Siberian Shamanism

This heading names a scholarly category, not a religion, and the category is contested enough that it should be dealt with first.

The word comes from saman in Evenki, a Tungusic language of eastern Siberia. Russian officials and travellers picked it up in the seventeenth century, applied it across northern Asia, and by the nineteenth century European writers were using it for ritual specialists in the Americas, Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia. Mircea Eliade's book of 1951 completed the move, defining shamanism as archaic techniques of ecstasy and treating it as a single worldwide phenomenon with a common structure of trance, soul flight and a layered cosmos.

That framework shaped a great deal of subsequent writing and has been substantially picked apart. Alice Kehoe has argued that generalising a Siberian word to unrelated practices produces a category that describes European expectations rather than anything the practitioners share, and that it flattens genuine differences while carrying an implication of primitiveness. Andrei Znamenski has traced how the shaman was constructed in Western imagination, first as a fraud or a psychiatric case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then as a figure of spiritual wisdom from the 1960s, with the evidence bending each time to the fashion.

Within Siberia itself the objection has force too. The peoples grouped here (Evenki, Buryat, Sakha, Tuvan, Khakas, Nenets, Chukchi, Nivkh and others), speak languages from several unrelated families and differ in cosmology, in the terms they use for their specialists, in how those specialists are recruited, and in what they are for. Buryat and Tuvan practice is deeply entangled with Tibetan Buddhism; Sakha tradition distinguishes categories of practitioner that do not correspond to the single figure of the model.

The grouping remains useful as a rough regional heading, and is used that way here. It should not be read as a claim that these peoples share one religion.

With the caution above in place, recurring features can be described across much of the region.

The world is commonly conceived in layers (an upper world, this middle world, and a lower one), populated by spirits with authority over animals, rivers, mountains, weather, disease and the dead. Human trouble is understood relationally: illness, failed hunting, bad weather and misfortune result from a spirit offended, a soul lost or stolen, or an obligation unmet. The specialist's job is to find out which and to negotiate a settlement.

Recruitment is typically involuntary. The characteristic account is an initiatory sickness in adolescence or early adulthood (illness, fits, disturbing dreams, withdrawal), understood as spirits selecting the person, and resolved either by accepting the role or by dying. Refusal is widely believed to be fatal. In some peoples the calling also runs in families and is confirmed by inherited spirits. Training follows under an established practitioner and can take years.

The working session usually involves drumming, sometimes singing and dance, sometimes fasting or cold, producing a state in which the specialist is understood either to travel to the spirits or to be entered by them. Which of the two is emphasised varies by people, and Eliade's preference for the journey over possession is one of the places his model has been criticised for tidying the evidence.

Costume and drum are equipment rather than decoration: iron pendants, animal parts and figures represent helping spirits and the structure of the worlds, and a drum is often understood as a mount. Both are made to specification, consecrated, and in many traditions destroyed or set aside at the owner's death.

Work is generally practical and paid: curing, finding lost animals or people, securing a hunt, divining, cleansing a household, and escorting the dead. Blacksmiths, singers and diviners carry related but distinct kinds of authority in several of these societies, and lumping them together is one of the errors the general category encourages.

Russian expansion east from the late sixteenth century imposed fur tribute, settlement, and Orthodox missions. Baptism was often a formality attached to tax relief, and indigenous practice generally continued underneath it; parallel pressure came from Tibetan Buddhism spreading north into Buryatia and Tuva from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which in places absorbed local spirits and specialists rather than displacing them.

Soviet policy was categorically harsher. From the late 1920s ritual was attacked as backwardness and fraud; drums and costumes were seized, some ending up in museums, practitioners were denounced, taxed as exploiters, arrested, exiled and in numbers killed. Children were removed to boarding schools where indigenous language and practice were suppressed, and state medicine was promoted as the replacement. By the 1960s open practice had largely ceased across much of Siberia. It did not disappear: work in remote herding camps and within families continued quietly, and knowledge passed in private.

After 1991 the revival was rapid and public. Registered shamanic organisations were founded in Tuva, Buryatia and the Sakha Republic, some with premises, fee schedules and formal certification of practitioners. Public rituals resumed at sacred sites, and regional governments have in places supported them as heritage and as a marker of national identity. Overlap with Buddhism and with Tengrism is common, and some practitioners hold both affiliations without difficulty.

How continuous any of this is remains genuinely disputed. Some practitioners trace unbroken family transmission; some reconstruct from published ethnography, which is to say from the writings of the people who suppressed the practice; and Western neo-shamanic material has fed back into the region. Commercial practice for urban Russian and foreign clients is now substantial, and tourism has shaped what is performed in public.

Two things follow. The revival is real and is not the same thing as the tradition recorded a century ago. And the people involved are the ones with standing to decide what counts, which is an argument still going on among them.