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Chapter 5 concerns the dilemmas that female shamans face in their quest for power. By exploring the rise and fall of Chimeg, a female shaman, the chapter unpacks the discrepancy between egalitarian rules and hierarchical practice and asks why female shamans’ skills as shamanic practitioners do not translate into political and material empowerment. The author explores how multiple gender systems in domestic, local, national, and state contexts impede female shamans’ ascent to power both during socialism and a market economy. Female shamans are betwixt and between: they need to be married and maintain households in order to fit the moral standards of womanhood, but their marriages and homes become obstacles to their advancement. If female shamans leave their households in order to pursue their shamanic practices, their lack of kinship and household support also impede their empowerment. They encounter a glass ceiling in either case, and so many tend to resort to unconventional sexual unions and creative strategies to maintain their audiences. Most broadly, the author argues that shamanism might give women a temporary escape from the tyranny of household patriarchy, but at the price of making them victims of patriarchy in the public sphere.

Chapter 4 is about dynamics of memory and power through time. It examines contemporary memories of two female shamans who secretly practiced during socialism. The author explores the discrepancy between their reputations—memories of one are widespread and flamboyant, while those of the other are silent—despite locals’ claims that they were equal in power. The author argues that this discrepancy in narrative memory and its distribution is linked to the politics of power and gender among contemporary descendants and disciples. Each person discussed in the chapter remembers the two female shamans in a particular way based on their individual relationships with them, their current socio-economic concerns, and most importantly on their relationships with the state, both during socialism and after its collapse. The author develops the term “personal political projects” to explore the individual subjectivity and agency of each narrator. She further explores how and why shamanism was largely feminized during socialism, but without bringing female shamans officially recognized power due to the suppression of religion. After their deaths, these female shamans became origin spirits and thus sources of power, mainly for contemporary male shamans, who took center stage after socialism.