Shamans and Spirits: Photography and the Irrational in the Age of Reason (original) (raw)
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Photography as a Form of Technological Mediumship in the 19th Century Spiritualism
Viraverita, 2022
The nineteenth century has been a process for spiritualists who used their physiological bodies to communicate with spirits. Spiritualists have combined photography with physiology and used technology as "mediums" to prove the visibility of spirits. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century has been also the exploitability of productions as much as their benefits. Spiritualists and spirit photographers have been denounced as impostors. However, spirit photography has endeavored to prove that a reality existed beyond the visible, and the visibility of spirits endorsed the spiritual narratives by invigorating the ties between mediumship and photography. This article will document the arguments of the spiritualists, defenders and debunkers of the nineteenth century and portray their contribution to mediumship.
Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography
Wojcik, Daniel. "Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography." Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 25, no. 1-2 (March-June 2009): 109-136. , 2009
For nearly 150 years, the photographic process has been attributed with the apparitional ability to reveal discarnate beings and miraculous phenomena. In the nineteenth century, members of the Spiritualist movement embraced photography as a technological medium that provided evidence of the afterlife and contact with departed loved ones. Today, traditions of supernatural photography continue to thrive, particularly among the Catholic faithful at Marian apparition sites who regularly use cameras to document miraculous phenomena. This article examines the meaning and appeal of beliefs about photography as a revelatory technology, the popular desire for visible proofs of invisible realms, and the ways that the photographic process allows believers to ritually engage the otherworldly, the sacred, and issues of ultimate concern.
Visual Anthropology Review, 2019
In its intent to make “culture” visible through the objective depiction of specific scenes of indigenous life, ethnographic photography at the turn of the twentieth century could be understood against two other scientific uses of the camera at that time: the anatomic photographs of physical anthropologists, on the one hand, and the ghost photographs of spiritualist circles, on the other. Indeed, while capturing “culture” involved having more than still bodies appear on the picture, which implied elaborate apparatuses meant to make it happen in front of the camera lens, early ethnographers were anxious not to let too much appear either, as “culture” was supposed to manifest itself more subtly than the ghosts revealed through spirit photography. This article thus argues that photographing “culture” at the turn of the twentieth century meant getting its invisibility right; it describes some of the devices and operations early ethnographers used to make it appear objectively.
For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.
Art and Shamanism: From Cave Painting to the White Cube
Religions, 2019
Art and shamanism are often represented as timeless, universal features of human experience, with an apparently immutable relationship. Shamanism is frequently held to represent the origin of religion and shamans are characterized as the first artists, leaving their infamous mark in the cave art of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Despite a disconnect of several millennia, modern artists too, from Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent van Gogh, to Joseph Beuys and Marcus Coates, have been labelled as inspired visionaries who access the trance-like states of shamans, and these artists of the ‘white cube’ or gallery setting are cited as the inheritors of an enduring tradition of shamanic art. But critical engagement with the history of thinking on art and shamanism, drawing on discourse analysis, shows these concepts are not unchanging, timeless ‘elective affinities’; they are constructed, historically situated and contentious. In this paper, I examine how art and shamanism have been conceived and their relationship entangled from the Renaissance to the present, focussing on the interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in the first half of the twentieth century—a key moment in this trajectory—to illustrate my case.
Shamanhood and Art: Traditional and Contemporary Arts, Artists, and Shamans
Contents (chapters and authors): The shamanic-ecstatic hypothesis for the Alpine rock art of Valcomonica, Umberto Sansoni. Sensuous visions: Encountering the shamanistic rock art of the Bayan Jurek Mountains, Kazakhstan, Kenneth Lymer. Depictions in Sami rock art of the Mother Earth figure, Inga-Maria Mulk. Argimpasa - Scythia goddess, patroness of shamans, Zaur Hasanov. The bear and the plough: Shamanism in the Neolithic, Giovanni Kezich. From shamanic rituals to theatre and cultural industry: The state, shamanism and gender among the Kavalan (Taiwan), Pi-Chen Liu. Mongolian shamanism envisaged, embodied, Eva Jane Neumann Fridman. Women shamans and their portrayal in the Olonkho Sakha epic poems, Lia Zola. The poetics of healing: Shamanic rituals in Central Nepal, Dagmar Eigner. Inadvertent art. Icons, music and dance in Chepang (Nepal) and Semang-Negrito (Peninsular Malaysia) shamanism, Diana Riboli. Artistic expressions of the visual language on Sami ritual drums, Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja. The ritual art and paraphernalia of the Nepalese jhankris and Tamang bombo, Vesa Matteo Piludu. Artists as shamans: Historical review and recent theoretical model, Denita Benyshek. Perspectives on the arts of Parbati, Barbara Wilhelmi. Shamanic artistry in a French Absurdist play, Daniel A. Kister. The shamanic works of Minsalim Timergazeev and other artists of the First International Woodcarving Festival of Uvat, Carla Corradi Musi. Norval Morrisseau - Shaman-Artist, Jurgen Werner Kremer. The hand on the wall of the cave. Exploring connections between shamanism and the visual arts, Susan Michaelson. Artist as shaman, Gilah Yelin Hirsch. Edited by Elvira Eevr Djaltchinova-Malec. Published by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary, Polish Institute of World Art Studies, Warsaw, and Tako Publishing House, Toruń, Poland. This book can be ordered by mail: Polish Institute of World Art Studies: biuro@world-art.pl Tako Publishing House: tako@tako.biz.pl
Photographing the invisible - Visual anthropology and spirit possession
photum - photography and humanism, 2020
The photo project "Korean-shamanism-betwixt and between", which has been shown several times in Korea and Germany, is the result of several years of field research in close collaboration with Korean shamans of the Hwanghaedo-Tradition (North-Korea) in the area of Seoul. Contact with the spiritual world and mediation between this world and the hereafter belongs to the central tasks of each shaman. Accordingly, the photo exhibition focuses on the topic of spiritual contact and shows shamans in liminal moments of trance, ecstasy and spirit possession. The paper discusses a more experimental approach to ethnographic representation. The power of visualization seems to help where words fail and emphasizes the blurred zone between anthropology, visual arts, and the new possibilities for conducting and communicating research whilst moving across-and defying-academic borders. Furthermore, it describes the changing relation between the ethnographer and his research participants and the influence of this relationship in flux on the photographic portfolio. keywords visual anthropology, Korean shamanism, photography, research, altered states of consciousness, exhibition, spirit possession
Shamanic representations: the case of Nicholas Black Elk and the sacred vision
2007
This essay is part of a longer piece that examines the changing representations, within a wide range of texts produced over the last century, of shamans and shamanic experiences. These include ethnographical, historical, autobiographical, and literary works, which are placed carefully within their intellectual as well as generic contexts. The main focus of this work is on the representation of shamanism by Western outsiders. Therefore, this article considers the encounter between a shamanic figure and a western “outsider” in the first half of the 20th century. It goes over the representations of Nicholas Black Elk, a Lakota shaman and his relationship with the poet John G. Neihardt. This work takes on the different approaches through which shamanism has been dealt with within the discourses on Native American shamanism in general. My approach gives a way of reconceptualizing the debates over magic, religion, and rationality by fully historicizing them, and showing for instance the w...