ABSTRACT
How can one be Tajik? We are not dealing here with Montesquieu’s question, prompted by astonishment at the exoticism of a people with strange customs; nor yet with that of the sociologist interested in the ‘formation of national identity’: rather, it was the substance of a project launched by the Nezarat-e Mo’aref (‘Commissariat of Education’) of Tajikistan1 and its organs, a number of journals published in the Tajik language from 1924 onwards.
