Spiritually Enmeshed, Socially Enmeshed: Shamanism and Belonging in Ulaanbaatar

Li Zehou’s ethics and the importance of Confucian kinship relations: the power of shamanistic rituality and the consolidation of relationalism (關係主義)

“…(Bird-David, 1999, p. 78) Recent anthropological research results also rather undoubtable prove that "shamanic practices can, through the generation of a spiritualized narrative past, relocate individual subjectivities in an extensive web of relationships" (Abrahms-Kavunenko 2016, p. 1). What is especially important for our questioning of Li Zehou's theoretical connection between shamanism, relationalism and kinship relations, is the fact that these research results, inter alia, also clearly show how and why this 'web of relationships' is located 'in a world of extended kinship connections that builds a cosmologically situated relationship' (Abrahms-Kavunenko, 2016). If we take into consideration a broader structure of early Chinese cosmologies, an axiological and social order like the Confucian one seems even as a relatively 'regular' continuation of animalistic and shamanistic religious practices and their social functions, for both worldviews also share another important element that represents an integral part of this relational network, namely the relationship with the ancestral souls, which maintains and regulates the everyday moral life in both types of cosmologies (see Wellens, 2017, p. 365).…”

Yokozuna Hakuhō—Japanese Mongolian hero

“…However, the complications of the renewal of shamanism affected by the years of “neglect” of spirits and the missing generation of shamans during the socialist regime results in suspicion toward the motivations of revived or renewed shamans. It would seem that even the spirits reflect the destitution and social unraveling in their behavior (Abrahms-Kavunenko, 2016; Buyandelger, 2018).…”