TY - JOUR
T1 - A Nation's Holy Land
T2 - Kazakhstan's Large-Scale National Project to Map Its Sacred Geography
AU - Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
AU - Bigozhin, Ulan
AU - Zhumabayev, Batyrkhan
N1 - Funding Information:
Interview, Expert 2. Experts 1 and 3 noted that after work was completed on the foundational principles and documents in 2017, they got the impression that higher authorities had lost interest in the project. In fact, the project’s funding in the following years was reduced, but in reality, the reduction was minor. For 2020, the budget was around 800 million tenge (without considering inflation). From 2017 through 2020, the project received a total of approximately 10 million US dollars. It is also worth taking into account that the project was funded not only via the Sacred Kazakhstan Center but also via grants given directly to scholarly projects by the Ministry of Education and Science.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This article focuses on the project Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, launched in 2017 in Kazakhstan as part of the nationwide program Ruqani Zhangyru (Modernization of Spirituality). The officially stated goal of the project is to cultivate a sense of patriotism in the country's residents related to places and geographic sites that are important for the historical memory of independent Kazakhstan. The authors assume that the real goal of the project is national territorialization, or recoding of the semantics of space, by selecting, codifying, and articulating some symbols and practices, while leveling and forgetting others. The analysis, which is based on expert interviews and official documents, shows that this postcolonial process fits into the tendency toward ethnonationalization of Kazakhstan, in which discourse on the civil nation continues to be reproduced at the official level, while real activity is more focused on reinforcing the idea of Kazakhstan as the state of the Kazakh nation. The institutionalization of organizing and recoding the sacred landscape involves a wide variety of groups and actors. These factors may explain the success of the project in comparison to other projects being implemented under the Ruqani Zhangyru program.
AB - This article focuses on the project Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, launched in 2017 in Kazakhstan as part of the nationwide program Ruqani Zhangyru (Modernization of Spirituality). The officially stated goal of the project is to cultivate a sense of patriotism in the country's residents related to places and geographic sites that are important for the historical memory of independent Kazakhstan. The authors assume that the real goal of the project is national territorialization, or recoding of the semantics of space, by selecting, codifying, and articulating some symbols and practices, while leveling and forgetting others. The analysis, which is based on expert interviews and official documents, shows that this postcolonial process fits into the tendency toward ethnonationalization of Kazakhstan, in which discourse on the civil nation continues to be reproduced at the official level, while real activity is more focused on reinforcing the idea of Kazakhstan as the state of the Kazakh nation. The institutionalization of organizing and recoding the sacred landscape involves a wide variety of groups and actors. These factors may explain the success of the project in comparison to other projects being implemented under the Ruqani Zhangyru program.
KW - Kazakhstan
KW - national territorialization
KW - nationalism
KW - sacred geography
KW - territory
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U2 - 10.1017/nps.2021.22
DO - 10.1017/nps.2021.22
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85117525866
SN - 0090-5992
VL - 50
SP - 704
EP - 721
JO - Nationalities Papers
JF - Nationalities Papers
IS - 4
ER -