Studies in Social and
Cultural Anthropology
General editors: Erich Kasten and David Koester
|
Tatiana Bulgakova
Nanai
Shamanic Culture in Indigenous
Discourse
2013,
Fürstenberg/Havel:
Kulturstiftung Sibirien
264 pp.,
5 color illustrations
ISBN:
978-3-942883-14-6
Euro 28,
USD 39; paperback
book
PDF
(2,4 MB) |
This book on Nanai shamanic culture is based on
first-hand information provided by shamans and
recorded in the years between 1980 and 2012, a time of
rapid socio-cultural change in Russia. It sheds light
on the lively indigenous discourse in which social
factors such as the splitting of society into
different paternal lineages relates to spiritual
troubles that Nanai people experience as collective
‘shamanic disease.’But inter-clan confrontations are
not only mediated in shamanic rituals, as these must
not be separated from folk narratives, dances and
other forms of art. Furthermore, the book provides
profound insights into the plurality of contradictory
discourses on indigenous knowledge as well as those
delivered in non-indigenous contexts. The latter arose
or became more intense in the Soviet and post-Soviet
periods, and often led to experiments in new shamanic
practices.
Tatiana Bulgakova was born in Khabarovsk. In
1980, she began her first fieldwork among the Nanai
and completed her second (doctorate) PhD dissertation
on socio-religious aspects of Nanai culture in 2001.
Since 1986 she has been teaching cultural anthropology
and folklore of the indigenous peoples of the Russian
North at the Herzen State Pedagogical University in
St. Petersburg. Her work has been supported by
scholarships from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,
Alaska, U.S.A. (Fulbright Program), from the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle,
Germany and the Institute for Advanced Studies,
Nantes, France.