BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA:
Director: Gulshat Omarova; Year made: 2008; Country of production: Kazakhstan / Germany / France; Language of film: Kazakh / Russian; Length of film: 87 minutes.
GENRE:
Feature film
SYNOPSIS:
Baksy centers on Aiday, an elderly shaman-healer living on a sacred hill in southern Kazakhstan. Her everyday life is inseparable from ritual practice: she treats illnesses, infertility, grief, and existential disorientation through tactile interventions, recitation of dhikr, the use of ritual objects, and prolonged embodied contact with those who seek her help. People arrive continuously, not as passive believers but as participants in a shared economy of care. Through these repeated encounters, Aiday’s authority is socially produced and reaffirmed. She functions as a mediator between bodily suffering, social rupture, and a broader cosmological order.
The central conflict emerges when the land on which Aiday lives – recognized locally as sacred and ancestrally charged – becomes targeted for commercial development: a gas station is planned for the site. This initiates a confrontation that structures the film’s dramatic arc. On one side stands a regime grounded in property rights, economic profit, and bureaucratic enforcement; on the other, a form of authority rooted in ritual legitimacy, ancestral presence, and collective recognition. Batyr, Aiday’s patron and a local criminal-business figure, occupies an unstable position between these regimes. His loyalty to the healer conflicts with the violent logic of the networks in which he is embedded.
The conflict escalates when Batyr’s son is kidnapped in an attempt to force the withdrawal of protection from Aiday and the relinquishing of the land. Shootings, arson, and intimidation follow, marking a sharp tonal shift from restrained ritual observation to open violence. Aiday herself does not intervene directly in these events. Yet she remains their symbolic center: her presence continues to stabilize the sacred space even as the surrounding social order disintegrates.
The film ends without reconciliation. Aiday remains on her land and continues her ritual practice, but the world around her is fractured. Sacred authority endures, yet it is shown to be contingent—dependent on continued recognition, performance, and the maintenance of fragile boundaries between incompatible orders.
BACKGROUND / CONTEXT:
Aiday’s character has a clear ethnographic prototype in the healer Bifatima Dauletova, active in the area of the sacred mountain Ungurtas, one of the most prominent pilgrimage landscapes in southern Kazakhstan. Ungurtas has, over recent decades, become a node of mass pilgrimage, attracting visitors seeking healing, purification, and existential orientation. The site exemplifies how sacred landscapes function simultaneously as spiritual, social, and material resources, organizing flows of people, narratives of efficacy, and localized economies of care. In popular media discourse, Dauletova is sometimes referred to as “the last dervish of Kazakhstan,” a label that reflects both her ascetic authority and the persistence of Sufi-inflected interpretations of healing practice in the region.
Without documenting this milieu directly, Baksy situates shamanism as an active social institution in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. The film depicts pilgrimage, religious tourism, and informal ritual organization, showing how sacred sites regulate access to healing, authority, and meaning outside formal state structures. In this sense, Aiday’s practice constitutes a form of biopolitical authority: she governs care, bodily integrity, and existential orientation in a context where state medicine and bureaucratic governance are perceived as insufficient or absent. Her authority is neither symbolic nor purely spiritual; it structures concrete life trajectories and social relations.
KEYWORDS:
Shamanism, Folk healing, Sacred sites, Boundary-making, Post-Soviet spirituality
ACADEMIC COMMENTARY:
Aiday exemplifies the structural liminality of the shaman as described in classical anthropological literature. Liminality here should be understood not metaphorically but structurally: the shaman occupies a threshold position that allows mediation between incompatible ontological regimes while sustaining social authority (Basilov 1992; Manichkin 2020; Hamayon 1990). Aiday’s legitimacy derives precisely from this position. She is neither fully embedded in everyday social hierarchies nor entirely withdrawn from them. Her authority rests on her capacity to traverse boundaries between health and illness, life and death, order and chaos.
This liminality is most clearly articulated in the episode in which Aiday stages her own death by stopping her pulse through controlled ritual practice. This gesture should not be interpreted as a spectacle of miraculous power or as a purely shamanic rite directed toward spirits. Rather, it functions as a social technology of withdrawal. By symbolically exiting the social body, Aiday removes herself from the field of negotiation, coercion, and bargaining. While alive and accessible, she can be pressured through intermediaries, threatened by violence, or instrumentalized as a stabilizing figure. Her staged disappearance suspends these mechanisms and reveals that respect for the sacred is sustained less by belief than by fragile systems of obligation and fear. The episode exposes the conditions under which sacred authority operates—and the ease with which it can collapse.
The film thus stages a conflict of boundary-making. Land functions simultaneously as material property and as a locus of ancestral memory, ritual efficacy, and communal legitimacy. For economic actors, it is a resource to be privatized and exploited; for Aiday and her visitors, it is inseparable from the efficacy of healing itself. Baksy visualizes the clash between these regimes not as an abstract opposition but as a concrete struggle over space, bodies, and care. This struggle is biopolitical in nature: it concerns who has the right to regulate health, suffering, and life trajectories, and under what conditions.
Omarova’s portrayal of shamanic authority is notably unsentimental. Aiday’s old age, physical vulnerability, and reliance on communal recognition underscore the contingent character of her power. Sacred authority persists only through continuous practice and acknowledgment; it is never guaranteed. Rituals do not transcend social reality but intervene within it, asserting temporary order in an environment marked by violence and instability.
Esotericism is central to the film’s logic and is presented without mediation or explanatory framing. Ritual efficacy remains epistemically opaque: neither the viewer nor the characters are offered definitive proof of miraculous causality. This opacity is not a narrative flaw but a structural feature of shamanic practice as a form of rejected and initiatory knowledge (Hamayon 1990). Participation itself – rather than belief – validates ritual power. Pilgrims, patients, and intermediaries collectively sustain a sacred economy in which efficacy is enacted rather than demonstrated. Omarova’s cinematic language reinforces this regime: long takes, a restrained color palette, and minimal musical intervention grant ritual scenes a mute authority that contrasts sharply with the noise and aggression of criminal and economic violence.
Ultimately, Baksy offers a sober reflection on the durability and limits of sacred authority under conditions of post-Soviet transformation (Penkala-Gawęcka 2010). Aiday does not “win” the conflict; her land remains hers, but the social fabric that once protected it is irreversibly damaged. The film suggests that sacred authority survives not because it triumphs over competing regimes, but because no alternative system is capable of fully replacing its functions. In this sense, Baksy constitutes a cinematic inquiry into legitimation, biopolitics, and the fragile maintenance of boundaries between worlds – making it a valuable object of analysis for scholars of religion, anthropology, and contemporary shamanism.
Nestor Manichkin
Bibliography:
- Basilov, Vladimir N. Shamanism Among the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan [Шаманство у народов Средней Азии и Казахстана]. Moscow: Nauka, 1992. (In Russian)
- 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]. Moscow: Smart Event, 2020. (In Russian)
- Penkala-Gawęcka, Danuta. Shamans, Islam and the State Medical Policy in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey, 2010, vol. 29, no. 3–4, pp. 301–317. DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2010.515306
