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Accepted Paper:
Transformation of Funeral Rituals: A Reflection of Societal Change in Kazakhstan
Gulzan Dossanova
(Charles University)
Over the past 100+ years, Kazakhstan has changed from a nomadic society to a settled agrarian society and then to an industrial contemporary society with both urban and rural settlements. The manifestation of this social changes in the funeral rite is my research interest. Funerals are associated with people's ideas about the afterlife and the transcendence of being.
In this paper, I focus on the transformations in funeral rituals with the emergence of independent Kazakhstan. Using the example of three rituals that were part of burial rites, I want to show how changes in society have affected the performance of funeral.
In researching this issue I drew on contemporary literature, and another important part of the research was guided interviews with informants - these took place in the Oral, Aqtobe and Aqtau regions of western Kazakhstan last autumn. An important contribution was people's memories of that time, how and what they experienced and felt. I consider their memories to be very valuable material, because the witnesses are passing away and to preserve the spirit of the times, it is necessary to record their remembarances.