The Rise of the Shamans

Traditional shamanic initiation produced a spirit-man, one who became in her essence an embodied consciousness of the reality of the times. For millennia shamans have embodied the logical structure of reality, commonly known as “two-worlds”, a spiritual world and a secular world that are secretly a unity. Once initiated, the shaman then could heal, curing individuals or communities of their ontological illness. An ontological illness occurs when an individual’s essential nature falls out of accord with the prevailing logic of the reality she and the community inhabits. But what happens to the shamanic way when this background reality is itself in flux, as it clearly is today? Is shamanism up to the task of the modern crisis in reality? What kind of initiation would an individual have today? And if that is possible what kind of healing shamanic practice would flow from that accomplishment?

Journal of the International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism, 2022

Shamanism has been defined in different ways by scholars over the years. Among practitioners in Western countries, the most common references are Mircea Eliade and his view of shamanism as a set of ecstatic techniques and Michael Harner's idea of the shaman as a person who journeys to nonordinary realities to gain power and knowledge. The label "shaman" has always worked by superimposition over local identifiers and, being a Western etic category of the nineteenth century, retains some degree of exoticism in its semantics. Yet, when the veil of exoticism is removed, it is possible to acknowledge that its core traits are found in a Western context as well. I will argue for a redefinition of shamanism that is context-sensitive and employs discourse analysis to better understand a malleable living phenomenon. As long as some form of "othering" plays a role in such definitions, an accurate understanding of shamanism will be hindered and retain cultural biases.

2006

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

Shaman, 2022

This article, based on field-based research conducted between 2014-2020, examines the lives and work of three healers practicing and teaching shamanism in NorthEast Scotland. The article aims to situate contemporary "western" healers within wider academic debates about shamanism as part of a dynamic cultural processes and to compare and contrast them with "traditional" shamanic practitioners. The article also examines whether these healers constitute a wider regional Scottish shamanic tradition, similar to that of "non-western" traditional shamanistic cultures, or whether these are still emerging and autonomous phenomena.

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 31(2), pp. 47-62., 2013

This article reviews the origins of the concept of the shaman and the principal sources of controversy regarding the existence and nature of shamanism. Confusion regarding the nature of shamanism is clarified with a review of research providing empirical support for a cross-cultural concept of shamans that distinguishes them from related shamanistic healers. The common shamanistic universals involving altered states of consciousness are examined from psychobiological perspectives to illustrate shamanism's relationships to human nature. Common biological aspects of altered states of consciousness help explain the origins of shamanism while social influences on this aspect of human nature help to explain the diverse manifestations of shamanistic phenomena involving an elicitation of endogenous healing responses.

HRAF, 2019

During the summer of 2010, while traveling from California to the Yucatan on an epic road trip to do anthropological fieldwork, I happened by chance to meet two shamans-wise men, healers, diviners, explorers of sacred realms. Later, working in rural Haiti, I met and grew to intimately know several other religious figures that I came to view as practicing a form of shamanism. In scholarly literature and the public imagination, these mysterious and mystical religious figures found across the world are often considered remnants or exemplars of archaic religious culture (Eliade 1964). Extensively exploring shamanic beliefs and practices, anthropologists have noted the existence of such religious practitioners in many cultures in Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas. Meeting these figures changed my perspective on the phenomenon of shamanism. I had initially learned from anthropological debates and texts that shamanism was a problematic, overused concept that often generalized and romanticized the archaic human past. However, after meeting shamans, getting to know them, and participating in shamanic ritual events, I found an amazing array of continuities and parallel beliefs and practices in cultures that had been separated by oceans and thousands of years of human history.

This essay explores the phenomena of the shaman both in traditional and contemporary societies, and across several cultures. The essay investigates what is, and how one becomes, a shaman. Efficacy of shamanic healing and the methods of its delivery are also considered by using examples from traditional cultures in comparison with two western contemporary models, clown doctors in New York hospitals, and the development of psychoneuroimmunology, which is based on the precepts of shamanism. The essay demonstrates that far from being a relic of archaic societies to be studied only for its academic value by social and cultural anthropologists and medical historians, contemporary shamanism, and at least one of its iterations, the circus clown, has a useful place alongside, and complimentary to, the currently dominant bio medical model in the milieu of the holistic healing process. According to Jakobsen (1999), shamanism first appeared in Siberia and central Asia as a religious phenomenon, in existence as long as there have been human beings with Eliade (2004), describing the etymology of 'shaman' as coming from the Russian Siberian, Tungusic language, sâman.

2013

This article reviews the origins of the concept of the shaman and the principal sources of controversy regarding the existence and nature of shamanism. Confusion regarding the nature of shamanism is clarified with a review of research providing empirical support for a cross-cultural concept of shamans that distinguishes them from related shamanistic healers. The common shamanistic universals involving altered states of consciousness are examined from psychobiological perspectives to illustrate shamanism’s relationships to human nature. Common biological aspects of altered states of consciousness help explain the origins of shamanism while social influences on this aspect of human nature help to explain the diverse manifestations of shamanistic phenomena involving an elicitation of endogenous healing responses.

Nature, and Social Transformations. Ethos, 1990

M. and Fields, T. (eds), So What? Now What? The Anthropology of Consciousness Respondsto a World in Crisis. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pp. 204-229, 2009

The phenomena of shamanism are described from the perspectives of cross-cultural research and the universals of shamanism are analyzed in terms of their biological bases. Uniformities in shamanic practices worldwide reflect: (1) community bonding rituals that extend mammalian opioid-attachment mechanisms; (2) social signaling and emotional communication processes such as singing, music, and drumming; (3) altered states of consciousness that elicit an integrative mode of consciousness, exemplified in the shamanic soul flight and visionary experiences; (4) innate representational modules that enhance selfawareness and social identity through using animal and spirit concepts as representational systems for personal and social identities; and (5) a variety of endogenous healing capacities elicited by ritual activities. The biological understandings of shamanic universals indicate that these potentials are still part of human nature and have relevance for understanding contemporary human health and illness. This relevance is illustrated by a review of literature that indicates the applicability of shamanic practices to the treatment of addictions.