Shamanism

Shamanism is a broad family of practices, found across many cultures on every inhabited continent, in which a specialist enters altered states of consciousness in order to interact with a spirit world on behalf of the community. The shaman is held to send their soul on journeys to other realms, ascending to upper worlds or descending to lower ones, to guide the souls of the dead, retrieve the lost souls of the sick, negotiate with the spirits of game animals, and bring back knowledge and healing. The trance is typically induced by rhythmic drumming, dancing, chanting, fasting, or, in some traditions, psychoactive plants, and the shaman's vocation often begins with a crisis, a serious illness or a "shamanic initiatory crisis" understood as a dismemberment and rebirth by the spirits.

The word itself comes from the Tungusic peoples of Siberia (saman), and it was the Siberian and Central Asian material that the historian Mircea Eliade used to define shamanism, in his influential study, as "archaic techniques of ecstasy." "Shamanism" as a single worldwide category is partly a scholarly construction, and its use has been criticized for flattening very different local traditions and for the way modern Western "neo-shamanism" has extracted and commercialized practices from their cultural contexts. But as a descriptive term it captures a genuinely recurrent human religious pattern, the mediator who travels in ecstatic trance between the human community and a world of spirits, attested from Siberia and the Americas to Africa, Australia, and beyond, and reaching back, many scholars believe, into deep prehistory.

The modern academic idea of shamanism owes more to a single book than to any tradition. Mircea Eliade's study, published in 1951, defined the shaman by ecstatic soul flight, a journey undertaken by the specialist's spirit to other worlds on the community's behalf, and treated possession, in which a spirit enters the specialist instead, as a later degeneration of the pure type.

Anthropologists have objected to almost every part of that. The distinction between journey and possession does not hold in the field, where both frequently occur in the same tradition and often in the same practitioner. The ranking of one as archaic and the other as decayed reflects Eliade's own preferences rather than any evidence about chronology. And the category assembled traditions from Siberia, the Arctic, the Americas, Central Asia and Southeast Asia on the strength of resemblances the author found meaningful.

The word's own history compounds the problem, since it belongs to one Siberian language family and every other tradition it names has its own vocabulary.

A further layer arrived in the 1980s. Core shamanism, taught in workshops to Western students, extracted a set of techniques from their traditions of origin on the theory that a universal method underlies them all. It is a real contemporary practice with real practitioners, and it is not the practice of any of the peoples it draws on, several of whom have said so.

The atlas keeps the term because the literature is written in it, and records the tradition by its own name wherever one exists.

Sources Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of EcstasyMircea Eliade with Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western ImaginationRonald Hutton