22 Ewa Nowicka Buryat society is a process literally tracing a pattern described decades ago by Florian Znaniecki ([1952] 1990: 44): the active and conscious involvement of elites. The ethnic mobilization is expressed in the intellectual activities of the young nation: in the last decades (in contrast to earlier periods) it is primarily Buryats who are writing about Buryats. A hindrance on the way to national unity is the fact that tribal-clan divides still function in the Buryat community. Key, then, is to distinguish and segregate the element of folk, local, and tribal culture from that which is national for the Buryats. This national tradition under construction draws on the engagement of the Buryat elites and all these “subcultures.” Yet isolation of the group’s folk culture from its everyday life leads, on the one hand, to folklorization, but, on the other hand, it is deliberately being utilized in the building of a canon for Buryat national culture. As a Buryat scholar, Xenia Gerasimova (2006: 25–29) has suggested, in reality this means that—from out of a sea of minute cultural contents as well as symbolic, philosophical, and ethical layers—only those pieces are selected which can be realized in today’s civilization, can be publicly shown, and can be applied in practice. Yet a national Buryat cultural canon is indeed being constructed. It is being created by preparing those elements identified by social scientists whose content is shared in common by all the Buryat groups. Extracted from local, regional, or tribal tradition today, certain components are imposed by institutionalized Buryat elites upon the whole of Buryat society. One of the forms this is taking is the organization of public events through which both the creation and preservation of tradition (sometimes described as neo-traditionalism) take place. Obviously tempting here would be reference to the concept of “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm & Ranger [1983] 2012), but this instrument is far too subtle for analysis of the processes which have been playing out in Buryatia. A variation of this more applicable to the current state of affairs would be “rediscovered tradition” because the Buryat elites are not forming a completely new cultural entity, but rather unveiling hidden content, reviving cultural phenomena remembered by a handful of individuals, and deciphering archival materials gathered by cultural historians. The birth of festival culture Under the conditions of societies in late modernity, ethnofestivals appear to be an exceptionally effective form for intergenerational transmission of cul-
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