Vernacular Historiography and Shamanic Genealogy of the Barga People. Ongγod qar-a sakiγus-un teüke Reconsidered

Abstract

Abstract A manuscript entitled Ongγod qar-a sakiγus-un teüke sudur bičig orosiba, written in the Classical Mongolian script, was acquired by Henning Haslund-Christensen in the Barga area of the Chakhar province of Inner Mongolia during the Royal Danish Geographical Society’s Central Asian Expedition (1938–1939). The text is currently preserved in the Royal Library of Copenhagen. Scholars who have previously worked with the source have characterised it as a secular chronicle on the origins of shamanism among the Chakhars or a Mongolian shamanistic manuskript, dating not later than the eighteenth century. The present article offers a detailed philological-historical analysis of the chronicle’s content and language as well as the historical circumstances of its discovery. Based on this analysis, the authors reconsider the source’s dating, re-evaluate the information included in the chronicle in the context of the political and cultural history of particular ethnic groups such as the Bargas, Solons and Uriankhais, and seek to prove that the text cannot be viewed as a source on Mongolian or Central Asian shamanism considered as a homogeneous religious system.