The book gives an ethnographic analysis of the family and marriage at the peoples of the Middle Asia and Kazakhstan in the nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. Opposite to his earlier book ‘Family and Marriage at Tadjiks’, which was based on the ethnographic material gathered by the author himself, this one included analysis of published sources.
Noteworthy, the history of research on the life of the Middle Asia and Kazakhstan, and collecting ethnographic material was started in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was connected with the military expansion of the Russian Empire. Earlier works were almost completely on the political, sometimes economical situation in the region. The initial studies of such bright side of life – first of all, wedding ceremonies – were followed with studying other rites connected with the family and marriage. The author put a special attention at various forms of family, the problem of exogamy, wedding rites, family taboo.
The author notes that the big patriarchal family preceded the small family on the all territory of the Middle Asia and Kazakhstan; the time of its shaping and existence depended on the social and economical development of a certain region: transfer to the small family was connected with the development of private property and capitalist forms of economy; in the nineteenth century, the small family still kept patriarchal patterns and survivals. Exogamy and endogamy were directly correlated on nomadic or settled style of life: preference of close-related marriages was connected with a desire to keep property formed through the transformation of natural type of economical system into the trade-financial one and to the settled life inside a clan; beside, the practice of close-related marriages depended on the dissemination of Islam and its influence.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a dominating form of marriage was organized through the payment of kalym for a bride; with the further development of economical relations kalym went to the past together with the patriarchal family and was replaced with the dowry for the economical development of the small family.