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Voicing Heritage: Eagle-Hunting, Manas Recitation, and Postcolonial Identity in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

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  • Federica Nardella
Federica Nardella
American University of Central Asia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/asiac-3557

Published 2026-04-07

Keywords

  • orality,
  • Turkic epic,
  • eagle-hunting,
  • vocality,
  • Kyrgyzstan

How to Cite

Nardella, F. (2026). Voicing Heritage: Eagle-Hunting, Manas Recitation, and Postcolonial Identity in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. ASIAC – Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus (SCC). https://doi.org/10.36253/asiac-3557

Copyright (c) 2026 Federica Nardella

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper discusses vocality and its role across contexts and in literature that voices heritage and reaffirms identity. It shows how vocal practices in eagle-hunting and Manas recitation mediate relationships between humans and non-humans, ancestors and contemporaries, and colonised and postcolonial identities in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. The practice of eagle-hunting embodies many of the virtues and ethics of Manas, alongside its depiction of human/environment relations. Strength, resilience, honour, patience, and respect for nature are some of the qualities that developing a partnership with a golden eagle is believed to bring out in a bürkütchü, an eagle-hunter. Eagle-hunting is, furthermore, mentioned in the epic. Eagle-hunters develop their bond with eagles by means of vocalisations. These include talking, singing, humming, crooning and the culture-specific kyittu and ku as summon calls. With this paper, I look at the significance of these vocalisations in the wider context of Kyrgyz orality and how, both in the case of epic recitation as of eagle-hunting, vocality conveys heritage and relationships across time and species. In both contexts, voice acts as a link, simultaneously channelling human identities as they are defined against the non-human and giving voice to heritage whilst defining postcolonial identities with and against it. This echoes the role of epic and its recitation as a practice that embodies relations with ancestors but also human and non-human actors.

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