Customer Reviews

Shaman's Coat

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

 

 

This is a well written, sometimes humorous, book on the indigenous peoples of Siberia, groups of people that I, like many, have never heard of. Peoples possessing their own rich cultures, who have suffered under the Tsars, under Stalin, and even today face hardships.

It's difficult to comprehend just how vast Siberia is, the Russian-ruled territory east of the Ural Mountains and bounded by the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, five million square miles of northern Asia, larger than the US. However, out of this vast territory the native groups are a minority, a mere 1.6 million out of a Siberian population of 32 million.

Though the origins of the Russians push into Siberia are disputed, dating back to the days of the 16th century and Tsar Ivan IV (the Formidable to the Russians, the Terrible to English speakers), from the beginning she chronicles a sometimes depressing history of abuse of native peoples, pushed aside by Russian settlers, maltreated by Russian and later Soviet administrators, their traditional ways of life and religion attacked, decimated by disease, forced to produce vast amounts of sable and other furs or other onerous tasks. Petersburg and later Moscow were less interested in native peoples than the use of Siberia as a land of exile, a place where criminals, prisoners of war, and political exiles were sent to, the land that "was the death of hope, the unhappiest of endings." Even those who sought to protect the native peoples often had little success thanks to corrupt and often very isolated officials; in some cases Reid writes the round trip time for communications during the days of the Tsars was two years!

The best part of the book though is the many fascinating native groups of Siberia. We meet the Khant of the river Ob region in western Siberia. Called sometimes by the Russians the Ostyaks (a term they generally consider derogatory), they are related to the Finns and Estonians, and lived lives of fishing and hunting, their most complicated artifacts their massive bows and highly specialized arrows. Their language, sadly now largely gone, was wonderfully precise, with no general word for instance for fish or bird, but only words for specific species, and amazingly their vocabulary was over 80 percent verbs, with different words for sitting on the ground, sitting on a log, and sitting on a stump. Their religion has virtually vanished too, one that involved feasts honoring bears that they hunted.

Along the Russian-Mongolian borderland she introduces us to the Buryat, a Mongol people who roamed as nomads a Sweden-sized mix of forest and steppe. Possessing written language, firearms, tribute-paying vassals, and vast livestock herds, they were among the most powerful nationalities encountered by the Russians in Siberia, subdued only after a series of wars that lasted some 30 years. Their rich Buddhist legacy was nearly annihilated under the Soviets much like the Chinese have done in Tibet, with temples destroyed or converted to other uses, lamas hunted down, and sacred relics burned.

Then there are the Tuvan, famed for their throat-singers. Their region sometimes called "Russia's Tibet" not only for the ethnic problems it poses to the capital but also for its rich Buddhist legacy (which as with the Buryat was largely destroyed), this region on the Mongolian border was nominally independent between the world wars; regrettably Stalin in 1948 formally announced the annexation of this country, five times the size of Belgium. Today the only region in Siberia where the indigenous people are the majority, it faces an uncertain future.

Northeastern Siberia is home to the Sakha. Found along the Lena River region, they were called by the Russians the Yakut, or "horse people." Despite similarities in physical appearance to the Japanese and living in pine forests on permafrost, they speak a Turkic language and herd horses rather than reindeer. Thought to perhaps have been displaced by the vast movements of Genghiz Khan, they were noted for their use of iron, shamans, and their olonholar, epics poems tens of thousands of verses long performed entirely from memory, as they were illiterate. Though Sakha is rich with diamonds, producing more than $1.5 billion a year, is increasingly ethnic Sakha as Russians emigrate, and is eleven times the size of Britain, it is still unlikely to chart its own course as independence would produce huge problems.

The far eastern island of Sakhalin - thought a peninsula well into the 19th century  was home to the Ainu, now only found in Japan, and the Uilta or "reindeer-men," the latter reduced to less than 200 people. More common on Sakhalin are the Nivkh (or to Russians, Gilyaks), noted for fishing, using god, and holding bear feasts. They were also noted for a complicated language (one with over 26 different methods of counting) and a highly complex kinship, where siblings of the opposite sex could not look at each other or even talk to one another except through a third person. Today some 2500 strong, the Nivkh have seen penal colonies and the Japanese come and go, and today try to cope with fish quotas and pollution from petroleum production.

The final ethnic group she looks at the Chukchi, at the very limits of northeastern Siberia, closely related to the Eskimos. They were a stone age people up into 18th century when the Russians first encountered them, inland tribes herding deer, the coastal tribes hunting whales and walrus. Though apparently "primitive" the Chukchi managed to avoid direct Russian rule until well into the 20th century; after a series of failed attempts to subdue them in the 18th century forced Petersburg to make peace, the only northern natives able to win a formal truce.

Reid admits she doesn't cover all of the "Small-Numbered Peoples" in her wonderful book, one that attempts to cover an area of over thirty nationalities, but it is a book I highly recommend.

This book is not what the title and cover suggested it would be. It is essentially a series of historical sketches of indigenous people of Siberia and how the Russians and Soviets exploited them. Shamanism is merely an occasional sidelight. Having said that, the book is well-written and insightful. It simply has very little to do with Shamanism.

I loved this book but felt the writing was choppy. Anna Reid would be explaining something about the particular tribe and the next thing I know she's describing what was happening to her at the moment.
I am an avid reader of Russian history and knew about the places and events she described but I know now after reading the book no more about Shaman than before I read her treatise.
Her travels were so interesting and the places and people she wrote about are so unique that the book is entralling however, she did not focus on Shaman. She did not focus on the culture of the indigenous peoples nor her reaction to them. I felt sad at the end of the book for leaving that part of the world with very little more knowledge than I had before reading about these obscure peoples living in Siberia.

Readers who anticipate an account of the shaman's role in the various native Siberian tribal cultures will be sorely disappointed. Despite her title and introductory emphasis on the shaman's central position historically, the author is forced to admit that, by the 1970's, "shamans still existed, just." That being the case, the impetus for her journey to post-Soviet Siberia some thirty years later seems dubious. She alludes to a "native Siberian renaissance," of which shamanism would be one indicator. The substance of her book is almost completely at odds with both a general and particular cultural rebirth. An awkward pastiche of travelogue, historical anecdote and ethnography, it evokes the Siberian scene following the collapse of Communism, dominated by a Russian presence and the virtual destruction of indigenous cultures.
Reid anticipates the refutation of her renaissance notion with her description of a conference on shamanism which she attended in Moscow. Funded and dominated by Californian shamanists (who else?), "at its back, ostentatiously bored, sat a row of real live (sic!) shamans--plump, middle aged Asian women, tricked out in nylon robes, neo-Celtic jewellery and gypsy scarves." (8) Her ambiguous description of these conferees is reinforced by one of the few extended accounts of her actual witness to contemporary "shamanistic" practice. The Tuvan clinic, a "swanky outfit" in Kyzyl, gives her occasion to observe the practice's "senior partner" performing a 30 minute ritual, after which, upon payment of his fee, "he gave me something suspiciously close to a wink." (114)
Although Reid's bibliography includes a number of Western scholars studies, their Russian counterparts' contributions are almost entirely lacking. Nor does she offer much in the way of detail regarding traditional shamanistic belief and practice. No mention is made, for example, of the role played by the fly agaric hallucinogen, which figured prominently in the mystic rituals of many Siberian tribes.
In general, Reid focuses more on the Russian expansionists' attitudes and behavior toward those they conquered than she does on the natives' existing cultures. It is the all-too familiar story of Western civilization's destructive impact on those ill-equpped to deal with it. That however, is a far cry from the book's declared purpose. Her belated attempt to reassert her cultural renaissance theory in the afterward is unpersuasive. Admitting that shamanism has been "reduced from a detailed, consistent way of apprehending the world to a rag-bag of vague disconnected beliefs and rituals" (201) she still insists that it is in "the process of reconstruction." Unfortunately, the details she has provided argue the contrary, revealing the rag-bag rather than the coherent whole. On this count alone, her work must be considered a failure.

This is a well written, sometimes humorous book on the indigenous peoples of Siberia, groups of people that I, like many, have never heard of. Peoples possessing their own rich cultures, who have suffered under the Tsars, under Stalin, and even today face hardships.

It's difficult to comprehend just how vast Siberia is, the Russian-ruled territory east of the Ural Mountains and bounded by the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, five million square miles of northern Asia, larger than the US. However, out of this vast territory the native groups are a minority, a mere 1.6 million out of a Siberian population of 32 million.

Though the origins of the Russians push into Siberia are disputed, dating back to the days of the 16th century and Tsar Ivan IV (the Formidable to the Russians, the Terrible to English speakers), the author chronicles a sometimes depressing history of abuse of native peoples, pushed aside by Russian settlers, maltreated by Russian and later Soviet administrators, their traditional ways of life and religion attacked, decimated by disease, forced to produce vast amounts of sable and other furs or other onerous tasks. Petersburg and later Moscow were less interested in native peoples than the use of Siberia as a land of exile, a place where criminals, prisoners of war, and political exiles were sent to, the land that "was the death of hope, the unhappiest of endings." Even those who sought to protect the native peoples often had little success thanks to corrupt and often very isolated officials; Reid writes in some cases the round trip time for communications during the days of the Tsars was two years!

The best part of the book though is the many fascinating native groups of Siberia. We meet the Khant of the river Ob region in western Siberia. Called sometimes by the Russians the Ostyaks (a term they generally consider derogatory), they are related to the Finns and Estonians, and lived lives of fishing and hunting, their most complicated artifacts their massive bows and highly specialized arrows. Their language, sadly now largely gone, was wonderfully precise, with no general word for instance for fish or bird, but only words for specific species, and amazingly their vocabulary was over 80 percent verbs, with different words for sitting on the ground, sitting on a log, and sitting on a stump. Their religion has virtually vanished too, one that involved feasts honoring bears that they hunted.

Along the Russian-Mongolian borderland she introduces us to the Buryat, a Mongol people who roamed as nomads a Sweden-sized mix of forest and steppe. Possessing written language, firearms, tribute-paying vassals, and vast livestock herds, they were among the most powerful nationalities encountered by the Russians in Siberia, subdued only after a series of wars that lasted some 30 years. Their rich Buddhist legacy was nearly annihilated under the Soviets much like the Chinese have done in Tibet, with temples destroyed or converted to other uses, lamas hunted down, and sacred relics burned.

Then there are the Tuvan, famed for their throat-singers. Their region sometimes called "Russia's Tibet" not only for the ethnic problems it poses but also for its rich Buddhist legacy (which as with the Buryat was largely destroyed), this region on the Mongolian border was nominally independent between the world wars; regrettably Stalin in 1948 formally announced the annexation of this country, five times the size of Belgium, to little protest. Today the only region in Siberia where the indigenous people are the majority, it faces an uncertain future.

Northeastern Siberia is home to the Sakha. Found along the Lena River region, they were called by the Russians the Yakut, or "horse people." Despite similarities in physical appearance to the Japanese and living in pine forests on permafrost, they speak a Turkic language and herd horses rather than reindeer. Thought to perhaps have been displaced by the vast movements of Genghiz Khan, they were noted for their use of iron, shamans, and their olonholar, epic poems tens of thousands of verses long performed entirely from memory. Though Sakha is rich with diamonds, producing more than $1.5 billion a year, is increasingly ethnic Sakha as Russians emigrate, and is eleven times the size of Britain, it is still unlikely to chart its own course as independence would produce huge problems.

The far eastern island of Sakhalin - thought a peninsula well into the 19th century - was home to the Ainu, now only found in Japan, and the Uilta or "reindeer-men," the latter reduced to less than 200 people. More common on Sakhalin are the Nivkh (or to Russians, Gilyaks), noted for fishing, using dogs, and holding bear feasts. They were also noted for a complicated language (one with over 26 different methods of counting) and a highly complex kinship system, where siblings of the opposite sex could not look at each other or even talk to one another except through a third person. Today some 2500 strong, the Nivkh have seen penal colonies and the Japanese come and go, and today try to cope with fishing quotas and pollution from petroleum production.

The final ethnic group she looks at are the Chukchi, at the very limits of northeastern Siberia, closely related to the Eskimos. They were a stone age people up into 18th century when the Russians first encountered them, inland tribes herding deer, the coastal tribes hunting whales and walrus. Though apparently "primitive," the Chukchi managed to avoid direct Russian rule until well into the 20th century; after a series of failed attempts to subdue them in the 18th century forced Petersburg to make peace, the only northern natives able to win a formal truce.

Reid admits she doesn't cover all of the "Small-Numbered Peoples" in her wonderful book, one that attempts to cover an area of over thirty nationalities, but it is a book I highly recommend.

Reid has gone in search of the shaman who helped native Siberians connect with their cold but animist history and backgrounds. Reid ends up finding a hodgepodge assortment of native inhabitants who have survived harsh terrain, gvoernmental indifferance and outright hostility, and forced Russification. The natives have had to deal with the Russians stealing their heritage as well as their best hunting grounds (where the native species have been decimanted to near extinction).

Over a span of two hundred years, but truly accelerated under the Stalinist Soviet regime, the Small-Number Peoples have been subjected to the worst abuses of an abusive system. Under conditions that made life tenuous at best the natives had developed cultures that had survived for over a thousand years. The greedy commissars and native leaders had done their best to take away the ability for survival and replaced it with liquor and syphyllis. Who could ask for more.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the small safety net that existed, fell apart. The natives stayed when most of the 'native' Russians left. Unable to remember how their ancestors survived, they are left with a cash economy that generates no cash jobs. They show all the casualties of the Inuit, Eskimo and Indians of our far north and Canada, with none of the oil money to save and promote their indigenous culture. With the Gulag gone they can't even make money by returning captured prisoners.

A sad state of affairs, since once they were at least 'Soviet Citizens', now they are part of the Russian Federation, but they will never be Russians.

As the author so vividly describes, the natives were extinguished here as well as the American West. Reid takes nine of the native groups and describes their plight under both the Czarist and Soviet regimes. Her travels through these lands in search of the native religion show that most of these native groups have given up a lot in terms of their old lifestyle. Now these groups are a splinter of the Russian nation.

This is a good travel book about the natives that inhabited Siberia. Siberia was only recently colonized by the Russian Czarist state, so the Russian experience is a relatively new one. In fact Tuva was added to the Russian state only in 1944. The lifestyle change on these natives was great.

This is a nice read about an unknown part of the world. Reid tries to be fair to the Russian and native groups. In her writings, she is not condescending to any of these groups. She does question the Russian political order which is still dominant over these natives. I hope Ms. Reid is not a snooty British author.

This book is not really about shamanism per se, but about the author's experiences in searching for indigenous Siberian peoples. She assumes that the state of shamanism will reflect the more general cultural health of the Siberian peoples, which is a rather shaky assumption to begin with, as not every single indigenous group had the same traditions.

After an introduction giving the basic information on the Russian conquest of Siberia, the body of the book is dedicated to a series of essays on specific indigenous Siberian peoples. She mixes history with her personal experiences. I was disappointed to see so little use made of Russian-language sources. There is a great deal of Russian-language material on indigenous Siberians, and to not see it cited made me wonder how good her Russian is. Once I started wondering that it made me less sure about her reporting of events that happened to her in Siberia.

Her chapters provide a spectrum of how the peoples of Siberia have dealt with the modern age. One side of the spectrum contains the Buryats, who became important Communist leaders and oppressed Mongolians during the Soviet takeover of that country in the 1920s and the Sakha (formerly Iakut), who were widely known for their ability to assimilate Russian settlers and who still have a strong culture. On the other, we see the Khant, who are presented as having almost completely lost their culture. She actually comes across the death of one culture, as the last Ainu woman in Siberia had had a stroke and could not speak to her. The Ainu woman's daughter has listed herself as Russian on her passport and says that she and her children are not interested in anything to do with the Ainu. That seems to be a pretty widespread attitude in Siberia more broadly.

I found the chapter on Tuva the most interesting, as it gives a sense of the place and its complicated history as a sometimes independent state caught between Russia/ the USSR and Mongolia. Reid is better with political history than with ethnography, so the chapters on the Buryats and Sakha are also stronger than the others. The Chukchi chapter is also interesting in tracing the Chukchi's unwillingness to be assimilated.

Reid notes that even though Stalin's collectivization and use of Siberia as a massive prison camp - the well-known Gulag system -- was bad, Khrushchev's policy of consolidating Siberian villages was really what destroyed a lot of the culture there. This is echoed in Valentin Rasputin's chapter on Russkoe Ustye in _Siberia, Siberia_ where he says the same about Khrushchev's policy.

If someone is seriously interested in the peoples of Siberia, I'd recommend James Forsyth's History of the Peoples of Siberia. However, this is a useful, if somewhat flawed, introduction. At least it can raise awareness of the great difficulties Siberian natives have and still do experience.

Who knew? 1.6 million native Siberians: Buryats, Nivkh, Khanty, Evenk, Uilats and many more. Not an in-depth academic study but a look at daily life and brief histories of people and places virtually never covered anywhere else.

Only three native populations in the world today have been virtually whipped out, driven from their homelands and yet they remain, remnants and testaments to a different world. These are the American Indian, the Aborigine of Australia and the Natives of Siberia. This essential work tells the stories of the tribes and the peoples of Siberia `from their view'. The Siberian natives, from the Buryat to the Khant are a diverse people from many walks of life and of different races. Many of these people were disastrously affected by the coming of Communism and the upheavals of Stalin and industrialization. Yet they remain in pockets in some of the harshest landscape in the world. This is a wonderful book that sheds light on these fascinating people.

Seth J. Frantzman