“Baksy”: A Kazakh Shamaness in Conflict of Legitimation

Film review: Baksy. Feature film. Director: Gulshat Omarova. Kazakhstan / Germany / France, 2008. Gulshat Omarova’s film Baksy (2008) represents a rare example in post-Soviet cinema of an artistic statement in which shamanism and folk healing are not portrayed as ethnographic relics or exotic background, but as an active social institution embedded in struggles over power, resources, and legitimacy under conditions of post-Soviet transformation. In this sense, Baksy should be viewed not so m...