ELENI ALBAROSA

Between eagle hunters and horsemen, or how Kazakhstan is shaping a national identity between folklore and modernity.

The Kazakh state is very young, only 33 years since its independence. My paper wants to deal with how Kazakhstan is trying to build a national identity after the Soviet period, (which had a flattening and cultural deconstruction effect towards local communities), through sports, and in particular traditional sports.
In fact, sport is most of all the card with which the Kazakh state wants to assert itself and present itself on the world stage on a cultural level, and it is no coincidence that this year they hosted the World Nomad Games.
Kazakhstan is a huge country, the ninth largest in the world and the first landlocked. It is a developing country. The richest in Central Asia because of its natural resources and therefore because of its importance and energy level and with major investments on the country from the world's greatest powers including the U.S. and Russia and China surrounding it.

In this scenario, therefore, it is important for Kazakhstan to establish itself as a hegemonic and independent state over the region, and of course it does this through cultural prestige and thus sports. Why is sport so important? The construction of Kazakhstan's identity and history has its roots in the history of Turkic communities, which in large part in the territory lived in nomadic mode, in the wild, and where horseback riding, wrestling, and eagle hunting were very important activities.

Nomadic life was virtually eliminated in the USSR period, and only a hint remained in the ALTAJ areas. But it is precisely these traditions that contemporary Kazakhstan needs and does not see them as an obstacle to development but rather precisely as a putof-strength, and it is precisely in this way that it wants to present itself to the world as a country of extreme modernity (the capital Astana is an obvious example of this) and tradition through a folkloric revival of everything that brings back nomadic traditions.