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- Convenor:
-
Christopher Baker
(American University of Central Asia)
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- Discussant:
-
Gabriel McGuire
(Nazarbayev University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Literature
Abstract
This panel examines issues of authority in the Kazakh context and the different forms of representation that construct, contest, and mediate it. Moving between lineage, festival, and archive, it interrogates how legitimacy is constituted, or questioned, through narrative, performance, and classification. Dinara Seksembayeva’s paper examines these issues in a post-Mongol imperial context in which older forms of steppe legitimacy began to falter or tremble. Focusing on Kazakh iterations of the Edige epic, she highlights its depictions of father-son ruptures and competition for Chinggisid daughters, arguing these were attempts to give narrative form to a changing landscape of prestige and political power. Gulzada Xan’s presentation relocates these concerns to the Soviet context and to the festival of Nauryz, a tradition originally reintroduced in the late Soviet era as a national form through which to display and disseminate Soviet authority. Her paper examines how Kazakh literary figures contested this legitimacy and the ways in which they reframed it as the recovery of an authentic Kazakh heritage. Shifting the focus to the steppe and to questions of epistemic authority, Christopher Baker’s paper examines the classifications of Chokan Valikhanov and a later generation of Soviet artists who used or repurposed pieces of his erudition to make the steppe legible. an engagement that in moments undermined the authority they attributed to his taxonomic precision. To engage his classifications, or to reflect on them in art, also meant confronting the question of whether the steppe was legible at all and if there was any authentic relationship between tables, lists, and lived experience.
Accepted papers
Abstract
This paper deals with the erudition of Chokan Valikhanov and a later generation of Soviet era Kazakh writers – Esenberllin, Suleimenov, Alimzhanov, and others – who became entangled in his classifications. Valikhanov was a Kazakh imperial officer involved in expeditions to transform the steppe and its borderlands into minutely detailed maps and lists of flora. He spent his career entangled in paper in the power-laden, indeterminate spaces at the edges of the Empire. The Kazakh writers who engaged Valikhanov in the Soviet era came across him as part of their effort to understand the inheritance of paper and taxonomy in the steppe. Their works were attempts to come to terms with what it meant to be sorted into categories or marked on multi-colored ethnographic maps. They encountered Valikhanov as a thing of paper, a patchwork of texts whose pieces they braided into others and to which they added more pieces, words, illustrations, and lists. Valikhnov’s works and the art of those who engaged him represent historically and culturally specific reflections on paper and taxonomy. Their writing involved a stance and a posture on the matter of representing lived confusion in enumerated lists. On whether the complexities of the steppe could fit in words or a book. It was a reflection on the capacity of imperial and Soviet civilization to make sense of the world in expedition notes, surveys, comprehensive maps, ethnographic dictionaries, and multi-volume encyclopedias. Their writing was a deliberation on the relationship between things and imperial and Soviet words.
Abstract
The epic of Edige is a widely shared epic tradition among various Turkic communities, including Kazakhs, which narrates the story of Edige, the legendary founder of the Noghay Horde. As a rich performative tradition, Edige has attracted the attention of scholars of oral literature, history, religion, such as Karl Reichl, Victor Zhirmunsky, and Devin DeWeese, who have examined the epic’s historical depth and performative elements. However, one central narrative motif, namely recurring father-son conflicts, has received little scholarly attention. This paper examines this theme in Kazakh versions of Edige, focusing on the rupture between Edige and his son Nuraly. In several variants, their feud frequently arises from Edige’s broken promise to give Nuraly one of the daughters of Tokhtamysh, a ruler of Chinggisid descent. While on the surface this episode dramatizes the consequences of failed paternal obligations, such as the distribution of war spoils, it simultaneously reveals broader political anxieties surrounding legitimacy and succession in the post-Mongol imperial context. The conflict becomes especially meaningful when viewed in relation to the institution of guregen, the political status of sons-in-law to the Chinggisid lineage. In the successor states of the Mongol empire, including the Golden Horde, marriage into the ruling family became one of the official pathways through which non-Chinggisid elites could acquire authority and secondary legitimacy. For Edige and his kin, access to Chinggisid daughters symbolized entry into the symbolic capital of Chinggisid prestige. Within this framework, the rivalry between Edige and Nuraly can be interpreted as a feud over access to political authority. Since the epic of Edige functions as “exculpatory narratives,” as Thomas Welsford argues, it provides Edige with alternative forms of legitimacy. The recurring presence of daughters of Tokhtamysh implicitly acknowledges the continuing political supremacy of Chinggisid descent and the need for such legitimacy among non-Chinggisid elites. Drawing on several Kazakh epic variants, including Edige Zhyr, Er Edige, Edige Batyr Angimesi, and Maulimniyaz-Edige, the paper argues that father-son conflicts centered on Tokhtamysh’s daughters acquire a clear political meaning, reflecting anxieties over access to Chinggisid legitimacy rather than merely disputes over broken promises.
Abstract
This paper analyzes how the Nauryz, a spring equinox holiday celebrated across Central
Asia became increasingly national in meaning during its revival in late Soviet Kazakhstan.
Although the holiday was reintroduced within the familiar Soviet formula that allowed national form within a socialist framework, literary figures, journalists, and editors used the revival to redefine Nauryz as part of Kazakh historical and cultural identity. Drawing on the late Soviet newspapers, poems, interviews, and archival materials, the paper shows that early media coverage framed Nauryz as a civic and ideologically acceptable celebration associated with
collective labor, ecological campaigns, and the discourse of friendship of nations, rather than as an explicitly national holiday.
At the same time, literary texts played a crucial role in the gradual nationalization of the holiday. Following Diana Kudaibergen’s argument that literature in late Soviet Kazakhstan functioned as a space for reimagining the nation, the paper examines how poets and writers used nostalgia, historical memory, and references to pre-Soviet tradition to frame Nauryz as a recovered element of Kazakh culture. Poems by Mukagali Makatayev and Mukhtar Shakhanov, as well as the republication of works by earlier figures such as Beimbet Mailin, Shakarim Kudaiberdiuly, and Mukhtar Auezov, connected the revival of the holiday to a broader process of cultural restoration. Newspapers and journals reinforced this narrative by citing earlier intellectuals, republishing historical texts, and presenting Nauryz as a tradition that had survived despite decades of official absence.