Contemporary “Shamanising Persons” among the Tungus-Manchu (Evenki, Even, and Nanai): Case Studies about Common Collective Spiritual Representations

• Published in: Study of Religion
• Main Authors: Lavrillier, Alexandra, Sem, Tatiana Yu.
• Other Authors: Cultures, Environnements, Arctique, Représentations, Climat (CEARC), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), IEA CNRS
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2021
• Subjects: collective spiritual representation; contemporary shamanising persons; Tungus-Manchu; gathering the spirits; methods of knowledge transmission; mentality; Siberia; [SHS.ANTHRO-SE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Social Anthropology and ethnology; Evenki; Tuva; Kamchatka; Yakut
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-03376078; https://doi.org/10.22250/2072-8662.2021.3.32-51

International audience This article studies common spiritual representations about contemporaryTungus-Manchu “shamanising persons”. It analyses ethnographic material gatheredby the authors between 1994 and 2020 among the Evenki, Even, and Nanai ofYakutia, the Amur region, Kamchatka, Novorossiysk, and Khabarovskii krai, as wellas the relevant scholarly literature. Under Soviet anti-religious policies, the traditionalshamans of these peoples went into significant decline: the last traditional shamanspassed away in the 2010s, thus potentially disrupting the transmission of the shamanicfunction. Nevertheless, according to collective representations, the spirits are stillactive and continue elect people to become shamans. Our paper argues that thesepeoples are enduring “ritual wanderings”, wedged between a lack of individualsable to transmit the knowledge required to become a traditional shaman and the factthey reject urban/western neo-shamanism (in contrast to other Siberian peoples likethe Buriat, Tuva, Yakut, and Altai). Through the analysis of a mosaic of case studieson shamanising persons who are neither traditional shamans nor neo-shamans, wereveal many relationships with the spirits, the ways these people deal with shamanicelection, and the common core of the spiritual representations of the Tungus-Manchu.This paper contributes to the study of contemporary shamanism, Tungus-Manchucultures, and human-nature relationships.