Kulshat Medeuova’s research while affiliated with L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University and other places

The article discusses the features of the interaction of local, national, and global memory of the traumatic past and the current commemorative practices of Kazakhstan. The authors used the concept of transnational, multidirectional, and agonistic memory to make an extended interpretation of Kazakhstan’s postcolonial/post-Soviet situation as avoiding conflict. Traditionally, the traumatic discourse of memory in Kazakhstan is described in the context of post-Gulag analytics. On the other hand, some places as the Baikonur cosmodrome produce technogenic traumas. The fundamental concept of the article is a traumatic memory infrastructure which allows, first, to link the diversity of places of memory with the implementation of technological megaprojects in Kazakhstan; second, to identify their correlation with transnational memory practices; and finally, to show the Kazakhstani outline of trauma, which is still insufficiently represented in academic literature. The article uses empirical materials collected by the authors during field research in Kazakhstan.

This chapter will consider different narratives of the oblivion, dismantlement, and transfer of Soviet monuments and traumatic and postcolonial syndromes of collective memory. It will also discuss the difference between urban and rural memory formats and analyze memory as a tool for mythologizing historical events. The empirical material for the chapter is grouped around the stories of the displacement of the Soviet monuments, the construction of the post-Soviet monuments, and the simultaneous building and restoration of mazars as original places of memory and important precolonial landmarks. The theoretical framework for the reassembly will be the concept of an inclusive, equitable right to memory in which both the state and grassroots actors participate. In this chapter, we do not consider memory practices as right or wrong; instead, we discuss balancing various memory strategies in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.

The authors have analyzed the dynamics of the growth of number of mosques built by religious associations in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and noted a transition from their unregulated and chaotic construction (proliferation) to their precise association with specific maddhabs, and their construction norms conceptualized by religious institutions represented by the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Kazakhstan (DUMK). The types of cultic facilities and the actors are discussed and ranked according to the type of their involvement and partnership. We should note that the participation of various actors adds weight to the status of mosques as important public facilities. The authors have paid particular attention to the religious communities’ revised registration realized under the Law of the RK on Religious Activities and Religious Associations of 2011, which optimized the religious space, consolidated the positions of traditional Islam and, hence, standardized the rules related to mosque construction. Keywords: mosque, public space, post-Soviet realities, re-Islamization, re-appropriation, “mosque diplomacy,” religious communities, traditional Islam, DUMK.

This article analyses the way in which the Soviet legacy has been combined with practices of public representation of national ideology in the space of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Astana. It examines how cultural and political elites exploit various archaic elements of the traditional imagery of the nation in the context of modern state-building. Referring to various examples in cityscape the article aims to show how the national ideology handles tradition not as a coherent corpus of 'inheritance', but as a reservoir of potential symbols, which can be used creatively for the fashioning of a national image of the capital city both in the international and in the domestic arena.