Book reviews ,

摘要

Native, or 'nearly-native', anthropologists tend to always produce impressive ethnographies. Manduhai Buyandelger's Tragic spirits is no exception and is in fact exemplary of the kind of study that brings to life intimate fieldwork exchanges and wider historical forces through a penetrating command of the local language. What we get from Tragic spirits is something beyond the ordinary. Buyandelger's book not only surpasses the expectation for ethnographic fluency that has increasingly become a virtue of today's anthropology, but it offers a cornucopia of shaman's stories, intertwined with the local politics that enable these tales to take on a life of their own. The reader thus finds herself holding a living repertoire of memories that reaches practically every field of experience among the Buryats, one of the many ethnic groups in contemporary Mongolia