Paper short abstract:

Cynthia Werner argued that life-cycle rituals enabled Kazakh households to cope with the social crisis of the 1990s by maintaining ties of “indebtedness”. On the grounds of an ethnography of Kyrgyz weddings, I will challenge this claim by means of Mauss', Levi-Strauss' and Graeber's theories.

Paper long abstract:

From the 1960s onwards, Central Asian life-cycle rituals (toi) have been described as an “economy of favours”. In the 1990s, Cynthia Werner argued that these ceremonies enabled Kazakh households to even out the risks stemming from the social and economic crisis that succeeded the collapse of the Soviet Union by maintaining ties of “mutual indebtedness”. This paper will discuss this hypothesis on the grounds of an ethnography of marriage ceremonies celebrated by Kyrgyz villagers in the Issyk-Kul region. I intend to expose the number of gifts and services exchanged by the participants and describe how the expenses related to the funding of these ceremonies are distributed between guests. The gifts given as matrimonial benefits will be compared to the contributions received from the various guests. Upon relying successively on the theoretical frameworks of Mauss’s gift economy, Levi-Strauss’s generalised exchange and Graeber’s human economy, I will argue that these various gifts promote heterogeneous forms of sociability. The asymmetry of matrimonial benefits will be explained by the structural inferiority of wife-takers to wife-givers. Furthermore, I will compare the bonds between distant relatives and friends, which are contingent on reciprocal gifts, to those between close relatives, which exclude debt, given the relevance of family communism and hierarchies related to seniority and kinship.