Becoming Muslim in Soviet and Post-Soviet Kazakhstan
Ulan Bigozhin
Assistant Professor, Nazarbaev University, ulan.bigozhin@nu.edu.kz
Assistant Professor, Nazarbaev University, ulan.bigozhin@nu.edu.kz
Abstract
This is an autoetnographic paper in which I, as an anthropologist, focus on my own experience of being a Central Asian Muslim from Kazakhstan. The paper consists of three main parts describing my spiritual growth and transformation over three periods in my life: my childhood in the late Soviet period, my youth during the early 1990s, and my path to maturity in the late 1990s and early 2000s. All three periods are partly shaped by the history of my family’s travels from the northern region of Kazakhstan to the south, and overlap with such historically important processes as perestroika, the collapse of the USSR, and Islamic revival in the period of independence.
This is an autoetnographic paper in which I, as an anthropologist, focus on my own experience of being a Central Asian Muslim from Kazakhstan. The paper consists of three main parts describing my spiritual growth and transformation over three periods in my life: my childhood in the late Soviet period, my youth during the early 1990s, and my path to maturity in the late 1990s and early 2000s. All three periods are partly shaped by the history of my family’s travels from the northern region of Kazakhstan to the south, and overlap with such historically important processes as perestroika, the collapse of the USSR, and Islamic revival in the period of independence.
CONTACT US
Emil Nasritdinov
Chief Editor
Phone: +996 998 654007
Email: nasritdinov_e@auca.kg
Email: nasritdinov_e@auca.kg
