Sacred missions and national identities: Modernist teleology and personhood in Siberian religious revivalism

This article takes a revivalist shamanic festival in Siberia, the Sakha people’s Yhyakh, as a case study, using it and the discourses around it to explore the ways Soviet ideology has been assimilated into contemporary perceptions of Sakha ethnicity. I trace the continuities between Soviet-era modernist contentions about reified ethnicity and universal value, and the ideas behind popular Sakha revivalism, showing how Soviet ideologies have been assimilated into movements, practices, and categories that their authors could never have imagined.