Paper long abstract:

Mealtime narratives provide insight into the social world of a community as demonstrated, for example, by Ochs and Taylor's (1995) work on gender dynamics in middle-class American families. There is a little of such research in post-Soviet Kazakhstan that is experiencing tremendous sociocultural changes, including a revival of their Kazakh identity by overcoming a colonial Soviet past (e.g., Kesici 2011). Applying the idea of three levels of positioning in narrative (e.g., Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008), I examine five personal narratives out of the set of twenty-five ones collected in a small Kazakh-speaking village in the north of Kazakhstan. The selected narratives involve Kazakhs and out-group members (people from other ethnic/national backgrounds) and revolve around the themes of economic development, financial resources, food, and family. I show how Kazakh narrators construct their ethnic identities through positioning Russian and American characters as more advanced in terms of economic and financial resources in the story worlds. The events in the story world effectively support the narrators' claims in the storytelling world, while also reflecting larger current ideological discourses of Russia's and the West's leading roles in the Central Asian region and world. In contrast, in the stories about food and family values, the narrators construct their ethnic identities by positioning the Kazakh characters as morally positive; these stories receive endorsement from the audience by way of alignment construction. The themes and identities created mirror current nation-building discourses that value Kazakh traditions. Collectively, the everyday narratives I examine in this analysis demonstrate how Kazakh identities are constructed through the narratives about the other ethnic groups, and how narrators (re)construct larger ideologies about what it means to be Kazakh. In conclusion, this research reveals the fruitfulness of personal narratives in understanding connections among language, community, and identity.