Issue 1 - Knowledge Production About Dzhatak Kazakhs: Fragmented Imperial Representations of Settled Poor by Russian Ethnographers, Public Writers, and Bureaucrats (1890-1900s)

Abstract

This article examines how the Russian Empire conceptualized and represented dzhatak Kazakhs—formerly nomadic individuals who settled due to the colonial dispossession—in the framework of late imperial knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic surveys, frontier bureaucratic reports, and articles from the Kirgizskaia Stepnaia Gazeta (1894–1904), the study explores how these sources with unique expertise and goals framed dzhataks as both symbols of progress and objects of disorder. Ethnographic expeditions, particularly the Shcherbina survey, portrayed dzhataks as reluctant but ultimately adaptable pioneers of sedentarization, legitimizing Russian colonization through a civilizing mission narrative. In turn, newspaper articles employed “strategic sensationalism” to depict dzhataks as impoverished, criminalized urban dwellers, both critiquing and reinforcing the empire’s reformist ideals. Meanwhile, intelligence reports by district chiefs cast dzhataks as subversive figures—susceptible to manipulation, Islamic mobilization, and administrative disorder—thereby justifying surveillance and coercive reforms. Rather than offering objective insight, these sources reveal tensions within the imperial knowledge regime, balancing between bureaucratic immediacy of action, emotional public discourse, and scholarly authority. In line with Gregory Afinogenov’s framework, the article argues that late imperial knowledge about the Kazakh Steppe was shaped by overlapping yet divergent aims—strategic governance, intellectual prestige, and ideological legitimation. The figure of the dzhatak, thus, illuminates broader contradictions in Russia’s colonial project that sets integration as a goal and yet produces marginalization, struggling to justify Imperial order and rationalize its detrimental consequences.