Uluslararası Halkbilimi Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

In the traditional culture of Siberian and Central Asian Turks, the two prominent figures of the society, the shaman and the singer of tales, have been living together for a long time. Shamanism, which has no written documents and has an oral visual character, also has the feature of being one of the best carriers of verbal culture. In this case, the shaman is both a bearer of cultural values and a good narrator on his own. In addition, the researches of scientists on this subject will not be overlooked. In fact, the shaman and the singer of tales are expressed with the same term in Central Asian Turks. The shaman is the source person who sings short volumes of prayer songs, conveys mythological narratives, and provides information about spirits and divine heroes. In the same way, the singer of tales is someone who has undertaken a social duty, but also tells stories and legends with mythological content, and performs heroic epics. There is a strong correlation between these two unique institutions. For example, being a shaman and being an epic teller are the same. Despite this, there are close similarities as well as differences between the shaman and the singer of tales. This is due to the nature of both institutions.
In this article, it will be investigated that the two narrator figures of Turkish culture often assume the functions of each other, a good narrator is also a good shaman, and the relationship between shaman and epic teller will be compared with other peoples' variants (such as Mongol, Tungus, Chukchi, Eskimo, Kamchatka aborigines, Malaysia etc.).