PART I

Click here to read Part II

Driving east out of Almaty, skyscrapers and American-style malls gradually give way to modest apartment blocks, unassuming mom-and-pop shops, and greasy-spoon restaurants. But every summer, the suburbs along the Ghulja Highway (Kūlja joly) transform into staging grounds for celebration. 

During the months filled with sunlight, the pulse of drums, the blare of brass and the roar of hundreds of revelers fill the area’s several dozen banquet halls. Ostensibly wedding ceremonies, these celebrations are full-scale extravaganzas – complete with orchestras, choreographed dancers, and professional singers. 

Underpinning all the glitter lies a lucrative, festive economy that sustains thousands of wedding professionals and anchors an entire community’s sense of belonging amid a rapidly changing cultural and social landscape. For Kazakhstan’s Uyghurs, a community heavily concentrated in Almaty and surrounding areas, this wedding bonanza is at once a source of livelihood and an opportunity for cultural renewal.

As Kazakhstan’s resource-fueled economy has grown steadily over the past several decades, citizens of various ethnic backgrounds are spending large sums on weddings. Supercharged by cash, social media, and a communal culture unafraid of flamboyance, weddings across Kazakhstan have evolved into a big industry and a source of constant public debate. 

The 2023 Kazakh comedy Jar-Jar (Love-Love) captures this phenomenon with biting humor, following two middle-class parents whose efforts to stage a perfect wedding for their son lead them into a series of financially absurd situations. Beneath the laughter, however, lies a pointed commentary on how families measure honor and status through binge-spending on weddings.

A typical Kazakh wedding consists of two major ceremonies: the qyz ūzatu (“sending off the bride”), organized and financed by the bride’s family, and the toy, the main reception hosted by the groom’s side. Each of these ceremonies can involve 200-300 guests and typically incurs a five-digit cost in US dollars, with some of the more lavish ceremonies costing more than $100,000.

Deep-seated concerns with maintaining family reputation, ensuring marital stability, and asserting parity or superiority over in-laws are motivations behind exorbitant wedding spending. Parents often view an opulent wedding as both a moral duty and a social safeguard, a means of securing respect within their extended kin network, local community, and social media following. 

The result is an enduring cycle of competitive spending, in which personal prestige, emotional fulfillment, and communal expectation converge, making the wedding not merely a family celebration but a public performance of status and belonging. The presence of large numbers of guests and, occasionally, performances by famous singers, are not only part of this power signaling, but also an act of public endorsement for the durability of the marriage. 

In large cities like Astana and Shymkent, five-star international hotels now compete with locally owned banquet halls (toy saraiy) for a share of the wedding economy. Although these venues offer similar menus, décor, lighting, and capacities, prices for large-scale weddings vary sharply depending on the prestige of the venue, further entrenching weddings as both economic enterprises and expressions of social standing.

Although many socio-economic dynamics that shape modern Kazakh weddings are also reflected in modern Uyghur weddings – most notably the tendency to instrumentalize weddings as a means of enhancing social capital, best encapsulated in the Uyghur idiomatic expression yüz bilen chiqish (literally, “to appear with one’s face”), there remain notable differences between urban Uyghur and Kazakh weddings in today’s Kazakhstan.

My first experience attending of an Uyghur wedding in Kazakhstan happened by accident. On a sweltering mid-summer afternoon, after arriving at a banquet hall in the predominantly Uyghur Almaty suburb of Qyzylqayrat (its name, meaning “red power,” a vestige of the region’s not so distant Soviet past) as an uninvited guest who knew no one except the leader of the traditional orchestra, I ate copiously, took hundreds of photos and videos from every angle, and observed the host, professional dancers, and the young and glamorous Uyghur diva Bakhara Ansarova from up close for hours without being asked a single question about who I was, or how I ended up there. Having spent a small fortune on the ceremony, the families appeared untroubled by the appetite of one hungry outsider – a negligible addition to the performance of abundance.

As I later spoke with many Almaty Uyghurs involved in the local wedding industry as well as young Kazakh scholars who had keenly observed such celebrations in their own communities, I found that, notwithstanding the similar extravagance of modern Uyghur and Kazakh weddings, a distinctive sense of communal unity and cultural affinity set the modern Uyghur weddings apart from similarly lavish Kazakh ones.

Indeed, the uniqueness of Almaty’s Uyghur community – and its gradual acculturation into Kazakh society – can be felt most vividly on the streets of Almaty’s most well-established Uyghur mehelle (neighborhood), Dostluq (Uyghur for “friendship,” known in Kazakh as Dostyq and in Russian as Druzhba). Long before Almaty’s sprawling highways and immaculate subway system reached its edge, Dostluq stood as a stronghold of Kazakhstan’s Uyghur culture and education. 

Even today, this urban enclave retains a distinctive character. The scent of freshly baked nans and samsas wafts from traditional Uyghur bakeries (nawaikhana); several large Uyghur schools still anchor the neighborhood; and the streets bear the names of revered Uyghur literati, scholars, and Bolshevik revolutionaries. The streets are lined with rows of tea, dried fruit, and ice-cream shops whose vendors advertise their goods in a spirited mix of accented Russian and Uyghur. 

Many Uyghur-owned businesses proudly bear names such as Urumchi, Kashgar, and Turpan, toponyms that evoke the community’s ancestral homeland beyond Kazakhstan’s borders. The mosques, adorned with Uyghur signage in the Perso-Arabic script and capped with traditional architectural flourishes, signal both piety and heritage. Elder men, their embroidered doppas (skullcaps) glinting in the sun, walk unhurriedly through streets in what many local Uyghurs still refer to as their yiza (village), despite the enclave’s administrative and infrastructural incorporation into Almaty and the metropolis’ urban skyline rising ever closer.

Almaty’s urban expansion is rapidly redrawing the boundaries of Dostluq. New roads and subway extensions have woven the enclave into the metropolitan grid, blurring the lines between the village and the city, as well as between Uyghurs and Kazakhs. The growing popularity of Uyghur cuisine – most notably the famed laghman and samsa – now draws Kazakh patrons from across Almaty, introducing a steady flow of outsiders to the area’s cafés, restaurants, and traditional bakeries. 

Inside these Uyghur-owned establishments, servers are increasingly ethnic Kazakhs who speak little or no Uyghur, a subtle sign of shifting demographics and labor patterns. At the same time, the Uyghur language is steadily receding among younger generations. Many parents now prefer to enroll their children in Russian-medium schools, viewing fluency in Russian as essential for upward mobility in Kazakhstan’s urban economy. This pragmatic choice, while understandable, accelerates the linguistic and cultural estrangement of the community’s youth. Dostluq thus embodies both cultural resilience and transformation – a neighborhood where the outward symbols of Uyghur identity endure even as the linguistic and demographic foundations beneath them have begun to erode.

The combined forces of urbanization, modernization, secularization, and language shift in post-Soviet Kazakhstan have dispersed the Uyghur population geographically and linguistically, fragmenting the traditional bases of cultural reproduction and threatening the long-term sustainability of Uyghur cultural institutions. In today’s Kazakhstan, the lines between civic/political and ethno-national identities are becoming increasingly elusive. 

Click here to read Part II.