When Everything Old Was New Again: Reclaiming Ethnonational Tradition in Post‐Soviet Buryatia

Abstract Why greet your family in Buryat rather than Russian? What does it matter how many times you fold the dough of a meat dumpling? How should one celebrate a holiday? In early twenty‐first‐century Buryatia, the Buryat Buddhist New Year, Sagaalgan, emerged as an important domain within which such small practices were reified as expressive of Buryat ethnonational affiliation. Amidst intense enthusiasm for cultural and linguistic revitalization, circulating texts, rituals, and performances around Sagaalgan were a rich field of rapid semiotic exchanges, within which different elements of Buryat culture were thingified, contested, and re‐valued. This article describes how this representational economy functioned in early twenty‐first‐century Buryatia, focusing on public and private representational practices surrounding Sagaalgan in Ulan‐Ude in 2007 and 2009. The case shows how reclamation of ethnonational tradition in post‐Soviet Russia worked through four interlocking discursive practices: foregrounding unsuccessful repression in the Soviet era, locating the authorship of rules within wider communities rather than within discrete individuals, tying local practices and beliefs to cultural histories and ethnic/racial groups beyond the Russian nation‐state, and exoticizing re‐surfaced traditions in contrast to Russian and Soviet traditions.