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Article ID: CBB001212969

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations (2013)

Whisker, Dan (Author)

History and Anthropology
Volume: 24, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 344-362
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

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Spiritualism Anthropology Psychology Science and religion 20th century, early 19th century Durkheim, Émile Jung, Carl Gustav Eliade, Mircea Freud, Sigmund Lévi-Strauss, Claude

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of neo-Shamanism as a spiritual practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between primitive and civilized which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of Shamanism to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made neo-Shamanism thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that neo-Shamanisms are rediscoveries of a primal spirituality write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.

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