Facebook Icon podcast icon Join our mailing list Icon



Image for Poca Logo

Central Asia Workshop: Language Politics in Buryatia

A discussion led by Julia McLean, Anthropology

Wednesday, October 12, 2016
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
11372 Bunche Hall



Image for Calendar ButtonImage for Calendar Button

This week’s discussion will focus on language politics in the Republic of Buryatia. Our first article, The Local History of an Imperial Category: Language and Religion in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1860s-1930s (Graber and Murray 2015), takes us to pre-Soviet South Siberian territories. Here, as elsewhere throughout the former Russian Empire, the late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the construction and naturalization of many unitary ethnolinguistic categories, which would serve diverse ends among first Russian and later Soviet colonial projects. The article combines disciplinary perspectives from linguistic anthropology and history to excavate the local history of one such category--the Buryat language. Graber and Murray trace the category’s origin in the grammars, translations, and correspondence of its first Russian proponents, Russian Orthodox missionary linguists working in the area around Lake Baikal. These projects would subsequently be taken up by Soviet linguists and Buryat nationalists, both in terms of naturalizing a Buryat-Mongolian ethnolinguistic border, and in fostering a Sovietization of Buryat peoples. The second article, Public Information: The Shifting Roles of Minority Language News Media in the Buryat Territories of Russia (Graber 2011) embraces similar themes from the 1930s to present, exploring the development of minority language media in multinational, multilingual Republic of Buryatia. The article analyzes the changing roles of minority language news media over a century of language shift in the Lake Baikal region, where generations of Buryat speakers increasingly rely upon Russian. Graber examines the ways in which linguists, journalists, and policymakers have directed minority language media practices in response to their own shifting conceptions of an existing, emergent, or contracting Buryat language public, and of the media’s ideal or actual relationship to it.

Please email Mia Bennett at mbennett7 at ucla dot edu for the two readings, to be read before the discussion.


Sponsor(s): Program on Central Asia