Abstract:
Contemporary post/decolonial discourses in Kazakhstan have completely excluded the following issue from the field of narrative: the
question of critically reevaluating the pre-colonial cultural structure.
These discourses consider current issues mostly as a result of colonialism and overemphasize external factors. It is important to read
and decipher the symbols of the cultural structure to understand
the origins of authoritarianism and other socio-political problems.
This article aims to investigate the origins of notions of the human
being and its existence in the postcolonial Kazakh culture through
comparing it to its pre-colonial cultural context. I will be working
with Abai’s Words of Edification, which is a collection of texts written
in prose in the form of a free philosophical meditation, and it is an
apt source for the investigation of the origin of the notion of human
existence. The politicization of Abai’s figure starting from the Soviet
period and continuing in the postcolonial era obscures the initial
questions in the text, and several lines from the Words of Edification
engendered the utmost controversy and overshadowed the rest of
the text. The aim of this article is to demythologize the poet’s image
and focus on symbols hitherto unread.
