The term Shaman comes from academics referring to practices of Shamans in the Tungus region of Siberia. Scholars defined it as practitioners who, as intermediaries between worlds, could use trance to communicate with spirits and heal people and as a set of techniques that anyone could use with training. Research shows that Shamanism is widespread among many indigenous peoples in many lands and across time and must be understood in a local context. So regarding Shamanism as a process rather than a structure helps to understand why it is not up to outsiders to decide who is or is not a Shaman.

Summary

What is Shamanism? And who is the Shaman? These are quite controversial questions and long-debated ones that we are going to answer in today’s video. So stay tuned if you want to find out.

Hello everyone. I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Before we start today’s video I have to make two premises. So, the first one is that, of course, the academic literature that I’m going to address in today’s video is not comprehensive of everything there is. So I strongly encourage you to do your own research and make up your own mind regarding the conceptualisation of Shamanism. The second premise is that I’m afraid I’m going to butcher a few names and terms in this video, so just check out the screen and I will put everything spelled out for you so you know how to look them up.

This video will be articulated in three sections. The first one discussing the history of the term, and how the term Shamanism came to be. The second one discussing the evolution of the use of the term and the controversy surrounding it. And the third part will be about a solution or rather a new way of understanding and conceptualising Shamanism, which is my personal take on how to interpret existing literature and how to move forward.

The first accounts of the terms Shamanism and Shaman come from Russian ethnography from the 19^th century where the terms Shaman and Shamanism were used in reference to a specific group of people from one region of Siberia, which is the Tungus region. And that is why you will find scholars pronounce it sha’manism rather than shay’manism because the term Shamanism comes from is the Tungusic term, Shaman. So Shamanism sounds somewhat closer to the origin, where the term comes from.

Mikhailovskii says that the term Shaman is found among the Tunguses, the Buryats, and the Yakuts. Viktor Mikhailovskii uses the word Shaman in reference to a person who is the intermediary between the human and the spirit world. He says that the term is found and used amongst the Tunguses and, although the Buryats and the Yakuts used the term, they also had their own terms for their Shamans. So the term itself is the only term used by the Tunguses to refer to their “Shamans”.

The most influential definition of Shamanism comes from Mircea Eliade. Mircea Eliade is the one who said that Shamanism is the mastery of the techniques of ecstasy. So the Shaman is the person who is able to enter an altered state of consciousness and since Mircea Eliade describes this as a set of techniques, this set the stage for many scholars and many practitioners to think and believe that Shamanism is not a religion but a set of techniques that can be practised alongside other, we may say any other, religious belief.

So, basically, the term Shamanism was invented by Western scholars and since there’s been a long debate regarding what are the limits of Shamanism – so what can fall under the umbrella of Shamanism and what cannot? I find it interesting that the historian Ronald Hutton wrote that the only common factor in the study of Shamanism is Western scholarship. For it created the term and produced the studies that extended its meaning, while also generating interest in the topic within the practising communities. And in the process, it has made the term into a label with absolutely no agreed-on meaning. So Hutton concludes that, in this regard, the Ivory Tower has become the Tower of Babel because, in reality, every, so-called, Shamanic tradition, across the world, has their own terms for their Shamans, for these people who enter in contact with the spirit worlds and take care of the community or heal people. So the issue that has arisen is that the fact that more and more local traditional Shamans have been using the word, overlapping the local term, has created the illusion, somehow, that there is a consistent, coherent movement which is just one consistent thing.

Having such mailable and undefined semantics, Shamanism has been understood in a different way, depending on the time and age it was being absorbed into. From the Enlightenment view of the Shaman as a charlatan, it is the positivist belief that Shamanism represented an archaic religious form belonging to “primitive peoples”. The term has been constantly shaped and reshaped by the times and cultures that adopted it. For example, in the twentieth century, psychopathological interpretations emerged, deeming the Shamanic experience a form of illness, specifically hysteria or epilepsy. And that is why Eliade’s work represented a turning point in the understanding of Shamanism for, basically, he turned the Shaman into a mystical figure who is able to create a contact with the spirit world and gain powers from it.

So, the aforementioned issues beg the question; is there really anything that all the different forms of Shamanism have in common? Does Shamanism have common traits across the different manifestations that we find? Margaret Stutley summarises the main traits that we find across the different forms of Shamanism as follows.

The first one is the belief in the existence of a world of spirits, with which the Shaman is in contact and he’s able to cooperate with these spirits to help and benefit the community.

The second trait would be the use of trance, so entering an altered state of consciousness – often by ecstatic singing, drumming, or dancing, and that is when the Shaman’s spirit exits his body or her body and enters the spirit world.

The third trait is that the Shaman cures illnesses, especially those of a psychosomatic nature. And also the Shaman helps members of the community to overcome various issues that they might encounter. Another aspect we find across different forms of Shamanism is Animism. Which is basically the belief that everything in the world has a spirit and that the world is populated by, as Graham Harvey calls them, “other than human people’ and the Shaman is able to establish relationships with these other than human people that populate, basically, everything that exists; things, objects, animals, every single thing in nature and in the reality that the Shaman experiences. So even an illness, for example, would have a spirit.

So, how can we understand Shamanism then? Since we have all these various interpretations of what it is and what are the main traits of Shamanism. I find it very interesting what Cacopardo wrote, which is; that, in order to understand Shamanism, we should make the same distinction that anthropologists make between structure and process and we should understand Shamanism as a process rather than a structure. As something that has a certain fluidity for its own nature.

I’ve personally developed a new approach to the understanding of Shamanism which is twofold basically. So I adopt a combination of two methodologies.

The first one is adopting a local, specific understanding and this comes, a bit, from the idea of Provincializing God by Michael Lambeck and the idea of a deictic approach by Bettina Schmidt. Bettina Schmidt describes DEIXIS as basically, a linguistic term that highlights that the problem, that the meaning of certain words is strongly dependent on their context. So there are certain words that don’t have an inherent meaning but they only acquire a meaning when they are attached to a specific context and ‘here’ and ‘there’ are examples of this because, of course, here doesn’t make any sense unless you relate it to a place. And also, Bettina Schmidt talks about the deictic approach, when it comes to the conceptualisation of spirit possession. I argue that it might actually be very interesting for the understanding of Shamanism as well. So, since Shamanism has been around for many, many years – for centuries and has been practised around the world, and the term itself, the concept of Shamanism, only arose because Western scholarship created it – creating the illusion that there is this consistent movement across the world, then the issue of whether you fit into the category of Shamanism was born. But actually, Shamanism was there before this concept.

I argue that Shamanism is to be understood as a deictic term, as a term that only gains meaning in reference to the context it’s applied to. And second I think that adopting discourse analysis would really benefit the understanding of Shamanism, especially when studying it as an anthropologist or an ethnographer who goes there and does fieldwork with people, as I do in my research. Discourse analysis comes from Foucault and challenges the idea that words are merely descriptive, to say that language actually shapes the world and the views that we have of it. So what does it mean to understand Shamanism using discourse analysis? It means that Shamanism becomes an empty signifier in the sense that it is historically, socially, and culturally negotiated over and over, depending on the context and how the people view it, understand it, and talk about it.

So, what I think after three years of research. Field research and, of course, academic scholarship on the topic is that, although there are still controversies and misunderstandings, or people disagreeing on the meaning of Shamanism and what constitutes Shamanism and what doesn’t constitute Shamanism. I think that Shamanism, as a term, is still very useful because you do find people, all around the world, who use the term Shamanism and understand what it means – that if you are practising Shamanism you are believing in a world of spirits, you are entering this spirit-world, whether you call it non-ordinary reality or whether you call it the Shamanic state of consciousness. So there may be different ways of perceiving it but there is still this belief that you are entering a different realm of reality or a different state of consciousness that allows you to speak and enter in contact with these spirits and from this contact you gain power and knowledge, as they say, in different forms of neo-Shamanism, for example.

We will talk about neo-Shamanism in a future video by the way.

So, I think it is not really up to the scholars to decide what is Shamanism and who is really a Shaman as opposed to someone who is not really a Shaman. If a person is using the word Shaman and referring to their practice as Shamanism, I believe that the role of the scholar is to understand what kind of reality and what kind of understanding they are constructing behind the word Shaman and Shamanism. What is the meaning that they associate with that word and what is the reality the word is creating in their own lives?

So, while you have these two main tendencies; so one that says only Siberians and Tunguses can be considered Shamans, you also have the other tendency that expands the term without any boundaries of any sort. I would argue that there might be a way of narrowing down the use of the term which needs to be context-sensitive and discourse-led. Basically, the role of the scholar, in this sense, is not really to tell the practitioner you are a Shaman or you are not a Shaman but rather to identify the patterns that emerge from the community that uses the term in their narratives – how those terms are used and how they become meaningful in the narratives that the community creates.

Because despite how difficult it is to define Shamanism the reality of its existence is there and it is a movement that is becoming increasingly popular. It certainly is in Italy where my fieldwork is based. But I can see from the experiences of my colleagues around the world that it is not just in Italy. So it is an increasingly popular practice and more and more people are using this term and debating this term.

What really matters is the semantic patterns, the patterns of meaning that are created within one specific community within a specific place, and how these patterns of meaning enter the narratives whereby the practitioners understand what Shamanism is. I hope that makes sense.

So more interesting questions would be; what are the shared premises underlying the different narratives the practitioners create around the word shamanism? And what is the reality created by these competing, yet similar narratives? Because although there are people who are fighting over what Shamanism, or true Shamanism, or real Shamanism is. When they are talking about Shamanism they are still understanding each other. So what are the underlying premises to this common understanding which goes beyond the conflicting ideas over what Shamanism is?

So hoped you enjoyed this brief overview of what Shamanism is and what is a Shaman. And let me know what you think about my methodological solution to, maybe, better understand Shamanism in the contemporary world.

So let me know what you think in the comment section down below. And if you have any questions or doubts do leave them and I will gladly answer your questions. So, if you liked this video smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, and stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

REFERENCES

Bowie, F. (2006) The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction, 2 edition., Malden, MA ; Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.

Cacopardo, A. S. (2009) ‘La trance sciamanica: esperienza estatica o performance rituale?’, in Scalera McClintock, G. and Conforti, R. (eds), La mente e l’estasi, Atti del convegno, Salerno, Rubbettino – Università degli Studi di Salerno, pp. 29–44 ).

Eliade, M. (1972) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (trans. W. R. Trask), Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Harvey, G. (2010) ‘Animism rather than Shamanism: New Approaches to what Shamans do (for other animists)’, in Schmidt, B. E. and Huskinson, L. (eds), Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 16–34.

Harvey, G. and Wallis, R. J. (2015) Historical Dictionary of Shamanism, Rowman & Littlefield. Hutton, R. (2006) ‘Shamanism: Mapping the Boundaries’, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 209–213.

Mikhailovskii, V. M. and Wardrop, O. (1895) Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, Being the Second Part of ‘Shamanstvo’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 24.

Owen, S. (2017) ‘What is Shamanism?’ In A.W. Hughes & R.T. McCutcheon (eds) Religion in Five Minutes (London; Oakville, CT: Equinox), 207-11.

Potter, J. and Edwards, D. (1996) ‘Discourse Analysis’, in Banyard, P. and Grayson, A. (eds), Introducing Psychological Research: Sixty Studies that Shape Psychology, London, Macmillan Education UK, pp. 419–425.

Schmidt, B. E. (2016) Spirits and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience, Bloomsbury Publishing.

Stutley, M. (2002) Shamanism: An Introduction, London ; New York, Routledge. Taira, T. (2013) ‘Making space for discursive study in religious studies’, Religion, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 26–45.

Tedeschi, E. (2017) ‘Omatakuyassi: la metànoia transculturale’, Democrazia e Sicurezza – Democracy and Security Review, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 365–403.

Willerslev, R. (2007) Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, 1 edition., Berkeley, University of California Press.