An American in Mongolia: Part XII

The shaman according to the anthropological canon and the Western public

According to Dolfyn, the North American new age author of Shamanism: A Beginner’s Guide,

If you ask what shamanism is, the answer you receive will depend upon whom you ask. Although the term comes from a native Siberian people’s language, anthropologists have adopted it to describe a range of spiritual beliefs and practices which are many thousands of years old and which are found, in one form or another, among the native peoples on every continent.20


David Abram, an eco-phenomenologist magician who lived with shamans in Southeast Asia, discusses the disconnect between the way that anthropology characterizes shamanism on a surface level and the way that members of the new age community utilize this surface characterization, and how the mainstream community has picked up on it since. Dolfyn’s writing is a text for aspiring shamans, which is predominantly disseminated within the New Age community in the U.S. to use a practical guide. Dolfyn might be what American Indians call a “twinkie”21, or a peddler of shallow and co-opted spirituality lacking in content. He could also be the well-intentioned humanist that Abram refers to, or maybe he’s a little bit of both.

Anthropology’s inability to discern the shaman’s allegiance to nonhuman nature has led to curious circumstance in the ‘developed world’ today, where many persons in search of spiritual understanding are enrolling in workshops concerned with ‘shamanic’ methods of personal discovery and revelation. Psychotherapists and some physicians have begun to specialize in ‘shamanic healing techniques.’ ‘Shamanism’ has thus come to connote an alternative form of therapy; the emphasis, among these new practitioners of popular humanism, is on personal insight and curing. These are noble aims, to be sure, yet they are secondary to, and derivative from, the primary role of the indigenous shaman, a role that cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, it’s patterns and vicissitudes. Mimicking the indigenous shaman’s curative methods without his intimate knowledge of the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the locus of dis-ease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the natural landscape.22

This passage from early on in Abram’s work The Spell of the Sensuous brings us to one possible conclusion about the incredible possibilities of shamanism when it is practiced by indigenous peoples around the world, and the impossibilities of effective practice by non-indigenous peoples in the Western world.23 The possibilities in the indigenous world have to do with the extent of liminality in its various manifestations and in its importance beyond being able to go into trance and communicate with the spirit realms (of deceased human beings) and traveling between them, it is also about being able to communicate and cooperate with the animate planet (or microcosm) and exist between the animate animal and plant world and the human world effectively, and this is of equal importance. In every sense of the word the shaman is a liaison. From my experiences from forays into the new age world through my parents, and also the world of ethnographic research on indigenous shamans in parts of Mongolia Abram’s assessment would ring true.

Mircea Eliade, a writer of Religion who traveled extensively but also collected accounts of turn-of-the-century explorers and anthropologists, within several different cultural contexts is considered to be one of the headiest academics on the subject of shamanism (despite valuable critiques of his phenomenological approach and his work on shamanism in general.24) He wrote a seminal text that has been used by anthropologists all over the world for decades as a primer on shamanism, and he happens to find the approach, and very definition of shamanism employed by Dolfyn rather problematic. Eliade comments on the mistreatment of the word, as well as possible other uses within different cultural contexts in his classic Shamanism

Since the beginning of the century, ethnologists have fallen into the habit of using the terms “shaman,” “medicine man,” “sorcerer,” and “magician” interchangeably to designate certain individuals possessing magico-religious powers and found in all “primitive” societies. […] For many reasons this confusion can only militate against any understanding of the shamanic phenomenon. […] We consider it advantageous to restrict the use of the words “shaman” and “shamanism,” precisely to avoid misunderstandings and to cast a clearer light on the history of “magic” and “sorcery.” For of course, the shaman is also a magician and medicine man; he is believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians, whether primitive or modern. But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be priest, mystic, and poet. […] Shamanism in the strict sense is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia.25


With this revised definition of shamanism (derived from the language of the Evenki people’s language of Tungus, the word saman), we learn that the best way to describe the shaman is broadly, as a caretaker for the needs of her tribe or community. The usage of the now antiquated terms of psychopomp and fakir brought the idea of liminality to the foreground once again, clearly a very important concept to shamanism (that begs that the language of anthropology be de-mystified.) A psychopomp is an ambassador between worlds, a being who has the ability to exist in the liminal space and offer guidance for transcending to the spirit realm and through the pathways of consciousness and unconsciousness. The fakir, on the other hand, is traditionally a Hindu or Muslim ascetic, with a focus on miracle production through spiritual practice (self-deprivation, fasting, and breatharianism are all associated,) specifically aimed towards a physical path of development.26 But in Central Asia, a shaman is also a potential glossolalia27, a seer, a diviner and a storyteller. She might go into a trance induced by psychoactive fungi, namely amanita muscaria harvested from a forest in the mountains, by playing the mouth harp, by playing the drum, by dancing ecstatically, or chanting. The reason why this definition is so broad, is because at its heart, anthropology’s concern is with understanding the internal logics of cultural phenomena rather than devising new classification systems.

Shamanism, prior to the heyday of explorers and anthropologists, was an oral tradition. There are sacred objects, but no sacred texts--only a sacred environment, sacred beings in the form of animals (humans & ancestors included), plants, landmasses, and deities. Shamanism is a reflection of the indigenous and especially, the nomadic existence in its highest form—it is the human attempt at symbiosis.