The Human Being in Social and Cosmic Orders. Categories of Traditional Culture and the Problems of Contemporary Buryat Identity

Acknowledgements 9 Note on transliteration 11 Introduction 13 Theoretical considerations on the problem of social order 15 Questions and claims 21 Methodology of data collection 23 Guest researchers in Buryatia 24 Researcher “at home” and the Buryat social order 29 Summary 34 1. The cultures of knowledge in Buryatia 36 1.1. The emergence of “Asia” and “Siberia” in European intellectual thought 37 1.2. Producing colonial knowledge about Siberia 43 1.3. Russian tradition of Oriental Studies 46 1.4. Buryat epistemic culture 49 1.5. Buryat attitude to the Western culture of knowledge 54 1.6. Soviet replacement of the traditional culture of knowledge 59 Summary 63 2. The history of social structures and their conceptions 65 2.1. The critique of the kinship society notion 65 2.2. A brief historical introduction: Buryat “clans” and their leaders before and after incorporation into the Russian state 71 2.3. The “tribal” vocabulary in selected Buryat sources 78 2.4. Focusing on the fi eldwork area 80 2.4.1. “Clan” and “tribes” of Khori Buryats 80 2.4.2. Soviet state and the traditional ideas of social order 87 2.4.3. The uses of genealogies: Creating and contesting Buryat identity 98 Summary 110 3. The human being in the flow of the vital forces 112 3.1. Kinship “materialities” 113 3.2. The relatedness of vital forces 115 3.3. The ideas of vital force 120 3.4. The hierarchy of vitality: Some practices of maintaining the relatedness 131 3.5. The order of vitality distribution 138 3.5.1. Yosun – the social order of vitality distribution 138 3.5.2. The universal order and the universal bonds 140 3.5.3. The individual engagement with the order 146 3.5.4. The human agency in the orders 152 3.6. The relation of individual and society 156 Summary 161 4. The social and cosmic orders 163 4.1. The relation between the social sphere and the non-social environment 164 4.2. Yosun as the order of a non-transcendental universe 171 4.3. Heuristic context of understanding the order: Selected aspects of Buryat-Mongolian social thought 176 4.4. The harmony of duality 183 4.5. On the way to defi ning the social sphere 189 4.6. Multiple orders of the universe 192 4.6.1. Ritual and dogma versus order and method 192 4.6.2. Yosun and the political order 201 Summary 205 5. The disturbed order: Categories of traditional culture and challenges of assimilative processes 207 5.1. The Buryat order and the problem of its continuity 207 5.2. The procedures of negotiating the yosun order 210 5.3. Language in the order 216 5.4. Inside and outside the order 223 5.5. The loss of the order and the decline of vitality 226 5.6. The restoration of vital forces – reconsidering the minority position 230 5.7. Problems of contemporary Buryat identity 237 Summary 240 Conclusion 241 Bibliography 248 Index of names 264 List of illustrations 267 Photographs 269