“Not Far from the Kingdom of God”: Shamanism and Colonial Control in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1853–1917*

Using the ethnographic writings of Russian Orthodox missionaries working among the Siberian Buryats, a Mongolic people resident along Russia’s border with Chinese Mongolia, during the second half of the nineteenth century as a case study, this article argues that local colonial contexts and anxieties strongly informed Russian ethnographies of Siberian religion during the nineteenth century and, in particular, influenced an important turn toward treating shamanism as a “Siberian religion,” regionally specific and worthy of scholarly treatment as a religion. The missionaries used shamanism as a means of labeling and describing cultural changes among the Buryats—changes that were favorable to their understandings of the Russian Empire as a space dominated by developmental processes that would lead towards cultural cohesion. Lamaism, with which shamanism was juxtaposed, served as a means of marking transnationally connected Buryats as lying outside of this space of cultural control, even though they were unquestionably subjects of the Russian Empire.