I. Stasevich

Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia

E‑mail: stinga73@mail.ru

 Kazakh Women Wedding Headdress in the MAE RAS Collection

 Abstract. The MAE RAS collections on Kazakh culture include four female wedding headdresses — saukele (сəукеле), originating from various regions of Kazakhstan and dating back to the 1850s—1930s. Despite keen interest in saukele shown by Kazakh culture researchers, many aspects of this headdress decoration and meaning of their imagery remain understudied until today. The aim of the present article is to introduce these museum objects into scholarly context as an ethnographic source as well as to establish their history and characteristic existence of such headdress type in the Kazakh culture by the way of a comparative historical and semantic analysis.

 Key words: MAE RAS, Kazakhstan, saukele, wedding headdresses, ethnographic collections, photographic illustration

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