SHAMAN

Volume 32 Numbers 1 & 2 Spring/Autumn 2024

Articles

VICTORIA SOYAN PEEMOT:

An Overview of the Tozhu Tyva Kham Paraphernalia in the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

This article is a report on an ongoing research project investigating the ethnographic collection brought by Ørjan Olsen from Tyva to Norway in 1914. The paper focuses only on a part of the collection—the ritual paraphernalia. The set includes the gown, headdress, footgear, and a drumstick that belonged to the Tozhu Tyva kham (shaman), who featured in Olsen’s photographs and two books about his trip to Tyva. Drawing on object analysis and indigenous storytelling and participant observation during ethnographic fieldwork as the main research methods, the project facilitates active knowledge-sharing between the host and home communities of the objects—the Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo and the Tozhu Tyva people in Tyva and the Tukha people in Mongolia.

ÉVA PÓCS:

Weather Magicians in Storm Clouds: Some Distinctive Methods of Supernatural Communication in Central Eastern Europe

The topic of my study is the supernatural communication with the spirit world of a distinctive etic subgroup of the European weather magicians, the so-called windy or storm magicians. One of their general characteristics is that they communicate with the demon world residing within a windy, watery storm-cloud otherworld, and they themselves have watery, windy attributes. Geographically they come from southern Croatian and western Serbian language areas (resp. stuha, zduhač; vetrovnjak, vjetrovito “windy”; oblačar, oblakoprogonnik, oblakovoditel “cloudy, cloud carrier,” etc.), from western Ukraine and southern Poland (płanetnik, płanetnyk, chmurnik, obłocznik “cloudy”), from Romania (şolomonar, ghetar “icy,” etc.), as well as from southern and eastern Hungarian language areas (resp. táltos, jégőrző “hail-guard,” etc.). I define storm magicians as dual beings: they have both human and spirit form and through metamorphosis can move between the two worlds: as humans, they can temporarily shapeshift into spirits, as spirits they can temporarily adopt a human form, or at times can act as mediators between the two worlds. The main theme of my study is the examination of the techniques of supernatural communication. I attempt to look at this practice and the folk-belief traditions behind it from a point of view that differs slightly from that of prevailing research traditions: I try to discern “from below” the emic categories behind the accepted scholarly categories. The main points of my study: (1) The storm-magicians as dual beings. Beliefs surrounding communication, its symbols and metaphors (disappearing bodily into a descending storm cloud/fog/rain, rising up to the cloud with the wind, in human or spirit shape or in spiritual body), and battles in the cloud otherworld against the storm demons; (2) The reality of magicians: symbolic battles that take place between earthly persons and the demons in the clouds, by means of real, earthly tools. The role of trance (and lack thereof) in communication. The main lessons of my research: (1) Polish and Ukrainian storm magicians are related to the magicians of the Balkans both in terms of their communication techniques and the context of their beliefs. It seems that we can speak of the vestiges of a shared tradition in the case of all Slavic peoples. (2) In the case of the Romanian and Hungarian weather magicians in all likelihood we are also dealing with Slavic influences. On the question of other past roles of the functioning Hungarian táltos—independent of these influences—we are in the dark. It is merely a cautious assumption that the táltos was once also in possession of the communication methods discussed. The name táltos existed at the time of the Hungarian Conquest (a.d. 895–6), but we do not know what it covered; the táltos could have been any kind of magico-religious specialist, but there is no evidence that he was a shaman. (3) As for the conceptual categories of storm magicians, I suggest the following. The activities of these specialists have been defined as shamanism by several scholars by overemphasizing the role of trance and the extension of the “classic” category of Eurasian shamanism. Since applying such a broad definition is not fruitful for research I am proposing to use “dual beings” and the overarching category of “metamorphosis.”

FENG QU:

From the Ecocosmological to the Cosmopolitical: An Exploration of Contemporary Oroqen Shamanism in Northeast China

This paper explores how Oroqen shamanism in northeast China has shifted from an ecocosmological to a cosmopolitical mode since the 1980s. The analysis of the revival of shamanic practices in the 1990s reveals how Oroqen shamans and communities have attempted to establish their animistic relationships with the environment and the natural world in an ecocosmological mode through the performance of sacrificial rites. This paper also provides analyses of the heritagization of Oroqen shamanism through a state-led heritage-making process, and argues that the construction of the heritage discourse among the Oroqen in the Daxinganling area has taken place not only in a top-down direction, driven by state policy, but has also intertwined with a bottom-up dimension involving ethnic communities’ efforts to gain agency.

DAVIDE TORRI:

Materializing the Invisible: Some Preliminary Notes on the Study of Shamanic Artefacts

This paper aims to offer some preliminary notes towards investigating the relationship between material objects considered as (representations of) spirits, entities, and non-human or extra-human dimensions produced within shamanic cultures or contexts, with particular attention to those images that, in fact, materialize and make visible what usually does not appear. In other words, as already asked by Webb Keane (2013, 4) in his essay “On Spirit Writing”: in what way do humans produce the immaterial through materiality? In addition, the paper takes into account and discusses relevant literature addressing the profound significance of shamanic ritual objects beyond their mere materiality or historical-religious value, particularly focusing on their role as performative agents in musealization dynamics as well as in contemporary indigenous identity-revitalization processes.

LIA ZOLA:

Is this the same nature we used to know? Assessing Local Knowledge in the Sakha Republic

The ISARS 2022 conference entitled “Shamanism and Crisis: Seeking Human Identity” aimed to investigate the multifaceted nature of crisis and uncertainty in the relationship between humans and non-human others. In line with the theme of the conference, existential crisis, on a broader scale, meant as an ecologically, socially and economically driven process, also affects modes and means of relating to other entities and ecosystems: one such way encompasses the production, transmission and use of local knowledge. In my paper I aim to analyze how local knowledge is produced and transmitted in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), a sovereign republic within the Russian Federation. Based on fieldwork trips in 2009, 2011, 2017 and 2019 devoted to the investigation of life histories of women healers, the following questions are addressed: how does folk knowledge transform in coping with environmental, social, economic and political changes? In such changing settings is it still passed on from generation to generation or is it switching to a more “horizontal” mode of transmission? And, in the event, what new body of indigenous knowledge is produced and who is “entitled” to use it (shamans, healers, ritual experts)?

Obituaries

Gregory G. Maskarinec (Marie Lecomte-Tilouine)