Learning to Become Turkmen examines the ways in which the iconography of everyday life—in dramatically different alphabets, multiple languages, and shifting education policies—reflects the evolution of Turkmen society in Central Asia over the past century. As Victoria Clement shows, the formal structures of the Russian imperial state did not affect Turkmen cultural formations nearly as much as Russian language and Cyrillic script. Their departure was also as transformative to Turkmen politics and society as their arrival. Complemented by extensive fieldwork, Learning to Become Turkmen is the first book in a Western language to draw on Turkmen archives, as it explores how Eurasia has been shaped historically. Revealing particular ways that Central Asians relate to the rest of the world, this study traces how Turkmen consciously used language and pedagogy to position themselves within global communities such as the Russian/Soviet Empire, the Turkic cultural continuum, and the greater Muslim world.

Turkmenistan is known for its huge oil and gas resources, as well as for the rich, complex, and captivating history of the Turkmen people. For centuries they were known as skillful and courageous warriors who left deep marks in the histories of other countries, such as India, Russia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Egypt. As craftsmen, they constructed extraordinary architectural monuments, whose ruins can be found all over the country, and famous Turkoman carpets are still highly valued in many parts of the world. Yet, for centuries, foreign invaders and local tribal conflict plagued the land with wars that devastated the Turkmen society and destroyed its magnificent but fragile oases. In the late 19th century, the Turkmens witnessed the establishment of the Russian Empire in their lands. In the years following, these lands were united by the Soviet government into a single political entity in an attempt to force the Soviet style nation-state building and socio-economic transformations. In 1991, the Turkmen parliament voted for the country's independence and promised to build a sovereign state capable of bringing prosperity and social and political stability to the society. The reality, however, proved to be more complex. After more than 15 years of independence, Turkmenistan still faces a number of difficulties, including economic and structural issues, security challenges, growing competition between various clans, and widespread poverty. Historical Dictionary of Turkmenistan provides a concise overview of the historical development of Turkmenistan. The introduction and chronology provide an overview of the Turkmen history, focusing on the history of the country in the 20th century, political and economic development, ethnic policies, and nation building. This is the first comprehensive reference book on Turkmenistan published in English that provides comprehensive up-to-date details about the contemporary history, economy, and culture. The dictionary consists of approximately 300 entries a

On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation? Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity. Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.

The notion of a propositional content plays a central role in contemporary philosophy of language. Propositional content makes up both the meaning of sentences and the content of propositional attitudes such as belief. One particular view about propositional content has been dominant in analytic philosophy, namely the Fregean conception of propositions as abstract mind-independent objects that come with truth conditions. But propositions in this sense raise a range of issues, which have become a center of debate in current philosophy of language. In particular, how should propositions as abstract objects be understood and how can they represent things and be true or false? A number of philosophers in contemporary analytic philosophy as well as in early analytic philosophy and phenomenology have approached the notion of a propositional content in a different way, not by starting out with an abstract truth berarer, but by focusing on cognitive acts of agents, such as acts of judging. It is in terms of such acts that the notion of a propositional content, on their view, should be understood. The act-based perspective historically goes back to the work of Central European philosophers, in particular that of Husserl, Twardowski, Meinong, and Reinach. However, their work has been unduly neglected and is in fact largely inaccessible to contemporary analytic philosophers. The volume presents a central selection of work of these philosophers that bear on an act-based conception of philosophical content, some of which in new translations (one paper by Reinach), some of which published in English for the very first time (two papers by Twardowski). In addition, the volume presents new work by leading contemporary philosophers of language pursuing or discussing an act-based conception of propositional content. Moreover, the book contains a crosslinguistic study of nominalizations for actions and products, a distinction that plays a central role in the philosophy of language of Twardowski.

A unique analysis of language policies in the central Asian states of the former Soviet Union

Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.