An ethnologist who challenged the nation as a fixed essence
He described the nation as a powerful metaphor that political actors compete to monopolize.
Valery Tishkov is a Russian ethnologist and social anthropologist known for studying ethnicity, nationalism, and interethnic conflict. He treated nations less as naturally given communities than as categories mobilized and reconstructed by political actors and elites, an approach crystallized in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame. As Minister for Nationalities in 1992, he connected scholarly analysis of ethnicity to the governing problems of a multiethnic state and the prevention of conflict. His constructivist interpretation became one pole of debate over whether nationalism is chiefly elite-made or also an autonomous expression of popular experience.
Career Timeline
- 1964Graduated from the history faculty of Moscow State University
- 1969–1972Dean of the history and philology faculty at Magadan State Pedagogical Institute
- 1972–1976Researcher at the Institute of World History of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1976–1981Scientific secretary of the history department of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1989–2015Director of the RAS Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology
- 1992Minister for Nationalities of the Russian Federation
- 2015–Scientific supervisor of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology