Adventures of the Metaphor: Shamanism and Shamanism Studies

2006

This paper was inspired by an invitation to participate in a seminar with an enigmatic title, "Shamanic Dilemmas of Modernity." When I sat down to write my presentation, I was forced to ask myself: are the shamans perplexed by modernity, or is it we, the anthropologists, who are perplexed by the plurality of shamanisms that are manifested today? Since my initiation in U.S. anthropology over forty years ago, the multiplicity of voices speaking about or claiming to be shamans has increased to such an extent that one could question the conceptual usefulness of the terms "shaman" and "shamanism" in the face of the process of globalization.

For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.

‘Shamanism’ is a problematic and contested concept. After Westerners first heard the term in Siberia at the end of the seventeenth century, it rapidly acquired a remarkable range of meanings in different contexts. Theologians saw shamans as sidekicks of the devil, enlightenment thinkers considered them as mentally ill or retarded. From the eighteenth century onwards, the Romantic image of the shaman as an artistically gifted mystic became fashionable, whereas nineteenth-century folklorists, in turn, used the term ‘shamanism’ in nationalist quests for the essence of the Volksgeist of their nation. Twentieth-century psychologists identified shamans both as schizophrenics and as primal therapists. During the 1960s shamans came to be perceived as psychonauts who used hallucinogens to gain access to the divine essence of life. During the 1970s an American anthropologist created workshops that, he claimed, were based on universal shamanic principles and practices. Through so-called archaic techniques his students could get in touch with the healing forces of nature. Contemporary forms of shamanism present themselves as countercultural, but a historical-sociological interpretation suggests that it is no coincidence that shamanism especially gained popularity at the time that neoliberal capitalism became dominant. Neoliberalisation disempowered people over their working lives and forced them to exert self-authority and make choices in their lives. Contemporary shamanic practices are also focused on self-authority, can be consumed in a free market and offer opportunities for empowerment. Instead of changing society, however, contemporary Western shamanism contributes to structure the structures it claims to resist.

With an increasing interest in shamanism in western societies during the last decades the character of the shaman was–with an act of identifying–implanted into the cultural perspective of many subcultures. Due to the widespread psychologization of shamanism an overgeneralized and oversimplified view of traditional shamanism gives a matrix which creates the different popular conceptualizations of the figure of the shaman. In this paper, four areas explicitly referring to the figure of the shaman are described, demonstrating the fascination it holds and the manifold possibilities of interpretation. The four areas are: neoshamanism, the ‘urban shaman’ as cultural critic and rebel, technoshamanism/cybershamanism, and the field of performing and visual arts. Looking at these areas one can find ten elements of the shaman myth which form the popular image of shamanism in western societies and which constitute the attractiveness and the fascination of the figure of the shaman. Referring to some philosophical concepts of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers the figure of the shaman can be understood as a powerful cipher of transcendence.

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of 'neo-Shamanism' as a 'spiritual' practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between 'primitive' and 'civilized' which characterized nineteenth century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of 'Shamanism' to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made 'neo-Shamanism' thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary westerners. Analyses which suggest that 'neo-Shamanisms' are rediscoveries of a primal 'spirituality' write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.

Anthropology of Consciousness, 1996

bare recognition of some importantly different functional levels of language (i.e., there was historially no "public" or low-context level of speaking in aboriginal societies such that strangers customarily spoke to each other in the same language; meaning was to a high degree dependent on shared knowledge and relationships). Basing a notion of human language on today's kind of public language does a disservice to research on the origins of human language. This is an important book which should be on the shelf of anyone interested in origins or evolution; it combines the best of modern research with a post-modern, Continental Philosophy perspective much needed in our overly analytic age.

The Pomegranate, 2013

This paper will explore shared symbols in Western shamanism, their meanings and signification. Shamanism is a contested and multivalent term, so first there will be a theoretical delimitation of what is meant by Western shamanism. The definition presented is a religious practice found in contemporary Western society. Symbolism will then be analysed through three main categories. The first category of symbols will be the use of darkness/light metaphors, and their meaning and importance in Western shamanism. Then the symbol of soul loss and retrieval will be analysed, and the image of the journeys and what this is supposed to achieve. Finally, the practice of symbolic appropriation will be tackled by analysing the use (and abuse) of symbols from other cultures. What this will demonstrate on the one hand is the Western origin of the shared symbols used in Western shamanism and on the other hand how this origin is concealed with non-Western symbols, used as a strategy of legitimation.

Choice Reviews Online, 2010

More information part v shamanic politics in a changing world 219 Shamanism under attack 221 13 Shamanic revitalizations 14 Neoshamanism 264 Epilogue 291 Bibliography 295 Index 312 vi Contents

Don Bosco Media Communication Kep Province, 2024

Today the term Shamanism is popular and attracts a lot of attention, especially in relation with Indigenous communities. But the topic is vast, and it includes the western anthropological construction of the concept, the influence it has in contemporary indigenous communities and their challenges to defend their own culture and identity, the intervention of new spiritualities and systems such as new age, neo-colonialism and western research in psychedelic plants and how indigenous communities are left behind and no recognized. It explores also the way of missionaries approaching indigenous communities through the history of colonialism and the reflection that the church is doing currently to a change of paradigms.

American Psychologist, 2002

Shamans' communities grant them privileged status to attend to those groups' psychological and spiritual needs. Shamans claim to modify their attentional states and engage in activities that enable them to access information not ordinarily attainable by members of the social group that has granted them shamanic status. Western perspectives on shamanism have changed and clashed over the centuries; this paper presents points and counterpoints regarding what might be termed the demonic model, the charlatan model, the schizophrenia model, the soul flight model, the decadent and crude technology model, and the deconstructionist model. Western interpretations of shamanism often reveal more about the observer than they do about the observed. Conflicting Perspectives on Shamans 3