From Fugitive Peasants to Diaspora

The Eastern Mari are descendants of migrants who, beginning from the sixteenth century, left their ancestral home in the Middle Volga for more easterly destinations on the interface between the Orthodox and Turkic-Muslim cultural worlds. In addition to exploring their settlement process, this study focuses on the beginning and the end of the twentieth century – two periods of revival and emergence of diasporic discource between the Eastern Mari and their ethnic kinsfolk in the putative homeland republic.