In Mukhtar Auezov's 1942 novel Abai Zholy, socialism is an end anticipated not just by history but more specifically by Kazakh literary history. In his earlier scholarly writings, Auezov had presented Abai as a transformational figure in the emergence of written Kazakh literature. In the novel, Abai becomes not only a literary innovator but also a political reformist: Auezov's Abai is horrified by the harsh and feudalistic behavior of his father Qunanbai, a wealthy local leader, and finds companionship and inspiration in his encounters with a series of famous 19th century Kazakh aqyns (bards). Auezov thus used Abai Zholy to argue that Kazakh folk literature had always been animated by a spirit of social critique which, in its laments and desires, had anticipated the Soviet world. This paper compares these aqyns’ depiction in the novel first with Auezov's earlier scholarship on the 19th century and second with the content of the aqyns’ own surviving works. These ideas reflected both contemporaneous shifts in Soviet nationalities policy and the influence of socialist realist literary models, which commonly staged both literary history and generational conflicts as allegories of political change.
In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, mobile pastoralism is now a task managed not by collective farms but by individual households: extended networks of kin band together to create flocks, and poor families trade labour for sustenance and a share of the flock’s live offspring. The success of these sheep-herding camps turns on their integrity as domestic units: the camp cannot function without the tasks customarily performed by women, yet relations of blood or marriage remain the only social institutions capable of mediating the exchange of domestic labour. This paper contrasts elaborate marriage ceremonies with more informal unions in which the primary desire is the presence of a woman’s labour. These marriages—unregistered, undertaken from necessity and celebrated by little more than a meal and perhaps a bottle of vodka for drinking toasts—index the conflicts and contradictions implicit in domestic labour being simultaneously fundamental to the household’s economic life and yet treated as a form of labour not to be honourably alienated from the family.
This paper traces the path of Motif K111.1, Alleged gold-dropping animal sold, through a series of tales in which the trickster Aldar Köse works his way to wealth through ruses that exploit the norms and institutions of mobile pastoral production. Comparison of the motif across eras reveals the ways in which a trickster figure who embodied a disorderly anarchy of appetite was improbably reborn as an apostle of order.
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