Bitan: Oracles and Healers in The Karakorams

The Hunzakutz, a high people in the western Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan, possess a shamanistic tradition centered around religious specialists known as bitan. These practitioners inhale the smile of burning juniper branches, dance to a special music, drink blood from a freshly severed goat’s head, enter into ecstatic trances, and converse with supernatural beings. An ethnographic and historical analysis of this little-known shamanistic tradition is offered, focusing on the rituals, beliefs, and practices of Hunzakutz bitan, their place in the traditional ritual and politico-ideological apparatus of the former Hunza state, and their role as healers and soothsayers.