The Evenki

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A man drives twenty-five reindeer through standing larch, and the forest does not end. It runs north past the last of the birch into a country of moss and bog and slow cold rivers, and it runs east, behind him and ahead of him, farther than any one people has ever needed to walk. The Evenki walk it anyway. From the Yenisei to the shore of the Pacific, and south across the watershed into Mongolia and the forests of northeastern China, the small mobile bands of this one people are scattered over a wider stretch of the earth than any other people of Siberia holds — something on the order of two and a half million square kilometers of taiga, thinly and continuously inhabited by hunters who move with their herds and carry their cosmology on the move.

They are a Tungusic people, the northern branch of the Manchu-Tungusic family, and the older books call them by their old name: the Tungus. The name they give themselves is Evenk — in their own tongue, simply, a person. It is a living name for a living people, around thirty-nine thousand in Russia and a comparable number in China by the most recent counts, and it carries, by an accident of history that is also a measure of their place in the record, a weight far out of proportion to their numbers. From the speech of these forest hunters the wider world took a single word, and built on it a whole category of the study of religion. The word is shaman.

A people of the taiga

The taiga is not a backdrop to Evenki life; it is the medium of it. The boreal forest of larch and pine and birch that belts the top of Asia is at once the hunting ground, the pasture, the road, and the cosmos, and the Evenki are organized around the problem of moving through it. Where the steppe peoples to the south rode horses across open grass, the taiga peoples bred and rode the reindeer, the one large animal that thrives on the lichen of the far north and can carry a rider over ground that defeats every other mount. The Evenki perfected a distinctive shoulder-saddle seat that let a rider balance high on the deer’s withers and pass through dense timber a horse could never enter, and with it they reached deeper into the forest than any of their neighbors.

The herd was modest by steppe standards — most households kept on the order of two dozen deer — and it was kept less for meat than for transport, for milk, and for the hides and sinew of daily life. Hunting and fishing fed the people; the reindeer made the hunting possible by carrying the camp from one ground to the next. This is the first thing to grasp about the Evenki economy: it was not herding in the pastoral sense, the running of great flocks for slaughter, but a hunting life mounted on a small, intimate herd. The deer was a partner in the work of the forest before it was a resource, and that partnership reaches up into the cosmology, where the reindeer is also reckoned a carrier of souls between the worlds.

The largest social unit that mattered was the clan. Each clan held its own country, and in the older reckoning that country was thought of as a river — a real watershed on the map, and at the same time a mythic stream that ran out of the lived world and on into the worlds beyond it. A clan was a stretch of forest, a line of descent, and a channel to the otherworld, all at once; and one of the figures who led it, who knew the course of that mythic river and could travel it, was the clan’s shaman.

An Evenki (Tungus) family with their reindeer, 1907. Photograph by A. A. Makarenko, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The dispersal of the people across so vast a range was not a single migration but the cumulative drift of small bands following game and pasture over centuries, and it carried Evenki groups far from one another. By the seventeenth century, when Russian fur-traders pushing east first wrote them into the documentary record, the Tungus were already established reindeer-herders across the basins of the Lena and the Yenisei. Some bands ranged north into the tundra margins, some east toward the Sea of Okhotsk, some south. One southern offshoot crossed eventually into the Greater Khingan range of what is now China, and their descendants — the reindeer Ewenki of Aoluguya, a few hundred people near the Russian border — remain the only reindeer-herding tribe within China’s borders. The range is the widest of any Siberian people not because the Evenki were numerous, but because they were mobile, and the forest was very large.

The saman, and the word the world took

At the center of Evenki religion stands the saman — the clan’s specialist in the spirits, and the source, through Russian and the travelers’ reports, of the term that every European language now uses. The chain of transmission is one of the better-documented etymologies in the comparative study of religion. The English shaman and German Schamane come from the Russian šamán, and the Russian word was taken in turn from a Tungusic language — by the usual account from the Evenki saman — during the eastward expansion that brought Russians into contact with the forest peoples. The Dutch scholar-statesman Nicolaes Witsen carried it into Western Europe in a book of 1692, and the merchant Adam Brand brought it to English readers a few years later. The word’s further history is contested in its details — some link the term to a Tungus root sa-, “to know,” a derivation the Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen judges phonologically irregular though not impossible, and an older proposal deriving it from the Sanskrit śramaṇa has been rejected as an anachronism — but the immediate source is not in serious doubt. A category of world religious studies bears an Evenki name.

What that name designates inside Evenki life is something more particular than the global abstraction built on it. The saman is not chosen by ambition or trained by apprenticeship in the ordinary way. He — or she, for the office is open to women — is seized by the spirits and made by them, often against his will. The calling announces itself as a sickness: a long, disordering crisis of illness, dreams, and visions, read not as disease but as the spirits’ summons, which the candidate resists until he submits and is remade into one who can bear their presence. To become a saman is to survive being claimed.

The made shaman keeps a body of spirit-helpers, many of them in animal form — the reindeer, the eagle, the bear among them — who guide and carry him in his work and stand as the instruments of his power. With their help he does the work the clan needs done at the seam between the worlds. He heals the sick; he recovers a soul that has strayed or been stolen, restoring it to the body it left; he escorts the souls of the dead to their place below; and he secures the hunt, negotiating with the masters of the animals for the game on which the people live. The drum is his principal instrument and, in the language of the tradition, his mount — the means by which he travels. None of this is performed here as technique, and the descriptions in the ethnographic record are careful to keep it at the level of what is done rather than how; the office is a genuine vocation, the saman a specialist in a real traffic with powers the forest is full of.

An Evenki shaman and family, 1907. Photograph by A. A. Makarenko, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The three worlds and the river between them

The cosmos through which the saman travels is layered. In the Evenki account it has three levels — an upper world, a middle world, and a lower world — and the shaman’s whole vocation consists in moving between them when no ordinary person can. The middle world is the lived earth, the taiga and its people and animals. The upper world is the country of the beneficent powers, among them a guardian of the plants and the animals named in the ethnographies as Seveki. The lower world is the place of the dead, who go on there in a life much like the one above, and on a deeper level the country of the harmful spirits and the sources of sickness.

The three worlds are joined, and the joining is what makes travel between them possible. In the imagery recorded among the Evenki the link is twofold: a world-tree whose roots reach down and whose crown reaches up, threading the levels onto a single axis, and a world-river that runs through all three. The clan river of the middle world — the watershed a clan inhabits — is understood as a stretch of a far longer stream that rises in the upper world and runs out at last into the world of the dead below. The saman knows the course of that river. To heal, to fetch back a stolen soul, to bring a dead person down to the country of the dead, he sends or carries his own soul along it, downstream or up, through the layered cosmos and back, and returns to the body he left behind. The geography of the soul-journey is, quite literally, the map of the taiga’s rivers projected onto the structure of the universe.

It is worth marking how this knowledge reaches us. The Evenki did not write, and almost everything in the documentary record of their religion was set down by outsiders — the Russian fur-traders and officials of the imperial period, and after them the travelers and ethnographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who went into the taiga to record a way of life the state was already pressing upon. The three worlds, the clan river, the spirit-helpers, the making of the shaman by sickness: these are reconstructions, assembled from observation and interview, and they carry the imprint of the conditions under which they were gathered. The tradition is real and was living when it was recorded; the record of it is the record of strangers, and the distance shows.

The Soviet century

The pressure that came in the twentieth century was of a different order from anything the forest had known. The new Soviet state did not merely tax the Evenki or trade with them, as the empire had; it set out to remake them. The official designation itself changed under that hand — the old name Tungus was retired in 1931 in favor of Evenk, the people’s own word, as part of a wider reorganization of the indigenous north into recognized nationalities. Behind the renaming came the program: collectivization, the gathering of mobile hunting bands into fixed collective enterprises, and the long campaign of forced settlement that pulled a people built around movement off the trail and into permanent villages.

For a people whose economy, society, and cosmology were all functions of mobility through the taiga, sedentarization struck at everything at once. And the shaman, the figure at the center of the clan’s traffic with the spirits, was a particular target. The antireligious campaigns of the early Soviet decades treated shamans as enemies of the new order, to be discredited, dispossessed, and silenced; drums and regalia were confiscated, the rites suppressed, the office driven underground or broken. The toll on the practitioners and on the continuity of the knowledge they carried was severe, and much of it remains incompletely documented. Alongside the suppression ran the slower attrition of Russification — the schooling of children away from their language, the erosion of the tongue and the traditions it carried — so that by the late Soviet period the Evenki language and the world it named were both in retreat. The damage was done soberly, in the name of progress, and it was no less damaging for that.

A living people

The Evenki did not vanish. They are present-tense — herders and hunters and townspeople dispersed across the Siberian taiga of the Russian Federation, with the largest concentration in the Sakha Republic, and a smaller community across the border in the forests of northeastern China. The reindeer Ewenki of the Greater Khingan still keep the deer that no one else in China keeps; the bands of the Russian north still range a forest that, for all the pressures on it, remains one of the great wild stretches of the planet. After the Soviet collapse, the open practice of the old religion became possible again, and across Siberia the shamanic traditions that had been pressed underground have been part of a broader revival — a recovery bound up, as such revivals are, with questions of language, heritage, and identity, and carried on by a people deciding for themselves what to keep.

Tungus (Evenki) people in a plate from Gustav-Theodor Pauli’s ethnographic survey of the peoples of Russia, 1862, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The Evenki sit at the northern edge of a wide world of Inner Asian and Siberian shamanic tradition — the Sakha to their north and east, with their oyuun and their bright sky-spirits the Aiyy; the Mongol Buryats to the south, around Lake Baikal, with the lord-spirit of Olkhon Island; the steppe sky-cult of Tengri and the birth-goddess Umai, attested far to the south in the Turkic inscriptions; the upper-world creator Ülgen of the Altai and the underworld king Erlik whom the shaman descends to face. The Evenki belong to that world and are distinct within it, a forest people where most of the others are peoples of the steppe and the high pasture.

But they hold one thing that none of the others holds. The categories the rest of the world reaches for when it tries to describe any of these traditions — the shaman, shamanism, the shamanic — are, at the root, Evenki words, taken from the speech of reindeer-herders in the larch forest and carried out across the earth until they came to name a kind of religious life found on every inhabited continent. The forest hunters who first used the word still range the taiga that gave it. The vocabulary went around the world; the people who minted it stayed home, and herd their deer there yet.

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