In 1990, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Mongolia, long a
satellite of the U.S.S.R., regained its independence. Socialism was out
and free markets returned. Religion — in the form of Buddhism,
shamanism, and other folk religions — became officially accepted again
in Mongolian society. That, in turn, produced another unexpected change:
The return of shamans, religious figures who claim to have a
supernatural ability to connect with the souls of the dead.
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| Cover of "Tragic Spirits" (University of Chicago Press) |
Indeed, as MIT anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger chronicles in a new
book, the revival of shamanism has shaped Mongolia in surprising ways in
the last two decades. From storefronts in Ulan Bator, the nation’s
capital, to homes in rural Mongolia, shamanism has become a growth
industry.
In the book — “Tragic Spirits,” published this month by the University
of Chicago Press — Buyandelger both documents this surprising phenomenon
and analyzes its meaning. The return of shamanism, she asserts,
represents more than the straightforward return of a once-banned
religion to Mongolia. And it is more than just a convenient method for
people to earn a little income by working as shamans.
Rather, she says, shamanism became more popular precisely because, in a
poor country recovering from Soviet domination — where Mongolia’s
occupiers had wiped away its records and the physical traces of its past
— shamanic practices have offered some Mongolians a way to reinvent
their own history. Shamans offer clients the supposed opportunity to
meet with the spirits of their distant ancestors and hear “fragmented
stories about their lives in the past,” as Buyandelger observes.
“Shamanism is a historical memory for people who lost parts of their
ancestral homeland, and who had been marginalized and politically
oppressed,” adds Buyandelger, an associate professor of anthropology at
MIT. It flourishes, she notes, where people have “no museums, no
libraries, no cemeteries, no mausoleums. They don’t have anything to
materialize their memories of the past.”
‘I wanted to … understand it, and capture it’
A native of Mongolia herself, Buyandelger’s project grew out of a desire
to study and write about the thrills, disorder, and uncertainty that
emerged in post-Soviet Mongolia.
“It was complete chaos, and an exciting time,” Buyandelger says. “I
wanted to write about it and understand it, and capture it.” Having
already learned Russian, she started studying English out of a desire to
write about Mongolia for the widest audience possible.
Meanwhile, in those first heady years of the 1990s, with religion
tolerated again and Mongolians having to carve out their livings outside
the socialist state system, shamanism suddenly flourished: “Religious
practitioners proliferated like mushrooms,” Buyandelger says.
“Astrologers, fortune tellers, shamans, monks were everywhere, from the
bus stations to homes, and monasteries were reviving and opening up.”
To be clear, shamanism never disappeared entirely from Mongolia, as
Buyandelger explains in the book; even while officially banned,
underground shamanism persisted, often practiced by women in rural
areas. However, the official repression of religion had created an “aura
of mystery” around shamanism, as Buyandelger says, which helped it grow
quickly again in the 1990s. That growth was also due to a symbiosis
among shamans and clients: Becoming a shaman was a way of having a job,
while going to a shaman was, in part, a way of finding reassurance at a
time when, for many people, “the future had fallen apart.”
Buyandelger, who grew up in Ulan Bator, focused in her book on 18 months
of fieldwork she conducted, largely with ethnic Buryat nomads in Dornod
province, the easternmost part of Mongolia. The village of Bayan-Uul,
where Buyandelger based her work, has a population of about 5,000
people.
In Dornod province, she noticed something deeper underlying the
shamanism revival. Shamanism, after all, promises communication with the
past — and in the Dornod area, which is particularly close to Russia,
Soviet erasure of Buryat history was especially harsh. So shamanism
quickly became a way of inventing, or trying to recreate, a past that
had otherwise completely vanished.
“People knew they had forgotten their past,” Buyandelger says. “So they
turned to a past that was embodied by the spirits of ancestors. Instead
of thinking about the past in terms of years or periods, shamanic
rituals teach people to think in terms of historical personas.”
Shamans themselves, as Buyandelger puts it, are “cultural bricoleurs”
who “make memories out of generic stories and make histories out of
knowledge that they collect throughout their practice.” Indeed, she
notes, the Mongolian word for history, tuukh, means “to collect.”
The book has been well-received by other scholars; Paul Stoller, an
anthropologist at West Chester University who has read the book, calls
it “a memorable evocation of the human condition as well as a powerful
exercise in social analysis.”
Looking for trust
In the book, Buyandelger also uncovers some more subtle dynamics
explaining the phenomenon of shamanism today. Women, while a minority of
practitioners, constituted a much larger portion of those who tried to
engage in shamanism during the Soviet era, as she relates in the book.
“Female shamans, as women, were not necessarily regarded as doing
anything harmful,” Buyandelger says, “whereas male shamans were under
the gaze of the state.”
Moreover, a popular need to learn more about the past helps shamanism
thrive now, precisely because clients have tended to try out a variety
of shamans in the search for the one who can connect with the past in
the most satisfactory and compelling way. A successful shaman,
Buyandelger notes, brings spirits alive to clients as “verbal
memorials,” which, taken together, comprise history for some Mongolians.
“People don’t have genealogical records, and you have shamans who don’t
know exactly how to conduct themselves, so everything is a trial,”
Buyandelger says. “Shamanism proliferates today not because people
necessarily believe it 100 percent, but because people are trying to
test it, and find out the most authentic practices they can trust. The
more skeptical people seeking out shamans, in some ways, have become the
most active catalysts of this proliferation.”
Today is - Underdog Day
