“Cursed lives” and the crisis of values in Tuvan society

Abstract

This is a review article focused on the monograph authored by the anthropologist Konstantinos Zorbas and published under the title “Shamanic Dialogues with the Invisible Dark in Tuva, Siberia. The Cursed Lives” in 2021 by Cambridge Scholar Publishing. The book is devoted to a special type of practice offered by the shamans of Kyzyl as part of their rituals — namely, removing curses invoked (as it is believed) by others, often through the mediation of shamans, in order to harm someone’s health, welfare, etc.

Zorbas’ book, originally published in English, focuses on the part of the sociocultural life of the Tuvan society which is little-known in Russian Tuvan studies. The authors of the review article discuss three ideas which they consider most interesting. Firstly, Zorbas states that the practice of shamanic curses spread in Tuva in the wake of the social and economic turmoil of the 1990s, with its mass disappointment, group conflicts and total mistrust. The authors of the review believe that these practices lay in the lower part of archaization trends in the society undergoing a crisis of social transformation.

Secondly, the authors follow Zorbas’ analysis of the value crisis and the rise of profit-seeking in society, of Shamanism as a kind of “ontological government”, of Zorbas’ observation of shamans’ clients, and also why some Russians living in the region also share some of the Shamanist ideas.

Thirdly, it is of special importance that a study of Shamanism’s dark practices was carried out by an outsider scholar. For mainstream scholars, this topic often remains taboo, since they cannot completely discard their own ethnocultural and religious identity, as well as some cultural orientations and religious prohibitions.