Introduction

Abstract IT was when he had become an elder, mettlesome and with every shining black hair in place but approaching the age of seventy, that Urgunge Onon suggested we explore his memories. He wanted a book to be written about the shamanism of his youth, a book which would explain shamanism both as an anthropological subject and ‘from inside’. Urgunge is a Daur Mongol who was born in Manchuria in far Northern China and now lives in England. Our book is based largely on his recollections of his youth, up to the time when he left China in 1948. It therefore grounds the magical and difficult-to-grasp topic of shamanism in a specific region, period, and set of historical circumstances. But we hope also to explain shamanism in a more general sense, in particular to explain the holding of the practical understandings, the metaphorical ideas, the fears, and the defiance that give rise to it. Existing studies of North Asian shamanism are virtually all written in the unsatisfactory idiom of general cultural models, neglecting history, singular views, contexts, and disagreements, and above all ignoring how people hold religious ideas, their salience, and the extent to which people really hold to them in particular situations.