Astronauts of Inner Space Identifying Shamanism in Rock Art and Psychobiology Institute of Archaeology ! 2 Acknowledgements (original) (raw)
Related papers
Add shamans and stir? A critical review of the shamanism model of forager rock art production
The "shamanism" or "neurpsychological" model proposed by Lewis-Williams and colleagues has had a powerful impact on rock art research, and has signiWcantly added to our knowledge of past foragers lifeways in southern Africa and elsewhere in the world. However, this model is primarily based on the view of shamanism as a universal and unvarying characteristic of foragers over space and time. This paper raises both theoretical and empirical problems with this view. The paper examines the relationship between the speciWc social roles and practices of shamanism and the overarching cosmological structures on which they are based in both southern Africa and Northern Eurasia. In both cases, the paper argues that many cosmological beliefs are highly persistent and durable, extending into prehistory, while the speciWc practices and roles of shamans are variable, changing to meet the immediate and local needs of their communities. This suggests that rock art is easier to relate to the overarching cosmological dispositions of the people that produced it and the paper closes by suggesting some theoretical and methodological alternatives recognizing this fact.
In this article I agree with those who see shamanism as a religious technique rather than a type of religion. As a religious technique the similarities in shamanic religious practices all over the world " can be seen as deriving from the ways in which the human nervous system behaves in altered states" (Clottes – Lewis-Williams 1998: 19). However, I am highly suspicious of anthropological generalisations linking this technique with a particular kind of ritual specialist and a specific cosmological understanding. I propose that the inflexibility of the typological method in evolutionary and culture-historical research led to a lack of awareness of the sheer diversity of religions and religious practices within hunter-gatherers and early fanning communities. Only recently has this inflexibility been challenged, but there is still a lot of critical thinking to be done on the accuracy of the basis of the anthropological study of religion. Those who work on past religious are, therefore, poorly equipped to undertake studies on prehistoric religious beliefs, and are even less prepared—I would say that we are not prepared at all—to be able to specify the type of religion the prehistoric groups we are studying had. The lack of ethnographic sources is an insuperable impediment. The likelihood of the neuropsychological method on its own providing a competent reading of prehistoric art. A comparison between Levantine and South African art has shown how the lack of ethnographic sources for the former prevents us from being sure that the shamanic interpretation fits better than alternative readings. On its own the neuropsychological method is not accurate enough either to distinguish between real cntoptics and abstract motifs which happen to resemble the visions people see in the first stage of altered state of consciousness. Neither can it be deployed to decide whether figurative images such as composite animal-human motifs represent hallucinations of third stage of trance or just someone in a festival attire. Notwithstanding my critique, I do not discount that communities who produced the Levantine paintings used trance as a religious technique. It is a possibility that, unfortunately, with the available data archaeologists are not in the position to either confirm or deny. A claim for a best-fit explanation regarding the shamanic hypothesis for Levantine art simply cannot be justified. Nor is it, I believe, in the case of Upper Palaeolithic art.
Rock Art, Shamanism and the Ontological Turn
The first ontological turn in archaeology occurred in rock art research, in the 1980s. This involved the recognition that ethnographic commentary on the making and meaning of the art could only be understand in emic turns, with an acknowledgement of the different epistemologies and ontologies of the cultures under investigation. The implementation of this methodological change has resulted in detailed understandings of the origins and symbolism of shamanistic rock art using ethnographic information that, previously, had been considered incomprehensible. Despite this advance, this shamanistic research has received little if any recognition for its role in this innovation. I contend that this has occurred because of the parallel rise of neoliberal archaeology, which emphasizes the significance of individual agency and action in bottom-up social processes, and derides concern with social and cultural structures, such as shamanism, with their implied top-down processes. I discuss the implications of neoliberal archaeology, including its origins in right-wing political-economic theory and its essentialist model of human social relations. I argue that the political, economic and social agendas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are inappropriate for contemporary prehistoric archaeology, despite how widely they are now considered the commonsense, natural order of things. I admit experiencing surprise if not confusion when I read a decade ago that archaeological theory was then-experiencing an "ontological turn." This emphasized the importance of relational theories of being in interpretations of non-western prehistory, in opposition to a (static) Western binary view of existence which putatively had driven previous archaeological interpretation. How could this be new? I at first thought, recognizing that the last three decades of research on shamanism and rock art were exactly predicated on acknowledging the ontological distinctions in the groups we studied. But once this surprise wore off a larger question arose: why were many archaeological theorists incapable of seeing how this earlier research had foreshadowed their own? A facile reply would be poor scholarship on the part of the (recent) proponents of this theoretical movement. A kinder interpretation might suggest that rock art research was always marginalized in archaeology and thus simply has been overlooked. But I believe that significant
2017
This book discusses both ancient and modern shamanism, demonstrating its longevity and spatial distribution, and is divided into eleven thought-provoking chapters that are organised into three sections: mind-body, nature, and culture. It discusses the clear associations with this sometimes little-understood ritualised practice, and asks what shamanism is and if tangible evidence can be extracted from a largely fragmentary archaeological record. The book offers a novel portrayal of the material culture of shamanism by collating carefully selected studies by specialists from three different continents, promoting a series of new perspectives on this idiosyncratic and sometimes intangible phenomenon.
Rock Arts, Shamans, and Grand Theories (2017), Oxford Handbooks Online
The shamanistic or neuropsychological model for interpreting rock arts generally, and hunter-gatherer rock arts in particular, emerged in South African rock art research. It has since been applied more widely, notably in efforts to explain the origins of art. The model has evolved over three decades, adapting to critiques and incorporating new ideas and theoretical advances. This chapter is concerned with its development, from its structural-semiotic origins to an account that attempts to incorporate history, diversity and the temporality of human action. The model’s adequacy as an account of visual production and whether it has escaped from the generalizations of grand theorizing are also considered. Keywords: rock arts, shamanism, San, /Xam, ethnographic analogy, neuropsychology, South Africa, art history, phenomenology
« Shamanism and proto-consciousness » (2015)
in René Lebrun, Julien De Vos et É. Van Quickelberghe (éds), Deus Unicus. Actes du colloque « Aux origines du monothéisme et du scepticisme religieux » organisé à Louvain-la-Neuve les 7 et 8 juin 2013 par le Centre d’histoire des Religions Cardinal Julien Ries [Cardinalis Julien Ries et Pierre Bordreuil in memoriam], Turnhout, Brepols, coll. Homo Religiosus série II, 14, 2015, pp. 247-260 The paper introduces to the stakes of the shamanic interpretation of the Paleolithic parietal art in five steps: first, it sketches the history of the discovery of Paleolithic cave paintings; second it briefly reviews the scientific vulgate on the matter; then the potentialities of ethnological comparativism are displayed and the overlapping existing between shamanism lato sensu and the homo religiosus ethos perused. In conclusion, we examine WILLIAM JAMES and A. N. WHITEHEAD respective import.
Journal of Arctic Studies , 2021
The essay examines the "shamanic rereading" of ancient and modern rock art（petroglyphs). Analyzing writings that deal with rock art of Southern Africa and Native America，the author shows how surrounding intellectual fashions affected scholarly approaches to the interpretation of ancient and modern petroglyphs. Originally scholars and writers viewed rock art from a materialistic viewpoint as a manifestation of hunting magic. Yet，since the 1980s—1990s, the petroglyphs have been increasingly reinterpreted in spiritual terms. The author argues that such change of perspective was informed by the decline of positivism in humanities and social sciences, the ascent of post-modernism，and the emergence of the large New Age thought collective and print media in the 1970s—1990s. To better root themselves in history，the latter widely appropriated archaeology for their spiritual practices（e.g. whistling bottles, various stone age figurines), mainstreaming the "ancient wisdom” into the general culture. Many archaeologists began to cast rock art as a manifestation of shamanic practices and related spiritual experiences. Particularly，the essay analyzes the scholarship of those authors who spearheaded a so-called entoptic interpretation (David Lewis-Williams, Jean Clottes, and David Whitely）that spiritualized rock art. Lastly, the author shows how such scholarly reassessment trickled down into popular media and interpretive tourist sites.