Books about Turkmen from Amazon.com

On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation?

Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity.

Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.

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Price: $16.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The author of The Owl Papers chronicles his odyssey through Turkmenistan, a Moslem republic in the former Soviet Union, in search of the Akal-Teke horse, a rare equine breed, and the people who breed and raise them. 15,000 first printing .
Price: $84.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Turkmen, the official language of the Republic of Turkmenistan, is spoken by over 3 million people throughout the world, including areas of Afghanistan and Iran. This guide, complete with a bilingual dictionary and comprehensive phrasebook, is an essential tool for students, travelers, and businesspeople.

• More than 4,000 total dictionary entries
• Comprehensive phrasebook
• Concise grammar section
• Easy-to-use pronunciation guide
• Includes cultural information and a brief history of the Turkmen people

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Price: $5.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Even if you do not like crossword puzzles, you may end up loving these. Designed for mother-tongue or completely fluent speakers of Turkmen wanting to improve their English skills, the puzzles may also be entertaining to English speakers. They are formatted so that each puzzle can be solved in 15 to 30 minutes. The vocabulary gradually becomes harder across puzzles thus increasing the challenge as you progress. Each book has 100 puzzles and each puzzle covers some 30 word pairs (equaling 3000 challenges!). These are truly pleasant, if not addictive, crossword puzzles for language learning. Learning a language is always difficult. To ease the pain, hints are provided in small script at the bottom of each page, though these are selected to prevent an engineered solution to the puzzle. Full solutions are provided in the back of the book. These two features (hints and verifiable solutions), force the reader to decipher a word’s meaning and serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. One recent reviewer of this series noted “As a Peace Corps Volunteer … this is definitely a fun way to keep up the language skills … The series has a whole bunch of "rarely spoken" languages, widely unknown to us in the Western world.” Another reviewer notes: “Good teacher as it has words listed below that are in puzzle so the clues are there if you need them.” Public domain translations for Turkmen contributed to Webster’s Online Dictionary used in these puzzles may have originated from uncited volunteers, native speakers, professional translators, field linguists and academics (not by the editor of the puzzles). If you would like citation for any translations, make suggestions, note errors, or contribute in any other way, please email Philip M. Parker at INSEAD, who will update this series from time to time. Reproduction rights are granted to educators..
Price: $14.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]