Smoldering Shrines: The Religion-Making of the Early Manchu State and the Shamanic Purges of Northeast Asia

Stephen Garrett, University of Pennsylvania

Scholars analyzed Shamanism in societies across Northeast Asia in terms ranging from its validity as a coherent cross-cultural category to its relationship with modernity, religion, and the state. Central to this is the perception of Shamanism as an inherently marginalized practice peripheral to or anathematized by the centralized state. However, this subaltern identity of Shamanism, however, understood, is context-dependent rather than essential. Shamanism, better understood as a body of concepts, traditions, rituals, and ritualists within a larger category of native religion, has played an important role in state-making. While the Korean Neo-Confucian Choson Dynasty and the Buddhist Mongol Altan Khanate treated Shamanism as subversive, the early Manchu Empire incorporated shamans, rituals, and traditions into legitimizing both ruler and empire. Even when thus patronized, shamans and their traditions still faced complex politicization, regulation, and persecution when considered a rival or threat to imperial power. Even as some shamans and their practices legitimated the empire, the court accused others of witchcraft and considered them a source of dynasty-threatening power. Taking the early 17th-century purge of “wild” Shamanism and patronization of state-sanctioned Shamanism by the Manchu Khan Hong Taiji (1592-1643) as the focus and bringing it into conversation with its parallels in bordering states such as the Choson Dynasty or preceding Inner Asian states such as the Altan Khanate, this paper will demonstrate the continuity and dissonance between examples of Shamanic phenomena and their state censure across Inner and Northeast Asia. Considering ideological motives, coercive means, and opportunities of historical circumstances, this paper delivers insight into Shamanism's relationship with empire and the varying logics of patronage and repression, a divide based on the power to redraw “religious” boundaries.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 38. Boundaries of Qing Frontier Politics: Shamanism, Property Right, and Inner Barrier