ABSTRACT
Cultural heritage is a folklore approach that links traditional games with national identity, nostalgia, and romanticism. A number of Central Asian nations have been reviving local traditional games since the fall of the Soviet Union. Since the 2003 ratification of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), 12 Central Asian traditional games’ (or game-adjacent) elements of cultural heritage have been safeguarded within the organization’s registers. UNESCO’s ICH platform, along with the popular World Nomad Games (initiated in 2012) and the World Ethnosport Confederation (established in 2015), provides a framework for better understanding the revival of traditional games as a locus of meaning in Central Asian cultural heritage, nostalgic spectacle, and ethnosymbolism. Focusing on interweaving themes of rural nomadic identity, ludodiversity, and heritagization, this chapter provides a cultural history of traditional games revival in the region, keeping in mind Henning Eichberg’s three safeguarding outcomes for traditional games: sportification, folklorization, and pedagogization. The adoption of traditional games as national sports (e.g. Kyrgyz kok boru) speaks to the significance of traditional physical culture in the nation-building process. The traditional, folkish, and ethnic elements of these sports serve to simultaneously differentiate, share, and connect Central Asian cultures.
