This insightful and theoretically well-informed book makes an important contribution to the study of Buddhism in Buryatia, a region often marginalized and neglected in Buddhist scholarship. Based on ethnographic and archival work, Religious Bodies Politics traces transnational Buddhism and politics in the Buryat Buddhist community of the south-central region of Siberia over the past century. It explores the intersection of religion and politics in post-Soviet Buryatia and the imprints of revolutionary eventson the lives of Buryat monks and their reincarnations, whose bodies the author interprets here as religious bodies politic, through which cultural sovereignty has been asserted and a balance between a greater Eurasian Buddhist world and Buryats' allegiance to Russia is preserved. In this book, the religious “bodies politic” (p. 5) category includes the dead bodies of famous lamas, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas and Buddhist celibate monks, imaginatively dismembered bodies of Buddhist lay practitioners of the tantric chod ritual, and the body of a Russian leader. Drawing from the work of Verdery,Footnote 8 Bernstein broadly argues that due to rapid social changes, such as those characterized by the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, important Buddhist figures became mobile and enduring bodies that stand in contrast to the secularized, sovereign, and what she calls the “closed” (p. 12) Soviet body.
The work begins with a look at the prerevolutionary history of Buryats' involvement with greater Eurasia and at the perspectives of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian Orientalists and political figures that are reflected in the views of contemporary Buryats. The point is well made that Eurasianist Buddhology emerged as a result of differing responses to Russia's cosmopolitanism, statehood, and shared political imaginaries.
In Chapter 1, the reader is introduced to Buryat Buddhologists, whose ethnographic work in early twentieth-century Tibet produced some of the first ethnographic studies of Tibetan Buddhism and transcended the boundaries of conventional area studies. Their promotion of Buryat national autonomy and Mongolian heritage after the 1917 Revolution has vestiges in current debates between the pro-Tibetan factions and those asserting the autocephality of Buryat Buddhism.
Chapter 2 continues with the exploration of Buryat lamas of the early twentieth century whose recent Tibetan incarnations facilitated expansions of religious ties between the Buryats and Tibetans. At the center of Bernstein's analysis are the ways in which certain cross-ethnic reincarnations became the sites of competing claims to sovereignty, which transformed Buryats' geopolitical imaginaries. As these reincarnations crossed the boundaries between the bodies and the nation-state, they diminished conventionally defined lines of kinship and ethnicity. The reader is further introduced to yet another case of the dead reappearing in a strange mix of post-Soviet and Buddhist necropolitics in contemporary Buryatia, which prompted a series of exhumations of dead bodies and unearthings of sacred objects hidden by local lamas of the prerevolutionary period and given a revelatory status. Bernstein points to the necropolitics that developed around the famous lama Itigelov, who died in the 1920s. His body, unearthed in 2003 according to his previous instructions and bearing certain signs of incorruptibility, came to be viewed as an insignia of the autonomy of Buryat Buddhism. In Bernstein's view, the relics of famous Buddhist monks and the unearthed ritual objects found in the ruins of monasteries and remote forested areas or allegedly spontaneously manifested became the means of strengthening the Buryats' notions of cultural sovereignty and Buddhist authenticity. Similarly to Buddhism in Mongolia, Buddhist tradition in Buryatia, being marginalized in the transnational Tibetan Buddhist arena, is presented with the challenge of supporting its claims to religious and cultural sovereignty. Bernstein skillfully demonstrates that the unearthed dead bodies, relics, and sacred objects came to be interpreted by the Buryats as evidence of the recentering of Buddhism into Buryatia and Mongolia and the marginalization of Tibetan Buddhism caused by the adverse political and social conditions of Tibetan Buddhists in China and in diaspora. She examines the lives of Buryat monks in the Tibetan Drepung Monastery in India and their subsequent reintegration into Buryat society in relation to issues of gender and religious authority, and she seeks to demonstrate that these religious bodies should be seen as arenas of competing conceptions of religious authority, gender, and national loyalties. Returning to Buryatia after many years, their religious bodies politic sometimes deviate from the indigenous Buryat understanding of the aforementioned ideas.
The last two chapters focus on lay tantric ritual practices involving the symbolic offering of one's own body to spirits and on alternative sources of autonomy rooted in postsocialist systems of exchange and gender formations. These are shown to be indicative of economic shifts and political imaginaries in the post-Soviet period.
This well-written and engaging work is strongly researched and timely. Its strength lies in the author's ability to illuminate the latest events in the light of their historical and current sociopolitical and religious contexts and in compelling arguments. Anyone interested in Buddhism, Buryatia, and Eurasia in general will find this book accessibly written and stimulating.
