The Mixing of Styles in Buryatia's Popular Culture

The cultural landscape of modern Buryatia presents a fascinating case where seemingly opposed trends coexist and often merge into something entirely new. From sports competitions to musical performances, from dance styles to fashion, the region displays a dynamic interplay between traditional practices and modern influences. Understanding how these different elements blend together offers valuable insights into the broader societal transformations taking place across areas with significant Buryat populations.

The Enduring Festivity of Surkharban

An ancient Buriat-Mongolian celebration of athletic prowess, Surkharban brings together wrestling, horse racing, and archery in a festival that possibly traces back to shamanic rituals. Throughout history, under Tsarist rule, during the Soviet era, and in post-Soviet times, this celebration has maintained its popularity among Buryat people, adapting to each political system it encountered. The evolution of Surkharban has mirrored the changes in Buryat society itself, with shifts in how the festival is organized and what it includes revealing broader social transformations.

The process of re-traditionalization after the collapse of the Soviet Union is accompanied by modernization, sometimes called ‘westernisation’ in local discourse. This article focuses on how young people in Buryatia navigate the apparent opposition between tradition and modernity, asking what this tells us about their broader cultural identity.

New Sports Meet Ancient Games

Today, the traditional “three games of men”—wrestling, horse racing, and archery—coexist alongside a growing range of newly introduced sports. Ball games such as volleyball, basketball, and soccer appeared in Buryatia over half a century ago, first gaining popularity with Russian communities and eventually attracting Buryat athletes as well. During the Soviet period, volleyball tournaments became standard additions to almost all Surkharban festivities, and soccer competitions between teams representing villages, schools, hospitals, and administrative offices became equally widespread. Rather than feel that these new activities threaten their ancient traditions, both Buryats and Russians view these additions as welcome enrichments.

The Triumph of Spectacle

Dumbbell lifting entered Buryatia during the 1930s and eventually became a fixture at post-war Surkharban competitions. Yet at the 2004 Republic Surkharban in Ulan-Ude, athletes put on a slick dumbbell juggling performance, a kind of dumbbell “ballet,” as part of the opening ceremony. This shift captured the broader global move to inject pure entertainment and showmanship into athletic events.

In recent years, Surkharban festivities have increasingly turned into major productions. Even so, strict adherence to competition rules remains important; the growing element of spectacle has largely been confined to entertainment segments and has not fundamentally altered the core competitions.

Kickboxing Versus Traditional Wrestling

The widening repertoire of sports at Surkharban can be illustrated with concrete examples. The opening ceremony at the 2004 Republic games included a taekwondo display, and the 2005 audience enjoyed performances in karate and wushu (the latter known in the West as kung fu) by young boys and girls.

The prominence of martial arts at Buryatia’s top annual sporting event is no coincidence. Disciplines such as kickboxing, taekwondo, judo, wushu, and sambo (an acronym for the Russian phrase meaning self defence without weapons) rocketed in popularity in a remarkably short time. The Judo Federation was founded locally in 1994, the Wushu Federation in 2002, and a Karate Club only in 2003. Despite these recent beginnings, the best practitioners have already captured titles at the Russian, European, and world levels of competition.

A similar story applies to the strength sports of arm-wrestling and power-lifting. Competitors from Buryatia have earned top honours internationally. Even though new recreational options keep appearing—a top-grade tennis court and a go-cart track opened in Ulan-Ude in 2004—the surge in interest for martial arts and strength sports remains notable. Nevertheless, the Buryat national sport of freestyle wrestling has suffered no decline.

The Advance of Women’s Participation

Freestyle wrestling in Buryatia is no longer a male-only arena. As of 31 December 2003, 570 of the republic’s 7,411 wrestlers were women. Other martial arts and strength sports show an even greater female presence. Remarkably, one of the traditionally defined male games—archery—boasts a female participation rate of 42 percent. Women actually outnumber men among high-performing archers. Among recently popular sports, shooting disciplines (small-bore rifle, air rifle, airgun, crossbow) attract many women to their ranges.

This rising participation of women in traditionally male domains occurs despite retraditionalising tendencies. Attempts to rename the Surkharban festival, reviving the old term Eryn Gurban Naadan or ‘The Three Games of Men,’ have not halted the advance of female competitors.

Tradition, Modernity, and Public Performance

Organizing competitions at Buryat festivities is a centuries-old custom. Historically, authorities held contests for singers of epic poems. Modern groups have tried to restore these and other traditional abilities.

One telling case is the Khongodor tribe, whose members are scattered across republic districts, the Irkutsk region, and northern Mongolia. They held a meeting in June 2004 at the village of Sanaga. Alongside the standard three athletic contests, they included competitions in the traditional nine skills of a Buryat man: woodwork, horseshoe forging, whip plaiting, and singing the morinoj solo, a dedicated horse praise. The program also featured a pageant for young women aged 18 to 25, sometimes titled Khongoodoroj Dangina or the ‘Miss Khongodor’ contest. In the Ekhirit-Bulagatsk District (village of Kapsal), organisers similarly staged a “Beauty Pageant Miss Ekhirit.”

The tasks demanded from the contestants reveal energetic straddling between eras. In Sanaga participants drew self-portraits, narrated their lives in the style of Buryat epics, sang Buryat folk songs, and danced folk dances. In Kapsal participants instead sang Russian pop, danced ballroom, answered political questions about what they would do as parliament members, and even had to cook domashnaia lapsha (homemade noodle soup). These mixed tasks are half traditional competition culture and half contemporary entertainment show.

Similarly, the 2004 Ulan-Ude annual City Festival “The Day of the City” included a hairstyling competition and a fashion show titled “avant-garde fashion.” Russian and Buryat models showcased elegant dresses blending trend-friendly European tailoring with recognizable Asian accents, particularly the designers’ affinity for bright silk fabrics.

Cross-Cultural co-Existence Rather Than Ethnic Division

The same city festival hosted a singing competition that used audience applaud level as a method to determine the winner. Of all participants, only one contestant performed a Buryat song. Against expectations, that performer not only competed but went on to win. The crowd was not overwhelmingly Buryat but presented a mix reflecting the city population division of roughly two-thirds Russian and one-third Buryat. This moment illustrates the mutual respect between the two main local groups, bridging habitual differences in taste and ethnicity.

Sport likewise fosters interaction. I saw wide separation or overt friction across no mixed, multiple-surveyed competitions in Buryatia including the Irkutsk and Chita autonomous districts. People engage openly: the Russian game lapta and soccer find stronger followings among Russians, whereas archery and wrestling may appeal to Buryats. Russians nevertheless increasingly adopt and succeed even in traditionally Buryat disciplines themselves, as when four months after the milestone competitions of 2004, in a wrestling hosting of a now regularly Buryat combination containing match participants at a New Year extravaganza at month’s close the four-mixed high point of forty-time Russian wrestler on only a set of entirely returning athletes Oleg monikers Buryat gatherings

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At Surkharban, another republican holiday, winners’ prizes at those competitions were more than double the standard amount — each victor received 21,000 rubles from Lama priests, equal to a teacher’s four-month salary. Commercial companies and state representatives donated a large part of that sum, and they sat flanking the Khambo Lama (Mikhailov 2004). Sports in Buryatia, in short, form a flashpoint in the contest for influence and power among the major political, commercial, and religious institutions. This competition proceeds peacefully, though often far from fair, and ultimately benefits Buryatia’s athletes and artists, because it is this rivalry that funds sports and festivals.

The questions raised here to frame a discussion of the diverse tendencies in sports, dance, and music in recent Buryatia deliberately hint at contradictions — but these are, in fact, illusory. The entire sphere of Buryat sports and popular culture can be described as a convergence, combination, or intertwining of phenomena and developments rather than as a set of contradictions: kickboxing, breakdance, and pop music — and wrestling, round dance, and folk music. Women’s emancipation and modern lifestyle — and male domination and traditional values. State power and Russian participation — and Buddhism and re-Buryatisation.

Buryat society is ethnically and culturally mixed and diverse; in post-Soviet times it has also become open, modern, and pluralistic in nearly every dimension. This reality, together with ongoing large-scale social change, necessarily finds expression in popular culture areas such as sports, dance, and music. Young people — who constitute the majority in these fields — are directly and actively caught up in societal transformations, as the many examples in this article have shown.

NOTES

1 By the way, half of the members of that ballet company were young women. (For more on female participation in sports in Buryatia, see “Women’s emancipation versus male domination.”) 2 Bair Ulakhinov, World Champion in professional kickboxing, and Sergei Dorzhitarov, two-time Sambo World Champion. 3 Maksim Maksimov has twice won the European and the World Championships in arm-wrestling. 4 All statistical data come from a survey by the State Committee of Youth Affairs, Physical Education and Sports of the Buryat Republic, intended for district administrations and federal authorities. The author has a private photocopy. 5 Ekhirit is the name of the largest Buryat tribe in the Irkutsk Region. 6 Morin khuur is a type of violin — a string instrument with a rectangular corpus and two strings played with a bow; instead of a violin’s scroll it has a carved horse head. Yataga is a large Buryat-Mongolian zither. 7 The examples of Buryat musicians and their audience presented here are not unique: Aimar Ventsel describes quite similar patterns and phenomena in the music scene of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) (Ventsel 2004, 2006). 8 A similar situation is described for Sakha: there, musicians are almost entirely dependent on financial and logistical support from politicians, state officials, businessmen, and often also (semi-)criminals — sometimes all embodied in one person (Ventsel 2004, 2006).

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