University of California Press

Chapter Title: Introduction

Book Title: Wayward Shamans

Book Subtitle: The Prehistory of an Idea
Book Author(s): Silvia Tomášková
Published by: University of California Press. (2013)
Stable URL: [Link]

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@[Link].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
[Link]

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Wayward Shamans

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
Introduction

“Why are shamans so popular?” a team of art historians asked recently,

in a somewhat exasperated tone. They were attempting to counter the
rise of shamanic interpretations in Mesoamerican prehistoric art, part
of a common, widespread trend.1 In offering accounts of the origins of
the human capacity for art, religion, and even science, archaeologists
regularly cast shamans as the stars of their scenarios. By the early twenty-
first century, tales of powerful prehistoric sorcerers have grown familiar
to both scholars and popular audiences alike. The term shaman appears
regularly in reference to ancient and indigenous forms of knowledge to
describe a ritual specialist, a categorical figure imbued with wisdom. Sha-
mans now walk through the pages of academic journals, tourist guide-
books, and New Age stores. They perform rituals, promise wisdom, and
promote products. They also provide a ready answer to the question of
who made the first art and what inspired them.
If newly popular, this story itself is hardly new. Rather, shamans have
traveled with us for well over three centuries since emerging from Sibe-
ria. Over the years, they have played a range of roles, depending on the
setting in which they were imagined. Proto-priests, religious leaders, art-
ists, and medicine men, shamans remain ever mysterious, however in-
stinctively familiar. In archaeology, they have primarily appeared as male
figures, less by conscious design than unthinking assumption. Yet even
after the rise of New Age perspectives in North America and Western

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
2 | Introduction

Europe that emphasize feminine spirituality, the shamans projected into

prehistory continue to be a largely male crew.
Trained as an archaeological specialist in Paleolithic Europe and
teaching partly in women’s and gender studies, I had long been wary of
the manner in which we casually project gender back into time. How
well, I wondered, did this vision of shamans fit the evidence? Given that
the material traces of prehistory offered few certain clues about social
life, let alone gender, history seemed the obvious place to turn. What
was the story behind this anthropological category? Where had the term
“shaman” come from, before its popularity in both archaeology and
drumming circles? How might it have changed along the way? The an-
swer, I would discover repeatedly, was far more complex than I initially
had imagined. Its details provided as many detours as certainties, and
suggested as much about the evolving present as they did about the
deeper past.

Travelers and Spirits

In many native traditions of Siberia, shamans appeared as travelers
guided by spirits, people who could reach other places and other worlds,
and so connect the known with the unknown. In this book, I will follow
this motif with regard to their conceptual offspring, tracing some of their
journeys as they crossed from Asia into Europe, from history into prehis-
tory and back again. This was hardly a nonstop flight. Rather, it involved
multiple landings, each of which altered the appearance of these figures
and the purpose of their travel. The large and diverse party of Siberian
shamans, as reported in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century
accounts of travelers and explorers, diminished with every stop. But their
legacy of attracting attention remained, and even as these sorcerers be-
came increasingly familiar, they continued to signal mysterious distance.
Described in vivid detail by early ethnographers and geographers of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shamans grew abstract as they
left their homeland. Soon they became a category: every tribe considered
outside civilization could now have at least one of them. As the term
came to describe practitioners of traditional rituals, shamans migrated
around the planet. Sightings were reported in North and South America,
Australia, and Africa. In transforming into a universal trope, shamans
suggested power, mystery, madness, and brilliance across a range of dif-
ferent imaginary frontiers. They now not only connected their world to
other worlds, but also increasingly linked the primitive and the civilized.

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction | 3

European societies in the nineteenth century were judged too advanced

to have shamans of their own, but archaeologists avidly debated when
similar healers and religious leaders might have been part of their dis-
tant past as well. Some shamans were said to have lived in caves; some
appeared reclusive, but others social. But more importantly, they now
stood at the very beginning of our collective social existence, to guide us
through human history, down the path that led away from them. At the
same time, a few still lingered beyond the eastern edge of Europe, where
we could discover them yet again at the end of the twentieth century.
Yet this book is not strictly speaking about shamans, let alone the
peoples of Siberia. Rather it is about the idea of a shaman, the imagina-
tion that fueled that idea and the history that nourished and encour-
aged it. I offer an account of those who encountered and imagined sha-
mans, a long story about all sorts of fascinating characters, mostly at the
edges of their own maps. Out of these elements I have sought to fashion
a historical mosaic, less a singular picture than an assemblage of frag-
ments. At its center lies Siberia: the Siberia imagined as well as encoun-
tered, the beliefs about its native peoples, and the multiple appearances
they made in European history and eventually prehistory. The surround-
ing panels sometimes overlap, and sometimes leave large gaps. I exam-
ine a few of them closely to fill in the details, while only suggesting a
larger whole. To see the shaman involves peering against the light, as
if through stained glass. Many layers now stand between us and the
distant world of human prehistory, each imparting its own colorful vi-
sion. The images we have of shamans, after all, come to us from others, be
they travelers, ethnographers, descendants, or archaeologists. To under-
stand the greater assemblage, we must try to see through each broken
piece in turn, recognizing its particular hue. Only then can we better eval-
uate what a general concept might capture, and what it might be missing.

The Long Road Traveled: Meeting the Shamans

My interest in the history of Siberian shamans stemmed from encoun-
tering them in archaeological discussions of prehistoric symbolic behav-
ior, and wondering when this explanation had first emerged. My initial
task seemed simple and straightforward enough: to trace the concept
from its present-day understanding back into the history of Siberia and
its indigenous populations. My modest plan was to broaden the hori-
zons of current literature by bringing writings in Russian and German
into view alongside well-known ethnographies circulating in English. I

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
4 | Introduction

anticipated some theoretical differences based on the historical, na-

tional, and political contexts of the writers. While tensions of interpre-
tation might appear, I thought, I ultimately expected to find a recogniz-
able conception at the core, the ideal shaman then projected into the
past. Hundreds of pages later, I found myself facing a far more daunting
project: a history far more complex and knotty than I had imagined,
stretching over centuries and across continents. By the end of my re-
search, the “core of a shaman” still remained elusive, and I doubted that
any definition could apply cleanly across time and place. However, I
began to realize that this was the point, that the fragile instability of
categories, their precarious nature, should give us pause when moving
any concept across space and time.
My extended journey in search of shamans, real and imagined, started
with recent accounts of indigenous groups in the broader region of
Siberia. The last decade of socialism and the first years of post-socialism
had opened a door for historical and ethnographic research in the for-
mer Soviet Union to a degree unprecedented for most of the century.
Even if the archives were still centrally controlled and travel was moni-
tored, Western as well as Russian scholars had an unsurpassed moment
of opportunity to communicate with members of indigenous groups and
decipher the records in historical archives. The resulting ethnographi-
cally rich work has revealed the immense diversity of the surviving na-
tive groups.2 Many of these ethnographies also make it clear that the
unprecedented resurgence of shamanism in Siberia in the last two de-
cades cannot be understood without recognition of the momentous so-
cial, demographic, and political shifts of a collapsing social system. New
histories and new identities emerged in the region, reassembled from a
mix of ancient, new, and invented traditions.
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, one of the early ethnographers in post-
socialist Siberia, recounts a particularly telling story of a modern female
shaman [who] reputedly used spirit power to fix a broken bus on the
way to a meeting with Native American visitors.3 The anecdote suc-
cinctly captures both the bricolage of present-day shamanism and the
ever-evolving historical context that surrounds it. Not only does spirit
power now engage with modern transportation, but disparate indigenous
groups also forge transnational connections. Such unorthodox examples
offer cautionary tales about any simple use of ethnographic analogy.
The incident also introduces another dimension of current concern:
gender. Contemporary ethnographies commonly mention practicing
women shamans. Their presence at the end of the twentieth or early

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction | 5

twenty-first century does not appear unusual, or particularly worthy of

comment. Nevertheless, a historically minded reader would wonder
whether this was always the case. Were women shamans ubiquitous
throughout history, or were they the exception? And most importantly
for archaeologists, how far back might we push such analogies? This
was the thread I started to follow more closely, when turning from eth-
nographic accounts to historical archives.

Mapping the Path

The chapters in this book are organized only partly chronologically.
Rather than attempting a more comprehensive account, which would
threaten to tax the reader as well as my own abilities, I have chosen a set
of episodes that highlight shifting visions of Siberian shamans. Together
they comprise a study in the geography of imagination and the wayward
paths that shamans and their spirits took. My ambition is to explore the
edges of possibility as they appeared to scholars of different generations,
backgrounds, and orientations.
Encounters between explorers and native men and women in any
colonial expansion involved a complicated alchemy of fear, curiosity,
and aggression as well as a desire for knowledge. Siberia was no excep-
tion. Nonetheless, the colonial project in that part of the world pos-
sessed particular qualities meriting close attention. The history of Rus-
sian colonial expansion into the vast land to the east has not been a
common part of the history of European science, nor is it commonly
addressed in discussions of European colonial endeavors. Yet the threads
of Siberian natives interlace the texts of European anthropology, geog-
raphy, and botany. As well as traveling the world, then, shamans in this
story also serve as guides through different layers of Europe’s own sense
of place.
In following the itinerant history of Siberian shamans, I also want to
retell the history of prehistoric archaeology as it came to be defined at
the end of the nineteenth century, suggesting that the search for the ori-
gin of civilization led east as well as underground. Europe, we too often
forget, is a region bounded not just by coastline but also by a less cer-
tain limit on land. The practice of a more “worldly” archaeology is thus
not simply a matter of moving beyond such continental confines but also
reimagining them. The formation of prehistory involved a complex inter-
play between religion and science, alternately opposed and intertwined.
Amid discussions of origins, empirical evidence met dreams about the

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
6 | Introduction

past, to the extent that a scientist could not be defined by fieldwork

methods alone. The fathers of the discipline translated many layers of
evidence and imagination when speaking about the emergence of soci-
ety, as well as art, science, and magic. Did ancient humans display mod-
ern capacities? If so, then when and how did they arise naturally? If not,
then how to explain odd traces that remained? Shamans ultimately
served to mediate such questions, moving between human and nonhu-
man forms of life, from animals to spirits.
However, before reaching this early twentieth-century moment in the
history of archaeology, we need to travel even farther back and explore
the ethnography out of which such shamanic analogies would be
drawn. This book, then, is about the places and people who brought us
shamans—their motives, histories, and mundane practices. In order to
understand the tales of wayward shamans, I argue, we need to find all
the characters that carried those tales to us.
Siberia has captivated travelers for centuries, and has been imagined
and discovered many times. The first chapter recounts the centuries of
descriptions of the region as a vast, frozen, and desolate place. An area
covering most of northern Asia, Siberia remains a vast land—“the larg-
est country in the world,” as an immodest self-description posted on
billboards throughout the region claims—with a climate more varied
than often supposed, except for the northern-most quadrants. Never-
theless, from the ancient Greeks on, imagination rather than reality has
dominated the visions of the area, and placing shamans into this space
long filled with monsters and unbelievable natural phenomena recalls
the sense of wonder that once surrounded them. Precisely such a space
accommodated the wildest imaginings of European historians and trav-
elers. Distant and hard to reach, Siberia inspired accounts that were
only intermittently encumbered by facts. One could imagine a frozen,
distant place where boundaries lost any meaning, where the land
stretched for days, and rivers and land merged, where humans, animals
and vegetation mutated into each other, and one could not tell men from
women. Later, scientific and ethnographic wonders replaced the mon-
sters of ancient times, and mammoth bones emerged from the ground,
bringing the Ice Age into the present. In this setting, shamans and their
magic were no longer the only surprising characters.
Once I began to address Siberian history, I came to realize that un-
certainty was nothing new. Like the question of shamans and their
“discovery,” the landscape they inhabited was built of fact and senti-
ment: a combination of knowledge gained from travelogues and scientific

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction | 7

expeditions, along with feelings of grudging admiration intermingled

with fear. Archival and literary records, going as far back as the Greeks,
tell tales of Siberia as a distant land beyond the edge of ordinary knowl-
edge. An early boundary of civilization, it suggested the edge of Europe
and the beginning of a vast, dramatically different space, a land of both
emptiness and infinite possibilities, teeming with creatures that no lon-
ger followed the laws of nature, such as the half-plant lamb of Tartary
or humans with bodies partially submerged in water. This fantastic place
emerged at the eastern edge of the Russian empire through foreign de-
scriptions, the tales of travelers who did not linger while crossing it in
haste to reach India and China.
Although Siberia’s natural resources, furs, and minerals became of
increasing interest to Russian emperors, for a long time they exhibited
only a reluctant desire to govern such an immense territory. Did own-
ership of a seemingly barren, empty, unknown, frozen land make a Eu-
ropean empire? The persistent dilemma of size and importance haunted
Russian emperors, who wished to join the powers of civilized Europe.
Science offered one solution: mapping, surveys, and ethnographic de-
scriptions produced the knowledge necessary to delineate the empire’s
boundaries and define a civilization that included Russia and separated
it from Asia. I therefore devote some time to exploring this space of
imagination, as Siberia stands geographically for what shamans do in
terms of spirituality—it is a concept ready to be filled with ideas.
Indeed, reading closely the earliest eighteenth-century accounts, I
was often struck by the lack of surprise in the face of magic. Travelers
seemed to expect conjuring, magical tricks, and even transformations of
people and objects. Although the details of magical practices in Siberia
may have been considered unusual and its practitioners sometimes char-
latans, European travelers anticipated the existence of otherworldly pow-
ers. Thus, the second chapter examines the longstanding interest of Eu-
ropean societies in magic, particularly among the nobility and royal
courts. To make sense of these early encounters with shamans, we need
to recall that traditions of alchemy and magic constituted serious alter-
native pursuits amid premodern science, and that Christian sensibilities
about the occult reflected the significant influence of Islamic and Jewish
traditions as well as the well-established circulation of scholars through-
out the continent. Thus, when German ethnographers encountered prac-
tices and beliefs in magic in the eastern regions in the eighteenth century,
they were neither surprised nor unprepared. To the contrary, despite the
overwhelmingly Christian character of European societies, forms of

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
8 | Introduction

instrumental magic—practical efforts to address challenges of the phys-

ical and spiritual worlds—remained intimately recognizable, if alter-
nately desirable and threatening. Shamans were both familiar and for-
eign characters, whose potential skills might be acknowledged and
derided as trickery at the same time.
Chapter 3 sketches the history of exploration and appropriation of
Siberia as a place filled with indigenous people. Russian expansion to the
east represented a peculiar form of colonialism in its haphazard nature,
carried out almost by proxy. Russian rulers desired all the natural re-
sources of Siberia, its furs in particular, but they were reluctant to invest
much time or energy in the project. Consequently, the colonial policies
and practices of each ruler would vary quite significantly, and were of-
ten reacting to Western European colonial expansion overseas. Greater
recognition of Russia as a European power was a primary motive, and
the size of the Russian empire mattered to its rulers, while simultane-
ously representing a major challenge, as their knowledge of the land re-
mained quite loose. Thus, in initial descriptions, Siberia appeared as a
land teeming with animals, rich in minerals, and relatively devoid of
people. Problems of violence, corruption, and unpaid taxes did periodi-
cally come to the attention of colonial bureaucrats, who entered the de-
tails in official letters and documents. However, during the initial stages
of Russian expansion, native people mattered primarily to the extent
they either abetted or hindered trade—as fur providers, rather than as
potential Christian souls or subjects of the ruler. Like the land of Sibe-
ria, its people remained the opposite of civilizing Russia, distinct in ap-
pearance, custom, religion, and way of life. Even their gender appeared
disturbingly indeterminate; the travelers did not find it easy to distin-
guish the men and women on sight.
Peter the Great ratcheted up Russian aspirations to be European,
and Siberia served him well for that purpose. The eastern lands pro-
vided an ideal contrast to “European Russia,” and German scientists
served as the ideal character witnesses. Chapter 4 describes the early
systematic survey and description of the indigenous people, animals, and
plants of Siberia. Peter and later Catherine (both aptly and immodestly
named “the Great”) may have wished for the natural recognition of Rus-
sian grandeur and sophistication in its own right, but in practice they
turned to Scandinavian and German scientists for such confirmation.
The thorough and detailed knowledge that emerged from the subsequent
decades of ethnographic labor reflected on both the colonial masters
and the native subjects. And despite all their effort and Protestant ethic,

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction | 9

the scientists’ descriptions of the native groups were filtered through the
simultaneous judgment of their Russian hosts, recording the latter’s in-
adequacies, uncivilized ways of being, brutality toward the locals, and
gullibility in the face of magic and conjuring.
Invited and paid by the Russian emperors, the German scholars car-
ried out extensive fieldwork, collecting and describing with stoic deter-
mination for more than a decade. These natural historians thus laid the
foundation for later Siberian ethnography, and it was from this space,
geographic and conceptual, that our first pictures and impressions of
shamans emerged. Although commonly described as tricksters, the re-
puted magicians and conjurers also had certain admirable skills that
impressed not only the locals but also Russian soldiers and traders. In
the exacting work of these scholars invited from the German centers of
learning, shamanism appears a matter of things and actions, practiced
by a diverse set of people.
Chapter 5 picks up one thread in this story to show the changing
nature of encounters and the shifting ways of imaging difference. From
the earliest sightings of indigenous people in Siberia, their lack of read-
ily observable sexual characteristics seriously troubled the traveling
scientists. Their writings are permeated with anxiety over an inability
to tell men and women apart. Not only did the native men sport no
beards, but both men and women grew very long hair and were perma-
nently bundled up in the same kind of clothing, making it difficult for
the visitors to distinguish gender. So pervasive was this theme that it
spilled into the descriptions of everyday activities, routines, and cus-
toms, and combined with an active interest in sexual practices. Thus,
early on we meet women shamans, some thought to be imposters, others
considered very powerful or dangerous, given the female proclivity to-
ward trickery.
The early German understanding of a shaman was very broad and,
for the most part, did not intend to evoke admiration or a comparison
with priests or artists. Consequently, the travelers at the time readily as-
sociated women with the term, as they viewed trickery, deception, for-
tune telling, and performance as falling within the realm of “typical”
comportment for women. We find numerous accounts of both male and
female shamans performing all sorts of tasks, some important and cru-
cial, others amusing or deceptive to the eyes of these early ethnogra-
phers. We know that the initial historical category of shamans as it ap-
peared in European accounts included women both young and old
because in the masculine space of military camps, trading posts, and

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
10 | Introduction

scientific expeditions, these native women garnered an inordinate and

unwelcome amount of attention. They regularly featured in official let-
ters, legal cases, and personal and scientific diaries, enmeshed in rela-
tions of desire, lust, loneliness, violence, and distorted power. Later,
once the scientific descriptions had stabilized in mapping indigenous
groups and their ways of being into a known pattern, this anxiety
dissipates—and with it, many traces of diversity. By the time the prehisto-
rians adopted shamans, they no longer imagined gender in all its confus-
ing detail; they were quite certain about the roles that men and women
should perform, no matter in which corner of the world.
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in relation to reports of
“changed women”—men who became women in order to perform sha-
manic duties. Chapter 6 tells the story of this practice and its varying
ethnographic visibility. The earliest mention of such a category of people
appears in the eighteenth century, amid confusion over the sexual iden-
tity of the native Kamchadal in eastern Siberia. In the context of all the
local traditions appearing strange, the observers did not find that a man
choosing to become a woman was particularly remarkable, which
makes the later absence of such descriptions seem far more striking.
Yet this was not a simple vanishing act. In the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Russian revolutionaries were exiled to the very eastern edge of
Kamchatka, where these avid readers of Marx and Engels found them-
selves amid people who were living proof of the existence of primitive
communism. They subsequently became ethnographers and passionate
advocates for native difference; they pursued exemplary fieldwork, and
dedicated their lives to understanding the indigenous way of life, myths,
and customs. For them, these indigenous communities held the poten-
tial for envisioning a different future, one where social arrangements
could be reconfigured, unlike the dominant exploitative capitalist forms
of their day that they fought against. They, too, reported men becom-
ing women when ordered by the spirits; for them, in their search for
alternative political regimes, varying bodies or sexual identities did
not seem too far-fetched. By then, open to the possibility of radical dif-
ference, the Russian revolutionaries themselves had become “changed
men.”
Picking up the eighteenth-century thread of shamans who traversed
bodily boundaries, changed gender, learned to fly, and turned into ani-
mals, the Russian ethnographers soberly commented on a slowly van-
ishing world. Through them, the imagined Siberia of the earliest en-

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction | 11

counters briefly reemerged—the land of open, boundless possibility.

Their accounts of changed women would subsequently intrigue the
scholars of psychoanalysis, who viewed them as evidence of formative
neuroses and varieties of hysteria. Through this medical lens, shamans
now appeared as the potential prototypes for out-of-this-world artists,
visionaries, and mystics. As the study of myths and rituals merged with
interests in personality, individual psychology, and deviancy, the spirits
that had ordered gender or sex changes in earlier times became per-
sonal demons, haunting troubled individuals as they teetered toward
madness.
Thus, by the early twentieth century, shamans were increasingly less
a reminder of a primitive past than they were symbols of a possibility of
impermanence of boundaries and categories. The skilled shape-shifters
turned into psychological individuals, with personality traits that pre-
disposed them toward certain behaviors. Under the new lens of psy-
chology, sex or gender change among shamans reflected a complex of
personality and desire, universal traits subject to professional analysis.
Rather than an aspect of folklore or mythical storytelling, shamanic
behavior constituted a medical condition. From “arctic hysteria” to later
theories of deep neurological sediments undergirding the human psyche,
traditional indigenous populations appeared universally human, even
amid their most dramatic expressions of difference. The twentieth-
century psychological concept of a person stretched worldwide, back
through the eastern edges of Siberia. Writing decades later in “The Sor-
cerer and His Magic,” Claude Lévi-Strauss makes a sustained compari-
son between a psychoanalyst and his patient and a shaman and the sick
in his community, clearly working with an accepted and seemingly un-
disputed category.4 For Lévi-Strauss, it was the detail of practice and the
relationship between magic and the social world that posed a problem
to ponder, not the given role itself.
The seventh chapter returns full circle to archaeology, as I describe
the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century institutionalization of
the European science of prehistory. French archaeology played a pivotal
role in establishing the conceptual parameters of the contemporary dis-
cipline, with key figures featuring prominently at this moment of birth.
I focus on two well-known “fathers of archaeology,” Gabriel de Morti-
llet and Abbé Henri Breuil. However, I rely on them as representatives
of different ways of imagining the past, rather than as individual found-
ers of a discipline. They each stood at opposite ends of an argument

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
12 | Introduction

about the place of art and religion in the earliest stages of human evolu-
tion. De Mortillet receives credit for providing chronological stages for
early human culture, though he situated all the events in France. At the
same time, as a fervent and active socialist, he defined humanity through
technology and labor, not through art and certainly not religion. So
strong was his opposition to any notion of religiosity—and consequently,
to any signs of nonutilitarian creativity—that it was only after his death
that French prehistorians accepted the possibility of prehistoric art.
Rather, it was a Catholic priest, Henri Breuil, who drove archaeology to
recognize spirituality, expressed through art, as a fundamental aspect of
human evolution.
In both cases, I draw attention to the institutions in which they oper-
ated as necessary physical places of ideas. Moreover, their collaborators
played a crucial role in conveying theoretical building blocks, creating
networks of like-minded researchers, keeping opposition at bay, and
marshaling evidence to support new interpretations of prehistoric art.
Henri Breuil introduced the figure of the sorcerer who painted caves at
the dawn of civilization. In his version, it was an unquestioned male
religious leader, without a hint of gender ambiguity, let alone sexual-
ity. With the foundation of hunting magic in place, French archaeol-
ogy held prominent place throughout the twentieth century not only
as the location of most of prehistoric art but also as the center of its
interpretation.
The conclusion brings the story of shamans into the present by the
way of South Africa. When archaeologists in the 1980s rediscovered the
shaman as the key creator of prehistoric art, it was only the latest in a
long string of permutations for this spirit guide. A renewed tie to a dif-
ferent ethnographic record—this one of the San in southern Africa—
would offer a direct historical connection. At the same time, claims about
the neurobiological grounding for the earliest forms of human art, reli-
gion, and ritual claimed universal truth at a new level of detail. The
figure of the shaman redoubled on itself: neurological functions of the
brain in a state of trance united varied practitioners across time and
the globe. By then, the term and category had traveled quite far from
the tents on the eastern Russian frontier, to now identify a general pattern
of human behavior, one projected backward onto ritual specialists of
the Ice Age. Yet most of its history and rich ethnographic detail had
been lost, forgotten, or considered irrelevant. The sense of variation in
the persons who might house such a wandering brain grew thin.

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction | 13

Wayward Shamans
What becomes of a shaman when far from Siberia? What changes in
crossing such enormous distances and so many centuries? These ques-
tions suggest issues beyond authenticity. Because my search for a his-
torical shaman never sought purity, I can hardly return to some “ur-
shaman,” put on display as the only true specimen. To the contrary,
after pouring through German archives, getting hopelessly lost in Sibe-
ria, reading the personal correspondence of Gabriel de Mortillet, Abbé
Breuil, Émile Cartailhac, and Salomon Reinach, and eyeing rock shel-
ters and painted caves, I emphasize, more than anything else, the impu-
rity of all categories. The messiness and multiplicity of history rarely
allow for simple claims. Shamans are useful guides precisely because they
are so unstable, having changed over and over, never standing still long
enough to be unquestionably real. Alternately loathed, admired, copied,
cleaned up, and reintroduced many times, any claim of their universal
transcendence falls flat in the face of their evident impermanence.
Instead, I suggest that shamans offer a mobile mirror for our own
shifting curiosity. This is not to say that they have never existed or do not
exist still, but simply to recognize that the concepts we use to describe
things at the edge of our knowledge are inherently uncertain. Amid the
remnants of strange and distant worlds, we project our own assumptions
and anxieties alongside the things we take as evidence, the past that we
catch as a glimpse of, say, through painted surfaces of rocks. Categories
are useful and necessary heuristic devices, in scholarly as well as every-
day life. When archaeologists approach representations and beliefs with-
out the benefit of ethnographic records, they necessarily appeal to gen-
eral concepts and forms drawn by analogy. Yet it is precisely when we do
not have access to ethnographic and historical accounts—troubling our
generalities with varied and sometimes contradictory detail—that con-
cepts appear the most deceptively pure. Projected into prehistory, shamans
assume a firm, convincing, universally understood character.
In a striking photo of a painted rock surface, a lion, a bull, or an eland
can easily appear to be transformed shamans doing their magic, perform-
ing their art, engaged in a clear ritual. When you visit the site, however,
you must climb a steep slope, at times walk through dark, long passages
of a cave, and only find the paintings after considerable effort. In per-
son, you now notice little stick figures to the right, bird-like creatures
underneath, a dotted line running in and out of a rock, and animals and

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]
14 | Introduction

shapes crowded, drawn over each other. Yes, there may be a lion, a bull,
or an eland, but so much else is also going on—and behind you is the
sound of wind, and above you a glimpse of open sky. That has become
my goal in following my traveling spirits: to point beyond these figures
to the ground behind them, to broaden the focus enough to suggest other
ghosts and other wondrous paths along the margins of history.

This content downloaded from [Link] on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]