Sacred land cairns and shamanic burial sites on the Sino-Russo-Mongolian borderlands

Abstract

ABSTRACT This contribution explores the ways the different ‘minority’ groups inhabiting the Chinese side of the Sino-Russo-Mongolian borderland have negotiated their ethnic and clan belonging through the construction and worship of sacred cairns (oboo) and shamanic burial sites (shindan) throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Following the emic representation of oboo and shindan as powerful monuments allowing for the symbolic reproduction of life, the article examines how each monument connects a group of people to their native land (nutag) and how it represents an alternative territorial and ethnic marker in the most multiethnic area of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It will show that the construction and worship of these holy cairns and sites is constitutive of practices that represent a certain idea of the ethnic group as a specific social entity in the borderlands.