The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia PDF Download

Author: Melissa Chakars
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633860148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

View

Book Description
The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.

Author: Anya Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607269X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

View

Book Description
Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world. During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.

Author: Franck Billé
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

View

Book Description
China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Despite their proximity, their interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour Mongolia - are rarely discussed. Although the three countries share a boundary, their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China's search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia's fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance.

Author: Virlana Tkacz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780930407575
Category : Buriats
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
This rare first-hand account, accompanied by 175 photographs of the setting, sacred tools, and costumes, follows each step of the shanar-a Siberian shaman dedication ritual. The Buryats are indigenous people of eastern Siberia, an area which gave rise to the languages from which the term 'shaman' is derived. Shamanism is dependent upon intimate connections to specific places and cultures, and this account of a ceremony celebrates that relationship, while using the ritual as an entry point to explore the living culture of a people obscure to most Western readers. This accessible and authentic guide to true shaman practice reveals the personalities involved and respects the complexities of the Buryat community, thereby achieving greater depth than conventional anthropological studies.

Author: Kathryn E. Graber
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501750526
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391

View

Book Description
Focusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, Mixed Messages engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. Kathryn E. Graber demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts? Who should produce them? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? Mixed Messages addresses these questions through a rich ethnography of the Russian Federation's Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia. Mixed Messages shows that belonging in Asian Russia is a dynamic process that one cannot capture analytically by using straightforward categories of ethnolinguistic identity.

Author: Manduhai Buyandelger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226086550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

View

Book Description
The collapse of socialism at the end of the twentieth century brought devastating changes to Mongolia. Economic shock therapy—an immediate liberalization of trade and privatization of publicly owned assets—quickly led to impoverishment, especially in rural parts of the country, where Tragic Spirits takes place. Following the travels of the nomadic Buryats, Manduhai Buyandelger tells a story not only of economic devastation but also a remarkable Buryat response to it—the revival of shamanic practices after decades of socialist suppression. Attributing their current misfortunes to returning ancestral spirits who are vengeful over being abandoned under socialism, the Buryats are now at once trying to appease their ancestors and recover the history of their people through shamanic practice. Thoroughly documenting this process, Buyandelger situates it as part of a global phenomenon, comparing the rise of shamanism in liberalized Mongolia to its similar rise in Africa and Indonesia. In doing so, she offers a sophisticated analysis of the way economics, politics, gender, and other factors influence the spirit world and the crucial workings of cultural memory.

Author: Alexandre Andreyev & Irina Garri
Publisher: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives
ISBN: 939075285X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

View

Book Description
Buddhism in Buryatia ALEXANDRE ANDREYEV & IRINA GARRI This book provides a succinct historical account of the flourishing of Buddhism in Buryatia, exploring its roots in the introduction of the Gelug order and the establishment of the first monastery in its heartland. Throughout its prime, numerous prominent Buddhist figures, including Agvan Dorzhiev, had significant dharmic connections with Tibet and Mongolia, spreading Buddhism far and wide across the region. Despite facing several political turmoils, war crises, harsh persecutions, and destruction, the people of Buryatia continued to revere Buddhism, successfully reviving it from the ashes and ruins. The era of World War II marked a monstrous period, yet remarkably, after 1980 and into the new millennium, a new and inspiring revival of Buddhism emerged, which continues to be enjoyed by people today. Embrace this book and immerse yourself in the captivating world of Buddhism in Buryatia, witnessing its enduring journey of resilience and devotion.

Author: Katherine Swancutt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454838
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

View

Book Description
Innovation-making is a classic theme in anthropology that reveals how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. This ethnographic study is an entrance into the world of Buryat Mongol divination, where a group of cursed shamans undertake the ‘race against time’ to produce innovative remedies that will improve their fallen fortunes at an unconventional pace. Drawing on parallels between social anthropology and chaos theory, the author gives an in-depth account of how Buryat shamans and their notion of fortune operate as ‘strange attractors’ who propagate the ongoing process of innovation-making. With its view into this long-term ‘cursing war’ between two shamanic factions in a rural Mongolian district, and the comparative findings on cursing in rural China, this book is a needed resource for anyone with an interest in the anthropology of religion, shamanism, witchcraft and genealogical change.

Author: Bayarma Khabtagaeva
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447060950
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 360

View

Book Description
Tuvan is one of the archaic Turkic languages. A powerful Mongolic influence means that it possibly also has more Mongolic elements than other Turkic languages. Results of the present work are based on a database of approximately 1500 Mongolic loanwords. After confirming the Mongolic origin of these words in Tuvan, etymological, phonetical and morphological aspects are listed to assure, when and from which Mongolian language the loanword was taken. The study demonstrates the powerful Mongolic influence on Tuvan and establishes what linguistic criteria are available to characterize and classify the Mongolic loanwords. Accordingly an earlier and a later layer are distinguished. The later layer further comprises three groups of loanwords, the Buryat, Khalkha and Oirat ones.

Author: Justine Buck Quijada
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019091680X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a "backwards" nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march towards the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state. In the process, they also recovered knowledge about the past that the Soviet Union had silenced. Borrowing the analytic lens of the chronotope from Bakhtin, Quijada argues that rituals have chronotopes which situate people within time and space. As they revived rituals, Post-Soviet Buryats encountered new historical information and traditional ways of being in time that enabled them to re-imagine the Buryat past, and what it means to be Buryat. Through the temporal perspective of a reincarnating Buddhist monk, Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, Buddhists come to see the Soviet period as a test on the path of dharma. Shamanic practitioners, in contrast, renegotiate their relationship to the past by speaking to their ancestors through the bodies of shamans. By comparing the versions of history that are produced in Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Buddhists, Shamans and Soviets offers a new lens for analyzing ritual, a new perspective on how an indigenous people grapples with a history of state repression, and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know about the past.