What a Post Marks, and Who It Is Now For

The serge sits at an awkward and interesting point between a ritual object and a public monument, and the last thirty years have pushed it further in the second direction. A post erected at a family homestead for the household's own reasons is one thing. A post erected at a road junction, a city square or the entrance to a district, carved to a standard design and photographed by visitors, is another, and both are now common across Buryatia and the Sakha Republic.

This is not a case of an old meaning being lost. It is a case of an object doing additional work. Posts went up in numbers from the 1990s onward at exactly the moment when Buryat and Sakha communities were re-establishing public practice after a long period in which it had been discouraged, and a serge is a cheap, legible and unmistakable statement of whose place this is. That the same object still carries ribbons and receives offerings does not make the civic use insincere.

For anyone reading the landscape, the practical consequence is that a serge cannot be dated by eye and cannot be assumed to be old. Most standing posts are recent. What is old is the form, and the habit of marking a place by driving something into the ground that a rider could tie a horse to.