Negotiating with evil. Power artefacts, shamanic relics and brain responses in African healing practices
Alberto Salza
Silhouettes africaines 2016 DOI: 10.4000/13o05 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Key points | Argues that shamanistic practices across diverse African cultures share a common neuropsychological basis in an Integrated Mode of Consciousness, which elicits psychoneuroimmunological healing responses through symbolic manipulation. |
Abstract
From its evolution in Africa about 100 thousand years ago, the brain architecture of all populations of Homo sapiens has shown a tendency to deal with ‘immaterial objects’ in a spirit world where virtual reality entities operated. The contact with this world was achieved by ‘shamans’, who mastered to enter it, connecting sympathetic and parasympathetic structures by psychointegrators (Integrated Mode of Consciousness, or IMC). The visual description of internal imagery, symbols and metaphors elaborated during this ‘soul flight’ is today considered ‘art’. The overall goal was a negotiation with evil spirits and their output: physical disease and social disorder. Spirits (or the like) produce manipulations of social and physiological dynamics with psychoneuroimmunological responses - up to symbolically induced biological changes - by eliciting endogenous healing responses and other recuperative potentials (symbolic medicine).In today’s Africa, many relics of this shamanistic world are still evident in rock-art, symbols, music/rhythms, witchcraft/sorcery rituals, power objects, death resolution, healing practises. Analysing different typologies of African artefacts, we connect their psychophysical structures to the IMC of the perceiver and consider basic cross-cultural brain responses in healing practises; we span from San hunter-gatherers’ trance dances to Kongo ‘fetishes’, from Ewe healers to Bozo drummers, from Lega associations to Ebola reactions in modern Liberia.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on shamanism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond | 2014 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Cognitive Neuroscience, Shamanism and the Rock Art of Native California | 1998 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From Culture to Experience: Shamanism in the Pages of the Soviet Anti-Religious Press | 2020 | Historical analysis | |
| Anthropology, Shamanism, and Alternate Ways of Knowing–Being in the World: One Anthropologist's Journey of Discovery and Transformation | 2010 | Reflective essay or personal narrative |