"Not Quite Shamans"

In Not Quite Shamans, Morten Axel Pedersen explores how shamanism serves to fill the spiritual void left by the collapse of socialism in Mongolia. Pedersen conducted his ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Mongolia's remote Shishged Valley among Darhads, who are famous for having the most "authentic" shamans. When Pedersen arrived to conduct his research in the late 1990s, however, he found a paradox: the homeland of shamanism, where shamans persevered even through the harshest persecution during socialism, was now barren. Instead of shamans, the place was full of böö shig or böörhuu individuals (shaman-like or sort-of-a-shaman-but-not-quite). These are almost exclusively young men who ought to be shamans but are unable to become them because of lack of accessible "authentic" teachers and insufficient resources to obtain shamanic paraphernalia that are necessary for appeasing and controlling the spirits -- the traits of trained shamans. 

Unable to learn how to subdue the spirits and so choose when to become possessed and when not, these young men remained permanently stuck as what Pedersen calls "not-quite-shamans." Pedersen illustrates how the daily lives of Darhads are affected by these "not-quite-shamans," whose undirected energies erupted in unpredictable, frightening bouts of violence and drunkenness. His main argument is that the lack of shamans does not make the Darhad life any less shamanic. Quite the contrary, without shamans, shamanism thrives and seeps through every pore of the moral, cultural, and natural lives in Shishged. Pedersen details how, for many Darhads, the postsocialist state itself has become shamanic in nature. 

"For scholars of shamanism, Pedersen, by demonstrating that it is not always the shamans who carry the practice to the new generations but the entire community, reveals some nuances behind shamanic resiliency around the world…" 

 - Review by Manduhai Buyandelger in American Anthropologist, Volume 115, Issue 1.