The author aims to capture the significance of the celebration of Nauryz, the ancient celebration of spring, family, and local community. She describes various forms of celebrating Nauryz on the official, national, local, and family level in Kazakhstan. She emphasizes that the renewed tradition of celebrating Nauryz is part of a process deliberately adopted by the Kazakh authorities in the post-Soviet period in order to build a community from a state of many ethnicities. She states that all the ways of celebrating Nauryz appeal to the original motivation of sustaining, restoring, and strengthening the community. This leads to the formation of communitas (in Victor Turner’s sense), which is conducive to forming the inhabitants of modern Kazakhstan into a multi-ethnic community.
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