Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Instead of changing society, however, contemporary Western shamanism contributes to structure the structures it claims to resist.įor the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. Contemporary shamanic practices are also focused on self-authority, can be consumed in a free market and offer opportunities for empowerment.

Neoliberalisation disempowered people over their working lives and forced them to exert self-authority and make choices in their lives.

Contemporary forms of shamanism present themselves as countercultural, but a historical-sociological interpretation suggests that it is no coincidence that shamanism especially gained popularity at the time that neoliberal capitalism became dominant. Through so-called archaic techniques his students could get in touch with the healing forces of nature. During the 1970s an American anthropologist created workshops that, he claimed, were based on universal shamanic principles and practices.

During the 1960s shamans came to be perceived as psychonauts who used hallucinogens to gain access to the divine essence of life. Twentieth-century psychologists identified shamans both as schizophrenics and as primal therapists. From the eighteenth century onwards, the Romantic image of the shaman as an artistically gifted mystic became fashionable, whereas nineteenth-century folklorists, in turn, used the term ‘shamanism’ in nationalist quests for the essence of the Volksgeist of their nation. Theologians saw shamans as sidekicks of the devil, enlightenment thinkers considered them as mentally ill or retarded. After Westerners first heard the term in Siberia at the end of the seventeenth century, it rapidly acquired a remarkable range of meanings in different contexts. ‘Shamanism’ is a problematic and contested concept.

Shamanic Voices by Joan Halifax