Forty Years of Notebooks

Khangalov was born in 1858 in the Irkutsk province, west of Lake Baikal, and trained at the teachers' seminary. He spent his working life as a schoolmaster in Buryat villages and collected in the evenings and in the school holidays for four decades.

What he collected was not a folklore sampler. He recorded the invocations shamans used, with the names of the beings addressed and the order in which they were called; the genealogies that placed a shaman in a line and gave the right to practise; the layout of ritual grounds; the classification of the tengri, the sky beings, and of the western and eastern halves into which the Buryat cosmos was divided; wedding and funeral procedure; children's games; and a large body of oral literature including material from the Geser epic. He worked in Buryat with named informants and gave their names.

The Imperial Russian Geographical Society published him through its East Siberian branch from the 1880s and awarded him its medal. He was not a university ethnographer and he was not writing to test a theory, and it shows: the material is presented at length and with detail that a theory-driven collector would have trimmed away. That is precisely why it is still used.