Documenting Kazakh Funeral Rituals through Material Life Indicators (1960s–1980s)
Journal: Geistes- sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Anzeiger
Year: 2023

Discourses on religious life during the late Soviet period have enduringly been hyper-normative in Central Asian societies and continue to obliterate the wide spectrum of Muslim practices performed daily from the 1960s to the 1980s. To circumvent this rhetoric, the present article proposes to focus on material life indicators as an innovative method for documenting the intensity of ritual life. It particularly investigates the case of Kazakh funeral rituals. During the Soviet period, honoring th