Tribal peoples believe that the shaman experiences, absorbs, and communicates a special mode of power, sustaining and healing. This book discusses American Indian shamanic traditions, particularly those of the Woodland Ojibway, in terms drawn from the classical shamanism of Siberian peoples. Using a cultural-historical method, John A. Grim describes the spiritual formation of shamans, male and female, and elucidates the special religious experience that they transmit to their tribes. Writing as a historian of religion well acquainted with ethnological materials, Grim identifies four patterns in the shamanic experience: cosmology, tribal sanction, ritual reenactment, and trance experience. Relating those concepts to the Siberian and Ojibway experiences, he draws on mythology, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to paint a picture of shamanism that is both particularized and interpretative. As religious personalities, shamans are important today because of their singular ability to express symbolically the forces that animate the tribal cosmology. Often identifying themselves with primordial earth processes, shamans develop symbol systems drawn from the archetypal earth images that are vital to their psychic healing technique. This particular ability to resonate with the natural world is felt as an important need in our time. Those readers who identify with American Indians as they confront modern technological society will value this introduction to our native shamanic traditions and to the religious experience itself. The author's discussion of Ojibway practices is the most comprehensive short treatment available, written with a fine poetic feeling that reflects the literary expressiveness inherent in American Indian religion and thought.

Siberia has had an interesting history, quite distinct from that of Russia. Absolutely vast, containing many non-Russian nationalities, and increasingly important at present because of its huge energy reserves, Siberia was at one time part of the Mongol Empire, was settled relatively late by the Russians, and was for a long period a wild frontier zone, similar to the American West. Providing a comprehensive history of Siberia from the very earliest times to the present, this book covers every period of Siberia's history in an accessible way.

The twelve articles in this volume describe Yeniseic, Samoyedic and Siberian Turkic languages as a linguistic complex of great interest to typologists, grammarians, diachronic and synchronic linguists, as well as cultural anthropologists. The articles demonstrate how interdependent the disparate languages spoken in this area actually are. Individual articles discuss borrowing and language replacement, as well as compare the development of language subsystems, such as numeral words in Ket and Selkup. Three of the articles also discuss the historical and anthropological origins of the tribes of this area. The book deals with linguistics from the vantage of both historical anthropology as well as diachronic and synchronic linguistic structure. The editor's introduction offers a concise summary of the diverse languages of this area, with attention to both their differences and similarities. A major feature uniting them is their mutual interaction with the unique Yeniseic language family – the only group in North Asia outside the Pacific Rim that does not belong to Uralic or Altaic. Except for the papers by Anderson and Harrison, all of the articles were originally written in Russian and they are made available in English here for the first time.

The art of Siberia is a fascinating subject, and the artifacts discovered in the hidden archives of the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg are nothing less than extraordinary. Artwork, day-to-day subjects and photos dating from the turn of the century all represent the testimonies of the Siberian people who refused to yield to the hegemony of a modern world.

This is the first ethnohistory of Siberia to appear in English, tracing the history of the native peoples from the Russian conquest onwards. James Forsyth compares the Siberian experience with that of the Indians and Eskimos in North America and the book as a whole will provide readers with a vast corpus of ethnographic information previously inaccessible to Western scholars.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This book takes you to the "classical academy of shamanism", Siberian tribal spirituality that gave birth to the expression "shamanism." For the first time, in this volume Znamenski has rendered in readable English more than one hundred books and articles that describe all aspects of Siberian shamanism: ideology, ritual, mythology, spiritual pantheon, and paraphernalia. It will prove valuable to anthropologists, historians of religion, psychologists and practitioners of shamanism.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Tracing the history of the vast region of Siberia, compromising virtually all of north Asia, A.J. Haywood offers a detailed account of this land from its Mongol civilization to its infamous gulags to the present.