Evenki Shaman's Coat

The Evenki coat is built out of two materials in tension. The garment itself is soft: reindeer or elk hide, cut generously, often with long fringes falling from the sleeves and the hem. Onto it is sewn a considerable quantity of iron, and the placement of that iron is not random. Observers who recorded these coats in the field noted that the plates and pendants across the chest and back correspond to parts of a body, ribs along the flanks, a line down the spine, long bones on the arms, so that the wearer is dressed in a skeleton.

Beyond the bones, the coats carry figures. Birds appear repeatedly, as do fish, small animals and human forms, cast or cut from iron and hung so that they swing. Discs, tubes, chains and bells fill the remaining space. Together they make the coat heavy, in some collected cases tens of kilograms, and loud, so that any movement produces a continuous ringing.

Neither the weight nor the noise is incidental. An account of a practitioner working in such a coat describes someone carrying a great deal of metal and generating sound with the whole body, not someone in a costume. The garment does part of the work.

Every coat is different. There is no pattern book and no standard, and the fittings on a particular garment record what its owner acquired, was given or had made across a working life.

The Evenki term for the practitioner who wore this coat was picked up by Russian speakers moving east across Siberia, entered Russian, and from there passed into German, French and English. It is the origin of the word shaman. Within a couple of centuries that single Tungus word was being used for ritual specialists in Lapland, Korea, Nepal, North America and the Amazon, most of whom had no historical connection to the Evenki and no comparable practice.

That is a considerable amount of weight for one loanword to carry, and a body of scholarship exists specifically to examine it. Alice Beck Kehoe has argued that the category flattens genuinely different practices into one imagined archaic religion. Ronald Hutton has shown how selectively the Siberian evidence was assembled and how much of it reached Western readers already interpreted. Andrei Znamenski has traced the further step by which the word was taken up outside scholarship altogether.

The coats themselves came west in the same period. Most complete examples now sit in Russian and European museums, collected while the practice they belonged to was under active pressure at home, so the objects survived better than the transmission did. Reading an Evenki coat means reading a collection history as well as a garment.

Sources Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical ThinkingAlice Beck Kehoe with Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western ImaginationRonald Hutton, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western ImaginationAndrei A. Znamenski