Abstract
AbstractThe centuries-old Turkmen community of Stavropol’ Krai in southern Russia, while currently numbering only about 15,000 people, is an integral part of the famously diverse ethnolinguistic landscape of the North Caucasus. To the extent that Euro-Atlantic scholars have noted the existence of this community at all, their comments have been rather cursory and dismissive, and it has been claimed that the North Caucasus Turkmen (virtually alone among the dozens of similarly small ethnic groups of the region) have never published anything in their own language. Intensive investigations in the bibliographic record (and in secondary sources in Russian, Turkish, and Turkmen) show that this is not actually the case, and that the North Caucasus Turkmen do have a modest record of Turkmen-language publishing stretching back a century or more. What are the implications of these published works for our understanding of Turkmen identity, the Turkmen diaspora, and the complicated multiethnic and multilingual environment of the North Caucasus? What does it mean when groups like the North Caucasus Turkmen are made all but invisible in Euro-Atlantic scholarship and Euro-Atlantic library collections?
Highlights
For a variety of historical, geopolitical, and linguistic reasons, Turkmenistan and the Turkmen are notoriously understudied in the academic institutions of the Euro-Atlantic world
For Turkmen-language works published after the abandonment of Arabic script in 1928, the picture is slightly worse, with approximately 5.8% of the post1928 monographic works listed in the major bibliography for mid-20th-century Turkmenistan (Kuvadova, Panova, and Pirliev 1965) held in any US library
Of the 87 post-1960 Turkmenlanguage periodical titles listed in the authoritative source on the journals and newspapers of Soviet Turkmenistan (Nazarova 1989), US libraries hold one or more issues of only 12, meaning that 86% of them are not held in US libraries at all
Summary
For a variety of historical, geopolitical, and linguistic reasons, Turkmenistan and the Turkmen are notoriously understudied in the academic institutions of the Euro-Atlantic world.
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