Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memories, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia written by Professor Manduhai Buyandelger (MIT) won the 2014 Hsu book Prize. Tragic Spirits illustrates how shamanism has been revived by the Buryat people in Mongolia after the collapse of socialism and the further impoverishment of this marginalized ethnic group under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. Through analyzing how economy, gender, and the state’s power influence the spirit world, Buyandelger documents the shamanistic practices that the Buryats use to make sense of their current misfortunes, reconstruct their memories, and recover their communal histories.
Yi Zhou: I love your book title, Tragic Spirits. Can you give us some background on how you chose this as your title?
Manduhai Buyandelger: It was visceral. It came from the consistent sadness and hurt that the supernatural beings communicated at almost every ritual that I had attended. I also wanted to convey the spirit of the place and time and what I understood about the people living through ongoing life-threatening misfortunes in the impoverished Mongolian countryside at the time of the collapse of socialism and the beginnings of capitalism.
YZ: As you stated in your book, shamanism is many things: a local epistemology, a medical practice, a political struggle, etc. Why do you prioritize shamanism’s ability to make memories and history?
MB: Shamanism and other inspirational practices have been theorized in anthropology in all sorts of ways and I spent a lot of time working through each of many framings, the epistemology, healing, resistance, etc. against my ethnographic material. But one theoretical framework seemed to downplay another. The emphasis on memory and history was inspired by many teachers and colleagues, but especially by Mary Margaret Steedly’s book Hanging without a Rope on Indonesian spirit mediums. She brings together various narratives by misfits, colonial officials, female mediums, and many others into an intricate shifting history, accompanied by a piercing analysis of postcolonial, narrative, and feminist theories. I wanted to bring in the stories of Buryat Mongolian shamans into a similar rendering. Once I began analyzing the production of memories, many other frameworks, especially the gendered politics, resistances to the colonial and socialist states as well as the influence of the market economy, began to fall into place as constitutive and constellating parts of the memory-making process.
While in the field I consistently encountered shamanism’s ability to mark lacunae and forgetting, and leave the people attending the rituals on the threshold of knowledge and who then became highly invested in attending to their experiences of epistemic crisis and interpretive dead ends! Much anthropological work tends to treat the local epistemologies as readily existing and more or less consistent. I wanted to show people’s experiences of living with forgetting, partial knowledge, and even the impossibility of knowing, especially after the state control of knowledge during socialism.
There is also a more direct answer to your question: regardless of the outcome of the rituals and the clients’ initial motives for consultations, the stories of spirits tended to take life of their own and become a part of the local history. Poignantly, most people sought shamanic help to solve their problems, especially economic devastation, but they got memories instead of resources.
YZ: How did the lens of gender help reveal the uniqueness of shamanism in the Buryat community for you, especially aspects of shamanism that otherwise would have been difficult to see?
MB: Attention to gender provides some key insights into memory making as an innovative and creative process. It was convenient to be around the generous, charismatic, and often hilariously entertaining male shamans and their families. They were the knowledge experts attracting anthropologists and tourists from all over. Because men controlled their domestic resources, the male shamans were also able to sponsor their rituals on time, mend their state-disrupted genealogies, and exclude the dangerous spirits and their disturbances.
Female shamans were usually in the midst of a series of inconveniences: their rituals stagnated, degrees postponed, resources ended, families abandoned, their spirits betrayed, and they received ambiguous messages. All of that led me to attend to the shifting qualities of history, conceptualize the ephemerality of voices, experiences of lacunae, and gendered politics behind silences.
Yet even if I just followed the male shamans it would have been hard to avoid gender issues. The vindictive spirits include male and female ancestors. But female spirits tend to be forgotten because in a patriarchal and patrilineal setting women’s names are not mentioned in genealogies, and women are discouraged from becoming shamans (which would make them into ancestral spirits after their death) by their husbands’ families. Yet in order to end the misfortunes caused by their malicious spirits, the community must appease both male and female spirits. The most qualified shamans to deal with the most malicious spirits happen to be, although not always, male. More, these male shamans must then challenge the ritual mechanisms and epistemological boundaries of shamanism that they have favored. Instead, they have to expand the neatly established notions of genealogy into a constellation of stories and include the narrative shreds about female ancestors. These efforts do not solve forgetting at a large scale, but they do something equally important; they reveal a structural crisis that is embedded in a gendered inequality in everyday practice, which is obscured in representations.
YZ: Could the Buryats’ shamanism be seen as participating in what a recent Cultural Anthropology special issue called “emergent indigeneities,” forms of indigeneity that are inextricably linked with the emergence of new ideas about politics and citizen rights (Issue 25, Vol 2, 2010)?
MB: Much of shamanism throughout Mongolia can be seen as participating in “emergent indigeneities,” as a political reaction to recent development in mining industries and the deterioration of the natural environment. But some shamans also participate in mining so it cannot be the dominant idea. “Indigeneity” would not work in ethnic terms either, as it might push the hierarchization among Mongolian ethnic groups all of which are experiencing the repercussions of extractive capitalism.
Manduhai Buyandelger is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is the author of Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Gender, and Memory in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In her next project she explores the experiences and strategies of women candidates’ participation in Parliamentary elections in Mongolia.