In this rich and sensitive ethnography, Manduhai Buyandelger shows how shamanism, a longstanding spiritual practice in Mongolia, has also become a key means for coping with the “endemic poverty, uncertainty, and ongoing crisis” that characterize postsocialist Mongolian life (9). Focusing on ethnic Buryats in northeastern Mongolia, the author examines the lives of shamans and their clients, relatives, and friends, probing their struggles for social status and security in a marginal environment. She shows how the fragmented narratives of the ancestors and origin spirits, channeled by shamans, together reconstruct a difficult and troubled history marked by violence, religious suppression, and social unrest. What emerges is a nuanced portrayal of how contemporary Buryats reckon with the past.
Tragic Spirits is part of a flurry of new ethnographic and historical monographs on Buryats in Russia and Mongolia (Bernstein 2013, Chakars 2013, Graber forthcoming, Quijada 2019). A common theme of this work is the complex way contemporary Buryats, an ethnic minority in both countries, are navigating a painful twentieth-century history to work out new forms of belonging geopolitically, temporally, and cosmically. It is fertile ground for studies of social transformation because Buryats have suffered radical upheaval and ruptures of multiple types: they fled collectivization and Stalinist purges on the Russian side of the border, then found shamanic practices brutally suppressed in socialist-era Mongolia as well. Although the postsocialist period has allowed for the revitalization and “proliferation” (31) of shamanic practices, it has also brought the “shock therapy” of rapid privatization and extreme poverty. 1999–2000, when Buyandelger’s research was concentrated, seems to have been a particularly desperate time in this corner of Mongolia, as people failed to navigate the new capitalist order. They attribute their failures to spirits who went neglected and unpropitiated during the socialist period and are now taking out their vengeance on the unfaithful. Buyandelger deftly shows how shamans represent a kind of spiritual stability in the face of this social and economic chaos, reconnecting contemporary (Buryat-)Mongolians materially and performatively to their ancestors by channeling different spirits. These include well-remembered ancestor-spirits, or ongons (ongon is also a generic term for spirits), and uheer, the “tragic spirits” of the title, who have been nearly forgotten and may have become malicious. Much of the negotiation described in the book is between shamans and clients seeking to reconnect the right spirit with the right supplicant, a delicate, emotionally fraught, and often unsuccessful venture.
The first part of the book explains the backdrop of historical suffering and post-privatization devastation against which the shamans’ and clients’ negotiations take place. Chapter 2, “Technologies of Forgetting, State Socialism, and Potential Memories,” makes one of the book’s most interesting sub-arguments, as Buyandelger shows how shamans (or the ongons that they channel) selectively focus on past slights and injustices to the exclusion of contemporary misfortunes, practicing “technologies of forgetting.” The second half of the book lays out Buyandelger’s central argument about gender: because Buryat women were disempowered more generally in the immediate postsocialist period, it also became more difficult for female shamans to assert their power and gain seniority. This is clearest in chapter 4, “Thriving and Silenced Stories,” and chapter 5, “Ironies of Gender Neutrality,” which also contain some of the book’s most emotionally powerful material, as Buyandelger describes the struggles of her friend, a gifted female shaman, to protect herself and her reputation in the face of repeated abuse. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that despite their supplications, most clients are not finding satisfaction through shamans. The last chapter, “Incomplete Lives,” shows this most poignantly through the story of a woman trekking from shaman to shaman, trying to understand the causes of her brother’s sudden death. The way she (and others) must consult ever more shamans, who increasingly compete with one another, suggests that the shamanic economy is becoming perversely like the neoliberal/capitalist one to which it has responded—a point that Buyandelger does not pursue here but that suggests possibilities for future research.
For folklore studies, one of the most important aspects of this book is Buyandelger’s attention to the use of narratives. All of the chapters interweave folkloric texts of multiple types: the texts of shamanic rituals, the stories people tell about how they were called to become shamans, and invocations of myths and semi-mythic histories that seem to subvert official histories. The power of the ethnography comes from how Buyandelger suggests people do this interweaving themselves, in the process reconstructing their history and working to re-position individuals who might otherwise appear powerless.
Buyandelger’s writing throughout is compelling. She opts to treat the ongons and uheer from an emic perspective, writing about them as real participants in the interactions she describes. This has the effect of drawing readers into rituals and other performance spaces as co-participants more than external onlookers. She also includes a great deal of personal narrative. Occasionally in the text, especially in long passages tacking between personal biographies, animations of spirits, and shamans’ accounts, it is difficult to locate the point at which Buyandelger’s voice ends and the voices of her interlocutors begin. Some readers, including this reviewer, might at these times wish for a clearer analytic voice, especially in the later chapters, which are almost exclusively ethnographic. What is gained by the choice to give most of the book over to ethnography, however, is a persuasive account of shamans’ and supplicants’ own interpretations of their social world, successfully de-exoticizing their beliefs. Readers not familiar with the Mongolian case or with shamanism can understand their motivations, fears, anxieties, and explanations. While not exactly experimental ethnographic writing, the emic viewpoint, including Buyandelger’s treatment of the spirits as “real,” is different enough to spark interesting discussions about subject position and writing choices. This makes it effective as a teaching text for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. (I have used it in linguistic anthropology courses, for instance, to good effect.) In sum, Tragic Spirits is a unique ethnographic treatment of how humans make sense of trauma through narrative—both remembering and forgetting.
WORKS CITED
Bernstein, Anya. Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Chakars, Melissa. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013.
Graber, Kathryn E. Mixed Messages: Minority Media and the Politics of Buryat Belonging. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming.
Quijada, Justine Buck. Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets: Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
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[Review length: 1074 words • Review posted on May 6, 2019]