Like the Circassians and other groups I wrote about in a previous blog post, the Russian campaigns in the Caucasus in the 1800s resulted in over half of the Abkhaz population leaving their historical homeland on the northwest shore of the Black Sea for Turkey, in what Abkhaz historian Stanislav Lakoba called an “ethnic catastrophe” […]
Diaspora
Exile, Diaspora, and Agency in Inner Asian Folk Narratives
Research Questions and Goals Within my upcoming three blog posts, my aim is to present two narratives of exile present in folk oral traditions in Inner Asia. After discussing the Urkun in my previous post, I realized that I had largely forgotten the issue of individual agency within such significant historical circumstances. To rectify this […]