Identity Building via Museum Politics: A Case Study of Tajikistan

Abstract

This thesis undertook a study of the National Museum of Tajikistan (NMT) as a political institution that participates in the process of national identity-building by endowing nationalist ideology promoted by the leadership of the country with emotional and scientific legitimacy. More specifically, the thesis explores the so called discursive tools that organize and represent historical artifacts, works of art, museum building and exhibitions as material evidence of historically known and culturally unique ‘Tajik nation’. Discourse analysis, as the main research method allows to scrutinize the way the system of texts, utterances, speeches, gestures and statements about and by the NMT forms a particular museum reality where the Tajik nation appears as a transhistorical natural fact devoid of disruptions and contradictions that the process of nation-building inevitably encounters. The thesis shows how museum objects and composition thereof, initially meaningless and void, acquire and change a repertoire of meanings related to the Tajik nation once placed into ideological context shaped by history writing, professing national culture and purging representations of ‘the Other’. The selected case-study also demonstrates the operations of power within the cultural realm as a convergence of discourse, knowledge and culture that allows the National Museum an authority to formulate the truth about the nation and instill national identity as a form of knowledge of the Self.