This book is a reworked version of my Ph.D. thesis, which concluded the research that I carried out between 2013 and 2016 for the project: Mongolian knowledge cultures in the 18th and 19th centuries: the construction of a ‘doctrine of the shamans’. The project was conceived of and coordinated by Prof. Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz at the Institute for the Science of Religion and Central Asian Studies at the University of Bern. The funding for the project came from a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) grant. During the project, I conducted research in the Russian Federation – first in 2014 and then in 2015 – in the state archives and libraries of Ulan-Ude, Chita, and St. Petersburg.
Following the research paths indicated by Kollmar-Paulenz in the project’s outline, the aim of the project was to determine whether, given the dissemination of Buddhism in Central Asia and southern Siberia, knowledge-building processes in Mongolia and Buryatia might have led to the construction of the ‘doctrine of the shamans’, an expression that was used in the nineteenth century by the Buryat authors when composing historiographies of Transbaikalia. If it could be shown that a category similar to the well-established “Western” taxonomy of shamanism existed within the entangled Tibetan, Mongolian and Russian epistemologies, this would account for the resemblance of such knowledge-building processes to those unfolding in “Western” cultural milieus. In other words, historical research on the emergence and reification of the ‘doctrine of the shamans’ helps determine whether an emic category of ‘shamanism’ existed within the non-European cultural milieu prior to colonial encounters. Confirmation of this hypothesis would contribute to ongoing discussion in the study of the history of religions about the existence of ‘religion’ as an emic category.
My research on whether an emic category of ‘religion’ exists in Buryat history was influenced by the academic discourse that I followed at the time, which was heavily shaped by postcolonial and Foucauldian approaches to the study of history. Although the initial aims of the project were quickly confronted with the reality of the sources that I found and studied during my archival and field work in Buryatia, the above perspectives still linger in the present book. Eventually, my philological and historical research on the existence of a connection between ‘religion’ and ‘shamanism’ in local historiographies was shattered, revealing an image that – although still obscure to this day – indicated a different task. This task involves writing about “shamanism” within a modern framework of the history of religion(s) that does not follow its own shadow. Even if the present book does not fully stand up to this task, it surely indicates future possibilities. While I deliberately retained some flaws in the structure and content of the original manuscript that mirror the imperfections characteristic of young scholarship, I hope that I still refined the text to suit my present view.
As an exercise in historical discourse analysis, the present book is an interdisciplinary study. I hope that The Religion of the Shamans will find its readers among scholars of the history of religions who work empirically on the socio-cultural setting of Central Asia and Southern Siberia, scholars interested in the history of shamanism in Transbaikalia and its relationship to Buddhism in the context of the Russian Tsarist politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and those generally interested in the interplay between religion and politics in the Siberian hinterlands.
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