I.R. Atnagulov
Institute of History, Philology, and Foreign Languages, Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University, Pr. Lenina 114, Magnitogorsk, 455038, Russia
The Nagaybak people are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group of the Southern Transurals, related to the Christianized Tatars of the Middle Volga, to the Chuvashs, and possibly to the Udmurts and the eastern Mari. The key factor in their origin was the emergence of the Orenburg Cossack Host and a variety of native military regiments in the 1730s. Unlike the Kalmyks, the Bashkirs, and the Mishar Tatar troops, who constituted independent and ethnically homogeneous regiments, the Nagaybaks served alongside the Russian Cossacks. Owing to some circumstances, specifi cally to the state policy of “organizing” the natives (Christianization, recruiting for the Cossack Host, and geographic isolation from closest ethnic relatives), their ethnicity shifted from religious (“Christianized Tatars”) and estate-based (Tatar-Cossacks) to a properly ethnic identity (the Nagaybaks). This case exemplifi es the impact of state policy on the origins of new ethnic groups. Current Nagaybak self-identity includes geographic, religious, and social constituents. Recent scholarship and the last two census reports mention just one name, Nagaybak, which, in essence, is an exoethnonym. This article discusses the emergence of the Nagaybak ethnic identity and all exoethnonyms and endoethnonyms of that group.
