Throw Your Voice
Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods
Abstract
Throw Your Voice is a story of loss and recovery. It relates how children placed in a temporary care institution make sense of their situations. Moving between a Kazakhstan government children's home, Hope House, and the Almaty State Puppet Theater, Meghanne Barker shows how children, and puppets, as proxies, bring to life ideologies of childhood and visions of a rosy future. Sites and stories run in parallel. Framed by the narrative of Anton Chekhov's ""Kashtanka,"" about a lost dog taken in by a kind stranger, the author follows the story's staging at the puppet theater. At Hope House, children find themselves on a path similar to Kashtanka, dislodged from their first homes to reside in a second.
The heart of this story is about living in displacement and about the fragile intimacies achieved amidst conditions of missing. Whether due to war, migration, or pandemic, people get separated from those closest to them. Throw Your Voice examines how strangers become familiar, and how objects mediate precarious ties. She shows how people use fantasy to mitigate loss.
Keywords
Puppetry in Central Asia, Children in postsocialist state institutional care, Performing cuteness and vulnerability for adults, Fantastic play with dolls and puppets, National ideologies of hope and futurityISBN
9781501776458, 9781501776472, 9781501776465, 9781501776489Publisher
Cornell University PressPublisher website
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/Publication date and place
2024Classification
Social and cultural anthropology
Puppetry, miniature and toy theatre