About Damira Umetbaeva
Damira Umetbaeva has a degree in Cultural Anthropology. From 2006 to 2008 she was instructor at the Anthropology department of the American University in Central Asia. She has been a research fellow at the the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research since October 2008.

New nation states frequently need to create a ‘national myth’ to justify their new status, and Kyrgyzstan is no exception. Since its emergence as an independent republic in 1991, historians have been drawing on Chinese and Russian historical sources in an attempt to trace Kyrgyz history back to ancient times. But, inevitably, the most controversial — and contradictory — part of their stories relate to the recent Soviet past, says Damira Umetbaeva.





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