Kyrgyz Jaramazan as a ritual folk practice: Structure, social functions, and cultural transmission
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examined Kyrgyz Jaramazan as a ritual folk practice, focusing on its structure, poetic features, social functions, and role in cultural transmission. Although Jaramazan had long been classified as a genre of religious-calendar folklore, its compositional pattern, linguistic organisation, and contribution to cultural continuity had received little sustained analysis. The aim of this study was to examine the compositional structure, poetic features, regional variation, social functions, and role of Kyrgyz Jaramazan in cultural transmission. The study therefore analysed the genre in structural, linguistic, and functional terms, and considered how it preserved ritual tradition and cultural memory in Kyrgyz society. The corpus comprised 14 Jaramazan texts drawn from published folklore collections representing the Talas, Osh, Jalal-Abad, and Chüy regions, together with anthology and contemporary examples, examined through comparative-historical, structural, motif-based, linguistic, and functional methods. The texts followed a stable compositional sequence: greeting, religious introduction, praise of the householder, blessings, a ritualised request for gifts, and a closing benediction. Their language rested on fixed formulas, lexical repetition, and syntactic parallelism, while regional differences appeared mainly in vocabulary and thematic emphasis. Talas variants favoured pastoral vocabulary and humour, the Osh and Jalal-Abad texts drew on a denser layer of Islamic terminology, and the Chüy material combined older formulas with more recent expressions. The analysis indicated that Jaramazan functioned as more than a seasonal religious song: it operated as a ritual practice that reinforced communal bonds, framed gift-giving as symbolic exchange, and transmitted cultural values across generations. A comparison of archival and recent materials showed that the tradition had retained its core language and ritual form even as its performance settings changed, remaining a living element of intangible cultural heritage sustained by its formulaic language, its performance, and its capacity to adapt
Authors: Gulzat Nurdin kyzy, Kalbubu Tairova
Institution: Kyrgyz-Türkish Manas Üniversity
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7204229129