Tribalism Long Source of Unity among Kazakhs Must Become So Again, Kumekov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 6 – For centuries, the tribal and clan organizations among the nomadic Kazakhs served as the basis for national unity, allowing the Kazakhs to retain a common language with few dialects and promoting a sense of commonality, Academician Bulat Kumekov says.

            But when the Russians conquered Kazakhstan and even more in Soviet times, they sought to play one tribal confederation (zhus) against another as part of a divide-and-rule strategy, the Eurasian University specialist on medieval Kazakh history says; and they were sufficiently successful that many concluded these divisions must be overcome.

            Kumekov argues that both Kazakhs and outsiders were wrong to draw that conclusion and that “the clan principle, which is present in the subconsciousness of every Kazakh must only strengthen our uniqueness and not divide and weaken us” now and in the future (exclusive.kz/expertiza/obshhestvo/123123/).

            “Relations between tribes and families in Kazakh society corresponded to the relations of brothers, and the zhuses had the interrelationship of blood relatives” before the Russians came. But then, “after the inclusion of Kazakhstan within Russia, this was forgotten” and Western scholars to this day argue that these groups necessarily lead to disunion.

            That might be true had the Kazakhs been a sedentary population, Kumekov says; but as a nomadic people, “everything was exactly the reverse: the clan and tribal system was established for the unification of the people” and worked that way until the Russians came and sought to subordinate the Kazakhs to themselves.

            These structures explain, he continues, “how our ancestors keep for themselves an enormous territory and why we Kazakhs, despite being separated from one another by thousands of kilometers up to the 20^th century spoke a language where there was no place for dialects. Those appeared only in Soviet times.”

            According to Kumekov, “the harsh discipline and order in the nomadic milieu was much higher than in sedentary societies” of those times. Indeed, “that each member of this society knew his place in it was dictated by the severe conditions of life,” a pattern that gave it advantages over neighboring Slavic groups which were already sedentary populations.

            That was “well shown” in Olzha Suleymenov’s 1975 book Az i Ya where the Kazakh scholar showed on the basis of his examination of the Lay of the Host of Igor that Slavs at that time borrowed from the nomadic Kazakhs and not the other way around which would have been the case had the Kazakhs been the more primitive people.

            For Soviet ideologists, this was heresy. The book was confiscated and disappeared from libraries. What happened next, Kumekov says, he learned from Andrey Konnov, a leading Russian Turcologist who took part in the discussion of Suleymenov’s books at a conference in Moscow.

            Many ideologists wanted “the harshest punishment” for Suleymenov, Konnov recalls. But he and some others sought to defend him by suggesting that as a poet, Suleymenov had gone too far from his specialist and made mistakes but should not be punished but only told to go back to his poetry.

            “After this,” however, Kumekov continues, “the issue of the influence of nomadic culture on settled agricultural societies for a long time was not discussed in the literature.” And as a result, many concluded that nomadic cultures like the Kazakh must be inferior to the settled Russian one and thus must change if they were to survive.

            But now it is possible to investigate these things; and that research, Kumekov argues, shows that tribalism still has “exceptional significance for the current stage of modernization of social consciousness and the unification of the people under conditions of globalization.” Indeed, these supposed “divisions” may be the key to unity now and in the future.