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Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets
OXFORD RITUAL STUDIES
Series Editors
Ronald Grimes, Ritual Studies International
Ute Hüsken, University of Oslo
Barry Stephenson, Memorial University
THE PROBLEM OF RITUAL EFFICACY NARRATIVES OF SORROW AND

Edited by William S. Sax, Johannes DIGNITY
Quack, and Jan Weinhold Japanese Women, Pregnancy Loss, and
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PERFORMING THE REFORMATION
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Public Ritual in the City of Luther
Barry Stephenson MAKING THINGS BETTER
A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values,
RITUAL, MEDIA, AND CONFLICT
and Environmental Behavior
Edited by Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Hüsken,
A. David Napier
Udo Simon, and Eric Venbrux
AYAHUASCA SHAMANISM IN THE
KNOWING BODY, MOVING MIND
AMAZON AND BEYOND
Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist
Edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and
Centers
Clancy Cavnar
Patricia Q. Campbell
HOMA VARIATIONS
SUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITIES
The Study of Ritual Change across the
How Rituals Enact the World
Longue Durée
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Edited by Richard K. Payne and
NEGOTIATING RITES Michael Witzel
Edited by Ute Hüsken and Frank Neubert
HOMO RITUALIS
THE DANCING DEAD Hindu Ritual and Its Significance to
Ritual and Religion among the Kapsiki/ Ritual Theory
Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Axel Michaels
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RITUAL GONE WRONG
Walter E.A. van Beek
What We Learn from Ritual Disruption
LOOKING FOR MARY MAGDALENE Kathryn T. McClymond
Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity
SINGING THE RITE TO BELONG
at Catholic Shrines in France
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The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early
RITES OF THE GOD-KING
Confucianism
Śānti, Orthopraxy, and Ritual Change in
Michael David Kaulana Ing
Early Hinduism
A DIFFERENT MEDICINE Marko Geslani
Postcolonial Healing in the Native
BUDDHISTS, SHAMANS, AND
American Church
SOVIETS
Joseph D. Calabrese
Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia
Justine Buck Quijada
Buddhists,
Shamans, and
Soviets
Rituals of History in Post-Soviet
Buryatia
zz
JUSTINE BUCK QUIJADA
1
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
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Transliterations, Translations, and Photographs xi
Chronology of Relevant Dates xiii
Maps xvii
Introduction: “If You Want to Have a Future You Have to Have

a Good Relationship to Your Past” 1
1. An Inauguration for Etigelov: Multiple Genres of History in Buryatia 34
2. Soviet Selves: Victory Day 60
3. City Day: Hospitality, the Friendship of the Peoples,

and Multikulturalizm 82
4. Etigelov at Maidari: The Once and Future Buddhist 111

5. Opening the Center, Opening the Roads 138
6. Porous Selves: Yuri’s Initiation 164
Epilogue 188
Notes 193
Bibliography 211
Index 229
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 re-
search 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 re-
turn 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 cooper-
ation 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.
viii 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 gen-
erosity 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 sup-
port. 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
Acknowledgments ix
Wesleyan University, including Elizabeth McAlister, Peter Gottschalk, Mary-

Jane 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 en-
couragement 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 chil-
dren 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 transliterations 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 in-
cluded 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 refer-
ring 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 Ulan-
Ude) 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 Etigelov elected and serves as Pandito Khambo Lama of
Buryatia
1914–1917 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”
xiv Chronology of Relevant Dates
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 Ust-Orda 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 met Boris 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 Ulan-
Ude 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 sim-
ilar 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
2 Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets
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 an-
cestor 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 relation-
ship 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 ceremo-
nies 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
Introduction 3
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 pre-
sent. 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 relation-
ship 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 post-
Soviet studies, indigenous studies, and the anthropology of religion. By
combining these disciplinary perspectives, I hope to contribute to the anthro-
pology of history, which is the anthropological study of how people produce
knowledge about the past. As in other post-Soviet places, the post-Soviet mo-
ment in Buryatia (from 1991 through today’s Putin era) is a window of imag-
inative 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 na-
tional traditions, they turned, in large part, to Buddhist and shamanic reli-
gious 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 pre-
sent 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 nationali-
ties, religious and ethnic revival went hand-in-hand. However, much of the ex-
isting 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 reli-
gious 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 peo-
ples 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 subjec-
tivity. 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 co-
constitutive: “the collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist
Introduction 5
as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. Rather, their con-
stitution 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 re-
ordering 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 knowl
edge 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 anni-
versary 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 for-
ward 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 in-
terest 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 occa-
sionally Islam or Buddhism). In the existing literature on post-Soviet religious
revival, religion and national identity are often equated, even if the relation-
ship between them is, in practice, complicated, and it is difficult to parse reli-
gion 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, how-
ever, 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 rela-
tionship 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 multicul-
turalism, and the reason why, in contrast to the violent separatism in the
Introduction 7
Caucasus, “everything here is calm, thank God.” Rather than arguing over
national religions, the people I met at the religious rituals seemed to be pri-
marily 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 dif-
ferent 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 eth-
nography about how people in post-Soviet, Putin-era Buryatia produce knowl
edge 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 iden-
tities, 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 non-
historians, 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 produc-
tion 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.
These are the parameters within which “history” happens. In its cosmolog-
ical and teleological capacities, religious practices are especially conducive to
making sense of the world and time, and thus to making history.
My endeavor is both old and new. It seems painfully obvious that people
have conceptions of past events and that the value they endow these events
with situates both people and events within culturally specific conceptions
of time and space. Ethnographies of post-socialism, rife with dead body pol-
itics (Gal 1991; Verdery 1999) and ghosts (Mueggler 2001; Buyandelgeriyn
2007), frequently address transformations in perceptions of time and history
(Burawoy and Lukacs 1994; Watson 1994; Verdery 1996; Wanner 1998; Platz
2000; Ten Dyke 2000). Many anthropological studies of religion examine
rituals and religious practice as loci of history-making, but the emphasis of
the analyses have been on the rituals, not on the historical narratives pro-
duced in them. Rituals bring past forms into the present. Spirit possession
can give voice to ancestors and historical figures. In colonial and post-colonial
contexts, ritual is often presented as a historical genre of the colonized, of-
fering forms of memory that stand as an alternative, and in opposition to, the
official history of the colonizer (Bloch 1986; Kelly and Kaplan 1990; Comaroff
and Comaroff 1992; Palmié 2002; Lambek 2003; Buyandelger 2013). And yet,
as Palmié and Stewart argue, the anthropology of history has not yet solidified
into a recognized sub-discipline (2016).
The need for a sub-discipline of anthropology that studies how people
produce knowledge about the past is located at the intersection between
two strands of scholarship. The first is the self-critique of historians such as
Reinhart Koselleck (1985) and Hayden White (1987), who drew attention to
the fact that even historians are interested in the past from the perspective
of the present, and that the form in which history is told, the emplotment of
the events that a history narrates, indelibly defines its content. More recently,
Jaume Aurell (2015) has focused on the idea of historical genres, broadening
his view of what counts as history to include popular genres such as histor-
ical re-enactments and video games. On the other hand, we have, beginning
with Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and Paul Connerton (1989), the assertion that
regular people also think about the past, under the theoretical framework of
collective memory.
However useful the idea of collective memory may have once been, it has
become stretched beyond recognition (Berliner 2005). Collective memory is
productive in relationship to the study of how particular groups of people re-
member events that they lived through. Collective memory, however, rides an
uncertain boundary between history and psychology, as if personal memory
and representations of events are somehow comparable forms of data. It
Introduction 9
sets up a false dichotomy between the knowledge of the past produced by

historians, which is textual and objective, and the knowledge of the past pro-
duced by non-historians, which is oral and personal. In literate or semi-literate
societies, which would include most people today, textual sources used and
produced by historians are part of the resources that people use in producing
popular knowledge about the past. Textual sources are read, argued about, and
used to authorize the historical knowledge production of ordinary people (see,
e.g., Rappaport 1993). In some cases, textual sources are experienced orally by
non-or semi-literate audiences, through reading aloud or performance, often
in religious contexts (see Thum 2014). In other cases, such as in Buryatia, a
highly literate population that has survived a century of heavy state censorship
and alphabet reforms may supplement textual sources with oral histories.7
When I sat in the state archives in Ulan-Ude, the people around me included
history students writing dissertations, journalists doing research for personal
interest stories, and people researching census records in the hope of identi-
fying shamanic ancestors who had been repressed. Textual and oral forms of
history-making inform and implicate each other in complicated and locally
specific ways that undermine distinctions between “history” as an academic
enterprise and “collective memory” as a popular one.
Collective memory also loses its utility when we begin to study how people
“remember” events that happened long before their birth, such as when
Buryats born in the last years of socialism explain the violence of Stalin’s
purges (1936–37) by comparing Stalin to Chinghis Khan (1162–1227), or when
people use archival sources, such as Soviet census records, to produce knowl
edge about events and people that have been erased by the state. One of the
key characteristics of history-making following the end of authoritarian state
violence is the conviction that local knowledge of the past has been silenced.
The past is experienced as a palpable absence, and textual sources such as
state archives can be combined with religious prophecy and divination (as we
will see in Chapters 1 and 4) or the testimony of ancestors embodied in sha-
manic trance (as in Chapters 5 and 6) to fill in the gaps left in textual sources.
Neither traditional forms of historiography nor the analytic framework of col-
lective memory is sufficiently nuanced to grapple with these kinds of historical
poesis.
From the disciplinary perspective of traditional history, this kind of his-
tory often lacks the appropriate evidentiary standards. As Trouillot (1995) has
argued, however, the preserved evidence that meets appropriate historical evi-
dentiary standards tends to favor the narratives of states and people in power.
Structures of power have produced silences that are being filled by these al-
ternative forms of knowledge production. Different cultural and religious
communities have different evidentiary criteria for knowledge about the past,
and these criteria are situated within a history of power structures. It is use-
less to open ourselves to the culturally situated nature of historical knowledge
production if we do not also recognize the culturally situated nature of eviden-
tiary standards and the power structures that enforce them. Thus the need,
as argued by Palmié and Stewart (2016), and seen in a flurry of new work on
historicity and history-making (Routon 2008; Hodges 2010; Wirtz 2011; 2016;
Bacigalupo 2016; Handman 2016; Lambek 2016 to list a few), for an anthro-
pology of history.
Defining Our Terms: Bakhtin’s Chronotopes

Reading an anthropology of history that describes current practices of history-
making is often confusing because the ethnographer is writing about the way
in which people are talking about the past. We are writing about past events,
but instead of interrogating the truth of these past events (which would be a
historian’s job), we focus on the way in which people endow these past events
with significance in the present. I suggest some terminology that I hope will
help to make this distinction clearer.
J. L. Austin draws a distinction between the constative meaning of speech
and the performative aspect of speech (1962). He does, in fact, note, that
most speech acts exist on a continuum between these two poles, and con-
tain both constative and performative meaning. Constative meaning is about
the content of speech, and can be evaluated as true or false (e.g., “this is a
table”—whatever you are pointing to either is a table or is not). In contrast,
performative speech does something. The prototypical example is “I hereby
pronounce you husband and wife,” in which “I am not reporting on a mar-
riage: I am indulging in it” (Austin 1962, 6). As Austin notes, these two speech
acts are extremes that illustrate the concepts. In practice, most speech acts are
both constative and performative at the same time.
I propose that this linguistic distinction, between constative and per-
formative speech, can be mapped onto history-making as an activity, and
in doing so provides us with a terminology that will allow us to parse the
content from the performative value of stating that fact in a particular con-
text. So for example, the historical fact that Buryat troops were at the battle
of Stalingrad might be recounted in order to argue that “we have been proud
members of the Soviet brotherhood of nations since the sacrificial moment
that consecrated our union.” Conversely, the same historical event (Buryat
soldiers at Stalingrad) might be used to justify the claim “see how the Soviet
Union was willing to exploit our soldiers in battles that had no bearing on our
Introduction 11
lives.” The historical event occurred, but the rhetorical effect of referencing
that event can change dramatically depending on the context in which it is
evoked. The event occurred in the past, but the rhetorical, performative effect
of producing knowledge about it, is very much about the present.
I therefore propose the following terminology, adapted from a combination
of Austin (1962) and Bakhtin (1981). A historical genre is a mode of history-
making. Like a literary genre, a genre of history-making has certain recogniz-
able conventions, although these vary significantly across genres. A historical
genre will have recognizable forms and its own evidentiary standards. These
genres are made up of constative content (historical events), and the perfor-
mative aspect of producing knowledge about these events, which I shall call,
following Bakhtin, a “chronotope” (see also Bender and Wellbery 1991; Lemon
2009; Handman 2016; Wirtz 2016).
Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, drawn from literary analysis, is particu-
larly useful because a chronotope is a relationship between modes of time and
space that act upon the characters within them. Does the particular historical
time matter to the story, or is it merely a neutral backdrop against which the
action takes place? Does one event in a story produce the next, or is the novel
simply a series of random events? Does the hero remain the same throughout
the story, or is her character transformed or revealed? Does a particular
chronotope posit a Golden Age in the past, from which we have fallen, or is it
working toward a utopian future? Or does everything take place at exactly the
same moment, even if the reader encounters the information sequentially?
Just as time can flow differently in a literary text, so our understanding of how
time flows can vary across genres of historical-knowledge production.
Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope focuses not merely on the different ways
time flows (linear, recursive, or concurrent) and how this time intersects with
a landscape (national, local, universal, or animate), but also how the hero
moves through these times and spaces and is shaped by them. The hero, in
the instances I describe in this book, is the community imagined and pro-
duced through these rituals. While I am taking the descriptive terminology
from Bakhtin, the contours of the chronotopes themselves—the relationship
formed between subject, time, and space—are produced by the civic, shamanic,
and Buddhist rituals I witnessed in Buryatia and will describe in the following
chapters. These civic, Buddhist, and shamanic rituals all posit a community
with profoundly different contours from one ritual context, one chronotope, to
the next. Since none of these rituals produces a stable and bounded imagined
community, no one conception of the Buryat nation emerges as dominant.
Rather, each is experienced as uniquely realistic through the ritual, but fades
into one of several imaginative possibilities as soon as the ritual ends. This
is why the same person can recount one history of Buryatia at the Buddhist
Maidari festival (see Chapter 4), and a completely different history to explain
Victory Day festivities (see Chapter 2). Drawing further on my linguistic
analogy, I refer to this as code-switching.
Applying the idea of the chronotope to practices of historical knowledge
production allows us to examine the performative effects of producing knowl
edge about the past. In discussions of alternative historicities, indigenous
chronotopes are usually placed in contrast to Western academic historicism,
which is predicated on a linear concept of time, and “linear uniform cau-
sality” (Palmié and Stewart 2016, 212). However, as Palmié and Stewart point
out, even in the West there are alternative popular forms of historicism that
co-exist alongside academic historicism. This co-existence is also the case in
Ulan-Ude.
Unlike the rural Buryat herders whom Ippei Shimamura (2011), Katherine
Swancutt (2012), and Manduhai Buyandelger (2013) worked with, urban
Buryats in Ulan-Ude live like contemporary residents of other big cities across
the world. Many hold higher education degrees and work in educational, sci-
entific, cultural, and medical fields. Western historicism (in its Marxist var-
iant), with its linear uniform causality and a commitment to a teleology of
progress, is their default historical genre. They learned this way of knowing
the past in Soviet-era schools and universities, and use this genre in popular
media. However, as they engage with religious rituals in a search for “cultural
heritage,” they encounter not merely new historical information, but older
ways of experiencing time, which are both personally “new” and culturally
“traditional.” These rituals evoke, perform, and embody time in profoundly
different ways, producing not only new historical knowledge but different
chronotopes.
Why Ritual?
The idea that rituals form social conceptions of time and space, at least from
within social scientific theory, goes back to Emile Durkheim, who posited that
religious practice is the source of collective representations (1995, 10–11). The
claim that ritual brings time and space into being clearly predates Durkheim
within religious contexts. The idea that a being, human or otherwise, sang
or danced the world into existence, and that certain rituals maintain the con-
tinued existence of the universe are extremely common. Durkheim, however,
is, to my knowledge, the first to stake this claim as the basis of scientific theory.
Durkheim’s argument is that ritual brings society into being, and society is the
origin of collective representations of time and space.
Introduction 13
Very little seems to happen with this insight for quite a long time in an-
thropological theories of ritual as a result of the way in which ritual was
conceptualized. From a functionalist perspective, ritual reaffirmed society’s
conceptions of time and space, while from a structuralist perspective, ritual
represented it. Anthropologists from E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) to Roy
Rappaport (1992) argued that ritual structured time, but this remained a rel-
atively uninteresting insight so long as ritual was theorized to be primarily
a representation. As interpretations of ritual move toward seeing ritual as
producing bodies, subjectivities and social relations (see, e.g., Asad 1993b;
Daniel 2002; Mahmood 2011), Durkheim’s claim that ritual produces collec-
tive representations of time and space begins to become epistemologically and
ontologically complicated. Does ritual produce a cultural representation of the
underlying universal reality of time, or, since time is in the eye of the observer,
does ritual actually produce time?
Frederique Apffel-Marglin pushes this theoretical ambiguity to its fur-
thest conclusion when she claims, “I understand the performativity of rituals
in terms of an alternative to the modernist epistemology of representation-
alism, where a pre-given reality is ‘represented’ by the human mind” (2011, 15).
She argues that representationalism enables a western modernist discourse
of science (which she is careful to distinguish from actual scientific theories
of time) to lay claim to the exclusive ability to define the underlying reality,
thereby disenfranchising other ways of knowing (see also Rifkin 2017). Ritual,
for Apffel-Marglin, brings time and space into being. I must, however, con-
fess, that as an anthropologist trained to think about discourse, I am not sure
what it means to abandon the idea of representation. Bracketing questions
about the underlying reality of time, I turn back to linguistically grounded
analogies, specifically, Webb Keane’s claim that “language is one medium
by which the presence and activity of beings that are otherwise unavailable
to the senses can be made presupposable, even compelling, in ways that
are publically yet also subjectively available to people as members of social
groups” (1997, 49). Language can make these beings presupposable through
indexicality, by “pointing” to their presence. In a similar way I see ritual as
making chronotopes presupposable by indexing them.
What I mean is similar to Erving Goffman’s idea of “footing”—an under-
lying understanding of how time and space are organized that distinguish
one genre from another (1979). This chronotopic footing may or may not
be explicitly produced through the ritual or liturgical system, but it becomes
visible through comparison. To say that rituals “do things,” whether it is
serving a social function, representing something, producing collectivities,
transforming individuals or disciplining subjectivities, cannot always be
usefully generalized. Any particular ritual may “do” any number of things, but
being a form of human creative activity, rituals necessarily take place within
particular conceptions of time, space, and subjectivity, and any ritual may
index such conceptions to greater or lesser degrees, in different ways, and
to different effect. In the particular post-Soviet context that I am examining,
the performative value of the past is particularly powerful, the way in which
rituals index their chronotopes takes center stage because the past is under
construction.
Michael Silverstein argues that “the presumptively shared knowledge and
beliefs of a group are accessed in a society’s rituals under dynamic gestural
(indexical) figuration. Ritual works in a kind of pictorial or iconic (specifically,
diagrammatic) mode. Ritual as enacted traces a moving structure of index-
ical gestures toward the knowledge presupposed to be necessary to its own
effectiveness in accomplishing something” (2004, 626; see also Tomlinson
2014). The rituals I describe here relate to their chronotopes in this way: Ritual
actions, ritual speech, and speech around the rituals pointed to a particular
chronotope. However, unlike in Silverstein’s characterization, the chronotope
to which participants pointed could not be presumed to be shared by everyone
present. Sometimes speakers would invoke the chronotope and the historical
events that characterized it explicitly in response to my questions, but I was
not the only one asking questions. At both Buddhist and shamanic rituals
participants asked about the proper way to do things, about what elements
of the ritual meant, and why we were to do these things. They asked other
participants, shamans or lamas or other professionals, and even from time
to time, they asked me. The answers to these questions made the indexed
chronotope explicit, producing it as shared cultural knowledge, instead of
merely pointing to an already shared understanding. It is in this sense that
I use the term “produced.” Chronotopic presumptions inherent in the ritual
form (e.g., that ancestors are co-present, or that a bodhisattva can exist and
then return) become shared cultural conceptions through participation
in the ritual, but the practice is always contingent and in dialog with other
chronotopes.
Durkheim wrote from a context that presumed that a society ought to
have a stable and unified sense of time and space. He diagnosed turn-of-the-
century European society as sick because it did not, and fetishized Australian
aboriginals because he presumed they retained a unified sense of time and
space, when in fact the reverse is more likely to be true. Colonizing Europeans
seem to have been singularly unimaginative in their conceptions of time and
space, whereas populations subjected to colonial regimes were forced to con-
front multiple conceptions of time. As Apffel-Marglin’s Peruvian interlocutors,
Introduction 15
like mine in Buryatia, demonstrate, an indigenous population that has been

subject to state-sponsored acculturation and educational projects is under-
standably quite self-conscious about the conceptions of time and space that
the state desires them to inhabit in contrast to the ones that their grandparents
did. Re-introducing rituals as projects of cultural revitalization can be seen
as reversing the ethnographic process. If the ethnographer takes habitus and
turns it into symbolic representation, ritual revitalization projects seek to take
symbolic representations and turn them into habitus.
While this might, at first glance, appear to be “invented tradition,” I do not
find this label particularly useful (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). As Ronald
Grimes argues, all traditions are to some degree invented and “improvisation
and revision are essential parts of many, if not most, ritual traditions” (1992,
33; see also Lindquist 2005). Civic rituals such as Victory Day and City Day are
explicitly and self-consciously designed by their organizers, and the Buddhist
and shamanic rituals I describe are not invented so much as redesigned
versions drawn from ethnographic materials and ritual manuals. They are
old rituals self-consciously adapted to new contexts. Furthermore, my analysis
does not focus on how they are re-imagined by their participants, but rather
on the chronotopes they index.
Using the term “genre” to describe ways of speaking and thinking about
the past opens up an analogy with the way people code-switch between speech
genres. Chapter 1 describes the way people can code-switch between histor-
ical genres within a single ritual. Rather than thinking of history-making as a
search for a single truth about the past, examining historical genres enables
us to see the ways in which the past becomes a resource for understanding the
present. Just as speech genres enable people to mark different modes of soci-
ality, code-switching between historical genres enables different relationships
to the past. Since each historical genre has a unique chronotope, each genre
enables an alternative perspective from which to render events meaningful,
enabling different methods of explaining a present that had become increas-
ingly inexplicable. Contemporary social problems that make no sense from a
linear, causative reading of history can be re-interpreted as the karmic legacy of
past violence, the wrath of forgotten ancestors, or the fulfillment of prophecy.
For example, I argue that history-making around the miraculously pre-
served body of Etigelov can occur in several different genres.8 One of these
genres I call a Buddhist genre, and it is primarily produced by official repre-
sentatives of the Traditional Buddhist Sangha, the oldest Buddhist institution
in Buryatia. Within this genre, time has a recursive, double-layered quality.
One layer is the chronological linear time of the Russian imperial state, and the
second is recursive, in which Etigelov repeatedly returns to the first timeline
through reincarnation. As a reincarnate lama, Etigelov appeared in Buryatia as

Zaiaev, the very first leader of Buryat Buddhists, in the 18th century; returned
as himself in the early 20th century; and then returned in the 21st as his mi-
raculously preserved body, folding time into cyclical returns, in which the
present and the past fulfill each other. This perspective endows Russian na-
tional linear time with a Buddhist theological interpretation that produces the
Buryat landscape and the Buryat nation as an intersection between Russia and
Asia. New meaning is revealed that has already always been there. Buddhist
memorializing practices, such as building stupas and rebuilding temples, re-
veal the hidden Buddhist histories of a landscape that only appears to have
been secular.
This stands in stark contrast to a Soviet historical genre, within which
time is linear and progressive, moving toward greater modernity manifested
in scientific understanding, which can be measured in material, observable
phenomenon. Soviet histories are histories told through graphs of grain pro-
duction quotas and photographs of war heroes, and grounded in the social
constructs of Soviet life: the collective farm, the nationality, the state. The
“hero” of this genre is also the Buryat nation, but unlike its Buddhist coun-
terpart, this Buryat nation is a “backward” Siberian nationality that entered
“modernity” by participating in the Soviet brotherhood of nations. The reality
of this genre is reinforced through the contours of a daily life lived in the insti-
tutional structures, buildings, and streets produced by the Soviet century and
the memory of World War II as the sacrificial moment in which the violence of
the Stalinist state was redeemed. However, even though it is a familiar genre,
some of the people who told me this history endowed the historical events
with a sharp criticism, using the Soviet genre to produce the Buryat nation as
a colonized people whose history had been stolen from them. Linear, utopian,
and familiar, this historical genre produces silences that the other genres seek
to fill.
The shamanic genre stands in contrast to both Buddhist and Soviet genres.
The past is constantly co-present in the form of ancestors in the spirit world
who are coexisting social actors, whose will and intentions continue to act
on the bodies of the living, and who must be taken into account when the
living make plans. The shamanic past is both past and an unseen dimen-
sion of the present. The Buryat nation imagined through shamanic rituals is
connected through genealogical and genetic ties that include ethnic Russians
and other nationalities. The Buryat nation that is the “hero” of this story is
a Central Asian nomadic indigenous people whose heritage reaches back to
Chinghis Khan.
Introduction 17
Although I discuss these genres separately, in order to make them clear

to the reader, the boundaries between them are fuzzy. These chronotopes
are, following my linguistic analogy, produced performatively and indexically
through ritual and other types of human interaction. They do not exist as webs
of signification floating above actor’s heads. Therefore, as I show in Chapter 1,
they can and do coexist side by side, intertwining and in dialog with each other.
The dead are present in all three genres (Buddhist, Soviet, and shamanic).
Most obviously, the ongons who enter the bodies of shamans are their dead
shamanic ancestors. Etigelov, as a bodhisattva, may not in fact be dead, but
he is not exactly alive either, and it is this ontological uncertainty that makes
him compelling. The dead are less vocal in the civic rituals of Victory Day and
City Day, grounded as these are in Soviet modernist material discourse, but
an awareness of ancestors and the causes they died for is nonetheless central
to these celebrations. As Verdery (1999) has argued, dead body politics are an
effective medium for debating questions of who and what a community is.
Recent ontological approaches encourage anthropologists to consider
the agency of nonhuman actors, but these are, in all three historical genres,
human actors, so attributing agency to them hardly seems radical, and has
a long tradition in anthropological analysis (Hallowell 1940). It must also
be remembered that the living do not simply do the will of the dead; they
attempt to discern the agency of the dead through signs, argue about these
signs, and then decide what to think about them. Debates rage within an-
thropology about the utility of taking interactions with spirits “at face value”
or seeing them as expressive of underlying political and economic concerns
(White 2013; Graeber 2015). I have tried here to walk the uneasy tightrope of
middle ground in that these interactions with spirits and bodies occur in a so-
ciocultural context that constantly argues about what taking them at face value
might mean. I have seen my task as describing the debates that Buryats and
other residents of Buryatia have about these encounters and the histories they
produce, not in order to fix Buryat ontological claims about spirits but rather
to understand the post-Soviet secular sociocultural and political context within
which these claims are made and debated.
Ritual Materiality and Secular Embodiment

The underlying question that drives Buryat engagement with the past in these
rituals is the question, “who are we?” That question is not unique to reli-
gious contexts and is rooted in the particular and profoundly unstable socio-
economic and political conditions of a post-Soviet national minority republic
with a marginal economy. When I worked in Buryatia in the early 2000s,
people were preoccupied with healing because they were sick and their access
to healthcare was unstable. Although the economic situation had improved
by a return trip in 2012, the underlying sense of social and economic insta-
bility continued. Their sense of instability was proven correct when the ruble
collapsed again in 2014.
The transition from socialism to neo-liberal Russia was experienced as a
transition from a world with limited but relatively stable possibilities, into one
with vast theoretical possibilities, but few resources and unstable institutions.
The economy, healthcare, the legal status of the republic within the Russian
Federation, the social position of Buryats within a newly Russian nation-state,
and the possibilities of knowing the past were all profoundly unstable, and
this context is essential to the questions that Buryats are exploring through
rituals. Religious institutions were similarly unstable, and religious practices
were one of many of the relatively new possibilities available at the time.
“Who are we?”; “where did we come from?”; and “where are we going?” are
classic cosmological questions. However, most people who were asking these
questions in a religious context in Ulan-Ude were coming to these rituals
from a Soviet secular background. As Buyandelger, (who has also published
under Buyandelgeriyn, 2007, 2013) found with Buryat shamans in Mongolia,
while socio-economic and political questions prompt people’s engagements
with ritual, these rituals do not always, or even often, resolve their questions.
Instead they often raise new problems and produce logics that take on lives
of their own. Buyandelger argues that rural Buryats in Mongolia turn to
shamans to resolve economic problems and inadvertently produce histories.
Among urban Buryats within the Russian Federation, I argue that people turn
to rituals to find solutions to quotidian problems, out of curiosity or kinship
obligation, and through these rituals produce different genres of history and
different chronotopes. Producing multiple conceptions of time and history
further destabilizes already unstable imaginary constructs, but also offers cre-
ative resources for rethinking the questions of who they are and where they
are going.
There are threads of continuity, however, which weave through these dif-
ferent genres, despite the code-switching. These threads are a secular dis-
course of proof and doubt, grounded in a rhetoric of materiality. Conversations
with spirits as they inhabit the bodies of shamans; medical tests performed on
the preserved body of Etigelov; and the physical symptoms of illness are read
as evidence of the veracity of truth claims made in these genres, providing
subjects with a sense of stability within shifting chronotopes. Grounded in
the embodied sensory and material experience of ritual, stories of the past
are anchored in the embodied materiality of the present, lending them a
Introduction 19
pre-discursive, materialist, and scientific “aura of factuality” (Geertz 1973).

As Asad (1993) points out, however, auras of factuality are produced through
power, and the aura of factuality produced by materiality plays on and with
secular conceptions of scientific evidence.
By focusing on rituals, I engage with contemporary concerns about the
role of materiality and matter in the world. Rituals, especially the kinds of
rituals I describe, are above all else, embodied sensory experiences. Bodies
move through space; hear chanting, singing, and drumming; speak to spirits,
recite mantras, smell incense, and taste the vodka that is offered to other-
than-human beings. However, my subjects engage with materiality in much
the same way as some ontologically focused anthropologists, by providing the
possibility of connecting to a reality that transcends discourse, that will give
them “knowledge” rather than “belief.” However, as David Graeber argues in
his critique of the ontological turn, “reality is that which can never be fully
encompassed in our imaginative constructs” (Graber 2015, 28). Just as “re-
ality” for Graeber is characterized by the “stubborn . . . immediate unpredicta-
bility, ultimate unknowability of the physical environment that surrounds us”
(Graeber 2015, 28), so too, for my Buryat interlocutors, proof that something
was “real” was generally constituted by the fact that it could be experienced but
not explained. One could observe that Etigelov’s body was not decaying. One
could (and in fact people did) prove that it was not decaying in a laboratory,
but no one could explain it. The inability of scientific imaginative constructs
to explain material evidence became proof that another imaginative con-
struct (whether that be the theological arguments presented by members of
the Traditional Buddhist Sangha or the idiosyncratic speculations of pilgrims,
shamans, historians, and taxi drivers) might be true, and the possibility of
the truth of these imaginative constructs became the justification for human
actions, even as they all entertained and debated the possibility that these im-
aginative constructs might be just imaginary.
In a period of prolonged ideological, political, social, and economic inex-
plicability, rituals both conjure up multifaceted explanations of the world and
allow people to act in the world without committing to one imaginative con-
struct. Am I reviving the argument that post-Soviet subjects turned to reli-
gion to fill the ideological vacuum produced by the collapse of Soviet ideology?
Yes and no. I do not believe we should dismiss the fact that our post-Soviet
interlocutors consistently tell us that they turned to religion to fill the ideolog-
ical vacuum, but I do not think we should read this statement at face value. If
historians and anthropologists like Alexei Yurchak (2006) are to be believed,
Soviet ideology had ceased to provide a comprehensive worldview to anyone
long before the collapse of the USSR as a political entity. It is true, however,
that as the political and economic institutions of the USSR became something
else in the post-Soviet period, life became increasingly inexplicable. To many
people living in that inexplicability, religion became a resource worth trying.
Indigeneity and the Stakes of History

in Buryatia
Ethnographies usually offer a history of the place they are written about to
help orient the reader. However, that can privilege the Western, academic,
linear genre of history in contrast to alternative religious and indigenous
chronotopes. It establishes the history in the introduction as the “real history”
against which we will measure the histories that my interlocutors produce.
I do not want to take sides.
The reader may find this disorienting; I intend it to be. Instead, I offer some
information (in part historical, and I am aware of the irony) that may help ex-
plain what is at stake in Buryat history-making projects. Buryats are an indig-
enous population, and the survivors of Stalin’s purges and decades of Soviet
social engineering. For both indigenous populations and post-authoritarian
societies—more so than for other populations—to write or speak a history is
a political act.
Rubie Watson (1994, 1) argues that “[u]‌nder state socialism, Marxism-
Leninism was not one ideology or political economy among many, but rather
was the inevitable and glorious outcome of a discernable historical process. If
one of the primary justifications of communist rule is its inevitability, then the
production of history takes on tremendous significance—political, ideological,
and moral.” The communist project rested on a teleology that made the pre-
sent merely a moment on the path toward a radiant utopian future. History,
even academic history, was not merely an account of past events, but rather a
meaningful structure that situated present citizens in relationship to a “back-
ward” past and a “radiant” future. While historians such as White (1987) and
Koselleck (1985) remind us that all history is a story written from a present
perspective, the political consequences for historical narratives are heightened
in political regimes such as communist or colonial ones, in which political
interventions are justified through teleologies of progress. Teleologies of prog-
ress are effective tools of governance because people identify with them and
aspire to their goals. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, people mourned
the loss of the radiant future toward which their everyday was directed, more
than they mourned the admittedly mediocre living conditions of late socialism
(Burawoy and Lukacs 1994; see also Paxson 2005, 99; Shimamura 2011, 69).
Introduction 21
The end of the Soviet Union produced an intense interest in history both
among former Soviet citizens and ethnographers of the period. Early ethno-
graphic accounts such as Watson’s edited collection (1994) focused on oppo-
sitional histories produced when socialist states still retained the power to
control, or at least aspire to control, public discourse. Other accounts focus on
the new histories of successor states (Gal 1991; Wanner 1998; Verdery 1999;
Platz 1996, 2000; Pelkmans 2006; Adams 2010; Buyandelgeriyn 2007, 2013).
In many of these states the new government and native intellectuals were able
to articulate national histories in opposition to the Soviet experience, which
they saw as imposed from outside, or to excise the Soviet experience, as an
anomaly, from the longer trajectory of national history (Verdery 1999, 116–
17). In Russia, in contrast, the Russian Federation’s relationship to the Soviet
Union was far more ambiguous (Oushakine 2000, see also 2009; Boym 2001;
Paxson 2005; Wertsch 2000, 2002). In many provincial areas, including most
of Siberia, pre-Soviet life was so radically different from the present that even
those who seek pre-Soviet continuity cannot excise the Soviet century from
their narrative.
In Buryatia, as in other autonomous republics with non-ethnically-Russian
titular nationalities, revising historical narratives became intertwined with
questions of ethno-national identity. Here, Soviet nationality policies intersect
with the colonizing projects of other western states; the theoretical lens of indi-
geneity reveals crucial similarities (as well as instructive differences) between
colonial timelines that produce indigenous peoples as primitive, backward,
and less-than-fully modern. Within the Soviet version of the Marxist teleology
of progress, Siberian peoples were discursively marked as the most “back-
ward” of all Russia’s inhabitants. The Soviet Union’s unique historical task
was to bring modernity, progress, and enlightenment to all its citizens, but as
the most “backward” the stakes of this modernization were especially high for
Siberian indigenous peoples (Slezkine 1992, 1994; Grant 1995; Skrynnikova,
Batomunkuev, and Varnavskii 2004; Chakars 2014).
On paper, Soviet nationality policies were ethnically neutral. Lenin
and Stalin sought to distinguish Soviet nationality policy from its imperial
predecessors by explicitly opposing what Lenin termed “great Russian chau-
vinism,” the belief that Russian culture was superior to that of other nation-
alities (Lenin 1975a, 1975b, 1975c). Union republics, autonomous republics,
and ethnic okrugs were established to allow nationalities self-determination.
These territories were defined in relationship to their “titular” nationality, and
the status of the territory depended on how developed that nationality was
deemed to be.9 In practice, however, since “Soviet progress” built on preex-
isting imperial discourses of backwardness and was usually delivered in the
Russian language by ethnic Russians, Soviet modernization must be exam-

ined within an ethnic context (Skrynnikova, Batomunkuev, and Varnavskii
2004, 2–5). In practice, just as assimilation meant culture loss for indigenous
populations around the world, Soviet modernization meant becoming more
like Russians.
In 1991, the Soviet Union became the Russian Federation, and Yeltsin
famously declared that national republics should take all the autonomy
they could swallow. While the Union republics became independent coun-
tries, autonomous republics, such as Buryatia, did not have the right to se-
cede. Nonetheless, they retained a separate legislature, a president, and a
limited amount of autonomy in internal affairs. Despite massive ideolog-
ical, political, and economic changes, the state institutions that structured
daily life remained relatively stable. As one Buryat friend cynically noted,
the sign on the door changed, but the person behind the desk was usually
the same. However, the ideological legitimacy of political, economic, and so-
cial structures was profoundly destabilized. Initially, perestroika appeared
to offer the potential for national cultural revival, but projects to support
and fund Buryat culture and language that were officially approved by the
republic’s legislature were subsequently underfunded and faltered. Religion
re-entered the public sphere with enthusiasm, but no one—not scholars,
priests, or laypeople—was quite sure what to make of the apparently sudden
return of religion.
Like other autonomous republics within the Russian Federation, Buryatia
has its own president, its own legislature, and limited autonomy. That au-
tonomy has been even more limited since 2004, when President Vladimir
Putin passed a law that regional governors and presidents were to be ap-
pointed, rather than elected. In the 2010 census, Buryats represented approx-
imately 29.5 percent of the republic’s 972,021 residents.10 Like other native
Siberian populations, they are a demographic minority within their own re-
public, where 62.16 percent of the population is ethnically Russian.
The Buryats with whom I worked and lived in Ulan-Ude in 2004–5, and
again in 2012, are, for the most part, urban, secular, and educated post-Soviet
subjects who are, at the same time, members of an indigenous minority na-
tionality. A majority of Buryats, and many ethnic Russians in Buryatia, were
deeply interested and invested in reviving and rediscovering their “tradi-
tional culture,” their national language, and their “religious traditions,” as
well as their connections to a broader Mongolian culture area, but they often
described themselves as interested precisely because these things had been
“lost,” reproducing and revaluing Soviet and Western tropes about indige-
neity, even as they sought to inhabit the category.
Introduction 23
I am staking a somewhat contradictory claim. I want to use the idea of in-

digeneity as a theoretical lens, without taking sides on whether or not Buryats
are an indigenous people. Although I find it productive to think about Buryats
as indigenous, not all Buryats identify as such. Some Buryats (including many
shamans) see themselves as indigenous, and actively seek out connections
and comparisons to other indigenous groups. The majority of Buryats accept
Soviet state categories out of habit, thinking of themselves as a nationality, and
by contrast think of what the Soviets called the “numerically small peoples of
the north,” such as the Evenki of northern Siberia, as indigenous. Others—
often Buddhists and Buryat nationalists—are actively opposed to the category
of indigeneity, and see themselves as a Mongolian diaspora population or an
Asian nation.
Whether or not Buryats should be considered indigenous is a complicated
question. In many cases, who should be considered indigenous appears fairly
self-evident, obscuring the ways in which this category is constructed and
contested in practice. The United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous
Issues offers guidelines, but explicitly refuses to define who should count
or not count as indigenous precisely because the stakes of being recog-
nized as belonging to the category can be very high (“Indigenous Peoples,
Indigenous Voices Factsheet,” n.d.). Instead, the UN Forum encourages self-
determination, which acknowledges that a group may consider themselves to
be indigenous, even if they are not recognized as such by the state in which
they live. However, the historical conditions under which Buryats and Buryat
territories were colonized by and incorporated into the Russian empire com-
plicate the ways in which Buryats might identify as indigenous.11
I consider Buryats to be indigenous in the sense that they are the long-
standing occupants of lands that have since been brought under the political
control of larger nation-states (Russia, Mongolia, and China) that are domi-
nated by other ethnic groups. In addition, there is a strong relationship be-
tween land and Buryat identity, at the personal, family, regional, and national
levels. Although it has been nearly a century since most Buryats in Russia
practiced pastoral nomadism, land remains key to identity in symbolic ways,
from annual clan offering rituals to an intense concern with the 1937 partition
of the republic during Stalin’s purges.12
However, although Buryat territories were incorporated into the Russian
empire, they were not done so in a way that produced the Buryats as an
autonomous political entity separate from the imperial state. Initially,
Russian Cossacks entered into an existing system of Central Asian tribu-
tary relationships. The Russian tsar was simply another khan to whom pay-
ment was due in exchange for protection from other khanates. Individual
Buryat clans paid tribute to different khans. After the borders between the
Romanov and Qing empires were set by the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk and
the 1727 Treaty of Kiakhta, theoretically those clans on the Russian side were
subjects of the Russian tsar and owed him tribute, but movement across the
border continued. Mikhail Speransky’s 1820 reforms established a form of
indirect rule, codifying local clan leaders as official members of the “steppe
duma,” thereby incorporating the Buryats into the existing structures of
the imperial government (Hundley 1984). As Buryats and Buryat territo-
ries were increasingly brought under the control of the Russian empire,
they were incorporated under a system modeled on the Ottoman empire,
in which religious affiliation stood for ethnic identity and determined the
legal status of individuals. Religious conversion produced a change in
legal status (Kappeler 1992; Slezkine 1994; Brower and Lazzerini 1997;
Schorkowitz 2001a, 2001b; Khodarkovsky 2002; Werth 2002, 2016; Murray
2012). Therefore, Buryats who converted to Christianity became “peasants”
(krest’iane) rather than “internal foreigners” (inorodtsy).13 Unlike a treaty
system, which negotiates the relationship between two sovereign entities,
Buryats were incorporated into the empire as clan groups or as individuals,
and were incorporated into legal systems that applied across the empire.
Buryat was produced as a nationality through intellectual and bureaucratic
categories of race and religion, but not as an independent political entity.
The Buryat republic itself was not a territorial entity until the fledgling
Bolshevik government established it in 1923.
At present, Buryats are too numerous to be considered “indigenous” under
Russian law, as that status is reserved for the numerically small peoples of the
North. Under Soviet law, as the titular nationality of a republic, Buryats had a
special status, but only in relationship to their territory (Martin 2001; Hirsch
2005). This produced an ambiguity, in that each republic’s government is sup-
posed to represent “its” titular nationality, as well as its non-titular residents.
Within this system, there was no legal difference between Siberian peoples,
who were numerical minorities within their republics, and other nation-
alities (such as Chechens, Tatars, or Tuvans), who are numerical majorities
within their republics. As Soviet-era forms of affirmative action within na-
tional republics were dismantled, the demographic differences between those
republics where the titular nationality is in the majority and those where it
is in the minority became starkly evident. Representative democracy sharply
disadvantages Siberian populations. Since much of the literature on Soviet
nationalities focuses on policy, it uses the categories of “national minority,”
which apply across these populations, obscuring the sharp differences be-
tween their historical experiences under both imperial and Soviet rule.
Introduction 25
However, as a consequence of Soviet nationality policies, most Buryats

think of themselves as a “nationality” and associate the term “indigenous”
with the “numerically small nationalities of the North,” such as the Evenki
or Soyot, who also live in the Republic of Buryatia. Since the United Nations
Working Group on Indigenous Affairs stresses self-identification as a central
feature of indigeneity, the fact that Buryats do not consistently self-identify as
indigenous fundamentally undermines the claim that they are. Due to the par-
ticular history of political incorporation, there is no political leadership, such
as a tribal government, that would have the authority to make such a claim on
behalf of the whole population.14
Given this ambiguity, I wish to use the idea of indigeneity as a theoretical
lens without staking a claim. Whether or not Buryats should be considered
indigenous is up to Buryats. However, seeing them as indigenous highlights
their political situation, and their ability to draw on indigenous subject
positions, even though at other times they refuse this identity. I use the lens
of indigeneity to highlight the way in which, as a people living on “their” ter-
ritory controlled by the political and institutional structures of a nation-state
that is not “theirs,” Buryat forms of historical knowledge production are al-
ways subject to the forces of the state. Authoritative, state-sponsored versions
of history are formulated from a Russian perspective. As we shall see, this
does not mean that all histories are Russian histories. They most emphati-
cally are not. But this power structure shapes the possibilities of historical
knowledge production and emphasizes the political nature and the stakes of
history-making.
Furthermore, I suggest that the uncomfortable fit of Buryats within the
category of indigenous suggests that this category is more constructed than
we usually perceive it to be, and therefore Buryatia can offer an instructive
comparison. Often, popular perspectives (and sometimes academic litera-
ture) present indigenous and Western groups in opposition, reifying the West
(modernity) vs. the Rest (tradition), even though these are more properly seen
as discursive subject positions that in turn limit and enable the projects of
the people who inhabit them. Indigenous peoples are no less modern, but
they occupy different subject positions within modernity. The study of his-
torical knowledge production in post-Soviet Ulan-Ude breaks down these
oppositions and shows how they are implicated within and entangled with
each other.
As post-Soviet residents of Buryatia re-examined and re-imagined the
Soviet teleology of progress, they necessarily also re-examined existing ideas
about ethnicity and national identity. Local ethnographers Amogolonova,
Elaeva, and Skrynnikova (2005, 7) argue:
In post-Soviet identificatory discourse Buryat history is re-examined as

that of a Siberian aboriginal people (narod) and as a Soviet socialist na-
tion (natsiia): negative motifs of colonization, humiliation of national
dignity and cultural assimilation, and at the same time the tendency to
construct new identities is strengthened, the resources and basis there-
fore are provided by the glorious pages of history and within which
one can notice the place taken by the mythologization of the histor-
ical past (before the unification with Russia in the 17th century) and its
personages.
While local ethnographers and historians both re-examine the past and study
the ways in which their colleagues do so, most local scholarship takes the
category of “Buryat” for granted. As Yuri Slezkine (1996) and Ronald Suny
(1993) have argued, Soviet bureaucratic practices and the “ethnos theory” that
dominated late Soviet social sciences (Bromley 1975, 1980; Gellner et al. 1975,
1980; Dragadze 1975) reified nationality categories.15 However, as I encoun-
tered these categories in the field, it became evident that they are much more
fluid. “Buryat” and “Russian” are labels that people in Buryatia assign easily to
individuals, but it rapidly became clear to me that these were place markers.
The collectivities these labels referenced shifted depending on context. It was
not merely that the state no longer authorized the official Soviet historical
narrative or that people were no longer convinced by Soviet narratives. In fact,
people continued to rely on these narratives. Rather, the referent of these his-
tories had been destabilized.
Are new histories to be the history of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious
republic? The Republic of Buryatia is the successor state to the Buryat Soviet
Socialist Autonomous Republic (BASSR), and as a national republic, Buryatia
is nominally the political entity that represents the Buryat nation. As a political
entity, however, the BASSR had no pre-Soviet existence. Of the nearly 60 per-
cent of the population that identify as ethnic Russians, many are descendants
of Old Believer Orthodox exiles who consider Buryatia their homeland
(Russ.—rodina), while others were brought to Buryatia to “build socialism”
during the Soviet period and do not share this sense of belonging. Therefore,
there is no self-evident identity around which to construct a history of the
Republic of Buryatia, and any history that reached past 1937 would have to in-
clude territories that no longer belong to the republic.
In addition, by 2005 many Buryats felt that the boundaries of their re-
public were under threat. There was widespread debate about the continued
existence of the republic (Graber and Long 2009; Peers 2009; Murray 2012,
ix–xiv). Under proposed administrative reforms, several national okrugs
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CHAPTER V
THE GREAT FIGHT
Margaret was quite sorry when Bob departed on Monday morning to

school, for although nothing further was said to assure her, his attitude
towards her was evidently changed, and she believed she was now upon a
friendly footing with the boy, and at least one of the difficulties of Oaklands
was partially overcome.
The days that intervened before his return upon the following Saturday
were not of the happiest. She determined to insist upon her charge having
special hours for study, and for recreation, and this meant a struggle of
wills. Ellice had hitherto had her own way entirely, and any curtailing of
that met strenuous opposition.
Monday morning was a lesson in patience to Margaret. Ellice came

willingly to the schoolroom, and condescended (for that was her attitude) to
give her mind to lessons for about half an hour. For that length of time she
seemed docility itself. Bob's words as to her ignorance had rankled in her
mind; the child was full of pride, and the idea of possibly being looked
down upon as an ignoramus later on was a detestable thought. But half an
hour every morning, she had determined, would be sufficient for her
concentration.
She worked busily and happily at first, and showed an intelligence

which pleased her teacher; then she grew a little restless, and cast furtive
glances at the clock. Margaret noticed the slackening of attention, but made
no remark. An hour and a half she thought would be sufficient for the first
week's morning's work: with such an undisciplined pupil it might be wise to
go slowly.
Suddenly Ellice threw down her book.
"It's ten, Miss Woodford. I've done enough for this morning. I don't
want to do any more."
"Oh, you've only just begun!" said Margaret quietly. "You started at
half-past nine; at eleven we will put the lessons away, and go into the
woods, or orchard, as you like."
"I know I'm not going to work until eleven," was the impertinent reply.
Jumping up from her seat, the child made for the door. But her
governess was too quick for her. Margaret had been fully on the alert for a
possible attempted escape, and in a moment she intercepted the flight.
"I am sorry, Ellice, but you cannot go yet," she said firmly. "Sit down,
child, and make the best of it; only an hour more, and you will be free."
For the second time in her life astonishment bereft Ellice of speech for a
few seconds, then her indignation vented itself in words as she stamped her
feet in her rage.
"I hate you!—I hate you! I will go out when I want to!' she stormed,
tears of passion shining in her eyes, and sobs half choking her.
"Stop that noise at once, Ellice," said Miss Woodford. "I am ashamed of
you. Sit down, and understand you will remain here for one hour longer as I
said; but unless you obey me now, it will be two."
With an abandonment of temper the little girl flung herself into a chair,
throwing her arms across the table and hiding her tear-scorched face in her
hands. There was still the sound of suppressed, gasping sobs, which
gradually died down into silence. It almost appeared that, wearied out with
her own temper, she had fallen asleep.
No sound now disturbed the quiet of the schoolroom, but the tick-tock
of the clock on the mantelshelf. Margaret remained silent, apparently
reading. Presently she glanced up at the time, laid her book down, and,
rising quietly, went and stood by her pupil. Unshed tears glimmered in her
eyes as she looked down upon the child whose uncontrolled temper meant
such misery to herself.
"Girlie," she said softly, "it is almost eleven, but before you go, I want
to ask you to forgive me for being, as you think, unkind and nasty. Listen,
Ellice. When your mother engaged me to come here as your governess, she
offered me a salary in exchange for giving so many hours a day to teaching
you. I agreed to her wishes, and I should not be honourable if I took her
money and did not fulfil my promise to do the very best I could for you—
can you understand that?"
"But I don't want to be taught," muttered the child; "I can teach myself
when I am older."
"If you were allowed to do as you wish, you would find presently, when
you were growing up, you would be despised by all the other girls of
education, because of your ignorance; you would be behind them probably
in everything. I don't think you would like that. From what I have seen of
you, I believe you would want to be first rather than last. Isn't that so?"
A half-murmured assent greeted this last.
"Can't you see, child, I want to help you? But you must be willing, and
try too if we are to succeed. How proud your dear father will be if his
daughter grows up bright and intelligent, and is able to be a companion to
him some day! He cares ever so much about that; he has told me so."
A slight movement indicated Ellice was listening.
"There is something else he cares about; he wants you to grow up sweet

and gentle, and to get over these selfish ways—do you know, trying to
please and help others always makes people happier than trying to please
themselves. You do it, and see. It just makes people love you. Then there is
one other thing I want to say; you are very fond of flowers. I know you look
at the garden when you go out, and bury your face in the sweetness of the
lavender bed, and smell the fragrance of the roses. Just think how God
loved you when He made the flowers so sweet to please you—and gave you
your garden and the woods and everything nice you love best. You
remember the hymn you sing sometimes:
"'All things bright and beautiful,
The great God made them all.'
"All things—and for you—and in His word to us He sends you this

message—this morning: 'Study to show yourself a workman approved of
God.' He has done so much for us, dear—He has given us every good thing
we possess. He came to this earth to die for us—to win our love and our
allegiance, and He asks us to show our gratitude by making a life-study of
how to prove our love to Him, as good workmen. He wants our best. Ellice,
shall we both make up our minds to try to give Him that always, to fight
against our tempers, our selfishness; to do even the dry lessons as well as
we can, to please Him? I have to try too—all the grown-up people who love
Him have to fight this battle with self. It is difficult sometimes, and we
often fail, but God has promised to give us His Holy Spirit, to enable us to
be brave and strong to do good, if we ask Him."
Margaret paused a moment as she gently stroked the child's bowed head
with her hand. Then:
"Ask Him now, darling, to help you all your life to be a workman
approved of God."
Again there was silence. The old clock ticked those precious moments
away, but at the same time registered a child's desire for a nobler life.
The lesson-time was over as the hour struck. Lesson books had not,
after all, played a great part in the morning's work; but was not something
learned of greater worth?
"Off you go," said Margaret brightly, and, pressing a light kiss upon the
tumbled curls, she turned and went out quietly, leaving her charge to her
own devices.
When they afterwards met at luncheon, all traces of the storm were past,
and Ellice chatted responsively to the governess she had intended earlier to
hate for ever and ever.
CHAPTER VI
OLD FRIENDS
Nothing was allowed to disturb Dr. Crane during his breakfast-time; his
wife took her meal in silence, while he studied his letters and newspaper.
This morning was no exception to the general rule, but suddenly he laid
down his correspondence, and said abruptly:
"By the way, Mary, have you heard anything from Margaret Woodford
lately?"
"A few days ago," she answered. "Why do you ask?"
"To tell you the truth, I've never felt quite satisfied about her going to
that post she accepted. I really owed it to her father to find out what kind of
people her employers were."
"Well, dear, she didn't give you much chance of doing that. You
remember she answered the advertisement, and got the situation through an
agency, and we knew nothing about it until everything was settled."
"Yes, but I still feel I ought to have made a point of inquiring personally.
Does she seem happy?"
"I don't know about happy—I should imagine not very; one can hardly
expect that, perhaps—but she mentions the people are kind, and the country
lovely. It is evident she is leading a quiet life; her employers for some
reason seem to wish to live in retirement."
"Now, I wonder why? I don't quite like that fact," said the Doctor, a
little testily.
"Why, John, surely you are unreasonably suspicious; the child is
evidently in a comfortable home, and I think must be interested in her work,
or she would not have stayed so long. I made her promise to come away to
us at once if she found anything wrong—in fact I asked her here for the
holidays in August."
"Oh, I'm glad you did that!" he interposed in more satisfied tones. "And
what does she say?"
"I think she fears it would be painful to see the old home again so soon;
she says she has been asked to stay where she is, and she would rather
remain, and in fact she does not need rest yet."
"I hope it is all right then," answered Dr. Crane. "Ask her in your next to
tell you everything unreservedly about the people, and if she is quite
content? Seems strange Woodford's daughter should be out in the world like
this, doesn't it?" he finished musingly.
"Yes—and how different it might have been if Jack—had—lived," said

Mrs. Crane sadly.
"Our hopes were certainly shattered in more ways than one," he

assented, with a sigh; "but, old lady, we wouldn't have it otherwise, would
we? God called him for the service of his country, and when a man answers
that call in His Name, all must be well. You miss the boy, I know—and well
—so do I, more than I can say; but we are getting on, and it will be a grand
homecoming when he stands, as we know he will stand, with outstretched
hands to welcome us on the other side. I expect we shall be glad then he
went over there first; what do you say, old dear?" he finished gently, and
coming round to where Mrs. Crane sat, the tears slowly coursing down her
cheeks, he stooped and kissed her forehead.
"Thank you, John," she answered. "I forget sometimes the joy that is
coming, the waiting seems so long, and yet it's a lovely thought, the King
may come into the air any day bringing our darling with Him. There is
nothing necessary to be fulfilled before that event, is there?"
"No, I think not; scripture gives us nothing, but we must wait patiently,
and be content with God's time and choice."
"I love those lines, John:
"'At midnight, eve, or morning,

We may hear the victory song.
Filling the heavens above us,
From Redemption's white-robed throng.'"
"I wish there were more stricken hearts comforted with the
Thessalonian promises," he answered thoughtfully. "I am amazed at the
numbers of people I come across in my profession who are apparently
content to live their life as if it were the fulfilment of all hopes and
ambitions, and not merely a pilgrimage here, an incident in eternity; but
there, I must be off to the surgery," he concluded, suddenly changing the
subject as the clock struck nine. As he was closing the door, he called out
hurriedly:
"My old friend Hatherley is coming down here in August to spend his
holiday with us."
"Oh, I am glad!" murmured Mrs. Crane to herself; "John will enjoy

that."
Then gathering up her correspondence, she went to interview cook. A

thought was in her mind to write Margaret a long motherly letter of
sympathy, giving her all the home news of interest she could think of, and
especially the Doctor's message.
CHAPTER VII
BOB IN TROUBLE
Weeks drifted into months, and Margaret, much to the satisfaction of the
inmates of Oaklands, was still at her post. Mrs. Crane had written and
invited her to spend the summer holiday with her in August, but the thought
of seeing the Abbey House again seemed more than she could bear just
then, and so her old friend's invitation had been refused, and Margaret
stayed on in the new environment, each day becoming more necessary in
the home of her employers. Another letter had arrived from Mrs. Crane this
morning, which yet remained to be answered when she felt there was more
news to write about.
The one big fight to gain ascendancy over her pupil had been worth
while. It is true Ellice did not give up her opposition without some further
struggle, but her wilfulness never again carried her so far. Lesson-time
became more pleasant both to governess and pupil, and gradually all
thought of direct disobedience passed, sulky silence presently giving way to
an interested co-operation.
Mr. Medhurst was not unobservant as to the friendship springing up

between Margaret and his small daughter, and was well pleased with the
way things were going. His wife spent most of her time in her own room,
although she was not a confirmed invalid. She did not give herself much
chance of knowing or understanding her children's characters, but she could
not help noticing a subtle change in Ellice.
Summer days were quickly passing away, the plentiful green brambles
which grew so luxuriantly on the common had ripened into a rich berry
harvest; the dainty gossamer houses of the spiders glistened on the
hedgerows, the tiny ropes of which caught Margaret Woodford's face as she
walked quickly across the spongy turf to the woods. She brushed the
irritating threads aside, an anxious expression clouding the usual brightness
of her countenance.
She had come away from the house this morning perturbed in spirit, and
more worried than she liked to admit to herself. She had not waited to find
her pupil, but was wanting to be alone and have time to think quietly. That
something serious had happened was easy to see from the trouble
discernible in her face. She had had a wakeful night, and a not too pleasant
interview with Mrs. Medhurst this morning.
The evening before she had gone up to bed early and sat reading for
some time in the quiet retreat of her room—Mr. Medhurst had not returned
from town, Mrs. Medhurst had dinner upstairs, and Ellice was in bed. It was
Wednesday, and Bob would not be home until the week-end, the September
term having just begun.
Upon putting down her book, Margaret had gone to the dressing-table
and opened her small jewel-box to put away the brooch she was wearing.
For a few moments she had stood still, gazing helplessly at the case before
her, astonishment depicted upon her countenance, her expression gradually
changing to consternation, as she grasped the unpleasant fact that her
beautiful ruby necklace—her mother's chain of rare jewels—the heirloom
which had descended to her—was missing.
Then, with fingers that trembled a little, she had turned the box upside
down and shaken out her other jewellery upon the table, although it was
obvious the chain was not there. She remembered having taken it out the
previous day, and carelessly left it lying on the dressing-table. Hastily she
opened the chest of drawers and swept the contents aside, hoping to find it
had been placed in safe custody by Betsy. Then she had stood up, looking
down upon the disorder she had created among her possessions, her breath
coming a little gaspingly as she murmured to herself:
"It is gone—stolen——" And a thought, so ugly, so disconcerting, had

rushed unbidden to her mind, making her heart beat unpleasantly at the
mere suggestion which came as a flash of illumination, to be followed by a
cloud of doubt, which enveloped her mind and filled her with untold
misery.
She had come to this house a stranger, she had been kindly treated, and
had grown fond of the young people who had entered into her life. The
household had appeared a strange one, and things had puzzled her. Now
something of bitterness sounded in her voice as she spoke her thoughts
aloud.
"I trusted them—I trusted them all," and now—the fact could not be
doubted, it had to be faced, and faced bravely, she had been robbed, it
seemed, by someone in this house who must be a thief. And yet—Could she
think it of any of them? The very suspicion sent the hot blood surging to her
face—she had felt shamed by the idea of doubting her friends—for they had
now become that to her. Even Betsy, the old and valued servant, had lately
been ready to do anything for her, and James, too, did many little things
which added to her comfort.
She was miserable and upset when she lay down to rest; she did not
suspect anyone particularly, and yet the horrid fact that the jewels were
gone could not be got over.
Margaret awoke the following morning with a headache; much of the

night had been spent in restless, wakeful tossing. Not until the sun was
shedding its soft beams through her lattice window did she fall into a
troubled sleep.
Immediately after breakfast she asked to see Mrs. Medhurst, and poured
out the story of her loss into sympathetic ears.
"My dear Miss Woodford, no wonder you are upset," she said. "Your
beautiful necklace you showed me one day—you remember—gone? I can
scarcely believe it. I can assure you there are no thieves in this house—at
least I have every reason to believe Betsy and James to be above suspicion,
they have been so many years in our service, and we have so trusted them—
but of course one can never say one is perfectly sure. I suppose you have
searched everywhere? Could it have fallen behind the dressing-chest?"
"No, I have looked; I don't think I have left a corner unsearched,"

answered Margaret. "I have not mentioned the matter to Betsy; I thought it
better to speak to you first; I should not like to offend or hurt her, or James,
by letting them imagine for a moment I suspected them."
"Quite right, my dear; I think the bare questioning would upset them;
and my husband will be deeply concerned; I almost think I would say
nothing about it to him just at present, he is not very well, and I am certain
it would worry him. I quite expect you will find it somewhere. The children
would not steal. Ellice might have looked at it, but beyond that——" and
Mrs. Medhurst shrugged her shoulders expressively, denoting the
impossibility of her child being implicated in the loss. "My little girl is
troublesome, Miss Woodford, I admit it, but—not a thief," she added coldly,
with a quick glance at Margaret's face, and a note of almost challenge in her
voice.
"Oh, no—no, Mrs. Medhurst, I do not think little Ellice has had
anything to do with it," answered Margaret. "She has come into my room
sometimes with me, and looked at my things, but I am quite sure she would
not dream of taking anything—please do not suppose I imagine it for a
moment?"
"Ah, well, let us leave the matter for a little, and both of us keep our
eyes open; at present I can see no explanation, but I have no doubt you will
find your necklace. I should not mention the matter to the child, but have
another good search. Ellice can be very troublesome, and she may have
hidden it; if so, she must be punished."
Margaret could get no further definite help or suggestion from Mrs.

Medhurst—in fact the above conversation had given her an uneasy sense of
discomfort; it seemed as if her hostess, although she had sympathised,
almost doubted her loss, and considered her personal carelessness was alone
responsible.
This morning, as she made her way across the fields, she felt homesick,
and almost wished she had never accepted her present post. Mrs. Crane had
written more than once to ask if she was happy, and if everything was
satisfactory in connection with this household. In fact, now she thought
things over, it appeared as if some possibility of her environment not being
satisfactory lurked in the minds of her old friends. In her last letter Mrs.
Crane had said, "Be sure, my dear child, to tell me exactly all your views,
and just what this situation means? Are the Medhursts the right kind of
people? Your previous communications are rather vague; give us your full
confidence—you know how dear you are to us. The Doctor wants especially
to hear if you are quite content in every way with your surroundings; if not,
be sure and come away to us at once."
Margaret had smiled when she had first read the above. Mrs. Crane's
evident anxiety about her had seemed quite unnecessary at the moment; but
now, in the light of her loss, she wondered if her old friends could possibly
have heard anything disquieting about Oaklands.
"I won't answer that letter just yet," she murmured to herself. "What
would they think if they knew? But oh, how I wish I could ask their
advice!" She walked on unheeding the glory of the trees flushed with
harlequin tints, and the rare sweetness of the fresh, hill-cooled breeze which
swept over the common, dying into stillness and warmth as she entered the
shelter of the woods. She presently sat down by the old oak, and, opening
the book she had brought with her, tried to lose herself in the troubles of the
heroine of Stepping Heavenwards, where the daily round and common task
is so naturally described by an author who realised how truly these things
furnish all we need to provide a battleground for those of us fighting the
fight of faith, on our way towards home.
A rustle in the brushwood near presently roused Margaret's attention,

and to her utter surprise Bob's face peered through the wooded density, and
in another moment he had pushed his way into the open and flung himself
at Margaret's feet.
"You, Bob!" she exclaimed, in amazement. "Why—where do you come

from? This is only Friday—you are not due until to-morrow."
There was no answer. The boy had thrown himself face downward upon
the mossy turf, and buried his face in his hands.
Margaret waited for a little, then, realising this meant something of

moment to the boy, said gently:
"Bob, what is it? What has happened? Won't you tell me?"
A sound like a smothered groan fell from the boy's lips, then, bending
her head, she caught the words:
"Miss Woodford—I'm—I'm in trouble."
"Yes, I guessed so. Can't I help you?" she added, the rare sympathy of
her voice reaching his ear.
The boy rolled over, and sat up, and something she saw in his face filled
her with a nameless anxiety.
"Tell me all about it. I—-I shall understand," she said kindly. "However
bad it is, don't be afraid."
Her tones and manner seemed to give the boy confidence.
"Miss Woodford, I'm often in trouble, as you know," he said, a little

bitterly. "I can stand a licking all right, but—but my father never seems to
think—to think I try. He never believes in me; he's told me I'm a rotter so—
often. He's fond of Ellice—but sometimes I think he hates me——"
"Oh, no—no, don't say or think that for a moment," broke in Margaret, a
great pity tugging at her heart. "He doesn't quite understand, that is all. You
must go on trying, Bob, however hard it is. You will win his regard yet—I
am sure—sure."
There was a pause, and then the boy continued, almost as if she had not
spoken:
"He will never forgive me for this. He won't listen to explanations. I got
in a rage about something this morning—I can't tell you what for—a boy
said something, and I knocked him down. I had a cricket stump in my hand
—and—I hurled it at him. I think for the moment I was mad with
indignation; I don't quite know what happened for a minute. I think I was
blind with rage. I just rushed away afterwards to the edge of the field to get
alone. Later a prefect came and told me the Headmaster wanted me. He
gave me this note to deliver to my father, and sent me home with it. He said
—I'd hurt—the boy—he'd been unconscious. He asked me to explain what I
did it for—but—I couldn't."
"What a pity," said Margaret; "it might have made a difference."
"Yes—I think he would have understood; he's just—but I felt I couldn't.

I would not repeat the boy's words—I should have got mad again."
"Poor Bob, I am sorry, dear! Now what can you do? You have a note
there, you say. Your father comes home early to-day; let's go at once and tell
him—tell him everything and get it over; perhaps he will understand."
"No—he won't, because I can't tell him; if I could, he would, because

my father is a gentleman."
Something that sounded like pride echoed in the boy's voice—pride of

the right sort—pride that spoke of a secret admiration for the man who yet
had never troubled to fathom the depths of his boy's heart.
Margaret felt a hope for better things spring up within her as she noted
it. Oh, if only she could bring these two together in a great bond of
friendship! The wife and mother seemed a little more aloof, her half
Spanish nationality a little bridge always to be crossed, where national
character and custom might be at variance. But the boy and the man were
essentially English; the strong control evident in both, with a reserve which
hid, as she felt sure, hearts of gold.
"Come, Bob dear, let's go—it is nearly lunch-time."
"Miss Woodford, I would rather—rather run away than face my father

with this." The boy spoke a little desperately, and the fingers which held the
Headmaster's note trembled as he thrust it back into his pocket.
"Bob, I know you are no coward," said Margaret gently; "to run from a
difficult post is coward's work. You won't do it, I know. You are trying to be
a servant of Christ; isn't that so?"
"I was," he muttered, "but it seems no use."

"Think a moment of what the Captain of your salvation did for you—
when the suffering of Calvary had to be endured, and the agony of the cross
lay before Him. It says, speaking of Him, He set His face like a flint. He
could have escaped that last journey to Jerusalem, have gone back to the
glory of His Heavenly Father's home, but for your sake He chose to suffer
and to die. Bob, His message to you at this moment seems to me to be some
words I read in His Book this morning: 'Endure hardness as a good soldier
of Jesus Christ.' The Holy Spirit, Who filled the heart and life of the
Saviour, can come upon you, and make you brave and strong. Ask Him
now."
Pressing the boy's hand, Margaret moved a little away, and as she gazed
upwards to the blue sky gleaming through the branches overhead, she lifted
up a silent petition to the great Friend of all mankind. Her own burden
lightened as she laid that of another pilgrim at the feet of Christ.
Her thoughts were disturbed by Bob's voice in her ears:
"Let's go now, Miss Woodford, and get it over."
"Yes, it's late," she answered, neither looking at the boy's face, nor
appearing conscious of an apparent change of atmosphere from the
excitement of distress to normality. But the quiet, even tones of the boy's
voice gave her confidence.
It did not take long to reach home; lunch was just being laid. James
paused in astonishment as he saw the two enter the hall, but a look from
Margaret silenced the words on his lips.
"Where is Mr. Medhurst?" she asked, in a brisk voice.
"In the library, miss," answered James, and moved on to his duties in the
dining-room.
"Come, let's find him," she said, turning to Bob.
"You need not come," he muttered.

"I would like to, if I may?" she asked.
No more was said, and the two entered the room together.
"Bob wants to speak to you, Mr. Medhurst," she said, by way of

explanation, and then moved to the window, leaving the boy facing his
father. She caught the quick look of surprise deepening into a swift survey
of the boy's form as if to ascertain if there had been an accident and he was
unhurt. Margaret realised the unspoken anxiety, although it was but
momentary. The man was evidently not indifferent to his son's welfare. That
cursory glance gave her hope, but even she was scarcely prepared for the
sudden change of aspect which now swept over him, his countenance
visibly darkening as he said:
"What do you want?" and the icy coldness was enough to estrange any
young heart anxious to unburden itself.
A shiver ran down the boy's back as he heard it, for a moment his
courage failed, and he stood staring at the stern face in front of him, his own
white with the tensity of the moment. Then he pulled himself together,
"Endure hardness as a good soldier"—the words rushed to his brain. He
raised his head a little more as if to cast away fear with disdain, then, taking
out of his pocket the Headmaster's note, he handed it to his father.
"Dr. Armstrong sent me home—and told me to give you that," he said,

in a low but clear voice.
Something of a sneer lurked on his father's lips as he took it, then, as he

read the contents, his brow contracted with a heavy frown. Fear, deadly
fear, came to Margaret as she heard his voice, of, it seemed, concentrated
wrath as, with a wave of his hand, he said:
"Get out of the room—go upstairs! I'll come to you."
The boy turned white and hopeless, but Margaret, with real terror in her
heart, sprang forward:
"Mr. Medhurst, please—please excuse me speaking in Bob's behalf, but
I am sure, if you knew all the circumstances in this trouble, you would find
it in your heart to forgive him," she pleaded.
Mr. Medhurst was too much of a gentleman not to be courteous to a

woman, though he could scarcely brook interference.
"You are the counsel for the defence, I perceive, Miss Woodford, but
I'm afraid you have no case; perhaps you don't understand my son—my son
in blind passion has struck a schoolfellow with a cricket stump and injured
him, apparently without provocation, as far as the Headmaster has been able
to ascertain."
"And do you believe that, Mr. Medhurst—believe it of your son? You

don't know Bob fully yet. Your son could never behave like that; to him, a
schoolboy, it would not be cricket, would it?"
"That's the gist of the matter, perhaps," he answered; "he is my son, and
I expect a decent spirit from him."
"Then let him explain the circumstances, Mr. Medhurst; don't punish
him until you have heard everything—it is only justice."
"Quite true. Can you deny these facts?" asked Mr. Medhurst, tapping the
Headmaster's statement, and now addressing Bob, who, at Margaret's
intervention, had paused near the door.
"It's true—but—but I was provoked, sir."
"So I suppose; but to what extent?"
"I would rather not say," answered the boy.
"There you are, Miss Woodford, I have followed your advice," said Mr.
Medhurst, with a short sarcastic laugh. "You see, the boy has no excuse
worthy of consideration; he's ashamed to bring it forward."
"Yes—I am—that's true," broke in Bob. "Don't bother, Miss Woodford;

I know I can't escape."
"Bob, you can—you must," Margaret insisted. "Whatever it is, tell your
father; trust him, trust him with the full story, and he will understand—I
know he will," she said eagerly.
Even Gordon Medhurst was moved by the girl's confidence. Was it

possible she was right, and this son of his was not the wastrel he feared and
believed?
There was tense silence for a moment, then the boy spoke again:
"I struck the boy Johnson in a passion because—because he said, I

ought to be turned out of the eleven because—because——
"Yes—because?" encouraged Margaret.
"Because my father was a—a gaol bird; then—I hit him—I hit him hard
—and I didn't care how hard."
There was a breathless pause which could almost be felt. Margaret was
afraid the others would hear the loud thumping of her heart as the long
moments passed. Then in a voice from which it sounded as if all feeling had
passed, Mr. Medhurst said quietly:
"What put such an idea in the boy's head, I wonder?"
"He said he heard his father tell a chum," answered Bob.
"What is the boy's name, by the way?"
"Johnson—his father is a barrister."
Did Margaret hear a catch in his breath as Mr. Medhurst said: "Ah,
Johnson."
Again there was silence, and then:
"Did you believe the boy's statement?" asked Mr. Medhurst, still in that
dull, toneless voice of indifference.
"Believe him, father!" The light of indignant scorn flamed into the boy's
eyes and rang in his voice: "Believe him, believe that of my father!"
Mr. Medhurst suddenly leaned forward, a new expression in his face, an

interested alertness in his voice.
"I see—you trust me—eh? Then why such excitement over the boy's
remark?"
"I punished his insolence, sir. How dared he say such a thing!"
"You knocked him out, evidently. I don't suppose he'll offend again,
though I fancy his father may object. This may mean a doctor's bill, but
never mind that, I expect there is no serious damage. You had better stay at
home until Monday, and meanwhile I will write to Dr. Armstrong. And
another time, keep your temper, my son, and treat such remarks with the
cold contempt they deserve. I think we must be better friends in the future,
eh?" he added. The kindly smile which lit his face as he spoke these last
words transfigured it; tears glistened in the boy's eyes.
Margaret left the room hurriedly, a great hope and joy tugging at her
heart; for the first time since she came to Oaklands she had seen an
expression of affection pass between father and son.
CHAPTER VIII
DISCOVERY
It was a month now since Margaret's necklace had disappeared, and she
had almost given up hope of its recovery. Mrs. Medhurst still advised her to
continue the search, but to refrain from troubling Mr. Medhurst, as he had
so many business worries, and would, she felt sure, be upset by the loss.
"Of course, it is wiser to keep the matter from the children; they can
know nothing about it. I have always trusted Betsy and James, they are such
old servants, and nothing of the kind has ever happened before. I have
questioned them, dear Miss Woodford. We must both watch and wait; still,
somehow I feel sure you will recover the jewels. I still think you must have
mislaid them. I feel so worried about your loss, I believe I could find it." So
she had argued.
Margaret smiled at the suggestion of her having put the necklace away
and overlooked it. She had searched her boxes more than once, and turned
out all her drawers, and now, anxious to soothe Mrs. Medhurst's anxiety,
she promised to go over them all again.
It was Monday evening, Ellice was in bed, and Mr. Medhurst had not
yet returned from a day in town, and Margaret (deciding it would be very
comfortable to take a book and read in her own domain) went upstairs
determined to have an extra rest. She passed Mrs. Medhurst's room on her
way, and as she did so a slight sound attracted her attention.
To her amazement she saw the flash of an electric light, and then caught
sight of a figure bending over the dressing-table and evidently gazing
intently at something she held in her left hand, while with the right she
concentrated the beam from her torch upon the object of interest.
Margaret stood silently watching for a few moments, petrified with

astonishment as she perceived what it was the light was concentrated upon.
There was no mistaking her employer's beautiful figure. The door was
wide open, and the girl was unnoticed by the occupant of the room, who
was apparently so absorbed she did not notice the light tread as Margaret
suddenly advanced to her side. The room was partly drowned in shadow,
but a bright beam of moonlight lit up the two, the one so unconscious of the
other's presence. Then a sharp cry burst involuntarily from Margaret's lips
as she darted forward and caught Mrs. Medhurst's wrist in a firm grasp.
"You—you!" she exclaimed, almost a ring of anguish in the indignant

tones of her voice.

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Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets:

Rituals of History in Post-Soviet

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THE PROBLEM OF RITUAL EFFICACY NARRATIVES OF SORROW AND

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Note on Transliterations, Translations, and Photographs xi

Chronology of Relevant Dates xiii

Introduction: “If You Want to Have a Future You Have to Have

1. An Inauguration for Etigelov: Multiple Genres of History in Buryatia 34

2. Soviet Selves: Victory Day 60

3. City Day: Hospitality, the Friendship of the Peoples,

4. Etigelov at Maidari: The Once and Future Buddhist 111

6. Porous Selves: Yuri’s Initiation 164

I especially thank Dashinima Dugarov for introducing me to Tengeri, and

Wesleyan University, including Elizabeth McAlister, Peter Gottschalk, Mary-​

All transliterations of Russian and Buryat words and names follow

ca. 1162–​1227 Chinghis Khan

a century of Soviet modernity, however, achieving a relationship with your

In this sense, Buryatia is part of a broader post-​ Soviet experience in

Theoretical and Other Groundings

sets up a false dichotomy between the knowledge of the past produced by

Defining Our Terms: Bakhtin’s Chronotopes

like mine in Buryatia, demonstrate, an indigenous population that has been

through reincarnation. As a reincarnate lama, Etigelov appeared in Buryatia as

Although I discuss these genres separately, in order to make them clear

Ritual Materiality and Secular Embodiment

pre-​discursive, materialist, and scientific “aura of factuality” (Geertz 1973).

Indigeneity and the Stakes of History

Russian language by ethnic Russians, Soviet modernization must be exam-

I am staking a somewhat contradictory claim. I want to use the idea of in-

However, as a consequence of Soviet nationality policies, most Buryats

In post-​Soviet identificatory discourse Buryat history is re-​examined as

THE GREAT FIGHT

Margaret was quite sorry when Bob departed on Monday morning to

Monday morning was a lesson in patience to Margaret. Ellice came

She worked busily and happily at first, and showed an intelligence

Suddenly Ellice threw down her book.

A half-murmured assent greeted this last.

A slight movement indicated Ellice was listening.

"There is something else he cares about; he wants you to grow up sweet

"All things—and for you—and in His word to us He sends you this

"A few days ago," she answered. "Why do you ask?"

"Yes—and how different it might have been if Jack—had—lived," said

"Our hopes were certainly shattered in more ways than one," he

"I love those lines, John:

"'At midnight, eve, or morning,

"Oh, I am glad!" murmured Mrs. Crane to herself; "John will enjoy

Wesleyan University, including Elizabeth McAlister, Peter Gottschalk, Mary-

ca. 1162–1227 Chinghis Khan

In this sense, Buryatia is part of a broader post- Soviet experience in

pre-discursive, materialist, and scientific “aura of factuality” (Geertz 1973).

In post-Soviet identificatory discourse Buryat history is re-examined as