From Culture to Experience: Shamanism in the Pages of the Soviet Anti-Religious Press
Contemporary European History May 1, 2020 J. Quijada 67 citations
In the 1960s, Soviet anti-religious journals changed how they depicted shamanism: it shifted from being presented as a specific ethnographic practice of Siberian indigenous peoples to being portrayed as a universal human capacity for altered states of consciousness and a precursor of mysticism, albeit a 'primitive' one. The article argues that this transformation coincided with changes in the Soviet atheist project and serves as a point of comparison highlighting similarities and differences between Soviet and Western modernist projects.