Abstract
The chapter focuses on the manner whereby myths and fantasies are finessed by the contemporary Kazakhstani state to legitimize its modernizing drives. Placed side by side, they constitute a teleological story of the Kazakh Becoming from the barely intelligible past into the distant future. Furthermore, the ideological aspects of that unified legitimation discourse morph into the physicality of the new Kazakh capital of Astana, turning it into a model Utopia in the middle of a [still] untamed steppe. The final part of the chapter briefly touches upon reactions of ordinary Kazakhstanis to this imbrication of objects and ideas. Although not reprobating, their reactions permit to register a widening cleft between the ideal as imagined by the authorities and the real as experienced by the rest.
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Notes
- 1.
Not to be confused with the present-day Uzbeks.
- 2.
Almaty, celebrating its 1000th year anniversary past year, is an excellent case in point.
- 3.
More precisely, at a conference held and organized by the ‘Kainar’ University in Almaty in 2005.
- 4.
It is interesting to note how every mythological ‘history’ wants to claim the invention of the sewage for itself; apparently, its ubiquitousness and indispensability easily make up for the unsavoriness of the processes it is supposed to service.
- 5.
Although some historians, not content with the presidential decree and eager to claim the glory of discoverers of the Kazakh antiquity, keep on investigating and pushing the proverbial Year One to still earlier periods; the real purpose of choosing that year and no other—that is, the desire to celebrate a respectable national jubilee while the memory of Putin’s unwitting insult was still fresh—apparently escaped them entirely.
- 6.
In a sense it is similar to another Utopia in the midst of a desert—Las Vegas.
- 7.
The last part of Nazarbayev’s statement has an unexpected ironic ring, for Utopia literally translates as the ‘no-place’, a place that does not exist.
- 8.
‘It is of principal importance for us not to get involved into this worldview discourse (mirovozzrencheskii diskurs)’, recommended the Kazakh President as he spoke of the ‘civilizational crisis’ (Kazakhstan-2050).
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Akulov, M. (2019). Eternal Futurostan: Myths, Fantasies and the Making of Astana in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan. In: Isaacs, R., Frigerio, A. (eds) Theorizing Central Asian Politics. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97355-5_9
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