Paper long abstract:

The Manas epic trilogy is a living oral tradition, with new narrators who claim ancestral inspiration stepping up regularly. Debutant narrators have to navigate a thin line between grounding their version of the epic in a century-old tradition and bringing in their own, original elements. These novel elements have the power to strengthen a narrator’s claim to an authentic relationship with the spiritual world, but can simultaneously work as a ground for dismissal of their work by their contemporaries.

Traditionally, the Manas epic has been the exclusive domain of male activities. Gender asymmetry used to be the norm of the epic’s public performance and transmission. In 1995-2005, the ten volume book Aiköl Manas (Manas Magnanimous), a written interpretation of the epic ”Manas”, has been produced by a woman, Bubu Mariam Musa kyzy, and published by her followers.

We argue that the entry of the female into the male epic world significantly challenges the social landscape in Kyrgyzstan. Bubu Mariam is a Russian-speaking livestock farmer and healer from a remote village in Naryn oblast who claims direct transmission of the Manas story by Manas’ bard Jaisan. Not only do rhythm and rhyme deviate from conventional Manas versions, a number of crucial gendered and ethnically charged storylines challenge contemporary consensus.

Aiköl Manas provides a number of fascinating insights into the tense dynamic between tradition and innovation in the living oral tradition of Manas epic narration. Diverting from the Manas narrating tradition in a number of significant ways, the written version has irreconcilably divided the epic’s supporters and experts. In 2012-2016, the book went through the series of public debates and faced a vehement crackdown, including an official ban on its publication and sale. Currently the book is in court, being condemned as ”extremist”. Everyone who has worked with Bubu Mariam or interested in Aiköl Manas has been entered on a list of “People’s Enemies”.

In this paper, we argue that the powerful resistance to Aiköl Manas and the public humiliation of Bubu Mairam are caused by both a new interpretation of the epic as well as the unusual way of its production. Paradoxically the academic paradigms established during the Soviet atheism, and radical Islamic norms that appeared in the post-soviet time, jointly ensured the public rejection of the book.