Paper short abstract:

Changes in house-building and furniture are a good example of Kazakhstani Dungan attitudes towards their inclusion into the category of ‘living fossils’ of culture as it was in Qing China

Paper long abstract:

Sinitic-speaking Muslims, better known in the former Soviet Central Asian countries as Dungans, have been seen by authors working on them as an 'example' of cultural conservation. The culture that Dungans are supposed to preserve is the one existing in Qing China, reason why they have been even branded as a kind of cultural 'living fossils'. However, despite of this perception, Dungan people have been also adding themselves to the changes in taste in relation to house-building and furniture. In the former Soviet republics, such new taste trend is known as evroremont. Evroremont usually means using materials standards and design patterns as in Europe. In Central Asia, nevertheless, such 'evro' standards are also influenced by People's Republic of China's architectural mimicry. In this paper, I analyse the ways that this complex panorama is experienced in the everyday life by Dungan people in south Kazakhstan.