The Taiga, the Master of Animals and a Word That Left

Evenki religious practice is built around hunting and herding in the taiga, and around the understanding that animals have masters who must be treated correctly. Game is not simply taken. The bear in particular is hunted under strict protocol, addressed by circumlocution rather than by name, and its bones are treated so that it can return. Offerings are made at particular trees and at passes, and the fire in the hearth is spoken to.

S. M. Shirokogoroff, who worked among the Evenki before and after the First World War, produced the study from which the word shaman entered anthropology as a general category. His account treats the shaman as a person who manages spirits on behalf of a community, in a role that is socially useful rather than pathological, and that argument was made against a literature which read the practice as illness.

Ronald Hutton's later study traces what happened to the word afterwards. Taken from Evenki into Russian and then into every European language, it was applied to religious specialists from Siberia to the Amazon and finally to Western practitioners with no connection to any of them. The atlas records the Evenki as the people the word came from, and treats the generalisation as a separate development with its own history.