Kazakh Ornament
The story of Kazakh ornament should be a proud one. For hundreds of years, these nomads of the Eurasian steppe had a rich relationship with pattern. Indeed, in the most minimal of landscapes, nothing but flat land and sky, plain surfaces were somehow banished. People lived in yurts that were wrapped on the outside with decorative belts, lined on the inside with woven reed mats, wall hangings, felt rugs. Wooden chests were covered in colorful designs, leather vessels even stamped with shapes. Women wore dresses packed with abstract flora, and their silver jewelry glistened with pinpoint detail. Artistry was all around, but that ornament was all in service of a greater way of life. When the pastoral economy was deemed unfit for modernity, the yurts were packed up, the rugs stored away, the silver sold off. The core of a culture was left to rot away, but the ornament was left to stay, and you can still see it today in Almaty, on buildings, signs, and advertisements, icons of a larger mythology that has been forgotten. If a nomad from two centuries past were brought to the present day, those patterns may be the only thing he would find familiar. Everything else has been extinguished.
Reproducing ornament, it turns out, was the perfect way to show token respect to a people's culture and history while they were otherwise assimilated into oblivion. Always there was this kind of doublespeak. Kazakh music ensembles were promoted - hooray! - except Kazakhs had never played in ensembles before and most groups had a Russian accordion. Solo performance, the truer Kazakh performance art, was relatively ignored. Tournaments were organized for "national sports", but the horsemanship these games relied on was usually developed through shepherding, and that vocation was becoming deliberately discouraged, so the codified games now had fewer able players. New buildings were put up that seemed to celebrate Kazakh pattern, but this very urbanization was killing off the yurts where patterned surfaces once thrived. Everywhere, "national culture" was reproduced in the most superficial way possible, a sleight of hand to console a population whose lives were being radically rearranged.
It might seem a positive development that Kazakh ornament became the subject of scientific study in the Soviet Union. It was another sick habit of the system, however. National cultures were obsessively documented by ethnographers before the state planners above them disassembled the very way of life they were recording. A man named Gani Ilyaev became a legendary "ornamentologist." He collected thousands of Kazakh patterns, it's been said, and a major street in Kazakhstan's second-largest city is named in his honor. In his portfolio were paisleys, zig-zags, diamonds, and rays of sun. Yet he traced his patterns from items that were becoming relics, and as patterned objects disappeared from everyday life, the new Soviet ornament was a flattened imitation of those rich tapestries, with a handful of shapes used over and over while other symbols, ancient and full of significance, were left for Ilyaev's academic catalogs. A fantastically detailed design grammar was being reduced to a set of simple stencils.
Master craftsmen were gone, so amateur designers reproduced, and continue to reproduce, a simple pattern. If you search the world's digital images for oyu-örnek [ою-өрнек], the Kazakh word for "ornament", you will see no paisleys or zig-zags, only variations of the same motif, a zoomorphic imitation of ram's horns called qoshqar müyiz [қошқар мүйіз]. The master craftsmen of the past could have showed you "camel's eyes" and "snake heads", but all this variety has been reduced to ram's horns, qoshqar müyiz everywhere. These horns, symmetrical, spiraling inward and tapered at the ends, are found on concrete fences, on balcony panels, on cast iron fences, and on facades. Look at the logos for Kazakhstan's national airline, for its national TV station, for its sovereign wealth fund. They all have the same ram's horns.
Why has qoshqar müyiz survived while other ornaments perished? There are several reasons we can propose. A good meme is remarkable for its simplicity, and the ram's horns have gone viral because they're so easy to make - students in Kazakh schools are shown how to cut out qoshqar müyiz with a folded piece of paper and scissors. They evoke an indigenous, pagan history of animal worship that gives Kazakhness a powerful narrative with deep roots; these horns are often described as "the most ancient of ornaments", so it's only suitable that they're used to prop up a new state in search of an ancient past. And most controversially, it can be argued that qoshqar müyiz have thrived because, in their three-pronged symmetry, they feel familiar, an exotic take on the fleur-de-lis. Could one motif be piggybacking on another meme's star power?
If there's one other pattern that can compete, it's the decorative border that's found on the hoist side of the Kazakh flag. Kazakh ornament was deemed so evocative that it was given space on the nation's most frequent self-identifying symbol. This symbol-on-a-symbol, actually, is often identified as qoshqar müyiz, and the ram's horns are certainly there, but it has memorable heart shapes that can be called qaz moyin [қаз мойын], or "goose necks", and it runs long, self repeating like the border on a carpet. This makes it real handy for adding a quick ethnic strip around signage, or for sticking on the side of a high rise. There have been rumors, in fact, that new high rises in Almaty were required to feature some sort of national ornament, as so many of them have the same ram's horns and goose necks flowing down their facades, afterthoughts masquerading as patriotism.
And if ornament has become an afterthought, in a way so has Kazakh culture. The very stuff of everyday life in Almaty now has a globalized form, and throwing "something Kazakh" on it is a way of resisting this inevitability, of insisting on a unique identity that people here can feel is exclusively their own. That shopping mall could be anywhere after all, but global anonymity is resisted; Kazakh ornament is slapped on the surface. That iPhone could be anybody's, but put some qoshqar müyiz on it, and it's Kazakh. As the internet and other forces bring local tastes in line with a global generic ideal, perhaps ornament will be one the only identity statements we're left to make. The nomadic dream, born in a yurt, is long dead, but its spirit lives on in endlessly repeating horns, stuck on our Chinese electronics.
Reproducing ornament, it turns out, was the perfect way to show token respect to a people's culture and history while they were otherwise assimilated into oblivion. Always there was this kind of doublespeak. Kazakh music ensembles were promoted - hooray! - except Kazakhs had never played in ensembles before and most groups had a Russian accordion. Solo performance, the truer Kazakh performance art, was relatively ignored. Tournaments were organized for "national sports", but the horsemanship these games relied on was usually developed through shepherding, and that vocation was becoming deliberately discouraged, so the codified games now had fewer able players. New buildings were put up that seemed to celebrate Kazakh pattern, but this very urbanization was killing off the yurts where patterned surfaces once thrived. Everywhere, "national culture" was reproduced in the most superficial way possible, a sleight of hand to console a population whose lives were being radically rearranged.
It might seem a positive development that Kazakh ornament became the subject of scientific study in the Soviet Union. It was another sick habit of the system, however. National cultures were obsessively documented by ethnographers before the state planners above them disassembled the very way of life they were recording. A man named Gani Ilyaev became a legendary "ornamentologist." He collected thousands of Kazakh patterns, it's been said, and a major street in Kazakhstan's second-largest city is named in his honor. In his portfolio were paisleys, zig-zags, diamonds, and rays of sun. Yet he traced his patterns from items that were becoming relics, and as patterned objects disappeared from everyday life, the new Soviet ornament was a flattened imitation of those rich tapestries, with a handful of shapes used over and over while other symbols, ancient and full of significance, were left for Ilyaev's academic catalogs. A fantastically detailed design grammar was being reduced to a set of simple stencils.
Master craftsmen were gone, so amateur designers reproduced, and continue to reproduce, a simple pattern. If you search the world's digital images for oyu-örnek [ою-өрнек], the Kazakh word for "ornament", you will see no paisleys or zig-zags, only variations of the same motif, a zoomorphic imitation of ram's horns called qoshqar müyiz [қошқар мүйіз]. The master craftsmen of the past could have showed you "camel's eyes" and "snake heads", but all this variety has been reduced to ram's horns, qoshqar müyiz everywhere. These horns, symmetrical, spiraling inward and tapered at the ends, are found on concrete fences, on balcony panels, on cast iron fences, and on facades. Look at the logos for Kazakhstan's national airline, for its national TV station, for its sovereign wealth fund. They all have the same ram's horns.
Why has qoshqar müyiz survived while other ornaments perished? There are several reasons we can propose. A good meme is remarkable for its simplicity, and the ram's horns have gone viral because they're so easy to make - students in Kazakh schools are shown how to cut out qoshqar müyiz with a folded piece of paper and scissors. They evoke an indigenous, pagan history of animal worship that gives Kazakhness a powerful narrative with deep roots; these horns are often described as "the most ancient of ornaments", so it's only suitable that they're used to prop up a new state in search of an ancient past. And most controversially, it can be argued that qoshqar müyiz have thrived because, in their three-pronged symmetry, they feel familiar, an exotic take on the fleur-de-lis. Could one motif be piggybacking on another meme's star power?
If there's one other pattern that can compete, it's the decorative border that's found on the hoist side of the Kazakh flag. Kazakh ornament was deemed so evocative that it was given space on the nation's most frequent self-identifying symbol. This symbol-on-a-symbol, actually, is often identified as qoshqar müyiz, and the ram's horns are certainly there, but it has memorable heart shapes that can be called qaz moyin [қаз мойын], or "goose necks", and it runs long, self repeating like the border on a carpet. This makes it real handy for adding a quick ethnic strip around signage, or for sticking on the side of a high rise. There have been rumors, in fact, that new high rises in Almaty were required to feature some sort of national ornament, as so many of them have the same ram's horns and goose necks flowing down their facades, afterthoughts masquerading as patriotism.
And if ornament has become an afterthought, in a way so has Kazakh culture. The very stuff of everyday life in Almaty now has a globalized form, and throwing "something Kazakh" on it is a way of resisting this inevitability, of insisting on a unique identity that people here can feel is exclusively their own. That shopping mall could be anywhere after all, but global anonymity is resisted; Kazakh ornament is slapped on the surface. That iPhone could be anybody's, but put some qoshqar müyiz on it, and it's Kazakh. As the internet and other forces bring local tastes in line with a global generic ideal, perhaps ornament will be one the only identity statements we're left to make. The nomadic dream, born in a yurt, is long dead, but its spirit lives on in endlessly repeating horns, stuck on our Chinese electronics.
