Mark Egart’s Travel Writings: Anthropology and Religion in Altai
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21847/2411-3093.2025.719Keywords:
Mark Egart, Altai Mountains, Soviet collectivization, anthropology, Shamanism, Burhanism, Religious transformations, Іndigenous beliefs, Cultural modernization, Soviet ideology.Abstract
The article analyzes the anthropological and religious aspects of Mark Egart's travel essays, which focus on the indigenous peoples of Altai during the Soviet collectivization of the 1930s. His book “The Ferry: Sketches of the Struggle for Socialism in the Altai Mountains” (1932) is examined as a valuable source that combines literary and ethnographic techniques to illuminate the profound cultural and religious transformations brought about by Soviet modernization. The study highlights shamanism, Burhanism, and everyday practices, through which Egart explores the interaction between traditional belief systems and Soviet ideological processes. Special attention is given to the methods Egart used to document the region’s spiritual and cultural heritage, as well as to how he integrated ideological narratives into his ethnographic descriptions. The article emphasizes the duality of Egart’s position: on one hand, he meticulously records the cultural specificities of the region; on the other, he interprets them through the lens of Soviet ideological paradigms, portraying traditions as relics of the past to be modernized. The study's findings evaluate Egart’s contribution to shaping the perception and literary image of the indigenous peoples of Altai through the interplay of anthropology, religion, and politics in the context of Soviet history. His travel essays are presented as an important source for understanding the dynamics of cultural change and the influence of ideology on traditional communities.
References
Anokhin, A.V. (1924). Materialy po shamanstvu u altay-tsev, sobrannye vo vremya puteshestviy po Altayu v 1910-1912 gg. po porucheniyu Russkogo Komiteta dlya izucheniya Sredney i Vostochnoy Azii. Sbornik muzeya antropologii i etnografii. Lenigrad, 4(2). (In Russian).
Anokhin, A. V. (1929). Dusha i ee svoystva po pred-stavleniyu teleutov. Sbornik muzeya antropologii i etnografii. Lenigrad, 8 (In Russian).
Clifford, J. (1991). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London.
Egart, M. (1932a). Pereprava. Altayskі narisi. Kyiv-Kharkіv. (In Ukrainian).
Egart, M. (1932b). The ferry: sketches of the struggle for socialism in the Altai mountains. New York.
Egart, M. (1932c). Pisatel o sebe. Vmesto Kritika. Khudozhestvennaya literatura. №2. S. 12-14. (In Rus-sian).
Eyngorn, N.D. (1969). K voprosu o reaktsionnoy roli du-khovenstva i tserkovnykh organizatsiy Gorno-Altayskoy oblasti v gody massovoy kollektivizatsii. Uchenye zapiski. Barnaul, №8. S. 23-29.
Khazan, V. (2023). Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael (Basic Outlines and Authors). In R. Katsman &M. Shrayer (Ed.), Studies in the History of Russian-Is-raeli Literature. Boston, USA: Academic Studies Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9798887191867-003
Kokpoev, P. (1929). Mekchi-kam emdi bolbosym, Kyzyl Oyrot. № 26. S. 4. (In Altai).
Kurts, B.G. (2014). Skhіdna Evropa ta Azіya: іstorіya torgіvlі v XVI – pershіi polovynі XX st., Kyiv Іnstitut skhodoznavstva іm. A.Yu. Krimskogo NAN Ukrainy. (In Ukrainian).
Tadyev, P.E. (1955). Reaktsionnaya sushchnost' shaman-izma i burkhanizma. Gorno-Altaysk. (In Russian).
Pratt, M. (1992), Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London.
Shrayer, M. (Ed.). (2018). Voices of Jewish-Russian Liter-ature: An Anthology. Boston, USA: Academic Studies Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781618117939-043
Slezkine, Yu. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaka: Cornell University Press.
Sovetskaya Oyrotiya, (1932). SSSR na stroyke. № 9. (In Russian).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Віталій Щепанський
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
1. Authors bear responsibility for the accuracy of facts, quotations, numbers and names used.
2. Manuscripts are not sent back.
3. The publisher does not always agree with the authors' opinion.
4. The authors reserve the right to authorship of the work and pass the first publication right of this work to the journal under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which allows others to freely distribute the published research with the obligatory reference to the authors of the original work and the first publication of the work in this journal.
5. The authors have the right to conclude separate supplement agreements that relate to non-exclusive work distribution in the form in which it has been published by the journal (for example, to upload the work to the online storage of the journal or publish it as part of a monograph), provided that the reference to the first publication of the work in this journal is included.
