Globalising the steppe: environment and identity in Ermek Tursunov’s Tengrist parables

ABSTRACT

Kazakhstani cinematic discourse on the environment has evolved from prioritising pressing nation-building and geopolitical objectives in the immediate post-independence era to proposing alternative models for human-nature relations and contributing important insights into the study of the Anthropocene. How has the sovereign Kazakhstan’s gradual integration into global systems and environmental discourses affected the ways in which Kazakhstani filmmakers depict the interrelationship between the local people and the environment, between the concerns of nation-building and local and global environmental challenges? This article takes as case study Ermek Tursunov’s cinematic parables set in the Kazakh lands, with a special focus on The Old Man (2012). The films explore indigenous epistemologies of nature rooted in the pre-Islamic Turkic religion of Tengrism, which centres on humankind’s relationship with nature mediated by the supreme deity Tengri, the Sky God. Drawing on the Tengrist worldview and his own experiences as a (post-) Soviet Kazakh eco-activist, athlete and filmmaker, Tursunov crafts a picture of Tengrism that is both ethnically particular and universal, as well as closely interrelated with other global phenomena, such as environmental concerns, soccer, and cinema. He thereby imagines a pan-human alternative to both old Soviet and new capitalist ecologies currently operating in Kazakhstan.

KEYWORDS:

• Kazakhstani cinema
• ethno-national cinema
• Tengrism
• postcolonial
• Anthropocene
• environmental humanities

Acknowledgements

I thank Birgit Beumers, Agnes Kefeli and Peter Rollberg for their constructive comments on a shorter version of this essay presented at the 2022 ASEEES convention in Chicago. Special thanks go to Arlene Forman and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful reading and invaluable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For an excellent introduction to Russian literature of the Anthropocene, see (Brookes and Fratto 2020).

2. For the plurality of spiritual expressions in Kyrgyz cinema, see (Monastireva-Ansdell 2021). For examples of Kyrgyz Tengrism-inflected films, see Aktan Arym Kubat’s The Light Thief (Svet-Ake 2012) and Centaur (2017), and Ernest Abdyzhaparov’s Saratan: Village Authorities (2005). For Tengrist motifs in Kazakhstani visual art, see the works of Saule Suleimenova, Almagul Menlibaeva and Said Atabekov, among others. For a wider overview of Kazakhstani films incorporating Tengrism, see (Isaacs 2018, 175–199).

3. For a more detailed discussion of Tursunov’s representation of cinema as an alternative religion akin to Tengrism that connects the local and the global, see (Monastireva-Ansdell 2019).

4. I thank one of my anonymous peer reviewers for pointing out the importance of including the gender dimension in my discussion.

5. On Tengrist traditions in music, see (Amanzhol 2016).

6. Blanter’s granddaughter, Tatyana Brodskaya, made the march freely available to post-Soviet soccer fans and players following the 2009 dispute between the Russian Soccer Premier League and the Russian Authorship Society that demanded royalties for using the piece at tournaments (Kapel’kin 2019). This story of honouring intergenerational legacy reverberates with Tursunov’s ethical message in The Old Man, since Brodskaya rejected the capitalist logic of individually inheriting and profiting from her grandfather’s inspirational work in favour of declaring it transnational communal heritage.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Monastireva-Ansdell

Elena Monastireva-Ansdell is Associate Professor of Russian at Colby College. She has published on both Thaw-era and contemporary Russian and Eurasian cinema with a focus on national mythology, media constructions of interethnic relations, postcolonial identities, and representations of the indigenous land and environment. Her investigations into Russia’s imperial identity and the image of the Caucasian/Chechen Other have appeared in The Russian Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and KinoKultura. Her work on Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasian Cinema is published in Monastireva-Ansdell (2023), Directory of World Cinema: Russia (2015), The Russian Cinema Reader (2013), and Modern Jewish Experiences in World Cinema (2011).