Closed and open structures in traditional Kazakh Women rites

Women’s initiatory rituals or women’s rites of passage in which the status of a woman changes is one of the least studied areas in cultural anthropology and history. The reason is the closeness of this sphere from the external view, especially from the view of an outside male researcher. Ethnographic information is usually rather scarce and contradictory, and historical information is almost absent. Some exception, perhaps, is the wedding ceremony, which marks the most important stage in a woman’s life in traditional society and is reflected in the literature more widely. It would be interesting to reconstruct the system of women’s rituals as a whole, but based on the available material this is a difficult task. The article has a more modest goal — to try to reveal the “logic” of symbolic thinking, which manifests itself in women’s rituals of transition on the example of a wedding ceremony. According to our hypothesis, the status of an unmarried girl is characterized by closed structures, a closed contour, for example, the side strands of hair “tulym” are woven into one braid, the bride’s earrings are connected by a chain. After marriage, the structures open, the circuit opens, for example, “tulym” is braided into two separate braids, and the chain connecting the earrings is removed. The reasoning of the archaeologist E.R. Usmanova and her co-authors about the gender symbolism of a medieval Turkic female statue became the impetus for revealing this “logic”. The symbolism of the knees of the girlish stone image brought together and the relaxed position of the legs of the statue of a nursing woman is obvious. It can be assumed that it was this symbolism that was developed in other open and closed structures associated with women’s rites