WORLDVIEWS brill.com/wo The Post-Colonial Ecology of Siberian Shamanic
The Sakha national revival in Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia, aims to recover dying elements of Sakha culture, in order to preserve the Sakha people’s distinctive identity. And yet this revival is itself imbued with assumptions rooted in the European cultures that initiated modernist colonisation. Contemp...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1033.9202 http://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/4946/WO_019_03_s003_003_Peers_proof_final.pdf%3Bjsessionid%3D4A781BAECC4AA66C4383BDBFEF8C9D97?sequence%3D1 |
| Summary: | The Sakha national revival in Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia, aims to recover dying elements of Sakha culture, in order to preserve the Sakha people’s distinctive identity. And yet this revival is itself imbued with assumptions rooted in the European cultures that initiated modernist colonisation. Contemporary Sakha shamanism reflects the ten-sions within the nationalist revival, in the contrasting tendencies for activists, firstly, to recover what is seen as the old, genuine shamanic practice—and, secondly, to assim-ilate foreign spiritual techniques. But when these two strands of endeavour are exam-ined with reference to the perceptions of person and environment that formed the basis of pre-Soviet Sakha life, it becomes apparent that they complement each other. Both facilitate the intersection of contrasting knots of relationship, predicated on dif-fering ontologies. Sakha people currently live and work within institutions that have their roots in European modernism. However, older Sakha relationships with a live natural environment have not entirely disappeared. The authors suggest that the per-sistent presence of an environment imbued with spiritual agency differentiates the Sakha shamanic revival from the European traditions that shape its central motiva-tions. This case reveals the importance of attending to place and environment, in the discussion of post-colonialist identity politics. 246 peers and kolodeznikova |
|---|