Buddhists, shamans, and Soviets : rituals of history in post-Soviet Buryatia / Justine Buck Quijada.

9780190916824 (electronic book)

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.

English

1 online resource : illustrations, maps.

BL2370.B87 Q45 2019

200.9575

History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a 'backward' nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march toward the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state. In the process, they also recovered knowledge about the past that the Soviet Union had silenced. Borrowing the analytic lens of the chronotope from Bakhtin, this text argues that rituals have chronotopes which situate people within time and space.

History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a 'backward' nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march toward the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state. In the process, they also recovered knowledge about the past that the Soviet Union had silenced. Borrowing the analytic lens of the chronotope from Bakhtin, this text argues that rituals have chronotopes which situate people within time and space.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on February 7, 2019).

Oxford scholarship online.

Print version: 9780190916794