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ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, European doctors began to credit kumiss (fermented mare’s milk) for the apparent absence of tuberculosis among the nomads of the Eurasian steppe. As European and American medical journals published articles on the ‘kumiss cure’ and Russian doctors opened kumiss sanatoria, praise for the drink’s curative powers was wound together with romanticized images of the nomadic pastoralists whose creation it was. In Soviet and now in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, kumiss came to hold the double status of medicine and of national heritage. Yet if in the nineteenth century, the steppe was notable for the absence of tuberculosis, in the late twentieth century, it is notable for its presence: Kazakhstan, like many post-Soviet countries, is currently the site of an epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Discussions of the epidemic now tangle together concerns over the physical health of the population with concern over the cultural health of the body politic.
Acknowledgements
This article is partially based on fieldwork funded by a Fulbright-Hayes grant. The author would like to thank Nazif Shahrani, Henry Glassie, Jason Jackson, Pravina Shukla, Brendan Pietsch, Saniya Karpykova, and the editor and reviewers of Central Asian Survey for comments on the paper’s various incarnations.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. All translations by author unless otherwise noted.
2. Kazakh words are romanized in accordance with the ALA-LC standard (but without the use of diacritics) except where other spellings have already become standard in English. In particular, the spelling kumiss is preferred here; alternate spellings (e.g., koumiss or koumyss) appear in quotations.
3. See Farmer (Citation2001) for analysis of the current global tuberculosis epidemic; Koch (Citation2013) offers a detailed ethnography of tuberculosis treatment regimes in post-Soviet Georgia.
4. For a more complete discussion of the terminology of kumiss, see Toqtabai (Citation2010, 217–220).
5. See Levine (Citation1999) and Salimei and Fantuz (Citation2012) for detailed reviews of the medical properties of mare's milk.
6. This story seems to be a confusion of the stories of Tolstoy (who did drink kumiss and credited it with his cure) and Dostoevsky (who was sent to Kazakhstan as a political prisoner but who did not, as far as I can discover, ever undertake the kumiss cure).
7. For a comparative discussion of kumiss in Mongolia, see Zhukovskaya (Citation2008).
8. In summarizing Grieve's article, I reproduce the spelling and punctuation of the original, but change the printer's orthography.
9. See Dubos and Dubos (Citation1987) and Bynum (Citation2012) for general histories of tuberculosis.
10. In the nineteenth century, the Kazakhs were often called ‘Khirgis’ and the Kyrgyz ‘Kara-Khirgis’, a usage Carrick seems to follow.
11. Abil’Mazhinov and Ismaganbetov were translating (and to some degree supplementing) Cherepanova et al.'s Kumiss i shubat (Citation1971), which had by then gone through multiple Russian-language editions.
12. The argument is slightly misleading, as the name Toqsanbai may also honour a grandparent who was 90 years old at the time of the birth. However, use of this name as a kind of historical evidence about the demography of the Kazakhs is common in conversations, newspapers, and even scholarship.
13. I have never read an editorial or spoken with someone who claims that one should drink kumiss rather than seek modern biomedical treatment. Paul Farmer (Citation2001) more broadly argues against seeing folk medical beliefs rather than the ‘structural violence’ of poverty and poor access to medical care as in any way causal of non-compliance with tuberculosis treatment regimes: his patients in Haiti often explained infection as the result of ‘sorcery’, yet still reliably followed treatment regimes when provided the necessary medicines.