The Shamaness in Asia

Gender, Religion and the State

Davide Torri, Sophie Roche, Davide Torri, Sophie Roche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000204544
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Buddhism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book concentrates on female shamanisms in Asia and their relationship with the state and other religions, offering a perspective on gender and shamanism that has often been neglected in previous accounts.

An international range of contributors cover a broad geographical scope, ranging from Siberia to South Asia, and Iran to Japan. Several key themes are considered, including the role of bureaucratic established religions in integrating, challenging and fighting shamanic practices, the position of women within shamanic complexes, and perceptions of the body. Beginning with a chapter that places the shamaness at the centre of the discussion, chapters then approach these issues in a variety of ways, from historically informed accounts, to presenting the findings of extensive ethnographic research by the authors themselves.

Offering an important counterbalance to male dominated accounts of shamanism, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Indigenous Peoples across Religious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Gender Studies.

Section 1
The conceptual debate

The role of gender and religion in shamanic studies

1
The shamaness at the threshold

Gender, religions and the state in Asia

Sophie Roche and Davide Torri

Introduction

The conflicts between forms of shamanism and bureaucratically integrated religious practice seem to be almost a constant of historical encounters. This is especially true if we take into consideration so-called world religions during phases of state formation or colonial expansions. Controlling beliefs and practices of a population over which empires and nation states expand was, and still is, considered a crucial part of state-building processes and a feature of modernization,¹ where regimes of signs have to be checked and sanitized for the smooth functioning of the state machinery. Shamanic beliefs and practices were often considered signs of superstition and backwardness and shamans nothing more than demonic worshippers or charlatans. In the framework of this seemingly recurring pattern, we also find important differentiations in the scale and degree of these dynamical encounters. While the full spectrum of possibilities and outcomes may include almost everything from total eradication to full incorporation, the results invariably offer us a clear view of the resilience of shamanic configurations. More often than not, we may argue, shamanic religious specialists managed to survive and to adapt, albeit in a marginal position, within various and diversified regimes of economies of the sacred (Torri 2014). While this basic notion may well constitute the backbone of this book, we also want to incorporate an additional layer to it: the issue of gender as a fundamental element of these dynamics.

This book originates in a series of lectures, which took place at the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context (University of Heidelberg), titled The Shamaness on the Threshold. Religious Encounters, Repression and Resistance in Asia. During the winter semester (2015/16), and with the involvement of several specialists from different areas as guest lecturers, we explored several cases of entanglement between world religions and local expressions of religiosity centred on trance/possession complex, with a special focus on gender. The materials, talks, data and comments gathered weekly over the semester constitute the raw elements from which this volume emerged.

The core ideas of the course revolved around the idea of asymmetrical religious encounters, with hegemonic religious establishments on one side and religions of the subaltern on the other. Soon, we also had to incorporate the state into the picture: imperial projects often entail soteriological themes underpinning military conquests, even when proclaiming themselves as the harbingers of rationality, scientific thought and atheism. It would be too simplistic to posit a purely antagonistic relation between organized religions and folk expressions of religiosity or between “new” religions acquiring hegemonic positions versus relics of the previous configurations. Equally unfruitful would be to consider these dynamics along a binary system involving regulated exchanges between great and little traditions or other similar dichotomies, for example, written culture vs. orality. For one thing is certain: every encounter engenders multiple dynamics that are often non-linear and in any case non-unidirectional. Elements are appropriated, recombined, redeployed or subverted by all the agents involved (Hamayon 2000, 7). Moreover, it would be a mistake to consider each configuration as a stable, homogeneous and organic field across time, devoid of any inner tension and inherent contradiction. The topic of gender introduces an additional area of friction, forcing us to reconsider and reassess previous historical and ethnographical accounts of religious dynamics.

We choose to consider shamanism as the other of the established religions. In doing this, we are very well aware of the critical debate surrounding the term. Nonetheless, we think the umbrella term will be useful to describe several of those systems or configurations which were denied legitimacy by the hegemonic agents, who roughly identified animism as demonolatry, superstition and witchcraft in older sources and animism during the second half of the 19th century. The history of the concept of shamanism itself is paradigmatic: from superstition in the 17th century to psychiatric disorder in the 19th century, from indigenous psychiatry (the wounded healer) of the mid-20th century to the neo-animism at the turn of the millennium, to conclude with the eco-spiritual environmentalist ideology of the indigenous revivals of the 21st century.

We are aware that, by using the notion of shamanism to interpret and describe religious configurations of Asia only, we are very close to that old cliché of northern Asia as the locus classicus of shamanism. It is not our intention to abide by that reductive definition. We choose to focus on Asia because of our own and our guest lecturers’ field of expertise we invited, and we want to present the results from that class. Similar dynamics, we are certain, also appear in other contexts, and the reader will find in the following chapters several mentions of issues and dynamics pertaining to other areas of the world beyond Asia.

Integration and exclusion of religions into state bureaucracy

The first colonial expansion of Europe was driven by men and envisioned as a manly endeavour, whether these were military actions, economic expeditions or missionaries who went to Africa, South America or Asia. Among others, missionaries were at the front exploring, converting and recruiting among the most different populations. The spiritual mission of the clergy paired well, and perfectly matched, with the “civilizational” aims of the colonial states. Gender concepts travelled along with those missionaries, and colonial communities were often centred on clear-cut assumptions regarding gender roles, in which wives were responsible “for sustaining exemplary families” (Grimshaw 2011, 9). Failing to do so was considered exposing the flank to heathenism, inviting sin or overtly witchcraft. Even if the boundaries could not be maintained as imagined in their concepts, gender division from Christian churches heavily impacted local communities. Many centuries before, Islam had equally had its expansionist period exporting, together with its main religious tenets, its gender concept to various regions in northern Africa and Asia. The Ottoman Empire was one of the colonial powers that along with its expansion introduced religious legal codes and shaped gender concepts (Zilfi 1997). Perhaps less militant, but equally gendered, was the expansion of Buddhism through networks of monastic institutions, traders and royal courts throughout Asia (Meinert 2016). Whether part of a colonial enterprise or slowly encroaching over diverse terrains, in these new locations, those religions joined hands with feudal or colonial regimes, becoming part and parcel of the establishment. We are certainly aware of the complexities involved in these processes and of the inherent tension between diverse, and diversified, agents acting into and through religio-political networks. For the purpose of this book, we define some religious networks as establishment and as hegemonic in a given context. By that we mean primarily normative across a range of social fields including, but not limited to, ethics, law and behaviour. Across the longue durée, the friction between diverse actors engendered transformative social processes. Of these processes, we will take into account the integration of local belief systems and practices into the wider framework of their own religious hierarchies and its entanglements with the sphere of gender. The fall of empires and the end of colonialism in the 20th century paved the way for the emergence of a paradigmatic secular agenda, either in its democratic, communist, post-colonial or neo-liberal versions.

While secularism indeed became the official credo for post-colonial nation states in Central Asia as much as for India or the Magreb countries, the importance of religion as an identity marker – often in opposition to the former colonial power – increased. The bureaucratic control of religion became an issue in probably all post-colonial states inheriting colonial structures. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to provide a concise overview to these different forms of bureaucratic processes. Suffice it to say that religion became a strategic domain for negotiating power. It comes as no surprise that, with few exceptions, male-dominated institutions were established along with the post-colonial regimes, sometimes after a short period of revolutionary gender liberation and religious freedom (Woollacott 2006; Northrop 2004). In many instances, we find examples of an oscillation between the social fluidity of revolutionary movements during the agitation phase, followed by more conservative steps towards the stable forms of the pre-revolutionary times. A clear example of it is the role and participation of women in armed national liberation struggles, followed by a quick and sober return to the less threatening – for the establishment – role of the nurturing, caregiving mothers (Goldman 1993; Gilmartin 1995; Linhard 2005: Werner 2009)

It has been stated before that empires imposed their own gendered hierarchies. Angela Woollacott (2006) argued that women who revolted against slavery and exploitation in British India were submitted to the same hierarchy that the colonizers followed. Racialized notions of masculinity had developed from Victorian imperial culture, shaping the way women were situated within the colonies. Similarly, Ann Laura Stoler (2002) has analyzed the politics of “race and gender” in Dutch colonies that constantly redefined sexuality and hierarchies. Anti-colonial struggles, in contrast, were identified as liberating, albeit temporary, moments regarding gender orders. Anti-colonial movements, in fact, included women on such a scale that, according to Woollacott (2006) it becomes impossible to think about nationalism without its feminist component after the decline, and the demise, of the British Empire. A similar argument was developed by Gregory Massell (1974), arguing that at the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, women were accorded a key function for transforming the empire’s outer borders into socialist republics (see also McClintock 1995; Northrop 2004). In the absence of a proletariat that would lead the revolution, women became the “surrogate proletariat” of Central Asia. The liberation of women from “harmful tradition” became an important step on the way to socialism (Bushkov and Mikul’skii 1996, 16; Polyakov 1992, 62; Northrop 2004, 60–61; Penkala-Gawęcka 2013, 2014, 2016).

In Soviet Central Asia, for example, the focus of state campaigns was mainly to gain control of if not to eradicate Islam altogether. Local religious identities were to be replaced by communist ideology and a pan-Soviet notion of citizenship. Women active as healers, shamans and fortunetellers somehow managed to remain under the radar and successfully maintained religious networks (Sultanova 2011). While gender issues in religion have been discussed primarily in relation to “save women” from domination (e.g., Northrop 2004; Kamp 2006), Muslim Central Asian women active as healers, shamans and fortunetellers were not directly included and targeted in these political campaigns. Instead, they were seen as victims of the old regime, of religious oppression and a male-dominated society.

This was slightly different in Siberia, where, beside Buddhist monks, sha-mans were also persecuted in the 1930s in order to “modernize” society and liberate at once peasants from exploitation, indigenous people from ignorance and women from oppression. The same situation unfolded, in the same years, in Mongolia, where cycles of persecutions hit individuals and classes considered counter-revolutionary (Buyandelger 2013, 74).

Shamans became a relic of the past and a class of exploiters of gullible villagers according to secularized social scientists and historians who deconstructed religious practices and interpreted them according to a strict evolutionary perspective, trying to identify their shamanic, pre-Islamic/pre-Buddhist and Islamic/Buddhist parts.

The development was different in India, where Hindus make up the majority of the population but where Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians (Parsis) and Jains have been legally recognized as religious minorities since 1992. While, according to some scholars, the processes of sanskritization entailed marginalization of several groups and oppression of women (Berreman 1993), popular cults centred on goddesses always had strong support, and, in addition, at the fringes of orthodoxy, there was space for experimentations with bodies and genders, for example in the cases of the possession rituals of the Khamakya temple in Assam, where male mediums impersonate female benevolent and wrathful deities (Burley 2019). Another example is the case of the religious pract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Biographical notes
• Section 1 The conceptual debate: the role of gender and religion in shamanic studies
• Section 2 Sociopolitical contexts: exclusion, marginalization, and participation
• Section 3 Tensions and syncretism: dynamic entanglements between shamanism and bureaucratic religions
• Index