Walking with Memories: Decolonial Knowledge and Intergenerational Learning in Nomadic and Rural Kazakhstan

Abstract (English)

In compounded crises and epistemic precarity, anthropology offers vital pathways to rethink knowledge, community, and sustainability beyond extractive and colonial paradigms. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in rural and nomadic communities in Kazakhstan, engaging with intergenerational learning, ecological knowledge, and the role of memory in place-based learning. Through walking methodologies and memory work, I explore how families and children construct their understandings of landscapes, multispecies relations, and history, often outside formal learning institutions. A central focus of this inquiry examines how knowledge is co-created across generations in ways that defy the rigid separations between expert and non-expert, as well as institutional and community knowledge systems. By attending to children’s stories, drawings, and embodied practices, I argue that everyday acts of remembering and engaging with land—including more-than-human relations—constitute a form of epistemic resistance against colonial and developmental frameworks that aim to discipline and erase local ways of knowing. This paper further destabilizes dominant onto-epistemologies by emphasizing the agency of non-human actors—animals, plants, and landscapes—as co-constitutive elements in the knowledge-making process. Positioned within interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship, this paper contributes to conversations on knowledge justice and the politics of care, aligning with the broader panel’s call to transcend disciplinary divides. Through an analysis of lived experiences in Kazakhstan, I demonstrate how anthropology, in dialogue with Indigenous studies, education, and environmental humanities, can reimagine relational, situated, and shared ways of being and knowing that nurture both scholarly and community-based futures.