Shamanism, sanity and remoteness in Russia
KRISTINA JONUTYTĖ
Kristina Jonutytė is a lecturer
and a research fellow at the
Center for Social Anthropology
at Vytautas Magnus University.
Her research examines the
post-Soviet resurgence of
Buddhism in Buryatia. Her
email is k.jonutyte.p@gmail.
com.
I would like to thank
Camille LeBlanc Liederman,
Vladimir Panov and the
anonymous reviewers for
reading and commenting on
the piece.
1. Only after the arrest of
the shaman, did a reportage
run on a state-run media
outlet, in which Gabyshev
was portrayed as an attentionseeking rogue surrounded
by criminals: ‘Why the
self-proclaimed shaman and
his gang of repeat offenders
did not make it to Moscow’.
https://www.vesti.ru/videos/
show/vid/812248/cid/1/
(accessed 19 February 2020).
2. His lawyers insisted on
an additional independent
psychiatric examination,
which concluded that he ‘does
not pose a threat to society
and does not need forced
treatment’. https://www.
svoboda.org/a/30234327.
html (accessed 19 February
2020). However, this does not
seem to have influenced the
progress of the case.
3. The author is writing in
February 2020.
4. The previous trek that
attracted public attention was
his second one. He is said
to have attempted a hike to
Moscow in 2018, but returned
when his dog was run over.
5. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=U0LaLhkKj2g
(accessed 19 November
2019).
6. For instance, https://
www.youtube.com/
watch?v=R_hdrfOViH8
(accessed 20 November
2019). Gabyshev seems
acutely aware of such public
judgements of his supposedly
weak mental health and
refused to speak to this
blogger.
BEATA BUBENEC.
Fig. 1. Aleksandr Gabyshev
in his home in Yakutsk as
captured by the documentary
film-maker Beata Bubenec
who is making a film about
his trek.
The trek of a warrior shaman
In spring 2019, a Sakha (Yakut) shaman, Aleksandr
Gabyshev, embarked on an 8,000 km trek from Yakutsk
to Moscow. His stated goal was to ‘expel demon-Putin’
(izgnat’ Putina-demona) from the Kremlin and thus liberate the people of Russia. Drawing a cart with supplies
and necessities, he slowly progressed along Siberian
highways, camping on roadsides along the way. While
initially, his journey attracted little attention beyond local
cybernauts, by the end of the summer, word of Gabyshev’s
campaign had spread far and wide. Gradually, people
started joining his trek – some only briefly to chat and
take a selfie, while others travelled from afar and sought
him out along the way. Dutiful bloggers, fundraisers and
impromptu managers emerged in the group, attracting further interest and support.
By September, Sasha-shaman, as he is popularly known,
had attracted the interest of the international media, from
The New York Times to The Guardian. Within Russia, too,
Gabyshev was under the spotlight. Predictably, however,
it was online reports, blogs and social media that promulgated his story, while Russian television and state-run
media mostly ignored it, possibly in an attempt to avoid
drawing additional attention to his cause.1
On 19 September, Gabyshev’s trek came to a halt,
almost 3,000 km in. As witnesses claim, several dozen
armed police arrested him in the dark of night as his
confused comrades looked on. Regional officials later
announced that he had been wanted for a crime committed
in the Sakha Republic. Sasha-shaman was flown back
to Yakutsk where he underwent a psychiatric examination and was diagnosed ‘insane’.2 Since then,3 Gabyshev
has been based at his home in Yakutsk, continuing blogging activities and planning the continuation of his trek.
Protests in support of him have been held in the city. He
is facing charges on account of ‘calls to extremism’ and
was put under travel restrictions (podpiska o nevyyezde)
for several months. After the restrictions expired in midDecember, the shaman quietly embarked on a third trek,4
but was again stopped by the authorities. His supporters
claim that the arrest lacked sufficient justification and
they filed a complaint with the European Court of Human
Rights. Recently, Gabyshev announced that he would con-
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 36 NO 2, APRIL 2020
tinue the trek in spring 2020 and would reach Moscow in
2021, expressing confidence in the impending success of
his venture.
The extensive interest that the shaman drew is certainly
unsurprising. The very feat of walking across the better
part of the country’s breadth inevitably raises a few eyebrows. When this is done to ‘exorcize the demon’ out of
the Kremlin, however, such attention reaches a whole new
level. For one thing, it is uncommon to make political
statements this openly in today’s Russia, where simply
reposting a meme can result in criminal charges. For
another, a number of elements of Gabyshev’s pursuit are
unusual, even provocative. The shaman’s use of a military discourse and aesthetic combined with his composed
demeanour seem to reinforce his assertiveness. He calls
himself a ‘warrior shaman’ (shaman-voin), while his
followers are his ‘squad’ and ‘army’ (otryad, armiya).
Further, the use of shamanic language, ritual and material
culture captures the interest of observers. What exactly is
the ‘demon’, ‘devil’ and ‘evil spirit’ that Putin is said to
be? How can one remove or exorcize him? What ritual will
it take to achieve this? And what powers does the shaman
command?
Finally and importantly, the broader political project that
many saw in Sasha-shaman’s campaign resonated across
Russia. While his overt programme initially seemed more
shamanic than political, Gabyshev has on many occasions stated that driving demon-Putin out is his primary
goal. ‘He crushed everyone. He doesn’t provide them with
[decent] conditions’, complained the shaman, naming a
broad range of politicians across the spectrum – Zyuganov,
Navalny, Zhirinovsky, Grudinin, Sobchak – as reasonable
alternatives.5
At first sight, the widespread support that Gabyshev
gained across the country – from social media posts to
political commentary – may seem to indicate common
ground and political solidarity among Siberian shamans,
Moscow intellectuals, pragmatic passers-by polled by
journalists across Russia and many others, seemingly
placing them on an equal footing with a shared vision.
However, upon closer examination, much of this support,
rather than bringing the varied actors together, in fact
establishes difference and distance between them. In what
3
Bakhtin, M. 1984.
Rabelais and his world.
Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Bernstein, A. 2013. Religious
bodies politic: Rituals
of sovereignty in Buryat
Buddhism. Chicago:
University of Chicago
Press.
Bogoraz, V.G. 1910. K
psikhologii shamanstva
u narodov Severovostochnoy Azii.
Etnograficheskoe
obozrenie 1-2: 1-36.
4
follows, I take a look at online responses to Gabyshev’s
campaign, as well as local reactions in Buryatia, the region
where he was arrested. I explore the discourse of support
as a sort of ‘removal’ (Saxer & Andersson 2019), establishing a deep rift between local and distant observers. I
argue that while it may take new forms, this disjunction is
rooted in a long history of Russia’s complicated relationship with its own orient.
where the people and the land were waiting to be tamed
(Etkind 2015). Bolsheviks embedded the underdevelopment of the Siberian peoples differently within their narratives, presenting them as the ‘truest moderns’ who were
underprivileged in the imperial regime, and who, in the
Soviet Union, were to skip directly from savagery to communism, thus validating the communist regime (Grant
1995: 9).
Shamanism, insanity and Russia’s orient
To many outside observers, Gabyshev’s pursuit was at once
puzzling and intriguing. However, discussions not only
revolved around the trek and its stated goals but the sanity
of the shaman himself. As the story unfolded, on several
occasions, friends from western parts of Russia asked me
as a researcher of Siberian religions whether Gabyshev
seemed to me to be mentally sound. Having watched his
interviews, they, like many Russians, remained unconvinced, even though he did not appear to be delirious in
the video recordings. ‘But he is simply somewhat strange.
How can one believe these things?’ asked a Muscovite
academic friend in disbelief. Many felt ambivalent about
Gabyshev’s official diagnosis of insanity: punitive psychiatry is a well-known Soviet strategy for eliminating
opposition that, as some argue, might be undergoing a
revival – journalists claimed that local psychiatric authorities were not even involved in the examination. At the
same time, for many, the diagnosis seemed to be potentially reasonable for someone who, from the perspective of
urban moderns, appeared to be quite ‘odd’. Russian bloggers and journalists, too, discussed the ‘degree of mental
capability’ (stepen’ adekvatnosti) of the shaman without
any hesitation.6
Such speculation over the mental disposition of shamanic specialists has a long history. At the turn of the 20th
century, theories linking shamanic practices in Siberia to
mental disorders reached their peak. Vladimir Bogoraz,
a prominent ethnographer of the Russian North, theorized shamanism as a ‘form of religion that was created
through the selection of mentally unstable people’, and
observed that, ‘studying shamanism, we encounter, first
of all, entire categories of men and women who either
suffer from nervous agitation or who are obviously not
in right mind or completely insane’ (Bogoraz 1910 cited
in Znamenski 2003: 18). Other scholars have linked shamanic practices to epilepsy (Murray 2016: 561), hysteria
(Znamenski 2003: 18), schizophrenia (ibid.: 168) or neurosis (ibid.: 178), often explaining them in terms of the
harsh local climate, lack of scientific knowledge or both.
Although mostly abandoned in favour of more social and
cultural interpretations, similar themes of shamanism and
mental disorders persist in some more recent academic
writing (e.g. Vainshtein & Moskalenko 1995) and in popular thought.7
As in religion, so too beyond it, indigenous populations
of Siberia have often been considered underdeveloped,
irrational and primitive. Both the smaller indigenous ethnic
groups of the north and the larger Siberian peoples such as
Buryats or Sakha have often been described in travelogues
and ethnographic literature as ahistorical and childlike
(Murray 2016; Slezkine 1994). Such a rendering has conveniently served as a justification for colonial, imperial,
missionary and other interventions. In imperial Russia, as
Murray argues, shamanism was somewhat favoured by
missionaries and scholars as it ‘served to demonstrate the
empire’s civilizing capabilities’, whereas Buddhism with
its elaborate institutional structure and literary culture
threatened it (2016: 538). The mission of civilizing the
wild was indeed so prevalent that for centuries, Russian
historiography naturalized and praised it, presenting the
process as Russia ‘colonizing itself’ (samokolonizatsiya),
The politics of rationality, coevality and distance
Despite a turbulent century in between, similar themes of
insanity and primitiveness remain noticeable in the Russian
public sphere today. Lively discussions of Gabyshev’s
campaign have made this especially visible.
One emergent theme in much of the reporting on the trek
is the apparent interchangeability of all things Siberian.
Observers have often confused or disregarded the specifics of Sakha material culture and religion, offhandedly
substituting them for those of other regions. Gabyshev’s
tent, for instance, became a ‘yurt’ in respectable Russian
online news portals. The shaman was often referred to as
a ‘magician’, ‘sorcerer’ (koldun, volshebnik) and the like,
abstracting his religious expertise into a general occultism
of the Other. A related trend was the use of general motifs
of wilderness in portrayals of Gabyshev. Some described
him as someone who ‘only just left the forest…and set
off to expel Putin’ (tol’ko vyshel iz lesa … i poshel Putina
izgonyat),8 or similar variations on the theme. This presumed fungibility of Siberian things and their designation
to the sphere of the untamed, backward Other is visible in
much of the engagement with Gabyshev’s campaign, both
among his supporters and critics. A similar disregard for
local specifics is also apparent among both groups, who
almost exclusively refer to the region and the people as
‘Yakutia’ and ‘Yakuts’, rather than the locally common
term for self-designation ‘Sakha’.9
Another reoccurring theme is a mocking of Gabyshev’s
beliefs, portraying them as irrational and odd. Many of
his proponents support him not because of his faith and
ritual skill, but despite it. A Twitter commenter and oppositional politician concluded: ‘people in Russia are so
desperate that they are ready to unify around shamans,
magicians, and sorcerers, even dance around with a drum
in the rain – anything to escape life under Putin’s tyrants’.10
Commenting upon the trek, the oppositional politician,
Navalny, discussed Russian political leaders’ fear of the
shaman. They are afraid of him, Navalny argued, because
they are:
terrible satanists themselves. They are pagans. And they [i.e.
Putin] gathered some kind of pine cones with [the defence minister] Shoigu in a Tuvan taiga and I have no doubt that, I don’t
know, they both danced around a fire, worshipped the Mother
of Walrus, smeared themselves with blood of some deer, and
called spirits to overcome this Yakut warrior shaman. Because
the Russian authorities are a community of fairly insane people
who are crazy about some esoteric stuff: red threads, astrologists and everything else.11
While there is a heavy dose of sarcasm embedded in
these comments and they are directed at the politicians and
not Gabyshev, it is to be assumed that the same ‘irrational
beliefs’ – as Navalny puts it later in the video – are shared
by the shaman and the Russian powers.
A similarly jocular tone is apparent in a significant
number of commentaries. To an extent, this might be read
as disrupting and even liberating, the carnivalesque mode
subverting the regular order and allowing for more open
critique of the dominant powers (Bakhtin 1984). However,
such joking hardly produces ‘political intimacy’ (Klumbytė
2011), a sense of mutuality amongst a wide range of actors
produced through certain types of humour. To the contrary,
it is decidedly one-sided, engaging the represented only to
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 36 NO 2, APRIL 2020
14678322, 2020, 2, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12560 by <Shibboleth>-member@soas.ac.uk, Wiley Online Library on [07/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
7. To some degree, such
speculations are based
on the phenomenon of
‘shamanic illness’. A person
who is to become a shaman
usually undergoes a period
of physical and sometimes
mental illness before they
pursue their calling. However,
once one becomes a shaman,
these conditions are said to
go away.
8. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=x8sfiiW0bi8
(accessed 2 December 2019).
9. This is despite Sakha
having been the primary name
of the republic for almost
three decades: Respublika
Sakha (Yakutia).
10. @msvetov,
19/09/2019, https://
twitter.com/msvetov/
status/1174554037989101568
(accessed 4 December 2019).
11. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=
5MMgfml8znI&t =192s
(accessed 4 December 2019).
12. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=TWef91Mfyjg
(accessed 19 February 2020).
13. @StalinGulag,
13/07/2019, https://
twitter.com/StalinGulag/
status/1150015606500069376
(accessed 4 December 2019).
14. @aktroitsky,
13/09/2019, https://
twitter.com/aktroitsky/
status/1172565999578693633
(accessed 4 December 2019).
15. @nicktan_mama,
13/07/2019, reply to @
Stalingulag.
16. It is widely known
that Gabyshev’s wife died a
few years ago, pushing him
to the edge of mental illness.
After his mother opposed
institutionalization, he spent
an extended period in a forest
where he realized his calling
as a warrior shaman.
17. https://newbur.
ru/n/47442/ (accessed 21
February 2020).
18. A similar case is
Wright’s (2016) account of
Israeli left-wing activism
that supports Palestinians but
is based on Zionist tropes
of kinship and community
as well as objectifying the
Palestinian Other, thus
performing a kind of violence
through ethical engagement
with it. The kind of solidarity
similarly expressed towards
the shaman professes
mutuality and support but
simultaneously removes
the two seemingly mutually
engaged parties.
BEATA BUBENEC
BEATA BUBENEC
BEATA BUBENEC
Fig. 2. Gabyshev and
his ‘squad’ in his home
in Yakutsk. Credit: Beata
Bubenec.
Fig. 3. A protest in Yakutsk
in Gabyshev’s support. The
poster reads Ya/My Shaman,
or I/We are the Shaman,
which was widely used on
social media after his arrest.
Credit: Beata Bubenec.
Fig. 4. Aleksandr Gabyshev
during a shamanic ritual.
Credit: Beata Bubenec.
the extent in which it mediates the relationship between
the two political poles.
Another instance of distancing is an interview with a
popular cultural and political commentator, who stated:
‘we are all sensible people and we understand that a
shaman walking to the Kremlin is something from the
realm of fairy tales or “non-science-fiction”’, later adding
that those who believe in exorcism are ‘[giggling] rather
strange people, not completely normal’.12 The journalist
conducting the interview similarly referred to ritual practices as ‘of course, to put it mildly, strange phenomena,
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 36 NO 2, APRIL 2020
Response in Buryatia
In Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, many were acutely
aware of such discourses and how they formed part of
the broader power dynamics. As it was the region where
Gabyshev was arrested and one where shamanism is
broadly practised, locals widely followed and discussed
his trek. Even more, after the shaman’s arrest, a small protest to support his rights coalesced with discontent about
the recent mayoral election, which many suspected was
rigged, leading to a protest involving several thousand
participants. While it was soon dispersed using arrests and
intimidation – the security forces were allegedly armed
with hatchets – a small but persistent daily demonstration endured, and general discontent remained for weeks
after the protests. This discontent was extremely broad in
scope: some, for instance, protested against political corruption, others the poor standard of living in the region, yet
others the rapid decline of the Buryat language, vanishing
autonomy and advancing Russification.
And while my Buryat interlocutors closely followed and
avidly debated Gabyshev’s trek, in the following weeks,
reactions to his campaign were often as much disputed as
5
14678322, 2020, 2, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12560 by <Shibboleth>-member@soas.ac.uk, Wiley Online Library on [07/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
from the perspective of a normal educated person’. Both
he and his interviewee repeatedly created a discursive
common ground between ‘us’ – i.e. sensible, rational and
‘normal’ people – as opposed to a superstitious and irrational ‘them’.
Other commentators, too, have often relegated Gabyshev
to a different, remote realm, be it in space or time. One
Twitter user announced the news of the shaman’s trek,
commenting sardonically: ‘nothing exceptional. Simply
news from Russia in the year 2019’.13 Another admired the
endeavour as an ‘astonishing and unique story’, but added
a surprised exclamation in brackets: ‘(21st century!)’.14
Apart from denying his coevality in time, many stressed
Gabyshev’s distance in space. Themes of remoteness and
provinciality figured strongly in the commentaries, calling
Gabyshev, for instance, a ‘naive weirdo from the hinterland’ (naivnyy chudak-chelovek iz glubinki).15 All this,
then, points to a perceived insurmountable spatio-temporal
distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, modernity and religion,
centre and periphery, between the shaman with his ‘squad’
and supporters from afar, many of whom are urban moderns from the western parts of the federation.
6
the trek itself. Many were amused by the fact that such an
event put Buryatia on the map, within Russia and even
abroad. Some found the attention pleasing, but many,
especially among the intelligentsia, had ambiguous feelings about it, being keenly aware of the reactions that
the shaman had elicited elsewhere. A cultural worker,
for instance, bitterly remarked that while Gabyshev’s
pursuit makes sense to most within a local context, outside of Siberia, he is largely looked down upon as a wild,
amusing eccentric. She pointed out that this is convenient
for the Russian authorities: since Gabyshev was detained
in Buryatia – a multi-ethnic region, like Sakha – the arrest
can easily be brushed aside as an inconsequential quibble
between two childlike subjects, or some neighbourly
rivalry. This is even more so because shortly before the
arrest, Gabyshev was confronted by a group of shamans
from a Buryat shamanic organization who tried to stop
him, arguing that his militant demeanour was inappropriate for a shaman.
A graduate student sarcastically commented on how
the initial memes poking fun at the shaman’s trek swiftly
turned into loud, supportive voices after the Ulan-Ude
protests – once the potential impact of his trek started to
emerge. He laughed at the curious shift in public opinion,
wondering how the mockery could indeed grow into seamless support quite so quickly. A local philologist, while not
especially impressed by the shaman’s story, commented
that even Russian orientalists who study Buryat language, religion and culture can hardly shed their prejudice
and arrogance against local people. He recalled several
instances when scholars made pejorative remarks and
jokes, and described their general air of arrogance, which,
for him, pointed to their continued misunderstanding of
and contempt for local ways of life, despite their decades
of work in the region.
Despite the proposed expulsion of Putin being presented
as a shamanic pursuit and therefore linked to local spirits
and Sakha traditions, Gabyshev’s trek has been neither
envisioned as a parochial pursuit, nor has it attracted only
Sakha, shamanic or a Siberian following. In his ‘squad’,
but also in the rally along his route in Chita and protests in
Ulan-Ude, a broad multi-ethnic, multifaith following was
evident. Gabyshev regularly performed Christian prayers
as well as shamanic rituals, and in his videos, he has said
that a person’s religion or ethnicity is not of importance
in the Russia he envisions. While some religious professionals – including shamans and Orthodox priests – have
condemned his pursuit, others, including several Ulan-Ude
Buddhist lamas, have supported him. The distancing and
exoticizing observers, too, have not necessarily drawn the
line of Otherness along ethnic or religious boundaries,
but more often along the lines of ‘normality’, ‘superstition’ and ‘sanity’. But while in analytical terms this may
hint at the ongoing effects of normative Soviet scientific
secularism, it also speaks to the spatialization of rationality
within the federal territory, where the ‘superstitious’ Other
is largely relegated to ‘distant’ regions and peoples.
Of course, in Buryatia, too, reactions to Sasha-shaman
have not all been positive and univocal. In Ulan-Ude,
I regularly heard people state that he was not a real
shaman (ne nastoyashchiy shaman) – a statement which
both undermines his credibility and questions the very
foundations of his project. Such scepticism stems from
Gabyshev’s obscure shamanic training, his lack of participation in local religious organizations, as well as the
close link between a recent trauma – his wife’s death –
and his sudden shamanic calling.16 Members of a local
shamanic organization in Buryatia who confronted him
along the way, have been especially vocal about the notion
that being a warrior is incompatible with being a shaman,
urging him to draw the line between religion and politics,
as ‘real’ shamans do.17 Another criticism that has cropped
up in Buryatia and elsewhere, is that Gabyshev represents interest groups of one kind or another kind, such
as Americans, ‘liberals’ or Sakha nationalists. Several of
my interlocutors in Ulan-Ude found the idea of an independent, critically minded shaman trekking across Russia
entirely inconceivable.
Besides the spectre of reactions to Gabyshev’s political
project and its authenticity, concerns have also appeared
regarding the unpredictable effects of his trek, especially
his arrest. In October 2019, Ulan-Ude seemed rife with
accidents, which were widely discussed in everyday conversations and social media groups. A tragic gas tank
explosion in a cafe on a central pedestrian alley was followed by a video on a popular local social media group
of recent suicides under tram rails, followed by ghastly
reports almost daily of fires and traffic accidents. As news
of other such events kept appearing, concerned commentators occasionally linked them back to the shaman’s arrest
a month earlier: it was suggested that either local spirits
were upset about it or the shaman’s wrath had caused the
recent misfortunes. Some joking, others earnest, such discussions placed Gabyshev at the centre of local current
events. They brought out debates about the inner Other,
too, as local opinions regarding spirit beliefs diverged,
with sceptics pointing to more scientific explanations like
frosts and the start of the heating season to educate impressionable and ‘superstitious’ others.
Conclusions
As Martin Saxer and Ruben Andersson (2019: 143) argue,
remoteness is a constantly changing geopolitical and social
relation that is ‘actively made and remade across political,
material and historical scales’, and closely linked with
relations of power. Such ‘removal’, they argue, involves
a reshaping of previous connectivities, and is inevitably
selective in forging new ties and cutting out old ones.
So in Buryatia, too, a common local grievance critiques
the keen connectivity on the part of Moscow in draining
natural resources in the region – ‘the richest country in the
world!’ I often heard said, sarcastically – while foregoing
genuine inclusivity in the symbolic and social body of the
federation. Significantly, such remoteness is reinforced by
the changing political economy, including, for instance,
diminishing passenger infrastructure for travelling to the
capital and decreasing access to quality education and
social mobility opportunities, largely concentrated in the
western parts of the country.
While Saxer and Andersson discuss remoteness on
the broader scale of world politics in the context of globalization, Siberia poses an interesting case of ‘removal’
within a nation state. Moreover, distancing here seems
to be especially profound both in terms of depth (temporal as well as topological) and in terms of breadth (it
is forged and sustained not just on the level of the state
but also among citizens themselves). Such removal, as I
have argued above, is rooted in a long history of Russian
expansive state-making. At the same time, it is taking on
novel forms at present, not just because of new sociopolitical configurations, but also technological ones, where
the widespread use of social media has enabled new kinds
of communities and solidarities. Indeed, many refer to the
trek as an ‘online phenomenon’, as it was largely streamed
and followed – and widely discussed – on the Internet, the
platform that increasingly shapes Russian political life as
it is severely limited in other public arenas (e.g. White &
McAllister 2014).
Remoteness, of course, can be a resource for reaping
economic, cultural, political and other benefits (Saxer
& Andersson 2019: 152). It may even be desired and
claimed as a right. Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk (2019),
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 36 NO 2, APRIL 2020
14678322, 2020, 2, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12560 by <Shibboleth>-member@soas.ac.uk, Wiley Online Library on [07/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Etkind, A. 2015. How Russia
‘colonized itself’: Internal
colonization in classical
Russian historiography.
International Journal
for History, Culture and
Modernity 3(2): 159-172.
Grant, B. 1995. In the Soviet
house of culture: A century
of perestroikas. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Hamayon, R.N. 2002.
Emblem of minority,
substitute for sovereignty:
The case of Buryatia.
Diogenes 49(2): 16-21.
Klumbytė, N. 2011. Political
intimacy: Power, laughter,
and coexistence in late
Soviet Lithuania. East
European Politics and
Societies 25(4): 658-677.
Murray, J.D. 2016. ‘Not far
from the kingdom of God’:
Shamanism and colonial
control in Russia’s eastern
borderlands, 1853-1917.
Journal of World History
27(3): 535-563.
Saxer, M. & R. Andersson
2019. The return of
remoteness: Insecurity,
isolation and connectivity
in the new world disorder.
Social Anthropology 27(2):
140-155.
Schein, L. 1997. Gender
and internal orientalism
in China. Modern China
23(1): 69-98.
Schweitzer, P. & O.
Povoroznyuk 2019. A right
to remoteness? A missing
bridge and articulations
of indigeneity along an
east Siberian railroad.
Social Anthropology 27(2):
236-252.
Slezkine, Y. 1994. Arctic
mirrors: Russia and the
small peoples of the north.
Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Vainshtein, S.I. & N.P.
Moskalenko 1995.
Problemy tuvinskogo
shamanstva: Genezis,
izbrannichestvo,
effektivnost’ lechebnykh
kamlanii, sovremennyi
renessans. In: D.A. Funk
(ed.) Shamanizm i rannie
religioznye predstavleniya,
62-75. Moskva: Institut
etnologii i antropologii.
White, S. & I. McAllister
2014. Did Russia
(nearly) have a Facebook
revolution in 2011? Social
media’s challenge to
authoritarianism. Politics
34(1): 72-84.
Wright, F. 2016. Palestine, my
love: The ethico-politics
of love and mourning in
Jewish Israeli solidarity
activism. American
Ethnologist 43(1): 130143.
Znamenski, A.A. 2003.
Shamanism in Siberia:
Russian records of
indigenous spirituality.
Berlin: Springer.
EATA BUBENEC
BEATA BUBENEC
BEATA BUBENEC
BEATA BUBENEC
D-MAPS.COM
BEATA BUBENEC
for instance, discuss a Siberian Evenki village that notoriously resisted the extension of a railway line to the village
in the 1980s, which would seemingly have benefited them
by granting year-round connectivity. Today, too, the villagers see remoteness in part as a resource which is conducive to the vitality of their indigenous lifestyles. At the
same time, they also perceive infrastructural remoteness as
an inconvenience caused by the retreat of the post-Soviet
state (ibid.: 249). Similar ambiguity towards remoteness
seems relevant more broadly in Siberia, where multiple
and hybrid identities and senses of belonging coexist today.
Buryats, for instance, have been argued to tread a careful
balance between claims to cultural sovereignty, loyalties
to Russia and links with the broader Mongol, Buddhist and
other communities (Bernstein 2013; Hamayon 2002).
Finally, as online platforms would seem to overcome
some of this distancing by enabling a range of different
actors – from Sakha shamans to Moscow politicians – to
come together to coalesce in shared political visions, it
appears that the kind of political solidarity enacted here is
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 36 NO 2, APRIL 2020
one of distance and objectification.18 On the one hand, it is
rooted in and has similarities with Russian colonial and orientalist narratives that render indigenous Siberians, especially shamans, as essentially different, non-coeval and
distant. On the other hand, the responses to the shaman’s
trek are not quite ‘internal orientalism’ (Schein 1997),
a form of ambiguous fascination with a minority group
within Russia. This is because of the shaman’s ecumenical
message and diverse following, but also because the line
of difference is drawn as much along the lines of ‘rationality’ as it is along the lines of ‘culture’. Nonetheless, how
these boundaries are mapped onto the territorial and demographic space of the country matter, producing difference,
hierarchy and centre-periphery tensions.
This removal, it seems, is often neglected in discussions of Russian society and politics. As debates around
Russia’s political future grow increasingly lively, such
spatial and temporal distancing is to be taken seriously, as
the return of remoteness is underway, both on a global and
nation state scale. l
7
14678322, 2020, 2, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12560 by <Shibboleth>-member@soas.ac.uk, Wiley Online Library on [07/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Fig. 5. Gabyshev and his
‘squad’ during the trek. The
shaman himself is in the
middle pulling his cart.
Fig. 6. Gabyshev during
the trek.
Fig. 7. The ‘squad’ trekking
across a Siberian highway.
Fig. 8. Doydi i Izgoni, or
‘Reach [Moscow] and expel
[Putin]’, a painting dedicated
to Gabyshev’s deed by a
Novosibirsk artist Konstantin
Eremenko.
Fig. 9. The shaman
undergoing an independent
psychiatric examination in his
home in Yakutsk.
Fig. 10. A map of the
Russian Federation, with
Sakha (Yakutia), Buryatia
and Moscow marked
in red. https://d-maps.
com/carte.php?num_
car=61279&lang=en “