ScholarWorks@경상국립대학교

초록

After independence, the pastoral societies in Kazakhstan went through a gradual recovery process after a sharp socioeconomic decline. The government's role in the recovery process was limited to providing a minimum legal standard. Pastoralists, instead, who had fallen from full employment in collective farms into unemployment, went beyond the “period of chaos” and reached a stage where they were able to rebuild their society through their own efforts. In this process, the “eyes on the steppe” played a pivotal role in providing stability to pastoral society, acting as a nexus between pastoralists and pastures, pastoralists and animals, and pastoralists and the entire village members. The key players in the emergence of this “eyes on the steppe” were the herders who gathered the livestock of smallholders and grazed them on their behalf. They firmly established a culture centered on production bases including Kokpar game, and since this culture has been directly connected to production activities it has the power to reproduce itself and grow by itself without being separated from real life. This paper presents a new perspective on the entire Kazakh pastoral society by tracing the behavioral patterns of the members of Sarybulak village, who gathered around the “eye on the steppe.”

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