Paper abstract:

The paper focuses on illuminating women’s agency in sustaining the Buryat-Mongolian community amid geopolitical and socioeconomic transformations in Eurasia. Various Buryat-Mongolian tribes that originated in the Mongol lands gravitated to the area around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia which was colonized by the Russian empire in the 17th century. The cross-border motion of ideas, relations and practices had nonetheless continued, giving rise to the Buryat-Mongolian transnational imaginary community. This community had been rooted in the shared cultural code containing a set of principles, rules and norms that defined the parameters of Buryat-Mongolian identity.

In this paper, I argue that while the Buryat-Mongols within the larger family of Mongolic peoples had been traditionally governed by the male-determined clan principle, the 21st century marked a major shift that has seen the (re-)emergence of women’s agency as a de facto underlying force that helps sustain collective ethnocultural identity. Notably, this is manifested in women-led Buryat language preservation, post-Soviet feminization of lay Buddhism, and care and domestic work that ensures the vitality of the community. In this process, however, women have been leveraged to support the ethnocultural tradition locally, while instrumentalized to achieve broader economic, demographic and political objectives within the state’s vested interests. Such arrangements have been embedded in paternalistic social norms amid rising neoliberal ideology of the post-colonial state. Nevertheless, women have transcended the post-colonial realm to exercise their agency and (re)produce culturally encoded knowledge, practices and values within and beyond frontiers.

In the existing epistemology, the history of Buryat-Mongols has not only been relegated to the margins of imperialist hegemonic discourse but it has also been largely gender-blind, with little recognition of women’s agency. I interpret this as a symptom of the transboundary patriarchal order as part of the larger colonial power matrix. Based on archival records, over 50 in-depth interviews, and fieldworks in Buryatia, Mongolia and India between 2019 and 2023, the proposed paper aims to reconstruct patriarchal narratives and deepen our understanding of heterogenous post-colonial experiences through an intersectional gender lens. It also reimagines the conventional conceptions of the ‘center’ by reconsidering the positioning of the Buryat-Mongolian borderland away from the geographical ‘periphery’ to the heartland of the broader Eurasian space, while creating a more holistic ethnocultural landscape.