Pan-Turanianism has its roots in the Finnish nationalist Fennophile and Fennoman movement, and in the works of Finnish nationalist and linguist Matthias Alexander Castrén. Castrén conducted more than seven years of fieldwork in western and southern Siberia between 1841 and 1849. His extensive field materials focus on Ob-Ugric, Samoyedic, Ketic, and Turkic languages. He collected valuable ethnographic information, especially on shamanism. Based on his research, he claimed that the Finnic, Ugric, Samoyed, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic languages were all of the same 'Altaic family'. He concluded that the Finns originated in Central Asia (in the Altai Mountains), and far from being a small, isolated people, they were part of a larger polity that included such peoples as the Magyars, Turks, Mongols, and so on. Based on his researches, he championed the ideology of pan-Turanism, the belief in the racial unity and the future greatness of the Ural-Altaic peoples. The concept spread from here to the kindred peoples of the Finns. As Castrén put it: