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Abstract

Throughout Central Asia, there has been a reconstruction and re-evaluation of ethnoreligious identities since the collapse of the socialist system. In the remote western part of Mongolia, the Qazaq minority, who enjoyed cultural autonomy for decades, now find themselves disturbed by these transformations. The suspension of state-funded economic, employment, and education opportunities shifted the means by which Qazaqs gained social mobility and integration within mainstream Mongolian society. Meanwhile, the rise of Mongolian nationalism, which proudly emphasized the Chinggis lineages (Bulag, 1998), put the country’s only non-titular minority, the Qazaqs, in “a more ambiguous position in the new landscape of nationalist imagination” (Sneath, 2010, p. 260). Parallel to these changes, almost half of the Qazaq Mongolians immigrated to newly independent Qazaqstan, with whom they shared historical and ethno-cultural heritage (Diener, 2009; Werner & Barcus, 2010). While the democratic constitution continues to guarantee cultural and religious rights for minorities, the questions of language, loyalty, and civic participation have increasingly been scrutinized in public discourse around Qazaq belonging.

This paper examines how Qazaq minorities articulate and negotiate their sense of belonging in this shifting context. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bayan-Ulgii and a series of in-depth interviews, it takes everyday life as its primary analytical site. Combining theoretical frameworks of everyday nationalism (Brubaker, 2004) and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011), this paper argues that the imaginaries of being Qazaq in contemporary Mongolia are dynamic processes in which multiple strategies of ethnoreligious identity and the sense of belonging constantly unfold and shift. The paper shows that ordinary Qazaqs navigate this unsettled terrain through active and creative strategies by realigning their ancestral histories, leveraging cultural resources, and asserting civic belonging in their everyday life. While previous research on national identity in post-socialist contexts has primarily examined majority populations through a top-down approach, this study takes a bottom-up approach, focusing on the lived experiences of a minority community. By situating these everyday strategies in broader national discourses, the paper illuminates how ordinary Qazaq men and women, across different generations, talk, perform, and choose their place within the shifting terms of belonging in contemporary Mongolia.