"Scenarios on Statehood: Media and Public Holidays in Kazakhstan" by Hilda Carper Eitzen

Hilda Carper Eitzen

Deposited 1999

Abstract
The translation of the imaginary into the concrete is a project of both art and politics, especially in state and nation-making. The goal of using image and celebration in the service of politics has been perpetuated in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as the ideal of multiethnic harmony becomes crucial for a region incorporating heterogeneous populations and bordering Russia and Asia.

In this thesis, Chapter I (The Formation of Kazakh National Identity and Incipient Statehood) explores the historical, geographic, and cultural background of Kazakhstan as it effects state-building.

Chapter II (Internationalization of the Economic Sphere) and Chapter III (Media in Late- and Post-Soviet Kazakhstan) are concerned with how the new post-Soviet state has attempted to reverse its position of former marginality through globalization in both commercial and cultural spheres. Internationalization of both the marketplace and the media have been one means to both implicitly and explicitly challenge the legacy of Russian supremacy.

At the same time, the overwhelming reach of global diversity has often encouraged counter-reaction among leaders and Kazakh nationalists alike in a turn toward a more inwardly defined political culture. Chapter IV (Reclaiming the Kazakh National Homeland) and Chapter V (Exploring Geneologies within Kazakh National Identity) show how globalized concerns have often been countered by indigenous ones. These chapters examine the disparate regionalisms and clan identities that complicate state-building processes, even within the ostensible unity of the Kazakh ethnicity.

Chapter VI (Claiming the State through Public Celebrations: Managing Diversity), Chapter VII (Transformation of the Soviet Celebratory Past: Toward Kazakh National Identity in a Multi-National State) and Chapter VIII (Claiming the New Nation through Post-Soviet Celebrations) explore the various types of public celebrations and their influence on the formation of the new multi-ethnic state.

Shifts characteristic of Kazakhstan in the last decade of the 20 th century have given mixed messages to the international public, if not the citizens themselves. Still, the counterbalancing of Europe and Asia, Slavic and Muslim, Arab and Mongol, industrial and agrarian, urbanized and nomadic, as mirrored in the range of public celebration, has afforded a multiplicity of opportunities for creative flux and paradoxical stability.