Fertility and the sacred feminine in the Central Asian healing and ritual practices

Abstract

 It is known that in Central Asia, women, not men are traditionally responsible for procreation. The absence of children in a family is usually associated with a woman’s inability to conceive. As a result, it is often women, not men, who seek solutions to the childlessness problem and turn to a variety of ways to augment their fertility. These patterns could be explained through a local understanding of motherhood as the meaning of womanhood, or through existing religious sensibilities supporting patriarchal social structures, which, in turn, continue to sustain existing gender ideology endowing women with responsibility for their ability to procreate (e.g., Akiner, 1997; Sultanova, 2011; Tabishalieva, 2000). But we find such explanations insufficient and offer a different approach,which contributes to the understanding of primordial reasons of this differentiation and stereotypical attitudes towards women’s fertility in Central Asia. Based on an analysis of ethnographic and archaeological materials, our investigation reveals the link between the existing views on women’s fertility and the female deity worship, going back to prehistoric times. This article is part of a joint project, based on the authors’ independent ethnographic field research in the Fergana Valley in the first decade of the 21st century.

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