A Visitor's Guide to Shamans and Shamanism
Sibirica March 1, 2020 DOI: 10.3167/sib.2020.190104 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that the museum's reorganization of Siberian and Central Asian materials under the category of shamanism served to unify Russia in Asia as a culturally contiguous imperial space. |
Abstract
In the late imperial era, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg produced a series of guidebooks for visitors that provided an account of the changes in the gallery spaces and collections within the museum. Among the changes was a reorganization of the collection that brought about the removal of a gallery dedicated to Russian ethnography, which had housed Siberian, Central Asian, and a small number of European Russian objects. Siberian and Central Asian materials were then presented by the museum in an Asian ethnographic collection. In this new Asian collection, shamanism emerged as a category that operated to unify Russia in Asia as a culturally contiguous space located in an imperial elsewhere east of the Urals.