Ivan
Stepanovich
Sopochin lived his whole life following the traditional customs
of his people,
one of the branches of the Eastern Khanty, on a tributary of the
Ob′, the
Woki-rap-yagun (‘Fox-cliff river’), near Surgut. He remained a
monolingual
speaker of his dialect, and was a guardian of spiritual
traditions. In his
youth he was arrested for the practice of shamanism – though he
called himself
not a shaman, but a ‘man who sees’, who has visions. In the last
years of his
life (he died in 1993), he attracted many visits from
researchers into
shamanism and traditional culture. The present volume presents
the research of
some of the scholars who carried out field work or have studied
Sopochin’s
spiritual traditions, and marks a significant contribution to
English-language
research into Eastern Khanty shamanism and traditional culture.