Origin Recorded in Russian and Soviet ethnography from the nineteenth century; suppressed through the Soviet period and in open use again from the 1990s
The dungur is the single-headed frame drum used by Tuvan practitioners in southern Siberia. A hide is stretched over a bent wooden hoop and the instrument is held from behind by a cross-brace, often worked into a figure, with iron rings and cones hung from the frame so that it rattles as well as sounds. Accounts from across southern Siberia describe such a drum as the practitioner's mount rather than as a musical instrument, and the beater as its whip. A drum is made for one person, treated as animate, and is not an object anyone may take up. Soviet policy destroyed large numbers of them, and most drums in use in Tuva today are new.
Facts
Disputed
Scholarly NoteWhether the practices of dozens of separate Siberian peoples belong under the single heading of shamanism is actively disputed; Hutton, Kehoe and Znamenski each argue the category was assembled by outsiders 1 The dungur is the frame drum used by Tuvan shamanic practitioners in southern Siberia, an instrument and a living practice whose existence Ronald Hutton's Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (2001) does not treat as in question at all. What Hutton documents as genuinely disputed is the comparative category shamanism itself, the practice of grouping the dungur alongside drums and ritual specialists from unrelated cultures worldwide under one anthropological label originally drawn from the Siberian word saman. One camp holds the comparative category identifies a real cross-cultural pattern of ecstatic religious specialism worth studying together; another holds the category flattens genuinely different traditions into a Western anthropological construct that obscures more than it reveals about any one of them, including the Tuvan practice itself. The method is historiographical, tracing how the term shamanism was built up by Western scholars comparing many societies rather than examining Tuvan practice alone. The dispute concerns the validity of the comparative label, not any fact about Tuvan practitioners or their instrument. Attributions
TraditionTuvan shamanic practice 1 Use
Who May Handle ItTrained or authorised specialists only 2Tradition: Tuvan practice ConsecrationConsecrated in a rite before use 3 Ritual ContextSpoken of as the practitioner's mount rather than as a musical instrument, with the beater as its whip 3Tradition: Southern Siberia Identity
Also Known AsTungur; the Tuvan shaman's drum 1 Origins
Origin PeriodRecorded in Russian and Soviet ethnography from the nineteenth century; suppressed through the Soviet period and in open use again from the 1990s 1Tradition: Tuvan practice Physical Form
MaterialA bent wooden hoop with a single hide head, an interior cross-brace handle and iron pendants 2Tradition: Tuvan practice Learn More
A Hoop, a Hide and a Handle Behind the Head
A Tuvan drum begins as a strip of larch or cedar, steamed and bent into a hoop, over which a single hide is stretched and lashed. Nothing covers the back. Instead the maker fits a cross-brace inside the frame, and it is this that the player grips, so that the whole weight of the instrument hangs from one hand and the free hand holds the beater. On many drums the vertical member of that brace is worked into a figure with a head, shoulders and a face, and the horizontal member carries iron rings, cones and small pendants that answer every stroke with a rattle of their own.
The result is not a clean drum tone. It is a layered sound, low and dry from the head, bright and continuous from the metal, and it carries a long way in open country. Where a drum is painted, the design is usually laid out in registers, figures set above and below a dividing line, and the ethnographers who collected such drums read those registers as a diagram of the world rather than as decoration.
The beater is a separate object with its own name, a spatula of wood or antler faced on one side with hide or fur. It is not treated as a stick. A drum is made for one person, is not lent, and among older practitioners was not stored with ordinary household possessions.
A Mount, a Whip, and the Argument Around the Word
Almost every account of drum use in southern Siberia reaches for the same image. The drum is a horse or a reindeer, the beater is its whip, and the practitioner travels on it. That vocabulary is not an outsider's metaphor. It sits in the words practitioners use and in the songs, where the drum is addressed directly and its origin told.
The frame most Western readers meet it in, though, was built by outsiders. The word shaman entered Russian from Tungus and passed from Russian into every European language, after which it was applied to practitioners from Lapland to the Amazon who had never been in contact with one another or with the Evenki. Ronald Hutton has traced how the Siberian material was collected, edited and pressed into a single system for European readers. Alice Beck Kehoe and Andrei Znamenski have both argued that much of what circulates under the heading of shamanism is a Western construction rather than a Siberian one. None of them denies that Tuvan practitioners exist or that they use drums. What is disputed is whether the practices of dozens of separate peoples belong under one word.
Soviet policy settled part of that question by force. Practitioners were persecuted, drums were confiscated and burned, and transmission broke in many families. Practice was organised openly again in Tuva in the 1990s, and the drums in use now are largely new ones.
Sources Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western ImaginationRonald Hutton with Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical ThinkingAlice Beck Kehoe, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western ImaginationAndrei A. Znamenski
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The drum is struck to carry the practitioner into the state in which the work is done.
Belongs to Tradition
The dungur is the drum of Tuvan practitioners, with close parallels among Altai and Khakas practitioners.
Composed Of
Iron, Metals Iron pendants hang from the hoop and sound as the drum is moved.
Sources
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