Taming the City: Unfinished Religious Expansion in Buryatia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper explores Buddhism and urbanisation in post-Soviet Buryatia (Russian Federation). While post-socialist religious revivals have often been discussed by scholars as questions of temporality, this paper suggests that they might also be seen as spatial reconfigurations. Seen in this way, a Buryat Buddhist religious revival might be perceived as an unfinished religious expansion, absorbing new spaces and appropriating them along the way. In this light, and to local Buddhists, the city is a new territory that is subject to a continuing religious intervention, making it less hostile and more manageable in the new – and difficult – urban condition. This religious intervention is discussed here as ‘taming the city’, and it provides basis for a rethinking of post-socialist religious resurgence in the region as a spatio-temporal process. These spatial aspects are entwined with social ones amidst ongoing religious change, as shifting religious topography interplays with transforming social, economic and political conditions.