The lunar New Year celebrations of February 2000 marked a turning point for three shamanic households in Bayandun, a Buryat Mongol district in rural northeast Mongolia. After several days of visiting extended relatives and friends for feasts and the exchanging of gifts, Yaruu, the shaman whose household I lived in, became ill. As she relaxed on her bed, she suddenly retracted her limbs tightly against her body (in an illness reflex known as ‘tatasan’) and called out that she was dying from a curse. Her two daughters started crying, and her mother, Ölzii, who had overheard the commotion in an...

Almost every Buryat shamanic ceremony, divination or correcting ritual can be traced to a series of ‘chaotic’ misfortunes, which compel Buryats to seek out remedies that will make their lives orderly again. Yet Buryat religious specialists and their inquirers only obtain these remedies when carrying out tasks which sustain the religious practice and even comprise the ‘backdrop’ to it. While living among Buryats, I frequently observed them deftly divide their attention between the spirits, other people, the religious implements or even the practice as a whole – so that the ‘work’ of the ceremony consisted in meeting the demands of these...

This chapter shows how two related phenomena – fortune (khiimor’) and the soul (süns) – can be mutually influential, affecting Buryats in an increasingly good or bad way. Buryats hold that a person’s fortune and soul respond in a similar way to hostile forces, such as curses, and this sometimes makes it diffi cult to distinguish whether the fortune, soul, or both have been adversely affected. Due to this ambiguity, Buryats in Bayandun carry out divinations and use a method for detecting soul loss to gauge whether their fortunes or souls have been harmed. Then they often seek out correcting rituals to...

The two main causes of fallen fortune and soul loss during my stay in Bayandun and Shinekhen Baruun Sum were curses (kharaal) and gossip that has curse-like effects (khel am). Buryats in both of these districts told me that although curses andkhel ammay cause similar types of harm, they work according to different scales of time. Whereas curses strike their victims immediately,khel ammay harm people both immediately and after a period of delay. Curses andkhel amthus fall into the larger Mongolian ontology of ‘bad speech’ (muu yaria), which is comprised of a sliding scale...

One recent leitmotif in the anthropology of religion has been the ‘intersubjective’ relations that people, spirits, animals and other ‘subjects’ produce through their face-to-face interactions. A growing corpus of ethnographic works has shown that, through intersubjective relations, people and other subjects adopt the same intentions, assumptions or outlook onto the situation at hand, which underpins the efficacy of their magical or ritual practices (Willerslev 2007, 94–105; Bird-David 2004, 335; Devisch 1991, 120–23, see also 125 and 129–30; Whyte 1997, 68–77; Parkin 1991, 183–84, see also 187–88). Intersubjective relations are also central to the process...

Here we return to the idea that no Buryat wants to wait out the gradual length of time that fortune usually takes to recover. So when Buryats learn that their fortunes have declined but fail to improve them with divinations and correcting rituals, they usually seek out innovative remedies to raise their fortunes immediately. Yaruu’s group, which had faced recurrent curse attacks for several months, therefore produced a new curse-blocking remedy that immediately raised the group’s fortunes, resolved the cursing and diffused the rivalries leading up to it. This chapter gives ethnography on both the curse-blocking remedy and an innovative...