Living the dream: Nanai shamanic experiments and porous engagements in the Siberian Far East

Abstract

This article is about the ways in which shamanic practice is engaged in navigating and responding to the current climatic and geopolitical crisis in Far East Siberia, Russia, through proposing experimental multiversal projects. It traces the manner in which a Nanai (Indigenous peoples of Siberia, Russia; literally, people of the Earth) sama (shaman), hereafter, shaman, brings together diverse techniques, such as shamanic dreams, storytelling, Christian prayers and game playing to materialise fragile moments of what this article names ontological porosity between different systems of knowing-being-doing. Focusing further on the tensions that this process implies, the article offers reflections on the notions of protest movements and resistance in areas of enforced silence and neglect.

Introduction

In the summer of 2021, many parts of Siberia, Russia, much like the rest of the world, were consumed by Covid-19. On top of the raging pandemic, new waves of extreme heat resulting in wildfires, permafrost thaw and floods continued to alarm Indigenous communities across different regions (Crate, 2021; Ulturgasheva, 2022). For the Nanai (Indigenous peoples of Siberia, Russia; literally, people of the Earth) living in and around Khabarovsk in Far East Siberia, it was a particularly difficult time as they experienced another year of scarce access to fish and wood caused by the climatic crisis and increasing resource exploitation. In 2022, the Amur River which flows through the city of Khabarovsk was empty for the first time in many years, as there were no fish at all. The very same year, the war in Ukraine broke out and partial conscription was announced. Many of those called up were from Indigenous communities, including Nanai. It is within this sociopolitical and environmental context that our critical analysis of protest movements and shamanic political engagements in urban settings has emerged. This article is the product of a collaboration between Leonid, a Nanai activist, researcher, writer and sama (shaman), hereafter, Shaman, and a Polish social anthropologist. It focuses on Leonid’s unique multiversal—combining ideas and techniques from different systems of thought and practice—experiment and a lifelong project, which brings together Nanai dreams, spirits, shamanic skills, chess playing, and Christian blessings and prayers in order to problematise the ways we go about protest and political resistance. Thus, the article offers important considerations for the avenues through which shamanic practice goes beyond the use of traditional shamanic tools, such as the drum, and spills over the ritual space to become a critical point of consideration for the role of shamanic practice in, what we name in this article, ontological porosity. By ontological porosity, we refer to temporary, and often dramatic, moments of openness and permeability (Bodenhorn, 2012; Smith, 2012) as key in addressing and tackling environmental and political crises as well as protecting Indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing.

Indigenous engagements in environmental and political movements seeking to protect Indigenous worlds and rights against the backdrop of colonial regimes, geopolitical upheavals and climatic crises have been widely discussed in the scholarly literature. They trace collaboration and interweavement of Indigenous and scientific knowledges (Ulturgasheva & Bodenhorn, 2022; Cruikshank, 2005; Moreton-Robinson, 2016; TallBear, 2017), the use of Indigenous concepts as a discrete response and survival strategies (Aikau et al., 2016; McGregor, 2018; Ulturgasheva, 2017, 2022), protest politics (Balzer, 2023; Lane, 2018) and novel methodological propositions (Escobar, 2018, 2020; Guntarik & Harwood, 2022; Hokowhitu, 2016), to name a few. In a number of these movements, a pivotal role is played by shamans, whose abilities to negotiate, advocate and translate have long been studied as being key in facilitating social change and transformation (Grant, 2021; Humphrey, 1996), including confrontations with White settler-colonists (Taussig, 1987; Whitehead & Wright, 2004), reinstitution of Indigenous rights in lieu of the collapse of the Soviet regime (Balzer, 2005, 2008; Vitebsky, 2003), navigation of economic uncertainties (Kendal, 2009; Niehaus, 2005) and existential uncertainties in the presence of sociopolitical shifts (Buyandelger, 2007; Pedersen, 2011). Shamans are also active participants in the processes of confronting climatic crises, as mediators between diverse experiences of climate change (Haberman, 2021; Riboli et al., 2021), and as representatives of a “spiritual-political resistance discourse” (Balzer, 2023, p. 38), including the activist work of Yanomani (Indigenous peoples of Amazonia, South America; literally, human being) shaman Davi Kopenava of the Brazilian Amazon (Ghosh, 2021; Kopenava & Albert, 2013) and the protest of Yakut (Indigenous peoples of Siberia, Russia; literally, people of the border) shaman Alexander Gabyshev in Russia (Balzer, 2023; Jonutyté, 2020). Through these studies, shamans emerge as visionaries undergirding complex models of thinking and techniques for addressing environmental and geopolitical turbulence across times and places.

Our discussion aims at broadening this purview of conceptual and methodological approaches to Indigenous environmental and political engagements by adding an important spin to the ways in which shamanic practice has been discussed in scholarly work as engaged in the nexus of spirituality, opposition politics and activism in moments of crisis. Problematising the notion of protest itself, we ask what transformational movements imply when the voices of those concerned are not only completely ignored, but also forcibly silenced by the threat of criminal prosecutions or psychiatric confinement (Balzer, 2023). We go on to explore how addressing the current climatic and geopolitical situation in Far East Siberia by Nanai requires the use of shamanic skills of negotiation and weave, yet, at the same time, does not embody the classic models of spiritual-political resistance or religious syncretism. By spiritual-political resistance, we refer to definitions foregrounded in the notions of mere confrontation and defence (Hokowhitu, 2016; TallBear, 2016) while by religious syncretism we point to fusion or diffusion of diverse religious elements (Leopold & Jensen, 2016). Turning towards the fields of political ontology (Escobar, 2020) and pluriverse (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018), we show how Leonid’s project and his reflections on it represent a discrete act of communication embedded in storytelling and conversation, rather than an event of protest. In this way, our analysis offers an ethnographic account of the ways in which shamans initiate, produce and maintain material markers of fragile dialogues between ideas and techniques that have rarely spoken on the common conceptual plane before, in order to foreground and cultivate urgent moments of worldly openness and interdependence—ontological porosity, rather than separation and singularity (Escobar, 2020, p. 11771801241261718i). Focusing further on the tensions that these encounters produce, our article provides an opportunity to critically reflect on theoretical models addressing shamanic commitments in relation to environmental and political movements, such as the aforementioned political ontology and pluriverse.

Drawing on experimental and virtual ethnography, this article emerges from 2 years of joint research conducted parallelly in Khabarovsk (Siberia) and Manchester (England) between 2021 and 2023. Our collaboration, in the Russian language, has been based on extensive semi-structured interviews and discussions with Leonid about his work as a shaman and an activist, and supplemented by the study of Nanai archive materials, photographs, virtual focus groups and semi-structured interviews with Nanai and Russian members of the cultural centre Buri (a bow), named after the hill upon which Khabarovsk was founded, and run by Leonid. The article engages with three stages of Leonid’s project, including the establishment of the Nanai chapel in Khabarovsk, the reinstatement of the Nanai chess game apokachi (a fighter), and an outdoor event organised on the eve of the local elections for a city mayor. All three stages are accompanied by experiences of prophetic dreams.

Living the dream

Nanai are an Indigenous community of Far East Asia who live mostly on the banks of the Amur River and speak a Tungus-Manchu language. They are a fishing and hunting community, and access to fish and fishing are at the very heart of Nanai day-to-day lives. This transpires in numerous practices, such as cooking techniques, diverse festivals, stories and legends, and interactions with water spirits (Gajew, 1991; Smoljak, 1991). Nanai were officially incorporated into Russia in the late 19th century, with Christian missions expanding in the region at the same time. Until the 1920s, Nanai retained, however, many of its traditions, along with the language and shamanic practice (Forsyth, 1992). The following expansion of the Soviet Union resulted in radical Russification and enforced atheism pushing shamans into secrecy (Bulgakova, 2009). With the collapse of the Soviet regime, shamanic practice has retained its discreet form, often conflated with neo-shamanic influences and shamanic societies offering tourist attractions. While traditional shamanic rituals, such as healing and hunting practices, remain present in Nanai shamanic training, the environmental and political pressures require a different kind of engagement from shamans such as Leonid in the navigation of extra-human and intra-human interactions.

Each year, the number of fish in Siberian rivers decreases drastically and diverse measures are being undertaken to avert their complete extinction. Unexpected environmental changes, such as rising temperatures, fires, pollution and human exploitation, influence further the ways in which natural resources are being used, directly affecting the number of fish in Siberia. While all Indigenous communities living in Khabarovsk, including Nanai, Nivkh, Ulchi and Eveny, are formally entitled to a specific number of fish every year, to receive this entitlement they have to prove their Indigenousness through extensive and chaotic bureaucratic processes, including providing birth certificates and Soviet passports which would confirm their ethnicity (Murashko, 2020). Many Nanai do not manage to successfully complete this process, which echoes wider tensions between Indigenous communities and governments around the world in evidencing ethnicity (Dove, 2006) through notions, such as Indigenous DNA (TallBear, 2017) and blood quantum (Whyte, 2016). The official entitlement to fish leads further to conflicts between Russians and Indigenous communities, as Russians do not benefit from a similarly secured access to the resource, even though in reality neither do the Nanai. Every year, Nanai express concerns for the lack of support from the local governing bodies and funders, as well as for their limited representation in the fish industry companies. In 2022, fears over environmental degradation together with the increasing general negligence of the needs of Indigenous communities were magnified by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and partial conscription, which in the first place involved Indigenous peoples. The ongoing geopolitical crisis along with the official state propaganda has further silenced (often under threat) any opposing voices, which has made the situation of Indigenous communities even more complex. Given the lack of any form of support or protective measures, one of the places where plans and discussions for the future of Nanai are drawn up on a daily basis is the Nanai Cultural Centre Buri run by Leonid, who since 2011 has worked for the Nanai community in Khabarovsk as a fierce protector of Nanai culture seeking its restoration and preservation. We began our collaboration in early 2021 when, limited by the travelling rules of Covid-19, we decided to set up an ethnographic experiment to conduct our joint research on Indigenous groups and climate change in Siberia through virtual means. One of the central topics of our collaborative research was Leonid’s unique project which was intended to vocalise Nanai ecological and existential concerns and needs through interweaving multicultural practices in a refreshed and postcolonial manner. The idea for the project came to Leonid in his dreams.

The practice of dreaming plays a particular role for Nanai in their decision-making processes. However, Nanai do not have dreams, instead they have tolkichi, also known as tolkini, such that they see or witness a dream. Dreaming often allows Nanai to interact with their deceased relatives and spirits who come to offer warnings and guidance, most of the time in a disguised form. Thus, for Nanai, many dreams might not be related to the actual physical world; nonetheless, they are closely connected to their lives. Dreams have always been an essential part of Nanai shamanic work and its power. Shamans would receive their calling through dreams; interact and converse with spirits while dreaming; interpret dreams as part of healing practices; offer prophecies and advice on any decision-making acts; or even suffer from dream illness if their soul was lost (Shirokogoroff, 1935/2005; Smoljak, 1991). It is also with dreaming that Leonid began the first part of his experimental project, that is, the building of the first Nanai Orthodox Chapel.

Leonid was brought up by his grandmother, a Nanai shaman who had promised to pass her shamanic powers and knowledge on to him one day. Nanai inherit the shamanic gift through blood and from a young age observe their relatives in shamanic rituals. The calling takes place usually in dreams, when a deceased shaman visits his successor followed by a brief period of shamanic illness (Smoljak, 1991). Indeed, as a child, Leonid supported his grandmother as a young apprentice and often accompanied her in many rituals. After Leonid’s grandmother died, she would regularly visit him in dreams offering advice and prophecies. For four consecutive years, however, no shamanic calling occurred, and Leonid was getting impatient. Eventually, he witnessed a dream where his grandmother in an unusually deep and loud voice said to him in Russian: “You are not focused enough yet”—a sentence he could not really comprehend at the time. In sequences of other dreams which followed over the next couple of years, he continued to witness his grandmother and some of the Nanai spirits often sitting silently outside a chapel, yet never going inside. He continued to feel some form of a calling being passed on to him, yet he was not able to discern what his grandmother sought to communicate. Moreover, he did not experience a common episode of shamanic illness. Instead, Leonid witnessed a dream where his grandmother sat next to the chapel with one of the Christian saints—this is how he describes this dream:

I thought it was an opening, a start to a crossing that is not easy and not obvious, but necessary. I decided to build a chapel for Nanai. Christians may go to heaven but who knows how well in that heaven we actually are. For Nanai, if you build something here, it will go with you to the next world. It will help the whole group of Nanai who are in Buni (the World of the Dead) and who are also Orthodox.

Therefore, dreaming represented an important process for Leonid in which both his unusual shamanic calling and a plan for the new project occurred. It gave key information, although disguised, for undertaking decisions with agency that transpired both waking and sleeping. In this way, Leonid’s dreams reflected the first example of ontological porosity—openness and permeability—between different forms of consciousness—sleep and waking, between the dead and the living, Leonid and his grandmother, between human and non-human, Leonid, non-anthropomorphic spirits and a human saint. These crossings were productive in a sense that they forged a distinct oneiric epistemology that was carefully threaded through different elements of strange encounters and confusing visions. Considering himself an authentic shaman, Leonid knew his calling could not be rejected. However, it required a different set of practices from the traditional ones he had learned from his grandmother. As he remarked, the Nanai community in Khabarovsk today is in need of the kind of shamanic work that intensifies negotiations and navigation of interactions, but goes beyond direct relationships with spirits as in a shamanic séance and the use of traditional shamanic tools, such as the drum. The proposed chapel was about to become a place where such interactions could happen. Thus, Leonid began to live his dream.

Materialising porosity—the chapel

The Nanai were christened in the 19th century by Saint Innokientij (1797–1879) Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomensk, glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977, as part of the missionary and colonial projects that Russia undertook in Siberia at the time. Saint Innokientij of Moscow was responsible for baptising all Far Eastern communities and designed an alphabet for the Indigenous languages of the area (Gajew, 1991). Most Nanai today embrace Christianity, at least formally, with some viewing it as a regular component of their day-to-day life, an inheritance from the ancestors, much like a shamanic calling, or as a sociocultural necessity. As part of the ongoing missionary project, the Orthodox Church in Khabarovsk has established a committee dedicated to collaboration with Indigenous peoples. However, for many Nanai, the committee does not understand their needs and concerns which go far beyond the missionary and conversion tasks propelled by the Church. Yet it is through this committee and his friendship with the priest Mikhail that Leonid introduced his project of building the first Nanai Orthodox Chapel in Siberia (only briefly mentioning the role of dreams in his design as these tend to be considered by the church as the work of the devil). Leonid reflects on this part of the project as follows:

As a nation, we were baptised in order to move forward and communicate with Russians. This move had to be made. Now, we have two confessions, this is part of our culture. You need to shift, even though you keep the previous forms. Thanks to your culture you can start a new mission. You use strategies from other cultures and nations in order to develop your own, rather than waiting for the people who take advantage of you to give you something, as you dance and sing for them.

The process of realising the project took over 9 years and was finally completed in 2021. On October 6, 2021, the long-awaited chapel was finally opened. It is a small room at the Buri centre filled with Christian icons and Nanai artefacts, such as fabrics, clothing, paintings, Nanai chess and a shamanic drum. It is meant to represent a unique space where people can pray, learn and discuss the history of both the Nanai culture and Orthodox Christianity and study the Nanai language. Once a week, the priest visits the chapel and offers a service, blessings and prayers. This event is usually well attended by both Russians and Nanai who work for the centre. Apart from the weekly mass, the chapel serves as a place where Nanai can be baptised, and the priest can bless diverse projects prepared by the centre, such as apokachi. By developing interactions with the priest, Leonid seeks to tap into Christianity as an embodiment of spiritual certainty weaving the church into his design as another way for social connection which can be shared between Nanai and Russians. While the dynamics of this collaboration are asymmetrical (a point that will be returned to later), they are dedicated to an idea of bringing people together and promoting an event of encounter and participation within religious boundaries. A similar process of entering and navigating a foreign system of knowing-being-doing to forge fragile interactions occurs in the context of apokachi.

Apokachi

As the chapel began its work, Leonid continued to witness recurring dreams, travelling through different villages, which remained empty, occasionally encountering spirits looking at him from afar. Some of these dreams included visitations from his grandmother, some did not. But he knew his work must continue. The second stage of Leonid’s project involved further support from the church; however, this time outside the religious discourse. Bringing together Nanai practices of storytelling as part of interactions with spirits and landscape (Gayer, 1991; Smoljak, 1991) and Russian proclivity for playing chess, Leonid decided to reinstate the forgotten Nanai game of apokachi, which is similar to regular chess. However, it offers a greater freedom of moves across the board carved into 10 pokto (roads) and has the distinctive flat shape of the wooden pawns also called pikte (soldiers). With approval from the Orthodox Church exemplified through official blessings and participation in the training sessions at the Buri centre, despite the Church’s concerns over gambling, the devil’s involvement and sinful conduct, apokachi quickly gained interest among both Russians and Nanai. Through weekly competitions at the centre and local festival appearances, the game started to bring together children and adults, and representatives of different professions, such as fishermen, journalists, teachers, local artists and even some members of the local authorities. As the apokachi project continued to gain in popularity, Leonid witnessed another dream. His grandmother came to him with an apokachi board and put numerous colourful stones on one of its sides. While Leonid did not recognise the meaning of the stones, he decided that his project was ready for its third and final stage. In early summer 2023, before the election for the city mayor, Leonid conducted a public event in one of the city’s popular squares, opposite the local government building. His goal was to take his project outside the chapel, the cultural centre and the festival venues and bring it to anyone who wished to speak to him. Wearing his shamanic costume, he spent seven consecutive days playing apokachi with random strangers on one of the benches in the square.

Using apokachi as a material marker of tense communication is a technique in which, after a new player expresses the will to play, Leonid introduces the rules and presents apokachi as an embodiment of a distinct combat strategy, where Nanai fight for their territory. Once the player understands the rules, the conversation continues around the successes and challenges the game as a project encounters, including challenges faced by Nanai themselves. At this stage, Leonid discusses ways in which new players can get involved in the apokachi project to help promote it. The key aspect, as he says, is to make sure players understand where they live and who they live with. Thus, reverting to the idea of competition and strict game rules, Leonid in a truly shamanic, that is disguised, manner seeks to embrace the ways of knowing-doing-being dominant in the contexts of power and hierarchy, such as science and politics, and navigate them in a productive manner (Ulturgasheva & Stelmaszyk, 2024). In this way, the game, like the chapel, becomes a platform for porous encounter and intermittent interactions, this time though outside the religious boundaries. However, as Leonid stresses, he does not want his project to be seen as a protest or mere confrontation. The ultimate goal is rather different.

Cosmic weavers

The idea of interweaving shamanic landscapes with Christianity, in particular in the context of political movements, is not novel in Siberia, and has been documented, for example, as part of anticolonial protests at the beginning of the 20th century (Balzer, 2023; Vinogradov, 2010), and the re-establishment of Indigenous rights, including land ownership rights in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union (Balzer, 2005; Pimienova, 2013; Vitebsky, 2003). The most recent example of combining shamanic and Christian elements was a protest and march on Moscow widely commented in the international media and exercised by shaman Gabyshev (Balzer, 2023). While Leonid’s project certainly embodies the shamanic skills of conjuring diverse elements from different sociocultural models with political and ecological engagements in mind, it is not, however, an event of protest understood as a profoundly political act of rebellion or resistance (Ghosh, 2021). Considering it as an example of mere religious syncretism also appears reductive given the vagueness of the term itself (Leopold & Jensen, 2016) and the span of the project, such as popularisation of apokachi, which goes well beyond the boundaries of religious, old or new, fields. We, therefore, propose it should be considered, as Leonid himself defines it, as a distinct act of communication, an urgent quest for intra-human and non-human porosity, and interdependence aimed at productive negotiation rather than confrontation.

In recent studies, some Indigenous scholars have expressed concerns regarding Indigenous projects and activism engagements being entrapped in the binary of coloniser/colonised discourses (Hokowhitu, 2016; TallBear, 2016). As TallBear (2016) has suggested Indigenous peoples should become “promiscuous disciplinary travellers and radical experimental surgeons, reattaching knowledges one to another in our approaches to the problems we tackle” (p. 73). Tallbear (2016) has further stressed, “the hope is that we not only protect our own interests but also go beyond, that our participation pushes the entire field toward more democratic practice” (p. 79). Leonid’s project precisely reflects such calls. Contextualising his political, ecological and sociocultural concerns and engagements in the place where voices are often forcibly silenced, he sees the chapel and apokachi as material markers of a dialogue that Nanai wish to establish with other parties, such as representatives of other religions, ethnicities, political and infrastructural bodies, and scientists. As Leonid repeatedly highlights, the project is a strategic move, a discrete method through which some urgent connections can be established and humans can be pushed into a condition of porosity that is momentary openness and permeability. In the project, Christianity functions as a trajectory, an enabling force which can facilitate such moments. Thus, the project does not necessarily create a new kind of religion or seek to establish a fusion of different religious elements. Instead, all three events deliver vulnerable and fragile spaces of crisscrossing and encounter, bringing together diverse ideas about the past and the future, the human and the non-human—spirits, the dead, the environment, the shamanic and the Christian, the Nanai and the Russian, as well as different techniques such as storytelling, game playing, praying and dreaming. In order to function, however, they require a person who can conjure these elements and exercise their porosity and permutation. As Ghosh (2021) states, it is hoped that in these spaces “a common idiom and a shared story—a narrative of humility in which humans acknowledge their mutual dependence not just on each other, but on all our relatives” (p. 242) will be established.

However, this multiversal experiment remains embedded in non-symmetrical relations of power and hierarchy, lodged between the ideas of openness, missionary assimilation and sociopolitical ignorance. In this way, it raises questions of how projects which seek to bring together diverse techniques of knowing-being-doing can be realised and propagated, especially in places of enforced silence and neglect, and what such realisations may require.

Micropluriverse

Recent ethnographic studies (Escobar, 2020; Ulturgasheva, 2022), while upholding the importance of theoretical and methodological proposals which foreground collaboration, point to the challenges associated with fragile crossings that such projects require. They specifically highlight the non-symmetrical interexchanges between systems of thought and practice, in particular, domination of one model and the inevitability of hierarchy and power dynamics as the governing aspects of any communication. This also transpires in the context of Leonid’s work. As discussed in the introduction to this article, Leonid’s project was created in response to the alarming situation of the Nanai in Khabarovsk triggered by climatic and geopolitical turbulence. In the absence of any other interventions, support or protective measures, the project has, indeed, delivered some hope through a series of events, including numerous Nanai members of the centre joining the green party; the increase of invitations extended to Nanai artists and activists to diverse festivals; winning a grant to popularise apokachi as a sport discipline and introduce it as part of ethnography classes in schools in Far East of Siberia; and inviting Buri centre members to participate in new regional ecological initiatives. The biggest success involved Leonid becoming an Indigenous representative on the regional committee dedicated to the dissemination of the fish resource in the Amur region. However, while the chapel operates on a day-to-day basis and apokachi continues to gain interest as a sport discipline in Khabarovsk and beyond, Leonid continues to be confronted with numerous financial, political and personal challenges, including the death of his beloved wife, Wera, a legal dispute with one of the members of The Society of Indigenous Small-numbered Peoples of the Far East, and a never-ending struggle for funding.

Apart from these numerous external obstacles, Leonid faces some of the internal dynamics of power as part of realising the chapel and apokachi projects. While priest Mikhail expresses his profound friendship for Leonid and recognises the importance of Nanai practices, his work, nonetheless, is embedded in the wider context of a missionary project and ultimate conversion, which are rarely absent from most of the major religious systems (Escobar, 2020, p. 21). The will to balance this uneven encounter and navigate the intensity with which porosity between different pieces of this experiment occurs lies on the side of the shaman Leonid. A great example of how these interexchanges reach fragile and tense moments is a recent event concerning a shamanic drum present as a symbol at the entrance to the chapel. One day, after a weekly blessing and a meeting in the chapel, the priest looked at the drum and suddenly suggested: “Why don’t we put the Christian cross on the drum? This way, the prayers can be made while you are drumming” (fieldnotes, 2023). Leonid looked at the priest with a smile and replied: There is no bloody way I am going to do this.

As Leonid stresses, there are certain limits to how far he is willing to go with his project. He also finds it very uncomfortable when some journalists in Khabarovsk and beyond continue to describe him as an orthodox shaman in their articles, along with Nanai practices such as apokachi being referred to as a rich source of tourist attraction in the region. Leonid’s work with the church as part of his experimental project is also occasionally considered by Khabarovsk dwellers as an example of sneaky marketing to promote and advance his personal career as a local politician. To Leonid, this is another example of a lack of understanding and a reductive take on what his project implies and on what needs and fears Indigenous communities have. Another instance of a lack of collaborative symmetry reflects the role of the chapel in Buni, the Nanai world of the dead. The chapel is an entity that those Nanai, who are Christian, will be able to carry with them once they reach Buni. The reason for this stems from the fact that Christian heaven remains a rather unappealing place for Nanai where there are no guarantees of living well. This vividly indicates the gaps in the priest’s conversion strategies which clearly do not accommodate the Nanai relationship with Christianity, but rather impose a singular paradigm of what life after death must be. The experiment conducted by Leonid is, therefore, a project which brings together the cosmic and the political, but where constant, resilient and sometimes disguised or ambiguous, manoeuvring, a characteristic of shamanic practice, must occur.

Thus, we argue that what Leonid’s work reflects is, first and foremost, the notion of cosmological world-making or world-constituting (Escobar, 2020; Kapferer, 2002) where material and immaterial traces and fragments are conjured together to enact a discrete cosmovision (Ulturgasheva, 2017). This technique is a wider reflection of sociality based on the principle of accommodation rather than incorporation present among Northern Siberians, including the Nanai, and the Circumpolar North animist societies (Bodenhorn, 2000; Cruikshank, 2005; Ulturgasheva, 2017). It derives from the kind of sociality embedded in the notions of movement and reciprocity, where space is provided for the accommodation—rather than assimilation—of the other into an existing cosmological order (Ulturgasheva, 2017). Moreover, as we have shown, the project represents a complex and dynamic meshwork with asymmetrical relationships that, as we propose, can be best understood through the field of political ontology (Escobar, 2020) and pluriversal tooling (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018).

De la Cadena and Blaser (2018) define pluriverse as a tool where through a series of practices numerous worlds come together and mediate their difficult co-being. What is particularly pivotal here is the premise upon which a pluriversal method allows what was once considered an antagonism to be turned into a productive yet tense possibility (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). Such opposing elements are represented in Leonid’s project through, for example, practices which see dreams as creations of subconsciousness or the work of the devil, as suggested by the priest, and dreams as agentive in a decision-making process; or shamans as unique cosmovisionaries and shamans as symbolic representatives of Indigenous cultures which foster ethnotourism. Pluriverse as a methodological tool is considered as an element of the wider field of political ontology (Escobar, 2020). As Escobar (2020) argues, political ontology “provides a space for studying the relationships between worlds, including the conflicts that result when different ontologies or worlds strive to preserve their existence in their interactions with other worlds, under asymmetric conditions of power” (p. 25). Such struggles are precisely reflected in, for example, the diverse aims that according to Leonid, he and the priest seek to secure through their collaboration, accommodation versus assimilation, attempts to put a cross on a shamanic drum; reducing Leonid’s work as a shaman to a mere tourist attraction or orthodox priesthood; showing that not all participants in Leonid’s project are equally pluriversal. However, Leonid never gives up emanating a kind of resilience and persistence that only shamans can express. Offering an ethnographic reflection on political ontology as a theoretical proposal, his project thus highlights the importance of internal and external dynamics of collaborative projects in terms of precision, perseverance and resilience that are needed to carefully navigate and weave pieces of different worldings as they encounter one another. It further pushes our thinking about shamanic practice beyond explanatory paradigms which tend to reduce shamans to meaning providers while, still, often confining them to the rigid boundaries of the ritual technique and one onto-epistemic system. Thanks to Leonid, the chapel and apokachi continue to generate a discrete space of porosity and openness while stressing the importance of interdependence. They attempt to give voice where silence prevails and record “the rise and political mobilization of relationality as a space for struggle and life force” (Escobar, 2020, p. 25), thus offering a glimmer of hope in the uncertain future.

Conclusion

In this article, we have described the ways in which shamanic practice spills over a singular shamanic context and one cosmological setting while proposing an experimental design to seek the condition of worldly porosity and fragile collaborations. By weaving shamanic dreams, Nanai storytelling practices, Christian prayers and blessings, a sport game and ecological concerns in different ways, Leonid’s project promotes active measures to provide new models of thinking and acting in the presence of profound uncertainty that engulfs us all. It shows how shamanic engagements in environmental and political resistance movements do not necessarily embody the notions of confrontation and protest in a strict sense. Rather, through platforms such as the chapel and apokachi they forge moments of porosity which may, however, involve some elements of ambiguity and challenge. Stressing the importance of practices which facilitate the conditions of openness and permeability, Leonid’s project offers further an urgent reflection on taking action in places where voices are forcibly silenced, especially with regard to environmental degradation and political systems, and where any other forms of intervention and support remain absent or purposely withheld. Moreover, in the uncertain and turbulent geopolitical context of today, Leonid’s approach points to the necessity of incessant resilience, where the present and the future can be productively negotiated rather than diminished. Thus, Leonid’s work provides insights on the ways in which shamanic practice today may open avenues to move beyond one-worldism within the scholarly debates, while contributing to the understanding of the nexus of spirituality, politics and protest.

Embodying conceptual fields of political ontology and pluriverse, Leonid’s work accentuates further the key role of internal and external dynamics of such projects in terms of the perseverance and precision that are necessary to negotiate and weave different cosmological elements as they encounter one another. As we have shown, these forms of collaboration are vulnerable in a sense that they are subject to non-symmetrical exchanges and politics of power and hierarchy. As such, they require carefully threaded navigation underpinned once again by profound resilience that emerges from the shaman, as often the actors involved in realising pluriversal projects are not equally pluriversal themselves. In this way, the project’s emphasis on openness, multiplicity and ontological porosity is fragile and in need of constant adjusting and coercing, just like any shamanic ritual. This allows further reflection on how theoretical models which foster multiplicity of worlds work on the ground, amid climatic and geopolitical crisis, reinforcing what symmetrical collaboration might imply and whether it is at all attainable.