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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.