Sacred femininity and authority: Gender stratification of neoshamanic groups (original) (raw)
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With an increasing interest in shamanism in western societies during the last decades the character of the shaman was–with an act of identifying–implanted into the cultural perspective of many subcultures. Due to the widespread psychologization of shamanism an overgeneralized and oversimplified view of traditional shamanism gives a matrix which creates the different popular conceptualizations of the figure of the shaman. In this paper, four areas explicitly referring to the figure of the shaman are described, demonstrating the fascination it holds and the manifold possibilities of interpretation. The four areas are: neoshamanism, the ‘urban shaman’ as cultural critic and rebel, technoshamanism/cybershamanism, and the field of performing and visual arts. Looking at these areas one can find ten elements of the shaman myth which form the popular image of shamanism in western societies and which constitute the attractiveness and the fascination of the figure of the shaman. Referring to some philosophical concepts of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers the figure of the shaman can be understood as a powerful cipher of transcendence.
Genealogies of Shamanism Struggles for Power, Charisma and Authority
Proefschrit ter verkrijging van het doctoraat in de Godgeleerdheid en Godsdienstwetenschap aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen op gezag van de Rector Magniicus, dr. E. Sterken, in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 9 juni 2011 om 11:00 uur door Jeroen Wim Boekhoven geboren op
Complexity and possession: Gender and social structure in the variability of shamanic traits
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2018
Singh deploys cultural evolution to explain recurrent features of shamanistic trance forms but fails to substantively address important distinctions between these forms. Possession trance (versus trance without possession) is disproportionately female dominated and found in complex societies. The effects of cultural conditions on shamanism thus extend beyond its presence or absence and are vital for modeling its professionalization and spread.
‘Shamanism’ is a problematic and contested concept. After Westerners first heard the term in Siberia at the end of the seventeenth century, it rapidly acquired a remarkable range of meanings in different contexts. Theologians saw shamans as sidekicks of the devil, enlightenment thinkers considered them as mentally ill or retarded. From the eighteenth century onwards, the Romantic image of the shaman as an artistically gifted mystic became fashionable, whereas nineteenth-century folklorists, in turn, used the term ‘shamanism’ in nationalist quests for the essence of the Volksgeist of their nation. Twentieth-century psychologists identified shamans both as schizophrenics and as primal therapists. During the 1960s shamans came to be perceived as psychonauts who used hallucinogens to gain access to the divine essence of life. During the 1970s an American anthropologist created workshops that, he claimed, were based on universal shamanic principles and practices. Through so-called archaic techniques his students could get in touch with the healing forces of nature. Contemporary forms of shamanism present themselves as countercultural, but a historical-sociological interpretation suggests that it is no coincidence that shamanism especially gained popularity at the time that neoliberal capitalism became dominant. Neoliberalisation disempowered people over their working lives and forced them to exert self-authority and make choices in their lives. Contemporary shamanic practices are also focused on self-authority, can be consumed in a free market and offer opportunities for empowerment. Instead of changing society, however, contemporary Western shamanism contributes to structure the structures it claims to resist.
Charismatic women have played significant roles as religious leaders in America. The spiritual experiences and visions of Ann Lee (d. 1784) and her ecstatic modes of worship attracted a following, ultimately resulting in the ordered Shaker communities of celibate men and women that flourished in the early nineteenth century. Later in the nineteenth century, American women became famous as trance speakers and mediums after the Fox sisters' claims of communication with the dead sparked interest in Spiritualism. Mary Baker Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, based on her healing experience entailing her immediate perception of the truth contained in the gospels. The mysterious Russian noblewoman, Madame Helena Blavatsky, claimed to receive teachings directly from hidden Masters of the Wisdom, and these teachings became the primary scriptures of the Theosophical movement. In contemporary America, white Pentecostal women cite God's calling to justify their itinerant preaching or pastoral ministry. Due to their direct contact with the Holy Spirit and with their spiritual fore mothers, African American women in New Orleans are ordained as ministers, bishops, and archbishops in the Spiritual churches there. The extraordinary nature of the leadership of all these women suggests that there is a need for women's religious leadership to be sanctioned by charisma, the direct experience of the sacred. But is it possible for women to go beyond charismatic legitimation of religious authority, and if so, how will that take place?
unpublished paper presented in 2008, 2008
Charismatic shamans who enter into ecstatic trance and commune with spirits attain their power because of their emergent public capacity to enter the ecstatic dissolution of trance, commune with spirits, and thereby express and conquer the most fearsome human reality: the disintegration of the self in insanity and death. Where society is small, closely knit, personalistic, and egalitarian, these shamanic figures are revered as healers and spiritual leaders. But even under these circumstances, they are also always viewed with a degree of fear, since those who can cure can also kill. The balance shifts from positive to negative when charismatic figures and movements occur within highly rationalized social configurations that are structurally hostile to immersion in immediate communal transcendent experience. It is not charisma itself, but the cultural, institutional, and ideological context in which it occurs, that determines the way it will be experienced, expressed, and evaluated. In more complex societies, the shaman is a demon to those in the mainstream, but beloved by the alienated disciples who wish to obliterate the old order. It is no surprise that today, in our complex society, the popular notion of charisma, as introduced by Weber, is used to explain the allure of monsters.
Religion, brain and behavior, 2020
Empirical cross-cultural research provides a typology of magico-religious practitioners and identifies their relations to social complexity, their selection-function relationships, and reveals their biosocial bases. Different practitioner types and configurations are associated with specific ecological and political dynamics that indicate a cultural evolutionary development. Relations between practitioners' selection processes and professional activities reveal three fundamental structures of religions: (1) selection and training involving alterations of consciousness used for healing, manifested in Shamans and other shamanistic healers; (2) social inheritance of leadership roles providing a hierarchical political organization of agricultural societies, manifested in Priests; and (3) attribution of a role involving inherently evil activities, and manifested in the Sorcerer/Witch. Shamans were transformed with foraging loss, agricultural intensification, warfare, and political integration into Healers and Mediums. Priests are predicted by agriculture and political integration beyond the local community, representing the emergence of a new stratum of magico-religious practice. Priests are also responsible for political and social conditions that significantly predict the presence of the Sorcerer/Witch. These findings suggest three distinctive biosocial structures of magico-religious activity related to alterations of consciousness and endogenous healing processes; hierarchically integrated social organization; and social persecution and incorporation.
Gendered and genderless constructions of religious identity in a Charismatic community of practice
Gender and Language, 2019
A plethora of studies that account for the differential use of language by men and women have explained why such differences exist from the standpoint of Deficit, Dominance and Difference models, emphasising male and female dichotomy or male domination over women. The present study aims at filling a gap in language and gender research by underpinning its analysis with a social constructionist paradigm which views language and its interaction with the community of practice (CofP) as the conduits in shaping identity and by locating the context of the study inside a religious CofP. Our analyses indicated that the members of a Charismatic religious community share common selfpresentation strategies when constructing their identities, rejecting the dualism that distinguishes male and female language. Both males and females in our study have the same tendencies in using Supplication, Intimidation, Admitting Mistakes, Apology and Excuse in the narration of their Old life and Exemplification and Burnishing in the characterisation of their New life. However, the same respondents also exhibited differential use of tactics that also bolster previous findings on gender order. The interlocking relations of language, identity
Conflicting perspectives on shamans and shamanism: Points and counterpoints.
American Psychologist, 2002
Shamans' communities grant them privileged status to attend to those groups' psychological and spiritual needs. Shamans claim to modify their attentional states and engage in activities that enable them to access information not ordinarily attainable by members of the social group that has granted them shamanic status. Western perspectives on shamanism have changed and clashed over the centuries; this paper presents points and counterpoints regarding what might be termed the demonic model, the charlatan model, the schizophrenia model, the soul flight model, the decadent and crude technology model, and the deconstructionist model. Western interpretations of shamanism often reveal more about the observer than they do about the observed. Conflicting Perspectives on Shamans 3