Shamanism

Shamanism
Sergei Ivanovich Borisov · Public domain · source
Name	Shamanism
Caption	Traditional drum used by shamans in ritual contexts
Founder	Various indigenous traditions
Founded in	Prehistoric periods
Regions	Siberia, Central Asia, North America, South America, Arctic, Southeast Asia, Africa
Scripture	Oral traditions
Practices	Soul journeying, trance, divination, healing, drumming, singing

Shamanism Shamanism is a set of indigenous religious practices characterized by specialist intermediaries who enter altered states to interact with spirits for healing, divination, and communal welfare. Although present across Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, and Oceania, its forms vary widely among peoples such as the Evenki people, Sámi people, Yakut people, Nenets, Ket people, Tuvan people, Buryat people, Mongols, Koryaks, Ainu people, Yukaghir people, Chukchi people, Nganasan people, Khanty people, Mansi people, Manchu people, Korean people, Japanese people, Native American tribes, Inuit, Aleut, Mapuche people, Quechua people, Aymara people, Guarani people, Ashaninka people, Shuar people, Kayapó people, Hopi, Navajo Nation, Iroquois Confederacy, Cherokee Nation, Lakota people, Comanche, Sioux, Zuni Pueblo, Puebloan peoples, Maya peoples, Aztec Empire, Inca Empire, Vodou, Candomblé, Umbanda, Santería, Hmong people, Karen people, Thai people, Lao people, Khmer people, Vietnamese people, Filipino people, Papua New Guinea, Australian Aboriginal peoples, Maori people, Zulu people, Xhosa people, Yoruba people, Mande people, Dogon people, Senufo people.

Definition and Core Concepts

Shamanic specialists perform soul journeys, spirit negotiation, and ritual intervention using tools such as drums, rattles, masks, costumes, and psychoactive substances, often within oral traditions linked to clans, lineages, and ritual calendars. Comparative studies reference fieldwork by scholars associated with institutions like British Museum, Smithsonian Institution, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Oxford, Max Planck Society, Russian Academy of Sciences, and archives such as Library of Congress. Ethnographies often cite practitioners recorded by researchers including Mircea Eliade, Barbara Tedlock, Michael Harner, Jeremy Narby, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tim Ingold, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Edward Burnett Tylor, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, James Frazer, Victor Turner, Richard Dawkins, Joseph Campbell, Noam Chomsky, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, Alfred Gell, David Lewis-Williams, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nancy Goodman.

Historical Development and Geographic Distribution

Archaeological, palaeoecological, and iconographic evidence links shamanic elements to Upper Paleolithic sites, rock art traditions, and burial practices connected to cultures such as the Magdalenian culture, Solutrean culture, Yamnaya culture, Scythians, Saka, Huns, Turkic peoples, Mongol Empire, Xiongnu, Tang dynasty, Yuan dynasty, Koryo dynasty, Joseon dynasty, Moche culture, Nazca culture, Chavín culture, Tiwanaku, Chimu culture, Mississippian culture, Hopewell tradition, Pueblo peoples, Ancestral Puebloans, Nazca lines, Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük, Tell Halaf, Jomon period, Yayoi period, Lapita culture, Austronesian expansion, Bantu expansion, Polynesian navigation. Colonial encounters with empires and states such as the Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire, British Empire, Russian Empire, Qing dynasty, Ottoman Empire, Dutch East India Company, French colonial empire influenced suppression, syncretism, and documentation of practices among communities like the Métis, Creole peoples, Garifuna, Maroons, Akan people, Ashanti Empire.

Practices and Rituals

Ritual repertoires include drumming, chanting, trance induction, ecstatic dance, divination, extraction of maladies, spirit possession, communal feasting, sacrifice, initiation rites, and use of sacred landscapes such as mountains, rivers, caves, and groves involved in pilgrimages to sites like Mount Elgon, Mount Ararat, Mount Fuji, Mount Kailash, Uluru, Lake Titicaca, Sacred Valley of the Incas, Navajo Nation Monument Valley, Stonehenge, Newgrange, Cueva de las Manos, Lascaux caves, Altai Mountains, Siberian tundra, Amazon Rainforest, Congo Basin, Great Rift Valley, Himalayas, Andes, Rocky Mountains, Great Plains. Ethnobotanical elements appear in traditions involving plants documented by researchers working with institutions like Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Missouri Botanical Garden, Royal Society, Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), and communities such as the Shipibo-Conibo, Ashéninka, Huni Kuin, Shuar, Jivaro, Matsés, Tsimané.

Role of Shamans in Society

Shamans serve as healers, mediators, historians, and ritual leaders within kinship systems, councils, and community institutions such as tribal confederations and ceremonial societies found among groups like the Iroquois Confederacy, Haudenosaunee, Powhatan Confederacy, Comanche Nation, Sioux tribes, Cherokee Nation, Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Zuni Pueblo, Mapuche, Aymara community organizations, Quechua communities, Basque communities, Sámi parliaments, Nordic councils. Their social roles intersect with legal, medicinal, and political structures encountered in contact with nation-states including Russia, United States, Canada, China, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand.

Beliefs, Cosmology, and Spirits

Cosmologies often articulate layered worlds—upper, middle, and lower realms—inhabited by ancestors, nature spirits, animal spirits, and deities paralleled in myth cycles recorded for cultures tied to texts or corpora such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh, Rigveda, Avesta, Mahabharata, Iliad and Odyssey, Edda, Kojiki, Nihon Shoki, Kalevala, Prose Edda, Bhagavata Purana, Book of Genesis (as preserved in the Hebrew Bible), and oral mythologies documented by collectors like Jacob Grimm, Sir James George Frazer, Alexander von Humboldt. Spirit taxonomies include named beings in indigenous ontologies—for instance, animal helpers among the Evenki people, ancestral tutelary spirits among the Sámi people, or nature spirits in Ainu lore—and are catalogued in ethnolinguistic studies by universities such as Saint Petersburg State University, Moscow State University, University of Helsinki, University of Oslo, University of Tokyo.

Contemporary Revival, Adaptation, and Criticism

Contemporary revival movements draw on indigenous peoples’ cultural rights advocated by organizations like the United Nations, UNESCO, International Labour Organization, World Health Organization, Amnesty International, Survival International, Cultural Survival, Greenpeace, and indigenous-led bodies such as the Assembly of First Nations, Sámi Council, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, National Congress of American Indians. Adaptations appear in New Age practices, psychotherapeutic contexts, neo-shamanic workshops popularized by figures associated with foundations, conferences, and publishers linked to New York University, University of California, Berkeley, Esalen Institute, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, Institute of Noetic Sciences, Theosophical Society, Transpersonal Psychology Association. Critics from academic, indigenous, and legal spheres include scholars at Stanford University, Yale University, Princeton University, Duke University, McGill University, activists in Idle No More, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and litigators invoking cultural appropriation laws and intellectual property regimes such as those discussed in venues like the World Intellectual Property Organization and national courts including Supreme Court of the United States, Supreme Court of Canada, European Court of Human Rights.

Category:Indigenous religions