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Paper abstract:

Documentary sources for Qazaq history prior to the nineteenth century are few, and most of these are the accounts of outsiders (comprising a scattershot of imperial reports and travel accounts). If we seek to hear the voices of eighteenth-century Qazaqs themselves, then the source-base dwindles to a handful of documents preserved in the Russian and Qing archives (most often in translation), in the form of diplomatic messages sent by Qazaq leaders.

To call this genre ‘diplomatic correspondence’ is in fact somewhat misleading. The eighteenth century marked a transition phase, when Qazaqs still viewed themselves as a distinct polity, yet found themselves increasingly affected and influenced by neighboring empires (including Russia, China, Kokand, and Jungaria). In working with these documents, I have come to see this correspondence (in particular that of Nūr ʿAlī Khan of the Kishi Juz) as better understood as a form of imperial-intermediary discourse, albeit one that reflected the as-yet limited power of the encroaching empires.

Whether viewed as diplomatic correspondence, or imperial intermediation, however, the fact remains that these were letters created by Qazaq elites, with the intention of eliciting specific responses and impressions from the rulers and officials of outside powers.

The question this paper will engage with is whether, and how, these diplomatic sources can be used to study Qazaq society itself. This topic reflects one of the major goals of my research, which is to shed light on the experiences and perspectives of eighteenth-century Qazaq society by engaging with the content and language of the extant Chagatay sources for the Kishi Juz.

The paper will argue that, indeed, it is possible to read ‘between the lines’ of these documents, in order to reach a deeper understanding of Qazaq internal political and social dynamics. The paper will start by examining the intermediary nature of these documents and highlighting how this positioning facilitates the effort to read them against the grain. It will then proceed to outline some of the specific approaches I have taken to analyze these documents—focusing on how Nūr ʿAlī’s demands and deflections reflected the internal political challenges he faced; and exploring the roundabout way that he chose to articulate his people’s needs and desires, in the guise of anticipating the Qazaq opposition that he would face.

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Paper abstract:

This paper seeks to analyze characteristics of a set of Qazaq texts written to Russian officials in the 1820s-30s through the sociolinguistic lens of “letters across social distance” (or “letters to power”). The texts, which were written by local scribes and submitted to Russian imperial administrative offices or officials by Qazaq nomads with a Russian audience in mind, were written in Chagatay and then translated into Russian. They were preserved in imperial archives, for imperial purposes. The texts represent but one genre of written communication in the fluid environment of the steppe territory as it began to come under colonial rule. Because of the rarity in this time period of any original texts produced by Qazaq nomads, they provide historians and linguists with a window on the larger language and social environment of the Qazaq steppe in this period that is otherwise largely obscured from view.

Focusing on the idea of “letters across social distance”—a term used by Alexander Nakhimovsky in his 2019 study of Russian peasant language, which is better known as “letters to power” in Russian historiography—this paper explores what these texts reveal and what they cannot reveal about the Qazaq nomads who orally dictated them and ensured their production and delivery in writing. Using these sources, we acknowledge the “social distance” between the Qazaq authors and official Russian recipients, which allows us to capture fragments of a nomadic world that existed outside of the Russian bureaucracy and structures, even as it built bridges with representatives of that bureaucracy. The letters depict social and political stances of the Qazaq authors and their communities, their relationships to written forms of communication and the multi-vectored cultural influences on the production and content of this genre of text. By analyzing characteristics of these texts, we can also identify some limitations to our historical understanding of issues around literacy, language contact and the steppe language environment in general in this time period.

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Paper abstract:

In the late 17th century, the Russian Empire started its colonial expansion into the Qazaq steppe, thus bringing Russians into direct, extended contact with the Qazaqs for the first time. Some records of this encounter have been preserved in the Russian imperial archival record. These include diplomatic correspondence, written in Chagatay from the Qazaqs to the Russians, as well as manuscript dictionaries and other unpublished sources written in Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. Today, many of these materials are kept in the archive of the Academic of Science in St Petersburg.

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of an 18th century’s Russian-Qazaq dictionary manuscript, one of the earliest such manuscripts, which can be dated to 1774. The dictionary manuscript is in good shape and most of it is in Cyrillic, with only a small portion in Arabic. It is essentially a list of words, phrases, and simple sentences with Qazaq equivalents, translations of the Lord’s Prayer, and a few other miscellaneous inserts. This linguistic data, dating back to the eighteenth century, represents the earliest available record of spoken Qazaq. It is also distinguished by its linguistic characteristics, which display phonological, morphosyntactic features unique to the 18th century Qazaq language. By developing a synchronic linguistic analysis of these historical materials, we are able to explore the phonological and morphosyntactic information that they contain and highlight their value as a source of natural linguistic data. This paper will discuss briefly the historical context in which the dictionary manuscript was produced then provide an introduction to the physical and paleographical characteristics of the manuscript. It also will discuss some of the major phonological and morphosyntactic properties of the Qazaq language recorded in the Arabic writing system, with emphasis on the challenges posed during the morphophonemic transcription and transliteration process.