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Objectives: Xinjiang plays a vital role in the trans-Eurasian population migration, language diffusion, and culture and technology exchange. However, the underrepresentation of Xinjiang's genomes has hindered a more comprehensive understanding of Xinjiang's genetic structure and population history., Materials and Methods: We collected and genotyped 70 southern Xinjiang's Kyrgyz (SXJK) individuals and combined the data with modern and ancient Eurasians published. We used allele-frequency methods, including PCA, ADMIXTURE, f-statistics, qpWave/qpAdm, ALDER, Treemix, and haplotype-shared methods including shared-IBD segments, fineSTRUCTURE, and GLOBETROTTER to unveil the fine-scale population structure and reconstruct admixture history., Results: We identified genetic substructure within the SXJK population with subgroups showing different genetic affinities to West and East Eurasians. All SXJK subgroups were suggested to have close genetic relationships with surrounding Turkic-speaking groups that is, Uyghur, Kyrgyz from north Xinjiang and Tajikistan, and Chinese Kazakh, suggesting a shared ancestry among those populations. Outgroup-f 3 and symmetrical f 4 statistics showed a high genetic affinity of SXJK to present-day Tungusic, Mongolic-speaking populations and Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) related groups. Allele sharing and haplotype sharing profiles revealed the east-west admixture pattern of SXJK. The qpAdm-based admixture models showed that SXJK derived ancestry from East Eurasian (ANA and East Asian, 42.7%-83.3%) and West Eurasian (Western Steppe herders and Central Asian, 16.7%-57.3%), the recent east-west admixture event could be traced to 1000 years ago based on ALDER and GLOBETROTTER analysis., Discussion: The high genetic affinity of SXJK to present-day Tungusic and Mongolic-speaking populations and short-shared IBD segments indicated their shared common ancestry. SXJK harbored a close genetic affinity to ANA-related populations, indicating the Northeast Asian origin of SXJK. The West and East Eurasian admixture models observed in SXJK further provided evidence of the dynamic admixture history in Xinjiang. The east-west admixture pattern and the identified ancestral makeup of SXJK suggested a genetic continuity from some Iron Age Xinjiang populations to present-day SXJK., (© 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Kyrgyz people, a Turkic-speaking ethnic group native to Central Asia, are considered as one mixed population from different historical tribes through the processes of conquest, intermarriage, assimilation and migration. The aim of this study was to infer the forensic statistical parameters and genetic structure of Chinese Kyrgyz and explore the patterns of their genetic relationships with adjacent and worldwide reference populations. We genotyped 25 forensic-related markers (amelogenin, Y-indel of rs2032678 and 23 Autosomal Short Tandem Repeats, A-STRs) in 491 Chinese Kyrgyzs. Allele frequency and forensic parameters were calculated using the STRAF software. Pairwise genetic distances were estimated using Phylip and subsequently dissected via principal component analysis, multidimensional scaling plots and phylogenetic relationship reconstruction. Investigations of allele frequency and forensic parameters indicated that all studied A-STRs are informative in the Chinese Kyrgyz population and can be used as a powerful tool in forensic individual identification and parentage testing. Results from genetic relationship analyses demonstrated that Akto Kyrgyz people harbour a genetically close relationship with Turkic-speaking Uyghur and Kazakh. Genetic structure analysis based on the raw genotype data among Eurasian populations further suggested that genetic ancestries and population substructures in Asia are largely associated with language and geography.

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Objective: The study deploys an ethnolinguistic conceptual framework to examine variations in different dimensions of marital conservatism in the Kyrgyz Republic, a post-Soviet nation in Central Asia, focusing on enduring, yet evolving, Russian linguo-cultural influence. Background: The global transformation of family and marriage systems has produced diverse local normative patterns that are historically rooted but are also reflective of context-specific contemporary socio-cultural, political, and economic transitions. The study investigates these patterns in a multi-ethnic setting where Soviet-era legacies, culturally pivoted on the use of the Russian language, have combined with post-Soviet exposure to both Western influences and rising neotraditionalism. Method: The study uses data from two rounds of a nationally representative cross-sectional householdbased survey, with each round including standardized interviews with over 2000 men and women aged 18-49. Multi-level regression models are fitted to predict ethnolinguistic variations in attitudes toward premarital chastity, optimal marriage age, support for parental preeminence in marital decisions, support for ethnic endogamy, and opposition to divorce, while accounting for universal correlates of marital conservatism, such as education, religiosity, and urbanicity. For most outcomes, the analyses examine separately how these attitudes apply to women versus men. Results: The results demonstrate the persistent normative imprints of the Russian linguistic and cultural influence but also instructive variations in them across the specific outcomes. They also suggest an overall rise in some aspects of marital conservatism. Conclusion: The findings elucidate the unique multidimensional complexities of family and marital change in transitional Eurasia, yet also its similarities with other post-colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to examine the ethnographic data about the Kazakh ethnic group from the European sources of the middle XIII to early XX centuries. The study uses problem-chronological and comparative-historical analyses to process data published by European travellers, merchants, soldiers and scientists. The European works contain factual inaccuracies, unverified information and speculations. Their quality has improved since the XVIII century though. The findings of European explorers allow a better understanding of the ethnogenesis of Kazakhs and their transition to statehood. Data available in these sources will help find the historical roots of contemporary ethnic and inter-ethnic problems in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. The present study allowed a look at the past life of Kazakh people and their ethnic distinction in Turkestan through the lens of European mentality.

What are ethnic boundaries made of? How do people come to experience such boundaries? Notwithstanding the formidable analytic attention to the role and effects of boundary drawing in social life, such questions are rarely asked. We look at the apparently stable boundary between Russians and Kyrgyz villagers in the Issyk-Kul region to trace how its dimensions were naturalized through settler colonialism, Soviet modernization, and post-socialist upheaval. But even if naturalized, the boundary behaves as a 'presence absence' whose relevance fluctuates and whose momentary features remain unpredictable, as we demonstrate by focusing on transgressive mixed marriages between Russian and Kyrgyz villagers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of Central Asia often view religion and ethno-national identity as being linked: "to be Kyrgyz (or Uzbek, Kazakh, etc.) is to be Muslim." The specific ways in which the relationship between ethno-national identity and religion is constructed and understood, however, have not been adequately researched. "Being Muslim" is not merely an ethnic marker: it can imply a range of different, perhaps even competing, theologies with different relationships to national identity. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2014, this article investigates the question of what it means to be Kyrgyz and to be Muslim by undertaking a comparative analysis of two Islamic discourses: Kyrgyz ethno-national traditionalism and the normative Maturidi Hanafism promoted by the Kyrgyz state and the religious authorities. What emerges is a portrait of a complex and variegated religious landscape, one in which the meaning of being Kyrgyz and Muslim is continually questioned and renegotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of sovereignty in elite and popular affection during the violent and turbulent events from April to October 2010 in the Kyrgyz Republic. Nationalist leaders promoted Kyrgyz ethnic values and ideals as the center of sovereignty held by some to be under threat. These events exemplify what we describe as the affective politics of sovereignty. We explore how emotion, in particular, serves as an important component of the constitution of sovereignty as both an international and popular institution. We explore how Kyrgyz identity has become intertwined with the sovereignty of Kyrgyzstan and clashes with Western multi-ethnic conceptions and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s brought statehood to peoples in the Central Asian borderlands at the interface between the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. In the past two decades, the cautious opening of this once tightly sealed border has led to renewed contact between individuals of the groups sharing the ‘Kyrgyz’ ethnonym with other individuals from homologous groups who are now citizens of Kyrgyzstan, China (Xinjiang Autonomous Region) and Tajikistan. This article focuses on how Kyrgyz groups beyond the territorial borders of their respective states regard their belonging to a wider Kyrgyz nation. Based on data gathered in anthropological fieldwork, I discuss these groups’ respective notions ofmeken(homeland) andchek-ara(borders) and place such narratives of inclusion and exclusion amongst Kyrgyz groups alongside local rhetoric of ethnic ascription, group affiliation and citizenship, and boundary marking in these borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Post-Soviet Central Asia has inherited a set of circumstances conducive to the revitalization of religion. The renewal of Muslim awareness and identity in Central Asia may not be surprising, but the growth of Christianity is, especially in its Protestant form within indigenous Muslim communities. This article, based on qualitative field research, reviews one example of this development: the process of conversion to Protestant Christianity among Muslim Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan. A prominent aspect of this social movement has been the ways in which Kyrgyz Christians have entered into a dynamic process of engaging with issues of identity and what it means to be Kyrgyz – a process that has sought to locate their new Christian religious identity within, rather than on the margins of, familial and ethnic identity, and one that challenges the normative understanding of Kyrgyz identity: that to be Kyrgyz is to be Muslim. While providing the context for Kyrgyz conversion, this discussion primarily focuses on the way Kyrgyz Christians utilize a number of different discursive strategies to contest normative Kyrgyz identity constructs and to legitimize a Kyrgyz Christian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces changes in the culture of the Kyrgyz ethnic group in the era after the break-up of the USSR. In order to describe correctly changes in their lives, a comparison was used from a wide range of areas where Kyrgyz live. As a basis, the way of life of Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan is used. Kyrgyz here represent the majority, but before the break-up they did not emphasize their ethnicity significantly. After the break up of the USSR and the formation of the national state, they began to look for new, or new-and-old, roots and to strengthen their nationalistic tendencies. Looking for new roots included the creation of historical constructs and emphasizing many specifics of lifestyles of ‘real Kyrgyz’. But Kyrgyz live in many other states as a minority – especially in China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. These Kyrgyz, however, often designate different elements of their culture as a basis of their ethnic group compared to Kyrgyz from Kyrgyzstan. The paper first tries to identify important elements of Kyrgyz culture in the era of the break-up of the USSR based on statements of respondents from Kyrgyzstan and to find out if these elements are also important as an identification feature for Kyrgyz in other states. Field research has been conducted in China and Tajikistan, but in this work, results from Afghanistan in particular are presented. The paper also tries to give an answer as to the influence of the formation of the national state (Kyrgyzstan) on members of ethnic groups living in other states as a minority (Kyrgyz in Afghanistan) and how this changed their ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade local scholars in Murghab, Tajikistan's easternmost district, have published several books in Kyrgyz on the history and culture of the Eastern Pamirs. In their work, the authors address the region's predominantly Kyrgyz population by emphasizing the ‘kyrgyzness’ of the Eastern Pamirs, which they refer to as Sarykol. The results of these local studies reverberate widely on the ground and have become integrated into everyday interaction. As a consequence, not only the region's history and culture, but also its territory, are perceived through an increasingly ethnicized lens. This paper seeks to explore local history as a way of appropriating space. Following Henri Lefebvre (1974), local history can be defined as an ethno-spatial practice that emphasizes ethnicity. Through an analysis of five works on local history and culture and their embedding in an ethnographic context, this article provides evidence for the significance of local studies in ‘kyrgyzizing’ space. It also demonstrates, moreover, that international non-governmental organizations, through their funding of such research, are entangled with globalized visions of culture, tradition and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides a historical and socio-economic profile on Wakhan in Afghanistan. It examines the political developments in the region, citing the mention of Wakhan by early Chinese travellers, the Wakhan Corridor being a highway of trade and communication, and its government until 1883. It discusses the culture and way of living of communities and ethnicities in Wakhan which include the ethnic groups Wakhi and Kyrgyz.

This paper challenges the thesis that mountain areas are regions of refuge. The refuge concept attributes irrelevant exchange and limited communication to isolated mountain habitats which mainly depend on production for home consumption. In contrast, it is shown that exchange relations in all walks of life have been affected not only recently but for nearly two centuries in Central Asia, although the continued importance of subsistence strategies in the agricultural sector can be observed. The Pamirian Knot provides the mountainous interface between South and Central Asia for case studies of two ethnic communities – Wakhi mountain farmers and Kirghiz pastoralists – in order to exemplify socio-political developments in similar mountain environments. Examples are presented from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and the People's Republic of China. The territories have been separated since the late nineteenth century by international boundaries conceived as the result of the imperial ‘Great Game’. Emphasis is placed on developments in the livestock sector and it is shown that adaptation to changing socio-political frameworks has affected the livelihood strategies of nomads and mountain farmers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]