Buriat Religion

Buriat Religion

BURIAT RELIGION. The Buriats, northern Mongols, are the most significant minority native to eastern Siberia. They are not a homogeneous body; there are two cultural extremes, between which exists a range of intermediate groups.

The western or Cisbaikalian extreme is represented by the Ekhirit-Bulagat tribe, forest dwellers who are engaged in hunting and fishing. Although they were isolated from the Mongolian empire, they had begun to practice livestock breeding through the influence of Mongolian émigrés at the time of the arrival of Russian cossacks in the mid-seventeenth century. After colonization and sedentarization, their segmentary clan structure survived more ideologically than practically. Shamanism has remained strong there up to the present, successfully resisting the assaults of lamaist propaganda and affected only superficially by Orthodox Christianity.

The eastern or Transbaikalian extreme is represented by the Khori, who, as a result of Mongolian civil wars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, settled with their herds in the steppes. They were treated favorably by the rulers of the Russian empire because of their strategic position in relation to the Chinese empire. Beginning in the eighteenth century, lamaism, which had come from Mongolia, spread rapidly. While lamaism favored the ideals of nomadic pastoralism and developed the tendency toward a centralizing hierarchy, it was forced to adapt its practice to traditional shamanic forms and to fight the power of the shamans themselves.

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