Post-Soviet Demographic Paradoxes: Ethnic Differences in Marriage and Fertility in Kazakhstan Essay

The goal of this research is to analyze the minority group status hypothesis regarding specific stages of the family-building process for different kind of countries, but they had stopped on the Middle East and Central Asia. These countries has been considered by Agadjanian in 1999 years, Gore & Carlson in 2008. The hypothesis posits an interaction effect between ethnicity on the one hand and education or other measures of socioeconomic status on the other hand. And also they respect to the timing and intensity of each stage of the reproductive cycle – first marriage, first birth interval, second birth interval and so on and ultimately completed family size. This interaction between ethnicity and education can appear in one or both of two partial forms. First, disadvantaged minority groups within a society may exhibit earlier marriage, shorter birth intervals, and subsequent higher levels of fertility than the majority population. This higher fertility at the â€Å"bottom† of the society has been interpreted variously as the result of blocked alternate opportunities, or as persistence of a separate minority group subculture emphasizing pronatalist norms. Second, elites among such minority groups may exhibit later marriage, longer birth intervals, and subsequently lower levels of fertility than the majority population. This has been interpreted as status anxiety of these minority elites in the face of potential discrimination from the majority. The minority group status hypothesis was first developed with respect to race/ethnic identity within the United States but has subsequently been applied to a wide range of ethnic minorities within national populations in many parts of the world. With respect to Central Asia, Agadjanian has explored this hypothesis in Kazakhstan and concluded that patterns of childbearing there do not fit the hypothesis well. On the other hand, Gore and Carlson have recently demonstrated that the hypothesis describes marriage patterns of ethnic Kurds compared to the majority population in nearby Turkey extremely well, with both forms of the effect clearly identifiable. This paper uses evidence from the 1995 and 1999 Kazakh Demographic and Health Surveys to examine the timing of marriage for two distinctive groups within the population of Kazakhstan. We follow Agadjanian in combining ethnic Russians with other European groups and comparing them to the ethnic Kazakh population in the country, and also in excluding small ethnic splinter groups from other Central Asian countries (Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, etc) from the analysis[1]. We concentrate on marriage timing in order to most closely replicate the work of Gore and Carlson for Turkey, and also because Agadjanian has demonstrated that virtually all births in Kazakhstan for these samples of women occurred within and shortly after marriage. Since marriage thus constitutes a reliable marker for the timing of the first step along the path of reproduction, it makes sense to begin analysis at that point. Agadjanian (1999) has treated this issue of marriage timing in Kazakhstan in a previous article, but that analysis completed some years ago did not involve event history analysis, and also did not specifically examine the hypothesized interaction effect between education and ethnicity[2]. Kazakhstan uniquely raises an unusual theoretical issue about the minority group status hypothesis, because it is not immediately obvious which of the ethnic populations in the country should be regarded as the â€Å"disadvantaged minority† in terms of expected consequences for timing of reproductive behavior. Some evidence shows that the ethnic Russian and more generally, the European segment of the population historically appropriated a disproportionate share of the higher-status occupations after immigrating into Kazakhstan in response to Russian/Soviet resettlement initiatives. However, other research has demonstrated a concentration of ethnic Kazakhs in higher education and some other fields. Similarly, the numerical balance of these groups in the population has shifted in recent decades, and has always been near parity in terms of dominance by sheer numbers. For these reasons we do not assume at the outset which group should be regarded as the â€Å"minority† group for evaluating the hypothesis, but rather examine the empirical results for clues on this question. Agadjanian has proposed and utilized in several studies a useful division of the ethnic Kazakh population into two groups described as more or less â€Å"russified† based on selection of interview language by these respondents at the time of each survey those who chose to be interviewed in Russian are compared to those who chose the Kazakh language for the survey interviews. 3] These groups allow further tests of the minority group status hypothesis, specifically for the most disadvantaged members of the population, in terms of evaluating the alternative hypotheses of blocked opportunities versus persistence of prontalist subcultures as explanations for higher fertility. Although the correspondence between ethnic and religious self-identification is extremely strong in these surveys nearly all Russians identify themselves as Orthodox and nearly all Kazakhs identify themselves as Moslem, regardless of language or other differences the correspondence is not perfect and we also examine religious identity as an alternative way of operationalizing ethnicity in examining the minority group status hypothesis. And at the end of my critical essay I would like to tell some interesting facts that happened in my country. The Kazakhs attach great significance to the birth and raising of children. A Kazakh family is not considered happy without children, especially sons—the continuers of the clan. There are many customs and ceremonies associated with birth and raising of children. These customs arose from centuries of experiences and from the Kazakh worldview. Thus, they protected a pregnant woman from the evil eye with the aid of amulets and did not allow her to leave the house alone at night; weapons, wolves’ teeth, eagles’ bills, and owl talons were forbidden wherever she lived. All this was necessary to protect her from impure forces. The pregnant woman herself had to observe a multitude of taboos. In order not to tangle the child’s umbilical cord, for example, she could not step over the staff for raising the dome of the yurt (bakan) , the device for catching horses (kuruk), rope (arkan) , and many other items. She was also forbidden to eat camel meat because it was thought that, were she to do so, she would carry her child for twelve months, like a she-camel. Kazakhs protect pregnant women from heavy labor, especially in the later months. Kazakhs carefully guard the woman and child during the actual birth and the first forty days thereafter, which are regarded as especially dangerous for the baby. Various rituals are followed—placing the child in the cradle on the seventh day, for example: the fortieth day after birth is seen as especially festive because the danger is deemed to have passed. Only women gather at this celebration. Kazakhs accustom children to work from an early age. They teach a boy to ride a horse at age 3 and to tend it and other livestock at age 5 or 6. The shaving ceremony, strongly upheld in modern times, is conducted when a boy has reached age 3 to 10. Girls are taught to sew, embroider, and carry out other household activities. In the past, Kazakhs believed that at age 13 to 15 they were ready for independent life and could have their own family; at present girls marry at age 16 to 18. The brief ceremony at the registration office is called a AHAZH. The AHAZH also features a procession of cars decorated in ribbons, which stops to take pictures along the way. In the city of Turkistan in southern Kazakhstan, the photos must include one of the couple at the Yasawi Shrine. For many progressive families the AHAZH has almost replaced both the Neke Qiyu and the betashar. The religious part of the Kazakh wedding ceremony is called Neke Qiyu. The wedding process may take many weeks and even months to complete. This is because a Kazakh marriage, like marriages in most Muslim societies, involves a contract between families which requires negotiation. The Neke Qiyu is a small portion of the whole, and usually takes about a half an hour to complete. The Neke Qiyu usually takes place on the evening of the day the bride is revealed to her groom’s family. This festive ceremony is calledbetashar or â€Å"revealing of the face. After she shows respect to her groom’s family, the veil is lifted and the bride receives a kiss from her mother-in-law[4]. The mother-in-law then puts a white scarf on her head to symbolize her marital status and then welcomes her into the groom’s family. After several hours a feasting, a mullah arrives. A mullah is a teacher of Islam who knows how to recite the Quran[5]. He performs the Neke Qiyu. Even though the betashar is performed outside in the garden in the presence of many relatives and friends, the Neke Qiyu is performed inside with close relatives only. The mullah and the couple sit facing one another. He briefly recites some verses from the Quran and asks the couple to confess the faith of Islam. When this ceremony is done, the couple must go and register their marriage at the state registry office, a practice introduced in the Soviet period. Among nomadic Kazakhs the small, individual family predominated, consisting, as a rule, of a married couple, their unmarried children, and elderly parents. In accordance with custom, the oldest son was able to marry first, followed by the other sons in descending order of age. The father allotted livestock to the married son and in this way created a new household. According to the ancient customs of the minorat, the youngest son was not allotted a household, even after marriage. He remained the heir to the ancestral hearth. Among the seminomadic and settled Kazakhs, there were extended families in which several closely related families lived in one household. Usually this was the family of the head of the household, as well as his married sons, and, after his death, the families of his married brothers. As a rule, however, after the death of the household master, the married brothers parted company. The daughters went to live with the families of their husbands after marriage. Elements of patriarchal relations were preserved in certain ways, however. Married sons, even when they had their own individual households, did not break ties with the paternal household completely. Many labor-intensive tasks, such as pasturing of livestock, shearing of sheep, preparation of felt, and so on, were accomplished through the efforts of several households with close relations along paternal lines. This was especially important in defending livestock and pastures from the encroachment of others. Such a unification of families, the basis of kinship ties, is called in the literature a â€Å"family-kin† group. In Kazakh, these groupings are called bir ata baralary (children of one father). If a family-kin group was called Koshenbaralary, for example, then their ancestor was called Koshen, and the families of this group had heads who were grandsons and great-grandsons of Koshen. Among the Kazakhs, such family-kin groups formed communities. The heads of families were considered close relatives up to the fourth or fifth generation.