At the north-eastern tip of Siberia, facing Alaska, live the Chukchi, a people traditionally divided into two groups: the reindeer herders of the interior and the sea-mammal hunters of the coast. Their shamanism is known above all through one of the great works of Siberian ethnography, the monograph by Waldemar Bogoras, published at the beginning of the 20th century.
Bogoras and the Jesup Expedition
Waldemar Bogoras (in Russian Vladimir Bogoraz) was a Russian revolutionary exiled to Siberia for his political activity. Like other exiles, during his deportation he devoted himself to studying the local peoples, learning their language and living among them for long periods.
His expertise earned him a place on the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902), a major scientific undertaking organised by the American Museum of Natural History in New York under the direction of the anthropologist Franz Boas. Its aim was to study the relations between the peoples on both shores of the North Pacific, in Siberia and America. Alongside Bogoras worked another exile, Waldemar Jochelson, who studied the Koryak and other neighbouring peoples.
From the expedition came the monograph The Chukchee, still a fundamental source today.
A family shamanism
One of the most interesting aspects Bogoras described is the family character of much of Chukchi religious life. Alongside the shamans proper, every family owned its own drum and celebrated domestic rites:
- during seasonal festivals, nearly all members of the family, men and women, took turns beating the drum;
- the rites were linked to the reindeer, the hunt, the hearth and the ancestors;
- the family drum was a ritual object of the household, not of a specialist.
The professional shaman stood out for his ability to enter into deeper relations with the spirits, to speak with their voices, to perform acts considered extraordinary. Bogoras also describes ritual ventriloquism, with voices that seemed to come from different points in the darkened tent.
| Level | Who practises it | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Family rite | the whole family | seasonal festivals, shared drum |
| Specialised shamanism | the shaman | sessions in the dark tent, spirit voices |
The «transformed» shamans
The theme for which Bogoras's work is most cited today is that of shamans who, at the will of the spirits, changed their social gender. Bogoras described them with the expression «transformed men» and, more rarely, «transformed women».
According to his observations, the change could have different degrees:
- adopting only the hairstyle of the other sex;
- wearing the clothes and doing the work traditionally reserved for the other sex;
- in rarer cases, living permanently in the role of the other gender, even marrying.
The change was regarded as an order from the spirits, often received in youth, and was accepted with fear. Transformed shamans were thought to be very powerful, precisely because their relationship with the invisible world had changed them so profoundly. Similar phenomena have also been described among the Koryak and other peoples of the region.
How to read these sources
Bogoras's descriptions are valuable, but they must be read with care. Bogoras wrote with the categories of his time and sometimes with judgements we would not share today. He also observed a society in rapid change, already touched by traders, missionaries and Russian administration.
Contemporary scholars urge us not to project modern categories of gender identity onto these figures, but to understand them in their context: a transformation willed by the spirits, which made the person a mediator between different worlds.
The legacy
The work of Bogoras and Jochelson documented a culture that, a few decades later, would be profoundly transformed by Soviet collectivisation. Today their monographs are also read by the descendants of the peoples they described. Studio Esoterico Cornelio recognises in them an example of how ethnography, for all its limits, can become shared memory.
In short
- The Chukchi live in north-eastern Siberia, divided between reindeer herders and coastal hunters.
- Waldemar Bogoras, a political exile, studied them for the Jesup Expedition directed by Franz Boas.
- Every Chukchi family owned a drum and celebrated seasonal domestic rites.
- Bogoras described shamans who, by order of the spirits, took on the opposite gender.
- These figures should be understood in their context, not through modern categories.
