Read more
Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets examines indigenous, post-Soviet religious revival in the Republic of Buryatia through the lens of Bakhtin's chronotope. Comparing histories from Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Quijada offers a new lens for analyzing ritual and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know their past.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliterations, Translations and Photographs
- Chronology
- Introduction: If you want to have a future you have to have a good relationship to your past
- Chapter 1: An Inauguration for Etigelov: Multiple Genres of History in Buryatia
- Chapter 2: Soviet Selves: Victory Day
- Chapter 3: City Day, Hospitality, the Friendship of the Peoples and Multikulturalizm
- Chapter 4: Etigelov at Maidari: The Once and Future Buddhist
- Chapter 5: Opening the Center, Opening the Roads
- Chapter 6: Porous Selves: Yuri's Initiation
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Justine Buck Quijada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on shamanism, secularism, and ritual. She is co-editor of Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia.
Summary
Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets examines indigenous, post-Soviet religious revival in the Republic of Buryatia through the lens of Bakhtin's chronotope. Comparing histories from Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Quijada offers a new lens for analyzing ritual and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know their past.
Additional text
In this highly innovative study, Dr. Quijada shows that rituals do not just make history, but do so through distinctive genres that come from seemingly contradictory domains: Soviet, shamanic, and Buddhist. By combining ritual studies with insights from linguistic anthropology she illustrates how rhetorical referencing can change an event that has occurred in the past.
