The Buryat People of Mongolia

In the early 1920s, Siberian pastoralists, who had roamed the countryside for centuries under loose power structures, formed a short-lived state, sympathetic with the rising force of Russian socialism. It took less than a decade for the Buryat Republic to collapse under Stalin's rapid expansion. Stalin, seeking to unify his budding nation and afraid of Buryat nationalism, killed more than 10,000 Buryats, including the intellectual and political elite. The Buryat resistance to Stalin's socialism evaporated. But now, Caroline Humphrey argues, the people of Buryatiya, though heavily influenced by more than half a century of Russian rule, retain a cultural distinctiveness and method of living that differs from their recent Russian history.

Humphrey's preface to her book, "Marx Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind," does a good job of sticking to the facts and addressing the current challenges of the Buryat people. Her compilation of essays, "The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism," also succeeds in its analysis of the smaller issues and its conclusions about differing ethics. In both works, Humphrey is weakest when she invokes anthropological theory in a convoluted and ineffective way. Humphrey does best when she sticks to the facts and avoids theorizing about universalities.

Humphrey, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, has carried out fieldwork in Buryatiya since the 1960s. She is a sort of structuralist who tries to see the issues from a framework within the culture. She also believes that power structures of oppression reinforce inequality.

In "Marx Went Away," written in 1998, she discusses the huge effects that the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. had on the Buryat Republic, now a province of Russia. Her main finding is that now, after the fall of the collective farm, there is a "need to integrate local cultures and rural economies at different stages of development into one national political economy."

After the U.S.S.R. broke up and money and private property were introduced into Buryatiya, life became, in some ways, more difficult for the Buryat people. The main city of Buryatiya, Ulan-Ude, and the Republic's government based there became financially supportive of the countryside but financially dependent on Moscow. The poverty of the region can now be shown with a numbers in terms of debt.

Buryat people are reluctant to blame Stalinism for their inability to be self-sufficient, partly because they do not consider themselves dependent and weak. But also because of the "two-sidedness of Stalinism" as combining the massive number of deaths caused by Stalin and the pain still felt by that with the stance of the socialist system as a structure for people's lives. That is, for many decades people lived, died and planned their lives through "the structures set up first by the Stalinist state."

This allegiance to the principles is reflected in the noncontroversial presence of communists at the head of government. It also causes an alternative interpretation of the past violence that Stalin committed against the Buryat people. The Buryat people's recollections of their ancestors who died fighting collectivism half a century ago are those of respect for people fighting for a just cause but there is no feeling that they were unjustly murdered. Humphreys says this is part of their way of coping with pain.

Another lingering part of Stalinism is the political part of the Buryat ethnic group's self-identification. They reject the stigma of and classification as being "Asiatic" Mongols, considering it "backward." When Stalin was in power, being anything other than a Russian had the potential "long-term implications" that being a "complainant" could infuriate the nationalistic Russian government. Compared to Mongols, Buryats are Europeanized Russians, but compared to Russians they cannot consider themselves Mongolian because of a "justified fear of Russian nationalist backlash against even small public encouragement of Buryat distinctiveness."

Humphreys says that Buryatiya is in the painful "grip of de-modernization" where "newspapers are full of advice about how to plant onions or how to store carrots." There is an odd mix in Buryatiya between the daughter who went to college and became a doctor and her elderly mother who must practice horticulture just to get food to eat in the parachute-free economy. One consequence of this is the return to the religious, shamanistic way embodied by the "cult of Soodei Lama of Barguzin" in an attempt to answer the question, "What is to be done."

The current feeling is that of regeneration, Humphreys says. Rural people in Buryatiya "are generating indigenous projects" for their communities. Humphreys also emphasizes the increase "localities," a vague term that has something to do with building community bonds and traditions at the cost of the nation-state's (Russia's) source of cohesive power.

Her essay compilation, "The Unmaking of Soviet Life," written in 2002, is mostly straightforward and presents issues in Buryatiya, as well as other post-socialist areas in Siberia and Central Russia. However, her main conclusion-that "the ongoing reproduction of a relationship or an organization is influenced by what people think it is"-while not easily disputed, is too vague and meaningless to tie the essays together. Her essays are based on fieldwork and an equivalent theoretical basis as "Marx Went Away."

The individual essays discuss pragmatic problems with the aim to understand.

It is "impossible to disentangle the 'economic' from the 'political' in postsocialist Russia," Humphrey argues, because the collective creates a cohesive community that politically excludes those not in it. Humphrey demonstrates this with studies on the collective farm and the way the poorer they got the more politically unified they became and with the emphasis placed on delineating foreign goods from domestic goods in Moscow.

She also argues that concept of the domination of the state remains strong despite the accepted increase in "mobile traders, who make profits from the existence of localized resources and demands." In one chapter, which has philosophical implications as well as anthropological ones, Humphrey discusses how bribery and racketeering create "parallel relations of power within and beyond legitimate institutions." Humphrey almost defends the thieves morally when she says, "when a state establishes [itself] in terms of economic rationale ... the law becomes something that is up for definition and appropriation."

Humphrey's weakest point is on the subject of personhood. She argues that when a person has no economic reference point in their life, they appear "as an actor in power relations that subsume the economic" and that their model of social relations becomes "based on domination, obedience, and obligation." She continues, saying that the economic instability is chanelled into shamanistic religious practices.

She comes back to her thesis with an economic and personal twist. She says that while people see "suddenly miserable poverty [coming] to exist alongside soaring, inexplicable wealth ... as 'happening to them,' they themselves have been and are participants." This means that the people chose to embrace the post-socialist way of living and create their own "new kinds of activities and new rationales." In other words, people find reasons for their lives.

Aside from the fact that a thesis statement should not need to be so distilled to make sense, the other flaw in this thesis is that it does not shed light on anything that profound. Of course, people participate in their own lives. Of course, it does not matter how much force is placed on a culture the decisions come down to a choice on what to believe. However, these ideas do not seem like the best conclusions for Humphrey's book. Perhaps she should have been content to allow her essays to stand by themselves as explanations of smaller issues.

This over-generalized, micro-level concept of a self-powered life in "The Unmaking of Soviet Life" is hard to reconcile with Humphrey's more tangible macro-level thesis in "Marx Went Away" of a necessity for integration of local cultures in a state. The two theses work from different angles but could be consolidated to say that, to create a state, people need to agree to and believe in the process of merging their cultures and economies with other disparate peoples.

Despite the quality of anthropological work in "Unmaking of Soviet Life," the thesis seems to be trying to condense the actions of a society into the choices of the individual actors and as such resembles a sort of psychological anthropology. This is disconcerting because of the importance in anthropology of discounting individual actions and emphasizing the collective actions of a society. The thesis stresses the Buryat people's choice to give in to Soviet power as a subconscious series of choices. But just because Humphrey posits the choices as subconscious does not mean that they should be considered in an anthropological work.

In contrast, "Karl Went Away" looks at the process of state building from the top down instead of the bottom up which is not necessarily effective. The idea of a cohesive state as inevitable and the focus on new methods of creating and conceptualizing this unity, ignores the point that Humphrey herself makes about Buryatiya being in the "grip of de-modernization." Humphrey makes an erroneous value judgment not about the difficulty and pain of de-modernization, which may be undeniable, but about how de-modernization is something that needs to be counteracted. She does not say this in so many words, but, despite her claim that she does "not aim to sum up 'the lesson' of collectivization," she seems to have a view of progress and an idea that with new tools and new techniques for conceptualizing life the Buryats will catch up with the rest of Russia.

In order for her conclusions to be more specific and not fall prey to psychological forces or assumptions about the inevitability of the state, it would be helpful for Humphrey to compare the Buryat and other post-U.S.S.R. people with peoples living in the wake of other states where socialism is on the decline. One area for study could be China, which has become less socialist in doctrine if not in name. When only one group of people is examined, it can be difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. Nonetheless, Humphrey's work has detailed well the lives and cultures of a group of people.

Humphrey, Caroline. Marx Went Away But Karl Stayed Behind. In J. Vincent (Ed.), The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Humphrey, Caroline. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2002.

Humphrey, Caroline. Marx Went Away But Karl Stayed Behind. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. 1998.