Dragos Gheorghiu, Emilia Pasztor, Herman Bender, and George Nash (eds.) ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SHAMANISM: Mind-Body, Nature, and Culture (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Time and Mind, 2018
There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity.' This quotation is perhaps more familiar to followers of late-1990s counterculture than to Classical scholars, but it would have formed a fitting epigram to Ustinova's study of mania in Ancient Greece 1 .
The Body of the Shaman in the Meeting of Archaeology and Aesthetics.
Sergio Poggianella, 2019
The Body of the Shaman in the Meeting of Archaeology and Aesthetics. Sergio Poggianella In this article the Author explores the theme of Shaman practice, inspired by an exhibition at the Türr István Museum in Baja related to shamanic flight. The exhibition includes nineteenth and twentieth century costumes, drums, headgear, necklaces and other ritual objects, from a private foundation. These exhibits relate to archaeological finds dating from the period between the Bronze Age and the second half of the Middle Ages, lent by Hungarian museums. The multidisciplinary character of the exhibition raises two fundamental questions: the first regarding the continuity of shaman tradition witnessed since Palaeolithic times in the symbols and forms of cave painting, rock engravings and mobiliary art; the second concerns the effects of the shaman trance and possession that we find represented in the complex symbology of shaman artefacts, known as paraphernalia. These, in connection with individual magic practice, refer to complex cosmogony concepts of time and space, telling us tales of initiation, mythical ancestry, struggle; and of the invocation of helping and guiding spirits. The paraphernalia, as well as being works of art, are very important instruments in the performance of shaman ceremony: they become a functional part of what we can define as the spiritual body of the shaman, causing magical-symbolic object transformation from matter to spirit.
The signs of the sacred: Identifying shamans using archaeological evidence
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2009
Anthropologists have determined that shamanism is a robust cross-cultural pattern, but they still have many methodological and theoretical issues to resolve. Central to archaeological religious studies is the need to develop a general and rigorous methodology for identifying the presence and structure of shamanism. This discussion begins by discussing shamans as a polythetic class and proposes that shamans and priests as they are commonly defined do not represent dichotomous religious structures, but rather reflect two ends of a continuum. The paper then presents a methodology for identifying and studying shamanism based on cross-cultural regularities in shamanic tools (sacra) and shamanic experiences. The methodology is then applied to the Casas Grandes region and Pottery Mound, both from the North American Southwest, and indicates that shamanic ritual was likely present during the late prehistoric occupation of the region.
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.
Shamans and Shamanisms: Reflections on Anthropological Dilemmas of Modernity
2006
This paper was inspired by an invitation to participate in a seminar with an enigmatic title, "Shamanic Dilemmas of Modernity." When I sat down to write my presentation, I was forced to ask myself: are the shamans perplexed by modernity, or is it we, the anthropologists, who are perplexed by the plurality of shamanisms that are manifested today? Since my initiation in U.S. anthropology over forty years ago, the multiplicity of voices speaking about or claiming to be shamans has increased to such an extent that one could question the conceptual usefulness of the terms "shaman" and "shamanism" in the face of the process of globalization.
Cross-Culturally Exploring the Concept of Shamanism
HRAF, 2019
During the summer of 2010, while traveling from California to the Yucatan on an epic road trip to do anthropological fieldwork, I happened by chance to meet two shamans-wise men, healers, diviners, explorers of sacred realms. Later, working in rural Haiti, I met and grew to intimately know several other religious figures that I came to view as practicing a form of shamanism. In scholarly literature and the public imagination, these mysterious and mystical religious figures found across the world are often considered remnants or exemplars of archaic religious culture (Eliade 1964). Extensively exploring shamanic beliefs and practices, anthropologists have noted the existence of such religious practitioners in many cultures in Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas. Meeting these figures changed my perspective on the phenomenon of shamanism. I had initially learned from anthropological debates and texts that shamanism was a problematic, overused concept that often generalized and romanticized the archaic human past. However, after meeting shamans, getting to know them, and participating in shamanic ritual events, I found an amazing array of continuities and parallel beliefs and practices in cultures that had been separated by oceans and thousands of years of human history.
Trends in Contemporary Research on Shamanism
Numen, 2011
Recent research on the topic of shamanism is reviewed and discussed. Included are works appearing since the early 1990s in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, archaeology, cognitive sciences, ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, art history, and ethnobotany. The survey demonstrates a continued strong interest in specific ethnographic case studies focusing on communities which make use of shamanic practices. Shamanic traditions are increasingly studied within their historical and political contexts, with strong attention to issues of research ideology. New trends in the study of cultural revitalization, neoshamanism, archaeology, gender, the history of anthropology, and the cognitive study of religion are highlighted.