These Tungusics from whom comes the word 'shaman', by Alexandra Lavrillier, Doctor in anthropology in Centre d’Etudes Mongole et Sibérienne (École Pratique des Haudes Études, Sorbonne)

The word « shaman  » came from their languages – Shaman – and entered into Russian from the XVIth century thanks to a story by an orthodox priest Avvakum. In the next two centuries, a story by two Dutch travellers, published in German, then translated into English and French ended up making this term famous. This simple word designating a ritual specialist – a medium between spirits filling nature and human beings –fired the imagination of representatives of imperial power for centuries, like Pierre Le Grand or Catherine II, of thinkers and philosophers. The shaman  and its rituals have inspired many fantastic and romantic stories before being considered worthy of being research material for social sciences. Not having a fixed definition, « shaman  », this Tungusic term was little by little used to refer to ritual specialists of the whole world, intangible, thus replacing the old terms of « sorcerer », « healer », « soothsayer », etc. [1] Other aspects of Tungusic culture like their social organisation have attracted the attention of general anthropology. The Tungusics experienced pressures of imperial and then communist politics on either side of the Chinese-Russian border. They have shown a great capacity of adaptation. But today, they are confronted with market economy from the Russian side, and neo-communism economy from the Chinese side. The proportion of population that had remained nomads in spite of the settling process – breeders of reindeer, horses or cattle – is up against the effects of climate change.

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But who are the Tungusics ? Born out of the complex history of Russian colonisation of Siberia, the word « Tungusic » has several, coherent meanings. According to the times, « Tungusic », in Russian and western sources, sometimes referred to the Evenks alone, sometimes to the Evenks together with a closely related people – the Evenes, both of them essentially breeders of reindeer and hunters. The term also had a more strictly linguistic meaning when it referred to all the nine people speaking the tunguso-manchu languages. In this last meaning, the term Tungusic was the opposite of « Turkish» and « Mongolian » as branch of the Altaic family. In the sources, this group of people was at times divided into three cultural subgroups: the Evenks (35 000 individuals in Russia, 35 000 in China and 1 000 in Mongolia) and the Evenes  all together (19 000 in Russia) ; the « Tungusics of the Amur Basin», that is, in Russia the Negidals (1 000), the Ulchs (3 000), the Orotchs (1 000), the Oroks (300), the Odegheis (2 000) and the Nanaïs (12 023). The Nanaïs, to which the famous heros of Arseniev and Kurosawa – Dersou Ouzala belonged – are 4 200 in China where they were called Hedje. The third subgroup and the most important in number was that of « Manchus ». The people speaking tunguso-manchu languages, about 10 million individuals were dispersed over a territory of nine thousand kilometres from east to west and three thousand kilometres from north to south. One historical specificity was that the languages of two father dynasty people belonged to this linguistic branch. These people have reigned China, Jurchen (Jin dynasty 1115-1234) and the Manchus (Qing dynasty 1644-1911).

From where does the word « Tungusic » come? Alien to the tunguso-manchu languages, it entered the Russian language in the XVIth century and about one century later, at the same time as the word « shaman  » in the West. According to hypothesis, it probably came from yakut, chinese, turkish or even nenets. The Nenents would have called their neighbours, the Evenks mixed with Russian settlers, by this name. In China, this name  came through Russian in the XXth century. Every people making up this group had one or several auto-ethnonyms. The Chinese policy of ethnic classification was the most complex and ended up creating a confusing situation. The Chinese forms of ethnonyms were Elunchun, Evenk, Oroqen, Solon, Khamnigan and Hedje. The Russian Soviet government of the 1930s changed the names of several peoples of Siberia, withdrawing those given by the Tzarist empire.

The troubled history of Sino-Russian relations had several consequences for the Tungusics. In China and Russia, some nomads were displaced, turned into a sedentary population and entrusted with protecting border segments. In the slack periods, the nomads frequently went from one bank to the other of the border rivers – Ussuri and Amur – to meet each other, to go to the fur trades. A major population of Hans and Manchus was moreover settled down on the Russian side. In 1901, after the armed conflicts, Nicolas II ordered these populations to be expelled and destroyed their places of worship. But it was in the second half of the XXth century, with the final closure of the Sino-Russian border that the Tungusics were as if broken into two. Having experienced a steady relation before, these people had since experienced different fates – divided by history and by science. Thenceforth, separate researches were conducted on them by the two sides of the border. The last Pan-Tungus researches dated back to the 1930s, they were those of S.M. Shirokogoroff, Russian ethnograph emigrated to China after the take-over by the Soviet power. His works published in English were quoted by several well-known western anthropologists.  

The Evenks – the greatest in number of the Tungusics (after the Manchus) – were undoutedly the most scattered and diversified people of Siberia. They were settled in small groups on an immense territory extending from the Yenisei River till the Sea of Okhotsk, from the side of the Arctic Ocean till the Amur River.

The first explorers and ethnographers of Siberia had often preferred to take the Evenks for guides. This was the case, among others, of the Frenchman J. Martin who brought back one of the richest shaman costume, today among the collections of the Museum of Quai Branly. According to travellors’ stories, these guides would have probably been overcome by a common passion in order to discover unknown spaces, accepting the most dangerous of adventures. It was by following the model of their hydrographic networks’ engravings on the bark of the birch tree that the first geographic maps of Siberia were drawn. So the space memorised by the Evenks by far crossed their own nomadisation zone.

            From the XVIIth century, the Russians settled down on the Evenks’ lands. They were subjected to taxes for fur and christianisation campaigns. Under Catherine II, this tax collection represented one third of the Empire’s fortune. The Soviet power confiscated the herds of reindeer and other cattle and constructed State farms whose nomads became employees. The gold mines bought the services of men and their reindeer from the State farms for the prospection missions of the vast forest. One part of the Evenk population settled down in the newly constructed villages. Some were employed in the universities of Russia to make up the future indigenous intelligentsia, which plays a leading role today. The atheism campaigns fighting for communist power, banning rituals, imprisoning the shamans, confiscating or destroying the ritual objects could have been right about the religious system of this people. But in spite of these changes and the dying out of almost all the shamans, the most important spirit – that on which depend the chance for hunting, reproduction of the herd and bliss of the human group – remains even today the guiding spirit of the natural universe. « We are not believers! », they say, « What is the use of it? We have nature that inspires us!»  From the Chinese side, the Evenks have undergone more or less the same type of pressure, in addition to the politics of « de-manchurisation » of Northern China, the Sino-Japonese war, then the fall of the Manchukouo. But in spite of that, some aspects of shamanism continues to survive.  

            The Evenks, like other peoples of Siberia or Manchuria have shown a great capacity to adapt their ritual practices. They have known to turn a professional Soviet function imposed to replace their rites into a collective ritual with a shamanic influence (but without shaman ), to replace their rites, fulfilling all the functions of the Evenk new year, that had just been banned by the same regime. Some shamans were able to evade repression by accepting to be « shaman’s imitators». They had to stage this ritual specialist on a show, while the communist propaganda called him « the parasite on the indigenous travellor’s body». At the same time, they practised other rituals quietly within the forest. After the fall of communism, the intelligentsia successfully lifted the seventy-year old ban on the Shaman new year, in its own way. For want of shaman, the children of the folk dance groups represented this ritual specialist dressed in costume. Everyone expected a symbolic efficiency from these rites.

But one of the specificities of the Evenks is their resistance to Neo-Shamanism and major religions. While several peoples of Siberia adhere to Neo-Shamanist movements or give in to proselytism of the Orthodox, Evangelists or Pentecostalist, the Evenks make do with multiplying the ritual expressions of their real or idealised attachment to nature. The nomads practise everyday several small ritual gestures and expect of the spirits game animals, births in the herd and human beings. The sedantary persons have two collective rituals in the year to practice and transmit their « traditions » and request the nature spirits some luck in modern life.  

But today, two new factors of change seem have the posibility of redefining several aspects of the Tungusic culture. The market economy reasoning becomes effective in the relations between the members of this community, where reciprocity is the order of the day. The effects of climate change, like extinction of some animal and vegetal species, increase of parasitic diseases in wild and domestic animals, rising scarcity of game animals, appearance of new species of insects, increase of mortality of domestic reindeer are more and more recorded. Nomads and sedentary people noticing this deterioration of the natural environment fear their people and culture will die out. It is in this context that among the nomads, popular stories announce the next rebirth of saving shamans who had defeated the spirits that caused the epidemy of smallpox , in the beginning of the XIXth century. At the same time, some sedantary people sell the farming rights of their lands to the mining companies at the best price.

 

[1] R. Hamayon, 2005, The concept of shamanism : a western construction in Shamanisms. Living with the spirits. From the original nature to the contemporary world, Religions and history N° 5 Nov.-Dec., Faton

A. Lavrillier, H. Lecomte, 2002, Evenks : Ritual chants of the taiga nomads, Paris, Buda Records [World Music, Siberia 8].