I found Sasha Cohen's film "Borat" entertaining, but I was upset and uncomfortable with just how far and for how long the device of ignorant, crude ethnic yahoo was taken by Cohen. For this is the very image of benighted country bumpkin that comes up in and is used to justify an empire's occupation or forceful re-education of its subjects.For example, it comes up often in the image of the crude and ignorant Ukrainian peasant that was created from an imperial Russian cultural perspective, as evident in many literary works. If the backward Ukrainian peasant, as depicted in fiction, would only learn Russian and renounce his Ukrainian, peasant culture, he would become civilized, and, of course, a proud Russian, as well. Ukrainian writers were quick to jump to the peasant's defense, in particular Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, a recorder and admirer of the peasant's fertile and creative linguistic resources.
After all, peasants possess a rich folk culture with rituals, myths, stories, an extensive knowledge of their surrounding natural world. Modern composers have turned to folk music for their melodies; scientific researchers, to peasants' knowledge of herbs to develop new medications. That said, we can note that the prototype for Cohen's ethnic yahoo is not a peasant as such, but rather a Soviet Man, that is, a descendant of an ex-peasant, one who was forcibly removed from his farm during the process of collectivization and industrialization during the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union. As part of an intensive and harmful industrialization process imposed from above by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, the age-old agricultural communities in Kazakhstan, Russia, Belorus, and especially in Ukraine, were destroyed, individual farms made into collectives. Up to seven or eight million peasants starved to death in an artificial famine that resulted. The descendants of these survivors became Soviet people stripped of their folk and rural culture, religion and customs; conceivably, some could even have become similar to the sort of declasse troglodyte that Cohen creates in his film. But one outcome of destroying the indigenous peasant culture was desirable to the nascent Soviet Union--to create a population that was dependent on the state for work and more likely to buy into its state propaganda.
In any event, Kazakhstan the land, and Kazakhs, the people, are by no means the backward land and people that Cohen's satire makes it out be, as demonstrated by some of its cutting edge architectural projects, like the currently under construction enormous enclosed city space, the Khan Shatyry. What is really backward about Kazakhstan is the deplorably bad situation of democratic rights to free speech and assembly--such speech is censored and banned--as well as the lack of transparency in a corrupt government--with no press and media to fear, the rulers of this Central Asian nation pocket much of its wealth with impunity for themselves. Kazakhstan has in fact had only one ruler, Nursaltan Nazarbayev, and his government, since 1991.
Thus, a really more harmful and cruel joke is being played on Kazakhs by their own president than by the comedian Cohen in his film. The sad truth is that it is likely easier to make and market a film about an imaginary ethnic yahoo than about a corrupt politician in a Central Asian nation, a megalomaniac like Nazarbayev.
While some improvement in the economy is clearly evident, as a result of oil revenues, which has provided the funds for spectacular architectural projects such as the tent city, this land has remained in many ways frozen in the Soviet past circa 1991. The snatches of official Kazakhstan state propaganda, which Cohen includes at the beginning of Borat, and which are in themselves unintentionally amusing because of the heavy handed praise of labor that contributes to state power--this propaganda may well have been updated in Kazakhstan, but it has yet to be satirized by the Kazakhs themselves.
Clearly, Nazarbayev's new and spectacular architectural projects of the future also serve as propaganda for his regime and state, more effective propaganda than that of the Soviet era. At this juncture, this architecture also can serve as a symbol of hope, a utopian dream that one future day Kazakhstan's citizens could enjoy the benefits of a democratically more open democratic and progressive society. But for now this tent city functions like a Potemkin-like distraction and stage-prop on the world stage.
http://www.registan.net/index.php/2006/12/10/the-excesses-of-kazakh-architecture/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Shatyry
http://www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/1438/Default.aspx
http://newsite.irinnews.org/country.aspx?CountryCode=KZ&RegionCode=ASI
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