Establishing mutual misunderstanding: a Buryat shamanic ritual in Ulaanbaatar

Abstract

This article discusses a strange case of shamanic ritual performed for a Buryat family in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar. This performance not only differs from those described in the regional literature, but it also seems to challenge some of the models used to account for ritual efficacy. Indeed, while the cathartic use of Buryat traumatic history to deal with a patient's misfortune in shamanic rituals is quite well documented, this performance stands out for the uncompassionate hopelessness with which spirits spoke of the family's fate as exiles in Mongolia. Meanwhile, the ever‐growing tension between participants, which culminated in an open crisis, would be a sure sign of a ritual failure had it not been the clear result of the shaman's own efforts to establish mutual misunderstanding between the spirits, the patients, and herself. Drawing on a pragmatic approach to ritual efficacy, this article ponders on the specific purpose of a performance which seems to be aimed at creating a context of miscommunication between participants.

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

“…But the shamanic proliferation has been fraught with conflict and inconsistencies. In most rituals that I attended, as in the rituals observed by Delaplace (2014), the shamans and the spirits were full of contempt, anger, and insults. Moreover, instead of resolving issues, some rituals created more misunderstandings and problems -which then required additional rituals to deal with (Buyandelger 2013).…”

Flesh and Blood

“…Højer & Pedersen 2019). Furthermore, thinking through meat highlights the ambiguities, fragility and uncertain obligations of kin relations (Delaplace 2014;Højer 2004;) that might otherwise be lost when relatedness is conceptualised a priori in terms that produce 'a warm, fuzzy glow' , as Carsten (2013: 246) writes of Marshall Sahlins' (2011) idea of 'mutuality of being' .…”

Transsingularities: the cognitive foundations of shamanism in Northern Asia

“…Cognitive sciences are of even less help when it comes to explaining the numerous ethnographically recorded situations in which people encounter extraordinary beings or events that they deliberately refuse to acknowledge as tokens of everyday categories, such as the long‐haired squirrel above. More specifically, those traditions that we group together under the umbrella of ‘shamanism’ do not operate using categorial knowledge, but rather according the unknown, the bizarre, paradoxical knowledge (Humphrey and Onon ), the confrontation of complex identities (Severi ), the voluntary opacification of communication (Déléage ), situations of confusion and misunderstanding (Delaplace ), and irony and lies (Pedersen ).…”