Life and Leisure

Magic mediums and their messages

By Bruce Humes (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-20 07:47

The Ergun River plays a crucial role in Chi Zijian's novel Right Bank of the Ergun. A tributary of the Amur River, it was established as the Sino-Russian border by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The folk tales recounted by the characters tell how they were long ago driven from their ancestral homeland on the left bank by the Russian army, and are now "exiled" to the right bank.

The people of the Ewenki ethnic group in Right Bank of the Ergun engage in reindeer husbandry, unlike the people on the left bank, who typically raise horses. Ordinarily, they don't eat their reindeer, valuing them instead for their milk and hides, and for transport as they move camp for better hunting and, of course, more abundant "reindeer moss" (lichen).

The Ewenki practice what anthropologists call "birch-bark culture": making baskets, utensils and even canoes out of the tree bark, reserving deerskin for boots, clothes and bedding.

They live in sierranju, the Ewenki word for teepee, which they cover with birch bark in the summer, and reindeer or moose hides in the bitterly cold winters.

Ewenki vocabulary peppers the text and is one of the bright spots in what is often a rather sad story. A subdivision of the Tungus languages, Ewenki is closely related to Manchu, the language of China's Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) rulers.

Chi Zijian's use of the language never confuses, instead highlighting things and concepts that are essentially "Ewenki": omi (soul), malu (clan spirit), kandahan (moose), labaz (animal-proof caches of emergency supplies hidden deep in the forest), and many more.

In fact, the word shaman is originally an Ewenki word, and the role of the shaman - who often doubled as clan head - was crucial. Traditional Ewenki belief is that the universe consists of an upper world that houses beneficent spirits, a middle world and a lower world that is home to evil spirits. Through their rituals, the shaman's role is to act as broker between clan members and the spirits that help or hinder their activities.

Arguably the most compelling motifs and vignettes in the novel are those involving shamanism and the Ewenki's animistic beliefs about the fire spirit, and totems such as the bear.

In one unforgettable scene, after the Japanese have proclaimed their puppet state, "Manchukuo", in 1932, an arrogant Japanese army officer dares Nidu the shaman to cure his recent leg wound.

Nidu replies simply that this can be done, but at a price: The officer's precious steed must die in exchange. The cynical officer agrees.

Nidu the shaman dons his ritual garments, communes with the spirits, and then collapses. The officer's leg is mysteriously healed, but both the fine horse and the shaman are now dead.

Similar to Tibetan traditions surrounding the sgrung, a shaman-like roaming bard who also enters a trance when performing, the Ewenki shaman can be male or female and is self-appointed, that is, not necessarily trained and anointed by a living shaman.

Read Tibetan author Alai's best-selling King Gesar (2009) for a fascinating tale of the tragic decline of this Tibetan tradition in modern times.

For China Daily