Discussion
Relationships between people, land, language, and nature in Sakha folklore are frequently utilized in environmentalist and anti-colonial discourses and resistance to legitimise claims to territory and self-determination. The extent of Sakha cultural productions from literature to film drawing upon narratives from folklore necessitates exploration of the discursive power within this genre to inform Indigenous linguocultural resistance to imperial hegemony. The Soviet, and earlier imperial, legacies of institutionalizing ethnocultural identities mean that neither folklore nor related cultural productions can be taken axiomatically as reflections of ‘genuine’, ‘bottom-up’ enterprises. This paper seeks to elucidate how representations of Sakha folkloric narratives found in cultural productions shape the self-perceptions of Sakha individuals in Kazakhstan and how such representations inform linguistic and cultural preservation and development in the diaspora. The (loosely defined) Sakha diaspora in Kazakhstan consists primarily of individuals who left the Sakha Republic in 2022 to avoid being mobilised to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The data presented in this paper was generated through participant observation and interviews with Sakha individuals in Kazakhstan between November 2023 and June 2024
[1]accompanied by analysis of the cultural productions discussed by participants. Some participants commented that since moving to Kazakhstan their “awareness has awoken”
(moe oznaznanie prosnulosʹ) and stated that their understanding of what it means to be Sakha and their desire to maintain and develop themselves and their communities linguistically and culturally has shifted since relocating to Kazakhstan. Though the shift does not appear to be exclusively a result of the sociolinguistic and political climate in the Russian Federation but due also to exposure to the cultural climate of Kazakhstan. The paper will argue that disruption to the social context in which existing Sakha cultural productions are being consumed, and new ones being created, has significantly influenced their reception, subsequently informing approaches to linguistic and cultural preservation.
[1] Though additional fieldwork will be undertaken before the ICCESS conference in July 2025.
