Siberia, the immense taiga and tundra of North Asia, carries a disproportionate weight in the study of religion, because it is from here that the very word shaman comes: from the Tungusic saman, the term for the ritual specialist of the Evenki and neighbouring peoples, which European observers borrowed and then generalized into a worldwide category.
The indigenous religions of Siberia's many peoples, Evenki, Buryat, Yakut (Sakha), Chukchi, Nenets, and others, share a broadly common pattern that became the template for the whole modern concept: a cosmos of upper, middle, and lower worlds populated by spirits and the souls of the dead; a specialist, the shaman, called (often through a crisis-illness) to mediate between the human community and this spirit world; and the technique of ecstatic trance, induced by drumming and dance, in which the shaman's soul is held to travel to the other worlds, ascending to the sky or descending to the underworld, to heal the sick, recover lost souls, guide the dead, or secure success in hunting.
The scholar Mircea Eliade drew heavily on Siberian material in defining shamanism as "archaic techniques of ecstasy." Suppressed under Soviet rule, these traditions have seen a revival in the post-Soviet period. Siberia thus stands as the source-region of one of the most widely applied, and much debated, categories in the study of world religion.