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Squatting, Self-Immolation, and the Repatriation of Crimean Tatars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Greta Uehling*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, U.S.A.

Extract

In the summer of 1978, a Crimean Tatar man named Musa Mamut walked out of his home in a small village in the Crimea toward a policeman waiting for him at his front gate. He was to be taken to the station for questioning, and quite possibly arrested for “violation of the passport regime.” But Mamut had already drenched himself with gasoline and, lighting a match, was engulfed in flames. He ran toward the policeman, who ran the other way. A deliveryman tripped Musa, and two friends who had been passing by extinguished the flames. His friends took him to the Simferopol city hospital, where he died six days later, never expressing any regret for what he did.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

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21. As cited in Edward Allworth, The Tatars of the Crimea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 242.Google Scholar

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42. Interview with author, Besh-Terek, Crimea, 2 January, 1998.Google Scholar

43. Ibid.Google Scholar

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46. Interview with author, Mejlis, Ukraine, 8 August, 1996.Google Scholar

47. The informant wishes to remain anonymous. Interview with author, Simferopol, 3 August 1995.Google Scholar

48. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

49. Izzet Khairov, interview with author, Tashkent, 13 February 1997.Google Scholar

50. Dmitri Bushev, “Simferopolskie Tragedii” [Simferopol Tragedies], Kievskoe Vremya [Kiev Times], 25 November 1997, p. 1.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., p. 1.Google Scholar

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53. These informants wish to remain anonymous. Interview with author, Simferopol, Ukraine, 5 December 1997.Google Scholar

54. By their own accounts, the Crimean Tatars are Muslims who were secularized under Soviet influence, but are now rediscovering Islam. There is a two-fold aspect to their Muslim identity: in Arabic, “Islam” means self-surrender to God as revealed through the message and life of the Prophet Muhammad. However, there is a secondary meaning of “Muslim,” which according to Ruthven shades into the first. In this understanding, a Muslim is an individual born to a Muslim father who takes on his or her parents' confessional identity without necessarily subscribing to the beliefs and practices of the faith. See Ruthven, op. cit., p. 3. This is the basis of an ambiguity inherent in Crimean Tatars' self-identification as Muslims.Google Scholar

55. Interview with author, Besh-Terek, Ukraine, 2 January, 1998.Google Scholar

56. The word “immolation” derives from the Latin root immolat(us), meaning to sprinkle holy grits in the sacrificial ceremony. See N. Subrahmanian, “Suicide,” in N. Subrahmanian, ed., Self-Immolation in Tamil Society (Madurai N. G.O. Colony: International Institute of Tamil Historical Studies, 1983), p. 19. The origin of the word in Latin has religious associations, but “immolation” has come to include non-religious acts as well.Google Scholar

57. Subrahmanian, Self-immolation in Tamil Society, pp. 1750.Google Scholar

58. A. V. Rao, “Suicide,” in N. Subrahmanian, ed., Self-immolation in Tamil Society (Madurai N. G.O. Colony: International Institute of Tamil Historical Studies, 1983), p. 3.Google Scholar

59. Jack D. Douglas, The Social Meaning of Suicide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

60. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: a study in sociology, translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, IL: United States: Free Press, 1951).Google Scholar

61. Maurice L. Farber, Theory of Suicide (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), p. 11.Google Scholar

62. This letter is dated 15 August 1978. It was in the possession of Zikie at the time of the interview with the author.Google Scholar

63. Kurt Treptow, “The Winter of Despair: Jan Palach and the Collapse of the Prague Spring,” Ukrainian Quarterly, Vol. 45, No.1, 1993, pp. 3147.Google Scholar

64. Treptow, op. cit., p. 43.Google Scholar

65. Interview with author, Besh-Terek, Ukraine, 2 January 1998.Google Scholar

66. Dzhemilev, op. cit., p. 70.Google Scholar

67. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 428.Google Scholar

68. Tonkin, op. cit., p. 54.Google Scholar

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70. Judith Irvine, “Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion,” in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu Lughod, eds, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 130.Google Scholar