Kazakh Traditions of China

Author: Awelkhan Hali, Zengxiang Li, Karl W. Luckert ISBN: 0761809562 Format: Hardcover, 280pp Pub. Date: December 1997 Publisher: University Press of America B&N Price: $34.50

 
FROM THE PUBLISHER
This book provides a window to the life and culture of the Kazakh people who live in China. The work summarizes Kazakh political history, social organization, ethnographical aspects of nomadism, linguistics, and Chinese national policy. To this array of information, the book brings humanity and cultural depth, revealing how Kazakhs bless and obliquely curse, and how they experience life's joys and sorrows together with the fate and the work they share. We learn about their wedding customs and their poetry of marriage; about their involvement with the religion of Islam, and about their enduring habit of occasionally having recourse to the ancient rites of shamans. In brief, this book presents glimpses of Kazakh culture and life, ranging from the joys of being born and married to the sorrows of death.
Author Biography: Awelkhan Hali is Professor of Folk Literature in China. Zengxiang Li is Professor of Turkic Languages at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, China. Karl W. Luckert is Professor in History of Religions at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri.

FROM THE CRITICS/ Book news
Documents modern Kazakh traditions, drawing on material gathered among Kazakhs living in northern Xinjiang, the Uighur Autonomous Region, before 1991, when the region gained full independence from Russia and the former Soviet Union. Covers aspects of life including origins, birth and childhood, marriage, fasting and faith, the legacy of ancient shamanism, and death and mourning.