Abstract:

Contemporary history textbooks in high schools of Kazakhstan have been widely adopted as “national identity” reinforcement tools through reshaping or reconstructing the so-called “socialist” notion of the state to more “ethnic nationalist”. This shift caused a confusing dilemma for the authors of the textbooks to accommodate both the national “Kazakh” ethnonym and “others”. The problem of representation of ethnic minority groups is receiving considerable attention with the development of the educational system of Kazakhstan and its impact on the new civic identity. This paper aims to explore portrayals of various ethnic minorities (such as Russians, Uzbeks, Koreans, etc.) in the secondary-level history textbooks published in the 2010s for 9th-11th grades. The focus of the research is directed toward three main historical periods - Kazakhstan as a part of late Imperial Russia, Kazakhstan in the USSR, and the Independent period. The content analysis method was applied to thoroughly consider those periods from the perspective of ethnic minorities. It is argued that the concept of cultural and ethnic diversity in the textbook materials is highly dependent on the government doctrines and ideologies that underlie such representations. The findings reveal that the verbal representation of certain ethnic groups is not elaboratively centralized and there are almost no distinguished boundaries between the use of terminology such as majority (non-minority) and minority. We conclude that the textual representation of ethnic minorities is highly limited to certain themes and topics within the historical context and there is a substantial lack of multicultural/multilingual context relevant to the diverse population of the state. This article also reveals the emerging need to provide more inclusive, post-colonial approaches of multi-ethnic historical perspective rather than the ideological ethnocentric narrative of the national past.