Soldier, Explorer, Merchant, Spy?: The Lifeworlds of Tsogto Badmazhapov (1871–1937) and the Challenges of Knowledge Production in the Imperial Situation

• In Event: Buddhists, Marxists, and Nationalists: Buryat-Mongol Intellectuals in History

Abstract

This paper analyzes and examines the work of Tsogto Badmazhapov (1871-1937?) based on a comprehensive study of materials at the Archive of the Russian Geographic Society in St Petersburg, in collections in Siberia, as well as in Tsogto Badmazhapov’s several published works. Best known as the one-time expeditionary companion of the tsarist officer-turned-explorer Petr K. Kozlov (1863-1936), Badmazhapov’s wider corpus of ethnographic, epistolary, and archaeological works remains understudied. This paper explains how the varying yet interlinked facets of Badmazhapov’s biography–Buddhist, merchant, indigenous ethnographer and archaeologist, agent of the Tsarist General Staff, functionary of the Revolutionary government and others–coalesced into a fundamentally hybrid but simultaneously distinct analytical language he deployed to describe and make sense of his world. Badmazhapov’s case is not one of a classic subaltern metaphorically silenced by hostile forces, but one of a historical actor testing out different strategies for the development of a new multivalent “language of self-description,” which would reflect the multiplicity of possibilities of the late imperial and early Soviet historical moment.

Author

• Ismael Biyashev, U of Michigan