Shamans and

Religion
An Anthropological Exploration
in Critical Thinking

Alice Beck Kehoe

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

WAVELAND

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Cover photo credit—Yakut shaman chief. Neg. 122773. Courtesy Dept. of

Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.
Frontispiece photo credit—Tungus shaman in dress, Siberia. Neg. 1610,
photo from Jesup Expedition. Courtesy Dept. of Library Services, American
Museum of Natural History.

Copyright © 2000 by Alice Beck Kehoe

10-digit ISBN 1-57766-162-1

13-digit ISBN 978-1-57766-162-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

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Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 9 8 7 6
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Real Shamans 7
Siberian Shamans, Then and Now 14
Siberian History and Shamans 16
2 Understanding Religion from an
Anthropological Perspective 21
An Anthropological Perspective on Religion 21
“Religion” from a Non-Western Perspective 25
An Anthropological View of Shamans 27
New Age Religions from an Anthropological View 29
Summary: What—in this context—is Religion? 34
3 The Idea of the Shaman 37
Armchair Scholars versus Field Researchers 40
4 Religion or Genes? 47
5 Shamans Everywhere? 57
Trance and Mysticism 58
Healing with Spirits 60
The King’s Touch 62
Use of Drugs 64
Circumboreal (Northern Forests) Elements 66
Charisma 68
The Particular and the General 69

v
vi Contents

6 Shaman Painters? 71
Territorial Markers 75
Cave Art 77
Overview 79
7 Selling “Shamanic Journeys” 81
Michael Harner’s “Way of the Shaman” 82
Neo-shamanism 85
The Problem with Selling Non-Western Spirituality 88
8 Deafening Silence 91
Civilization and Its Other 93
Finding Healing 98
Conclusion 100
Sources 103
References 105
Additional Readings 113
Index 117
 Introduction

Once upon a time, in Paris, there was a Romanian scholar who

desperately wanted to become a professor in a major Western European
or American university. World War II had just ended and people felt
soul-weary. The scholar was asked to review a book linking arctic hys-
teria, a temporary insanity possibly triggered by diet deficiency among
Inuit in the dark arctic winters, with ecstatic hallucinations purport-
edly manifested by religious leaders—shamans—among northern
Siberian nomadic peoples. He seized the opportunity to make his mark
by going far beyond the book’s scope, placing shamanism within the
broad range of “initiatory rites and mystical experiences of certain
primitive and Oriental peoples” (Eliade 1981:116–117). He expanded
his review into a thick academic study, replete with references to
obscure publications in Russian and Hungarian as well as French, Ger-
man, Italian, and English.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy came out in French in
1951. It conformed to the European tradition of a compilation of travel-
ers’ descriptions used to exemplify a category named in a European lan-
guage, for example, Law, Religion, Kinship (or, in the sciences, Barnacles,
Tortoises, Sedimentary Rocks . . .). Sitting in his quiet, book-lined office,
the highly educated scholar organized data to demonstrate the essential
nature and accepted range of occurrences within the selected category.
Within this scholastic tradition, his erudite contemplation was more
highly valued than the dirty fieldwork of more menial producers of data.
The ambitious Romanian had been no closer to “primitive and Oriental
peoples” than a university in Bangladesh. His enterprise collating sec-
ond-hand data to picture a projected ancient religion was rewarded with
a professorship at the University of Chicago and direction of a new pro-
gram there, with its own scholarly journal, on the history of religions.
Publication in 1964 of an English translation of Shamanism consoli-
dated Mircea Eliade’s reputation as the leading scholar of comparative

1
2 Introduction

religion, successor to the similarly deskbound Sir James G. Frazer whose

turn-of-the-century encyclopedic works Eliade imitated.
Eliade’s Shamanism became an instant classic in the middle of a
century that began with the world dominated by empires on which the
sun never set, all speaking European languages, and has ended with a
shattering resurgence of diverse ethnicities. Political fragmentation and
campaigns to resurrect indigenous cultural practices are echoed in the
academic world’s postmodern, deconstructionist movement. It is appro-
priate now to look critically at Eliade’s method and categorizations, his
assumptions and sources. They don’t hold up well. As chapter 3 explains,
the text itself of Shamanism reveals a mystical presupposition at odds
with a scholarly ethnographic work. Beyond the question of Eliade’s
romantic conception of an eternally manifesting Sacred, the book perpet-
uates the classical myth that out beyond civilization roam noble savages
preserving a primordial religion more pure and true than any in the
West. This myth dehumanizes non-Western nations, makes them “peo-
ple without history,” as anthropologist Eric Wolf so cogently argued
(1982).
“Shamans” and “shamanism” are words used so loosely and naively,
by anthropologists no less than the general public, that they convey con-
fusion far more than knowledge. Clarifying problems in the facile use of
the label “shaman,” this book argues for a more ethnographically
grounded usage. Beyond that, it may be appropriate for teaching critical
thinking more generally.
Critical thinking always has been the fundamental method of
scholars, and recently it also has been brought to the fore in pedagogy
from primary school through college. Citizens in the twenty-first century
must examine a global spectrum of concepts, propositions, premises, and
statements presented as fact. How should students develop the habit of
searching out biases and emotional nuances along with examination of
concrete evidence and chains of logic? Educators agree that students
need real-world issues to discuss, although instructors may fear that live
issues might be mired in controversy, likely to affront students, or appear
charged with biases. Writing on Critical Thinking and the Academic
Study of Religion, Richard Penaskovic emphasizes that students taught
critical thinking not only must evaluate the bases for authoritative state-
ments, but also will realize “that preconception influences observation;
that is, we often see what we expect to see and fail to see [or note] things
we are not looking for” (Penaskovic 1997:10).
Cross-cultural comparisons—the core of anthropology—are partic-
ularly prone to the problems addressed by critical thinking. Our own
socialization, creating deeply embedded preconceptions reflecting our
culture’s habits of language, observation, and correlations, interferes
with noticing foreign modes of relating. Our premises about what is real,
what is “ordinary reality,” may not match those of other societies. This
Introduction 3

does not mean (as discussed in chapters 4 and 7) that another society’s
concept of what is real has to be accepted as more true than contempo-
rary Western formulation. An anthropological study such as this, com-
paring religious practices in a number of societies, both Western and
non-Western, demonstrates that every persisting worldview has a con-
siderable measure of empirical reality and a measure of “story-line” that
papers over some unsettling questions.
Critical thinking is a means to winnow out distorting stereotypes
and parrotted slogans. Rather than destroying students’ faith in their
families’ religions, critical thinking brings them closer to serious theol-
ogy. This book takes as a case study a set of popular beliefs about non-
Western religions, a case particularly useful for college students because
the best-known authority on the topic cogently illustrates the problems
critical thinking approaches.
The book opens with descriptions of shamans—the originals of the
term, Siberians performing traditional, community-oriented rituals of
drum, song, dance, and intense mental concentration to the point of
apparent dissociation from sense-perception. These are the benchmarks
defining “shaman.” A chapter “Defining Religion” from an anthropologi-
cal perspective follows, emphasizing social-functional analyses not only
because these are prominent in anthropology, but also because they may
be less familiar to readers than faith beliefs or ritual. The emphasis here
does not signify that anthropologists are cold materialists, only that the
social functions and material effects of religious behavior should not be
ignored. Anthropology has the advantage of incorporating human biol-
ogy into the equations, providing a holistic perspective particularly use-
ful for critical thinking.
With this anthropological perspective set out, the next chapter pre-
sents the classic Western idea of the shaman, an idea formulated two
centuries before Eliade wrote his book and derived from one of the oldest
documented notions in European thought, the stereotype of distant
primitive savages preserving a pure primordial religion lost to alienated
educated civilized men. Eliade uncritically accepted this ancient chest-
nut of Western thinking, using many secondary and unreliable sources
and apparently not always grasping the conclusions of those primary
sources he did consult when they contradicted traditional Western
biases about “the primitives” (Saliba 1976:117).
Chapter 4 examines the concept that ecstatic trance is the hall-
mark of exalted spirituality. “Trance” and “hypnosis” are colloquial
words for which “intense mental concentration” seems a more accurate
term. Humans can work themselves into such intense concentration
upon an anxiety or problem that they are temporarily not conscious of
ordinary sense impressions. Rhythmic drumming, song, and dancing can
be learned cues to focus so intently; much simpler, quicker cues can be
learned, too, such as the snap of a therapist’s fingers, or a feather or
4 Introduction

watch dangled in front of the client’s eyes. Some contemporary psychia-

trists use the hypnotic technique to assist patients to work toward
resolving deep anxiety. Religious mystics have used it to achieve a feeling
of transcendence. Anthropology’s holistic perspective suggests the capac-
ity to focus mentally to such an intense degree is a human characteristic
rooted in our genes.
The next two chapters look at how the terms “shaman,” “shaman-
ism,” “shamanistic religions,” and even “shamanic worlds” have been
applied. Siberians themselves distinguish between several types of prac-
titioners and adepts too loosely labeled “shaman” by outsiders. Some of
the practices and beliefs common among indigenous Siberian small
nations are found in northern North America, perhaps spread at least in
part through recent centuries of contacts across Bering Strait and by
Russian fur trade enterprises as far south as California. The defining
characteristics of Siberian/circumnorthern shamans do not occur among
South American or Australian indigenous healers and diviners. An
extreme case of applying the term universally is the claim of some
archaeologists studying rock paintings and engravings that they all were
made by shamans depicting what they saw “with the interior eye,” in
trance or hallucinating. No one has documented a shaman—Siberian or
similar circumnorthern indigenous person—actually making rock art of
such visions, and critical thinking asks for direct documentation to sup-
port the hypothesis.
Chapter 7 moves to contemporary New Age appropriation of the
inner “journey” described by some adepts in non-Western nations.
Whereas religious practitioners in these small indigenous nations usu-
ally work to relieve afflictions besetting others in their community, or the
community as a whole, New Age questers in Europe and America typi-
cally seek self-fulfillment. In this they reflect modern Western emphasis
on the individual rather than the community, although many enjoy the
feeling of community they gain in the shamanic workshop or celebration.
Finally, chapter 8 examines more critically the Westerner’s roman-
tic stereotype of distant primitives’ spirituality. As Joan Vincent ana-
lyzes in her superb study Anthropology and Politics, the discipline first
reinforced the classical Western contrast between civilized Us and prim-
itive Other, then throughout the twentieth century wrestled with the dis-
conformity between the stereotype ingrained through our schooling and
the actual people anthropologists experienced in fieldwork. An ugly word
for the stereotype is “racism.”
Anthropology has been in the vanguard of academics decrying rac-
ism, yet thoroughly ferreting out the fallout from the stereotype is exceed-
ingly difficult. In the 1940s, Robert Lowie, a student of Franz Boas who
had once written popular books on “Primitive Religion” and “Primitive
Society,” taught his anthropology classes to substitute “shaman” for the
derogatory terms “medicine man” or “witch doctor.” Apparently it did not
Introduction 5

occur to Lowie that practitioners in non-Western societies could be

termed “healers,” “doctors,” and “seers,” like Western practitioners. Noted
anthropologist/educator Yolanda Moses closed the century lamenting the
“deafening silence” she, an African American, encounters when she
points out this spectre still haunting us. Critically analyzing usage of the
term “shaman” may open up the stereotype of the Other, may help break
the silence over the racist baggage that accompanies some not-so-inno-
cent labels ensconced in the discipline from a less critical past.

Sources for a Critical Thinking

Study of Eliade
Critiques of Mircea Eliade’s work are well suited for a case study
for critical thinking. The most sympathetic is Bryan Rennie’s 1996
Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. Part Two of Rennie’s
book discusses in detail “Previous and Potential Criticisms” of Eliade’s
work, including “Eliade’s Political Involvement” in the 1930s and Nazi-
period right-wing propaganda. Rennie’s “Scholarly Criticism of Eliade”
includes thirteen summary points he cites from a 1981 article by R. F.
Brown. Overall, Rennie is an apologist for Eliade, whose efforts to
describe “religious man” fit Rennie’s own commitment to “a humanist
approach [to] human religiousness” (Rennie 1996:259).
Guilford Dudley’s Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics
(1977) reviews “Attacks on Eliade’s Methodology” as well as his “Inter-
pretive Vision” of the sacred. Dudley accepts that “Even a scholar of Eli-
ade’s stature, who offers a methodology of such promise, cannot avoid the
tests of scientific rigor that are urgently demanded by his empirically
minded colleagues” (Dudley 1977:36). In the end, Dudley emphasizes the
promise or potential he sees in Eliade’s “research program . . . of an anti-
history of religions” (Dudley 1977:160). He, like Rennie, believes in a
timeless human religiousness that he would distinguish from actual
time- and culture-bound religious practices and beliefs.
John Saliba, in contrast to Rennie and Dudley, focuses on the
anthropological content and critiques of Eliade’s work. Saliba modestly
states that his “book is written by a religious believer with the simple
aim of examining whether Eliade’s interpretation of the religions of non-
literate societies conforms to contemporary anthropological research”
(Saliba 1976:2). His conclusion is, in a word, that it does not. Saliba
explains that
In history, as in the natural and social sciences, generalizations are
looked upon as hypotheses for which both positive and negative
proofs are applied. . . . Nowhere in Eliade’s writings can we detect
any attempt on his part to take into account these simple method-
ological procedures so common in history (Saliba 1976:110).
Turning to Eliade’s source material, Saliba states,
6 Introduction

there are three main critiques which can be leveled at the way Eliade
uses his sources. First, he does not distinguish between primary and
secondary sources. . . . Secondly, Eliade makes, as a rule, no attempt
to evaluate the sources he cites; when he does evaluate, he is not al-
ways right from an anthropological standpoint. It has to be empha-
sized that not all ethnographic reporting is of the same academic
standard. . . . Thirdly, Eliade’s writings are a perfect example of
grouping together of sources without the application of any criteria
whatsoever. . . . There is no realization that the religious data which
these different sources supply vary as regards accuracy, certainty,
interpretation and content (Saliba 1976:116–118).
Of the three books, Saliba’s is the most straightforward, the one
most accessible and useful to a student interested in comparative reli-
gions. Armed with some experience in critical reading, a student will find
much to discuss in Rennie’s and Dudley’s sometimes anguished endeav-
ors to hold on to that seductive picture of the immanent “Sacred” painted
by Eliade. My book, here, stays within the anthropological perspective
limiting discussion to replicable observations—the essential foundation
of scientific studies. The books by Saliba, Rennie, and Dudley lie within
the humanistic tradition offering individuals’ arguments stimulated by
personal faith. Their acknowledgments of Eliade’s flaws as a historian or
social scientist, coupled with their reluctance to dismiss his writings,
make a good example of the differences between scientific and humanis-
tic studies.
Chapter One

Real Shamans

Russian ethnologists Waldemar and Dina Brodsky Jochelson were

in the Siberian village of Kamenskoye during the winter of 1900–1901
when a native Koryak trader and his assistant came to the village. The
assistant was “a bashful youth. His features . . . were flexible and pleas-
ant, and his eyes were bright.” Jochelson had heard that the young assis-
tant was a practicing shaman—a ritual adept who could divine the
future and heal sick people. “I asked him to show me proof of his shaman-
istic art,” Jochelson tells us.
The people put out the oil-lamps in the underground house in which
he stopped with his master. Only a few coals were glowing on the
hearth, and it was almost dark in the house. On the large platform
which is put up in the front part of the house as the seat and sleep-
ing-place for visitors, and not far from where my wife and I were sit-
ting, we could just discern the shaman in an ordinary shaggy shirt of
reindeer-skin, squatting on the reindeer-skins that covered the plat-
form. His face was covered with a large oval drum.
Suddenly he commenced to beat the drum softly and to sing in a
plaintive voice: then the beating of the drum grew stronger and
stronger; and his song—in which could be heard sounds imitating
the howling of the wolf, the groaning of the cargoose [grebe, a water-
fowl], and the voices of other animals, his guardian spirits—ap-
peared to come, sometimes from the corner nearest to my seat, then
from the opposite end, then again from the middle of the house, and
then it seemed to proceed from the ceiling. He was a ventriloquist.
Shamans versed in this art are believed to possess particular power.
His drum also seemed to sound, now over my head, now at my feet,
now behind, now in front of me. I could see nothing; but it seemed to
me that the shaman was moving around, noiselessly stepping upon
the platform with his fur shoes, then retiring to some distance, then
coming nearer, lightly jumping, and then squatting down on his
heels.

7
8 Chapter One

All of a sudden the sound of the drum and the singing ceased. When
the women had relighted their lamps, he was lying, completely ex-
hausted, on a white reindeer-skin on which he had been sitting be-
fore the shamanistic performance. The concluding words of the
shaman, which he pronounced in a recitative, were uttered as though
spoken by the spirit whom he had summoned up, and who declared
that the “disease” had left the village, and would not return (Jochel-
son 1908:49).
What is a shaman? The word comes from the Tungus language of
Central Siberia, where it designates religious leaders, men and women
who serve their communities by using hand-held drums to call spirit
allies. Saman in Tungus incorporates the root word sa, “to know,” hence
an especially knowledgable person. The techniques Jochelson observed
in Kamenskoye were, and to a lesser degree still are, practiced through-
out the far north of Eurasia and America, particularly by peoples who
depend upon the reindeer for food and clothing. From the Saami (Lapps)
in Scandinavia, all across northern Russia and Siberia and across the
northern half of North America into Greenland, communities relying on
hunting reindeer (or caribou in America) expected certain individuals to
be approached by spirits who promised to assist the practitioner if he or
she studied how to invoke them. Usually these adepts had been born into
families of such practitioners. To be a shaman is a priestly calling.
The young Koryak man met by the Jochelsons performed the ritual
typical of these northern shamans. Another impressive illusion was
observed by the Jochelsons in the Koryak village:
The shaman had a position on the floor in a corner of the tent, not far
from the entrance. He was sitting with his legs crossed and from time
to time he would rise to his knees. He beat the drum violently and
sang in a loud voice, summoning the spirits. As he explained to me
after the ceremony, his main guardian spirits were One-who-walks-
around-the-Earth (the bear), Broad-soled One (the wolf), and the
raven. The appearance of the spirits of these animals was accompa-
nied by imitations of sounds characteristic of their voices. Through
their mediation he appealed to The-One-on-High with the following
song, which was accompanied by the beating of the drum:
It is good that he should arrive,
Also I should myself also well reach home.
[In the Koryak language, these lines are a poetic couplet.] Suddenly,
in the midst of the wildest singing and beating of the drum, he
stopped, and said to me, “The spirits say that I should cut myself
with a knife. You will not be afraid.” “You may cut yourself, I am not
afraid,” I replied. “Give me your knife, then. I am performing my in-
cantations for you, so I have to cut myself with your knife,” said he.
To tell the truth, I commenced to feel somewhat uneasy, while my
wife . . . entreated me not to give him the knife. . . . I took from its
Real Shamans 9

sheath my sharp “Finnish” traveling-knife, that looked like a dagger,

and gave it to him. The light in the tent was put out; but the dim light
of the arctic spring night (it was in April), which penetrated the can-
vas of the tent, was sufficient to allow me to follow the movements of
the shaman. He took the knife, beat the drum, and sang, telling the
spirits that he was ready to carry out their wishes. After a little while
he put away the drum, and, emitting a rattling sound from his
throat, he thrust the knife into his breast up to the hilt. I noticed,
however, that after having cut his jacket, he turned the knife down-
ward. He drew out the knife with the same rattling in his throat, and
resumed beating the drum. Then he turned to me, and said that the
spirits had secured for me a safe journey over the Koryak land, and
predicted that the Sun-Chief—i.e., the Czar [of Russia]—would re-
ward me for my labors.

Reindeer Koryak, Taigonos Peninsula, Siberia, young man shaman performing to heal the sick
brother of the yurt owner. From Waldemar Jochelson, The Koryak (Plate II, AMNH Memoir 10,
1908.) Neg. 4132, Photo from Jesup Expedition. Courtesy Dept. of Library Services, American
Museum of Natural History.

Contrary to my expectations, he returned the knife to me . . . and

through the hole in his jacket he showed spots of blood on his body.
Of course, these spots had been made before. However, this cannot
be looked upon as mere deception. Things visible and imaginary are
confounded . . . the shaman himself may have thought that there
was, invisible to others, a real gash in his body, as had been demand-
ed by the spirits. The common Koryak are sure that the shaman ac-
10 Chapter One

tually cuts himself, and that the wound heals up immediately

(Jochelson 1908:51–52).
Waldemar and Dina Jochelson went on to record the culture of the
Yukaghir, neighbors to the Koryak. They stayed in the earth-lodge of an
elderly man named Nelbosh. Questioned about who served the local peo-
ple as shaman, Nelbosh told the Jochelsons that no one still alive had
that function; several years later, the Jochelsons learned that Nelbosh
himself was the shaman: “he had kept that fact from me, fearing that I
might tell about it to the [Russian Orthodox] priest at Verchne-Kolymsk,
of whom he stood in mortal fear.” Russian authorities demanded that the
Siberians become Christian, and after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviets
forbade shamans to practice their religion. Many were executed as “ene-
mies of the state.”
Nelbosh volunteered to demonstrate to the Jochelsons how sha-
mans practiced. His performance, more real than the Jochelsons realized
at the time, illustrates another mode of Siberian shamanism, the belief
that instead of calling spirits into the house, the shaman’s soul may go
out of the house in company with his or her spirits.
From the storage-house on high poles, a drum was produced. He
made the hat with fringe out of reindeer hide which I gave to him. He
had no special shamanistic coat. He put on a woman’s coat with a
fringe and metallic decorations. . . . Nelbosh let his long hair fly loose,
put on the fringed hat, sat down on the floor on a reindeer skin and
began quietly to beat the drum. Then he began to emit sounds imita-
tive of animals and birds thus conjuring the spirits of these animals,
his protectors. Then he sang:
My fore-father, my ancestors, stand near by me.
To help me, stand near me, my girl-spirits,
Xanbadaxche and Yeñechuope, bring here.
After this, the shaman again began to beat the drum, then, with the
assistance of his helper, he stood up and, approaching the door,
opened it and began to take deep breaths, thus breathing in the souls
of ancestors and other spirits he had conjured. Then he returned to
his place, again squatted down on the skin, shook the drum and said:
My children, my descendants, why do you torture us? Thus the spirit
of his fore-fathers spoke through the shaman. Then the relatives of
the patient, who were present, said:
The man drowns in a pool of water they have placed in order to
see you.
To this the shaman replied:
The soul of the patient, it seems, has traveled along the road to
the Kingdom of Shadows.
Real Shamans 11

Thus spoke through the shaman the spirit of the ancestors. The rel-
atives of the patient, that is, the people present, answered to this:
Be strong, strength do not spare!
Then the shaman stopped beating the drum, put it down near by,
and remained motionless, lying on his stomach on the reindeer skin.
This meant that the soul of the shaman had left his body and through
the drum as through a lake, had descended into the Kingdom of
Shadows. The shaman lay motionless for a long time, and those
present were waiting for his awakening. As to what becomes of the
soul after it leaves his body, Nelbosh, after the performance, told me
the following:
The soul of the shaman accompanied by spirits followed the road
which leads to the Kingdom of Shadows. It reached a little house in
front of which was a dog which barked at the shaman. Then an old
woman, who guards the road to the Kingdom of Shadows, came out
of the house and holding in her hand a scraper for dressing skins,
asked the shaman: “Did you come forever or for a time?” The shaman
did not answer the old woman, but said to the spirit protectors who
were accompanying him: “Do not listen to the old woman’s words,
walk on, without stopping.” They reached a river. On the bank there
was a boat. The shaman looked at the opposite bank and saw tents
standing there. Their hide covers seemed white in the sunlight, the
inhabitants walked about in the yard. The ornaments on their gar-
ments made a tinkling noise. The shaman accompanied by his spirit
helpers sat down in the boat and crossed to the other bank. He left
the boat and ascended the bank. The spirits of the deceased relatives
of the shaman were among the other shadows. The soul of the sha-
man entered their tent and there it saw the soul of the sick man. The
shaman began to ask the relatives of the soul to give it up, saying:
With you which finds itself the man’s soul, to take came I.
The relatives did not want to give it up, were sorry for it. Then the
shaman with the help of his spirits, took it by force. In order to re-
turn, the shaman inhaled the soul of the sick man, and stuffed up his
ear, to prevent it from escaping. When the shaman’s soul came back
to earth, to the body, which was still lying on the ground he began to
move and sang:
Drag me out of my sun rays.
But the shaman’s legs had become stiff, they would not bend, and
two virgin girls who were present began to rub the joints of the sha-
man’s legs, to make them regain their former pliability. After this the
shaman, beating the drum and jumping, moved toward the patient
and said:
Of the Kingdom of Shadows, on its way here up I came.
The shaman approached the patient, began to feel about the sick
12 Chapter One

place, and returned to the patient his soul that had escaped. Then he
sang turning to his spirits:
Guard his soul, not to leave.
Then he began to beat the drum joyously, walked from the patient to-
wards the door and said:
Spirits, in the yard do what you should. [That is, go away.]
. . . Nelbosh would sing with deep feeling, but in a low, drawn out
voice, as if lulling somebody to sleep, and producing an atmosphere
of quiet sadness. The motions of his body were smooth and rhythmi-
cal (Jochelson 1926:196–199].

Nelbosh’s son-in-law, a Tungus1 named Mashka, also was a sha-

man. Jochelson described Mashka as large and physically very strong,
unafraid of his spirits or anyone else, and so “furious and stormy” as he
performed his ritual that his jumps, yells, and wild drumming left Joch-
elson, observing, too exhausted to write up his notes (Jochelson
1926:200)!
Siberian shamans performed rituals for success in hunting as well
as to heal the sick, divine the future, and conduct offerings to local, fam-
ily, and higher spirits. Nelbosh described to the Jochelsons the prelude to
hunting:
The performance starts in the same way as does the ritual for the
curing of the sick. Towards the middle of the performance the sha-
man falls down unconscious. His soul does not go to the Kingdom of
Shadows but to one or another of the deities who control the game.
For instance, he described to me a visit of his soul to the Owner of the
Earth, as follows:
“The soul of the shaman, having approached the house of the Owner
of the Earth, half-opens the door, but does not enter, fearing to insult
the Owner of the Earth by its persistence. The shaman is herein sup-
ported by his guardian spirits.” The shaman, that is, his soul, says
through the open door:
Earth-Owner! Your children send to me for some food for the
future.
If the Owner of the Earth loves the shaman, he gives the soul of a
reindeer doe, if he does not love him, he gives the shadow of a [re-
indeer] bull.
Shaman will take that reindeer, having taken will bring home.
That is, the shaman then comes to, rises to his feet, beats his drum
and dances with joy. Then he sings to his spirit protectors, who
helped him in his journey to the Owner of the Earth.
Lead me well, protect from evil, else I will kill [evil spirits].
Real Shamans 13

Then the shaman approaches the head hunter and hands him the
soul of the reindeer. The hunter does not, of course, see the soul, for
only shamans can see it. The shaman places it on the head of the
hunter, and, tying it with an invisible bandage, says:
A river will stand, when there will stand on the right bank of it,
go, there you will find [the reindeer].
The next day, in the morning, the head hunter will go to the river and
there, on the right shore, a reindeer will come to meet him. He will
shoot and kill it. If the Owner of the Earth gave a shadow of a doe the
hunter will kill a doe, for this will be the same reindeer whose soul
was brought by the shaman. Then throughout the entire hunting
season the hunters will have luck in following the reindeer. If, on the
other hand, the Owner of the Earth gave a bull, the hunter will only
kill that bull, and there will be no more game. . . .
If the shaman, without asking the Owner of the Earth, himself takes
the souls of animals, with the assistance of his spirits, then, if that
shaman should come to the house of the Owner of the Earth, the lat-
ter will give him nothing:
A bad shaman, to the Earth Owner if he comes, he does not like,
does not give because stealing souls he does not like.
The Owner of the Earth punishes also in other ways the shaman who
steals the souls of animals. He kills his child or some other of his rel-
atives. At times he kills the thief himself (Jochelson 1926:210–211).
Waldemar and Dina Jochelson and their friends and colleagues
Waldemar and Sofya Bogoras, spent years in the field in Siberia, living
with the indigenous communities and learning their languages. This
was tough work, in the summer beset with millions of biting flies and
mosquitoes, in winter holed up in dark, smoky, sooty, sod-roofed pit-
houses along with lice and smelly blubber (Freed, Freed and Williamson
1988:20). The couples traveled by dog sled in winter, by raft, rowboat,
horseback, or on foot in summer, carrying the bulky cameras of the time
and buying, and somehow shipping, thousands of items of everyday life
for the collections of the great museums of New York and St. Petersburg.
These scientifically trained ethnographers scrupulously recorded their
direct observations, identified what was recounted to them but not
directly observed, and took down the exact words of utterances, obtain-
ing translations from local people who could speak Russian. Nelbosh, liv-
ing on the Korkodon River, was a real man serving a real 1890s Yukaghir
community; his son-in-law was real, so was the “bashful youth” who
worked for the Koryak trader.
14 Chapter One

SIBERIAN SHAMANS, THEN AND NOW

Shamans were described by several seventeenth-century scientific

travelers in Siberia and Lapland. Nicolas Witsen, a Dutch explorer
whose knowledge of Russia’s remote provinces impressed Czar Peter the
Great, published observations of Tungus shamans that sound much like
those by the Jochelsons two centuries later:
Thus must the sorcerer with his magic know what to say, or advise
about who had done such, or what is going on. . . . They chop down
the branches of trees, which they then lay on the water, or, in the
winter, set in the middle of the ice, around which they do their work.
And then they take in their hand a heavy cutting knife or an arrow,
making much clamor by jumping and screaming while drumming on
a little drum. Afterward the soothsayer then also stabs himself
bravely in his body. Many Samoyedes stand around him screaming
similarly. The sorcerer, hurting himself in this manner, falls in a
faint while jumping, and after having lain for a time, just as if rising
out of a sleep, begins to prophesy about all the preceding matters.
This is the most respected kind of divination. Smaller things are di-
vined and examined with fewer efforts, although not without practic-
ing magic in their manner, but rather without the chopping down of
trees, that is, only inside a tent or in the smoke from the fireplace
(quoted in Flaherty 1992:25).
The English geographer Samuel Purchas included a vivid account
of a shaman reported from 1557: “He singeth, as wee use here in England
to hollow [halloo], whoope, or shout at Hounds, and the rest of the Com-
pany answere him with this Outes Igha, Igha, Igha, to which the Priest
with his voice replieth” (quoted in Flaherty 1992:35).
Anthropology as a field of study developed in the late nineteenth
century. Some anthropologists aimed to discover laws of human behavior
comparable to the laws of physics and chemistry, using observations of
“primitive” (i.e., non-European) communities as if they were basic ele-
ments and arranging them in a kind of periodic table not unlike that for
chemistry. In these Law of Progress schemes, the fur-clad shaman was
listed as the most ancient and primitive religious element, “hollowing and
whooping” as civilized people do to spur on hunting dogs. Lacking formal
schooling and written texts, shamans were supposed to act spontaneously
and their beliefs assumed to be irrational and deluded. Because it was
presumed that all nations that did not raise crops through plow agricul-
ture were simple and not evolved much from animal ancestors, the reli-
gious practitioners of Siberia, Lapland, the Himalayas, Australia, and
most of the Americas were lumped together as “shamans” or “medicine
men.” Animism (belief that there are many invisible spirits in the world)
Real Shamans 15

was equated with “shamanism” and labeled the earliest, most primitive
religion, superseded among civilized people by the true faith in monothe-
ism. Some nineteenth-century anthropologists suggested that scientific
knowledge would supersede monotheism, freeing the most “advanced”
nations from all “superstition.”
Even in the pioneer generation of professional anthropologists
there were scholars whose field experience led them to respect non-West-
ern modes of thought and social action. Foremost among these was Franz
Boas, a German who spent a year, 1883–84, living with Inuit in Baffin-
land, the northeasternmost region of Canada. Risking his life in bliz-
zards and numbing cold, out of reach of any food other than what could
be hunted, Boas depended on the knowledge and skills of his Inuit com-
panions. When he watched his hosts’ ritual practitioners drum, sing,
dance, and prophesy, he admired their art and realized it reflected a high
degree of training. Boas correctly understood that all contemporary peo-
ples are equally evolved, that every nation has as long a history as every
other, regardless of whether it happens to be recorded in scripts. He also
understood that to make broad generalizations, a scientist needs a huge
number of accurate observations, and while a physicist or chemist can
run hundreds of experiments in a year, an anthropologist is much slower
in collecting data, since anthropologists cannot dissect, manipulate or
speed up the actual societies that form anthropology’s “natural experi-
ments.” Boas arranged sponsorship for much of the Jochelsons’ work, to
obtain sound data from that part of the world.
For more than a century now, there has been tension and contro-
versy between anthropologists who generalize types and apparent regu-
larities of human behavior, and those who consider our data too limited
and particular to justify claims for valid universal laws of human behav-
ior. The study of shamans can test this argument by comparing the par-
ticularities of Siberian practices against generalizations such as text-
book statements that religious leaders in small non-literate societies are
spontaneously inspired “shamans” and as such contrast with literate
societies’ trained “priests.” This book follows the Boasian standpoint that
ethnographic particularities are highly significant clues to societies’ his-
tories (including their adaptations to environment and other societies);
classifying societies into logical categories, ignoring unconforming
details, can distort our understanding of past and present humans.
Worse, to lump non-literate societies into one half of a dichotomy, “sim-
ple” versus “complex” societies, may have legal consequences for colo-
nized nations struggling to reclaim their territories and some degree of
sovereignty against governments accustomed to dismiss them as untu-
tored savages.
From Purchas and Witsen through the Jochelsons and anthropolo-
gists currently observing Siberian communities, it is clear that Siberian
shamanism is a well-formulated set of religious practices that, as
16 Chapter One

recorded by literate travelers, has endured for at least five centuries.

Contemporary research reveals that within the basic pattern there is
considerable variation between different regions of Siberia and obvious
adaptations to historical circumstances. Before we question whether
“shamanism” is a religious experience universal in human societies, let
us investigate the known variations and histories of Siberian nations
where shamans practice.

SIBERIAN HISTORY AND SHAMANS

The Far North was a fabled territory to city dwellers in “civilized,”2

temperate Europe. Classical Greek and Roman geographers told their
readers that north beyond civilized settlements roamed cannibals; dog-
headed people who barked; people who hibernated half of the year or
spent half the year underwater; people who had no notion of private
property, marriage, or laws. Medieval travel writers including Marco
Polo repeated the fantastic tales. Meanwhile, the Russian kingdoms of
Novgorod and then Moscow developed a trade in expensive furs—sable,
fox, and beaver—with northern hunters. By the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, Cossacks employed by Russian agents shattered Tatar rule in Sibir
and extended the Czar’s sovereignty through series of fortified trading
posts where natives were obliged to pay tribute in the form of furs,
receiving “gifts” from “the czar’s exalted hand” in return. The “gifts” were
axes and knives, cloth, beads, tea, sugar, and tobacco, presented with
exotic food (Russian bread) and liquor. Superficially, it looked like the
Western European trade with American Indians that would develop a
century later, except that Russia considered the Siberian nations to be
their subjects and enforced tribute with military campaigns. Siberia
being an exceedingly large territory, it took Russia a good two centuries
to push sovereignty eastward to the Pacific, and then the Bolshevik Rev-
olution of 1917 turned the Czar’s rule into Soviet domination.
Russian or Soviet, the conquering power officially classified the
non-Russian people as “aliens.” A few “aliens” were formally educated
town-dwellers or peasant farmers and could be treated like Russians,
many were classified as “nomads” who moved with their herds regularly
to seasonal pastures, and others were classified as “wanderers” who
hunted and fished apparently (so far as the Russian officials noticed)
without fixed movements. Nomads and wanderers were required to turn
in annual fur tributes, but the Russian colonial officials let them con-
tinue their “alien” customs. “Aliens” who accepted Christian baptism
were compelled to settle in Russian outposts. Native women who were
married to, or kept as concubines by, Russians expected this, but for
Real Shamans 17

native men, it meant leaving their families and occupations of herding or

hunting. For the Russian enterprise, it meant these men ceased to pay
fur tribute; therefore there was little government effort to convert the
Siberians until, in 1702, Peter the Great encouraged the Russian Ortho-
dox missionaries to bring soldiers with them to persuade whole villages
to accept baptism after the priests burned their shrines and images of
spirits. Czar Peter protected the Crown’s revenue by rescinding the rule
that converts were freed of fur tribute.
Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian
interventions in Siberia became increasingly onerous for the indigenous
nations. Siberian families became accustomed to trade for metal kettles
as well as axes, knives, and traps, and purchased flour, tea, and sugar
were regularly eaten. Liquor and tobacco remained important constitu-
ents of the fur trade. The “aliens” were subject to labor taxes including
road building, carting, providing firewood to heat the trading posts, and
assisting officials. An 1822 law formally recognized a policy of indirect
rule with Russian officials governing through designated male “clan
elders” regardless of whether the people had clans. These appointees
administered customary law and relieved some of the burden of tribute
collecting. A designated “clan elder” could be a shaman, or simply the
oldest active responsible man in a district. Historian Yuri Slezkine
(1994:88) considers this attitude toward the empire’s “aliens” to reflect
nineteenth-century Western intellectuals’ belief that uncivilized (i.e., not
living in cities) peoples are indicative of the early condition of human-
kind, incapable of performing the obligations and rights of citizens.
Superficially, the policy seems benign, but in fact it was racist, denying
the social achievements of the small nations adapted to the harsh envi-
ronments of the north. Their independence was abrogated without
granting them political rights allowed to Russians. Because it was
believed that years, perhaps generations, of tutelage and example would
be necessary before the “savages” could progress sufficiently to compre-
hend Christianity, there was less pressure on them to convert, a situa-
tion of apparent religious tolerance actually stemming from ethnocentric
disdain for the indigenous people. Anthropologist Caroline Humphrey
points out (1994:195) that, ironically, several of the small nations of cen-
tral Asia in the nineteenth century had only a few centuries earlier been
ambitious conquering states: best-known are the Mongols under Ching-
gis (Genghis) Khan who overran much of Asia and eastern Europe in the
thirteenth century. Shifts in military and economic power could be
claimed to represent superior races overtaking less-evolved ones.
Stalin’s 1928 takeover of the Soviet Union radically changed the
attitude toward the north. Differences between rich and poor were to be
ruthlessly eradicated, extending to differences in the size of reindeer
herds. Family herds had to be pooled in collective kolkhozy and the peo-
ple settled in kolkhoz houses. Stalin’s campaign to execute as enemies of
18 Chapter One

the state all the more prosperous peasants (kulaks) caused frightened
administrators in the north to declare that the custom for families with
larger herds to give reindeer to poorer kinspeople was disguised exploi-
tation, for the recipients of course herded the animals given to them,
freeing the giver of this task! “Rich” reindeer owners, the “tundra
kulaks,” were humiliated, fined, forced to work for the state, and their
animals taken, impoverishing their families. One Evenk man attempted
suicide in despair, only to be punished by the Soviet administrator for his
“political demonstration against the state” (Slezkine 1994:204).
Above all, the Soviets held the shamans to be their worst adversar-
ies in the campaign to turn the primitive, communal—yet not Commu-
nist—economies of the north into proper kolkhozy. In Russia, Christian
priests were targeted as leaders of resistance; in Siberia, the shamans.
Shamans were not only degraded and their drums and costumes confis-
cated, they might also be exiled (sometimes their communities followed
them into their place of exile) and some were executed. Photographs of
shamans during the Stalinist era show men in ragged Western clothing.
In Soviet museum exhibits, shamans often were depicted as wild-eyed
maniacs, and Soviet anthropologists were encouraged to interpret sha-
mans either as psychotics or evil manipulators of naive natives. Women
were less likely to be targeted as enemies of the state, so women sha-
mans might practice more openly than men.
Soviet policy toward the north was to promote “modernization,”
meaning exploitation of mineral resources such as oil and metals, con-
struction of industrial cities, and commercialization of fishing and herd-
ing. Russians were encouraged to “go east” as pioneers; political prison-
ers were transported to Siberia as they had been in the Czarist era, and
put to hard labor in prison camps. The influx of agricultural pioneers,
convicts, geologists, miners, railroad builders, and bureaucrats over-
whelmed much of the land, greatly reducing reindeer pastures and for-
ests and polluting rivers and lakes, destroying fishing. Indigenous chil-
dren were held in boarding schools where they were taught a Russian
curriculum, similar to the nineteenth-century U.S. policy of taking
American Indian children from their parents to be “civilized” in boarding
schools. Women and the elderly were pressured to remain in villages of
cold Russian-style frame houses while men worked for weeks or months
away from home as contract labor or herding reindeer in distant pas-
tures. Under such conditions, shamans were wanted for healing and
divining, less so for rituals for traditional hunting success or for invoking
and placating spirits of the landscape.
The break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s freed shamans from
its persecution. Now they are honored—if they can be found! The
decades of Soviet denial cut the transmission of shamans’ knowledge,
many dying without the opportunity to train successors. A younger gen-
eration of northern people praises the wisdom of their ancestors without
Real Shamans 19

being able to speak the ancestors’ language or herd, hunt, fish, travel,
tan hides, sew, make tents, and prepare food as they did. In Yakutsk,
principal city of the Sakhá (formerly known as the Yakut), well-educated
professional people try to learn about their foreparents’ shaman beliefs
and practices, asserting these to be the core of their Sakhá ethnicity. An
authentic “real shaman” is said to live far from Yakutsk, unwilling to mix
with its crowds, noise, and pollution. Meanwhile, Russians and seekers
of wisdom from Western Europe and America travel to Yakutia and the
other Siberian indigenous nations expecting to encounter shaman gurus.

Notes
1 The name Tungus is now used for the group of related
languages, while the people of central and southeastern
Siberia formerly known as Tungus are called Evenki. NOTE:
Siberian nations have been known by different names in the
course of history. The Yakut are now called Sakhá, and the
Ostiak are called Khanty.

2
“Civilized” and “city” come from the same root word, civis,
Latin for “citizen.”
Chapter Two

Understanding Religion
from an Anthropological
Perspective

Defining “religion” is difficult. United States courts are challenged

again and again on whether the Ten Commandments are “religious”
(and should not be displayed in a public tax-supported building),
whether a municipality can force all businesses to close on Sunday
(Christians’ Sabbath), whether a member of the Native American
Church can be fired from his job on the grounds he takes drugs when he
has only taken the peyote passed around as communion in his legally
established church. St. Nicholas is a religious figure but Santa Claus is
not. Michael Harner advertises that his shamanic technique workshops
are secular, not religious, yet many attracted to them are seeking spiri-
tual fulfillment (see chapter 7).

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
ON RELIGION

One of the first textbooks of anthropology was Edward Burnett

Tylor’s 1881 volume, Anthropology. Although he doesn’t present the com-
parative method as such, he uses it constantly, orienting readers to the
standard comparative method of anatomists at the beginning of his second
chapter. Tylor’s chapter on religion is titled “The Spirit-World,” and begins,
“The anthropologist, who has to look at the religions of nations as a main
part of their life, may best become acquainted with their general principles
by beginning with the simple notions of the lower races” (Tylor 1881:342).

21
22 Chapter Two

Nineteenth-century anthropologists collected descriptions of non-

Western nations and of peasants in their own nations in order to define
postulated stages of human evolution. They based their work on the
premise, modeled on paleontology, that some human “races” (i.e., popu-
lations) are “living fossils,” unchanged from a much earlier time. Arrang-
ing similar organisms from simple to complex, against a series of the
growth stages of embryos of “advanced” species, paleontologists virtu-
ally fleshed out their fossils, projecting that the ancient organisms would
have had the perishable features, such as muscles and fur, seen in con-
temporary species. This comparative method for paleontology was con-
structed well before Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species, and it
accommodated the idea of God’s basic plan as easily as, later, it would
accommodate Darwinian evolution.
Anthropologists accepted the comparative method to flesh out pic-
tures of ancient human societies. They discussed whether civilized chil-
dren are the equivalents of ancient humans, stage by stage as they grow
up, a discussion resolved by claiming that “primitive” living “races” are
child-like. The ethnocentric premise that non-Westerners are less
evolved compared to Europeans and Euro-Americans was combated as
early as the late nineteenth century by a few anthropologists, notably by
Franz Boas and his associates such as the Jochelsons, but generally the
notion prevailed that peoples overcome by European invaders were sim-
ple-minded. Chapter 3 will discuss the longstanding tendency in West-
ern culture to contrast civilized “Us” with distant “primitives.”
We should examine the claim that there is a “shamanic religion”
contrasting with the “religions of the book” through examining the term
“religion.” There is in America what sociologists have called “civil reli-
gion,” rituals and myths promoting patriotism and community feeling
overriding differences of denominational affiliation. There are groups of
people who meet to carry out rituals with drumming and singing and
invocations, some of them saying they are religious (for example, Wicca)
and others saying they are not (for example, men’s-movement camps).
Some people join a particular church for the same reason they join a
country club, to be seen with the elite.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin word “to bind,” pointing
us to a major function of religions, the binding together of persons into a
supportive congregation or community. Daur Mongols (chapter 4) held a
major village-wide ceremony every third year during which the yadgan
encircled the gathered community with a long leather rope, pulling on it
until the people felt squashed, dramatically experiencing the binding
function of their ritual. Contemporary anthropologist Eva Fridman
observed Buryat families in central Asia, learning that they are tied into
communities by knowledge of common ancestry that is manifested in reg-
ular prayerful rituals led by a shaman related to the family group. When
Russian and Soviet government decrees moved some Buryat families
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 23

away from ancestral territories, the families carried stones from their
holy places with them, setting the stones under the altars they con-
structed in their new home regions. Ancestors’ spirits were believed to
congregate at the mountain peaks, cliffs, or springs in the ancestral
lands, and to come to the new homes when called at the altars. More
recently deceased forebears are simply called, with prayer and food offer-
ings, in family farmyards and woods. Fridman saw how the shaman-led
rituals honoring ancestors made visible the supportive community of rel-
atives and neighbors, gathered for the celebration. The binding function
of religion was particularly noticeable when Fridman talked with an eth-
nically Russian woman who had married a Buryat physician. Even after
her husband died, the woman came with her daughters to the Buryat
family ritual. She told Fridman that the depression she suffered when
widowed had been considerably relieved as she realized the continuing
support from her in-laws, together with her during the shaman’s invoca-
tion of the souls of the deceased physician, his father, and other forebears.
Chapter 4 sets out hypotheses explaining phenomena classed
together as “shamanism.” Humans’ ability to concentrate intently, focus-
ing on mental images to the extent of not responding to real-world sense
perceptions, is fundamental to much behavior labeled “religious.” For
most educated people today, “religious” brings to mind an individual’s
longing for deeper understanding of the conundrums of existence—why
does good not always prevail? why should there be evil? suffering? war?
or indeed, why should there be beauty? love? or the ultimate question,
why should there be anything? French anthropologist Claude Lévi-
Strauss postulates that pondering on such philosophical questions led to
the many religions of the world, every society maintaining a system of
ideas built up by its poets and leaders; myths, parables, moral command-
ments, and metaphysics are related components of the system. Lévi-
Strauss’ countryman Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes the way people in a
society form their concepts and images of the world, society, and humans
through the common experience of their environment, their bodies and
homes, their modes of gaining a living, and historical events. American
anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace studied cases of religious change
and perceived a pattern of times of social stress, the emergence of a char-
ismatic “prophet” advocating reforms, and widespread acceptance of the
advocated modifications: a “revitalization movement” in Wallace’s terms.
Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish-born anthropologist living in England,
showed how legends and supposed facts are presented to model and
legitimate the status quo by those who enjoy that status, or to challenge
its legitimacy. Each of these anthropologists based his analyses on cross-
cultural comparisons between non-Western and familiar Western societ-
ies, stimulated by field experience to recognize the metaphysical as well
as community-binding significance of religions.
Taking the broad perspective of anthropology, our accustomed mod-
24 Chapter Two

ern Western focus on individuals is acceptable provided we add to it the

realization that humans are gregarious mammals. We do have bodies,
each of us exists only because a man’s sperm and a woman’s ovum came
together and the resulting embryo lodged in a woman’s uterus for
months, nourished through a placenta. Nearly all humans survived
through suckling mother’s milk produced in women’s mammary glands
(that’s why we’re “mammals”). Survival was greatly enhanced if the
mother was aided by others in her community: gregarious humans were
more apt to survive and reproduce another generation than loners were.
Whether you think of the perils of carnivorous beasts, accidents, starving
or freezing or heatstroke that would have killed far more loners than
people in groups, or consider that gregarious people are more likely to
meet mates, it is obvious that it has been highly advantageous to
humans to be gregarious—to live in groups. Émile Durkheim, a French
pioneer sociologist, saw a century ago that underlying the transcenden-
tal dimensions of religious belief are actual congregating people invoking
a deity or spirit symbolizing their common concerns. These are, as he
said, “social facts” arising from societies’ need to enlist their members in
activities likely to promote the general welfare. Thus there is no conflict
between looking at religions from the point of view of individuals ponder-
ing the eternal questions of existence, and analyzing the function reli-
gions serve in binding people into communities.
The social function of religion is admirably exhibited in American
civil religion. A calendar of special days—Christmas/New Year’s, Presi-
dents’ Birthdays, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July,
Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving—punctuate workaday life,
reminding Americans nearly every month to celebrate together the soci-
ety they hold in common. Although Christmas and Easter are ostensibly
Christian holy days, they are symbolized in America by pre-Christian
European mythic figures, the “jolly elf ” Santa Claus and the Easter
Bunny. Americans are given the days off from employment to signal that
these celebrations in common are so important that they rank above
earning a living, and to ensure that every American can join the celebra-
tion without penalty. Displaying the American flag and respectfully lis-
tening to the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” are civil religious
rituals filling in between the legal holidays. Schools devote many days to
teaching children the forms for civil religious rituals, from turkey-eating
on Thanksgiving (turkey is native to America, unlike chicken or beef or
pork) to flowers for mothers (without mothers, there would be no next
generation of Americans). Civil religion has imposing courthouses, city
halls, and state capitol buildings for its cathedrals. It provides moral
commandments and myths, stories ranging from “The First Thanksgiv-
ing” and “George Washington Cannot Tell a Lie” to “Raising the Flag on
Iwo Jima” (“All races triumph together for America”) and “Chief Seattle’s
Speech” (this plea to protect our American earth was written in 1969 by
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 25

a Euro-American for an environmental campaign). The religious power

of civil religion can be grasped by realizing that thousands of men, from
the Civil War on, have truly been willing to die to protect American free-
dom, in spite of the actual fact that conscription laws took away their
freedom to choose whether to go to war.

“RELIGION” FROM A NON-WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

It is often remarked that in many societies, “everything is ‘reli-

gion.’” Conversely, in the United States, people tend to equate “religion”
with “church.” “Religion” is, bottom line, a category label used in Western
societies to cover belief in transcendental power or deity, rituals express-
ing that belief, a group’s worldview or cosmology, and myths explaining
the works of the power or deity and associated beings. In other words,
“religion” is a term we affix to selected sorts of human behavior. Organi-
zations formed to enable these sorts of behavior to be practiced and
taught are labeled “religions,” for example “Christianity,” “Pentecostal-
ism,” “Russian Orthodox.” Such labels may be used as ethnic signs. Mod-
ern states base certain privileges on residents’ “religious” affiliation—
exempting recognized “religious” organizations from taxes, for example,
or denying persons outside the state religion the right to vote or hold
civil-service jobs. The phrase “ethnic politics” refers to bloc voting, lobby-
ing, campaigning to attract identified ethnic groups, and so on, and fre-
quently the targeted “ethnic” group is characterized by its “religious”
affiliation label, e.g., “the Catholic vote,” the “Christian Right.” “Reli-
gious affiliation” binds together those congregating to practice it, while
it may become a means of preaching hostility toward others differently
affiliated, fomenting wars and genocide.
Where a “religion” tag doesn’t attach to political baggage, the
notion of separating out knowledge and actions according to “real” ver-
sus “spiritual” may seem weird. Bronislaw Malinowski, in the 1920s,
described canoe-building in the Pacific island where he worked to include
prayers and prescriptions for right thinking. The builders were sure that
these prayers were just as necessary for a seaworthy canoe as their
woodworking and engineering skills. Malinowski observed that what he
might have called “magic” or “religious ritual” was, for the islanders, part
of canoe-building technology. Similarly, prayers and ritual motions were
necessary parts of agricultural technology, health practices, economic
transactions, and most other of what Western culture would call mun-
dane practices. The people he discussed this with pointed out to him the
disasters that had occurred to persons who had neglected to perform
these aspects with care. (It’s like blame for a car accident. How many
times have you risked passing, been OK, and instantly forgotten you
26 Chapter Two

hadn’t been quite as careful as ideally, only to be convinced that such

negligence must be the cause of an accident when one did happen?) Mali-
nowski’s analysis was that many endeavors are inherently risky, and
persons who are meticulous in prayer and ritual are not only likely to be
mindful of care in the rest of the business at hand, but to carry on with
a sure self-confidence that might pull them through a crisis in which an
anxious person would panic and fail.
Contemporary anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet has lived, off and
on, for a dozen years with the Dene Tha (Dene is pronounced “Deh nay”),
a northern Canadian indigenous nation. Goulet learned their language
and what they call “the Dene Tha way.” His friends helped him under-
stand that formal verbal instruction doesn’t count for much in their for-
est homeland (book learning they didn’t even bother talking about).
Dene Tha learn from personal experience, by observing people, animals,
and weather directly, listening to them while in the same situation as
they. They also learn from personal experience in mental concentration
and in dreams that impress them as significant. A dream or vision land-
scape is felt to be another place, as Vancouver or Ottawa are other places.
Human spirits and animal spirits live in these other places, as humans
and animals live in Vancouver or Ottawa, and Dene Tha can journey
there and back, with or without their mortal bodies. Goulet concludes
that “religion” misrepresents the way Dene Tha know their world, and
learn to know it. He himself came to understand that writing everything
down in words incompletely rendered “the Dene Tha way,” what he had
absorbed through all his senses over several years in their land. Is “the
Dene Tha way” spiritual? Not from their point of view. There are spirits
and souls in their land, and they feel awe for the power in the universe,
but they consider themselves practical people who try to “know a little
bit” of the immensity of the universe so they can make a decent life.
Dene are not much different from Western followers of “religions of
the book” in their conviction that daily life must incorporate knowledge
gained “through one’s mind,” as they say, through revelation. The Bible,
Qur’an, and teachings of the Buddha preserve revelations in written
texts, and non-literate communities such as the Dene preserve revela-
tions through oral telling. Ordained priest or Dene “dreamer,” spiritual
knowledge is learned from preceding generations, reflected upon, taught
as moral commandments and explanations for conditions we experience,
and sometimes amplified by personal revelation. Christian, Jewish,
Muslim, and Buddhist leaders are as insistent as any Dene “dreamer”
that they are expounding a “way” for the conduct of human lives. From
the perspective of a church person, “religion” should no more be confined
within the church building or activated only during prayer or services,
than a Dene would accept separating knowledge experienced “through
one’s mind” from the rest of one’s life. The difference between Dene living
in their small villages and urban Euro-Americans is not that Indians are
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 27

spiritual and Euro-Americans not; it is that the great number of persons

in cities makes it easier to ignore joining a congregation, or avoid ponder-
ing the possibility of transcendental revelation or existence. Goulet gives
a vivid example, recounting how some young men in the Dene Tha vil-
lage in which he lived were spending their days drinking beer and driv-
ing up and down the road, loud and useless. Some of the older people qui-
etly encouraged the young men in their families to practice drumming
and singing. Within two years, Goulet saw nine of these ex-wastrels
accompanying a community religious ritual, performing expertly and
beautifully for their people including, as Goulet’s friends pointed out, the
young wives they had settled down with.
Dene Tha sensitivity to unusual animal or weather behavior, inter-
preted as communication from other-than-human beings, seems compa-
rable to many Christians’ sensitivity to what are interpreted as inner
promptings from Jesus, a saint, or the Holy Spirit. Dene in the forest
need to be highly sensitive to the natural forces around them, and resi-
dents in American towns need to be sensitive to the great number of
other people with whom they interact. Subliminal (not quite conscious)
perceptions may be crucial in dealing with each situation, so that train-
ing children to be open to registering subtle impressions—cognized as
other-than-human promptings—can enhance success. In each case, peo-
ple who live in a community or congregation teaching that spirit beings
communicate “through one’s mind” can consider such attention quite
straightforward listening. Michael Harner (chapter 7) shows us that
even a university professor with a Ph.D., once he became convinced of
“nonordinary reality” as he terms it, can insist that such private commu-
nication is real and claim his visions should be accepted as scientific evi-
dence for spirits. (Science, however, is based on observations that others
also can see.)

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW OF SHAMANS

Siberian shamans serve their communities, directly when they sac-

ralize a family’s home, yard, and environs as Eva Fridman observed
among Buryats, and indirectly when they heal and divine for individuals
in the community. Shared beliefs about the nature of the world and its
beings—“religion,” if you will—frame a village’s common interests, not
least of which will be common concern over members’ capacity to care for
themselves and their dependents, and the nurturing of new generations.
Healing thus is of more than individual benefit, because an incapaci-
tated person requires sustenance and time from others. We gregarious
mammals do not easily abandon members of our group; instead, we seek
means to restore them to normal capacity.
28 Chapter Two

That shamans really can heal by sucking out or blowing off disease
or retrieving souls by interior journeying is well documented. Two scien-
tific explanations account for this: the placebo effect, involving hormonal
changes induced by emotions, and the fact that many illnesses simply
heal given enough time. A placebo is a harmless substance or procedure
that a practitioner tells a patient will help him or her. Numerous clinical
studies have shown that about one-third of patients given a placebo will
report feeling improved, and often it is measurable improvement, not
just a patient trying to please a doctor by saying a treatment helps. This
is, at least in part, because expectation of improvement can trigger hor-
mone production that supports healing. (Conversely, telling a person
that he or she will sicken or die may trigger hormone production damag-
ing health, depressing appetite, and creating crippling anxiety. This is
the usual explanation for “voodoo death,” people dying after they are con-
vinced they have been malevolently bewitched.)
There is a saying that colds will heal in seven days if treated, and
in a week if left alone. A sick or injured animal lies still, conserving
energy while its metabolism engages to overcome an infection or heal a
wound. Humans, too, often recover if left in quiet and kept comfortable.
During the time a shaman is being asked to intervene, prepares the rit-
ual, and carries it out, the patient has gained several days of recupera-
tion. Add to that a possible placebo effect from being assured there is
likely to be improvement, and many patients do indeed improve after a
shaman’s therapy.
Divining shamans draw upon their life experience and knowledge
of people to infer a probable answer to clients’ questions, plus their pre-
dictions will influence clients’ choices. If someone tells you that you will
have bad luck if you do such-and-such a thing, you’ll avoid the bad luck
by refraining from doing the prophesied action. When it comes to appar-
ently influencing other-than-human beings beyond the shaman’s com-
munity, for example wild reindeer, the shaman relies on probability:
chances are, a reindeer will appear to a hunter who goes to the river,
especially if the hunter, because of the prediction, waits patiently and
quietly from camouflage. A. I. Hallowell, attending an Ojibwe shaking-
tent performance, asked the “conjurer” to find out his ill father’s state of
health. The spirit Mikinak the Turtle was sent to Philadelphia to find
out, and reported (in his “Donald Duck” voice [chapter 7]) that the elder
Hallowell was “no worse,” which his son found was true when he
returned to Philadelphia months later. Is this astonishing, or a reason-
able guess?
My own experience with a Plains Ojibwe diviner who didn’t use a
shaking tent, merely intense concentration, confirmed to me the impor-
tance of experience in prompting diviners’ pronouncements. The man I
interviewed divined by concentrating until an image came into his mind.
One example he gave me concerned a case of a fellow villager who had
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 29

misplaced money. The family claimed it had looked all over the house,
emptied drawers, etc. The diviner concentrated until he saw in his mind
a kitchen drawer pulled out of its cabinet and a wad of money stuck
behind the drawer. Sure enough, the missing money appeared when the
family removed the kitchen drawers, something they hadn’t thought of
before. Again, is this astonishing?
To sum up, shamans’ successes can be attributed to the probability
that intense concentration will “conjure up” an image that could well be
correct, given the diviner’s familiarity with the client’s life and the prob-
ability that time may allow the body to heal, plus the beneficial hormonal
effect of optimism. In a broader view, shamans’ efforts function to liter-
ally bring together a community, reinforcing the gregariousness that is
part of our species’ mode of survival. Gathered for a shaman’s perfor-
mance, the community allays its members’ anxieties through reassuring
the unfortunate of their supportive good will and placating them with
promises of betterment. This strengthens the community itself by reliev-
ing, at least sometimes or for a period of time, the burden caused by an
incapacitated member. The same benefits are procured for urban West-
ern communities by hospitals, counselors, support groups, evangelists,
and those well-advertised seminars in big motels touting handsome Tai-
lored Suits’ Five Principles of Business Success (#4: Invest the Wad of
Money Behind the Kitchen Drawer in Franchises).

NEW AGE RELIGIONS FROM

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW

Anthropologists’ basic method of cross-cultural comparison

requires us to observe and analyze fellow humans in our own societies as
well as in more remote countries. Many of us keep notes on local religious
activities to sharpen the comparisons we are drawing from fieldwork
elsewhere. We can test our more generalized interpretations, too, by
applying them to communities we know from the inside, as natives. The
case of “shamans” and “shamanism” profits from investigating the whys
and hows of contemporary educated Westerners’ espousals of what they
may label with these terms.
The most startling, yet expected, difference between Siberian sha-
mans and most of the Americans “taking the shamanic path” is, as lead-
ing guru Michael Harner makes clear, the Siberian serves his or her fel-
lows, versus the highly individualistic, self-focused quest of so many
American seekers of spirituality. This book is not the place to lay out the
West’s history of liberal democracy replacing feudal order and the prin-
ciple of individual human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-
30 Chapter Two

ness replacing the medieval European principle of birth into a social

class determining one’s occupation, religion, residence, even clothing and
bread (sumptuary laws forbade peasants and tradespeople from wearing
luxury fabrics and eating finely-milled white bread). The effect of several
centuries of expanding liberal democratic principles is that we take for
granted the notions that one’s fate is in one’s own hands, opportunities
are out there, private happiness is a proper goal for everyone. We also
take it for granted that “the market” is powerful in regulating social
interactions, capitalizing on industrial production to provide vast
amounts of foods and goods within everyone’s economic reach, and
accepting the idea that services are marketed like goods. Dominant
though that idea may be, in fact most Americans rely on family and
friends for informal exchanges of services rather than, or in addition to,
purchased services. Given our society’s premise, enshrined in the United
States’ Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights—
copied by dozens of other nations—that the individual is the embodi-
ment of political and economic actions, no wonder that we exhort individ-
uals to strive for self-fulfillment.
Cutting into the pursuit of self-fulfillment is American (and Euro-
pean) civil religion, pressuring schoolchildren and adults to conform to
national stereotypes on designated days. At Thanksgiving, we are likely
to invite near-strangers such as a college student’s dorm acquaintance to
join our family for the turkey dinner, because Thanksgiving is a day to
ritually acknowledge the value of sharing, otherwise hidden behind
advertised services-for-pay in “the market.” Thus it is not that Ameri-
cans and Europeans are brought up to be cold, calculating, callous
money-grubbers, it is rather that much of the communitas (“communal”)
spirit pervading our daily lives is taken for granted, talked about under
the labels “chat” and “gossip” as if trivial. Our society seems to need to
teach us explicitly to see ourselves as autonomous individuals responsi-
ble for our own fate. This notion is not, after all, so “natural,” just as pri-
vate-enterprise market political economies aren’t instinctive to human
beings.
With this background, it becomes probable that most seekers of
self-fulfillment through what are called “New Age religions” are edu-
cated and middle-class: this broad class has had the most indoctrination
of liberal-democratic principles of individual rights and responsibility for
one’s fate. This class is also likely to have the money to pay for work-
shops, courses, and travel. The Swedish ethnographer Galina Lindquist
met, to her surprise, Swedish “shamanic workshop” customers who had
taken out loans to pay for shamanizing courses (and note that their
credit was sufficient to get the loan). It might seem that with all the
schooling in logic and at least basic science, middle-class, educated West-
erners would have no truck with fantasies about spirits and soul jour-
neyings, but this is to overlook both the parallel schooling about faith
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 31

Reindeer Koryak, Taigonos Peninsula, Siberia, woman shaman performing for family inside their
yurt. She sings, “Thou said, drum—make well. [We] shall live, the reindeer not dying; also after-
wards, children well.” From Waldemar Jochelson, The Koryak (Plate III, AMNH Memoir 10,
1908.) Neg. 4164, Photo from Jesup Expedition. Courtesy Dept. of Library Services, American
Museum of Natural History.

that most have received in church or synagogue, and the texts and dis-
cussions in classes about literature and philosophy. We give lip service to
being strictly rational, while our culture actually feeds us a steady diet
of fantasy ranging from Shakespeare and Homer to Elvis Presley and
Disney productions. The late Joseph Campbell deliberately wrote books
of myths for contemporary educated Americans, pastiches of bits from
anthropological and literary sources making up his offerings of Myths to
Live By, as he titled a 1972 book.
It is characteristic of New Age religions that as a consequence of the
focus on the individual seeker, there are innumerable varieties, and few
are exclusive. Campbell’s coffee-table books furnish a starting point for
many, with New Age bookshops providing labeled shelves of further
readings in directions he points out. Alternate newspapers, often stacked
for free distribution at the bookshops and natural-foods markets and
cafes, carry pages and pages of ads for every conceivable mode of break-
ing through a dull existence. In line with the individualism indoctrinated
in our culture, ads promise personal healing or pleasure. One of my stu-
dents in an Anthropology of Religion class reported on a small congrega-
tion calling itself the Church of Friendship through Self-Realization, a
name that would serve for a good portion of New Age groups; so would
its creed of combining figures from all the well-known religions: Jesus,
Buddha, yogas, the Qur’an, and a California religion guru. As you would
32 Chapter Two

expect, the creation of the Internet immensely facilitated the dissemina-

tion of New Age ideas. Anthropologist Joan Townsend, who has observed
New Age “shamanism” since the early 1980s, emphasizes that what we
now have are not so much movements or cults as networks, with persons
often beginning with a workshop or course but building beyond that
through Internet contacts and postings. That picture of the devotee alone
at his or her computer, connecting via the pixels on the monitor screen,
heightens the individualism taken for granted by many New Age seek-
ers.
How does the modern focus on the individual square with our spe-
cies’ gregariousness? Politically, representative democracy is a structure
that allows each franchised individual to vote to select a group spokes-
person for legislation, the groups ranging from municipal units to
national political parties. Economically, individuals band together in
interest groups such as business corporations and labor unions, while
billions of dollars are sunk into pervasive advertising to persuade each
of us to want mass-produced goods. “Express your individuality,” trum-
pets the ad, “when you select Name Brand jeans!” Socially, gregarious-
ness finds its outlets in support groups, sport clubs, crowded malls, con-
certs, festivals, and so on, to the mind-boggling spectacle of thousands of
people massed to run, jog, or walk in Celebrity Name’s Race for Disease.
When it comes to neo-shamanism, the individual’s interior journey is not
only taught by another, usually in a small friendly group, but is fre-
quently practiced in small groups.
Galina Lindquist observed Swedish neo-shamanists during the
1990s. Her perceptive account peels back the overlay of individualism to
reveal a strong communitarian foundation. Although a few persons told
her that they preferred to be alone when “going on a shamanic journey,”
most came together with others into what she calls a “fuzzy community,”
“fuzzy” like mathematicians’ “fuzzy sets,” without obvious or definite
boundaries. Novices together in a neo-shamanism workshop felt a cohe-
sion fostered by their workshop teacher, and those who continued with
neo-shamanism met at seasonal rituals. Lindquist was struck by the fact
that workshop novices generally were strangers initially, yet the teacher
paired them and instructed each to work for the other’s “healing,” first
shaking a rattle around the other while moving a hand close to the
patient to “perceive the aura,” then lying lengthwise, touching, beside
the person while “journeying” to find the patient’s Power Animal spirit,
carrying the Animal “back” in one’s arms, and blowing it “into” the per-
son. Lindquist observed, “If nothing else, the unreserved attention given
to the other makes this work with partners a very agreeable experience
for most” (Lindquist 1997:97). After paired-off “healing,” the teacher had
the workshop participants come together in a line, touching, to form a
“spirit boat” that they would “paddle” by shaking their rattles to a drum-
beat. They are to sing and “see” the Underworld river they paddle on,
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 33

carrying the teacher’s spirit until he finds the Power Animal of the
patient he is lying alongside, then paddling back with him and the Ani-
mal. Individually or on the “boat,” participants are to feel free to burst
into shouts, extemporaneous songs, or animal cries; participants will be
“energized” by sharing their heightened emotionality.
Lindquist’s penetrating analysis brings out the degree to which
Swedish “shamanic” rituals are performances, another contradiction
between the rhetoric and what she observed. The workshop teacher she
followed, an American trained by Michael Harner who settled in Scandi-
navia to purvey his own variation on Harner’s “shamanic journeying,”
vehemently insisted to her that he does not “perform,” he actually does
journey incorporally (without his body) to the Under- and Upper Worlds.
Lindquist, as a social scientist, can only report what she herself sees and
hears, his dramatic skill in acting out his “imaginal” journeys. The Power
Animal, a lynx he supposedly carried back on the spirit boat, was invisi-
ble to the “paddlers” except as he placed his arms around what could not
be seen, stroked it, seemed to move its weight in his hands as he brought
it to the patient. If his miming was convincing, even more skillful was the
professional actor portraying the Goat of Thor for the Swedish neo-sha-
mans’ midwinter ritual: Lindquist discovers that the neo-shamans’ ideal
of unstructured, individual free expression betoking participants’ inner
spirit actions is in reality rather formulaic, conventionalized unconven-
tionality. One consequence of the orchestrated, relatively standardized
ritual performances was that persons who were strongly committed to
personal inner journeying turned away from the group meetings. Others
dropped away as a growing family of their own fulfilled their gregarious
instinct.
Neo-shamanism offers a haven for educated, middle-class Western-
ers uncomfortable with conventional institutionalized congregations and
unwilling to limit themselves to strictly materialistic pursuits. Brought
up in countries where having faith is publicly touted as essential to
morality and happiness, these people feel empty and threatened. One of
the paradoxes of neo-shamanism is that participants will come to a
workshop to be told by a stranger to follow their own inner voice. It is the
anthropological perspective, with its recognition of the gregariousness
that meant survival for our ancient ancestors, that resolves this paradox
by acknowledging the critical importance for our species of conforming to
group expectations. If every human acted out impetuously, disregarding
advice from others, we’d starve, freeze, die from accidents or illness, and
fail to nurture children. Our remote ancestors wouldn’t be our ancestors,
they’d have died without reproducing. Survival through the generations
depended on helping one another in groups, learning means of coping
from those whose lives showed them to be viable models. This fundamen-
tal way of being human can’t be jettisoned just because a person doesn’t
feel satisfied with their parents’ community. A dissatisfied educated,
34 Chapter Two

middle-class person will avoid congregations stigmatized by enrolling

mostly less-educated, working-class members. He or, especially, she will
feel safe and comfortable in groups with members similar to the seeker’s
own background. The college-educated or widely-read seeker has
learned that there is a variety of religions claiming truth, a “marketplace
of ideas” for consumers accustomed to turning to markets. In that vast
Mall of Modernity, one of the shops selling gregariousness, relief from
anxiety, and myths to daydream with, is neo-shamanism.

SUMMARY:
WHAT—IN THIS CONTEXT—IS RELIGION?

The simple rule of thumb in American societies is that “religion”

has to do with the supernatural, contrasted to that which is natural.
Anthropologists have, for a century, followed Durkheim and Malinowski
in analyzing religious activities (those making reference to what we con-
sider supernatural) from the point of view that most socially prescribed
behavior tends to promote the survival and welfare of the society, that is,
has a societal function. Hence the emphasis on the binding effect of reli-
gious activities and the therapeutic effect of rituals carried out by
socially recognized healers on behalf of a sufferer. This functional per-
spective has dominated ethnographic studies of shamans in Siberia and
what has been termed shamanism outside the circumboreal region of the
northern hemisphere.
From the point of view of adherents of a religious belief and those
scholars who study such beliefs in and of themselves, a functional per-
spective misses the driving force of belief. Religious beliefs often are cos-
mologies picturing a universe in which believers perceive meaning for
their existence and motivation to strive for moral goodness. This per-
spective sees the sense of communitas, active concern with the welfare of
one’s fellows, as a consequence of the moral principles instilled through
the religious teaching. Poetry, music, dance, drama, and visual arts are
performative aspects of the teaching, profoundly enriching it. The
excerpts in this book from descriptions and transcriptions of shamans’
rituals convey some of the beauty and emotional effect of religions
emphasized in studies focusing on experience and belief.
This chapter has expounded a functionalist perspective because it
is likely to be less familiar to readers than one oriented around belief and
performance. The functionalist perspective tends to focus on social
groups or communities, superficially contrasting with the modern West-
ern focus on individuals, but as indicated here, self-fulfillment is seldom
a solitary pursuit. A danger lurks in the assumption that individuals are
Understanding Religion from an Anthropological Perspective 35

free agents, their lives determined by their choices of options: focusing on

individuals blinds us to the power of societal classes, especially those
classes called “race” in North America. Because Western culture has tra-
ditionally delineated distant nations as opposite to its urban societies,
and this primitivist rhetoric was incorporated into anthropology in the
nineteenth century, persisting until former colonies achieved indepen-
dence in the 1960s, there is a racist undercurrent in many classic ethno-
graphic studies. Certainly many anthropologists clearly saw and com-
bated this propensity for descriptions of colonies and small nations to be
read as descriptions of simpler peoples whose cultures are destined to
disappear. The following chapters discuss academic concepts of shamans
and shamanism, rooted in classical Western primitivism, against ethno-
graphic and historical data that call into question the loose and facile
labeling of much non-Western healing and divining as “shamanic.”
Chapter Three

The Idea of the Shaman

Accounts of Siberian shamans were so well known among Euro-

pean intellectuals in the eighteenth century that there is a detailed entry
on “Schamans” in the first real encyclopedia, published in France by
Denis Diderot, 1751–1765. Empress Catherine of Russia (born a German
princess) noticed a number of entries about things Russian in the Ency-
clopédie and invited Diderot to visit her in 1773. Her reaction to the
scholar’s unremitting questions was to write a play (in German), The
Siberian Shaman (1786). The title character is clearly a villain who uses
the credulity of a well-to-do family to bring him to St. Petersburg where
his tricks draw civilized young men paying to learn his “ancient wisdom.”
Catherine’s stage directions for the actor portraying the Siberian sha-
man tell him to beat a tambourine drum while he chants meaningless
vowels and runs and jumps about the stage, then to collapse and lie as if
dead; the Empress herself had seen some of her subjects dance them-
selves into trance when she visited the Crimea region. The play was
meant to make it clear that modern Russia under its gifted Empress was
no longer hospitable to wild extravagances of spiritualism.
Two centuries after Diderot, Mircea Eliade wrote Shamanism, a
book taken at face value as a minutely researched, amply footnoted,
definitive study of shamans; its subtitle, “Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,”
made it sexy. Eliade himself, appointed to teach at the University of Chi-
cago, was charismatic; students found his lectures fascinating. Eliade
claimed “shamanism” is timeless, “at once mysticism, magic, and ‘reli-
gion’” (1964:xix). Learning how shamans perform “launches a dialogue
and an interrelationship with the others . . . historically, culturally, and
spiritually we [Western civilized people] are entering, or ready to enter,
a new era” (Eliade 1991[1982]:11–12; his italics).
“The others” are “the Siberian hunters, and . . . the primitive peo-
ples of Australia, the Malay Archipelago, South America, North Amer-
ica, and other regions” (1964:502–503)—in other words, people of color.

37
38 Chapter Three

Here is found “the man of the archaic civilizations . . . proud of his mode
of existence, which allows him to be free and to create . . . free to annul
his own history through periodic abolition of time and collective regener-
ation” (Eliade 1991[1954]:81). People of color, people without history.
Semi-naked people, people with long hair, drumming. Primitive people,
or the Woodstock Generation? 1960s counterculture, youths barefoot in a
meadow rocking to a heavy beat, stoned, escaping civilization and its dis-
contents (to use Freud’s phrase). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy hit the postwar market of younger educated adults rebelling
against their parents’ adulation of “scientific” sterility and scheduling.
Along with John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, a heavily reworked ver-
sion of a Lakota Indian man’s reminiscences, Eliade’s book became a cor-
nerstone of the New Age.
Explaining in his autobiography how he came to write his famous
book, Eliade said he had been asked to review a book on shamans that
hypothesized that their wild behavior was “arctic hysteria” provoked by
the privations and darkness of the Far North. (“Arctic hysteria” usually
referred to individuals suddenly going berserk, running out of iglus and
shedding their clothes. In 1972, medical anthropologist Edward Foulks
suggested that a calcium deficiency is the probable cause of these fits.)
Eliade focused on the reported trances—the “as if dead” stage in which
shamans collapse and believe their souls journey out—and used the
word “ecstasy” in its most literal sense of “being beside oneself” (from the
Greek words “from”/“making stand”; most readers would think of the
broader use of the word “ecstasy” to mean “poetic frenzy, rapture.”)
Emphasizing the trance, Eliade says,
I attempted to situate the “problem of shamanism” in the context of
the history of religions, the only perspective which does not nullify its
significance and function. Thus I analyzed the typology of shamanic
initiation and the structure of the ecstatic journeys . . . emphasizing
analogies with the initiatory rites and mystical experiences of cer-
tain primitive and Oriental peoples (Eliade 1981:117).
The key here is the claim that only Eliade’s focus on mystic ecstasy
“does not nullify [the ethnographically reported behavior’s] significance
and function.” Exactly the opposing view is held by contemporary
anthropologists. Caroline Humphrey, a British ethnologist with many
years of fieldwork in Central Asia, reports that after undertaking to col-
laborate on a book with an exiled Mongolian intellectual, Urgunge Onon,
“Urgunge and I decided reluctantly that we would have to use the word
‘shamanism’ but . . . shamanism may not be an ‘it’ at all . . . Among prac-
titioners there was no name for the various activities that outsiders have
called ‘shamanism’ and these practices were not thought of as all one
thing” (Humphrey 1996:4). Humphrey’s conclusion is important because
her collaborator, Onon, after growing up in the Daur region of Mongolia
The Idea of the Shaman 39

during the 1920s and attending university in Japan during World War
II, in 1948 became an instructor of Mongolian at the prestigious Johns
Hopkins University in the United States and then, in 1963, took a simi-
lar faculty position at Leeds University in England. Much of the collabo-
ration for the book took place at Cambridge University, where Hum-
phrey teaches. Onon thus is a sophisticated scholar well experienced in
Western academic modes of thought, and his reluctance to accept the
term “shamanism” was carefully articulated:
Not üzel [view, ideology, creed], that is a Buddhist idea; not har
shashin [black religion], we Daurs do not have the word shashin; not
itgel [faith], that is really Buddhist. Not shüteen [worship], I never
heard Daurs use this word. No, there is no word for “religion” in Daur
language. In the old days I think people in our village sometimes
used a Chinese word to talk about shamanism, lun. It means notable
pronouncements (Humphrey 1996:47–48).
Eliade followed other European scholars in supposing that contem-
porary non-Western indigenous small nations such as the Daurs—“prim-
itive peoples”—preserved elements of culture superseded in the West by
civilizations, and that these elements could be linked to Paleolithic cave
paintings and figurines, thus giving us the beliefs and practices of ances-
tors twenty thousand and more years ago (Eliade 1964:502–504). In
effect, Eliade wrote as if he were exploring the history of religions, but his
presupposition, that “primitive peoples” of today exhibit a religion simi-
lar to the beliefs and practices of very ancient humans, placed their reli-
gions in a time warp outside history. Indeed, Eliade made the peculiar
claim that a history of religion is very different from any other history in
that religion can reverse history, i.e., religion can revert to an earlier con-
dition. His own mystical sentiment is revealed in this statement:
All history is in some measure a fall of the sacred . . . but the sacred
does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it
resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly (Eliade
1964:xix).
What is this eternal “sacred” tirelessly struggling against human imper-
fection? Eliade does not elucidate his apprehension.
The 1964 English edition of Shamanism, expanded beyond the
original 1951 French edition, was critically reviewed by English-lan-
guage anthropologists. Edmund Leach, an iconoclastic English theorist
familiar with French anthropology of the decade, was especially harsh
(Leach 1966). Willard Park, an American who carried out fieldwork with
American Indians in the West purportedly practicing “shamanism,”
thought that the book showed “great skill and learning” but “Eliade’s
scholarship is weak on ... the evaluation of the sources” (Park
1965:1306). This very serious criticism has been reiterated by the con-
temporary American expert on Siberian cultures, Marjorie Mandelstam
40 Chapter Three

Balzer, stating that Eliade is “remarkably inaccurate on details about

Siberian shamanism” (Balzer 1990:47–48). Astonishingly, Eliade’s stu-
dent and translator thinks nothing of such criticism:
One reviewer of the first volume [of Eliade’s autobiography] thought
he had demolished Eliade’s autobiographical effort by calling it a
piece of “creative hermeneutics” and “sacred fiction”: a work that as-
cribes meanings to events “even when they aren’t there.” I believe
that Eliade would not have objected to these characterizations, nor
would he have considered them to be destructive criticism (Ricketts
1981:x–xi).

ARMCHAIR SCHOLARS VERSUS

FIELD RESEARCHERS

Mircea Eliade is one of the more popular examples of the armchair

scholar in the ivory tower of the university. His experience of non-West-
ern societies was limited to three years in his twenties when he studied
philosophy and religion in India. He wrote a book on Australian aborig-
ine religion without ever going to Australia (Sam Gill’s 1998 book, Sto-
rytracking, unravels the tangle of Eliade’s sources and suppositions).
Apparently Eliade never went to American Indian reservations or talked
with Indians in Chicago. He had been trained in a European academic
tradition wherein learned treatises by highly educated Westerners are
considered superior to prosaic experience. It is part of the European cul-
tural tradition to hold that the mind is somehow independent of the body,
and mind-work more valued than manual work. The elite scientific
Royal Society in England and the French Academy recruited from the
upper classes, their aristocratic experimenters were expected to direct
technician employees, and distinction was made between theory and
“mechanicks” paralleling that between mind and body (see, e.g., Shapin
and Schaffer 1985).
American anthropology, like Americans in general, tended to dis-
parage ivory-tower scholars. The Smithsonian Institution’s first director,
Joseph Henry, deliberately encouraged amateur scientists across the
country to contribute data to the specialists in his institution. “Demo-
cratic science,” he called it, contrasting it to class-ridden Europeans’
“aristocrats’ science.” The Smithsonian’s very first publication, in 1848,
was the work of two middle-class citizens who trudged into the fields car-
rying their surveying instruments to record the “Ancient Monuments of
the Mississippi Valley,” as their monograph was titled. After the Civil
War, Major John W. Powell persuaded Congress to fund both a geological
survey and a Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian, to support
fieldworkers gathering data on the inert and on the live aspects of the
The Idea of the Shaman 41

American West. Powell didn’t care whether his Bureau of Ethnology staff
had college degrees; one of his best people, James Mooney, came from
hardscrabble farming immigrant parents and couldn’t afford advanced
education. Powell even hired literate American Indians to work as regu-
lar staff in the Bureau in an era when government policy treated Indians
as fit only for manual labor. (Powell hired women, too—but that’s not
part of this story.)
Although Franz Boas came from a prosperous family in Germany
and earned a doctorate there, he shared Powell’s high valuation of field-
work and expected his students at Columbia University in New York to
get out of the city and spend months in rural American Indian commu-
nities or overseas (Margaret Mead was one of his students). A generation
after Powell and Boas set the American tradition, British anthropolo-
gists, led by Polish-born Bronislaw Malinowski, established their own
tradition holding that extended fieldwork is essential to good anthropol-
ogy. Direct experience, literally getting down and dirty, became the hall-
mark of twentieth-century anthropology.
Balancing immersion in actual field experience, anthropologists,
like other scientists, compare their data to others’, evaluating similari-
ties or recognizing differences. Since the seventeenth century, Western
science has distrusted superficial appearances, seeking deeper struc-
tures and functional types (for example, in the Linnaean classification of
organisms; for general discussion, see Foucault 1973). Hence, general
comparative works of classification continue to be produced. Someone
such as Eliade, who lists pages of source books in German, French, Rus-
sian, even Turkish, and articles published in many rather obscure aca-
demic series, is likely to impress readers familiar only with English. Few
are the contemporary scholars such as Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer and
Caroline Humphrey who combine extended fieldwork in Siberia with
knowledge of Russian, German, and French and participation in inter-
national conferences of researchers. Eliade’s presentation looks thor-
ough to readers lacking Balzer’s or Humphrey’s experience, and it
appeals to a general audience that seeks “ultimate meaning” beyond the
details of firsthand observation filling the pages of standard ethnogra-
phies.
Eliade’s book is cited in hundreds of studies of “shamanism.” It
takes for granted that there exists “an immemorial religious tradition”
of which “shamanism” is one of
the most essential elements: . . . Constituted by the ecstatic experi-
ence and by magic, shamanism adapts itself more or less successfully
to the various religious structures that preceded or are cotemporal
with it (Eliade 1964:12).
According to Eliade, the “ecstatic (dreams, trances, etc.)” is the nec-
essary beginning to a shaman’s career, to which the candidate will add
42 Chapter Three

training in sleight-of-hand, incantation, drumming, and other skills and

knowledge of the role. Eliade generalizes that all shamans fall sick and
then are cured of their sickness by espousing the shaman’s career: this
sickness crisis, he claims, is an initiation rite. The sickness might be psy-
chological, giving credence to the notion that shamans are epileptics or
mentally unbalanced persons whose involuntary fits are explained by
their communities as soul journeys. In central and north Asia, Eliade
says, shamans serve as “psychopomps” (Greek for “soul leader”) guiding
the souls of dead people to the afterworld. Shamans, in Eliade’s view,
share a capacity for spirituality with all humans, but are marked out by
their falling into ecstasy and then learning to control ecstatic techniques
for heightening religious experience. The ecstatic state, or trance, inter-
preted by the shaman as his soul journeying to the sky or underworld, is
for Eliade the fundamental or essential experience of spirituality; it is
the mystical immanent “sacred” manifesting itself.
By this reasoning, Upper Paleolithic humans twenty thousand
years ago and supposedly “primitive” people in less-developed regions
today would have the same basic religious experience, i.e., shamanism
generated by ecstatic trance. If “shamanism” equates with a heightened
religious experience that is a mystical “sacred” manifesting itself, how is
it evinced among “civilized” people? In more than five hundred pages,
Eliade doesn’t come to grips with this logical question: he only suggests
that lyric poetry arises in ecstasy. “Poetic creation still remains an act of
perfect spiritual freedom,” he tells us (Eliade 1964:510). (Ask a practic-
ing poet whether he or she thinks so.) Ecstasies written up by saints and
prophets of the major world religions are slighted in Eliade’s book. The
implication is that citizens of the major nations are less likely to experi-
ence that peak religiosity firsthand.
Eliade seemed to give the stamp of approval to lumping spiritual
leaders and ritual practitioners around the world outside of the urban
West under the term “shaman.” He modernized the term through his
emphasis on “ecstasy” and techniques of achieving it, in the sense that he
spotlighted the practitioners as individuals fulfilling spiritual callings,
rather than as servants to their communities. Modern Western culture
of the last three centuries has increasingly centered on the individual,
his inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That line
that lyric poetry “remains an act of perfect spiritual freedom” fits the
loose use of “shaman” for anyone seeking the experience of ecstasy; it
does not fit Siberian shamans, for these take care to employ hallowed for-
mulas of invocation. Real shamans work, they work for their patients
and communities, they are exhausted by their hard work struggling with
spirits.
Fundamentally, Eliade’s interpretation of shamans is another in a
very long line of pictures of cultural primitivism, where “the model of
human excellence and happiness is sought in the present, in the mode of
The Idea of the Shaman 43

life of existing primitive, or so-called ‘savage’ peoples . . . at some consid-

erable distance from the people to whom the preacher of primitivism
commends them” (Lovejoy and Boas 1935:8). From at least the Classical
Greeks more than two thousand years ago, to today, literary authors
have been telling their audiences that far away and also long ago there
lived men and women intimate with Nature and their own bodies, not
cut off from feeling but freely indulging emotions. The intellectual histo-
rians Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas (not related to Franz Boas) who
compiled the exhaustive study of the idea of primitivism remark that
this notion of the far away and long ago being freer, happier, and truer
seems to be a fallacy so common that they wonder, with tongue in cheek,
whether even Paleolithic “cave-men”
discoursed with contempt upon the cowardly effeminacy of living un-
der shelter or upon the exasperating inconvenience of constantly re-
turning for food and sleep to the same place instead of being free to
roam at large in the wide-open spaces (Lovejoy and Boas 1935:7).
For Classical Greek authors, the more perfect life might be glimpsed in
the distant land of the Scythians, in those wide-open spaces east of the
civilized world, today’s Siberia.
During the Renaissance and early modern period, the fifteenth
through seventeenth centuries, primitivist notions fueled debates that
climaxed in the “Battle of the Ancients and Moderns.” Champions of the
“Ancients” insisted that true knowledge had been widely available in
early civilizations, especially to the Classical Greeks, while our contem-
porary ideas are much corrupted by our intellectual inadequacies, ambi-
tion, jealousies, and copyists’ errors. They sought the oldest versions of
the oldest texts from antiquity. “Moderns” despised the antique authors,
asserting that our present understanding benefits from centuries of
knowledge accumulated from hundreds of brilliant men. A twist on the
Ancients’ reverence for the chronologically primitive came from Chris-
tian belief that Adam in the Garden of Eden had enjoyed “pure and
uncorrupted natural knowledge,” as Sir Francis Bacon put it in the early
1600s (quoted in Shapin 1996:74).
Astonishing as it may seem to us, the learned seventeenth-century
intellectuals who established the principles of experimental science did
not question the existence of invisible spirits, nor their ability to affect
things in this world. In fact, these three centuries during which the sci-
entific method was constructed was the period of state witch-hunts
bringing thousands of men and women to torture and death because gov-
ernment officers and theologians believed humans could make pacts
with the Devil and gain spirit familiars. As late as the closing decades of
the nineteenth century, some leading university scientists seriously and
openly investigated contacts with spirits. Belief in spirits is not in itself
primitive nor distant in time or place from the twentieth-century West.
44 Chapter Three

Lovejoy and Boas contrast classical cultural primitivism, praising

the far-away for innocent satisfaction with filling basic needs, to a mod-
ern cultural primitivism drawing upon Romantic ideals. Eliade clearly
corresponds to this modern Romantic version of primitivism, finding
the supreme excellence of man in . . . his insatiability, restlessness,
variability, his consciousness of his own inner states, the dissatisfac-
tion and disharmony with himself which this engendered, his pro-
pensity to attempt intellectual and moral achievements beyond his
powers (Lovejoy and Boas 1935:22).
Widely-read in philosophy and literature, Eliade collated published
accounts of “the primitives” to illustrate a romantic ideal purportedly
innate in humans though disdained by his civilized fellows.
It happened that in the 1950s, two anthropologists whose publica-
tions would become influential were launching their careers. Cosmopol-
itan scholars, the Austrian emigrant Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and the
American Peter Furst read Eliade and exclaimed “Shaman!” when they
saw American Indian ritual leaders appear to slide into ecstatic intro-
spection. Peter Furst recorded his 1966 ethnographic observation of a
Huichol ritualist, Ramón. Furst, Barbara Myerhoff, a fellow anthropolo-
gist, and Ramón were talking over his previous day’s performance of
bird-like flying leaps over a waterall. Ramón said to them,
“Perhaps you thought, ‘Ah, Ramón is drunk with too much beer.’ . . .
but no, no. I took you there to show you what it means to have bal-
ance. . . . Because when one crosses over as a shaman one looks be-
low. . . . If he does not have balance he is afraid.” . . . Barbara and I
looked at each other and said, almost simultaneously, “Eliade!”
(Furst 1994:129).
What Spanish or Huichol word did Ramón use, where Furst writes
“shaman”? “Mara’akáme is the Huichol term for the specialist in the
sacred; without a precise English match it is loosely equivalent to sha-
man, shaman-singer, or shaman-priest” (Furst 1994:119, my italics).
Here, and in previous publications, Furst chooses to contribute to a top-
ical book about “shamans” a description of a mara’akáme, a particular,
clearly-defined social role among the Huichol of northwestern Mexico.
He and Myerhoff, advanced graduate students, applied to this
mara’akáme a word popularized by a writer who had never seen a real
shaman performing, nor any American Indian or indigenous Australian
ritual adept. And notice that Ramón told them he was not affected by the
beer he had enjoyed at a picnic lunch on the way to the waterfall. His
marvelous accuracy in leaping from boulder to boulder over the dizzy-
ingly steep waterfall showed a man in superb control.
While Furst and Myerhoff were recording Huichol practices, in
South America Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff recorded beliefs from Tukano-
speaking Indians of the Colombian border rainforest lowlands. The ritual
The Idea of the Shaman 45

adepts he called shamans (payé 1 in Desana, kumu in Barasana

Tukanoan) are quite different from Huichol mara’akáme, not to say Sibe-
rian shamans. Tukanoan ritual adepts depend on heavy use of hallucino-
genic plants to put them into what Reichel-Dolmatoff calls “narcotic
trances,” and they do not use drums in their rituals. Instead, their ritual
music is performed on flutes, “trumpets” (more like megaphones), pan-
pipes, whistles, and rattles. They do not wear hide or fringed garments
nor iron or doll-like pendants, nor do they wear antler headdresses; they
wear necklaces with rock crystals, quartz, and jaguar teeth, and crowns
of feathers. As Furst assumed the Huichol mara’akáme must be in an
ecstatic state, so Reichel-Dolmatoff assumed the men he saw in the deep
stupor of narcotic intoxication were in an ecstatic trance. Is it helpful to
stuff into the one simple word “shaman” Ramón the mara’akáme execut-
ing flying leaps over a precipitous waterfall, the South American man
lying for hours in stupor from powerful drugs, and the Siberian adept
drumming, singing, dancing, and hyperventilating into collapse?
One simple word for all non-Western religious practitioners brings
us back to that millennia-old division between civilized Us and primitive,
far-away Others. British anthropologist Adam Kuper remarks that
The idea of primitive society . . . was ideally suited for debate about
modern society. . . . It could be used equally by right or left, reaction-
ary or progressive, poet and politician. . . . They had particular ideas
about modern society and constructed a directly contrary account of
primitive society. Primitive society was the mirror image of modern
society (Kuper 1988:240).
Kuper regretfully admitted that these “orthodox models provided conve-
nient short-cuts to analysis, and most students gratefully accepted their
help” (Kuper 1988:241).
Much of the power of Eliade’s ideas comes from his tapping deeply
into the traditions of Western intellectual culture. He explicated myths
known from Classical antiquity and still today, from his readings,
embodied in novels and dramas. The very familiarity of his models made
his work credible and his insights illuminating. When he turned to writ-
ing about shamans, he continued mining Western mythology, the tradi-
tional construct of distant and primitive Others, mirror image of our
urban society. Anthropologists reading his book should have been tipped
off by his introductory lines “the sacred does not cease to manifest
itself”—this is an argument about what is allegedly missing in our soci-
eties; it is theology, not ethnography.

Note
1 The Tupi-speaking Parakanã of the southeastern Amazon
lowlands in Brazil use the word pajé as “a word of a thousand
meanings—the festival, the songs, ceremonial friends, lovers,
46 Chapter Three

as well as shamanic power” (Fausto 1999:943). As with

Reichel-Dolmatoff in his ethnographies of the northeastern
lowlands Fausto follows the convention of labeling Parakanã
ritual practitioners “shamans” although they use none of
circumboreal shamans’ ritual paraphernalia, consider the
ritual swallowing of smoke from specially-prepared tobacco
cigars the essential means of obtaining good fortune and
curative power, and exclude or discourage women (Fausto
1999:951), notes 17, 18).
Chapter Four

Religion or Genes?

Ramón the Huichol mara’akáme in Mexico, 1966:

Ramón, now barefoot, clambered up one of the rocks, lifted his arms,
spread them wide, and, after a moment’s hesitation, proceeded to
leap—“fly” might be more appropriate—from crag to crag, often
seemingly landing only a few inches from the slippery edge. Or we
would see him stand without moving for perhaps twenty seconds,
arms stretched out, atop a monumental stone, then suddenly wheel
about and make a great leap to the other side of the cataract. Some-
times he seated himself right at the edge, leaning slightly forward
from the hips and shading his eyes against the sun as he peered
down to the river far below and into the country beyond. He was not
oblivious to us, for once or twice we saw him glancing in our direc-
tion, as though to assure himself that we were taking everything in.
Now and again he disappeared from view for what seemed like an
age, only to emerge suddenly from an unexpected direction. Barbara
commented that he looked “like a bird, just like a big, colorful bird”
(Furst 1994:121).
Now G. K. Nikiforov, a Yakut shaman, demonstrating in 1951 to a
Soviet anthropologist:
The most characteristic figures of dance, in our view, were those re-
lated to the very artistic and highly professional imitation of the fly-
ing and alighting of a bird. Nikiforov showed us how he performed
the flight of the bird: he stood on one (the right) leg, and raised his
left leg with the knee flexed forward. When doing so he extended his
arms sideways, palms down, sticking out his neck and head. He
stood for a while in this posture. After that, to indicate that the bird
alighted on the ground, he flexed in his elbows, joined his palms and
sat down on crossed legs, inclining his head. Summoning a raven, G.
K. Nikiforov tossed his head back and, jumping on one foot, cried out:
‘kuk!’ During this pantomime of joy he kept leaping from one foot to
the other, made turns, looking out for somebody, lunged with his

47
48 Chapter Four

right leg, putting on it the weight of his entire body. He pulled back
the hand holding his drum and put the other hand on his forehead in
front of his eyes. All motions of the legs and body went in rhythm
with the drumbeat (Žornickaja 1978:302–303).
Are Don Ramón and Comrade Nikiforov showing us variations of a
primordial religious dance surviving from the Paleolithic more than
twenty thousand years? Was this supposedly most ancient religion car-
ried over Bering Strait and down through the Americas by the Huichols’
remote ancestors?
Let us call this explanation Hypothesis One. This is the one favored
by Eliade and many who consider him an eminent authority. Hypothesis
One requires us to assume that in some societies, people carried on ritu-
als unchanged over hundreds of generations without any means of writ-
ing or even detailed pictures. What we actually know of the history of
documented religious beliefs and rituals is that nowhere do these persist
unchanged even when they are held to be sacred revelation. Consider, for
example, Luther’s sixteenth-century Reformation and Pope John XXIII’s
1960s Second Vatican Council reformation of Roman Catholic practices.
If such radical changes could appear and be accepted even in the bas-
tions of Christian leadership where a written Bible is the ultimate
authority, how likely is it that small non-literate nations could or would
carry on rituals virtually unchanged over thousands of years and miles?
Hypothesis Two can be the opposite of Hypothesis One: can we
premise that the similarities between Don Ramón and Comrade Nikifo-
rov are due to relatively recent contacts between their communities?
This is not preposterous—the Russian-American Company organized in
1799 to regulate fur hunting and trade in Russian America, from Alaska
to northern California (Fort Ross on the Russian River), employed Sibe-
rian hunters along with Russians, Aleuts, and American Indians. Many
Siberian men married American Indian women and settled in their com-
munities. Resemblances between Siberian shamanic practices and
beliefs and American Indian religious practices, and for that matter
between central Siberian annual community rituals around a pole
topped with a thunderbird and the Plains Indians’ Sun Dances, could
have originated in the late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century
mixing of men from the two continents in the fur trade.
Long-standing contacts across Bering Strait between Iñupiat and
Yupik in Alaska, and Yuit and Chukchi on the Siberian side are attested
from the seventeenth century when a Russian trading post was estab-
lished on the Anadyr River in northeastern Siberia, drawing Chukchi
and possibly Yuit. In 1789, Russia began an annual trading fair on the
Anyui River 800 miles west of Bering Strait. Records from this event doc-
ument American furs brought to this fair, and occasionally a Yuit as well
as Chukchi. Waldemar Jochelson considered the similarities between
indigenous nations on the two sides of Bering Strait so strong that he
Religion or Genes? 49

classified “Chukchee, Koryak, Kamchadal, Yukaghir, Chuvantzy, and

Gilyak . . . as Americanoids” and suggested that
if we disregard . . . the domestication of the reindeer, we will find the
peoples of northeastern Siberia related to the American aborigines in
language structure, spiritual life, material culture, and somatology
[physical characteristics] (Jochelson 1928:44).
Jochelson’s opinion was disregarded by Soviet scholars who termed the
northeastern Siberians “Paleoasiatics.”
Hypothesis Three sidesteps the question of history, looking instead
at what it is that Don Ramón and Comrade Nikiforov exhibit. If a person
spends a lifetime in the countryside closely observing birds and other
animals, and wishes to dance in the manner of large birds, there must be
similarity due to the characteristics common to large birds. In 1960, the
Yakut [Sakhá] shaman Efimov Pavlovic Mamaev danced as a swan:
He sang to the accompaniment of his drum, imitating animal voices.
He raised the drum high and, holding it in his left hand, cried out,
‘kuk! kuk! kuk!’. The movements of his body were impetuous and
calm alternately. He leapt from one leg to the other, making turns,
stooped and continued jumping vehemently. With amazing ease and
softness Mamaev simulated the characteristic habitual moves of the
swan. He turned on one leg with hands stretched sideways, sprang
from one leg on another, gently flapping his arms like wings
(Žornickaja 1978:304).
These actions are similar to those of ballet dancers enacting Tchai-
kovsky’s Swan Lake, as you may see by renting a video of a performance.
Hypothesis Three says that the similarities in performances of dances
and songs imitating animals come from the animals’ behavior, specific to
each species of animal. Why should people imitate animals in dance? The
animals imitated are significant actors in hunters’ worlds, and their
actions often are beautiful or thrilling. Even a city-dweller such as Tchai-
kovsky may be moved to create a dance imitating swans.
Hypothesis Four rephrases the idea that shamans’ rituals and
beliefs are survivals of a primordial Paleolithic religion. Hypothesis Four
states that human physiology will stimulate certain behaviors and forms
of thinking. Humans respond to rhythm (an unborn fetus hears its
mother’s heartbeat rhythm), often feeling stimulated to move to a
rhythm, to dance. Humans, like so many other animals, vocalize and
may feel pleasure from rhythmic vocalizing. Dancing, singing, and mak-
ing rhythmic and pleasing sounds from objects are part of every human
culture. Humans use bodily experiences and observations of the world
about them metaphorically to communicate emotions and abstract con-
cepts, for example the song, “You are my sunshine.” Anthropologists
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explained,
50 Chapter Four

the nature of our bodies and our physical and cultural environment
imposes a structure on our experience. . . . Recurrent experience
leads to the formation of categories, which . . . define coherence in our
experience. . . . We understand our experience directly . . . from inter-
action with and in our environment. We understand experience met-
aphorically when we use a [concept] from one domain of experience
to structure experience in another domain (Lakoff and Johnson
1980:230).
They say of religious rituals that “real-world objects” become metaphors
standing for concepts in the society’s cosmology. Swans stand for an ideal
of pure grace embodied in strength. For Tchaikovsky, swans were a met-
aphor for danger hidden in beauty—his Prince is destroyed by the Swan;
in fact, swans can kill humans. For Mamaev, the swan is powerful not only
because it is big enough and strong enough to kill a man, but also because
it flies extraordinarily high and for incredible distances; it is superhu-
manly beautiful, strong, and capable of traveling far beyond human capa-
bility. Feeling strong emotion to help an ill member of their community,
men and women may imagine a powerful bird beating the illness; flying
high, high, higher; overcoming the misfortune. The bird is a metaphor for
overcoming illness, dancing the bird is enacting the metaphor.1
French anthropologist Gilbert Rouget observed African ritual danc-
ers who believed themselves to be taken over temporarily—possessed—
by a spirit. Rouget assessed the idea that the ritual music directly
induced “trance” in dancers. To broaden his data base, he read widely, lis-
tened to recordings, and discussed data with anthropologists who did
fieldwork in Siberia and had observed shamans there. His conclusion:
Music has often been thought of as endowed with the mysterious
power of triggering possession [trance], and the musicians . . . as
the withholders of some mysterious knowledge that enables them
to manipulate this power. There is no truth whatsoever in this as-
sumption.
[G]reat musical skill . . . has developed over a long period of time. . . .
[I]t creates a certain emotional climate for the adepts . . . it leads the
adepts toward . . . becoming identified with the spirits . . . [and] it pro-
vides the adept with the means of manifesting this identification . . .
[b]ecause it is the only language that speaks simultaneously, if I may
so put it, to the head and the legs (Rouget 1985:325).
Rouget makes the point that if particular music had the innate
capacity to work on the human nervous system to automatically trigger
trance, then ritual trance music from different parts of the world would
be similar, yet his investigation (as a trained musicologist as well as
anthropologist) showed him that there seem to be no universal qualities
in all trance music. Instead, each cultural tradition has its own particu-
lar music learned by its members to be associated with ritual trance.
Religion or Genes? 51

Trance music in one society has no effect on people from other societies
unfamiliar with that music’s ritual. In other words, in a particular soci-
ety certain musical forms are learned to be a signal to switch mentally
into the state of altered consciousness we call trance.
Let us consider our four hypotheses together. Hypothesis One is
contrary to all documented knowledge of religious behavior and beliefs.
It is a fundamental principle of science that knowledge of present pro-
cesses is used to infer what most likely happened in the past, so we must
assume that as the human world changed through millennia, so did the
religions that conceptualized the world and humans’ place in it. When
the Pleistocene Ice Age ended ten thousand years ago, and agricultural
production and manufacturing for trade gradually developed, the world
of Paleolithic peoples disappeared; even the Arctic and Australia were
touched by entrepreneurial traders well before historic European explo-
ration. To suppose that Siberian shamans and ritual adepts of other
parts of the world preserve a Paleolithic religion is contrary to the scien-
tific method for interpreting the past, because the notion that a religion
would be unchanged for millennia and on several continents is contrary
to our knowledge of ongoing human social behavior.
Hypotheses Two, Three, and Four are compatible. The scientific
method supports the premise that ritual music and dance develop from
innate genetic properties of the human species—ritual, music and dance
are observed in every known human society, and rhythmic movements
and vocalization in babies. This innate tendency to express emotions and
find pleasure in music and dance is molded by experiences with conspic-
uous animals and natural phenomena such as wind and thunder. Gifted
artists elaborate aesthetic and emotion-inducing forms of musical and
dance expression, working within cultural traditions of style and passing
on their achievements into their tradition and to others who visit their
communities. Don Ramón and Comrades Nikiforov and Mamaev were
performance artists drawing on visual images familiar to their commu-
nities, and indeed to vast numbers of humans; they communicated
through stunning metaphor the concept that the human soul can soar far
beyond its everyday limits. Performers seek to improve the power of their
exhibitions, and it often has been documented that an artist travels to
gain ideas and skill from peers in other communities.
It remains to examine Hypothesis Two more closely. Siberians and
northwestern American Indians were in contact, especially during the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the Russian fur trade.
Could a Huichol have observed a Yakut swan dance, or a Yakut a Huichol
bird evocation? It’s not impossible—there was indigenous trade and
travel between northwestern Mexico and central California, as well as
between the continents under the fur-trading Russian-American Com-
pany—but less likely than the Hypothesis Three explanation of general
observation of large impressive birds.
52 Chapter Four

At this point, let’s list particulars of Siberian shaman rituals, to

compare with rituals in other parts of the world:
• single-headed hide drum held in one hand near the head
• costume with pendants of geometric, animal, and human form
• ritual of drumming, chanting/singing, and dancing including
imitations of animal voices and movements
• collapse for a period of intense inward concentration
Peter Furst’s picture of Don Ramón shows the Huichol ritual
adept with a costume very different from the Siberian tunic, one
adorned with woven bands which we know come from the highly valued
Huichol art of weaving. Don Ramón used a three-legged upright drum
and played a musical bow and reed flute. He used peyote cactus to help
him see beyond the ordinary world, and in curing would blow smoke
from a native tobacco cigarette onto his patient. His curing ritual was
that of a sucking doctor, chanting until the rhythm intensified his con-
centration, then forcefully sucking on what he had divined were
affected parts of the patient to pull out the evil substance that was
causing illness.
Sucking out illness was occasionally noted in Central Asia, as one
form of exorcising the demon spirit causing illness (chanting, yelling, and
making threatening gestures were often sufficient for exorcism). Peyote
cactus, growing only in northernmost Mexico, was unknown in Siberia,
as was tobacco until it was introduced by Russians as a secular drug. The
Huichol adept thus differed from the Siberian in material objects (type
of drum, other instruments, costume, use of peyote and tobacco), while
his practice was similar in employing music and dance, divining through
intense concentration, and believing that healing could result from the
adepts inducing a mental state in which they felt their souls went out
seeking the strayed soul of a patient. Exorcism through sucking out evil
also was conceptualized on both continents. Evaluating the similarities
and differences, it seems that general similarities arise through common
experiences and human proclivities (music and dance), while differences
reflect particular societies’ cultural styles and objects.
The question of whether “shamanism” can be considered to be a
worldwide phenomenon hinges on what label to give the human species’
proclivities to create music and dance and the intense concentration that
is felt as disembodying one’s soul. Should this aspect of human nature be
labeled with the Tungus word for their ritual practitioner? Is there a
good reason to select a word that entered the European vocabulary in the
eighteenth century from accounts of explorations in Siberia? Historian
Gloria Flaherty lists Italian giocolare, French jongleur, German Gaukler,
and English wizard among “the many words in many languages and dia-
lects designating the phenomenon” and suggests perhaps the earliest
Religion or Genes? 53

written term would be Classical Greek pharmakeus “sorcerer, magician,

shaman,” used by Plato to describe how powerfully Socrates moved those
who gathered to hear him speak (Flaherty 1992:5–6). Alternately, we
could use descriptive English: ritual practitioner, adept, religious leader,
spiritual healer, diviner, seer, sorcerer. Even among Tungus speakers,
there are several distinct ritual practitioners, not all called “shaman.” It
is confusing and misleading to use a simple blanket word, lifted from an
unfamiliar Asian language, for a variety of culturally recognized distinct
practices and practitioners.
Urgunge Onon, the Daur Mongol scholar, recalled six distinct ritual
practitioners in his native village: (1) the yadgan who drummed, sang,
and danced to invoke the spirit they had learned to control to work with
them against other, damaging spirits; (2) the bagchi or male elder who
propitiated clan and landscape spirits on behalf of the community; (3)
otishi, women curers working through a goddess-like spirit to assist
women with conception and child health; (4) bariyachi, midwives
directly involved in childbirth; (5) barishi, “bone-setters” who not only
set broken bones but diagnosed by palpating over patients’ bones, and (6)
kianchi, representing malevolent animal spirits trying to become human
(Humphrey 1996:51). Each practitioner was trained to derive power
from knowledge of particular spirits, and to use this power to relieve
patients of illness, anxiety, depression, or misfortune. A Danish ethnog-
rapher working in Mongolia in the 1920s and 1930s told of a Solon Tun-
gus shaman whose only son was killed by a Japanese car. Brooding over
the tragedy, the shaman realized that automobiles were only part of a
threatening industrialization, of which railroads thundering through his
forests were the most destructive aspect. The old man drummed and
sang night after night to summon all the spirits he had learned to know,
for all the spirits were likely to be dispossessed from their ancient lands
by this huge threat. Then he left to confront the iron monster sent by his
people’s Japanese and Russian enemies. His body was discovered at the
bottom of a railway embankment, defeated in his epic struggle against
the industrial might invading his nation.
Anthropologists Robert Carlsen and Martin Prechtel were dis-
turbed by the “sacrifice,” as they put it, of cultural information resulting
from applying the generic word “shaman” to ritual practitioners they
observed among Guatemalan Maya. They list the following Maya roles
under “the category shaman,” although they admit the Maya of Santiago
Atitlán, where they worked, do not have any concept that could be
labeled “shamanism.” Instead, there are these roles:
1. Aj’kun—doctor or curer who “goes out to find” the deity or spirit that
can be invoked to cure an affliction. Aj’kuna use either the more dif-
ficult “left-hand way” (aj’ch’o) of fighting afflicting spirits, or the
calmer “right-hand way” (aj’way ya) of calling in helping spirits.
54 Chapter Four

Aj’kuna are able to see into an alternate “dream” world to divine the
patient’s soul’s position there, and most believe they can themselves
enter that alternate world to find the cure.
2. Iyom—midwife, who is believed to “become possessed by her patron
deity or even by the moon” as she assists during a birth.
3. Aj’q’umanel—herbalists who use prayer to make their medicines
more efficacious.
4. Aj’q’ij—astrologer who also uses a set of small objects such as seeds
or corn kernels to cast lots to divine a client’s best course of action.
5. Aj’mes—“sweeper” who sweeps a soul’s path, a spiritist.
6. Isay ruki kumats—snake bite curer, and ruki kik ‘om—spider bite
curer, who use esoteric archaic language, incisions with sharp little
obsidian blades on the bite, and poultices.
7. Q’isom—witch transformed into its animal familiar.
8. Aj’tzay—one who “salts” a person’s road (symbolically), causing the
victim to dry up and probably die; an evil sorcerer.
9. Aj’itz—“bad [person],” a general term for evil sorcerer.
10. Nabeysil—Mayan priest in charge of ritually maintaining sacred
bundles (holy relics). The naybeysil must be celibate, and the posi-
tion is frequently held for life.
11. Telinel—“shoulderer,” one who carries the statue of the deity Mam
on his shoulder during Holy Week processions. This position is usu-
ally held by an individual for only one year, and telinel are likely to
be aj’kuna. (Carlsen and Prechtel 1994).
It will be recalled that the Maya were fully literate a thousand years
before the Spanish invasions of their kingdoms, and wrote thousands of
books detailing their religious knowledge and practices (all but a hand-
ful, sad to tell, burnt by the conquering Spaniards).
Another example of the misleading oversimplification caused by
using “shaman” as a generic term can be given from European studies.
Identifying what might be called “shamanic” in European cultural
behaviors runs into the problem of denunciation by established Chris-
tian churches. Consorting with spirits has been equated with consorting
with the Devil, with people suspected of meeting spirits persecuted as
heretics or witches. Nevertheless, “faith healers” and psychics have
always been part of European societies, and today can be found advertis-
ing in the yellow pages of city telephone directories and on the sides of
public buses. The Hungarian folklorist Éva Pócs researched records of
witchcraft trials hoping to uncover, as she put it, “the roots of witchcraft
. . . in so-called European shamanism” (Pócs 1999:13). What she did find
is that, as Carlsen and Prechtel tell us of Maya, a number of distinct, if
overlapping, named kinds of priestly offices, healers, seers, diviners, and
Religion or Genes? 55

mediators between humans and spirits worked in European societies.

After Eliade’s widely read book was published, some scholars applied the
words “shaman” and “shamanic” to these various practitioners. The tál-
tos, the historic Hungarian practitioner communicating with spirits,
might be labeled in this way. Pócs discovered that several distinct, recog-
nized types of practitioners have been popularly called táltos, so that
simply labeling village táltos as “shamans” loses much culturally signif-
icant information.
Persistence of psychics and faith healers in contemporary Ameri-
can cities indicates a “religiosity” among humans that cannot be confined
to disciplined church doctrines and offices. Established churches—and
their doctrine-inculcating equivalents in Soviet-style state Commu-
nism—are connected to state interests in controlling the populace. This
was blatant under the Soviet regime when Siberian shamans were
declared “enemies of the state,” and in seventeenth-century Europe
when villagers disrespectful of newly strengthened state authority were
liable to be burned at the stake. Even in the United States, established
churches have collaborated with legislators to control sexual activities,
Sunday commerce, gambling, and indoctrination of schoolchildren with
selected Christian beliefs and practices. Periodic “enthusiasms” for less-
inhibited worship—dancing, shouting and energetic singing, speaking in
tongues (glossolalia), and collapsing into intense states of concentra-
tion—resemble some of the behavior observed in Siberian shamans.
We can recognize common human tendencies toward “enthusiastic”
spirituality, toward extending the human world by conceptualizing unseen
beings in the universe, and toward a compulsion to express emotion-laden
ideas through music and dance. All known societies are “shamanistic” soci-
eties in that they harbor individuals who have seen, and learned, ritual
practices disapproved by mainstream Christian and Jewish seminaries.
Labeling non-Western societies “shamanic” while at the same time claim-
ing that contemporary Europeans and Americans have lost “the way of the
shaman” perpetuates the hoary notion that they are barbarians and we
are civilized. That notion disrespects the religions and ritual practitioners
of other cultural traditions at the same time that it blinds us to the reality
of similar practices among many of our own citizens.
The cross-cultural comparisons and holistic perspective so basic to
anthropology push us to acknowledge that human physiology and cogni-
tive processes tend to manifest behavior similar to that lumped under
the label “religious.” Scientific interpretation, by definition limited to
phenomena of this world that any researcher can observe, postulates
that what has been seen in so many religious practitioners in so many
countries is stimulated by our species’ genetic make-up. Over and above
the common tendencies, particular stylized expressions are developed in
these various nations and may be taken up by neighboring societies or
carried across distances by travelers. Within contemporary European-
56 Chapter Four

American medical practices, some highly respected doctors use what is

popularly called hypnosis to reduce patients’ anxieties and enhance
cooperation. Techniques, sometimes labeled relaxation training, are
taught in medical colleges. Herbert and David Spiegel, a father and son
team of medical psychotherapists who carried out clinical studies of hyp-
nosis in treatment, stated that
Hypnosis is essentially a psychophysiological state of aroused, atten-
tive, receptive focal concentration with a corresponding diminution
in peripheral awareness. . . . [A]ll hypnosis . . . activates this capacity
for a shift of awareness and permits more intensive concentration in
a designated direction (Spiegel and Spiegel 1978:33–34).
Several researchers on “hypnosis” have noticed that therapists’
methods of inducing patients’ strongly focused concentration on the
struggle to cope better with their lives resemble athletes’ techniques to
psyche themselves up for the game. In other words, there are simple
techniques by which people can intensify their concentration on a task,
raising their effectiveness in carrying it out. This could be part of Don
Ramón’s remarkable athleticism leaping like a flying bird around the
waterfall. The medical therapists testify to how easily a motivated per-
son can move mentally to intense focused concentration (with the dimi-
nution of awareness of outside stimuli), and the use of a learned signal
to move into this mode. An anthropological analysis seeks out the com-
mon tendencies likely to reflect genetic properties, and marks out histor-
ical and environmental factors contributing to each society’s unique cul-
tural heritage.

Note
1 Incidentally,
“overcome” is a metaphor. It takes the real-world
experience of physically climbing over an obstacle and makes
that stand for the concept of prevailing in spite of bad
circumstances. Read Lakoff and Johnson’s astounding little
book to understand how impossible it would be for us to
communicate, or even think, without metaphors.
Chapter Five

Shamans Everywhere?

In the simplistic black-and-white world of some Westerners, there

are societies whose religious practitioners put on costumes, dance and
sing and beat a drum, fall into trance, and claim to have communed with
spirits. Then there are our societies whose religious practitioners have
many years of formal schooling, are tested on their knowledge of received
texts, are ceremonially ordained, and minister to congregations by
preaching, carrying out rituals, and counseling. The first so-called bar-
baric or primitive type is irrational and emotional, the second—ours—is
rational and knows revealed truth. It is easy to refer students to anthro-
pological studies that convincingly describe rationality and complexity
in small societies living from subsistence rather than industrial produc-
tion. It is just as easy to refer them to studies of “irrational” groups and
practices in the United States and Europe, from believers in witchcraft
to snake-handling rural churches. Less well known are the similarities
between Siberian shamans and features of historic civilizations, includ-
ing revered mystics, the concept of the monarch’s healing touch, heaven’s
choice of sovereign, and bureaucratized divination. In this chapter we
will tackle two projects, a survey of the diversity of practices that have
been, or might be, loosely labeled “shamanic,” and then a closer exami-
nation of Siberian shaman practices and of similar practices in northern
America.
The essence of “shamanism” is generally listed as a healing ritual
incorporating observable drumming, dancing, and chanting climaxing in
the adept falling down in trance, plus stated belief that the adept’s soul
leaves the body to travel in company with spirits during the trance.
Many writers also assume that ingestion of a psychotropic substance is
part of shamanism. Eliade’s emphasis on “ecstasy” flavors the idea of the
shaman; as we have seen, “ecstasy” can mean a range of emotional states
from mental dissociation to the transports of joy a poet supposedly expe-
riences upon viewing an inspiring subject. Somewhere in this range is

57
58 Chapter Five

drug-stimulated hallucination (as by the street drug called ecstasy). It

will be illuminating to look at European religious behavior that is seldom
labeled “shamanic,” although not visibly much different from non-West-
ern “shamanisms,” as well as at religious practices in non-Western soci-
eties outside the North.

TRANCE AND MYSTICISM

Right off, “trance” turns out to be about as loose a term as “ecstasy.”

It has become fashionable to say “altered state of consciousness” (ASC)
in reference to dissociation, hallucination (drug-induced or not), and feel-
ing that one’s spirit is out of one’s body. Trance would be an ASC. Most
anthropologists distinguish between trance, in which the person believes
his or her soul is active but the body still, and possession, in which the
person feels his or her own consciousness somehow repressed while a
spirit takes over the body. (The possessed person may be said to be the
“horse” ridden by the possessing spirit.) Tranced persons are not neces-
sarily catatonically still; they may obey a hypnotist’s orders, utter words
believed spoken by a spirit, dance, walk on hot coals, shout, suck out ill-
ness or evil—in “trance” the person loses the everyday, acute sense of my-
thinking-self-in-this-body. A straightforward explanation of trance is
that it is intense mental concentration, so intense that the mind disen-
gages from noticing bodily sensations.
Achieving such a degree of concentration is a learned skill. In some
cultural traditions meditation is taught as the means to reach a state of
undistracted insight, in others it may be reached through absorption in
particular music, dancing to music, long contemplation of an image, or
under the direction of an adept who commands the person to fix atten-
tion on a slowly waving feather, finger, or pendant. There also is an over-
lapping condition in which mental dissociation or spasms are triggered
by vitamin or mineral deficiencies and then labeled by a society as spirit
possession. Not surprisingly, such “possession cults” or associations are
more common among poor people and among women in societies where
women customarily eat after men of the household have finished, or are
expected to refrain from some foods. If in these societies some women
and poor men involuntarily lose consciousness and then are brought to a
group offering them a feast, music, and fellowship, others who long for
such enjoyment may wish to be “possessed” and, along with those invol-
untarily afflicted, learn to concentrate on triggering music, slide into the
“trance” state, and dance in recognized movements. In practice, people
all over the world usually readily distinguish between involuntarily
afflicted hysterics and persons who voluntarily learn to perform ritually;
foreign observers may not see the distinction, especially if the indigenous
Shamans Everywhere? 59

people treat the involuntary affliction by assuring the victims that their
attacks represent a calling to a spiritual vocation.
Among adherents of the “religions of the book,” those major world
religions founded upon holy texts, members who go into a trance state to
achieve greater spiritual insight are usually termed “mystics.” St. Teresa
of Ávila (1515–1582), a Spanish nun, is one of the most renowned Chris-
tian mystics. Dedicated to reforming the Roman Catholic Church, which
she believed was straying from its redemptive mission, Teresa wrote an
autobiography and treatises to help others follow her practices into spir-
itual exaltation. Thus we have from her, and her compatriots St. John of
the Cross and St. Ignatius Loyola, instructions for tested mental exer-
cises facilitating a state in which, Teresa says,
the breathing gradually diminishes, so that it becomes impossible to
speak or to open the eyes . . . the natural warmth vanishes . . . the
hands become cold and sometimes stiff and straight as pieces of
wood; . . . the soul is so full of the joy of that which Our Lord is setting
before it, that it seems to forget to animate the body and abandons it
(quoted in Underhill 1955:360).
Her autobiography explains that she would begin with meditation, then
proceed to a long Prayer of Quiet leading to “Sleep of the Faculties” and
the culminating sense of self-negating union with Divinity (O’Brien
1964:211).
Alcoholics Anonymous can be considered a twentieth-century insti-
tutionalized mystical redemptive movement. It is well-known that AA
members are required to acknowledge a “higher Power.” This began
when Anonymous founder “Bill W.” was surprised to see a former drink-
ing buddy converted to a Christian group-meeting movement. “Bill W.”
felt ashamed of his own deterioration.
All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show
himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up on
an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in
my mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air
but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free
man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay there on the bed, but now for
a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness (quoted
in Galanter 1989:177).
The famous mystics of the religions of the book, including here “Bill
W.,” appear solipsistic, that is, thinking only of their own selves, in con-
trast to Siberian shamans who move into trance in order to help others
in their communities. Although the process Teresa outlined is not so dif-
ferent from what Jochelson observed of shamans, the purpose seems very
different—but wait! Teresa was an active woman in her world, establish-
60 Chapter Five

ing several convents and working with male colleagues in reform efforts.
She recommended her spiritual exercise for healing, claiming “he who
was before sickly and full of pain comes forth healthy and even with new
strength” (quoted in Underhill 1955:363). Authors celebrating the saintly
mystics of the religions of the book write in a tradition that slights active
accomplishments in favor of their literate subjects’ self-reported inner
life. Anthropologists such as Jochelson are careful to describe what they
actually observe firsthand, as a scientist should, with limited opportunity
to obtain accounts of people’s inner consciousness.
This last point comes out of my own fieldwork experiences. I had
the privilege, in the 1960s, to camp in a meadow near the small home of
Piakwutch, an elderly, deeply respected Cree man who served his
Saskatchewan Cree community as priest and spiritual healer. In stan-
dard anthropologist routine, I had formal interviews with Piakwutch in
which I took down in my notebook many discussions of Cree beliefs and
history, interpreted into English by Piakwutch’s son. If I had visited
Piakwutch only for these interviews, I would not have known that he
spent hours every morning in meditative contemplation of the eastern
horizon, standing silent in the meadow outside his house. My companion
and I were careful to keep our breakfast activities quiet, respecting the
saintly man’s introspection that began every dawn. He was kind enough
to explain to us that his morning vigil facing the waxing sun restored his
spiritual power, often depleted by the ritual healings and prayer sessions
he had conducted the previous evening. Should Piakwutch’s intense con-
centration be labeled trance? St. Teresa said, “as to the body, if the rap-
ture comes on when it is standing or kneeling it remains so” (quoted in
Underhill 1955:360). We did not intrude upon Piakwutch’s contempla-
tion, and certainly did not touch him to see if he was insensate. I have no
idea how many ritual leaders in traditionally non-literate small nations
engage regularly in meditative contemplation as Piakwutch did,
although I know, from polite inquiry and further camping experiences
near ritual leaders, that it is not uncommon with other Cree, Dakota,
and Blackfoot.

HEALING WITH SPIRITS

Piakwutch healed afflictions—illness, misfortune, malaise—with

prayer made efficacious by the reservoir of spiritual power he main-
tained through his daily contemplation of the waxing sun. To be able to
heal in this way, he had apprenticed for years to an experienced ritual
practitioner. Piakwutch’s daughter healed people and livestock by
administering herbs and herbal mixtures made efficacious by prayers
she spoke over the patient and earlier when gathering the plants; she
Shamans Everywhere? 61

had been taught her art by her grandmother. Both father and daughter
believed the most significant part of their doctoring to be the invocation
of the blessing of Almighty Power, begging that it manifest its benefice
through the practices they had been taught. Neither father nor daughter
went into trance, so far as I know, nor did they require drumming. Some
who use the word “shaman” loosely would apply it to both healers, simply
because both forms of Cree doctoring are said to be means of allying with
spiritual power.
Another fieldwork experience I had was at my own university in
downtown Milwaukee. Two nurses were permitted to use the campus
Varsity Theater for a Saturday, to teach what they called “Healing in
Jesus’ Name.” The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee assigned a priest
to the nurses’ program because at one point they wanted to offer a sacra-
ment. In the lobby, tiny vials of holy oil were available. The six-hundred-
seat theater was nearly filled; I sat in a back row hoping to take notes
unobtrusively. Much of the program consisted of exhortations to the
audience to believe in Jesus’ power to heal. There was some singing and
speaking in tongues, by most of the audience together. We were told to
embrace and kiss people around us, like the kiss of peace used by some
congregations in the contemporary Mass. There were testimonies of
healing, and a description of the “healing chain,” when a dozen or more
believers clasp one another in a line, the head of the line holding the
afflicted person. The audience in the theater then prayed together, fer-
vently, led by the nurses on stage. We were told as we prayed to think
intently about someone dear to us who needed healing or good luck. No
one went into trance, so far as I could see, and there was no drumming.
You might say there was no dancing, except the nurses on stage moved
rhythmically and the audience tended to sway on their feet. Energy
poured forth, and to judge by their beaming faces and springy step, a
good part of the audience felt uplifted. The nurses insisted that their fer-
vor in invoking the spirit of Jesus was bringing healing. Is this “sha-
manic”?
Once, one of my students confided in me that her aunt was gifted
with the power to invoke healing by prayer. The aunt, of Polish descent,
was American born and had lived all her life in Milwaukee’s old Polish
working-class neighborhood. She prayed Catholic prayers over afflicted
people, and often they said they felt better. The problem was that her
parish priest said she had not been officially recognized by the Church as
a miraculous healer, so she should stop her efforts with the afflicted. How
could she, her niece asked me, when these sufferers came begging her to
help? Every week the unhappy woman confessed her dereliction to the
parish priest and performed the prescribed penance, every week she felt
compelled to minister to sufferers coming to her door. Because she, like
the nurses, believed her ritualistic prayers invoked a spirit that healed
those who sought her, would her ritual be “shamanic”?
62 Chapter Five

Not only Christians whose actions are unorthodox believe that

healing is more efficacious when prayers call down a spirit. John Tem-
pleton, described in an authorized biography as a man “who, after one of
the most successful careers in Wall Street history, has devoted his retire-
ment to the cause of humanity’s spiritual progress,” bankrolled the Tem-
pleton Foundation (giving away fifteen to twenty million dollars each
year), Templeton Lectures, Templeton Prize, and Science and Spirit
magazine, all in support of showing that science can validate the value
of spirituality. A 1998 Science and Spirit issue headlined “Faith and
Medicine,” citing a 1996 Time magazine cover on “Faith and Healing” as
one of a number of indications that Americans are actively interested in
connecting spirituality with better health. Through Templeton, a Center
on Religion/Spirituality and Health is funding a four-year project at
Duke University researching the connection. A recurring theme in Sci-
ence and Spirit reports that intensive prayer, especially by groups of peo-
ple for one ill person, caused remarkable recovery. The challenge is to
verify in a scientifically acceptable mode of demonstration that “the
higher power,” as Science and Spirit likes to term it, effected the recov-
ery, rather than the eventual effect of medication, the body’s own healing
capacity, or the emotional/hormonal effect on the patient of the demon-
stration of love around the sickbed. Former U. S. Surgeon General Dr. C.
Everett Koop remarked in an interview in the magazine,
faith is the evidence of things not seen. There is a point beyond which
you cannot go in proving faith and proving prayer. . . . [W]hether it
is divine intervention or whether it is mind-body medicine [i.e., fac-
toring in hormones, etc.] that gets you better, you will never really be
sure (Koop quoted by Dan Kauffman, Science and Spirit 9[3]:9).

THE KING’S TOUCH

The great eighteenth-century English literary man Dr. Samuel

Johnson was a sickly child. When he was two years old, his anxious par-
ents, on the advice of their physician, took the little boy to be touched by
the reigning monarch, Queen Anne. At her coronation, Anne, like all the
English monarchs, was anointed with oil mixed from a secret formula,
kept in a small flask in the shape of an eagle. This was believed to endow
the sovereign with the power to cure diseases merely by touching;
French kings were supposed to have the same power, although by the
early modern age the king said as he touched the suppliant, “Le roi te
touche: Dieu te guerisse” (“The king touches you: God cures you”). Sev-
enteenth-century kings of France, Spain, and England each touched
thousands of sufferers every year, sometimes more than a thousand in
one day. Scrofula, a form of tuberculosis causing ugly sores, was called
Shamans Everywhere? 63

the king’s evil because it was held to be resistant to any cure other than
the monarch’s touch.
The king’s healing touch reflected a widespread faith that a heav-
enly power selects and maintains, or deposes, earthly rulers. The notion
appeared in Classical Rome, where it was claimed that an undying cor-
pus mysticum incarnated in the mortal bodies of the rulers, giving the
concept of “the king’s two bodies” (“The king is dead. Long live the
king!”). In China, the right to rule derived from t’ien ming, “heaven’s
mandate.” Both China and the West considered the sovereign to embody
a priestly office as well as governing power, so that the healing touch
flowed from the priestly ordination within the coronation ritual. Still
today, the British monarch is Head of the Church of England.
Some scholars trace the “shamanic” (as they term it) aspects of the
Emperor of China to the protohistoric Shang period, four thousand years
ago, when the legendary first emperors created their states. Most of the
inscriptions surviving from this period (on bones used in divination and
on bronze vessels) have to do with incantations and divination, and in
the first millennium B.C. the imperial courts employed ritual organizers
called wu who were said to be gifted with a capacity to bring down spirits
enabling them to discern what would please the gods. The Han dynasty
(202 B.C.–A.D. 220), influenced by secular, rational Confucian moral phi-
losophy, curbed the earlier wu practices; these moved to the philosophi-
cal tradition developed in opposition to Confucianism, the Dao (formerly
spelled Tao in English). Later in the first millennium A.D., emperors
called upon diviners and mediums from Daoist sanctuaries, while com-
moners saw their local seers and exorcists as somehow Daoist, that is,
contrasting with official Confucian and Buddhist tenets and practices.
In the thirteenth century, Mongols conquered China and brought
with them both the custom of the ruler consulting frequently with a
diviner-medium (it was such a personage who named Prince Temujin
“Chinggis [Genghis] Khan”), and of the ruler himself enacting trance to
foretell and guide his actions. A Muslim traveler wrote that Chinggis
was adept in magic and deception, and some of the devils were his
friends. Every now and then he used to fall into a trance, and in that
state of insensibility all sorts of things used to proceed from his
tongue . . . and the devils which had power over him foretold his vic-
tories. . . . A person used to take the whole down in writing and en-
close it in a bag and place a seal upon it, and when Chinggis Khan
came to his senses again, they used to read his utterances over to him
. . . and according to these he would act (quoted in Humphrey
1994:203).
Chinggis, like more ordinary Northern Asian shamans, kept a special
tunic to wear when prophesying.
After the overthrow of the Mongol (Yuan in Chinese) dynasty in
64 Chapter Five

China, there was an ethnically Chinese dynasty (Ming), then another

conquest by Mongolian armies in the seventeenth century, named Man-
chu when they set up their Qing dynasty. A century and a half later, in
1778, the Qing emperor Hongli officially restored Mongolian shaman rit-
uals to court favor as a means of asserting the dominance of his dynasty
over the ethnic Chinese whose Confucian and Buddhist ideas had by
then been espoused by many of the Manchu aristocracy in their urban
palaces. Hongli believed that the nomadic Mongolians beyond the
empire preserved the ancient, more powerful rituals, and he sent out
scholars to record these in detail so that the “correct” forms could be uti-
lized in the imperial court. The Yuan and Qing rituals retained, or
restored, from preconquest Mongolian practices can properly be termed
shamanic, because these were historically part of the Northern Asian
religious practices including those of the Tungus saman (shaman). It is
only a hypothesis, however, that Chinese wu priests had been part of
that religious tradition, and the notion of some archaeologists that the
legendary Shang emperors of four thousand years ago were practicing
shamans like Chinggis Khan is interpreting all Chinese history on the
model of the Yuan and Qing dynasties of the past 800 years.

USE OF DRUGS

During the 1960s, taking mind-altering drugs became more socially

acceptable in Western societies. These drugs, ranging from marijuana to
strong substances such as LSD and heroin, contrast with the previously
socially common alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine in that those either dull
mental acuity or stimulate behavior, whereas the 1960s fad was for sub-
stances that cause hallucinations inside the mind: they are not taken to
promote sociability. The general awareness of hallucinogens in the 1960s
led to more research and discussion (and willingness, by some, to try the
stuff) by anthropologists on hallucinogen use in non-Western societies.
One area of research was on Northern societies, asking whether
shamans regularly took hallucinogens to achieve out-of-body experience
or perceive spirits. Some are factually reported to have ingested the
mushroom fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, a hallucinogen so powerful it is
said to affect people who only drink the urine of someone who has taken
it (as a matter of fact, it is said that people prefer to get it through
another’s urine because that is safer than risking a straight dose from the
mushroom itself). Gordon Wasson, a banker who with his Russian-born
wife spent decades studying the uses of mushrooms, deduced that the
magical potion soma celebrated in the Hindu hymns of the Rig-Veda was
fly agaric, explaining peculiar references to drinking gods’ urine as refer-
ences to this method of imbibing the drug. Wasson mentions that deer
Shamans Everywhere? 65

and reindeer will eat fly agaric and appear to be hallucinating as a result,
possibly how this plant came to the attention of Siberians. Its use could
have passed through Central Asia to northern India, just as elements of
Hindu and Buddhist rituals passed in the other direction to northern
Asia. Potentially fatal fly agaric seems to have diminished in use once
Russia took over northern Asia, with vodka sometimes drunk by sha-
mans beginning their rituals. Hungarian folklorists have some evidence
that fly agaric was used in their country (the dominant ethnic group in
Hungary, the Magyars, migrated there from western Asia around A.D.
900), which accounts for the curious story that táltos would appear at cot-
tage doors asking for milk: milk is an antidote to fly agaric toxicity.
Neither fly agaric nor marijuana was required by northern Asian
shamans, even if used by some to induce “trance.” Nor was any psyche-
delic plant other than tobacco used in northern America; the tobacco
smoked there in ceremonies is stronger than commercial cigarette and
cigar tobaccos and can have a stimulant effect, but it is primarily
incense, its smoke enveloping participants in the ritual and rising to the
Above. In contrast, men in most Central and South American indigenous
societies regularly ingest psychotropic plants in religious rituals.
Tobacco is taken as snuff, or its smoke vigorously inhaled to produce a
hallucinatory experience. Aztec and other Mexican priests and curers
used the Psilocybe mushroom (not fly agaric), morning glory seeds, jim-
son weed (Datura), and peyote cactus, as well as tobacco, in various rit-
uals for psychotropic effect.
South America, except for its southernmost region, is the area with
the most common ritual use of psychedelic plants. The Andean region
also uses coca leaves, but primarily as a kind of chewed tea (which is
what they taste like) giving a mild pleasant relaxing feeling.1 Especially
in the lowland tropical forests, South American Indian men are accus-
tomed to ingesting tobacco snuff or the vine leaves Banisteriopsis, called
ayahuasca in Peru, yajé in Colombia, and other names. Both the strong
tobacco snuff and Banisteriopsis are apt to cause nausea and vomiting,
followed by the desired hallucinations of being freed of one’s body and
seeing spirit beings. Ritual leaders in these societies supervise youths’
initiation into the use of these plants and subsequent use by the men of
the community together, and the leaders will use the plant more fre-
quently to divine and heal afflictions. Since the 1960s, the label “sha-
man” has been applied to these drug-using ritual leaders in spite of the
many significant differences between them and Siberian shamans, nota-
bly in that psychotropic plants are not a necessary component in Siberia
and, conversely, lowland South American ritual leaders do not generally
use a drum, which is necessary for most Siberian shamans. It seems to
be the popularity of Mircea Eliade’s book that led to the label “shaman”
for the Central and South American ritualists, disregarding the vital dif-
ferences between them and Siberian shamans.
66 Chapter Five

CIRCUMBOREAL (NORTHERN FORESTS)

ELEMENTS

It is in northern North America that indigenous ritual adepts

resemble Siberian shamans in the importance of the single-headed drum
for their rituals. I noticed recently that at a Blackfoot traditional Sun
Dance, this type of drum was used to accompany the holy songs, in con-
trast to the big bass drum used in powwows (which are secular festivals).
So far as I have heard, American Indians do not speak of “riding” their
drums, as Siberian shamans do. For Siberians, the animal hide drum-
head becomes the animal—reindeer, deer, horse, or bull—when the sha-
man reaches the state of intense concentration, and the shaman then
rides the animal to his or her spirit allies. Of course, American Indians
did not ride any animals until the European invasions of the sixteenth
century brought in domesticated horses, whereas riding animals have
been familiar to Siberians for some four thousand years.
An interesting common element in Siberian and northern Ameri-
can divination rituals is the practice of the adept being tightly tied up,
the room darkened or the adept placed in a screened booth or tent while
the spirits speak, and the adept amazingly freed of his bonds after the
spirits leave and he can be seen again. Frequently the comment is made
that the ropes that tied the adept lie neatly coiled beside him. The closest
parallel is between Siberia and the Yuwipi ritual of the Lakota Indians
in the Dakotas, in that both rely on darkness for the spirit visits, while
among Algonkian-speaking nations of Canada (Ojibwe/Anishinabe,
Cree, Innu [Montagnais-Naskapi]), the seer is enclosed in a small booth
or wigwam and the audience sits around outside it. A striking feature of
the Algonkian lodge is that it shakes very noticeably when the adept is
inside (remember, he is seen to be tightly bound when the seance begins),
hence the ritual is often called the shaking tent rite. Supposedly the
winds of the cosmos shake the booth, or else the spirits as they enter and
perch on its poles. Anthropologist A. I. Hallowell attended several shak-
ing tent seances in Manitoba in the 1930s and reports that each spirit
has its distinct recognizable voice and song, so the audience knows which
spirits have come and can address their questions directly. A favorite
spirit visitor is Mikinak, “Turtle,” who “talks in a throaty nasal voice not
unlike that of Donald Duck,” says Hallowell, and when tobacco is passed
into the shaking tent for Mikinak to enjoy a smoke, “when smoking he
has the peculiar habit of emitting a long uninterrupted whistle” (Hallow-
ell 1942:45–46). Among these Ojibwe, the adept does not himself journey
out of body; instead, Mikinak or another spirit will go on the errand to
find how a distant loved one is, where a lost object is, or other query,
returning to the shaking tent to give the answer.
Shamans Everywhere? 67

Is the feature of the adept being bound, then appearing free of the
ropes when the lights go on or booth is opened, enough to link Siberian
and northern American diviners? The famous Euro-American profes-
sional magician Harry Houdini frequently performed this trick. Houdini,
born Erich Weiss and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, during the 1880s as
a rabbi’s son, might have seen a shaking tent seance on the Menominee
Reservation near Appleton, but there seems no record of his hanging out
with Indian people, and a contemporary professional magician told me
that the bound-magician trick has been well known and practiced for
centuries among European magicians. Houdini most emphatically could
not be termed a shaman, because he devoted much of his career to
unmasking people who claimed to contact spirits. The similarity between
his escape performances and those of the tied-up shaking tent and
yuwipi practitioners illustrates the necessity for caution in applying a
label such as “shaman” to superficially alike events.
Comparing circumboreal spiritual adepts from northern Scandina-
via, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, extending south to the
plains of Central Asia and of North America, there seems to be a basic
concept that gifted individuals can develop through apprenticeship and
self-privation, the capacity to invoke spirits to come to aid in assisting
community members. The adept will be a seer or diviner, with spirit par-
ticipation, and the divination may prescribe means to cure affliction.
American Indian diviners seem to put more emphasis on the spirits—
dozens or even hundreds—coming to the adept, and Eurasian and Inuit
adepts on the practitioner’s soul leaving the body to journey in company
with spirits, or to the place of souls and spirits, but there are many
accounts of northern American soul journeys, and conversely of spirits
coming into the tent or cabin of a Siberian shaman, manifested by whis-
tlings, odd voices, people feeling a feather brushing their face, and such
phenomena common in American Indian seances. The shaking tent out-
doors is usually described as American Indian, and not mentioned for
Siberian seances which, like Lakota yuwipi, are held inside homes. Both
in Siberia and America, the feat of the securely-bound adept slipping free
of the ropes excites much amazement.
On both continents, songs are a major component of the seance rit-
ual, actually sacred music that may achieve poetic and musical beauty
even a foreign observer can admire; Hallowell mentions one song that not
only he, but an Ojibwe youth in the community, found particularly attrac-
tive. The youth started to sing it while traveling but was told at once by
others in the party to stop: spirit songs are not for everyday. Enhanced by
this reservation for serious occasions, the beauty of ritual songs may
draw audiences beyond those concerned for the afflicted persons.
Because there are many variations in the basic divining ritual,
from region to region and also from practitioner to practitioner, the dif-
ferences between Siberians, generalized, and Inuit and American Indi-
68 Chapter Five

ans, generalized, may be not much greater than between any two partic-
ular performances on one continent or the other. Siberian shamans are
not priests of a single “church” or “religion,” yet neither are the practices
likely to have arisen totally independently in each region. Given the
extent of the fur trade (going back before official governmental organiza-
tions), their recruitment and deployment of men thousands of miles from
their homelands, and the many instances (those that happened to get
recorded) of non-literate individuals journeying enormous distances
(Kehoe 1989:34, 99), some transfers of ideas and paraphernalia must
have occurred across these distances, facilitated by their emotional and
entertainment values for people living in small communities dependent
on themselves for doctoring and for drama.

CHARISMA

Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, devoted much of his

work to the study of religions in societies. He pointed out that successful
leaders tend to have “a certain quality” he termed charisma, using a
Greek word meaning “gift,” in the sense of divine gift of grace or favor.
Charisma is recognized in leaders by their followers: a person can claim
to be divinely gifted but for Weber, the litmus test is whether other people
see that gift in the person—mental hospitals have plenty of patients who
try to claim divine gift. A leader may modestly deny being specially gifted
but followers may insist they do see charisma. Anthropologist F. G.
Bailey remarked,
[The leader] must nourish in others the illusion that he is gifted with
superhuman talents. . . . But at the same time the leader must be
practical and must cope with the real world; that is, he and his en-
tourage . . . have the difficult task of ensuring that the reality never
gets so far out of line that it cannot be represented as conforming
with the illusion. Failures must be concealed or at least . . . ex-
plained. . . . [T]he god cannot afford a failure, not even one; he is
above judgment of any kind, and to recognize failure is, ipso facto, to
make a judgment. But . . . a claim to humanity, . . . to bring off the
supreme trick of identification in which the mass see him not only as
an ideal above them but simultaneously as one of them . . . is a step
in the direction of the real world (Bailey 1988:118–119).
Bailey takes a tone of superiority here, but his point is perspicacious.
Balancing vision and pragmatic responses to actuality is a feat of Sibe-
rian shamans and religious and political leaders in general, from Old
Testament prophets and Socrates, through medieval kings and saints
such as Joan of Arc, to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas
Gandhi, and—there are evil leaders with charisma—Hitler. During lead-
Shamans Everywhere? 69

ers’ lifetimes, their “gift” may be doubted or repudiated, until later gen-
erations decide events upheld their followers’ imputation of divine favor.
Weber’s idea of charisma as a quality of successful leaders is dis-
cussed today in business management. A management textbook states,
Followers become ‘charisma hungry’ when they experience a loss of
control over their environment, when their needs and expectations
are frustrated because of perceived . . . barriers and threats, when an
uncertain future is presented. . . . [W]e would like to point out that in
order for charismatic influence to operate, the context must be
viewed differently by leaders and followers. The leader must identify
and articulate both crisis in the status quo and opportunities within
the larger context to achieve the future vision. The followers, on the
other hand, must view the context as representing crisis and/or op-
portunities that they are unable to achieve by themselves (Conger,
Kanungo et al. 1988:332–333).
Understanding that anxious people seek someone more capable than they
believe themselves to be helps us comprehend the interesting similarities
between ritual practitioners and secular leaders, especially regarding
their followers ascribing extraordinary qualities to them. The ultimate
ascription of charisma is the belief that an anointed monarch carries
heaven’s mandate to rule. The common ascription of charisma to persons
willing to make the effort to lead and help their fellows may be couched in
terms of drawing upon spiritual power, or upon unusual intelligence.

THE PARTICULAR AND THE GENERAL

Again we face the dilemma of weighing the historically evidenced

particular against insights gained from broad comparisons. Generaliza-
tions may be flawed by analysts accepting cases misleadingly labeled or
inaccurately described. Anxiety over the pitfalls of going beyond one’s
own fieldwork can paralyze efforts to gain some understanding of human
nature and historical processes, understanding that may assist in deal-
ing with the diversity within the global system coming to dominate our
planet. This chapter has cast a wide net to examine the alleged charac-
teristics of shamans identified among indigenous Siberians, finding this
sweep takes in historical Western mystics, healers, leaders, and magi-
cians as well as Siberians and northern American Indians.
Chapter 4 discussed human physiological capacities that underlie
recourse to music and dance, intense concentration, and enacted meta-
phors. Here, social factors have been brought forward, situations that
impel some persons to actively and more or less publicly seek transcen-
dental epiphany. Max Weber astutely pointed to the reciprocal relation
likely to develop between visionaries—spiritual or secular—and their
70 Chapter Five

followers. Monarchs’ divine healing touch illustrates well how charisma

may be attributed to an individual. We don’t see seventeenth-century
Western European kings and queens labeled as “shamans” because they
performed that ritual spiritual healing. The wide net shows how consis-
tent application of the term would encompass historic and contemporary
Western urban societies as well as non-Western indigenous peoples
ranging from Tungus and Ojibwe to Chinggis Khan and his court. If we
would be consistent, the term “shaman” becomes a synonym for “spiri-
tual,” and potentially confusing because, unlike “spiritual,” it does have
its concrete particular historic meaning, too. If we are not consistent,
using “shaman” as a general term for non-Western societies’ spiritual
adepts, healers, and diviners but not for their counterparts in Judaeo-
Christian-Islamic societies, then the term carries a primitivist connota-
tion. And that tends to foster racism, as argued in chapter 8.

Note
1 Along with the other women with grown children, I chewed
coca leaves most afternoons after work in the fields during the
months I spent in a Lake Titicaca Indian village on an
anthropological project. We ladies sat together very much like
British women at tea time—I spent some months in Britain
the next year and found not only the custom of women
gathering for relaxation in late afternoon to be similar, but the
effect of chewing coca or drinking strong British tea practically
the same.
Chapter Six

Shaman Painters?

Years ago, when I was living on an Indian reservation in Montana,

an elderly lady told me that when she was a child on the Gros Ventre
Reservation in the eastern part of the state, her family met two other
families every summer to spend about a week berry-picking. This would
have been in the early 1900s, when reservation women dried many
quarts of chokecherries and saskatoon berries for their families to eat
over the winter. The Gros Ventre elder recounted that it would happen
that one family arrived at the rendezvous, a prominent landmark cliff,
several days before the others, and to pass the time, the waiting children
liked to draw and peck pictures on the rock face.
Rock art often seems mysterious, in part because that which has
been preserved to the present is generally fairly inaccessible, on an out-
crop or in a cave—untold thousands placed more conveniently have been
destroyed by later development. Large animals and stylized human or
quasi-human figures most often are seen in rock art, reflecting what peo-
ple would notice moving across the landscape. In Siberia and northern-
most Europe, there are reindeer, on the North American Plains there are
bison, in the Canadian forests there are elk and moose, and in southern
Africa there are cattle and eland antelopes. Humans are seldom repre-
sented as naturalistically as animals, we don’t know why. There may be
scenes of herds running, human figures apparently walking one after
another or dancing in a group, or depictions seemingly placed indepen-
dent of any relation to others on the rock. Determining the age of rock art
was difficult until the very recent refinement of radiocarbon dating to the
point that it can be done with miniscule amounts of organic pigment, and
even today many sites, lacking such pigment, defy definitive dating. Con-
temporary indigenous residents near rock art sites may profess ignorance
of their meaning, attributing them to ancient predecessors or declining to
talk about a religious adept’s knowledge. With not much payoff to be
expected, either in dating or in interpreting, archaeologists have tended

71
72 Chapter Six

to record what is seen in the interest of preservation, leaving further

study to such time as new techniques may promise more information.
Since the 1980s, a burgeoning subfield of archaeological rock art
studies has been spawning dozens of ambitious theoretical papers.
Debate rages over a proposition that all paintings and petroglyphs
(pecked or incised into the rock) attributable to ancient and to contempo-
rary hunter-gatherers are attempts by shamans to depict what they see
in trance. Proponents of this theory are convinced that all these paint-
ings and pecked-rock pictures come out of religious beliefs that contrast
with our Western religions: beliefs in spirit animals hallucinated by sha-
mans. Cultural primitivism! Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas would
have shouted. In other words, here again is the hoary Western assump-
tion that if you aren’t a literate, city-dwelling citizen of a major nation,
then you are unsophisticated, emotional, primitive, and unable to figure
out the difference between dreams, hallucinations, and reality. There’s
no room in these grand theories for children making pictures to pass the
time while their mamas are picking berries.
South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams set off this end-
of-the-century resurrection of primitivism with a 1988 paper in the inter-
national journal Current Anthropology. Lewis-Williams earlier had
interpreted South African rock art to have been painted by ritual practi-
tioners in the native nations generally called San, or Bushmen. Caught
between southward-conquering Bantu nations such as the Zulu and
northward-conquering Dutch and then British immigrants, during the
last three centuries the San lost most of their cattle herds and pastures.
Many retreated to the deserts where they survived by hunting and gath-
ering wild foods; others became workers on conquerors’ farms. Besides
San in South Africa, there were other nations speaking related lan-
guages of the Khoi-San linguistic stock, and very likely nations whose
names and practices were not recorded by the European invaders. Such
uncertainties about the protohistoric, not to mention prehistoric, peoples
of South Africa were not addressed by Lewis-Williams.
Using limited transcriptions, in translation, of some San beliefs
recorded in the late nineteenth century, he inferred that San communi-
ties had ritual practitioners who went into trance in order to experience
out-of-body travel sensations and meet spirit animals who might lend
potency to the practitioner’s healing rituals. Prominent among the spirit
animals in both contemporary San belief and in rock art, according to
Lewis-Williams, is the eland, the largest antelope in the country. Lewis-
Williams discounts the obvious notion that this impressive creature
might have been painted simply because it is so striking a figure in the
veld landscape. For him the frequency of depictions of this animal must
link to altered-state-of-consciousness visions that the ritual practitio-
ners felt compelled to record by painting on rock faces. Lewis-Williams
labels these San ritualists “shamans” because the San conceptualize a
Shamans Painters? 73

tiered cosmos they can reach through in trance. What is a tiered cosmos?
One example would be Heaven, Earth, and Hell; by Lewis-Williams’ def-
initions, presumably any Christians who believe their prayers reach
Heaven should be labeled shamans, and the Christian religions “sha-
manistic.” Tiered cosmos are conceptualized also by peoples in India and
China and the Maya of Mexico and Central America, all building multi-
tiered temples representing the cosmology.
Next, Lewis-Williams claimed that psychologists’ reports of hallu-
cinating persons, mostly under the influence of drugs but including sen-
sory-deprivation and stress-induced dissociative states of mind, demon-
strate basic elements he interprets to arise from human neurology. The
elements he describes he calls entoptic, from en- “in” plus optic, relating
to sight, i.e., seen “inside the eye.” He lists seven geometric forms as the
basic entoptic elements: grid; parallel lines; dots; zigzag; nested curves;
thin meandering lines; spiral. Any picture, it turns out, can be analyzed
into these underlying simple forms. It’s like those “Learn to Draw”
instructions—draw an oval, now put eyes into it, etc.—only run back-
ward as it were. Perhaps eventually Lewis-Williams will analyze
museum-collection paintings by Western artists, perhaps he will test his
theory of the prevalence of entoptics by interviewing contemporary art-
ists. The latter possibility was really driven home to me when a friend
brought me to visit a professional artist in Seattle. On his apartment
walls hung large paintings that seemed to consist entirely of myriads of
Lewis-Williams’ entoptic forms. Startled, I asked whether our host was
experimenting with entoptics. “With what?” he asked: he had never
heard of “entoptics,” much less of Lewis-Williams; nor, he insisted, did he
take drugs or hallucinate. (His wife and our mutual friend laughed. The
painter is much too serious and disciplined about his work to fool around
with stuff that would interfere with his vision.) No, the painter had a
wonderfully straightforward explanation for his paintings: he is fasci-
nated by the variety of ways he can paint edges of shapes. These private
paintings kept in his home are his explorations of the effects of varying
treatments of edge.
Lewis-Williams concludes that because both South African rock art
and European Upper Paleolithic cave paintings depict mostly hunted
animals, especially the biggest game, and in both regions simple geomet-
ric forms also are common, both Upper Paleolithic and South African
rock art represent shamans’ hallucinations. The 1988 Current Anthro-
pology with Lewis-Williams’ paper prints a commentary on it by Alison
Wylie, a trained philosopher considerably experienced in archaeology.
She asks, “What is the likelihood that [the rock art figures] could be pro-
duced by other causal factors?” rather than shamans recording halluci-
nations. The simpler figures on South African rock faces and in habitable
caves could have been children’s pastimes. Skilled paintings could have
been performed by gifted artists whose talent impels them to create
74 Chapter Six

visual beauty, framed in the experiences of their people.

Professor Wylie tactfully pointed out the need for Lewis-Williams
to bring forward many more documented cases of ritual practitioners
going into trance and then representing their visions on rock surfaces.
Other archaeologists have attacked his theory on two fronts, the validity
of his San case and the validity of the notion of a “shamanistic” religion
common to hunter-gatherers from the Upper Paleolithic of twenty thou-
sand or more years ago to twentieth-century refugees from military con-
quests of South Africa.
Labeling San ritual practitioners “shamans” because they officiate
at healing rituals called by Western observers “trance dance” is playing
loose with terms. While a chorus of women sings, !Kung men (there can
be several at once) focus intense concentration on stroking upward the
bodies of the afflicted, pulling up their ailing spirits. The strokers may
dissociate from ordinary perceptions. This ritual of the !Kung group of
San reminds one of the Hindu Kundalini practice of drawing a person’s
spirit upward from belly to head, to invigorate or heal them, and a his-
torically minded observer remembers that there have been many centu-
ries of trade and merchants’ colonies across the Indian Ocean between
India and eastern Africa. In other !Kung rituals, an experienced older
man may act as leader or director, similarly intensely concentrating on
magnifying the spiritual potency of the ritual. Unfortunately for Lewis-
Williams’ theory, the observed San practitioners did not then go paint or
engrave rock faces, or make any other representation of what they may
have experienced. Lewis-Williams’ own prime case is not as strong as he
would have it.
The second aspect of Lewis-Williams’ theory, that there has been
and still is a hunter-gatherers’ “shamanistic” religion contrasting with
the literate religions of urban civilizations, is similarly poorly supported.
As we have noted, his “tiered cosmos” definition of “shamanistic” takes
in Christianity and many other religions of literate societies. Intense
concentration leading into dissociation and a feeling of transcending
one’s body is a human capacity amply described by Christian, Jewish,
Muslim, Buddhist, Daoist, and other highly literate, urban mystics. Like
the actually observed !Kung ritual practitioners, other mystics did not,
as a rule, draw or paint representations of what they saw. Like the
observed !Kung practitioners, and Siberian shamans, other mystics
often expressed themselves in poetry and music. Poetry and music are
not preserved among archaeologists’ material data.
Southern California American Indians did have a ritual that ended
with participants painting on rock. These were young girls initiated into
womanhood. Their teachers made sandpaintings illustrating deities who
would favor or punish people, according to how well or ill a person
behaved, and the girls’ paintings fit this theme. Significantly, neither
these girls nor their teachers would have been in an altered state of con-
Shamans Painters? 75

sciousness. Southern California Indian boys, in contrast to the girls,

underwent initiation into adulthood through taking datura (jimson
weed) under the supervision of ritual leaders. The boys would experience
powerful visions—datura is related to the most commonly used South
American hallucinogenic plants—but the boys did not paint vision crea-
tures on rock; the art associated with boys’ initiation, as with the adults
who taught girls, was sandpaintings. There is at least one cave in South-
ern California with striking indigenous paintings, and some Indian peo-
ple went to the cave to pray, supposing it must be a holy place although
they did not know when or by whom the paintings were made. Several
Indians in the Far West quizzed by anthropologists years ago about rock
art replied that they presumed the paintings not only were of supernat-
urals but were probably produced by supernaturals, self-portraits as it
were, perhaps as revelation to humans.

TERRITORIAL MARKERS

Paintings and petroglyphs on exposed rock faces tend to be located

either along travel routes or near settlements or shrines. For example, in
the northern Midwest and adjacent Canada one sees paintings on rock
cliffs bordering lakes, where canoeists will see them. Indian travelers
often dropped a pinch of tobacco at the cliff and prayed for good luck,
believing the painting indicated a place imbued with holy power. In Chaco
Canyon, New Mexico, a major settlement and trading location a thousand
years ago, one sees paintings on rock faces above pueblo ruins. Other
paintings are on rocks at pilgrimage sites, signs of the holiness of the
place. In western Wisconsin, a shallow cave at the head of a ravine has an
impressive mural depicting a legendary Ho-chunk (Winnebago) hero, his
wolf companion, the giants who tried to kill him, and the female giant
who became his wife. The mural dates to the Mississippian Late Prehis-
toric period, a few centuries before European invasions; excavations into
the floor of the rock shelter revealed it had been a place of ritual for many
centuries. The legend of the Ho-chunk hero is like an Old Testament book,
told by priests with proto-literate symbols rather than an alphabet, as dif-
ferent from Siberian shaman rituals as were the ancient Israelites’ wor-
ship with the Torah. Shrines and temples are deeply integrated into
nations’ territories, centering community worship and also extending the
community to rural places outside its immediate settlement.
Along the Zuojiang River in southern China, Guangxi Region, are
hundreds of cliff paintings of humans, dogs, birds, weapons, and drums.
The paintings are particularly associated with bends in the river and are
visible for long distances. Central in many paintings are a large man
armed with knife and sword, with a bronze drum beside him. Since it is
76 Chapter Six

Painted panel at the Gottschall Rockshelter, Wisconsin, Late Prehistoric period. Hochungara
(Ho-Chunk, Winnebago) viewing the panel believe it to represent the story of their ancient
hero Red Horn, shown battling giants as a thunderbird watches. Above the giants is a turtle.
Reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Archeological Society.

known that such bronze drums, often with words cast into the surface,
were kept by local lords to signal their lineage’s power, it is reasonable to
read the paintings as markers of lords’ territories. Similarly, a cliff above
the Mississippi River at Alton, Illinois, is marked with a fearsome leg-
endary creature with a panther body, tail like a serpent, and stag’s ant-
lers. At this point, boats going to or from the great prehistoric Mississip-
pian city at Cahokia, on the east side of the Mississippi across from St.
Louis, could have been intercepted by Cahokian defenders or tariff-col-
lectors. Comparable river points on the other borders of the Cahokia
floodplain are marked with rock images of raptor birds and cross-in-cir-
cle (a general American symbol for the world with its four directions),
probably signaling guarded approaches to the capital city.
Less definitive, but probably comparable as a border marker, is the
remarkable granite outcrop dome on the north valley side above the
Trent River near Peterborough, Ontario. This huge bald rock protruding
from the forest around it is covered with hundreds of petroglyphs. Con-
troversies swirl around their interpretation, but one fact may be perti-
nent: at the time of the seventeenth-century European invasions into
eastern Canada, the Trent River Valley was a boundary between the
Algonkian-speaking nations north of it and the Iroquoians south of it.
The several nations on each side traded with one another, but at the
same time feared incursions, actively defending their core territories.
Algonkian communities in this region had ritual adepts who believed
they had learned spirit techniques for casting misfortune among their
enemies, so it is quite possible that some of the Peterborough petroglyphs
Shamans Painters? 77

functioned as territorial boundary signs that were simultaneously

threats against enemies across the river. A southeastern Canadian
Algonkian-speaking ritual adept may have been termed powwow—orig-
inally that word referred to a diviner, doctor, or sorcerer among these
eastern First Nations.
We know that some of the pictures on the rock faces at Writing-on-
Stone, in southern Alberta, Canada, just north of the Montana border,
were meant to proclaim Blackfoot territory, warning intruders it was
defended by both armed men and the spiritual power attending their
righteous cause. Blackfoot veterans of their nineteenth-century vigi-
lance identified Writing-on-Stone with the Sweetgrass Hills facing it
from the south. These are three high hills rising abruptly from the roll-
ing plains, seemingly an outlier of the Rocky Mountains some eighty
miles to the west. Verdant, full of game, they appeared to be an Eden in
the plains, imbued with a spiritual aura. The river running north of the
hills and the rimrock of its valley are natural territorial markers along a
travel route; like the warlords of the Zuojiang, the Blackfoot used strate-
gically placed rock faces to signal territorial claims. Military successes
reinforced the feeling that the striking landscape features held a power
that could strengthen the nation’s foundation. Rock art such as that at
Writing-on-Stone is like the triumphal arches erected by Roman emper-
ors, covered with scenes of battles won and enemies humiliated.

CAVE ART

David Lewis-Williams joined French archaeologist Jean Clottes to

write a coffee-table book arguing for Lewis-Williams’ belief that “sha-
mans” painted, engraved, or molded the representations and signs pre-
served from Paleolithic times in caves in France and Spain. These
authors claim that Lewis-Williams’ “method” explains a considerable
amount of data better than competing interpretations.
First, let us be clear what is to be covered through this method. The
two archaeologists together studied twelve French caves with evidence
of art from the range of the Upper Paleolithic, approximately 30,000 to
11,000 B.C. Clottes is familiar with many more Paleolithic art caves, rock
shelters, open-air rock faces, and portable art such as figurines. Depic-
tions may be fully painted realistic animals as in Lascaux and Altamira
Caves, silhouettes, incompletely sketched figures (in many examples
done by a skilled hand able to suggest the animals with only a few
insightful strokes), geometric forms, painted dots, meandering lines,
hand prints or outlines, or a natural contour lightly modified to reinforce
seeing an animal in it. Many painted or engraved figures are as far as a
mile deep into a cave, requiring agonizing crawls, drops, squeezing, and
78 Chapter Six

clinging to ledges in pitch darkness illuminated only by burning wood

torches or wicks floating in a stone or clay saucer of animal fat. What
must be explained is not only the art itself, as in South African paintings
on open rock faces, but the artists’ conviction that the art must be created
fearsomely deep within the dark, slippery, clammy earth. It’s not the
same as a Siberian shaman drumming, dancing, and then divining in a
tent or cabin filled with the people of the community. Darkness inside a
dwelling doesn’t equal darkness through a mile of twisting rock. Deep
cave art is one area where we can rule out creation by doodling children.
It is important to understand that painting far into dark caves is
not done only by “primitives,” “preliterates,” or whatever term Western
culture members want to apply to small non-Western societies. The
Maya of Mexico and Central America incorporated caves into their reli-
gious practices throughout the first millennium A.D. and much of this
religion and its rituals persist today. One scholar who studied the cave of
Naj Tunich, on the Guatemala-Belize border, tells us she
was immediately struck upon arrival by an uncanny juxtaposition of
art and environment, one in which delicate paintings, clearly the
product of a refined mindset, covered the labyrinthine tunnels of a
rugged, three-kilometer-long cave (Stone 1995:3).
(Three kilometers equal two miles.) The drawings of people and deities
within Naj Tunich cave are accompanied by hieroglyphic texts—the
Maya were fully literate—some of them ritual phrases, some emblems of
noble lords indicating that ceremonies in the cave were attended by per-
sons of high rank as well as their priests. Stone points out that these
nobles and priests are portrayed in simple clothing, as if the awesome
caverns made human displays seem puny; she points out, too, that there
seems no order of images in the maze of tunnels and chambers. Outside,
where cities and farms could be constructed, Maya lords brought the
landscape under control with plazas, sets of buildings, and roads. They
built temples on top of pyramids representing mountains, the interior
sanctum of the temple being a kind of man-made cave, but when they
came on pilgrimage to the real mountains and caves, they humbled
themselves before the superhuman scale of the natural world. These
caves dramatically symbolized, to the highly civilized Maya, that beyond
their cities are powers infinitely superior to the mightiest kings or most
learned priests.
Paleolithic people had no cities to contrast with the natural world.
Their art deep inside dark caves cannot have had the same social func-
tion as Maya cave paintings and texts. The case of the Maya demon-
strates that the ambience of caves can be utilized by very disparate soci-
eties: there is no necessary connection between deep cave art and hunt-
ing or cave art and small societies, much less cave art and shamans.
Maya painted and carved on open-air rocks and rock faces, as well as
Shamans Painters? 79

Naj Tunich Cave, Guatemala. Maya scribes painted hieroglyphic texts (columns on right)
beside carefully executed depictions of ritual priests. Photograph by Allan Cobb.

inside caves, and most spectacularly on their buildings and on stone ste-
lae (upright stone slabs) set in plazas where their calligraphic hiero-
glyphs record the histories of the haughty lords and ladies depicted.
Keeping in mind the Maya cave paintings, it would be rash to suppose
we can interpret all cave paintings as shamans’ hallucinations.

OVERVIEW

Stone’s study of Naj Tunich emphasizes its place in the larger world
of Maya kingdoms. Such a broad view, that the paintings are only part of
performances of ritual and the performances only part of expressions of
worldview and society, contrasts with the customary Western view of a
piece of art as unique and complete in itself. This convention is false to
our art as well, considering that nearly all art recognized in Western
societies has been created for patrons or as part of societal roles, for
example for cathedrals, wealthy homes, or public spaces.
Rock art, especially within caves, may be the only visual expres-
sions remaining to us out of a society’s realm encompassing ornaments,
80 Chapter Six

clothing, basketry and fabrics, wood carvings, paintings on bark and

hide, dance and mime. Think of a Plains Indian rendezvous camp: many
of the tipis are painted with figures representing manifestations of the
favor of the Almighty granted to the occupants’ forebear. Men, women,
and children move among the tipis dressed in embroidered clothing, and
dance bedecked with brilliant arrays of feathers and beaded ornaments.
What does the archaeologist see in the site once occupied by such a
camp? No art at all. None of the media on which so much beauty was cre-
ated has lasted to be recovered from the ground. If we turn to Maya sites,
that which their highly professional artists carved on stone, painted
within their stone buildings or on ceramic vessels, may be preserved, but
again, the brilliant panoply of jewels, gold, iridescent feathers and tex-
tiles come alive in dance and ceremony is gone, only echoed to us in the
flat bas-reliefs and paintings. Here, the hieroglyphic texts do tell us the
phrases repeated in the ceremonies, but no oratorical voices read them
to us as the Maya heard them a thousand years ago, no music accompa-
nies them.
Whether we look at Paleolithic art, South African rock art, or Maya
art, we see segments of a society’s arts still here from the happenstance
of preservation conditions. We must accept that in each case, the original
array of arts reflected the society’s history and environment and embod-
ied their conceptions of humanity, the world, and eternity. The case of
Maya caves such as Naj Tunich demonstrates that without the range of
art, without both the cities’ depictions of elaborately garbed rulers and
the caves’ depictions of great nobles humbled in the presence of truly
awesome power, we could not grasp the society’s beliefs. Claiming, as has
been done even for the Maya, that rock art most likely was done by “sha-
mans” coming out of trance and representing “inside the eye” patterns,
is reductionist and, so long as the researchers exclude Western art from
their “method,” perpetuating an invidious distinction between Us and all
Them outside our cultural tradition.
Chapter Seven

Selling
“Shamanic Journeys”

My neighborhood shopping district has a bookstore specializing in

New Age spirituality. Yes, in Milwaukee, home of Harley-Davidson
motorcycles, Miller beer, the Wisconsin State Fair with its famous cows
and cream puffs, and Midwest Express Airline serving chocolate chip
cookies baked on board. Seeking spirituality outside churches is common
in California, Arizona, New York, and in America’s heartland.
I bought my week’s groceries, got stamps at the branch post office, a
graduation card at Walgreen’s, and stopped in at the New Age bookstore.
Shaman’s Drum was on the magazine rack. Among the many advertisers
on its slick pages were the Sixteenth International Shamanism Conference
in San Rafael, California, the Dance of the Deer Foundation Center for Sha-
manic Studies in Soquel, California (www.shamanism.com), and “Experi-
ence Huichol Shamanism with Brant Secunda” (who isn’t Huichol) at your
choice of “Alaska, a Living Dream;” Feathered Pipe Ranch, Montana; the
Catskill Mountains, New York; fall equinox in Big Sur, California; or in
Santa Cruz, California, with “six time Ironman Triathlon World Champion
Mark Allen.” Mr. Secunda didn’t list his prices. The phrase “plastic medi-
cine men” came to mind, a phrase describing both a readiness to take credit
card payment for rituals, and the made-to-order rituals purveyed.
Selling shamanic journeys is a multimillion-dollar business today.
Some sellers, such as Michael Harner, believe they really are assisting
clients to “cross the shamanic bridge” into contact with spirits, to heal ills
and extend cosmic knowledge. Some sellers appear merely earning a liv-
ing. A few can be dangerous, callous of clients’ safety, or even sadistic.
Some are Euro-Americans, some of American Indian, or Asian descent;
Africans and African Americans don’t usually get the label “shaman”
when they practice spiritual healing or divining. In Siberia, some come

81
82 Chapter Seven

from traditional shamans’ families. What the sellers of shamanic jour-

neys have in common is that they do not minister to their own communi-
ties but to strangers. New Age shamanism universalizes practices and
principles just as scientific medicine does; it, too, comes out of the West-
ern cultural tradition.

MICHAEL HARNER’S “WAY OF THE SHAMAN”

Michael Harner earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the Univer-

sity of California, Berkeley, living among the Shuar (formerly called
Jívaro) in the Ecuador rainforest. Taking to heart the anthropological
method of participant-observation, Harner drank ayahuasca with
Conibo men in the Peruvian montaña rainforest in 1961 and three years
later persuaded a Shuar spiritual leader to give him a datura drink after
an arduous trek to a thrilling waterfall cascading over the rim of the high
plateau. These two drug-induced vision experiences convinced Harner
that the “shamans” (i.e., South American ritual leaders who work with
hallucinogenic plants) really do reach through mundane life to perceive
spirits. For a number of years, Harner taught anthropology as a profes-
sor in New York City and “shamanic methods” in workshops he orga-
nized; eventually, he resigned from academia to devote himself to his
workshops and Foundation for Shamanic Studies, established in 1985
and now in Mill Valley, California.
Harner’s workshops and the book he published for those who can-
not attend them, The Way of the Shaman, present a technique he devel-
oped primarily from his experiences with northern South American rit-
ual leaders, plus some observations of North American Indian ritualists.
He states he supplemented his personal observations by reading others’
ethnographies of ritual practitioners; he has not carried out comparable
observation in Siberia. A very important feature of Harner’s workshops
and book is that he advocates relying on intense concentration, not on
drugs (thus differing significantly from his Conibo and Shuar exem-
plars). Listening to drumming is his means to achieve the “Shamanic
State of Consciousness,” and his non-profit Foundation for Shamanic
Studies sells cassette tapes of Harner’s own drumming. Harner avoids
the appearance of religious fanaticism, lavish lifestyle, or costume.
At the 1998 meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
Harner presented a paper arguing
that there are two realities and that the perception of each depends
upon one’s state of consciousness. Therefore those in the “ordinary
state of consciousness” (OSC) perceive only “ordinary reality” (OR).
Those in the “shamanic state of consciousness” (SSC) are able to en-
ter into and perceive “nonordinary reality” (NOR) [these terms Harn-
Selling “Shamanic Journeys” 83

er takes from Carlos Castaneda (Horrigan 1996:73)]. These are both

called realities because each is empirically encountered. . . . A corol-
lary assumption is that the individual forms encountered in nonordi-
nary reality are themselves real. These are called “spirits,” and are
considered real by shamanic practitioners because they interact with
them firsthand. This interaction involves direct perception with all
the senses. In other words, for the shamanic practitioner, the exist-
ence of spirits is not a belief, but an empirical fact. . . . As they work,
individual practitioners discover which of the encountered entities
are personal helping, or tutelary, spirits which often provide mirac-
ulous help in healing and divination. . . . For shamanic practitioners,
souls are identifiable entities because they encounter them directly
in nonordinary reality, as they do other spirits (Harner 1998:1–2).
According to Harner,
Western science and medicine decreed that souls and spirits did not
exist . . . [which] limits the parameters of science by decreeing a pri-
ori that certain phenomena cannot exist . . . the position of science on
this matter is quite unscientific and, ironically, a matter of faith
(Harner 1998:3).
Here Harner misstates the scientific position on the existence of spirits.
No one knowledgable about science would say a priori that a phenome-
non cannot exist, only that a supposed phenomenon cannot be explained
by current information about the natural world. The foundation of the
scientific method is that it deals with phenomena that (1) can in princi-
ple be perceived by any person (although to do so may require apparatus
such as a microscope), and (2) the phenomenon is seen by more than one
person, i.e., the perception has been replicated. When a phenomenon has
been observed again and again, in nature or experiment, it is said to have
been validated. Harner removes his experiences from scientific valida-
tion by insisting that
NOR is not a consensual reality, and indeed if it were, shamanic
practitioners would have no function, for it is their responsibility to
perceive successfully what others do not (Harner 1998:2).
The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, led by Harner, strives to
strip “shamanic practice” from specific cultural baggage, presenting
what Harner terms “core shamanism.” Thus he can omit the hallucino-
genic plants essential to his South American teachers, the songs of ritual
practitioners, the pilgrimages to holy places such as the Shuars’ water-
fall. “Core shamanism is especially suited for utilization by Westerners
who desire a relatively culture-free system that they can adopt and inte-
grate into their contemporary lives,” Harner affirms (1998:4). His “core
shamanism” courses advertise teaching the “basic” Shamanic Journey
(into Nonordinary Reality), extraction of disease (by sucking or blowing),
divination, soul retrieval, Dream Dance ritual, and the Harner Method
84 Chapter Seven

Shamanic Counseling. This latter “uses electronically provided sonic-

driving technique . . . to go ‘outside of time’ to utilize the ancient sha-
manic problem-solving methods” (Shamanism 11[2]:40). In plain
English, students bring portable stereo cassette players, headphones,
and a lapel microphone to listen to recorded drumming and to record
their own narratives of their “journeys into nonordinary reality.” The
Foundation materials stress that Harner Method Shamanic Counselors
are only “facilitators,” the “real shamanic counselors are in nonordinary
reality . . . wise teachers that the clients spontaneously encounter in
their shamanic journeys” (Shamanism 11[2]:40). Students wanting to
learn the Harner Method Shamanic Counseling are warned that they
must “have been having success in contacting your power animals and/
or teachers on your own and that you feel confident about your journey
skills” (Shamanism 11[2]:39).
The Foundation for Shamanic Studies does more than purvey spir-
itualism to Americans and Europeans who can afford the workshop fees.
In 1993, Harner instituted an Urgent Tribal Assistance Project to sup-
port non-Western shamans and encourage them to teach younger per-
sons in their tribal nations to continue their practices. Fieldworkers
nominate notable “shamans” to receive Foundation stipends as “Living
Treasures;” by 1997 five indigenous practitioners had been selected, one
a member of the Camaiurá in the Brazilian rainforest, one a Yaminahua
of the Peruvian Amazon, one Tibetan (in Nepal), and two Siberian. One
of the Siberian Living Treasures in 1996, and in 1998 three Tuva sha-
mans from Siberia “enthusiastically exchanged details of shamanic
methods” with Harner workshop graduates in Sonoma, California (Sha-
manism 5(4)/6(1):1, 10(1):26, 11(2):2). Another Tuva shaman had pre-
sented “shamanic healing demonstrations” in Austria and Switzerland
(Shamanism 11(1):31).
Michael Harner and his followers are evidently earnestly sincere in
their conviction that we all have one or more guardian spirits (“power
animals and/or wise teachers”) whether or not we recognize them, plus
we can gain additional spirit helpers. They truly believe their souls jour-
ney outside their bodies, see a brilliant “nonordinary” universe popu-
lated with dragons, eagles, and ghosts, discover people’s souls often in
dire straits from which they can be rescued, and act as “psychopomps”
guiding a soul from a dead body out of our Middle World to “a place where
they will be content.” Their publications brim with heartfelt stories of
wondrous recoveries from illness, alcoholism, and adolescent gang vio-
lence. Harner’s position that his experiences are empirical, no different
from observations accepted by scientists, pervades his Foundation’s
material, to the point that one of his disciples “contracted to provide soul
retrievals and other shamanic healing for certain companies contracting
with a local health maintenance organization [HMO]” (Shamanism
11(1):5).
Selling “Shamanic Journeys” 85

NEO-SHAMANISM

Harner’s method workshops are relatively prosaic compared to

what anthropologist Joan Townsend terms Neo-shamanism, “idealized
and metaphorical images of shamanism . . . attach[ing] these to a wide
range of rituals and beliefs not directly related to shamanism”
(Townsend in press). “Eclectic spiritualism” is perhaps the best term for
these people, frequently middle-class college graduates, who think of
themselves as on a continuing quest for “spiritual growth.” Many com-
plain that the institutionalized churches or synagogues of their parents
did not provide the personal, transformative excitement they seek. A
mean critic could ask why, then, do they not join Pentecostal and similar
churches, or Jewish Hasidim, where congregations speak in tongues,
dance, fall into visions, and practice mystical healing? Is it that many of
those Christian congregations are largely working-class, or black, or, in
the case of the Hasidim, must wear conspicuously modest clothing? The
social-class affiliation of American religious organizations and move-
ments tends to be a touchy subject not always fully acknowledged.
Neo-shamanists would usually be identified as within the New Age
movement, that is, one tenet of their position is that we need to abandon
the conventions of present-day Western culture and forge a new age of
caring, caring for the earth, caring for our fellow humans. Our present
age they see as rife with violence against nature and humans, even
within the medical profession with its reliance on expensive technology.
This intelligent position unfortunately tends to be supported not with
straightforward strategies to shift production into the use of sustainable
resources, reduce consumer waste, and distribute necessities more
equally, but with an appeal to reestablish a supposed lost ancient reli-
gion. For some New Agers, that was a “Neolithic Age of Matriarchy” or
Goddess Worship, when civilization was ruled by nurturing women, only
to be overturned by cruel warmongering patriarchal barbaric men riding
out of the steppes; archaeology can find no good evidence for such a
mythical Matriarchal Age. For other New Agers, before civilizations
there was, and there remains outside the borders of urban civilizations,
a primordial True Religion; the truly religious should find and resume it.
This type is ready to believe that non-Western ritual practitioners—
”shamans”—are the last who know that primordial religion.
Eclectic spiritualists can be amazingly uncritical. I recall a neigh-
bor couple, he a university professor of political science, who had vaca-
tioned at Cancun and insisted to me that the man who had offered to be
their guide at the Maya site Tulum, near the huge resort, must be correct
when he told them the ruins show extraterrestial space voyagers teach-
ing esoteric knowledge to the Maya. This couple angrily refused to let me
86 Chapter Seven

show them archaeological studies of the complex histories of Maya

nations, they did not want to hear about other Maya cities I knew first-
hand, nor talk with the Mayan archaeologist in the husband’s own uni-
versity. The couple now host New Age gatherings on a small farm they
bought. Like a giant salad bar, the opportunities fostered by their loose
group are a mix-as-you-please outlay of “shamanic techniques,” yoga,
feng-shui, organic gardening, berm-insulated buildings, vision quests,
crystals, massage, nuggets from Hindu, Buddhist, Tao, and Mesopota-
mian cuneiform-tablet texts, “Celtic wisdom” supposedly passed on sur-
reptitiously in such places as England’s New Forest (which is a heath,
not a wooded forest), and “Native American spirituality” from Carlos
Castaneda and his friends in and near Beverly Hills, California.
One general characteristic of Neo-shamanists that contrasts
strongly with the real shamans of Siberian communities, with the hallu-
cinogen-using ritual leaders of South American rainforest nations, with
Inuit angakkut and Algonkian jessakids and Lakota yuwipi men, is that
New Age spiritualists more actively work on their own personal enlight-
enment and “growth,” where the non-Western practitioners see them-
selves primarily as doctors to others in their communities. Put another
way, the apprenticeship of the non-Western practitioners is akin to med-
ical school rather than personal salvation. Michael Harner has tried to
emphasize this in his workshops, although he is swimming against the
tide of the New Age.
Another contrast between eclectic-spiritualist “shamanic journey-
ing” and circumboreal shamans, a contrast emphasized by Danish
anthropologist Merete Jakobsen, is that the Inuit angakkut and other
traditional shamans often struggle with spirits, whereas in Jakobsen’s
research experience in Denmark and England, shamanic teachers speak
only of benign spirits—power animals and wise spirit teachers waiting
out there in nonordinary reality to help souls. Harner assures readers in
Way of the Shaman that “You probably had at least one [guardian spirit]
in the past, or otherwise you would not have survived childhood’s haz-
ards and illnesses” (Harner 1990:65). Jakobsen and the several anthro-
pologists writing on Inuit angakkut in the 1997 volume edited by Saladin
d’Anglure and Thérien frequently describe the fear inspired by the most
famous angakkut, because their mastery over spirits could be used to
harm as well as help. As Jakobsen notes, an angakkoq struggled to con-
trol spirits, he or she commanded spirit allies who would be no more
eager to help a human than would an ordinary polar bear, raven, or the
moon. Of course, what benefits one person may be misfortune to that per-
son’s enemy, so that an angakkoq perceived as good by one family could
be believed to be an evil sorcerer by another family. In the same manner,
a spirit who helps one angakkoq’s client could be thought to be harming
that client’s antagonist. There is a good example of such ambiguity in the
case of the Igluligaarjuk angakkoq Qimuksiraaq (1876–1948), who was
Selling “Shamanic Journeys” 87

told by Catholic missionaries that Adolf Hitler was responsible for mil-
lions of deaths in World War II. Qimuksiraaq sent his spirit assistants
out to destroy this evil man. The first time, they came back reporting
that they couldn’t locate him. Qimuksiraaq sent them out again, and the
second time they did find him and told the angakkoq that he had been
made to pay for his crimes. When word of Hitler’s suicide and the end of
World War II came to Igluligaarjuk, Qimuksiraaq revealed his role in
terminating that evil (Saladin d’Anglure 1997:51).
Qimuksiraaq’s action on behalf of all good people epitomizes how
most anthropologists see the social role of shaman or angakkoq, includ-
ing in this generalization the South American ritual leaders too facilely
labeled “shamans.” Eliade, on the other hand, by his subtitle “Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy” slanted his work toward Western individualized
personal fulfillment. There is a striking overlap here with “Bill W.’s” cre-
ation of Alcoholics Anonymous, “I was caught up on an ecstasy . . . now
for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness” (quoted
by Galanter 1989:177). Western, especially Christian, mysticism visual-
izes a paradoxically universal yet personal God. Christianity preaches
individuals’ need for salvation, to be sought by personal devotions. Is it
surprising that Americans and Europeans brought up and living in dom-
inantly Christian countries should actively seek instruction in personal
spiritual fulfillment?
New Age in this way carries on the modern Western focus on the
individual, in spite of its bemoaning our supposed loss of community.
Online chat rooms and networks do not a community make. Although
many New Age seekers do try to form communities, from those who live
communally or meet weekly in a drumming circle to those who appear at
annual camps such as the Rainbow Gathering, private fulfillment seems
the overriding goal of neo-shamanic “journeying.” Canadian political phi-
losopher C. B. Macpherson summed up the modern Western concept of
the human person as “possessive individualism,” the idea that we are
each separate beings possessed of qualities such as intelligence and
beauty plus consumer items. Under this concept, we join with others in
“social contracts” to get what we as single individuals cannot obtain
alone. It is up to each individual to work to find, make, or purchase what
they need to be happy; persons who lack what they need to be happy are
judged to be lazy or stupid unless visibly disabled. Neo-shamanism’s
pitch to individual fulfillment is very much part of contemporary West-
ern possessive individualism. Its “shamanic journeying” is a trip to a
great Nonordinary Mall filled with spirits as eager as salesclerks to
assist all comers. Merete Jakobsen notes how readily clients pay good
fees to Western shamanic counselors and teachers: it’s an upscale mid-
dle-class Mall.
88 Chapter Seven

THE PROBLEM WITH SELLING

NON-WESTERN SPIRITUALITY

By the mid-1980s, proliferation of plastic medicine men and women

induced several American Indian leaders’ groups to denounce “making
money off of Native Religions.” “We cannot prevent people from throwing
their money away on so-called ‘Indian ceremonies’ but we can challenge
those who misuse our sacred pipes, sweatlodges and ceremonies” (Phoe-
nix 1988–89:12–13). Misuse ranges from non-Indians showing up at res-
ervation worship events demanding to participate without bothering
with fasting, appropriate dress, or other observances of respect, to dis-
playing a Lakota holy pipe beneath a crucifix in a Christian church, pro-
claiming it to be the benighted heathens’ approximation of the Cross of
Jesus. I was shocked when a mother in a small children’s playgroup
showed us the “power object” her child had made in preschool: it was a
chicken bone with a dyed commercial feather and a bead attached, and
the child had been taught it was “the Indian way” to gain a good spirit’s
protection. “Was the teacher Indian?” I inquired. “Oh, no, she found the
idea in a book about Indians.”
Cultural primitivism does more than exile non-Westerners from
civilization. A 1987 protest from a First Nations conference stated they
“will not Tolerate such misrepresentation, BECAUSE IT TAKES THE
PUBLIC EYE AWAY FROM THE REAL ISSUES THAT NATIVES
FACE TODAY” (Phoenix 1988–89:13, capitalization in original). The real
issue today is sovereignty, the right of nations to govern themselves.
Many, but by no means all, North American First Nations signed treaties
with the colonizing nations, treaties holding both signatories to be inde-
pendent nations. Other North American nations, most in South America,
and many small nations in Africa and Eurasia such as the Siberian rein-
deer-using groups were overwhelmed or conquered, their prior sover-
eignty obvious but not formally acknowledged. Expropriating a small
nation’s religious practices infringes upon its sovereignty, akin to taking
over its land. Something has been stolen, its rightful users disrespected.
The fundamental issue is, in Western terms, violating owners’ legitimate
rights.
Outside such a legalistic perspective, it can be deeply distressing to
see unqualified persons violating religious practices. Michael Harner is
quintessentially American in reducing “shamanic journeying” to a basic
technique that anyone can learn in a few hours. Already more than a cen-
tury ago, “the American system” of quickly-produced interchangeable
parts for a mass consumer market was contrasted with the “Old World
system” of custom-crafted objects. Using drumming to achieve intense
focused concentration is tapping into universal human physiology, but is
Selling “Shamanic Journeys” 89

it right to assert this is a shamanic technique? Is it right to teach, under

the label “shamanism,” a Disney world of benign power animals and wise
teachers awaiting the client who pays the several-hundred-dollar fee to
learn the technique? Is it right to universalize a purported “shamanic
religion,” making Siberians’ distinct religions into a self-centered alter-
native for educated middle-class Christians and Jews? To homogenize
practices forged in particular nations’ histories and serve them up with
a distinctly Western romantic dressing?
Selling “shamanic techniques” is selling physiological training
labeled to make it seem precious, rare, worth a high price. If it is said to
be “genuine shamanism,” then it owes royalties to its Siberian develop-
ers. If it is supposed to be American Indian “shamanism,” it has stolen
practices out of context. Professing good will does not justify teaching a
four-year-old that American Indians believe a chicken bone with a
feather and bead is a power object, nor teaching an adult that a stereo-
typed mental journey through a tunnel to see benign spirits represents
a primordial religion preserved only by Siberian or Latin American
Indian healers.
Chapter Eight

Deafening Silence

Yolanda Moses achieved the highest level in her chosen field, Pres-
ident of the American Anthropological Association and President of City
College of New York. Coming from a working-class home where the
assistance of the G. I. Bill enabled her war-veteran father to attend a
trade school, Dr. Moses is a shining example of success won by intelli-
gence, determination, and social skills generated through deep and gen-
uine concern for her fellow humans. With some African ancestry, Dr.
Moses is labeled a black American. Notwithstanding her exemplary
career, she has strong firsthand experience of racism. Her position as
head of a public urban college demands that she build a system maximiz-
ing opportunities for disadvantaged students—people like her father—
and her training as an anthropologist fits her well for that challenge. She
finds that whatever lip service is paid to respecting cultural diversity, the
hard fact is that racism remains pervasive in American society. Ameri-
cans don’t want to talk about racism. No one seems to see themselves as
racist. “The silence is deafening,” Moses laments (1999:274).
The people who are fascinated by “shamanic worlds” are horrified
that someone might consider them racist. They assure us they respect
the primeval wisdom of “shamanic peoples.” Is it respect when Michael
Harner writes, in 1990,
Today shamanic knowledge survives primarily among people who,
until recently, had primitive cultures. . . . Why, then, is shamanic
knowledge so basically consistent in different parts of the primitive
world? . . . In my opinion, the low technological level of those cultures
. . . shamans in these low-technology cultures . . . (Harner 1990:40, 42).
The Oxford dictionary defines “primitive” as “early, ancient; simple,
rude.” Twentieth-century people can’t be “early” or “ancient,” they can
only be “primitive” in the sense of “simple, rude.” This is respect?
Chapter 2 introduced the definitions of primitivism developed by

91
92 Chapter Eight

the historians Lovejoy and Boas. Both chronological primitivism, being

“early, ancient,” and cultural primitivism, being “simple, rude” are asso-
ciated with “shamanism” in academic and popular discourse. We have
seen, in chapter 6, that interpreting Paleolithic or South African or Cali-
fornia Indian rock art to be the record of shamans’ visions fails not only
in direct proof, but is contradicted in historic instances by actual obser-
vances of healers and diviners not customarily depicting inner visions on
rock faces. Nor can Siberian rock art be connected to shamans’ practices
in that region. The logic here is conflation of chronological and cultural
primitivism, ascribing a supposed “shamanic culture” to Paleolithic peo-
ple twenty thousand or more years ago and to contemporary non-Western
nations, on the argument that these are all “low-technology” societies.
Robin Ridington, an anthropologist working with a Dené group,
Dunne-za, neighboring Jean-Guy Goulet’s Dene Tha, wrote a thoughtful
essay on the technology he observed in the forest community:
[T]he strategic application of cultural knowledge [is] at the heart of
technology. . . . because our own culture is obsessed with the produc-
tion, exchange, and possession of artifacts, we inadvertently overlook
. . . the technological artifice of many nomadic hunting and gathering
people, for whom material possessions that must be carried are a
necessary burden rather than “goods” of unquestioned value. . . . For
such people, techniques that can be carried in the mind and imple-
mented using locally available resources are far more cost-effective.
. . . The sophistication of such a technology might be measured by its
cost-effectiveness in terms of a ratio of weight and bulk to productive
capacity rather than by [its “complexity”]. . . . A person with knowl-
edge derived from studying the relationship between people and nat-
ural environment is genuinely powerful. Such power is distinctively
human (Ridington 1990:86, 96).
A crude way of making Ridington’s point is to remind ourselves that all
the complex technology of all-terrain vehicles, powerboats, planes, snow-
mobiles, prefabricated houses, synthetic-material clothing, rifles with
telescopic sights, etc., that you or I might take into Dunne-za territory to
survive would become inadequate quickly unless constantly renewed
with costly imports. Like Ridington, we would learn the hard way that
the sustainable technology of the Dunne-za is, in their forests, superior
to our industrial high technology.
From the perspective of genuine, distinctively human empower-
ment, the term “primitive” cannot, in any sense, be applied to the small
indigenous nations of northern Eurasia and America. Their technology
is not “low,” but constructed from renewable raw materials. This perspec-
tive applies to medical (“healing”) practices, which generally demand
prayer and invocation but incorporate plants and techniques with very
demonstrable physical qualities useful for treating illnesses. Few studies
of “shamans” detail these aspects of practice to the extent provided by
Deafening Silence 93

anthropologist David Young’s collaboration with the Cree practitioner

Russell Willier, whom his noted great-grandfather Moostoos selected to
carry on his medicine bundle. My own field experience with the Plains
Cree spiritual healer and Sun Dance priest Piakwutch and his herbalist
daughter impressed me with the value of the woman’s pharmaceutical
plant collection, dispensed as appropriate to Indians, Euro-Canadian
farmers, and livestock. Her father as well as she recognized the need for
plant medicines complementing their prayers. Whether Urgunge Onon
describing the six types of practitioners in his Daur Mongol village,
Carlsen and Prechtel listing the eleven in a Maya community (chapter
4), or Goulet explaining how Dene Tha see a variety of individuals
including Western physicians each “knowing a little bit something” use-
ful to help sufferers, non-literate people in isolated small communities
work with complex cognitive structures.

CIVILIZATION AND ITS OTHER

Edward Tylor, in his pioneering anthropology textbook, did not dis-

cuss either Siberia or shamans, limiting his examples more or less to
Britain’s empire—Australia, India, Africa, North America, Polynesia,
and would-be conquest, China. He explained that
Anthropology finds race-differences most clearly in stature and pro-
portions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within,
characters of features, skin, eyes, and hair, peculiarities of constitu-
tion, and mental and moral temperament (Tylor 1881:56, my italics).
. . . In comparing races, one of the first questions that occurs is
whether people who differ so much intellectually as savage tribes
and civilized nations, show any corresponding difference in their
brain. There is, in fact, a considerable difference (Tylor 1881:60).
Following forty-five pages detailing, with engravings from photographs,
visible physical features of the many contemporary “races” (regional pop-
ulations), Tylor concludes,
We come at last to the white men, whose nations have all through
history been growing more and more dominant intellectually, moral-
ly, and politically on the earth. . . . It may perhaps be reasonable to
imagine as latest-formed the white race of the temperate region,
least able to bear extreme heat or live without the appliances of cul-
ture, but gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which give
them sway over the world (Tylor 1881:105, 113).
It is generally acknowledged that Tylor was the established author-
ity for English-language anthropology in the late nineteenth century. His
94 Chapter Eight

direct experience of non-Western communities was limited to a few

months when he was a young man traveling to see ruins near Indian
peasant villages in Mexico. Years later, comfortable in his London home,
Tylor collated other travelers’ publications to construct these authorita-
tive pronouncements on his own nation’s superiority.
The nineteenth-century comparative method noted that Siberian
small nations subsisted primarily on reindeer, and archaeological finds
indicated that Stone Age Europeans killed quantities of reindeer, there-
fore the Siberians could be living fossils for European Paleolithic
research. Siberian nations have shamans, therefore this perishable part
of their societies could be attributed also to their fossil analogs, never
mind that no drums or shamans’ costumes, nor any paintings or carvings
of these, have been discovered in Paleolithic sites. Jean Clottes and
David Lewis-Williams (chapter 6) did not invent the hypothesis that
Paleolithic communities had shamans resembling those in historic Sibe-
ria, they merely utilize the nineteenth-century comparative method,
modifying the nineteenth-century interpretation that Paleolithic art is
about hunting magic, to claiming it records shamans’ visions of hunting
success. They accept the nineteenth-century understanding that their
human “living fossils” are less evolved than civilized people. Neither
Clottes nor Lewis-Williams would deny a San or Tungus person an
opportunity for higher education or political rights; they are not con-
sciously racist, yet they state,
A correlation . . . between prehistoric “primitives” and “savages” from
far-off and poorly understood lands . . . did rest on solid foundations.
In all these cases we are dealing with the same human species at the
same degree of economic evolution (Clottes and Lewis-Williams
1998:63; my italics).
What is it but armchair racism to declare, “Australian aborigines,
some [American] Indian tribes, the South African Bushmen, and many
other . . . hunter-gatherers” had, in the late nineteenth century, “a social
and cultural level of evolution comparable to that of the Paleolithics”
(ibid., my italics)? Every one of the nations listed, and the Siberians, at
the time of historic descriptions were living on the lawless frontiers of
expanding capitalist empires. Clottes and Lewis-Williams are deafen-
ingly silent about this radical difference between the situation of their
hunter-gatherer nations and Paleolithic people: not “social and cultural
level of evolution” but harsh political and economic forces.
“It is fair to say that many anthropologists still retain in their
minds, at least unconsciously, a kind of generalized model of Primitive
Man. It is an unintended legacy of Progressivism,” commented William
Y. Adams in his disentanglement of The Philosophical Roots of Anthro-
pology (1998:256). Jane Monnig Atkinson, an anthropologist whose
study of an Indonesian community is titled The Art and Politics of Wana
Deafening Silence 95

Shamanship, writes in her review “Shamanisms Today,”

A central aim of this review is to interject contemporary ethnograph-
ic research into the literature on shamanism. . . . Without an ethno-
graphic counterweight this literature slips quickly into unwarranted
reductionism and romantic exoticizing of a homogeneous non-West-
ern Other (Atkinson 1992:309).
Another experienced field anthropologist, Piers Vitebsky, summa-
rizes the challenges facing us now if we wish to understand “shaman-
ism:”
For shamanism, as with any other kind of local knowledge, the es-
sence of globality today is that it belongs both in the past of remote
tribes, and in the present of industrial subcultures. But there are fur-
ther twists: the shamanic revival is now reappearing in the present
of some of these remote tribes—only now these are neither remote
nor tribal (Vitebsky 1995:184).
Primitivism must be really hard pressed now that you can take a lunch
break in downtown Milwaukee, and listen to, says the ad, “Rock n’ rollers
from Siberia—it’s the Red Elvises! Catch the buzz and come hear three
Russians from LA play Siberian surf rock.”
Siberian surf rockers are, seriously, part of the counterweight
Atkinson calls for. The older weight of a “homogeneous non-Western
Other” is a titanic construction. In 1884, Algonquin Legends of New
England, by Charles G. Leland, mentioned “Shamanism . . . a vague fear
of invisible evils and the sorcerer,” calling it “the world’s first religion”
(quoted in Parkhill 1997:61). Leland also published, in his researches to
find the world’s first religion, a book he claimed was based on the private
notebook of an Italian village strega, or witch. Much effort was expended
by others to track down this remarkable woman who must have flown
away on her broomstick, for neither she nor her notebook were ever
found. Another component in Leland’s nineteenth-century conjecture of
the world’s first religion was Norse mythology that he read in a transla-
tion of the medieval Icelandic manuscript called the Edda. In Algonquin
Legends of New England, Leland saw dozens of parallels between the
American Indian and Norse stories, concluding that the Norse in Green-
land taught their stories to American Indians. Leland believed he him-
self had “Injun ways”—unfettered, noble, quick to anger, fiery—inher-
ited from a forgotten Indian ancestress; others perceived a Philadelphia
minister’s son rebelling against the career set for him in the law. For his
late-Victorian readers, Leland considerably “improved” Algonquin Leg-
ends, from the notes he took from Passamaquoddy in Maine and a Bap-
tist missionary’s collection from Micmac parishioners. In turn, Joseph
Campbell used Leland’s versions in his presentations of mythology for
mid-twentieth-century readers.
Charles Leland’s reference to “Shamanism” in his 1884 book
96 Chapter Eight

reflects the romantic exoticizing deplored by Atkinson. In America, the

handiest non-Westerners seemed to be the Indians beyond the frontier.
Seldom did Euro-Americans cast American blacks as the romantic
Other: African Americans dressed in their masters’ old clothing, spoke
English, and were Christians, although supposedly prone to supersti-
tions (their African religions). Because the majority were enslaved, Afri-
cans in America couldn’t stand for the romantic free spirit contrasting
with civilization’s minions. Nor could Indians on the conquered side of
the frontier who were prohibited from freely practicing their religions
and forced into poverty that rendered them unattractive to Anglo neigh-
bors. In any case, as Lovejoy and Boas demonstrated, primitivism oper-
ates by focusing on distant peoples. Hence in America, and in Russia, the
unfettered Other moved inexorably across the continent as First Nations
were conquered.
Once the United States, Canada, and Russia completed their terri-
torial conquests from sea to shining sea, it became easier for bourgeois
writers and artists to visit “primitives.” The Atchison, Topeka and Santa
Fe Railroad enlisted the Fred Harvey Company, a chain of train-station
restaurants founded by an English immigrant, to increase the number of
passengers by attracting tourists to the Southwest, otherwise a rather
barren long stretch between the Midwest and California. Fred Harvey
merchandised colorful Indian crafts in station shops and ran automobile
tours to Indian pueblos from the station hotels, necessitating, of course,
overnight stays in the hotels and eating in their restaurants. Aside from
the lovely lady-like young women guides on the automobile tours, there
might not be much to see in the dusty adobe villages called pueblos. The
Fred Harvey Company organized “traditional” craftspeople to work in
front of tour groups, tying them in with sales of pottery, Navajo rugs, and
silver jewelry at the stations. “Traditional” is in quotation marks because
Fred Harvey promoted innovations that sold better to the tourist mar-
ket, and ignored such actual traditions as men weavers in most of the
pueblos—the sight of men sitting for hours indoors at looms wasn’t as
romantic as Navajo women outdoors, their sheep baaing in the back-
ground. Hispanic artisans were excluded, a discrimination that persists
and still rankles as Indian silversmiths under the portico of the Palace
of the Governors in Santa Fe sell their jewelry with “authentic Indian”
tags, while Hispanics whose families may have lived in New Mexico for
four centuries can only set up in the public park across the street.
Indian religious dances were publicized events on the Fred Harvey
tours. Tourists, with their cameras, were packed by the hundreds in the
narrow plazas of the pueblo villages. Most popular was the Hopi Snake
Dance, a ritual climaxing (for the tourists) with painted men climbing
out of a kiva holding live rattlesnakes in their mouths. The men dance
with the animals, then let them go (loose! in the midst of the crowded vil-
lage! thrilling!). Pamphlets published for the tourists assure them the
Deafening Silence 97

“Mokis” (Hopi) are peaceful and childlike primitives, like primitives in

Asia but so much less expensive and fatiguing to visit, thanks to the
Santa Fe Railroad. The Hopi Snake Dance evoked an anything but vague
“fear of invisible evils and the sorcerer” with the snakes squirming
around the costumed dancers, as different, as Other, as can be imagined
contrasted with the tourists’ mainline Christian ministers. Eventually,
the only way the Hopi Nation could continue to carry out its ceremonies
was to prohibit tourists from attending the rituals.
Diminishing access to pueblo rituals was compensated for by twen-
tieth-century proliferation of Euro-American representations of the
primitive Indian. The Santa Fe Railroad and Fred Harvey Company
strongly encouraged the development of artists’ colonies in Santa Fe and
Taos. Mabel Dodge, heiress to the automobile fortune, married a Taos
Indian, Tony Luhan, settling with him in a large “Southwest-style”
house near his pueblo and hosting many famous literary figures includ-
ing the Englishmen D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Both these men
sought the kind of ecstatic mystical experience said to be familiar to
“primitives,” bemoaning their civilization’s loss of “authentic” feelings.
Ordinary bourgeois Americans, balked from luxuriating in Mrs.
Luhan’s adobe mansion, flocked to camps where Boy Scouts, Camp Fire
Girls, Woodcraft Indians, Red Men, Buckskin Men, and the like set up
canvas tipis, built campfires, put feathers in their headbands, and
danced powwow-style. Leading psychologist G. Stanley Hall wrote in
1904 that human ontogeny recapitulates the phylogeny of the race, i.e.,
the civilized family’s child begins life as an inarticulate savage, gradually
grows able to perform simple crafts and garden-tending, and if White,
will mature into a formally educated, literate, disciplined adult. Hall
advocated woodland camps to allow children to express their savage
“hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle playing proclivities” so that their
deeper humanity and creativity would not be stifled, crippling their per-
sonal evolution (quoted in Deloria 1998:107). Twentieth-century middle-
class urban Euro-Americans paid for their children to spend much of the
summer in rural camps with “Indian” names, living out their primitive
Other inner nature with archery, canoe paddling, simple crafts, and
never-ending adult supervision through heavily scheduled days and
nights—the primitive, tamed.
Ontogeny recapitulating the evolution of the race gradually faded
out of scientific respectability in the twentieth century, its default rein-
forcing rather than lessening the dichotomy between civilized Westerner
and the Other. The primitivist kernel remained within self-described
alienated unauthentic urban dwellers yearning for Nature’s green glens
and dusky half-naked childlike people. The concept Lovejoy and Boas
traced to the earliest European literature, that Truth resides in Nature
and Naturvölker, Nature’s folk, lost none of its mythic power and popu-
larity. An extraordinary example was an Englishman, Archie Belaney,
98 Chapter Eight

whose ne’er-do-well father and too-young mother gave him to be raised

by his father’s two sisters in their comfortable spinsters’ home. Young
Archie felt stifled. He escaped first to the company of small wild animals
he kept in his aunts’ house, then while still in his teens, to Canada, find-
ing his way to northern Ontario to learn canoeing, trapping, and working
as a fire ranger in the forest. It didn’t take Belaney long to metamor-
phose into an apparent Indian with long hair tied by a headband, buck-
skins, moccasins, some Ojibwe words, and a young Ojibwe wife whom he
abandoned soon after their baby was born. By the 1930s, the man called
himself Grey Owl, telling people his mother was an Apache who had
married a rancher. Dyeing his hair and skin helped his story. He made
his living touring America and England lecturing to audiences of thou-
sands, assisted by a beautiful Iroquois wife and tame beavers. His tour
manager recalled,
Suddenly here was this romantic figure telling them with his deep
and thrilling voice that somewhere there was a land where life could
begin again, a place which the screams of demented dictators [Hitler]
could not reach, where the air was fresh and not stagnant with the
fumes of industry (quoted in Smith 1990:124).
Concluding his biography of this better-than-real primitive, Canadian
historian Donald Smith contends that Grey Owl was singularly effective
in instilling a concern for wilderness conservation in the generation
brought as children to see the beavers and hear Grey Owl’s dramatic
pleas.

FINDING HEALING

The crux of primitivism is that civilized citizens of conquering

states bemoan the hollowness of their luxuries but won’t give them up.
Henry David Thoreau left the town for a cabin in the woods, close enough
that he could eat dinner at his mother’s boarding house. He died before
the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century fad for “primitive masculinity,”
repeated now at the turn of the twentieth century. Middle-class men
brought up like Archie Belaney felt, as he did, oppressed by industrial-
ism that paved over the country, pressured them and their families to
buy buy buy, to spend innumerable hours getting money and leftover
time in maintaining their purchases. Like Belaney, they saw women as
their oppressors. Few were, or now are, really trying to make a go of liv-
ing from the wilderness, even in Belaney’s off-again/on-again style. A
1902 magazine article suggested the perfect solution, a den for the man
of the house:
Deafening Silence 99

Make it a place where he can lie and growl over his bones when he
feels like it. . . . One lucky man of my acquaintance has such a den,
which is to him as a cave to a primitive man (quoted in Rotundo
1993:227).
Slightly less privileged men joined the burgeoning fraternal lodges
to mark their masculine (and middle-class) power with rituals copied
from descriptions of non-Western men’s initiation rites. A century ago,
the men’s lodges were openly racist in addition to excluding women. No
one but Christian Euro-Americans usually were admitted; furthermore,
the excluded classes frequently were publicly mocked by performances of
blackface minstrel shows, “cannibal choruses,” and immigrant “Paddy,”
“Ike,” and Chinese in comedy skits.
A century later, in the 1990s, “primitive masculinity” returned in
what is called the mythopoetic—re-mythologizing—men’s movement.
Robert Bly, with his book Iron John (1990), and Sam Keen with his Fire
in the Belly (1991), are credited with creating this movement. Bly implies
that his title myth, “Iron Hans” in the Grimms’ collection of German
fairy tales, comes out of primordial Paleolithic culture in spite of kings
and princesses and metallurgy figuring prominently in the tale. This is
only the beginning of the primitivism in the movement, which centers on
men gathering around a fire to drum and dance and hug one another to
let out their repressed masculine animal nature. Rotundo quotes a late-
nineteenth-century “primitive masculine” poem that should work just as
well for 1990s mythopoetic men:
Do you fear the force of the wind,
The slash of the rain?
Go face them and fight them,
Be savage again.
Go hungry and cold like the wolf,
Go wade like the crane.
The palms of your hands will thicken,
The skin of your forehead tan—
You’ll be ragged and swarthy and weary
But—you’ll walk like a man.
(Hamlin Garland, quoted in Rotundo 1993:229)
The relevance of the mythopoetic men’s movement to New Age sha-
manism leaps out when Michael Kimmel describes a 1991 men’s move-
ment workshop to find “sacred masculine space.” This workshop takes
place in an Austin, Texas, hotel.
We’ve begun our session with a West African chant of welcome, while
we participants move around the room welcoming one another to our
shared ritual space. I am unable to ignore that I am in a pricey hotel
meeting room, with light grey wall to wall carpeting. . . . Our first
task in this workshop will be to explore our playful male natures
100 Chapter Eight

through getting in touch with the earth, which Bliss [the workshop
teacher] invites us to do by taking off our shoes. “Feel the earth be-
neath your feet, the ground tilled by your ancestors,” Bliss suggests.
The carpeting is soft. . . . “Some of you might want to get on all fours
and explore the ground with your hands as well,” he suggests. . . .
“Some of you might feel some noises coming into your throats, the
noises of male animals.” . . . Lights off, blinds drawn against the mid-
day sun, Bliss invites us on a guided meditation to encounter our fa-
thers. Lying on the floor, eyes closed, we move through several
fantasy doors, down paths, and toward clearings in the fields until
we encounter him. We are each invited to walk with our fathers for
a few steps, telling him the things we always wanted him to hear,
and listening to the things he never told us (Kimmel 1995:1–3).
Is this any different from Harner’s “shamanic journeying”? Shepherd
Bliss, praising drumming and dancing, says, “We alter consciousness
with our use of the arts and lift men into nonordinary reality” (Bliss
1995:297). Nonordinary reality: the clue to the common ground for neo-
shamanism and mythopoetic men’s gatherings.
Nonordinary reality seems to be a bucolic place of fields, caves, riv-
ers, and trees. Whether journeying to find power animals or one’s father,
apparently no one pounds pavement. The healing sought is for particular
known individuals, oneself, or a workshop partner, people affluent
enough to pay the workshop fees. Ordinary reality has millions of Afri-
can Americans, American Indians, and impoverished immigrants suffer-
ing rates of illness and mortality markedly higher than those for middle-
class American-born Euro-Americans. The silence about actively work-
ing in ordinary reality to heal horrible societal ills is deafening.

CONCLUSION

Perhaps you began this book expecting to read juicy descriptions of

head trips dramatically enacted by strangely costumed men beating
drums. Probably you did not anticipate ending the book reading that rac-
ism is so ingrained in Western thinking that even well-meaning anthro-
pologists may reinforce it, simply by believing it irrelevant to their par-
ticular studies.
Faye Harrison, an anthropologist of African-American heritage,
asked “whether anthropology can continue to be preoccupied with con-
structions and representations of Otherness” (Harrison 1991:9). This
book is sensitive to the centuries-old Western representation of Other-
ness in the guise of the shaman. Gloria Flaherty’s erudite history of
Europeans’ discovery of shamans as Europeans traveled in northern
Asia, and the incorporation of these travelers’ accounts into some of the
Deafening Silence 101

most profound philosophical works of eighteenth-century Europe amply

demonstrates the stereotype of the shaman as essence of Otherness.
Struggling to divest themselves of superstition and illogical think-
ing, eighteenth-century European Enlightenment intellectuals clarified
their ideal, Rational Man by contrasting him to his opposite, the Other,
conveniently exemplified in several widely-read reports on Russia’s fron-
tier nations. Flaherty pinpoints this intellectuals’ transformation of
Siberian shamans into primordial enchanters to a 1774 collection called
Old Folksongs (Alte Volkslieder) published by the eminent German
scholar Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking the Classical Greek mythic
hero Orpheus as a type, Herder claimed he had been “the noblest sha-
man” of ancient Greece (Flaherty 1992:138). Pre-Christian Celts, Norse,
Inuit, and American Indians were blended into this stereotype, contin-
ued, as noted above, a century after Herder by Charles Leland. Herder
praised the “primitives’ love of freedom, indolence, ecstasy and song”
(quoted in Flaherty 1992:142, her translation), and like so many anthro-
pologists, New Age questers, and shamanic journeyers today, did not
think he was demeaning them.
Mircea Eliade neither cited Herder’s work nor discussed his ideas
about the “shamanic” Orpheus. Instead, Eliade wrote as if he may have
been the first to see Orpheus as “Great Shaman.” Failing to refer to one’s
intellectual predecessors is a serious flaw for a scholar. Because Eliade’s
book on “Shamanism” appears to be so thoroughly researched, younger
academics did not look for the history of Western appropriation of “sha-
manism” until literary scholar Gloria Flaherty realized she could not
understand Goethe and his German fellow writers until she tracked
down their use of the stereotype “shaman.” This deeper background to
the stereotype “shaman,” this eighteenth-century blending of travelers’
accounts with Greek, Norse, Celtic, and North American Indian myths
and rituals, elucidates the surprising similarity between Michael
Harner’s “shamanic journeying” and Shepherd Bliss’ “fantasy journey-
ing to meet one’s father:” both are embedded in Enlightenment and
Romantic constructions of the distant, potent Other.
From this perspective, to routinely apply the label “shaman” to rit-
ual practitioners outside the word’s Siberian homeland is naïve. Sound
scholarship requires knowledgable consideration of its three centuries of
use in Western academic writing, and sensitivity to their racist over-
tones. Harner’s “shamanic healing” works (when it does) because his
technique is so close to that of the psychiatrists who employ Milton
Erickson’s “deepening techniques,” intensifying anxious persons’ concen-
tration to come to grips with what is disturbing them. Yes, many Sibe-
rian shamans, and Ojibwe jessakids and Inuit angakkut and Lakota
yuwipi men used similar techniques. So did St. Teresa of Ávila and other
saintly European mystics. Mircea Eliade denied that civilized Europeans
could be compared in this way to “tribal spirituality;” he stated, “we con-
102 Chapter Eight

ceive the shamanic traditions to have been ‘put in their place’ by . . . civ-
ilizations of agrarian and urban type” (Eliade 1964:379).
Good scholarship, good science, and ethics oblige anthropologists to
maintain the terms “shaman” and “shamanism” primarily to Siberian
practitioners so called in their homelands. The terms may be used with
notes of caution for apparently similar practitioners in the zone of north-
ern steppes, forests, and tundra in which Siberians historically linked
with Saami, Inuit, and American Indians. Outside this northern zone,
differences are large and similarities seem generally attributable to use
of that human ability for “deepening” concentration employed by psychi-
atrists.
This book describing shamans and others has as its significant
theme recognition of Western construction of a stereotyped, mythical
Other. Lumping healers, diviners, and priests outside the global “reli-
gions of the book” under the label “shamans” shows how difficult it is for
Westerners to recognize the stereotyped Other embedded in our educa-
tion. Kindergarteners enacting the First Thanksgiving with some wear-
ing paper feathers to portray Indians already are learning Us and
Them—eulogizing the supposed “primitives” is no less dehumanizing
and disrespectful than demonizing them as bloodthirsty savages. Learn-
ing to search out sources of information and evaluate them against their
social and historical context can break down stereotypes so taken for
granted even scholars may unthinkingly perpetuate them. The deafen-
ing silence over embedded racism decried by Dr. Moses can be dynamited
by critical thinking.
 Sources

Introduction:
Dudley; McWhorter; Penaskovic; Rennie; Salida; Vincent; Wolf.
The information about Robert Lowie’s recommendation to use “shaman”
in place of “medicine man” or “witch doctor” comes from personal com-
munication, Patricia J. Lyon, April 8, 2000; Dr. Lyon was a student in
Lowie’s course, 1949–1950.

Chapter 1
Balzer, ed.; Flaherty; Freed, Freed and Williamson; Humphrey with
Onon; Jochelson; Krupnik; Slezkine; Thomas and Humphrey; Vitebsky.

Chapter 2
Fridman; Goulet; Kehoe 1998; Lindquist; Townsend; Tylor.

Chapter 3
Anton; Campbell; Eliade; Fausto; Flaherty; Foucault; Furst; Gill;
Hugh-Jones; Humphrey with Onon; Leach; Lovejoy and Boas; Overholt;
Park; Reichel-Dolmatoff; Ricketts; Shapin; Shapin and Schaffer.

Chapter 4
Atkinson; Carlsen and Prechtel; Chaves; Flaherty; Furst; Gibson;
Golden; Humphrey with Onon; Jochelson 1928; Kirsch; Lakoff and
Johnson; Pócs; Rouget; Spiegel and Spiegel; Žornickaja.

Chapter 5
Balzer, ed.; Bailey; Chang; Clegg; Conger, Kanungo; Furst; Furst,
ed.; Galanter; Hallowell; Holden; Humphrey; Kehoe; Kehoe and Giletti;
Lewis; O’Brien, E.; Powers; Rose; Schultes; Science and Spirit; Seaman;

103
104 Sources

Siikala and Hoppál; Underhill.

Chapter 6
Bahn; Clottes and Lewis-Williams; Chippindale and Taçon; Con-
way and Conway; DeCicco; Frost; Guenther; Keyser; Lewis-Williams;
Lewis-Williams and Dowson; Marshack; O’Brien, P.; Quinlan; Salzer;
Solomon; Stone; Vastokas.

Chapter 7
Balzer; Hallowell; Harner; Hefner; Horrigan; Jakobsen; Kehoe
1990; Lindquist; Macpherson; Phoenix; Saladin d’Anglure; Shamanism;
Shaman’s Drum; Torgovnick; Townsend.

Chapter 8
Adams; Atkinson; Bliss; Deloria; Dilworth; Flaherty; Gould; Harri-
son; Kimmel; Kuper; Moses; Parkhill; Ridington; Rotundo; Smith; Tylor;
Vitebsky; Young, Ingram and Swartz.
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Furst, Peter T. 1998. “Shamanic Symbolism, Transformation, and Deities in West

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114 Additional Reading

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______. 1998b. “The Case of the Missing Kings: Looking for the Lords of Ancient
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Hugh-Jones, Christine. 1979. From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Pro-
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con Press. [Original: Le totémisme aujourd’hui, Paris, Presses Universitaires
de France, 1962.]
Levin, M. G., and L. P. Potapov, eds. 1964. The Peoples of Siberia, trans. by Scrip-
ta Technica, Inc., ed. by Stephen Dunn. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Lewis, I. (Ioan) M. 1986. Religions in Context: Cults and Charisma. Cambridge:
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Liberty, Margot P. 1970. “Priest and Shaman on the Plains: A False Dichotomy?”
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______. 1993. “Hail to Thee, Papa Bear.” Natural History 102(12):34–41.

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Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika, ed. in English by Bruce Grant. Seattle:
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Sanders, William T. 1995. “A Sceptical Response.” Cambridge Archaeological
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Shirokogoroff, S. M. 1935. The Psychomental Complex of the Tungus. London:
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 Index

Adams, William Y., 94, 105 Anthropology and Politics (Vincent),

African Americans, 96 4
Alaska, trade with Siberia, 48–49 Anton, Ted, 105
Alcoholics Anonymous, 59 Archaeological rock art, 72
Algonkian jessakids, 86 Art
Algonkian lodge, 66 cave art, 77–79
Algonkian-speaking peoples, 66 rock art, 71–75
Algonquin Legends of New England as territorial markers, 75–77
(Leland), 95 Art and Politics of Wana Shaman-
Altered state of consciousness (ASC), ship, The (Atkinson), 94–95
58–60 ASC. See altered state of
American Indians consciousness
Bureau of Ethnology and, 41 Atkinson, Jane Monnig, 94–95, 96,
contacts with Siberian peoples, 105
48–49 Australia, religious practitioners as
Norse stories and, 95 shamans in, 14
religious dances of, 96–97 Ayahuasca, 65
representations of culture of, 97
rock art in Southern California, Bacon, Francis, 43
74–75 Baffinland, 15
shamanism and, 39, 44 Bagchi, 53
Americanoids, 49 Bahn, Paul G., 105
Americas. See also specific regions Bailey, F. G., 68, 105
and peoples Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, 39–40,
religious practitioners as sha- 41, 105
mans in, 14 Banisteriopsis, 65. See also ayahuasca
“Ancients,” “Moderns” and, 43 Bantu nations, 72
Animism, 14–15 Barishi, 53
Anthropological perspective, 2–3 Bariyachi, 53
Anthropology Barrick, W. Boyd, 109
controversy within, 15 Belaney, Archie (Grey Owl), 97–98
in late 19th century, 14–15 Bering Strait, trade across, 48–49
Anthropology (Tylor), 21–22 Biebuyck, Brunhilde, 110

117
118
Blackfoot people, 60
rock art of, 77
Bliss, Shepherd, 100, 101, 105
Bly, Robert, 99
Boas, Franz, 4, 15, 22
fieldwork and, 41
Boas, George, 43, 44, 72, 92, 109
Bogoras, Waldemar and Sofya, 13
Bound-magician trick, 67
Bourdieu, Pierre, 23
Bureau of Ethnology, in Smithsonian,
40–41
Buryat people, 27
families of, 22–23
Bushmen, 72
Cahokia, 76
Campbell, Aidan, 105
Campbell, Joseph, 31, 95
Canada
Algonkian-speaking nations of, 66
Inuit people in, 15
rock painting in, 76–77
Canoe-building, role of religion in,
25–26
Carlsen, Robert, 53
Catherine of Russia, 37
Catholic Church, mysticism and, 59,
61
Cave art, 77–79
Central America, 65
Central Asia, 17
Chang, K. C., 105
Charisma, 68–69
Chaves, John F., 105
China
cliff paintings in, 75–76
healing touch in, 63–64
Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, 18, 63
Chippindale, Christopher, 106
Christianity, 59, 61–62
spirits in, 53
Chukchi, 48
Circumboreal spiritual adepts, 66–68
Civilization, Western concept of, 55
Civil religion, American, 22, 24–25
Clan elder, 17
Index
Clegg, Stewart R., 106
Cliff paintings, 75–76
Clottes, Jean, 77, 94, 106
Cobb, Allan, 79
Coca leaves, 65
chewing of, 70n
Comparative method, 22, 94. See also
Cross-cultural comparisons
Comparative religion, Eliade and, 2
Concentration
Harner and, 82
as human capacity, 26, 56, 74
Conger, Jay A., 106
Contacts, between communities,
48–49, 51–52
Conway, Julie, 106
Conway, Thor, 106
Cree people, 60, 66, 93
Critical thinking, 2–3
Critical Thinking and the Academic
Study of Religion (Penaskovic), 2
Cross-cultural comparisons, 2–3,
55–56
Cults, 32, 58. See also New Age
religion
possession, 58
Cultural primitivism, 42–43, 72, 88.
See also Primitivism
Curing ritual, 52
Current Anthropology, 72, 73
Dakota people, 60
Dance, 47–48, 49, 66, 96–97
Darwin, Charles, 22
Daur Mongols, 22, 38–39, 93
Day, Jane S., 105, 107, 110
DeCicco, Gabriel, 106
Deloria, Philip J., 97, 106
Dene Tha people, 26–27, 92
Denmark, 86
Diderot, Denis, 37
Dilworth, Leah, 106
Divination rituals, 66
Divining shamans, 28–29
Dowson, Thomas A., 108
Drug use, 64–65
Harner on shamans and, 82
Index
Drumming, 27, 31, 45, 52–53, 65
Harner and, 82
Dudley, Guilford, III, 5, 106
Dunne-za, 92
Durkheim, Émile, 24, 34
Eclectic spiritualists, 85–86
Ecstatic experiences, 57–58, 97
Edda, 95
Eliade, Mircea, 1–2, 3, 37–38,
101–102, 106
as “armchair scholar,” 40
Central and South American
ritualists and, 65
critiques of, 5–6, 39–40
on ecstasy, 57
experience of non-Western societ-
ies, 40, 45
focus on “primitive” peoples, 38,
39, 44
on personal fulfillment, 87
on shamanism, 41–42, 55
on supposed unchanging nature of
“sacred,” 48
Empowerment, term “primitive” and,
92–93
Enacted rituals, 49–51
England, 86
Enlightenment, “Other” and, 101
Erickson, Milton, 101. See hypnosis,
56
Ethnocentrism, 22
Ethnographic particularities, 15
Europe, reindeer in, 94
Evenki people, 19n
Exorcism, 52
Exoticizing, 96
Faith healers, 54, 55
Fausto, Carlos, 106
Fieldwork, 60
Boas and, 41
Malinowski and, 41
Powell and, 40–41
Fire in the Belly (Keen), 99
First Nations. See North American
First Nations
119
Flaherty, Gloria, 52–53, 100–101, 106
Fly agaric, 64–65
Foucault, Michel, 41, 106
Foulks, Edward, 38
Foundation for Shamanic Studies,
82, 83, 84
Frazer, James G., 2
Freed, Ruth S., 13, 106
Freed, Stanley A., 13, 106
Fridman, Eva, 22–23, 27, 106
Frost, Leslie M., 106
Functionalist perspective, on
religion, 34–35
Furst, Peter T., 44, 45, 106, 107
Fur trade, 48–49, 51–52
Galanter, Marc, 59, 107
Gibson, James R., 107
Giletti, Dody H., 108
Gill, Sam, 40, 107
Glazier, Stephen D., 111
Gottschall Rockshelter, 76
Gould, Stephen Jay, 107
Goulet, Jean-Guy, 26, 92, 107
Grey Owl (Archie Belaney), 98
Gros Ventre Reservation, 71
Guatemalan Maya, 53–54
Guenther, Mathias, 107
Hall, G. Stanley, 97
Hallowell, A. Irving, 28, 66, 107
Hallucinations, 73
Hallucinogens, 45, 64–65
Neo-shamanists and, 86
peyote, 52
Harner, Michael, 21, 27, 29, 33, 91,
100, 107
Way of the Shaman of, 82–84
Harner Method Shamanic Counsel-
ing, 83–84
Harrison, Faye V., 100, 107
Hawkes, Sophie, 106
Healing, 27–28, 92–93, 98–100
faith healers and, 54, 55
with spirits, 60–62
Swedish neo-shamanists and, 32–33
through touch, 62–64
120
Healing ritual, 57
Hefner, Robert W., 107
Henry, Joseph, 40
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 101
Herding, 16–17
Himalayas, religious practitioners as
shamans in, 14
Ho-chunk (Winnebago) hero, 75
Holden, Constance, 107
Hongli (Qing emperor), 64
Hopi Snake Dance, 96–97
Hoppál, Mihály, 110
Horrigan, Bonnie, 107
Houdini, Harry (Eric Weiss), 67
Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 107
Huichol ritualist, 44–45, 47, 51
Humphrey, Caroline, 17, 38–39, 41,
107, 110
Hungary, 54–55, 65
Hunting, 16–17
shamans and, 18
Siberian rituals for, 12–13
Huxley, Aldous, 97
Hypnosis, 56
Illness. See also Healing
sucking out of, 52
Individual
contemporary focus on, 31–32
Western focus on, 23–24
Ingold, Tim, 107
Ingram, Grant, 111
Innu, 66
Intellectual culture, Western, 43, 45
Internet, New Age ideas and, 32
Inuit angakkut, 86–87
Inuit people, Boas and, 15
Iron John (Bly), 99
Jakobsen, Merete Demant, 86, 87, 107
Jívaro people. See Shuar (Jívaro)
people
Jochelson, Dina Brodsky, 7–13, 22
Jochelson, Waldemar, 7–13, 22,
48–49, 60
Johnson, Mark, 49–50, 56n, 108
Johnson, Samuel, 62
Index
Kanungo, Rabindra N., 106
Keen, Sam, 99
Kehoe, Alice Beck, 108
Keyser, James D., 108
Khanty people, 19n
Khoi-San liguistic stock, 72
Kimmel, Michael S., 100, 108
King, healing touch of, 62–63
Kirsch, Irving, 108
Kolkhozy, 17–18
Koop, C. Everett, 62
Koryak people, 7. See also Reindeer
Koryak
shaman of, 7, 8–10
Krupnik, Igor, 108
Kulaks, 18
Kundalini practice, Hindu, 74
!Kung rituals, 74
Kuper, Adam, 45, 108
Lakoff, George, 49–50, 56n, 108
Lakota Indians, 66
Lakota yuwipi men, 86
Language, depicting ritual behavior,
52–53
Lapland, religious practitioners as
shamans in, 14
Law of Progress schemes, 14
Lawrence, D. H., 97
Leach, Edmund, 39, 108
Leland, Charles G., 95–96, 101
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 23
Lewis, Thomas H., 108
Lewis-Williams, David, 72–74, 94,
106, 108
on cave art, 77–79
Lindquist, Galina, 30, 32–33, 108
Lovejoy, Arthur O., 43, 44, 72, 92, 109
Lowie, Robert, 4, 5
Loyola, Ignatius, 59
Macpherson, C. B., 87, 109
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 23, 25, 34
fieldwork and, 41
Mamaev, Efimov Pavlovic, 49, 51
Mara’akáme (Huichol), 44–45, 47
Marijuana, 65
Index
Marshack, Alexander, 109
Mashka (Tungus shaman), 12–13
Maya people, 53–54, 73
cave art of, 78, 79, 80
Neo-Shamanists and, 85–86
of Santiago Atitlán, 53
McWhorter, Kathleen T., 109
Medicine. See also Healing
hypnosis and, 56
Medicine man, use of term, 4
Men’s movement, 22
mythopoetic, 99–100
Mikinak (Ojibwe spirit), 66
Mind-altering drugs, 64–65
Ming dynasty, 64
Mississippian Late Prehistoric
period, 75–76
Mississippi River, cliff paintings
along, 76
“Moderns,” “Ancients and,” 43
Mongol (Yuan) dynasty, 63
Mongols, 17, 63–64. See also Daur
Mongols
Monotheism, 15
Montagnais-Naskapi. See Innu
Mooney, James, 41
Moostoos, 93
Moses, Yolanda T., 5, 91, 102, 109
Mushrooms, as hallucinogens, 64
Music. See also Dance
in seance ritual, 67
trance and, 50–51
Myerhoff, Barbara, 44
Mystic ecstasy, Eliade on, 38
Mysticism, trance and, 58–60
Mythopoetic men’s movement, 99–100
Myths, New Age religion and, 31
Myths to Live By (Campbell), 31
Naj Tunich cave, 78, 79, 80
Nature, truth and, 97–98
Nelbosh (elderly Yukaghir), 10, 12–13
Neo-shamanism, 32–34, 85–87
Networks, New Age religion and, 32
New Age religion, 81
anthropological point of view on,
29–34
121
inner “journey” and, 4
mythopoetic men’s movement
and, 99–100
Neo-shamanists and, 85
Nikiforov, G. K., 47–48, 51
Nomads, Siberian, 16
Non-literate societies, 15. See also
“primitive” peoples
Non-Western spirituality, selling of,
88–89
Non-Western world
modes of thought in, 14–15
religion in, 22, 25–27
North America
civil religion in, 22, 24–25
indigenous rituals in, 66–68
North American First Nations, 88
O’Brien, Elmer, S. J., 109
O’Brien, Patricia J., 59
Ojibwe/Anishinabe, 66
Ojibwe people, 28–29
Onon, Urgunge, 38–39, 53, 93, 107
On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 22
Orpheus, “Shamanic,” 101
Other
Rational Man and, 100
stereotyped, 102
Otishi, 53
Overholt, Thomas W., 109
Painting
cave art, 77–79
at Gottschall Rockshelter, 76
rock art and, 71–75
as territorial markers, 75–77
Paleolithic art
cave art as, 77–79
rock art and, 73–74
Paleolithic peoples, 94
cave art of, 78–79
Paleolithic religion, shamans and,
49, 51, 72–75, 77–79
Paleontology, comparative method
for, 22
Parakanã people, 45n–46n
Park, Willard Z., 39, 109
122 Index

Parkhill, Thomas C., 109 Reality, cross-cultural comparisons

Peasants, Soviets and, 18 and, 2–3
Penaskovic, Richard, 2, 109 Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense
People of color, shamanism and, 37–38 of Religion (Rennie), 5
Peterborough, Ontario, petroglyphs, Rédey, Dzilvia, 109
76–77 Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, 44–45,
Peter the Great, 17 46n, 109
Petroglyphs, 72, 75 Reindeer Koryak, 8, 9, 31
at Peterborough, 76–77 Religion. See also Civil religion
Peyote, 52 in American societies, 34
Philosophical Roots of Anthropology, anthropological perspective on,
The (Adams), 94 21–25
Physiological capabilities, 49–51 defined, 21
Piakwutch (Saskatchewan Cree), holidays and, 24
60–61, 93 New Age, 29–34
Plains Ojibwe. See Ojibwe people non-Western perspective on, 25–27
Pócs, Éva, 54, 55, 109 non-Western religions, 3, 14–15
Possession cults, 58 origins of term, 22
Powell, John W., 40–41 types of, 22
Powers, William K., 109 Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and
Powwow, 77 His Critics (Dudley), 5
Prechtel, Martin, 53, 105 Religions of the book, 26
“Primitive” peoples, 14 trances and, 59
Eliade on, 37–38, 42 Religious leader, shaman as, 8
racism and, 94–95 Religious practitioners, as “shamans”
stereotypes of, 102 or “medicine men,” 14–15
Primitivism, 94–95 Rennie, Bryan, 5, 109
concept of, 43 Riches, David, 107
defined, 91–92 Ricketts, Mac Linscott, 109
healing and, 98–100 Ridington, Robin, 92, 110
Psilocybe mushroom, 65 Ritual dancers, spirits and, 50
Psychedelic plants, 65 Rituals
Psychics, 55 changes in, 48, 51
Psychotropic plants, 65 of Koryak people, 8–10
Pueblo Indian rituals, 96–97 shamanistic, 52
Purchas, Samuel, 14 for success in hunting, 12–13
as survivals of ancient religions,
Qimuksiraaq (Inuit angakkuq), 86–87 48, 49, 51
Qing emperor, 64 Swedish shamanic, 33
Quinlan, Angus R., 109 Ritual trance, 50–51
Rock art, 71–75
“Races,” 22 geometric forms in, 73
Racism, 70, 94 Paleolithic cave paintings and, 73–74
issue of, 91 purpose of, 79–80
Rainbow Gathering, 87 of Southern California Indians,
Ramón (Huichol ritualist), 44, 45, 47, 51 74–75
Rational Man, and the Other, 100 territorial markers and, 75–77
Index
Rose, Louis, 110
Rotundo, E. Anthony, 99, 110
Rouget, Gilbert, 50, 110
Russia, 8
attitudes toward Siberians, 16–17
contacts with Americas, 48–49,
51–52
shamanism forbidden in, 10
Saami (Lapps) people, 8
Sakhá (former Yakut), 19
Saladin d’Anglure, Bernard, 110
Saliba, John A., 3, 5–6, 110
Salzer, Robert J., 110
San (Bushmen) people, 72–73, 94
Saskatchewan Cree, 60
Schaffer, Simon, 40
Schultes, Richard Evans, 110
Science and Spirit magazine, 62
Seaman, Gary, 105, 106, 107, 110
Seances, shaking tent, 66
Self-fulfillment, 34–35
new age religions and, 29–30, 87
Shaking tent seances, 66, 67
Shaman. See also Siberian shamanism
anthropological view of, 27–29
application of term, 4
beliefs as survivals of Paleolithic
religion, 49
in China, 64
defined, 8
divining, 28–29
as generic term, 53–54
Harner and indigenous practitio-
ners, 84
healing by, 27–28
idea of, 37–46
respect for, 18–19
Siberian, 7–19
similarities among, 49
use of term, 2, 4–5
Shamanic journeys, 81–89
of Harner, 33
“Shamanic” Orpheus, 101
“Shamanic path,” 29
Shamanic practice
Harner on, 83–84
123
selling, 88–89
Shamanism
diversity of, 57–70
Eliade cited about, 41–42
essence of, 57
hypotheses about, 23
Onon’s response to term, 39
proof of, 7–8
as supposed worldwide phenome-
non, 52–56
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy (Eliade), 1–2, 37, 39–40
Shaman’s Drum (magazine), 81
Shapin, Steven, 40, 43, 110
Shuar (Jívaro) people, 82
Siberia, 1, 4, 7–19
American Indian contacts with,
48–49
classification of peoples as
“aliens,” 16–17
northern North American rituals
and, 66–68
Peter the Great and, 17
Russian rule of, 17
shamans in, 27
trade in, 17
Siberian shamanism
and American Indian religious
practices, 48
critique of Eliade and, 39–40
past and present, 14–19
patterns of religious practice in,
15–16
rituals of, 52
Siberian history and, 16–19
Soviet impact on, 17–18
spread of information about, 37
Siikala, Anna-Leena, 110
Slezkine, Yuri, 17, 18, 110
Smith, Donald B., 98, 110
Smithsonian Institution, 40
Social groups, functionalist perspec-
tive and, 34–35
Socialization, cross-cultural compari-
sons and, 2–3
Society, comparative method and, 22
Solomon, Anne, 110
124
Solon Tungus shaman, 53
Songs, 49
in seance ritual, 67
Soul, leaving house with spirits,
10–12
South Africa, rock art in, 72–74
South America
psychedelic plants in, 65
“shamans” in, 44–45
Tukano-speaking Indians in,
44–45
Southern California Indians, rock art
of, 74–75
Soviet Union
breakup of, 18–19
“modernization” policy of, 18
shamanism forbidden by, 10
Siberian peoples and, 17–18
Spencer, John R., 109
Spiegel, David, 56, 110
Spiegel, Herbert, 56, 110
Spirits
beliefs in, 43
in European Christianity, 53
Harner on, 83
healing with, 60–62
in ritual dances, 50
shaman’s soul leaving house with,
10–12
Stalin, 17–18
Stone, Andrea J., 79, 111
Storytracking (Gill), 40
Sun Dance, 93
Supernatural, concept of religion as,
34
Swartz, Lise, 111
Sweden, neo-shamanists in, 32–33
Taçon, Paul S. C., 106
Táltos, 55
Taxation, of Siberians, 17
Templeton, John, 62
Teresa of Ávila, 59–60
Territorial boundary signs, petro-
glyphs as, 76–77
Territorial markers, in rock art,
75–77
Index
Thomas, Nicholas, 111
Tobacco, as drug, 65
Torgovnick, Marianna, 111
Touch, as cure, 62–64
Tourism, to American Indian com-
munities, 96–97
Townsend, Joan B., 32, 85, 111
Trade
between Siberia and Alaska,
48–59
Siberian, 17
Trance(s)
as ASC, 58
drugs and, 65
mysticism, 58–60
ritual, 50–51
San people and, 73
among Tukanoans, 45
Trance dance, 74
Trance music, 50–51
Tukano-speaking Indians, in South
America, 44–45
“Tundra kulaks,” 18
Tungus language, 8, 53
Tungus people, 12–13, 94
as Evenki, 19n
shamans in 17th century, 14
Solon Tungus shaman, 53
use of term, 19n
Tupi-speaking Parakanã, 45n–46n
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 21, 93–94, 111
Underhill, Evelyn, 59, 60, 111
Upper Paleolithic. See Cave art;
Paleolithic art
Urgent Tribal Assistance Project, of
Harner, 84
Vastokas, Joan M., 111
Vincent, Joan, 4, 111
Vitebsky, Piers, 95, 111
Wallace, Anthony F. C., 23
Wasson, Gordon, 64–65
Way of the Shaman (Harner), 82–84,
86
Webb, Michael, 109
Index
Weber, Max
charisma and, 68, 69
visionary-follower relationship
and, 69–70
Western world
cross-cultural comparisons and, 3
focus on individuals, 23–24
Wicca, 22
Williamson, Laila, 13, 106
Willier, Russell, 93
Winnebago (Ho-chunk) hero, 75
Witchcraft, 54
Witch doctor, use of term, 4
Witsen, Nicolas, 14
Wolf, Eric R., 2, 111
125
Woodburn, James, 107
Wylie, Alison, 73, 74
Yadgan (Daur Mongols), 22, 53
Yakut shaman, 47–48, 49
Yakutsk, 19
Young, David, 93, 111
Yuan China, 63, 64
Yuit, 48
Yukaghir people, 10
Yuwipi ritual, 66
Žornickaja, M. Ja., 111
Zulu people, 72