The Human Being in Social and Cosmic Orders. Categories Of
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l l l l l Ayur Zhanaev • TheHuman Being • • in Social and Cosmic Orders • • Categories of Traditional Culture • • and the Problems • of Contemporary Buryat Identity •• •• :\.�"'E,RSYT,e1; --i' u .::, * t,, • • • - it � • • • • • • � • • • � � � *0 0!>is "'wuw •• •• •• •• •• •• •• Reviewer Łukasz Smyrski Commissioning Editor Ewa Wyszyńska Editing and Proofreading Ewa Balcerzyk Marta Radwańska Index Ewa Balcerzyk Cover Design Magdalena Jędraszko Layout and Typesetting Dariusz Górski Published with fi nancial support from the University of Warsaw Published with fi nancial support from the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Resocialisation, University of Warsaw © Copyright by Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa 2019 Ayur Zhanaev ORCID 0000-0002-8976-8811 ISBN 978-83-235-4009-0 (print) ISBN 978-83-235-4017-5 (pdf online) ISBN 978-83-235-4025-0 (e-pub) ISBN 978-83-235-4033-5 (mobi) Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 00-497 Warszawa, ul. Nowy Świat 4 e-mail: [email protected] Internet bookshop: www.wuw.pl 1st Edition, Warsaw 2019 Print and binding POZKAL Contents 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 6 Contents 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 fl ow 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 Contents 7 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 Acknowledgements Th e book is based on my doctoral thesis, Th e Human Being in Social and Cosmic Orders. Categories of Traditional Culture and the Problems of Contemporary Buryat Identity, which I defended in 2017 at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. Some fragments of this work were created, or later published, as separate papers. Nevertheless, only being brought together, within one work, they could make more sense. Th is book would not be possible without the help of many. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Stanisław Zapaśnik and Ewa No wicka, my research supervisors, for their patient guidance, encour- agement and critique of this research work. My grateful thanks are also extended to all my teachers: Polina Da shini maeva, Oyuna Dorzhigushaeva, Tuyana Dugarova, Krzysztof Gawlikowski, Hieronim Grala, Albert Jawłowski, Krzysztof Kiciński, Jan Kieniewicz, Zoya Morokhoeva, Wojciech Pawlik, Wojciech Połeć, Oyun- gerel Tangad, Andrzej Tymowski, Grażyna Woroniecka, and the reviewers of my work – Sławoj Szynkiewicz, Marcin Lubaś and Łukasz Smyrski. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Resocialisation, the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, the Centre for East European Studies of the University of Warsaw for their valuable sup- port. I owe a huge part of my inspirations to the seminars, workshops and other events organized by the project “Searching Identity: Global Challenges, Local Traditions” held by Jan Kieniewicz at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”. I am particularly grateful for the constructive feedback given by Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Ewa Domańska on some parts of this work, as well as for the fi rst lectures of the Polish language given 10 Acknowledgements by Agnieszka Fijałkowska in the already non-existing Centre of Polish Language, History and Culture at the Buryat State University. I wish to thank the Chair of Mongolian and Tibetan Studies of the University of Warsaw, namely: Agata Bareja-Starzyńska, Jerzy Tulisow and Stanisław Godziński, for consultations and the possibility to attend their classes and conferences; Ewa Dziurzyńska from the Archives of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cracow for helping me with the work in Władysław Kotwicz’s archives; Justyna Olko, John Sullivan, Aleksandra Sekuła for giving me the opportunity to take part in the fi eld school, workshops and seminars of the Engaged Humanities project; the Foundation for the Promotion of Mongolian Studies for the possibility of attending the Mongolian Government Summer School for Young Mongolists; interlocutors in Buryatia, Aga Okrug and Mongolia; and many others whom I do not mention here. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, relatives and friends for their support and encouragement throughout my study. Note on transliteration Transliteration of both Russian and Buryat follows the American Library Association – Library of Congress (ALA-LC) system for Cyril- lic. I adopted a modifi ed version of this style, rendering ë as yo. Th e three additional letters of the Buryat (and Mongolian) alphabet, Өө, Үү and Hh, are represented with Öö, Üü and Hh respectively; besides, I denote the letter Ээ as Ėė. For transliteration of the examples written in Classical Mongolian script, I used the system proposed by Stanisław Kałużyński [1998: 20–21]. Th ese rules do not apply to citations or instances that already have more familiar conventional spellings. Introduction From the interesting encounters I had while compiling this project, the strangest of all was at Tsugol. Th e proximity of the Chinese-Russian border had created the possibility for local Buryat lamas to have easier contacts with the Buddhist world and their kin in the Qing Empire. Consequently, in the 19th century, this area grew to become one of the largest centres of Buryat Buddhism with thousands of lamas res- ident, and yet was desolated during the anti-religious campaign soon after the rise of the Soviet state. After this, the border region became heavily militarized in order to avoid the threat from the pro-Japanese Manchukuo state and, later on, due to worsening relations with China. When in 2012 me and some Polish anthropologist colleagues were there for a short fi eldwork study, I saw the typical post-Soviet scenery of an abandoned and devastated semi-urbanized settlement. Unlike other Buryat monastic compounds, the main temple complex has been preserved, primarily because it had served as an important military supply depot and, then, it seemed out of place, almost anachronistic. It appeared as a mismatching object from a parallel world. After recent restoration works, it was the only island of relative prosperity amid the general backdrop of relative decline. However, while there were neither crowds of lamas, nor regiments of soldiers, the fl ow of history in this place was always present to its observer. We met a local school teacher, a pleasant Russian woman who had been gathering materials over the years and was truly interested in the local history and culture. She had come there from a diff erent region of Transbaikalia in the 1980s and witnessed many macro-changes, which were transforming this place. I decline to elaborate on the much-exotisized 14 Introduction topic of the post-Soviet frustration, which is actually my everyday reality, because a more pertinent topic demands my attention. It was clear to me that this woman was trying to tell us something that she found of cultural signifi cance. She began more than once with phrases like: “Th is was peculiar…” or “I was stricken with the fact that…”, but could not continue because she had to introduce the historical context fi rst.