“Imperial Religion in Eurasian Borderlands:” James Meador on Empire, Religion, and Nation-States
By Kavi Wilson
An isolated extraterritorial enclave of Manchu villagers was the central topic of a meandering and erudite talk by James Meador '09, of the University of Michigan, entitled "Imperial Religion in Eurasian Borderlands." Living on land ceded by the Qing Dynasty to the Russian Empire under the unequal treaty of 1858, but remaining de jure Qing subjects, these villagers fell into an intersection between two different kinds of empires, Meador said. Called the "64 villages" by Russian sources, the citizens of this enclave were ‘Banner people,’ a hereditary military caste of the Qing Dynasty who were forbidden from entering into other professions. The villagers were violently expelled from Russian territory during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, with few survivors.
"Prepare yourself for men," the learned professor warned at the beginning of the lecture. "Ambitious, unscrupulous men who set out to make their fortunes on the frontier." He was referring to Roman Tsyrenpilov and his compatriots, missionaries who hoped to advance their careers by proselytizing among the borderland villages. The missionary journal of Roman Tsyrenpilov remains presently the only accessible detailed source on life in the "64 villages," with most Imperial Russian and Qing documents locked away in closed archives.
"'Your clothes, manners, and religion is different than ours; the only similitude is in the face,'" a villager is quoted as saying to Tsyrenpilov in one of his entries, cataloging the villagers' views on Russia. Other entries describe Tsyrenpilov almost being arrested by village elders out of mistrust for his "strange wanderings." Meador noted, though, that the multifarious anecdotes may not be reliable; Tsyrenpilov himself was a Buryat Mongol and a Russian citizen and Orthodox Christian only by conversion, with an interest in proving his own ‘Russian-ness’ and advancing his career by the publication of this journal. The relationship between religion and nationality in the Russian Empire is highlighted by the fact that Tyrenpilov, despite his missionary duties, was not permitted by his government to baptize any villagers – for under contemporaneous laws, doing so might inadvertently convey Russian citizenship onto them. After several years of stagnation, the missionary project was called off.
Meador contextualized the failure of the missionaries using models of the social semiotics of empire. Specifically, he characterized empires, in contrast with nation-states, as tolerating inhomogeneity; that an empire is content to rule its domains as a conglomeration of diverse local autonomies, a nation-state requires the construction of a homogenous body-politic; that an empire is content ruling a diverse array of subjects, while a nation-state needs a homogenous mass of citizens, assimilated to preserve its national characteristics. Though warning that these characterizations are far from universal, Meador discussed how the Russian Empire gradually shifted from an empire with a policy of “rule by difference” to that of a “nationalizing empire,” which seeks to create a homogenous nation-state out of its provinces, replacing a policy of delegation of power with one of assimilation and, at times, extermination of minorities. This change, he claimed, could explain why the Empire chose to settle Russians in the area of the “64 villages” instead of empowering missionaries to convert and naturalize the villagers. The Qing Dynasty, he said, in contrast, remained throughout its entire existence a “rule by difference” empire, with a hierarchically empowered ruling class that made no effort to assimilate the body politic into its ranks.
Meador concluded his talk by noting that empires, especially 'rule by difference' empires, often foster more local autonomy and local decision-making than nation-states due to having a less powerful locus of control, mentioning that governance in some parts of the Russian Empire was “almost anarchic.”