Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage

Auteur

Joseph J. Long is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Research and Policy Lead for Scottish Autism. In 2012 he was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's J.B. Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art for his work on Buryat dance.

Texte du rabat

In the mid-2000s, Russia's government began to merge Siberian indigenous territories (autonomous okrugs) into larger administrative regions. Among the Buryats living to the west of Lake Baikal, the state promoted a policy of "National Cultural Autonomy" that sought to separate cultural identity from land and mobilized public performances of Buryat culture to show support for this separation of nationality from territorial sovereignty. However, resurgent local rituals reinforced Buryats' enduring ties to the land.
In Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage, Joseph J. Long provides new insights into the ways in which shamanist ritual and Buryat national culture have shaped one another over time. Both have created spaces for Buryats to negotiate, renegotiate, and make public different kinds of belonging. Based primarily on anthropological fieldwork undertaken in Western Buryat communities, this book provides firsthand accounts and original photographs of everyday ritual practices, clan ceremonies, and dance and folklore performances.
Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage explores the relationship between shamanist rituals and formal performing arts, showing how post-Soviet public culture and performances are shaped by one another to create new symbols of national identity.

Contenu

Acknowledgments
Notes on transliteration, terminology, and style
Acronyms and abbreviations, groups and associations
Introduction
Mankhai, October 2005

1. Western Buryats in Context
2. Hospitality, Reciprocity, and Everyday Ritual
3. Kinship, Ritual, and Belonging in Western Buryat Communities
4. Constructing Culture, Framing Performance
5. Territorial Unification and National Cultural Autonomy in Cisbaikalia
6. Buryat Dance and the Aesthetics of Belonging
7. Institutionalized Shamanism and Ritual Change
8. Mankhai Revisited: Place-Making and Precedence after Territorial Autonomy
   Conclusions, Returns, and Reflections
   Bibliography
   Index