Shamanism - Science topic

Thank you for your thoughts on this subject. We have spent the last six months refining our research and have come up with the following: This basic research aims to describe the confluence of nature, spirituality, and connection for the well-being of followers of contemporary Western shamanism.

If you are interested in classical sources, I would recommend the account of Knud Rasmussen (himself an ethnologist of Inuit descent) who interviewed the Caribou Inuit shaman Igjugȃrjuk more than a century ago.

See:

Igjugȃrjuk and K. Rasmussen 2001 Seeking Knowledge in the Solitude of Nature. In Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge, edited by J. Narby and F. Huxley, pp. 81- 83. Putnam, New York.

Creio que não se separa o todo de suas partes. Onde estamos, o que fazemos, nossas crenças nos acompanham, por ser um elemento fundante da nossa socialização cultural. Espero ter contribuído.

I think you need to consider the sources of these terms. I doubt that many societies describe their own health/religious specialists as "witch doctors". Shamans are, as noted above, religious specialists, but the separation between medical and religious systems in many societies is quite vague. In order to address this issue, you would also need to consider priests and faith healers. Faith healers can be grouped with shamans, certainly. There is quite a bit of ethnocentrism lurking in these terms that needs to be worked out. I would suggest that you take a look at Peter Brown's book Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology, with a focus on the section on ethnomedicine and healing. It would be a good place to start.

"Rêve et chamanisme", ed Accarias l'Originel, Paris, 1998.

Thanks Michael, I'll try to follow that up.

There's also the Minoan Potnia Theron.  On a methodological note, I think it's important to look at differences as well as well similarities.  Outward similarities may not indicate common meanings across cultures.  So speaking of an Animal Master/Mistress is problematic, because it implies it's the same figure worldwide and can be interpreted the same way....   I'm certainly not against the idea of cross-cultural similarity, phenomenological or otherwise, but I'm also very cautious about it.  

I'm also skeptical about claims of the great prehistoric antiquity of shamanism (often based on dubious equations between indigenous cultures and what we imagine early humans to have been like), and about the interpretation of rock art as necessarily shamanistic.  On these points see Alice Kehoe's Shamans and Religion, and H. Sidky's article "On the antiquity of shamanism and its role in human religiosity," in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22.

Howdy Alan, you are certainly asking tough questions, and if you don't know, I'm not sure how much  us amateur rock art folks can do! Obviously, the first point is that imagery does not mean the same thing in all contexts.  Like most things that hunter-gatherers do, rock art also is almost certainly particular to specific environments, and we should expect temporal differences even in similar locations. Other than the tremendous interest in Australian rock art, there has been ethnographic questioning of only  a few groups of H&Gs about either their own rock art or past examples in that in their current land use areas. John Marshall filmed a Ju/'hoansi informant interpreting a rock art panel as the story of a hunt. Hard to know how much that was influenced by the filming Marshall was doing or ≠Toma's role in it and his interest in hunting. Laurens van der Post & Jane Taylor popular book "Testament to the Bushnmen", 1984, recounts some older observations about Ju/'hoansi folks who had accounts of 19th century accounts of painting. Van der Post notes that human figures are much more common than animal images in art attributed to "bushmen". He cites several researchers who recorded rock art in Ju/'hoansi territory. Most of these early accounts  link the imagery to mythical stories (i.e., J. M.  Orpen questions to a guide eliciting info he and other researchers felt was purely related to myth). I personally think a lot of this "myth & ritual" is passing off our linguistic ineptitudes as informants concern with non-concrete, non-scientific concepts. In my time with Pumé hunter-gatherers in the savannas of Venezuela, It has often taken up to 24 months and my slowly growing competence in the language of this monolingual group to get answers volunteered that explain activities I've been asking about. Why do Pumé kill all raptors (I thought maybe it was because of competition for the small game-armadillos lizards-rbbits that they rely on for most of their hunting)? After asking over a 20 month period, someone turned to me, while scrambling some hawk eggs with an arrow after her husband climbed a tree and threw all the eggs out of a hawk nest during a hunting trip, and explained that "the Hawk people fly away and tell the Deer people we are here." I thought this was a cute story until I realized it was a naturalistic description of animal behavior, deer see somewhat poorly, but hear and smell acutely, and the hawk's alarm call would certainly startle them. They explained evapotranspiration during the dry season in accurate physics terms: "the wind drinks the water." The only things that are difficult to explain are things with complex causes, such as where will lightning strike and how can it be avoided? We cannot predict that well even with our technological abilities to image and track storms. I have a couple additional long-winded stories about lightning and anti-lightning "magic" devices that I think puts it into a scientific light as well  I personally think a lot of "myth" pseudo-explanations is our own laziness and potentially racism at not realizing that hunter-gatherers have very sophisticated knowledge about the natural world they live in and observe every day (as do agricultural and pastoral folks as well). The geological stability of Australia's  Central Desert seems associated with the geographic stability of much of the placement of rock art imagery, and its frequent association with water holes. Lew Binford contrasted this with his experiences with the Nunamuit in Alaska where he felt  rock art was identified with changing environmental conditions and human behavioral dynamics. I don't think he ever published this, but an example he used was that some rock art was associated with good river crossings. As rivers change their course, new crossings need to be identified. Crossings are named for the individual who identifies them, and rock art is more human focused and less ornamented with animals. He contrasted this with the stable locations and images with fixed names in Australian rock art he visited with the Alyawara. I have one other seminal study that should be well noted. Jennifer Galindo, an M.A. student of LuAnn Wandsnider's at the Univ of Nebraska, Lincoln did a fabulous thesis on rock art in N Australia that should have been a Ph.D dissertation. It is very hard to get a hold of. Iain Davidson "begged" a copy of mine, he could not find it anywhere in Australia. She spent over a year doing an ethnoarchaeological study of rock art distribution and imagery. She was an early competent  archaeological GPS technician and mapped rock art across a set of different clan territories. Her informants were no longer refreshing the rock art or making new rock art, but they used the same images in bark art for the tourist trade. So they were still very conversant in what the images represented. Adults also were still very knowledgable about the locations and boundaries of different clan territories. Jennifer compared images with their geographical and clan territory distributions. She recorded the design format of each rock art image (color(s); solid or outline; infilling style-i.e.,hatched; dots; "x-ray"; etc). In comparing the distributions of the images to the natural and clan geography, she found no associations between any terrestrial animals and any natural or clan areas. Fish had a slight association with streams, but that was not exclusive. No stylistic element of color, infilling, etc. patterned spatially. The ONLY spatial association was that anthropomorphs were distinct to particular clan territories, and were located along paths, so that if someone was unfamiliar with the area or too stupid to know whose territory they were entering, there was a big road sign spelling it out. Many Australian groups maintain detailed stewardship knowledge about areas they have special knowledge about, and that includes who goes in there and what they find. Most groups, at least in desert areas, must use multiple territories. Often bands are made up of folks with different "ethnicities" who together have access to several areas or have secondary-tertiary  abilities to request permission to forage in other locales.  Clan markers were important in Galindo's study. In talking with Jennifer about her results, it seemed the terrestrial animals are everywhere, and rock art with them reflects that distribution. Fish were mostly painted near water, but not always. No design or stylistic treatment had any pattern, these appeared to simply be idiosyncratic choices by the artist. Jennifer presented her findings at an SAA symposium on rock art, dominated by interpretations of penis and vulva images in anything long, lozenge shaped, or triangular. No one expressed any interest in what I thought was superb, hard-headed scientific inquiry, doing difficult ethnoarchaeology over one year, approaching a very intractable topic with exemplary creativity and rigor.  This doesn't answer your question Alan, but I hope it outlines some positive real world ways that scientific archaeology can sneak up on aspects of rock art with hypothesis, and not on the crutches of assumed mythological meaning (how could we ever get at such subjective "meaning" if it was the core of rock art imagery?). There are many aspects of creativity in rock art, but I think we have to start by evaluating what is knowledge that can be anchored to some real world hypothesis (like the zooarchaeology people have done very successfully with taphonomy-which applies to ALL aspects of the archeological record). Additionally, the archaeological record is an accretion of materials across many years, decades, centuries, or millenia. It is not stacked individual ethnographic moments, and almost never can it provide the view we have if we walk into a hunter-gatherer camp. The most visible archaeological records are temporal abstractions beyond the experience of any individual lifetime or short set of events. Interpretive approaches to rock art that hope to unlock their meaning seem unlikely to succeed. However, I think we can improve our understanding of how rock art may have functioned in some places. Alan, we have discussed some conversations I've had with Hopi informants to this effect as well. 

Great, Matias, you thought you already knew Cláudio Naranjo. If by any chance I get to know of other names I will let you know. Best regards! Alfredo