Benedikte M. Kristensen - The Living Landscape of Knowledge: An analysis of shamanism among the Duha Tuvinians of Northern Mongolia

The Living Landscape of Knowledge
An analysis of shamanism among the Duha Tuvinians of Northern Mongolia

Institut for Antropologi, Københavns Universitet
Specialeafhandling til Kandidateksamen, Specialerække nr. 317

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes first to the many Duha Tuvinians and Tuvinians in Mongolia and in Tuva who generously gave me so many insights into their lives and shamanic traditions. In Mongolia I especially want to thank my adoptive parents Gompo and Centaling and my host family Erdemchimeg and Bat-zajah for inviting me to live in their homes for several month, for the guidance they gave me in my research and for their warmth and kindness as the friends and relatives they became. My gratitude also goes to "my dear brother" Dakdji for his patience and generosity in several interviews and conversations and to Ojombadum, who helped me transcribe my fieldnotes, and came with interesting comments on my material. Moreover, I want to thank all the Duha Tuvans, Darhat and Halh Mongols without whom this fieldwork could not have been done.

In Tuva I want to thank the shamanic organisation "Toc-Deer", the president of the organisation Mongush Kenin Lopsan, all the shamans working in the clinic and clients in the clinic for letting me work both as a shaman and an anthropologist among them. Moreover, I want to thank my Tuvan friends Maja Salchakovna, Tatjana Ondar and Nikolai Abaev for their help in my research and for their warm friendship.

I also want to thank the financial support of "Kronprins Frederiks Fond", "Lise & Aage Dahls Fond", "Feltarbejdspuljen", "Ølgod Rotary klub" and "Ølgod Elforsyningsfond" , which made my fieldwork possible.

In Denmark, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, anthropologist Finn Sivert Nielsen, who has thoroughly read and commented on my drafts. Moreover, I want to thank friends and relatives for their comments on my drafts, and for their patience and support, when I sometimes disappeared in my studies.

Chapter one: Introduction

The shamanic traditions of the Tuvinians - a nomadic people living in the Russian republic Tuva⁽¹⁾ in southern Siberia and in the mountainous regions of northern Mongolia - has puzzled and fascinated foreign travellers and scientists up through history. For example, in 1914 an English explorer; Douglas Carruthers described the Duha Tuvinians (or "Urianhai" as they were called in those days) in this Rossausian romantic way:

"The Urianhai, in his simple and yet subtle belief, sees mystery and feels the supernatural on all sides. His attitude is scarcely to be wondered at. The mystery of the sudden, taiga-clothed hills, the dark, silent valleys, and the mountain-crags which toss their heights above the forest, fill him with awe and crowd his thought with dread." (Carruthers 1914: 244).

The communist regimes in Mongolia and Russia perceived the Tuvinians, and other indigenous people in the region as "the children of nature", ready to make "a leap from primitive-communal society to socialism" (Grant 1995: 10). However, they also perceived shamanism as "opium for the people" and the shaman "as a counterrevolutionary". This resulted in a massive political repression of shamanism in the region, which lasted over half a century. Shamans were killed and imprisoned, and people were forced to practice their traditions in hiding. However, after the breakdown of communism, the Tuvinians in Northern Mongolia are once again practicing their shamanic traditions in the open, and in Tuva intellectuals and shamans have even organised shamanic clinics and organisations, to preserve and maintain their indigenous traditions.

In 2000-2001, while I was living amongst the Duha Tuvinian reindeer nomads in Northern Mongolia, researching the construction of shamanistic knowledge, my informants were often reluctant to talk about shamanism (bögiin sjasjin) and many said they had no faith in shamanism. In contrast, the presence and influence of spirits in human life and in the landscape never seemed to be doubted. The landscape is inhabited by various spirits, such as ezes⁽²⁾ (spirit owners mastering specific natural entities and places) luc' (ancestor spirits) ongods (shamanic helper spirits) and chötgörs (dangerous demon-like spirits). My adoptive father Gompo and other Duha Tuvinians often told me that they honoured and entrusted their fate (zajah) to their surrounding landscape - Oron Hangai - and their sacrificial trees and oboos (stone-cairns or wooden cairns).

The Duha Tuvianians perceive human fate (zajah) as intimately connected with the deeds of their ancestors, who influence them through specific natural entities located in the local landscape. Each patrilineal clan has its own sacrificial mountain oboos (stone cairns) and each shamanic lineage have their own sacrificial trees (taxih shutdeg mod) in the landscape, which they describe as "my mountain, my tree". Such personal relations to trees and mountains are connected to the Duha Tuvinian' concepts of ongods - shamanic spirit helpers - and luc' - ancestor spirits, which after a shaman's or another important person's death become located in a natural entity, from where it influences the lives of the living kin.

The way a certain spirit affects humans depends on the character of the spirit, which is in turn connected to the actions of the historical person from which the spirit originated. However, the character of the spirit is not unchangeable, it can be moulded and even totally transformed by the deeds of the living kin and people roaming in the area inhabited by the spirit. Conducting wrong sacrifices, hunting, urinating or digging holes in the ground results in pollution, which may anger and sometimes transform a luc into a chötgör - devil. Polluted places are known as chötgertei - devilish places - where demon-like spirits roam, spreading misfortune and illness among humans.

Confronted with misfortune and illness the Duha Tuvinians will sometimes seek the help of shamans and participate in shamanic rituals. A couple of times a month - at dates which are considered suitable according to the lunar calendar - the Duha Tuvinian' shamans conduct rituals, where they drum in order to travel to the places of the spirits, which they fight to heal illnesses and repair (zazal hinaa) misfortune.

During the last couple of years some Duha Tuvinian and Darhad⁽³⁾ shamans have visited the towns of Mörön, Erdenet and Ulaan Bator, to conduct healing and prophecy rituals for an urban audience. This is a practice most Duha Tuvinians see as wrong and even dangerous, for the travelling shaman and for the community as a whole. They often told me that the shamanic drum and dress - animated by shamanic ongods⁽⁴⁾ - should be kept in the clean and sacred northern part of the urts (tepee-like dwelling). Taking it away from the shaman's urts can lead to pollution of the shamanic equipment. It is not the shaman travelling, as a person, which is seen as dangerous, but the separation of the shamanic ongods from the shaman's urts in the local landscape.

Shamanism among the Duha Tuvinians is thus a deeply local tradition, closely intertwined with their awareness of the surrounding landscape. For them it is important to know where the spirits of one's clan are located, and to make offerings to specific sacrificial trees and oboos, in order to avoid disastrous events. On the other hand shamanism among urban Tuvinians is only partly a local tradition and to some extent a more "global" or "modern" tradition; since urban Tuvinian shamanism both deals with the concrete landscape and with an "imagined" landscape. Among them, knowledge of shamanic cosmology is not only important when one moves in the concrete landscape of known places and kinship: rather the local landscape is being relocated, to affirm ethnic identity and rights in Russian national space. In the Tuvan capital Kyzil shamans and academics are using shamanism politically at conferences and in the media, representing shamanism as "an ethnic wisdom about the environment genetically remembered by the Tuvinians" (Personal conversation with Professor Abaev 2001).

1.1 Formulation of the problem

This thesis examines the ways in which the Duha Tuvinians perceive human life as related to the various beings (human and non-human spirits and animals) and natural entities in the land. I will discuss the way they conceive past and present fates as intertwined with the local landscape, and how they continually create and reinvent the landscape as a meaningful place through cosmological symbols and ritualised experience of place and space. I will investigate how the Duha Tuvinians try to control, understand and negotiate their lives through ritual engagement with natural entities and "spirits" in the landscape, and by transforming the space of the land into a place suitable for human living. Finally, I will discuss the flexibility of Duha Tuvinian' shamanistic knowledge, and explore how changes in their livelihood, shamanic practices and knowledge transmission may challenge their tradition.

In order to investigate these questions, the thesis is structured as follows: Chapter 1 provides background information on other anthropological work about shamanism in the region and the setting of my fieldwork. Chapter 2 introduces shamanism, landscape and knowledge as analytical perspectives within anthropology. In chapter 3, "Fieldwork and methodology", I discuss the methods I have used to gain access to the field and to produce field data. Chapter 4, "Land of the living and the dead", focuses on how the Duha Tuvinians use symbols to construct their land as a meaningful place, representing past and present lives and as a blueprint of rules for appropriate human behaviour. Chapter 5, "Nomadic life - moving from place to place", discusses how the migration cycle is organised to integrate humans in a transhuman world of spirits, animals and humans, to reproduce their homeland of the taiga and how the practices of larger scale social formations pose a challenge to the livelihood and shamanic traditions of the Duha Tuvinians. Chapter 6, "Flexible fates and unsafe bodies", analyses how the Duha Tuvinians use their shamanic cosmology and rituals to negotiate and challenge their problems and life. Chapter 7, "The Shaman who went to Town", analyses why the Duha Tuvinians perceive new shamanic practices as a threat to their lives and their homeland, and how these new practices may challenge the tradition. Finally, Chapter 8, "Conclusion and perspectives", makes the conlusions and perspectives of this thesis.

1.2 Recent work on religion and tradition in the region

Many recent works on North Asian shamanism in general and Tuvinian shamanism in particular focus on the revitalisation of shamanism and the neo-traditional movements in the urban areas of the region (Ondar 1998, Vitebsky 2001, Figureido 1997). The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky proposes that when neo-traditional movements co-opt local shamanic ideas this results in a shamanism that is inherently different from "the local shamanism" they claim to represent: of fixed rather than flexible knowledge, and with an understanding of the landscape as an ethnic territory in global or national space, rather than as a concrete land of ancestors spirits and kin relations (Vitebsky 2001: 293). Some anthropologists propose that shamanism in the traditional sense of the term - as a local tradition embedded in a specific people's understanding of their concrete landscape - does not exist any longer or only exists to a limited extent among North Asian people (Siikala 1992: 17, Vitebsky 2001). Other anthropologists assert that these new forms of shamanism are just another example of the flexibility of traditional shamanism, and its capacity to adapt to changing social circumstances (Hoppal 1992, Figureido 1997).

Caroline Humphrey (1994) - who has conducted comprehensive studies of Mongolian shamanism - investigates how shamanism has changed up through history as a response to changes in local social systems and wider political structures in the region. Humphrey perceives shamanism mainly from a macro-perspective, and sees broader political powers - such as the rise and fall of the Mongol state - as the primary agents shaping local shamanic traditions. Tuvinian shamanism certainly responds to - and is shaped by - the increase in social problems and the ideological void, which followed the collapse of the Communist regimes in Russia and Mongolia. As one Duha Tuvinian told me: "before, the state helped us, but it does not any longer. So we can only rely on the help of the spirits, and turn to the shamans to find solutions to our problems". My perspective differs from Humphrey's, as I view Tuvinian shamanism from an actor-oriented perspective, where I want to investigate how the Tuvinians make use of shamanic knowledge about their land and its spirits to deal with concrete problems deriving from social change, rather than how social changes mould shamanism.

Some anthropologists have adopted a micro-perspective in their investigation of the indigenous ontologies of the hunters, pastoralists and reindeer herders in rural areas of North Asia (Pedersen 2001, Willerslev 2001). These studies place themselves within the recent revival of the animism debate, and uses new theories of animism, perspectivism and classical theories of totemism to describe the native ontologies in the region. In this thesis I will use these theories to reach an understanding of how the Duha Tuvinians perceive humans, non-humans and the landscape. To reach an understanding of how they create their landscape as a map representing human fate, and of how they link individual fates to places, natural entities, spiritual beings and human deeds I will use Roy Wagner's (1986) theory of how humans construct meaning in a dialectic between conceptualising or naming symbols and establishing relations of analogy between these symbols.

The "landscape" is central to most studies of both neo-traditional and traditional shamanism in the region (Humphrey 1997, Lindskog 2000, Pedersen 2003, personal conversation with Halemba 2004). Generally, studies on new shamanic movements investigate how the land is constructed as "imagined" through discourse and narrative (Vitebsky 2001, Halemba). New studies of traditional shamanism and indigenous ontologies often seek to "denaturalise" the landscape - by viewing it from a more phenomenological perspective - to investigate how people's engagement with and concepts of the land constructs their perceptions of the land (see: Pedersen 2001, 2003, Lindskog 2000, Willerslev 2001). The Danish anthropologist Morten Pedersen uses Bruno Latour's actor-network theory and a phenomenological perspective in his analysis of how Tsaatang' [Duha Tuvinian'] animism and nomadism structures spatial perception of the landscape (Pedersen 2003: 243). The Duha Tuvinians view specific places in the land as the location of spirits, who influence humans in various ways. These places are however - according to Pedersen, and I agree - not perceived as delimited areas with exact spatial boundaries, rather it is the experience of unusual events at a place, which the Duha Tuvinians link to the presence of spiritual beings (Pedersen 2003: 245).

It is thus experience, rather than convention, which structures Duha Tuvinian shamanic knowledge. In my work as a "shaman" - which will be described in chapter 2 - I was fortunate to gain insights into how people in practice link their own and other people's fate to unusual events in the landscape and human life and how they seek to control their fate through ritual engagement with the land and participation in shamanic rituals. To gain insight into such a fluid tradition is difficult through traditional anthropological methods. In this thesis I will - in contrast to other anthropological works from the region - use not only the perspective of the anthropologist, but also the perspective of the anthropologist as a shaman, in an attempt to reach a more profound understanding of how Duha Tuvinians link their own fates to the land and its spirits, and how they negotiate this relation through interaction with the land and its spirits.

1.3 Historical Background

The Tuvinians are a Turkish-speaking nomadic people, living in the Russian republic Tuva and in northern Mongolia. Today, approximately 210,000 Tuvinians live in Tuva, while only around 400 Duha Tuvinians (also known by the name Tsaatang and Urainhai) live in Mongolia. In the steppe regions of Tuva the Tuvinians have traditionally been nomads, breeding cattle, horses, sheep, goats and camels, while they in the forested and mountainous regions of Western Tuva and Northern Mongolia have traditionally lived as reindeer herders and hunters.

The geographical isolation of the Tuvinian' homeland, bordered by the Eastern Saian Mountains to the North, and the Western Saian to the South, has led some early ethnographers (Carruthers 1914: 215) and many contemporary travellers to represent the Tuvinians as a historically isolated people independent of outside influence. However, this picture is misleading, since the Tuvinians' homeland up through history has been a zone contested by various empires and occupied by a succession of conquerors - the Turkish Khanate, Uighurs, Kyrgyz, Manchus, Russians, Mongols, Soviets - competing for control of Inner Asia. These empires have influenced the Tuvinians linguistically, socially, economically and politically⁽⁵⁾.

In 1921, Tuva gained nominal independence, and the Tannu-Tuva People's Republic was established, as a republic under Soviet sovereignty. In the first years after independence, Mongolia made attempts to regain control of the area, but the Russians were unwilling to give the entire territory of Tuva back to the Mongols. However, in 1924, following the establishment of the Mongolian People's Republic, the Soviets granted Mongolia "a strip of territory, sparsely inhabited and small in size (about 16,000 sq. km.), called Darhad - west of Khöbsögöl" (Friters 1949: 131). The Darhad territory is the traditional homeland of Darhad Mongols and Duha Tuvinians, who then came under Mongol control. The Mongolian government decided that the Duha Tuvinians, as a people of Tuvinian nationality, were supposed to live in Tuva, and began a series of campaigns - lasting from 1927 up until 1951 - to expel them from Mongolia (Farkas 1992: 7-8). Yet, within a few years of each eviction, the Duha would return to Mongolia - only to be driven out again⁽⁶⁾.

By the middle of the 1950s, the Duha Tuvinians had basically all returned to the Mongolian taiga. As a result of the Mongolian government's collectivisation campaigns in the 1950's, the Duha Tuvinians were obliged to join local negdel (collectives), collectivise their reindeer, and submit to national hunting regulations. They were given access to state provided medical care, schooling and veterinary assistance. The government's motives in collectivising the reindeer did not so much derive from a concern for transforming reindeer herding into a productive part of the national economy, as a desire to integrate the Duha Tuvinians into production and sedentarize them (Wheeler 2000: 49-50) to control their whereabout and livelihood to make them a part of the socialist project of the state. Almost half of the younger generation was forced to move away from the taiga to a small fishing collective in Tsagaan Nuur, while the other half was allowed to stay in the taiga to herd the government's newly collectivised reindeer⁽⁷⁾.

Communist rule not only forced the Duha Tuvinians to be collectivised and sedentarized, their shamanic tradition was also repressed. At the end of the 1930's, the Mongolian president Choibalsan initiated a violent campaign against religion, persecuting and liquidating thousands of Buddhist lamas, destroying hundreds of monasteries and prohibiting religious practice by law. According to my informants, several Duha Tuvinian and Darhad shamans were also liquidated in this period. The liquidation of lamas and shamans ended in the beginning of the 1940's, but the suppression of religious practice and the prison confinement of lamas and shamans continued up until the 1980's.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union The Mongolian People's Republic Party gave up power in 1989, and economic reform and democracy were implemented in Mongolia. For the Duha Tuvinians - as for the Tuvinians in Russia - the transition meant freedom of religion, but also a sudden increase of poverty. During the economic crisis in Mongolia in 1992 the government was no longer able to pay salaries to the Duha Tuvinians, and "leased" the reindeer, so the Duha Tuvinians could personally profit from the livestock (Wheeler 2000: 55). The government completely privatised the reindeer in 1995, giving each family the herd, which they had so far been leasing (ibid: 55).

The Duha Tuvinians now had to rely for subsistence on reindeer herding and hunting, as state supplies had disappeared with the collapse of the communist system. Unfortunately, the small number of reindeer in the herds, the poor health of the reindeer resulting from inbreeding, lack of veterinary assistance and medical supplies, and the practice of cutting the reindeer's antlers (which weaken their immune system) has led to a serious decline in the total number of reindeer. Moreover, violent assaults, alcohol abuse and crime have increased among the Duha Tuvinians during the last 10 years.

Today there are only around 200 Duha Tuvinians who still live as reindeer nomads in the forest areas of the Zuun and Baruun taiga of Northern Mongolia. From autumn 2000 until summer 2001 I lived among these nomads. In Zuun Taiga I lived for 4 months in the household of an elderly couple in their fifties, Gompo and Centaling, and their two adopted daughters. In Baruun Taiga I lived for another 4 months, in the household of a younger couple in their early thirties with four children. I lived in various households of both Duha Tuvinians and Khalha Mongols in the village of Tsagaan Nuur for 2 months.

The Duha Tuvinians' mother tongue is Tuvinian, however most people speak and many young people only speak Mongolian with a strong Darhad accent. During my fieldwork I chose to learn Mongolian - which I studied in Tuva for two months - instead of Tuvinan, as this allowed me to speak with both Tuvinians and Darhad. Thus, the indigenous terms used in this thesis are mostly Mongolian/Darhad. However, I believe that to use this language does not transform the contents of the cosmology, since many Duha Tuvinians among themselves use the Mongolian/Darhad language in daily life, also when discussing cosmological issues, and since the shamanism of the Duha Tuvinians and Darhad are closely related⁽⁸⁾.

The Duha Tuvinians are nomadic, and their subsistence is based on reindeer breeding and hunting. While I lived among them we would migrate to new pastures once or twice a month. Campsites were chosen on the basis of availability of grasses and water, and according to shamanic ideas of how the spirits of certain places might influence livestock and people.

The Duha Tuvinians are divided into three clans - Balakshi, Urat and Sojong - which are subdivided into several exogamous patrilineal sub-clans. Each clan has an informal leader, who is informally chosen on the basis of age, gender and abilities. At the time of my fieldwork the leader of the Balakshi clan was Gompo. Decisions about when to migrate, go hunting, or go to town for barter were discussed - mostly by the men - and the final decision was usually taken by Gompo in his position as leader of the Balakshi clan.

Work activities are broadly divided according to gender. The women mainly take care of work within the camp, such as preparing food, childcare, making clothes, looking after the reindeer and conducting offerings at the sacrificial places close to the camp. Men are mostly in charge of duties outside the camp, hunting, trading and travelling to sacrificial trees and oboos many days' ride from their current homeland.

As a result of the decreasing size of reindeer herds and the absence of resources formerly supplied by the state, the Duha Tuvinians' main subsistence activity today is hunting. While I lived among them, the male members of the camp went hunting for several months at a time on the border between Mongolia and Russia. While the men were away, the women and children stayed in the camp, to look after the reindeer and take care of daily work activities.

On returning from hunting trips, the men and sometimes women would travel to Tsagaan Nuur to barter skins, antlers and furs for basic food supplies and clothing items. Tsagaan Nuur is the link to the broader Mongolian context: it houses a Mongolian border station - overseeing the border between Russia and Mongolia - a post office, a medical clinic (mostly without staff and medical supplies), and a primary school. Most Duha Tuvinian children go to school in Tsagaan Nuur for 7 years from the age of eight. During the school season they live in the local boarding school or in the households of relatives⁽⁹⁾.

During the last couple of years some tourist companies have started to organize tours to the Duha Tuvinians, where they travel by helicopter or by horse to their camps, and stay for a few days to photograph and experience the lives of the reindeer herders. The Duha Tuvinians usually speak positively about the foreign tourists, who sometimes give money, food, medicine etc.: "It is interesting to meet them, and see their helicopters". On the other hand some of them perceive the tourists as intruders, who: "Just come here and photograph us", and as a threat to the spirits and the land, since "they throw their leftovers in the land and urinate whereever they want, unaware that they might pollute the land and its spirits". Another problem is that some Duha Tuvinians, mainly in Zuun Taiga, choose their summer camp in order to be close to Tsagaan Nuur, so tourists can arrive easily, regardless of the fact that this is a threat to the reindeer's health, since it is too warm.

Since the early 1990s shamans and lay-people; who during communist rule had to practice their shamanic traditions in secret, have begun to practice the tradition openly. Many Duha Tuvinian and Darhad Mongols have - in the last couple of years - become shamans. According to the Duha Tuvinians, this sudden increase in the number of shamans has various reasons. First, it is no longer politically dangerous to be a shaman, so people who receive "the shamanic call" are able to follow their shamanic fate (zajah)⁽¹⁰⁾. Secondly, shamanizing is seen as just another means to make a livelihood, as Juvaang among others explained, "in these days there are many shamans, but few are "real" shamans. Some shamans just shamanize to make money". Thirdly, shamanism as an ontology and cosmology seems to fill up the ideological gap left by the fall of communism, and as a practical tool and a cosmology it seems to offer solutions and explanations for the increasing social problems.

Chapter two: Shamanism, landscape and knowledge

2.1 Shamanism - definition of a highly contested term

The applicability of the term "shamanism", to define the inspirational practices and cosmologies of the indigenous people of Mongolia and Siberia, is a contested issue among scientists working in the region (Humphrey 1996, personal conversation with Abaev 2001). The Tuvinian historian Nikolai Abaev proposes that the religious traditions of the Tuvinians are not shamanism in the strict sense of the term, since their cosmology includes an idea of "god" (burhan) and not just spirits. The term "shamanism" gives a misleading impression of a single unified system, and of the shaman as a "singular ritual practitioner", while the Tuvinian traditions termed "shamanism" are generally flexible and fluid, and have several religious specialists in addition to the shaman (see Humphrey 1996, Vitebsky 2001).

I have decided to retain the concept of shamanism, as the Duha Tuvinians use a similar concept - böögiin sjasjin (shamanic religion or faith) - to describe their cosmology and cosmological practices. However, they sometimes made a distinction between "shamanism" (böögiin sjasjin) as faith in shamans, and as worship of and belief in spirits. Some people told me that they did not believe in "shamanism" because they did not trust the shamans nowadays - there were no longer any powerful (xuchtei) shamans left. Thus, the competence (chadah) and strength (xuch) of shamans can be questioned, but I never heard any Duha Tuvinian doubt the presence of spirits. Drawing on Humphrey (1996) I will use the term "shamanism" as "the entire conglomeration of ideas about beings in the world which includes the shaman" (ibid: 50), and not in the Duha Tuvinians' strict understanding of the term (faith in living shamans).

2.2 The shaman and shamanism: A historical overview

The Duha Tuvinians perceive the land as inhabited by various - for a layman's eye - hidden spirits, which influence the lives of the living. They need shamans to reach a deeper understanding of the intricate relation between humans and spirits, since it is only shamans who can travel to the world of spirits, see the origin of people's misfortunes, and fight demons and other ill-minded spirits. During rituals - performed from midnight to dawn - the Duha Tuvinian shaman calls his ongods (spirit helpers) by singing and drumming, and with the help of his ongods and his drum⁽¹¹⁾ he rides or flies to the places of the ongods and luc' of each member of the audience, to seek out the reasons behind - and search for ways to heal - misfortune, illness and other problems. The shamanic performances I saw among the Duha Tuvinians and Darhad Mongols were often scary, the shaman's dancing, singing and drumming was "wild": the shaman would have fits, loose consciousness, shiver, scream, laugh and hit or scratch himself or herself and others.

The shaman's seemingly "outrageous behaviour" during rituals has led many ethnographers from East and West to define shamans as "hysterics" and "half-insane" (see Basilov 1989). The idea of the shaman as suffering from mental disease was challenged by the historian Mircea Eliade (1974), who viewed shamans as former psychotics - cured through their shamanizing, and by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 b), who saw the shaman (or sorcerer) as similar to the psychotherapist, and compared the shamanic ritual with psychoanalysis.

In the 1960s many scholars started to investigate the altered state of consciousness of the shaman, inspired by Eliade, and influenced by biological and psychological works on how human consciousness operate. Interest in the psychological state of shamans has lasted until today, and has led some scholars to perceive shamanism as identical with the state of consciousness⁽¹²⁾ shamans obtain during rituals (Peter and Price Williams 1980). Other scholars have followed Lévi-Strauss and investigated the therapeutic effects of shamanic rituals (1991).

It is my impression that Duha Tuvinian' shamans does enter an altered state of consciousness during their rituals, and also that the ritual does seem to have a therapeutic effect, allowing sensitive issues to be discussed openly. However, the Duha Tuvinians healing and altered states of consciousness are not ends in themselves, but means to obtain information about the relation between spirits and men. Altered states of consciousness are - as Ridington writes - "revelatory, not in and of themselves but because of their place in cultural systems of knowledge" (in Atkinson 1992: 311).

In the past two decades, anthropologists have started to focus on the processes of knowledge production inherent in shamanism. The anthropologist Graham Townsley (Townsley 2000) defines shamanism as "an ensemble of techniques for knowing", and sees shamans as "sophisticated producers of meaning" (ibid: 264). However, Townsley fails to situate shamanic knowledge in its historical setting, as he constructs cosmological knowledge as a-temporal.

I believe, following Humphrey (1994), that broader political power and historical circumstances shapes local shamanism (ibid: 192). Humphrey posits that two variants of shamanism are simultaneously possible for any Mongol group (ibid: 194). The first variant Humphrey terms "patriarchal", as it concerns shamanic involvement in the symbolic reproduction of the patrilineage, clan or polity. Shamanic practices in this form involve divination, sacrifice and prayer. The other variant she calls "transformational", because it deals with hidden aspects of forces thought to be immanent in the world. The shaman, operating through rituals and in trance fights and negotiates natural, spiritual and political forces. At times when native political organisation was powerful and successful, people tended to practice patriarchal shamanism. When political organisation came under threat and was weak and unsuccessful, people have turned to transformational shamanism (ibid: 199-200).

The sudden increase in the number of shamans among the Duha Tuvinians can - as earlier noted - partly be seen as a result of the social insecurity, following the breakdown of communism. The Duha Tuvinian and Darhad shamans may be seen as practitioners of transformational shamanism. They offer their clients explanations to current problems, by negotiating with and challenging the various natural and spiritual forces in the land.

The Duha Tuvinians perceive both human misfortune and prosperity as intimately connected with spirits located at specific sites in the surrounding landscape. They say that it is only by interpreting the land and its spirits that one can comprehend the nature of human life, and only by interacting with the spirits of the land that one can ensure human well-being. This means that to reach an understanding of Duha Tuvinian "shamanism" we need to investigate how the Duha Tuvinians conceive their surrounding landscape.

2.3 Landscape

Vitebsky (2001) defines traditional shamanism as local knowledge systems deeply intertwined with a local population's conception of their surrounding territory. Shamanistic knowledge traditions are characterised by the fact that cosmic space penetrates into the space of everyday life at specific points marked by certain natural features in a local landscape. Moreover, shamanistic thinking is holistic, in that the cosmos and the local landscape between them provide a total rendering of the universe (ibid: 293). Duha Tuvinian shamanism can thus be seen as a local tradition, which cannot be separated from the landscape these people inhabit.

The Duha Tuvinians use the term Oron Hangai (forested land) to describe their surrounding landscape. Oron Hangai is not merely the concrete physical landscape, but also contains a - for the human eye - hidden dimension of spirits of crucial importance for human well-being. To avoid misfortune it is thus basic to be aware of this hidden aspect of the land, and this implies knowing how to interact with and interpret it.

The Duha Tuvinian concept of landscape differs from its western counterpart, which reflects the idea of objectification of place related to practices such as painting, map-making, song and poetry. The Western idea of landscape is essentially static; a denial of process. This idea is, however, inadequate regarding the Duha Tuvinians conception of landscape, where it is not contemplation of the land that is important but interaction with it (see Humphrey 1997). I see the Duha Tuvinian landscape - drawing on Ingold - as:

"not a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the mind's eye, nor, however is it an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human order. Thus neither is the landscape identical to nature, nor is it on the side of humanity against nature. As the familiar domain of our dwelling, it is with us, not against us, but it is no less real for that. And through living in it, the landscape becomes part of us, just as we are part of it" (Ingold 1993: 5).

Landscape is thus more than a static representation; it is a cultural process (Hirsch 1996). The landscape is, following Hirsch, constructed in the dialectic between a "foreground landscape" - the concrete place of everyday life - and a "background landscape" - a space of potentiality for new interpretations. The landscape is a process in so far as people attempt to realise in "the foreground" landscape of everyday life the potentiality of "the background" landscape (ibid: 3-5).

The "foreground" of the Duha Tuvinian landscape is the camp and everyday life in it, while the surrounding landscape, with its concealed spirits, is the "background" landscape of potentiality. The people create their landscape by utilising their knowledge about the hidden dimensions of the land in the construction of the camp, and by using their everyday experiences of life in the camp and of concrete phenomena in nature, to understand the concealed aspects of the land.

During my fieldwork, the Duha Tuvinians taught me that the intricate relation between humans and spirits cannot be understood intellectually, rather one has to interpret and sense the spirits concealed in the land with one's body.

2.4 Shamanic knowledge

Duha Tuvinian shamanistic knowledge is inconsistent and fluid rather than doctrinal. As such, it is a flexible kind of knowledge that is always in the making. It is - as Fredrik Barth writes about cosmologies in oral traditions - a living knowledge tradition in continual change, closely intertwined with daily life, rather than grounded in a formal system of knowledge (Barth 1987: 84).

The "inconsistent" nature of shamanic knowledge may be considered a result of the social distribution of the tradition and the transaction processes and communicative means involved in its reproduction. The unequal distribution of knowledge and ideas among the interacting parties in a population is, as Barth writes, a major factor in the organisation of that body of knowledge and ideas (Barth 1987: 77). Each Duha Tuvinian generally knows about the spirits connected to his or her patrilineage and shamanic lineages, whereas knowledge of other people's spirits is more limited.

Duha Tuvinians generally agree about the existence of three different worlds, the underworld, this world and the heavens. But their understanding of how these worlds are composed varies from individual to individual⁽¹³⁾. When I confronted them with the seeming discrepancies, they often said that maybe for the other person it was just different, which did not seem to bother them. Later I understood that my initial search for a consistent system was bound to fail, since this cosmological knowledge involves knowing how to act in the landscape to avoid misfortune, rather than possessing an exact knowledge of abstract cosmological terms.

In the anthropological analysis of local knowledge, we need, as Robert Borofsky writes, to overcome the bias of fitting indigenous knowledge into the form of scientific culture. Instead we should try to discover the knowledge organisation used by our informants (Borofsky 1994). Borofsky suggests that we should conceive of a continuum between knowledge (understanding that is definite and delineated) and knowing (understanding that is fluid and flexible) (ibid: 24). The flexible character of knowing derives from three sources. First, knowing can change in different contexts, as when individuals present different accounts in various settings. At the start of my stay among the Duha Tuvinians, Centaling thus assured me that there were no longer any black shamans. Later - after visiting the household of a shaman - she told me that this shaman is a very dangerous black shaman, and described in detail how he had killed several people. Secondly, some aspects of knowing can be "relatively defined in some respects and relatively undefined in others" (ibid 335). The Duha Tuvinians all agreed about the presence of "three worlds", but the exact composition of these worlds differed from person to person. Thirdly, parts of what is known cannot be precisely delineated and explained precisely (ibid: 335). It is futile to ask the Duha Tuvinians to describe the exact form and character of spirits, as they change form and character as a result of human action, and are understood not as fixed forms, but fluid beings.

To reach an understanding of the flexibility of Duha Tuvinian "knowing" I find it important - drawing on Borofsky - to investigate how "the known" is grounded in meaningful activity, rather than focusing on the known as content detached from activity (ibid: 338). We need to understand - as Borofsky writes - "when a difference really makes a difference" in what people say and do, if we are to understand diversity" (ibid: 338).

For the Duha Tuvinians it does not make a difference whether there are one or several beings in the underworld, because shamanic knowledge is concerned with controlling the forces in the world rather than understanding them intellectually. "Knowing" implies the ability to control the known object (Humphrey 1996). This power relationship is crucial for shamanism, where knowing means to be able to perceive, restore and control the intricate relations between humans and spirits.

Chapter three: Fieldwork and methodology

3.1 Anthropologist, adopted daughter and ignorant child

In October 2000, I arrived in Tsagaan Nuur, a tiny village in Northern Mongolia, from where I planned to make my way, on horseback, to the shaman Ingtuja's camp in the mountains north of the village. I knew Ingtuja from my earlier pilot studies in the area in 1998 and 1999, when she and her family had agreed to adopt me and allow me to do fieldwork among them when I returned.

When I arrived in Tsagaan Nuur, in the autumn of 2000, local nomads told me that Ingtuja was hospitalised in Mörön, a town 300 km south of Tsagaan Nuur, after receiving a gunshot in her arm. I decided to try to find another family who could adopt me. Through my Mongolian teacher in Tuva, I became acquainted with Ojombadum - a local Duha Tuvinian, working as a schoolteacher in Tsagaan Nuur. Ojombadum introduced me to her mother-in-law - Centaling - who suggested that she could adopt me. It seemed a good opportunity, so I agreed and travelled by horse together with Centaling to her camp in Zuun Taiga, a two-day ride from Tsagaan Nuur.

The willingness to adopt me seems to derive from several sources. Adopting, not only children, but also unmarried females is a common practice among Duha Tuvinians. My status as a foreigner with knowledge of the West and, maybe most importantly, of their homeland Tuva across the border in Russia, made me someone worth adopting. My contribution to the family's subsistence, through my supplies of flour, rice and tea, was, of course, also important.

Attaining the position as an adopted daughter was important for me, because in a society where kinship defines most relationships, it is important to have "a role as a fictive kin person in order to participate" (Abu-Lughod 1988 [1986]: 15). Like Jean Briggs, who was adopted into an Inuit family, I also had qualms concerning:

"The loss of objective position in the community, drains on my supplies which would result from contributing to the maintenance of a family household, and loss of privacy with resultant difficulties in working" (Briggs 1970: 20).

However, I had not expected the fear that became an all-compassing element during the first couple of months of my stay in my adoptive family's household. Alcoholism and violence are, as mentioned above, a part of daily life among the Duha Tuvinians. My initial meeting with my adoptive father Gompo; gave me an insight into the relations I would have to deal with as an adopted daughter. In my dairy, I wrote:

"As Centaling and I were approaching the Duha Tuvinian camp we saw a hunter approaching us on his reindeer. Centaling told me: "That is my husband Gompo". As he came nearer he suddenly fired his gun at us, and we only avoided the bullets by throwing ourselves to the ground. Another hunter forced Gompo's gun away from him. However, this did not pacify Gompo, who started to beat Centaling violently until she was lying silently crying on the snow. Afterwards, Gompo presented himself to me, with the words "I am Gompo, your adoptive father, get on your horse. Now we are riding to our camp".

The incident, of course, scared me, and I thought of going back to Tsagaan Nuur. But I decided to stay, since I was unable to find my way back to the village alone, and I feared Gompo's reaction if I asked the nomads of our camp to help me back.

I tried to find a position as a daughter in Gompo's household, by taking part in daily chores, sewing boots, milking reindeer, fetching snow for water etc. Both Gompo and Centaling were very helpful and kind in teaching me how to fulfil my daily obligations. I was not very talented at sewing and I continued, unknowingly, to break taboos, which made me the "foreign clown" of the village. Breaking taboos was important for my understanding of the relationship between shamanistic cosmology and the landscape. For example, one day, I unknowingly urinated close to a spring, which turned out to be the home of an ancestor spirit. This was a dangerous act, from the Duha Tuvinian point of view, as I could have angered the spirit and even died.

After about a month's time, my clownish behaviour had become a practical burden, both for me, for my adoptive parents and for the broader community. The atmosphere started to become tense. For a time it was funny to observe and be a clown, but then it turned out to be uncomfortable for all parties. The clown position gave me insights, but it was also an obstacle, since it defined me as a child, who was not permitted to discuss serious questions of cosmology. When I tried to ask what kind of creatures ongods and luc' are, what they do, where they are situated etc. people would answer very briefly and often evade my question with a non-committal "I do not know".

In retrospect, I believe their initial reluctance to share their knowledge with me derived from several sources. First, my elaborate questions were a reminder of the communist past; when government officials were sent to cross-examine the Duha Tuvinians about religious issues, which often resulted in shamans being subjected to political punishment. Secondly, in my position as an ignorant foreign child, I was not considered able to understand or someone worth discussing serious issues - like shamanism - with. Finally, formal interviewing did not make sense to people, as shamanic knowledge is based on concrete experiences rather than abstract principles. Although they deal with the luc' and ongods daily, they do not talk much about them. Knowledge about the spirits is often non-linguistic and difficult to translate into words.

3.2 From participant observation to experiencing participation

At the start of my fieldwork I was, in my position as an ignorant child, prevented from making formal interviews and had to rely on what I observed and what the Duha Tuvinians occasionally told me about shamanic issues. To achieve access to shamanic knowledge I had to be included in the adult sphere. According to the Duha Tuvinians "to be an adult" is defined not only by age, but also by the ability to know how to act in the world of men and spirits, and to be able to fulfil the practical skills aquired for adulthood. I was not able to fill an ordinary adult position; as I was not very skilled at sewing, cooking, milking reindeer, social etiquette (the traditional duties of a grown woman). To become acknowledged as an adult one of the few "adult" roles I could fill was that of "the shaman", since shamans diverge from convention, just as I did.

Since the publication of Laura Bohannan's book "Return to Laughter" in 1954, the tension between participation and observation that is implied in "participant observation" has been a matter of discussion. Anthropologists have long been aware that it is impossible for the fieldworker to be a detached observer, "a fly on the wall" observing "the other". Instead the anthropologists is - in the act of observing - always a positioned subject in the field.

As Fabian (1991) and Stoller (1989) point out, it is essential to participate actively in the lives of the people we are studying not only with our mind but with our body, with our emotions, senses and feelings, if we are to reach an understanding of the lives of our subjects. Participation may be seen as "a willingness to engage with another world, life and idea; an ability to use one's experience, to try to grasp, or convey meanings that reside neither in words, "facts", nor texts, but are evoked in the meeting of one experiencing subject with the other" (Wikan 1992: 463).

The question is, however, to what extent we - as anthropologists - can share the experience of the people we are studying. Clifford Geertz wrote: "We cannot live other people's lives and it is a piece of bad faith to try. We can but listen to what in words, in images, in actions they say about their lives" (Geertz 1986: 373). It is impossible to live other people's lives. What we need is, to become engaged in their lives, sharing time and space with them, and finding common ways of coping. This is what Hervik call "shared reflexivity" in the field (Hervik 1994).

As Bloch (1992) and Okeley (1994) have noted, much of the knowledge that we - as anthropologists - purport to study is non-linguistic and involves implicit networks of meanings which are formed through experience of, and engagement with, the external world. This is especially the case with Duha Tuvinian shamanism, where people seek an understanding of the relation between spirits and humans through bodily engagement with natural entities. To gain insight into such non-linguistic knowledge requires a more full-fledged participation prior to analytical dissection, than classical participant observation permits (Turner 1992, Jackson 1989).

Some anthropologists propose that such participation may be achieved through "experiencing participation" (Ots 1994), "socialisation in their (our subjects) systems of meanings and participation in the dynamic process of the construction of these meanings in which they are engaged" (Lindquist 1995: 5). The inclusion of the experience of the professional anthropologist in his or her ethnography is part of what Jackson (1989) calls a radical empirical method, whereby anthropologists make themselves "experimental subjects" and treat their own experience as primary data. In this sense, personal experience "becomes a mode of experimentation, of testing and exploring the ways in which our experiences conjoin or connect us with others, rather than the way they set us apart" (Ibid: 4).

3.3 Chosen by the spirits

An honest account of the circumstances of fieldwork, not merely a perfunctory note stating the dates the anthropologist was "there", is, as Maybury Lewis (in Abu-Lughod 1988 [1986]) points out, not only essential for evaluating the facts and interpretations presented in ethnographic reports, but sometimes embarrassing. Coming home from the field, it was sometimes not only embarrassing, but painful to talk about some of my experiences among the Duha Tuvinians.

It was often difficult to talk about the violence that shaped my initial meeting with my adoptive father Gompo, and the ensuing fear of living in his household. I was also embarrassed to talk about my position as at once a shaman and an anthropologist in the field, as I feared that my story would be categorised as an "elaborate hoax" (see Stoller and Olkes 1987: 25). A legacy deriving from the questionable authencity of Carlos Castanada's work, that makes any report of extraordinary experiences risky in the profession (de Mille 1981a, 1981b). However, I believe, as Goulet and Young have argued, that:

"taking our informants seriously when they call upon us to "experience" in rituals, visions or dreams, the realities that inform their lives, allows us to go beyond describing the "obvious" aspects of a culture, to a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of those beliefs and practices that are central to the meanings of a group" (Goulet and Young 1993: 329).

One day, confused by my problems with gaining access to the field, I was looking at some tarot cards, which a shaman had given me in Tuva. Our neighbour, Centaling's younger brother, Bat, asked what I was doing, and when I told him about the cards he asked me to give him a reading. While Bat had previously been very reluctant to discuss shamanic issues with me, he now asked me "how are my ongods influencing me". I asked him to pick four cards, which turned out to be the 8 of disks (a picture with a huge tree), death (the man with the scythe), art (two women standing over a stove) and the hermit (an old man). I told Bat that the tree was a sign of potential good fortune and happiness in his life, which however were suppressed and turned into poverty and misfortune by two sources. First, he had unintentionally hurt an elder woman, who now sought to revenge herself on him. Secondly, an older man had destroyed Bat's happiness by hurting a young woman close to Bat's heart.

After the reading Bat gave me an acknowledging look and said: "Yes, you are right". People in the urts started whispering about my reading. One man said, "Yes, it is that deer you wounded at Tengic", another said, "Remember, the bear; no normal bear would break into an urts". I could not make any sense out of these remarks, and did not ask, since I was used to not getting answers. After Bat had left, Centaling told me: "Tuja [my Mongolian name], you told the truth. The tree is our sacrificial tree, on our mother's line, situated close to the river Tengic. Here Bat once wounded a deer, and now our mother's ongods are taking revenge on him. The young woman is Bat's deceased wife; she was only 25 when she died. Nobody could do anything. Her father, the old man on your cards, was a cattle thief, he stole cattle from the strong shaman Tsagaan, and the shaman's luc' and ongods are still taking revenge on our clan, you see the daughter (Bat's wife) and her mother, were killed by the shaman, he took the form of a bear and broke into the urts, only her blood-stained clothes were left. The ongods are strong, it is hard to repair such misdeeds".

In the following days, our urts was full of people actively discussing cosmological issues with each other and me. Following this session, my position in the field changed totally. I was no longer a foolish child, but someone who was able to perform a ritual act, which they could relate to. My readings seemed to have proven that I had some kind of shamanic knowledge, and this urged Centaling and others to tell me stories, which would help me understand the messages in the readings, and repair (zazal hina) the relations between humans and spirits.

When my informants insisted on revising our roles, and asked me questions instead of the other way around, I started to reach an understanding of which cosmological questions are important to the Duha Tuvinians. These questions can be grouped into three overlapping categories: First, the role played by luc' and ongods in unexplainable events experienced in nature; secondly, the complex relationship between ancestor spirits, animals, natural entities and the fate of living kin; thirdly, how to repair (zazal hina) and control (hjanalt) the relationship between spirits, animals, natural entities and humans.

As a mere anthropologist I was unable to answer these questions. But people insisted that I try, and as I told them about the meaning connected to the signs on the cards, people sitting in our urts started to elaborate on my interpretation according to Duha Tuvinian cosmological ideas.

I started to conduct the tarot sessions as a kind of informal focus group activity, where one person would ask a question, and on the basis of the picture on the cards, all the camp members sitting in our urts would participate in creating an interpretation. Asking questions by letting people interpret pictures was much more fruitful than formal interviewing, because it was similar to the interpretative practices that the Duha Tuvinians were used to. It resembled the fortune-telling techniques they themselves use when they read the cosmological signs in the landscape, in money-notes, in stones and in burned sheep shoulder bones (dal).

On the basis of central cosmological ideas and concrete events discussed during my informal focus groups I started conducting formal interviews. My tarot readings had increased my access to information about shamanism dramatically: I no longer had to "beg" for answers and interviews, people often wanted to tell me about spirits affecting their lives, so I, as they said, "could help them (with their problems) and myself (to become an adult, as well as to write my thesis)".

During my focus groups cum tarot sessions and my formal interviews, I was still mainly the observing anthropologist listening to people's words. Then I had an experience, which forced me to enter into a deeper participation in Duha Tuvinian cosmological traditions.

I was deep asleep one night with my two sleeping bags protecting me from the indoor temperature of minus 50 Celsius, when I woke and saw an elderly man dressed in a heavy fur coat coming into our urts. At first I thought this visit was nothing unusual. Often before, both aquainted and unacquainted hunters had spent the night in our household. As always, as Gompo's daughter, I got up and made tea for him. The visitor was unusually quiet, and did not answer my questions. He just sat there, intensely observing me, which made me rather uncomfortable. Usually, the dogs would howl when visitors came to our urts and people would wake up, but the dogs had been silent and my family was deep asleep, which I also found strange. Suddenly the visitor said farewell and left the urts.

Next morning I told Gompo and Centaling about the visitor. They asked me to describe his appearance and clothes to them. Then they started discussing who the visitor could be. After some time they concluded that it had been the protector spirit of the shaman Bair's clan mountain. Later, Bat came into the urts to report a dream he had had that same night, where the shaman Bair came into his urts pointing at the spot in its north eastern part, where an amulet she had made for him was lying. While people were discussing the possible interrelations between Bat's dream and my "vision", a rider came to our camp with the message that the shaman Bair had died that night. People took this as evidence that Bair's spirit had in fact visited us that night, and they told me: "You must be a shaman, since the protector spirit of Bair's mountain has chosen to reveal itself to your eyes. No ordinary person could see such a spirit."

I felt very confused after this incident: Wondering whether the man I had seen was a product of a dream or maybe an actual spirit, feeling that I had started to lose control over my position in the field, since I was no longer seen as an anthropologist, but as some kind of shaman; a role I was not at all sure I wanted to fill. At first I tried to avoid the position as "a shaman" by refusing to engage in the interpretation sessions. However, they did not accept my refusal, but insisted that I try to interpret their lives and heal them. They would say that "now they had been riding for several days just to get my advice" or "why did I refuse to help them, when I could actually see?" I tried to explain that I actually could not "see" the spirits, but they usually just took this is a sign of modesty and laughed.

Following "my dream", the Duha Tuvinians started to teach me how to interpret phenomena in the landscape according to shamanic ideas. They would tell me which spirits belonged to which places, the signs indicating the presence of evil spirits, the ritual actions that should be performed at certain sites, and encouraged me not merely to understand the spirits intellectually, but to sense them through ritual engagement with natural phenomena - springs, trees, mountains - listening to the sounds from the burning wood in our fireplace, feeling the hailstones beat against my skin.

Such bodily experiences are seen as indicators of the spirit's presence in human life, and are the starting point for verbal discussions of the spirit's influence and presence in specific situations. In my efforts to reach an understanding of Duha Tuvinian' shamanistic knowledge, I believe it was crucial to participate in these bodily experiences, since they are such an important part of shamanic knowledge production. As Favret Saada wrote about witchcraft in Bocage:

"To understand the meaning of this discourse (the gift of unwitching, seeing everything) there is no other solution but to practice it oneself, to become one's own informant, to penetrate one's own amnesia, and to try to make explicit what one finds unstateable in oneself " (Favret-Saada 1980: 22).

The reason why the Duha Tuvinians decided to share their experience and knowledge with me, seems to be that they saw me as having access to a knowledge that was important for their own welfare, and that I through my acts had shown myself to be an adult, capable of discussing the relation between spirits and humans. Our neighbour Bat told me several times: "It is good you are here, it will be difficult when you leave, because the spirits have chosen you to see things".

Trying to integrate my experiences as "a shaman" in my anthropological work, I made notes about how the Duha Tuvinians taught me to "see" or "feel" the spirits, what I "saw" or "heard" during these experiences, and how the Duha Tuvinians interpreted my experiences. I often wondered whether my "seeing" was just a product of my imagination. However, I believe we can gain valuable insight into the way informants construct knowledge through "experiencing participation". As Bloch has written: "As a result of fieldwork; I too can judge whether a bit of forest in Madagascar makes a good swidden. If I walk through the forest I am continually and involuntarily carrying out such evaluations" (Bloch 1992: 194).

When I, in the summer 2001, got on the bus to Ulaan Bator and left my nomadic life among the Duha Tuvinians behind me, I became aware of the extent to which I had assimilated their' sense of the fatal relation between humans and specific places. When the bus driver - a Khalka Mongol - passed a holy oboo (stone cairn) without stopping, I immediately started shivering from nervousness, thinking that the spirits of the place would take revenge on the whole bus and make it explode. Without thinking, I resolutely went up to the driver and asked him to drive back so I could place a few matches on the oboo. The driver first looked surprised, then said approvingly, "It is good you know the traditions", and went out with me to conduct offerings.

In retrospect I am very grateful that the Duha Tuvinians insisted on teaching me to "see" the land, as this gave me insights into how knowledge is constructed in practice, which I do not think I could have gained through a more traditional kind of participant observation. In the following chapter I will investigate the processes these people engage in when creating their land as a realm of interconnections between humans and spirits.

Chapter four: Land of the living and the dead

In my work as a shaman, the Duha Tuvinians often asked me how specific places and natural features in the land influenced their lives - questions I at first could not answer, as I did not know how they perceived the land. However, my adoptive family and others were eager to teach me how signs in nature hints at the presence of specific spirits and how they mould and colour individual lives. Among other things, they taught me that if cotton ribbons are tied to the branches of a cedar-tree it is not an ordinary tree but a sacrificial tree inhabited by a deceased shaman's ongods (shamanic helper-spirits) and luc' (a spirit of an ancestor, in this case the shaman's spirit). Black cotton ribbons indicate the presence of black and dangerous ongods, which may inflict illness and misfortune on human life, while white cotton ribbons signals white and beneficial ongods, spreading prosperity and health among humans.

The history of the Duha Tuvinians is reflected in the land, where certain mountains represent specific patrilineages, and certain sacrificial trees represent specific shamans in a shamanic lineage. Mountains and trees do not merely represent patrilineal and shamanic ancestors, but also affect the fate and lives of the living, as the deeds of deceased and living kin mould the character of spirits located in natural entities and influence the lives of the living. Every person belongs to his or her father's patrilineages, and to both his/her fathers and mother's shamanic lineage(s). A shamanic lineage consists of a temporal series of related shamans - both men and woman - who have inherited the ability to become shamans from a deceased shaman and have been chosen by the ongods to become shamans. Both the paternal and maternal kin of a deceased or living shaman belongs to the shaman's lineage, and should worship the sacrificial trees of their lineage. This means that each person only has one mountain - the one connected to their patrilineage - but often multiple sacrificial trees - connected to their fathers and mother's shamanic lineages - which they should worship.

In this chapter I will investigate how the Duha Tuvinians construct their surrounding landscape as a map representing the histories of patrilineages and shamanic lineages, and as a blueprint for appropriate human behaviour. Moreover, I will discuss how human fate is perceived as intertwined with the land, and how individual fates in particular are tied to specific natural and spiritual entities in the land.

4.1 The iconic landscape

Language is, as James Weiner has noted, not merely a neutral tool, useful for describing a world "out there" but constitutive of the world itself (Weiner 1991: 31-32). When trying to reach an understanding of how the Duha Tuvinians conceive human fate as interconnected with Oron Hangai (their surrounding landscape) it is important to grasp the conceptual means by which they understand the world.

As previously stated, the Duha Tuvinians associate each clan and each patrilineage with a certain mountain oboo (cairn), and each shamanic lineage with specific sacrificial trees. In the classical anthropological literature such identifications between people and natural phenomena are termed totemism. Lévi-Strauss saw totemism as a certain kind of rationality by which people use the distinctions in nature to impose social divisions between people. It is, according to Lévi-Strauss, not the actual species used in totemic differentiation, which is important; rather it is the fact that animals exist as species. We are dealing with identities in form, rather than content, where the difference between animal species is similar to the difference between clans. Any field, domain or series within the natural world can thus be speciated; that is "detotalized", and consequently used to introduce social distinctions into human communities (Lévi-Strauss 1963a).

According to Weiner and others indigenous conceptualisation of landscape is often iconic of human history. Individual lives are detotalized (Lévi-Strauss 1963) into a series of place names that, taken in their entirety, stand for the totality of a person's history (see Weiner 1994: 600). Among the Duha Tuvinians, commonly known oboos and sacrificial trees are distributed along the migration routes of past generations, with some sites situated in Tuva, several week's travel away from their' current homeland. The stories of sacrificial trees reflect the history of specific shamans and shamanic lineages, while the stories of oboos reflects the conventional values of the patrilineage.

Stories about sacrificial trees concern the particular details about how specific trees originated from particular shamans and their spirits, and how these spirits influence his or her living maternal and paternal kin. This is shown in the story Bat zajah told me about his sacrificial tree:

"My father was the shaman Gompo. His mother was also a shaman. Her sacrificial tree is far away in the south-west. My father's sacrificial tree is situated here (pointing to the west) close to the river Xaramat Gol. My father was a very good (ich cain) and strong (xuchtei) shaman. You see; he even knew when he was going to die. He took off all his clothes and lay down. Then he told us that it was his time to die, and told us that when he had passed away we should place his shamanic gear beside this tree. Then he died, you see he really knew when he would die. So his ongods are at that place. Good white ongods. We are linked to them. One of us (the children of Gompo) had to become a shaman. My sister - (pointing to her) - went ill. Ambii said it was the shamanic disease, so she was to become a shaman, and she did. But she had different teachers, first Ambii Guaj, and then Nergvi. The ongod did not like that, they started to fight each other, and you see my pure sister turned mad and no one can heal her."

This story exemplifies how the history of a shamanic lineage is remembered through the land, where each sacrificial tree represents a single shaman and her or his life and deeds, and where the totality of sacrificial trees represents the entire history of the shamanic lineage. The stories of oboos include few details about the individual ancestors located at an oboo; rather they concern the conventional values of the patrilineage. An example is the story Dungarmaa told me about his clan oboo:

"Each clan has its oboos and mountains, where they worship their ancestors, and pray for the continuance of the lineage, and its health. People should show reverence to the heavens. Otherwise, the luc' in the heavens scold you, just as an elder scolds a disrespectful child. People should worship their ancestors (patrilineal) on mountains, because mountains are males. On the mountain we reach up to the male luc' of the heavens. My Sojong clan has an oboo in Zuun taiga, at a high mountain. My brothers and I go there to make offerings to the heavens, to our ancestors. We do this to make sure that our clan will continue, that it will prosper and our children be healthy. Only us men go to the oboo, women should not go. The eze do not like woman."

As in this story, narratives about oboos describe the connection between an oboo and a patrilineage or clan, and confirm the conventional values of hierarchy and male domination as the basis for social organisation. The more particular details about the human ancestors worshipped at the oboo, their origin characteristics, are usually not mentioned, and often not known. On the other hand, the eze (non-human owner spirit) of the oboo is remembered as a complex and unique individual.

The Duha Tuvinian landscape may thus be seen as a "map" of divisions between and within patrilineages and shamanic lineages. Moreover the landscape represents a "moral" map, where beneficial and dangerous places and natural entities reflect a division between "morally" proper and improper human deeds.

4.2 The natural law and the rules

The moral character of a sacrificial tree is reflected in the offerings left at the place, and revealed in the narratives told about the deceased kin inhabiting the place. My adoptive mother Centaling often told me how some deceased shamans had conducted "black deeds"; brought disease or death on humans and livestock. This she was sure of, as she had seen the black cotton ribbons tied to the branches of their sacrificial tress, which indicate the presence of black and dangerous ongods. On the other hand, white cotton ribbons signals the presence of white and beneficial ongods, which shamans use to conduct "white deeds", heal people from disease; increase people's livestock; regain their hunting-luck etc.

According to Centaling it is dangerous to approach a tree with black ongods, as these ongods are ferocious and angry and may inflict misfortune in your life. Centaling also warned me that I should not approach chötgörtei (devilish) places, as such places are inhabited by dangerous chötgörs, who might steal my soul. She explained that, lone standing trees, red cliffs and a sound like human whispering were all signs indicating the presence and land of a chötgör. These chötgörs derive from human pollution (boxirdol), which has transformed former beneficial human, non-human luc'' (spirits and animals) and former beneficial white ongods into dangerous chötgörs. Juvaang, an elderly man, explained:

"Without pollution, there are no dangerous places. Some places are dangerous, because in the old days people did not believe and worship the luc' of this area. These luc' make bad things, because they have been polluted, they have become bug chötgör. They are angry with everybody, so we call such places dangerous. You know that Gol Xaramat (area in the western taiga) is a place with many chötgörs. In the old days people were buried in this land. During Communism, people burned the ongods (cotton ribbons representing shamanic helper spirits) of these people, thinking that these things were not suitable for them. The people who burned these things did not have a good life. If you burn the ongods they become chötgörtei (devil spirits)."

As this example shows the character of spirits is tied to - and moulded by - human interaction with the land and its spirits. Centaling was always very concerned to teach me to avoid "polluting activities", such as urinating close to water or digging holes in the ground. Just talking about these issues made Centaling and other Duha Tuvinians sound angry, and they would tell me over and over again that pollution is very dangerous. To reach an understanding of why some activities are seen as polluting and dangerous, we must search into the Duha Tuvinian concepts of "the natural law" (jam), and "the rules" (yos).

Dakdji explained to me that to avoid pollution, I needed to learn to follow the yos (rules) of the natural law (jam). It is heaven (tenger), which has given humans the natural law, which prescribes the ideal order of the cosmos. This order implies two interdependent ideas. First, it contains a social order of the world, where all living things (humans, animals and spirits) are ordered in a hierarchy of beings. Very generally we can say that heaven luc' and ezes of the land, are situated in a superior position, humans and animals in a middle position, and earth luc' in a low position. It should be noted that although the idea of hierarchy is shared by all Duha Tuvinians I spoke with, its exact composition is fluid. Secondly, the rules imply a natural order of the world, where all living beings have their own way of being (asjitai); their characteristic livelihood and physical characteristics, which are interconnected with the asjigtai (way of being) of all other living beings (ambtan) - animals and spirits. As Dakdji explained:

"On the earth there are all kinds of people and animals, they all have their own asjigtai in nature. For example animals drink water, they hide in the woods and make shelters to keep themselves warm, in the same way as humans drink water to keep alive and cut the trees to make an urts", and he continued, "the Duha Tuvinian asjigtai (way of being) is to hunt, breed reindeer and move (nüüh) in the taiga."

The Duha Tuvinian yos⁽¹⁴⁾ prescribes how humans should interact with the asjigtai of other living beings, and how they should position themselves in the hierarchy of living beings. The Duha Tuvinians often explain to their children why certain acts are wrong, by recounting narratives about how humans have gone mad after disturbing the asjitai of other living beings, or how humans have suffered various misfortunes because they polluted the land of the spirits, by acting as if they were superior to a spirit. As Basso demonstrates concerning the Apache Indians, narratives about the landscape often express the systems or rules according to which people expect themselves and others to organise and lead their lives (Basso 1984: 36). Conceptions of the land thus work in important ways to shape the image people have of themselves (ibid: 49). Pollution and danger belief are, as Mary Douglas has demonstrated, often used to support and maintain the moral values and social rules of a given society (Douglas 1966: 3). In the case of the Duha Tuvinians the notions of chötgör and pollution (boxirdol) are used to explain immoral or improper behaviour and attitudes. As Dakdji explained:

"Without people's bad minds and hearts there would be no pollution (boxirdol), there would be no chötgör in Oron Hangai. For example if a shaman has a bad mind - makes poison (xorlox)⁽¹⁵⁾ - then luc'' from Oron Hangai get polluted, they get a bad mind. chötgörs - devils - are a thing connected to people's bad mind and heart."

To avoid disturbing the order of the cosmos by polluting thus requires an awareness of the complex yos of the natural law. People should interact with all natural entities - both as a natural phenomenas and as the habitats of a spiritual entities - according to certain yos; principles for human behaviour towards the social and natural aspects of other living beings. The concept of yos contains ideas of the way of being (asjitai) and hierarchical position of spiritual and natural entities, which is the basis for acting correctly - acting according to the yos - toward these entities (see also Lindskog 2000: 131-135).

According to the Duha Tuvinians, pollution derives from dirt or from wrong activities. Activities or things, which contradict the hierarchical and natural order of the world, may produce dirt and pollution. Pollution can, following Mary Douglas (1995) be defined as "matter out of place": "things" or "activities" which confuse or contradict shared classifications in a given culture. Humans try to create order in society and human life by categorising objects and events, as either male or female, within or without, above or below etc., and eliminating things which do not fit into these categories (ibid: 4). Pollution is thus, as Douglas writes, never a unique, isolated, event, rather it is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements (ibid: 36). This means that where there is pollution there is always some kind of system, and pollution should be understood as an expression of this system. In the case of the Duha Tuvinians, I believe - as explained by Dakdji - that such a system can be localised around two concepts implied in the natural law. First, a "loose" hierarchical order of beings, secondly the idea that each living being has its own unique way of being (asjitai), which should not be disturbed by other living beings.

When I asked the Duha Tuvinians "why they thought it is wrong to hunt game animals in a land inhabited by an eze (an owner spirit)", they explained that it is because these animals are the possession of the eze, and humans are inferior to eze. This example shows that pollution arises from not acknowledging one's inferior position to that of eze. Though the earth luc' generally are perceived as having a lower position than humans, it also produces pollution to dig holes in the ground - for example to bury people - since such practices disturb the way of being (asjigtai) of earth luc'. The Duha Tuvinian shaman Gosta explained the dangers of such disturbance:

"Today these luc' are very ferocious, because people have polluted this homeland. They have thrown garbage on the ground, defecated and urinated close to water, dug holes in the ground. Therefore luc' are harming people. In the old days our homeland was clean, but today it is polluted. According to our traditions a dead man should not be buried in the ground, the natural law is to place him on the open ground. According to our yos it is wrong to dig holes in the ground."

Some ideas about the natural law seemed to be shared by most Duha Tuvinians. Almost everybody I spoke with sounded angry and even scared when they talked about digging holes in the ground⁽¹⁶⁾. They saw this as a major violation of the natural law. Ideas about more abstract principles of the natural law - like the composition of the hierarchy of beings - differed from person to person, which did not seem to bother people. The concern of the Duha Tuvinians was rather the yos, because as Dakdji explained: "We need to be aware of the yos to ensure human well-being". The way people conceive the yos differs from person to person, and in different contexts: It is people's experience of the land, rather than conventional ideas about yos, which is seen as the most reliable resource for understanding the yos. The fact that experience is seen as a better tool for understanding than convention, is, as I see it, connected to the idea that the hierarchical position of spiritual and natural entities is not stable, but changeable. This means that to live according to the yos one must interpret the current nature of entities, rather than rely on stable ideas, which might no longer be appropriate for the natural entity in question.

4.3 My tree is my fate

Each human being has his or her own fate (zajah), which is given by their position in the patrilineage and by ongods at their sacrificial tree(s). Fate includes predestined and unavoidable elements, for example if one's fate is to become a shaman - if the ongods decide so - one has to become a shaman otherwise one will almost certainly die⁽¹⁷⁾. Yet, fate also includes that which is predestined yet avoidable. For example it is the fate of an elder man to be wise and a leader, but if an elder man does not have the abilities of leadership he may not become a leader. Moreover, individuals constantly mould their own and other people's fate by their actions. If a person pollutes Oron Hangai the pollution will feed back on the fates of the trespasser and his/her family. Finally, shamans may mould the fates of people, they may make "poison" and inflict misfortune on people's fate, or they may free people from an unfortunate fate.

People should ideally follow and live in accordance with their fate, since if they diverge from it they may suffer disease and other misfortune. The problem is however, that an individual can almost never live according to his or her fate, since every person has multiple and often contradictory fates. In theory this could make all fates and all Duha Tuvinians equal. In practice, not all members of the Duha Tuvinian community are regarded as sharing the same fates and social positions. In daily life it is person's position in the patrilineage, which governs fate and social position. However, when your abilities differ from your conventional position or when you experience something unusual in your life or in the land, you often reinterpret your own and other people's fate, which may give you a new position in the community. "The unusual" is often linked to people's sacrificial trees, which - I believe - contain a potential for negotiating and expanding convention. To take control over one's own fate - to find out why one is suffering misfortune, how to challenge the conventional "power" of men and elders - people interpret which sacrificial trees mould their own and other people's fate, and how.

To understand their collective fate, the Duha Tuvinians seem to interpret the landscape as a temporal map, representing the totality of the clan's history and the entirety of moral actions performed by humans. Collective problems - within the clan and within the Duha Tuvinian population, such as decreasing reindeer herds and general poverty - are often seen as the direct result of ancestors' misdeeds. Natural entities do not merely represent conventional clan and moral divisions, but directly influence the lives of present generations. The landscape is full of potential dangers, which cannot just be avoided, as prosperity in the lives of the living depends on knowledge of the lives and actions of deceased clan members and interaction with the luc' and ongods of one's clan.

During my fieldwork I often heard people say "my sacrificial tree is my fate", and the Duha Tuvinians often explained current misfortune with the character of their ongods and their luc' situated at their sacrificial trees. Trees have their own distinct asjigtai (way of being), just as humans and other living beings, as will be elaborated in chapters 5 and 6. However, when a tree is made into a sacrificial tree and inhabited by the luc' and ongods of a deceased shaman the conventional frame of reference in which people and trees are distinct entities - each possessing their own unique asjitai - breaks down. The tree is transformed into a sacrificial tree, and the fate of the deceased shaman's family is tied to the sacrificial tree and the ongods and luc' inhabiting it.

Thus, the Duha Tuvinians seem to construct their surrounding landscape as meaningful by (1) conceiving the land as representing the whole history of shamanic lineages and patrilineages and the entirety of yos, (2) by employing places to represent conventional divisions between shamanic and patrilineages, and between inappropriate and appropriate behaviour; and, (3) linking these concrete places to individual fates in an ongoing search for solutions and explanations for current misfortune and problems.

The process whereby the landscape is invested with meaning may be seen as a dialectical interaction between what Roy Wagner (1986) describes as a microcosm of names - "merely representing the things named" - and a macrocosm of analogic relations - where "naming becomes a matter of analogy: symbol and symbolized belong to a single relation" (Ibid: 14). In the first case we are dealing with a closed world of signs separated from the world of phenomena - as symbols and names merely represent their references. Here meaning arises in the contrast and grouping of names or symbols, for example the concept of purity is understood in opposition to the concepts of impurity and pollution. In the second case, symbolic references are part of the world of phenomena, as meaning relies on the relation between the concrete symbol and its reference. It is only my concrete sacrificial trees, and not any tree, which are my fate, as it is only at this concrete tree that my white ongods of my shamanic ancestors are situated. If this tree dies I will almost certainly die, as my fate and the fate of the tree are analogous.

I see the microcosm of names, as a structural way of perceiving the world in Ricoeur's (1971) sense of the term, where signs only refer to other signs within a closed system of signs, and not to the world of phenomena (ibid: 554). From this point of view the Duha Tuvinian landscape consists of named places representing collective shared values, rather than the concrete physical landscape. On the other hand, the macrocosm of analogous relations can be defined as a more hermeneutic way of perceiving the world; where the concrete sign and its reference are part and parcel of each other; part of a broader world (ibid: 560-561). The concrete sacrificial tree and other natural entities matter for the Duha Tuvinians, changes in their appearance hint at a similar change in human life. If the branches or trunk of a sacrificial tree are broken the human subjects, related to the deceased shaman located at the tree, will suffer misfortune. Sacrificial trees contain a potential for creativity and innovation, since almost any idea and value can be read into the complex symbol of the tree.

To understand how the Duha Tuvinians invest their landscape and its natural entities with meaning, I believe we must, like Wagner, combine a structuralist and a hermeneutic approach. As Wagner writes: "the microcosm of social names mediates the macrocosm of analogy by cutting it into manageable pieces. And the macrocosm of analogy, of course, mediates the microcosmic points of reference by allowing us to see resemblance among them" (Wagner 1986: 16). The microcosm deals with "collective conventional ideas", whereas the macrocosm of analogy is concerned with "concrete, holistic, individuative facts or events", and has a potential for innovation and new thinking, as it challenges conventional reference by establishing new relations between categories (ibid: 24-25). "The dialectic, then, mediates between two ideal and effectively unrealisable points, the social collectivity and the concrete, individuative fact or event" (ibid: 25).

The Duha Tuvinian microcosm of landscape terms is, as we have seen, characterised by its use of lineage (patri- and shamanic) terminology, and by its use of the oppositional terms pure-impure, beneficial-dangerous and white-black. These terms represent the conventional and collective shared values of the Duha Tuvinians, and proper and moral deeds are seen as pure, beneficial and white, whereas improper and immoral deeds are seen as impure, dangerous and black. It is by mapping former clan members unto specific features of the land, and dividing these places into black and white ezentei places and polluted chötgörtei places that the landscape is named.

The Duha Tuvinian concept of fate (zajah) connects the members of a shamanic lineage and their sacrificial tree in an analogic macrocosmic relation. This analogy poses a challenge to the conventional hierarchy of the patrilineaage, since youngsters, elders, females and males may be considered equal in the shamanic lineage, as they may have the same fates and since the ongods grant them similar abilities.

I believe that the analogy between person and sacrificial tree relies on a series of analogies, which are all based on an initial analogy between shaman and ongod. A layman is chosen to become a shaman, because the ongods have possessed his body. He has in other words "become the ongods" and acts in "mad" ways, as he is not yet able to control the ongods. To control the ongods the layman needs to become a shaman. This presupposes a "new" analogy, in the form of a barter between shaman and ongods, where the layman entrusts his children's fate to the ongods in order to receive shamanic power and become a shaman. During the shaman's lifetime he/she influences his/her children's fate through his ongods, as the shaman's actions and the shaman's mind are analogous with the character of his ongods. The performance of black shamanism makes the shaman's ongods black, whereas the performance of white shamanism results in white ongods. The death of the shaman marks the separation of shaman and ongods, and ends the shaman's ability to control his ongods. The shaman's children's fate is, however, still dependent on the ongods. To control the ongods, the shaman's children should place the shaman's equipment at a certain cedar tree - according to the prescriptions given by the shaman before his death. When the shamanic gear is placed at such a tree it becomes enlivened by the shamans luc (spirit) and his/her ongods, which transforms the tree into a sacrificial tree for worship of these spirits. Dakdji explained this:

"After a shaman's death his own children should certainly start a worshipping cult, because they should certainly make offerings, if they do not the spirits will be angry, also the children won't know where the ongods are, and so they will be badly affected. The ongods of the shaman will be passed to the children of the shaman and to future generations. The ongods will follow the souls of these people, their zajah is entrusted to these ongods".

In the evenings, Centaling often told me how the deeds of former shamans colour their sacrificial trees and influence their living kin. One evening Centaling said:

"She (Sering) has black ongods at her father's sacrificial tree and she also keeps some of these black ongods at her home. You see, Sering's father was a very strong and dangerous shaman, he made many bad things, and he even killed people through poison (black magic). Therefore, most of his children died early and therefore Sering and her children lead a miserable life. Their fate is tied to the black ongods at their sacrificial tree situated at a mountain north of our camp".

According to Centaling, Sering sometimes tied black cotton ribbons to her sacrificial tree, in order to do "bad things", to inflict illness or misfortune on people. The act of fastening black cotton ribbons to a "black" tree (a sacrificial tree which is commonly known to be inhabited by black ongods) confirms the conventional idea that this tree represents impure and dangerous forces. The act of linking the lives of individuals - the concrete suffering, poverty or illness they have experienced - to their tree and its ongods may, in the long run, expand, challenge or even change the conventional values attached to a given tree. This is especially the case when people use their tree and its ongods to mould their own and other people's lives. My Mongolian teacher Ojombadum told me how an acquaintance of hers had changed the nature of his tree:

"His sacrificial tree used to be white, it was a good and pure tree. But this man has done things, dangerous things, he has made poison toward people. So he went up to that tree and fastened black cotton ribbons, while he read spells. He used those white powers to conduct evil deeds. He transformed the white ongods into black ongods. Now this is a polluted tree. Many people do such things, but they will not tell you."

The sign(s) of a sacrificial tree may be read in a way, which confirms conventional and collectively shared ideas, but also has a potential for alternative readings, which may challenge convention. As individuals link their own lives to that of the tree and its ongods, and as they seek to mould their own and other people's lives through ritual engagement with the tree, they participate in constructing the meaning of the sign(s) of the tree. The meaning of a given sacrificial tree is thus fluid over time, and continually recreated and renewed. As Wagner notes, concerning the Walbiri aboriginals in Australia:

"Since the traditional Walbiri must perforce as hunter gatherers, not only gain their living following tracks, but also spend their lives constantly making tracks themselves, thereby life in all of its acts becomes a process of inscription. And this inscription, in large part an endless repetition of domestic and productive acts, a following of custom and techniques, was also a retracing of trails and tracks that had been known from time immemorial. The life of a person is the sum of his tracks, the total inscription something that can be traced out along the ground" (Wagner 1986: 21).

Something similar seems to be the case of the Duha Tuvinian worship of sacrificial trees, where people go to worship the sacrificial trees of their ancestors and repeat the customs and conventions applied to their trees, and inscribe their own life in the signs of the tree.

The analogy between person and cult place is named in microcosmic terms - fate - but it cannot be reduced to a cognitive ordering of place. Confronted with seemingly unexplainable problems and misfortunes the Duha Tuvinians often try to find explanations for their fate through practical engagement with and interpretations of macrocosmic images, especially sacrificial trees, but also other natural entities such as cliffs, mountains, lakes etc. It is through such engagement with macrocosmic images that the analogy between person and natural entity is experienced. This became apparent to me during my "upbringing" among the Duha Tuvinians.

During migration and travels to worship sites I asked people which yos were connected to this or that natural entity. They would answer shortly, encourage me to experience the natural entity with all my senses, and explain how to conduct the right offerings. Descending from the worship mountain Gurvan Saihan, a heavy hailstorm began, and my adoptive brother Dakdji commented:

"Feel, Tuja, the hailstones beating against your skin. It is the luc' thanking us for the offerings we made. If it was silent weather it would be a bad sign, but the hailstorm shows that they are eating our offerings."

As Humphrey has demonstrated concerning the Daur Mongols, a religious concept's felt authenticity is guaranteed primarily by direct modes of experiencing natural phenomena (Humphrey 1996: 126). Once or twice a year the Duha Tuvinians travel to their sacrificial trees and their oboos to make offerings to the luc' and ongods of their shamanic and patrilineages. On such occasions they often interpret how their sacrificial trees are currently influencing their life⁽¹⁸⁾. Their interpretations are never simple and clear-cut, since both their own deeds and the deeds of deceased and living kin influence the character of their sacrificial trees and thus their fate.

To avoid misfortune, the Duha Tuvinians try to figure out which ongods and which places influence their fate, and seek to control their zajah by making offerings to the ongods and luc' of their sacrificial trees according to the yos connected to the place. Such interaction with natural entities and spirits is seen as at once necessary and dangerous, since people may not be aware of the right yos - which are not consistent dogmas - and might unknowingly conduct the wrong offerings and cause pollution.

The landscape at once represents past lives and conventional collective values, and is continually recreated and invested with new meaning, reflecting current problems and individual fates. In daily life the Duha Tuvinians engage with an at once known landscape; a microcosm of named natural entities commonly acknowledged as inhabited by either fierce or beneficial spirits connected to certain shamanic lineages, and with a hidden landscape of potential - forgotten and not yet revealed spirits. To avoid misfortune they interpret and interact with natural entities and their spirits according to commonly known yos. However, no natural entity is attached to an absolute conventional meaning: it can only be understood and interpreted in relation to events in human life. Lay people can reach a rough understanding of this relation by interpreting events in nature and human life, but only shamans have the knowledge and means to make out the details of this intricate relation.

4.4 The shamanic ritual

Confronted with misfortune - such as illness among people and reindeer, marriage problems, loss of hunting luck - the Duha Tuvinians often seek the advice of shamans, who search for answers and solutions to misfortune during shamanic rituals. During my stay among the Duha Tuvinians, I often joined such rituals together with my adoptive parents and other clan members. In January 2001, my neighbours Bat and Bair returned to our camp from a month-long hunt, depressed and exhausted, as they had caught almost no game. Moreover, both of the men's livestock had decreased, the wolves had taken some and others had died from various diseases. The men decided to ask the shaman Balchir to find the reason for their misfortune, since they could not understand it themselves. I joined Bat and Bair at the shamanic ritual and the following is an extract from what I wrote in my notebook:

"We arrived at Balchir's household just before sunset. His ger (felt tent) was crowded, approximately 20 people were lying and sitting in his house, some drinking tea, others half-asleep and others - who had just arrived - giving offerings (tea, vodka, milk products, candies) to Balchir, which he placed at the altar in the north-eastern end of the house. Bat and Bair handed Balchir their offerings and said: "We would like to ask the ongods why we have lost our hunting luck". At midnight Balchir dressed in his shamanic coat and headgear and started to drum. For around an hour Balchir's drumming was monotonous, like the sound of a horse galloping through the forest, as he sang "I am riding, I am on my way", and people commented, "He is riding to the spirit world on his drum". After the first hour, the drumming suddenly became wild and unstructured, and Balchir started to jump around with his drum, scream, and cry, giving the impression that he was in some kind of fight. People whispered and said: "The ongods have arrived, they are angry, which ongods have arrived, is it my ongods, is that the sound of a wolf, is that an owl?". Balchir's voice became clear and he sang, "You wounded a fox". Then his voice broke and he laughed angrily and howled like a wolf. Bat whispered to Bair: "Don't you have a wolf ongod? I think it is your ongods that has arrived". "I don't know if there is such an ongod in my clan", whispered Bair. The audience started to discuss the messages of the shaman, which became more and more confusing, one moment a roar like a bear, then howling again and songs with almost indecipherable words. However, an old woman knew that there are actually wolf ongods in Bair's clan, and Bair got up to sit in front of the shaman. The shaman started to drum monotonously in front of Bair, and people whispered: "It is right, it was his ongods". After a short while, Balchir started to sing again: "The river is flowing, a fox is wounded, a mountain with human bones", and he screamed and fell to the ground in fits. His assistant burned some incense around him, people looked frightened and were almost silent as they observed him. Suddenly, the shaman jumped up and laughed, beating Bair with cotton ribbons from his shamanic coat. Bat whispered to me: "Now he is trying to remove something bad from Bair, it is good". Bair got up again and sat among the audience, while Balchir started to sing and drum wildly again, followed by people's discussion of which ongods had arrived and what messages they had. Bair and Bat were absorbed in discussing the meaning of the ongod's message to Bair: "It might be that human skull we saw lying on that mountain, maybe it was a chötgörtei place…" After the shamanic ritual, Balchir discussed the meaning of the ongods' messages with the audience. He asked Bair and Bat whether they had actually seen human bones on a mountain, and they told him that they had wounded a fox on their last hunt and afterwards had seen a human skull on a mountain slope. Balchir nodded and said: "Yes, that was an ezentei mountain, you were not supposed to hunt there, and the fox you wounded was an eze (owner spirit): "You see you have polluted this place, so therefore you do not receive any game and your reindeer are dying. Also you drink too much Bair, therefore your ongods are angry, you should not drink, when you drink you do not know what is game and what is eze. Also, there is a tree in the west next to a river, this place is dangerous". Bair answers: "But that is one of my worship places, where my ongods are". Balchir replies, "You think they are ongods, but someone has polluted the place, and they are chötgör. I have tried to repair your misdeeds, but to calm the eze of that mountain you have to go back and make offerings. People should not hunt at that mountain. It is ezentei, people should only make offerings at that place."

In the shamanic performance, the ongods are not hidden spirits, which are only revealed through natural entities representing them. The audience experiences the ongods as present through the shaman's dramatic performance. I believe the shamanic ritual can be seen as a macrocosmic image - "a symbol that stands for itself" (Wagner 1986: 25) - where analogic relations are combined in new ways - human fate, moral deeds, human misfortune, natural entities, sacrificial trees and oboos are played out against each other and connected - which makes the meaning of the ritual highly innovative (see Wagner 1986: 29). The ritual may give individuals an impression of the content of their fate - how it is moulded by their position in the lineage hierarchy, their ongods at their sacrificial trees and their own deeds - and how they should live and act to avoid and solve misfortune. Moreover, the ritual has a potential for new thinking and change, as conventional references - such as fate as governed by age and gender - can be opened and imbued with new meaning - though I am a woman I might have abilities superior to my position, since my ongods give me capabilities - during the analogic flow of the performance.

The cryptic message of the ritual itself can lead people to reflect in new ways on the relation between their own fate and various spiritual and natural entities in the land, but to be able to use these reflections to challenge convention in the broader community, the ambiguous messages of the ongods need to be translated into conventional language. This takes place after the ritual - when the shaman explains the more specific meaning of the ongods's ambiguous messages to the audience. The macrocosmic images of the ritual cannot be used directly to negotiate convention, since they are part and parcel of the ritual performance, and as such only make sense in the context of the ritual. To use the innovative potential of the ritual to challenge and negotiate conventional values and social positions outside the context of the ritual, it is necessary to translate the macrocosmic and fluid messages of the ritual into the discourse of convention, which is microcosmic.

In daily life, the spirits should ideally not be seen or heard by a layman but only manifest themselves through the signs of nature. It is only during formal rituals that spirits - in the form of ongods - should be perceived by lay-people, and only a part of the ongods' message should be told to the audience, while the shaman keeps other information secret. This separation between everyday knowledge - which is based on interpretation and knowledge of natural entities and yos - and ritual knowledge - which is founded upon actually seeing and hearing the ongods - is not trivial. It can - following Bateson (1990) - be seen as a precondition for flexibility.

The shamanic ritual may challenge the conventional facts of microcosmic knowledge. The ongods - possessing a macrocosmic knowledge about the world - are perceived as present by the audience during the ritual. The ongods offer their messages to the audience through the shaman's body: his song, his words, the rhythm of the drum and movements of his body are all used to interpret the ongods' messages. The full understanding of the ongods' complex messages can only be recognised by shamans. After the ritual, the shaman explains the meaning of the ongods' messages to the audience, but as the shaman Gosta told me, "We never tell everything, many things are secret, and should not be told".

To conceal certain information is - as Bateson writes - basic if the sacred is to be maintained, as communication can change the character of the way we conceive the sacred (Bateson 1990: 88). For a system to survive, part of the information in its variables should be kept secret or unconscious, and not be communicated to the other variables. Non-communication and secrecy is needed to preserve solutions and knowledge, which would be dissolved or transformed if it were made conscious or communicated verbally. The secrecy in Duha Tuvinian shamanism means that lay people can never be quite sure of the content of the connection between humans and spirits; they need to interpret "macrocosmic symbols" in nature, human life and rituals to gain insight into it. In theory, anything can be read into such macrocosmic symbols, as they are subject to invention and flexible.

During the shamanic ritual the relation between human fate, human deeds, the land, its spirits and its natural entities are played out against each other, in a search for explanation and solutions for misfortune. The Duha Tuvinians mainly join such rituals when they are faced with severe misfortune, which they cannot solve in other ways. More minor problems are interpreted and solutions attempted in everyday conversation about - and interaction with - the land and its hidden spirits. In fact - I believe - the practical skills of nomadism are organised to avoid infecting human life with misfortune and to integrate humans in a society of living and deceased clan members. In the following chapter I will investigate how the Duha Tuvinians try to control and understand individual and collective fate through the practices of nomadism.

Chapter Five: Nomadic life: Moving from place to place

In my upbringing as "a daughter" and "a shaman", my adoptive parents and other Duha Tuvinians put great effort into teaching me the practical skills of nomadism: how to load a reindeer, find a place for a camp, where to make a halt during migration, erect an urts etc. According to them it is crucial to master these skills in order to live the Duha Tuvinian asjigtai (way of being) - to find and live one's proper position in the land of Oron Hangai, and to avoid disturbing and angering the asjigtais (way of being) of other beings. The skills of nomadism do thus not merely serve practical aims, but can - following Appadurai - be seen as instances of locality production⁽¹⁹⁾ which aims to produce local subjects; "actors who properly belong to a situated community of kin, neighbours, friends and enemies" (Appadurai 1995: 205).

In order to produce and reproduce local subjects it is - according to Appadurai - necessary to construct a concrete neighbourhood, in and through which the production of locality can be realised. According to Appadurai the challenge of settled people is to maintain and reproduce their neighbourhoods. Since the Duha Tuvinians are nomadic, their neighbourhood of campsites and urts' are bound to be temporary places, which must be partly erased to go on migration, and must continually be recreated in new places⁽²⁰⁾. Their challenge is thus - in contrast to that of settled people - to continually recreate and erase their neihbourhood of campsites.

To produce a neighbourhood people define and shape their territory as a representation of their own social values, in opposition or relation to other contexts (social, environmental, material) and neighbourhoods (ibid: 208). The Duha Tuvinian neighbourhood is not limited to their campsites; rather it includes the broader area of their pastures and cult-places, which they call their homeland (nutag). The homeland is punctuated by significant places - in the form of cultplaces for the worship of human ancestor spirits and non-human eze (master-spirits). This homeland may - drawing on Appadurai - be seen as a context, which provides "the frame or setting within which various kinds of human action (productive, reproductive, interpretive, performative) can be initiated and conducted meaningfully" (ibid: 209). The Duha Tuvinian homeland in the taiga stands in contrast to the Darhad homeland in the steppe, and to the wilderness (xeer); the areas of the taiga, which is not inhabited by humans. Only the Duha Tuvinians are seen as capable of roaming safely in their homeland, since it is inhabited by their ancestor-spirits, which may infect misfortune in the lives of outsiders or non-relatives passing their locations.

According to Appadurai the construction of a neighbourhood is inherently colonizing, as it requires "the assertion of socially (often ritually) organised power over potentially chaotic and rebellious places and settings", through "risky or even violent action in respect to the earth, the forest, animals and other humans" (ibid: 208 - 209). To erect an urts or to create a cult-place in the taiga are both acts of colonization, since they aim at controlling a place and its spirits in order to integrate humans in the land. However, the aim of Duha Tuvinian colonization is not first and foremost to gain power over the land, but as Bat explained: "to try to fit into the land of Oron Hangai, without disturbing the asjigtai of other living beings". The relation between humans and the landscape among the Duha Tuvinians is thus - as Humphrey notes regarding Mongolians - "an interactive field, rather than a passive setting in which human beings take action" (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 2).

The Duha Tuvinian subsistence as reindeer herders is based on a continual oscillation between settling in place and migrating in space, which is organized as a move from place to place. They strike camp and move to a new place approximately once every second month during winter and early spring, and once every month during the summer and early autumn. During migration, they usually only make a halt at cult-places, where they stop to make offerings to the spirits and rest, and at camp-sites, where they stop to eat, drink and visit acquaintances. People should not halt simply in open space - areas in between cult-places and camp-sites - since it may be inhabited by dangerous

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