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Bender, Mark, and Su Huana (n.d.). Folktales of the Daur Nationality. Beijing: New World Press.
Caroline HUMPHREY with Urgunge ONON.- Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols. Oxford University Press. 1996
The jacket
of the book reads:
Shamans and Elders is a major study of Mongolian shamanism and society,
past and present. It presents a wealth of new information, and offers
a fresh understanding of the widespread phenomenon of shamanism.
This unique
and detailed analysis of a fascinating subject combines the insights from
a long series of conversions held with Urgunge Onon and Caroline Humphrey's
text- and field-based analysis of Inner Asian shamanism. The book aims
to place shamanic practice in the history and politics of early 20th-century
Manchuria. Among other things it covers the nature and transmission of
shamanic knowledge; notions of gender in Mongolian society, including
male and female traditions in ritual; attitudes to death and regeneration;
the importance of different types of ancestry in power relations of elders
and shamans, and their relation to state rule; and Daur notions of landscape
within their direct experience (the importance of the sky, of the mountains,
of the forest, rivers, etc.) and beyond.
In covering
these diverse areas, the authors depart from the general cultural models
usually offered in discussions of shamanism, providing a new vision of
'shamanism' as made up of fragmentary parts based on different types of
knowledge. They give much-needed insight into a little-known world, and
point to an original new way of conducting anthropology.
MIHÁLY
HOPPÁL (Budapest): Trance and Sacrifice in a Daur Shamanic Healing
Rite
After decades
of fieldwork, the author is certain that sacrificial ritual plays an important
role in the practice of shamans. It can be said that the sacrifice makes
the whole ritual event sacred. The other focus of the present article
is the problem of trance, the reality of which has been called into question
recently. The article presents an eyewitness account of shamanic trance
which indicates that it is a necessary part of the whole ritual, at least
among the Daurs of Inner Mongolia, Northeast China. In 2003 we filmed
a healing ritual in a small village where a Daur and an Evenki shamaness,
working together, went into trance several times. Trance is necessary
to communicate with the spirits. Furthermore, the trance indicates to
participants that the spirit helpers have indeed appeared and that there
is hope of recovery for the patient. At this point the gates are open
to spiritual experience.
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