On the Social Background of the Modern Revival of Shamanism (Evidence from the Buryats of China)

The revival of shamanism in Russia, including shamanism practiced by the Buryats who reside in the eastern part of the country, has recently been drawing increasing attention from both domestic and foreign scholars. As they notice shamanism’s growing influence on the modern society as a whole and its increasing importance for the well-being of its individual adherents, they are trying to analyze and understand the actual premises and the driving forces of this unexpected revival. Currently, they tend to explain it by either a strong impact of socio-cultural factors, such as general post-Soviet anomie, loss of universal moral guidelines, sudden erosion of values, and the subsequent rise of interest in traditional beliefs or, alternatively, by purely political reasons, such as liberalization of religious policies during the reforms of the late 1980s coupled with the gradual weakening of the state institutions and ideologies during the Soviet Union’s disintegration which eventually caused a political and ideological vacuum. The paper argues that this theoretical dilemma may be solved through the analysis of the similar process of the revival of shamanistic practices developing just across the border, i.e. among the Buryats residing in the Shenehen region of China. The traditional culture and the archaic shamanistic worldview of those people are almost identical to those of their kinsmen living in Russia but at the same time they were free from those dramatic political transformations of the late 20th century that took place in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. After elaboration on the peculiarities and specifics of the recent revival of shamanism among the Buryats of China, the paper eventually concludes that particular political transformations have only limited ability to shape the exact route that the process of revitalization of traditional beliefs may or may not take. At the same time, the major factors responsible for the revival of shamanism among the Buryats, and, presumably, among other nationalities of the region are still largely sociocultural by nature, the most important of them being the inability of the modern society to address the fears and everyday cares of ordinary people considering those insignificant.

Buryats, shamanism, revitalization, Shenehen, China, religious policies, social background

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