The Construction of the Tuvan ‘High Culture’ during the Soviet Period

E. Gellner (2006) focused on the construction of ‘high culture’ during the process of nation building. In the process of attaining the ‘high culture’, the construction of various institutions supporting written national languages as a step in creating national languages, played an important role. Unlike theorists, who analyze national features through a historical perspective, the Soviet theorists used a bilateral approach in which essentialism and evolutionism intertwine. According to Gellner, while ethnic groups construct their national solidarity around a ‘high culture’, workers whose national culture was already established through a socialist context, imagine themselves as part of the same international community with other nations’ workers, a slight modification of Anderson’s argument. This gives an evolutionary perspective to the essential nature of nation. In this article, the mentioned process is examined in the case of Tuva after 1921