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“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 much as a “film about a shamaness” but as a cinematic inquiry into conflicts between different regimes of the sacred and the profane, and between traditional and capitalist modes of governing space and bodies.

Film cover, source: www.imdb.com

As for the term used in the film’s title: among Kazakhs, baksy, and among Kyrgyz, bakshy, refer to shamans—sacral specialists who combine ancient Turkic ritual practices with elements of folk Islam. According to the orientalist Vasilii Bartold, the term is borrowed from Sanskrit and derives from bhikṣu, a degree of monastic initiation in Buddhism. It likely entered Central Asia during the Mongol period and gradually became attached to local shamans (Bartold 1900, 421), or was inherited from Uyghur tantric practitioners (Basilov 1992, 49). Among Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, baksy incorporated Sufi dhikr, ritual whips, knives, Muslim prayer beads, and special staffs. Their practices are closely linked to the culture of dervishhood (Manichkin 2020, 41–45, 74), a connection convincingly reflected in the film.

Over the past three centuries, Kazakh shamanism and related practices have undergone significant transformations. By the late twentieth century, religious tourism had emerged, along with so-called ordo—informal organizations whose unifying element is the practice of pilgrimages to sacred sites (mazars among the Kyrgyz, auliye among the Kazakhs). While veneration of sacred places is a traditional practice, the organization of such cults unfolds under contemporary conditions. This often generates conflicts between shamans, custodians of sacred sites, and their followers on the one hand, and authorities, businesses, and neighboring communities on the other. It is precisely this type of conflict that forms the dramatic core of Baksy.

The film focuses on an elderly healer, Aiday, who resides on land regarded as sacred by the local population. Aiday is a figure deeply embedded in the landscape: her corporeality, dwelling, ritual actions, and mode of existence are inseparable from the steppe and the sacred hill. She does not wear a distinct ceremonial costume commonly associated with “classical” shamanism; instead, her appearance remains deliberately ordinary, marked only by minimal ritual attributes such as a wooden staff, prayer beads, pieces of cloth tied to the landscape, and everyday clothing that blurs the boundary between ritual and daily life. In the opening scenes, the film consistently constructs her authority through depictions of everyday ritual practice: people come to Aiday with illnesses, infertility, loss, and existential disorientation. Her healing practices are shown as restrained and routine rather than spectacular: whispered prayers, elements of Sufi dhikr, tactile contact with the body, controlled breathing, and prolonged silences that structure the ritual encounter. The camera captures not so much “miracles” as trust—recognition of her power by the community. By emphasizing the austerity and non-theatrical nature of her actions, the film presents shamanic practice as an embodied discipline rather than a visual spectacle. From the outset, the film establishes a crucial point for anthropological analysis: the shamaness’s legitimacy is not institutional but socially confirmed through her continuous appeal as a mediator between bodily, social, and cosmic orders.

Aiday

Conflict arises when the sacred space inhabited by Aiday becomes an object of economic interest, namely a hill and surrounding land locally recognized as a place of healing, pilgrimage, and ritual interaction with ancestral and spiritual forces, marked by repeated ritual use rather than by formal religious institutions. Plans are made to build a gas station on the land. This motif is fundamental, as it shifts the film from the realm of “mystical drama” into that of political and economic circumstances. Land here is not merely a backdrop but a resource that is simultaneously material and symbolic. For business people, it is an object of privatization and profit extraction. For Aiday and those who come to her, it is a space of power, memory, and connection with ancestors. The film thus visualizes a clash between two regimes of legitimation: a capitalist one based on property rights and economic rationality, and a traditional one grounded in the sacred status of place and recognition of its extraordinary power. Capitalism is presented in its “wild,” unregulated form characteristic of the early post-Soviet period. Shamanism, by contrast—despite its historical specificity (post-Soviet legitimation, strong Muslim undertones)—appears as an almost timeless phenomenon.

Dramaturgically, this conflict is intensified through the figure of Aiday’s patron, Batyr, a young local criminal-business authority who owes his personal prosperity to her. He is torn between loyalty to the healer and the logic of violence and capital in which he has embedded himself. Through Batyr, the film demonstrates that shamanic power does not exist “outside the system” but is forced to engage in complex and often compromising relationships with modern forms of authority.

The conflict escalates sharply when violence enters the struggle for land. Batyr’s son is kidnapped to force him to withdraw support for Aiday and relinquish the territory. Batyr is compelled to enter open criminal warfare. The film introduces scenes of shootings, killings, and arson—a sharp generic shift from meditative “steppe mysticism” to a harsh criminal thriller.

Aiday does not directly participate in these events, yet she remains their cause and center. She continues to live on her land, to perform rituals, and refuses to yield to any claims. Her position is absolutely uncompromising: “This is holy land! The land of ancestors! Only here can I heal…”. She neither negotiates nor explains herself, acting as a bearer of a different logic—the logic of sacred prohibition.

A notable moment occurs when Aiday stages her own death by stopping her pulse through dhikr. This is not so much a shamanic ritual or a “miraculous death” as a social gesture: she ceases to be an accessible figure around whom persuasion, pressure, and bargaining are possible. While Aiday is alive, she can be coerced through Batyr, suppressed via the police apparatus, intimidated, and used as a point of stabilization for the conflict. Her feigned death removes her from the field of direct influence and reveals that respect for the sacred rested not on belief but on personal obligations and fear.

Aiday and her followers face threats

This device creates a short pause before catastrophe hits. After Aiday’s “death,” the conflict does not disappear; on the contrary, it intensifies dramatically: the sacred space is instantly stripped of protection, and open violence and criminal escalation take over. The staged death is directly linked to the structural liminality of the shaman as a figure positioned between the worlds of the living and the dead. Anthropologically, the shaman is legitimate precisely because they do not fully belong to the world of the living: they are capable of symbolically “dying,” disappearing, exiting the social body, and returning without being destroyed, a capacity described in classic studies of shamanism as a constitutive element of shamanic initiation and authority (Eliade 1964, 33–36, 168–170; Hamayon 1990, 425–430) By staging her death, Aiday temporarily places herself in a liminal zone—no longer a participant in social relations, yet not definitively gone—corresponding to the classical status of the shaman as a mediator between ontological regimes.

Ultimately, Aiday remains on her land, but the world around her is fractured. This constitutes the film’s tragedy: the shamaness’s sacred power is tied not only to the land but also to communal recognition and to the ability to maintain the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. When these mechanisms are disrupted, even her territory is no longer protected from chaos.

Of particular importance is that Aiday’s character has a clear ethnographic prototype—the contemporary healer Bifatima Dauletova, then 85 years old, active in the area of the sacred mountain Ungurtas, one of the most prominent sacred landscapes in southern Kazakhstan (see analytical report: Eurasianet 2008). In recent decades, Ungurtas has become a center of mass pilgrimage, attracting people from various regions seeking healing, “purification,” and existential orientation. Around Dauletova’s figure, a stable cult has evolved, including regular pilgrimages, rituals, and narratives of miraculous healings, allowing her to be described not merely as a “folk healer” but as a focal point of local religious economy and symbolic power; in journalistic and popular media discourse, she is at times referred to as “the last dervish of Kazakhstan,” a label that reflects both her perceived ascetic authority and the persistence of Sufi-inflected interpretations of her practice.

Bifatima Dauletova inspired Baksy’s main female character. In a shot by photojournalist Ikuru Kuwajima, she prays while holding dragon figurines. Source: eurasianet.org

Baksy artistically reworks this phenomenon without directly documenting it, while preserving its key structural elements: sacred landscape, charismatic healer, flow of pilgrims, and tense relations with external social institutions. In this sense, the cinematic language serves as a form of anthropological modeling. Long takes, a restrained color palette, and the absence of musical expressiveness in ritual scenes create the effect of a “mute authority” of the sacred, in opposition to the noise and aggression of the modern world.

The film engages with issues described by anthropologist Danuta Penkala-Gawęcka in her studies of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, where the revival of shamanism and spiritual healing after the collapse of the USSR is shown to be linked not only to cultural memory but also to the crisis of state medicine and the search for alternative regimes of care for body and soul (Penkala-Gawęcka 2010). In the film, Aiday regulates suffering, sustains health, and shapes life trajectories outside the state and official medicine. This is precisely why her presence becomes problematic for capitalist and administrative orders striving to monopolize control over space and bodies.

It is important to emphasize that Baksy does not romanticize shamanism. Aiday is not portrayed as an omnipotent figure standing above conflict; instead, her vulnerability, old age, and dependence on external circumstances underscore the fragility of traditional forms of authority amid violent modernization. The film’s ending offers no comforting resolution and thus rejects the myth of the “victory of tradition.” Instead, the viewer is confronted with a tragic reflection on loss—not of a specific place, since the sacred land remains with the shamaness, but of an integral system of relations between humans and the sacred.

Thus, Baksy can be read as a cinematic exploration of post-Soviet biopolitics, in which shamanism appears not as an exotic survival but as an alternative form of legitimizing power and care. In dialogue with the works of Penkala-Gawęcka (2006; 2010), as well as broader anthropological research on sacred landscapes and pilgrimage in Central Asia (Manichkin 2020), Omarova’s film emerges as a valuable source for analyzing how religious and occult practices continue to structure social reality while coming into conflict with the state, the market, and modernist rationality. In this capacity, Baksy deserves close attention not only from film scholars but also from specialists in religious studies and social anthropology, as well as researchers of contemporary shamanism and new esoteric and religious movements.

References

Bartold, Vasilii V. Turkestan in the Era of the Mongol Invasion. Vol. II: Study [Туркестан в эпоху монгольского нашествия. Ч. II. Исследование]. St. Petersburg: Printing House of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1900. (In Russian)

Basilov, Vladimir N. Shamanism Among the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan [Шаманство у народов Средней Азии и Казахстана]. Moscow: Nauka, 1992. (In Russian)

Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Eurasianet (2008). “Kazakhstan: A Visit to the Healer.” Retrieved from https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-a-visit-to-the-healer

Hamayon, Roberte. La chasse à l’âme: Esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien [The Hunt for the Soul: Outline of a Theory of Siberian Shamanism]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 1990. (In French)

Manichkin, Nestor A. Shamanism and Spiritual-Magical Practices of the Kyrgyz. [Шаманизм и духовно-магические практики кыргызов: монография]. Moscow: Smart Event, 2020. (In Russian)

Penkala-Gawęcka D. The Way of the Shaman and the Revival of Spiritual Healing in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2006.

Penkala-Gawęcka D. “Shamans, Islam and the State Medical Policy in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.”: Central Asian Survey. 2010. Vol. 29, No. 3–4: 301–317. DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2010.515306


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nestor Manichkin (January 11, 2026). “Baksy”: A Kazakh Shamaness in Conflict of Legitimation. New Age in Eurasia. Retrieved May 19, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15hd6


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