Evenki

Evenki religious practice is built around hunting and herding in the taiga, and around the understanding that animals have masters who must be treated correctly. Game is not simply taken. The bear in particular is hunted under strict protocol, addressed by circumlocution rather than by name, and its bones are treated so that it can return. Offerings are made at particular trees and at passes, and the fire in the hearth is spoken to.

S. M. Shirokogoroff, who worked among the Evenki before and after the First World War, produced the study from which the word shaman entered anthropology as a general category. His account treats the shaman as a person who manages spirits on behalf of a community, in a role that is socially useful rather than pathological, and that argument was made against a literature which read the practice as illness.

Ronald Hutton's later study traces what happened to the word afterwards. Taken from Evenki into Russian and then into every European language, it was applied to religious specialists from Siberia to the Amazon and finally to Western practitioners with no connection to any of them. The atlas records the Evenki as the people the word came from, and treats the generalisation as a separate development with its own history.

The Evenki are spread across a territory larger than most countries, from the Yenisei to the Pacific and south into Mongolia and northeastern China, in scattered groups that were never politically united. Their language is Tungusic, and the numbers speaking it are now small and falling in the Russian Federation, while a distinct community continues in Inner Mongolia.

G. V. Ksenofontov, a Yakut scholar who collected accounts of shamans from Yakut, Buryat and Tungus informants in the 1920s, assembled the fullest record of practitioners describing their own calling. It is a source produced at the last possible moment. Ksenofontov was executed in 1938 during the purges.

Soviet policy then moved the Evenki into collective farms and permanent settlements, sent children to boarding schools, and suppressed the shamans directly, with practitioners imprisoned and killed. Russian Orthodox mission had already been present for two centuries and had produced a mixed observance rather than a replacement. Since 1990 there has been revival on both sides of the border, alongside the wider pressure of industrial extraction on the taiga, and the Evenki appear in the atlas as a living people whose religious history includes a deliberate attempt by a state to end it.