Iluminace 2025, 37(3):77-108 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1826

Refiguring the Buryat Photographic Archive: Ethnographic Visuality, Vernacular Montage, and Shamanic Temporality

Aleksei Ziniuk1, Margarita Galandina2
1 Kingston University, United Kingdom ✉
2 Independent Researcher, United Kingdom ✉

This article examines the Buryat photographic archive as a contested site of visual ethnography, historical trauma, and postcolonial critique. Spanning late Imperial ethnography (1880s), early Soviet ethnographic activism (1910s–1920s), and anthropometric studies (1930s), the archive documents the transformation of Buryat communities under imperial and Soviet regimes. Its dispersed materiality and digital aggregation foreground gaps, absences, and the mediated nature of memory, prompting an approach that combines archival analysis, vernacular photography, and contemporary photographic intervention. Structured in three parts, the article first analyzes three scopic photographic regimes — Pyotr Shimkevich’s imperial anthropology, Bernhard Petri’s activist ethnography, and E. G. Shurkin’s anthropometry — to trace how Buryat identity was framed through classificatory and visual taxonomies. It then turns to the family album of Sodnom-Dorzhi Badmaev, where historical consciousness emerges through montage, inscription, and personal recollection. Finally, it examines contemporary performative re-enactment, where the artist’s body becomes a site of visual and historical reclamation, engaging directly with the colonial archive’s anthropometric legacy. In the concluding section, shamanic concepts of memory and temporality provide a methodological lens for foregrounding embodied and affective forms of engaging with fragmented histories. Across these three registers, the study reveals how photography mediates between state surveillance, personal memory, and embodied acts of Indigenous visual sovereignty.

Keywords: visual anthropology, expanded photographic practice, archival intervention, alternative historiography, ethno-aesthetics

Received: June 4, 2025; Revised: November 8, 2025; Accepted: December 10, 2025; Published: February 3, 2026  Show citation

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Ziniuk, A., & Galandina, M. (2025). Refiguring the Buryat Photographic Archive: Ethnographic Visuality, Vernacular Montage, and Shamanic Temporality. Iluminace, 37(3), 77-108. doi: 10.58193/ilu.1826
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