Slippage: An Anthropology of Shamanism

Summary

The study explores how shamanism, despite its historically partial and varied understanding, has become a prominent topic in anthropology. It argues that shamans are seen as translators of the unseen while also representing anxiety amid social relations marked by gender, class, and colonialism. Anthropologists have cultivated a diverse library of shamanic practices, finding parallels between themselves and spirit practitioners across different cultures, highlighting a significant aspect of anthropology's history.

Study at a glance

Abstract

If our knowledge of shamanism has been so abidingly partial, so impressively uneven, so deeply varied by history, and so enduringly skeptical for so long, how has its study come to occupy such pride of place in the anthropological canon? One answer comes in a history of social relations where shamans both are cast as translators of the unseen and are themselves sites of anxiety in a very real world, one of encounters across lines of gender, class, and colonial incursions often defined by race. This article contends that as anthropologists have cultivated a long and growing library of shamanic practice, many appear to have found, in a globally diverse range of spirit practitioners, translators across social worlds who are not unlike themselves, suggesting that in the shaman we find a remarkable history of anthropology.

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