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...