The sub-ethnic aspects of the Buryats: the issues of ethnic self-identification

Abstract

The article describes the ethnic self-consciousness of Buryats in contemporary Russia, with a focus on sub-ethnic identification. Thus the issue of sub-ethnicity is seen through the prism of identification and linked to the clan and tribal structure of an ethnicity.

The complex tribal structure of the Buryats includes a multitude of entities, the largest of which are the Ekhirid, the Bulagad, the Khondogor and the Khori. All of them are descendants of proto-Buryat tribes who lived in the Baikal region in the Middle Ages. It is with these groups that many contemporary Buryats identify themselves.

A brief look at the history of Buryat tribes shows that they began as strictly exogamic communities, as large patriarchal families. The arrival of Russian settlers in the Baikal region in the 17^th century led to a rearrangement of the borders of the tribes’ traditional territories. At the turn of the 19^th century, land was divided along the territorial borders of the ulus, rather than viewed as belonging to a particular clan. Thus, clan structure no longer directly matched territorial communities. In the 19^th century clans begin functioning as administrative units. Tribal divisions survived, but tribes split into smaller groups which recruited representatives of other nomadic clans passing through the territory associated with a tribe. In early 20^th century the administrative role of clan communities collapsed. The policy aimed at the construction of a Socialist Buryat nation, aided by the official control of migration in the USSR, created a specific ethnic community within the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The clan and tribal structure in the Soviet years lost its historical functions, but survived in the memories and self-identification of the Buryats. The 1990s saw its renaissance in the general conditions of national revival – including the re-actualization of clans and tribes as identities.

The existence of Buryats’ sub-ethnic identification with a clan and a tribe does not prevent them from belonging to a unified Buryat ethnicity or a federal-level Russian civil identity. The identification with a clan in Buryatia is relevant, since a number of functions are assigned to it. Therefore, in the foreseeable future it will survive as a specific feature of the Buryat ethnicity.