MCLC: perils of being a shaman

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: perils of being a shaman
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (9/20/13):
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/china-mongolia-shaman-mining-t
own

Former herder reveals perils of being a shaman in atheist China
Erdemt, a Mongolian shaman, tells of his life and work in the mining
boom-town of Xi Wuqi
By Jonathan Kaiman in Xi Wuqi

[Link to video: A Mongolian shaman in atheist China
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/sep/20/mongolian-shaman-atheis
t-china-video>]

The shaman of Xi Wuqi city wakes before sunrise on a Wednesday morning in
June, piles his family into his silver Peugeot, and drives out beyond the
city's boxy mid-rises, past miles of strip-mines and coal refineries, and
to the foot of a broad kelly-green hillside on the grasslands. He hikes to
the top, removes his trainers and button-down shirt, and dons a black robe
and a feather headdress. Then he gets to work.

The hill is on the shaman's ancestral land, and he climbs it once a year
to summon his ancestors; to express his desires, and to hear their
demands. For the two hours he delivers a thunderous performance, rife with
drum-beating, horn-blowing, the jingle of bells and the clanging of
cymbals. His wife and son scatter sheep's milk and rice liquor beneath
variegated prayer flags. They throw handfuls of confetti to the wind.

"I saw a spirit riding a white horse with a flowing mane, and he told me
right now, your ability as a shaman, your energy, your magic, they've
improved very quickly," the shaman said that afternoon, sitting in his
two-bedroom apartment chain-smoking cigarettes, a Chinese news broadcast
running mute on his flatscreen TV. "He said right now, you've already
arrived – you can commune with the spirit of any river, or any mountain."

Erdemt is a 54-year-old former herder (who, like many Mongolians, only
goes by one name), and as a shaman, he is considered an intermediary
between the human and spiritual worlds. Although he is new to the role –
he became a shaman in 2009 – thousands of people, all of them ethnically
Mongolian, have visited so that he could decipher nightmares, proffer
moral guidance and cure mysterious ills. His patients pay him as much as
they wish.

Despite his success, Erdemt's status as a shaman in China is uniquely
precarious. He's an emerging religious figure in an officially atheist
state, an expression of ethnic pride amid roiling ethnic tensions, and an
embodiment of the distant past in a rapidly changing present. His China is
one of resource extraction, mass migration and cultural upheaval. It is a
constant exercise in compromise and restraint.

The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the sprawling northern borderland
that Erdemt calls home, is one of the country's most rapidly developing
areas – its GDP grew an average of 17% annually between 2001 and 2011,
faster than any Chinese province. Its greatest asset is its natural
resources – copper, rare earths, and especially coal. State-owned mining
companies have arrived en masse, and they have changed the region
indelibly.

The region's native Mongolians, many of them nomadic herders, have largely
paid the price. Strip mining has devastated large swaths of pasture land,
forcing them to move into newly built cities with few economic prospects.
Mongolians now account for less than 20% of the region's 24 million
people, and they own only a fraction of its wealth. Ethnic tensions simmer
and occasionally explode.

Protests rippled across the area in May 2011, when Han drivers killed two
Mongolian herders as they tried to block a caravan of coal trucks. Inner
Mongolian authorities deployed riot police and barricaded university
campuses. The drivers were hauled before a judge; they confessed, and one
was promptly executed. The protests ended as quickly as they began.

Erdemt's hometown Xi Wuqi, a city of 70,000 flush against the grasslands,
was built to help sustain the mining boom. The tiny Han-owned boutiques
that line its broad, well-paved thoroughfares are so new that their
interiors smell like fresh paint. Five years ago, its residents say, it
was little more than a cluster of one-storey red-brick homes.

Shamanism is among the world's oldest religions, dating back as far as the
paleolithic era, and many of Erdemt's clients see him as an embodiment of
a timeless order that was devastated by the boom. "In the past, living a
pastoral life was the purest way to be in touch with nature – to absorb
its energy," said Nisu Yila, a professional Mongolian wrestler in Xi Wuqi,
as he sat on the shaman's living room couch wearing a traditional deel
robe and a cowboy hat. "But bit by bit, that kind of life began to
disappear. And we began to panic." The shaman, he said, reminds him of
what China's Mongolians have lost. "He's like a short cut," he said.

Experts say that this sentiment – the desire to reconnect with a forgotten
past – is nearly ubiquitous in China, a natural byproduct of rapid change.
"Because of modernisation, and now urbanisation, traditional culture is
vanishing and being replaced by western culture, and under such
conditions, people realise that these things are worth protecting," said
Tian Qing 
<http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/07/worse-cultural-revolution
-interview-tian-qing/>, the head of the Chinese Intangible Cultural
Heritage Protection Centre and a prominent adviser to the government on
cultural affairs.

"Right now, Chinese society is like a pot of soup, and it's boiling over
the top. Have you ever cooked? You think that's not going to hurt you?
People here get psychological problems. There's pressure. There's
difficulty. And so they look towards religion for comfort."

Tian quoted a Tang dynasty poem to underscore his point: "Even a prairie
fire can't destroy the grass; it just grows again when the spring breeze
blows."

While Erdemt's social role may be timeless, his professional duties – the
therapy-like sessions and ebullient rituals – are inexorably modern. He
provides solace to white-collar job seekers and helps local officials
assess the spiritual implications of approving new mines. He understands
that there are lines he cannot cross.

"The government, they don't formally acknowledge me the way they
acknowledge other religions," he says. "But as long as I don't do anything
illegal – or at least, what they'd consider illegal – they won't limit
me." Pamphlets and broadcasts are strictly out of bounds. Although he's
careful to couch his ethnic sentiments in benign terms, he refuses to see
Han clients. Most of them see his services as an investment, he says.
They're angered by weak returns.

Erdemt's son Bao Lidao, a bespectacled 26-year-old with ruddy cheeks and
an explosive laugh, is experiencing a quarter-life crisis. After
graduating from university in the region's capital city, Hohhot, Bao took
a government job mediating between land-hungry railway ministry officials
and the nomads they sought to displace.

The position overwhelmed him. The nomads were fickle – they'd be seduced
by sizable compensation packages one day and reticent the next, aware that
the cash was, unlike their land, ephemeral. Last year, he took a
secretarial job with the Xi Wuqi government, and he finds the position
stultifying. "These people, although they drive good cars, they eat well,
they live well, they wear nice things – I feel their hearts are empty," he
said.

Bao wants to be a shaman – for weeks in a row he'll dream of flying, which
he takes as a cosmic sign. Yet his father, like so many in China, is a
pragmatist. "He thinks it'd be best if I find my own career," said Bao.
"Even if I don't become a shaman, I'll still be a shaman's son, and I'll
dedicate myself to researching shamanism, developing the field. I think
this is my life's mission."

Erdemt himself knew nothing of shamanism as a child. He spent his
formative years in a felt-lined tent on the grasslands, frequently
skipping school to help his parents herd. During Mao's Cultural
Revolution, the religion was dubbed "feudal superstition" and banned. One
of his neighbours was beaten for practising it openly, and decades of
silence followed suit.

The shaman grew to middle age. He married and had two children, both of
whom learned to rear sheep before they were packed off to university. The
coal boom came suddenly, and in 2007, his pastures began to wilt; a summer
hailstorm decimated his livestock. Newly destitute, he considered his
options and moved to Xi Wuqi, where he found a part-time job unloading
trucks.

His wife bought buckets of sheep's milk and processed it into dried
yogurt, a traditional Mongolian snack, which she sold to local markets.
They were desperate to return to the grasslands.

Around that time, Erdemt began to have strange dreams, he says. Some
involved tigers; in one, snakes writhed around his body. He discovered
within himself an extraordinary aptitude for prediction, allowing him to
foretell chance encounters with old friends.

One day in 2009, he quit his job and took a bus to Ordos, a gleaming new
city in the area's arid west which, like Xi Wuqi, was built to accommodate
the coal boom. There, amid empty skyscrapers and vast, dusty boulevards,
he met a friend whose brother owned a brick factory in Mongolia; the
brother knew a master shaman in the country's capital, Ulan Bator.

Erdemt applied for a passport, hopped on a cross-border train, and showed
up at the shaman's house carrying his suitcases. For 27 days, he memorised
ancient texts and fine-tuned elaborate rituals; he returned to Xi Wuqi
carrying a sheepskin drum, confident about his future.
The decision has served him well, he says. Moving back to the grasslands
is no longer a priority.