But is Shaman a Tungus word or is it now an English (or French, German, Hungarian or Russian) word? Are the only real Shamans those found among Tungus speakers? Is what Tungus speakers mean when they say Shaman necessarily definitive? Or has the word now become part of a new vocabulary where it carries additional associations and implications?

Graham Harvey

Can Westerners be Shamans? Let’s try and answer this question in this video.

Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Today we will talk about whether Westerners can be Shamans or not so first of all I’d like to premise that if you haven’t watched my video on “What is Shamanism” I would highly suggest you to watch that one first because otherwise some of the things that I’m going to talk about in this video would not be as clear.

As I mentioned in that video, the term Shaman has undergone and is still undergoing an evolution in its meaning and how the term is applied, basically. It has been long debated whether the term Shaman can only be used by the Tungusic speakers or whether it can be applied to other geographical areas. As I have addressed in the previous video at length, the term Shaman was created by Western scholars and is still being applied to previously existing terms. So every indigenous people or every area where Shamanism is present, and usually have their own terms for their Shamans. The term Shaman itself works by superimposition. So there are a lot of terms to refer to the Shaman from that area and the term Shaman is a more universally and broadly understood term so it is basically useful for people, who already have their own local native terms, to adopt the label Shaman in order for outsiders to understand what they are doing.

When it comes to Western Shamanisms, which are forms of transcultural Shamanism, which means the Shamanisms which have been imported from indigenous traditions and reinterpreted according to Western categories and needs. Neoshamanism and Core Shamanism, which is the tradition founded by Michael Harner, on which we will have a separate video. They usually have a reverence towards indigenous traditions, especially the indigenous traditions from which they have imported their practices and reinterpreted them. They tend not to use the term Shaman to refer to themselves out of respect for the indigenous peoples who, according to them, have more of a right on the use of that term. They tend to call themselves Practitioners of Shamanism rather than Shamans themselves and in most cases, they say that it is not up to the person to say they are a Shaman but rather up to the people that they are helping. So if somebody has been helped by you and healed by you, they may refer to you as a Shaman but it wouldn’t be appropriate to refer to yourself as a Shaman. It is something that other people have to tell you and acknowledge of you rather than you self-appointing yourself as a Shaman.

So this may beg the question can Westerners be Shamans really? And it is, actually, a very interesting question because as we have seen in the previous video on what is Shamanism? The term Shaman itself was created by Western scholars and it works by superimposition. So since the term Shaman works by superimposition and there is no one geographical area that owns the rights to this specific term, why are we asking whether Westerners can be Shamans? I think that the answer to this question is we found in the idea of exoticism taking its root in 18th-century Europe. Gloria Flaherty addressed the interest that 18th century Europeans took in the ‘other’ highlighting how they became fascinated with these tales of adventurers in faraway countries and exotic places. The initial mockery towards peoples with such different ways of living turned into kind of a fascination towards the other. This fascination toward this exotic other persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. And it’s still present nowadays fostering a correlation between Shamanism and otherness to the point where only foreign healers from exotic places can be considered Shamans.

This idea that Shamanism belongs to exotic others is, I think, an imperialistic concept that Westerners uphold. Since there is no central authority in Shamanism to dictate what rules should one abide by in order to be named a Shaman and since the term itself has always worked by superimposition upon local specific labels there is no legitimate impediment for somebody who believes to fit what the label denotes to call themselves a Shaman. As Robert Wallace points out, the term Shaman can arguably be seen as self-defining – essentially people calling themselves Shamans are Shamans. Since the term is invented and means different things to different people as you might tell my answer to the question, can Westerners be Shamans is yes, they can be Shamans because I find it to be an imperialistic form of exoticism to assume that only foreign healers from faraway countries, with very different ways of living and different societies, are allowed to be Shamans.

Let me know what you think in the comment sections down below. If you liked this video SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will always be notified when I upload a new video and stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

REFERENCES

Botta, S. (2018) Dagli sciamani allo sciamanesimo: discorsi, credenze, pratiche, Carocci.

Flaherty, G. (2014) Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, Princeton University Press.

Francfort, H. P., Hamayon, R. and Bahn, P. G. (2001) The Concept of Shamanism: Uses and Abuses, Akadémiai Kiadó.
Harvey, G. (2003) Shamanism: A Reader, Routledge.

Noel, D. C. (1999) The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities, New York, Continuum Intl Pub Group.

Wallis, R. J. (2003) Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, 1 edition., London, New York, Routledge.

First uploaded 23 Nov 2019