Many Peoples, One Broad Descriptive Category

This entry records that Siberian shamanism, a term scholars use to group the related but genuinely distinct shamanic religious traditions of numerous indigenous peoples across Siberia, including Yakut, Buryat, Evenki, Nenets, Chukchi and many other communities, involves extensive practices of prayer, chant and spirit invocation performed by trained shamans, without reproducing specific liturgical material here. The term itself, shaman, entered international scholarly and popular vocabulary from the Evenki language specifically before being generalized by anthropologists to describe structurally similar religious specialists across many different cultures worldwide, a generalization scholars of religion now treat with some caution given how much genuine variation exists among the specific traditions the broad category groups together.

Siberian shamanic prayer and ritual is understood within these traditions as knowledge and practice transmitted through a shaman's own calling, often involving a significant personal or physical crisis interpreted as a spirit-initiated calling, followed by training under an established shaman, meaning this material is not treated within the traditions themselves as generally available devotional text but as specialized knowledge tied to a specific ritual role and lineage of transmission.