(Interview with Richard Noll.) "Journey to a Sacred Summons," by Janelle Hill. DeSales University News 11 September 2017 (original) (raw)

Notes on Conversation with a Shaman from Mongolia

International Conference on Study of Shamanism, 2004

Notes on a conversation with Zorigtbaatar Banzar, Shaman from Mongolia, in attendance at the 21st International Conference on the Study of Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing. Zorigtbaatar Banzar and his wife, Bayarmaa Osor, conversed with William C. Gough, Cynthia Larson, Richard Hiersch, and Bett Martinez in September 2004, thanks to translation assistance by Jamba Luvsan.

Contemporary shamanisms in Mongolia

In Asian Ethnicity Vol.11 No. 2, 2010. pp. 229-38, 2010

The aim of this paper is to outline the current situation of shamanism in Mongolia. It examines the relationship between shamanism and ethnicity, the phenomenon of urban shamanism and the emergence of shaman associations and shamanic enterprises in Ulaanbaatar. The study is based on a year-long fieldwork in Mongolia 2004-05, during which the author came into contact with the two most influential shamanic associations, the 'Golomt Center' and the 'Heaven's Dagger' association and had interviews with the members, and attended a number of shamanic rituals that they conducted. The field study was conducted at a time when these associations and enterprises had already 'grown up', i.e. they had recruited a vast number of members and attracted enough clients to operate, but still had not reached the stage of economic prosperity. This was also the time when the partly conscious attempt of forging a standardized Mongolian shamanism mainly from Darkhat and Buryat sources and the recreation of Khalkha shamanism began to take place.

Establishing mutual misunderstanding. A Buryat Shamanic ritual in Ulaanbaatar (2014)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014

This article discusses a strange case of shamanic ritual performed for a Buryat family in Mongolia’s capital city Ulaanbaatar. This performance not only differs from those described in the regional literature, but it also seems to challenge some of the models used to account for ritual efficacy. Indeed, while the cathartic use of Buryat traumatic history to deal with a patient’s misfortune in shamanic rituals is quite well documented, this performance stands out for the uncompassionate hopelessness with which spirits spoke of the family’s fate as exiles in Mongolia. Meanwhile, the ever-growing tension between participants, which culminated in an open crisis, would be a sure sign of a ritual failure had it not been the clear result of the shaman’s own efforts to establish mutual misunderstanding between the spirits, the patients, and herself. Drawing on a pragmatic approach to ritual efficacy, this article ponders on the specific purpose of a performance which seems to be aimed at creating a context of miscommunication between participants.

Institutionalization of Mongolian shamanism: from primitivism to civilization

This article traced the construction of the Mongolian term and concept böö mörgöl, which denotes ‘shamanism’, later developed to böögiin shashin meaning ‘shamanic religion’. Although the term bö’e (alternatively böge or böö), referring to spiritual practitioners such as shamans, appears early in the literature from the thirteenth century onward, the combination böö mörgöl and khara shajin meaning ‘black religion’ is fairly recent and first appeared in sources from the nineteenth century. Its latest version, böögiin shashin, has an even shorter history dating as recently to 1980s, and has spread rapidly over the last two decades. I argue that ‘shamanism’ in Mongolia has been constructed in scholarly works mostly by public involvement and shamans themselves. More precisely, academic discourses have played a key role in institutionalising individual spiritual practitioners in two fields, first by creating a history for ‘Mongolian shamanism’ and second by creating archetypes for miscellaneous spiritual practices and practitioners. The concept böö mörgöl have been used in translating and importing the Western construction of ‘shamanism’ while in the next step of development, böögiin shashin was important in institutionalizing a national religion of shamanism versus world religions. As a result, Mongols have an original religion which has been the main building block in constructing Mongolian ‘nomadic civilization’. Keywords: Mongolia; shamanism; shamanic religion; institutionalization; academic knowledge production

A Tricky Business: Mongolian and Korean Shamans in the Modern World

In this paper, we’ll look at three books about Mongolian shamanism: Caroline Humphrey’s Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power Among the Daur Mongols, Manduhai Buyandelger’s Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia, and Sarangerel’s Riding Windhorses: A Journey into the Heart of Mongolian Shamanism. In each, there is a process of engagement with Mongolian shamanism that occupies a peculiar place between belief and disbelief, as both the authors and their informants attempt to translate the experience of Mongolian shamanism into paragraphs and chapters written in English and folded between covers. I am especially interested in the ways that the authors and informants cope with the shifting landscape of modernity, and I want to bring in my own knowledge of Korean shamanism as a kind of counterweight or commentary as we go along.