This article is devoted to contemporary return migrations by Kazakhs – a process of great significance for the population and cultural policies of the government of independent Kazakhstan. I examine the repatriation process of the Kazakh population from the point of view of the cultural transformations of Kazakh society itself, unveiling the intended and unintended effects of these return migrations. The case of the Kazakh returns is a historically unique phenomenon, yet it provides data permitting the formulation of broader generalisa-tions. It illustrates the dual impact of culturally different environments, which leads to a simultaneous pre-serving and changing of the culture of the new immigrants. The analyses found in this article are based upon data collected during two periods of fieldwork conducted in June–July 2016 and March 2018 at several locations in Kazakhstan and in cooperation with a Kazakh university. The research methodology is anchored in multi-sited, multi-year fieldwork.
This paper discusses the question of how the old Kazakh custom of the ban on uttering the name of a husband and his male relatives by his wife is still observed in modern Kazakhstan. To do this, material from five main regions of Kazakhstan (North, South, Central, East and West) was collected and analysed. The study aims to do a sociolinguistic analysis of the result of the questionnaire. Although this old tradition is well known and described a long time ago by such researchers as Nikolaj Ilminskii, Nikolaj Grodekov, Ybyraı Altynsarın, Grigorij Potanin, Aleksandr Samoilovich and others, no modern fieldwork was done to check whether this tradition is still alive and how it changes. As is known, present-day Kazakhstan had changed significantly since the 19th century, when Ilminskii first studied the Kazakh language and traditions, Wilhelm Radloff and the researchers mentioned earlier, who were linguists and explorers. However, many cultures are still observed. As Grodekov noted, the avoiding of the pronunciation of a husband’s name and his male relatives by his wife is familiar to the Kazakhs and Kirghiz. Somoilovich, basing on Mustafa Shoqaı’s materials, devoted a paper to this question. Perhaps the best story was related by Altynsarın, who has registered an anecdote how a woman who went to bring water and saw a wolf killing an ewe rushed back to her house and shouted for help, transforming the words ‘lake’, ‘reed’, ‘wolf’, ‘sheep’ and ‘knife’, since her husband and his male relatives bore names composed of these words.