Digital trance

Dynamics of Communicative Practices in Siberian Neo-Shamanism

“…Among them we find both the descendants of a true shamanic lineage and representatives of other ethnic groupings. We have revealed many similar professional stories in Indigenous villages of the Khabarovsk region and in the Altai (Ivashchenko and Elinskaya 2016).…”

“…On the one hand, the successors and disciples carried on their teachers' tradition, on the other they modified it, introduced other spiritual techniques, opened their own schools and organizations, or, conversely, worked individually as urban "arm-chair" shamans. Two of our informants' biographiesshaman Vladimir from Komsomolsk-on-Amur and shaman Svetlana from Novosibirsk-are indicative in the second example (Ivashchenko and Elinskaya 2016). Russia's religions life began to be very patchy even in one and the same field of spirituality: "Many said that shamanic practices had become more diverse than in the 1990s" (Volkova 2021: 44).…”

“…Thus, in late 1990-ies -early 2000-ies, the neo-shamanic teaching and its applications demonstrated diversity that grew due to active collaboration between religions and institutions at conferences, festivals, inspiritual tourism and other mass events. In addition to a selected shamanic tradition, the modern shaman widely draws on various elements of Buddhism, Slavic paganism, Christianity, Indian Yoga, pieces of knowledge from academic psychology and natural sciences (Ivashchenko and Elinskaya 2016). We see the emergence of such oxymorons as "Orthodox shaman", "scholar shaman", "singer shaman."…”

“…Detlef Shplich explores the phenomenon of cyber-shamanism, highlighting the functions and types of roles of shaman artists in the digital environment (Shplich 2016). Among the studies of how Internet communications impact the social practice of Russian neo-shamanism we can point to only our own article where the types of sites and social media pages were identified, the gender and age characteristics of the audience and unified structures for the representation of shamanic experience in social media were determined (Ivashchenko, Ivanov, and Elinskaya 2019).…”