Performing Transition in Mongolia: Repatriation and Loss in the Music of Kazakh Mobile Pastoralists

Abstract

In 1991 the government of Kazakhstan began an effort to repatriate Kazakh peoples living outside of Kazakhstan in order to manage the significant cultural loss that had occurred during the Soviet period and to address national identity after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Kazakh residents of China, Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, and other locations were invited to return to their “historic homeland” where they were promised financial support, medical services, social assistance, housing, and land (UNDP 2006; Diener 2009). Many of the Kazakh families living outside of Kazakhstan are descendants of people who had been forced out or fled the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of particular interest to the programme were the Kazakh people of Mongolia, whom organizers in Kazakhstan believed to have retained older cultural practices longer than Kazakhs in other locations due to the unique geo-cultural circumstances they shared with other mobile pastoralists (Diener 2007). Over 70,000 Kazakhs (more than 50 per cent of their population) moved from Mongolia to Kazakhstan during the two decades that followed. Despite this statistic, the programme has not been entirely successful, due partly to difficulties in its administration in Kazakhstan and partly to the reception oforalmandar(returnees) by permanent residents of the country. Mongolian Kazakh repatriates have also suffered due to a sense of loss and attachment to place, and some have subsequently decided to return to their home country—to Mongolia (Diener 2005, 2009; Barcus and Werner 2010).

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