The English word shaman entered European languages from Siberia, through Russian, from Tungusic, and its subsequent career is a case study in what happens when a specific office becomes a general category.
The early record is made by outsiders travelling under Russian imperial authority: exiles, explorers, missionaries and administrators, several of whom produced detailed accounts of peoples they had been sent to among. That material is valuable and it was gathered under conditions of colonisation.
By the later nineteenth century the term had been detached from the region entirely and applied to ritual specialists worldwide, and by the twentieth it was the basis of a general theory of religion, most influentially in a comparative study that presented an archaic technique found everywhere. The effect was to make a Siberian office into a universal type, and then to read the universal type back onto the Siberians.
The Soviet period then removed the possibility of correcting this from the field. Practitioners were persecuted, practice was driven underground, and research operated under constraint.
Since the 1990s the traditions have revived publicly, and Indigenous scholars from these peoples now write about them. What has also arrived is an international market in shamanic experience, which has an interest in the universalised version rather than the local one.
The atlas keeps the peoples distinct where it can and does not elaborate what is held.