Invention, or Something Finally Able to Speak

Scholars studying this modern movement read its emergence in two genuinely different ways, and the disagreement is substantive rather than a matter of emphasis or tone. One body of scholarship, represented by researchers such as Marlene Laruelle working on Tengrism's political deployment in Central Asia and Tatarstan, reads the modern movement as an invention of tradition in the technical sense: a real, deliberately assembled modern construction, built out of folklore, earlier scholarship and selectively recovered practice, put together to serve a specific contemporary argument about national identity and continuity. A different reading treats modern Tengrism instead as the public surfacing of practice that had, in fact, never actually stopped being carried on at the local level through the centuries covered above, now given a formal name and organizational shape because a religion without either could not be defended, taught or legally recognized in a modern public sphere in the way an organized tradition can be. Both readings are argued in published scholarship rather than merely asserted, and the disagreement is not a minor one, since it bears directly on the basic question of whether Tengrism should be described as an ancient religion continuing under a new name or as a new religion built from ancient materials.