Edited by William S. Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Weinhold
PERFORMING THE REFORMATION
Public Ritual in the City of Luther
Barry Stephenson
RITUAL, MEDIA, AND CONFLICT
Edited by Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Hüsken, Udo Simon, and Eric Venbrux
KNOWING BODY, MOVING MIND
Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers
Patricia Q. Campbell
SUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITIES
How Rituals Enact the World Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
NEGOTIATING RITES
Edited by Ute Hüsken and Frank Neubert
THE DANCING DEAD
Ritual and Religion among the Kapsiki/ Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria
Walter E.A. van Beek
LOOKING FOR MARY MAGDALENE
Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France
Anna Fedele
The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism
Michael David Kaulana Ing
A DIFFERENT MEDICINE
Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church
Joseph D. Calabrese
NARRATIVES OF SORROW AND DIGNITY
Japanese Women, Pregnancy Loss, and Modern Rituals of Grieving
Bardwell L. Smith
MAKING THINGS BETTER
A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values, and Environmental Behavior
A. David Napier
AYAHUASCA SHAMANISM IN THE AMAZON AND BEYOND
Edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar
HOMA VARIATIONS
The Study of Ritual Change across the Longue Durée
Edited by Richard K. Payne and Michael Witzel
HOMO RITUALIS
Hindu Ritual and Its Significance to Ritual Theory
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RITUAL GONE WRONG
What We Learn from Ritual Disruption
Kathryn T. McClymond
SINGING THE RITE TO BELONG Ritual, Music, and the New Irish
Helen Phelan
RITES OF THE GOD-KING
Śānti, Orthopraxy, and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism
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BUDDHISTS, SHAMANS, AND SOVIETS
Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia
Justine Buck Quijada
Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets
Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia
z
JUSTINE BUCK QUIJADA
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Quijada, Justine B., 1973– author.
Title: Buddhists, shamans, and Soviets : rituals of history in post-Soviet Buryatia / Justine Buck Quijada.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030292 (print) | LCCN 2018034587 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190916800 (updf) | ISBN 9780190916817 (epub) | ISBN 9780190916824 (online content) | ISBN 9780190916794 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Buriats—Religion. | Buddhism—Russia (Federation)—Bur?i?ati?i?a—Rituals. | Shamanism—Russia (Federation)—Bur?i?ati?i?a—Rituals.
Classification: LCC BL2370. B87 (ebook) | LCC BL2370. B87 Q45 2019 (print) | DDC 200.957/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030292
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Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without the assistance of a great many people. They should get most of the credit and none of the blame. This project would not have been possible without the generous support of several funding agencies. Pre-field research was supported by a Leiffer Pre-dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. Dissertation fieldwork was generously funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunity Grant. Dissertation writing was supported by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, and reworking that into this book was made possible by a post-doctoral research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and a faculty fellowship at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. I am deeply grateful for all their support. All conclusions are my own.
I owe a great deal to a great many people in Buryatia. First and foremost, I must thank Nikolai Tsyrempilov for his friendship, inspiration and endless support. I would also like thank Inge Tsyrempilova, Zhargal and Natasha Badagarov and their sons, Bair Sundupov and Alessia and Darima Ardanovna Batorova and her family (especially her grandmother) for making us at home in Ulan-Ude. I am deeply grateful for the friendship and intellectual support of Margarita Maximovna Boronova and to Tsimzhit Badmazhapovna Bazarova, for her infinite patience in teaching me Buryat. I am deeply grateful to Erzhena Alexandrovna Bazarova and Sveta Sergeevna Khabinova. They first introduced me to Ulan-Ude and their long-standing friendship is a big reason why I return to Buryatia, time and again. I must also thank Sveta’s sister, Valentina Sergeevna Antropova, and all of their family for their welcome and help.
My research would have been impossible without the support and cooperation of local scholars in Ulan-Ude. Special thanks go to Tatiana Skrynnikova and her colleagues at the Academy of Sciences, at the National Archives of the Republic of Buraytia, and the faculty and staff of the Buryat State University.
Acknowledgments
I especially thank Dashinima Dugarov for introducing me to Tengeri, and Anatolii Dambaevich Zhalsaraev for putting up with me.
None of this would be possible without the enthusiastic cooperation of the Local Shaman’s Organization Tengeri and the Etigelov Institute. I thank Ianzhima Dambaevna Vasil’eva at the Etigelov Institute for her time, her generosity and openness, Pandito Khambo Lama Damba Aiusheev for allowing me at the datsan, and giving permission to photograph Etigelov, and to all the monks, whose names I did not know, but who shared their thoughts with me. Many of the members of Tengeri have since gone their separate ways, and I hope that if and when they read these chapters they remember their time together as fondly as I do. I must thank Bair Zhambalovich Tsyrendorzhiev, Victor Dorzhievich Tsydipov, Budazhab Purboevich Shiretorov, Tsitsik Batoevna Garmaeva, Aldar Andanovich Rampilov, Oleg Dongidovich Dorzhiev, Valerii Viktorovich Khodoshkinov, Marina Schoetschel, and all the members of Tengeri, their friends and family, who welcomed us and took the time to explain their lives to us. Victor Dorzhievich Tsydipov, deserves to be mentioned twice for all of his patience, time and enthusiasm. I would also especially like to thank Yuri Nikolaivich Baldanov, his wife Larissa, and his mother Nellie Inokentievna, for sharing Yuri’s initiation with us. I also thank the many people I met in Ulan-Ude over the course of my time there.
I have incurred many debts, intellectual and otherwise, at home as well. At the University of Chicago, my dissertation committee, Susan Gal, Elizabeth Povinelli, Adam T. Smith and Danilyn Rutherford generously shared their time and their wisdom. I am deeply grateful for their mentorship, as well as that of Jean and John Comaroff, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and all of my teachers at Haskell Hall. I would also like to thank Sheila Fitzpatrick for allowing me to hang around with the historians. Raymond T. Fogelson, and especially E. Valentine Daniel, deserve special mention for their mentorship and support. I am deeply grateful to Anne Chien for everything she does at Haskell Hall. I want to thank Melissa and Janis Chakars, Kathryn Graber, Eleanor Peers and Naj Wikoff for many productive discussions in the field, and all my fellow Buryat studies colleagues, including Manduhai Buyandelger, Tatiana Chudakova, Melissa Chakars, Tristra Newyear, Kathryn Metzo, Joseph Long, and Ivan Sablin. Feedback and support from Bruce Grant, Alaina Lemon, Laurel Kendall, Catherine Wanner, Serguei Oushakine, Sonja Luehrmann, Neringa Klumbyte, and Doug Rogers at various stages was deeply appreciated. I am likewise grateful to all my colleagues and mentors at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany, especially Peter van der Veer, Tam Ngo, Vibha Joshi and Sophorntavy Vorng. I am deeply grateful to my wonderful and supportive colleagues at
Wesleyan University, including Elizabeth McAlister, Peter Gottschalk, MaryJane Rubenstein, Ron Cameron, Dalit Katz, Yaniv Feller, Victoria Smolkin, Priscilla Meyer, Susanne Fusso, Peter Rutland, Betsy Traube, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and all the members of the Indigenous Studies Research Network, as well as Sergei Bunaev, Anna Gelzer, Jenny Caplan and Ryan Overbey, all of whom gave much needed feedback and encouragement. I need to thank Marc Eisner for his support, and Ethan Kleinberg for my time at the Center for the Humanities, and for helping me frame my ideas about history. Thanks go as well to Rhonda Kissinger, to Sheri Dursin, and to Eric Stephen for all his help. A special thank you goes to Meaghan Parker, who is the best friend and the best editor. I would also like to thank Jim Lance, Cynthia Read and Ronald Grimes and the anonymous readers at Cornell and Oxford, whose feedback was transformative.
I would not have been able to complete this without the support and encouragement of all my family and my friends, both those I have known most of my life, and those I have met along this path. I especially need to mention Regina Shoykhet, Kimberly Arkin, Greg Beckett and Christina Trier.
I am deeply grateful to my aunt, Eva Maria Perrot, for first taking me to Russia as a teenager in 1989, just before it ended, beginning my fascination with all things Soviet. I would like to thank my grandmother, Frida Johanna Mathes, for urging me to ‘not let anything get in the way’, my uncles, Fritz Phillip Mathes and Alexander Perrot for their support, my parents-in-law, Maria and Juan Astudillo for all their help over the years, and my father, Bill Buck, for encouraging me to question everything. I wish you could have seen the final version. I am eternally grateful to my mother, Waltrudis Buck, for cat-sitting, for fieldnote hauling, for hours of baby-sitting and undaunted cheerleading.
Last, but never least, I would like to thank my husband Roberto Quijada, whose photos grace these pages, who was with me every step of the way, who never faltered in his support, and who makes all things seem possible. There is no way I could have done this without you. I give daily thanks for my children Eva Maria and Esme Maja, who make life worth living, and who remind me that if I get my work done I get to play with them. They voted this their least favorite book ever. I love you.
May all of your roads be open.
Note on Transliterations, Translations, and Photographs
All T r A nsli T er AT ions of Russian and Buryat words and names follow the Library of Congress transliteration standards for Russian, except in cases where another spelling is commonly used in English. For example, I write Buryatia and Buryat instead of Buriatiia and Buriat because this is how most Buryats spell their ethnonym when writing in English. In the text I have included native terms where I thought additional meaning might be gained from knowing the original term or where a translation fails to capture the meaning of the original. The source language (Russian or Buryat) is marked by using Russ.— or Bur.— before the term. When using original terms in the text, I have rendered transliterated terms plural by using an -s at the end, to facilitate reading by an English speaking audience. For example, when referring to ancestral shamanic spirits, I use ongon (sing.), ongons (pl.). instead of ongonuud, as it would be in Buryat, or ongony, as it would be in Russian.
Buryats follow the Russian convention with regard to personal names, using a first name, patronymic, and family name. As per Russian convention, I use the first name and patronymic to refer to most speakers, except a few speakers with whom I, and the reader, become well acquainted.
The archival materials used are from the National Archive of the Republic of Buryatia (NARB) and are identified by Fond, Opis, Delo, and List as is standard for Russian archives. All translations are my own except where noted in the text. All photographs were taken by Roberto Quijada.
Chronology of Relevant Dates
ca. 1162–1227 Chinghis Khan
1652 Patriarch Nikon’s reforms produce a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church
1666 The fort of Udinskoye (later Verkhneudinsk, then UlanUde) founded
1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk establishes border between Russia and China
1703
Delegation of Khori Buryat clan leaders visit Peter I 1727 Treaty of Kiakhta solidifies border between Russia and China
1741 Buddhism recognized by Empress Elizabeth I as an official religion of the Russian empire
1764 Damba Dorzha Zaiaev (1711–1776) becomes the first Pandito Khambo Lama of Buryatia
1852 Birth of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov
1911–1917
1914–1917
Etigelov elected and serves as Pandito Khambo Lama of Buryatia
World War I
1917 Russian Revolution, followed by the second, Bolshevik Revolution in October
1917–1923
Russian Civil War, during which the Bolshevik forces (the Red Army) fight a coalition of anti-Bolshevik forces (the White Army) for control of the country
1922 Stalin (1878–1953) becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party
1923 Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic established
1924 Lenin dies and is embalmed
1927 Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov “leaves”
1928–1932 The First Five Year Plan and the beginning of agricultural collectivization
1930 Buryat language reform requires Buryat to be written in the Latin alphabet
1934 The city of Verkhneudinsk is renamed Ulan-Ude
1936 The last Buddhist monastery (datsan) in Buryatia is closed
1937 Stalin’s purges
1938 Buryat language reform requires Buryat to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet
1941 Hitler invades Russia, and Russia enters World War II
May 9, 1945 Victory Day
1946 Ivolginsky Buddhist monastery (datsan) opened
1985 Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party. He initiates perestroika (reconstruction/renovation), a policy intended to reform the Communist Party and the government of the USSR
1991 The USSR is dissolved. The Union Republics become autonomous countries and the remaining territories (including Buryatia) become the Russian Federation. The Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic becomes the Republic of Buryatia
1991 Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) becomes President of Russia
1992 Nadezhda Stepanova founds the first shaman’s organization in Buryatia, Bo Murgel
1995 Damba Aiusheev elected Pandito Khambo Lama
1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations legally distinguishes traditional and new religions
1999 Vladimir Putin becomes President of Russia
2002 Etigelov is exhumed and brought to the Ivolginsky monastery
2003 “Local Religious Organization of Shamans, Tengeri” [Mestnaia religioznaia organizatsiia shamanov Tengeri (MROSH)] officially registered as a religious organization in the Republic of Buryatia
2008 Ust-Orda and Aga Buryat Autonomous Okrugs are merged into Irkutsk and Chita oblasts, respectively
Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets
Map 0.1 Map of Russia showing the Republic of Buryatia. Map courtesy of Eric Stephen, 2014.
Map 0.2 Map of the Republic of Buryatia, showing UstOrda and Aga Buryat okrugs. Map courtesy of Eric Stephen, 2014.
Introduction
“If You Want to Have a Future You Have to Have a Good Relationship to Your Past”
i me T b oris and Svetlana in 2012 outside the Tengeri shamans’ offices in Ulan-Ude, the capital city of Buryatia, a republic located in south-central Siberia along Russia’s border with Mongolia (Map 0.1–0.2). The city of UlanUde has nearly half a million residents, but the suburb where Tengeri built their offices still has enough open space for them to hold rituals.1 I was waiting to speak to someone about attending an upcoming initiation, and they were waiting for their shaman to finish meeting with a client.
Boris and Svetlana, a Buryat couple in their fifties, were friendly and eager to tell me about their experiences with the shamans. They lived and worked in Yakutia, another indigenous republic farther north in Siberia, for most of the year. Boris had grown up in Yakutia; his parents were scientists who had been sent there during the Soviet years. They had started coming back to Buryatia every summer to hold clan offering ceremonies with a shaman at Tengeri. Their children were in their early thirties, they explained, but did not yet have children of their own. At this rate, they were afraid they would never have grandchildren, so they had turned to the shamans to remedy the situation. They did not explain why this was a problem; they did not need to. Every Buryat with childless, adult children that I had ever met expressed similar concerns. Given the uncertain post-Soviet economy, young Buryats were marrying and having children later than their parents, causing their families untold stress.
Friends had told Boris and Svetlana that the shamans at Tengeri might be able to help them. But for the shamans to help, they had to contact Boris’s ancestors and find out if they were the cause. As educated, urban children of the Soviet era, neither Boris nor Svetlana knew their genealogies. Their own
parents did not know much more than they did, so they turned to the state census and tax records, but these only listed the first few generations. They asked every relative they could find, until finally an uncle revealed that he had the family’s un bichig, a genealogical chart from the 19th century, showing all ten patrilineal generations. He had saved it for just such an occasion. “Can you imagine how lucky we are?” Svetlana said. “No one has these anymore. We were sure all this was completely gone.”
The shaman they worked with at Tengeri then channeled his own ancestor spirit (ongon). This ancestor spirit served as an intermediary for Boris’s ancestors, to find out whether they were causing their descendant’s fertility problems. Knowing whom to ask for in the spirit world simplifies the process considerably. Boris and Svetlana’s case was not serious. No one had a calling to become a shaman. Instead, they simply needed to re-establish a relationship with their ancestors by holding a clan ceremony to offer them a sheep every year. I asked whether they had to travel to their ancestral land, as clan offerings are supposed to be made in the place that a family is from. “No,” Boris explained. “We don’t know exactly where that is, so we do the ceremonies here at the Tengeri offices.”
The organization had built their shamanic center on a stretch of land in a suburb precisely so that they would have space for this kind of ritual. Other people, who were skeptical of Tengeri’s project, had told me that a clan ritual held in the wrong place would not be effective, but Boris and Svetlana seemed satisfied. This was the third year that they had made offerings. Their daughter was now married, and their son had a girlfriend, so they were hopeful. The ritual seemed to be working.
Boris and Svetlana’s story is completely prosaic. I heard similar stories (and far more dramatic ones), but their story encapsulates the themes that will fill the coming pages. As a result of the socio-economic and political changes of the Soviet period, Boris and Svetlana do not know very much about their past. They describe themselves as having been disconnected from what they see as traditional Buryat forms of knowledge: genealogies, ancestral clan territories, and shamanic rituals. In the post-Soviet period, concerned about whether their family will have a future, they turn to religious practice to reconnect to their past. To fill the gaps in their historical knowledge, they combine archival research and oral history with information gleaned from spirits channeled through a shaman. They measure the success of this endeavor in the physical condition of their and their children’s bodies: in this case, the birth of grandchildren.
Like Boris and Svetlana, many Buryats share a strong feeling that if you want to have a future, you have to have a good relationship to your past. After
a century of Soviet modernity, however, achieving a relationship with your past requires effort and creativity. This book describes how people in Buryatia produce and reproduce knowledge about their past through rituals in the present. It is based on eighteen months of fieldwork, spread over a decade, in Ulan-Ude.
Ulan-Ude, now the capital city of the Republic of Buryatia, was founded as a Cossack trading post on the tea road connecting China to Europe. Contemporary Buryats are the descendants of Mongolian-speaking pastoral nomads whose ancestors were allied with Chinghis Khan, and who ended up on the Russian side of the border with Mongolia and China when it was drawn on a map in the 17th century. Although they are culturally similar to Mongolians, through incorporation into the Russian empire Buryats became a distinct and separate ethnic group, and the various dialects that make up the Buryat language are not mutually intelligible with Khalkh Mongol. Stretching south along the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the border, Buryatia stands at the intersection of indigenous Siberia, European Russia, and the Tibetan Buddhist world; its people have been missionized by Tibetan Buddhists, Russian Orthodox Christians, and Soviet atheists. A highly educated, formerly Soviet, indigenous population, Buryats are trying to establish a new relationship to their past, and in the process, they are reviving shamanic and Buddhist practices after a century of state-sponsored atheism.
Like Buryatia itself, this book stands at the intersection between postSoviet studies, indigenous studies, and the anthropology of religion. By combining these disciplinary perspectives, I hope to contribute to the anthropology of history, which is the anthropological study of how people produce knowledge about the past. As in other post-Soviet places, the post-Soviet moment in Buryatia (from 1991 through today’s Putin era) is a window of imaginative potential in which people question received knowledge and imagine new futures.2 The collapse of Soviet versions of history and nationality politics prompted Buryats to re-evaluate what it meant to be Buryat.3 In search of national traditions, they turned, in large part, to Buddhist and shamanic religious practices and ended up finding new histories.
By engaging in Buddhist and shamanic religious practices, everyday Buryats not only learned and produced new information about the past, they were reintroduced to older, indigenous Buryat conceptions of time. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, I call these conceptions of time chronotopes. These chronotopes, generated by ritual practice, offer new perspectives from which to make the present meaningful by offering different ways to connect the present to the past.
In this sense, Buryatia is part of a broader post-Soviet experience in which ethnic minorities within the former Soviet Union revived previously suppressed religious practices. For Buryats, as for most post-Soviet nationalities, religious and ethnic revival went hand-in-hand. However, much of the existing literature has tended to view these processes through the lens of Soviet nationality policy. There is great merit to this approach; interlocutors in the field insist that religious practice is about expressing national identity, and it makes sense to examine this expression of identity in relationship to the Soviet nationality policies that produced it. However, this approach views religious rituals as expressing underlying beliefs. In contrast, current perspectives see rituals as doing things, creating subjects and groups, and producing effects in the world. It is precisely this productive and creative aspect of ritual that makes it an appealing resource for post-Soviet subjects who are re-imagining who they were, are, and can become. Rituals produce identities, collectivities, chronologies, and cosmologies. What kinds of effects are produced by religious rituals conducted by former atheists in a multi-religious setting?
I revisit existing ideas about the post-Soviet religious revival by focusing both on ritual as a productive practice, by comparing across religious and civic settings, and on Buryats as an indigenous population (a category that, admittedly, not all Buryats accept). Viewing post-Soviet identity projects solely through the lens of nationality policy obscures similarities between the Soviet experience and other colonial projects. By reframing Buryatia through the lens of indigeneity, we can see how their religious practices contribute to a broader project of rediscovering and reclaiming the languages, arts, and knowledge of their ancestors, in ways comparable to similar efforts of indigenous peoples around the world. By viewing Buryatia through the lens of indigeneity, we are able to see that the production of history is both a post-Soviet and a decolonizing project.
As they produce new knowledge about the past in religious rituals, Buryats are discovering older, religious, and Buryat ways of being in time and space. The situation in Buryatia is particularly striking due to the multiplicity of genres in which they produce the past. Over the centuries, Buryatia has been subject to multiple waves of religious missionization. Older indigenous forms of religion that are now called “shamanism” were overlaid by Buddhist, Russian Orthodox, and finally Soviet conceptions of time, space, and subjectivity. Produced through material practices of ritual, these genres of knowing the past are resources that Buryats draw on as they negotiate the present.
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, both social groups and knowledge of the past are shaped by structures of power, and these two processes are coconstitutive: “the collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist
as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. Rather, their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past. As such, they do not succeed such a past: they are its contemporaries” (1995, 16). Shamanic practitioners such as Boris and Svetlana are constituted as indigenous subjects through the reconstruction of their family genealogies and reconnection with their ancestors (see Chapters 5 and 6). Through rituals where ancestor spirits enter the bodies of shamans and speak to their living descendants, people engaging in these rituals come to understand the past as existing continuously in relationship to the present.
In Buddhist contexts, pilgrims visiting the miraculously preserved body of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, a reincarnate pre-Soviet Buddhist monk, are presented with recursive time, in which Etigelov (who, as a bodhisattva, exists outside of time) reappears in the linear national timeline, fulfilling prophecy and reordering the meaning of the Soviet years that passed between his arrivals.4 This Buddhist history produces the Buryat nation, a nation of scholars and intellectuals that has long been a bridge between the Russian empire and the Tibetan Buddhist community (see Chapters 1 and 4).
Both Buddhist and shamanic practices are generating new historical knowledge and new ways of thinking about space and time, but these religiously generated chronotopes have not erased or superseded Soviet ways of thinking about the past. Participating in civic rituals such as Victory Day (see Chapter 2) and City Day (see Chapter 3) continues to reproduce Buryats as Soviet citizens and residents of a multi-ethnic republic. These civic festivals reproduce both familiar historical knowledge and familiar linear Soviet chronotopes. Victory Day—commemorating the end of World War II—reproduces the Soviet view of history as the progressive inclusion of Buryats into modernity. However, the mismatch between Soviet ritual forms and contemporary post-Soviet lives offers an alternative perspective from which to re-evaluate the Soviet version of the past. The ritual of City Day—an annual holiday celebrating the anniversary of the city’s founding—echoes the Soviet genre, but tweaks it into a sub-genre I call the “hospitality genre.” The hospitality genre recounts the history of Buryatia as successive waves of immigration to a welcoming land, producing a local ethic of multi-ethnic tolerance and conviviality. This version of the past both mutes the history of Russian colonization and produces a local identity that stands in opposition to the Russian center.
Each of these ritual forms tells a history of Buryatia in a distinctive genre, and through this history, produces a collective subject in the present. These genres have different chronotopes: within each of these genres of the past, time flows differently. Soviet time is linear and progressive, moving ever forward toward the radiant future (Burawoy and Lukacs 1994). Buddhist time is
recursive and cyclical, as reincarnate lamas return to infuse linear time with dharmic meaning. In shamanic genres, the past remains present, as ancestors continue to act on and interact with their descendants.
Theoretical and Other Groundings
I went to Ulan-Ude because I was interested in the intersection between identity politics and religion. I am not indigenous, but my previous work in museums repatriating Native American collections had sparked a deep interest in how political claims by indigenous actors are often interwoven with religious claims. Buryatia was particularly interesting to me because in most places indigenous religion stands in a binary contrast to Christianity (or occasionally Islam or Buddhism). In the existing literature on post-Soviet religious revival, religion and national identity are often equated, even if the relationship between them is, in practice, complicated, and it is difficult to parse religion from nationality when there is a one-to-one equation (Borowik, Babinski, and Babinski 1997; Balzer 1999, 2005, 2011; Lewis 2000; Agadjanian 2001; Goluboff 2002; Skrynnikova 2003; Wanner 2007, 2012; Rogers 2009; Hann and Pelkmans 2009; Hann 2006, 2010; Amogolonova 2014). In Buryatia, however, ethnic Buryats practice both Buddhism and shamanism. Buddhism is more visible in the public sphere, and more Buryats, especially urban Buryats, identify Buddhism as their “national religion” than they do shamanism.5 That does not, however, mean that they do not engage in the practices of other traditions.
Most ethnic Russians will publicly identify as Russian Orthodox. However, since approximately a third of Buryatia’s ethnic Russians were the descendants of Old Believer exiles—a schismatic and largely endogamous group of Russian Orthodox Christians—ethnic Russians in Buryatia looking for their national religion can turn to either official Russian Orthodoxy or Old Believer Orthodoxy.6 This multiplicity of choices seemed to disrupt the easy binary pairing between identity and religion presumed in the literature, and allow the local contours of the category of religion and its Soviet legacy to stand out.
Once I got to Ulan-Ude, I found that although both Buryats and Russians occasionally argued about which religion was the true “national religion” of their respective ethnic group, these arguments were largely made in relationship to claims for state funding and carried little emotional investment. “Religion” in these contexts was a bureaucratic category. In other contexts, however, “our local tradition of tolerance,” which enabled people to turn to all of these religions as resources, was lauded as a local form of multiculturalism, and the reason why, in contrast to the violent separatism in the
Caucasus, “everything here is calm, thank God.” Rather than arguing over national religions, the people I met at the religious rituals seemed to be primarily interested in history. Nationality (or ethnic identity) mattered at these rituals not in terms of who did or did not belong at the ritual—they were all explicitly open to everyone—but rather in terms of whose history was being presented, and how.
When I started to write the requisite historical background for this project, I struggled to pick a position from which to view that history. The history of Buryatia as explained at a Buddhist ritual was completely different from the history of Buryatia I would be told at a shamanic ritual, and both were different from the history of Buryatia in a Soviet textbook. Moreover, the person telling me these three histories might be the same person, the only difference being that they told that history in a different ritual context.
This book is my attempt to make sense of these histories. It is an ethnography about how people in post-Soviet, Putin-era Buryatia produce knowledge about the past in religious and civic rituals, and how this knowledge of the past produces identities in the present. This book attempts what Stephan Palmié and Charles Stewart (2016) call an “anthropology of history” or what Rian Thum (2014) labels “global comparative historiography.” The study of how people produce histories is important because, as Thum argues, “as both a practice and an imagination, history shapes communal and individual identities, enacts and provides justifications for political projects, and serves as a continually re-created general framework for understanding the present” (2014, 7). The anthropology of history, as Palmié and Stewart envision it, is the anthropological study of the knowledge-production practices of nonhistorians, an ethnographically situated study of historical poetics, grounded in two assertions: first, that producing knowledge about the past is not limited to professional historians, and second, that people produce knowledge about the past in order to make sense of the present. Although most of the events discussed in this book took place in the past, this is a story about the present that traces how knowledge of the past is produced in the present, and what kinds of identities are imagined in doing so.
I make two further assertions: first, the stakes of this knowledge production are higher and the engagement with them more intense in indigenous, post-colonial, and post-authoritarian societies where history has been highly politicized and state violence has silenced alternative voices.
Second, I assert that religion and ritual are particularly conducive media within which to imagine alternative histories. Religious practices are grounded in and produce cosmologies, teleologies, and anthropologies—claims about the shape of the world, how time works, and what it means to be human.
