Place-naming, Storytelling and Environmental knowledge in a Northern Kazakhstan Farming Village

Abstract

This capstone project describes the relationship between language and environment in a farming village of Northern Kazakhstan. My main argument is that while farmers’ have a close interaction with surrounding environment, their everyday speech reflects the relational worldview towards it, meaning that land, plants, animals and weather are understood not as resources or abstract objects but as active participants of life. Through storytelling, place-names, and specific language use (metaphors, personifications etc.), community members express ecological knowledge, memories, attitudes and moral values connected to the environment, work and lifestyle. This project is connected with the field of linguistic anthropology, focusing on theories such as dwelling by Ingold (2000), which describes how people live within and interact with their environments. Another source is Basso’s (1996) work which focuses on place-making and storytelling, explaining how place-names store community knowledge and memory, while storytelling acts as a powerful tool to activate it. As methods, this study uses fieldwork in a rural farming village, including semi-structured interviews, storytelling sessions, participants’ observation, and guiding trips with five elderly participants, where they talked about working in agriculture and their life stories. Overall, community members’ language reflects a relational worldview, meaning the environment and participants are interconnected and influencing each other. The study demonstrates how everyday language can reveal a community's ecological knowledge, perception and values, while storytelling and place names are evidenced to play an influential role in preserving it. I believe that this project’s main value is preserving the farming village’s local history and analyzing discourse about the environment, for which this region remains understudied.