A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 41
vigor, for not hunting but herding had become their principal occupation.On
the one hand, the shamans had to adapt themselves to the more
predictable conditions and rhythms of pastoral life, and on the other,
contacts with neighboring settled regions such as China and Sogdia
allowed some infiltration of religious elements from there.The appearance
of tengri (a word found both in Mongolian and Turkic) as the
supreme deity may have been inspired by the Chinese concept of tian or
heaven.The shaman of Inner Asian pastoralists thus came to include
during his trance a symbolic flight to heaven (a vertical movement, in
contrast to the shaman of strictly hunting societies, whose range of
movement is defined by modern anthropologists as chiefly horizontal).
Turco-Mongol shamanism thus had a somewhat contradictory effect
at the moment of these peoples’ conversion to Islam or Buddhism.On
the one hand, the formlessness of the system facilitated its abandonment
and the nomads’ adoption of a new religion; on the other, the shamans’
charismatic power may have resurfaced in the new garb of Islamic dervishes
and Buddhist lamas.
Nomads and Sedentaries
As we have already emphasized, one of the salient features emerging
from any discussion of Inner Asian anthropology is the fact that until
recently, it was a world of two distinct ways of life: that of the pastoral
nomad, and that of the sedentary agriculturalist or urban dweller.
Moreover, a concomitant feature is the fact that the nomad has in historic
times been mostly Turco-Mongol, whereas the sedentary was either
an Indo-European or else the Turkicized descendant of Indo-
Europeans.
A striking feature of nomadic society was its tribal structure.The tribe
or a confederation of tribes, rather than nationality, territory, or state,
commanded the nomad’s lasting allegiance and sense of identity.The
more immediate loyalty was to the extended family or clan.
Nevertheless, a mostly subconscious awareness of a still broader community,
remotely comparable to that of nationality, did exist among the
nomads: this rested on a combination of several factors, the most important
of which was linguistic.Thus the Kyrgyz, who before 1924 had
never created a state of their own in their present homeland, appear to
have been fully aware of their distinct identity, different from that of
even such close kinsmen as Kazakhs; this identity, cemented by the
common link that was the Kyrgyz form of Turkic, was so strong that it