Tradizioni dell’orso tra i Nativi nord-americani

Abstract

In the Native American world, the bear appears as the most appropriate animal for acting as instructor and helper during the process which an individual has to undergo in order to become a shaman. Many hunting peoples regarded the bear as the shaman of the animal world. Furthermore, bear’s descent into the bowels of the earth, every fall, to spend its period of hibernation, was regarded as a sort of paradigmatic image of the symbolic death and rebirth which constituted the initiatory journey for every apprentice shaman. In many instances, the bear was considered as the teacher of the knowledge about medicines and of the songs that shamans chanted during their therapeutic ceremonies. When the bear appeared in visions or dreams, during vision quests, the individual who received them had to become a medicine-man.Though a dream or visionary experience could disclose to everyone the possibility to get a glimpse beyond the outward appearances of the world, in order to perceive something of the world of non-human beings, in most of Native cultures existed individuals who were able to operate more effectively these transitions from one world to the other, from one dimension to the other. Such figures were those persons usually called, in the anthropological literature, “shamans”. Native cultures interpreted reality as a continuous process of metamorphosis, their world was a world with a “high level of transformability”. Shamanism can be considered as the capacity of some individuals to cross the corporeal borders separating one species from the other, and to adopt the perspective and world-view of other beings: animals, spirits, divinities, dead. In this sense, shamans, like the bear, their patron spirit, were “commutators of perspective”.A ritual scheme, common to many Native American traditions, is based on the conception that the human being, in order to obtain an enhancement of his/her nature, which is regarded as intrinsically incomplete and defective, has to submit him/herself to a journey which leads to temporarily identify him/herself with an “other” being, to experience otherness and the contiguity with the non-human. From this transformative experience, the individual can obtain a refreshing power, an increase in energy and new qualities permitting him/her to acquire a new social standing and a social acknowledgment of the metamorphosis occurred. So, such a transformative experience forms the focus of a process of construction of the self, of “auto-poiesis”, which is accomplished through the adoption of an animal’s (often of the bear’s) point of view.