Tom Miller (University of California, Berkeley)
In Deaf Taiga: Shamanic Vocal Knowledge, the Geopoetics of Yukagir Song, and Ghosts of the Soviet Past in Upper Kolyma
This paper explores the spiritual geography of the Upper Kolyma region, Sakha Republic (Yakutia) through the songs of shamans and others recorded in the field by the author at the turn of the 21st century. The historic near-extinction of the Yukagir, demographically one of the smallest of the Small Peoples of the North, contrasts with their adaptation and perseverance through the Soviet era.
The role of the Yukagir shaman suggests a spiritual parallel to the secular authority of the state. The masters of the earth—local animal and nature spirits—perform surveillance and act as informants, telling the shaman about the people and their activities while acting as guardians and enforcers. Shamans communicate with their spirits by means of sounds, musically mediating between the worlds of nature and supernature. But the source of the Yukagir shaman's power is ecological, residing in sacred elements of the environment beyond the reach of bureaucrats and apparatchiks. Like the people themselves, the spirits belong to the land and are thus inalienable. In their magical otherness, shamans acted as historical conduits for resistance and provided a secret counternarrative to Soviet domination.
The militant wave of atheism following collectivization brought public ceremonies to a halt. Despite the fierce anti-shaman repression campaigns, well-known Sakha (Yakut) singers preserved sacred vocal knowledge in the north by performing and recording as secular folk artists. Shamans' songs were also presenced in outbreaks of involuntary singing diseases which periodically swept through the native settlements, triggered in part by the imposing presence of Russian authorities. The psychopathology and behavior of these echolalic nervous afflictions is documented in rare eyewitness accounts by a Soviet doctor in Kolyma during the 1920s, and in contemporary oral testimony from the author's field research. Soviet medical policies focused on collectivization and re-education as therapeutic tools to cure the singing diseases linked in native consciousness to ancestor spirits haunting and inhabiting the landscape.
In the acoustemology of place, certain forest zones thick with trees are known as deep or "deaf" taiga. Sounds are muted in such densely wooded areas; their deathly silence is a source of fear in the popular imaginary. Because of their remoteness, they became sites of prisons and death camps in the Stalinist gulag. Songs rooted in historic Russian melodies tell of doomed souls and the return of the dead encountered in these far-off places. In later Yukagir songs the stark landscape serves as a metaphor of love and loss, geopoetically marking the spatial and temporal distance between souls through lyrical images of distance and longing. The members of what Nikolai Vakhtin has called the "rupture generation" suffered the erasures of tradition and identity, undergoing the displacements of collectivization, purges, famine, and war. Through these deeply personal songs resonating with the collective memory of deprivation and persecution, the narrative of their experiences survives the Soviet epoch. At once autobiographical and rooted in folkloric motifs, they incorporate distinct influences from Russian, Sakha (Yakut), Tunguso-Manchurian, and ancient Kolymian tales and melodies in a fluid style unique to the region. The presentation includes excerpts and analysis of melodies and texts, recorded in the field by the author, showing how spiritual power was encoded in music to modulate secular Soviet authority.
The role of the Yukagir shaman suggests a spiritual parallel to the secular authority of the state. The masters of the earth—local animal and nature spirits—perform surveillance and act as informants, telling the shaman about the people and their activities while acting as guardians and enforcers. Shamans communicate with their spirits by means of sounds, musically mediating between the worlds of nature and supernature. But the source of the Yukagir shaman's power is ecological, residing in sacred elements of the environment beyond the reach of bureaucrats and apparatchiks. Like the people themselves, the spirits belong to the land and are thus inalienable. In their magical otherness, shamans acted as historical conduits for resistance and provided a secret counternarrative to Soviet domination.
The militant wave of atheism following collectivization brought public ceremonies to a halt. Despite the fierce anti-shaman repression campaigns, well-known Sakha (Yakut) singers preserved sacred vocal knowledge in the north by performing and recording as secular folk artists. Shamans' songs were also presenced in outbreaks of involuntary singing diseases which periodically swept through the native settlements, triggered in part by the imposing presence of Russian authorities. The psychopathology and behavior of these echolalic nervous afflictions is documented in rare eyewitness accounts by a Soviet doctor in Kolyma during the 1920s, and in contemporary oral testimony from the author's field research. Soviet medical policies focused on collectivization and re-education as therapeutic tools to cure the singing diseases linked in native consciousness to ancestor spirits haunting and inhabiting the landscape.
In the acoustemology of place, certain forest zones thick with trees are known as deep or "deaf" taiga. Sounds are muted in such densely wooded areas; their deathly silence is a source of fear in the popular imaginary. Because of their remoteness, they became sites of prisons and death camps in the Stalinist gulag. Songs rooted in historic Russian melodies tell of doomed souls and the return of the dead encountered in these far-off places. In later Yukagir songs the stark landscape serves as a metaphor of love and loss, geopoetically marking the spatial and temporal distance between souls through lyrical images of distance and longing. The members of what Nikolai Vakhtin has called the "rupture generation" suffered the erasures of tradition and identity, undergoing the displacements of collectivization, purges, famine, and war. Through these deeply personal songs resonating with the collective memory of deprivation and persecution, the narrative of their experiences survives the Soviet epoch. At once autobiographical and rooted in folkloric motifs, they incorporate distinct influences from Russian, Sakha (Yakut), Tunguso-Manchurian, and ancient Kolymian tales and melodies in a fluid style unique to the region. The presentation includes excerpts and analysis of melodies and texts, recorded in the field by the author, showing how spiritual power was encoded in music to modulate secular Soviet authority.
