Kehoe (anthropology, U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) seeks to inoculate her students against the mushy thinking she finds concerning shamans and shamanism. She traces the misinformation to a sensational mid-20th-century French tome by which expatriate Romanian Mircea Eliade hoped to acquire a reputation and a place in a European or American university. (He succeeded.) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Historians of art or religion and mythologists, such as Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, have written extensively on prehistoric religion, but no one before has offered a comprehensive and uniquely archaeological perspective on the subject. Hayden opens his book with an examination of the difference between traditional religions, which are passed on through generations orally or experientially, and more modern “book” religions, which are based on some form of scripture that describes supernatural beings and a moral code, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He attempts to answer the question of why religion developed at all, arguing that basic religious behaviors of the past and present have been shaped by our innate emotional makeup, specifically our ability to enter into ecstatic states through a variety of techniques and to create binding relationships with other people, institutions, or ideals associated with those states.
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. This enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing. For most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals express these through the longings of the dead and the playful antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for imported whiskey. No other book-length study captures the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s, endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium. She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance, healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and consumption will find much of interest here.
Shamans of the Lost World bridges the gap between recent work in the cognitive sciences and some of humankind's oldest religious expressions. In this detailed look at the prehistoric shamanism of the Ohio Hopewell, Romain uses cognitive science, archaeology, and ethnology to propose that the shamanic worldview results from psychological mechanisms that have a basis in our cognitive evolutionary development. The discussions in this volume of the most current theories concerning how early peoples came to believe in spirits and gods, as well as how those theories help account for what we find in the archaeological record of the Hopewell, are of interest to archaeologists and cognitive scientists alike.
Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices. Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents. Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas. Contributors Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright
Schizophrenia is one of the most enigmatic human experiences. While it can cause terrible distress, it doesn't fit the mold of a classic medical disease. In Shamans Among Us, Joseph Polimeni shows that today's schizophrenia patients are no less than the modern manifestation of tribal shamans, people vital to the success of early human cultures. Spanning human history and including discussions of evolution, the definition of disease, and the nature of psychosis, Shamans Among Us is the most detailed and comprehensive evolutionary theory yet assembled to explain a specific psychiatric diagnosis. "Joseph Polimeni's scholarly book challenges several traditional concepts of both evolutionary biology and medicine. I strongly recommend it to all those who dare to think outside the box." - Martin Brüne, MD, author of Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry.
"Animal and Shaman, a comparative study of the indigenous pre-Christian and pre-Muslim religions of Central Asia, describes a common inheritance among the beliefs of the various peoples who have lived in Central Asia or have migrated from there: Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Manchus, Finns and Hungarians." "Shamans - holy men and healers among the pagan faiths - relied heavily on animal sacrifices to create spiritual purity and to nourish the soul and, as a result, animals and spirituality were locked in a mutually dependent embrace. Julian Baldick demonstrates that in pagan times there were remarkable common features in the forms of worship and spiritual expression and that these similarities were largely based on the roles of animals in the different cultures of Central Asia. He shows that these have not only survived in the myths and legends of the region but have also found their way into the mythologies of the West." "This analysis will be of importance to historians as well as to cultural and social anthropologists."--Jacket.
Native Americans believed that it was their responsibility to maintain harmony in the natural world on which they depended by performing a variety of rituals. Shamans were credited with exceptional powers to act on behalf of the community. They claimed to be capable of separating their spirits from their bodies and interceding with those spirits that controlled the many forces of nature. Having studied the subject at first hand during his many visits to American tribes, Dr. Norman Bancroft Hunt sets out the richly rewarding results of his research in this survey of shamanic traditions and practices in various Native American groups. Shamanism in North America is profusely illustrated with the most remarkable masks, effigies, and implements used by shamans and includes evocative images of the often harsh wilderness inhabited by the tribes under discussion, as well as some revealing historical photographs of shamans.
A distinguished anthropologist–who is also an initiated shaman–reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world’s oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition, from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today. Shamanism was not only humankind’s first spiritual and healing practice, it was originally the domain of women. This is the claim of Barbara Tedlock’s provocative and myth-shattering book. Reinterpreting generations of scholarship, Tedlock–herself an expert in dreamwork, divination, and healing–explains how and why the role of women in shamanism was misinterpreted and suppressed, and offers a dazzling array of evidence, from prehistoric African rock art to modern Mongolian ceremonies, for women’s shamanic powers. Tedlock combines firsthand accounts of her own training among the Maya of Guatemala with the rich record of women warriors and hunters, spiritual guides, and prophets from many cultures and times. Probing the practices that distinguish female shamanism from the much better known male traditions, she reveals: • The key role of body wisdom and women’s eroticism in shamanic trance and ecstasy • The female forms of dream witnessing, vision questing, and use of hallucinogenic drugs • Shamanic midwifery and the spiritual powers released in childbirth and monthly female cycles • Shamanic symbolism in weaving and other feminine arts • Gender shifting and male-female partnership in shamanic practice Filled with illuminating stories and illustrations, The Woman in the Shaman’s Body restores women to their essential place in the history of spirituality and celebrates their continuing role in the worldwide resurgence of shamanism today.
