The article examines various options that scholars have explored in their efforts to construct a history of shamanism. Recognizing Eliade's promise that such a history lies in the near future, the ...article then explores the important ways in which this has been undertaken. It specifies four such ways: with prehistoric rock art, the origins of cultural myths, memory studies, and movements of cultural resistance. Ultimately resisting each of these four options while paying particular attention to the case of early Chinese shamanism, its concluding sections recognize the work of Mircea Eliade and Roberte Hamayon as providing two alternative pathways that might lead into possible constructions of this history, and it then attempts to locate a third way between them.
The ayahuasca shamanic ritual has been adopted, adapted, and reinvented in urban and cosmopolitan contexts in different countries of the world, a process largely influenced by New Age-type beliefs ...and practices. One of the local versions of this phenomenon is known in Colombia as tomas de yaje, where nonindigenous, urban middle and upper classes seek traditional alterity and spiritual inspiration. The empirical research that gave rise to this article is mainly based on ethnographic observations and interviews, focusing on the ways in which this form of shamanism is interpreted and, more specifically, inquiring about the uses and meanings of the concept of spirituality in the narratives of the people who attend these ayahuasca rituals. The results are discussed in the light of theories on subjectivities and religiosities in modernity, a theoretical framework that contributes to a better understanding of the sociocultural foundations and the implications of this spiritualization of shamanism. The article concludes that the "subjective turn" of late modernity is a key factor in understanding the ritual's recent appraisal, paradoxically, as a vehicle for the diffusion of individualistic values.
La figura del Sacrificador en la iconografía tiahuanacota ha sido debatida desde hace casi un siglo, y todavía persisten dudas acerca de su identidad y naturaleza. En este trabajo damos a conocer los ...resultados de una investigación en torno a este personaje, cuyo corpus de imágenes entrega datos sobre la existencia de un conjunto de atributos estables y connotativos de su especial iconografía. Además de la cabeza cortada y el hacha que el Sacrificador sostiene en las manos, proponemos otros elementos que integran dicho conjunto, como la túnica cuatripartita, la faja, el colgante de codo, la postura corporal y la plataforma escalonada. Dichos rasgos lo caracterizarían como agente u oficiante del rito chamánico, en tanto vehículo de comunicación con las deidades. Aunque algunos de los atributos mencionados fueron ya abordados en estudios previos, otros derivan de nuestro propio análisis. El presente trabajo permite articular unos y otros en un conjunto específico, cuestión no realizada hasta hoy, y proponer un significado para este personaje ubicuo de la iconografía centro-sur andina como correlato visual del chamán.
ABSTRACT – Anthropophagic-Perspectivistic Poetics for a Re-Vision of the Brazilian Theater: the scene of origin – This text presents a plan of construction of a Poetics, whose purpose is to effect a ...Re-Vision, in five key moments, of the Brazilian Theater. To do this, we seek to establish a scene of origin, outlined after the meeting – impregnated with attraction and repulsion – that takes place in Brazil, from the sixteenth century, between Amerindian and European civilizations. Two metaphysics and forms of expression thus form the intensive and pantheatrical basis of a Poetics that projects a notion of Brazilian theater in a constant state of struggles of perspectives, symbolized, in its origins, by two anthropophagic mouths interdevouring: the mercantilist Christian Eucharist and the Amerindian cosmopolitical.
Using archival material and oral testimony collected during workshops in Nunavut between 1996 and 2008, Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten provide a nuanced look at Inuit religion, offering a strong ...counter narrative to the idea that traditional Inuit culture declined post-contact. They show that setting up a dichotomy between a past identified with traditional culture and a present involving Christianity obscures the continuity and dynamics of Inuit society, which has long borrowed and adapted "outside" elements. They argue that both Shamanism and Christianity are continually changing in the Arctic and ideas of transformation and transition are necessary to understand both how the ideology of a hunting society shaped Inuit Christian cosmology and how Christianity changed Inuit shamanic traditions.
This article explores how a healer (iñapakaita), Afonso Fontes, a Baniwa man of the Hoohodene clan, searches for a shamanic incantation against an unknown disease: Covid-19. The iñapakaita's quest is ...understood to be inventive, in terms of Wagnerian dialectics (2010), because it derives from his knowledge of the cosmos, of mythical and actual worlds, of non-human and human, and of indigenous and non-indigenous. The analysis of the verbal formulas contained in Afonso's incantation against the coronavirus describes their compositional character, making explicit the perspectives from which they are constituted, as well as the shamanic agency in reordering the cosmos. Finally, starting from a shamanic critique, the article speculates on the emergence of illnesses as connected to other collapses and associated with the way of life of non-indigenous people in the Anthropocene.
This article put together information about the formation of the warao self-care practices, exposing the centrality of shamanism in the processes of health and illness. The reflection is built from ...the context of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic in indigenous shelters in Manaus (Amazonas), between March and December of 2020. These actions not only systematically disregarded shamanism and native theories, but also produced strong control over the presence of these indigenous people in the city. Through a critical analysis of the situation in the Amazonian capital, it reflects on the need for adaptation in health care for the Warao in Brazil and, by extension, for other indigenous people, especially those residing in urban contexts. The data presented were obtained through fieldwork with an ethnographic perspective, in addition to documentary and bibliographical research.
This paper presents a case study of the first shamanic organization in China and argues that organizational shamanism in Northeast China is characterized by the double identities of the shaman and ...the dualistic attitudes of the national authorities. The analyses in this paper reveal how the shamanic organization created a modernized and globalized space for traditional shamans and specialists to connect with the outside world, enabling them to gain empowerment, legitimacy, and agency. Chinese authorities hold dualistic attitudes towards shamanism: the positive attitude of seeing shamanism as part of cultural heritage has always been coupled with the negative attitude of seeing shamanism as superstition. The studies in this paper demonstrate that organizational shamanism in Northeast China has played a crucial role in negotiating with political authorities and linking local traditions with global discourse. In this sense, the traditional eco-cosmological way of maintaining relationships with natural forces and nonhuman beings has been irrevocably transformed into a cosmopolitical form for the shaman, where the animistic world engages with the outside world, global currency, and political forces.
“Sámi Religion: Religious Identities, Practices, and Dynamics” explores expressions of ‘’Sámi religion’’ in contemporary cultures, the role it plays in identity politics and heritagization processes, ...and the ways the past and present are entangled. In recent years, attitudes towards ‘’Sámi religion’’ have changed both within religious, cultural, political, and educational contexts as a consequence of what can be called the ‘’Indigenous turn’’. Contemporary, indigenous religion is approached as a something that adds value by a range of diverse actors and for a variety of reasons. In this Special Issue, we take account of emic categories and connections, focusing on which notions of ‘’Sámi religion’’ are used today by religious entrepreneurs and others who share and promote these types of spiritual beliefs, and how Sámi religion is taking shape on a plenitude of arenas in contemporary society.
In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are caused by malicious group mates using magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs ...and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly created Mystical Harm Survey, I show that several conceptions of malicious mystical practitioners, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts), recur around the world. I argue that these beliefs develop from three cultural selective processes: a selection for intuitive magic, a selection for plausible explanations of impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism, conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics—but around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and feared witch. I use the tripartite theory to explain the forms of beliefs in mystical harm and outline 10 predictions for how shifting conditions should affect those conceptions. Societally corrosive beliefs can persist when they are intuitively appealing or they serve some believers’ agendas.
