Central Asian Folk Religions

What many Central Asian folk religions have in common is the practice of shamanism, a system of religious practice that beleives that shamans, by connecting with the spiritual realm, have the power to heal the sick, communicate with spirits, and escort souls of the dead to the afterlife. The origins of Shamanism stem from indigenous peoples of far northern Europe and Siberia. shamans are found in a variety of cultures that are not traditionally associated with the concept; spirit mediums in sub-Saharan Africa and cases of spirit possession in East Asia. New World shamanism, however, derives from its root stock, reaching the Americas 12,000 to 30,000 years ago. Shamanism is beleived to be one of the world’s oldest religions. Evidence of shamanic practice is contained in Paleolithic cave art. New Age revivals of this practice also make it one of its newest. Shamanic experiences are being cultivated in contemporary societies as neoshamanistic variations on an ancient theme. The narrowest conceptions of shamanism restrict the use of the term to a specific form of religious practice found in Siberia, where Tungus religious practitioners called šamán (source of the term shaman) serve as a model. Romanian historian Mircea Eliade’s classic study of this subject grants historical and conceptual priority to shamanism, and traces its outward spread from its Siberian base. Others argue that the concept of shamanism should be extended to a nearly universal set of beliefs about spirits, spiritism, and the occult realms. American anthropologist Lowell Bean, for example, comments that “Shamanism is the religion of all hunting and gathering cultures, and it forms the basis of many more formalized religions that retain shamanistic elements." Anthropologists have often adopted this broader perspective, seeking similarities among overtly different traditions typically by linking them according to the social functions served by shamans (healing through spirit intervention, community protection from attack by malignant spirits, and the pursuit of community political goals through the medium of spiritism). Shamanism is a useful concept to describe a set of religious phenomena of historical depth and wide ethnographic extent, and there is value in considering how such a wide range of beliefs and practices can be related to a basic set of defining characteristics. Shamanism has been recently described as a form of interaction between a practitioner and spirits, one that is not available to other members of a community. The practitioner acts on behalf of a community, or on behalf of individual members of that community, to perform a variety of social roles. These may include healing, harming and ensuring the successful outcome of subsistence activities through intervention with the spiritual realm or by using knowledge gained through communication with the spirits.