Epilogue

The epilogue re-caps the arguments presented in the previous chapters, and revisits Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope as an analytic terminology for an anthropology of history. The epilogue argues that a comparative approach to indigenous revitalization projects in post-Soviet secular Buryatia reveals the contingent and creative nature of human conceptions of time and space, and the productive capacity of ritual. The chronotopes indexed in rituals exist as negotiated, contingent, performative evocations of pasts that continuously produce Buryats as subjects in the present. The epilogue also reminds readers that all the previous chapters are linked by the way in which contemporary Buryats emphasize materiality as proof for belief, and argues that this is a secular conception that undergirds contemporary Siberian religious practices. The materiality of ritual appears to participants to exceed its explanations, grounding revived post-Soviet religious practice in a secular discourse of evidentiary proof.

Porous Selves

Chapter 6 narrates a shamanic initiation and describes the family history that is produced in the process of diagnosing the initiate’s shamanic calling. In Yuri’s initiation we see the stakes of embracing one historical genre over another. For Yuri, whose father is Buryat and his mother Russian, whether or not he accepts a shamanic genealogical genre of the past is a matter of life or death for him and his family. This chapter illustrates the kind of relationships to the past that shamanic practices can build, and shows how engaging with historical genres can transform conceptions of self for post-Soviet subjects. The shamanic genre critiques the kind of self, the New Soviet Person, that Soviet modernism sought to cultivate. Through the process of diagnosing a calling and initiation, the aspiring shaman remakes themselves into porous subject, subjected to the will of their ancestors.

Etigelov at Maidari

Chapter 4 describes the summer festival of Maidari, the festival for the Maitreya Buddha held at the Ivolginsky monastery and an opportunity for pilgrims to worship the miraculously preserved body of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov. Both Etigelov and Maitreya are bodhisattvas who return, bringing enlightenment. The history of Buryatia produced through this genre is a Tibetan Buddhist history with a recursive chronotope. Told as a history of bodies, this history recounts the stories of Etigelov’s life, death, and return; Lenin’s preservation; Soviet medicine; and the effects of these on post-Soviet Buryat bodies. While Maitreya will return in the future, Etigelov has already returned, bringing healing by producing a recursive chronotope, in which the Soviet experience is encompassed by a Buddhist history within which science and scholarship are shown to have been always, already Buddhist and Buryat.

Soviet Selves

Chapter 2 presents the Soviet chronotope embodied in Victory Day celebrations. Victory Day, which is the celebration of the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II, presumes the familiar Soviet genre of history, in which the Soviet Union brought civilization to Buryatia, and Buryats achieved full citizenship in the Soviet utopian dream through their collective sacrifice during the war. The ritual does not narrate Soviet history. Instead, through Soviet and wartime imagery, and the parade form, the public holiday evokes this genre in symbolic form, enabling local residents to read their own narratives of the past into the imagery. This space for interpretation enables both validation as well as critique of the Soviet experience in Buryatia. Although not everyone in Buryatia agrees on how to evaluate this history, this genre is the taken-for-granted backdrop against which other religious actors define their narratives.

Opening the Center, Opening the Roads

Chapter 5 describes the inauguration of the Tengeri Shaman Association’s center in downtown Ulan-Ude. Tengeri considers contemporary social problems to be the karmic debt of violence from the Soviet period and sees Buddhism as a foreign colonizing power. By reaching back to the court of Chinghis Khan, when shamanism was a state religion, the shamans at Tengeri seek to recover the true, universal religion of all humanity, restore positive relationships with ancestor spirits and in the process, seek to solve social problems faced by contemporary Buryats. Their rituals produce a shamanic chronotope within which the past (as ancestor spirits) is co-present. Shamans thereby are able to produce an ongoing and malleable relationship with the past, that enables them to reconfigure the temporal double-bind faced by indigenous populations. They are able to restore “traditional” practices while rejecting the linear timeline that evaluates these practices through their distance from the modern.

An Inauguration for Etigelov

This chapter describes the inauguration of a Buddhist monument (stupa) in honor of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, a pre-revolutionary Buddhist leader who has returned in the post-Soviet period as a miraculously preserved body. This ritual allows us to see how three different historical genres coexist in the same context, thereby illustrating the larger argument of the book. These genres are a Buddhist institutional genre produced by the Buddhist Sangha, a local shamanic genre that focuses on state violence and draws on shamanic ideas about place spirits, and a Soviet genre that tells the history of the same village as a collective farm. This chapter presents an example of how multiple historical genres coexist and how people code-switch between them, depending on the context in which “us” is invoked.

Introduction

Applying J. L. Austin’s distinction between constative and performative speech to history-making offers terminology for studying how knowledge about the past is produced and wielded in the present. In drawing a distinction between a historical event as a constative fact and the performative effect of talking about that historical event in the present, scholars can identify historical genres. Just as literary genres are defined by chronotopes (the relationship between time, space, and the hero), so too historical genres can be defined by chronotopes. By indexing these chronotopes, ritual can work to situate people within time and space. In post-Soviet Buryatia, rituals become spaces where people can explore alternative chronotopes and re-evaluate the past. The chapter offers key background information and argues that the stakes of history are higher both in post-authoritarian contexts and among indigenous peoples.

City Day

City Day is a public celebration of the anniversary of Ulan-Ude’s founding. The public holiday, with a parade and speeches, indexes a chronotope and genre of history labeled the hospitality genre. This genre tells the history of Buryatia as a series of arrivals, beginning with the Buryats, followed by the Cossacks and Old Believer Orthodox Christians (Semeiskie). Both Cossacks and Old Believer Orthodox are Russian and yet not Russian, produced as local ethnic groups in opposition to the central Russian state, thereby transforming what might be a story of Russian colonization into a history of successive migrations. This genre produces a local history of multi-ethnic coexistence and toleration that contrasts the peaceful and multi-ethnic local with the national, and produces Buryatia as a place where many ethnicities have always, and will continue, to live together in peace and neighborly conviviality.