Claiming an ancestral homeland: Kazakh pilgrimage and migration in Inner Asia

In this paper the authors explore alternative discursive constructions by Kazakhs in Mongolia and Kazakhstan of a 'Kazakh homeland', one which is markedly not coterminous with the borders of any state. As the use of nomadic pasture lands cut through and across state borders in the last centuries, so do contemporary Kazakhs describe and justify a variety of other cultural practices, from visiting shrines to obtaining illegal passports, in terms of a shared 'Kazakh' cultural history of movement. The stories people evoke and tell about the connection and 'Kazakhness' (Kazakhshylykh) evidence the simultaneous idealization of both ancestral rootedness and mobility as fundamental to a sense of 'belonging' to the land. This ancestral world also reveals the fundamentally arbitrary nature of borders in a world where belonging is made by moving: moving through space, moving through time. From such discursive temporal and spatial practices of passing and dwelling emerges a cultural-historical position that ultimately transcends the region's colonial history and its current nationalizing states