Overview

Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity's first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent's eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.

Full Product Details

9780520275324

Table of Contents

Reviews

Ultimately, scholars studying a variety of topics will ?nd this book useful. American Anthropologist 20140301

""Ultimately, scholars studying a variety of topics will ?nd this book useful."" American Anthropologist ""The author finely demonstrates how shamans lost their 'historical diversity' and 'gender variability'; Wayward shamans is a highly interesting and rigorous study that should definitely captivate the attention of those interested in the history of religions, of art, and of Western ideas of otherness and their crucial gender dimensions."" -- Paolo Fortis Jornal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Author Information

Silvia Tomaskova is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available