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Current Anthropology

ISSN 00113204

3 papers in the library · 15 citations · publishing 2021-2026

Papers

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Moving to the Center of the Earth

Current Anthropology September 1, 2026 Nurit Stadler

This article inquires how specific bodily movements, such as kneeling, crawling, bowing, and other forms of approach-oriented, low-posture locomotion, produce religious experiences and spatial public manifestations of the sacred. To address this question, I present and theorize kinetic rituals: the directional and counted sequences of embodied movement elicited by site-specific architectural...

Ambiguous Relations

Current Anthropology June 16, 2026 Joe Ellis

This paper examines the relationship between women in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar who visit and become shamans and the violence they experience. It shows that in many cases, women’s engagement with shamanism arises in the context of physical violence from their husband or male kin. Yet this paper also resists functionalist explanations that render violence as the sole cause of shamanic...

Altered vision: Ayahuasca shamanism and sensory individualism

Current Anthropology April 1, 2021 Alex K. Gearin, Óscar Calavia Sáez 15 citations

Notions of visualism and individualism have long been employed to elucidate the contours of Western subjectivity. It is therefore not surprising to find the indigenous Amazonian shamanic brew ayahuasca being adopted by Australian neoshamanic practitioners as a medicine that provides personalized visions delivering unambiguous moral import. While this adoption represents a radically new style of...