Daghestan: Tradition & Survival

Rating:
Summary: rich and bewildering
Review: Robert Chenciner has written the first English book on contemporary Daghestan. This alone is laudable, given the difficult access to the Russian mountain republic in the Caucasus and the scarcity of information on it abroad. Chenciner, a multi-faceted scholar, has researched his topic for over a decade. He is - among other things - an expert on rugs, folk-tales and costume. The book is very much an attempt to preserve traditional Daghestani village culture, which is indeed in danger. The author acknowledges that it is the product of ten years' work - most chapters seem collected from an abundance of accumulated travel notes. Others contain endless pieces of folk-tales, interwoven with personal impressions. They come in a funny order - sex, birth and death in the beginning, religion and nationalism at the end. The middle is about food, textiles and fighting beasts. Sadly, Chenciner has relatively little to say about Daghestan's Babylonic array of 29 indigenous languages (which are also endangered). His chapter on religion is slight and looks little further than 1991 - an inexcusable omission, given that the country has since been treading the path to a religious war. Overall, the book very much resembles Daghestan - it is complex and bewildering. One should take time to read it and to look carefully at the authors' brilliant pictures, which round off his preservation work. Nikolaus von Twickel