Reconciling Ethnic Nationalism and Imperial Cosmopolitanism: The Lifeworlds of Tsyben Zhamtsarano (1880–1942)

Abstract

Abstract This article intends to make a contribution to our understanding of how the Russian empire was shaped by its colonies by shifting the focus away from the circulation of knowledge between the European empires and onto crosscultural transfers between the imperial center and one part of Central Asia – the Buryat lands in southern Siberia and Outer Mongolia, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The article looks at these transfers through the life of one remarkable individual, Tsyben Zhamtsarano, a Buryat from the Aga region on the eastern shores of the Siberian Lake Baikal. It argues that Zhamtsarano’s case strikingly exemplifies a situation concerning the production of knowledge about the colonial periphery in which the colonized could have an upper hand, and their pre-eminence could be, at least partially, acknowledged in the imperial center. It is also demonstrated in the article how and why such an empowerment could only be temporary in Russia’s ever changing imperial context.