Between science, religion, and tradition: multiple forms of legitimation of occult practices in contemporary Kazakhstan

1 Introduction

In classical and contemporary theories, modernization is associated with increasing institutional complexity, rationalization, secularization, and changing value orientations. These processes, however, do not unfold linearly and do not automatically lead to the disappearance of religious, magical, or other forms of an “enchanted” perception of the world. Weber’s idea of the “disenchantment of the world” captures an important logic of modern rationalization, while subsequent scholarship has demonstrated the multiplicity of trajectories of modernity and the persistence of cultural differences throughout social transformation (Weber, 1946; Casanova, 1994; Eisenstadt, 2000; Inglehart and Welzel, 2005). Possible relationships between modernization and recourse to occult practices therefore require empirical examination in specific social contexts rather than causal postulation.

Kazakhstan constitutes a particularly relevant case because it combines accelerated post-Soviet modernization, high levels of urbanization and educational attainment among the urban population, religious revival, digitalization, and the continuing resilience of traditional cultural practices. Post-Soviet transformation has not simply displaced cultural memory; rather, it has involved its reinterpretation and incorporation into new forms of religious and everyday life. Studies of religiosity in Kazakhstan point to persistent links among collective memory, ethnic identity, folk healing, and family-ritual practices (Privratsky, 2001; Aliyarov et al., 2021). This overlap of modernization and traditional logics makes Kazakhstan a significant context for examining contemporary forms of occult and esoteric knowledge.

Against this background, the central research interest is not whether Kazakhstan is experiencing a predetermined “return to the archaic,” but how urban residents themselves draw boundaries between science, religion, tradition, and occult knowledge; why particular practices are perceived as acceptable or useful; and what roles institutional trust, cultural memory, the digital environment, and the service market play in these interpretations. Previous research in Kazakhstan has documented the presence of occult ideas among urban residents (Aliyarov et al., 2021), but their contemporary sociopolitical significance requires a more multidimensional empirical analysis.

Although studies exist on religiosity, traditional beliefs, folk healing, and particular manifestations of esotericism, it remains insufficiently understood how occult practices in contemporary Kazakhstan are simultaneously associated, in the perceptions of urban residents, with modernization, institutional trust, cultural memory, commercialization, and state regulation. The purpose of this study is to examine how urban residents of Kazakhstan perceive and interpret occult and esoteric practices, what social, institutional, and cultural meanings they attribute to them, and how these practices are represented and normalized in public media discourse.

The study is organized around four research questions: (1) How do urban residents of Kazakhstan interpret occult and esoteric practices? (2) What institutional, social, psychological, and cultural motives do respondents associate with recourse to such practices? (3) How are occult services represented, commercialized, and normalized in Kazakhstan’s digital and media environment? (4) How are attitudes toward state regulation of occult services related to respondents’ broader perceptions of trust, security, and the role of state institutions?

2 Theoretical framework

Occultism as an object of sociopolitical analysis has long remained at the margins of Kazakhstan’s domestic research agenda. This does not mean that studies of religiosity, folk beliefs, or healing practices in Kazakhstan are absent: such scholarship exists and makes it possible to trace links among collective memory, ethnic identity, and lived religion (Privratsky, 2001; Aliyarov et al., 2021). However, the contemporary intersection of occult practices with the digital environment, commercialization, institutional trust, and state regulation remains fragmented in the literature. This study therefore proceeds not from a claim of a research “vacuum,” but from the need to connect several analytical perspectives that have previously been treated separately.

The theoretical task of the study is to examine occult and esoteric practices without reducing them in advance to “ignorance,” psychopathology, or exclusively religious deviance. Contemporary research on esotericism and lived religion shows that the boundaries between institutional religion, everyday beliefs, therapeutic practices, and individualized forms of meaning-making can be fluid (McGuire, 2008; Hanegraaff, 2013; Ammerman, 2014). This is particularly relevant in the Kazakhstani context, where the same action may be interpreted by participants as tradition, a religiously impermissible practice, psychological support, “science,” or a commercial service.

In this study, the concepts of “occultism,” “esotericism,” “magic,” “divination,” and “traditional/non-conventional healing” are not treated as theoretically identical. Occultism is used as an umbrella term for teachings and practices that presume access to hidden or supernatural forces and forms of knowledge; esotericism refers to a broader field of specialized, “inner,” or hidden systems of knowledge and corresponding modes of interpreting the world (Hanegraaff, 2013). Magic refers to ritual-instrumental actions believed to influence events through supernatural forces or symbolic correspondences; divination refers to practices intended to obtain information about the future or concealed circumstances; and traditional and non-conventional healing refers to forms of assistance and treatment located outside institutional biomedicine or at its margins and often grounded in cultural-religious understandings. These categories are considered together not because they are theoretically interchangeable, but because of the empirical material: respondents themselves frequently overlap these categories, associating them with prediction, healing, protection, advice-seeking, and personal orientation. The term “irrational compensation” is retained as the authors’ theoretical concept, whereas the empirical discussion primarily uses more neutral formulations such as “occult and esoteric practices,” “non-institutional meaning-making practices,” and “alternative practices of orientation and support.”

Historically, magical and divinatory practices have existed in different societies and have not disappeared as religious and scientific systems became more complex. Their social status has changed: in some periods they were incorporated into accepted ritual forms, whereas in others they were marginalized, persecuted, or relegated to the private sphere. The mere fact of recourse to magic therefore does not justify automatically associating it only with early stages of social development.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anthropology, sociology, and psychology offered different explanations of magic, ranging from evolutionary accounts of a “transitional” stage of culture to functional and psychological interpretations (Frazer, 1925; Levy-Bruhl, 1923; Malinowski, 1948; Durkheim, 1995). Of particular importance for the present study is the line of scholarship showing that magical action can coexist with practical rational knowledge. Malinowski’s classic example demonstrates that recourse to magic does not exclude calculation, experience, or instrumental behavior; the same individual may employ these logics in different situations (Malinowski, 1948).

Contemporary studies of esotericism further problematize the linear assumption that rationalization should inevitably displace “enchanted” forms of knowledge. Esoteric ideas and practices can adapt to scientific terminology, mass culture, and new media formats while remaining attractive in modernized settings (Pasi, 2009; Hanegraaff, 2013). In this regard, Weberian “disenchantment” is treated here primarily as an analytical reference point rather than as a completed historical process.

The historical discussion therefore serves to establish one point: the persistence of magical and esoteric practices does not in itself demonstrate an “archaization” of consciousness. A more productive question concerns the functions, meanings, and forms of legitimation such practices acquire in a particular contemporary society and why they can coexist with education, science, religion, and digital technologies.

From this perspective, recourse to occult and esoteric practices may have several competing explanations. One concerns uncertainty and coping strategies: when subjective perceptions of control decline, people may become more likely to seek patterns, symbolic connections, and ways of restoring predictability (Whitson and Galinsky, 2008). Another perspective focuses not on a deficit of rationality but on cultural continuity and the everyday reproduction of inherited modes of explanation and assistance (McGuire, 2008; Privratsky, 2001).

Identity construction is equally important. Practices that may appear magical to an external observer can function for participants as a “tribute to one’s roots,” a family habit, a form of ethnocultural belonging, or a means of maintaining intergenerational continuity. In such cases, recourse to these practices does not necessarily imply a rejection of rational knowledge: it may be situational and coexist with professional medicine, religious identity, and secular education.

A psychological perspective likewise makes it possible to interpret such practices as ways of coping with anxiety, uncertainty, and difficult life decisions. This does not imply that occult practices actually eliminate the causes of a crisis; rather, the focus is on their subjectively perceived functions of support, hope, protection, and orientation. This formulation is consistent with the broader logic of therapeutic culture, in which individualized self-help techniques and personal advisory practices become a familiar language for addressing life difficulties (Madsen, 2014).

A further explanation concerns commercialization and consumer culture. Contemporary spirituality and alternative practices can be transformed into services, personal consultation, and market products in which the promise of an individualized solution becomes part of a marketing strategy (Carrette and King, 2005). The market form does not necessarily negate a consumer’s sincere belief in the effectiveness of a practice; instead, it adds another layer of legitimation.

Finally, the digital environment increases the accessibility and everyday visibility of such practices. Social media enable esoteric practitioners to combine religious, psychological, quasi-scientific, and promotional vocabularies, while algorithmic content distribution makes such messages part of routine information consumption. Research on digital religion shows that new media do not merely transfer belief online but also reshape how beliefs are represented, authorized, and incorporated into everyday life (Campbell, 2013). Digital normalization is therefore treated here as an independent interpretive perspective rather than as an automatic consequence of modernization.

Against this background, the compensation theory associated with J. Ritter, H. Lübbe, and O. Marquard is used in this study as an interpretive, or sensitizing, framework (Ritter, 1963; Lübbe, 1992; Marquard, 1986). Its heuristic value lies in the proposition that accelerated social change may be accompanied by a need for stable points of orientation, cultural memory, and forms of subjective compensation. The study does not treat this theory as the only possible explanation of the observed practices and does not seek to “verify” it in a causal-statistical sense.

Within this logic, modernization changes not only institutions but also modes of self-definition: it expands the space of individual choice while increasing the number of competing sources of knowledge, authority, and life orientation. For some individuals, this may heighten the need for stable symbolic foundations, although specific responses depend on biographical experience, cultural context, and the condition of social institutions. The compensatory interpretation is therefore applied only where it is supported by respondents’ accounts and is considered alongside alternative explanations.

Cultural-historical memory occupies a particular place in compensation theory. Lübbe associated the acceleration of modernization with the growing significance of historical self-identification: the more rapidly the surrounding environment changes, the more salient the need to preserve elements of origin and cultural continuity becomes (Lübbe, 1992). For Kazakhstan, this perspective is useful when analyzing cases in which healing, ancestor veneration, or purification rituals are perceived not as “occultism,” but as part of family and ethnocultural tradition.

At the same time, the concept of “irrational compensation” should not become a universal explanation. Limited institutional trust, life uncertainty, cultural continuity, therapeutic culture, commercialization, and digital normalization may operate simultaneously or independently. Accordingly, in the empirical part of the study, modernization is treated as a macrosocial context rather than as a directly measured independent variable.

This approach is also consistent with the idea of multiple modernities, according to which social change does not erase cultural heritage along a single linear trajectory but interacts with historically established norms and institutions (Eisenstadt, 2000). For catch-up and post-Soviet societies, the analytically important issue is precisely the gap between rapid institutional change and the slower transformation of everyday practices, identities, and modes of trust.

Accordingly, the article’s theoretical model is not built around a single causal chain of “modernization → occultism,” but around a comparison of several possible mechanisms. Compensation theory provides one interpretive framework; alternative perspectives—coping under uncertainty, cultural continuity, identity construction, commercialization, therapeutic culture, and digital normalization—are used to examine the heterogeneity of meanings and motives identified in the survey, interviews, and media corpus.

3 Materials and methods

The study employed an exploratory mixed-methods design combining three complementary components: a descriptive online survey, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and qualitative-quantitative media content analysis. The purpose of integrating these methods was not to achieve statistical representation of the population of Kazakhstan, but to examine multidimensionally how occult and esoteric practices are perceived, interpreted, and publicly represented. Combining quantitative and qualitative sources makes it possible to compare distributions of views within the surveyed sample with individual meaning-making and public media discourse (Creswell and Plano Clark, 2018; Fetters et al., 2013).

Survey data were collected through a self-administered electronic questionnaire on the Survio platform from 4 February to 30 March 2026. Access to the questionnaire was open through a public web link distributed via WhatsApp and Telegram messengers and by Gmail email. Snowball dissemination was also used, whereby initially recruited participants could forward the link to other potential respondents who met the inclusion criteria. Participation was limited to individuals aged 18 years or older who permanently resided in urban localities in Kazakhstan. The resulting sample was therefore a non-probability self-selected online sample. This approach enabled relatively broad geographical coverage while also imposing important limitations on statistical representativeness and generalizability. The final analytical dataset comprised 764 fully completed questionnaires from residents of 19 cities, with a substantial share of responses from Almaty, Astana, and Shymkent. According to Survio’s technical report, the survey page received 1,284 visits during the data-collection period; 764 visits resulted in fully completed submissions, while 520 involved visits without submission of a completed form. No partially completed questionnaires were retained by the system. The overall completion rate was 59.5%. Only fully completed questionnaires were included in the analytical dataset. The web-survey settings permitted multiple submissions and did not use IP-address restrictions or password protection; consequently, repeat participation could not be technically excluded. This is treated as a limitation of the online recruitment procedure. No personally identifying information was collected. On the introductory page, participants were informed that the study was anonymous and that there were no “right” or “wrong” answers. Reporting of the web-survey procedure followed the CHERRIES (Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys) recommendations (Eysenbach, 2004). The resulting sample is not representative of the entire urban population of Kazakhstan; the findings are therefore used to describe distributions of views, experiences, and patterns of perception within the surveyed sample and are not extrapolated to the national population.

The sample showed a pronounced gender imbalance: women accounted for 66.5% (508 participants), compared with 33.5% men (256 participants). This imbalance must be taken into account when interpreting the findings. Previous research in Kazakhstan has likewise documented a notable role of women in the use of occult services (Aliyarov et al., 2021); however, the composition of the present sample does not in itself permit conclusions about a higher prevalence of such practices among women in the national population.

The age profile was also skewed toward younger respondents: 59.4% were aged 18–25, 12.3% were aged 26–35, and approximately 23% belonged to age groups between 36 and 55. The sample had a high educational profile: 46.6% had completed higher education, 10.5% held a master’s or PhD degree, and a proportion of participants were currently enrolled in higher education. The socio-professional composition included students (52.7%), specialists (21.1%), civil servants (8.1%), and researchers (7.5%). These categories ensure the presence of several socio-professional groups but not their representative proportions. The high shares of women, younger respondents, students, and highly educated participants limit the generalizability of the findings and require all quantitative indicators to be interpreted strictly within the boundaries of the surveyed sample. In terms of religious affiliation, 76.7% identified with Islam, whereas 11.1% reported no religious affiliation.

The survey instrument was designed to capture respondents’ subjective understanding of occultism, personal experience with the listed practices, purposes for such engagement – including curiosity, attempts to resolve personal problems, and psychological support – attitudes toward state regulation, and perceptions of potential social risk. Quantitative data were analyzed primarily descriptively using frequency distributions and percentages. Statistical indicators are used to characterize the surveyed sample; no population-level or causal inferences are made. Because the present analysis does not employ separate correlational or regression tests, the terms “correlation” and “statistical verification” are not used in interpreting the results.

The present article does not analyze open-ended survey responses as a qualitative dataset; all survey findings reported here are treated as descriptive response distributions. Qualitative interpretation is based on the interview transcripts and media corpus. An English translation of the complete bilingual Kazakh-Russian questionnaire, including the original item structure and response options, is provided as Supplementary Material 1 for transparency and reproducibility.

Key concepts were operationalized as follows. “Recourse to occult practices” refers to respondents’ self-reported personal experience with astrology, numerology, divination (cards, runes, etc.), extrasensory practices/healing, magical rituals, online practices, bioenergy/cosmoenergy, and other practices listed in the questionnaire. “Institutional trust” refers to participants’ evaluations and statements concerning state, medical, religious, and educational institutions; no separate validated institutional-trust scale was administered. “Compensatory function” refers to participants’ descriptions of using such practices to obtain support, hope, protection, orientation, assistance with decision-making, or relief from uncertainty. “Educational attainment” refers to the highest completed or current level of education reported by the respondent. “Modernization” was not measured by a separate empirical scale and is therefore not treated as a directly tested independent variable; it functions as a macrosocial context and theoretical framework for the study.

The qualitative component followed an exploratory qualitative design using semi-structured in-depth interviews (n = 10) to identify subjective interpretations, motivations, and contradictory ways of understanding occult practices. The purpose of the qualitative sample was not to estimate prevalence, but to reveal the diversity of meanings and biographical logics associated with recourse to, or rejection of, such practices. Participants were selected purposively to include different forms of personal experience and different attitudes toward occultism, including both positively disposed and skeptical respondents.

The qualitative sample was gender-balanced (five men and five women) and included participants aged 23–47 years. All respondents had completed higher education or were studying at the corresponding level; the sample included academics, entrepreneurs, forensic experts, managers, teachers, and students. Religious self-identification ranged from Muslim to deist, agnostic, and skeptical positions. This composition is not used for quantitative generalization, but enables comparison of different ways in which science, religion, tradition, and personal experience are combined. The socio-demographic characteristics of the interview participants are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Socio-demographic characteristics of interview respondents (n = 10).

Source: Compiled by the authors.

An important selection criterion was variation in personal experience: the sample included respondents who had used occult and esoteric services as well as participants with explicitly critical positions who viewed them as commercial products or forms of psychological support. All participants were fluent in Kazakh and Russian. Interview material was analyzed thematically (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Statements were organized into thematic blocks concerning definitions of the occult, motivations for engagement, institutional trust, state regulation, commercialization, and cultural memory. Similar and contradictory positions were compared, and disagreements among respondents were retained as an analytical result rather than resolved. All 10 interviews were fully transcribed, and the transcripts were retained in the research archive as the primary qualitative dataset. Identifying information was removed or replaced with pseudonyms before analysis. Coding was conducted by members of the research team involved in qualitative data collection and analysis. Interpretive trustworthiness was strengthened through comparison across interviews and triangulation with the survey and media corpus, consistent with general principles of qualitative rigor and trustworthiness (Nowell et al., 2017). This triangulation was used to identify convergences and divergences among individual interpretations, quantitative distributions, and public media discourse, but not as a means of establishing causal relationships.

Confidentiality and anonymization of participants’ personal data were maintained throughout the interviews; the names used in Table 1 and throughout the manuscript are pseudonyms. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Kazakhstan Center for Humanitarian and Political Trends (IRB-KCHPT-001/2026). Participation was voluntary, and the principles of informed consent, confidentiality, and data anonymization were observed.

The third component of the research design was a qualitative-quantitative content analysis of Kazakhstan’s media environment covering 2023–2026 (Krippendorff, 2018). The corpus comprised 375 purposively selected units from the Kazakhstani segment of the internet. The unit of analysis was an individual news or analytical article, advertisement, video item, social-media post, or self-contained discussion unit/thread. The corpus included Kazakhstani news portals and analytical publications, advertisements, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, and Telegram. Search and selection were conducted in Kazakh and Russian. The purpose of this component was to analyze how occult practices are publicly represented, commercialized, and normalized, rather than to estimate the prevalence of such content across the entire Kazakhstani internet. The chronological coverage extended from March 2023 to February 2026, with the principal collection and recording of digital materials conducted in February 2026. Searches were performed in Russian and Kazakh using keywords and semantic combinations including “occultism” (оккультизм), “esotericism” (эзотерика), “magic” (магия), “astrology” (астрология), “horoscope” (гороскоп), “natal chart” (натальная карта), “numerology” (нумерология), “tarot” (Таро), “divination” (гадание), “psychic” (экстрасенс), “healer/healing” (целитель/целительство), “clairvoyance” (ясновидение), “cosmoenergy” (космоэнергетика), “bioenergy” (биоэнергетика), “Xiucai” (Сюцай), and “matrix of destiny” (матрица судьбы), together with Kazakh-language equivalents such as balger (балгер), köripkel (көріпкел), emshi (емші), bal ashu (бал ашу), and zhuldyz zhoramal (жұлдыз жорамал). Materials were included if they directly concerned occult, esoteric, predictive, or non-institutional practices, or their public perception, commercialization, risks, and state regulation, and if they were accessible for substantive analysis and related to Kazakhstan or a Kazakhstani urban audience. Materials outside the specified time frame, items containing only incidental or contextually irrelevant mentions, inaccessible materials, and duplicates were excluded. Repeated materials were checked by URL, title, and content: identical publications were counted once, whereas separate posts or videos from the same author or account were retained as independent units when they contained distinct substantive material.

For analytical systematization, the media material was coded into thematic categories directly linked to the research questions and the structure of the results: (1) commercialization of occult services; (2) use of scientific and quasi-scientific terminology; (3) psychological support and self-help; (4) cultural and traditional legitimation; (5) risk, fraud, and social threat; (6) state regulation; (7) distrust of institutions; and (8) status and prestige consumption. Particular attention was paid to advertising strategies, languages of legitimation, and user responses. Media items were treated as illustrative material that enabled comparison of public discourse with survey and interview data, rather than as independent evidence of causal relationships. Countervailing and negative cases were deliberately retained, including materials that framed occult and esoteric practices as pseudoscience, fraud, risk, or an object of state criticism, rather than selecting only examples consistent with compensation theory. Selected media exemplars illustrating these contrasting discursive roles are summarized in Table 2. Formal inter-coder reliability statistics were not calculated because the content analysis was exploratory; to enhance analytical consistency, ambiguous items were repeatedly assessed against the adopted coding scheme.

Table 2. Selected media exemplars used for qualitative contextualization.

Selected media items are presented as illustrative examples of recurrent themes identified in the analyzed corpus (n = 375) and are not intended to be statistically representative of the entire dataset.

The selected items include both normalizing/commercializing and critical/regulatory cases, thereby ensuring that the media component does not operate as a one-directional confirmation of the compensation framework. This selection also makes the analytical environment more transparent by showing how divergent public framings were retained in the interpretation.

The three components were integrated at the interpretation stage. Survey data described the distribution of positions within the surveyed sample; interviews revealed subjective meanings and contradictions; and the media corpus illustrated common ways in which the same themes were publicly represented. Such triangulation does not transform the findings into statistically representative evidence, but it makes it possible to identify where different types of data converge and where they support alternative explanations (Fetters et al., 2013).

The quantitative component is therefore used primarily as a descriptive context for qualitative interpretation. It does not establish macrosocial regularities among education, urbanization, institutional trust, and recourse to occult practices. The semi-structured interviews, in turn, provide access to the micro-level of meaning—to how respondents themselves explain the use of alternative practices, experiences of uncertainty, and attitudes toward medicine, religion, and the state.

Content analysis adds a public-discourse dimension concerning commercialization, “scientific” legitimation, cultural tradition, and regulation. Taken together, the methods provide an exploratory mapping of the phenomenon and allow compensation theory to be discussed alongside alternative interpretations. Modernization was not measured by a separate scale and was not tested as an independent variable; it functions as a macrosocial context and theoretical framework in this research design.

4 Results and discussion

4.1 The paradox of “educated rationality”

One important issue identified in the study is the mismatch between the simple Enlightenment assumption that increasing education and rationalization should automatically lead to the final “disenchantment of the world.” The data do not permit estimates of the prevalence of occult practices among Kazakhstan’s highly educated population as a whole, but they do demonstrate the presence and substantive significance of such practices for some highly educated participants in the study. In this limited sense, the findings are consistent with the proposition that education alone does not preclude the coexistence of rational and esoteric modes of interpreting experience (Weber, 1946; Pasi, 2009; Hanegraaff, 2013).

The high proportion of respondents with higher and postgraduate education does not allow the conclusion that occult practices are more prevalent among highly educated populations, because the sample itself has a high educational profile. The combined share of participants with completed higher education, master’s degrees, and PhDs exceeds 57% (Figure 1). This figure describes the structure of the sample rather than the educational profile of all consumers of occult services. At the same time, the findings show that interest in and personal experience with such practices are present among highly educated participants and therefore cannot be explained solely by a lack of formal education.

Within the surveyed sample, 43.5% of respondents reported personal experience with one or more occult practices, while 34.8% regarded such practices as completely incompatible with science. These findings do not demonstrate a general “epistemological transformation” of the urban population, but they do indicate ambiguity in how some participants draw boundaries between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. For certain respondents, particular practices—especially astrology and numerology—are described as “non-academic science” or as systems of observation, making quasi-scientific language one means of their subjective legitimation.

A similar logic appears in the interviews, where participants articulate the boundary between science and occult knowledge in markedly different ways. Azamat states: “Astrology and numerology, in my understanding, are closer to science, since they involve calculations based on stars and numbers, certain combinations.” Didar offers a more elaborate justification: “I myself studied astrology and numerology, and I consider them sciences of observation, rather than occultism in its pure form. It is like Vedic knowledge from ancient India – a philosophy based on precedents and results. One could say that this is a scientific method: observation–result.” Ainur likewise describes the practice through personal efficacy: “For me, astrology and numerology are a science. The numerologist described my situation accurately and gave valuable advice, and in the end I decided to resign from my job.” These statements are important not as confirmation of the scientific status of the practices, but as evidence of how participants themselves construct their credibility. The use of terms such as “calculations,” “energy,” “cosmos,” “quantum physics,” and other quasi-scientific formulations may create an impression of rationalized knowledge for part of the audience.

The content-analysis material illustrates a similar mechanism of public normalization. News portals and social media contain numerological and astrological forecasts, horoscopes, divination, and advertisements for esoteric services. The recurrent visibility of such content may contribute to its perception as a familiar element of everyday media consumption; however, this alone does not justify conclusions about reduced critical thinking or the causal effects of algorithms. From the perspective of digital religion and digital-culture research, it is more appropriate to consider how media platforms reshape the accessibility, authority, and repetition of such messages (Campbell, 2013).

The interviews suggest that, for some educated participants, the use of occult tools represents not a rejection of rationality but a situational supplement to other modes of decision-making. The authors describe this as “pragmatic irrationalism”: an attempt to restore a subjective sense of control under uncertainty through practices that respondents may simultaneously combine with academic knowledge, professional consultation, or religious beliefs. This interpretation is consistent with the logics of compensation and coping with uncertainty, but it is not the only possible explanation.

A different position is represented by Leila. In her view, recourse to occult practices may be associated with an unwillingness to analyze reality in depth: “People believe in what they want to believe. Not everyone is prepared to examine deeply what is true and what is not.” She also describes such practices as a way of shifting responsibility for life choices: “People have certain difficulties and problems that they cannot cope with, and they resort to such methods… For me, this looks like shifting responsibility.” The view of a single respondent does not support conclusions about consequences for civic activity at the population level, but it does reveal an important alternative interpretation: the use of an external symbolic system to simplify difficult choices.

Accordingly, the “paradox of educated rationality” is used here in a limited sense: not as evidence that occultism is more prevalent among educated people, but as an empirical observation that high educational attainment and interest in such practices coexist within the surveyed sample. This coexistence may involve, simultaneously or separately, a need for control, quasi-scientific legitimation, cultural habit, therapeutic demand, and commercial appeal.

4.2 Occult practices, institutional trust, and perceived institutional insufficiency

The second analytical block concerns how respondents themselves connect recourse to alternative practices with their experiences of formal institutions. Dissatisfaction with healthcare, religious organizations, and state structures appears prominently in the interviews; however, these accounts document subjectively perceived institutional insufficiency rather than objective evidence of systemic institutional crisis.

This logic is most clearly expressed in accounts concerning healthcare. Respondents describe turning to healers in connection with dissatisfaction with formal medicine, prolonged searches for a diagnosis, insufficient attention, or loss of hope. Ademai, speaking about her child’s health, states: “If state medicine does not produce results, a person, out of desperation, searches for other paths… I was left with an extremely negative attitude toward that doctor. At the very first appointment, she diagnosed a two-year-old child by saying that ‘autism cannot be treated’… It seemed as if all of this was being done for money.” This account should be read as the respondent’s experience of formal healthcare rather than as an objective assessment of the system as a whole. For the authors’ interpretation, it makes perceived institutional insufficiency one contextual factor that may accompany recourse to alternative practices, but not a universal cause.

A similar theme appears in Leila’s interview, where she links difficulties in healthcare to physicians’ workloads and socioeconomic position: “Doctors are the first line, but many of them do not have their basic needs met… The state does not raise the issue of salaries: a courier can earn two or three times more than a doctor. These are the realities of our time.” She then shifts from institutional criticism to the emotional function of alternative help: “When there is no hope, some rural healer may say that hope exists. And every person needs hope.” In this reading, an occult or healing service competes not so much with medical knowledge itself as with the experience of receiving attention, hope, and prompt personalized support. This may become particularly meaningful under conditions of perceived socioeconomic uncertainty.

Aruzhan likewise points to a pragmatic aspect: “Sometimes it seems cheaper and faster than medicine: instead of months of examinations, a person goes to an esoteric practitioner for a quick diagnosis.” This example illustrates the respondent’s logic of saving time and resources, but it does not establish that the state system is objectively “incapable” of providing assistance. Analytically, the more relevant observation is that subjective assessments of the accessibility and speed of institutional services may influence the choice of an alternative source of consultation.

Media materials provide an illustrative context for these interviews. In one analyzed item, a physician explicitly links interest in “healers” to a loss of trust in domestic medicine: “It must be acknowledged that people’s interest in ‘healers’ is a symptom of the illness of domestic medicine. We have lost trust; our word has ceased to be law. There are many problems in the sphere; work is not properly organized everywhere, and because of their workload doctors do not have the opportunity to listen to every patient at length. Meanwhile, over there sit good psychologists, listening to them and promising healing” (“Exorcising Shaitan…,” 2025). This expert assessment is consistent with some interview accounts, but it is treated as a position within public discourse rather than as independent confirmation of a causal relationship between healthcare quality and the prevalence of occult practices.

Public interest in the issue intensified following the high-profile 2024 trial of Kazakhstan’s former Minister of National Economy, Kuandyk Bishimbayev, when recourse to a clairvoyant in a critical situation became the subject of public discussion. The expression “Bishimbayev syndrome” emerged in the media as a journalistic label for reliance on psychic advice (“Bishimbaev syndrome…,” 2024). For the present study, this case is important primarily as an example of how occult knowledge can become politicized and shifted from the private sphere into debates about responsibility, safety, and regulation.

Institutional trust also extends to the religious sphere. Dias offers a sharply critical account of the communication style of some official clergy: “The institution of imams is to blame for the fact that Kazakhs are running away from Islam. One cannot expect a child who was frightened with hell to love religion… Against this background, occultists come along; they do not accuse, but praise.” This judgment cannot be generalized to religious institutions in Kazakhstan as a whole, but it shows that respondents compare different sources of moral and psychological authority not only by the content of their teachings but also by the way they interact with individuals.

In Farida’s interview, trust is framed in terms of relations with the state and identity: “There is also distrust of the state. People see that the state ‘squeezes’ more out of the people than it helps. In the absence of a clear ideology and under conditions of globalization, people lose their identity; they are afraid of being alone, and they ‘invent God’ and occult practices as a point of orientation.” Here, the causal relationship is formulated by the respondent herself. The authors’ interpretation is limited to the proposition that experiences of institutional and identity uncertainty may create a context in which alternative points of orientation become more attractive. In this sense, the metaphor of a “political surrogate” is used as an analytical description of a possible substitutive function rather than as an established fact.

Taken together, the interviews reveal not a single “institutional crisis,” but a spectrum of subjective assessments concerning institutional sufficiency, accessibility, and trustworthiness. For some participants, recourse to healers or esoteric practitioners is associated with disappointment in formal assistance; for others, it is explained through cultural habit, marketing, or personal responsibility. The dynamics of occult practices therefore cannot be treated as a direct derivative of the effectiveness of public administration. A more cautious conclusion is that subjectively perceived institutional insufficiency may constitute one context in which alternative practices acquire additional appeal.

4.3 Demand for state regulation and security

The survey data indicate a noticeable but non-uniform demand for state involvement in the regulation of occult services. Within the surveyed sample, 48.4% of respondents considered state regulation necessary, including 25.4% who selected the option implying the most active form of state intervention. At the same time, 49.2% perceived occult practices as a potential danger to society, including 24.1% who expressed this view unequivocally. These indicators coexist, but without specific statistical tests it is not possible to claim a direct correlation between perceived threat and support for regulation.

For 36.5% of participants, occult practices were not perceived as a social threat, while another 14.3% found it difficult to answer. The quantitative findings therefore point more strongly to an absence of consensus: some respondents expect a more pronounced protective and regulatory role from the state, whereas others do not regard individual recourse to such practices as a matter of public security. This heterogeneity is more analytically important than an attempt to present a single dominant public demand.

The interviews include positions in favor of relatively strict legal control. Askar states: “I would like Kazakhstan to adopt a law banning magic and esotericism… Everything should be regulated at the legislative level: through cash registers, with tax payments and the conclusion of contracts.” Leila similarly frames the issue through the risk of dependence: “It would be good to introduce these bans, as with betting shops or microcredit organizations. I support the fight against all addictions.” She also questions the durability of the promised help: “I do not think these practices can guarantee anything in terms of solving a problem. Their effect is short-term.” These statements reflect an orientation among some participants toward consumer protection and provider accountability, but they do not represent the position of the entire surveyed sample.

Public debate surrounding the teaching of “Xiucai” likewise illustrates the politicization of the issue. Following the announcement of an event within the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs “Atameken,” critical publications appeared and a parliamentary inquiry called for measures concerning pseudo-psychologists, esoteric practitioners, and “teachers of enlightenment” (“A talisman against…”, 2025). The response of the Ministry of Culture and Information emphasized informational and educational work. This case is treated as an example of the tension between the commercial dissemination of an esoteric product and expectations of state oversight, rather than as evidence of a unified state strategy.

At the same time, another group of participants explicitly opposes a prohibitive model. Amir warns: “Legislative bans may only fuel interest and drive everything underground.” In his view, the more durable response lies not in legal persecution but in “improving the well-being of the people,” because confidence in the future and access to high-quality social and medical support would reduce the need to seek a “miracle.” His position illustrates that expectations of the state as a regulator are not equivalent to support for repressive policy.

Farida likewise proposes regulation rather than prohibition: “The state should not ban this sphere, but regulate it. Bans will only create ‘roundabout ways,’ as happened under the Soviet ‘dry law.’” She favors integration and control, including certification and professional requirements. Ainur takes a related but education-centered position: “It is impossible to ban this – ‘forbidden fruit is sweet’; people will still be interested in ancient knowledge. But scholars must take responsibility and educate young people.” Taken together, these positions form an ambivalent model: legal control is understood as a possible instrument of transparency and protection, yet the risks of excessive intervention are also recognized. The findings do not indicate a unified public demand for a ban on occult practices. Rather, they reveal tension between expectations of state oversight, the desire for consumer protection, and recognition of the individual right to use such practices.

4.4 Commercialization and the “fashion” for occultism: from sacred gift to symbolic consumption

Commercialization represents another distinct context in which occult services have expanded. According to the Bureau of National Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the total declared volume of services classified within the relevant category reached 2.9 billion KZT (US$6.18 million) in 2024, compared with 39.5 million KZT in 2023 (Stat.gov.kz, 2024). Nominally, this represents an increase of approximately 75 times. However, the sharp rise in the declared volume of services should not be interpreted exclusively as a 75-fold increase in actual consumption. The observed dynamics may simultaneously reflect changes in demand, the formalization of previously unregistered activity, changes in tax reporting, and the movement of some practitioners into the officially recorded sector.

The statistical data are therefore better interpreted as evidence of a sharp change in the registered market volume rather than as a direct measure of the number of consumers or the intensity of belief in occult practices. The introduction and use of broad classifications of economic activity, changes in tax-reporting regimes, and the legalization of previously unrecorded activity may substantially influence the visible trend. This qualification is important for distinguishing the economic registration of a service from its cultural prevalence.

Official statistics distinguish between psychic services and the services of numerologists, astrologers, and fortune-tellers. The second group accounts for more than 90% of the total declared amount, revealing the structure of the officially recorded segment but not permitting an estimate of the informal market or the actual number of consultations (“The market of magical…”, 2025). Comparative trends in the declared volume of these services for 2019–2024 are presented in Figure 2.

The participation of organizations in purchasing such services is also noteworthy, since official statistics are not limited to private consumers. The announcement of a “Xiucai” master class within the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs “Atameken” in October 2025 provides an illustrative example of an attempt to introduce esoteric content into a business setting (“They wanted…”, 2025). Following public discussion, the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Kazakhstan publicly classified “Xiucai” as a pseudoscientific practice (“Xiucai…”, 2025). This single case cannot establish the prevalence of such practices among organizations, but it does demonstrate that they can extend beyond exclusively private consumption.

The limits of official statistics should also be recognized. Because many esoteric and occult services do not have a dedicated licensing category, some providers may register their activities under the general OKED 96.09 classification or operate outside the fully observable sector. The declared indicators therefore likely capture only part of the market and do not justify the claim, without separate empirical assessment, that most practitioners operate illegally.

The interviews illuminate commercialization through participants’ own perceptions. Dias states: “For me, this is marketing; these are excellent sales. I believe there is nothing spiritual in it – it is exclusively commercial activity. It is an excellent form of earning money because, as in psychology, a person comes with pain, and you help them by allowing them to hear what, deep down, they actually want to hear.” Amir offers a similar but even more categorical interpretation: “I consider occultism and esotericism to be a purely commercial business… it is a kind of modern marketing that has grown out of paganism,” adding that “99% of esoteric practitioners are simply competent psychologists who know how to make money from people.” These positions contrast spiritual and market interpretations and show that some respondents explain the persistence of such services not through supernatural efficacy but through providers’ capacity to offer emotionally appealing and personalized responses.

From the perspectives of Amir and Askar, commercial appeal becomes especially pronounced in crisis situations, when individuals seek quick and understandable results. Amir compares this mechanism with commercial promises of rapid bodily transformation: people want a “quick result,” which is “similar to the cult of the beautiful body, when people are promised a loss of 10 kg in five days – people believe marketing that plays on their desires.” Askar describes contemporary magic as “a scam and fraud for the sake of making money,” arguing that practitioners “understand why people come to them and bring psychology into it… they know that a person has a problem and put pressure on it.” These accounts are consistent with the logics of consumer and therapeutic culture, in which personal advice, promises of change, and individualized engagement with anxiety can be transformed into market products (Carrette and King, 2005; Madsen, 2014). They remain respondents’ interpretations of demand mechanisms rather than evidence that all providers deliberately exploit vulnerabilities.

Status consumption constitutes another theme in the interviews. Amir states: “Occultists now position themselves as ‘personal specialists’ – this is the Western fashion for personal doctors, lawyers, and psychologists that has reached us. For our society, having a ‘personal astrologer’ is considered something first-class.” Azamat describes what he sees as an emerging success script: “A construct is now being broadcast: every successful person, even a deputy, should have their own numerologist. This has become a sign of success.” Aruzhan adds that “the spiritual has been made commercial” and notes the use of numerological calculations for choosing “car numbers, apartment numbers, and wedding dates.” These examples make it possible to interpret some occult services as symbolic and reputational goods, but they do not establish that this model characterizes the majority of Kazakhstan’s urban residents.

A similar motif appears in one media item in which a psychologist links recourse to mediums with the status associated with having a personal esoteric adviser (“Why many Kazakhstanis…”, 2024). In the present study, this item is used as an example of the public articulation of the status motive and is compared with interview material; it does not substitute for an independent measurement of its prevalence.

The digital media environment also sustains the visibility of this market. Farida describes a credibility effect produced by the online behavior of people she already trusts: “Well-known journalists and psychologists, who are authorities for me, are subscribed to the Instagram pages of female shamans and healers… they speak convincingly about their teachings, and therefore one begins to believe in a miracle.” Ainur describes repeated exposure after an initial search: “Targeted advertising on Instagram, after searching once, constantly suggests the services of shamans or tarot readers,” and connects this to a desire to reproduce visible success “in the easiest and fastest way.” These observations support discussion of mechanisms of digital normalization and repeated exposure to content. At the same time, the present data do not permit conclusions about the causal effects of algorithms on beliefs or actual consumer behavior.

Media materials also indicate a wide range of advertised prices, from inexpensive divination to premium and potentially harmful ritual services (“Mercury Retrograde…”, 2025). This variation is consistent with an interpretation of the market as reputationally stratified, in which prices may depend on branding, media visibility, and promised exclusivity. However, the purposively selected media corpus is not designed to produce representative price statistics for the market.

Leila describes a shift in esoteric content from television entertainment formats to its continuous presence on social media: “Now there is so much of this on the internet that no one is protected from the appearance of such materials, because people are looking for profit and playing on emotions.” She links the appeal of such content to affective vulnerability rather than to a single ideological disposition: “Many people have inner anxiety and fears. A person tries to find certain meanings and perhaps finds answers.” This position illustrates the intersection of commercial and therapeutic logics: what is being sold is not only a specific service but also the promise of psychological comfort, attention, and a simpler explanation of a complex situation. For the authors, this is one possible interpretation that requires further examination using broader and more representative data.

Commercialization, therefore, should be reduced neither to “proof” of the growth of occultism nor to an exclusively spiritual search. In the material examined here, it appears as a combination of market service, personalized support, status consumption, and digital promotion. This perspective is analytically distinct from compensation theory and helps explain why some practices may become routinely visible even without assuming a direct effect of modernization pressures.

4.5 Occult practices, cultural memory, and ethnic identity

The fifth analytical block concerns cultural memory and identity. The interviews show that some practices an external researcher might classify as occult or magical are not labeled as such by participants themselves. Ancestor veneration, alastau, zheti shelpek, particular forms of folk healing, and the interpretation of dreams may instead be understood as family tradition, cultural custom, or elements of spiritual heritage. This perspective is consistent with research on Kazakh collective memory and lived religion that demonstrates the persistence of ritual and healing practices within cultural identity (Privratsky, 2001; McGuire, 2008).

Farida associates recourse to such practices with the search for orientation and the preservation of identity under globalization. In other interviews, cultural logic is less explicit but remains visible in memories of family experience, advice from older generations, and everyday ritual practices. This makes cultural continuity a distinct explanation that does not necessarily presuppose institutional crisis or modernization-induced compensation.

Several respondents recall encountering healing and related practices in childhood or through older generations. Leila emphasizes the importance of biographical context: “People believe in what they want to believe, and this largely depends on their background.” Dias recalls: “In childhood, I was very ill… I was taken to all kinds of old women-healers.” Farida describes a family environment in which ancestral support formed part of everyday interpretation: “I grew up in this system of values, was raised by my grandparents, and always heard that aruakhtar [ancestors] support us.” Askar provides a particularly important negative or contradictory case: despite describing recourse to occult services in Islamic terms as “shirk” and maintaining a skeptical position, he followed the advice of elders and consulted a healer when his child became ill. These accounts point to intergenerational transmission and situational ambivalence among the interview participants, but a sample of n = 10 does not permit conclusions about the mass prevalence of such experience in Kazakhstani society.

In some interviews, contemporary forms such as numerology, astrology, and “Xiucai” are combined with traditional rituals. Askar explicitly links the new and old forms: “Astrologers and numerologists are the same healers, simply modernized for the contemporary world. If in the past people divined with beans, today in cities they believe in numbers and cosmic knowledge, although the psychological essence has remained the same.” Didar describes simultaneous use of both repertoires: “In my work and personal life, I use both natal chart analysis for planning business negotiations and making important architectural decisions, and purification with salt, fire, or harmala smoke to protect my home and my relatives.” Farida similarly combines ancestor-centered interpretation with digital tools: “I believe in dreams and interpret my dreams through the cult of ancestors, but at the same time I use modern dream books on Google to decode them.” Such combinations can be described as glocalization: global esoteric formats are embedded in local cultural meanings and acquire a hybrid character.

The contradictory nature of these interpretations is itself one of the most important findings of the qualitative component and is retained rather than theoretically resolved. Azamat describes astrology and numerology through the language of “science”; Didar combines contemporary esoteric tools with traditional purification rituals; Askar defines recourse to occult practices in religious terms as “shirk,” yet consulted a healer in a family crisis; Amir describes the sphere primarily as “marketing” and commercial psychology; Leila sees it as a possible means of shifting responsibility while also emphasizing the human need for hope; and Farida links particular practices to identity, family memory, and cultural orientation. Read side by side, these accounts show that the same or closely related practices may simultaneously be understood as science, tradition, religious transgression, therapeutic support, commerce, a status resource, and a source of cultural continuity. The unresolved tension among these interpretations is treated as an empirical finding in its own right rather than as noise to be absorbed into a single theoretical model.

In summarizing the findings, it is therefore more accurate to speak not of a single compensatory mechanism but of a multilayered field of meanings. Within the surveyed urban sample, occult and esoteric practices intersect with education, institutional trust, cultural memory, state regulation, the market, and the digital environment. Some observations are consistent with compensation theory: respondents do describe searches for hope, protection, orientation, and subjective control under uncertainty. Other findings, however, are better accounted for by cultural continuity, consumer and therapeutic culture, commercialization, and digital normalization. Compensation theory therefore retains analytical value as one sensitizing framework, but it is not granted the status of a single causal explanation.

5 Limitations

The study has several limitations that are fundamental to the interpretation of its findings. The online survey is based on a self-selected sample and does not represent the entire urban population of Kazakhstan. Women (66.5%), respondents aged 18–25 (59.4%), students (52.7%), and participants with high levels of education are overrepresented, limiting the generalizability of quantitative indicators. Because the web-survey settings permitted multiple submissions and did not use IP-address restrictions, repeat participation could not be technically excluded. The cross-sectional nature of the survey and interviews does not permit causal relationships to be established between modernization, institutional trust, and recourse to occult practices. Moreover, modernization was not measured using a separate empirical scale.

The qualitative sample of 10 interviews was designed to identify a diversity of meanings, interpretations, and contradictory positions rather than to estimate the prevalence of particular attitudes in the population. Similarly, the media corpus of 375 units was purposively constructed and was not intended to reproduce the statistical structure of occult and esoteric content across Kazakhstan’s entire digital environment. Formal inter-coder reliability statistics were not calculated for the media material, which should be recognized as a limitation of the exploratory content analysis. To enhance analytical consistency, materials were assessed against a common thematic coding scheme and ambiguous cases were reviewed again. Taken together, the qualitative findings should be interpreted as an exploratory mapping of social representations, motives, and modes of legitimation surrounding occult practices, rather than as empirical proof that modernization causally affects their prevalence.

The revised presentation gives substantially greater space to participants’ own voices and to contradictory cases, but the quotations remain analytically selected excerpts rather than complete interview transcripts. Likewise, the media exemplars are used to make the discursive environment visible rather than to reproduce the full 375-item corpus in the article. Full interview transcripts are not made public because of confidentiality commitments; the complete survey instrument is provided as Supplementary Material 1 so that readers can inspect the wording and response structure directly.

6 Conclusion

The study does not establish a direct causal relationship between modernization and the prevalence of occult practices. Its findings show that, within the observed highly educated urban sample, such practices acquire multiple and contradictory meanings – from cultural tradition and psychological support to commercial products, status resources, and alternative sources of orientation under conditions of perceived institutional uncertainty. The sample’s high educational profile does not permit conclusions about the prevalence of occultism among educated Kazakhstanis, but it does show that interest in such practices cannot be reduced exclusively to a lack of formal education. The interviews, in turn, demonstrate that the same practice may simultaneously be articulated through the languages of science, religion, family memory, self-help, and the market. Crucially, this does not imply recognizing astrology, numerology, or other occult practices as scientific. Rather, it concerns how participants themselves draw and redefine the boundaries between scientific and non-scientific knowledge, using the language of “calculations,” “observations,” “energy,” or psychological effectiveness to substantiate the credibility of particular practices.

The findings are consistent with the use of compensation theory as one interpretive framework: some interviews indeed contain narratives of searching for hope, protection, predictability, and stable identity-related points of orientation. At the same time, the data do not confirm compensation theory as the sole causal explanation. Cultural continuity, individual coping strategies under uncertainty, therapeutic culture, commercialization, and digital normalization are also significant. For public policy, the most defensible implication is not a general call for prohibition, but the need to distinguish among freedom of individual belief, consumer protection, fraud, medical safety, and the accuracy of advertising claims.

The permeability of these boundaries is arguably the most theoretically significant finding of the study. It is consistent with the classic observation that practical rational knowledge and magical action can coexist (Malinowski, 1948), as well as with research on contemporary esotericism showing its capacity to adapt to the language of science, modernity, and mass culture (Pasi, 2009; Hanegraaff, 2013). An additional perspective is offered by the concept of “boundary-work,” which treats the demarcation of science from non-science as a socially constructed and contextually variable process (Gieryn, 1983). In this sense, the findings shift the analytical focus away from a rigid binary opposition between “rational” and “irrational” toward the study of multiple epistemic repertoires through which people attribute credibility to knowledge and navigate among competing sources of authority.

A promising next step is to return to the qualitative dataset with a dedicated focus on statements concerning science, evidence, calculation, observation, psychology, and religion, as well as to conduct follow-up research capable of tracing how the same participants shift between different modes of explanation depending on context. Future research could compare such epistemic strategies across educational and professional groups and complement interviews with digital ethnography and discourse analysis of media content. The central finding therefore changes our initial analytical perspective: occult practices in contemporary urban society may be more productively understood not only as survivals, deficits of rationality, or compensatory reactions, but also as a hybrid field in which scientific, religious, therapeutic, cultural, and commercial modes of legitimating knowledge intersect and compete.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2026.1895091/full#supplementary-material

Survey questionnaire: English translation of the complete bilingual Kazakh-Russian survey instrument used in the study. Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Neil Dagnall, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Mike Sosteric, Athabasca University, Canada

Miray Dogan, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Türkiye