Muhiddin Faizulloev Research Project - Overview

This collection contains digital representations of field notebooks and a photo collection provided by ethnographer Muhiddin Faizulloev. It supports active research in the Center for Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University into both the Tajik people and the evolution of the social sciences and academic institutions in the USSR.

Thirty ethnographic and archaeological expeditions 1972-95

Faizulloev studied ethnography in Dushanbe (Tajikistan) in the early 1970s and later in Moscow and completed his dissertation after a long struggle against established authorities. Over the course of his career Faizulloev accompanied more than thirty ethnographic and archaeological expeditions and produced many field notebooks. He worked with Sergei Polyakov (Moscow State University) and Valentin Bushkov (Moscow Archive), two prominent Russian ethnographers who have published extensively on the Tajik people.

The material presented here dates from ethnographic expeditions in Tadjikistan between 1972 and 1995. In 2014 Faizulloev was guest at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University and agreed to make this primary research material available to a larger public to contribute to a differentiated view of ethnographic research during the Soviet period in Central Asia. During that time Sophie Roche and her Research Group on Central Asia transcribed all field notebooks and conducted several interviews with Faizulloev on the material he provided and information collected at that time has been used to enrich the collection metadata.

Development

Work on the Faizulloev collection commenced in 2014 with an agreement between the Cluster of Excellence and Data Futures to use the freizo software platform for rapid prototyping of metadata and development of contributor workflows for multi-lingual transcription. freizo produces JSON-based digital collections which are designed to be portable independent of infrastructure technology. Detailed knowledge of Russian as well as Tajik is essential in this project - which also has German research documentation and presentation in English.

A sustainable digital corpus repository

The aim of this project is two-fold: firstly to create a sustainable digital corpus repository in which eventually all of Faizulloev’s material can be made accessible to the international community for the long-term.