Human groups are notoriously fractioning, particularly religions in times of trouble. New religious movements have been widely studied as a well-known social phenomenon, with some scholars arguing that Christianity and Buddhism are themselves variations on new religious movements established by charismatic and self-sacrificing leaders. Japanese scholars consider some spiritual revitalization movements to be spinoffs of relatively recent others, to the point where they discuss “new, new religious movements.”Footnote1
It is logical that the spiritual experimentation and political-economic instability of the post-Soviet period have provided substantial contexts for local variations on new religious movements in various parts of Eurasia. Fearful or conservative outsiders often derogatorily name such movements “sects” or “cults.” However, they manifest a range of group “insider” dynamics and a potential feast for open-minded searchers for processes behind cultural change.Footnote2 Focus in this issue is on two movements in traditionally Buddhist regions within the Russian Federation: the republics of Kalmykia and Altai.
The kernel of this project began with a delightful, unsolicited email from Valeria Gazizova, a talented Tatar–Russian woman with a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Oslo. She has been working since 2011 with a group of nativist Kalmyk proselytizers of a religious movement that advocates returning to Kalmyk roots, specifically valorizing a legendary figure called the White Old Man (Tsagan Aava in Kalmyk), who they deem has been given short shrift in official Buddhist practice.Footnote3 Their rituals and texts hinge on cosmic messages that members receive from the White Old Man (Pure Wise Elder) in a ritual language that must then be deciphered and interpreted by the group, using a mix of Kalmyk and Russian. Valeria’s original letter to me included two tantalizing photographs. Would I be interested? Of course I was hooked, and a complex correspondence resulted in expansion of the article and further photographs.
Is this “Cosmic Buddhism” movement a symptom of “constructed culture” or “invented religion?” Is it bricolage layering or a syncretic composite? Inauthentic?Footnote4 Given the passion of its followers, and the spinoffs of groups from their original charismatic female leader, it hardly seems fair to label something this exciting and dynamic “inauthentic,” even if its ritual practices seem like a capricious amalgam of pre-Buddhist fire sacrifices and Buddhist piety, clothed in shiny white satin. Whether the “White Old Man” movement can become a fully sustainable “new religion” depends on its membership, as well as the responses of political and Buddhist authorities to its messages.
A fascinatingly parallel movement has flourished in the Altai Mountains, complete with Buddhist rebellion, ecology activism, and roots in the turn-of-the-twentieth century movement called Burkhanism.Footnote5 It comes with all-too-familiar official scrutiny, including the labeling of some of its tracts as “dangerous.” This Altaian new religious movement is called Ak-Jang [Ak-Çaŋ], sometimes glossed as “White Faith,” with meanings including “Holy pathway/law.” While relatively better known than “Cosmic Buddhism,” it too features messages from cosmic forces that resemble religious “channeling.” Some of its charismatic leaders have been arrested and tried for religious extremism on the basis of their disseminated literature (books, brochures).
Our anthropologist-interpreter of Ak-Jang is Dmitry Arzyutov, a charming Russian scholar with long-term field experience in the Altai, known and admired for productive collaborative projects with local scholars. For this project Arzyutov has focused on the narratives of insider Ak-Jang members who have received and interpreted cosmic “messages” that they say urge them to protect sacred Altai lands, not only for the Altaian people but for the whole world. Supplementing his field narratives with data from several local Altai Internet group listservs, he points out that the solidarity built through these new media has changed the nature of the religious practice itself. Well versed in American and European anthropology, he cites MacArthur Foundation prizewinner Faye Ginsburg on the meaning of new media for indigenous peoples. He also interprets the ways that local, politicized Ak-Jang members have adapted Buddhism by turning it to their own purposes. This process resembles the oppositional revitalization movements of Native Americans, such as the Prophet Dance and the somewhat later and more famous Ghost Dance of the nineteenth century.Footnote6 Ak-Jang activists have, he explains, been practicing a kind of “visionary politics” complete with prophetic warnings.
In sum, this issue features data and analysis illuminating two of the most striking new religious movements to have come out of Buddhist-Indigenous interactions in the post-Soviet period. While focus is on Kalmykia and the Altai, homelands of peoples of Mongol and Turkic backgrounds, lessons learned go considerably beyond these lesser-known regions of Russia. We are reminded yet again of the astonishing human creativity expressed through spiritual impulses, particularly when members of nonhegemonic groups perceive themselves to be under siege by outsiders, be they neocolonial Russians or local Native authorities or multiethnic tourists.
Our next issue continues the theme of “new and old religious movements” by analyzing manifestations of politically meaningful, spiritually infused ritual practices emerging from Russian Orthodox tradition, and from new interpretations of Judaism.
Notes
1. The literature on new religious movements is burgeoning, including guides for further reference. See especially Dereck Daschke and W. Michael Ashcraft, eds., New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University, 2005); James Lewis and Inge Tollefsen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (New York: Oxford, 2016, 2nd ed.); Olaf Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, eds., The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
2. Relevant scholarship is emerging from Russia, centered on scholars from St. Petersburg. See Zhanna Kormina, Aleksander Panchenko and Sergei Shtyrkov, eds., Izobretenie religii: Desekuliarizatsii v postsovetsom kontekste? (St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2015), a collection derived from a conference held at the European University.
3. For context see Elza Bair-Guchinova, “The Republic of Kalmykia: Mongols in Europe,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia,1999, vol. 37 (4), pp. 11–90; and Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., “Kalmyk Connections,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2015, vol. 53 (4), pp. 1–92.
4. These questions represent debates in anthropology and religious studies, inspired by and adapting Western scholarship from theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson on “constructed” or “invented” culture and “imagined communities.” See Alexander Agadjanian’s clever review of Zhanna Kormina, Alexander Panchenko, and Sergei Shtyrkov, eds.: “The Invention of Religion: Desecularization in the Post-Soviet Context?” State, Religion and Church, 2016 (1), pp. 106–15.
5. See also Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., Religion and Politics in Russia (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2010); and Agnieszka E. Halemba, The Telengits of Southern Siberia: Landscape, Religion and Knowledge in Motion (London: Routledge, 2006).
6. Arzyutov uses these analogies, mentioning the work of Sergei Kan and Julie Cruikshank. See also the classic monographs by James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991 reprint); and Leslie Spier, The Prophet Dance of the Northwest and Its Derivatives: The Source of the Ghost Dance (Menasha: George Banta Publishing, 1935). For indigenous perspective, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).