Interethnic Love and Marriages on the Rise in Kazakhstan

Trend Can Lead to Creation of "Eurasian" Ethnicity, Scientist Says

As thousands of couples throughout Kazakhstan celebrated Valentine's Day last week with exchanges of flowers, gifts and, yes, specially timed weddings, scientists spoke of specific trends in interethnic love and marriages that seem to confirm the country's reputation as "a melting pot of ethnic groups" and can have potential implications for future population qualities.

Professor Makash Tatimov, a renowned demographer, said there is an incremental growth in interethnic marriages in Kazakhstan that can potentially lead to developing a type of "Eurasian" ethnicity.

"Neither religious, nor intra-ethnic taboos can stop the ongoing process of interethnic blending in Kazakhstan," he told Vremya weekly newspaper
(www.time.kz) on Feb. 13. "Right now, every fifth
marriage in Kazakhstan is an interethnic one, but I think by 2050 this ratio will be one in three," he said.

Statistics seems to confirm his assumptions. Of the total of just under 100,000 marriages concluded in Kazakhstan in 2002, 19,502, or roughly 20%, were between people of different ethnicity.

Tatimov says this trend leads to unification of ethnic groups into two larger groups united by race and language characteristics, a European and an Oriental one. While the interethnic marriages are currently mostly relevant for the European ethnic groups, Tatimov says the trend is also swaying the traditionally more conservative Asians, - the Uzbeks, the Tartars, the Azeris, the Uighurs and finally the Kazakhs, the majority ethnic group.

"These days marriage ads do not say 'I am looking for an ethnic Russian' or 'an ethnic Uighur," Tatimov said. "Rather, they say 'a man of European origin' or 'a woman of Oriental ethnicity'."

Reasons for these tendencies lie in the fact that many ethnic groups do not live compactly, Tatimov says, but they are spread out throughout Kazakhstan. Statistics says there are more than 80 percent of mixed marriages among the Ukrainians, the Belorussians, the Tartars, and the Germans and 27 percent among the Russians.

For ethnic Kazakhs, however, the ratio is only 4.1 percent, but Tatimov believes that will change. "The very origin of Kazakhs is the result of blending of two races, the European and the Mongoloid," Tatimov said.