Museumification of a mosque: Kazakhstani discourse of public spaces

Abstract

Public consciousness often replicates established notions of what public spaces mean, endowing them with familiar characteristics and features stemming from their openness or closedness to the interaction of individuals or the communication of communities. At the same time, as various processes and changes in culture and everyday life show, public spaces, violating our habitual notions of them, demand their reconsideration, as if insistently offering us new and unexpected scenarios of their own transformations and hybridizations. It is especially interesting to trace this to the examples of changes in urban life, where, in our opinion, the probability of the intersection of different practices influencing the construction of the discourse on new public spaces seems to be the highest. The article presents some reconsideration of the role and place of the mosque in Kazakhstani society, in the discourse on public space based on statistical data from 1990 to 2021, as well as field data collected between December 2021 and March 2022. The main focus is to trace the emergence of cultural memory beyond the boundaries of museums, the museification of Kazakhstani mosques, and wider public space. The authors have fixed a new tendency to the openness of religious space in Kazakhstan, when mosques perform not only the usual cult rituals and ceremonies, but also become a new public space, a place of complicity of state, religious and cultural institutions. As individual cases, we analyzed collaborations among representatives of various local communities aimed at expanding the functions of mosques, including their use for broader social communication and the translation of religious values and narratives of cultural memory