I've been meaning to post about this for a while... A recent report on the religious struggles between followers of Sufi and Salafi Islam in Chechnya mentioned a young, prominent Salafi preacher who was trained in Egypt, Sheikh Said Buryatsky. As his name implies, he's half Buryat.
Admired by many for his eloquent, passionate sermons, Buryatsky has recently teamed up with Chechen rebel leaders, making the popular preacher persona non grata. Yet he seems to occupy an interesting position. Though trained by a prominent Salafi (sometimes referred to Wahhabi) teacher, Buryatsky was still allowed to preach on Radio Islam, an outlet closely controlled by Russian authorities who are no big fans of Salafi teachings.
Wouldn't you love to hear more about this guy's story? How did he decide to convert? How did he get to Egypt? Where's he from in Buryatia?
Friday, August 15, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The other side of the Buryat game
Okay, it may seem strange to reference an Erykah Badu song in the same breath as the early 20th-century Buryat intelligentsia, but that's how I roll. What I'm getting at is the hidden side in all the lives of the great Buryat men of letters: Their wives.
Finding women in historical documents is both ridiculously easy and mindnumbingly frustrating. We all know there had to women in the picture, and you can even find a few names. But discovering more about who they were, how they thought, what their lives were like... that's a tall order. Buryat women were notoriously undereducated, even though there were a few girl's schools among the Western Buryats near Irkutsk starting as early as the 1860s. Yet even the literate women didn't seem to have the time or perhaps the inclination to write about themselves. Unless there are sources in the archives somewhere I haven't seen. I hope there are.
That said, you can sometimes catch a brief glimpse of the amazing women who shared their lives with early Buryat intellectuals. Writer and scholar Bazar Baradin, for example, was married via arranged marriage in his teens to a literate young woman from Aga, Khandama Tsydenova. She was sent to a women's labor camp in Kazakhstan after her husband was arrested in 1937 during the psycho Stalinist witch hunt, and died there.
Tsyben Zhamtsarano, another lion of Buryat letters and thought, also had an extraordinary wife,Varvara Vladimirovna Vampilova who hailed from a progressive family from Alar (W. Buryat). Many of her relatives were respected teachers.
She was one of the first, if not the first, Buryat woman to attend the Leshaft Courses for Higher Education in St. Petersburg, a leading site for women's education in the 1900s and 1910s, which, I believe, Buryat Bolshevik bad-ass Maria Sakhianova also went to. She then went on to become a trained midwife, studying at the Imperial Clinical Gynological Institute, also in St. Petersburg. However, Vampilova died tragically young.
Prof. A. Rudnev, an important Mongolist at the time, wrote her obituary in the journal Zhivaia starina (1914) and described her thus:
"A Buryat by birth, V.V. Vampilova was one of the first women of that nation to strike out on the path of European education and, having achieved significant success, used the knowledge she had acquired for the good of her people.
"With her smarts and surprisingly warm and responsive personality, Varvara Vladimirovna charmed everyone who came in contact with her. She was an extraordinarily intelligent person and an excellent comrade. She gave herself over wholeheartedly to the interests of her native country and her people, and her soul ached at their need.
"Varvara Vladimirovna had a wonderful voice and knew many Buryat songs, the majority of which were recorded onto phonographs. [Wow! Anybody heard of these?] She became the wife of Prof. Zhamtsarano.
"At the height of her energies and career as a midwife, she died in Urga [Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia] during the campaign to combat typhoid fever in 1914."
Sad. Did Varvara write letters? Diaries? I wish I knew. I'd love to find out more about her.
Finding women in historical documents is both ridiculously easy and mindnumbingly frustrating. We all know there had to women in the picture, and you can even find a few names. But discovering more about who they were, how they thought, what their lives were like... that's a tall order. Buryat women were notoriously undereducated, even though there were a few girl's schools among the Western Buryats near Irkutsk starting as early as the 1860s. Yet even the literate women didn't seem to have the time or perhaps the inclination to write about themselves. Unless there are sources in the archives somewhere I haven't seen. I hope there are.
That said, you can sometimes catch a brief glimpse of the amazing women who shared their lives with early Buryat intellectuals. Writer and scholar Bazar Baradin, for example, was married via arranged marriage in his teens to a literate young woman from Aga, Khandama Tsydenova. She was sent to a women's labor camp in Kazakhstan after her husband was arrested in 1937 during the psycho Stalinist witch hunt, and died there.
Tsyben Zhamtsarano, another lion of Buryat letters and thought, also had an extraordinary wife,Varvara Vladimirovna Vampilova who hailed from a progressive family from Alar (W. Buryat). Many of her relatives were respected teachers.
She was one of the first, if not the first, Buryat woman to attend the Leshaft Courses for Higher Education in St. Petersburg, a leading site for women's education in the 1900s and 1910s, which, I believe, Buryat Bolshevik bad-ass Maria Sakhianova also went to. She then went on to become a trained midwife, studying at the Imperial Clinical Gynological Institute, also in St. Petersburg. However, Vampilova died tragically young.
Prof. A. Rudnev, an important Mongolist at the time, wrote her obituary in the journal Zhivaia starina (1914) and described her thus:
"A Buryat by birth, V.V. Vampilova was one of the first women of that nation to strike out on the path of European education and, having achieved significant success, used the knowledge she had acquired for the good of her people.
"With her smarts and surprisingly warm and responsive personality, Varvara Vladimirovna charmed everyone who came in contact with her. She was an extraordinarily intelligent person and an excellent comrade. She gave herself over wholeheartedly to the interests of her native country and her people, and her soul ached at their need.
"Varvara Vladimirovna had a wonderful voice and knew many Buryat songs, the majority of which were recorded onto phonographs. [Wow! Anybody heard of these?] She became the wife of Prof. Zhamtsarano.
"At the height of her energies and career as a midwife, she died in Urga [Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia] during the campaign to combat typhoid fever in 1914."
Sad. Did Varvara write letters? Diaries? I wish I knew. I'd love to find out more about her.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Buryats Down Under
It's the stuff of legend: A Buryat community down under. Recently, a colleague/buddy (hey, in the world of Buryatology, we're all buds) shot a question out about the Australian Buryats. I shrugged, not knowing anything about Australia or any potential long-lost Aga Buryats there. A recent visitor of Aga Buryat extraction thought the Australian hypothesis somewhat improbable, as no one from there had ever come back to Aga to say hi. Very reasonable.
But then, as I sat recently at our local library, reading and wishing I had a cookie, I came across this tidbit in a 2005 book by B. Shirnen published in Ulaanbaatar and titled Buriadyn nuudel--khel, aialguuny uchir. There, to my great surprise, I discovered not just a passing mention, but a whole subsection on the Buryats of Australia (pp 81-83).
The story is pretty wacky. The story begins in 1981, when a Buryat archery champ from the Chita region met an old man who spoke Buryat and told the tale of Australia's 40-odd Buryat households whose ancestors had left Aga during difficult times. First, Buryats were drafted into the Russian military to dig ditches and built fortifications in World War I. Prior to this draft, "native peoples" such as the Buryats had been exempt from military service (with the exception, naturally, of the Buryat Cossacks). Then, the Civil War broke out a few years later, and many intellectual and religious leaders decided it would be better to move to Inner or Outer Mongolia.
However, several enterprising young Buryats decided to look for the legendary homeland of Nayan Navaa and headed for Japan. They traveled long through Manchuria, asking the way, until they reached the Pacific. After they were robbed at port, they were taken by a ship's captain to Australia, to become servants of a wealthy man there who understood only two words of his new employees' language: "Chinggis" and "Mongol".
The Buryats herded their new master's sheep and took care of his flocks on Australia's grasslands. Their master treated them like slaves, but eventually they learned to read and write English, and through mutual support were able to get their own farms and start families.
Read more in an oh so accessible article by a certain Galsan, "Avstrali ruu achigdsan buriad," an article in the Tsagaan-Ovoo sum (Dornod Aimag, Mongolia) newspaper from 1995 (no. 8). Hey, no one ever said Buryatology was easy.
But then, as I sat recently at our local library, reading and wishing I had a cookie, I came across this tidbit in a 2005 book by B. Shirnen published in Ulaanbaatar and titled Buriadyn nuudel--khel, aialguuny uchir. There, to my great surprise, I discovered not just a passing mention, but a whole subsection on the Buryats of Australia (pp 81-83).
The story is pretty wacky. The story begins in 1981, when a Buryat archery champ from the Chita region met an old man who spoke Buryat and told the tale of Australia's 40-odd Buryat households whose ancestors had left Aga during difficult times. First, Buryats were drafted into the Russian military to dig ditches and built fortifications in World War I. Prior to this draft, "native peoples" such as the Buryats had been exempt from military service (with the exception, naturally, of the Buryat Cossacks). Then, the Civil War broke out a few years later, and many intellectual and religious leaders decided it would be better to move to Inner or Outer Mongolia.
However, several enterprising young Buryats decided to look for the legendary homeland of Nayan Navaa and headed for Japan. They traveled long through Manchuria, asking the way, until they reached the Pacific. After they were robbed at port, they were taken by a ship's captain to Australia, to become servants of a wealthy man there who understood only two words of his new employees' language: "Chinggis" and "Mongol".
The Buryats herded their new master's sheep and took care of his flocks on Australia's grasslands. Their master treated them like slaves, but eventually they learned to read and write English, and through mutual support were able to get their own farms and start families.
Read more in an oh so accessible article by a certain Galsan, "Avstrali ruu achigdsan buriad," an article in the Tsagaan-Ovoo sum (Dornod Aimag, Mongolia) newspaper from 1995 (no. 8). Hey, no one ever said Buryatology was easy.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Fantastic Orientalism, with terrifying "Buriat" prince
Read all about it: Olga Davidoff's Wedding.
The setting: the highly sophisticated society of Tobolsk, where "Samoyeds" and foie gras appear in the space of a single sentence. And where charming, civilized Buryats sweep well-bred young ladies off their feet, only to entangle them in dark webs of Siberian savagery! I feel my bosom trembling in its corset as I type!
During a long Google Books troll for anything that might possibly add to my dissertation, I found this little Orientalist gem, courtesy of the Belgravia Annual. This issue came out in 1884, at Christmas. What says Christmas more than a wildly wacky fantasy trip to a Buryat "castle" where banditry is the name of the game? This very creative version of Buryat culture naturally says more about the author and the author's culture than its subjects.
The setting: the highly sophisticated society of Tobolsk, where "Samoyeds" and foie gras appear in the space of a single sentence. And where charming, civilized Buryats sweep well-bred young ladies off their feet, only to entangle them in dark webs of Siberian savagery! I feel my bosom trembling in its corset as I type!
During a long Google Books troll for anything that might possibly add to my dissertation, I found this little Orientalist gem, courtesy of the Belgravia Annual. This issue came out in 1884, at Christmas. What says Christmas more than a wildly wacky fantasy trip to a Buryat "castle" where banditry is the name of the game? This very creative version of Buryat culture naturally says more about the author and the author's culture than its subjects.
By Way of Explanation
Hi. You can call me Shinejil. I have a confession to make: I'm a Buryatophile.
There, I've said it.
Hence this blog. I hope it will be a place where people like me, from academic and non-academic worlds, can discuss all things Buryat, passionately but politely, in English, Buryat, Mongol, or Russian.
There, I've said it.
Hence this blog. I hope it will be a place where people like me, from academic and non-academic worlds, can discuss all things Buryat, passionately but politely, in English, Buryat, Mongol, or Russian.
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