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This paper deals with the peculiarities and recent developments of popular culture in general and sports competitions, dance and music, particularly in Buryatia and other regions of significant Buryat population. Based mainly on the author's own observations it is shown how the ongoing societal changes are reflected in the activities of sportspeople, dancers and musicians. All of them are characterised by both traditional and re-traditionalised elements as well as by processes of modernisation. It is shown that these at first sight contradictory features are in fact most often converging. Thus, in Buryatia today, mixing styles can be identified as one of the main and most typical characteristics of sports, dance, and music.

The authors intend to provide an overview of the diaries, travelogues, and correspondence of Austro-Hungarians who traveled to the Asian peripheries of Russia during the Dual Monarchy. We aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on colonial discourses of otherness, as well as to the historical development of ethnographic scholarship in Europe. Travel writing, orientalism, and colonial encounters with Asian otherness are closely intermingling phenomena in the modern era. We argue that the rich corpus of visual and verbal representations of North-, Central-, and Inner-Asian peoples recorded by the subjects of the Dual Monarchy provides instructive examples of colonial encounters with non-colonizers in 19 th century Asia. Furthermore, we believe that these examples will bring forth a more detailed picture of how the ideas born in the centers of German enlightenment (like Völkerkunde) impregnated the intellectual life of more peripheral regions in Europe. As ethnographic scholarship developed within national research traditions rather than in the frame of a monolithic, European intellectual project, our question is whether or not the Dual Monarchy provided a meaningful frame to bridge national research traditions.

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