English Explanatory Dictionary

mankurt

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A person with a lost or degraded cultural and ethnic identity or awareness about his or her ancestry, especially due to being affected by a dominant culture.

Word forms

mankurt mankurts

Etymology

From Russian манкурт (mankurt). Coined by the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov in his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980), in which people are turned into docile servants (mankurts) by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun; the skins tighten as they dry, causing brain damage, such that the mankurts no longer recognize their name, family, or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being".

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