Udmurts, like Tatars, in search of a strategy for preserving national identity
January 08, 2019
Udmurts, like Tatars, in search of a strategy for preserving national identity
Every nation living in the Russian Federation must show its development strategy to the world. We bring to your attention the Prolegomena (introduction) to the strategy for preservation and development of the Udmurt people. Their ideas may be useful in developing the strategy of the Tatars.
The author is Artem Malykh, a member of the MUSH working group, the vice-president of the Youth Association of Finno-Ugric Peoples.
The structure of the Udmurt society and tactics of preserving the Udmurt language. Prolegomena to the strategy of the Udmurt language
The structure of Udmurt society
What is considered a society? Society is a certain organized social environment. Society exists among the people if the following 4 points are maintained:
- Representatives of the people have a single information space: there is a single generally accepted set of information sources (they read Udmurt Dunne and watch Elknowledge everywhere from St. Petersburg to Kukmor), a single information and thematic agenda on which opinion leaders speak in society;
- The number of contacts within the people exceeds the number of contacts and connections outside of it (the most important types of contacts are marriage and friendship);
- people’s self-relatedness: the people first of all relate all phenomena and events to themselves and their values, that is, it acts as a model and comparison criterion for different facts for itself, it is itself, and not another people or another society;
- the people have within themselves institutions of their own governance (instruments of reward and punishment).
If these four points are not fulfilled, the people have no society, their representatives live separately from each other, and people are only in the case of a census or other action to fix these people in a single ethnographic unit.
Sustainable can only be a society where these 4 points are maintained, and society reproduces itself.
