Articles
Russian diaspora in Mongolia: stages of forming frontier religiosity
Alexey Mikhalev
Vostok/Oriens '2017, №2
This paper seeks to examine religious issues in frontier local com-munities of Mongolia. The author studies the change of ethnic Russians' religious identity in Mongolia and attempts to find out how change of borderline has influenced religious identity. The basic question is can a society preserve its religious tradition in the conditions of changing borders? As the author of this paper concludes, it is impossible. Since the Russian Empire collapsed, the role of Russian Orthodoxy reduced, and it became merely an element of collective memory. Russian Orthodoxy now only de-fines the identity of those Russians who live in Mongolia. This is the key reason why the author presents a new notion – “memory of Russian Ortho-doxy”. This notion is a set of memorizing practices which emerge in the conditions when links to the church and the church itself are absent. Such conditions are the reason why a special type of religious identity appears. Such religious identity is based on two or three religious traditions. Having two or even three faiths is widely spread among the peoples of Inner Asia. The usual combination is represented by Buddhism and Shamanism. Russian colonization of Mongolia, starting from Eastern Siberia, a region with widely spread practices of double or triple faith, led to their final establishment as a social phenomenon. At the same time, Russians borrowed a wide range of phenomena from the Mongols, from religion to language and everyday life practices. This has influenced the identity of the social group under study. Russians were transformed into so-called local Russians and, later on, into the “locals”. As the identity of “local Russians” was connected with local traditions and the frontier (which represented a re-source), they had more opportunities to choose their religions. The timeline of the study covers a period from the late nineteenth till the early twenty first century, the whole period when the Russian diaspora has lived in Mongolia.
Keywords: Russian diaspora, religion, Mongolia, frontier, local Russians
Pages: С. 62–71
