Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with a ritual of shamanic healing in Siberia, which employs basic cultural symbols while also building around intense stimulation of vision, hearing and smell, and predicated upon impulses of touch. The healing ritual is seen as working indexically by ‘awakening senses’, as well as a signifying practice based on shared cognitive decodings.

Paper long abstract:

Traditional healing in non-western societies has been theorized as a way to reorient the embodied self in the cosmological order and to realign the sufferer as a moral person in the local social universe. Ritual healing has often been treated as 'traditional' in symbols and ritual designs, even though the notion of 'tradition' itself has been deconstructed and related to postmodernity, postcolonialism and globalization. What happens to 'traditional' healing in the contexts of cultural revitalization, when tradition itself is excavated, revived, contested, and used on the political arena as an instrument of identity building? These questions are analysed on the example of a shamanic healing ritual as it is practiced in the post-socialist Tuva, an autonomous republic on the outskirts of the Russian Federation, in Southern Siberia. This ritual is built around intense stimulation of basic senses such as vision, hearing and smell, and predicated upon indexical impulses of touch, employed by different practitioners in different degrees. At the same time, the elements and symbols that are likely cognitively decoded, and that belong to 'traditional' Tuvan shamanism, globalized neo-shamanism, Buddhism, and Russian-style faith healing are tossed together in various combinations chosen at will by different practitioners. Yet, this complex healing performance contains a modicum of symbols and ritual elements that are shared across the spectrum of local Tuvan shamanic specialists, and between shamans and Buddhist lamas. Does this healing work indexically or symbolically, physically or cognitively? What do these core symbols tell us about the local cosmology and Tuvan cultural universe? This paper juxtaposes a classical approach to healing rituals as signifying practices in the attempt to get a glimpse of their cultural signifiers with seeing these rituals as 'awakening senses', which, in semiotic terms, would be acting indexically. The latter touches on the most general mechanisms of healing, while the former can be one of the few remaining ways to make out threads of coherent cultural meaning and value, concealed under the morass left behind by post-communist, post-colonial transformations.