Sergei Shirokogorov

Shaman is not a general term that happens to be applied to Siberia. It is a Tungus word, saman, which entered Russian from Evenki speakers in the seventeenth century, passed into German and then into every other European language, and was gradually stretched to cover ritual specialists on six continents. Shirokogorov is the ethnographer of the people it came from.

He worked among Tungus groups in Transbaikalia and in Manchuria between 1912 and 1917 for the Russian Academy of Sciences, in long stays rather than short visits, and he learned the language. Social Organization of the Northern Tungus appeared in 1929 and Psychomental Complex of the Tungus in 1935, both published in China, where he had settled after leaving Russia.

The second book is the one that matters here. It is an attempt to describe an entire mental and spiritual system, spirits, souls, illness, dreams, the practitioner and the community, as one working arrangement rather than as a list of beliefs held. It runs to several hundred pages, it is unusually specific about what Tungus people themselves said and how they said it, and it remains the fullest single account of any Siberian religious system in a European language. It is also, because of where and when it was printed, one of the harder classics of the field to find.

Two of his arguments cut against what most readers wanted shamanism to be.

The first concerns the shaman's condition. Nineteenth century and early twentieth century writers had generally read the shamanic crisis as pathology, an arctic hysteria or a seizure dressed up. Shirokogorov replied that the shaman is the person who handles the psychic disturbance of others: the institution exists because a population under stress produces disturbance, and the shaman is the socially sanctioned mechanism for absorbing and discharging it. On that reading the practitioner is not the sick member of the group but the one who keeps the group from being sick, and the states involved are trained rather than merely suffered.

The second concerns origins. The Tungus complex was widely taken to be archaic, a survival of something very old that had escaped the world religions. Shirokogorov argued the opposite for much of it: that the hierarchy of spirits, several of the ritual objects and a good deal of the terminology showed the impress of Buddhist and Chinese contact by way of the Manchus and the Mongols, and that what looked primordial was in significant part recent. That claim has been contested ever since, but it introduced a historical dimension the earlier literature lacked, and it is one reason his book is still argued with rather than merely cited.

He left Russia after the revolution, taught at Shanghai and then in Beijing, and died there in 1939.