page_title: Shamanism in the Qing dynasty
section_title: Scholarly interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Shamanism in the Qing dynasty / Scholarly interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: Russian etnologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogorov
context_page_description: Shamanism was the dominant religion of the Jurchen people of northeast Asia and of their descendants, the Manchu people. As early as the Jin dynasty, the Jurchens conducted shamanic ceremonies at shrines called tangse. There were two kinds of shamans: those who entered in a trance and let themselves be possessed by the spirits, and those who conducted regular sacrifices to heaven, to a clan's ancestors, or to the clan's protective spirits.
  When Nurhaci, the chieftain of the Jianzhou Jurchens, unified the other Jurchen tribes under his own rule in the early seventeenth century, he imposed the protective spirits of his clan, the Aisin Gioro, upon other clans, and often destroyed their shrines. As early as the 1590s, he placed shamanism at the center of his state's ritual, sacrificing to heaven before engaging in military campaigns. His son and successor Hong Taiji, who renamed the Jurchens "Manchu" and officially founded the Qing dynasty, further put shamanistic practices in the service of the state, notably by forbidding others to erect new tangse for ritual purposes. In the 1620s and 1630s, the Qing ruler conducted shamanic sacrifices at the tangse of Mukden, the Qing capital.
context_section_description: During his fieldwork among the Tungusic peoples of "Manchuria" from 1912 to 1918, Russian anthropologist S. M. Shirokogoroff (1887–1939) found enough surviving practices to develop an influential theory of shamanism. He noted that the northern Tungus had been heavily influenced by Manchu language and culture: they wore Manchu clothing and hairstyle, read Manchu books, and conducted weddings and funerals according to Manchu customs. As he also discovered, the Manchus venerated many Buddhist deities, so much that he hypothesized that northeast Asian shamanism was an outgrowth of Buddhism. This thesis has not been widely accepted. His definition of shamanism, however, has been widely discussed. Equipped with specific ritual implements, the shaman enters into a trance to gain control of harmful spirits who cause illness or misfortune to a clan or a tribe. His role is recognized by his society, and there is an explicit explanation of how he masters the spirits.
  Shirokogoroff claimed that true shamanism only existed among the Tungus and the Manchus, but despite his warnings that Tungus shamanism could only be understood in relation to all other elements of Tungus culture, and that his findings should therefore not serve to develop a general interpretation of shamanism, Shirokogoroff's ideas have shaped theoretical debates about shamanism. Social anthropologists Raymond Firth (1901–2002) and Ioan Lewis (b. 1930)—the latter a student of E. E. Evans-Pritchard—drew from Shirokogoroff's work to emphasize the social roles of shamans. Lewis's influential analysis of spirit possession was also directly inspired by Shirokogoroff. Historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) borrowed from the Russian ethnologist and many others to build his seminal theory of shamanism, which he presented in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964, based on a French original dated 1951). Eliade's notion of "classic shamanism" or "shamanism in the strict and proper sense" was based on Siberian models. But whereas Shirokogoroff emphasized that control over the spirits was the chief function of shamanic rituals, Eliade stated that the ecstatic and visionary spirit-journey induced by trance was the most central aspect of shamanism.
  Shirokogoroff's and Eliade's views of shamanism were both centered on individuals and on the role of shamans in small groups. Shirokogoroff, for instance, considered eighteenth-century Qing shamanism too formalized to be authentic. Historians of northeast Asia have criticized Eliade's and Shirokogoroff's interpretations because they neglect the political roles of shamans and shamanism's relation with the state. Eliade's claim that shamanism is by essence archaic, individualistic, and socially transgressive led him and his followers to neglect historical contexts in which shamanism fulfilled political functions or served the needs of the state, as it did under the Qing.
caption: The Russian ethnologist S. M. Shirokogoroff, whose influential theories on shamanism were based on his fieldwork among the Manchus
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