Overview

What happens when a civilization loses its rituals of passage? This book is not a practical guide to shamanic techniques, nor a romanticized vision of Indigenous spirituality. Instead, it is an anthropological and philosophical exploration of the ritual structures that once oriented human existence within many Native North American traditions - and of what their progressive disappearance reveals about the modern world. Through themes such as the Vision Quest, the Sweat Lodge, the Sun Dance, healing rituals, symbolic language, dreams, animal allies, initiation, and the relational conception of the sacred, this work examines how ritual once functioned not merely as belief, but as a structure capable of transforming crisis into orientation and experience into responsibility. At the same time, the book confronts the historical fracture produced by colonization, forced assimilation, and the prohibition of Indigenous ceremonies, while critically examining contemporary neo-shamanism and the risks of spiritual appropriation detached from communal and cultural context. Moving beyond both exoticism and reductionism, Native North American Shamanism proposes a deeper question: What happens to individuals and societies when symbolic structures capable of guiding transformation disappear? Combining anthropology, philosophy, symbolic analysis, and reflections on modernity, this work offers not rituals to imitate, but structures to understand. Because without form, transformation becomes fragmentation. Without return, no crossing is complete. Originally published in Italian, this international English edition preserves the conceptual structure and philosophical voice of the original work while adapting it for an international readership.

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