Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Jeremy NarbyEditor: Francis Huxley
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-04-23
ISBN: 1585420913
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Tarcher
Book Reviews of Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge
Book Review: A Wonderful Ontogenic Purview
Summary: 4 Stars
Shamans Through Time is not simply another long-winded dissertation, it is a collection of short anecdotes and ethnographic observations made between 1535 and 1995 by mostly western missionaries, anthropologists, and other observers with ulterior agenda, on what are these days commonly called shaman. As another reviewer pointed out, the writings are centered around the Americas, North and South, and Siberia, where the term shaman originated.
Although I picked up my copy from a used bookstore shelf labeled "New Age", there is really nothing new age about this book. It should more rightly have been shelved in the Anthropology section. Even where it discusses Castaneda, which may properly be categorized as New Age, the Castaneda phenomenon is so important as the impetus for further immersion and the defacto introduction to shamanism, that it would be remiss, even prejudiced to have not included an overview of Castaneda. And while there are many Native Americans who positively hate and slander Castaneda, as they feel he had no doubt lampooned NatAm culture, he served a very important purpose as the stepping stone to a more academic and mature understanding of what shamanism is about.
The subject is out of the bag, and western civilization will proceed to accrete shamanic practice into the traditional religious medical bag, perhaps even improving upon it, in the same way that Japan has taken the American automobile and improved upon it in most ways. Neither wishing it will just go away, nor vandalizing the reputation of those who wish to deepen their understanding will effectively irradicate the concept of shamanism from modern culture. Just as original Jewish Christians of antiquity may have been repulsed by the idea that a Roman pope would be so audacious as to presume an original and monolithic authority over an invention of Palestine, and that later European Christian movements would pervert the Old Testament to justify their own adaptation of an essentially Middle Eastern religion, all the while forgetting their own indigenous spiritual heritage, the time is now for amateur or lay students, such as myself, to remember where and how shamanism came to be incorporated into modern ecclectic spirituality. I recently watched a Tuvan throatsinging ("khoomei") group perform in front of an astounded audience. This is first hand ethnographic experience, as was the late Paul Peña's documentary foray "Ghengis Blues". The more dimensions of alien culture we explore, the less alien they become, and the more we find ourselves accepting of strange and foreign ways. A review written on Tuvan throatsinging in 2006 will appear naive and ethnocentric when reread 500 years from now. Antoine Biet's 1664 "Evoking The Devil: Fasting With Tobacco To Learn How To Cure" must be read, tonuge-in-cheek, with a certain forgiveness as a product of the culture in which he was immersed.
The editors are splendidly responsbile, and to avoid problems of being perceived as biased toward unfettered promotion of shamanism, they illuminate the movement as it currently exists in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where adherents and practitioners buy wholesale a sanitized version of the techniques, which are removed and isolated from their original social and cultural context, where shamanism is inherently dangerous, with grave implications for both the shaman, who may be killed for accusing sorcerers in another village, or for just plain being wrong in his predictions, and his patient, who may likewise die in the process of trying to be healed. The editors rightly confront the absurdity of popular shamanism-lite, while acknowledging that if modern civilization wants to keep it, we must redefine our relationship with the shaman of the past, and examine the progressive devlopment toward a wholesome western understanding. As drugs have become systematically outlawed (as tobacco is also at that intermediate evolutionary state, followed, no doubt, by coffee and tea), and the government has finally shackled our minds so that the only danger in our will to explore is the danger of incarceration and defamation, hedonistic expositions such as Woodstock can no longer be experienced in an authentic, unpasteurized, unhomogenized form, the legal and socially acceptable forms of shamanism will become necessarily more sedate, quiet, behind closed doors. Perhaps shamanic techniques will become so suppressed as to become unrecognizable, even when the neo-shaman is practicing the technique right before our very eyes.
This is the launch point for Shamans Through Time, and the unique purpose of this book--to read what Russians, Spaniards, French and Englishmen have observed over the last 500 years, allowing us to be the judge. We witnesses our own collective understanding as moving from infancy to maturity. Hopefullly, the shaman will not extinguish by the time we have arrived at cultural adulthood in our relationship with this primal religious form.
B.T.W., I find it very suspicious that there is one review out of the four prior reviews which is conspicuously negative, and has achieved an astonishing 10 votes (3 of which are "not helpful"), and while that one review is not the first review, all of the others have only three to four votes. You can't tell me there isn't something a little bit fishy about the 7 "helpful" votes for that one particular review...
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