Matvey Nikolaevich Khangalov

About museum

Matvey Nikolaevich Khangalov was a Russian Buryat scholar, ethnographer, folklorist, archaeologist, writer, researcher of Siberian shamanism, translator, and teacher. Khangalov was born in the ulus of Zakuley in the Irkutsk Governorate. The scholar studied the material and spiritual culture of the Buryats and produced a number of fundamental works on family life, social organization, and shamanic traditions. In 1902 Khangalov took part in an expedition led by the French academic Paul Labbé, devoted to the study of shamanism among the Ungin Buryats. In 1903 he received a laureate diploma from the French Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. Khangalov's works and collections are held in leading Russian museums — the Russian Ethnographic Museum, the archives of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Irkutsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, and the Museum of the History of Buryatia.