Shaman in the Museum: The Experience of Studying the Heritage of an Indigenous Community in a Resource-Type Region

The article presents some results of research work on the case of the "last Nganasan shaman" Tubyaku Ngamtusu'o (Kosterkin), whose shamanic vestments are exhibited in the Taymyr Local History Museum. The costume of Tubyak Dyuhodovich is surrounded by many stories: about the formation of a shaman, his life and rite, about the transfer of a complex of objects by the owner to museum staff, about the conclusion of a certain "contract" for storage, about holding a "farewell rite" and about the further "life" of shamanic objects and the tradition of shamanism itself in the museum space. These stories are considered by the author in the optics of heritage anthropology, which combines institutional theory, approaches of heritage studies and modern practices of ethnological expertise of cultural management processes. The author presents the shaman Tubyak Dyuhodovich and his costume in a situation where they act as some kind of "switches" between two "worlds": the space of the tradition of shamanism and the space of heritage, where today the indigenous population is actively involved in the processes of ethnic identification, reflection, self-presentation and relationships with various stakeholders in the public space. The main purpose of the study was to find a descriptive answer to the question: how do representatives of indigenous communities interact with the "non-indigenous" idea of heritage as a process of (safe)-guarding certain cultural practices and what problems does this help them solve? The stories about the interaction of the shaman with various researchers and their "joint" production of knowledge, which the author also considers, allow us to dive even deeper into the problem of heritage management and the interaction of three actors in this process - the indigenous communities, researchers and government representatives.