Three Generations of Karata: The Transformation of a Daghestani Collective into a Global Islamic Religious Community

Abstract

The article describes transformations of the mountain village society of Karata, in the republic of Daghestan, in Russia’s North Caucasus. In the Soviet period organized into a collective farm from a kin-group oriented Islamic community, by the post-Soviet period its Andi-language people were split among the mountain village, the capital of Daghestan Makhachkala, flatland villages on the Daghestani plain, other cities of the Russian Federation, and the near and far abroad. This analysis focuses on changes in the social, religious, and political organization of Karata in the course of the three generations, from those born in the 1940s in the mountains to those born in the 1980s–90s who grew up in cities. This change of generations is accompanied by the replacement of a Karata identity with an Islamic one—for the younger generation of Karata people, the so-called second, urban generation, the global Islamic agenda, including jihad in Syria, is closer than the village concerns of Karata people born in the 1960s and 1970s.