The Falling Sky Kopenawa, Davi; Albert, Bruce; Elliott, Nicholas ...
2023, 2023-01-31
eBook
Anthropologist Bruce Albert captures the poetic voice of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon, in this unique reading experience--a coming-of-age story, ...historical account, and shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest.
Art, shamanism, and animism are mutable, contested terms which, when brought together, present a highly charged package. Debates around these three terms continue to generate interest and strong ...opinions in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The editors recognise the urgency to explore them together in an unprecedented exercise which, to date, has only been attempted with reference to selected disciplines, periods, or regions. The contributors to this collection reignite debates around the status of ‘things’ identified as ‘art’ through the lens of theories drawn from new materialism, new animism, and multi-species and relational thinking. They are concerned with how and when art-like things may exceed conventional understandings of ‘art’ and ‘representation’ to fully articulate multiple scenarios or ‘manifestations’ in which they interface with academic discourses around animism and shamanism. The authors put in sharp focus the materiality of art-things while stressing their agentive, emotive, and performative aspects, looking beyond their appearances to what they do and who they may be or become in their dealings with diverse interlocutors. The contributors are united in their recognition that things and images are deeply entangled with how different communities, human and other-than-human, experience life, shifting attention from an obsolete concept of worldview to how reality is perceived through all the senses, in all its aspects, both tangible and intangible.
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.
Evolutionary approaches to religious representations must be grounded in a precise description of the forms of religious activity that occurred before the emergence of state societies and doctrinal ...religious organizations. These informal religious activities or "wild traditions" consist of services provided by individual specialists, with no formal training or organization, who generally specialize in palliating or preventing misfortune. The anthropological and historical record show that (a) such traditions are present in almost all documented human societies, (b) they have important common features, and (c) they reappear despite the political dominance of doctrinal organizations. The form of religious activity that humans spontaneously create, or re-create in the face of political suppression, comprises no stable doctrine, faith, or community of believers. In light of these facts, important corrections should be made to current models of the evolutionary underpinnings of religious thought and behavior, in particular, by taking into account the great importance of political coercion and the minor role of doctrines in the spread of religious concepts and practices.
This article aims to highlight the complex connection between ecology and politics within the mythological and cosmological formulation produced by the shaman Davi Koppenawa in his book The falling ...sky. Myth becomes a tool to elaborate the past but also the present. Yanomami cosmology speaks about a plural reality where every being is connected to the others. The history of Yanomami people can’t be isolated from the history of the forest and its non-human collectives and neither can be indigenous and environmental struggles. Politics and ecology become here one thing, which gains sense only within a cosmological and ontological structure: letting the native speak means letting an entire world arise and show its possibilities.
Three possibilities can occur when religion enters a society already having its own culture and traditions: acceptance, rejection, and adjustment. This study analyzed the socio-religiosity of the ...Kalang people, a minority ethnic group in Kendal, following the arrival of Islam into their lives. Highlighting how they practiced their worship and presented their identity in the majority of Muslim society, the research was focused on the socio-religious practices of the Dukun Kalang as a representation of Kalang people and unveiled her critical roles in the Kalang socio-cultural system, such as leading every ritual activity, and being a source of knowledge about Kalang teachings and other mystical information about ancestral spirits. Using the qualitative method, it was found that the Kalang shaman's religiosity model symbolized the way of religion without losing faith in indigenous culture and traditions. This spiritual adaptation model, in the perspective of symbolic interaction, can be interpreted as a form of resistance and as a strategy to maintain the cultural identity of the minority amid the threat of extinction due to the penetration of major ideologies, including mainstream religions.
In Mexico, shamans are recognized for the gift of entering a deep trance that allows them to know the origin of the diseases and conflicts that afflict people. They commonly treat patients through
...(cleansing) to extract negative elements sent by a witch or that were "collected" in places that harbor "evil winds." We present a case study of an 81-year-old Mexican shaman who noticed her gift in childhood. Electroencephalographic recordings were made while the shaman performed three activities: reading cards to diagnose a patient and answer the questions he posed;
with chicken eggs, stones, and bells to absorb adverse "things"; and the incorporation trance through which the deceased is believed to occupy the shaman's body to use it as a communication channel. Alpha activity was observed when concentrated, suggesting a hypnagogic-like state. Predominant beta and gamma oscillations were observed, suggesting a potential plastic phenomenon that modulates the assimilation of external and internal referents guiding temporal schemes for action, attention, and the integration of mnemonic, sensory, and imaginative elements. We used a neuroanthropological approach to understand shamanic trance as a biological potential of the human brain to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness linked to cultural beliefs and practices.
In popular culture, such diverse characters as occultist Aleister Crowley, Doors musician Jim Morrison, and performance artist Joseph Beuys have been called shamans. In anthropology, on the other ...hand, shamanism has associations with sorcery, witchcraft and healing, and archaeologists have suggested the meaning of prehistoric cave art lies with shamans and altered consciousness. Robert J. Wallis explores the interface between 'new' and prehistoric shamans. The book draws on interviews with a variety of practitioners, particularly contemporary pagans in Britain and north America. Wallis looks at historical and archaeological sources to explore contemporary pagan engagements with prehistoric sacred sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury, and discusses the controversial use by neo-Shamans of indigenous (particularly native American) shamanism.
List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction A Native at Home: Producing Ethnographic Fragments of Neo-Shamanisms 1. 'White-Shamans': Sources for Neo-Shamans 2. Plastic Medicine Men? Appraising the 'Great Pretenders' 3. Taliesin's Trip, Wyrd Woden: Druid and Heathen Neo-Shamans 4. 'Celtic' and 'Northern' Shamanisms? Contesting the Past 5. 'Sacred' Sites? Neo-Shamans and Prehistoric Heritage 6. Waking Neolithic Ancestors: Further Controversies and 'Reburial' 7. Invading Anthros, Thieving Archos, Wannabe Indians: Academics, Neo-Shamans and Indigenous Communities Conclusion: Neo-Shamans in Post-modernity Appendix Resolution of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Tradition Elders Circle & AIM Resolution References Index
Mesoamerican forms of shamanism have rarely been discussed in international academic debates. Through ethnographic information collected in the Sierra de Texcoco, in Mexico, what might be called ...a Nahua shamanic tradition is analyzed in light of the interlacing of relationship modes conceptually associated with hunting and agriculture. Nahua shamanism relates to a sacrificial cosmology that places predation as the first moment of a cosmic cycle of agonistic exchange, whose moment of retribution is linked to rain and agricultural fertility. The specificity of Nahua shamanism lies precisely in this articulation of logics of a hunting and agricultural nature, involved in the definition all at once of the entities at work, of the specialist himself and of the dynamics that govern the exercise of cosmic politics.
Based on a linguistic analysis of a collection of Inuktitut stories of fortuitous meetings with spirits, the notion of meeting will be examined, and its content detailed. By taking into account the ...narrative structure of the stories, as well as the morphosyntactic division of certain utterances, it will be possible to highlight what it means phenomenologically to “meet” a spirit. If the stories in the collection show that a meeting with a spirit is always characterised by a paradoxical perception, their Inuktitut versions place even more emphasis on the processual and incomplete dimension of the interaction. The morphological study of utterances extracted from these stories will make it possible to explore the idea that what characterises the stories is precisely that they recount experiences that almost took place, in the sense that, although the encounter with the spirit did not fail, there might not be any witness left to talk about it.
