The Way of the Shaman

Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman is an influential and commercially successful popular work presenting Harner's own synthesized system of core shamanism, distilled from his anthropological fieldwork among multiple indigenous societies into techniques intended for a general Western audience seeking personal spiritual practice. Its historical importance for the modern Western neo-shamanic movement is well documented, since it substantially shaped how that movement's practices and vocabulary developed. Its reception among specialists in the indigenous traditions Harner drew from has been considerably more critical, with some anthropologists and indigenous voices arguing his extracted, decontextualized techniques strip specific culturally embedded practices of their original meaning and community authority. Cite it as the founding text of core shamanism, not as a neutral ethnographic account of any single indigenous tradition.