Ontologically challenged

James Laidlaw

Not quite shamans: spirit worlds and political lives in Northern Mongolia By
Morten Axel Pedersen

Anyone who thinks that epidemics of sorcery or spirit possession in conditions of rapid
social upheaval are already well-understood phenomena should read this impressive and
eye-opening book. On one level its a familiar story the massive dislocations of the
transition from socialism accompanied by widespread occult violence but Pedersen
shows in richly observed and brilliantly argued ethnographic detail that the specific forms
in which shamanic spirits have made themselves manifest in northern Mongolia in the
last few decades have been quite distinctive, and that those forms are not a mere reflection
of supposedly more material realities, but are themselves distinctively shamanic. The
impression that notions such as occult economy explain these phenomena is superficial
and misleading. The real story of the revival of shamanism in northern Mongolia is much
more interesting and thought provoking.
When the military and financial support of the USSR was suddenly removed in the early
1990s, the institutions of the Mongolian socialist state and economy promptly went into
terminal collapse. This was wholly unexpected locally, because viewed from inside, the
fragility and dependence of the socialist system had been quite invisible: it seemed allpowerful, all pervasive, and as if it had crushed its enemies beyond all hope or even
memory. The suppression of religious practice in the Mongolian Peoples Republic had
been among the most brutal and uncompromising of any socialist regime; all the more
dramatic because the order socialism replaced had been so pervasively structured by
Buddhist and shamanic institutions.
This seemed nowhere more true than in the remote and isolated northern valley of
Shishged. Its plain had been dominated by a massive Buddhist monastic estate, controlled
ultimately by the highest-ranking reincarnate lama in Mongolia and theocratic emperor
of the short-lived independent state, but its extensive forested hills (taiga) had been at
best lightly governed by Buddhist institutions, and long regarded as some of the most
shamanic places in Mongolia. The imposition of Buddhist civilization and the

domestication of the landscape had never been completed, and the forests were largely
left to shamans and hunters. The Darhad people of the region had a reputation for being
wilder, poorer, cruder, funnier, and (above all) more shamanic than anyone elsewhere
in Mongolia. But by the height of the socialist order shamanism, along with Buddhism,
appeared to have been wiped out here even more completely than in the rest of Mongolia.
Not only were there no shamans and no practice of shamanic possession; gone also was
all everyday experience of the presence of shamanic spirits.
But the economic trials and hardships people in this region had to endure in the 1990s
were exacerbated by an epidemic of young men sent into terrifying homicidal rages by
shamanic spirits. The spirits, long forgotten, had returned with a vengeance, but there
were no institutions and specialists to control them. The possessed young men could not
become shamans proper. Indeed there has been no revival of shamanism in the most
obvious sense: still virtually no one whom anyone recognizes as a genuine shaman.
Unable to learn how to subdue the spirits and so choose when to become possessed and
when not, these young men remained permanently stuck as what Pedersen calls not quite
shamans.
Pedersen argues nevertheless that shamanism has flourished in northern Mongolia since
the demise of socialism, not in spite of but because there are virtually no genuine
shamans. To such an extent has it flourished, in fact, that the state that has emerged from
the rubble is in certain respects itself shamanic in form. The upheavals of the last
decades have been such that now socialism tends to be remembered as stasis, as a deep
sense of sameness, predictability, and inevitability. Pedersen does not of course mistake
this memory for a description of what things were actually like. His point indeed is that
shamanism was one of the many things that became unimaginable within the hegemony
of representation (Alexei Yurchaks expression) that characterized late socialism. But
the apparently monolithic socialist state, ever-present and unchanging, yet driving society
inexorably forward towards modernity, was replaced in very short order by a state with
an ephemeral spirit-like presence. The way persons might constitute themselves as
significant political agents might come to be seen like a state has changed. Political
agency has come to look like what shamanic power had always looked like: visible in
fleeting, conflictual encounters arising from confusing, unpredictable, and unintended
events (p. 60). Pedersen illustrates the new shamanic form of state power with a series

of brilliant descriptions: a shamans display of election posters, the conduct of strongmen

political bosses, and the robust electoral support for anti-communist political candidates
in the region. The last of these phenomena points, Pedersen suggests, to an affinity
between shamanism and both democracy and the emerging capitalist market (Buddhism,
by contrast, locally has an affinity with socialism (p. 76) although this observation isnt
developed). Shamanisms multifarious form mirrors these political phenomena,
encompassing contradictions in a way that modernist socio-political projects with a single
logic never could do.
Pedersen draws a comparison with hunters, who need to be able to switch at will between
human subjectivity and that of their intended prey, but unlike accomplished hunters, notquite shamans are not in control of which subjectivity to adopt at any given time, an
incapacity that would be fatal for a hunter. Because they might be possessed at any
moment, they are permanently in some respects half spirit and half human, and although
they may live in villages among neighbours and kin, they become socially marginalized.
A whole generation of men is stuck in transition, not quite having become shamans, a
shamanic equivalent of Yurchaks last Soviet generation. Pedersen describes how the
male antecedents of one not-quite shaman have each in their turn occupied equivalently
marginal social positions, replicating in each generation an analogous affliction, but the
precise form of their marginalization was substantively as different as the socio-political
regimes to which they were successively marginal.
Most literature on religious revival in post-socialist contexts describes more or less
voluntary affiliations or conversions, but in northern Mongolia shamanism is a
predicament people find themselves in: an involuntary calling. Not-quite shamans are
ambivalent, trickster figures, who constantly break proprieties and conventions and speak
about their spirits in riddles and paradox because their own experience of spirits takes
such forms. They tell wild stories that deliberately confound any attempt on the part of a
listener to sort out truth from falsehood, because, Pedersen suggests, this is the only way
accurately to talk about shamanic experience. Its for this reason that one of the distinctive
art forms of the Shishged area was a kind of satirical and mocking joking song. These
were appropriated in Soviet times to state-socialist nationalities policy and folklorized
versions of them, reified as Darhad culture, were performed in state celebrations. But in
the context of comprehensive state suppression, these were the only contexts Pedersen

has found where any vestige of shamanism could be made manifest in a revealingly
parodic way. So there are tales now of one lone surviving secret shaman, employed to act
the part of a shaman in house of culture performances. But actually he was not acting.
He really did become possessed while on stage. Indeed the only way he could respond
to his shamanic calling was by pretending to pretend that he was a shaman (p. 209)
which was I suppose another shamanic way of being not quite a shaman.
Pedersen notes that the situation in northern Mongolia now has clear parallels not only
with other post-socialist contexts but also with the widespread revival of witchcraft in
Africa, and he concedes how neatly the most influential accounts of the latter
phenomenon might seem to apply. But very carefully and courteously, Pedersen argues
against reading these shamanic phenomena as the expression on a symbolic level of the
real structural disorders of that academic occult phenomenon, neo-liberalism, which
haunts so many recent anthropological accounts and is invoked to explain just about
everything about contemporary realities that observers regard with distaste. He notes the
capacious ambiguity of these accounts sometimes occult phenomena are a symbolic
comment on real-life changes, sometimes they are interpreted psychologically as an
attempt to cope and give meaning to them. Either way, these symbolic-functionalist
analytics fail to take them seriously. Since the analysts already know all about the
structures and forces that make up reality, the ethnographic data have no chance to teach
them anything they dont already know. Occult phenomena are reduced to fulfilling one
or more of a few universal functions, already stipulated in the theory: whether
rubberized as witchcraft, sorcery, or shamanism [they] are collective
representations or to use a more fashionable term, social imaginaries within a neoMarxist (and indeed neo-Durkheimian) model of social production (pp. 33-4).
Pedersen gives us a penetrating description of this kind of bad social science, in which
explanatory concepts are fixed and therefore dead containers of sociocultural content
and their purported political-economic context (p. 36). And he inveighs eloquently
against restrictive ideas of social form as, mental and ideological schemata through
which some fixed structure of order or symbolic meaning is imposed on an inherently
disorderly world of social and material practices.
But at times Pedersen seems to draw back from the implications of his own critique, and
retreats to a position that implies a strange kind of ontological apartheid. Thus on occasion

(e.g. p. 38) he says this unsatisfactory conception of form, and its associated reductive
functional explanations, may have some merit for Africa. They are only definitely
inadequate, in Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Asia, and he limits the alternative
view he proposes by designating it non-Euro-American (and non-Cartesian as if these
were the same thing), even though his own exposition of that alternative view draws
heavily on a galaxy of indubitably Euro-American thinkers. The implication is that the
very stuff of reality, and therefore what will work as an explanatory account, is different
in these two realms. Among the oddities of this formulation is that it leaves ontologically
ambiguous everywhere other than Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia on
the one hand and Euro-America on the other, and therefore a good deal of the world and
much of human history, including of course the sources and most of the life story of the
Buddhism that has been so pervasively influential in northern Mongolia, and, to his credit,
is integral to Pedersens own account of the region.
Why should this generally bold and persuasive book have occasional resort to a less
cogent and more timid position that doesnt really suit its purposes? The reason seems to
be that it has been intermittently possessed by a theory, and, like a not-quite shaman with
his spirits, has not quite yet managed to subdue that theory.
The theory in question is variously labelled here perspectivist, post-plural, post-human,
ontological (i.e. post-epistemological), and a few other designations, which generally
most insistently announce its newness. Indeed, for a view that sets itself so resolutely
against Euro-America, this seems to betray a strikingly Modernist faith in the avantgarde. The theory goes (or has gone) that the radical alterity of certain societies (in
Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia) consists not in them having different
socially constructed viewpoints on the same (natural) world, but in them living in
actually different worlds. The differences between them and Euro-America are not
therefore epistemological (different ways of knowing the same reality) but ontological
(fundamentally different realities). With this theory, because it asserts the ontological
auto-determination of the worlds peoples (the phrase is Eduardo Viveiros de Castros),
the problems of relativism are said to disappear; the picture we have to grapple with
now is not multi-cultural but multi-natural, and the theoretical challenge for anthropology
is to develop new concepts to enable us to understand these alternative natural realities:
new notions of truth, cause, relation, etc. Luckily, by an amazing historical coincidence,

many of the necessary conceptual resources were prefabricated for us by Gilles Deleuze,
even though the problem in this form had not yet been discovered when he wrote, and
even though he lived in a Euro-American multi-cultural ontology. But thats a whole other
story.
The signs of the books struggle with this theory are scattered here and there, but we may
take as an example a long footnote on page 35. Ontology refers of course to the study
of, or reflection on, the question of what there is what are the fundamental entities or
kinds of stuff that exist? Ontologies therefore refers to any theories or concepts of what
exists. So, Pedersen points out, in this sense the claim that different societies have
different ontologies far from referring to what really really exists and the true nature
of things . . . denotes the set of things whose existence is acknowledged by a particular
theory, or of a metaphysical system [like shamanism] of having such-and-such an
ontology (citing the philosopher Ted Honderich).
This reformulation certainly evades some of the obvious problems that confronted the
bolder ontological theory: what on earth happens at the boundaries between these
different ontologies, and when things or people cross from one to another? What kind of
meta-ontology does one have to postulate to make sense of the thought that the world
could be made up of different stuff in different places? How has this ontological pluralism
come about, and do different peoples (a strikingly unproblematized term) make their
worlds different (as the notion of auto-determination would seem to imply) or do their
different ideas respond to and reflect different pre-existing realities? And so on. But the
price for avoiding all this is that this use of ontologies (to refer to views about what
exists rather than putting forward a claim about what exists) doesnt do the work the other
sense of the word, in the original formulation, was there to do: it does nothing to establish
that people in Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia live in different worlds,
or enjoy ontological auto-determination; it delivers not new post-plural multi-naturalism,
but merely the familiar old idea that different peoples have different theories about the
world. So we have, by these means, not escaped the spectres of multi-culturalism after
all.
And perhaps for this reason, some of the time, including in the second half of that same
footnote on page 35, Pedersen seems to feel that the original formulation was better after
all. So he insists, such ontologies are not simply linguistic or mental (ideational)

phenomena, thus denying just what the retreat to ontologies as theories and
metaphysical systems had conceded.
But Pedersen then continues: certain material things (shamanic costumes) and certain
social forms (such as joking practices) may be said to constitute distinct concepts and
theories and therefore indeed ontologies in their own right. So after wavering, the
footnote ends with the revised different theories position after all: we are back to the
familiar idea of diverse local theories, including as embodied in objects and practices.
One other way in which this book is occasionally possessed by its theory may be seen in
how Pedersen sometimes mischaracterizes some of his own best observations. He
describes how he elicited many consistently negative and even angry responses . . . when
asking people in the Shishged to spell out the precise nature of the shamanic spirits. Even
specialists replied with teasing fantasies, mockery, and diverting comical stories: Not
only did people deny the presence of shamans . . . they kept making jokes about people
who were clearly not shamans, endlessly pointing out to me this or that person (children
included) while exclaiming, with suppressed giggles, Watch out, Morten, he is a
shaman (p. 185). Pedersen once asked one of his key not-quite-shaman informants
Where does a spirit master go when it is not present in the game animal any more? The
reply was dismissive: He cut me off with I have no idea, clearly annoyed by my
question. I guess it just goes here and there (p. 175). But our ethnographer wont take
I dont know for an answer, and brightly continues, Answers like these suggest that
spirit helpers are thought of as visible traces left by the invisible movements of spirit
guardians, each new metamorphosis being like a shadow cast by the [spirits] travel across
the duration of time, which could be so, although it seems equally likely that the
aggravated informant meant to suggest that hed been asked a question to which there is
no answer.
Pedersen does have an excellent idea here. He goes on to draw a contrastive parallel
between these essentially motile spirits and Platonic Ideas. Instead of being unchanging
entities of which peoples diverse fleeting impressions are imperfect representations, the
unseen entities of shamanism are labile, as it were, all the way up. What you see is all
you get. The confusing, fragmentary manifestations people encounter in a shamanic
sance just is what there is. On this account, genuine shamans, those who are able to
some degree to pin their spirits down and control them are, Pedersen argues, less

shamanic than the not-quite shamans whose unpredictable behaviour more fully manifests
the fluid ontology of spirits: ontology here meaning merely composition.
All of this of course amply supports Pedersens argument that shamanism is most itself
where it is fleeting, implicit, and incomplete. But then, and at first sight unaccountably,
he insists on calling this a coherent cosmology imbued with a distinct logic (p. 180).
Everything in his ethnography, his own brilliant commentary on it, and the explicit and
forceful statements of his informants proclaims against there being any such thing. The
reason Pedersen resorts to this idea of a coherent cosmology emerges when he defends
it not against the protestations of his informants, but against an imagined social
constructionist accusation that it is antiquated to postulate a shared system of cultural
meanings. He retorts that social constructionism is itself an obsolete paradigm, since
perspectivist multinaturalism has postulated multiple worlds. So the theory has briefly
taken possession again: the cosmology is a version of the distinct ontology of
Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia. But although Pederson does make as
good a case for it as I think may be possible, the elaborate super-ontology of perspectivist
multinaturalism is neither required for his fascinating account of north-Mongolian
shamanism, and nor does that account constitute evidence for it.
The central conviction of this book, I think, is that the anthropologist should take seriously
the concepts and theories embodied in the ethnographic data, as concepts to think with
and use in ethnographic analysis, rather than supposing that we already have all the
concepts we need, because we already know all the kinds of stuff of which social reality
might be composed those dead containers of sociocultural content and their purported
political-economic context. We should be open to the possibility that what we learn from
our ethnography can tell us something we dont already know about what kinds of things
there are in the world. This is an important proposition for anthropology, but Pedersen
seems once to have thought, and every so often to fear, that in order to sustain this
conviction he needs a theory that makes Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia
into a different ontological realm, where things can be true without having to be true for
the rest of us. This seems to me both unsustainable you have to oscillate between two
different uses of ontology to make it appear both true and interesting, but it cant in
logic be both at the same time and also an unnecessary qualification to the central claim,
which the substance of this book rather triumphantly vindicates. But this theory, although

it seizes him from time to time has not taken full possession. Indeed, taken as a whole the
book demonstrates brilliantly in scrupulous and fascinating ethnography and
inexhaustibly creative and insightful interpretation that no post-anything overarching
theory is needed to practise its precept.
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