[WIIND BLOWS, OLD RECORDING OF SHAMAN SONG]
>> LAUREL KENDALL: A shaman is a master
of the spirits.
The word comes to us from the language
of the Even, reindeer herders living in Siberia.
[SHAMAN SONG, DRUMMING]
A shaman is someone able to travel into
spirit realms and come back with knowledge,
to go down into the underworld.
If you look at the shaman costume
of the Sakha people,
you will see that it's bedecked
with a great deal of metal.
The metal is a conductor of magic.
Some say the bits of metal
represent the bones of birds,
so that the shaman, when he flaps the arms
of the costume,
is able to fly through the sky.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
Here in the Asian Ethnographic collection,
we have an amazing trove of materials
from Siberia, related to shamanic practice.
I'm Laurel Kendall.
I'm an anthropologist.
And here we are in the Conservation Lab
of the Division of Anthropology
where our conservators have been working
on material collected by
the Jesup North Pacific Expedition
more than 100 years ago.
The Jesup North Pacific Expedition was probably
the most ambitious anthropology expedition of all time.
It was the brainchild of Dr. Franz Boas,
the founder of American anthropology,
and for many years, a curator in this Museum.
His idea was to send teams of scholars
to do research on both sides of the Bering Strait—
one on the American side,
one on the Russian side—
and have them explore the question of
who came over the Strait, when.
They would do this by looking at the cultures
of then-living peoples.
On the Siberian side, their mandate was
studying peoples' life ways,
collecting objects.
They were taking lists of vocabulary
and recording songs.
[OLD RECORDING OF SONG]
They took a lot of photographs.
They took hundreds and hundreds of
front view and side view.
This was a method in the day
when people thought that
they were studying different biological types.
But, you know, when you look at the faces
of some of these photographs,
you don't see what you see in many other places—
a very stiff, very clinical.
We get some sense of the person,
the- you know, the living human being
with an imagination,
with a sense of humor, perhaps,
behind the photograph.
[LOW DRONE, WIND BLOWING]
The Soviet era was a hard time
for Siberian peoples.
The shamans were persecuted.
And there was a fear
that Native culture might be lost.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
But once there was an opening,
we began to be contacted by Native scholars
from the Russian Far East.
And we have had many visits,
and some truly wonderful things have happened.
The Jesup Collection is important
not only to us, as part of world heritage,
but it's important—critically important—
to the descendants of the people who
worked with the Jesup Expedition.
[MUSIC PLAYS]