ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the transformations and evolutions of practices and religious roles of women in the Altai Republic (Southern Siberia, Russian Federation) that are analysed in a diachronic way. Previously, women could also be shamans (kam in Altaian). Men still nevertheless represented the great majority of shamans. At the beginning of the 20th century, a millenarian, messianic, anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox religious movement called Burkhanism caused the sudden disappearance of these ritual specialists. As a mirror of Orthodoxy, men constituted a Burkhanist “clergy” in which they monopolised religious roles as “messengers”.
In spite of antireligious policies during the Soviet period, women continued certain religious practices in a hidden way, such as feeding the domestic fire or celebrating the New Year. This allowed the preservation of these particular ritual practices to some extent. Nowadays, most of these practices are (re)constructed using existing ethnographic materials.
While male ritual specialists predominate in this reinvented form of Burkhanism, women have acquired new roles and statuses as ritual experts: for instance, as bards in olden times (who were exclusively men), they receive texts from the spirits. Similar evolutions can be observed in contemporary Shamanism. Consequently, the question is to know how Altaian women, getting out of their traditional role of hearth keepers, managed to reach such religious positions usually invested by men and to increase their skills, competencies and knowledge of Burkhanism and Shamanism.
From this perspective, on the one hand, it appears suitable to examine the margins of freedom in the organisation of the patriarchal Altaian society, which has traditionally put men forward. On the other hand, we will look at some of the transformations in society caused by interactions with Russia between the 19th and 21st centuries. We will particularly focus on the improvement of women’s rights, perceived as a symbol of social progress and modernity during the Soviet period, and on the recent influence of Russian New Age.
