J. Jeremiah Curtin: a path to the Buryat-Mongolian folklore

The article gives a comprehensive description of American anthropologist Jeremiah Curtin’s journey through Eastern Siberia in 1900. He collected the unique material on folklore and ethnography of Buryats, their shamanic legacy. Attention is drawn to the extracts from the scientist's travel notes translated from English, which show his wide research horizon and keen interest in the Buryat reality of that time. We have analyzed the contribution of J. Curtin to Buryat studies and evaluation of his role as a discoverer of Buryat mythology and epic in the West. He first introduced the Mongolian Geseriade in its archaic Ekhirit-Bulagat version, recorded from the narrator M. Imegenov, to the English-speaking world.