The Return of the Aryan Myth: Tajikistan in Search of a Secularized National Ideology Marlene Laruelle For more than a decade, the five Central Asian republics have been “readjusting” their academic institutions in response to the new borders created by the fall of the USSR and subsequent independence in 1991. Both the university system and the Academy of Sciences have been called on to rethink their research policy in order to meet the new national stakes and current political demands. Thus, the elaboration of a national discourse is a particularly relevant object of study in order to observe the different modes of legitimization of the new Central Asian states and the scholarly tools they deem necessary for their political ratification. Consequently, in retracing the genealogy of the contemporary historical analyses we must pose a question regarding the development of the academic disciplines and the data concerning their political environment. Does Tajik independence in 1991 involve rethinking the genesis of the nation and the scholarly fields linked to the elaboration of the national narrative? Why have the political authorities declared 2006 the “year of the Aryan civilization”? According to the pressure put on academic circles by the Tajik authorities and the ideological obsessions of the current regime, all human and social sciences can be con- sidered as being more or less politicized. As in all the post-Soviet republics, the issue of the nation’s ancient presence on its contemporary territory represents the elemental matrix of national discourse. The historical analysis of this phenomenon is performed in an essentialist mode, retroactively projecting onto the past the existence of a Tajik nation born out of Soviet modernity: ethnic groups exist as objective and natural facts from which the contemporary national construction inevitably ensues. The autochtho- nous question is considered to be all the more a crucial key element of the political and economic reality of contemporary Tajikistan as this country is in competition with its Uzbek neighbour. Thus, archaeology and ethnology have become highly strategic: archaeology because it alone can confirm or invalidate the relation between the world-famous sedentary civilization that developed in the mythic Khorassan, Bactria and Sogdia and the contemporary population, and ethnology because this dis- cipline provides a scientific justification, in the Soviet tradition, for the policy on nationalities carried out within the country. Marlene Laruelle, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, USA. Email: marlenelaruelle@yahoo.com Nationalities Papers, Vol. 35, No. 1, March 2007 ISSN 0090-5992 print; ISSN 1465-3923 online/07/010051-20 # 2007 Association for the Study of Nationalities DOI: 10.1080/00905990601124462