Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking by Alice Beck Kehoe

Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking Reviews

• 
  Maya

  This is definitely an awesome book on Shamanism and the use of critical thinking when discussing it. Anyone thinking of taking "Core Shamanism" or learning about "Celtic Shamanism" should read this book first. It is very short and won't take you more than an hour or two to read but the benefits you will get from it are huge.
• 
  Trunatrschild

  This book is Kehoe's opinion on critical thinking on the subject of shamanism. She gives bried descriptions of many of the tribal rituals and their leaders that many westerners label "shamans/shamanism" and she gives a brief description of the beliefs of the Siberian groups practicing their rituals which we now lump under the label shamanism as well, yet they have several names for varying different rituals and techniques. She describes that some that we call shaman don't even use ecstatic trancing and some use drugs, having barely any resemblance at all to the rituals used by the people from whom we appropriated the word Shaman (saman). She cites studies going back 400 years culminating with Mircea Eliade who never once met a healer/shaman/ritual leader in his life just compiled his evidence from books well knowing that he was aiming it at a group of westerners who didn't particularly want to know the depth of the practices of any of these people. Many of Eliade's own written sources had themselves never met a 'ritual leader', yet the western world has absorbe his writings as fact. I myself thought a lot of his writings were from personal observance, I didn't realize that NONE of it was.
  Basically this is not exploring critical thinking about shamanism itself, but why westerners have this need to make them 'other' and then extract what sounds nice and pleasant and leave the rest. Eliade's use of "Archaic" in his title apparently gave Westerners free reign to make these 'primitive' peoples 'other' and then appropriate PARTS of their practices and call it their own, leaving what possibly might be construed as 'negative' out. For example, Siberian shaman spend their lives struggling with spirits that are no more helpful and are possibly just as harmful as a polar bear, to over come and make them their allies, yet, in the west, shamanism is taught to be a way to reach the always helpful, completely benevolent and wise spirits, oh and you can do it in a half an hour after you plop down some money.
  Westerners have some idea that appropriating the positive aspects of 'primitive' peoples will help them in their unique spirituality, completely ignoring that these spiritual leaders, that we lump with the name 'shaman' do none of this stuff for THEIR spirituality, but because it is necessary for the community and these westerners often use it to set themselves even further apart from their own community. This book begs the question of why westerners who would never think of themselves as racist, yet by their actions appropriate PARTIAL customs that are not theirs to appropriate, especially angering the Native Americans, do this thinking that they themselves are growing spiritually.
  Personally, I think that westerners would grow more in a spiritual manner if they were able to unlump 'primitive peoples' from the shaman label and maybe realize the depth and complexity of these people that they are stealing from and then QUIT SELLING IT. Course, if you buy into the Plastic Shaman or the Plastic Medicine Men, then you sort of are getting exactly what you pay for.
  Oh, one thing the author mentions a few times that is interesting. Almost never is an African or African descended ritual worker termed a 'shaman'. She finds this interesting, I do too. If yer gonna lump, why not lump them all? You also don't pick up the latest edition of the magazine "Shaman's Drum" and see shamanistic experiences with African spiritualists offered in expensive Montana resorts, or trips to Africa to learn with your own tame African shaman! Interesting...
• 
  Edward Irons

  Shamanism is a slippery topic. The word is used widely, everyone speaking as if the meaning is perfectly obvious. As Alice Kehoe makes clear, it is not perfectly obvious what we mean by shamanism. In fact the figure of the shaman is a battleground of competing interpretations, in a number of fields, including anthropology, ethnology, religious studies, mysticism, and indigenous rights, and politics. Kehoe approaches it from the anthropological perspective. She provides a clear, laudatory, and indeed necessary explanation of this figure who embodies so much.
  
  Speaking of the shaman as a carrier, a representation of some other ideas immediately brings up one of Kehoe’s biggest critiques—the shaman as representative of the primitive. Generations of early anthropologists tried to fit accounts of ritual and trance practice among indigenous peoples into a framework that saw human progress move from primitive to advanced to the pinnacle, a point that corresponded nicely to the time and place in which the author wrote. Nearly all early writers on anthropology and religion in the 19th century, such as Edward Tylor, were guilty of this assumption. But this conceit was also held by Mircea Eliade.
  
  Eliade promoted the idea of cultural primitivism, the idea that people in primitive societies lived ideal lives, “intimate with Nature and their own bodies, not cut off from feelings but freely indulging emotions” (Kehoe, 42-3). The perspective of cultural primitivism was not limited to armchair anthropologists; it goes back to the Greek historians who imagined that the Scythians lived perfect lives on the grand Eurasian plains. The idea found ready a ready audience in the Romantics of the 19th century, who were quick to label a bundle of things that came to encapsulate the alien traits of primitive society: the shaman. In writing his blockbuster tome on the shaman, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Eliade had tapped into (but did not always acknowledge) habits of thought that ran deep in Western culture.
  
  The assumption that shamanism equals primitivism continues to run deep. It forms an unconscious residue in the minds of contemporary anthropologists, asserts William Y. Adams in The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology. But the idea of the shaman has also been picked up by popular culture. In the U.S. New Age participants use sweat lodges and take peyote. The ecstatic was associated with mystical experiences no longer available to modern humans. One of the most powerful uses of shamanism is Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman, a series of training courses that teach anyone to become a shaman. Harner’s organization shears shamanism of its cultural elements and presents it in a form palatable to western culture.
  
  Kehoe is at her best in explaining the connection between shamanism and western ideology. She is most biting when criticizing Eliade, whom she concludes was seriously flawed. But Eliade has been widely criticized by others for several decades, and his influence recedes. What remains is the idea of the shaman, performing ritual and embarking on flights of ecstasy.
  
  Kehoe is perhaps weakest in investigating the possible foundations of shamanic experience that are not tied to Eliade’s depiction. She summarizes four possible theories of how shamanism could work. The first is that shamanistic dance and trance is a holdover from a never-changing primitive religion. The second is that shamanistic practices are cultural borrowings between groups, for instance between Siberian tribes and Alaskan Aleuts. The third is that shamanism results from close observation of animals. And the fourth is that shamanism results from human physiology, such aspects as heartbeat rhythm and the use of the body to express strong emotions (48-50). She acknowledges that there is evidence to support the hypothesis that music and dance are “innate genetic properties of the human species” (51). She grudgingly accepts that there may be common human tendencies toward ‘enthusiastic’ spirituality” (55). But she fails to elaborate this further. In fact there is an increasing wave of research on possible neurological underpinnings of shamanistic action. It remains possible that what we commonly label as shamanism is a way of referring to universal human activity. Nevertheless, from an ethnographic point of view there is a vast diversity of healing, trance, and ritual practices seen in cultures world-wide. It is hard not to agree with her thesis that it is no longer valid to try to stuff such breadth into one bag labelled “shamanism.”
  
  Kehoe concludes that it is impossible to eliminate shamanism from the concept of Otherness that is a constant preoccupation of western culture. Following Gloria Flaherty and Faye Harrison, Kehoe notes the need for a figure of the Other to counterbalance the Enlightenment idea of Rational Man (101). She argues strongly for a narrow use of the term “shaman” to refer solely to the Siberian peoples who practitioners. Any other usage is scholarly naive (101). Unfortunately the word has entered popular discourse, which plays by different rules. Shamans will remain among us, in many guises, and to expect otherwise is also naive. Through works like this we can, however, add nuance to our understanding.
  
• 
  Eileen

  The author gives an anthropologist's view of shamanism in cultural context as opposed to Western misunderstandings of those who try to embrace it out of context. As a worldwide phenomenon, she notes important distinctions between the different forms of shamanism found in different countries, and concludes that there really is no set of shamanic practices common to all. She criticizes modern Western practitioners of shamanism as taking advantage of traditional practitioners' methods for their own personal gain (whether personal fulfillment or monetary gain).
• 
  Adrian Colesberry

  On her way to exploring the world of shamanism, Kehoe very consciously steps the reader through the basics of critical thinking and how to apply critical thinking to anthropology. Her debunking of Western shamanism is virtuosic and something I often return to in my own thinking.
• 
  Omair Malik

  started reading