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

Hello old friend!
Fall break came and went, far more quickly than I think any of us intended! The day I got back on campus I holed myself up my room, picked up the books I’d left in piles on my desk, and proceeded to get really excited about our project!
We met with Eric the day before break began, and he suggested that we funnel our new direction into an even more specific area: the internationalization of silk road performative traditions and their relationship with authenticity. More colloquially, we are describing what is happening now by relating it to what it once was. This change is going to make our final map product look a whole lot cooler because the topic has the potential to span more geographical regions than our original idea did. For instance, Jilly has shown some interest in dance. Performances of traditional Mongolian dance are actually occurring across the globe now, and we could very feasibly plot a point for our project in New York City. This sense of a geographical journey will lend really well to the narrative that Eric and Zhihong are looking for.
This honestly doesn’t change my research too drastically, but it does give everything a clearer shape for me. My most recent research has involved the age of current Shamans in the regions of Mongolia. I have found that the majority of current Shamans in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia are over the age of seventy–they took up Shamanizing in their youth, thus narrowly escaping the attempts to eradicate Shamanism during the cultural revolution.
Our most recent readings for class also filled in some gaps I’ve had in my brain about Shamanic practices and their intersections with musical traditions: I learned about the way that the shamanic drum is actually traditionally played in a dissonant manner. This style of drumming is rhythmically asymmetric in an attempt to imitate the sounds of the natural world, such as whistling winds or the thumping of horses’ hooves, which I think is extraordinarily beautiful.
I think that we are going to be having a lot of really fascinating conversations about what this “authenticity” in our new topic really means; I know that in my research I have already run into a lot of seemingly silly new-agey approaches to Shamanism that seem appropriative to me. I am very interested in concepts of performativity and what necessarily makes one spiritual practice more authentic than another, so I am excited to connect my research to these new more philosophical ideas.
 

A common theme in our past few group meetings has been a lack of relevancy: we all feel so caught up in current events that are taking place a mere hour from our school and therefore have been struggling to feel invested in research on something so far away, both geographically and time-wise. Elena, our angelic silkworm, was able to synthesize this uneasy sentiment and proposed a solution in last night’s meeting: what if we worked on the music and ritual of the Karakorum region right now and then worked backwards into history from there? Up until now we have been confusedly sifting out certain chunks of information because we felt like they weren’t relevant or weren’t the right era, but this way we can include any valuable items of interest. I think that this change will allow us to feel more directly connected to our research, and it will make Youtube a more relevant resource for us: we can actually watch current musical rituals online.

Hello again!
It has been a while since my last blog post, so I’ll begin by catching everyone up to speed: it’s been a busy two weeks! The pace of the semester finally picked up, which of course means that all of my classes got exponentially harder. I have had trouble finding the time to sit down and do diligent research for this course, what with the other readings and the map test that Eric and Zhihong assigned us.
However, I am still excited about this project! All of the interlibrary loans that I requested for my research have started to come in, and seeing them sitting in a cute (albeit towering) pile on my desk is certainly inspiring. The team that I am a part of is also chock full of really intelligent and fun people, and every time we meet (even if we just end up talking about the reading that is due that night) I am reminded of the potential we have as a group.
In the sparse amounts of research that I have been able to get done, I have been finding commonalities of various shamanic traditions throughout our chosen region. Many of the books I have on Shamanism are actually more focused on shamanic figures on the western world, so I of course have had to filter those out. Hopefully our group will meet this weekend and we will discuss our new knowledge of storymapping.
Moving forward I really plan on pushing myself to find balance with this project: even when I’m feeling overwhelmed I still need to take the time to sit down and get a little bit of research done every few days.

When we first began the discernment process I was admittedly a little frustrated. As a seasoned (possibly even a slightly jaded) senior at Guilford, I am at the point in my academic career where I have figured out the exact formula for group projects. The catch is that this silk road endeavor simply doesn’t fit into my meticulously sculpted mold due to its experimental, multi-faceted shape. I think the most difficult thing for our group (once we all fell into our respective places regarding broad topical interests) was the sheer breadth of possibilities for our research. Our lack of prior knowledge on the silk road and its endless intricacies made us feel a little bit helpless, like we were flailing around in a stormy sea of JSTOR links, and reminded me of something that one of my favorite theatre professors, Marc Williams, always says about directing exercises: “Limitations are freeing.”
However, once we met outside of the classroom setting in a library alcove and began bouncing ideas off of each other’s bewildered brains, I became immediately inspired: while limitations can certainly be freeing in the sense that a thesis should be pointed in a specific direction and prompts can spark new stories in creative writing, we were actually able to choose our own limitations, to set our own parameters. This is such a cool opportunity because we are picking subjects that legitimately matter to us. We knew that we were interested in everything from music, shamanism, animals, and the steppe regions. Within just a few meetings we came up with the following goal statement: our goal is to determine how the movement, spread, and dispersion of musical traditions in the Mongolian Steppe are related to regional religious and ritual practices. If we do find that they are related, we plan to examine how growth and change in one area might have affected the evolution of the other. One instrument that may have been particularly impactful is the horsehead fiddle, traditionally played in Mongolia and often made at least in part from the animal it emulates. We aim to investigate how the use of the horsehead fiddle is connected to Mongolian horse culture, riding, and ritual. We also suspect that music, dance, and spiritually significant instruments play important roles in the shamanic traditions of the region. In light of this, we may also cover some shamanic practices that relate to our overarching focus on music in the Steppe. Overall, we hope to determine how musical and religious traditions intersect within Steppe culture, and how the exchange of ideas throughout the Silk Roads may have influenced them or helped them spread to other regions.
I am so lucky to have experienced the initial discomfort that I mentioned previously, because I think that it is expanding my previously narrow views of what roles students and teachers should and shouldn’t take in the classroom. We are claiming our own academic autonomies in ways that I don’t think any of us expected coming into the course, and it’s honestly awesome. Intuitive, self-motivated research is such an important skill, and I know that it will serve me far beyond this course. The technological aspects will also serve me farther on down the line, although I am currently feeling very comfortable with WordPress because I have used systems similar to it before. I am also learning about what it means to legitimately trust my peers with important project tasks: Jilly volunteered to upload the final version of the proposal for our team, and it was actually a relief to release my typical inclinations towards micromanagement. I think that this project is already helping me become a better (and more pleasant) team player.
My individual role is technically reporter, which means that I will be articulating our progress to the class. Serving as the vehicle for our syncretism will be good for me because I often approach my personal research in a fairly haphazard fashion: one thing will interest me, and then while I’m delving into sources on that thing I’ll find something else… and so on and so forth until my research becomes a black hole. It will be really nice to be forced to report in an articulate fashion exactly what we have been working on. In addition to reporting our findings, I also have a specialized area of research within the more broad parameters, due to my particular interest in shamanism. Rituals across the entire span of the Silk Road employed various types of music, and I will be researching the introduction of different musical movements and the impact that those changes had on the performative qualities of Shamanism. I am particularly interested in the implementation of horses and horse imagery in rituals, which our group has included in the proposal through the idea of the horse head fiddle.
This is a very busy semester for me, as I am conducting my senior thesis for my Theatre major this fall. While I am beyond excited about all the things that I am learning in this course (my research on the silk road and shamanism currently serves as a sort of break from the madness of the semester), I have not allotted nearly enough time to this project so far. I have only skimmed one of the books that I checked out from the library last week, and I still need to devote a good chunk of time to doing preliminary research online. I am proud of my team’s excitement and our ability to listen compassionately and intelligently to one another, but I am aware that I could be bringing more to our meetings. I plan on doing more research outside of group meetings so that I can focus more on cohesion and that syncretism that I was so excited about when we are all together.
Overall, I think that The Heart team is off to a smooth start, and that we will continue to thump regularly along for the rest of the project. I look forward to updating you all with our findings as the semester progresses.