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Abstract
This article analyses the social life of narratives within the contemporary Ak-Jang [Ak-Çaŋ] movement of the Altai people of Southern Siberia, based on periodic fieldwork from 2009-2012, with recent updates using the Internet and short trips. The author argues that the Ak-Jang movement, while it has roots and commonalities in the Burkhanist “new religion” of the turn of the twentieth century, also has divergences. While both were politically oppositionist, Ak-Jang members today mobilize against formal, official Buddhism and against outsiders, including tourists. Focus of the article is on written texts, often defending the ecology of sacred lands, stemming from cosmic “messages” received by Ak-Jang members.
List of Abbreviations
| AMAE RAN — | = | Archive of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St. Petersburg. |
| GANO — | = | State Archive of Novosibirsk Oblast, Novoskbirsk. |
| IEA RAN — | = | The Russian Academy of Sciences N.N. Miklukho-Maklay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Moscow. |
| MAE RAN — | = | Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg. |
| R.A. — | = | The Altai Republic. |
Notes
1. The present publication is a supplemented and reworked variant of two previously published articles by the author in French and Russian [Arzyutov Citation2014; Arzyutov Citation2015].
2. Taken from the official page of Ak-Jang [Ak-Çan̡]in the VKontakte social network. The text was published on May 5, 2015 with the signature Kudajdьn bicigin bicip algan kiƶi Tabaeva N. [https://vk.com/wall-47031643_1109].
3. Some of the “messages” were previously published by researchers (Halemba Citation2008, Arzyutov Citation2015).
4. Due to the public nature of the movement and the multitude of publications by movement participants indicating authors’ names, including in social networks, none of the names of my Altai acquaintances in this article are changed to “anonymous.”
5. The existence of the image of Japon-Khan [Japon-Xan] in Altai folklore is not corroborated by the sources.
6. Altaians call a cow’s stomach a “book,” and a sheep’s as well. Such transference of a book onto an animal’s body can be interpreted as variants of the use of fragments of the latter in magic practices that are compared with “reading.”
7. At present, K.I. Tanashev’s manuscript is fully read, translated, and commented on, and is being prepared for printing together with N.O. Tadysheva.
8. The books of Nikolai Shodoev, director of the Museum of Mendur-Sokkon in Ust’-Kan region, can be called the best-known case of “scientization” (see, for example, Shodoev, Citation2009). However, Shodoev’s “philosophy” is a separate case for further analysis.
9. The Plateau Prophet Dance (or Prophet Dance) is a messianic (nativistic, revitalization) movement among the Indians of North America, above all among the Coast Salish, who live in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. The movement consists of ritual dances, through which participants aspire to bring back the dead and to renew the world, invoking the time before European colonization. The Prophet Dance was a predecessor of the Ghost Dance of the second half of the nineteenth century.
10. Comparisons and analogies have their limitations, no matter how great the temptation to use them. Thus, the structure and composition of the “messages” little resembles the “magic writing” or “luck letters” known to folklorists (for detail see Panchenko 2000, pp. 341–53).
11. A Tag’l is a stone altar in the form of a rectangular flat stone, or it can be the aggregate of such altars, that is, a ritual place.
12. About Bor (Boor) see Neskazovhnaia proza 2011, pp. 351–61.
13. Majman—a numerically large kin-group of the Altai people, divided into two halves: kara-majman (“black majmans”) and kөgөl-majman (“blue majmans”). Majmans are historically connected with analogous kin-groups among the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Mongols, and others.
14. This village is better known in the Altai translation of its Soviet name, for the collective farm that used to exist here, Lenin çol, “Lenin’s way.”
15. This is not particularly unusual for Altai newspapers, where such sections appear both in Krasnaia Oirotiia in the 1930s and in the contemporary Zvezda Altaia.
17. https://vk.com/ak_burkan .
18. For example, over a hundred photographs were displayed on the Çaŋь Altaj–dvizhenie group site in 2017, a chain of images showing the creation of a new ritual place, a tag’l, in the village of Kyryk in the Ust’-Kan region (https://vk.com/album-47031643_244419662).
19. Ak-Alaka (Akalakha on maps) is a river in the south of the Altai Republic in the Ukok Plateau, where the “Altai princess” was found.
20. This pairing has been relevant in the Altai for a long time, at least since 1948, when the Oirot Autonomous Oblast became the Gorno-Altai [AO]), when convergence of the toponym (the Altai) and the ethnonym (Altai people, Altaians) occured (for more detail see Broz Citation2009b).
21. During field research, I often heard that religious “sorting out” [opredelenie] is part of the policy of the “center,” but no one referenced any concrete administrative instructions from “the higher authorities [big powers].”
a. The linguistic terms “emic” and “etic” are adapted here, referring to “insider” and “outsider” views, although those who use these terms recognize that there can be great variation within them. For other sources on Burkhanism and Ak-Jang, see especially Liudmila Sherstova “Burkhanism in Gornyi Altai” Religion and Politics in Russia, M. M. Balzer, ed. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2010, pp. 225-244; and Andrei Vinogradov “The Phenomenon of the ‘White Faith’ in Southern Siberia” Religion and Politics in Russia, M. M. Balzer, ed. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2010, pp. 245-257.
b. The gloss ‘altar’ does minimal justice to the word tag’l . As translator Stephan Lang points out, it is a “node” where the wall between worlds is particularly porous. Literally, it is “a button that is fastened to god.” It is also explained in note 12 of the author.
c. Editor Leslie English points out that this is a common gesture in Buddhism that usually implies sacredness and veneration, not necessarily “revealing the meaning of the ‘text.’” It is possible that Danilin was not fully versed in Buddhist worship.
d. I traced the original language, rather than relying on a back-translation for this passage from Sergei Oushakine’s “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture, 2001, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 196.
e. The original text is used, and the author’s reference to Julie Cruikshank’s fieldwork is slightly corrected, since she worked with Athabascan Yukon Dené peoples. Her larger point, citing Catherine McClennon and glossed here, is that indigenous groups used and adapted Christian texts and ideas for their own purposes, a theme integral to Bryn Mawr anthropology that we shared with Catherine McClennon and Frederica de Laguna, our mentors. See also Julie Criukshank Do Glaciers Listen. Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounter and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005).
f. The Altai princess or “Golden princess” is also called in English the “Siberian Ice Maiden.” See this journal for her political context, M. M. Balzer, ed. “Archeology and Nationalism,” especially the article by Gertjan Plets et al “Repatriation, Doxa, and Contested Heritages” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia 2013, 52 (2), pp. 72-98.
g. The author is using Benedict Anderson’s phrase and adapting his argument concerning “imagined communities.” See only later than 1991 editions, for example Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). For Michel Foucault, mentioned without attribution in the paragraph above, see his The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994).