Mankurts are unthinking slaves in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance.[1]
According to Aitmatov's fictional[2] legend, mankurts were prisoners of war who were turned into non-autonomous docile servants by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun. These skins dried tight, like a steel band, causing brain damage and figurative zombification. Mankurts did not recognise their name, family, or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being".[3]
Aitmatov stated that he did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself.[2]
In Aitmatov's novel, a young man defending his homeland from invasion by the nomadic Rouran is captured, tortured, and brainwashed into serving his homeland's conquerors. Having completely lost his memory, he kills his mother when she attempts to rescue him from captivity. In the later years of the Soviet Union mankurt entered everyday speech to describe the alienation that people had toward a society that repressed them and distorted their history.[4]
In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance[1] and journalism.[5] In Russian, there have appeared neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization").[6] In some former Soviet republics, the term has come to represent those non-Russians who have lost their ethnic heritage by the effects of the Soviet system.[7]
In 1990, the film Mankurt was released in the Soviet Union.[8] Written by Mariya Urmadova, the film is based on one narrative strand from Aitmatov's novel.[9][10]