Kazakh childbirth rituals: tradition and modernity

The article examines the Kazakh childbirth rituals, which includes ritual practices in the prenatal period, during the delivery and in the postnatal period. The semantics and symbolism of prohibitions and regulations related to a pregnant woman are described in detail, special attention is paid to the demonological concepts of spirits and demons that can harm a woman and a child during the border, liminal period. Based on ethnographic records and field materials, the author describes the ritual and social functions of the marked participants in these rituals (the midwife, the “umbilical cord mother” or the one who was assigned to cut the umbilical cord of a newborn, the mother’s brother), as well as the functions of occasional participants – guests visiting a pregnant woman or a woman in labor. The work describes in detail the most important cultural codes of the Kazakh rituals of the childbirth and infant period – spatial (yurt locus), material (functions of the child’s first clothes, cradle, various amulets), animalistic (images of a dog and a horse), nutritional (food that produces the health of mother and child, forbidden food, as well as joint festive meals with the participation of relatives and other guests as an act of ritual return of the mother and child to society). An integrated consideration of the Kazakh rituals related to a child against the background of a broader Turkic context (in comparison with the traditions of the Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Altaians, etc.) allows to trace changes in the structure of certain rituals and their reduced elements and, as a result, gain a more complete understanding of their current state, which is also the subject of the article.

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