Ethnographic Counter-Histories at the Gurminj Museum of Musical Instruments in Tajikistan

• In Event: Musical Genealogies and Remembered Pasts in Central Asia

Abstract

This paper examines grassroots heritage discourses unfolding since the late 1980s in relation to a private collection of musical instruments and ethnographic artifacts in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe. What became known as the Gurminj Museum was created by actor-musician Gurminj Zavqibekov (1929-2003) as a personal home archive for materials gathered from his native Pamir Mountains in eastern Tajikistan and the broader region. Over the following three decades, it matured into a vibrant node of urban Pamiri minority cultural life and a popular tourist attraction. In contrast with state-administered presentations of national culture—e.g., the scientifically authoritative exhibit, the historicizing musicological study, and the staged folkloristic music and dance performance—the Gurminj Museum made available its repository of unlabeled and uncategorized objects as informal aides-mémoires for community members to handle, interpret, and play. Drawing on my ethnomusicological fieldwork at the museum from 2014 to 2020 as well as archival audiovisual and print media, I argue that such intuitive, multi-sensorial, and embodied engagements with the past through storytelling and music-making produce flexible counter-histories to official Tajik nation-building historical narratives (cf. Blakkisrud and Kuziev 2019). A certain degree of routinization in the presence of strangers notwithstanding, these performative and discursive histories have served both to communicate valuable local knowledge not readily available elsewhere and to popularize Pamiri traditional musical instruments and repertoires.

Author

• Katherine Freeze Wolf, Independent Scholar