Almost every account of drum use in southern Siberia reaches for the same image. The drum is a horse or a reindeer, the beater is its whip, and the practitioner travels on it. That vocabulary is not an outsider's metaphor. It sits in the words practitioners use and in the songs, where the drum is addressed directly and its origin told.
The frame most Western readers meet it in, though, was built by outsiders. The word shaman entered Russian from Tungus and passed from Russian into every European language, after which it was applied to practitioners from Lapland to the Amazon who had never been in contact with one another or with the Evenki. Ronald Hutton has traced how the Siberian material was collected, edited and pressed into a single system for European readers. Alice Beck Kehoe and Andrei Znamenski have both argued that much of what circulates under the heading of shamanism is a Western construction rather than a Siberian one. None of them denies that Tuvan practitioners exist or that they use drums. What is disputed is whether the practices of dozens of separate peoples belong under one word.
Soviet policy settled part of that question by force. Practitioners were persecuted, drums were confiscated and burned, and transmission broke in many families. Practice was organised openly again in Tuva in the 1990s, and the drums in use now are largely new ones.
Sources Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western ImaginationRonald Hutton with Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical ThinkingAlice Beck Kehoe, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western ImaginationAndrei A. Znamenski