Psychomental Complex of the Tungus

Psychomental Complex of the Tungus, by S. M. Shirokogoroff, published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner in 1935, is the ethnographic study that introduced the word shaman into Western scholarly vocabulary from its Tungusic, specifically Evenki, origin, built on Shirokogoroff's own extensive fieldwork among Tungusic peoples of Siberia and Manchuria across the early twentieth century. Its strength is exactly that origin, a firsthand ethnographer documenting the term and the practice in the culture that produced the word, before shamanism became a generalized comparative category applied far beyond its Siberian source. Its limit is that Shirokogoroff's own theoretical framework, describing shamanism partly through a psychological lens of nervous excitability he called the psychomental complex, reflects period specific anthropological and psychiatric assumptions later scholars have moved well past, so a claim resting on his interpretive theory rather than his direct ethnographic description needs to be checked against more recent shamanism scholarship.