Tengrism as a Modern Name

The underlying religious material here is genuinely old and continuously attested: the veneration of the sky, the powers of earth and water, and a recognizable body of associated ritual practice appear from the Turkic inscriptions of the eighth century onward and persisted afterward in local forms for many centuries across a wide stretch of Central Asia and Siberia. What is new, and considerably more recent, is the name and the organized shape now attached to that older material. Tengrism as the title of a distinct religion, complete with an articulated doctrine, a claimed continuous identity and formal organizations built to represent it, took its current form only in the twentieth century, and it spread rapidly across Central Asia, the Volga region and Mongolia after 1991, in the immediate wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. That timing is not incidental. The movement's growth ran alongside, and very often was actively bound up with, broader movements of national revival across the same territories, as newly independent or newly assertive nations looked for symbols and religious identities that were neither the Islam nor the Orthodox Christianity long associated with foreign or colonial influence, nor the atheism the Soviet period had imposed.

Scholars studying this modern movement read its emergence in two genuinely different ways, and the disagreement is substantive rather than a matter of emphasis or tone. One body of scholarship, represented by researchers such as Marlene Laruelle working on Tengrism's political deployment in Central Asia and Tatarstan, reads the modern movement as an invention of tradition in the technical sense: a real, deliberately assembled modern construction, built out of folklore, earlier scholarship and selectively recovered practice, put together to serve a specific contemporary argument about national identity and continuity. A different reading treats modern Tengrism instead as the public surfacing of practice that had, in fact, never actually stopped being carried on at the local level through the centuries covered above, now given a formal name and organizational shape because a religion without either could not be defended, taught or legally recognized in a modern public sphere in the way an organized tradition can be. Both readings are argued in published scholarship rather than merely asserted, and the disagreement is not a minor one, since it bears directly on the basic question of whether Tengrism should be described as an ancient religion continuing under a new name or as a new religion built from ancient materials.