Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs

"This is about a particular group of Siberian shamans. Now, I lay claim to no fluency of the language of Siberian tribes, but it might be worth noting for the record that the word ‘shaman’ actually comes from a Siberian tribal language. There’s now a locution among anthropologists and social scientists, the ‘California shaman’, which has obviously not a lot to do with what the Siberians thought it was. So there are people selling their services on the internet as shamans, they’re probably not from Siberia. “Being a shaman is nearly destroyed by Stalin and his policies” Actually, this book is fantastic is because it’s about the way in which being a shaman is nearly destroyed by Stalin and his policies. He wants to wipe it out for the same sort of reason that Protestants want to wipe out the grey areas that I’ve been describing in late medieval culture: because he wants everybody to have exactly the same mindset. Of course it fails, which is the good news. The bad news is a lot of people die, but the good news is that it fails. The book is about the revival of Siberian shamanism since the fall of the Berlin wall and the way that these groups of tribes are coming back together and trying to rediscover the traditional practices of their forefathers. Which is great. On the other hand, being a shaman is really, horrifyingly difficult. I’d be keen to ask some California shaman if they’ve really tried the full-on method, because it’s not just about the occasional tap on a drum. Really, to be able to become a shamanic healer, you have to be able to contract the disease you’re trying to heal and nearly die of it. The closer you come to dying, the greater your power. It’s important to remember that it’s not just something that goes on in your head; it’s also something you do with your body. It’s something you have to invest in as an embodied and fleshed entity. So again, that’s me not liking dualism very much, and not being very comfortable with the idea that people aren’t their bodies. People are their bodies. Nor can you really control every function of your body in the way you can maybe control electric lights. It’s increasingly to do with the relation between the Siberian people and their environment. As you probably know if you read the papers, the environment in Siberia—just like the environment all around the poles—is changing much faster. The further up you go, the more strongly climate change is happening noticeably. In Siberia, they’re dealing with incredibly scary stuff, like fields of bubbling methane. How can you manage totally non-traditional climatic events with traditional material? The answer would appear to be that only traditional material offers you the chance to give something back to the landscape. To see yourself as a creature within that landscape—rather than as something separate that’s using or digging into or mining that landscape, which is how Western man tends to see it. What I think we’re seeing is the rise of practitioners that want to promulgate not even a green idea, but more an idea that reduces the dominance of a human to something that’s much more intersectional and relational. Shamanism is a violent religion. It’s also what we would think of as self-harm. In order to induce the appropriate state of mind, self-harm is sometimes involved. In terms of whether we can really say that there’s acts of violence perpetrated by shamans, I would probably want to call them acts of resistance, because they’re never going to be the dominant force in the area, even. There’s always going to be an overlay of big business, and mining companies, and various globalized entities that militate against that sense of the local and the engaged. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I get the tendency of the California shaman to want to resist some of those forces. I also think that there’s something to be said for all of us opening up to some sort of idea where we allow nature to win some battles. Rather than insisting on making every single thing in our lives perfect for us, irrespective of other stuff. Now, you could call that violence. That’s right. And the responses to Greta Thunberg struck me as very much a callback to some of the kinds of rhetoric that we see associated with the young children caught up in the witch trials. The easy equation of autism with madness was one of the most nightmarish aspects of the response to her. My eldest daughter is autistic, so I have to come out and say I have a vested interest in neurodiversity. But equally, I thought that a lot of it was about the same kinds of issues that crop up repeatedly in the witch trials, most famously at Salem, where little girls actually seize the opportunity to get their annoyingly, obstreperously bossy elders into tons of trouble. There’s a wonderful ballad by one of the descendants of the Salem witches called ‘I, But a Little Girl’. This is one of the things that the accusers at Salem say: “we be but little girls”. The point that the ballad makes is that the adults let them do it. The adults don’t fight back. The fact that eleven people are executed has nothing to do with little girls per se, and everything to do with the adults who indulge them. But it’s also strikingly about a fightback by the little girls against the abusive power of adults. Adults in Salem, because it’s isolated, have total power over children. I’m not talking about clerical sexual abuse or anything along those lines—I’m talking more about the complete disregard for the feelings, the imaginations, or the emotional needs of children. It’s the effect of creating a situation like that. To some extent, Greta Thunberg is a side effect of the industrialization and globalization that we’ve imposed on the planet and basically left our kids to deal with. The town, yes. But have you been to the village? The village renamed itself in the nineteenth century, so many people don’t know it’s there. It renamed itself Danvers. It’s got a memorial to the Salem witches that lived there. The one that lived there that many people know about is Rebecca Nurse. Her house is still there and you can go visit it. Unlike the town, it has this hushed quality. It’s like walking with death. You’re right—the town of Salem is this creepy monetization of the terrifying aspects of the past. That to me is a little uncomfortable. I sometimes want to say to people: you realize actual people died here, right? This isn’t fun. “The Salem witches were trapped in the same kind of way that you could be trapped on Love Island” Those people were trapped—the Salem witches were trapped in the same kind of way that you could be trapped on Love Island. People don’t really realize this, but Salem was this tiny clearing in the woods. There was a town in the sense that it was a port, but it’s reasonably distant from the village. If you only had your feet, it would be very distant from the village. Say you’re Abigail Williams and you’re ten years old (she’s one of the principal accusers). You’re living with maybe 200 people and they’re the only people you know. They’re the only people you’ve ever known. There’s no television. There are no books except the Bible. And that’s your world. It’s horrifying! But I do want to say—Abigail Williams was ten years old. I want to say it again, because in Arthur Miller’s play, she’s somehow made into a lustful teenager. That’s Arthur Miller’s explanation for the entire phenomenon. Which is, frankly, absolutely gross. Gross in a particular kind of way that often masquerades as liberalism and is actually the opposite."