A Military Zone in a Dwelling of the Buddhas: Appropriation and Re-appropriation of the Cultural Landscape in Transbaikalia

Abstract

This article considers a place as being filled with the symbolic meanings of the different groups controlling that place in different periods of history. It focuses on the example of the Soviet military zone in Transbaikalia, which was created on the site of the Buryat Buddhist monastery of Tsugol in the early 1930s. The military zone went on to replace the previous identity of the place by appropriating the meanings and symbols attached to the monastery. Fifty years later, in the post-Soviet period, the place was "reappropriated" by the Buryat Buddhist monastery. The article discusses the practices of appropriation and re-appropriation of the place, and the way the competing narratives merge into a multilocal phenomenon.