Will Post-socialism Create “Post-shamanism”? On the Problems of Research on Modern Siberian Shamanism.
The article describes the problem of mutual relations between the “post-Soviet” situation and the process of renaissance or the “rebirth” of shamanism. The author asks the question whether a sufficient explanation for the reappearance of shamanism in Siberia is the collapse of the communist system. The next question is whether contemporary shamanism is a completely different phenomenon than pre-revolutionary shamanism and may be considered as “neo-shamanism”. The author claims that in the case of Siberian shamanism, when asking about the continuity of shamanism, we also need to ask ourselves whether we mean the continuation of the whole system or only its chosen manifestations. We must take into account the changing cultural and social context of shamanism and relationships between shamanism and the cultures of indigenous peoples. Empirical base of this paper are four fieldworks in the south of Siberia in the years 2000, 2010, 2013 and 2014.
