First published in 1985, Shamans, Lamas and Evangelicals tells the little known yet fascinating story of a missionary venture to Eastern Siberia in the year 1818. Two missionaries, one English, one Swedish, with the tiresome voyage across the Baltic behind them, set out with their wives to face the daunting prospect of a 3000-mile journey by sledge across the rough snow roads of Siberia in the depths of winter. The mission was unusual in its conception. Established by the London Missionary Society and the backing of the Tsar, Alexander I, its aim was to bring the Christian gospel to the Buryats, and, once that was accomplished, to cross into China, evangelize the Mongols there, and then set about the conversion of the Chinese. The mission failed, but it was nonetheless an extraordinary episode. It is the story of men who first had to learn Russian in order to teach themselves Mongolian, who brought up their families, founded schools, treated the sick, and translated the entire Bible into Mongolian, printing the Old Testament on their own local press. This is an interesting historical reference work for scholars and researchers of Russian history and Mongolian history.

Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity’s first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent’s eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.

This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building, with geographic coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.

This book offers an in-depth insight into post-socialist rural shamans in Mongolia thereby making a rare but important contribution to the ethnography of both Inner Asia and Southern Siberia. It examines the social making of shamans, in particular those of the Shishget depression of the northernmost borders of Mongolia. By analysing practices, discourses and performances in local and national arenas, the author traces the social constitution of the shamans’ inspirational power, examines the shamans’ performance of power during the seance, discusses the economy of reputation of successful shamans and scrutinizes their legitimizing practices. The study will be welcomed by students of social/cultural anthropology and religious studies with a particular interest in shamanism or ritual studies.

Cover -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Approaching shamanism -- 2 Eighteenth and nineteenth-century interpretations -- 3 Early twentieth-century American interpretations -- 4 Twentieth-century European constructions -- 5 The Bollingen connection, 1930s-1960s -- 6 Post-war American visions -- 7 The genesis of a field of shamanism, America 1960s-1990s -- 8 A Case Study: Shamanisms in the Netherlands -- 9 Struggles for power, charisma and authority: a balance -- Bibliography -- Index

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.

The fascinating history of an unknown people A vivid mixture of history and reporting, The Shaman's Coat tells the story of some of the world's least-known peoples-the indigenous tribes of Siberia. Russia's equivalent to the Native Americans or Australian Aborigines, they divide into two dozen different and ancient nationalities-among them Buryat, Tuvans, Sakha, and Chukchi. Though they number more than one million and have begun to demand land rights and political autonomy since the fall of communism, most Westerners are not even aware that they exist. Journalist and historian Anna Reid traveled the length and breadth of Siberia-one-twelfth of the world's land surface, larger than the United States and Western Europe combined-to tell the story of its people. Drawing on sources ranging from folktales to KGB reports, and on interviews with shamans and Buddhist monks, reindeer herders and whale hunters, camp survivors and Party apparatchiks, The Shaman's Coat travels through four hundred years of history, from the Cossacks' campaigns against the last of the Tatar khans to native rights activists against oil development. The result is a moving group portrait of extraordinary and threatened peoples, and a unique and intrepid travel chronicle.

This fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Mongolia covers the people and organizations that brought Mongolia from revolution and oppression to independence and democracy, and its current unprecedented level of national wealth and international growth. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,200 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Mongolia.

In Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: the Brethren in Twentieth-Century China, David Woodbridge offers an account of a little-known Protestant missionary group. Often depicted as extreme and marginal, the Brethren were in fact an influential force within modern evangelicalism. They sought to recreate the life of the primitive church, and to replicate the simplicity and dynamism of its missionary work. Using newly-released archive material, Woodbridge examines the activities of Brethren missionaries in diverse locations across China, from the cosmopolitan treaty ports to the Mongolian and Tibetan frontiers. The book presents a fascinating encounter between primitivist missionaries and a modernising China, and reveals the important role of the Brethren in the development of Chinese Christianity.