Religious identity in Kazakh culture: the limits of the chronotope

Abstract

The article explores some structural characteristics of religious identity and the chronotope of traditional Kazakh culture as one of the basic organizing models of the sacred semiosphere. For cross-cultural expansion and verification of the research, not only narrative, written and ethnographic sources were used, but also archeological data. This paper shows how traditional Kazakh culture encodes space, time, and action. To prove the existence of the chronotope, not only as an analytical category of our study, but as a real life context that successfully functions in traditional culture, the article gives an example of going beyond the boundaries of the chronotope and the consequences of this exit for violating the «laws of the genre». Thus, the magic of the symbol of traditional (in our case, Kazakh) culture exists within the boundaries of the chronotope, embodied not only in body codes, rites and models of behavior, but also encodes space: architecture, artifacts and the symbolic actions surrounding them (as evidence of cross-cultural the universality of these archetypal models, we have given archaeological examples from the medieval past of settled cultures in Kazakhstan). Religious identity in Kazakh culture is a complex, multi-layered, situational ethnomethaphysical continuum of a unique and universal.