Chapter 1
A Race Against Time:
Mongolian Fortune and
the Anthropology of Magic
The lunar New Year celebrations of February 2000 marked a turning point for three shamanic households in Bayandun, a Buryat Mongol district in rural northeast Mongolia. After several days of visiting extended relatives and friends for feasts and the exchanging of gifts, Yaruu, the shaman whose household I lived in, became ill. As she relaxed on her bed, she suddenly retracted her limbs tightly against her body (in an illness reflex known as âtatasanâ) and called out that she was dying from a curse. Her two daughters started crying, and her mother, Ălzii, who had overheard the commotion in an adjacent wing of the house, rushed in to find her daughter writhing on the bed. Immediately, Ălzii instructed Yaruuâs older daughter, Tuyaa, to hand her the shamanic implements. Running these across Yaruuâs limbs, Ălzii tried to remove the curse symptoms with the latent strength (chadal) of the shamanic spirits (ongon). Although she was not a shaman, Ălzii summoned the spirits to intervene, requesting that they descend upon her daughterâs home from their residences in the heavens â residences which are so synonymous with the Buryat shamanic spirits that she repeated them rapidly, as mantra-like invocations, with the formulaic phrase: âthe fifty-five western heavens, the forty-four eastern heavensâ (âbaruuni tavin tavan tenger; zĂŒĂŒni döchiin dörven tengerâ). Ălziiâs act of desperation was considered risky. As a layperson, she could have been blinded or struck dead for wielding shamanic implements without the necessary training or connection â roots (ug) â to the spirits. Eventually, though, her actions calmed Yaruu, who, in the following days, divined and held numerous ceremonies with her shamanic pupils. Their divinations confirmed that Yaruuâs group of shaman friends had been cursed by three rival shamanic households in Bayandun. The curses were not entirely surprising, since Yaruuâs group had suspected a growing shamanic rivalry for two full months, during which they had faced persistent business difficulties and illnesses. Originally, Yaruuâs group ascribed these misfortunes to their own blunders of having offended the shamanic spirits with broken taboos and insufficient offerings, but this attack confirmed that their rivals had been cursing them and making their fortunes (khiimorâ) decline. So Yaruuâs group started their new year by embarking on a series of counter-curse measures, which lasted for several months until they hit upon an innovative curse-blocking remedy. Some months later I observed a similar but unrelated episode three hundred kilometres to the east, in Shinekhen Baruun Sum, a Buryat district of northeast China, in which a curse victim obtained an innovative remedy for recovering her money losses and raising her fallen fortune.
By a stroke of fortune, during my first fieldwork on Mongolian divination I found case studies on cursing and innovative magical remedies that changed peopleâs lives. Anthropologists have been captivated with the production of magical innovations since the inception of the discipline, because these innovations cut straight to the heart of the human condition, revealing how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. Looking back now, I realize how pivotal it was for me to have been located precisely where I was, when I was, within specific Buryat episodes of cursing, haunting and innovation-making. Like the witchcraft in the Bocage region of western France described by Jeanne Favret-Saada, Buryat cursing and innovation-making revolves around a âsystem of positionsâ or alliances between specific people, in which âthe first point to grasp is whom each âinformantâ thinks he is speaking to, since he utters such radically different discourses depending on the position he thinks his interlocutor holdsâ (1980, 16â17). Magical innovation is common nowadays among Buryats, especially where there are shamans who regularly provide face-to-face dialogues with the spirits. But these innovations are usually contained within just one or a few households, bringing about small-scale social changes through the covert resolution of local rivalries and family breakups. Thus while the Buryat invention of new magical practices is common enough, information about them is, at least initially, kept secret, allowing the practices to be known only within the households that generate them. Moreover, due to the secrecy and extreme novelty of these remedies, there is no established parlance for them. Buryat innovative remedies may be referred to by the euphemism âthe thing which the shamanic spirits instructed to be doneâ (ongon zaasan khiikh yĂŒm) or by the even vaguer turn of phrase âthat thingâ (ter yĂŒm). Each of these euphemisms â although not conventional terms â sets innovative remedies conceptually apart from the conventional âcorrectingâ or ârepairingâ rituals (zasal) that pervade everyday Buryat life. Still, I should underscore that while the phrase âinnovative remedyâ accurately captures the Buryat propensity for innovation-making, it is my own analytical category, not a Buryat vernacular term.
By tracing the rise of several innovations over a four-year period, I offer penetrating ethnography on cursing rivalries and family crises among Buryats in rural Mongolia and China. I take the reader to the inside of the curse and the households affected by it, showing how curse âvictimsâ initially detected their curse symptoms, how they witnessed the curse castings, how they detected and deflected curses through divinations or shamanic ceremonies and, finally, how they resolved their rivalries with innovative remedies obtained from the spirits. Additionally, I give an account of how, four years later, Ălzii obtained further innovations, which resolved her family crisis, expunging her ex-husband and his vampiric imps from the patriline. Each of these innovations did more than simply add to the existing magical and religious repertoires: they changed the livelihoods of those people who implemented them and protected them within their homes so that their fortunes (khiimorâ) would rise in an unconventionally short span of time. These innovations thus altered the time-space dimensions of a rural Buryat district, as well as the relations between victims and their rivals there.
One simple explanation for innovation in places such as rural Mongolia and China, which have undergone recent religious oppressions, is that people are likely to produce new knowledge when they are not working with a repertoire that has been intact for generations. Among Buryats, this new knowledge is most readily accessible in ceremonies where the shaman adopts the perspective of a shamanic spirit and then holds a âspirit-humanâ dialogue with one or more laypersons, who then may use these dialogues as divinatory sessions for uncovering innovative remedies which could resolve their problems. Both Buryat divinations and spirit-human dialogues are practised on a partly improvisational basis, without the extremely codified elements that anthropologists often associate with shamanic repertoires, such as the recitation of epic myths. Instead, divinations and dialogues only require that Buryats organize their interactions around the purpose of gathering information from the divinatory implements, the spirits, other people and anything else which may pertain to the questions at hand. Not surprisingly, then, these divinations and shamanic dialogues recently appear to have become the central feature of the Buryat religious repertoire in Mongolia and China (Buyandelgeriyn 2007, 130â32, see also 134â42; HĂžjer 2009, 580â86; Shimamura 2002, 92â106; 2004, 203â10), which, in moments of crisis, revolves around the production of innovative magical remedies (Swancutt 2006, 346â50; 2008, 858â61).
Another significant impetus behind Buryat innovation-making is the rhetoric on keeping order, which is espoused at the official and popular levels in Mongolia, China and Russia (see chapter 2, on cosmology). Humphrey has shown that the sense of order which pervades social life in provincial Russia, including in the Buryat Republic, is traceable to the Soviet influence, with its state management of production, as well as the recent forms of trade and protection rackets that have developed since the early 1990s after perestroika (1999, 22, see also 42â43). Significantly, Humphreyâs study highlights the provincial Russian view of trade in the 1990s, where âuncontrolled movement violates the sense of order pertaining to bounded wholesâ, because âTrade brings in desirable goods, but it also carries out valuablesâ, such that âMarkets and border crossings are places where âdisorderâ (bezproyadok) is fearedâ (1999, 22). A similar emphasis on order has been prevalent throughout China for centuries, where personal relations and commerce have worked in tandem through different modes of production, such as the âtributaryâ or âpetty capitalistâ modes highlighted by Hill Gates (1996, 7â9). More recently, Stephan Feuchtwang has shown that Chinese efforts to promote âan economy decollectivized and removed from direct state controlâ have effectively exchanged the ârealm of organized fairness and unfairnessâ from the collectivization period for âa set of obligations [to the Party-state or state-run units] beyond whose seclusion an ocean of fortune, instrumentality and exploitation â regulated or not â is continuously expandingâ (2002, 202). In this newer milieu, rural Chinese find that âbeyond human responsiveness is the realm of gain, which comes either through luck (fuqi) or fairness, or through the unfair deployment of personal connections or the amoral skills of instrumental networkingâ, the positive side of which is that âfrom this amoral economy reserves flow into the more sphereâ (ibid.). Of course, the Buryat ethnic minority living in remote corners of China, who are officially classed as a âsmall nationalitiesâ (shaoshu minzu) group, make their own permutations on the notions of order espoused by the Chinese state. But the dynamic impact made by the tide of change in Chinese policy is unmistakable, especially among Buryats who link improvements in fortune to the orderly production of innovative magical remedies.
Revealingly, the Buryats with whom I worked have a historical connection to the Buryat Republic in Russia and nostalgically consider it to be their homeland (nutag). The earlier generations lived through periods of collectivization in either Mongolia or China and were thus concerned about their roles in the uncontrolled movement of larger spheres, such as trade. Nonetheless, amid the larger public spaces of fluctuating order, these Buryats seek to produce innovative remedies which combat persistent problems whilst being contained secretly within the private sphere of the home. Indeed, as we will see, their innovative magical remedies afford a hyperorderly means of resolving problems, which is highly desirable because â unlike trade â it is not open to public scrutiny. This preference for order even tallies with Buryat notions about the kind of personality which is suited to the shamanic vocation. According to Ălzii, the most successful ceremonies are held by shamans who are calm people (nomkhon khĂŒn), such as her daughter Yaruu, since their orderly demeanour helps them to readily adopt spirit perspectives. Ălzii felt that neither she nor Yaruuâs younger daughter could become shamans, because they became angry (uurlaj baina) easily, whereas Yaruu and her older daughter, Tuyaa, who (according to Ălzii) could become shamans, were calm and suited to the vocation. Ălziiâs explanation corresponds with my observation that Buryat shamans who exhibit the more âecstaticâ performances, in the sense given to the term by Eliade (1964, 182â84) or Lewis (1971, 38â39), such as bombastically beating the drum and singing loudly, usually do so because they find it difficult to take on spirit perspectives. These shamans exert themselves in exhausting performances, and when they fail to adopt the necessary spirit perspectives, they fall short of their own expectations â as well as the expectations of their inquirers.
Against this backdrop of preferred orderliness, Buryats I met in northeast Mongolia often reflected upon the disorder which pervaded their religious life, telling me that because their ancestors had not been allowed to practice openly as shamans during the oppressions, no Buryat shaman nowadays knows entirely what he or she is doing when holding ceremonies. Even those shamans who secretly practised abbreviated rituals during the oppressions were not considered able to have transferred their full knowledge across the generations, once they started practising regularly again, from the 1990s onwards. Many Buryat shamans and laypersons thus felt that much of their religious practices were undertaken in ad hoc procedures, including cases where practitioners referred to written lists used by senior practitioners which specified the proper order for invoking the spirits. Moreover, Buryats often cited their lack of knowledge about past modes of religious practice as the reason why they could not gauge how their current practices are evolving. I received similar accounts when travelling throughout Mongolia from July to November 1999, where every religious specialist I interviewed linked the endemic lack of knowledge to religious oppressions.1
And yet, as this book will show, Buryats in northeast Mongolia and China regularly produce innovative magical remedies in a calm, orderly manner, when carrying out their shamanic or divinatory practices. Buryats use these innovations to organize the apparently âunknownâ or âdisorderedâ elements of their cosmologies and social settings. In this sense, Buryat innovation-making sheds significant light on the production of order more generally and falls into step with Roy Wagnerâs âdialectical approachâ to the invention of culture, where conventions and inventions mutually evolve so as to continuously produce new variations upon each other (1981, xviii). At the same time, Buryat innovation-making echoes the production of hyperorderly results in scientific experiments, which ironically fall under the heading of âchaos scienceâ. Anthropologists already have drawn analogies between social phenomena and elements of chaos science, as early as in Wagnerâs study of âThe Fractal Personâ (1991) and more recently within Mosko and Damonâs volume (2005), a work I have borne especially in mind when discussing the tendency for any given Buryat innovation to elicit follow-up innovations. I give only a brief background to the comparison between Buryat magical innovations and chaos science here, since I develop this comparison throughout the book.
Scientific studies actually use the term chaos âto refer to deterministic kinds of order â not âdisorderâ as the term is understood popularly â arising from the generalized properties of complex dynamical systems; or simply, order within apparent disorderâ (Mosko 2005, 7; emphasis in original). Thus while so-called chaos experiments take place under fast-changing conditions that may give the appearance of disorder, those changes, in fact, are hyperorderly responses which can, to some extent, be predicted in advance. One of the trademark features of chaos science is that its experiments involve numerous bifurcations from an original source, which have the effect of rapidly introducing irreversible changes, on multiple levels, into the experimental milieu (Mosko 2005, 11â17). I argue that, in a similar way, Buryats who produce innovations irreversibly alter their social and cosmological settings.
The lack of order, or âchaosâ, which seems to pervade Buryat life in Mongolia or China could be said, as with any ethnographic setting, to take place on a variety of levels. Among rural Buryats, an everyday indeterminacy about how to obtain basic necessities amid extreme poverty and the scarcity of resources â especially water and cash â is the most notable form of chaos. Moments of crisis are even endemic in Bayandun, where the sudden lack of state subsidies in the 1990s bequeathed a very chaotic means of gathering everyday life provisions. To combat these difficulties Buryats produce innovations which â like chaos-science experiments â alter their lives (and not just a given course of events) by introducing irreversible new starting points from which they can carry out social relations and from which they can increase their fortunes, business prospects, well-being, success and so on. For instance, the magical Buryat innovation that blocks curses and dangerous gossip from the home, discussed at length in this book, does more than simply deflect curses â it offers a fresh platform for resolving the local interpersonal rivalries which initially lead to the cursing. Although never popularized as a conventional correcting ritual, this innovation helped to restore the pre-curse âconventionâ of good neighbourly relations between Yaruuâs group and their rival shamans â and in this narrower sense I propose that it triggered a dialectical shift, in Wagnerâs sense of the term, from invention (blocking curses) back to convention (sociable relations between district residents) ([1975] 1981, 52â53).
I recall being struck by the initial impression that rural Buryats produced innovations with a remarkable efficiency which paralleled the âefficiencyâ found among some urban businessmen or scientists â or, given the lack of regular electricity and other modern technology in their areas â even could be said to have outstripped them. These similarities between the Buryats and business or scientific efficiency at innovation-making remained apparent to me throughout my fieldwork and, indeed, to some degree, appeared to have been the outcome of seventy years of Socialist indoctrination, as well as the Buryatsâ association to the Russians. The Buryats I came to know often devoted their days to obsessively exchanging information about their rivalsâ curses, regularly observing their rivals and holding several hours-long divination sessions to confirm or refute speculations about the cursing. In my view, the constant attention these Buryats gave to curses resembled the detailed observations of scientists in lengthy laboratory experiments. Revealingly, Buryats even stressed the importance of following the proper divinatory or soul-loss checking methods when uncovering curses â much in the same way that scientists stress the accurate implementation of their methods â so that they would not distort the divinatory results (see chapters 3 and 5).
Strange attractors: innovative shamans and fortune
If we take the analogy to chaos science further, a parallel arises between Buryat shamans (or other powerful religious practitioners) who produce innovations and the âstrange attractorsâ of chaos theory (Mosko 2005, 18â20). In chaos science...