What shamanism is

What it is

"Shamanism" is used to name a supposed universal type: a specialist who enters an altered state in order to deal with unseen powers on behalf of a community — healing, divining, recovering lost souls, guiding the dead.

The word is Evenki. Šamán, from a Tungusic language of Siberia, entered Russian through seventeenth-century contact and then European languages, where it was rapidly generalised to practices from Amazonia to the Arctic to Australia — none of which had any connection to the Evenki, or to each other.

That generalisation is the first thing to examine, because most of the difficulty in this subject follows from it.

Where it came from

Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) is the book that fixed the category. Eliade defined shamanism by ecstatic soul-flight — the specialist's spirit leaving the body to travel to upper or lower worlds — and assembled a universal pattern from sources worldwide: the initiatory crisis, the vision of dismemberment and reassembly, the world tree, the drum as vehicle, spirit helpers.

It is a compelling picture and it has been substantially dismantled.

The criticisms are specific. Eliade constructed a type from scattered secondary reports without fieldwork, and where his sources conflicted with the pattern he treated them as degenerate forms. He privileged soul-flight over possession — the specialist being entered by a spirit rather than travelling — although possession is at least as widespread and in many traditions is the practice. And his comparative method produced a timeless archaic essence from material with actual histories.

Alice Kehoe's Shamans and Religion (2000) presses the argument further: that the category flattens hundreds of distinct traditions, that it serves a Western appetite for a primitive spirituality untouched by modernity, and that many of the practitioners so labelled do not use the word or recognise the description.

Eliade's own history is also part of the scholarly discussion — his associations with the Romanian Iron Guard in the 1930s, and the relationship between that politics and his search for archaic sacred essences, have been examined at length and are not incidental.

How it is used

Most consequentially, in "core shamanism". Michael Harner, an anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Amazonia, published The Way of the Shaman in 1980 and founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies to teach what he presented as the universal core of shamanic technique, stripped of any particular culture: monotonous drumming at around four to seven beats per second, and a structured "journey" to non-ordinary reality.

It is taught in weekend workshops, worldwide, to people with no connection to any of the source traditions.

Native American critics have a term for what this produces — plastic shamans — and the objection is set out in the material discussed under cultural appropriation: practices taken from peoples who were legally prohibited from performing them within living memory, repackaged without lineage or obligation, and sold.

What we can and cannot say

We can say something real is being pointed at, even if the category is bad. Across a very large number of unconnected societies there are specialists who enter altered states deliberately, who are held to deal with unseen forces, and whose social role is healing and divination. The techniques recur: drumming, dancing, fasting, isolation, sleep deprivation, pain, and psychoactive plants. These are the same methods this site has found producing altered states in scrying, breathwork and silence.

That recurrence needs explaining, and the explanation available is not a shared archaic religion. It is that human nervous systems respond similarly to similar interventions, and that societies which need someone to manage crisis, illness and death will produce a role for it.

We can say the differences matter more than the category admits. Soul-flight and possession are not variants of one thing. A Korean mudang, a Shipibo onanya, an Evenki practitioner and a Haitian houngan have different cosmologies, different training, different obligations and different social positions. Grouping them tells you about the grouper.

We can say the recurrence-versus-construction problem here is the same one covered under perennialism and constructivism, and that the constructivist case is unusually strong: the similarities were substantially produced by the observers.

We cannot describe practice, and this site will not. What each tradition does belongs to the people who do it, and the articles that follow describe context, history and public record rather than technique.

Further reading

• Alice Beck Kehoe, Shamans and Religion (2000) — the critique of the category.
• Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (2001).
• Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (1951), read knowing what has been said about it.