CUTTING THREADS, CONNECTING VOICES: PRAGMATIC STUDY OF TUSAU KESU IN DIGITAL CONTEXT

Abstract

This study explores how ritual language and digital communication meet at crossroads with a deep examination of bata, a traditional Kazakh form of blessing, and its practice on social media. Focusing specifically on TikTok videos of the tusau kesu ceremony, a Kazakh life-cycle ritual celebrating children’s first steps, it investigates how users engage with and reinterpret bata through comments within the platform's environment. This study largely draws on Erving Goffman’s participation framework theory to examine how traditional Kazakh blessings, bata, are recontextualized and transformed within the interactional spaces of TikTok. The research employed a qualitative design, analyzing user comments under TikTok videos depicting tusau kesu to examine how bata blessings are produced, received, and reconfigured in digital spaces. By categorizing types of comments and mapping participation roles, the study generated evidence on the shifting dynamics of speaker-hearer relationships and the broader cultural implications of digital ritual practices. Findings of this research reveal that bata in its digital form extends beyond the traditional dyadic speaker-hearer communicative dynamics, exhibiting a multilayered and nuanced participation that allows us to “hear” generationally and spatio-temporally removed voices. The analysis also revealed that the participation of some bata might also be centered around one individual, the self, or the imagined collective whole, the nation. As a Kazakh ritual-centered case study of blessing communication within an asynchronous digital environment, this study contributes both to the fields of ritual language studies and linguistic anthropology by expanding the understanding of bata as a speech act. Bata, as observed in this study, persists and transforms in the digital space as a multidialogic and asynchronous speech act that accommodates fresh forms of addressivity, audience participation, and spatio-temporal flexibility, while retaining its core functions.