Shamans Emerging From Repression in Siberia: Lightning Rods of Fear and Hope

Abstract

To honor the broad ranging legacy of Åke Hultkranz, this article focuses on the changing social and political ramifications of indigenous people’s spiritual revitalization in Siberia. My approach balances Hultkrantz’s sensitivity to commonalities of shamanism throughout the circumpolar North with attention to more specific aspects of shamanistic practices and beliefs in Far Eastern Siberia, especially the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), over time. Shamans and shamanic prophets can be found in many kinds of communities, from rural Siberia to Native North America to urban Korea. Over-generalizations behind standard or “ideal type” distinctions among “shamans,” “priests,” and “prophets” limit our understanding of the richness of shamanic cultural traditions. Research featured here is based on long-term fieldwork, many return trips to Siberia over the past thirty-five years, and work with the Sakha diaspora. It analyses the resurgence of post-Soviet shamanic healing practices, the organization of an Association of Folk Medicine, and shamanic leadership in an ecology activist movement. Shamans explain that their crucial imperative to heal and protect their clients and communities survived the Soviet period. Shamans and others, by adapting shamanic belief systems, can engage, if not soothe, the legacies of social as well as personal suffering. Yet many shamans were killed or repressed in the Soviet period, rituals were suppressed, and the reputations of shamans have long been ambiguous, depending on whom they protect and how. In socially fraught, crisis-ridden contexts, the personal becomes political. Shamans’