ABSTRACT
This ethnography has been down-to-earth, a traditional empirical effort to specify cultural content . Its analytic perspective departs from Valikhanov and his academic descendents at key points : I have characterized Muslim lifeways among the Kazaks as an integral experience of the Muslim life and a local version of the Islamic cultural synthesis, rather than as a survival of shamanism or a shamano-sufic hodge-podge . Like other "world religions, " Islam is more likely to be strengthened than weakened when it is contextualized in local forms and thought-processes . Without this departure from positivist, doctrinal understandings of Islam, Islam in Kazakstan cannot be understood or even properly identified. Recognizing Islam ( Gilsenan 1982 ) is, after all, the first task of those of us who have lived among Muslims and studied them.
