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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.
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.
2 Acknowledgements I owe many people a lot of thanks for all their support and guidance. But I am particularly grateful for the constant good humor, good advice and good friendship from my mate Zoe. I am thankful for the love and confidence lavished upon me by soul mate, Nick. However, I can honestly say that this paper would never have seen the light of day if not for the steady vigilance, patience and rapier wit of Professor Peter J. Ucko. Last but not least, let me not forget all the good people at Rose's Wine for their sturdy supply of kindness and liquid courage.
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.
Archaeological Approaches to Shamanism. Mind-Body, Nature, and Culture
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.
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.
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.
Jean Clottes, Chauvet and Paleolithic Shamanism
Medium.com, 2019
Working on Jean Clottes is a great pleasure because of his personal views on Paleolithic art in Sout-West Europe (France, Spain, and Portugal mainly) and in this book written and published after forty years of work in the field Jean Clottes tries to summarize his own life in archaeology. Unluckily he does not open up the necessary doors that could bring in what has been done since the year 2000, which he mostly ignores because he has not been in the field then and he moved in his life too much as an archaeological tourist in many sites all over the world that all have cave art or rock art, including some that have not been yet dated like Baja California in Mexico. We would criticize students if they did that under our guidance because that is not a good method. Things were different before and after the peak of the glaciation, just for one remark. So projecting back retrospectively present time shamanism in Southern Africa onto this Paleolithic art, before the peak and after the peak of teh Ice Age equally is very debatable.