Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination

By Katherine Swancutt

Innovation-making is a classic theme in anthropology that reveals how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. This ethnographic study is an entrance into the world of Buryat Mongol divination, where a group of cursed shamans undertake the ‘race against time’ to produce innovative remedies that will improve their fallen fortunes at an unconventional pace. Drawing on parallels between social anthropology and chaos theory, the author gives an in-depth account of how Buryat shamans and their notion of fortune operate as ‘strange attractors’ who propagate the ongoing process of innovation-making. With its view into this long-term ‘cursing war’ between two shamanic factions in a rural Mongolian district, and the comparative findings on cursing in rural China, this book is a needed resource for anyone with an interest in the anthropology of religion, shamanism, witchcraft and genealogical change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857454836

Katherine Swancutt

Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King's College London. She is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant (2020-2026) 'Cosmological Visionaries' and has conducted research across Inner Asia on shamanic and animistic religion for upwards of two decades. Key publications include: Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Berghahn, 2018) and Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn, 2012).

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Preface

My first trip to Mongolia in the summer of 1999 introduced me to the present-day lynchpins of Buryat Mongol religion: divining, shamanic spirit-human dialogues and the making of innovative magical remedies. I had gone to Mongolia with an interest in uncovering the rise of new religious practices, but I had not known that my fieldwork would revolve around case studies of Buryats who strategically used divination to produce new magical remedies – or even that I would be requested to divine frequently for other Buryats – until I settled into my village home in northeast Mongolia. Inspired by Caroline Humphrey’s work on the rise of religious cults at the turn of the twentieth century among Daur Mongols (Humphrey 1996, 328–52), I planned to focus upon the divinations, bone-setting practices and other ‘correcting’ or ‘repairing’ rituals (zasal) which existed alongside of the larger shamanic ceremonies or public rituals in Mongolia, to see how they might occasionally trigger changes to religious life. To my surprise, I found that Buryat religious life was replete with divinations and concerns over fallen fortune, which drove an ongoing innovation-making process that could last for months. Over time, I also learned that innovation-making was a response to local rivalries, which among shamanic Buryats often gave rise to ‘groups’ or factions in a rural district, comprised of three to five households, one of which was headed by a senior shaman. Innovation-making was such an important tactic for resolving interpersonal conflict among the Buryats I knew that they specifically instructed me not to interact with their rivals. They even took me by the hand to show me physical evidence of the invisible hostile forces, such as curses or vampiric imps, which they first deflected with conventional correcting rituals and only eventually blocked from the home with innovative remedies. These Buryats wanted me to keep pace with the ongoing developments in their rivalries so that I could understand what problems were afoot and so that I could help to resolve them, as a member of their group and as a diviner. Under their apprenticeship-like instruction, I found that Buryat innovative remedies were as-yet unnamed anomalies. When speaking to me, these Buryats referred to their innovative remedies with the euphemism of ‘the thing which the shamanic spirits instructed to be done’ (ongon zaasan khiikh yüm), thus underscoring their novelty and conceptual difference to correcting rituals. Usually, though, these Buryats did not speak even this clearly about their innovative remedies, preferring to call them by the more general euphemism of ‘that thing’ (ter yüm), so as to protect their secrecy. Thus I introduce the term ‘innovative remedy’ as my own analytical category, which, however, I propose captures the essence of these phenomena and innovation-making more generally within the Buryat landscape (see chapter 1).

It was invaluable, then, that I launched my first fieldwork by taking short trips to five provinces in Mongolia – Dornod, Zavkhan, Sukhbaatar, Uvs and Khövsgöl – where free from the constraints of district politics, I could gather the biographies of religious specialists from different Mongol ethnic backgrounds and basic information on the kinds of divination they practised. This quick introduction to Mongolian life, and to religion in their rural districts, provided an extremely useful backdrop against which I could, during fieldwork, comparatively map my findings among Buryats. Just as these short trips within Mongolia gave me some degree of comparative grounding for my main fieldwork site – the district of Bayandun in Dornod Province, Mongolia – I later found that I sometimes used Bayandun as a comparative lens for viewing my second field site, the district of Shinekhen Baruun Sum in the Evenk Nationality Autonomous Banner of Inner Mongolia, China.

After completing these initial trips and settling into Bayandun in November 1999, it quickly became clear to me that the Buryats I knew spent long hours each day on divinations, shamanic ceremonies and correcting rituals. My access to these religious practices, and to the process of innovative-making in Bayandun, was enabled by my living in the home of the shaman Yaruu. Certainly Yaruu’s group of shaman friends, and other Buryats in Bayandun, appeared to spend far more time on religion than did the people I had met in other parts of Mongolia. On a daily basis they often held four-hour divination sessions and even regularly planned other activities around the next divination or shamanic ceremony. Since Bayandun faced an unemployment rate of 86 per cent from 1999 to 2000, it was not entirely surprising that these Buryats devoted so much time to religious practices which, in large part, were used to gauge how to overcome business difficulties, illnesses and, of course, how to raise a person’s or household’s fortune (khiimor’).

Revealingly, when I crossed the border into Inner Mongolia, China, in summer 2000, I found that the ‘more Buddhist’ Buryats living in Shinekhen Baruun Sum also took a strong interest in divination, in their local Buddhist monastery, and even in the unfamiliar shamanic practices which took place locally only when someone requested that a visiting shaman hold a ceremony in his or her home. While staying in Shinekhen Baruun Sum I lived in the homes of laypeople, but I made frequent visits to the local diviner or visiting shamans and travelled occasionally to meet with shamans or diviners living in the nearby township of Nantun. There were, however, some notable differences between Shinekhen Baruun Sum and Bayandun. Shinekhen Baruun Sum clearly had fewer religious practitioners, who divined or held other religious practices less frequently than in Bayandun. At the same time, Buryats in Shinekhen Baruun Sum enjoyed much higher rates of employment and entrepreneurial activity. Nonetheless, I found that the divinations and correcting rituals held in either of these rural districts elicited a similar degree of concern about raising fortune and resolving problems more generally. And this observation pushed me to uncover what precisely was attracting all of this religious activity – particularly the innovative remedies which Buryats on both sides of the Mongol-Chinese border had sought to obtain. Clearly a simple comparison, based on which Buryats had more wealth, resources or exposure to the historical turn of modernization, would not fully account for the innovation-making, the different kinds of religious activity taking place or the wide range of concerns and emotions addressed through their religious practices.

Until my return trip to Bayandun in late summer 2004, though, I was unsure of where to locate the impetus behind this religious activity and the innovations in particular. It was only when I observed Yaruu produce new remedies, which explicitly built upon her innovations from 2000, that I realized a definite pattern of innovation-making had emerged. Gradually, I came to the conclusion that the success of Yaruu’s innovative remedies in 2000, which raised the fortunes of her group at an unconventional pace, had attracted these follow-up innovations. I gathered that by 2004, Yaruu’s group had become very familiar and comfortable with seeking out tailor-made innovative remedies, once all their conventional remedies had failed. And by expanding her oeuvre of innovative remedies, Yaruu had become increasingly adept at making variations not only on conventional correcting rituals, but also on the innovations which she had previously introduced. Yaruu’s innovation-making thus echoed Roy Wagner’s approach to the ‘invention of culture’, where conventions and inventions co-evolve in dialectical relationship to each other ([1975] 1981, 52–53). According to Wagner, conventions are the building blocks of inventions – and vice versa – so that they each ‘continually divert the force of earlier expressions and subsume it into newer constructions’ ([1975] 1981, xiv). Since these ‘newer constructions’ are initially received as inventions and only later accepted as conventions, Wagner proposes that the ‘distinction’ between them is never ‘lost’, but instead affords the ‘axis’ along which the process of innovation-making starts afresh again (ibid.). What, then, counts as ‘conventional’ or ‘inventive’ shifts over time, creating new benchmarks for what becomes classed as innovations within the ever-evolving process of cultural invention.

Tellingly, I observed that both Yaruu’s and the Buryats’ notion of fluctuating fortune propagated this invention of culture by drawing increasingly more innovations to them, like the ‘strange attractors’ of chaos science, which I present as one of the important backbones to this book in chapter 1. However, the Buryat innovations I describe did not fully follow the trajectory of Wagner’s dialectic, since they never developed into conventional correcting rituals. Instead, these innovations remained part of the prized repertoire which, I propose, small groups of Buryats frequently use in their household-centric society to battle persistent problems.

There are three important reasons for the open-ended dialectic in Buryat innovation-making. First, Buryats in both Bayandun and Shinekhen Baruun Sum produce innovations as expedient measures in moments of crisis to deflect persistent curses or hauntings traced to local human rivals. Their innovations are thus purpose driven and often considered destined to become obsolete along with the problems they resolve. Second, these innovative remedies are contained within the home and shared with only a few close friends who maintain their secrecy. Protecting innovations with secrecy ensures that they will remain potent and safe from rivals’ counterattacks but also means that they most likely will fail to receive the more public attention necessary for transforming them into accepted conventions. Third, these remedies are potent for a limited range of time (often two or three years), after which they only are effective if refreshed by a follow-up ceremony. Given the short-lived nature of crises, the remedies usually are forgotten, rather than refreshed. Thus Buryat innovation-making arises in booms and busts, when tailor-made remedies are needed, rather than unfolding in smooth transitions from conventions to innovations. Moreover, the expediency, secrecy and limited potency of Buryat remedies sustain their ‘open-endedly innovative’ quality until they are forgotten – or potentially reemerge – as arcane novelties with enough conventional cachet to become the building blocks of yet newer remedies.

This book, then, draws upon sixteen total months of fieldwork among two rural districts of Buryats, in Mongolia and China, and gives an extended case study from Bayandun which shows that innovation-making is a common Buryat strategy for addressing crisis situations. By highlighting the strength of these innovations – namely, their ability to immediately resolve problems which conventional correcting rituals only gradually address – the book uncovers how innovation-making accelerates the ‘delayed’ recovery time which Buryats typically face. Thus the book’s step-by-step documentation of divinations and shamanic ceremonies held to combat an entire episode of a cursing rivalry or to deflect a haunting that worsened with a divorce underscores how the Buryat innovation-making process invariably swells, over time, in response to its own ‘strange attractors’. Outside of the Buryat context, this innovation-making process may well be at work in other household-centric societies responding to local crises, in Inner Asia and beyond.

Some brief words on formatting are in order. A ‘Cast of Characters’ has been drawn up for the principal people named in the extended case study from Bayandun. However, due to the sensitivity of the case study, and following requests from people in Bayandun, I have given a pseudonym to each person in the book. Additionally, I have had to choose between several systems for transliterating Mongolian or Chinese into English. For Mongolian I have used the transliteration commonly used for Russian, whilst adding ‘ü’ and ‘ö’ for front vowels specific to the Mongolian language. Chinese words have been rendered in pinyin.

Chapter 1

A Race Against Time:

Mongolian Fortune and

the Anthropology of Magic

The lunar New Year celebrations of February 2000 marked a turning point for three shamanic households in Bayandun, a Buryat Mongol district in rural northeast Mongolia. After several days of visiting extended relatives and friends for feasts and the exchanging of gifts, Yaruu, the shaman whose household I lived in, became ill. As she relaxed on her bed, she suddenly retracted her limbs tightly against her body (in an illness reflex known as ‘tatasan’) and called out that she was dying from a curse. Her two daughters started crying, and her mother, Ölzii, who had overheard the commotion in an adjacent wing of the house, rushed in to find her daughter writhing on the bed. Immediately, Ölzii instructed Yaruu’s older daughter, Tuyaa, to hand her the shamanic implements. Running these across Yaruu’s limbs, Ölzii tried to remove the curse symptoms with the latent strength (chadal) of the shamanic spirits (ongon). Although she was not a shaman, Ölzii summoned the spirits to intervene, requesting that they descend upon her daughter’s home from their residences in the heavens – residences which are so synonymous with the Buryat shamanic spirits that she repeated them rapidly, as mantra-like invocations, with the formulaic phrase: ‘the fifty-five western heavens, the forty-four eastern heavens’ (‘baruuni tavin tavan tenger; züüni döchiin dörven tenger’). Ölzii’s act of desperation was considered risky. As a layperson, she could have been blinded or struck dead for wielding shamanic implements without the necessary training or connection – roots (ug) – to the spirits. Eventually, though, her actions calmed Yaruu, who, in the following days, divined and held numerous ceremonies with her shamanic pupils. Their divinations confirmed that Yaruu’s group of shaman friends had been cursed by three rival shamanic households in Bayandun. The curses were not entirely surprising, since Yaruu’s group had suspected a growing shamanic rivalry for two full months, during which they had faced persistent business difficulties and illnesses. Originally, Yaruu’s group ascribed these misfortunes to their own blunders of having offended the shamanic spirits with broken taboos and insufficient offerings, but this attack confirmed that their rivals had been cursing them and making their fortunes (khiimor’) decline. So Yaruu’s group started their new year by embarking on a series of counter-curse measures, which lasted for several months until they hit upon an innovative curse-blocking remedy. Some months later I observed a similar but unrelated episode three hundred kilometres to the east, in Shinekhen Baruun Sum, a Buryat district of northeast China, in which a curse victim obtained an innovative remedy for recovering her money losses and raising her fallen fortune.

By a stroke of fortune, during my first fieldwork on Mongolian divination I found case studies on cursing and innovative magical remedies that changed people’s lives. Anthropologists have been captivated with the production of magical innovations since the inception of the discipline, because these innovations cut straight to the heart of the human condition, revealing how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. Looking back now, I realize how pivotal it was for me to have been located precisely where I was, when I was, within specific Buryat episodes of cursing, haunting and innovation-making. Like the witchcraft in the Bocage region of western France described by Jeanne Favret-Saada, Buryat cursing and innovation-making revolves around a ‘system of positions’ or alliances between specific people, in which ‘the first point to grasp is whom each informant thinks he is speaking to, since he utters such radically different discourses depending on the position he thinks his interlocutor holds’ (1980, 16–17). Magical innovation is common nowadays among Buryats, especially where there are shamans who regularly provide face-to-face dialogues with the spirits. But these innovations are usually contained within just one or a few households, bringing about small-scale social changes through the covert resolution of local rivalries and family breakups. Thus while the Buryat invention of new magical practices is common enough, information about them is, at least initially, kept secret, allowing the practices to be known only within the households that generate them. Moreover, due to the secrecy and extreme novelty of these remedies, there is no established parlance for them. Buryat innovative remedies may be referred to by the euphemism ‘the thing which the shamanic spirits instructed to be done’ (ongon zaasan khiikh yüm) or by the even vaguer turn of phrase ‘that thing’ (ter yüm). Each of these euphemisms – although not conventional terms – sets innovative remedies conceptually apart from the conventional ‘correcting’ or ‘repairing’ rituals (zasal) that pervade everyday Buryat life. Still, I should underscore that while the phrase ‘innovative remedy’ accurately captures the Buryat propensity for innovation-making, it is my own analytical category, not a Buryat vernacular term.

By tracing the rise of several innovations over a four-year period, I offer penetrating ethnography on cursing rivalries and family crises among Buryats in rural Mongolia and China. I take the reader to the inside of the curse and the households affected by it, showing how curse ‘victims’ initially detected their curse symptoms, how they witnessed the curse castings, how they detected and deflected curses through divinations or shamanic ceremonies and, finally, how they resolved their rivalries with innovative remedies obtained from the spirits. Additionally, I give an account of how, four years later, Ölzii obtained further innovations, which resolved her family crisis, expunging her ex-husband and his vampiric imps from the patriline. Each of these innovations did more than simply add to the existing magical and religious repertoires: they changed the livelihoods of those people who implemented them and protected them within their homes so that their fortunes (khiimor’) would rise in an unconventionally short span of time. These innovations thus altered the time-space dimensions of a rural Buryat district, as well as the relations between victims and their rivals there.

One simple explanation for innovation in places such as rural Mongolia and China, which have undergone recent religious oppressions, is that people are likely to produce new knowledge when they are not working with a repertoire that has been intact for generations. Among Buryats, this new knowledge is most readily accessible in ceremonies where the shaman adopts the perspective of a shamanic spirit and then holds a ‘spirit-human’ dialogue with one or more laypersons, who then may use these dialogues as divinatory sessions for uncovering innovative remedies which could resolve their problems. Both Buryat divinations and spirit-human dialogues are practised on a partly improvisational basis, without the extremely codified elements that anthropologists often associate with shamanic repertoires, such as the recitation of epic myths. Instead, divinations and dialogues only require that Buryats organize their interactions around the purpose of gathering information from the divinatory implements, the spirits, other people and anything else which may pertain to the questions at hand. Not surprisingly, then, these divinations and shamanic dialogues recently appear to have become the central feature of the Buryat religious repertoire in Mongolia and China (Buyandelgeriyn 2007, 130–32, see also 134–42; Højer 2009, 580–86; Shimamura 2002, 92–106; 2004, 203–10), which, in moments of crisis, revolves around the production of innovative magical remedies (Swancutt 2006, 346–50; 2008, 858–61).

Another significant impetus behind Buryat innovation-making is the rhetoric on keeping order, which is espoused at the official and popular levels in Mongolia, China and Russia (see chapter 2, on cosmology). Humphrey has shown that the sense of order which pervades social life in provincial Russia, including in the Buryat Republic, is traceable to the Soviet influence, with its state management of production, as well as the recent forms of trade and protection rackets that have developed since the early 1990s after perestroika (1999, 22, see also 42–43). Significantly, Humphrey’s study highlights the provincial Russian view of trade in the 1990s, where ‘uncontrolled movement violates the sense of order pertaining to bounded wholes’, because ‘Trade brings in desirable goods, but it also carries out valuables’, such that ‘Markets and border crossings are places where disorder (bezproyadok) is feared’ (1999, 22). A similar emphasis on order has been prevalent throughout China for centuries, where personal relations and commerce have worked in tandem through different modes of production, such as the ‘tributary’ or ‘petty capitalist’ modes highlighted by Hill Gates (1996, 7–9). More recently, Stephan Feuchtwang has shown that Chinese efforts to promote ‘an economy decollectivized and removed from direct state control’ have effectively exchanged the ‘realm of organized fairness and unfairness’ from the collectivization period for ‘a set of obligations [to the Party-state or state-run units] beyond whose seclusion an ocean of fortune, instrumentality and exploitation – regulated or not – is continuously expanding’ (2002, 202). In this newer milieu, rural Chinese find that ‘beyond human responsiveness is the realm of gain, which comes either through luck (fuqi) or fairness, or through the unfair deployment of personal connections or the amoral skills of instrumental networking’, the positive side of which is that ‘from this amoral economy reserves flow into the more sphere’ (ibid.). Of course, the Buryat ethnic minority living in remote corners of China, who are officially classed as a ‘small nationalities’ (shaoshu minzu) group, make their own permutations on the notions of order espoused by the Chinese state. But the dynamic impact made by the tide of change in Chinese policy is unmistakable, especially among Buryats who link improvements in fortune to the orderly production of innovative magical remedies.

Revealingly, the Buryats with whom I worked have a historical connection to the Buryat Republic in Russia and nostalgically consider it to be their homeland (nutag). The earlier generations lived through periods of collectivization in either Mongolia or China and were thus concerned about their roles in the uncontrolled movement of larger spheres, such as trade. Nonetheless, amid the larger public spaces of fluctuating order, these Buryats seek to produce innovative remedies which combat persistent problems whilst being contained secretly within the private sphere of the home. Indeed, as we will see, their innovative magical remedies afford a hyperorderly means of resolving problems, which is highly desirable because – unlike trade – it is not open to public scrutiny. This preference for order even tallies with Buryat notions about the kind of personality which is suited to the shamanic vocation. According to Ölzii, the most successful ceremonies are held by shamans who are calm people (nomkhon khün), such as her daughter Yaruu, since their orderly demeanour helps them to readily adopt spirit perspectives. Ölzii felt that neither she nor Yaruu’s younger daughter could become shamans, because they became angry (uurlaj baina) easily, whereas Yaruu and her older daughter, Tuyaa, who (according to Ölzii) could become shamans, were calm and suited to the vocation. Ölzii’s explanation corresponds with my observation that Buryat shamans who exhibit the more ‘ecstatic’ performances, in the sense given to the term by Eliade (1964, 182–84) or Lewis (1971, 38–39), such as bombastically beating the drum and singing loudly, usually do so because they find it difficult to take on spirit perspectives. These shamans exert themselves in exhausting performances, and when they fail to adopt the necessary spirit perspectives, they fall short of their own expectations – as well as the expectations of their inquirers.

Against this backdrop of preferred orderliness, Buryats I met in northeast Mongolia often reflected upon the disorder which pervaded their religious life, telling me that because their ancestors had not been allowed to practice openly as shamans during the oppressions, no Buryat shaman nowadays knows entirely what he or she is doing when holding ceremonies. Even those shamans who secretly practised abbreviated rituals during the oppressions were not considered able to have transferred their full knowledge across the generations, once they started practising regularly again, from the 1990s onwards. Many Buryat shamans and laypersons thus felt that much of their religious practices were undertaken in ad hoc procedures, including cases where practitioners referred to written lists used by senior practitioners which specified the proper order for invoking the spirits. Moreover, Buryats often cited their lack of knowledge about past modes of religious practice as the reason why they could not gauge how their current practices are evolving. I received similar accounts when travelling throughout Mongolia from July to November 1999, where every religious specialist I interviewed linked the endemic lack of knowledge to religious oppressions.¹

And yet, as this book will show, Buryats in northeast Mongolia and China regularly produce innovative magical remedies in a calm, orderly manner, when carrying out their shamanic or divinatory practices. Buryats use these innovations to organize the apparently ‘unknown’ or ‘disordered’ elements of their cosmologies and social settings. In this sense, Buryat innovation-making sheds significant light on the production of order more generally and falls into step with Roy Wagner’s ‘dialectical approach’ to the invention of culture, where conventions and inventions mutually evolve so as to continuously produce new variations upon each other (1981, xviii). At the same time, Buryat innovation-making echoes the production of hyperorderly results in scientific experiments, which ironically fall under the heading of ‘chaos science’. Anthropologists already have drawn analogies between social phenomena and elements of chaos science, as early as in Wagner’s study of ‘The Fractal Person’ (1991) and more recently within Mosko and Damon’s volume (2005), a work I have borne especially in mind when discussing the tendency for any given Buryat innovation to elicit follow-up innovations. I give only a brief background to the comparison between Buryat magical innovations and chaos science here, since I develop this comparison throughout the book.

Scientific studies actually use the term chaos ‘to refer to deterministic kinds of order – not disorder as the term is understood popularly – arising from the generalized properties of complex dynamical systems; or simply, order within apparent disorder’ (Mosko 2005, 7; emphasis in original). Thus while so-called chaos experiments take place under fast-changing conditions that may give the appearance of disorder, those changes, in fact, are hyperorderly responses which can, to some extent, be predicted in advance. One of the trademark features of chaos science is that its experiments involve numerous bifurcations from an original source, which have the effect of rapidly introducing irreversible changes, on multiple levels, into the experimental milieu (Mosko 2005, 11–17). I argue that, in a similar way, Buryats who produce innovations irreversibly alter their social and cosmological settings.

The lack of order, or ‘chaos’, which seems to pervade Buryat life in Mongolia or China could be said, as with any ethnographic setting, to take place on a variety of levels. Among rural Buryats, an everyday indeterminacy about how to obtain basic necessities amid extreme poverty and the scarcity of resources – especially water and cash – is the most notable form of chaos. Moments of crisis are even endemic in Bayandun, where the sudden lack of state subsidies in the 1990s bequeathed a very chaotic means of gathering everyday life provisions. To combat these difficulties Buryats produce innovations which – like chaos-science experiments – alter their lives (and not just a given course of events) by introducing irreversible new starting points from which they can carry out social relations and from which they can increase their fortunes, business prospects, well-being, success and so on. For instance, the magical Buryat innovation that blocks curses and dangerous gossip from the home, discussed at length in this book, does more than simply deflect curses – it offers a fresh platform for resolving the local interpersonal rivalries which initially lead to the cursing. Although never popularized as a conventional correcting ritual, this innovation helped to restore the pre-curse ‘convention’ of good neighbourly relations between Yaruu’s group and their rival shamans – and in this narrower sense I propose that it triggered a dialectical shift, in Wagner’s sense of the term, from invention (blocking curses) back to convention (sociable relations between district residents) ([1975] 1981, 52–53).

I recall being struck by the initial impression that rural Buryats produced innovations with a remarkable efficiency which paralleled the ‘efficiency’ found among some urban businessmen or scientists – or, given the lack of regular electricity and other modern technology in their areas – even could be said to have outstripped them. These similarities between the Buryats and business or scientific efficiency at innovation-making remained apparent to me throughout my fieldwork and, indeed, to some degree, appeared to have been the outcome of seventy years of Socialist indoctrination, as well as the Buryats’ association to the Russians. The Buryats I came to know often devoted their days to obsessively exchanging information about their rivals’ curses, regularly observing their rivals and holding several hours-long divination sessions to confirm or refute speculations about the cursing. In my view, the constant attention these Buryats gave to curses resembled the detailed observations of scientists in lengthy laboratory experiments. Revealingly, Buryats even stressed the importance of following the proper divinatory or soul-loss checking methods when uncovering curses – much in the same way that scientists stress the accurate implementation of their methods – so that they would not distort the divinatory results (see chapters 3 and 5).

Strange attractors: innovative shamans and fortune

If we take the analogy to chaos science further, a parallel arises between Buryat shamans (or other powerful religious practitioners) who produce innovations