Tracing Shamans in Tuva

In the geographical centre of Asia - in today's Tuva Republic, within the frame of the Russian Federation - there lives a small ethnic group which the historical and ethnographic literature variously calls Soyot, Uriankhai, Tofa, Todzha. To fully appreciate the work of Mongush Kenin-Lopsan (1997), it is worth getting to know the history of research on Tuva shamanism. We need to do so especially since Hungarian researchers, including Vilmos Diószegi (1923-1972), the teacher of the present author, also collected in Tuva in 1958 and published important studies. This is why we have borrowed, with a slight change, the title of his book published in English (Diószegi 1968) as the title of this overview