Social Science Research Council

"The Politics of Festival Music in Kazakstan"

My doctoral project entails ethnomusicological field research in Kazakstan and Xinjiang, Northwest China, and focuses on private and state-sponsored festival celebrations, both live and televised, and their political import. The Kazak government has been engaged in a process of nation-building since achieving independence in 1991, and presently treads a fine line between encouraging Kazak nationalism and acknowledging the multiethnic nature of its population. Its nation-building efforts have specifically targeted Xinjiang Kazaks in an effort to woo back diaspora population to achieve titular majority. In contrast, Chinese cultural policy, particularly as reflected in televised festival events such as the multi-cultural New Year's celebrations, has long emphasized the minority status of non-Han populations, including Kazaks. My intent is to investigate the disjunctures between the Kazakstani and Chinese policies and their popular reception. I hope in doing so to gain an understanding of how nationhood embodies and reflects notions of minority and majority identity through national arts and music celebrations.

During the first phase of my project, I will spend one year in Kazakstan studying Kazak festivals and the effects of Kazak nation-building. For the second phase, I will spend six months in Xinjiang, investigating how Xinjiang Kazaks are affected by nation-building policies of both their home state (Kazakstan) and minority-targeted cultural policy of their host state (China), as reflected in Chinese state-sponsored and private Kazak festivals. Since many Xinjiang Kazaks left Kazakstan in the early twentieth century, the yearning for the Kazak homeland is a powerful presence in many private festival songs. Xinjiang Kazaks' emotional ties to the Kazak majority across the border conflicts with their minority image promoted by the Chinese state. By contrast, in Kazakstan, private notions of Kazakness seem to coincide more clearly with state-promoted images, with nostalgia for the Kazak nomadic past a strong undercurrent. Through interviews discussing televised and live festivals, I seek to illuminate how such festivals reveal complex relations between state and popular constructions of identity and those of the two Kazak populations split at the border.