World Nomad Games Highlight Central Asia's Nomadic Heritage

Photo: divainternational.ch

Editor’s Note: This is a first installment of a series describing the 5th World Nomad Games that took place in Astana, Kazakhstan, earlier this year. The celebrations of nomadic cultures, their skills, crafts, arts and traditions welcomed participants from all over the world, including the United States. And while you may ask yourself “Why are you writing about Kazakhstan and its nomads?,” the author – Anya Petrone Slepyan – asks a more pointed question: “What happened to all nomads, along with their ancient way of life?” 

On a sunny day in September, Granny Liza was in a very good mood. She was walking with her granddaughter and four-year-old great grandson through a park admiring the clothing, food, crafts, and music traditional to nomadic Central Asian Steppe cultures. The cultural display was part of the “ethno-village” built for the 5th World Nomad Games hosted in Astana, Kazakhstan. 

The Games were attended by around 3,000 athletes from 89 countries, including the United States, competing in 21 different sports based on Central Asian folk games. These included several varieties of wrestling and archery (both on and off horseback), tug of war, hunting with eagles and falcons, intellectual board games, and of course, Kazakhstan’s national sport, kokpar – a rugby-like game played on horseback. The Games also included a scientific and historical conference.  

Granny Liza’s pride was evident as she surveyed the busy scene. 

“I’m very glad the 5th World Nomad Games are being held in Kazakhstan, it’s very important to me,” she told the Daily Yonder in Kazakh. “I see how our traditions and customs are being shown, and I’m proud of it.”

Granny Liza smiled as she observed the crowded “ethno-village,” filled with display yurts, food stalls, craft markets, and performers. “I’m in a very good mood,” she said. (Still from video by Owen Halstad / Otter House Productions)

The international nature of the games is an opportunity to showcase rural cultures from around the world. A team of American horsemen who had come to Kazakhstan to play kokpar celebrated their love of horseback riding and wide open spaces, common values between their lives in the American West and that of Central Asian nomadism.

But the vibrant displays of the ethno-village disguise a complicated truth. While many nomadic cultural traditions survive and are practiced in Kazakhstan, a century of oppression has ensured that few, if any, Kazakh nomads remain today. 

Like in North America, the indigenous nomadic cultures of Central Asia did not disappear on their own. Rather, they were subjected to targeted violence from imposing empires.

Building a National Narrative

The 5th World Nomad Games took place in Astana, a recently-constructed city of over a million people. But despite their urban location, the Games were a tribute to cultures and traditions of pastoral nomadism, an inherently rural way of life that was once synonymous with Kazakh communities and still influences modern Kazakh identity. 

The Games both exemplified and reinforced this connection. The opening ceremony featured hundreds of dancers in traditional dress, as well as horses, camels, and eagles. Performers traced the history of Central Asian nomadic civilizations from the pre-Islamic religion of Tengrism to the rise of the Kazakh Khanate. In his opening address, Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke of nomadism in Kazakhstan’s past and present. 

“We are the descendents of wise and brave nomads who were able to preserve their unique identity and gave us the civilization of the Great Steppe,” he said. “Our common duty is to cherish this sacred heritage and pass it on to future generations.” 

The first World Nomad Games was hosted in Chapin Alta, Kyrgyzstan, in 2014. It has since been hosted twice more in Kyrgyzstan, and once in Turkey, before moving to Kazakhstan for the first time in 2024.

The Games gave Kazakhstani officials a unique chance to present a national narrative to both a Kazakhstani and international audience, according to Dr. Ulan Bigozhin, a professor of Anthropology at Nazarbayev University in Astana. 

This is especially important for such a young country. Though the Kazakh people have a long history on this land, modern Kazakhstan was only established in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.

“Kazakhstani state-makers identify Kazakhstan as not just a product of the collapse of the USSR,” Bigozhin said. “They build a narrative that our history goes all the way back to the Steppe empires of the Bronze Age. And archaeologically, this is true.”

“These Games are one of the ways that we are stepping out from the so-called Russian world,” Bigozhin said. “We’re telling the world that we’re building something different, which is Central Asian, pan-Turanic, pan-nomadic.”

But for all this focus on nomadism, the narrative of the Games left some important questions unanswered. What happened to the nomads? And how is life in rural Kazakhstan today?

The Nomads

For over four thousand years, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Mongols and other nomadic peoples of Central Asia traversed the land seasonally, grazing their herds which included sheep, horses, and camels. This was the dominant way of life in a vast part of the Eurasian continent, from Xinjiang, China to Siberia. 

“Nomadism was both an economic and a cultural practice,” said Dr. Sarah Cameron, a professor of History at the University of Maryland. “One of the stereotypes that outsiders have is that nomadism is backwards. But in reality, it was a highly sophisticated adaptation to the steppe environment.”

But although the nomadic past is at the center of the World Nomad Games, there was little discussion of how or why nomadic cultures in Kazakhstan are no longer present. 

Beginning in the late 1800s, Imperial Russia began to more intentionally settle Slavic peasants on fertile lands in Kazakhstan, disrupting the traditional routes of Kazakh nomadic migration, according to Adeeb Khalid, a professor of History and Asian Studies at Carleton College.

“There’s a thought that there is excess land that the nomads don’t know how to use properly, and settling it would make it more Russian and easier to control,” Khalid said. “And in many ways, the timing is the same as the westward expansion of the United States, where you have exactly the same process of dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their land and preparing it for settlement by ‘superior’ peoples.” 

But despite this increasing disruption, nomadism defined ethnic Kazakh communities until the 1930s, when the Soviet policy of agricultural collectivization forcibly replaced nomadic practices to disastrous effect, according to Cameron. In her book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, Cameron writes that Soviet policies in Kazakhstan resulted in a famine from 1930-1933 that killed 1.5 million people, a quarter of the inhabitants of Soviet Kazakhstan. 

This combination of the famine and Soviet policies forced ethnic Kazakhs into a sedentary lifestyle, and the country urbanized rapidly in the second half of the 20th century. Today, 62.7% of Kazakhstan’s population is urban, according to Kazakhstan’s Bureau of National Statistics. 

The nomadic past has been critical to Kazakhstan’s efforts to forge a distinctive national identity, both within the Soviet Union and as an independent nation after the USSR collapsed in 1991. But the memory of brutality that eradicated nomadic communities has not been preserved in the same way.

Much of the art sold in the ethno-village portrayed images of traditional nomadic life. (Still from video by Owen Halstad / Otter House Productions)

One reason for that, according to Cameron, is the misconception that “evolutionarily, nomadism was destined to fade away as the world became more modern.” This same line of thinking, applied to North America, explains away the decimation of indigenous tribes as a matter of coincidence or destiny. But this interpretation erases a slew of state-sponsored genocidal policies, from broken treaties and forced resettlement to cultural suppression and forced assimilation through the residential school system. The suppression of nomadic cultures in Central Asia was equally intentional. 

The Kazakhstani government, and scholars who it sponsors, may also be reluctant to engage in the darker side of nomadic history out of fear of harming their close relationship with Russia, Cameron said. 

“Officially, at least, [the government of Kazakhstan] adopts the Russian government’s line, which is that these collectivization famines across the Soviet Union were a tragedy of the Soviet peoples, rather than an attack on any one group,” Cameron said. “But behind closed doors, I will tell you, many Kazakhs think differently. They believe it was a genocide.”

A Wealth of Opinions

Another possible reason for relative silence on the topic of the famine is that many people hold mixed opinions about modernization in Soviet Kazakhstan. 

“I’ve been told by several Kazakh scholars, ‘look, we were nomads before and now we’re a modern society,” Cameron said. “So I think there’s ambivalence about the Soviet past and what it meant.”

Kazakhstan is the wealthiest country in Central Asia, with a GDP of 14.78 thousand USD per capita according to the International Monetary Fund – more than 7.5 times that of neighboring Kyrgyzstan. But this wealth is distributed unevenly.

Several generations after the famine, nearly 40% of Kazakhstani citizens still live in rural communities. But unlike their nomadic predecessors, they are worse off economically than their urban peers, according to a study published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute in August of 2024.

While poverty levels in Kazakhstan vary from region to region, the rural poverty rate is nearly twice as high as the urban rate nationwide, according to researchers.

The study cites a variety of factors that contribute to this discrepancy, including lack of educational and employment opportunities, lower wages, and an underdeveloped private sector. 

Visitors to the World Nomad Games played on a selkinchek, a traditional wooden swing commonly found in villages and settlements. (Still from video by Owen Halstad / Otter House Productions)

In response, the government of Kazakhstan has enacted a rural development program called “Auyl – El Besigi,” which translates to “the village is the cradle of the nation.” 

The program was intended to benefit 3,500 rural villages, which are home to 90% of Kazakhstan’s villagers, according to the office of the Prime Minister. 

But the success of the program has been disputed. In August, poverty researchers wrote that the implementation of the program was “ineffective.” 

“Out of 6293 rural settlements, only 665 villages (instead of 3500) saw intended changes over three years, and most of the problems were not resolved,” according to the study. 

“Reclaiming Pride in Nomadism”

Kazakhstan’s relatively high level of rural poverty is the result of the transfer of wealth from rural communities to urban areas over the past century, as nomadism was eradicated. But whatever economic benefits the World Nomad Games may provide to Kazakhstan are most likely to be concentrated in the host city Astana, one of the country’s largest urban centers. 

Still, according to Khalid, the fact that the games celebrate nomadic cultures is itself an important development.

“Over time, too many people have seen nomadism as the epitome of backwardness and violence,” Khalid said. “Ultimately, I think the World Nomad Games are about reclaiming pride in nomadism.”

A young boy takes a ride on a camel in the ethno-village. One of the goals of the World Nomad Games is to preserve traditions and pass them on to younger generations. (Still from video by Owen Halstad / Otter House Productions)

This sense of pride was evident among the Kazakh spectators who spoke with the Daily Yonder. 

“We love to remember our history, our culture, our traditions,” said Aisana Imanberdi, a university student. “And it’s important to bring these nomadic traditions to our modern way of life and show young people that it’s still relevant.”

Granny Liza was pleased that her great grandson was able to witness the Games, and learn the importance of Kazakh traditions.“He has to witness the people, the atmosphere. He must see how kokpar (Kazakhstan’s national sport) is being played, how the competitions are being carried out,” she said. “All of this he will remember throughout his life, so it is very good for him.”