Central Asia Losing Its Oral Traditions with Passing of Last Aksakals

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – The aksakals, as the older members of the Central Asian nations who for centuries have transmitted the cultural memories of their peoples to the rising generations, are now dying out with no replacements in sight, the victims of urbanization, globalization and economic challenges.

            The last generation of aksakals, people born in the 1940s and 1950s, are now reaching the end of their lives; and according to the Bugin news agency, there are no replacements among those born later and efforts to save the aksakals by digitalizing their words are falling short (bugin.info/detail/poslednie-aksakaly-kak-ts/ru).

            That means that one of the chief transmission belts of cultural knowledge is disappearing and that differences between those raised with aksakals and those raised without them are increasing, a development that could threaten the ethnic unity of these peoples and lead to radical changes. 

            Oral history in Central Asia, Bugin notes, “includes epics, sayings, genealogies, and also stories about local events such as the hunger of the 1930s or the consequences of World War II.” With the passing of the aksakals and the tradition they had maintained, few young people know much about their past and the poems and stories which have united their peoples.

            The aksakal tradition is rapidly dying out because of globalization and digitalization, educational systems which stress formal training rather than the informal transmission of ideas that the aksakals represented, and economic factors which have driven so many young people to leave their villages and even countries in the search for work, cutting them off from the past.

            All the governments of the region and many international organizations recognize this problem, but their efforts to collect and publish what the aksakals have said have not had the impact many hoped for because the Central Asian leaders have not integrated these documentary findings into the school system.

            Some Central Asians are now looking to Finland as a model for what they should do. Helsinki has made the oral tradition of the Kalevala central to its educational system; and three countries in Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – have indicated that they hope to do the same. But time is not on their side.