An Inauguration for Etigelov

Abstract

This chapter describes the inauguration of a Buddhist monument (stupa) in honor of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, a pre-revolutionary Buddhist leader who has returned in the post-Soviet period as a miraculously preserved body. This ritual allows us to see how three different historical genres coexist in the same context, thereby illustrating the larger argument of the book. These genres are a Buddhist institutional genre produced by the Buddhist Sangha, a local shamanic genre that focuses on state violence and draws on shamanic ideas about place spirits, and a Soviet genre that tells the history of the same village as a collective farm. This chapter presents an example of how multiple historical genres coexist and how people code-switch between them, depending on the context in which “us” is invoked.