This is a past event
Russia's Sakha population - the dominant ethnic group in the Siberian Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) - have developed their own vibrant popular music industry over recent decades shaped by shamanic tradition.
Eleanor Peers, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen will give the Anthropology Seminar on Thursday 10 December 2015 from 3-5pm, in Room F61 of the Edward Wright Building, Aberdeen University, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. Free event, open to all.
Her paper examines the way pop music is shaped by the Sakha people’s shamanic tradition – a tradition that has maintained its continuity through Soviet-era modernisation, and which is now enjoying a dramatic resurgence, within an ongoing Sakha cultural revival.
Paradoxically, the renewed popularity of shamanic healing sits with further modernising social transformation, as the Sakha population moves from the rural Sakha heartlands into the Republic’s capital, Yakutsk. Pre-Soviet Sakha shamanic practice was founded on complex relationships with the deities, demons and spirits that were seen to inhabit the natural environment.
How, then, can this tradition be pursued in Yakutsk’s concrete jungle, where lives are set among laptops, offices and shopping malls, rather than horses, forests and cow-byres?
Sakha pop music has certain remarkable distinguishing characteristics. Most striking of these is a constant preoccupation with celebrating the natural environment, and the home village or region.
A close examination of Sakha pop performance reveals traces of the communities and relationships that underpin rural shamanism, articulated through the post-modern medium of a popular music industry.
Contemporary Sakha shamanic practice is therefore based on a translation of rural ontologies, and the entities and relationships they presume, into the tastes, technologies and identifications of urban life. As a whole, this case exemplifies the unexpected sites and forms of post-Soviet religiosity, as it intersects with economic and demographic change.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ysyakh/themes/sakha-people/
- Speaker
- Dr Eleanor Peers
- Venue
- Edward Wright Building
- Contact
-
No booking required.