Shamanism: A Reader

Folklore, August, 2005 by Keith Howard

Shamanism: A Reader. Edited by Graham Harvey. London: Routledge, 2003. 461 xv pp. 18.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk), 63.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-415-25330-6 (pbk), 0-415-25329-2 (hbk)

Until recently, the name of Mircea Eliade hung over all studies of shamanism. His 1951 text Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l'extase was sacrosanct, defining a tradition in which ritual specialists embarked on an ecstatic journey to the spirit realm. The tradition, Eliade told us, was no longer found in pristine form, but from roots in Siberia through diffusion over many centuries manifested itself in derivations across broad territories. Eliade's typology separated shamans from priests--the latter indulged in "plagiaristic aping" of the original--and, as has often been argued since, claimed that shamanism had no place in Africa. He promoted a model of the spiritual realm divided into seven levels. The concept of diffusionism, however, and the idea of a historical archetype discernable from distinct and different contemporary practices are increasingly distrusted. Dissenting voices question whether shamanic and priestly behaviour really can be separated; it has become relatively commonplace for ethnographers to note a continuum of, or at least an overlap between, different ritual practice, and to question terms such as "ecstasy" and "trance," or the need for ritualists to embark on spiritual journeys.

To Harvey, Eliade is no longer central. Eliade is not among the twenty-five distinguished contributors chosen to convey the reality of a very diverse and contested ritual practice. His ideas, however, are mentioned. In the introduction they appear with telling asides: "We need not follow Eliade's categorisation ... especially since it is based on his insistent fitting of evidence into a pre-existing theological and evolutionary schema" (pp. 7-8). We hear of Eliade's inability "to convincingly construct true shamans as safely archaic and principled performers ... his need to cite evidence of other, contemporary and continuing ways of being shamanic undercuts his systematisation" (p. 16). Harvey notes in an obliquely critical way that Eliade's description has been appropriated by adherents of New Age practices, and he includes essays critical of contemporary Western practices, notably Ward Churchill's "Spiritual Hucksterism: the Rise of the Plastic Medicine Men" and Paul C. Johnson's "Shamanism from Ecuador to Chicago: a Case Study in New Age Spiritual Appropriation," as well as an excerpt from Michael Harner's immensely popular and inspirational The Way of the Shaman (1980). Harner, the founder and guru of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, builds the new on the old, but Harvey cleverly juxtaposes his essay with a personal account by the Siberian Nganasans Sereptie Djarvoskin that tells how he became a shaman.

Harvey, then, intends to explore the diversity that characterises shamanism--or rather, shamanisms (following Jane Monnig Atkinson's term). In the Introduction, he rehearses the Siberian Tungus derivation of the term, and its meaning, but quickly broadens to consider how "shaman" is used in the contemporary world for many communal leaders and religious practitioners, as a valid alternative to "witch doctor, "medicine man," "magician," and more. He argues that there may be identifiable similarities between many such practitioners, and that using "shaman" as a loan word where no suitable local term exists is no different from the European adoption of Polynesian tabu and mana. The ritual practices, of course, were noted by academics, who often teased out and defined them from the accounts and fantasies of travellers and missionaries. And if "shaman" only refers to Tungus practitioners, a lot of "paper and breath has been wasted expounding and repeating irrelevancies" (p. 3).

Harvey adopts a structural-functionalist approach as he warns that concepts of indigeneity, interpretation, and meaning must be interrogated to reduce strange exoticism in a way that might reinterpret spirituality as a quest for sustenance, health, and prosperity. Spirits become "other than human persons," meta-empirical beings whom shamans relate to and control (or are controlled by). Admittedly, the reality or not of spirits has proved problematic for anthropologists and those who seek to medicalise the shamans broken condition. This reviewer, however, remains concerned about Harvey's discussion: he misses the fact that in many societies human ancestors populate this spirit realm, and argues that "if someone says there are spirits out there ... it is incumbent on them to say what such beings are like more precisely than most academics have done to date" (p. 11)--something I find difficult to achieve because my metaphors of identity seem rarely to match those of shamans I meet. This is a minor point, more than compensated for by Harvey's subsequent consideration of altered states of consciousness and of the importance of performance aspects in ritual.