Childbirth and Transitional Rites of the Shilde Period among the Kazakhs of Western Siberia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the rituals of the intermediate period during the first forty days of a newborn’s life – shilde – which continue to play an important role in traditional Kazakh culture to this day. The shilde rituals are a part of rituals of protecting and safeguarding the newborn during this dangerous period of his life and safe integration into the physical world. Changes in economic and traditional everyday life during the 20th and first quarter of the 21st centuries as well as urbanization processes resulted in simplification and even loss of some elements of birth rituals while maintaining their general content and understanding of their meaning. Departure from the observance of shildehana, simplification and transformation in the rituals of placing the baby into the cradle (it kөilek), and transition from the intermediate period were identified. Rituals associated with the dog’s shirt (қalzha ritual), performed immediately after the birth for the mother and newborn, and ritual of incorporating the infant into this world (kyrkynan shygaru) were reconstructed. This study analyzes the childhood rituals of the intermediate period before the newborn’s incorporation into the physical world and reconstructs the rituals of it kөilek, қalzha, and kyrkynan shygaru using the evidence gathered by the Kazakh ethnographic expeditions of the United Institute of History, Philology and Philosophy of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2002 and 2004–2005, and Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006–2010 in the steppe and forest-steppe zones of Omsk Region, Novosibirsk Region, Tyumen Region, and the Altai Krai of the Russian Federation and Pavlodar Region of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The study used A. van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage, methods of reconstruction, field ethnography, and participant observation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".