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The Last Yugur Shaman from Sunan, Gansu (China)

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The Last Yugur Shaman from Sunan, Gansu (China) VOL. 24. NOS. 1-2. SHAMAN SPRING/AUTUMN 2016 The Last Yugur Shaman from Sunan, Gansu (China) DAVID SOMFAI KARA INSTITUTE OF ETHNOLOGY, HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES In Gansu Province of Northwest China, there lives a small minority, called Yugur. They consist of two distinct groups: the Kara Yugur who are the descendants of the Orkhon Uighur Empire and speak a Turkic language, and the Shira Yugur who are one of the so-called White Mongol tribes from the Amdo Region of Tibet. The Mongolic-speaking Shira Yugur follow Tibetan Buddhism while the Turkic-speaking Kara Yugur have preserved their sha- manic traditions practiced by a specialist (elči) until recent times. The earli- est information collected on Kara Yugur shamanic traditions date back to the beginning of the 1900s. In 2011 and 2013, I visited the Western Yugur and collected data on Korgui, the last elči to conduct the yaka ritual. I also recorded a short myth from his daughter on the emergence of the first sha- man. The present article seeks to shed some light on the Kara Yugur shamans and their vanishing shamanic practices, as well as their relation to Tibetan Buddhism and the Shira Yugur religious traditions. In August, 2011, I visited the Yugur minority of China in Sunan Yugur Autonomous County, Gansu Province.1 We travelled 433 kilometres from Xining, the center of the Qinghai Province (Amdo)2 by car across the picturesque Qilian Mountains and the Biandukou Pass (3,500 m). The Yugurs number around 15,000, and the majority of them live in Sunan 1 On my first trip, I was accompanied by former director of the Institute of Ethnology (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Mihály Hoppál. 2 Amdo was the traditional name for the region in Tibetan. The current name Qinghai comes from the Chinese name of the great lake of the province (Köke-Naur in Mongol and Co-Ngoin in Tibetan meaning ‘Blue Lake’). 114 David Somfai Kara County.3 The center of Sunan is Hongwansi (红湾寺 Red Bay Temple) and four townships, Minhua, Dahe, Kangle, and Huangcheng (明 花 、大 河 、康 乐 , 皇城) have a significant Yugur population (map 1). The Yugurs are linguistically not homogeneous: the Western Yugurs speak a Turkic language (in Minhua and Dahe), while the Eastern Yugurs (in Kangle and Huangcheng) speak a Mongolic language. Western Yugur has some 4,000 speakers, while Eastern Yugur has around 2,000 speakers. The term “Yellow Uighur” is used in scholarship to designate the Yugurs (Hahn 1998). During our visit, our informants told us that the Western group was called Kara (Black) Yugur, or simply Yugur, and only the Eastern (Mongolic) group was called Shira (Yellow) Yugur.4 The Turkic Yugurs are believed to be descendants of the Orkhon Uighur Empire (744–840) (Golden 1992, 155–188) and its successor states (idem, 163–9) that existed here in Gansu (848–1036) with towns, like Ganzhou, Suzhou and Dunhuang. Later the Gansu Uighur state was conquered by the Tanguts and the Mongols. The Mongolic (East- ern Yugur) group is also called ınggar,5 and they are probably a Monguor (Tuzu) tribe that migrated here from Amdo during the Manchu Era in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was these Yugur groups that Hungarian Tibetologist Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784–1842) wanted to visit, but he died during his trip to Lhasa (Ligeti 1931). The so-called Modern Uighurs (Chinese 维吾尔 weiwu’r) of Xinjiang Province in northwest China only adopted the ethnic name “Uighur” in 1921, and they are not directly related to the Yugurs of Gansu. The Turkic-speaking Yugurs are also divided into two distinct groups: the Mountain (taglıg ) Yugur in Dahe and the Plains (oylıg) Yugur in Minhua between Jiuquan (Suzhou) and Zhangye (Ganzhou). The center of Sunan, Hongwansi got its name after a Tibetan Buddhist temple that was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The town is situated by the Longsur (Mandarin Longche) River and 3 Sunan Yugur Autonomous District has an area of 20,456 square kilometres, its population is over 50,000: 10,000 Yugurs, 10,000 Tibetans, 30,000 Han and as well as some Khalkha Mongols, Monguors, Hui and Dongxiang. The Yugurs live mainly in Minhua (3,000), Dahe (3,000) and Kangle (2,500), Huangcheng (2,000) townships. 4 See also Nugteren 2003. 5 See also Hahn (1998, 397; Nugteren 2003, 265). The Yugur-Chinese dictionary gives three meanings for the word ınggar: ‘hybrid calf (yak and cattle); foolish; Mongolic speaking Yugur’ (Lei 1992, 22). The Last Yugur Shaman from Sunan, Gansu (China) 115 Map 1. Yugur villages in Sunan Yugur Autonomous District. Drawn by Béla Nagy, 2016. Nagy, Béla by Drawn District. Autonomous Yugur Sunan in villages Yugur 1. Map 116 David Somfai Kara nowadays it is developing rapidly, giving way to an influx of the Han Chi- nese. Young generations of Yugurs switch to Mandarin, so both Turkic and Mongolic (Shira) Yugur have become endangered languages. The Yugurs were first described in modern scholarship by Grigoriĭ N. Potanin (1893). Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim (1911) visited them shortly in 1907, and mentioned some Buddhist characteristics of Yugur religious life, but referred to no shamans at all.6 It was the Russian Turkologist, Sergeĭ E. Malov (1880–1957) who, in turn, collected detailed information on Yugur shamans, among other linguistic and ethnographic data and folklore texts, during his field trip of 1910 and 1911.7 In an article Malov (1912a) gave a detailed account of his fieldwork on the elči shamans and their yaka8 rituals, an even photographed the ritual. Matthias Hermanns visited the Yugurs in 1935, and published an article (Hermanns 1940– 1941) on the Yugur along with some linguistic data and two pictures, nos. 5 and 6, and a drawing, no. 8 in the original, connected with the yaka ritual. Nowadays Chinese colleagues tend to think that shamanic traditions are forgotten among the Yugurs, though Zhong Jinwen (1995) attempted to recognize some traits of shamanism in Yugur folk tales.9 So obviously I was curious about the current situation. Having arrived to Hongwansi, I met two elderly sisters at a Yugur Minority social event: Chimitar (born 1939) and Renchirtan (born 1942). They were from the Yaglakar village (clan)10 of Dahe Township. I asked them if they had ever heard of the elči shamans and their yaka rituals. Soon it became clear that they happened to be the daughters of the last Yugur shaman, Korgai, who died in 1977, just after the Cultural Revolution ended. When we met them in Hongwansi, they were just 6 Mannerheim’s account was reviewed by Malov (1912b). 7 For further details see Thomsen (1959) with a list of Malov’s publications on the Yugur (idem, 1959, 565). 8 Some Yugur words like elči and yaka are pronounced with a voiced pharyngeal con- sonant that produced the pharyngealization of the proceeding vowel. It is indicated with a ʕ sign in the IPA system, but in order to simplify the transcript, I have omitted it. 9 It must be added that the Chinese author uses the term “shamanism” rather vaguely, what he speaks of in his article may better be classified as the “natural religion of the Yugur.” Later Zhong and Martti Roos (1997) added some complementary linguistic notes to the data they published in their 1995 article. 10 Yaglakar was the leading tribe of the Orkhon Uighur Empire founded by Kutlug Bilge in 744. The Last Yugur Shaman from Sunan, Gansu (China) 117 visiting Renchirtan’s son, Tümen Jastar (杜成峰 Du Chengfeng, from Sunan, Dahe), who lives in that town with his Tibetan wife. The Elči Specialist The following day I visited Chimitar and Renchirtan in Jastar’s home in Hongwansi (figs. 1, 2), where they showed me a picture featuring their father,11 and explained to me that there were two, or, more precisely, three types of elči. The em elči was a sort of healing shaman, while the kam elči performed rituals and evoked spirits.12 In addition, there was also a third type of shaman, called pör elči, who could perform both the healing and the spirit invoking rituals. Chimitar’s and Renchirtan’s father was a pör elči.13 (I consider elči a title of respect—like Old Turkic tarqan and Old Uighur baqši from Chinese boshi—given to different religious specialists: qam ‘shaman’ and emči ‘healer’.) Chimitar and Renchirtan also showed us their father’s shamanic paraphernalia (dorwun),14 which closely resembled the headdress of some Tibetan Bonpo specialists (figs. 3, 4).15 It is interesting to note here that Malov (1912a, 63) remarks that Yugur shamans did not use any special attire, and that they performed ceremonies in their everyday dress. Korgui could not pass on his tradition to his son—Malov also men- tions that the Yugur shaman Sanıšqap planned to pass on his knowledge to his twelve-year-old son (1912a, 61) and that it often happened that shamans’ sons followed their fathers in their profession (idem, 1912a, 64)—due to the political situation during the Cultural Revolution, so the last Yugur shaman died having no pupils. Her daughters had only a limited knowledge of shamanic traditions and the yaka ritual, since girls were not allowed to participate at religious ceremonies. Only sons 11 I took a picture of the old photograph, but its quality is too poor to be reproduced here. 12 See also Lei (1992, 27). 13 Malov (1912a, 63) explains that elči and qam were two different terms for the same shaman. 14 Malov also mentioned an object, called torvun (1912a, 63) saying that it was some kind of “magic bag,” hanging on the wall of the shaman’s house, but did not report anything about its usage.
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