From May 31 to June 1, 2019, the international symposium “The 1916 Uprising in Central Asia: academic integration, new approaches and knowledge”  took place in Karakol.

 

Panel 1: Historiography and sources for study of the uprising

Janyl Bokontaeva. Oral stories about the uprising of 1916: in the fate and memory of residents of the Issyk-Kul region.

 

Abstract: Using interviews with residents of the Issyk-Kul region as an example, I will try to show how the memories of the uprising of 1916 in modern Kyrgyz society provide the basis for the formation of a new collective identity in the ideological space left after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In my research, I proceed from the assumption that the loss of the former Soviet identity, associated with the loss of semantic and social structures in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, led to cultural trauma and the search for a new identity. Thus, applying the concept of binding trauma to the memories of the uprising of 1916 in modern Kyrgyzstan, I argue that the traumatic memories of the uprising of 1916 are a tool for overcoming injuries caused by the crisis of Soviet identity, and a tool for creating new forms of self-consciousness and national identity. Not being direct participants or witnesses of the uprising of 1916, contemporary Issyk-Kul residents nevertheless experience the memories of the uprising as a personal and collective trauma. Collective grief and general experience of suffering, even if secondary, experienced by my respondents, unites them into a social and ethnic community and gives meaning to the events of the recent past, which led to the loss of Soviet identity by my respondents.

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