Born in the body of beasts. Animals and the social order in didactic Buddhist literature of Buryat-Mongols (XIX- beg. XX century)

Abstract

This paper engages with current discussions concerning the ways in which human cultures construct the sphere labelled as “social” against that of the broadly defined environment. I contribute to these discussions with an analysis of the didactic Buddhist literature of Buryat-Mongols (19th–beg. 20th century), focusing on the image of non-human animals and their position in the social/universal order. With the emergence of environmentalist trends in the humanities, pre-modern/“non-Western” inter-species relationships have often served as counter-alternatives to the problematic “Western” nature-culture dichotomy. While expecting to see the human being described as a part of “nature” in the analyzed texts, I found a different picture: the anthropocentric social sphere is clearly distinguished from animals, and in some fragments, the idioms used with regard to animals are reminiscent of European evolutionist discourse. Through an exhaustive analysis of Buryat attitudes towards animals is beyond the scope of this study, this literature gives insight into a particular cultural discourse as represented in reputed sources of the period.