Shaman, Samaan, S'aman

The word shaman comes from the Evenki and related Tungusic languages such as Manchu, where it also appears as samaan or s’aman. European invaders and travellers picked it up in the late 1600s. Later, Russian ethnographers and European anthropologists began to use the word beyond its Siberian shaman drumming in ful regaliaoriginal ethnic context, since names for this concept had been excised from most European languages during centuries of religious persecution in Christian Europe.

The broader use of the term for spiritual practices involving transformed consciousness has been controversial, and criticized as an inappropriate use of a culturally specific word. I agree that it is better to use each people's own word when discussing those traditions. But those authentic names are not always available to us. We also need an umbrella term in order to talk about the transcultural similarities. It's important to compare these spiritual ways which have been so important to human experience all over the world, and to discuss their history of repression by rulers and religious hierarchies who were threatened by their power. Until someone comes up with better language to do this, I throw in with those who use the term shaman, along with a range of other names: medicine woman, diviner, oracle, and even priestess in many cultural contexts. There's also spirit medium (but problematic assumptions about women often accompany this term, as i'll discuss later.)

A persistent claim has been advanced that Tungusic shaman was a borrowing that came from Sanskrit s'ramana, meaning Buddhist ascetic or monk. Its Prakrit form, samana, entered Chinese as sha1-men2, and some scholars contended that it spread into north Asia and was adopted by the Tungusic peoples. This theory was popular because of the strong bias toward literate “civilized” societies and an assumption that they must have influenced aboriginal societies, who they believed were unlikely to originate important cultural institutions of their own. These scholars were seduced by a paper trail of the Indian word into Greek, Persian, and Arabic, although these mentions referred to Buddhists or, in Muslim Persia, to idol-worshippers. Later the word turned up in Tokharian, as an Indian loan word, and some argued that these people living in the Tarim basin north of Tibet had passed samaane to the Tungusic peoples. But here too it simply meant Buddhist monk. This idea was decisively refuted a century ago by Berthold Laufer. [Laufer, Berthold. "Origin of the Word Shaman", American Anthropologist 19.3 , 1917, 361-371] Yet it has taken on a life of its own.

Modern linguists have come to reject any connection between the words, for convincing reasons based on the comparative method of historical linguistics. The two words might resemble each other on paper, but they don’t necessarily sound alike. Victor Mair has pointed out that Chinese has two separate words: sha1men2, for the Sanskrit term meaning monk, and sa4man3, which is used in the expression samanjiao, “shamanic religion.” These words differ from each other phonetically and also are pronounced with completely different tones, a shift which would be highly unlikely in Chinese. [See discussions on Indo-Eurasia listserv, October 2006]

Now that that’s out of the way, what did the word originally meant in Evenk? It’s been proposed to be derived from saa: “to know,” but linguists have pointed out problems with this formation, and its original proponent later rejected it. It may be distantly related to the Turkic word kam, which also means “shaman.” But the most-accepted derivation today is from a Tungusic root meaning "to leap up, jump, dance." This answers to the ecstatic practices that are at the core of shamanism.

The scholars noticed early on that “there is a fairly uniform designation for the female shaman (udagaan, utygan, udgan, ubakxan, etc.).” V. F. Troshschanski theorized that this broadly attested name was evidence that Siberian shamans were originally female. [Laufer, 367, n. 3. He adds Eastern Siberian Golde and Gilyak forms s’ama and cham to the Turk kam, arguing for a broader context for the Tungusic names. However, in both Evenk and Manchu s’aman also refers to females.]

But this was not a popular theory, and Mircea Eliade got much more traction out of his theory that shamanism grew out of male hunting culture and that women became involved in it only in a period of decline and decadence. He also claimed that male shamans commanded spirits and performed exalted acts like flying, while the females were possessed by spirits and mere mediums who directed nothing. [I'll post more analysis on masculine bias in Eliade and other theorists in future.]

 

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