Hello there!

This week has been a very interesting one in regards to this course, and I am excited to fill you in!
Last Tuesday, we took a class field trip to Chapel Hill, where we got to see a performance by Youssou N’Dour, one of the most famous pop musicians in Senegal. The entire show was brilliant and full of incredible energy; even when I couldn’t fully grasp what was going on (there was a point where people handed the performers handfuls of dollar bills?), I could sense how much the event meant to the West African members of the audience. My favorite part of the show was that a group of audience members went up to the front and danced. Something that I found really cool was the way that Youssou N’Dour incorporated a narrative-style storyline into his performance and, of course, this sparked some ideas regarding our silk road project.
I’ve become a lot more interested in the role that the Cultural Revolution played in the current shape of modern Shamanic practices. Of course, the region that I am the most focused on (as far as origins go) is  Mongolia, but as we have learned most recently in class,  the regions of Mongolia fluctuated quite a bit. The regions that were heavily impacted by the Cultural Revolution were also impacted by the reign of the Mongols.
An article that has been especially helpful to me recently is called New Material on East Mongolian Shamanism, and it was written in 1990. Of course, newness is relative here because it is now 2016, but a lot of the content has been instrumental in my research and I am learning that when you delve into the depths of history like this, sometimes the best source really is a rather old one. This field of study (although I definitely agree with our professor Eric’s ideas about the limitations of typifying disciplines) is different from psychology in that it is not necessarily detrimental to cite a source that is old. Additionally, as I become more specific with my research the range of sources diminishes–thank god! This particular article focuses on the Shamanism of the Mongol population north and east of the Hsiang mountains up to the Yablonoj mountains, and it includes names for types of Shamans and semi-Shamans, which I thought was really cool. For instance the word for male shamans is “boge” and the word for female Shamans “iduyan.”
Anyway, I look forward to sharing how our week shapes up–on Thursday we are meeting with Tierney to put all of our research up on the StoryMap!
xoxo