ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that an alternative sense of belonging to land has been effected through ritual practices relating to ancestral spirits and former pastoral migration cycles among local Buryats. It uses the term 'shamanist topography' to describe the constellation of places in the landscape - pastoral routes, sacred mountains, offering sites, and ancestral villages - where these rites take place. The chapter speaks of shamanist and state topographies in order to denote complexes of places in the landscape. It demonstrates that both these constellations of places are inscribed as significant in ways that are not limited to description or graphic representation such as mapping. The chapter argues that these two topographies together inform Buryat's experience of the Cisbaikal landscape. It therefore resists too simple a dichotomy between indigenous place and state space. The chapter illustrates that relationships to these topographies have historically been constituted in distinct ways.
