|
Volume 7 Number 1 (Spring 1999)
Articles
MIHÁLY HOPPÁL (Budapest): The Life and Works of Benedek
Baráthosi Balogh, a Hungarian Researcher of Manchu-Tunguz
Shamanism
The Hungarian linguist and ethnographer, Benedek Baráthosi
Balogh visited the Far East (Japan, Sahalin, Amur region,
Korea, Manchuria, China) on several study trips at the
beginning of the 20th century. His linguistic and folklore
collections are entirely unknown, partly because they
remained in manuscript and partly because another portion
of them was published only in Hungarian. When, in 1996,
the Budapest Museum of Ethnography organised an exhibition
of Baráthosi's object collection, primarily the material
collected in the Nanai and Ainu areas of the Amur region,
9 Nanai shaman songs (prayers) were also discovered
in the archives. These are being published here in K.
Köhalmi's phonetic transcription, with T. D. Bulgakova's
commentary.
TATIANA BULGAKOVA (St. Petersburg) and CATHERINE U.
KÖHALMI (Budapest): Nanai Shaman Songs From Benedek
Baráthosi Balogh's Collection
ULLA JOHANSEN (Cologne): Further Thoughts on the History
of Shamanism
Countless articles and not a few books have been written
on the history of shamanism. Most, however, advance
speculative hypotheses suggesting that shamanism had
its origins at the very outset of mankind's development
with no explicit definition of who is considered to
have been a shaman and who not. This paper therefore
opens with a general definition of "shaman" and, in
the light of this, reconsiders those Eurasian sources
which report on persons who qualify as shamans. An overview
shows that most Paleolithic rock carvings do not provide
unambiguous evidence of shamanism, as Hoppál has claimed.
Only a limited number of archaeological finds indicate
that shamanism existed in Northern Asia and China 3,000
years B.C. or perhaps a little earlier. From mediaeval
times onwards there are many written records of shamans,
but these show that they were only one of many groups
of religious specialists (as in present-day Korea) under
the great empires. Only in small, scattered societies
do shamans have such manifold tasks as the anthropological
prototype of the shaman would indicate. Shamanism, then,
has undergone many changes, not only in the present
century but in earlier centuries as well. We should
not conceive of it, in contradistinction to all other
continuously changing cultural elements, as an immutable
institution.
BARTON KUNSTLER (Cambridge, MA): Sappho's Koma: Insights
Into the Vocabulary of Shamanic Trance in Ancient Greek
Poetry
Although most scholars discount the existence of an
active shamanic tradition in mainstream Hellenic culture,
an analysis of one of Sappho's poems reveals Sappho
to have been a trance practitioner. The key term in
this regard is koma, central to a matrix of terms employed
in Greek poetry to describe the experience of trance.
Comparative analysis of passages from the Iliad, Odyssey,
Theogony, and Pythian I, as well as the Biblical Song
of Songs, uncovers a language of shamanic trance in
which koma, the River Styx, paradisal gardens, wind
and breath, metaphors for psychotropic substances, and
key words such as kaluptein and pneuma, are among the
key elements. Decoding this language provides insight
into the history of shamanism, epic and poetic themes,
poetic diction, and the transition from direct experiential
modes of religion to more formal, mimetic institutional
practices.
Field Reports
DANIEL KISTER (Seoul): Present-Day Shamanism in Northern
China and the Amur Region
Volume 7 Number 2 (Autumn 1999)
Articles
JENNY BLAIN (Halifax): Seidr as Shamanistic Practice:
Reconstructing a Tradition of Ambiguity
The Saga of Eirik the Red describes a seeress, who
sat in a specially prepared High Seat to foretell events
for a Greenland community of 1000 years ago. She used
a technique known as seidr, calling on "powers"
to help her see further. Seidr magic was chiefly performed
by women, with male practitioners disparaged as ergi.
Today members of reconstructionist "heathen"
communities in North America are drawing on such accounts
in establishing seidr as shamanistic practice, involving
trance or shapeshifting, for foretelling and healing.
This article examines constructions and contestations
of seidr within communities of past and present.
I. N. GEMUEV (Novosibirsk) and G. I. PELIKH (Tomsk):
Categories of Selkup Shamans
On the basis of fieldwork carried out among the Northern
Selkup of Tazov and Turukhansk and the Selkups of the
Ob River area in the Russian Federation in the 1960s
and 70s, the authors distinguish three types of Selkup
shamans (tätypy): the tätypy sombyrni, the tätypy kamityrni
and the tätypy aloga. The first two differ in their
paraphernalia and the time of day they perform their
ceremonies. Recent research supports the idea, suggested
earlier, that the Selkup did not have separate shamans
who were only in touch with good or evil spirits. The
aloga, the most esoteric category, occupy a special
place among Selkup shamans and are known to us today
only through relics. While the first two types of shamanism
developed in the already emerged Selkup ethnos, the
origin of the aloga goes back to the Siberian ethnic
groups with which the Samoyed came into contact during
the period (or periods) of their northward migration.
Discussions
JOHN A. DOOLEY (Manciet, France): Trance or Symbolic
Representation: That is the Question
For some time Roberte Hamayon and Ake Hultkrantz have
aired their differing modes of approach to the current
notions of what constitutes trance and ecstasy. This
article endeavours to briefly sum up their respective
positions, and then-by examples-to work beyond these
in a demonstration of support for Hamayon's use of symbolic
representations to describe an elusive condition which-to
my mind-cannot otherwise be described scientifically
at present; that is given the suppositious terms anthropologists
may be obliged to adopt in any attempt to directly describe
these phenomena.
Field Reports
KIRA VAN DEUSEN (Vancouver, B.C.): In Black and White:
Contemporary Buriat Shamans
Book Reviews
ROBERTE HAMAYON. La chasse a l'âme. Esquisse d'une théorie
du chamanisme sibérien (by György Kara)
THOMAS. C. PARKHILL. Weaving Ourselves into the Land:
Charles Godfrey Leland, "Indians," and the
Study of Native American Religions (by Ake Hultkrantz)
Variations chamaniques 1-2, [cahiers] présenté[s] et
coordonné[s] par Marie-Lise Beffa et Marie-Dominique
Even (by György Kara)
News and Notes
DANIEL A. KISTER (Seoul) and PETER KNECHT (Nagoya)
Report "Central Asian Shamanism: Past and Present,"
The 5th Conference of ISSR, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
GREGORY G. MASKARINEC (Honolulu) Minutes of the 5th
Conference of ISSR, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
KIRA VAN DEUSEN (Vancouver, B.C.) Report on the Moscow
Conference
|
|