Customer Reviews

Animal and Shaman: Ancient Religions of Central Asia

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author provides no first-hand knowledge of his own, providing only second-hand synopses of the works of others.

If you are willing to research further, this would seem to provide a ready-made outline. My interest in buying the book was for possible linguistic comparison, but the author only names a few native gods and gives very little in the native languages.

The author prides himself in identifying his allegience to French methodology. Evidently this explains his negligent lack of maps, glossary, charts, or any detailed descriptions of concrete facts.

Unless you can trawl through academic journals, or read French, there's so little in the way of historical work on indigenous steppe religion. It's great to have this: a survey that pulls together the information, and tries to draw together the common threads, find the steppe-wide religious concepts... animals are his theme, humans-animals, shamans-animals. True, it's largely an excursion through the materials we have for study: from steppe epic to anthropology, but gives you thumbnails of what's written in French and Russian and Hungarian, and is quite exhaustive, even if each stop on the trip is far too brief. As an introductory on steppe religion - before, underneath Buddhism and Islam - what else is out there? I give five stars for usefulness.

Now, who's going to translate from French Roux's Religion of the Turks and Mongols? Who can I beg?