Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Anthropology

Major Professor

Benita J. Howell

Committee Members

Rosiland J. Hackett, Thomas N. Turner, William Y. Adams

Abstract

This study in the anthropology of religion examines the relationship between Kazak ethnicity and religion, exploring how the collective memory is mediating Muslim values in Kazak culture in the 1990s. Ethnographic field research was conducted in the Kazak language from 1992 to 1998 in the city of Turkistan (Turkestan) in southern Kazakstan (Kazakhstan). Turkistan is the site of the Timurid shrine of Ahmet Yasawi (Ahmed Yasavi), a key figure in the Turkic Sufism of Central Asia. Today it is also a cultural center of the new Pan-Turkism and the site of a Kazak-Turkish international university.

The findings of the study are that Kazak religion in Turkistan is affectively experienced as five elements: (1) an ethnic identity that is conceived as a Muslim identity, because the Kazak steppe has been sacralized by Muslim architectural landscapes; (2) normative Islam idealized as the "pure way," which the Kazak elders and Qojas (khojas), a religious honor group with roots in the Sufi tradition, are expected to practice as surrogates for the Kazak community; (3) an ancestor cult energized by dreams and dream-visions and expressed in domestic and neighborhood rites that reflect the Islamic cycle of funerary meals; (4) pilgrimage (ziyarat) to the tomb of Ahmet Yasawi and the peripheral shrines of other Muslim saints, whose spirits are associated with the spirits of the Kazak ancestors; and (5) folk medicine associated with Muslim therapeutic values, the blessing (baraka) of Muslim saints, and the healer's ancestor-spirits.

In five descriptive chapters these elements are substantiated with verbatim interview data in Kazak, with English translations. The problem of normative and popular Islam (folk Islam), the lslamization of Inner Asia, the syncretic interpretation of Turko-Mongolian shamanism, and the semantic fields of Kazak religious discourse are explored.

The persistence of Kazak religion in the Soviet Union is accounted for by the strength of the contextualization of Islam in the nomadic period and the capacity of the collective memory to store religious values in attenuated ritual forms. The study concludes that religion identified with sacred habitus and ethnic identity will persist in the collective memory even under severe deculturative pressure.

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