The research is supported by a grant of the Russian Science Foundation, project № 16-18-10083

Russian scholar Nikolay Kharuzin (1865–1900) and his sister Vera Kharuzina (1886–1931) were standing at the origins of the Russian Ethnography and its academic formation in the Russian universities. They collected a great ethnographic material about the peoples living on the territory of the Russian Empire such as the Votyaks, Yukaghirs, Tunguses, and Lapps. Summarizing this material and rethinking it theoretically, the Kharuzins noticed a crucial role of studying the religious beliefs of different peoples. Thus, one of the first research work by Nikolay Kharuzin was “About the noaidis among the ancient and modern Lapps” (1889) dedicated to description and analysis of the Lapp shamanism, and to comparison of the ancient and modern Lapps with the reasoning about the impact of Christianity on modern Russian Lapps. A particular attention to the shamanism was paid by Kharuzin in his course of lectures “Ethnography”, which was edited and printed after his death in 1905 by his sister Vera Kharuzina. She was interested in the history of religion and presented more theoretical view on the issues of shamanism in her own course of “Ethnography” (1909). V.N. Kharuzina emphasizes the role of individual qualities in shaman’s becoming and notes that social influence is reflected in actions, visions, and speeches of a shaman. This paper presents the analysis of descriptions and research of shamanism in the works of Nikolay and Vera Kharuzins.

Key words: V.N. Kharuzina, N.N. Kharuzin, History of Religion, Religious Studies, Intellectual History, Science in Russia, Ethnography, Anthropology, Shamanism, Lapps, noaidi.

DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2017.4.172-177

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About the author

Veronika V. Khorina – Master in Religious Studies, research assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, St. Petersburg State University; 9/11 Universitetskaya naberezhnaya, St. Petersburg, Russia, 199034; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.