Muslim communities. For this reason, such ‘local vernaculars’ as the Turkmen were seeing as ‘subordinate’ to the Arabic and Persian. However, in the beginning of the 20th century, several scholars, including Samoilovich, insisted on the necessity to shift the focus towards the modern-day languages and their ability to produce their own meanings. This new methodology was intertwined with their support for autonomy claims raised by the elites of those communities. The turmoil of the Civil War gave birth to the new Soviet State which cooperated with those scholars in its attempt to spread the control over the peripheral regions of the former empire. 

But, how this mechanism of interaction was built? What ideas and visions accompanied this cooperation? 

This paper focuses on three projects that Samoilovich proposed to the government of the Turkmen SSR in the period between 1925 and 1931. The three projects were the Academic Dictionary of the Turkmen Language, the writing of the History of Turkmen Literature and the mapping of Turkmen carpet making. All three projects were connected with each other and had a common goal - to study the meaning production by the Turkmen communities. Samoilovich believed in the further evolution of the local vernaculars towards a unified structure of national language related to his vision of anthropological and philological theories. For this reason, he needed the data base to track those changes. His projects, in their essence, were an attempt to structure the knowledge about the Turkmen language according to the orientalist vision. However, they contradicted the intentions of the local intellectuals such as Kümüşaly Böri-ogly who tried to gain control over these projects in his own hands. By articulating the different perspectives of the key personalities, this paper proposed to reveal the factor of subjectivities in the knowledge production about Central Asia in the early Soviet period.