Early Modern Kyrgyz Oral-Derived Narrative Sources (EMKONS)

FAIN: RZ-279862-21

Miami University (Oxford, OH 45056-1846)
Daniel G. Prior (Project Director: December 2020 to present)

Planning and convening of an international collaboration among scholars of Silk Road literature for two weeks at the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic. (12 months)

This project will use a Planning International Collaboration Grant to convene six colleagues from the U.S. and Kyrgyzstan in the archives of the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences to plan fundamental research on premodern Central Asian Turkic manuscript narratives, and dissemination of our work in electronic and print venues. These narratives were created within networks of changing oral and written genres including history, genealogy, and epic poetry, and thus lie at the nexus of interpretive problems where historians, linguists, paleographers, philologists, and scholars of oral tradition require each other's insights and methods to do sustained work. Scholars and the public can benefit from the project to study 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.