Gavriil Ksenofontov

The method Ksenofontov used was to ask shamans and former shamans to describe their own election, in their own words, and to write down what they said. The result, published in 1930 as Legends and Stories about Shamans among the Yakuts, Buryats and Tungus, is a body of first-person narrative that almost nothing else in the Siberian literature can match.

The accounts follow a shape that has since become famous. The candidate falls ill and cannot recover; the illness is understood as a call that cannot be refused; in vision the body is taken apart by spirits, the flesh stripped, the bones counted and sorted, and an extra bone or a missing one determines what kind of specialist the person will be; the body is reassembled and the candidate recovers, now able to work. He also collected the counterpart material on the shaman's tree, the animal double, and the geography of the upper and lower worlds.

The year before he had published a study of what he called the cult of madness in Uralo-Altaic shamanism, arguing against reading shamanic illness as pathology and for reading it as an institution with its own logic. His material was translated into German in the 1950s and reached western readers that way, and a great deal of what general books say about shamanic initiation traces back through that translation to notebooks taken in Yakutia in the 1920s.

Ksenofontov was born in 1888 near Yakutsk into a Sakha family of some means, studied law at Tomsk University, and practised before turning to ethnography. In the revolutionary years he took part in Sakha national politics, which is part of what later killed him.

His fieldwork belongs to the 1920s, a decade in which Soviet policy toward the peoples of the north still had room for national scholarship and native institutions. That window closed. In the 1930s the same policy turned to eradicating shamanic practice as a survival of class exploitation and to purging the national intelligentsias that had grown up in the 1920s. Ksenofontov was arrested and shot in 1938. His books were withdrawn from libraries and his name was dropped from citation.

The material survived along two routes. Copies of the 1929 and 1930 volumes were outside the Soviet Union and were used by western writers on shamanism, usually without much sense of what had happened to the author. Inside Russia he was rehabilitated late, and his work, including the large historical study of the origins of the Sakha, was republished at Yakutsk from the 1990s. He is now a national figure in the Sakha Republic. The sequence, a native scholar recording a practice, the state destroying both the practice and the scholar, and the notebooks returning as the principal evidence for what was destroyed, is the shape of a great deal of the Siberian record.