In her book entitled Modernization of the Early Soviet Era in the Fate of Women of Kazakhstan, 1920–1930: Monograph (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, 2017), Janat Kundakbayeva, Doctor of Historical Sciences and Professor of the Department of History of Kazakhstan at…

In this interview, Peter Rollberg, one of the rare foreign specialists on Soviet Kazakh cinema, speaks about the first Kazakh filmmakers, their main themes and relations with the audience, and the legacy they left for modern Kazakh society. Your book…

The lives of women in Central Asia before Russian colonization are often portrayed in a miserable light. European travelers did not leave much visual evidence about local women. Women in large cities (Bukhara, Samarkand, and others) did not dare to…

  It is known that dance is a bodily expression of human feelings and emotions. Every nation has its own lexicography and distinguished style of dance. How things were with the development of Kazakh dance? In this interview, Anvara Sadykova,…

Contemporary Kazakh Proverb Research: Digital, Cognitive, Literary, and Ecological Approaches is a collected volume of research on proverbs by Kazakh authors edited by Gulnar Omarbekova (Kazakhstan) and Erik Aasland (USA) and published by Peter Lang (New York) in 2023. This…

In 2016, Joo-Yup Lee, a historian from the University of Toronto, published Qazaqlïq, or Ambitious Brigandage, and the Formation of the Qazaqs: State and Identity in Post-Mongol Central Eurasia (Brill, 2016). The book dealt with the formation of the Kazakhs (Qazaqs) as a nation and as those who pursued qazaqlïq, or the qazaq way of life. In fact, qazaqlïq, a political fluidity or vagabondage, was also practiced by the founders of the Shibanid Uzbeks and the Ukrainian Cossacks. The book was translated into Russian and published in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in June 2022. In this essay, Joo-Yup Lee tells of his recent trip to Kazakhstan, where he participated in a book presentation and discussion, met old friends, and made new ones.