Siberia

Siberia, the immense taiga and tundra of North Asia, carries a disproportionate weight in the study of religion, because it is from here that the very word shaman comes: from the Tungusic saman, the term for the ritual specialist of the Evenki and neighbouring peoples, which European observers borrowed and then generalized into a worldwide category.

The indigenous religions of Siberia's many peoples, Evenki, Buryat, Yakut (Sakha), Chukchi, Nenets, and others, share a broadly common pattern that became the template for the whole modern concept: a cosmos of upper, middle, and lower worlds populated by spirits and the souls of the dead; a specialist, the shaman, called (often through a crisis-illness) to mediate between the human community and this spirit world; and the technique of ecstatic trance, induced by drumming and dance, in which the shaman's soul is held to travel to the other worlds, ascending to the sky or descending to the underworld, to heal the sick, recover lost souls, guide the dead, or secure success in hunting.

The scholar Mircea Eliade drew heavily on Siberian material in defining shamanism as "archaic techniques of ecstasy." Suppressed under Soviet rule, these traditions have seen a revival in the post-Soviet period. Siberia thus stands as the source-region of one of the most widely applied, and much debated, categories in the study of world religion.

Siberia's largest contribution to the study of religion is a single word, and what happened to that word is a lesson in how comparative categories are made.

Saman belongs to the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia, and it named a specific kind of practitioner among specific peoples: someone called to the role, usually through illness or crisis, initiated by others already holding it, and working with drum, costume and helping spirits on behalf of a community. Russian travellers, officials and exiles reported on such practitioners from the seventeenth century onward, and the word entered European languages through those reports.

From there it expanded without limit. By the twentieth century shamanism was being used for practitioners in the Amazon, in Africa, in Korea, in Australia and in Neolithic Europe, on the strength of resemblances that the observers found striking. The category did real work, and it also flattened traditions that had their own names, their own training and their own theories of what was happening.

Meanwhile the practice in Siberia itself was suppressed. Soviet policy treated it as backwardness and as a rival authority; practitioners were persecuted, and drums and costumes were confiscated or destroyed. Much of the twentieth-century ethnographic record was made either just before that or in its shadow.

Practice has been reconstituted since, partly from the ethnographic literature, which makes the modern relationship between the record and the tradition unusually tangled.