Petra Rethmannthreads so that they can immediately set themselves up in the other
world. Shura Shishkin had to make sure that all of this happened.
On those occasions, she insisted on my presence. She held up objects
given to the dead person so that I could better photograph them. She
also taught me something about the proper dealings with (what we
call) magic mushrooms (mukhamory) and spirits. The day I left to
live in a reindeer camp in the tundra, she gave me little parcels filled
with lauteng, a sort of sacred grass, reindeer flesh, beads, and tobacco.
They were for me to drop on the way to the camp, to ensure my pro-
tection and safety.
Shura Shishkin’s idea of learning, I believe, was steeped in experi-
ence. And what that meant was that one had to be present. Not just
“there,” but fully aware of the moment, of the now. To be fully open
to what was happening in the moment. And nothing evinced this bet-
ter than her insistence that I needed to play the drum. There were two
old drums hanging over her bedstead, and one of her grandchildren
had scribbled little pictures on one of them. While Shura Shishkin ap-
peared unconcerned, in the beginning I was troubled by this. For, to
my mind, initially at least, the drums were part of Koriak artifacts,
ritual objects, sacred, through which one could communicate with
the spirits. Or so it had been written in the books on Siberian anthro-
pology. In fact, I had written an ma thesis on the concept of ecstasy
in Siberian shamanism around the area of Lake Baikal and thought I
knew something about it. For Shura Shishkin, it turned out, the drum
was living and not dead. To me the drum was interesting but, in a
way, also dead: I had never used it. Shura Shishkin saw things quite
differently. Who cared if there were a few scribbles on it? Perhaps her
grandchild had had fun drawing those pictures, and perhaps it made
him quiet. The drum could still be used to quiet oneself and others,
and to call on other beings.
And this was what Shura Shishkin set out to teach me. To play the
drum. Let’s be clear: I was never very good at it. Moreover, most of
the time I felt embarrassed. I had read so much about anthropologi-
cal criticisms of fieldwork, research, and “going native” that I entirely
refused to play. I was, after all, a person with a critical mind—and
mostly only allowed myself to experience things through the mind,