"Tragic Spirits" is probably the most sensitive and respectful take on shamanic-based spirit-work that I've read by a scholarly type who doesn't actually believe in the spirits that her subjects base their lives around. That sounds like cold praise, but it's not. After reading two hundred years of accounts of shamanism by outsiders who don't believe that the indigenous individuals sincerely practicing their religion are doing much beyond enacting childish superstitions, those of us who do actually practice spirit-based shamanic faiths can get pretty sick of the patronizing sneers in those writings ... not to mention example after example of completely missing the point, a point that you can't get if you don't take the world view seriously enough. This book manages to avoid that trap; the author even admits that she doesn't believe in spirits, but manages to describe the practices of her subjects by speaking from their world view without the usual caveats and disclaimers meant to reassure modern atheist western academics that "of course we don't really believe in all this nonsense".
I was especially moved - and informed - by the in-depth discussions of this rebirth of Mongolian shamanism after the devastation of a century of Soviet conquering, oppression, and collapse, and the generations of mourning that it left in its wake. The book discusses the dichotomy of gender in Mongolian shamanism - there's no technical barrier to a woman becoming a shaman, as the genders are equal in the actual practice, but being a shaman is such a full-time job that it's very difficult to manage without a strongly service-oriented partner who is willing to be your personal assistant, and it's nearly impossible for women to find Mongolian men who are culturally willing to fill that role. The book also covers some successful shamans and how they rode the new wave of shamanic revival. In all, it's both full of hope - shamanism is coming back, hurrah! - but also full of sadness in confronting how wounded and traumatized the Mongolians are as a people. I can only hope that the new shamans can help heal generation upon generation of woundedness.
So yeah, totally worth reading as an antidote to New Age feel-good shamanism. This is an outsider's patient description of the real thing.
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