Historical Narrative, Intertextuality, and Cultural Continuity in Post-Soviet Tajikistan

This article considers the relationship of historical narrative to reconceptualizations of religious self-understanding in post-Soviet Tajikistan. Oral historical narratives and related bodies of printed literature associated with the lives and exploits of pre-Soviet exemplars have enabled new religious practices and helped form the basis of new post-Soviet religious identification practices. Narrators use historical narrative to create intertextual relationships between newly fashioned narratives and traditional paradigms of saintly and political power. Intertextual relationships lend legitimacy to contemporary devotion and allow for unique configurations of post-Soviet cultural continuity by establishing discursive connections between the pre-Soviet and post-Soviet religious environments. Oral historical narrative and its accompanying patterns of cultural continuity are central to the post-Soviet devotional project in Tajikistan.