Imperial Boundaries and Borderland Communities: Exploring Injustice in Eurasia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel engages with the 2024 ASEEES Convention theme of liberation through a focus on exploring injustice in borderland communities in Eurasia. All four papers examine specific instances of imperial injustice along with strategies employed to prevail over them. Chechesh Kudachinova’s paper researches how the Telenggits were forced to pay tribute to both the Russian and Qing Empires. However, the Telenggits’ encounters transformed from initially destructive to interactive and even profitable, enabling them to keep many of their social institutions intact while developing a lively trade. Melissa Chakars’s paper analyzes Russian imperial legislation aimed at reducing the influence of Buddhism among the Buryats and Kalmyks. It also investigates methods of resistance that led to great differences between regulations on paper and what happened in practice. Griffin Creech’s paper is about the injustice of Russian imperial state-sponsored Slavic settler colonialism in Siberia that led the Buryats to respond by migrating to neighboring Mongolia. Ivan Peshkov’s paper delves into colonial policies among the Evenki that weakened their Buddhist and Shamanist religious traditions, but also allowed for an emergence of syncretic forms of faith and complex processes involving the Evenkization of Christianity.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Helen Sharon Hundley, Wichita State U

Papers

• Subjects of Two Powers: Mapping the Frontier Dynamics of the Double Tributary in the Altay Mountains, 1750s-1860s - Chechesh Kudachinova, Free U Berlin (Germany)

• Managing Buddhism in the Russian Empire: Buryats, Kalmyks, and Imperial Officials - Melissa Andrea Chakars, Saint Joseph's U

• 'There Is No Grass or Water': Settler Colonialism and Buryat Migration to Mongolia, 1880-1916 - Griffin B. Creech, U of Pennsylvania

• Between Christ and Burkhans: The 'Double Faith' of the Transborder Evenks and Imperial Bordering in Inner Asia - Ivan Peshkov, Adam Mickiewicz U (Poland)

Discussant

• Andrei Znamenski, U of Memphis