Ton Nijhuis is the Scientific Director of the Duitsland Instituut in Amsterdam and Professor in German Studies at the University of Amsterdam. In 2009 he received the Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis. Katherine Swancutt is a Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She has carried out fieldwork on shamanic religion across Inner Asia, working among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and China since 1999, and among the Nuosu of Southwest China since 2007.