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Eleanor Peers
How does the development of popular identities, values and beliefs interact with the constraints imposed by economic change and political power? What boundaries in their turn do popular attitudes impose on political decision-making and economic change? How do politicians and citizens collude, together with the impersonal forces of economics, information technologies and mass communication, to generate the changing mass cultures that form the bases of contemporary polities? As this collection of papers will show, the history and culture of the Buryat people, and the area they live in, can shed a unique light on these issues, particularly as they occur within the post-Soviet space.
Tristra Newyear
Abstract
This paper explores the origins of debate regarding bride price (Rus. kalym) among the Buryats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as expressed in literary texts and media reports. Buryats began denouncing the practice after the mid nineteenth century, when bride price became more monetised and burdensome for ordinary families arranging marriages for their sons. Progressive, literate Buryats proposed a new approach to marriage and women’s roles, based on romantic affinity instead of economic interests. The debate moved community meetings (suglans) to literature and the stage at around the turn of the twentieth century. During the early Soviet era, bride price continued to be denounced by Buryat writers, though it had become increasingly rare. Kalym was transformed into a symbol for women’s oppression in general, and a means for demarcating the backwards Buryat past from the progressive Soviet future.
Anya Bernstein
Abstract
This article looks at the pre-Revolutionary history of Buryats’ engagement with greater Eurasia, drawing on the legacies of the long underappreciated Russian Buddhological school and exploring the intellectual and political context of its emergence in the late nineteenth century. Exploring the role of Russian Orientalists and political figures such as the Orientalists V.P. Vasil’ev and Prince E.E. Ukhtomskii, and taking a close look at the fieldwork of the first Russian trained indigenous Buryat Buddhologists G.Ts. Tsybikov and B.B. Baradiin, I demonstrate that this ultimately Eurasianist school of Buddhology was borne out of conflicting sentiments towards Russia’s cosmopolitanism, statehood, and imperial destiny in Asia, as well as representations of indigenous peoples of southern Siberia. As a conclusion, I map the emergent forms of what I call ‘Asian Eurasianism’, linking it to contemporary cultural debates in Buryatia. I suggest that the term offers us a better way to understand the many ways by which many non-Russians position themselves in relation to the vast Eurasian continent.
Melissaa. Chakars
Abstract
This paper explores the history of Buryat literature as an institution in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Buryat literature was not simply the creation of Buryat writers. Local Party and government officials, censors, editors, publishers, and others made a substantial contribution to the direction, promotion, and content of Buryat literature. Buryat literature, as well as writers, was widely promoted by local media. Literature was also taught regularly at all levels of education. Buryat writers did not produce any samizdat and they generally did not use literature as a way to explore their pre-Soviet or pre-Russian history and culture as did other Soviet nationalities. Instead, Buryat literature generally emphasised topics that promoted and supported the project of Soviet modernisation. It promoted the value of Soviet leadership, the importance of the friendship of nations and in particular the friendship between Buryats and Russians, and it promoted the idea that life was better for the Buryats in the Soviet Union than it had been in the past or could be anywhere else. In addition, it helped create a new Buryat history that showed how the Buryats played an important role in Soviet historical events such as the Civil War, the October Revolution, the collectivisation of agriculture, and the Second World War. Buryat literature was a place to define and promote the new Soviet Buryat nation and all its modern attributes.
Eleanor Peers
Abstract
This article explores the influence of political communication on the development of Buryat identity in the contemporary Republic of Buryatia. It compares the discourse produced by Buryatia’s leading government-sponsored newspaper with that of a popular commercial newspaper, to investigate both the understanding of Buryat identity these newspapers reproduce, and the way their ideas interact. As these newspapers suggest, political attempts to detach notions of Buryat identity from the state could in fact be hindering the Buryat population’s affiliation with Russia’s state institutions.
Anatoliy Breslavsky
Abstract
This article describes the development of criminal youth networks in rural Buryatia, Eastern Siberia. As it shows, the criminal gangs emerging out of the state collapse in the 1990s have colonised entire villages: a movement originally offering escape from a harsh economic environment has acquired the power to dictate the social reality of the regions it occupies. This piece also investigates the extent to which the practices mediating power relations within these criminal networks generate a distinct subculture, using Huizinga’s analysis of culture as a ‘game’, which has to be ‘played out’ according to mutually understood conventions and norms.
Anna Yur’evna Buyanova
Abstract
This article explores the repercussions of the demographic changes currently taking place in Buryatia. In particular, it concerns the mass migration of young rural Buryats to Ulan-Ude, in search of a higher education and, eventually, better career prospects. In-depth interviews with a sample of Buryat university students are used to reveal the challenges rural incomers face in adapting to urban life, and the differing strategies they use to overcome them. As these interviews show, the success of a rural Buryat’s university career depends on their capacity to change their behaviour and aspirations to fit urban cultural norms.
Rebecca Empson & Baasanjav Terbish
Abstract
This article examines Mongolian perspectives on the Buriad through the vector of a poem called ‘Buriad’, written by the dissident Mongolian poet and writer Choinom Renchin during the socialist era. In the first part, we give a short biography of Choinom, along with an analysis of his poem. We suggest that the poem may be viewed as a critique of dominant Halh perspectives on the Buriad, while raising more general issues to do with historicity, political repression, youth, love, and Mongolian poetry. In the second part,we present the first-ever English translation of Choinom’s poem, along with a Mongolian Cyrillic version.This is to add to the slender volume of literature on Mongolian poetry available inEnglish.
Kathryn Graber and Joseph Long
Abstract
This field report comprises observations on the political processes through which the two Buryat autonomous okrugs in Siberia were dissolved into (or, in local political rhetoric, ‘unified’ with) the larger territories surrounding them in 2008. The two sections discuss the dissolution decisions as observed by the authors in the course of fieldwork, in Pribaikal’e (Cisbaikal) by Joseph Long and in Zabaikal’e (Transbaikal) by Kathryn Graber. Some joint reflections on these events are given at the end.
Vol. 10 No. 2
Natalia L. Zhukovskaya
Abstract
Two antagonistic forces confronted each other on the territory of the Republic of Buryatia in 2002. One of them was YUKOS, an international petroleum company, the other the Tunka National Park, a legally protected nature reserve of national importance. The essence of the conflict was the intention of YUKOS to build a pipeline from Angarsk (a town in the Irkutsk province of Russia) to Daqing (a city in the Heilongjian province in China) directly through the territory of the national park, though the law forbade it. The mighty YUKOS, supported by the Government and President of Buryatia, faced resistance from Buryat ecologists, the administration and personnel of the national park, and the rank-and-file of Tunka district – cattle-breeders, farmers, teachers, doctors, pensioners – all of whom understood that the ecology of the park would suffer irretrievably, compromising both its natural riches and beauty, and many cultural and historical objects: archaeological sites, sacred groves, clan cemeteries, places of shamanist and Buddhist worship, etc. The practitioners of the local religions, such as shamans, Buddhist lamas and divinators of mountain spirits, united to organise special rituals and prayers around the places of worship and sacred objects, asking the local deities and spirits to defend their worshippers, their land, and their sanctuaries. Although the final collapse of YUKOS was determined politically, the experience of Tunka has demonstrated that oil magnates should not arrogantly disregard the populations and cultures of the territories they intend to utilise for their business activities.
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