Paper long abstract:

While pilgrimage is often framed as a quest, as a removal from the everyday, involving the altering of temporal experience and the sacralization of place, pilgrimage can also reflect everyday realities and societal instabilities. Simultaneously mundane and transcendent, and often undertaken in times of crisis, pilgrimage may offer an opportunity to imagine a different future, a different self, to effect a transformation, to plead for a particular outcome in work or love, or to overcome hardship. With a long history throughout Central Asia, pilgrimage and faith healing continue to be widespread in Kazakhstan, particularly during times of economic and social instability. Many Kazakhstani pilgrims I met, particularly those in gendered, economic, or political positions of precarity, are at an impasse—a stuck place, "a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward" (Berlant 2011:4). Cut loose from the socialist past and encouraged to imagine a capitalist future of wealth and prosperity that is out of reach for many, Kazakhstanis access practices such as pilgrimage and faith healing to "open the road," to clear the obstacles from their present path, to navigate a rough patch. In discussions with urban Kazakh women who practice pilgrimage and faith healing, I saw many grappling with what it means to be Muslim, trying on different Muslim personae, experimenting with spirituality while challenging ideas about proper dress and behavior. For many, pilgrimage presents a way of exploring new approaches to old problems, of questioning life choices, and probing an uncertain faith. This paper examines the exploratory "trying on" of different ways of being Muslim, through interviews with faith healers, their clients, and those undertaking pilgrimage in Kazakhstan.