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A guide to worldwide shamanism and shamanistic practices, emphasizing historical and current cultural adaptations. This two-volume reference is the first international survey of shamanistic beliefs from prehistory to the present day. In nearly 200 detailed, readable entries, leading ethnographers, psychologists, archaeologists, historians, and scholars of religion and folk literature explain the general principles of shamanism as well as the details of widely varied practices. What is it like to be a shaman? Entries describe, region by region, the traits, such as sicknesses and dreams, that mark a person as a shaman, as well as the training undertaken by initiates. They detail the costumes, music, rituals, artifacts, and drugs that shamans use to achieve altered states of consciousness, communicate with spirits, travel in the spirit world, and retrieve souls. Unlike most Western books on shamanism, which focus narrowly on the individual's experience of healing and trance, Shamanism also examines the function of shamanism in society from social, political, and historical perspectives and identifies the ancient, continuous thread that connects shamanistic beliefs and rituals across cultures and millennia.
Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity’s first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent’s eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.
Kehoe (anthropology, U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) seeks to inoculate her students against the mushy thinking she finds concerning shamans and shamanism. She traces the misinformation to a sensational mid-20th-century French tome by which expatriate Romanian Mircea Eliade hoped to acquire a reputation and a place in a European or American university. (He succeeded.) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Title first published in 2003. Shamanism has a contradictory position within the Korean cultural system, leading to the periodical suppression of shamanism yet also, paradoxically, ensuring its survival throughout Korean history. This book examines the place of shamans within contemporary society as a cultural practice in which people make use of shamanic ritual and disputing the prevalent view that shamanism is 'popular culture', a 'women's religion' or 'performing arts'. Directly confronting the prejudice against shamans and their paradoxical situation in a modern society such as Korea, this book reveals the cultural discrepancy between two worlds in Korean culture, the ordinary world and the shamanic world, showing that these two worlds cannot be reconciled. This unique study of shamanism offers a significant contribution to growing studies in indigenous anthropology and indigenous religions, and provides a captivating read for a wide range of readers through retelling the stories-never-to-be-told involving shamanic ritual.
Shamans of the Lost World bridges the gap between recent work in the cognitive sciences and some of humankind's oldest religious expressions. In this detailed look at the prehistoric shamanism of the Ohio Hopewell, Romain uses cognitive science, archaeology, and ethnology to propose that the shamanic worldview results from psychological mechanisms that have a basis in our cognitive evolutionary development. The discussions in this volume of the most current theories concerning how early peoples came to believe in spirits and gods, as well as how those theories help account for what we find in the archaeological record of the Hopewell, are of interest to archaeologists and cognitive scientists alike.
Shamans throughout much of Asia are regarded as having the power to control and coerce spirits. Many Asians today still turn to shamans to communicate with the world of the dead, heal the sick, and explain enigmatic events. To understand Asian religions, therefore, a knowledge of shamanism is essential. Shamans in Asia provides an introduction to the study of shamans and six ethnographic studies, each of which describes and analyses the lives and activities of shamans in five different regions: Siberia, China, Korea, and the Ryukyu islands of southern Japan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The essays show what type of people become shamans, what social roles they play, and how shamans actively draw from the worldviews of the communities in which they operate. As the first book in English to provide in-depth accounts of shamans from different regions of Asia, it allows students and scholars to view the diversity and similarities of shamans and their religions. Those interested in spiritual specialists, the anthropological study of religion, and local religions in Asia will be intrigued, if not entranced, by Shamans in Asia.
Native Americans believed that it was their responsibility to maintain harmony in the natural world on which they depended by performing a variety of rituals. Shamans were credited with exceptional powers to act on behalf of the community. They claimed to be capable of separating their spirits from their bodies and interceding with those spirits that controlled the many forces of nature. Having studied the subject at first hand during his many visits to American tribes, Dr. Norman Bancroft Hunt sets out the richly rewarding results of his research in this survey of shamanic traditions and practices in various Native American groups. Shamanism in North America is profusely illustrated with the most remarkable masks, effigies, and implements used by shamans and includes evocative images of the often harsh wilderness inhabited by the tribes under discussion, as well as some revealing historical photographs of shamans.
A series of psychological and anthropological studies about the oldest and the most fascinating religious tradition of Korea.
This phenomenologically oriented ethnography focuses on experiential aspects of Yanomami shamanism, including shamanistic activities in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the idea that the “part is equal to the whole,” which is embedded in the nature of the Yanomami macrocosm, human dwelling, multiple-soul components, and shamans’ relationships with embodied spirit-helpers. This book fills an important gap in the regional study of Yanomami people, and, on a broader scale, enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon by focusing on the consciousness involved in shamanism through firsthand experiential involvement.
This book emerged from two sessions of the 4th International Conference of the International Society for Shamanic Research held in France in 1997. One session was devoted to prehistory, another to "urban shamanisms and neo-shamanisms." All the papers published in the second part of this book devoted to modernizing societies were presented at the conference. Discussions on prehistory developed subsequently, and new contributions have also been included.