Savant

In Tajikistan today, the state discourse on reclaiming identity emphasizes popular culture, particularly with regard to music. This paper analyzes the process of the enhanced prestige of the falak musical genre, trying to understand how various social actors – such as governmental institutions, academics and musicians – perceive it, and the stakes involved by this process. A “folk” music is redefined and made classical in order to be inserted into a political discourse, which seeks to erase regional differences and establish a national specificity. Although the state obviously aims at building a national cultural identity, the real impact of its discourse remains hardly measurable, as it is reinterpreted by musicians. Indeed, while taking advantage of this movement for their reputation, they prefer understanding it as a legitimate recognition of their musical tradition, artistic as well as spiritual. More than a reinvention of the history of music through an idealized vision of culture, the issue here is the one of music as a symbol of memory. The study of the identity mechanism at work through this musical repertoire reveals as much the difficulties of defining a music as a “national Tajik” one, as the variety of benchmarks from which the folk musical tradition in present-day Tajikistan draws.